Working Title: Three Jacks

Part two of my work in progress

Dear readers

I gained 103 subscribers in October which makes me very happy. My new book is out and you can buy it here. It’s about how I became a comics writer and came up with Earth 616 and the multiverse as seen in the Marvel cinematic universe.

As you know I am stuck in a wheelchair, being disabled and having had a stroke. Previous posts tell the story. I’m still waiting for the results of an MRI scan to tell me why my condition is getting worse. My wheelchair is electric, and this week I’ve had it fitted with new straps to hold me in place.

I have lost some of my personal assistants who help me with day-to-day activities. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber as you will help me pay for the one assistant who is left while I search for more. The others left for health reasons, and it is extremely difficult to find new carers. They help me do everything I used to be able to do myself.

I dictate everything I write on the computer correcting mistakes with one finger, including this post, which takes a long time, so please forgive any mistakes. It explains the strangeness of the writing.

Now I will continue to serialise my work in progress. Substack readers are getting a sneak preview. I began this with the last post, do read that first if you have not done so yet. I am imagining three versions of myself with a different name in different realities. All of them wish they were dead.

Knowing that you are waiting to see it gives me the motivation to keep going with it. Charles Dickens also serialised his novels in literature magazines at the time. So I am in good company. I believe Dickens would have blogged if he were alive today.

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The doctor comes to pay a visit, nervous, smelling of fear. Jack had gone to the doctor's the day before his major stroke to report the minor one the previous day although we did not know what it was at the time. In Earths most of them in which this afternoon happened he was correctly diagnosed and given drugs which meant that he did not have a major stroke but to recover only continue with this job.

The doctor does not look healthy. He has no neck, his head has sunk into his body, the top of his back is bent, he rests his chin on his gnarled hands (now there is a word with a silent letter which the computer does not understand so it has to be typed).

Jack is thinking of sueing the medical practice. The doctor knows this and they both record the conversation. There is only a small number of universes in which Jack did have a stroke, too bed for him to be living in the universe anyway shit happens in and in which the doctor type with his buttoned up shirt and the body to match praise Play is that sympathy. He's not a good actor and the mask slips: "what do you want?" "yeah yeah Compensation."

Jack features the doctor should have recognised the symptoms, given him the joke that's a would have prevented the major stroke from happening. "Loss of earnings." "Sure you don't want tomorrow's winning the lottery number as well?" Jack can see he regrets the joke attempt as soon as it believes his lips. He mumbles an apology but the damage is done. Except in 353 when he is witty enough to turn it into self-deprecating humour. But not in 351, in this universe his Head sinks even more into his shoulders wanting to disappear completely but in no universe is this possible.

That day Jack gets an email. He gets hundreds of emails a day because he is on so many lists. Somebody somewhere thinks he will benefit from an email form somebody offering counselling advised to therapist. He reads "What is the most important thing your clients need to deal with depression? Is hope. Hope Therapy explains hope as a combination of people being able to see themselves as agents of change and being able to determine ways to Change." But change is not his friend just as it wasn't Johnny Online's. In a previous life he was he was Johnny.

He looks out the window. What does he see? The figure of Eternity pointing at him inside the outline of these edge stars and galaxies far back in time when the universe was young. And there is the Whatcher in his Roman style toga 20 feet tall keeping an eye on him as if this would save a hell of cosmic importance.

Nowadays he cut waiting for the minute just to pass, he's seats waiting for the minutes to pass, wishing the hours away, as he lives as he lies on his side on his own in the dark unable to sleep, or he sits in the daylight only zone waiting for someone to come. A meal would punctuate the loneliness, the monotony.

Jack went to a hospital in Neath Port Talbot last week where the doctor gave him a Botox injection. Two actually. One in each thigh. This doctor had three female assistants dressed as nurses. They helped him to transfer onto a bed. One of them how old his hand. The others held him down.

It was distracting, did the job as a fourth assistant gave the doctor a large needle which he plunged into Japs pleasure Jack's not so fetish flesh. The Whatcher watched. Eternity held its breath. It hurt it stung like a cosmic bee. Me and you are all outside meanwhile yonder Younger passing him bye.

It was distracting, did the job as a fourth assistant gave the doctor a large needle which he plunged into Japs pleasure Jack's not so fetish flesh. The Whatcher watched. Eternity held its breath. It hurt it stung like a cosmic bee. Me and you are all outside meanwhile yonder Younger passing him bye.

More than a week later the Botox has had no Apex. Jack's disease still club together like a teenage Christian virgin Woman. The consultant does down yeah, does not care, yesterday his job wisdom was done.

One day when he was working before he was forcibly retired he went to the office. He worked for Future Perfect, there's an empty wallet name if you ever heard one, are campaigning pleasure group campaigning for action on climate change, Global overheating, what is it that you want to go early. His job was to unmask trolls, climate denialists, spell them out, destroy them if possible.

The office was rented, cheap, institution green paint, Metal windows, freezing in winter. Hot desking they called it, the desk was 20 years old bought secondhand along with everything else in the office including the filing cabinets. He liked it when there was nobody else in the office so he often went there in the evenings which was when the enemy tended to post their fake news messages on social media. There was no alternative Earth on which the things they posted about were true because they violent counter to the Reality of science.

He had been after this one four weeks. The poster ran about 20 accounts on different platforms. You could tell after a while that they were all by the same guy because the same phrases kept popping up in different messages..." You just can't believe this" "unreal" "on a different planet" "divergent". Also references to the same so-called scientific papers.

But on this particular occasion there was somebody else working at one of the desks; Bob Michael who always wore a duffel coat don't matter the time of year. They called him Boris for no other reason. He was a big Doctor Who fan who made models of Daleks. He had a theory that time did not exist and everything happened at once; Doctor Who never travelled to a different time in this timestream but to a different splace where everything was like it was in the past but with him there as well. "So I could kill my grandfather and still be alive because it is not a time stream and it is not the same grandfather."

If only Jack had known, Boris was talking about alternative Earths, or may as well have been. But this was talking about the church you this, or he may as well be in. Jack picked a desk where Boris could not see his screen. Yes he was paranoid. This was not a state of mind that was a people often talk about in the 2020s although most people suffered from it: maybe because it was too common to be remarkable. But Jack thought it was because they didn't want people to acknowledge it. He load on and soon found himself posting correctional messages under his online identity of not lies, found himself as usual linking to the Carbon Ledger website wishing the truth sometime varied. It was so boring that it never changed, he could see why people were attracted to different versions of the truth, it was so much more entertaining.

Back in the person day he went to a yoga session. The session leader in her extend till the end Voice talked a lot about the breath. "Breathe in, think of your inner self which is so much more important then your outer self. The inner informs the outer, not the other way round. Breathe out. Send your breath into the universe." Jack tried hard to do as she said but he did not have a picture of the universe in his mind. He could do murders of the exercises but no more. He was taped to his wheelchair, his legs wouldn't move, found himself wondering whether he should have an affair with one of his carers.

There was a pandemic on and they had to wear masks so he often imagined what her mouth was like, so as mostly he was disappointed when he finally saw it. She was fit not overweight like most of them, and as he looked down while she cut his toenails so tenderly he admired the cut of her hair, the shape of her neck, the tapering off her up this. Then he came to his senses. If he had tried to initiate an affair even if it was successful it would end badly. It did, in many universes where he did this it did end badly in most of them, only in one of them did it work out for them to die of old age in a car accident. He thought in this universe it would be unequal, he would lose her as a carer and lose his partner and she would lose hers. He dismissed the idea, tried to breathe it out into the universe, but the universe kept pushy it's back in. The universe, Earth 651, did not want him to forget this idea. What would the yoga expert teacher think of that?

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That’s the end of chapter 1. More next week. Don't forget, if you like this please consider becoming a paid subscriber and buying my new book.