Time is change. But all things do not change equally fast.
An example: fashion is a perennial production, architecture last centuries.
Everything evolves at its own internal speed. Thus time moves on
in a myriad of separate but interwoven roads...
Sleeping one night in the 90'es, I had a parallel dream.
It begins in a future, where teleportation is normal and widely used...
I'm about to travel to another place,
but this should only take a few seconds since I'm going to 'port' myself.
I step into the transmitter-box, my body dissolves. In the shape of pure code
my body (and mind) is sent to the corresponding receiver-box.
Then an accident happens on the hyperway.
Maybe only a small temporary glitch in the stream? One critical but corrupted bit?
Whatever the cause might be, the result is that I miss my target,
I'm now a lost infopacket in a random flight.
(Now I know how the schródinger-cat must feel...)
Snap, the slightest shift in perception, a shiver.
Another coincidense happens, a parallel world quite closer to mine kicks in.
The reason is a similar receiver-box expecting a message close to mine.
I'm suddenly received, and materialize far from home.
Right time wrong space...
Everything, every single object appears at the same time familiar and not, and yet...
I look at houses, and I know it's houses, but only recognize them 90%. I stare at cars,
they also lack the last 10% in being wellknown. People too. And the sky. Myself?
I've never seen anything exactly like this but always something of that kind.
Like looking at things without ever getting them completely into focus.
The last 10 % remains a mystery...
I've been lost more than once, sometimes even in familiar spaces.
But only once have I been lost in a parallel world.
It is one thing not to know exactly where your are.
Another not to know exactly in what kind of world you are.
Like not knowing where the ground is versus not knowing where your feet are.
I woke up again, in the normal world, which behaved just as unnormal as it normally does.
In that world I remembered that I once read a book by John Brunner: "The infinity of go".
The novel includes teleport-accidents, as mankind invents teleportation
without realizing such things happens in a multiverse. I liked the story,
and so did my subconscious mind apparently, since it borrowed the plot.
But it was one thing being lost in the story, quite another being lost for real...
Mads Dam, february 2005