In particular, he contemplated the notion that reality is made up of an infinite number of universes, all occupying the same place and time. In which case, somewhere nearby (so close he ought to be able to reach out and touch it) was a universe in which he’d moved that pesky decimal point right instead of left. In that universe, where would he be, right now? Switzerland, probably; in his palatial, air-freshened, carpeted office, working hard on Phase 9 before going home to his comfortable house and his loving wife. He lifted the bottle and stared through it; first through the glass, then through the clear liquid that wasn’t neat acid. The distorting effect of the bottle and the opacity of its contents blurred his focus just nicely. He tapped the bottle with the fingernails of his visible left hand, and admired the gentle, clipped ting. It looked nice and snug inside there, he decided, probably a great place to live, almost certainly better than where he was living now. He could climb inside, pull the cork in after himself, and be peaceful for a while. He’d like that. Then, maybe, after he’d been – what did wine do? – maturing in the bottle for a thousand years or so, perhaps he’d mutate or evolve into something rather better; a genie, obviously, a powerful, magical entity trapped in a bottle but capable of being released, to do good deeds and grant wishes. Maybe. Or maybe he could turn into a message, bobbing through an endless sea, bearing an awful warning.
He glanced at the label, which told him nothing he could understand.
Drowning your sorrows won’t help, said a voice in his head. It sounded a bit like his mother, a woman who’d lied to him about the existence of Santa Claus and was therefore not to be trusted on matters of any importance. Rope theory. End-of-rope theory. At the very end of your rope, you can either hang on or let go, but in most cases it makes very little difference in the long run. Besides, he wasn’t drowning his sorrows, he was dissolving them in acid. There’s a difference.
Here endeth the lesson. He drank a bit more, altering the optical qualities of the bottle, whose value as an instrument of scientific observation he was beginning to question. People reckoned the world looked better seen through the bottom of a bottle, but it didn’t. Just a bit rounder, and sort of an orange colour.
If only the heartburn wasn’t fuzzing his powers of concentration, maybe he could combine string theory and rope theory to make macramé theory; whereby it should be possible to take all those flailing strings and weave them into what you wanted them to be – a lifeline, perhaps, that’d be nice, or a halter, or a noose. Or even – how about this for a really neat idea – one of those South American rope bridges that sway alarmingly above a mind-numbing abyss, seconds before some clown with a machete cuts through the rope, as always happens in the movies, and the whole lot goes twisting and crashing back down into the –
Um. Not the sort of image you want in your mind when you’ve just drunk two-thirds of a bottle of saturated solution of saccharine on top of an end-of-date meat pie. He sat up, which made the world stop swirling. Excellent. Cause for a celebration. He celebrated with three gulping mouthfuls, dropped the bottle, closed his eyes and flopped against the side of the skip.
The bottle didn’t break when it hit the ground. Instead, it rolled a little way, bumped against the toe of Theo’s boot, and stopped. Theo was well away by then, asleep and dreaming the one where he was being chased by giant cucumbers across the shuttle bay of the Enterprise. Accordingly, he wasn’t watching the bottle as the last inch or so of acid drained out of it, revealing a small object.
To identify the object he’d have had to lean forwards and peer closely through the glass. This would’ve had a bad effect, probably culminating in the return of the meat pie, so it’s just as well he didn’t. But if he had, he’d have seen inside the bottle a tiny model of a ship, barely an inch long but perfect in every detail, right down to its gossamer rigging. The ship floated on the outgoing tide until its draught was too great for the meniscus to support it; then it flopped