The Viner Dimension

A different kind of different

Six-thirty. I'm waiting outside the back of the supermarket. Not open yet, but this early it's the only place that I'll be able to get a whole stack of cardboard boxes. I'll need them.

Do a bit more reading while I wait. Still trying to make sense of this mess.

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A different world, she said. That is also our world. That's the bit that's complicated.

My first guess was that it was the 'different' that's like in those alternative-history stories. You know, the Nazis won the Battle of Britain and took over the country. That kind of thing.

But that kind of different wouldn't give us Uncle George and Aunt Kat. Or the house.

It's a different kind of different to that.

Kind of hard to describe that different, though. Even with everything I've read so far in her papers.

This one's hard.

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Okay, make another guess at some way to make sense of that 'different'. Could well be completely wrong, but it's worth a try. I need some way to make sense of this...

You've heard of the 'alternative-worlds hypothesis', right? That every choice we make, a different world splits off either side of that choice? That the side that represents the choice that we made, then becomes what we experience as 'reality'? But the other side doesn't cease to exist - it becomes another reality that is experienced by a different 'you' that made the other choice.

It's not just people making choices: it's everything. Every possibility. Like the possible reality from the comet that missed, and didn't wipe out the dinosaurs. That kind of thing.

And not just the big things, like that comet - it's every small thing too. There are quite a few films that look at this. 'Sliding Doors', for example, with Gwyneth Paltrow. That sci-fi thing 'The Butterfly Effect'. Or that German classic, 'Run, Lola, Run'. Small choices. That usually lead to small changes, though sometimes big changes, too.

Yet other than that change, everything else stays the same. Is the same. The bit that doesn't change each time - which is most of the world, usually - it isn't an alternative world: it's the same world.

That's the tricky bit.

Now scale that up. Lots of changes. Lots and lots of them. More and more and more, over time. Yet throughout all of those changes, some things still stay the same. For centuries, sometimes. And until they do change, those places are the same in each 'alternate reality'.

But not just look the same: they are the same. Literally.

Which means that that 'sameness' could connect back to something that's different.

Or the different could connect back to here. Because it's not different - it's actually the same.

That might just do it...