There are many Declans in this story, but let’s begin with ours.
Declan sits on the edge of his bed, absently sweeping his hands under the crumpled sheets in search of the remote. When that fails, he reaches beneath the bed without bothering to look, hoping his fingers brush against salvation.
Declan is a man approaching the far end of middle age, though you wouldn’t peg him as someone clinging to the past. If retirement were an option, he’d take it in a heartbeat — but our Declan doesn’t have a job in the ordinary sense. He’s an inventor. A brilliant, widely published, entirely reclusive inventor. Few know his face. Fewer have heard his voice. His name, however, is infamous in scientific circles: a ghostwriter of genius.
In the reflection across the room, the mirror paints his portrait — Declan, with the soft belly of too many seated years, hair thinning in patches, shoulders slumped by habit rather than defeat. He yawns, not from tiredness, but as if the act of being awake is a long-standing chore.
His only spark of enthusiasm lives in his work — if one can call it that. Dreaming up absurd gadgets with serious scientific underpinning. Most are mechanisms for indulgence, enablers of passivity. And yet, they’re bought for obscene sums by corporations who prize the illusion of progress.
He lives modestly despite his wealth: plain home, frayed clothes, and a foot-powered scooter for rare excursions. He’s published in all the best journals; his outlandish theories on time travel and prehistoric architecture turn heads — especially his paper proposing that dinosaurs built storm shelters. His peers call him “Schrödinger’s Declan,” a man whose existence is debated as if he’s a thought experiment come to life.
Most days, Declan hovers at the edge of some great idea, a “what if” dangling just out of reach. Today is no different — until it is.
He finds the remote in the sock drawer, though he swears he never put it there. Pointing it at the TV, he begins the usual ritual: clicking from one channel to the next, searching for something that feels less pointless than the last.
Then it happens.
A what-if takes shape. Not on screen — but in his mind. Not just a flicker. A full scene. A bridge. A path. A destination. His eyes brighten, diamonds cut from static.
He looks around, half expecting the walls to overhear him. Clutching the remote like a relic, he sprints from the room, bounding down the stairs with a hand on the rail to steady his knees.
The basement is dim and unfinished. A single bare bulb dangles from the ceiling, its glow too weak to fully erase the strips of light coming through the blurred windows due to the overgrown foilage.
In the corner, beneath the dust and silence, lies his toolbox.
Declan pulls it open, revealing a tangle of wires, circuit boards, tools, and scribbled Post-its. All the necessary components are in place. The moment is right.
He begins.
An hour — or perhaps a lifetime — later, he sits on the worn couch, pointing what was once a TV remote but is now something entirely different.
A Parallel Universe Converter.
He clicks.
Each channel shows a different version of his life. Some are triumphant. Others, disastrous. All foreign, yet painfully familiar.
On Channel 3, Declan is atop Mount Everest, planting a flag that promptly sails off into the stratosphere. He bursts into laughter.
“How stupid can that version of me be?” He grins. “This is awesome.”
He runs upstairs, grabs popcorn and soda, and returns to flip through channels like a kid home sick from school.
Most universes are mundane reruns: minor deviations, inconsequential tweaks. But then, Channel 15.
A boy. Twelve years old. On a summer camping trip.
Declan leans forward, the popcorn forgotten.
He remembers this. The summer before high school. Arlo — his childhood best friend — beside him. They’d joined a camp that offered canoeing, swimming, crafts, and, eventually, a three-day overnight trip.
There were girls, Sissy and Stella. Awkward flirtations. Underwater dunking as courtship. Declan and Sissy kissed behind the counsellor’s cabin. Then, like a flipped switch, they ignored each other for the rest of the trip.
Even in alternate lives, Declan seems prone to running away.
He watches the four of them on a bench, gazing at the stars, pretending to be adults. He smiles. Then he changes the channel.
On Channel 29, he’s eighteen. Acceptance letters from top Canadian universities are scattered across the kitchen table. McGill for physics. Western for archaeology.
Archaeology — the backup dream. The life of deserts, relics, romance under impossible suns. In that world, Declan becomes an adventurer, dodging tomb traps, barely surviving his own ambition.
He skips over channels he can’t bear. One’s too close to his real life. Ones where he’s nothing but a minor character in someone else’s story. No grand inventions. No thrilling divergences.
But then he finds Channel 7.
He stops breathing.
On Channel 7, everything is different. Every “no” he ever muttered is now a “yes.” All the inventions he dreamed of realized.
But none of it compares to her.
On Channel 7, he marries the woman. The woman. The one whose memory lingers at the edges of all his days. The one who slipped through his fingers while he was busy building machines to distract himself from wanting her.
They have children — a family. Laughter echoing through a house that never existed here.
Declan wants to look away — but he can’t.
In the quiet hum of his dark basement, the soda hisses softly in his hand. He takes a sip, settles back into the couch, and watches the life he might have lived.
And he doesn’t change the channel.
Gareth Vieira is a Canadian fiction writer whose work explores surreal landscapes, dark comedy, and the unseen edges of small-town life. His stories often feature eccentric characters, magical realism, and the strange logic of childhood and folklore. He writes from a place of mischief and melancholy. His fiction is set in and around the mythical Hope County.
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