Tag Archives: multiverse

Creationivity

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I’ve been working away at this concept of a novel series, Elyen, for over a decade now, though it’s gone by a number of other names in its earlier forms. Maybe it should not be taking me as long to make the kind of progress that I have in that time (which I will deliberately not specify), but the fact is that the story has changed immensely from its original concept.

I think that, out of all of the changes, the most profound is that of my role as the story’s author. In fact, I seriously question if ‘author’ is even now the right word for it anymore. What I mean by that is this: When I first set out to work on what is now Elyen, I had no doubt in my mind whatsoever that I was the story’s author, it’s creator. It wasn’t even a question. There was no alternative way of looking at my relationship with that early body of work, no other function to it beyond that which you would expect to exist between an author and his story.

Now, I see myself as being more of a reporter, if anything. The story might as well be its own living thing, and I am merely studying it. The universe (/multiverse/metaverse) that is Elyen, and the world of Drendast in particular, have become their own sovereign domains, into which I am now little more than a privileged guest, granted the freedom to write about anything I see.

I am become Marco…

Anyways, I’m sure you can imagine how perplexing it is to arrive at a conclusion like that and then pair it with the notion that I likewise exist as some unknown element within that same story as well.

So now I question whether I have ever created anything now encompassed within the body of work that is now, and will yet be, Elyen. This threw my head for a little spin when I really started thinking about it last night. My conclusion, however, is that I have created (and now maintain) the means by which I observe and report the goings on in Drendast. And that’s still a very vital part in the grand scheme of things, though not as dictatorial (why can’t we just shorten that down to just ‘dictorial’??) as what I believed my role was when I first began.

I now believe that the events which unfold in Elyen do so largely independently of how I might wish for them to, and that the characters have every bit as much free will as I believe that I, myself, have. I am unaware of what influence or impact I may or may not still have, if I ever had any to begin with. In either case, when I record something and it goes into the body of work known as Elyen, I understand that such things could just as easily have gone any other way. More accurately, given the multiversal nature of Elyen, it should be stated that anything I record is simply only one way (out of countless other ways all taking place simultaneously and in parallel) that things are going.

And if there’s one thing I wish to convey through the writing of Elyen, it’s that anything and everything that can happen, is happening. The question is not “what happens in Elyen?“, but rather, “which version of events am I seeing unfolding in Elyen?“

…Polo.

Drendast, Part 1: The Big Picture

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My best attempt to track down the original creator of this image came up inconclusive, but there’s a strong chance that credit for this picture goes out to BBC. Or Mother Nature. Or a space agency of one sort or another. Or an artist, you know, like the kind who render images like these for fun. Either way.

I’ve been sitting on a lot of ideas pertaining to the story I’ve been working on called Elyen for a long time now, but in all this time, I’ve hardly shared any of the details publicly. This is my first major disclosure of some of the bits and pieces I’ve got going on so far, starting first with the setting.

Much of Elyen toys with the idea of parallel universes/multiverses. In fact, Elyen is the name of a particular(ly large) multiverse, within which the characters will end up doing a great deal of sight-seeing. At the heart of Elyen is the planet Drendast, serving as a the primary hub between universes.

Drendast is a mega water-planet forged in the ether eons ago. It is absolutely massive. It originally sported no less than 12 super-continent sized landmasses called Subworlds spread evenly across its surface and separated by unfathomable distances of sheer ocean. It is so huge that rather than orbiting around a star, it had three of its very own sun-sized stars orbiting around it, ensuring a perpetual state of day light . 

Had, was the operative word. Around ten thousand years ago or so (according to the few surviving historical records), one of the suns orbiting around Drendast came crashing down, causing massive devastation in its wake. But rather than destroy the planet outright, Drendast happened to be SO huge that it absorbed the worst of the impact without crumbling apart or evaporating away. Many myths abound to this day attempting to explain the cause of the judgement that reigned down from the heavens that fateful day.

Originally, the three suns were Tropreus, Neora and Selah. Now, only Selah and Neora remain.

Originally, Drendast had 12 thriving Subworlds. Now, a full third of them have either been rendered uninhabitable, or were vaporized completely.

Much of the action in the early stages of the story will take place on one of the remaining Subworlds called Sarenalis (Ser`n`AY`liss). Before the Fall of Tropreus, there was never (or very, very seldom?) any night fall. Like on most Subworlds, many of the creatures which evolved there had the benefit of being photovorus (light-eating).

There was certainly enough sunlight to power all of creation indefinitely when all three stars circled the world. However, since the Fall, all life became a struggle. Sarenalis was one of the Subworlds least affected by the Fall since it was located on the complete opposite side of the planet from where the impact took place. Still, great suffering occurred there as much as anywhere else where the night touched.

Once great and peaceful creatures took to predation and killing all in order to survive in the face of scarcity and chaos. Civilization fell into disproportionate states of disarray. Many advances in medicine and technology were lost. Most importantly, the Subworlds, which were once connected to one another by a series of ethereal channels (often mistaken for wormholes by outsiders) called Conduits, were now completely isolated. The oceans between Subworlds were simply too vast to ever cross using most surviving conventional methods of transportation of the day.

Geographic separation began to take its course. At the height of Drendain evolution in the day was a humanoid race known as the Sævanii. Ever since the Fall, the separation between Subworlds forced the original Sævian line to branch out and become distinctly new entities.

Now, nearly ten thousand years following the calamity that Tropreus brought down, the Conduits have slowly begun to repair, re-establishing the links between the remaining Subworlds, but more than that, re-establishing the links between Drendast and the now-wild external multiverse at large. Mighty airships have also begun to make an appearance, slowly replacing reliance on the Conduits as the only way to get around the planet.

Many creatures have begun to adapt to the new nightfall conditions, even making sense of the star-and-constallation-filled night skies for the first time in all recorded Drendain history. New ecological niches have begun to mature. Balance and vitality were slowly being restored to the planet.

However, a new element began to materialize in the natural world still very much under-repair: Ambition. Can the devastated people of Drendast survive this strange new drive emerging from among them to carve out a competitive way of life for themselves so soon after their world was nearly destroyed?

Learning Curve

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K, I’ve said before that I’m an adherent to (a rather bastardized version of) the Multi-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, and to parallel universes by extension. Don’t ask me to elaborate on that in anything approximating a technical jargon, but I can spin loose and fast notions and concepts together all night if I had to. Certainly not with any authority, but with wonder and awe to anyone willing to listen.

More importantly, I have a hard time stating up front whether any of what I’m about to say next is “real” or not, because, for all I know, it very well could be. What I can do is assert that I have no bloody proof one way or the other, but, in classic fashion, I won’t hesitate to speculate and conjecture up some ideas as they come to me.

I wonder about the collective conscious. If it exists, it’s notorious for being invisible, intangible, and otherwise non-directly knowable. We can only infer it’s supposed qualities based on it’s perceived effects, which are highly subject to, well, subjectivity. But like most things, it’s difficult to disprove completely. It may be more sensible to discount it until we discover something more concrete about it, but doing so could be limiting our full view of what might really be going on.

In the meantime, I’ll take the difficulty in disproving negatives (or rather, the art of ignoring established improbabilities) under advisement and proceed, regardless, with a suggestion that the collective conscious may, in fact, exist. In some senses, it may be indistinguishable from certain concepts of “God”, if that helps (it doesn’t, I know, but just humour me).

Here’s my supposition: I can’t help but wonder if there is not some kind of over-arching consciousness that serves as a memory or experience bank for us temporal beings, one that allows us to draw on future learning without necessarily being aware of what we’re accessing or even when.

Think of it this way: A large majority of non-open world videos games still follow a vaguely linear progression. Hell, even open-world games still have fairly established event sequences, only with more flexibility. But in whatever case, when something goes wrong, the power is in the player’s hands to revert to a prior save or check point, and redo certain actions, only with a heads up. Knowledge gained from prior attempts now carries over and allows the character to accomplish things they might not have before.

The thing is, the character, even though they’re the ones directly living out the events, does not retain memory of their actions or of the events they experience. All of that lies within the domain of the player (in so far as I am aware of the level of sentience typical video game characters possess. Please correct me if I’m wrong). It’s a classic divide that anyone who’s ever played any table top RPG’s, having given it any real thought, has probably stumbled around.

Player-character lines may also make up a wider relationship dynamic within a larger multiversal structure. I have no idea what exactly that structure looks like, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the collective conscious is (at least from our perspective) a kind of passive monitoring system.

Maybe that’s a bit of an ego-centric head trip. If we’re the character, and the collective conscious is whatever passes for a player on that level of existence, then we’re the passive sensory platforms feeding information back up to it, and it, whatever it is, is ultimately what may be calling the shots.

But who can say for sure? Maybe it has nothing to do with ‘up above’ and ‘down below’. Maybe it’s no more a lofty, executive-level operating system overseeing our lowly, experiential-level of existence as yin is to yang. Perhaps it’s just two (possibly interchangeable) sides of the same coin.

What I would assume, however, is that there is a multitude of alternate versions of ourselves out there in the multiverse, not only in same-moment parallel universes (where similar events are happening in sync), but also dynamic-moment parallel universes (where similar timelines are being experienced at different points along their sequences). So, this would mean that the me that I was 3 years ago, say, is experiencing the events of 3 years ago, only that it is doing so presently. Equally true, potentially, is that the me which is experiencing events taking place at the tail end of 2016 (3 years from now) is also doing so presently (albeit without my direct awareness of it, of course) as well.

In fact, any point in time that has happened, any alternate version of events which might have happened, any version of events which could be happening now instead of those which presently appear to be actually taking place now, as well as the host of all possible future events which the present me has no direct knowledge of as of yet… all these things and more would be plain to whatever over-arching collective consciousness (or god-like being) may or may not exist.

What’s fascinating to me is not so much that it brings my free will into question so much as that I feel safe trusting it, whatever it is (could be nothing, and I’m wasting my breath and effort even trying to describe it. Who knows?). As far as I’m concerned, this collective conscious behaves in such a way that I can only infer to be for my good, in the same way that a player, more often than not, conducts a character’s actions in such a way so as to lead towards favourable events and outcomes more often than not.

I believe that “luck” is a direct result of unknown collective conscious processes

I don’t feel compelled or controlled by anyone or anything in particular (that doesn’t exclude the possibility that I actually am, only I am unaware of that fact or incapable of perceiving it), but I do see that my life, for the most part, is good. I understand that an untold number of other versions of me could very well have met unfortunate demises in other universes, but that an over-arching, memory-and-experience-banking side of me (whatever my place might be within the collective conscious) learns.

It believe that it (that I?) makes mistakes and adapts, and as a result, there are an equal number of untold versions of me (including this one that I have explicit awareness of, the one that I call ‘me’, the one that is typing this up right now), who benefit from the ability of my collective self to learn from my collective experiences in order to realize beneficial outcomes whenever possible.

I don’t know what all there is to learn, but if it’s good, then I don’t want it to be for just me. I see no reason why this dynamic wouldn’t also be true for every person rather than just me. Perhaps there’s an ever wider enveloping collective conscious that not only looks over all versions of a single person at all points in their multiple existences, but also a grand collective conscious that brings together all of the collective consciousnesses of all people.

[Edit: I believe the classic sense of “collective conscious” refers to something consisting of the conscious impressions of many souls in a given realm or area, such as perhaps that of humans — or of all life — on Earth. The description of “collective conscious” I have been talking about instead looked at an isolated individual’s potential collective self spread across multiple universes/timelines first before giving consideration the more classic sense second]

Now I begin to wonder if there wouldn’t be a perpetual blur between where one person ends and another begins… Perhaps this is evidence for the need for what feels like immutable separation of persons. Or, perhaps, that is just a natural side effect of being ego-centric. Maybe other versions of myself have absolutely no trouble feeling a fluid sense of oneness amongst ourselves and likewise with others. Such a concept eludes my ability to imagine vividly, but I find the idea fascinating nonetheless.

__Vergence

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I was having a bit of a discussion with my girlfriend about the Zelda timelines. She now has the unspeakable pleasure of trying out the new Zelda game called A Link Between Worlds. She can’t express enough how happy she is that Link is once again left-handed. Apparently, this installment takes place after the events in A Link to the Past have transpired. There’s a whole other version of Hyrule that Link can now explore called Lorule. From how she’s described it so far, I immediately recalled to mind the Twilight Realm from Twilight Princess. Those who have played each game will have to forgive my ignorance on that part since I haven’t seen Lorule for myself yet.

Anyways. Timelines. That’s what this is about.

We’ve all wondered about how things would be different if things were, well, different. What if the JFK or Abraham Lincoln assassinations were prevented, if the process of colonizing the new world were handled much, much differently, if Rome never fell, if the impact from the meteor that wiped out most of the dinosaurs was much less severe (or never occurred at all), if our crush from 8th grade actually liked us back instead of the idiot they ended up dating instead, that sort of thing?

In this case, even though the Twilight Realm apparently lacked a triforce of its own, what if they were one-and-the-same place, only within different timelines? As my girlfriend put it, the Twilight Realm could, perhaps, be Lorule in an alternate timeline where the hero of time fails his quest and the triforce is taken. Nintendo would have to go to some lengths to back that up (also likely pissing off a lot of devoted fans in the process), but still, it’s not inconceivable to pull off.

Then, I was watching my friend play Call of Duty Ghosts. She actually gave the campaign mode a try. I know, right? Who does that?? (secretly, all of us first person shooter fans do at one time or another, but it’s more fun to be hypocritical). Anyways, the opening bits… How incredibly Red Dawn-like. Mind you, it’s probably unfair to say that. Just about any story nowadays that involves America crumbling at the hands of some new attack by one random (targeted), foreign power or other has the unfair disadvantage of being likened unto one of the biggest box office remakes on that very same thematic basis in recent memory, (that being Red Dawn, in case I wasn’t clear). Doesn’t matter if it wasn’t the first or if it won’t be the last because, for now, it’s the definitive point of reference.
More importantly, whether it be Red Dawn, COD Ghosts, or any other WWIII/apocalyptic tale, it always involves events which play on our ability to envision it actually happening. Like, for real. Some of us might not have much of a hard time imagining what being an elf or dwarf hunting an orc party halfway across Middle Earth might be like, but when it comes to events which could very well take place in our own actual backyards at any moment, well… It makes for a far less imaginative exercise than it does a drill rehearsal.
But no matter, because in both Red Dawn and COD Ghosts, as well as a myriad of others, those events simply have not happened. You can throw a “yet” at the end of that if you want to or not, but the point is that it’s far from inconceivable that they perhaps could happen.
Now here’s where I come in. As an adherent to my own bastardized take on the Multiple Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics and, by extension, parallel universes, I’m already convinced that such events have already taken place. In fact, they’re happening right now. Continually, even. If there are an infinite number of universes within a larger multiverse structure within which alternate timelines might exist (and to be clear, there might not be) then, in theory, events such as those shown in Red Dawn are happening an infinite number of times. Endlessly. All of the time.
Equally true is that another requirement of the premise of infinite universes is that there would also be an infinite number of timelines where everything is made out of candy, and others where trees sound like Quagmire from Family Guy when they communicate with one another, and still others where gravity worked in reverse yet nothing appeared to be even remotely different (owing, of course, to the divine providence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster as administered by his noodly appendages, hallelujah). All things, regardless of how improbable, are possible.
For a good example of this, consider the “technical” explanation of the Infinite Improbability Drive in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or simply enjoy some lul-filled goodness here.

I have no difficulty seeing how any given choice we could make or any fork in the road could eventually lead to the kind of resulting, diverging timelines that could spell the difference between the rise or fall of entire empires, given enough time, but what about converging timelines? Why is it that, once separated from a possible outcome that failed to be, we can never visit (any of) the resulting parallel universe(s) that came into existence at that exact moment?

Can you imagine the decoherence? Overlayed, or rather, enmeshed within the fabric of the reality that is presently happening, there suddenly appeared a secondary reality, playing along at the very same time. It might look like two movies playing on the same tv at the same time if the one on top was set to half transparency, but how would one function within it an environment like that if it couldn’t just be turned off when it got too confusing?

Say that someone approaches you and asks you a question in both, only, in one version, they ask you one thing, and in the other, they ask you something completely different? If you’re experiencing both at the same time, how would you respond? Would your response be appropriate for both, or might you also happen to see yourself responding in a different manner along side the self you happen to be fully self-awareness of? (The whole self version 1, self version 1.1, self version 1.2, etc. thing is a whole other nutshell to crack into another time).

And that’s just considering two timelines intertwined. Imagining being able to perceive of thousands simultaneously (and knowing that even that amount is on the pathetically low end of godhood relative to a truly infinite number).

Anyways, for an idea of what I envision for the characters in Elyen, navigating between parallel universes, filtering between realities, and converging or diverging between timeline events is absolutely and ridiculously mundane for them. It’s more a matter of practicality, in the same way that tools are useful for serving a functional requirement or meeting some inherent need.

Think of it this way: In a certain light, the fact that we humans drive cars to get to and from work would be considered the working of immensely powerful magic in the eyes of certain primitive societies. Yet it ain’t no thing to us, really. By the same token, perhaps a sufficiently advanced version of ourselves might have access to the means to traverse the (or a) multiverse (who’s to say there can only be one multiverse, hmm?) and yet regard it as being equally normal and unexciting. Boring, even.

Perhaps a civilization like that, if it might be called a civilization at all, would be glad to have a consciousness that consists of a single, unstoppable “now”, an unknown future, and an unchangeable past. In all likelihood, they’d regard such quaint notions as an absurd oversimplification, perhaps even a blatant fallacy when compared to the real truth of the matter of time, but so what? For all we know, they could envy the bliss that comes with our potentially remarkable ignorance.

Infectious Ideas

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So, as part of the thematic foundation for The Story I am working on, I keep rolling over the ideas of death, life, reincarnation and other various afterlife-related thoughts. Here’s the thing: Elyen, the story, focuses very heavily on multiple universes. That’s key. Couple that with my fascination for:

1) anything to do with FTL phenomena,

2) the impending technological Singularity/birth of smarter-than-human AI,

3) quantum computing,

4) evolution,

5) chaos/entropy vs order and control, and

6) the relative nature of time/eternal vs temporal phenomena

[Edit: 7) the wonder of biology]

…and we get an incredibly rich mixture of concepts from out of which can emerge any number of plausible philosophies, including those along the death-is-only-the-beginning line of reasoning.

To give a type of example — and just to be clear, as abstract, pseudo-technical and intellectual-sounding as these concepts and my particular take on them (including the following example) may sound, I have absolutely zero factual proof that any of what I have to conjecture is actually valid — think about the following event:

You’re walking down the street, on the sidewalk of course, and you come up to an intersection. It’s a busy and bustling city, so there are traffic lights and such to direct the flow of vehicles and pedestrians safely in turns. You wait for your right to proceed across the street. Once the light changes, you begin to do so. Suddenly, a vehicle approaches heading directly towards you from your left side on, moving dangerously fast and showing no signs of stopping.

In any number of universes, you could be distracted at that moment. You could be listening to your ipod with the headphone volume cranked up. You could have initiated your crossing a few seconds earlier or later (depending on your proclivity towards j-walking or not paying attention right away when the light changes, for example). Others could be crossing with you, walking faster or slower. Road conditions might be slippery. The exact conditions could have been anything. This is just one time that you happen to find yourself crossing one particular street out of potentially hundreds, maybe even thousands of times crossing the very same street.

What happens? Theoretically, everything. But only one possible outcome will ever actually be realized by you, personally. What that is remains utterly unknown until it happens. Obviously, certain possibilities appear to be incredibly more probable than others, but there’s still always a statistical chance of experiencing a fluke. More to the point, let me ask you something: Have you ever had a close call? Ever find yourself in a situation very much like this? Nearly struck by a vehicle who’s driver failed to slow down and come to a stop or swerve out of your path as you were about to cross? Ever actually been struck in a situation like that?

Ever die from a collision like that? Or at all?

What kind of question is that? I’ll tell you. In my view, I actually do seriously question how life and death works sometimes. I do believe death can visit us all, perhaps at any moment if it’s our time, but I do also acknowledge that I could be wrong about that. Yes, I see the graveyards filled with the bodies of those for whom death has inescapably brought about the end of their physical lives. Many countless people who once lived no longer do, but I don’t believe that things are nearly as cut and dry as they may appear to be.

A time or two, I have experienced a close call, as with the above example. In these moments, I feel a rush of fear and excitement, the tell tale fight-or-flight reactions brought about by a surge of adrenaline. Again, I have no proof of this, but I’ve come to suspect that there’s more, much more to that feeling than simple physical responses.

I believe in parallel universes, as stated already. In a vast number of those universes, I died. And in those brief moments, I believe that I’ve felt it. At least, other versions of me (including yours truly) did.

Here’s the thing: all matter can theoretically exist in a wave-particle duality. What we see around us are atoms and molecules that have been “collapsed”. As in, if a brick is a brick when we look at it now, it’s still going to be a brick if we look away, and still going to be a brick when we look back a short time later. There’s exceedingly little possibility that the brick might spontaneously become a puddle of water, or a small animal, or any other truly non-brick thing without some interacting conversion process affecting it first. The substance it’s made of is fixed, and once it is fixed, it won’t spontaneously unfix and refix as something else (presumably).

When it comes to the future, however, the unknown of events which are yet to be, it works kind of like this: In front of you is a picture. It’s really blurry. However, the longer you look at it for, the clearer it gets. If you look at the picture long enough, and if the clear picture is of something you recognize, then, in all likelihood, you will eventually identify it before long. However, while the picture is blurry and still of something as-of-yet unknown, it might as well be a blurry picture of anything.

So what if it really was a picture of anything? What if the blurry picture was a composite of thousands of differing, but perhaps similar, images, all morphed into one? However, as it becomes clearer, the number of pictures from which it is comprised begins to drop down from thousands, to hundreds, to tens, to a few, until eventually, finally, just one.

What if that is how the future works? Full of possibilities counter-weighted with probabilities, and as we near each successive, seemingly instantaneous moment, each new frame or slice of unfolding events, each new “now”, the picture unfolds revealing it’s singular clarity, but not without first having whittled down the possible other outcomes which might have been instead.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, in a multiverse where the unfolding events involve a street, a pedestrian, and a car failing to stop at their red light all brought together, the “pictures of the future” involve all the possibilities mentioned above (distraction, slippery conditions, loud music, etc.) and many, many more besides. However, the way that the entirety of the events actually plays out can only involve one fixed, final, irrevocable outcome for someone experiencing them.

Per universe.

My argument is that similar, nearby universes played out similar events and arrived at slightly — or perhaps greatly — differing outcomes. Perhaps countless numbers of them.

In any number of those outcomes, for those of us who are alive now and reading this and able to relate to the experience of a close call event like in the example above, is it really all that much of a stretch to believe that we’ve died in some of them? To press the point, the “closer the call” was (the more anxiety/fight-or-flight responses we felt, etc.), perhaps what really happened was that we felt the reverberations of our own deaths more acutely than in situations where the events leading to our deaths in other universes were much more remote.

I believe that universes abide by a proximity principle, and this may, perhaps, be one of the only ways we sub lightspeed-existent human beings have of interacting with other such otherwise unreachable places in the truly wide, fascinating and mysterious world that we may find ourselves in.

So, I’m not saying we’re all free to jump in front of cars, but I would hazard a guess that should a car strike us and kill us in one universe, we would instantaneously snap into awareness of ourselves in a universe where we did not die. This idea may rightfully be challenged by the idea of fate and whether or not we all, in fact, have our inescapable, predetermined time to die. At this time, I have no thoughts to weigh in on that matter, but I’m sure I’ll dream up something that seems sensible for the sake of The Story soon enough (I swear, I don’t purposely try to create alliteration in my phrases, but it does seem to happen a lot).

Also, it is an inescapable fact that universes in which we die, assuming they’re not also universes where it is routinely common to come back from being legally dead, are also universes in which we would leave behind loved ones. That’s never fun, for anyone involved. So, just to stress the point, don’t jump in front of cars. All I’m saying is, if it’s not your time (if there even is such a thing as “your time”), you won’t even realize how often you die on a regular basis in nearby universes anyways, so even if this idea infects you and blows your mind open a little, don’t fuss about it. Seriously. Why? ‘Cause you live in a universe where you’re too busy living, and that is honestly awesome. So go on, live and be, let whatever happens will happen. Just be sure look both ways when crossing the street.

[Edit: There’s much about these notions that have bothered me to think about in the years since initially musing about them. One example is the case of serious injuries. At what point can/does/should transference to a different, safer, but highly similar universe happen? I have no answers, only hopeful ideals]