Extraordinary Enough to Be Ordinary

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There were about five of us standing on a narrow, lacy thread of substance far away in outer space. We had been taken there to do a particular mission of discovery. This was a part of outer space that had oxygen and gravity. As long as we balanced on this tiny strip of cosmic membrane, we were safe. If we stepped off, we would fall, instantly beyond reach, and we would fall until we died—and then it would be our dead bodies falling forever.

One of the women discovered a way to make the patch of membrane extend itself into the distance, an undulating, translucent gray ribbon. We began inching along one of these long offshoots to see what we might discover. The ribbon turned out to be a sort of timeline or movie film of human history. As we reached certain points, that “frame” of the ribbon would expand and surround us as a room, or some portion of a city, or a piece of landscape, and we would explore that replica of a moment in mankind’s history.

We explorers became separated along the trail, but then I found that certain of the expansion spots contained doorways or paths to other expansion spots. This little filmy patch of safe ground we had started with was now becoming a world we could explore almost as safely as we might have explored Earth. If it continued to surprise us in the same way, it might become a world we could have ordinary lives on, the same kind of lives we had known before leaving Earth to search for some other kind of world.