Back to the Present

There are days when my mind is so divided that I cannot hear what I think. Sometimes, when I react to situations and know my inner thoughts, I see the monster in me. I believe that there are many versions of us with traces of every trait that we see in others. Every individual is ultimately a few versions merged into one.

No matter how hard we try to erase some stuff from our memory bank, they tend to replay in our head like a broken record. The ghosts of these past form part of us and after some time they become blurred and we can no longer recall why they had mattered. We have to decide what and who should matter in our lives. We have to be mindful of our thoughts and try to understand why we are affected by what is going on around us. From time to time we land our own reality so as  to move on with  life.

All Our Wrong Todays written by Elan Mastai is the story of a time traveller. The year is 2016.

First there is Tom Barren who lives in a techno-utopian world that we are supposed to have, that is with ‘ flying cars, robot maids, food pills, teleportation, jet packs, moving sidewalks, ray guns, hover boards, space vacations, and moon bases.’  It is a ‘techno- utopian paradise of abundance , purpose and wonder’.

Imagine a world where every avocado you ever eat is perfect and all the banal functions of daily life are taken care of by technology. The menial and manual jobs are automated and mechanized.

‘Getting dressed involves an automated device that cuts and stitches a new outfit every morning, indexed to your personal style and body type. This fabric is made from laser-hardened strands of a light-sensitive liquid polymer that’s recycled nightly for daily reuse.’

 Tom’s father, Victor Barren is a genius.

‘After finishing his third PhD, Victor Barren spent a few crucial years working in long-range teleportation before founding his own lab to pursue his specific niche field – time travel.’

In the techno world that is built on the limitless energy of the Goettreider Engine , oil is irrelevant and basic resources are plentiful yet not everything is perfect because people still get anxiety and stress and there is still corruption, unrequited love  and failed marriages, childhood could be a playground or a dungeon.  Pharmaceutical use is rampant.

In his voice, Tom writes,

‘I’ve never succeeded at anything, so for me failure is pretty much synonymous with life itself. ‘

In  the techno- utopian world, his mother is dead. When she was alive, she was more like a mother to his father because his father needed  everything that didn’t involve his big brain managed for him. So within a few months of her sudden death, everything became a total disaster.

Tom is unable to find his place in this dazzling and technology advanced world and he makes a rash decision by travelling back in time to drastically change not only his own life but the very fabric of the universe itself. He wakes up into his own dream and find him in the world that is similar to our  real world but for him, our world seems like a dystopian wasteland. He discovers a different version of his family.

Tom  is John, a successful, driven and impressive architect in another reality. His dad, Victor Barren, a tenured professor of physics at the University of Toronto with a specialty in photonics who teaches undergraduate and graduate courses. He has a sister, Greta  and he has his parents’ rapt focus yet he chronically shrugs them off.  He meets Penny and he tells Penny that he is an accidental plagiarist. There is Tom in John.

“Okay,” she says, “but what if every creative idea that someone has is unconsciously borrowed from that person’s experiences in another reality? Maybe all ideas are plagiarized without us knowing it, because they come to us through some cryptic and unprovable reality slippage?’

“Does that mean, like, the version of you that had the idea in the other reality also stole from another version of you in yet another reality ?’ I say.

The conversation between Penny and John continues.

“ Or maybe we’re giving individual human beings too much credit. Maybe a vast alien intelligence is seeding original concepts into our minds to test if they can pass through whatever boundary separates us from other dimensions. Like, some ideas are porous, while others are impermeable and can’t escape their root reality. Maybe the best ideas are the ones that travel freely and don’t really belong to any one person. “

I often find that ideas flash through fast and freely as if someone channels them , some inconsequential while a lot of it are elusive and some of it make sense vaguely. Here is a passage in Tom's voice,

' The truth is , there are no alternate realities. At least not the way Penny describes them. Maybe an infinite multiverse is born from every action, whether it’s two atoms colliding or two people. Maybe reality is constantly fluctuating around us, but our senses aren’t equipped to detect those quantum variations. Maybe that’s what our senses are, an ungainly organic sieve through which the chaos of existence is filtered into something manageable enough that you can get out of bed in the morning . Maybe the totality of what we perceive with our senses is as clumsy a portrait of reality as a child’s chalk drawing on a sidewalk compared to the face of the woman you’re already falling in love with lying next to you in a mess of sheets and blankets, her lips still pursed as they pull away from your mouth.’

The story is cleverly crafted and told in an engaging voice. I am  a fan of time travelling stories and thus I have enjoyed reading  All Our Wrong Todays,click a smart and witty debut novel by Elan Mastai. click A mind-bending story where the protagonist gets to decide which version of his life he wants to live in. 

The idea that what if there is another me in another timeline is intriguing but for now , I have to get on with my reality whatever that makes sense to me as John narrates, 
“ But in terms of our actual experience, there’s just one reality , this reality”