Chapter 1: It Began with an Ending

Wednesday, November 19, 2003

Sometimes in life a single event can be both good news and bad news for a participant; I just didn't expect this duality to arise out of my death. I didn't expect anything to arise out of my death; that pretty much defeated the purpose of it.

My life was awful. It had never been good, and had gone seriously downhill when puberty cursed me. School sucked, my relationships with girls sucked (ha!, as if I had "relationships with"; "ridicule from" was as close as I got). I was as bad at sports as I was with girls, and last but not least in my litany of troubles, I seemed to be the favorite victim of every bully in town. And I wouldn't be surprised if a few out-of-town bullies made special trips in just to make my life miserable.

Even my parents and little blisters - Carol and Donna, 2 and 3 years younger than me - had little time for me.

The only thing I had going for me was that I was just a little bit smart, but that only meant that I was smart enough to recognize that I was a failure, and smart enough to imagine the unhappiness of my future.

I'd decided that I'd had enough. November 19, 2003, was The Day. My fourteenth birthday had been ten days ago and it'd been pointless. Thanksgiving was in a week and I had less than nothing to be thankful for. My death, that I referred to earlier, was self-inflicted.

I had long fantasized over which suicide method to use, and had narrowed my options down to two: shooting myself in the head, or sitting in a warm bath and slitting my wrists to bleed out. I wanted to go with the first option but I'd failed to get hold of a gun, so my success at death was looking to be pretty much the same as my success at life. I was having to go out by slitting my wrists. As it turned out I'm glad I didn't obtain a gun, as without a brain my autobiography would've stopped right here. That would've been such a pity.

Lying bleeding to death in the bath, in the last few seconds of my life, I began to experience déjà vu. I've experienced this phenomenon a few times before, and have always found it to be strange, curious and little annoying. Annoying because the question, "Have I experienced this situation before?" was always irritatingly unanswered before the phenomenon ended. To experience it during my suicide was mildly pleasing, as the timing neatly answered that question. With obvious logic I was pretty sure I hadn't committed suicide before.

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[[I wrote above that events can be both good news and bad news. This is where the REALLY good part of my death kicked in. By kicking the bucket, I discovered that just like it says in science fiction books, there really are parallel dimensions.

At the time I knew no more about déjà vu than you - my readers - do, but I'll provide you with some explanation now.

The parallel dimensions truly are "parallel", not linearly, but in the sense that if something happens in one dimension, it probably happens in many of the other dimensions too. For the dimensions to stay somewhat consistent there has to be a synchronization process between them, which requires an exchange of information. There are innumerable such synchronizations occurring at any one moment, between any two random parallel dimensions, and for small volumes of space each time. (Actually the dimensions aren't chosen randomly as they have to be similar in some respects. And more accurately, "small volumes of space" should be "small volumes of Consciousness", as they aren't necessarily at the same spatial coordinates within their respective dimensions, but usually are.) The process is a two-way averaging of the two dimensions' Consciousnesses, although "averaging" is too crude a term as there are several natural laws which make the synchronization function more sophisticated than that.

Looking at it from a greater perspective, all the dimensions were created at the same time so are the same age. They're each running on their own track, but there's a natural process that causes those tracks to converge: the Consciousness synchronizing process mentioned above. There's also a natural process that causes the tracks to diverge: the randomly probabilistic nature of wavefunction collapses (i.e., luck). The sophisticated averaging function referred to above operates to give order to the whole Universe. Not necessarily the same order for every dimension, but there is an overall structure to it all. As an analogy, in your body individual cells behave somewhat randomly. At a somewhat higher level, heart cells behave similarly to other heart cells but very differently to blood cells. At a higher level still, there's also a collective structure that keeps the whole body roughly in line. There are similarities and differences at many levels within the Universe, but there's also an overarching natural structure and process.

When the volumes of space being synchronized include minds in both dimensions, déjà vu can occur. Having minds at both ends of the connection is considerably more likely than squaring the proportion of the Universe occupied by minds. If there's a mind at one end of the connection, having a mind at the other end is certain because the synchronization occurs between volumes of virtually identical Consciousness. (It would seem more natural for me to have written "brains" rather than "minds" above, but they're not synonymous and their differences become important later.)

For déjà vu to occur, the two minds involved have to be virtually identical. So close to identical that déjà vu is not possible between different people. Bob's mind in one dimension cannot déjà vu with Fred's mind in another. It requires the 'same' 'individual' (to misuse both words) in both dimensions, Bob#1 to Bob#2.

In addition, the two minds have to be on the same 'frequency' - in the same sort of mood, doing similar things, thinking similar thoughts, etc. It occurs at a much lower level than that, and "frequency" is a gross simplification of the complexity of the phenomenon, but it'll give you the general idea.

Once the pre-conditions are met, the cross-dimensional synchronization process starts. There are various low-level functions that occur for a while, but they aren't relevant to this discussion. Critically important to the way my life turned out, is that toward the end of the synchronization process the Universe's Consciousness in dimension#1 makes a temporary local copy of dimension#2's synchronization volume, so the Consciousness can process them together. That occurs in the other direction too, and the copies are kept up to date during the comparison and averaging process by their being refreshed from their source dimensions periodically; about every 0.1 seconds, although that varies depending on the informational complexity of the volume being processed. The inter-dimensional transfer of information being so slow is why synchronization requires local copies to work from.

Chapter 2 »