Reality Lottery - Part One

A dull buzzing rings out beside me as I slowly stir awake, the painfully red sunrise blaring in through my window and painting my room in its crimson light. Rolling onto my side, facing away from the window in an effort to spare my eyes, I see the source of the noise. My phone is ringing on silent, eschewing my usual alarm as someone attempts to call me first thing in the morning.

"Who the fu..." I croak, squinting my eyes through the crusty sleep clinging to them in an attempt to see the caller ID. As I slowly begin to make out the white text my heart skips a beat, a cold sweat of fear running down my neck as my heart rapidly beats in excitement.

"The Reality Lottery" I whisper, reaching for the phone with a shaking hand before quickly picking it up.

The Reality Lottery had started up around a year or two back when a small proprietary company managed to create a bridge between our and another world. While this required that company to exist independently in the other world, they soon found themselves linking to more and more disparate worlds. In secret they worked with their other selves, attempting to work out how best to use and monetize their discovery. They discovered that their system had a few, minor, issues that would need to be worked around;

• Only a few individuals could move from or to a world each day, the bridge growing weaker and weaker with each subsequent travel and needing time to recharge. And,

• Only one instance of any given person could exist in any given reality. A traveller would be unable to enter a new reality so long as their counterpart was still existing in that world. However, if both were in the bridging space at the same time they could both move to each other's world. This had a strange property whereby once you stepped into a new world your body would slowly be molded by it, shifting over a matter of hours or days to become a doppelganger of your counterpart and correcting that physical discrepancy in the world.

After months of discussion and debate the company finally decided on their plan, creating a cross reality lottery which offered the chance of moving to a better life. The only problem was that they needed both people to enter the bridging space, the area connecting their realities, to effect this prize.

A simple solution was devised, there would always be a winner and a loser. When purchasing a ticket, hoping to win a better life in a new reality, you would also be put up as a prize for a winner in a worse-off reality.

A winner would receive a call, congratulating them on their win, before being given a choice of three new lives for them to take over. Upon choosing a new home reality they would simply head to their local Lottery office to accept their prize and leave their world forever.

Losers on the other hand would receive the same call but with no option or choice of body. Instead, they would be told to go to their local Lottery office willingly or a collection crew would be sent to retrieve the winner's "Prize".

I had been buying a weekly ticket for quite a while, having seen the numerous news articles about and interviews with some of the winners. A CEO who had been rejected from the initial entry-level position in their old world thanks to the employer throwing away half the resumes, a trust fund party girl whose parents had their kid a decade earlier in their home world which caused a life of relative poverty, and the world-famous guitarist who had been forced to learn and subsequently given up on the trumpet in their world thanks to a coin flip by her parents.

Other profiles were closer to fluff pieces, interviewing people about their old worlds. Some fantastical, and potentially false, recounts were given of worlds of magic and elves or worlds with technology that had would have been considered sci-fi by those of us in my world.

These profiles always followed the winners, the dream image of the lottery, while pushing any thoughts of the losers to the side in favor of hyping up what could and what would happen if you win.

Swallowing hard I bring the phone to my ear, answering the call as I shiver under the covers of my bed. "Uh...hello..." I meekly squeak into the receiver.

"Mr. Hughes?" a well-rehearsed and crystal clear voice calls out from the other end.

"Sp...speaking" I reply nervously.

"This is the Reality Lottery, we're calling you today to inform you at..."