Okay, make another guess at some way to make sense of that ‘different’. Could well be completely wrong, but it’s worth a try. I need some way to make sense of this…

You’ve heard of the ‘alternative-worlds hypothesis’, right? That every choice we make, a different world splits off either side of that choice? That the side that represents the choice that we made, then becomes what we experience as ‘reality’? But the other side doesn’t cease to exist – it becomes another reality that is experienced by a different ‘you’ that made the other choice.

It’s not just people making choices: it’s everything. Every possibility. Like the possible reality from the comet that missed, and didn’t wipe out the dinosaurs. That kind of thing.

And not just the big things, like that comet – it’s every small thing too. There are quite a few films that look at this. ‘Sliding Doors’, for example, with Gwyneth Paltrow. That sci-fi thing ‘The Butterfly Effect’. Or that German classic, ‘Run, Lola, Run’. Small choices. That usually lead to small changes, though sometimes big changes, too.

Yet other than that change, everything else stays the same. Is the same. The bit that doesn’t change each time – which is most of the world, usually – it isn’t an alternative world: it’s the same world.

That’s the tricky bit.

Now scale that up. Lots of changes. Lots and lots of them. More and more and more, over time. Yet throughout all of those changes, some things still stay the same. For centuries, sometimes. And until they do change, those places are the same in each ‘alternate reality’.

But not just look the same: they are the same. Literally.

Which means that that ‘sameness’ could connect back to something that’s different.

Or the different could connect back to here. Because it’s not different – it’s actually the same.

That might just do it…

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Back when we were kids, Aunt Kat had told us that one morning in the mid-1930s was when they first heard about the First World War; it hadn’t happened at all in the world they knew, she said. But once they knew about it, they were stuck with it.

I didn’t believe her back then, of course. Just another of Aunt Kat’s crazy stories, like Mother said. But maybe not so crazy now?