This is what it’s like to live in the wrong timeline, right?
The wrong what?
The timeline to fuckville. Which is our timeline. Where things just get worse and worse.
How do you actually escape a timeline? Can we go back in time and change the past? Correct it?
It’s like in Terminator 2, when they have to kill that guy who invented some microchip. That enabled Skynet to become self aware and take over the world, or whatever.
Judgement Day, right?
Sure – the awakening of artificial superintelligence. They couldn’t switch it off, right? Skynet saw humanity as a threat, and launched an all out nuclear attack on Russia. And then Russia fired off some nuclear counter-attack on the US …
Is that what’s going to happen here? Is an artificial Organisational Management intelligence waking up …
We need Arnie to come and save us. Come with me if you want to live and so on.
We need a time-travelling Delorian.
Like in Back to the Future? That’s not about timelines.
I’m thinking of Back to the Future II …
The one with cowboys?
The one before that. Where they go back in time to stop Biff becoming world-dictator, or whatever.
The Man in the High Castle – Philip K. Dick’s novel, not the TV series: that’s the clue. There’s the real timeline, where the allies win the war, and the fake one, where the characters in the novel live. And the characters know they’re in a fake one – that a false timeline split off from the real one. That’s our problem, right? This world isn’t real.
We’re on the fake timeline … Which is why we can’t help but tell lies. Every word that comes out of our mouths on the fake timeline … is a lie.
How can we make our lives true?
We can’t – that’s the tragedy.
But at least we know that we lie. That it’s all lies. That’s something, isn’t it?
It’s a tragedy, that’s what it is. It means we’re Gnostics, nothing else. And it's getting worse. We’re just falling further. We’re getting more and more entangled.
Is that why Cicero always talked about Gnosticism? Because she knew we were in a fake world.
Maybe.
All that stuff about the perfect culpability of the world. About seeing the world in its pure, brute being …
We should explode this world – this fake timeline. We should, like, destroy the abomination. Destroy ourselves – what this timeline has made us into.. These false selves … These shadows of what we really are …
When did the timelines diverge, anyway?
When they built the campus, I reckon. After they demolished the Newcastle Brown building and whatever else was here.
So they still brew Newcastle Brown in the city, in the true timeline.
And they didn’t clear the land. There wasn’t some terribly convenient giant fire, where everything burnt down …
Yeah, a ‘fire’ … Space lasers more like. Direct energy weapons.
Seriously?
They zapped it all, cleared it all, and bought it all for pennies on the pound.
So the university has direct energy weapons?
Or it knows somebody who does.
So what’s going in the true timeline? Are there versions of us?
I … guess so.
What are we doing? I mean … are we in Newcastle?
We might never have got jobs here … Cicero might never have gone in search for us …
On the true timeline, the old Philosophy department never would have been shut down. It’d still be there, thriving. The assault on the humanities never would have begun …
So the timelines diverged when they closed the old department?
Sure, just like they diverged when the Germans developed the A bomb before the Americans and changed the course of the world in Philip K. Dick’s novel.
And where’d we be? What would we have been doing? Would we ever have got our PhDs? Would we still be whoring for work in part time hell? I think I actually prefer this timeline …
On the true timeline, we’d never have gotten lectureships – and rightly so. We’d never have got anywhere. We wouldn’t have gotten PhDs, either. Or even passed our MAs … Our BAs …
On the true timeline, we’d never have been born. Beautiful fucking idea! Never have opened our fucking eyes! Never even been conceived! We’d be literally incon-fucking-ceivable, which is exactly as it should be.
Work in Progress 