![]() Ursa Major-as she named herself long ago, but only called herself since she left-discovered that the hardest and strangest aspect of her journey would not be finding food or water or supplies, nor navigating the sprawling interdimensional web of tens of thousands of trains and their meandering routes among ten billion different versions of Earth it would be connecting with the strangers she met on the boxcar roofs. I couldn’t follow where she went instead I’ve made myself her distant biographer: collecting all the eyewitness sightings, second-hand anecdotes, and muttered rumors I’ve been able to get my hands on through the years. I was the only person she told her true name before she left, and I’ve missed her terribly. She was my best friend, my sister in arms through the worst of middle and high school. No, her sole regret was that in the instant the hook caught and the rope went steel-taut and she careened away into the multiverse on the alien aethertrain’s relentless momentum, shock and reflex took over and denied her the presence of mind to flip this particular version of Earth the bird, once, hard. It wasn’t longing for anyone or anything she was leaving behind in our world-not even me, and I don’t begrudge her that. It was not that she hadn’t bothered to ask whether there was breathable air in whatever weird multidimensional space the train was heading into. Ursa left with neither a second thought, nor the thinnest inkling of return, nor the name and gender her parents had always tried to hang on her, nor anything else she couldn’t cram into a backpack and still have room for the purpose-bought spool of rope and grappling hook by which, after several tries, she finally snagged one of those boxcars (for want of any other earthly concept to describe them) and held on for dear life. It was the lucky break of her life that she just happened to be there, a short sprint from one of those points where the alien aethertrain briefly punched through into our world: a multidimensional mechanical worm intersecting our reality as a rush of vaguely boxcar-like shapes strung between entry and exit portals, thirty-odd feet above one suburb or another, a cornfield, a strip mall, a stadium. Ursa Major got right the fuck out of our universe on the very afternoon she learned there were other options.
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