Another, Alternate Universe Me?

A common storytelling technique in comic books and science fiction is the use of alternate realities or timelines, allowing creators the freedom to re-boot franchises, fix continuity errors or play around with established characters without ticking off the fan base too badly. It explains all the evil Batmen currently running around the DC Universe, how the Leonard Nimoy Spock was able to meet the Zachary Quinto Spock in the newer Star Trek films and how Fox doesn’t even seem to try and make the X Men movies make any sense. When we went to see Spider-Man: Homecoming my daughter was confused about why Spider-Man was white. She’s more familiar with the Miles Morales Spider-Man of Earth-1610, not the Peter Parker of Earth- 610 that daddy grew up with.

Still with me?

I’m going to stop before I get really nerdy and start talking about String Theory and quantum physics, but it’s worth mentioning that as far back as 1935 Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen were discussing possible means of inter-dimensional travel and the very last paper published by Steven Hawking before he died laid down the scientific groundwork for the finding of parallel universes.

The idea of one such parallel universe, another Earth where different events have caused a different evolution of the world, is the idea behind the Starz television show Counterpart, the finale of which I finally got around to watching this past week. The premise is that based on an accident caused by East German scientists in 1987, a copy of our world was spun off and began experiencing it’s own history, including a devastating plague that a rebel faction in the second universe blames on the first. Only certain government agencies on either side are aware of the existence of the other.

The brilliance of the show comes from JK Simmons as Howard Silk, a low level bureaucrat lovingly devoted to his coma-stricken wife on one side, a cold-blooded secret agent on the other.

It’s a concept that has always fascinated me, the belief that our lives are dictated not by a higher power, but by a series of choices that we and those around us make, each one leading us down a different path than otherwise may have been taken. Some of these choices are easily identifiable, events such as a breakup, a job change, or a move, but I wonder how many of the smaller ones that we make every day have a much more profound effect on our lives than we realize. Is there an alternate version of me somewhere that is living a completely different life right now because he chooses to sleep in on a day that I got up on time?

I consider myself a pretty happy person, content with his place in life and not often inclined to wonder what I could have done differently along the way, but wouldn’t it be cool to be able to see? To steal a glimpse into what your life could have been? Or would you rather not know?

What if in some alternate dimension there is a rakish version of me that sports a mustache and a fedora, leading the resistance against the Nazi overlords in an America that lost World War Two? I think that I’d kinda like to meet that guy.