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He’d spent the night in the boat. Next to the spaghetti queen. William glanced at the hobo girl. She sat across from him, huddled in a clump. Her stench had gotten worse overnight, probably from the dampness. Another night like the last one, and he might snap and dunk her into that river just to clear the air. She saw him looking. Dark eyes regarded him with slight scorn. William leaned forward and pointed at the river. “I don’t know why you rolled in spaghetti sauce, ” he said in a confidential voice. “I don’t really care. But that water over there won’t hurt you. Try washing it off.” She stuck her tongue out.“ Maybe after you’re clean, ” he said. Her eyes widened. She stared at him for a long moment. A little crazy spark lit up in her dark irises. She raised her finger, licked it, and rubbed some dirt off her forehead. Now what? The girl showed him her stained finger and reached toward him slowly, aiming for his face.“ No, ” William said. “Bad hobo.” The finger kept coming closer. .Ilona Andrews
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Even though this world is narrow, it is wide... to those who understand. This world isn't the only one.CLAMP
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Her vision of the world under the water represented a beautiful stillness, a version of heaven. It was the lost city of Lena, her alternate universe, the life she yearned for but didn't get to have.Ann Brashares
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If there are "Infinite Dimensions" then there would be infinite alternaterealities, and if there are infinite alternate realities we would existin almost all of them that would make all of us omnipresent. And if anyone of those beings was connected with all knowledge in all the realities they would fall under what most call a God..Stanley Victor Paskavich
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Enemy, " hiss the bushes all around. The rest of the Pride glided forward, surrounding Lily, Rowan, and Spike.Josephine Angelini
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Can you imagine life without the horror genre? There would be no monsters. Only a**holes.Michael A. Arnzen
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Rebecca approached the causality violation chamber (too grand a name for such a faulty thing), placed her hand against its door, and closed her eyes, much as Philip had during its christening years ago. There was no response from the machine; no prophecy; no apology; no advice. It did not relay the news from other, brighter timelines. It did not tell her what would have transpired had she returned from yesterday's shopping trip a few hours later, or had she turned the steering wheel left instead of right two years ago, or had she not taken that first drink, or had she turned down any one of the thousands of drinks that had followed, or had she chosen not to respond to Philip's insistent and perhaps deliberately oblivious messages during the early days of their online courtship, or had her parents or her grandparents, or her great-grandparents never met. The machine's obstinate silence was all it had to offer; the message of that silence was that she had made her choices in life, and her choices had made her in return.Dexter Palmer
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I keep having this fantasy about some wide river or channel I'm on the bank of. I can look up, and on the far side is another, better self, holding hands with Mercer–that's his name, my ex–and both of them are watching me flail over here, watching me from the life I'm supposed to have had. When did it become impossible to get there from here? When did that bridge get burned?Garth Risk Hallberg
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What we are proposing, ' Alicia said, 'is that the laws of physics are such that causality violation is subject to a form of version control, one that prevents a forking of history. That instead of causality violation creating an alternate universe, one version of history is outright overwritten by another. One past is replaced with another future. Which means that the memories of the past of the people in that future are replaced with memories of a different past.' Carson interrupted. 'Including the memories of any–'' Purely hypothetical–''–time travelers.'' So take our time traveler from the traditional story, ' Carson continued. 'He leaves his utopian future for the past. He kills the butterfly. The Magna Carta is never written. He returns to the dystopian future that his misstep created. But he doesn't see it as a dystopia: he sees it as home, the world he grew up in, the world he left to go back in time. Because he doesn't remember that first future, and has no other world to which he can compare this one. Maybe he even sees it as a utopia. Maybe everyone does. Maybe everyone in this dark place believes that they live in the best of all possible worlds.Dexter Palmer
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It was an alien place, as much inhuman as it was ungodly. There was no life in this place. It was a different world altogether. This world was dead.Angelo Tsanatelis
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If the future changed, and the time traveler we're talking about was from that future, and was the product of events that created that future, why wouldn't the time traveler also change when those events changed?Dexter Palmer
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You could consider the idea of the multiverse, and think of it as something like a tree–that is, the universe we live in is one of an uncountable number of branches of possible universes, created by random chance and the decisions of sentient beings. So, for instance, when I rang you up in the morning, there was a possible future universe in which you answered the phone, and another in which you did not, and by answering the phone you put us in one universe and not the other. In that instance the time traveler doesn't just move from the future to the past and back to the future: he moves down one branch of the universe, toward the root that's back at the beginning of time, and back up another branch.Dexter Palmer
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The mysteries of universe are revealed to those who seek to know the truth of their own existence first.Anjali Chugh