Dr. Wren Halvorsen had built a machine that could see into infinite alternate universes, and the only thing it had shown her all week was a version of Earth where everyone communicated exclusively through jazz flute.

“Turn it off,” she said to her lab assistant, Leo, who was recording everything on his phone. “Turn it off before we learn anything else about jazz flute Earth.”

“But this is incredible,” Leo said. “Do you understand what you’ve built? This is a doorway to the multiverse. This is the biggest scientific achievement since fire.”

“It’s a doorway to a universe where the president resigned because his flute solo was, and I quote, ‘derivative.’ Turn it off.”

The machine, which Wren had named the Cross-Dimensional Aperture Viewer, or CDAV, sat in the corner of her converted garage like an oversized microwave crossed with a satellite dish. She had spent four years and most of her retirement savings building it. She had expected, reasonably, that peering into alternate realities would reveal grand cosmic truths. Instead it had mostly revealed that the multiverse had a lot of free time and terrible ideas.

Leo finally hit the switch. The screen went dark, then flickered back to life on its own.

“I didn’t touch anything,” he said.

“It does that sometimes.” Wren rubbed her eyes. She had been awake for thirty-one hours. Her actual job, the one that paid her actual rent, was as an underappreciated systems analyst at a regional insurance company, a fact she generally left out of grant applications. She built the CDAV at night, on weekends, during her lunch breaks, fueled by gas station coffee and a stubborn refusal to believe that a person without a fancy university lab couldn’t change the world from a garage in Ohio. “It resets to a semi-random frequency. We should probably fix that.”

“Should we?” Leo was already leaning toward the screen. “Or should we see what’s on.”

The screen resolved into a new image. A man in a lab coat, unmistakably a version of Wren’s neighbor Gary, stood before a podium. Behind him, a banner read WORLD CONGRESS OF SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVEMENT.

“—and so,” Gary-from-another-dimension said, “we are honored to present the highest award in all of human science, the Nobel Prize, to the inventor of the wheelbarrow.”

The crowd erupted in applause. Confetti fell. Someone in the front row wept.

“The wheelbarrow,” Wren said.

“The wheelbarrow,” Leo confirmed.

“They gave the Nobel Prize to whoever invented the wheelbarrow.”

“I think that’s Gary. I think Gary invented the wheelbarrow in that universe.”

Wren sat down slowly in her office chair, which squeaked in a way that suggested it, too, was disappointed in this development. “We built a machine that can access every possible version of reality across the infinite multiverse, and the first three things it has shown us are jazz flute diplomacy, a mysteriously resetting frequency dial, and Gary winning the Nobel Prize for a wheelbarrow.”

“Statistically,” Leo said, “somewhere in the infinite multiverse there has to be a universe where things are normal.”

“Do they, though?”

The machine buzzed and the image changed again. This time it showed a version of Wren’s own kitchen, except every surface, including the walls, the refrigerator, and what appeared to be the family cat, was covered in a fine layer of glitter.

“Alternate-me has a glitter problem,” Wren said.

“To be fair, that tracks.”

“I do not have a glitter problem.”

“You have three separate glitter incidents logged in the shared calendar.”

The doorbell rang. Wren briefly considered pretending not to be home, a strategy that had served her well throughout most of graduate school, but Leo was already halfway to the door because Leo had never met a doorbell he could ignore.

He returned a moment later with a man in a gray suit holding a briefcase and wearing an expression that suggested he had been having a very long day that was about to get longer.

“Dr. Halvorsen?” the man said. “My name is Harold Weeks. I’m with the Interdimensional Regulatory Commission.”

Wren looked at Leo. Leo looked at Wren.

“That’s not a real thing,” Wren said.

“It’s a very real thing, and it’s chronically understaffed, and I have been driving for six hours because your machine has apparently been triggering minor bleed-through events in at least four adjacent realities.” Harold set his briefcase on the workbench and opened it to reveal a stack of paperwork roughly the height of a toaster. “We’re going to need you to fill out form 14-B, the Unauthorized Cross-Dimensional Aperture Disclosure, in triplicate.”

“There’s an Interdimensional Regulatory Commission.”

“There is.”

“Since when?”

“Since always, technically, though our funding was cut in the eighties and we didn’t get it back until the multiverse started leaking again in the early two thousands.” Harold pulled out a pen. “Look, I’m not here to shut you down. I’m here because if we don’t process this properly, you’re going to start getting complaints. And trust me, you do not want interdimensional complaints. Last year a man in Nebraska accidentally opened a stable aperture to a universe where breakfast cereal is sentient, and we are still dealing with the paperwork.”

“Sentient breakfast cereal,” Leo said, in the tone of a man having the best day of his life.

“Do not,” Harold said, pointing at him, “ask it about oat allergies. It gets personal.”

Wren pressed her palms against her eyes. “I built this machine to understand the fundamental structure of reality. I did not build it to fill out government forms about jazz flute presidents and sentient cereal.”

“Welcome to interdimensional science,” Harold said. “It’s ninety percent paperwork and ten percent existential horror. Now, if you could just initial here, here, and here, we can get you a provisional license and you can go back to whatever it is you were doing.”

While Wren filled out form 14-B, which had a section specifically for “Nature of Bleed-Through, if Musical,” the CDAV buzzed again and the image shifted. This time it showed what appeared to be a war room, tense generals huddled around a map, a red phone blinking urgently.

“Oh no,” Leo said. “Is this the one where they’re all fighting?”

On screen, a general in full military regalia snatched up the red phone. “Sir,” he barked, “we have a situation. The Belgians have refused to return our shipment of waffles. I’m afraid this means war.”

“The Waffle Accords,” Harold said, without looking up from his paperwork. “That’s universe 4471-C. They’ve been in a cold war over brunch items for almost thirty years. Don’t worry about it, they never actually fight, they just have really passive-aggressive summits.”

“You know the number of this universe,” Wren said slowly.

“I know the numbers of a lot of universes. It’s my job.” Harold took the completed form from her and slid it into his briefcase. “Look, I get it. You built something extraordinary, and instead of cosmic truth, you got glitter cats and wheelbarrow Nobel laureates. But here’s the thing nobody tells you about the multiverse. It’s not smarter than us. It’s not wiser. It’s just more. More of everything, including more of the stupid stuff. You wanted to see what else was out there and it turns out what’s out there is basically us, minus a filter.”

Wren considered this. On some level it was almost comforting. She had spent four years imagining that somewhere across the infinite branching possibilities of existence there was a version of reality that had it all figured out, a universe of clean answers and elegant solutions, and instead the multiverse had handed her jazz flute and waffle wars and a cat covered in glitter. But there was something almost sweet about that. Even infinite universes, infinite chances to get it right, still ended up occasionally deciding that cereal deserved feelings and wheelbarrows deserved medals.

“Can I ask you something?” she said to Harold.

“Sure.”

“Is there a universe where I actually finish this project on time, get proper funding, and don’t have to fill out government paperwork at eleven o’clock at night?”

Harold consulted a small tablet from his briefcase. He scrolled for a moment, frowning.

“There’s one where you finish on time,” he said. “But you also accidentally invent a machine that turns everyone’s socks into soup, so I wouldn’t necessarily call it a win.”

“Sock soup.”

“It’s a whole thing over there. Don’t ask about the shoes.”

Leo, who had been quiet for almost ninety seconds, which was a personal record, finally spoke up. “So what happens now? Do we get shut down? Do we get, like, recruited by a secret interdimensional agency?”

“Neither,” Harold said, snapping his briefcase shut. “You get a provisional license, a pamphlet on aperture safety, and my card in case you start seeing anything genuinely dangerous, like a universe where taxes are due retroactively or one where everyone agrees on politics. That second one is extremely rare and extremely unsettling, trust me.” He handed Wren a business card that, on closer inspection, appeared to shimmer slightly at the edges. “Also, turn the machine off at night. It draws them in.”

“Draws what in?”

“You don’t want to know. Goodnight, Doctor. Nice work on the wheelbarrow discovery, by the way. That’s going to make somebody’s day at the office.”

He let himself out.

Wren and Leo sat in silence for a long moment, staring at the CDAV, which continued to hum contentedly in the corner, occasionally flickering between realities like a television with a mind of its own and questionable taste.

“So,” Leo said eventually. “Tomorrow. Same time?”

Wren thought about the insurance job waiting for her in six hours, about the thirty-one hours she had already been awake, about the paperwork tucked into Harold Weeks’s shimmering briefcase, about a version of herself buried in glitter and another one drowning in sock soup and a third one probably very happy having invented the wheelbarrow after all. She thought about the fact that she had built, with her own hands, in her own garage, a window into the entire multiverse, and the multiverse had responded by showing her exactly how ordinary and strange and occasionally ridiculous existence could be, in every possible form it could take.

“Same time,” she said. “But if it shows us the jazz flute people again, I’m hitting it with a hammer.”

“Noted,” Leo said, already reaching for his phone to keep recording. “For the record, I think this is going to be the best thing that ever happened to us.”

Behind them, the CDAV buzzed once more and the screen flickered to life, revealing, in vivid and inexplicable detail, a universe where the moon had apparently been replaced with an enormous, gently rotating bagel.

Wren looked at it for a long moment.

“Somewhere out there,” she said, “someone is having a very confusing breakfast.”

She left the machine running.