The Federal Bureau of Alternate Reality, like most federal programs, came into existence through a combination of random chance and bureaucratic oversight.

It started out, under pressure from the land development lobbies, as the Bureau of Alternative Real Estate Financing. The word “Financing” was quickly dropped, as it hinted at the possible involvement of tax money, and “Real Estate” was shortened to “Realty” on a recommendation from the Department of Making Important Recommendations about Other Departments. After a routine overhaul in word processing, it emerged as the Bureau of Altering Real Tea, got sent back by someone on a congressional subcommittee who had actually read the first page, and was resubmitted as the Bureau of Alternate Reality.

Now facing dwindling support, it was collated by mistake into the wrong document, where it passed overwhelmingly as part of a 900-page bill to reduce government inefficiency.

It was the only part of the bill that succeeded.

* * *

Wilfred sat hunched in the cramped space inside the machine in Professor McInerny’s study, and looked at the panel he was supposed to be opening.

Normally, opening a panel ought to have been the simplest of jobs for a handyman. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have a tool box. In fact, one reason the space inside the machine was so cramped was the sheer volume of the tool box that bulged beside him. He had pliers, drills, electrostatic converters, tools for measuring specific gravity, tools for deciding whether specific gravity was really that important after all … in short, he had every tool imaginable except for the one tool he could never put his hands on, which was a Phillips screwdriver.

Wilfred stared at the rows of shiny Phillips screws smugly holding the panel in place.

“Wilfred!” Professor McInerny’s voice called from outside the machine. “Haven’t you finished yet?”

“Uh … not too much longer now,” Wilfred said.

Assertiveness was not Wilfred’s strong point. He had occasionally wondered about this without ever guessing the actual truth, which was that when God dished out assertiveness to various lumps of primordial clay, Saint Peter happened to ask, “Have you got the time?” at the very moment that the lump that was to become Wilfred approached on the conveyor belt. In the split second it took God to create the cesium-beam atomic clock, Wilfred had passed along the conveyor belt minus his dose of assertiveness.

This meant God had one dose of assertiveness left over at the end, so He popped a second dose into the last lump on the conveyor belt, which happened by a curious coincidence to become the future Professor Elaine McInerny.
1999 had not been a good year for Wilfred. His wife had left him, which had come as a blow. His dog had left him as well, which he’d taken rather harder, since he hadn’t expected it. Even the hairline around his temples was starting to feel that the general Wilfred-exodus wasn’t such a bad idea.

Wilfred shifted uncomfortably onto his elbow in the confined space and began one last painstaking search of his tool box.

He glared at the screws.

The screws waited, confident of their advantage.

Reluctantly swallowing his professional pride, Wilfred reached into his pocket and took out a pocket-knife. He unscrewed the panel and examined the wiring behind it.

The problem was clear. There were two wires on opposite sides of the panel which looked as if they ought to be connected, but were instead waving freely like the antennae of an agitated marine crustacean.

Professor McInerny had instructed him only to remove the panel, not to tamper with what lay beyond. But Wilfred was, after all, a handyman, and joining two wires together shouldn’t be that difficult a task.

He attached the wires and replaced the panel. He expected to hear Professor McInerny blaring out distant criticisms, but Professor McInerny, for reasons of her own, remained in remarkably controlled silence.

Wilfred began to wonder what had gone wrong.

He slipped the pocket-knife back into his pocket, then extricated himself from between the control panel and the tool box, and stood up. He dusted himself off, opened the exit hatch of the machine, and stepped out.

He stared in astonishment.

Instead of stepping out into Professor McInerny’s study, he found himself in a checkerboard-floored room which appeared to be a bedroom ...