Rasmus at One Hundred Volts
One man, one box that plugs into a hundred volts, and every life he might have had instead.
Every episode drops Rasmus into one life, for one day, with one box and no way of asking anybody for help. Read them in any order; he is no closer to home in the last one than the first.
How these are made
The box has three rules, and every story in the series obeys them. It needs a hundred volts, which in practice means Japan and almost nowhere else on Earth. Where you plug 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 you are standing on. And he does not travel. He arrives in the life that is already there, keeping his own memory and nothing else, which is the part that costs.
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.
He is not a hero and he is not owed a way home. In some of these he has money. In one of them he has a conviction. In one of them he does not have hands. The series is not building toward his return, because the number he needs is the one he was standing on when he left, and he never wrote it down.
The questions this series answers, one piece each:
A note on this series. These are works of fiction. Only the electricity is real: Japan's hundred-volt supply and its fifty and sixty hertz grids, sourced under each story. Rasmus, the Kanbara Institute, the cell and everything the dial does are invented, and no real person, laboratory or experiment lies behind any of it. Read our originality statement.