"I have a solution, but it's rather extreme."
"What is it?" asked the Sharons in unison, since the butterfly effect was just beginning its work on their brains and it was going to take hours for them to differentiate to an appreciable degree.
"I will send each of you to an alternate universe. They'll be planarly far from here so you won't have a double there as well."
Jim opened a secret door in his basement lab (actually it wasn't secret at all, it's just that so much junk was piled against it that nobody would have dared to open it) and flipped an old fashioned knife-type switch. The new room was small and totally bare except from a strange machine surrounding a sort of electric chair. From the chamber came a dinstinct smell of ozone.
"This is my personal alt-catapult. It's outbound only, of course; but it will do. Hopefully on the other side, you'll find people who will help you to build yourselves a new identity."
"And where does that thing take?"
"Almost to any reality you can imagine... within this sector, of course. I'll build a random vector for each of you, to be fair."
"But which one of us stays here?" The twelve girls didn't look very keen to leap into the unknown, especially considering that the original Sharon did read a couple of novels by Harry Turtledove.
"I don't know. Decide for yourself!" Jim obviously didn't want to take any responsibility.
Fri Jul 16 03:04:16 1999