An Interview with “The Other Me” Author Rebekah Bergman
What inspired “The Other Me?”
One day at work, a coworker was telling me about a basketball game she attended and how, randomly, she "got on the Jumbotron." It was a small detail, but I was struck by it. I think the name alone—Jumbotron—is pretty striking and evil-sounding. Plus, the image of seeing one's own face enlarged and projected in a crowded stadium of strangers felt, to me, like an experience that could cause a lot of dissociation. I don't fully remember the rest of my friend's story about that basketball game. I think she waved at herself, or possibly blew the Jumbotron a kiss. But I started writing The Other Me with the uncanniness of the situation in mind, not really sure where the narrative would go from there.
What gets you excited about the Many Worlds project?
I'm excited about many pieces of the Many Worlds project! One thing I love is how, for me with this story, it brought new context to an older piece. I didn't write “The Other Me” to be part of this project originally. But when Cadwell was first describing Many Worlds and his vision for it, I thought of it right away. It seemed to fit perfectly into Many Worlds and I have loved how placing it within this project has brought new dimensions to the story while deepening the original uncanniness that I was interested in when I first wrote it.
Your story is a passing glance, a moment in time, an eerie moment of non-encounter. What does time mean to you as a person? As a writer, do you often use time as a tool?
I am fascinated with time and how we, as humans, are always moving through it whether we notice or pay attention to it or not. Time is kind of an eerie, spectral presence in our lives in that way. In my writing, I am not always overly concerned with conventional "plot." But I am very often very concerned with time. That means, even when nothing else is happening in a story, time is still passing. I think this alone can be enough to move a character from Point A to Point B. Especially in very short fiction, time can be a really powerful agent.
Do you think the Simulacrum experiences time? If so, how?
This is such a good question! One possibility that I like a lot is that the Simulacrum exists outside of time and is, essentially, more powerful than time. It makes some sense to me that an entity capable of running simultaneous versions of worlds could also bend time and make "edits" to time in those worlds. Where I reach the edges of my imagination is in trying to articulate or even fully picture what that means—to be outside of time and more powerful than it. I suppose in a sense, that would make the Simulacrum like a kind of god...that makes some sense to me too!