Amina Durriyyah Speaks On Interdimensional Refugees
EXTRACT FROM THE ARTICLE 'AMINA DURRIYYAH SPEAKS ON INTERDIMENSIONAL REFUGEES', APPEARING IN THE NY TIMES, THE ATLANTIS CHRONICLE AND THE INDEPENDENT, AMONG OTHERS.
Our job is mainly split into two parts. There's the surveying of the population, which is always important, because you need to know who is from where and what difficulties they may have. Some came by accident or want a way to go back to their home, and we give it to them if we can. If there's a home left to go to. Some come from earths so near to ours that it's hardly a problem at all, except for when you talk to them about history. Some come from worlds where the rules are entirely different, and those have the hardest time coping. And there are a few - a few - who come from places that are dangerous to ours, not just in the physical sense. There's a few remnant Nazi empires out there, for example, and every once in a while someone from there will come over not to escape the destruction, and end up in a world they loathe. We have to watch for those and try and get them to acclimatize before they blow up - which, in some cases, people have tried to do literally and take the, quote, 'Inferior Scum' with them. Luckily, that doesn't happen very often.
Then, once they're here, we have to help them out. One of the biggest problems is the language barrier. Some of these people aren't human and don't even speak in the same way we do, and - well, sure, some bring along universal translators. But universal in what sense? We have different rules here. And even if they do work, which is rarely, they require some kind of material or construction method that just isn't common enough here, so we can't build more or even maintain them properly. We don't have enough to go around.
I mean, take Doctor Dinah. She's a genius. A scientific prodigy. A brilliant mind like something never seen before. And she's a dinosaur from an earth where they were wiped out a couple of billion years later. Can you imagine? She can't speak like a human. We've got her a voicebox, but even that has its problems because nobody's used to designing things for intelligent raptors, and most human machinery she tries to work with breaks due to her claws. Which is a shame because, as I said, she is an absolute genius. And that's just one of her problems, and this is a fairly typical case, or as close as we can get. She works with us now: most of our staff is composed of refugees, because then they have easier access to the resources to help them and they understand what the others are going through. That's our regular stuff.
Then there's the stuff that sends us for a whirl, such as the case of Multiple Max. You've got all these worlds, right? A lot of them are destroyed or have escapees from a planetwide tyranny or arrived here through a freak accident. There's not many each year, but a significant portion of them are the more or less the same person. Just one person. Do you know the chances of that?
Sometimes Max is male, or female. Sometimes they're human or not. Sometimes they're Max, or Maxine, or Maximillium, or Maxis or what have you. But the strange thing is that they're all as close to identical in DNA as possible, even when it shouldn't work that way. A mobile brain-in-a-jar should not have that kind of similarity with a roman legionnaire, but they do. Even if their personalities are different, there are similar patterns in their lives, similar people, similar places, similar victories and defeats, as you'd expect from alternative versions of yourself, no matter what time or place or strange interdimensional thing they're from. But there's one thing about them: They work really well together. Seriously. Even the ex-slave and the roman slave-owner. If you want something solved, send a team of Maxes in to deal with it. They'll fix it every time.
