Monsieur Poincare

Just like having a good sneeze, it's an enjoyable act to entertain a conspiracy. Actually, it’s a form of thought experimentation. Here's a good one to try. Apparently it came from the French mathematician, Poincare. He wondered: what if one night while everyone was asleep the universe became a thousand times greater in size?
 

No one would be able to tell the difference, he surmised. People would wake up and blindly go about their business as usual. No one would know, because how could they? Their instruments and scales would have increased in size too. Well, that idea disturbed me when I read about it, because got me to conjure up a notion of my own. 

What if every day we wake up as different person?

We touched on this earlier in this book where I invited you to step into my shoes. Just as you wouldn’t register a change in size, you wouldn’t know if you’d become another person, not if the procedure involved the complete deletion of your previous memories and the uploading of new ones. You’d wake up with your whole new history in mind, and this would be just another day of the person you now remember being. Oh my! The reason that this idea freaked me out was how could I be sure that it wasn’t already happening?
 
Consider: we awake into another body. We enter into another life by forgetting the old and assuming the new. We come to consciousness inside another life with its background intact, every episode of all previous seasons. The yesterdays that we recall are its yesterdays, its events and its birthday parties. What a conspiracy that would be, to be forever leaping into new continuums.
 
I guess you could call it quantum jumping. To all intents and purposes, you become another person with every leap. It stands to reason. That’s more or less how we define selfhood. If a person suddenly occupied another head with exactly the same genes, upbringing, environment, circumstances, knowledge, beliefs and attitudes as that entity—absolutely everything—then they would act and make the very same decisions and choices as he or she. 

I’m talking exactly the same here. If you retained any inkling of your former self, would ruin the effect, but without such an inkling—if your brain was well and truly washed—then there’d be no way to tell you had changed hosts, now would there? You wouldn’t know that you were no longer ‘you’. How could you?
 
Your day would seamlessly ensue from the background of all that had gone before. In every respect you would be who you’d always been. Without the memories and self-awareness of a previous self, you would not miss your earlier existence. It would be like being born again in a sense. We’d be unaware of it having happened because all links would be lost. We’ve reincarnated. Incarcerated. At most there’s just the ghost of déjà vu. 

Why could this not be true? It makes such sense that it must be true. This is how things work; that’s how the world is. I’m telling you . . .
 
No, I shouldn’t be telling you. No-one likes to be told what to think. Okay, please, bear with me. Hear me out. Po statements, remember? These are just fleeting butterflies. Don’t rip their wings off, weasels!

Message in a bottle

To make our conspiracy even more delicious, I’ll introduce another element to the above scenario by means of a riddle. What do you get when you cross E.T. and The Truman Show? What you get is a secret task. 

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to locate ‘The Other’. It’s to get back into touch with (or meet for the first time; it's a moot point) some really important individual. We share a very close tie of an unknown nature. 

But I, or s/he, or even both of us have been brainwashed (as per the above). The knowledge of our relationship has been scrubbed. The grand conspiracy has worked to separate us. (By the way, I’ll use the name Theo from now on—from THE Other—and refer to Theo in the second person singular to avoid having to dither between ‘he’ and ‘she’.) 

It has hidden Theo. Maybe you’ve morphed you into an unrecognizable form. I don’t know what you look like, or even if you’re human! I don’t know where you are, or when you live. But somehow through some means or another I must reach you and convince you of our plight.  

How’s that for a premise? Rod Serling would have loved it! 

I refer to this as a mission because Theo could be anywhere in the world. For all I know, you may be living in another time period also. I hope you don’t live in the past, because how could I you reach backwards in time? But if you occupy the future, then clearly the best way forward is to plant this book for you to find.
 
Another difficulty is that we wouldn’t necessarily recognize one another on sight. We’re both in mufti. How would we get around that one? I, at least, have the benefit of knowing that there is a person to be on the lookout for. I’ve got my eyes primed. But you don’t necessarily know that there’s even a game on. Your lenses—your overview of the situation—may not be so clear. 

Still, I can make a stab at Theo’s characteristics, feelings, perceptions, attitudes and mental orientation. I must trust that you are fortunate enough to live in a relatively open society, one in which differences are at least tolerated, and where it is possible to harbor variant thoughts (as long as you keep them to yourself). Those around you probably follow a conventional religion, and you might also, in spite of the fact that you’re not one-hundred-percent convinced. But Theo is the type of person who goes along with the flow. I warrant that you’re not the sort of person who makes waves.
 
That being so, I figure my best course of action is to send Theo a message-in-a-bottle. Not only must I spell it out clearly, but I can’t waste any time. An added complication is that things are not static. As the search goes on (and as I write) Theo and I are moving around. Every day we wake up in different bodies. 

What a predicament! Is our situation hopeless? Come back and find out—same time, same place, next week.