2. The foundation of this experiment

John Levesque's version of the imaginary novel Geneva Farewell by me, Peter Chaff, begins with physicist Hugh Everett's Great Disclaimer: "Once we have granted that any physical theory is essentially only a model for the world of experience, we must renounce all hope of finding anything like the correct theory... simply because the totality of experience is never accessible to us."

That statement on the limits of knowledge, made by Everett in 1957, echoes backward and forward through the centuries. Everett is telling us, all versions of ourselves, all versions of all history, that nothing is absolute because everything is in a state of infinite adjustment and permanent incompleteness.

Everett’s Relative State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics proposed an infinite number of worlds, each of them "governed" by an infinite number of chains of probability. An idea like that was bound to unsettle many people and excite many others. For one thing, it raised all products of the human imagination, past and future – stories, songs and verse, legends, conspiracy theories, myths of good and evil – to the level of a cultural record with a much longer shelf life than the fickle consensus we like to call facts.

The widespread acceptance of Everett's Idea certainly unsettled church and state authorities in Anglo-America who understood the importance of "controlling the narrative." (Anglo-America is my world's totalitarian counterpart of your world's Britain, United States and Canada. ) They knew that little could be done retroactively about subversive cultural artifacts from antiquity up to the middle of the 20th century other than to ban them. But they could take steps to prevent any further cultural impurities from seeping in.

In 1975, shortly after First Minister Richard Nixon was deposed and imprisoned for supporting free speech, the Roman Capitalist Congress of Anglo-America created a legislated body for authorizing and licensing the creation of all new books, motion pictures, stage plays, fantasy media and any other cultural artifacts. Plot content and themes were closely examined to prevent themes that might alter history in undesirable ways. Under the 1975 law, private possession of physical cultural artifacts – books, pictures, copies of movies, etc. – became a criminal offence. Richard Nixon fought to the end of his life to overturn these restrictions.

It was a disciple of Hugh Everett’s, psychologist Timothy Leary, who struck back at the Roman Capitalist clampdown on storytelling with his idea of imaginary stories. These undetectable, unwritten works could, according to Everettian probability, depict and influence actual events. Leary’s breakthrough premise was that even an unspoken thought has the power to change reality because of the blowback from all the other reality strands it alters simply by being imagined. For example, because I am imagining this blog post, someone in another strand (John Levesque, for example) is compelled to "transcribe" it.

Everett's Relative State Formulation was dismissed by most of his peers as crackpottery in your world. Timothy Leary probably never even heard of him. (Leary was thought of mainly as the showboating high priest of psychedelics in your world.) Everett abandoned quantum mechanics and focused on his Cold War work at the Pentagon. Among other things, he calculated potential mortality rates from radioactive fallout in a full-scale nuclear war. He died in 1982 at the age of 51. As per his specific wishes, his wife put his ashes out with the garbage.

On page 174 of his Geneva Farewell, John Levesque writes of a driving vacation to the Atlantic Ocean which I, Peter Chaff, took with a woman named Naomi. What JL doesn't mention is that Naomi had recently acquired the illegal printed works of Hugh Everett and brought them along for the ride. She quoted passages as I drove. Naomi wondered in what world the perfect Naomi, "the most Naomi of all Naomis," lived. I told her I wanted nothing to to do with that kind of Naomi.

“In one of those worlds ,” she taunted me, “you just lost control of the car and now we’re both dead.” “In one of those worlds,” I volleyed back, “you grabbed the steering wheel and turned it and I lost control of the car and now you’re dead but I walked away without a scratch.” “In one of those worlds," she fired deep, "I find what you just said funny.” “In one of those worlds," as I lunged for her long ball, "I give a shit whether you find it funny or not.” She grabbed the steering wheel and turned it sharply to the right. The car hit the gravel shoulder, fishtailed, then swerved back onto the pavement. I asked her if she was crazy. “Not here," she said, "but someplace.”

I'm surprised John Levesque didn't include that vignette from my original imaginary novel in his print version of Geneva Farewell. It nicely illustrates the Everettian maze in which we all pass our brief lives. JL also failed to include something Monteverdi once said about how the world can adjust and even thrive inside an endless puzzle that can never be solved: "Rulers have to start acting like compasses." "Is that a clue or something?" I asked him but he had withdrawn.