The first happened shortly after they met. They were both students at Manchester medical school. Pheroza in her second year, and Cholon just about to enter his first. Pheroza had printouts scattered all over the floor, when Cholon walked into their rooms for the first time. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor peering at two of the printouts. She looked up briefly into the calm stoic face of the short Mongolian and said, "New roommate?"
"Yes," he said, breaking into a surprisingly broad simple grin.
"Well come in," she said uninvitingly. She gestured towards a bedroom and said, "Don't step on anything." Cholon said nothing, but walked expertly between the prints towards his bedroom.
"They have a lot of rocks you have to jump over in that village you come from I suppose," she said without looking up.
"Yes," he said, "And we are used to herding cows too." At this, she looked up with a grin. "There's some tea in the thermos in the corner. Extra milky. You guys like it that way anyways don't you?"
Pheroza was tall and thin. Her long hair usually fell over her face from a half-undone bun. Apart from that, her body was a collection of sharp angles, including the large sharp nose projecting out of her oval face, her long fingers and her girlishly long legs. The girl from Pune, was as different physically from the short squat man from Ulaan Bataar as she was in every other way. Neither of them could figure out why Student Services, which was so careful about matching compatible profiles these days, had lumped them together.
Until Pheroza Khan overheard a bespectacled student advisor asking Cholon in stupid hopefulness, "You're not related to Genghis Khan, are you?"
"Oh," thought Cholon. "Khan. Khan and Khan. No wonder."
"Oh," thought Pheroza, "Genghis Khan? If they put him on a horse, his feet wouldn't even reach the stirrups."
To the advisor, Cholon said with a big grin, "Well I could tell you. But then I'd have to slaughter you."
Pheroza often had the prints she studied scattered about on the floor. She would sit on the floor and bend over towards one of them, nose almost touching it, trying to decipher something in the image.
It took Cholon a few weeks to decrypt what they were. "They're neurograms," he said, "You've split each one into four pieces and..."
"Done a little superimposition of them in pairs," she continued. "Just in case any of the village idiots come looking," she said with a grin, "Lean in close and you can see the colour difference."
"Those are illegal," he said matter-of-factly.
"And the only real brainwave pictures we have."
"All of those subjects died soon after. How can you have all those microbots crawling around your brain?" He shook his head with distaste.
Turning away, she said, "If you're going to turn me in, do it after I finish my tea."
Cholon began to study the neurograms himself. One, of particular interest, was of a certain Elizabeth Jensen. Jensen had been diagnosed with multiple personality or dissociate identity disorder. All of the neurograms, when superimposed on their corresponding EEGs showed large variation inside of what was a smooth EEG curve. Nano-volt patterns that were for the most part flat. Jensen's pattern was more complex and could be broken up into four or five individual "regular" patterns.
It was a puzzle both Cholon and Pheroza would solve at the sane time, their second moment of revelation together. The night after a day of New Pagan Wiccan celebrations in the college.
It was a night when the air was sickly sweet with the smell of celebration. Pheroza, back early, lay on her bed drunk and half passed out. Her room had a better view of the fireworks that were going on, so Cholon had padded in quietly to watch them from her window. After the fireworks had ended, he watched her face in silence. The banal thought of how angelic she looked asleep was just about to cross his mind, when she said, "Go away. I'm not that souped. Go away."
"I wasn't going to..." he began in confusion.
"Sorry," she said, "But what?"
"I was just thinking. We're all a dozen different people under the skin," he said as he left her room.
And it was then, that it struck both of them at the same time. Though, the crystallization of the thought would take a few half-asleep hours for both of them.
Cholon, the less tired of the two, was the first to awaken. He outlined the answer on three white pieces of paper. He was already through a second cup of tea, when Pheroza awoke and walked up to the table palmtop in hand to consider the pages with sleepy eyes. Cholon left for class. She spent the next couple of hours on her palmtop - drawing, scribbling, erasing and redrawing the full answer.
Over lunch, she said to him, "We'll get arrested you know, and jailed."
"Only if none of the fringe groups manage to kill us first," he replied flatly.
The answer, was published at first only in one of the smaller medical journals. What it stated, very simply was contained in a quote from Cholon run in a newspaper shortly after the journal article, when the issue had caught fire - "Each human brain has the potential to contain several different, distinct personalities - distinct minds, distinct people if you will. The vast majority of people contain all but one of these minds as unrealized potentialities. A few are able to, through a mechanism we don't yet understand, maintain or contain more than one of these personalities at the same time."
The fallout was not as bad as they had feared. They were charged with illegal possession of the Hassel neurograms. A number of lobby groups, backed by religious bodies, anti-anti-mind groups and using the Hassel Families support group as a front pushed for a long jail sentence. But support did come from a surprisingly large section of the medical community. The Khan-Chimeddorj Theory of Mulitple Personalities would create a fault-line in the psychiatric community, that would later fissure as a result of the Free Selves movement.
Cholon and Pheroza had to endure a few uncomfortable days in jail and then a few months of fear of attacks from thwarted organisations and groups. It was during these months, spending days together in the bare rooms of hideouts, surrounded by security personnel that were all either resentful, or professionally indifferent, that they started to drift apart.
Cholon pulled himself back into academic research, devoting some time to MuPer research, but increasingly, as time went on, to other unrelated areas.
Pheroza pushed herself into the vanguard of what would become the Free Selves movement. She was the one that delivered the first public speech of the movement, delivered to a dozen disinterested journalists and a couple of hundred curious onlookers - "The 'Selves' in Free Selves stands for the 'unrealized potentialities' in each human brain. And by potentialities I don't mean talent or ideas. I mean people just like you and me. The 'Free' part stands for the idea that these selves have as much of a right to exist as a First Self. That is, as much a right as you and I do. They're waiting for us, these people. Waiting to be let into our consciousness, our lives." Her undone hair flapped about her face in the sight breeze. "Let them in. Let them out of their silence."
The Free Selvers began to explore techniques, both sensible and ridiculous, of bringing these selves to consciousness. The odd cocktails of techniques they used were not surprising - hypnotism, psychotropic drugs, variations or derivations of Shamanism and Voodoo. What was surprising, was how often, and how easily they succeeded.
The first freed Free Selves came into being (or consciousness) within a few years time. These personalities, contrary to various hopes and fears at the time, were neither angels nor demons. Pheroza discovered two of her Other Selves, Farzana and Farhana, five years after she and Cholon had stopped talking. The break-off was gradual, as Pheroza sunk deeper and deeper into the movement and her own Selves Development. Having to share her conscious time with her Other Selves, also meant she had literally much less time with her. In one of the number of books and pamphlets she would write, Pheroza wrote, "These people, these newly Freed Selves, are not spectacularly more or less intelligent, sensible, violent, attractive or contradictory than any of their respective First Selves - than you or me. There are of course, sometimes vast differences in temperament and taste between Selves sharing the same brain."
Farhana was the most outgoing and fun-loving of Pheroza's New Selves. She partied on almost every day of consciousness assigned to her. The hangovers and bodily strain she left behind for her other two selves to pick up was a constant source of resentment for the more orthodox and sedate Farzana. Farzana prayed constantly for the redemption of her Other Selves.
In her book, Pheroza wrote, "These differences however are no greater, no more insurmountable than the differences people have always had to face with parents, siblings, lovers and others around them. All that the world gained, is a lot more new people. And the world, by and large, is learning to cope with it.
It was the vivacious Farhana who contacted Cholon after a long break. She sauntered into his office one afternoon, and was able to enjoy his confusion even with only her vague Other Self's memory to rely on. The clothes and the hair were very different from the clumsy dressing Cholon remembered, but he assumed this was because of the time that had passed. But there were other differences, the way Farhana's lips seemed fuller and her eyes full of more mischief than Pheroza's ever did.
"Didn't you two sleep together at all?" she asked him amusedly, "I guess not. She was never that souped. I usually am though." The affair was short-lived, and, in a way academically fascinating to Cholon, a secret from Pheroza herself. Pheroza and Cholon finally met after a gap of nearly nine years, when Cholon mistakenly came to meet Farhana on what was one of Pheroza's conscious days, rather than Farhana's. They found that they were still comfortable with each other, even after the long gap.
They met once every week or two weeks now, usually over cups of Cholon's overly-milky tea. Pheroza, and her other Selves Farzana and Farhana were now facing problems similar to the other Free Selvers of their generation. Their bodies were deteriorating rapidly, burning up under the strain of leading three lives in the same body. Three very different careers, three marriages and five children all demanded work from the same single pair of hands, and leaned on the same single pair of shoulders. Eighteen years after it started, the Free Self movement was in a period of deep self-doubt that was rapidly moving to despair.
The strain on the relationship between Cholon and Pheroza was also increasing. Cholon had become more and more vocal in his denouncing of the fruits of his former work. The human body was only built to cope with the demands of one mind, even if the human brain wasn't. There were days when Pheroza would refuse to speak to him, and other days when she called him a murderer.
This was probably why her family refused to let him see her, when her body started to break down. In a very short time, she became bedridden, and was incoherent most of the time. She didn't respond to treatment that tried to suppress her Other Selves - drug-therapy or hypnotherapy, her brain seemed to increasingly resemble a jumble of her three selves.
It was at this point, with Pheroza bedridden, and on the verge of qualifying for family-approved euthanasia, that Cholon and Pheroza had their third moment of revelation together.
The euthanasia idea had put enough guilt in Pheroza's family's minds to allow Cholon to start seeing her.
She was frailer now than he had ever seen her. She lay mostly under the white sheets in a bed that had the look and smell of a hospital bed, even in her own house. The windows were always closed and there was always some discordant music bouncing around the room in senseless echoes.
On one particular day he sat, straight-backed in a chair, next to her bed. Dr. Kirtane, her doctor, stood in a corner near a closed window. He wore glasses that were too big for his face and he constantly touched his thin receding hairline in an attitude of worry.
Cholon said idly, "Which song is that?"
"Runaway," she replied, "Some retro-retro shit. I like the Elvis version. Farzu likes the original by Del Shannon, I think the bastard sounds like a eunuch. And Farhu likes the version by Bonny Rait. But they're all the same song. Just variations."
And it was then that it struck them.
"Multiple universes," said Cholon softly.
"Manifold, many folds," mumbled Pheroza, "how many how many many angels on the point of a neuron."
She turned her head towards Cholon, "Don't tell me they're not real. Don't tell me."
"They are real," he said. "Just not in this universe, not in our version of the universe. They're just shadows here, dreams."
"They're real"
"Dreams can be real," he said gently, "And now its time to let those dreams go."
Her face constricted in a stubborn expression, "If I'm dreaming them, then they're dreaming me. If I let them go, then they let me go. If they die..."
"You die," he said, "in their version of the Universe. But not here." He held her frail hand in both of his. "Not there."
"You need to concentrate.."
"No," she said turning her head away. "Lets do it simple with a needle. Shoot me up doctor. Shoot me up with it. I'm ready." Turning back to Cholon, she said with a weak grin, "This time I will be that souped."
The Free Self movement dissolved in a growing sea of psychotropic drug usage. Thousands found themselves waking to a world where different sets of social networks they had never known were clinging to them with desperation.
Pheroza, in increasing health, did her best to cope, even as one person, with the responsibilities of three families. There was always the temptation to abandon the threads from the lives of her former Other Selves, but this would be to bury away parts of reality underneath her waking conscious mind. And it was of doing this that she was most afraid, of what dreams could come.