I mean, think about it. If—and I’m a little hazy on the
physics here, but then, who isn’t—if every decision point creates the
opportunity for an alternate reality, who’s to say I’m in the reality I’m
supposed to be in? Maybe I tripped or sneezed or got a raspberry seed caught
under my dental plate, something to distract me just enough that I made a
decision I wouldn’t have otherwise and here I am—divorced from someone I
shouldn’t be, driving the wrong car or even standing in the wrong checkout line
at WalMart.
What’s more, if my decision created this universe by
mistake, and if all of you people are in this universe too, then all of you are
also in the wrong place, just because I belched up a bad taste from my chili
last night and was distracted as I was playing solitaire on my computer.
Even worse, I’m in my sixties now. That means I’ve had a
lifetime of opportunities to stumble around from one bad decision to the next
(and I can recall quite a few without even trying) creating and then abandoning
one wrong universe after another. I could’ve left hundreds of thousands of
billions of people in utter confusion and despair as I slipped seamlessly from
one sinking ship to the next.
Oh, you think entering a parallel universe wouldn’t be that
easy, huh? Well, I said seamlessly and I’ll stick to it. There is nothing I
have found in the literature that guarantees it takes some sort of catastrophically
explosive tear in the so-called fabric of spacetime to connect alternate realities.
As a matter of fact, any reputable physicist will admit that the “rules”
governing such occurrences may be entirely outside our known laws of physics.
In light of that, I feel quite confident in asserting that
the nature of such rules, I’ll call it exophysics,
pretty much does guarantee that the inter-universe connections occur in ways we
have not even imagined.
You want proof? Okay, here’s an experiment. First, pick out
a technical field of which you have absolutely no knowledge, like brain
surgery, rocket science or guaranteeing your privacy on the internet. Now,
assuming you’re not a brain surgeon, rocket scientist or the operator of some
on-line social network, tell me how to go about removing a brain tumor, landing
on Mars or keeping your email address from some erstwhile Nigerian “prince.” Go
ahead, take your time. Use the back of the page if necessary.
You haven’t got a clue, have you? So what makes you think
you know the first thing about exophysics?
And even if you could guess the exophysics outside of this
universe, that would be absolutely no help in guessing about the exophysics
outside another universe, especially if I’ve plunked you into one of my wrong
universes to begin with.
All I can say is, I’m really, really sorry. Sorry for
creating another wrong universe in which you’re now trapped and sorry for
ending the last paragraph with a preposition. I can only have hope. Perhaps, in
the next universe, it will be acceptable to end a sentence with a preposition.
[?]
