<fffshwwPOP!!> … <thump!> “Ow!”

That white satin dress, that molten‑silver voice. “Anne? Is that you? Are you OK?”

“Yeah, Sy, it’s me. I’m all right … I think.”

“What happened? Where’ve you been all year? Or considering it’s you I should ask, when’ve you been?”

“You know the line between history and archaeology?”

“Whether or not there was writing?”

“Sort of. Anyway, I’ve crossed it dozens of times. You wouldn’t believe some of the things I’ve seen. The professionals sure wouldn’t.”

“Wait, does the dress go with you? White satin wasn’t a thing centuries ago.”

“Oh, it changes like camouflage when I travel. That’s one reason I like this era — white satin’s so much nicer than muddy homespun or deerskins, mmm?”

“Mm‑hmmm. I suppose that’s why the dress didn’t get messed up when you erupted here. What led to that, anyway?”

“I don’t know. It probably had something to do with me experimenting with my ‘pushing’ superpower, going for a direction I hadn’t tried before. I’ve always known that front‑and‑back ‘pushing’ moves me forward or backward in time. You helped me understand that a ‘push’ to the side shifts me between alternate Universes at different probability levels. ‘Pushing’ up or down changes my size. Well, this morning I figured out a different direction to ‘push’ and that was weird.”

“You’ve described all three normal directions of space, so a new one would have to be weird.”

“I know what that direction feels like even if I can’t describe it. What was weird is what happened when I tried ‘pushing’ there. Things came into focus a little slowly. That may be what saved me. What I saw in front of me was … me. Dress, hair, everything, reflected left‑to‑right like looking in a mirror but our movements were a little different. Things were sharpening up and suddenly this sheet of fire flared between us and it blew me … here, to your office. What was all that about, Sy?”

“A couple of questions first. That sheet of fire — did it have a color or was it pure white?”

“Not white, more of a bright blue-violet.”

“And did it start like <snap> or were there preliminary sparkles?”

“Umm .. yes, there were sparkles! In fact I was already ‘pushing’ away when the bad flare‑up started. How did you know?”

“Just following a train of thought. I’m hypothesizing here, but I think you just barely escaped blowing the Earth apart.”

“WHAAATT!!?!”

“It all goes back to the Big Bang and our belief that physical phenomena have fundamental symmetries. Back in the Universe’s first few skillionths of a second the energy density was so high that the electromagnetic and nuclear forces were symmetry‑related. Any twitch in the chaotic unified force field was equally likely to become a proton or an anti‑proton, matter or anti‑matter. So why is anti‑matter so rare in our Universe?”

“Maybe the matter atoms just wiped out all the anti‑matter.”

“Uh‑uh. By symmetry, there should have been exactly as much of each sort. If the wipe‑out had happened there wouldn’t have been enough matter left over to make a single galaxy, much less billions of them. But here we are. Explaining that is one of the biggest challenges in cosmology.”

“You say ‘symmetry‘ like that’s a sacred principle.”

“I wouldn’t say ‘sacred‘ but the most accurate physical theory we know of is based on the product of Charge, Parity and Time symmetries being constant in our Universe. If you take a normal atom and somehow reverse both its charge and spin to get an anti‑matter atom, the symmetries say that the reversed atom must travel backward in time. From an outsider’s perspective it’d be like the original atom and the anti‑atom rush together, annihilate each other and release the enormous amount of energy that accomplished the reversal. Anne, I think you almost ‘pushed’ yourself into an anti‑Universe with a reversed CPT symmetry.”

“Those blue-violet flashes…”

“…were atoms from the air you carried with you, colliding with anti‑atoms in your anti‑twin’s air. Good thing those micro‑collisions released enough energy to get you back here before…”

“…I touched anti‑Anne or even breathed! <shiver> That would have been…”

“…BLOOEY!”

“This is nicer, mmm?”

~~ Rich Olcott