Jo and the dance of a hundred Jos: Jo 1

The note only had a time and place. Jo recognised the handwriting as it was clearly her own. This was strange, she wasn’t in the habit of writing notes to herself.

Jo stepped through the door to the location indicated on the note.

“What the fuck….” Jo found herself in a circular room with, at an estimate, one hundred other people. Each person was stood in front of a door, turning around, Jo saw that she was stood in front of a door too. Hanging on the back of the door a red t-shirt with a black number one.

“Hey, you’re number one”

“What?” Jo turned to the person who had spoken to her. It was her. Jo.

“I’m number twenty one this time.” Jo twenty one held up a blue t-shirt with a yellow twenty one on it.

Jo looked round the room before replying. Approximately eighty percent of the people were Jo, all approximately the same age as her. Well at least they looked the same biological age. The other twenty percent were men, aliens, objects and a cat.

Now, having spent an incalculable amount of time being alive and stepping between different timelines, Jo was uniquely comfortable with running into herself. However, and this was a big however, she had never met so many versions of herself.

And never a toaster version of herself.

“What is going on?” Jo asked Jo twenty one.

“We are here for a dance competition. Number six or seven instigated it.”

“A dance competition?”

“Yep, something to do with the end of the world. You know, normal stuff.”

Jo nodded. End of the world stuff was her bread and butter and a dance off was not the most ludicrous solution she had come across personally. “How is this even possible?”

“Which bit?”

“The bit where there are so many of us. I assume the men, the cat and the toaster, etc are all us too.”

“They are.”

“OK but how is it possible that there are so many of us here? What I mean is, that I am here for the first time. I have no idea what is happening. But you are here for the twenty first time, at least that is what I am assuming the numbers mean. Surely you know everything that is going to happen.”

“It doesn’t really work like that. I remember quite a bit, like the dance moves for example. Well at least most of the dance moves. We don’t have an eidetic memory, we can’t remember everything that happens.”

“But I have had an eidetic memory, it’s something that we have learnt.”

“Do you really think that you can remember every single thing that has ever happened to you? I bet you can’t even recreate your house from three life time’s ago.”

The house had been… made of bricks… or was it wood?

“OK fine. Maybe we don’t have a perfect memory but you have done the same thing twenty times now. How can you not remember it all?”

“Last time I was here was maybe two millennia ago. Stop pushing the point that this is illogical, everyone gets that. You sound like one of the authors. Just enjoy the ride.”

Jo turned to talk to the Jo who was on her right, maybe they had some better answers.

There was no one there. Just a mustard coloured t-shirt with a camel coloured number eighty four. The colour combination was the most repulsive Jo had even seen.

Then all of a sudden, the door burst open and threw a Jo out. She skidded across the floor on her back and came to a stop. Jo rushed over to help her.

“We need to…” Jo, presumably, eighty four looked around “Fuck not this place again.”

“Are you Jo eighty four?”

“Guess so. Help me up will ya.”

Jo held out a hand and pulled Jo eighty four up. She was Jo but old, maybe in her sixties, with grey hair. She was covered in brick dust and debris which had been smeared over her face, blood ran from a cut above one ear.

“Tell Jo eighty five that I’m sorry and that I understand now.”

“What? Where are you going?”

“Back. I have things to do.” She walked past Jo

“But you can’t leave…”

Jo eighty four stopped and turned back “I’m Jo. You’re Jo. We do whatever we want and whatever needs to be done.” Then she was gone.

“Yeah some of us get a bit dramatic like that” Jo twenty one piped up.

“PLACES. LET’S SEE IF WE CAN GET THIS DONE PROMPTLY. WHERE’S JO 1?” A Jo wearing an orange t-shirt with a pink seventy six on it.

“Oh, seventy six. I told you that we don’t remember all the details.”

A story where there are one hundred Jo’s. Does that mean this story will be told one hundred times? Yes! Probably… Maybe?