Welcome, Reader

There is a version of this story that goes:

Andy was afraid of heights, and Andy believed in quantum mechanics, and everything else is left as an exercise for the reader.

There is a version of this story that goes:

Andrew lived in a tiny cottage near a high granite cliff that towered over the ocean and looked like the broken edge of something smashed by an angry god. Tucked inside his cottage, Andy buried himself in books filled with names like Schrodinger and Planck and Dirac. And when he had read too much, and if it was not too windy – and occasionally even when it was – his mind would force his body to carry it to the top of the cliff so that it could peer through the crisp, clear air resting atop the blue-black ocean.

He would stay there until his poor heart could take the strain no more, whereupon he would return to his books.

And it went on like that for quite a while.

There is a version of this story that goes:

Anthony dreamed of flying. He spent his childhood alone, reading about not the greatest pilots of history, but the most fascinating ones – not so much the Wright Brothers as the Night Witches, less experimental jets and more human-powered helicopters – and stories about fliers and transformation. Magic carpets and wax wings and ugly ducklings entranced him for days on end. 

And when nature showed him that these dreams were not for him – not for the one-and-a-half-eyed boy with the weight problem – he found himself looking for ways to bypass mere possibility.

He found books of magic, and they held his attention for a while. He swam through imagined air alongside wizards and superheroes and things that would be gods, given the chance. The rush of imaginary wind amplified his whispered desire into an irresistible yawping purpose.

Charlatans and madmen took him in, as they have since time immemorial, and soaked him of what money and talents he possessed, returning nothing more than the hard-won knowledge of what not to do.

It was an exhausting existence, and it is no wonder that eventually Anthony turned away from his dreams towards something more tangible – if only just – in science. His soaring imagination came to ground, and he turned his eye towards the realm of quantifiable uncertainties and testable hypotheses and margins of error.

He swam great seas of knowledge in search of a new dream, one that might fall within his merely-mortal grasp.

In a graduate school not unlike the ones you know, he found something. A tantalizing hint at the edges of the known, a model of consciousness that suggested that anything – that everything, in fact – comes true somewhere in the infinite weave of possibilities.

He took this idea further, conjecturing that perhaps consciousness is the tracery of only those branches where each consciousness – and here we imply by that word the persistent pattern that endures despite the ephemerality of the mere matter of which its form is constituted – continues to exist. There was immortality in this, which would please any man, but there was a kind of wishing in it too, and that pleased Anthony in particular.

And so he bought a small house in a small town and took a small stipend to do theoretical research that would never make him famous – that would, indeed, see him ostracized as far as his professional peers were concerned – but that would nonetheless point him at the dreams of his childhood once more.

There is a version of this story that goes:

Andy was a sad boy, and an even sadder man, and one day it killed him.

There is a version of this story that goes:

Andy wound up his courage and leapt out into the air, which took pity and caught him, and from that day to this, Andy and the air have been inseparable.

And, to Andy at least, that last universe is the only one that matters.