What If?

Some people believe in the concept of a multiverse, some people know they exist, others claim that they don’t exist in any capacity. I’d like to stop for a minute and pose the question «How do you know?». If there are any furries, animé fans, movie/TV critics… anyone, really. I’d like to know how you know. The universe is, according to Wiktionary (yet another reason for me to bother cleaning up some), «The sum of all things in the cosmos.». The definition that I like to use is «A collection of all things in existence that can be directly interacted with, without the need for mediation.». I feel like I’m getting into a little bit of a philosophical area here, but bear with me, because I feel like this could be a very open-ended topic with, really, no one right answer on its own. Sure, you can add more context, but that’s not what we’re doing here.

Do Roy, Moss, and Jen exist? Yes, but only within a painfully-funny British comedy. Does the insufferable duo exist? Yes, but only within the writing pieces I have on my computer and DoK. Do Steve & Alex exist? Yes, but only within the game of Minecraft. I could go on, but I believe this illustrates my point.

The next step is to ask «What if?».

I wanna cut to the chase now, and explain what prompted this particular «What If?», and that’s a story that I started writing, thanks to Writer’s Block on The Golden Record (more specifically, a scene where there’s very little going on in it, leading my thoughts to be jumbled like crazy), and the premise of it is that my other Aleksey (Penelope Turner, aka Tan Pingning, still not released to the public yet!!) not only doesn’t get enough of my attention, I feel, but also because I wanted to see how she’d do in a violent vampire story. Basically, what happens is that another universe’s version of Penelope, after being turned into a vampire, is sent into Penelope’s universe, and her original goal, after finding out that both universes have similar versions of the same people, is to kill and replace Penelope, though that changes with the death of a nurse in the hospital later on when the doppelganger realizes just how similar they are, so she adopts the pseudonym Si Syueguei and lives as Penelope’s sister (making for a dangerous duo, in all honesty).

Cliché? Yeah.

Deranged? Probably.

The point is that, by definition, the act of creating fiction is at least analogous to proving that different universes exist. I’m not gonna lie, I spend so much time pondering what might be going on in a parallel universe that it might’ve caused some of the scatterbrain issues I have, but that’s a good thing, because it can open up a debate for, if nothing else, a model of how such a principle might somehow exist. Being completely honest here, I’ll admit that, actually, it’s pretty neat to know that, in a reality that’s parallel to our own, aliens might have visited Earth in 1995 or that humans and beastmen might coexist together, or even in some far-off reality, a loner falls for a cute vampire girl, marries her, gets turned, defeat an evil vampire king, and rule over that land as king and queen together for eons.

Limitless possibilities means without limit, and if it’s true from a scientific standpoint how we can interact with it, that can also bring about the question «If every possibility exists, each within its own realm of reality, does that mean our fiction is… nonfiction?» As I sit here, typing this and wondering if I’m coming off as deranged, it never leaves me, the idea that it’s good to ask these questions, to go down these rabbit holes, to explore these trains of thought. Of course, they’re not the most logical… you’ll never see a horse person with bat wings come about naturally (and some experiment in a lab doesn’t count! No cheating!) in what we know, but what if what we know is just a limited scope? What if it’s all proven wrong at some point and we do see a bat girl with ice-blue hair speaking Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean while hacking from a computer the same age as both of the vehicles I own (‘97 and ‘96… the first was given to me by my late grandfather and the second is a cheap worktruck that I tinker with on good days.)? Does that mean that we’ll have to start from the ground up and throw everything away? Not likely, but it is something to keep in mind as a thought experiment, if nothing else.

With that, I wish you all a good day.