Many Earths
A Novel
What If Another You Existed?
An engineer who treats the unexplained as noise meets the anomaly she cannot discard: herself.
Fiona Ly is paid to find the faults no one else catches. The ones in herself, she has learned not to look at.
For years the discipline has held: file away the grief, the anger, the poetry, and everything else that doesn’t compile. Then her neighbor is murdered, her twin brother is charged with the killing, and the trail leads through a flawed Alzheimer’s drug to the research of Aunt Millie, the woman who raised her. Millie died in an explosion off the coast of Crete four years ago, though no bodies were ever recovered, and Fiona was hospitalized for refusing to believe she was gone.
Fiona investigates the way she does everything: precisely. But her reflection has started moving half a second behind her. And the woman waiting for her has Fiona’s face, Fiona’s scar, Fiona’s memories, and every part of herself Fiona cut away.
She says she has come to help. She watches like someone owed a debt.
To prove her brother innocent, Fiona must follow the trail toward a dead aunt who may not be dead and decide whether to trust the impossible woman who knows every part of her, including the self Fiona abandoned to survive.
Read an Excerpt
1
Friday, November 12, 2004 – 10:00 PM
Preparing for a third rerun, Fiona leans forward to adjust the waveform parameters and sees her reflection move half a second late. Her pulse spikes. She lifts a hand. This time, the reflection moves with her. No delay. But the wrongness lingers, not in the glass now, but somewhere behind her eyes, a faint misalignment that makes her hold still a moment longer than she means to, aware of the low fluorescent hum, the flat wash of the screen’s light, how the glow drains the color from her hands, leaving them almost gray against the keyboard. That half-second gap, like arriving late to her own life.
The protocol is the same as always. She files away what doesn’t fit—Aunt Millie’s absence, the occasional echo of her voice in an otherwise empty room, the abandoned poetry, the way her breath catches when she thinks of the lines she no longer finishes.
Data points without patterns are noise. But this one clings. After thirty-six hours on barely any sleep, her mind keeps slipping back to the dream she didn’t mean to remember during the nap she didn’t mean to take. She refuses to call it a nightmare, though it was: her own body lying askew beneath a trimmed hedge, rain-slicked and still, a cup of coffee offered in comfort, the lid giving way, and beneath it, blood, dark against the paper. The image persists. She has to push it away herself this time.
Friday already. Eight weeks before tape-out, and the chip won’t finish itself. She refocuses, but the monitor now flashes INTERNAL ERROR in hard red. Hours of work—gone.
“Damn it.”
“You okay?” Evan asks, hovering at her cubicle door, rumpled in yesterday’s conference polo and still wearing his badge lanyard.
“Just peachy.” She gestures at the screen.
Xuan Ba Nguyen 