"Well, my initial state of sanity was sort of debatable to begin with if you ask most people from my initial universe, but my friends and I used to speculate about this kind of thing when I was in college," Ray says blithely. "The existence of as many potential alternate universes as there are potential alternate outcomes to any given situation was postulated in a Larry Niven short story called All The Myriad Ways. In Niven's work, the discovery of the existence of all these alternates caused widespread societal breakdown as people assumed that their particular choices didn't matter because some other version of them, somewhere, was choosing something else- so they did whatever the hell they wanted, or went nuts. I've always assumed since reading that story that my actions were the ones that mattered, regardless of what any other me might or might not be doing, or how other universes might be structured. It helps, in situations like that."