Consultation 140.

“God, I’m not able to blink. Please fix this.”

“Just blink.” What kind of idiot can’t blink? Did she forget how to close her eyes?

“Did you not hear what I just said? I can’t do that, that’s why I’m here. If I could just blink whenever I wanted to, do you think I’d need to ask for your help?”

“Why exactly can’t you blink?”

“Because something horrible happens when I do.”

“Horrible? Surely you’re exaggerating. If you really want help to blink so badly, lean closer and I’ll help pull down those eyelids for you.”

“No! Absolutely not! Do you have any idea how difficult it is to keep my eyes open like this without ever blinking? I have to eat, shit, and sleep with my eyes open and rolled back without ever closing them.”

“You do all three with your eyes rolled back?”

“Oh, sorry, my mistake. Only the last two require my eyes be rolled back.”

“I-I see.” When I pictured her taking a shit with her eyes open and rolled back I nearly lost it.

“So… from the sound of it, you CAN blink, but choose not to due to certain circumstances.”

“Yes, that is correct.”

“What exactly happens when you blink that is so horrible?”

“When I open my eyes after blinking, I find myself in a random world. If I blink again, I’m back to my original world.”

“I see.” Another cursed bitch. Luckily I’m already used to these strange curses that keep getting thrown at me.

“Why not just never open your eyes?”

“I end up somewhere where I can’t breathe and I’m eventually forced to open them.”

“Oh, hence why you sleep with your eyes open.”

“Exactly.”

It seems like quite the pain in the ass curse to live with. I can see why she’d be stumped and book this consultation.

“Now please fix this.”

What the hell would be causing this? It’s somewhat similar to the idiot who kept reincarnating, but I can’t think of something that would result in this. Summoning definitely wasn’t it.

The only explanation I had was… she was actually just crazy and imagining she was in another world.

Oh! Wait a minute, maybe her physical body isn’t actually going to another world at all. Perhaps just her awareness is.

It could be some careless god fucked up when cleaning or defragmenting parallel branch worlds. They probably just did a half-assed job, they might have started the process, went to take a break, then forgot to come back and finish the damn job resulting in this mess. 

The data from these parallel worlds where copies of her also existed ended up entangled as a result. Because the wavelengths for those branches are very close together and the universal constants are identical in those branch worlds, whenever she blinks, it leads to a disruption in continuous visual input to her brain. This disruption in continuous visual input is likely what causes her awareness to slip into one of the random worlds closely entangled with hers where a copy of her also existed.

That also potentially explains why she is unable to breathe when her eyes are closed. It’s because she enters a transitory state where her awareness grows confused and she doesn’t know which world to breathe in. As for why this doesn’t happen when her eyes are rolled back… I have no fucking idea.

Is there a difference? What about when she’s in a pitch-black room with the lights off? Maybe it has to do with the threshold of visual input data. 

Oh, the entire premise my hypothesis was based on might be completely off.  I could very well be wrong about the wavelength of the electromagnetic waves being disrupted here. Who said for certain it was related to the visible spectrum of light? Even in a dark room, there were all sorts of different wavelengths of electromagnetic waves being absorbed and reflected by the body. 

But if that’s the case, then it makes finding the wavelength of the electromagnetic wave causing the problem all the more frustrating. Wait, do I even need to care about that? I already established it was likely a result of dropping below a certain threshold when her eyes are closed, didn’t I? The amplitude of the wave is what matters here. The wavelength will just dictate how quickly that wave’s amplitude decays when traversing through a certain medium.

If I actually cared to find the source of the problem, I would trial and error it with formulas by testing out different wavelengths knowing the magnetic permeability and electrical permittivity of skin, but that’s unnecessary here. The problem is simply that this unidentified electromagnetic wave decays too much when passing through her eyelids before it enters her eyes. If that’s the case, all she needs to do is thin out her eyelids enough for it to not decay below the threshold so it remains continuously detected without interruption.

You could definitely solve it mathematically to figure out exactly how thin her eyelids needed to be using some simplified formulas for electromagnetic wave decay once you figured out the wavelength of the electromagnetic wave causing this problem. To find the wavelength responsible, simply put a shield in front of her eyes to act as a bandpass filter that attenuates the amplitude of certain frequencies of electromagnetic waves before they enter her eyes. But there was really no need to go through all that trouble when you already knew the conclusion you’d arrive at in the end.

It was a simplistic black box problem where you could acquire the inputs and outputs through simple measurements, you didn’t know what was going on inside the black box transforming the signal, but you didn’t need to. The specific finer details weren’t important as long as you knew what you wanted for an output given an input. 

Simply make her eyelids thinner bit by bit until she no longer sees another world whenever she blinks.

Having arrived at a conclusion, I opened my mouth and said, “I think I’ve come up with a simple solution to your problem.”

“What is it? It better not be something like just never blink or have my eyelids permanently removed so I can’t blink even if I wanted to. I don’t want to go around looking like a freak who scares little children for the rest of my life. I’d definitely be turned into one of those urban legends that mothers tell their children as a scary bedtime story.”

“Don’t worry, you can keep your eyelids. All you need to do is get an eyelid transplant. You just need to make sure the eyelids are as thin as possible.”

“Hah? How the hell is that supposed to solve anything? When I blink I’m still going to see another world.”

“You won’t. It’s too troublesome to explain everything, all you need to know is that your problem is caused by an unidentified wavelength of electromagnetic wave that enter your eyes. When the signal is disrupted and the amplitude drops below a certain threshold, your awareness slips into a world where a copy of you exists. In reality, your body is never changing its location, it’s only your awareness that is.”

“My awareness?”

“Yes.”

“And making my eyelids thinner would solve the problem?”

“Yes. Though it doesn’t solve the root problem as there are still cases where you will end up in another world. For example, if you cover your eyes with your hands you will still find yourself in another world. But this at the very least fixes your problem of being unable to blink freely.”

“That’s fine! That’s totally okay with me! I don’t really get anything of what you said, but just being able to blink is more than enough salvation for me! You have no idea what sort of hell it’s been like being unable to blink. It’s such a simple action that people take for granted. Being unable to blink has effectively made my life unlivable. Thank you for your guidance, God. I’ve got to go. I can’t wait any longer to free myself from this terrible fate. The freedom to blink, I can already taste it!”

With tears in her eyes, she ran out the door at full speed. It was a weird sight to see her unblinkingly shedding tears. It was actually a first. It was scarier than I expected. It gave off some major, ‘I’m crying because it hurts how I want to kill you because I love you too much’ vibes.

But with that, the case of the woman who found herself in a random world every time she blinked was closed. 

Only, the case of the woman who found herself in a random world when she covered her eyes had just begun. 

Well, at least it was better than every time she blinked.