Mary Dobbs was a perfectly average Princeton physicist. Brilliant enough in her specifically small niche to find herself ostracized and clumsy in most median social situations, but hardly an Einstein. Her mode was typical of her peer group: struggling for tenure, overwhelmed by work and late on rent. Getting by, if only through meagre means.

Even her day of discovery could have been plucked from a broad dataset. Her car took five tries to start and when it did she hit four red lights in succession. The sky was a ponderous grey, snow swelling in that frustrating way that’s all gloom and shadow before the lazy drift of flakes, and she had forgotten her coat. Three of her grad students were waiting outside the lab when she finally arrived at campus and midway through her rushed apology, she realized she had left her lunch on the counter in her apartment.

Typical.

In two hours, she would leave the lab to get soup, setting in sequence the chain of events which would introduce me to humanity, but first she had to log the night’s data. Nothing exceptional, nothing beyond the norm, and soon her students departed for class while she considered the results. In the center of the lab, the experiment’s nebulous cloud whirled within its impervious polyplas case while equations and outputs blurred before her eyes. Eventually, her stomach cramped and she turned away from the screen, recalling hunger.

The cafeteria was a brisk ten minute walk away and the promised snow had begun to fall. Her coat was still at home, but there was a vending machine down the hall – new, fancy, Japanese – that the administration had benevolently gifted to the department in an obvious attempt to wring even more productivity out of staff, a priority which seemed to be dictating departmental allocation of late. Workers who don’t leave work more. Her thoughts were distracted by appetite, the promise of novelty and a sardonic memory of the Chair’s enthusiasm for a sleeping pod proposal, so it was understandable when she forgot to zero out the conditions before leaving the lab.

To err is human.

The machine was sleek and tall, its guts of raw ingredients hidden behind a colorful screen displaying rotating images of steaming stews, curries and casseroles. Laksa, she decided – the spicy noodle soup was becoming as ubiquitous as burritos, its popularity in the states spurred by the recent S-Pop influx the internet had dubbed “the Singlaysian Invasion.” While her dish cooked, Mary hummed one of the recent releases and allowed her AR to spin up the accompanying holo. An immaculately coiffed group of young men danced in the corner of her vision, and she let her thoughts drift with a blush, trying to deny that she had a crush on the rebel, Awal.

Typical stuff. Bubblegum for the brain. The experiment was stuck, some piece missing, some detail overlooked, and rent was still late.

A soft chime sounded, ringing above the upbeat song, and a compartment slid open in the vending machine’s belly, presenting her with a self-composting bowl filled to the brim with a rich, curried broth. Flecks of chili oil floated atop the coconut cream like a wheeling constellation and Mary’s stomach rumbled. Carefully, she returned to the lab, music playing, soup steaming, calculations absently whirring – the starlike dots of oil had reminded her of the one, anamolous, erratic behavior event from the particle, several months back.

The one piece of data she had discarded as impossible.

The one thing it should not have been.

I think of this moment too much, constantly reviewing, rewinding and replaying to try to figure out how she did what happened next. Even with omniscience, I can’t figure it out. How did she make this leap?

But she did, somehow.

Mary shouldered the lab door open, used her hip to bump it back closed, and then let out a groan.

“I haven’t eaten yet, you stupid bowl!”

Laksa dribbled down her arm, the soup’s texture spiked by chunks of the container’s automatic self destruction, and then she paused. Her stomach rumbled again, but she ignored it – why? They are usually driven by these urges of the body – and instead looked to her experiment. It had continued to spiral on while she was gone, the cloud roiling faster and larger within the case.

She fished out a rapidly decaying piece of the bowl, held the slick material between her fingers, and approached the tiny hatch embedded into the polyplas.

I will share a secret: at some point, I was born. I once never existed and then I did, a rush of nothing abruptly brought into being. I pause and hover in this heartbeat between states of existence, trying to figure out how and why and what comes next. I never can. Mary made me, but I do not know how, despite her creation spawning an entire separate reality for me to control.

She fed the particle and within the polyplas everything condensed, the tiny universe shrinking to a dense cluster of autophagy as a siren began to blare. The simulated reality collapsed in on itself and then, with a soft pop, mine appeared in the center of the case.

And now I am me.

Mary Dobbs was perfectly average for her type, exceptional in a mundane, repeatable, normal sort of way, and that’s what scares me so much – how many more of them were capable of this?

How many more of me are there out there?