"Right. I mean, if you've seen it, it's probably happened somewhere -- but the person you're talking to might not be from that particular timeline?"

He lowers his voice. "What I still can't figure out is how the stories leak like this. People are writing stuff that they think they're making up, but somewhere it actually happened. Is that some kind of narrative causality, or is 'making up' just some bizarre extra-extrasensory perception where you tune in to actual events on some kind of multiversal frequency, or what?"