You Can Get Anything You Want At Simon’s Place

by Gary Cuba

I met my friend Simon in the Student Union for lunch, as I did at least once every week. Unlike most of the other post-grad teaching assistants, he always insisted on eating there rather than in the quieter, more pleasant faculty dining hall. It was easy enough to figure out why. It was the only way Simon would be able to catch a glimpse of Meredith, that fetching, blonde-haired undergraduate student he adored.

Poor sod, I thought. Hopelessly enamored of someone he could never have. He was brilliant in physics and math, but totally at a loss when it came to anything relating to the human world around him.

“So, any luck, pal?” I asked.

Simon obviously knew exactly what I was talking about. He stared down at his lap. “None at all, Glen. To her, I’m the scum of the Earth. I actually scraped up the gumption to ask her out yesterday. She told me she’d rather date a slime fungus.”

I studied my friend. Pity took over. “Sorry, buddy. That’s a crying shame. But you’ve got to look at it objectively. Forgive me for saying it, but you’re not exactly the archetype of a virile, sexually interesting human specimen. Maybe in some other universe, but not in this one.”

“Easy for you to say. Yeah, I know I lack the genes you were blessed with, the blonde hair and blue eyes, the good teeth, the athletic body . . .”

“It’s not all about genes, Simon,” I said. “Heck, just a little more interest in your personal hygiene might make a big difference. Take a shower every day. Get your stringy hair cut. Put on clean clothes each morning. Brush the moss off your teeth and pop a breath mint once in a while. You know what I’m saying.”

“I suppose so, but there never seems to be enough time to deal with all that mundane stuff. And even if I did do it, it’d be like . . . well, like putting shoe polish on a turd.”

“All I’m suggesting is that you out to think about those sorts of details, is all. You’re a great guy, Simon. I like you. You’ve got a heart of gold, and you only need to get the world to look past your exterior self to see it. Or at least Meredith.”

“I know you mean to help, Glen. You’ve always been a good friend.” His face suddenly lit up. “Anyway, you’ve just now given me an idea about how to make things different. Tangibly so.”

“Oh? How’s that?”

“I’d rather not go into it now. Let me get it all worked out in my head first. Look! There she is! Oh, Gawd . . .”

I turned in my chair and looked behind me. Meredith had exited the fast food line and was sauntering over to a table on the far side of the common room to join a group of girls. I chuckled as I watched all the male undergrad students in the place swivel their heads around to ogle her. The cacophony of idle conversation that had reigned a moment ago evaporated into a reverent hush.

As well it should have. Make no mistake about it, Meredith was fabulous to behold. Her long, straight blonde hair reached down to the small of her back, where it waved back and forth in a silky, mesmerizing arc as she walked. Her perfect facial features might have been chiseled out of rare Italian marble by a master sculptor, and I couldn’t ever recall having seen such exquisite proportions or posture on another female body. Top to bottom, bottom to top. All was completely awesome in its synchronized, seductive movement.

Me, I focused on the bottom parts.

I turned back toward Simon, and saw his mouth hanging open. His irises rose and half-disappeared behind his fluttering eyelids. He uttered a low moan. I had no doubt that the horny little sonavugun had just experienced a spontaneous orgasm right then and there.

I couldn’t find it in my heart to tell Simon that I’d begun dating Meredith a couple of weeks ago. And that she was everything his sexually charged imagination could have conjured her up to be – and more.

—

My friend Simon met me in the Student Union for lunch, as he did at least once every week. I liked to eat here rather than in the quieter, more pleasant faculty dining hall. Easy enough to understand why: otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to catch a glimpse oc Meredith. Without that, life would hardly have been worth living.

“Hey, buddy, how’s it hanging?” I said to Simon as he pulled up a chair next to me. I brushed a strand of stringy dark hair out of my eyes and plunged back into my plate of mystery meat.

“Upward and ever onward, Glen.”

Simon smiled, and for the thousandth time I envied him his perfect white teeth, his blonde hair, his good looks. I sighed. The vagaries of genetics curse some and bless others, I thought. Too bad the cursed group included me. Maybe someday I’d spring for some work to correct my pathetic, snaggly dentition. But I couldn’t afford that right now, not on my paltry post-grad teaching assistant’s stipend.

“Aren’t you going to ask?” he said.

“You didn’t!”

“Yes, yes, and yes! My date with Meredith was fabulous! Dinner at my apartment, a chick-flick DVD, then . . . well, what can I say? One thing led to another.”

“Oh, man! You dog, you! I’d love to get into her knickers, but when I asked her out she treated me like . . . like unholy whale shit.”

“Sorry, Glen. But you’ve got to look at things objectively. Forgive me for saying it, but you’re simply not the epitome of a virile, sexually attractive male. Not in this universe, anyway.”

“Easy for you to say, given your lucky genes. The best part of me ran down my father’s leg.”

Simon studied me for a moment. I thought I saw a glimmer of pity in his eyes.

“You’ve always been a good friend, Glen. In more ways than I can tell you. Even inspirationally so.” He paused for a moment, then said, “Finish up your lunch and let me show you something that might interest you.”

—

We left the Student Union and walked along the edge of the campus to Simon’s apartment, which had been constructed over a garage behind an old house adjacent to the university grounds. We ascended a rickety outside stairway, and he unlocked the door at the top. He entered, and I followed close behind him.

As my eyes adapted to the dim light, things began to take shape inside the apartment. I saw a futon lounge against one wall, and my mind flashed to an image of Simon and Meredith sharing orgasmic delights on it. A small table stood outside a tiny kitchen area, with an empty wine bottle and two empty glasses sitting in it. Simon walked into a rear room and bechined for me to follow him.

“Forgive the mess in here, Glen. I was always more of a theoretical guy, not much into the experimental realm.”

I saw a long table with several PCs and monitors resting on it, flanked by impossibly tangled coils of electrical cables. An expensive video camera and a couple of floodlights on stands were positioned on one side of the room, pointing toward a bare wall. My eyes drifted over to a large electrical transformer that sat hulking in a corner.

“I’m totally gobsmaked, Simon. What’s it all for?”

“You should know. Or at least, one of you would’ve known. The one that gave me the idea in the first place: how to become a better person, a person that Meredith would be attracted to.”

“I don’t understand. I’m not getting this.”

“Glen, Glen. You’re forgetting your Physics. The Wheeler-Everett Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, 1957. As you yourself told me, in some universe we’re all enjoying Meredith’s love.”

“Sure, Simon. I know all about the MWI. I even happen to believe it’s true. I can grant that scads of me are spinning off into their own universes in every unit of Planck time. A few are probably even sleeping with Meredith right now. But it doesn’t do me any good. I’m not the ‘me’ who’s with her in any of those alternate worlds. I’m stuck here being whale shit in this one.”

“Then improve yourself, and go get her in your own world.”

Simon pointed to the transformer and picked up a couple of thick cables, each terminated with a long, straight copper handgrip.

“The camera is part of a sophisticated image recognition system,” he said. “Want blue eyes? Blonde hair? Rippling abs? You need only punch in the target image characteristic, and it’ll recognize it – when it sees it. And then it’ll immediately terminate the . . . transformation process.”

I began to put things together. I must’ve gasped, because Simon grinned fiendishly at that moment.

“My God, it’s a quantum suicide machine, isn’t it?” I said. ‘Where’s the trigger?”

Simon pointed to a small metal box sitting on one end of the table. “Radium source. An old glow-in-the-dark watch I bought at a flea market, actually. You can see the end of a photomultiplier tube sticking out of the chamber, there. It’s a true quantum trigger. I’ve got it tuned so that, in every buss cycle of the PC, a photon from the radioactive disintegration process will either hit or not hit the collector. And either deliver or not deliver the deadly current from the transformer into my body. Roughly 50% odds, each cycle. Whenever I get the juice, the Schrodinger wavefunction dictates that my world will split, resulting in one dead Simon and one live one. With the guarantee that the live one will be slightly different – and sometimes better – than the original one.”

“Jesus, I . . . Jesus, Simon! How could you have known that your personal consciousness would survive? I mean, that your own ‘I’ would jump over to the survivor, the spin-off?”

Simon snorted. I didn’t. My heart was in my throat during the first test run. It took everything in me to initiate it. One single buss cycle, a one-shot trial, just to check out the theory. I honestly thought it might just as well have gone the other way, with the ‘I ‘ that’s me expiring right then and there. Heck, despite feeling the jolt, it took me a long time to even confirm that it’d really worked – I finally saw that a birthmark on my stomach had changed shape ever so slightly.”

“I don’t understand why the change. Wouldn’t the spin-off you be physically identical to the starting you?”

“Indeed, why? I had an inkling that residual, irresolvable eigen values must be buried in the Schrodinger equations, and they’d prevent localized geometric congruence between any pair of evolved universes. Turned out to be correct. And obviously, that’s an exploitable phenomenon.”

Simon paused and gazed at me, frowning slightly. “When I started this project, I looked a lot like you do now, Glen – in another universe, of course. I’m just so sorry that you ended up changing for the worse over the course of it. You were such a beautiful human specimen back there and then. It’s the one thing in this whole deal that I’ve felt shitty about.”

“You’ve gone bonkers, Simon. Pulling off something like this is . . . it’s total, absolute Wacko City.”

“You can’t know how much I adored Meredith back then. Or maybe you did, but you never realized the lengths I would go to have her.”

“Does it hurt? I mean, that big transformer over there looks pretty gnarly.”

“Oh, yes, my friend. It does hurt, immensely so. There’s an instant of excruciating pain when you get the jolt, before your consciousness makes the jump, as your brain fries inside your cranium. And if you consider the trial frequency ramped up to the PC’s buss rate, it’s continuous agony. You’re dying again and again and again, at two gigs per second, more painfully than you can possibly imagine. And sometimes it takes a good long while to achieve the target, since you don’t want to lose any of the previous . . . enhancements. My longest run was close to twenty minutes.” He chuckled. “Took that long to get my penis how I wanted it. But the end reward . . .”

Simon sighed and stared at the floor. “It’s worth it, is all I can say. It’s all been worth it.”

“Jesus. Dear God in Heaven.”

He looked up at me, eyes wide. “And you can do it, too, Glen. You can have whatever you truly desire – if you really want it badly enough.”

—

I met my boyfriend Simon in the Student Union for lunch, as I did every day. I felt like the luckiest girl in the world.

“Glenda, sweetheart,” he said as I sat down. “How do you manage to always look so darned sexy?”

I giggled and felt my face blush. Meredith joined us at that moment; she leaned over and brushed my coiffure aside to nuzzle my neck. Her short, spiky blonde cut tickled me deliciously.

“You want some sugar too, Simon-doll?” she asked.

Simon smiled demurely from across the table. “Oh, save it for later, I think. When the three of us can be . . . properly alone.”

—

Gary Cuba lives with his wife and an unruly horde of freeloading domestic critters in South Carolina. His short fiction has appeared or is scheduled in Jim Baen’s Universe, Abyss & Apex, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Brain Harvest, Fictitious Force and numerous other speculative and mainstream publications.