The Big Reveal -Greg 20

So I sat in my chair and watched it all happen like it always does. They signed the papers eventually, everyone does. After maybe six minutes of awkward silence (and you know how I hate awkward silence) Ian got up, and Scarlett immediately followed. They signed and sat down.
"Alright," Ellen began, and my mind floated back to a scene so different and so much the same, so many years ago.
It was another room like this one, and a man was talking to us. Later we'd come to know him as Jimmy, but for now he was just the recruiter. We didn't have a Scarlett. We didn't do names. He gave us the backing out talk and we signed. I'd signed because I was studying political science at Yale to be like my daddy, except that I hated politics with a passion. Wasn't too crazy about old dad either. And I was thinking, here's a chance to get out of it; be a real American hero.
Anyway, we signed, and old Jimmy said just what Ellen was saying.
"Alright," He-She said, it all blurred together, "You know that you're here for a mission, and you all have other reasons you're really here, but you don't know what this is all about. I really wish this was the big reveal, and I could tell you all the secrets, but it doesn't work that way. I'm afraid I'm just going to make more questions for you, but one thing at a time.
"And speaking of time, the first thing you're going to have to wrap your heads around is time travel. It's possible; It happens; It complicates things. Hopefully we won't have to send you through time, but it's possible.
"You see, everything's possible. It's a long held theory that for anything that could have happened, there is a universe in which it did. It was only recently discovered that one can actually travel between them. And because one can, one does. Of course, we don't. Research has been done in societies far more advanced then ours that concludes that overuse of this technology will collapse the universe from which it stems. The infinite universes that already exist are one thing, but when they interact with each other, they increase exponentially. Infinity squared may be too much for the world to handle."
That was a dramatic pause for old Jimmy, but perhaps Ellen held it out too long, or perhaps it was just the new group. Anyway, Scarlett cut in.
"This is a pretty far-fetched story," she said, "but even if it's true, if 'we' don't travel to other universes, why are we here?"
"Well," said Ellen, "I lied. It's a script, designed to reveal the information in the easiest possible way for you."
I couldn't believe it. She told them she was scripted. And she stopped following it, too.
"The fact is we do use it, but only to undo the damage caused by those from other universes. We protect our universe from collapse, and we keep the population from learning about it."
And this time it was Gillian who cut in. She'd been deep in thought for a while, but it appeared to have sunken in, because she asked the question.
"Why? There could be, and, I guess, must be universes where cancer is cured or electric cars work better than gas. We could learn all this stuff."
"We've been warned against it. It's destroyed universes before. This isn't some strange new world to be explored, like space or a new continent. This is the world of could have been, and it's a dangerous, dangerous place."
And that was straight out of the script.