Redshirts

Nothing from yourself, no new pictures posted into your albums. No trace of you leaving a message for you.
    You stood up from your desk and turned around, scanning the room. You went to your bookshelves. There you took down the blank journals that you had bought around the time you decided to be a screenwriter, so you could write down your thoughts and use them later for your masterworks. You thumbed through them. They were as blank as they had been before. You placed them back on the shelf and then ran your eyes over to your high school yearbooks. You pulled them down, disturbing the dust on the bookshelf, and opened them, looking for a new inscription among the ones that were already there. There were none. You returned them to the shelf, and as you did so you noticed another place on the bookshelf where the dust had been disturbed, but not in the shape of a book.
    You looked at the shape of the disturbance for a minute, and then you turned around, walked to your bed table and picked up your camera. You slid open the slot for the memory card, popped it out, took it to your computer and opened up the pictures folder, arranging it so you could see the picture files by date.
    There were three new files made since your accident. One photo and two video files.
    The picture file was of someone’s legs and shoes. You smiled at this. The first video file consisted of someone panning across the room with the camera, swinging it back and forth as if they were trying to figure out how the thing worked.
    The third video was of you. In it, your face appeared, followed by some wild thrashing as you set down the camera and propped it up so you would stay in the frame. You were sitting. The autofocus buzzed back and forth for a second and then settled, framing you sharply.
    “Hi, Matthew,” you said. “I’m Jasper Hester. I’m you. Sort of. I’ve spent a couple of days with your family now, talking to them about you, and they tell me you haven’t touched this camera in a year, which I figure means it’s the perfect place to leave you a message. If you wake up and just go on with your life, then you’ll never find it and there’s no harm done. But if you do find this, I figure it’s because you’re looking for it.
    “If you are looking for it, then I figure either one of two things have happened. Either you’ve figured out something’s weird and no one will tell you anything about it, or you’ve been told about it and you don’t believe it. If it’s the first of these, then no, you’re not crazy or had some sort of weird psychotic break with your life. You haven’t had a stroke. You did have a massive brain injury, but not with the body you’re in now. So don’t worry about that. Also, you don’t have amnesia. You don’t have any memory of this because it’s not you doing it. I guess that’s pretty simple.
    “If you’ve been told what happened and you don’t believe it, hopefully this will convince you. And if it doesn’t, well, I don’t know what to tell you, then. Believe what you want. But in the meantime indulge me for a minute.”
    In the video Hester who is not you but also is ran his fingers through his hair and looked away, trying to figure what to say next.
    “Okay, here’s what I want to say. I think I exist because you exist. Somehow, in a way I really couldn’t ever try to explain in any way that makes any sense, I believe that the day you asked your dad if you could try acting in his show, on that day something happened. Something happened that meant that in the universe I live in, events twisted and turned and did whatever they do so that I was born and I lived a life that you could be part of, as me, as a fictional character, in your world. I don’t know how it works or why, but it does. It just does.
    “Our lives are twisted together, because we’re sort of the same person, just one universe and a few centuries apart. And because of that, I think I can ask you this next question.
    “Honestly, Matthew, what the fuck are we doing with our lives?
    “I’ve been talking to your family about you, you know. They love you. They all do. They love you and when you had your accident it was like someone came along and stabbed them in the heart. It’s amazing how much love they have for you. But, and again, I can tell you this because you’re me, I can tell they think you need to get your ass in gear. They talk about how you have so many interests, and how you’re waiting for that one