The bench I’m sitting on is in a park in the center of the city. The city has been deserted and it seems that I’m the only one left in this thread. I take out my Notch(tm) pen from my shirt pocket and looks at it. Should I go back to my earliest notch, just to see people again, not to be totally alone?

A dog pisses against a tree, while it observes my every move with great suspicion. At least there are a lot of animals in all the threads. If only I had been a little foresighted, I could have made an alliance with a few other people, dumped the damn Notch(tm) pens, and lived in a thread together.

That miserable Italian, Francesco Salvatucci and his CERN research. That damned day he discovered the quantum connection that allowed putting a marker in time, which you could return to.

Out of it came the Notch(tm) pen. Suddenly everyone could put a mark in time, do crazy stuff and return to the mark. On a second the world exploded in extremism. Set a notch. Kill your boss, wife, old high school menace, shoot everyone in a church, synagogue or mosque. Reactivate your notch and the world was blissfully unaware of your crime. “Your personal universe” as the add said. Except for the rest of us, left in your old reality, until we got Notch(tm) pens of our own.

The quantum universes divided again and again and again. People got hooked on notching. Forbidden fantasies was being relived, violence and rape was the order of the day. I curse and envy the “Holy” that despised the Notch(tm) pen from the start. “They” are in all the threads. They avoid me like the plaque. They are not like me.

I look at my pen again. Should I reactivate? Reactivate, just to see the others like me, see my friends, yet another last time, before they reactivate and disappears, quickly, quickly, out of my fragile reality, leaving me alone with the animals and the “Holy”.

I scream against the universe, but in “Your Personal Universe” no one can hear you scream.