Just when we thought things were getting normal, on Saturday morning before we left the house, another pickup towing a trailer showed up. It looked like our pickup and trailer, if we’d let hippies decorate the outside. The people who came out of the truck looked like we might imagine we would if we’d been hippies, which was something we had never imagined before, since we were born decades too late. Except that Joe, Ellen, Henrietta, and I all realized we had just dreamed about them. We invited them in and served them breakfast.

“I’m Aspen, and this is my wife Flower,” my counterpart from the new couple said. “Seems like Squaresville here, but thanks for inviting us in.”

“I’m Angelo, and my wife is Henrietta. The couple over there preparing breakfast for us all is Joe and Ellen.”

“Square names, too, from the old times.”

“Did you two by any chance win a TV reality show and build that trailer as part of your prize?” I asked them.

“We did! How’d you guess?”

“We did that too, and every night we slept in it, we were transported to a different world.”

“That happened to us, too! It’s been the most groovy experience.”

“Was this where you lived in your world?”

“No. The address we lived at doesn’t exist, but we found this one written on the truck’s registration paper and decided to come here.”

“How do we tell them about the state this country is in?” Henrietta asked me.

“I think we just tell them this world is different from theirs, straight up. Warn them,” I replied.

“What is it that we need to be warned about?” Flower asked.

“I’m afraid our world is not like yours. You called it Squaresville, and from your perspective that may be right. Hippies were a short-lived fad in this world, and while the concept of the flower child never fully vanished, they are few and far between today.”

“I figured that had to be. How else could the place look so boring?” Aspen replied.

Flower added, “They must not have had the revolution here.”

As Joe and Ellen brought our food and then joined us in eating, I commented, “Oh, right. The more political hippies wanted a revolution, and the others simply wanted peace and an end to the war in Vietnam, or at least for the United States to withdraw from it. Tell us how the revolution happened in your world.”

Flower said, “California voted to secede from the United States on November 4, 1969. For almost a year they stood alone as the California Republic.”

“What, they just let them secede?” Henrietta asked, flabbergasted.

“The United States sent in troops, twice, but most of the troops deserted and joined with the hippies when they gave them pot.”

We all laughed as Flower continued her story.

“Oregon joined them in secession August 4, 1970, and on August 10, 1970, the two states established the Hippie States of America. In November 1970, secession was on the ballot in twenty-two states, and only in Michigan did it not pass. These states joined the new nation later that year. The United States withdrew from Vietnam immediately after that, but it was too late for the old country. Most of the remaining states seceded in separate votes during 1971. New York was the last state remaining in the union, and it’s not clear whether it was their vote in May 1972 or the federal government’s vote that same month that officially ended the United States, but by the end of the month, all fifty states had joined the Hippie States, and Maryland annexed Washington, D.C. so that they wouldn’t be left out. Guam and Puerto Rico also joined as states to bring us to fifty-two.”

“So it was a completely peaceful revolution?” I asked.

Aspen replied, “Yes. Peace was the key point in the new nation’s constitution. They promised not to get involved in other nations’ wars. Only if it was necessary to protect the HSA would they participate in war.”

“I wish we had peace here,” Joe commented.

“Who are you at war with?”

“Officially, nobody. But we have a president who wants to be a dictator and has tried to pick fights with the whole world. He’s also used immigration and customs enforcement to effectively run a war of terror on immigrants within the country. It’s supposed to be illegal immigrants, but in reality they are simply going after anyone who looks foreign, or different. There are enough in Congress who are theoretically part of his party to keep them from doing much about it.”

“Why, that’s awful!” Flower exclaimed. “Thanks for the warning.”

Aspen added, “The other thing we were promised was legal pot. We even put it on our flag: Green, yellow, and red stripes with a black pot leaf in the middle.”

Joe replied, “We still don’t have it at the federal level here, but several states, I have lost count of how many, have passed various kinds of laws to legalize marijuana. You can just walk into a store in those states and buy it; even though it’s banned federally, the federal government has chosen not to enforce the law there.”

Ellen interjected, “Well, you can only buy it only in special stores that are licensed to sell it, and you have to show ID to show you’re of age, and in some cases, a resident of the state.”

“Well of course!” Aspen exclaimed. “It’s legal in all our states, so we don’t have the resident rule, but we have a minimum age, which is 18 in most of our states. Some states have raised it to 21, while some at times experimented with reducing it to 16 but those have all gone back to 18. Schools will punish kids for bringing it into school or for being high in class, even if they can legally use it, and there are other places you can’t use it, too.”

Joe responded, “We don’t have legal pot here, but our states that do all have rules like that, too. That is another thing we need to warn you about. If you have any pot, keep it hidden while you’re here today. I assume you plan on leaving tonight the same way you got here.”

“We haven’t stayed in any of the worlds for more than one day. Have you confirmed that sleeping outside the trailer will allow us to stay in one of the worlds?” Flower asked.

I replied, “Yes. We have been in this world a few days now.”

Aspen said, “I hope you don’t mind me asking, but where’s your trailer?”

“Joe and Ellen here didn’t go on the show yet. We parked our trailer over by their store since it’s no longer used for sleeping. It is extra storage and lets us use the tools we brought with us. Speaking of which, we should all be heading out to our workshop.”

“Oh, what are you making?”

“We collect damaged and broken furniture people are putting out as trash and repair, refinish, and sell it at our store.”

“That’s cool. We might have done something like that if we hadn’t gotten lost on the way home, but being lost has become its own adventure. Good luck,” Aspen said, as he and Flower left. They got in their truck and drove off.

The weekend was as hectic as Joe and Ellen had said. We only brought in a few new pieces but I completed the finishing order I started Friday and two others, and started on another two, and participated in three deliveries, as well as helping out on the sales floor and with loading furniture for some people who picked stuff up.

Joe ordered pizza for Sunday dinner while we were all still at the shop, and we ate it in the kitchen area of the workshop. Two large pizzas, because we were all hungry after working hard. And as it turned out, we were so tired that we all passed out on the table.

It was sometime in the middle of the night when we all awoke, and we immediately realized we’d had one of those weird dreams again.

“Crap!” I shouted. “Did we dream ourselves to another world?”

“I think so,” Ellen responded. “I dreamed we were in a place that celebrates All-Gender Day.”

Henrietta replied, “I bet, with Trump in charge, you guys didn’t have a day like that.”

Joe said, “Nope.”

I added, “So this might be our world. Things aren’t completely smooth sailing for transgender people here, but we don’t have the government trying to kill us, deport us, or deny we exist.”

We were still in the kitchen area of our workshop, but it wasn’t the same. Apart from where we’d dirtied it knocking stuff on the floor as we were dozing on the table, it was clean and new. The store itself was different. There was lots of new stuff throughout the store, and nowhere near the inventory we’d had. Apart from the remains of our dinner, there wasn’t even any food in the kitchen, as if we’d just installed the appliances and had not gone out to buy food to stock it with yet.

We went outside and saw that both our pickups, which had been parked under the shelter by the store’s loading dock, and the trailer, which was still attached to its outlet, came along with us. While it was at the same address, the store in their world was freestanding, but the one here was at the end of what looked like a completely vacant shopping center. Some windows were boarded up, and you could see the silhouettes of the signs of stores that used to occupy the empty spaces.

“Hey, I recognize this place,” I said. “I remember when all these stores were here when I was a kid. It closed years ago and sat vacant.”

Joe responded, “Except it’s not completely vacant anymore, because our store’s here. Your store, I should say.”

Henrietta said, “Wait. Do we have our money?” and pulled out her phone.

One thing we were sad about in Joe and Ellen’s world is that we didn’t have our winnings. They hadn’t gone on the show yet, and our money didn’t carry over to the other world.

Henrietta discovered her phone didn’t work because it had the SIM from the other world, but she dug her original out of her purse, swapped it in, and soon was able to log into our online banking.

She then reported, “We had our money, up until three days ago, when we spent most of it at once.”

She did some more on her phone and reported, “It looks like our producers canceled the home remodeling TV series we were hoping to be in. We, or I suppose some other copy of us who was here at the time, then bought this entire shopping center as plan B, using most of our winnings.”

Ellen said, “That’s a steal, if you can figure out what to do with it.”

Henrietta continued, “All the email I got yesterday was unread, so presumably they jumped worlds the night before.”

I suggested, “Obviously, they had decided to open the same kind of woodworking store Joe and Ellen had, but they were just starting out. Maybe the idea was to make a successful store here and try to rent out the other units? Maybe fix them up a bit?”

After first driving by the address where Joe and Ellen lived in the other world and seeing a different house there, I drove the four of us to the address we’d originally lived at, and found the house we’d originally lived in. Our keys opened the door. There was nobody else there; we didn’t find another set of Joe and Ellen. There was recently purchased food, presumably from the other us who briefly spent time here. We ate breakfast and discussed our situation.

“Clearly, though we didn’t sleep in the trailer, we slept close enough to it,” I began.

Joe noted, “The place you parked the trailer was immediately outside of the part of the store where our kitchen was. We might have been within twenty feet of it.”

Henrietta added, “We didn’t jump worlds when we slept in your house when the trailer was parked on the street in front. How far was that?”

Ellen replied, “I think about fifty feet. And Joe and I were equally far from it in our bedroom as you were.”

I declared, “OK, no more sleeping in the store at all. Or outside it, or anywhere within fifty feet of the trailer. If we are tired, we close the store and come home.”

We quickly found paperwork at the house showing the plan was as we had thought. The other us had bought the place Friday at a bankruptcy auction, and had managed to take the whole thing for a bid of seventy grand, the minimum bid, because nobody else bid on it. Nobody else was even interested enough in a whole shopping center to even bid the cost of a small house on it.

They had set up the legal documents to lease out individual stores in this shopping center, established our business in the first unit, and apparently spent Saturday getting our store set up, spending a bunch of the rest of our winnings. We had a glass company coming out today to replace broken windows in three of the units. Our own store was set up to have a grand opening a week from today, and the advertising for that was already going out. It indeed looked like the idea was to attract clients by putting one successful business in the center, along with making the others ready.

We decided to follow Joe and Ellen’s plan of scavenging items in the morning’s garbage pickup zone. But here, we decided we would be ourselves, that is, Angela and Henry. We didn’t pass completely, but we could wear clothes over the stuff we had on the show to look good enough. Ironically, the legal documents were in Joe and Ellen’s names, though, so if somebody needed to sign something, we were going to have them do it.

We took Joe and Ellen to their truck at the store so we could both go out and scavenge stuff. But we added more items to the shopping list. We’d pick up anything that looked like it might help us clean up and set up the other stores.

We came back and unloaded the truck and went out a second time. Joe and Ellen made a couple trips as well. We unloaded the stuff into our store, putting old and damaged wooden furniture in the workshop area, and tools in another. We didn’t worry about trying to fix any of them today. We had too few spare parts, anyway.

After we found a huge ring of unlabeled keys, which we correctly guessed were for the other stores, we started exploring them. We made a first pass just to assess the state of the stores. We used Scotch tape and a pencil to label the keys as we figured out which was which. Most of the units still had suite numbers above the doors, and where they were missing, we painted a number on a wooden sign and put it in the window. We also added locksmithing and keymaking tools to the shopping list so we could give out keys other people might not have 50-year-old copies of. Maybe electronic locks.

What they needed most was vacuuming. There were heaps of dust in every store. Fortunately, each of our groups had picked up a Shop-Vac. One had a damaged cord and the other just needed a new filter. We got both working again and managed to vacuum out two stores before we started getting hungry.

We went out and bought food to stock the workshop’s kitchen. Then we made sandwiches in the same assembly line style we had done in the other world.

Just as we finished eating, the glass company showed up. We went out with them, showed them the damaged units, unlocked them, and vacuumed the areas around the windows so they wouldn’t have to work in filth. Then we let them do their work while we worked on the other stores. We found a couple pieces of damaged furniture we took back to our store, and noted where there were metal store shelves in some of the units, but didn’t try to move them.

By the end of the day, all the units were vacuumed, all the broken glass had been replaced, and we had noted other conditions of the units. One unit was missing a doorknob on a door to a storage room. One restroom had a cracked sink that needed to be replaced. There were several places with minor damage to walls and missing floor tiles. And there were several other issues like that, but nothing we couldn’t deal with.

At dinnertime we locked everything up and went over to my house. Following our new rule, we stayed at the house after dinner, setting up a room for Joe and Ellen to sleep in.

The next morning, we woke up still in our house. Joe and Ellen were still with us, too. We continued working on gathering furniture in the mornings and afterward doing the basic work needed on the other units to make them ready. We put real numbers on the units lacking them, and fixed the doorknob, the sink, and the wall and floor issues.

By early afternoon Thursday we were done with that work on the other units, at least until we had tenants who might want more specific work done. We focused more on the furniture. We had gotten quite a bit of salvage and we designated all the more seriously broken items as scrap for parts. So little of the furniture repair work that was our counterparts’ main business in the other world had been done in this store that we didn’t even have bins for many types of spare parts, but we made makeshift bins out of cardboard boxes some of the things we had needed to buy came in. Through the weekend we made more than thirty pieces ready, most of them just bare wood, as customers could choose a color and style of finish, except in cases where the old finish was soaked so deeply into the wood we had to stick with a similar color. That was some nice stuff to have ready for the grand opening. And Friday, we received our order from a wholesaler of spare parts, paints and stains, and other things customers might buy along with an order. A separate order brought us lumber.

The grand opening Monday went smoothly, and we took in just over a thousand dollars from the first day’s sales. Considering we have no rent to pay for the store, and minimal expenses besides our own labor, this wasn’t bad. We got a similar level of sales through the rest of the week, though we had to keep scavenging, repairing, finishing, and delivering furniture to make that happen. Having four of us doing it really helped.

“I feel sorry for your customers back in your world,” I told Joe. “Unless another copy of us has dropped in there, it must just look like you up and skipped town.”

“Or got murdered, kidnapped, or deported by Trump’s goon squad he calls ICE,” he responded. “Your world is nicer in not having that stuff going on.”

We continued doing this, and pretty soon had the store full of inventory and even higher sales than at the opening. The jackpot, though, was getting our first interest from another company wanting to open a store in the shopping center. We had learned what retail space like this rented for in the area, and we were intentionally slightly under that to compensate for having a location that was long vacant. While we did some work to fix each store up for its new tenant, this was mostly free money for us, and would eventually exceed what we could bring in from our own store once we filled the shopping center.

Two months later, we had achieved that, with only two units still not leased, though most of the companies were still in the process of setting up their stores. By that time, we had noticed some small differences that made us believe that we weren’t back in our own world. There were 74 genders in this world, and All-Gender Day was celebrated two days later. We watched some of the episodes of our competition when they aired, and the Joe and Ellen who won weren’t transgender and never appeared as Angela and Henry. Some of the details of how they assembled their trailer were different, and not, we thought, due to editing.

Around that time, yet another copy of Joe and Ellen showed up with their trailer. The different details we had noticed matched the reality they came from, and maybe they were the right ones for this world. We caught them up on all that had happened, and they decided to go by their middle names, William and Susan, or Bill and Sue for short.

Bill and Sue told us about the dozens of other worlds they had been to, including the one they most recently left, in which people didn’t have different sexes. They both had the organs for both genders, and a generally female shape to the body. Everybody there was like that, as far as they could tell. There were clothes similar to both men’s and women’s styles of the kinds we were all used to, but that’s actually true here if you just look at women’s clothes.

Bill said, “The funniest thing, I thought, was yoga pants. The bulge from the male junk of the people wearing them was obvious, and it seemed like the pants were made with a pouch to contain them. The top half of the same person was just as obviously female.”

“That would be awesome,” Henry said. “No need for surgery, hormones, or anything. If you want to be male, you just dress male. To be female, just dress female. Everybody’s both anyway.”

I added, “Yeah, I wouldn’t need these things.” I shocked the other two couples by lifting my blouse and bra and ripping off one of the breast forms to show they were fake. They were so realistic that if I hadn’t done that, the others would never know.

When evening came, we realized there wasn’t enough room in the house for all three couples to sleep. Joe and Ellen offered to find one couple a hotel, but Henry and I decided otherwise.

“It’s time that we moved on,” I told the others.

Henry said, “This world is nice, and it’s a lot like ours, but we know now that it’s not ours. We also know there is at least one world out there we’d rather be in. So we want to go hook up our trailer to our truck and move on. Even though it means we might be waking up in a different world every day for a while.”

“We’ll miss you,” Joe and Ellen said.

There were hugs and kisses all around. Henry and I had never actually kissed Joe and Ellen before. Between the gender issues and the appearance of cheating on our spouses with their near-doubles, we had always decided it was better off not done. Now that we were leaving, it was clearly the right time.

Henry and I packed everything that belonged to us in our pickup. All six of us drove to the store, and we went through both the store and the trailer to make sure we were taking what we thought belonged to us and not to Joe and Ellen. And they gave us three thousand in cash so we’d have something in case we came to a world where we didn’t have any money, or one where there wasn’t even another us there to have money. We hooked up the trailer to our pickup, then drove to an open area of the parking lot far from any other cars, buildings, or people. The others went back to the house to sleep, while we set up to sleep in our trailer.

And we awoke in some other world. It wasn’t the right one. But we visited with a Joe and Ellen for the day and moved on. And again the next day. And the next.

Sometimes Joe and Ellen had different names. Sometimes they weren’t even there. About one day in every five was nothing like ours but resembled some work of fiction, usually one that one of us could recognize. Occasionally we visited worlds that were bad enough that we just drove out of town and camped out in the trailer all day somewhere where nobody would bother us. There were plenty of worlds that were just fine, though, just not the one we wanted. It didn’t have to be specifically that one if it had some other unusual feature that made it more appealing to us as transgender people. But we didn’t find that feature.

We visited hundreds of worlds, some of them multiple times. We encountered five other Joes and Ellens who had been to the world we were looking for, and only confirmed further for us that we wanted to get there. It took us five years. We woke up one morning and found ourselves in the bodies the couple who replaced us had described, with both sets of sexual organs on female-shaped bodies, and we knew we’d arrived.

We checked the address on our vehicle registration and drove over. It was the shopping center one of our alternate selves had bought at bankruptcy, but here, they’d built apartments above one wing of the stores. They had wedged a stairwell along one wall of their woodworking shop to put a door to the apartments upstairs at ground level. While we were trying to figure out how to get to them, somebody there saw us and came out to meet us.

The person, dressed like a woman, led us inside and introduced themselves as the couple who ran the woodworking shop. Her partner, who was eating breakfast, saw us and simply said, “Oh, another one,” but she went and fixed us some breakfast. She introduced herself as Sarah, and I noticed that she had a face similar to mine while her partner looked more like Henry. After she served our food, she sat down to her own plate of mostly finished food and explained a bit.

“We are never forced to choose a gender, but most of us do. For most people, the gender we choose determines the role we play in a relationship, and so at high school or college age we choose a gender, or at least consciously choose to swap between the genders. It’s forbidden to force children to choose a gender and children are given gender-neutral names. Mine was Pen. Those who choose a gender choose a gendered name at that time. You’ve already been using the gendered pronouns he and she with my husband and me, and that’s correct. We use it for people who have not chosen a gender, though that is sometimes not obvious, especially with strangers.”

Sarah’s husband Kenneth added, “We’re allowed to change our declared gender and our gendered name at any time, but apart from the genderfluid, few do while they are in a relationship. But even people with a long-established gender sometimes change. It’s allowed. The concept of transgender, though, is something that doesn’t apply among our people. There’s no wrong gender. But we’re familiar with it because we understand that other worlds aren’t like ours, and a bunch of our counterparts who are transgender in their worlds have come here.”

“How many?” I asked.

“You’re couple number ten.”

“Do you keep in touch with them all?”

“Yeah, they live in these apartments.”

“Really?”

“We built them for this purpose when we realized this was happening. Your reality show never aired in this world, but it’s clear that it aired in many of the worlds with separate male and female people, where being transgender is a thing, and some but not all of you are transgender. And we’ve come to know you all well enough now to recognize you among them.”

“I guess I can’t hide it from someone who knows my look-alikes as well as you.”

“The first two couples who came, we made space for in our home, though it was getting to be tight quarters. We were already exploring the possibility of building apartments over the stores when the third couple showed up. We made temporary housing in an empty retail unit while the eight of us all spent time involved in the building. We built four units at first, but immediately started work on a second block of four units, and we have since added a third. The arrivals have considerably slowed down now, so I’m not sure we are ever going to need a fourth.”

“What sorts of work do they all do?”

“Oh, they live here rent-free to help us in our various businesses. Many years ago, we rented the woodworking store at the end of the row here, and when the rest of the complex was empty and the owners declared bankruptcy, we bought the whole complex cheap. We rented out some of the stores at times, and expanded into others ourselves. But when the others started arriving, we took over all the empty units.”

“I hope you’re extending this offer to us.”

“Certainly. Oh, and one more thing.”

“Oh, what?”

“If you decide you want this to be your forever home, one of our friends runs a junkyard. All the others have eventually decided they wanted to remove any risk of ever leaving this world and they’ve sent their trailers to the crusher after removing everything of value.”

“We spent five years trying to find this world after one of the other copies of us that we ran into told us about it. I imagine we’ll be doing that pretty quickly.”

Henry was standing close behind me, and I felt something he never had before poking me in a delicate place. He said, “I agree with what she said,” and then kissed me on the cheek.