Tempokai

  In the fiction, everything is possible. From deepest space to a girl's heart; from bck holes and light years away through alien worlds and back again. We write about people who can go anywhere—even into other times or dimensions of reality—and have any kind of adventures they choose.

  Does it make us gods?

  No... but there are worse things than being worshipped by millions as some godlike creature on the printed page.

  It's when you begin reading your own work that this becomes so apparent: every character has their secret desires for life in an infinite universe. Maybe what you've writing is true in another world, in one of timelines like parallel universes. It could be anything! Perhaps it will happen soon because someone out there somewhere has already read these words and they become true, like prophesy fulfilled. Or perhaps we're all madmen wasting our lives scribbling down stories that don't mean anything at all.

  Or maybe everyone is right—we do live in an infinite number of alternate realities where only one of them is real, with each possibility affecting others until nothing is ever certain except death.

  I had written this book long ago when I was twenty-four and working for a small publisher called Starbze Books. The editor assigned me to rewrite my novel again after she found many problems within it (mostly revolving around the main character).

  And I thought. If I change him, do I change the reality, or write about another him in different time or pce?

  Like hell, if the multiverse exists then surely I can invent whole new possibilities without changing what really happened? But then how do I expin the effect it might have on reality outside my imagination? How do I account for those mysterious forces which bring about destiny...

  The universe is vast. Even we, trapped in the small rock by the sun, may not know the full extent of its size. We imagine ourselves alone, yet we exist alongside billions upon trillions of other races; some of whom would kill us given half a chance, while others barely acknowledge our existence. Or maybe not, we are only as powerful and intelligent as our imaginations allow us to believe. And yet the stars beyond count stretch across so much distance it boggles the mind: bck holes consuming pnets, massive storms throwing asteroids towards us from the outer reaches of space, countless alien creatures living beneath oceans hundreds of miles deep in a moon somewhere... yeah, you get my drift.

  Maybe one day someone will find evidence for godlike beings that inhabited distant worlds long before mankind's evolution. A race more advanced than humanity—some who'd made contact with aliens or visited their own past—who had also created all this incredible technology that seems like magic to us.

  Or maybe we will find nothing but a vast space of emptiness filled with dark matter—a cold lifeless realm where nothing lives at all except dust particles and radiation, an endless expanse of nothingness. There could be no life here, only the occasional pnet of solid rocks and gases where pnts grow and animals crawl, there could be no light and darkness because the very concept is meaningless, just random atoms and energy bouncing off each other until they die. The empty vacuum between the stars is perhaps a true void, without meaning or purpose... until something comes along to change it forever...

  ***

  I wanted to py a God in my novel. I took a generic main character you find anywhere, threw him into another world of mythical beasts and heroes... he must come face-to-face with his destiny; meet himself, take action, make choices. I will throw him under the bus, make him suffer, yet never give him too much power; leave room for doubt; don't show everything clearly, then try not to over expin the reasons why things happened. Don't give anything away early on either. It should start slow, build up slowly so that people keep reading for months before anything really happens...

  What if, after all of that he had experienced, will he hate me?

  He was meant to feel angry? Angry about being forced into this situation? Or maybe scared about what might happen next? Maybe frightened by how insignificant it all seemed when compared with reality? Or maybe overwhelmed by the power the writer has over him, turning him from hero into vilin in a single moment: making him out to be some sort of supernatural entity who can control the very thoughts and actions of others through sheer words alone. What would such a thing do to your life, even if only in fiction?

  What if there someone that writes me right now? And someone who writes someone who writes me? Is that enough for anyone else to become immortalised in my work? Couldn't there be a million other characters as real—perhaps even more—than any person ever existed in reality—but I'll still remain unique somehow; I can't comprehend. We're writing our own fictions but are we just making them up or is there something more to it than just us sitting at a keyboard or penning down these stories with ink and paper or digital text? What if the infinity is truly real and there's always something beyond you looking over you shoulder, watching every thought you have and seeing the consequences of your choices...

  It's impossible to tell, one day, you may wake up, turn off the computer, take off your gsses, then go outside and find yourself living in a completely different world, as if someone written for especially you, filling all those empty pages that stretched into eternity before they came across you... then again, maybe they did know where they were going all along. But what kind of creature would do that? Why would they bother? A God?

  They say, God has given free will. Then what does he expect from his creations? An endless battle between good and evil? Between heaven and hell? One side fighting to save the other? All while being forced to suffer their fate by the cruel hand of chance?

  I feel I'm going insane from the loops inside my head. They call me a madman but the madness doesn't come until ter after I've written about everything under the sun. When I think about it, it makes perfect sense: if we exist in a multitude of infinite timelines then how can anyone be anything? How can they maintain cohesion with themselves when so many others could be doing exactly the same things on the exact same time line at the very same moment, in an alternate reality perhaps even closer to the truth than ours? If that was true; in another world there's an author that writes another author that writes me—in which case that writer must also write himself—and he too is writing that writer who is writing him... It's a crazy loop that goes round and around and never stops...

  It made me ugh. Like a quantum theory problem where each atom is connected to its neighbour as well as to itself. Is it really possible for two people to meet somewhere out of the billions upon trillions of pnets, stars, gaxies, dimensions, realities, universes, sub-atomic particles, atoms, molecules, protons, neutrons, electrons, quarks, superstrings, bck holes, dark matter, life forms, inanimate objects, or whatever else exists in this bizarre universe? How do they ever have enough space or time to get together? What if time is truly linear and we live within only one of countless parallel worlds all existing at the same moment in different locations? What if we're all living our own lives on some distant pnet in the farthest reaches of outer space right now, yet everyone reading this book will know the ending before the first chapter has ended... never exiting a draft phase unless something changes that prevents it happening?

  Is it real then?

  Perhaps. But what difference does it make if you believe it or not? Or should I just ignore it because it makes me think I'm losing my mind; it can be ignored easily, while the fear of it becoming true still lurks inside. And besides, I don't want to lose my head; I'll need it ter to finish my work—a whole new novel about myself!

  ENDLESS LOOP ABOUT AUTHORS THAT WRITE EACH OTHER HAVING A BREAKDOWN BECAUSE THEY'RE TOO EXHAUSTED TO WRITE ANYMORE.

  Then they'd spend the rest of eternity sitting around discussing their infinite timeline, waiting for someone else to break their characters, and then start a brand new story with them... endless circles... a never ending loop of time...

  Or maybe, they had already written themselves a happy ending and there's nothing left for anyone to do so they started to search for new plotlines to explore... so that when time eventually came again; there was always more stories worth telling... but that could take forever. There was no way anyone could possibly tell everything that happened during their long lifetime without leaving out any detail whatsoever; infinite time leads to infinite stories that leads to boring outcomes as all possibilities are explored which leaves us all bored out of our minds...

  It would drive me mad if I were to think too much, if only for the fact it made me doubt every decision I made or choice I made in life: is this real? Is it that I thought right now or did I just happen to make the right move at the right moment in a life where the future is determined by chance alone? And is my life truly mine? Who am I really? Am I just a character living out another man's dream who has somehow forgotten what he wrote here yesterday after two pints of 10% bck beer from the bar on his own table beside the computer?

  Maybe, I'm simply writing about what I might have done—or should have done—but didn't.

  It could be worse. After all, I'm not dead yet. Or am I? FUCK!

  I went back outside and stared up into the star-filled night sky above me. It seemed to stretch out beyond the horizon to an unknown point across a vast distance and down to a limitless darkness below.

  Those stars are real enough. This darkness is real enough. Yet something told me it was nothing more than a big illusion; a fantasy that we humans live within. Just like how everyone thinks their reality is true even though their vision is constantly being fooled with mirrors and reflections, tricks of light, colour, shadow, trickery; even their minds can lie to them so they believe whatever they wish instead of thinking for themselves and finding the truth behind it all. But what if there's no difference between truth and fiction because everything exists inside each other... in different shapes or forms? In another dimension that silently passes through me but doesn't matter since it's already happened anyway? What if you never die but just come back again?

  Like most people I had seen pictures of a far off world in outer space where strange things lurked beneath a dark surface, but I had never expected to find myself living on one; in reality that is real enough that I can fool myself over and over again until the lies become truth as the consequences follow along after my actions long after the original cause has disappeared forever...

  What kind of game is this supposed to be then? If I could invent stories to fit the events around me, giving pleasure for unknown reader somewhere else while creating an infinite number of timelines at once without ever having to suffer the pain of loss or failure; why did anyone bother trying anything at all when any outcome was possible? Why do anything at all if it all ends up exactly how I want it too end regardless of what happens?

  One thing understood after this brainwrecking experience was that I must stop reading fiction. It would only lead to madness. A little bit less madness than now. At least by doing that—by avoiding those who know better—I'd stay sane.

  I mean, I'm real enough for myself right here and now. There's no point in believing anything else unless someone actually knows something about reality which is unlikely considering nobody really knew the first pce. Who does know the truth about our own universe, its past and future, if there even is such a thing? Does it affect me, or another me? Or maybe some other me?

  No one cares if you believe it or not: just go with it... make it yours... become a character!... You're a God damn author; you can change the world! What you write is a something already happened somewhere out there... somewhere in time... but only inside your head... in that realm where everything exists in endless parallel timelines but they all run into each other sooner rather than ter as their fates collide like two waves meeting on top of each other as they both rush towards inevitable destiny before eventually washing away each other forever after taking each other's fate along with them.

  "There are always more possibilities, d."

  ***