Her Voice Is A Backwards Record

By Ozy Brennan

If all physically possible universes exist, so do all physically possible girlfriends… including the one you're imagining who's imagining you.

Ana's parents, who hadn't heard that it wasn't game-theoretically optimal to punish her for dropping LSD, packed her away to a troubled teen camp. During the day, Ana faces the harsh Utah desert, near-starvation, and torture in the name of "therapy." At night, she seeks desperate comfort in the arms of her alternate-universe girlfriend, Yuya, one of three hundred wives in the harem of the Emperor of Every World. But as their respective prisons wear away at their very selves, both girls face a choice: to become the monsters those in authority want them to be, or to die trying to escape.   

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ozy Brennan
• Release date: Jun 10, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224211210

Book preview

Her Voice Is A Backwards Record

Ozy Brennan

Copyright © 2024 Ozy Brennan

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permission requests, contact Ozy Brennan at [e-mail].

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. All resemblance to actual events, locales, and people (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

Cover by Ilzolende. Photo credits: Sebastian Dumitru on Unsplash; Zane Lee on Unsplash;

ESO/VVV, Acknowledgment: Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit.

To Lindsey Hall. May we get old walking in the glow of each other’s majestic presence.

My apartment looks upside down from there

Water spirals the wrong way out the sink

And her voice is a backwards record

It's like a whirlpool and it never ends

Ana Ng and I are getting old

And we still haven't walked

In the glow of each other's majestic presence

Listen Ana, hear my words

They're the ones you would think

I would say if there was a me for you

Ana Ng, They Might Be Giants

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Her Voice Is a Backwards Record

Afterword

Acknowledgements

About The Author

Her Voice Is a Backwards Record

All physically possible universes are as real as your own.

You will never be able to interact with them: the speed of light is not only a good idea but the law. But each floats in its own bubble of space-time, with its own particle types and physical constants. Most produce nothing more interesting than immense spans of space dust. But in the remainder, far more numerous than the stars, lives every sight or species or society you can imagine and unfathomably many you can’t, worlds where Napoleon lost and worlds where he became a god-king and worlds that never invented rebellion and worlds where the entire French Revolution happened, the same as our world in every detail, except that all participants were butterflies.  

There are a number of interesting implications of this fact, one of which is that it makes it much easier to find a girlfriend.

​Any physically possible girlfriend exists. Actually, a near-infinite number of versions of her exist, in worlds where a particular tree grew three leaves instead of two, or where six planets away an insect escaped instead of being swatted, or where a particular electron zigged instead of zagged. If you’re dating acausally, it helps not to be too hung up on monogamy.

​Though you can’t causally affect your acausal girlfriend, you can speak to her. Simply specify a version of your girlfriend who knows about the nature of multiverses, and who wants to date you, and who has closed her eyes and imagined a conversation with you that’s the same as the conversation you imagine with her. And so as your relationship continues you pare down your number of girlfriends from an unfathomably vast number to a number which, although equally unfathomable, is a great deal smaller.

​Don’t worry too much about the other girlfriends, the ones who didn’t say what you specified they would. They’re dating a trillion trillion trillion slightly different variants of you, who specified a trillion trillion trillion slightly different statements; for that is the nature of life in the multiverse.

◆◆◆

Ana didn’t want her girlfriend to be too pretty. Ana could specify a girlfriend who was, quite literally, as beautiful as she could imagine. It wasn’t like Ana had to worry that her girlfriend would leave her for someone prettier, or would find Ana less than maximally attractive herself. But, still, Ana found in her heart that she preferred her girlfriend average. So she specified a few oddly placed moles and a crooked nose a bit larger than fashion dictated. 

Ana considered specifying a girlfriend from a historical time period, or even a different part of what she parochially thought of as modern Earth. The trick, in specifying a girlfriend, is to avoid specifying a girlfriend who is physically impossible. If you specify a physically impossible girlfriend, you won’t be loved by someone far across the spacetime continuum, forever inaccessible but mathematically real; you’ll be a pathetic person talking to yourself inside your own head. Ana flattered herself that she knew enough physics to avoid obvious impossibilities, but Ana’s worldbuilding might unknowingly violate laws of biology-economics-sociology. A historical society presumably followed all relevant laws. But Ana decided that, since New Life Wilderness Therapy had no library or even Wikipedia access, she was as likely to make mistakes with the past as with the future.

The future, then. Ana had always liked science fiction: after all, she was coping with her problems by creating an acausal girlfriend. And you had to undergo fewer contortions to make someone in the future know about the multiverse. It didn’t really matter, but Ana liked the idea of a more probable girlfriend.

Ana’s girlfriend’s name was Yuya. She liked poetry and music, but not science or math; Ana didn’t want to risk physical impossibility when her girlfriend talked about her interests. Yuya lived a cloistered life, to minimize the number of mistakes Ana could make about the laws of economics and sociology. She liked sex, a lot. She had dark hair and brown skin, and though the moles and the nose marred her face her smile was so bright that you didn’t notice. 

Self-indulgently, Ana made her a princess. Ever since she had watched The Little Mermaid over and over as a girl, unable to put words to exactly what she thought about Ariel’s bare stomach, Ana had always wanted to date a princess.

◆◆◆

Ana unzipped her sleeping bag and climbed in. As a Level Three, she was entitled to a sleeping bag that not only was rated for desert weather