Order and Chaos

There was about a ten second stretch of silence in my memory. You know - the type you get when you cross a threshold and all of a sudden you can't understand anything that's going on anymore. That's what it was. It was right at the time where we went around the tunnel, and I followed them inside the tunnel. You know - a flash of lightning and a buzz and a word and all of a sudden you feel really quite listless.

There was an inexplicable blank in my memory. Exactly the kind of blank you'd have if you were really a clone who had only come into existence at around that time. So maybe I was. Maybe the cop holding the gun to my head was the real me, just like she thought.

Then she got kicked in the head by an angry ninja, and Milton yawned. Ugh, that's why I had the blank in my memory. Milton must have dozed off for a moment. He produced a cup of coffee from nowhere and promptly started drinking it.

"We need to find that cab soon," he said, sounding unsettlingly calm as we watched me try to fight off an angry ninja. "I think I'm building up a tolerance to this stuff."

"Hold on. You're the god here. So tell me, am I the real me?"

He managed as close to a shrug as a cat can.

"As long as you're the Lauren Order who's going to help me save the universe, does it really matter?"

It probably didn't, but I wasn't going to admit that to him even though he probably already knew I was thinking it.

But how were we going to track down a cab in a cab?

Hundreds of thousands of them.

I hadn't even lost the cops. There were swarms of them, more cars than I could count, surrounding us and the ninjas.

A lady cop - the exact same lady cop - stepped out of all the cars, each one accompanied by an identical cat cop. And they all pulled out their guns and pointed them at the ninjas, us, and each other, and said, in unison, "YOU'RE UNDER ARREST!"

I should clarify that the cops weren't some kind of sci-fi hivemind, they just agreed very strongly that somebody should be arrested and had a good sense of timing.

But sci-fi hivemind or no sci-fi hivemind, I needed some kind of plan for getting out of this mess. I glanced at the professor for guidance, but he didn't seem to have any.

So what was I going to do?