When I was a larval nerd in the 1970s and early 1980s, the concept of a Multiverse, as it’s popularly known and understood today, never came across my event horizon. The closest thing for me was the Mirror Universe in Star Trek, which was literally a mirror of our own. That was a concept I could easily understand: it was its own thing, on the other side of a single doorway that separated it from the Prime Universe.

The concept of an infinite number of discrete realities, most with vanishingly small differences between them, each of them as real and unreachable as our own was probably a little much for my tiny mind, but since I read a book called Hyperspace in probably 1989 or 1990, I can’t imagine anything different.

Sometimes, I’ll think about this, and I’ll say hello to the other Wils in their own realities, just in case one of them exists in a universe where hearing me is possible.

The first time I remember encountering this in fiction was Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. It came along at the perfect time for me, and landed in that part of my Venn diagram where fantasy and science overlap.

The first time I encountered a tangible, tactile, oh-this-is-exactly-a-parallel-universe-metaphor was last week, on Star Trek: the Cruise.

I have spent a lot of time Backstage, in theaters, at theme parks, at too many performances to remember. The idea of an area that is specifically for preparing the show, that the audience doesn’t see, is not some profound Plato’s Cave revelation. But an entire ship, with its own public spaces, dining rooms, bars, personal quarters, and all the other things the crew needs to live, silently weaving itself alongside the ship that all the passengers experience for their brief voyage, was a memorable experience. I only saw about 2% of it, mostly elevators (tiny, tiny, tiny elevators oh my god so tiny and unsettling) and corridors, but I saw enough of it to remember reading Neverwhere, and whenever the cruise staff used it to get me from one place to another as quickly as possible, my imagination took off, and I had a lot of fun pretending to pop in and out of this universe.

One of the times I … TRAVELED … like this was to get from my room on the 10th deck aft to the 3rd deck forward, to a space called Studio B. That’s where we did our Crusher Family Comedy Hour, and it’s where I did Wil Wheaton is Still Just A Geek: readings from and inspired by blah blah blah.

Only I didn’t have enough time to do any readings from, so I did inspired by; three pieces, one longer than the others, that I have never done in public before. I hoped they would all fit together to tell a story, and I was scared to death the the story they told wouldn’t resonate with the audience if it did.

But I needed to trust myself, trust Anne and my friend who told me it absolutely was going to work, and take what felt like a very big emotional and creative risk.

So I did, and … I think it landed the way I hoped it would. The audience was receptive, which was not always the case at cons for me but has increasingly become the norm this century. For the rest of the cruise, lots and lots of people told me, in that way only other survivors can, that my story meant a lot to them. And every single time, I’m like, “I’m so sorry, but I’m so glad we see each other,” and they’re like, “yeah, it sucks, but we are here”, and we never do an actual secret handshake, but we also do a secret handshake we wish we didn’t know.

I use my phone to record all of my talks and readings, and then I put them with all my glasses and my shoes, so I have them. Most of them, I keep for myself, but from time to time I want to share them with an audience that’s a little bigger than what we could fit in the room.

So here’s a link to the first performance (of two) I did.

At the beginning, you’re going to barely hear my space brother, Ed Speleers, introducing me. You can’t hear the smile on my face, or the overwhelming joy and gratitude in my heart, but it was there. I had no idea he was going to introduce me, and he was just so kind and lovely and everything you hope he will be.

Then you’re going to hear me read something I titled I Turned Myself To Face Me, which I hope will be part of a larger work later this year.