The thing about working at the Bureau of Interdimensional Affairs is that nothing ever happens, except when everything happens at once, and even then it is mostly paperwork.
Mira Okafor has been a Level 3 Reality Compliance Officer for six years. Her job involves reviewing incident reports from field agents who patrol the membranes between parallel universes, making sure no one smuggles unauthorized matter across dimensional boundaries or creates paradoxes that require expensive cleanup crews. The work is tedious. The coffee is worse. The break room smells like someone microwaved fish in Reality 447-B, and that smell has somehow become a multiversal constant.
She is sitting at her desk on a Wednesday, filling out Form 19-C (Minor Temporal Anomaly Report, Non-Threatening), when her computer screen flickers. This is not unusual. Bureau technology runs on something called quantum-parallel processing, which means it works by doing calculations across multiple universes simultaneously. The IT department insists this makes it faster. Mostly it makes it glitchy.
The flicker resolves into an email.
FROM: Jasper Chen, Reality 782-F
TO: Mira Okafor, Reality 782-A
SUBJECT: Your 3:00 PM meeting is cancelled
Mira stares at the email. She does not have a 3:00 PM meeting. She checks her calendar. Empty, except for a reminder to submit her timesheets before Friday.
She hovers her cursor over the reply button, hesitates. Inter-reality emails are technically allowed but strongly discouraged. The bandwidth costs alone could fund a small continental breakfast for the entire department. Also, Protocol 7 clearly states that communication between parallel instances of the same person is prohibited under penalty of mandatory sensitivity training.
But this email is not from another Mira. It is from someone named Jasper Chen.
She types: I think you have the wrong Mira.
The reply comes back in less than a minute.
FROM: Jasper Chen, Reality 782-F
TO: Mira Okafor, Reality 782-A
RE: Your 3:00 PM meeting is cancelled
Oh no. Sorry. I'm new. The addressing system here is impossible. Are you Reality Compliance?
Mira leans back in her chair. She should report this. Unauthorized inter-reality contact, possible information breach, definitely a waste of Bureau resources.
She types: Yes. Six years. You?
Two weeks. They have me reviewing contraband reports. Someone tried to smuggle a live chicken across from Reality 991-Q yesterday. A chicken. The form for livestock violations is forty-seven pages long.
Mira laughs. Actually laughs, out loud, which makes her cube neighbor glance over with suspicion.
She types: Wait until you get to the bioluminescent squid incident of 2019. That one required an inter-departmental task force.
Over the next three days, Mira and Jasper exchange exactly seventeen emails. Technically eighteen, but one of them gets caught in a quantum loop and arrives four times, each version slightly different.
They talk about the absurdity of Bureau bureaucracy, the best places to get lunch near headquarters (though headquarters exists in slightly different locations in their respective Realitys), and the philosophical implications of a job that requires you to believe in infinite parallel universes while also filling out expense reports in triplicate.
Jasper is funny. He has a way of describing the mundane tedium of their work that makes it sound almost heroic. He once spent six hours trying to locate a missing stapler that had accidentally been duplicated across four realities.
He writes: I found all four staplers. They're in my desk drawer now. I'm a stapler hoarder across the multiverse.
Mira writes back: That's the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me.
She sends it before she realizes what she has typed. Her finger hovers over the unsend button, but quantum email does not work that way. Once a message crosses dimensional membranes, it is out there, somewhere, everywhere, all at once.
The reply takes six minutes.
I should clarify that I don't actually keep them in my drawer. That would be inappropriate misuse of Bureau property. I returned three of them. But I did keep one. It has a nice weight to it. Very satisfying staplings.
Mira grins at her screen.
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The first time they video call, is an accident.
Mira is trying to send a file (Form 23-J, Update Request for Minor Protocol Violations) and clicks the wrong button. Her screen blooms into a window showing a small office that looks almost exactly like hers, except the poster on the wall is different. Hers says TEAMWORK MAKES THE DREAM WORK in aggressive block letters. His says HANG IN THERE with a picture of a cat clinging to a branch.
Jasper Chen appears in frame, startled, holding a sandwich.
He is handsome in an unassuming way. Dark hair that looks like he cuts it himself, glasses that are slightly too large for his face, a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows.
"Oh," he says. "Hi."
"Hi," Mira says. She suddenly wishes she had worn something other than her backup cardigan, the one with the fraying cuffs.
They stare at each other for three seconds that feel like thirty.
"Nice poster," Mira says.
Jasper glances behind him. "Oh. Yeah. It came with the office. I think it's supposed to be motivational? But honestly it just makes me sad for the cat."
"Mine says teamwork makes the dream work."
"That's worse."
"I know."
They both laugh, and the laugh trails off into another silence, this one softer.
"I should go," Mira says, not moving.
"Yeah," Jasper says, also not moving.
"This is probably against some protocol."
"Definitely against several protocols."
Mira closes the call. She sits at her desk, staring at her reflection in the darkened screen. Her heart is doing something complicated.
That night she dreams about quantum entanglement. Two particles, separated by impossible distances, still affecting each other instantaneously. No communication, no signal. Just connection, faster than light, weirder than physics should allow.
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The emails continue. They become longer, more personal. Jasper tells her about his mother, who works as a botanist and once tried to breed a rose that could survive in low-oxygen environments. The experiment failed, but the roses turned a color that does not exist in nature, something between purple and the sound of wind chimes.
Mira tells him about her brother, who disappeared when she was nineteen. Not across realities. Just disappeared in the regular, awful way people sometimes do. The Bureau offered to help her search alternate versions of her brother, see if he existed somewhere else, alive and okay. She declined. She does not want a replacement. She wants her brother.
Jasper writes: I think that's the saddest and most loyal thing I've ever heard.
Mira writes back: It's not loyalty. It's just that other versions wouldn't be him. They'd be close. But close isn't the same.
She sends it, then stares at the screen. She wonders if she is talking about her brother or something else entirely.
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Three weeks into their correspondence, Mira gets called into her supervisor's office.
Supervisor Valdez is a woman who looks like she was born wearing a pantsuit. She has perfected the art of the disappointed look, the kind that makes you feel like you have let down not just her but also several generations of your ancestors.
"Sit," Valdez says.
Mira sits.
Valdez taps her desk screen, and a log appears. Emails. Seventeen of them. Eighteen if you count the duplicates.
"You've been in contact with an employee in Reality 782-F," Valdez says. It is not a question.
"Yes."
"You know that's discouraged."
"Yes."
"Bandwidth costs, potential information leakage, risk of emotional entanglement across dimensional barriers."
Mira nods. She feels like a teenager caught passing notes in class.
Valdez sighs. She closes the log. "I'm not going to write you up."
Mira finally blinks. "You're not?"
"Do you know how boring it is, working here? I've been at the Bureau for twenty-three years. I've seen people quit because they couldn't handle the tedium. I've seen people transfer to Reality Enforcement just so something, anything, would happen. If you've found someone who makes the paperwork slightly less soul-crushing, I'm not going to stop you."
Valdez leans forward. "But you need to be careful. Inter-reality relationships are complicated. I'm not talking about HR regulations. I'm talking about physics."
"Physics?"
"You exist in Reality 782-A. He exists in Reality 782-F. You're not just in different places. You're in different quantum states. Every decision you make creates a new branch, a new reality. You think you're talking to the same person each time, but technically you're talking to a slightly different version every single conversation. He's changing. You're changing. The person you're falling for might not be the person who shows up tomorrow."
Mira's throat tightens. "I know."
"Do you?" Valdez's expression softens. "I had someone once. Reality 309-L. We tried to make it work. But every day we talked, we drifted further apart. Not emotionally. Quantum mechanically. Eventually, we were having two completely different conversations. He was talking to a version of me that I'd already stopped being. I was talking to a ghost."
The office is very quiet.
"I'm sorry," Mira says.
Valdez waves a hand. "It was fifteen years ago. I'm fine. I'm just saying, be careful. And maybe talk to someone in Quantum Relations. They have therapists who specialize in this kind of thing."
Mira leaves the office feeling like she has swallowed a stone.
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She does not email Jasper for two days. She reads articles on quantum decoherence, watches videos about the Many-Worlds Interpretation, tries to understand the mathematics of what it means to exist in parallel. The numbers blur together. She is not a physicist. She is a bureaucrat who stamps forms and drinks bad coffee.
On the third day, Jasper emails her.
FROM: Jasper Chen, Reality 782-F
TO: Mira Okafor, Reality 782-A
SUBJECT: Are you okay?
You haven't replied to my last two messages. If I said something wrong, I'm sorry. If you're just busy, I get it. But I wanted to make sure you're alright.
Mira stares at the email for ten minutes.
She types: Can we talk? Video?
The call connects thirty seconds later.
Jasper looks worried. "Hey."
"Hey."
"You okay?"
Mira takes a breath. "My supervisor talked to me. About us. About the emails."
"Oh. Are you in trouble? Am I?"
"No. Not exactly. She just warned me. About the physics."
Jasper tilts his head. "The physics?"
"We exist in different realities. Different quantum states. Every time we talk, we're both changing, branching into new versions of ourselves. She said eventually we'll drift so far apart that we won't even be having the same conversation anymore."
Jasper is quiet for a long moment. Then he says, "That's true for everyone."
"What?"
"Everyone drifts. Everyone changes. My best friend from college, we don't talk anymore. Not because we had a fight. We just became different people. That's not quantum mechanics. That's just life."
Mira feels something in her chest loosen. "You're saying it doesn't matter?"
"I'm saying it always matters, and it never matters. Look, I don't know what's going to happen. Maybe we'll keep talking and it'll be great. Maybe we'll drift apart and it'll hurt. But that's true for anyone, anywhere, any reality. The quantum stuff just makes it sound more official."
He adjusts his glasses, a nervous gesture she has come to recognize. "I like talking to you. I don't care what reality you're in. I just care that you're you."
Mira wipes her eyes. She is not crying, not exactly. "That's the second most romantic thing you've ever said to me."
Jasper grins. "What's the first?"
"The staplers."
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They keep talking. Weeks become months. They learn each other's schedules, the small rhythms of their separate lives.
Mira learns that Jasper hums when he is concentrating, that he takes his coffee with too much sugar, that he has a scar on his left hand from a childhood accident involving a fence and a badly thrown baseball.
Jasper learns that Mira bites her thumbnail when she is nervous, that she reads mystery novels on her lunch break, that she once wanted to be a dancer before a knee injury redirected her life toward the safety of a desk job.
They do not talk about what they are. Relationship feels too official. Friends feels too small. They exist in the space between, undefined and uncertain.
One day, Jasper says, "I looked it up."
"Looked what up?"
"The rules. For inter-reality relationships."
Mira's stomach drops. "And?"
"They're allowed. Technically. But if we want to meet in person, we'd need to file Form 88-D, Request for Supervised Cross-Reality Visitation. It requires approval from both our supervisors, a quantum physicist, and someone from HR. Plus we'd have to meet in a neutral reality, one neither of us is from."
"That sounds complicated."
"It's seventeen pages. Plus appendices."
Mira laughs despite herself. "Of course it is."
Jasper leans closer to the screen. "Do you want to meet?"
The question hangs in the air like a held breath.
"Yes," Mira says. "But I'm scared."
"Of what?"
"That you'll be different. Or I'll be different. That it won't be the same."
Jasper nods slowly. "I'm scared too. But I think I'd regret it more if we didn't try."
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Form 88-D takes six weeks to process. Mira fills out her section with the kind of meticulous care she usually reserves for audit reports.
She lists her reasons for requesting cross-reality visitation: Professional collaboration on inter-departmental case review. It is technically true. They have been trading notes on a particularly complicated contraband case involving recursive time loops and a shipment of self-replicating garden gnomes.
Supervisor Valdez approves it without comment, though Mira swears she sees the hint of a smile.
The meeting is scheduled for Reality 782-M, a neutral branch selected by the Quantum Relations Department. It is a version of their city where the Bureau headquarters is located in a building that looks like it was designed by someone who only ever saw buildings in dreams. The architecture is off, angles not quite right, windows in places windows should not be.
Mira arrives fifteen minutes early. She stands in the lobby, which is too bright and smells like vanilla for some reason. She is wearing her good blazer, the one she saves for performance reviews. Her palms are sweating.
Jasper walks in at exactly 2:00 PM.
He looks like his video calls, but also more real. Taller than she expected. His glasses catch the light. He is wearing a tie that is slightly crooked.
They stand three feet apart, staring at each other.
"Hi," Jasper says.
"Hi," Mira says.
"You're real."
"So are you."
They both laugh, nervous and relieved.
"Do you want to get coffee?" Jasper asks. "There's a place across the street. I checked. They have good reviews in at least seven realities."
"Sure."
They walk side by side, not quite touching. The city around them is familiar but wrong in small ways. The traffic lights are a different shade of green. The street signs use a font Mira has never seen. It is disorienting, being in a place that is almost home but not quite.
The coffee shop is small and crowded. They order drinks and sit by the window. Mira gets a latte. Jasper gets something with too much sugar, just like she knew he would.
"This is weird," Mira says.
"Very weird."
"Good weird or bad weird?"
Jasper considers. "Good weird. I think. Ask me again in an hour."
They talk for three hours. They talk about everything and nothing.
Jasper tells her about a case he is working on involving a man who accidentally created a stable time loop by sending himself lottery numbers from the future.
Mira tells him about the time she had to explain to a field agent why you cannot bring back souvenirs from realities where the Aztec Empire never fell.
At some point, their hands end up close together on the table. Not touching, but close.
"Can I ask you something?" Jasper says.
"Yes."
"What happens if we do this? If we keep doing this?"
Mira looks at their almost-touching hands. "I don't know. The physics gets complicated. We'd have to file more forms. Request ongoing visitation rights. There are people who make it work. Inter-reality couples. I've heard about them."
"But it's hard."
"Everything's hard."
Jasper nods. He moves his hand, and his fingers brush against hers. It is the lightest touch, barely there. It sends electricity up her arm.
"I want to try," he says. "If you do."
Mira turns her hand over, lets their palms meet. His hand is warm. Real. Solid across impossible distances.
"Let's try then," she says.
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They fill out the forms.
Form 91-C, Request for Ongoing Cross-Reality Relationship (Romantic).
Form 91-C-1, Acknowledgment of Quantum Risks and Emotional Hazards.
Form 91-C-2, Emergency Contact Information in Case of Dimensional Collapse (Unlikely But Legally Required).
The paperwork is absurd. There are questions about their long-term intentions, their understanding of quantum decoherence, their contingency plans if one of them gets reassigned to a different reality.
But they fill it out, together, over video calls and shared documents that sync across dimensional barriers.
Approval comes back in four weeks.
They are allowed supervised visits once a month, increasing to twice a month after six months of stable quantum coherence. They can email as much as they want, within bandwidth limits. They are required to check in with a Quantum Relations counselor every three months.
It is not perfect. But it is something.
--------------------------------------------------
Their first official date is in Reality 782-M again. They go to a museum that exists in both their realities but has completely different exhibits.
In Mira's reality, it is a natural history museum. In Jasper's reality, it is a museum of failed inventions.
In Reality 782-M, it is a museum dedicated to the history of bureaucracy.
"This is the most depressing date location ever," Jasper says, staring at an exhibit about the evolution of filing systems.
"I love it," Mira says.
They wander through halls filled with antique typewriters and examples of ancient permit paperwork.
There is an entire room dedicated to the history of the stamp. Not postage stamps. Approval stamps. Ink stamps that say APPROVED or REJECTED or PENDING FURTHER REVIEW.
Jasper takes her hand in the stamp room. This time it is not tentative. This time it is deliberate.
"I'm glad we did this," he says.
"The museum?"
"All of it. The forms. The risk. I'm glad."
Mira squeezes his hand. "Me too."
They kiss for the first time in front of an exhibit about the invention of carbon paper. It is awkward and sweet and tastes like the coffee they had earlier. When they pull apart, Mira is smiling so hard her face hurts.
"That was nice," Jasper says.
"Very nice."
"We should probably fill out a form about that."
"Form 92-B. Notification of Physical Intimacy Across Reality Barriers."
"You're kidding."
"I wish I was."
They both start laughing, and they cannot stop. They laugh until tears stream down their faces, until other museum visitors start staring, until a security guard politely asks them to keep it down.
--------------------------------------------------
Months pass. They settle into a rhythm. Video calls every evening. Emails throughout the day. Monthly visits that become the highlights of Mira's carefully structured life. They meet in Reality 782-M, which starts to feel like their reality, even though neither of them is from there.
They learn to navigate the complications. The lag in video calls when quantum interference is high. The occasional email that arrives scrambled or out of order. The strange, disorienting feeling of existing in two places at once, of living a life that is split across dimensional boundaries.
It is not easy. Some nights, Mira lies in bed and wonders if this is sustainable. If they can keep doing this for years, decades. If the quantum drift Valdez warned her about will eventually pull them apart.
But then Jasper will email her something funny, or they will talk until 2:00 AM about nothing important, and the doubt fades.
One year in, Jasper submits a transfer request. He wants to move to Reality 782-A. Mira's reality.
"You don't have to do that," Mira says when he tells her.
"I know. But I want to."
"It's a big change. Everything will be slightly different. The streets, the weather, the way people talk. It'll be disorienting."
Jasper smiles. "I've been disoriented since I met you. In a good way."
The transfer takes three months to process. There are more forms.
Form 103-A, Request for Permanent Reality Reassignment.
Form 103-B, Psychological Evaluation for Cross-Reality Migration.
Form 103-C, Waiver of Rights in Original Reality (Emotionally Devastating But Legally Necessary).
Mira helps him pack, virtually, over video calls. She watches him box up his life, sorting through what to bring and what to leave behind.
You can't just bring everything across realities. The quantum math does not allow it. You get one suitcase of personal items, and everything else gets left to whatever version of you branches off and stays.
"What if I hate it there?" Jasper asks one night, surrounded by half-filled boxes.
"Then we'll figure it out."
"What if I'm different there? What if moving changes me?"
Mira thinks about this. "You'll be different. I'll be different. We're already different than we were a year ago. That's not bad. That's just what happens."
Jasper nods. He looks tired and scared and hopeful all at once.
"I love you," he says. It is the first time either of them has said it out loud.
"I love you too," Mira says. And she means it, across realities, across quantum probabilities, across every version of herself that might have been.
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Jasper arrives in Reality 782-A on a Tuesday morning. Mira meets him at the Bureau's Transfer Processing Center, a building that exists solely to receive people and objects moving between realities. It is clinical and cold, all white walls and humming machinery.
Jasper walks through the portal looking disoriented. His hair is messed up. He is carrying a single suitcase.
Mira runs to him. They collide in the middle of the processing room, holding each other like they are the only solid things in an uncertain universe.
"You're here," Mira says into his shoulder.
"I'm here."
"How do you feel?"
Jasper pulls back, looks around. "Weird. Everything looks almost right but not quite. The air smells different. Is that normal?"
"Very normal. It'll take a few days to adjust."
They go back to Mira's apartment, which is now their apartment. Jasper unpacks his suitcase. He brought his clothes, his laptop, a photo of his mother, and the stapler. The one he kept from the incident six years ago, when he accidentally duplicated it across four realities.
"You really kept it," Mira says.
"Of course I did. It's a good stapler."
He sets it on the desk they will now share. It sits there, ordinary and impossible, a small piece of him that crossed impossible distances to be here.
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They do not live happily ever after, because happily ever after is not how life works. They live normally ever after, which is better.
Jasper gets reassigned to Reality Compliance in Mira's department. They become the couple that everyone knows about, the inter-reality romance that somehow worked out. People ask them for advice. How do you make it work? How do you deal with the uncertainty?
Mira always gives the same answer. You fill out the forms. You do the work. You wake up every day and choose each other, even when it is hard, even when the quantum math says you should drift apart.
Some days are easy. Some days Jasper is homesick for a reality he can never go back to. Some days Mira wonders what her life would have been like if she had never clicked reply on that first accidental email.
But most days are good. They drink bad coffee in the break room. They complain about paperwork. They go home to their apartment that smells like the dinners they cook together, that is filled with both their books and both their mess.
Two years after Jasper's transfer, they get married. The ceremony is small, held in Reality 782-M because it feels right. Supervisor Valdez attends. So does Jasper's mother, who has to get special clearance to cross realities for the event. She brings them roses. Not the failed ones from her experiment. Regular roses, red and normal and perfect.
The officiant is a Justice of the Peace who specializes in cross-reality unions. She makes them sign Form 156-G, Certificate of Marriage Across Dimensional Boundaries (Emotionally Significant, Legally Complex).
When they kiss, Mira thinks about quantum entanglement. Two particles, connected across impossible distances. She does not know if that is how love works. She does not know if the metaphor holds up to scientific scrutiny.
But she knows this: she is here, and Jasper is here, and they are choosing this, together, every day.
That is enough.
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Five years later, they are still at the Bureau. Still filling out forms, still drinking bad coffee, still making each other laugh in the middle of tedious workdays.
They have a routine now. Email each other throughout the day, even though they work three cubes apart. Have lunch together in the break room that still smells like microwaved fish from Reality 447-B. Go home and cook dinner and talk about nothing important.
On their fifth anniversary, Jasper gives her a gift. It is small, wrapped in paper covered with tiny diagrams of quantum wave functions.
Mira unwraps it. Inside is a stapler.
"Is this—"
"The one from the incident? No. That one's still on our desk. This is a new one. I had it made special."
Mira examines it. It looks like a regular stapler, black and utilitarian. But when she opens it, she sees an engraving on the inside. Two sets of coordinates. Reality 782-A and Reality 782-F.
"Where we started," Jasper says. "I know it's cheesy. But I wanted something to remind you that we did this. We made it work."
Mira sets the stapler down carefully. She takes Jasper's face in her hands.
"It's perfect," she says.
And she means it. Across realities, across quantum probabilities, across every version of herself that might have been or could still be. This moment, this person, this impossible love.
It is perfect.
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END
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