Multiverse Me

Have you heard the theories about us living not in a universe, but instead in a multiverse? Many scientists now believe that we live [the me who is writing this post and the you who is reading it] in just one version of countless parallel realities.

It's what fiction writers have always expected of course and the idea has accounted for numerous books and films over the years, where characters suddenly find some sort of portal into another world that's slightly askew from their own.

But according to science, there are not just a couple of these worlds but continuously new and emerging ones, to add to the myriad already spun off. So in one of these worlds for example Carmen Capuano would be married to the first guy who ever asked her, on another there would be a career woman, etcetera, etcetera, each world spun off from the path not taken in this life.

This is in fact the premise of Split Decision - a showing of the other way, the road not taken by Natalie as she made her choice between the two guys. To find out what happens, you will of course need to read the book.

But what concerns me here are all those other versions of me. I feel for them, I really do. They are me and yet not me. Are they happy? Did this current me, the one who writes and is unmarried and lives in Bromsgrove, did she make the right choices?

Strangely enough its a vague worry. I cannot know their circumstances or whether they are ok or not, and indeed I guess in some worlds I would have already died from some illness or accident. And there is a truth that if these theories are correct, in a way it doesn't matter if I make the right choices in life, because that means that some other version of me does, although that might be taking altruism a little too far.

The weirdest thought that all of this has dredged up, is which one is the original me? Am I the one who was born and from that moment spawned a zillion other worlds with my choices and actions? Or instead am I created by the original, spun off like a cheap rendition from that very first split in my own life, perhaps the first childhood sickness I had or even the first time my pregnant mother rushed across a busy road and narrowly avoided an accident?

I will never know. But to those other Carmen Capuanos I would say this if I could, "Good luck and stay strong".

Happy Reading.