Guilty in Every World

Every episode runs the same shape and none of them resolve it. He arrives in a life that is already underway. Somewhere in it is the Rasmus who belongs here, or the hole where that Rasmus was, and whatever that man did is now waiting with our man's face on it. He cannot prove he is not that person, because in this world he is, and everything true he says about himself makes it worse.

The way out is the box, and the box has three rules. It needs a hundred volts, which in practice means Japan and almost nowhere else on Earth. Where he plugs it in decides what the dial means, because the country runs at fifty cycles a second east of the Fujigawa River and sixty west of it, so the same number is a different door depending on which side he is standing on. And it needs a wall. Which is the clock in every one of these: the moment anybody takes him somewhere secure, there is no socket, and he is that world's man for good.

He does not get home. The number he needs is the one he was standing on when he left, and he wrote down the one he was going to instead, because that is what an engineer records. He knows it was past nine and he is never going to get further than that.

The voltage and the frequency split are real. Tokyo bought its first generators from Germany and Osaka bought its from America in the eighteen-nineties, neither side gave in, and the country has run on two incompatible grids ever since. Everything the box does with that is invented, and every story says so at the foot of the page.