1. Peter Chaff explains all

My name is Peter Chaff. My imaginary novel, Geneva Farewell, was composed in my mind but deliberately not written for a number of reasons. I didn't once imagine it would turn up in written form in some other reality strand. It's not like the few people who knew about reality strands and the ways they interacted were broadbanding the news. I didn't find out until it was too late.

Geneva Farewell was bound to be “composed” by an “author” (in this case "John Levesque") who was bound to be even more blind to the dynamics of inter-strand overlaps than I am. He probably thinks he created Geneva Farewell. That's the kind of category error the human mind makes when it contemplates the intricate house of cards that is our multiverse.

Rudy Monteverdi is a Translator who tried to alert me to what was going on in the pages of Geneva Farewell even as John Levesque wrote them down! Rudy roams more or less at will among the reality strands. Slowly he has been showing me how to "see into" other strands. The first strand I successfully saw into was this world – the world in which you are reading these words. It's the world that contains the John Levesque version of Geneva Farewell and he thought I would want to read it.

The novel was published by Mosaic Press in March of 2020 as though to mark the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in your world. It is for sale on a limited basis, mainly from the Mosaic Press website, mosaic-press.com.

Such is the nature of the multiverse that other versions of Geneva Farewell have necessarily started turning up in adjacent reality strands. The blog I, Peter Chaff, am creating here is not intended for such worlds, but rather for a world such as your own in which a combination of my flawed original concept and John Levesque's inability to capture the rich flavour of those flaws has generated fairly severe turbulence. Meanwhile there is an I.V.-like trickling of Levesque's printed version into the collective imagination in your virus-compromised world.

Not long after Monteverdi was first alerted to the existence of the John Levesque version of our story, he stumbled on another print version. This one was authored by “Samla Bishap”. This author has done very well with the book. According to her FaceMe page it's her first novel and it was published to immediate acclaim. Her Geneva Farewell dust jacket has no photo of her and her bio says only that she is based in Mumbai where she co-owns a small cargo company. Already she has been the subject of fawning profiles among many of the top "social influenzas" in her world.

Why would these two lamentable throwbacks, Levesque and Bishap, toiling in their respective reality strands where novels can be still be written and published with impunity, be interested in someone like me? Monteverdi says they wrote about me because I am a hybrid archetype, a Catalyst with strong Translator tendencies. Also, they have no choice.

"Like all hybrid archetypes, you have more super weaknesses than powers. It's the same with me, who am a Translator with strong Catalyst tendencies. You and I make a yinyang! Our misadventures provide vicarious thrills to the more balanced types. False opinion and wrong thought sometimes defile us yet good intentions polish our folly to the highest sheen."

Fate, for humans and other living beings, is mainly embedded in their genes. But for archetypes, even hybrid ones like Rudy Monteverdi and me, fate recognizes genetic markers only in the most superficial way. We are governed instead by the so-called Laws of the Strands, known to all archetypes and understood by none. We retain some control over our archetypal nature, but we understand that there are limits. For example, we are not visible, audible or touchable in your world. That we exist in multiple worlds is because of parasitic wordsmiths such as John Levesque and Samla Bishap who lured us into them.

Being in a state of confinement in my own world, with time and space on my hands, I have begun this imaginary blog for the benefit of readers in your world, including John Levesque, who have been or are soon to be exposed to his print version of Geneva Farewell. Those of you who have not yet been seen this book should acquire it and read it now. The book is mother-sister to the blog.

Our immediate goal, you might as well know, is to find a missing fellow archetype, a Protector named Geneva Farewell.