Timeline Convergence
in The Last Tomorrow

Many stories have been written where for every possible decision or outcome, each path is taken in some universe: every present has multiple futures. But The Last Tomorrow explores the reverse: every present has multiple pasts.

In retrospect, this is intuitively obvious. You've experienced it yourself, although you likely rationalized it as faulty memory. An example from the story: You might remember that the day you met your spouse, you wore a blue dress. But he swears you wore a red one. Perhaps you both are right. This explains many disagreements, because the further apart in time and space two events are, the less likely they are from the same timeline. You may remember a happy childhood in a happy family, while your sibling can remember an unhappy mother who cried a lot. If you and your sibling have different pasts, you both can be right.

Perhaps that missing sock in the dryer is there in another timeline. It its past, you haven't washed it, yet.

The truly odd thing is that this concept is straight out of quantum mechanics. Take the famous Schrödinger's Cat scenario: place a cat in a sealed box with a radioactive timer that will release a vial of poison if a beta particle strikes it. Wait long enough for there to be a 50/50 chance that the timer has triggered. You and I might say that the cat is either alive or dead, and we can't tell which until we open the box. But quantum mechanics says that the cat is both alive and dead, in a superposition of possible states. Further, the act of observing the cat is what collapses that superposition into either the dead or alive reality. Until observed, it is not meaningful to describe the cat as dead or alive, because it's both.

Einstein and many others had a problem with this description (indeed, Schrödinger himself came up with the cat scenario to ridicule the predictions of quantum mechanics - but decades of rigorous study have failed to find a flaw.) And extremely careful experiments have proven, without any doubt, that the path a particle takes through a detector can be selected after the fact by a late choice of observer (experiment).

An alternative and valid description of quantum superposition is that the act of observing an event selects from the possible pasts that led to it. For the cat, it is both alive and dead in different timelines, and opening the box selects which timeline led to the present reality.

There are strange implications for cause and effect. Perhaps a different you, in a different past reality, shot and killed someone. But the evidence - the smoking gun with your fingerprints - shows up in this reality. Are you guilty?

In my novel The Last Tomorrow, the differences in our memories grow more and more obvious. A singularity in time is approaching, such that each new present moment results from a more and more diverse set of past realities. Timelines are noticeably converging, and the protagonist's models indicate an infinite value will soon be reached. He concludes that something fundamental to the nature of time is happening - the world is coming to an end. And he must do everything in his power to save it.

As the catastrophe approaches, reality becomes more and more bizarre. The GPS network is one of the first things to fail, but it's soon followed by database problems (credit cards become useless), technology problems (standards, such as the gas station nozzle size, vary across the nation), even memory problems (what if your spouse no longer recognizes you? What if your stillborn twin survived? And you didn't?)

Remember, even Einstein couldn't find a way around this prediction of quantum mechanics. He refused to believe that God played with dice. But Stephen Hawking demonstrated that "not only does God play with dice, he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen."

I like another Stephen Hawking quote: “All the evidence shows that God was actually quite a gambler, and the universe is a great casino, where dice are thrown, and roulette wheels spin on every occasion.”

Timeline Convergence in The Last Tomorrow

Timeline Convergence
in The Last Tomorrow