Based on this prompt: Once every year, you have the power to swap minds with someone. However, there’s a catch: the target is completely random, and the swap lasts for only one minute

The post’s a bit old at this point, so I decided to make a new one. I hope that’s ok.

The prompt stuck with me a bit. This story is probably a little rough, I haven’t really edited this at all.

For all the marbles

Of the amount of people who ever lived, around five percent are alive today. That’s what they say, anyway, the scientists. I think they’re pretty close. Off by half of a percent, perhaps.

Have you ever seen one of those bowls full of marbles, where there’s a prize if you can guess how many? Counting people is a lot like that, and there are multiple ways to go about it. You could count them all individually, of course, but that’s usually impractical. You could measure the size of the bowl and the size of a marble, and calculate how many can fit. Weigh the bowl and the marbles, and there you go. Maybe you know how long it took to fill the bowl, and how fast the person who filled it was doing so. There’s even evidence that if you just have enough people guess, their guesses will average pretty close to the real value. Perhaps you know how much the bowl cost, and what the cost of a marble is.

I was sixteen the first time it happened. Sitting in class, bored out of my mind, wanting to be anywhere else. Then suddenly I was. Now I know it was Dubai, although I didn’t realize it at the time. I couldn’t have. I found myself in some high-rise building, staring across the desert at some giant mirror in the distance. A desk full of papers in some eastern language. Wearing a robe. Being a man. Having a beard. That was all the time I had before I found myself back in class. In my own body, with everyone staring.

It turned out I had flipped out and cursed the class in Arabic, which of course I did not know how to speak. I tried to play it off, and it worked for a while, until it happened again. Even as a teenager, you can take one blip on your radar, but two? I’d been Chinese, that time, and once again I did not know enough about China to find the problem. I tried to explain what had happened, and my rants caught the attention of the faculty who escalated me into psychriatic care. The experience had been traumatic enough that I probably could have used some therapy, but the machine was aimed at a problem I didn’t have. Psychosis, schitzophrenia, delusion, it fired bullets made of drugs, electricity and denial, and they left holes in me that have never healed. At least I wasn’t born twenty years earlier. They would’ve stuck a pick in my eye and been done with it.

The process brought it on again, of course. The catalyst is wanting to be somewhere else, and if you’ve ever been to a ward, there’s nowhere else you wouldn’t rather be. Africa next, and institutional racism that had me thinking it was all mud-huts and straw skirts made me not question it. South-America somewhere, same deal. Then rural Pakistan, maybe. Every time an episode of me freaking out in a language I didn’t speak. It happened five times before I really realized what was happening.

For a single moment every year, I was trading places with someone. Completely random, one minute long. I had some control over the timing. Like I said, the catalyst was wanting to be somewhere else. I had to wait at least one year, but I could wait longer, and I usually did. It takes a lot of self-control to force yourself to believe you want to be at work, in a lecture, or stuck in traffic. To come home to safety, and make yourself believe you want to be elsewhere. But doing it somewhere safe means not being observed. It means no more treatment, and no more holes.

I enrolled in college, and studied geography. I was twenty-three when I realized what should have been obvious, looking back. Not only was the location random, but so was the time. Some of the places I’d been, I hadn’t recognized because they weren’t like that anymore, or yet. I began to record my experiences. A minute isn’t really time to do much other than observe. I made notes, and I tried to figure out what it meant. I was determined to learn something, and… holy shit…

Back to the bowl of marbles, and the last way of counting. But first we’ll make the problem a lot more difficult. We’ll make it at least a hundred billion marbles, and we’ll make most of them weightless and invisible, and we don’t get to know how big the bowl is or who filled it. And no one gets to see the bowl but you. That takes care of all the solutions we found before, I think. So how do you count the marbles now? Thanks to a very special tool we have in this scenario, there is a way.

First we have to count all the marbles that aren’t invisible. Let’s say that’s about eight billion. The important part is we know how many. Then we use a magic machine to pick marbles at random from anywhere in the whole bowl. We’ll have to pick a fair amount. The more the merrier, although we don’t get to pick one very often. I’m sure you see what I’m getting at. After we’ve picked enough marbles, we tally up how many we can see. Do some maths with the proportions, and there we are.

With my magic machine, I have now picked sixty-seven marbles. I’ve done everything I can to tell where each marble is from. I’m reasonably sure a little over half of them happened in the last two thousand years. A little over half of those, from the last two hundred. A little less than half of those in the last fifty. Two marbles from the twenty-first century. Two. Both of them in the future. The Emirates finish that ridiculous Line, by the way.

I don’t know what happens, exactly, and while my sample size is small, it is consistent: five per cent of the people who ever lived are alive today, and five per cent, give or take, of the people who ever will be.