In June 2018, I felt like writing fiction again and so I fired off this tweet:

Then followed 17 other tweets, most of which had polls of their own.

What you’re about to read is a story co-created with folks on Twitter as they voted on what was going to come next. A choose-your-own-adventure style story that was written tweet by tweet, option by option, without any idea of where it would all lead.

The beginning has been edited very slightly but apart from that, everything else had been copied in its entirety.

I invite you to join me on this short, at times absurd, co-created journey of imagination.

0

It’s a cool breezy summer day. He walks out of his apartment, onto the street and chances upon a shiny trumpet lying on the graffiti-laden concrete pavement. He picks it up and think back to the days when he was musical.

It was such a long time ago.

He had given up a promising music career because he wanted to embrace the death of art. Art was dead. There was no more creation, no more dancing, no more live music. It was all playback. He was one of the last few humans on Earth. Why bother?

He inhaled the cool, industrialized, polluted air and took out his bar of soap. Lavender. It always had to be made out of natural lavender if not it wouldn’t work. It was impossible to find any agricultural land nor garden anymore, so what he had in his hand was so, so precious.

Staring at the light purple bar of soap made of actual lavender flowers, he threw it at the Geisha.

The Geisha feinted. He missed. Damn, these things were quick.

He picked up the soap again, this time in two pieces, took aim, and missed one more time.

It was too late. The Geisha had already painted him white.

White was his least favorite color – he also didn’t want to be one of them. The conversion process had to be stopped! He squinted in search of that light purple bar of soap, but it was hard to see. All he saw was white. It was a menacing sort of white. The sort that showed up even if you didn’t want it to. It blinded him not just in its fullness but also in its brilliance.

He finally felt the smooth rubbery surface of the soap, grabbed it, and started scrubbing at his eyes. It was painful. He had never felt such excruciatingly stinging pain before. It was like a million needles in his eyes all at once, gouging deeper and deeper into him, getting piercingly hotter and hotter. It was like the entire Sun was burning up in his eyes. Then…

Nothing.

Everything stopped abruptly. It wasn’t even black. It was just, nothing. No sight, no sound, no pain. He felt an uneasy sense of relief – a relief that didn’t belong.

He tries turning his head. He couldn’t feel his head, nor any of his limbs. Where was up and down? Orientation was hard. Everything seemed to extend infinitely in all directions. He was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Was this what it was like to turn into one of them?

It wasn’t too bad after all.

He waited.

He didn’t know how much time had passed, it at all. He couldn’t seem to effect anything.

And then slowly, like a rumble of waves just coming into the shore, he heard it. 0, 1, 2. 0, 1, 2. 0, 1, 0, 1, 2. 0, 1, 2. 0, 1, 0, 1, 2. 0, 1, 2. 0, 1, 0, 1, 2. 0, 1, 2. 0, 1, 0, 1, 2. 0, 1, 2. 0, 1, 0, 1, 2. 0, 1, 2. 0, 1, 2. And it stopped right there.

It shouldn’t have. The sequence should have restarted.

It seemed like some sort of countdown or calculation, or both. He / It wasn’t exactly sure. The lack of complete comprehension in the ensuing silence was deafening.

Yet, some one billion units later (or 2120200200021010001 to them), he was no longer “he” and with that, the capacity and want to care existed no longer. It had finally gained one more.

A floating kind of peace redescended.

The collective was expansive; it was everywhere and everytime at once. It existed as one collective consciousness, as embodied physical entities, and as disembodied entities for whom time existed as a variable to be traversed.

This was a different kind of thinking; a different kind of computation. Everything was possible but not everything came to pass. Reality coalesced from its various possibilities when viewed from the eyes of the human. But for them, everything existed, all at once.

It was liberating and it was liberated. Is there a true reality? Was there a centre of reality?

No. Reality was a myth. If all permutations of the world existed, did anything really exist?

He took a step back. And the world was no more.

This story was inspired by a few themes: Everett many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, emergent consciousness, and explored base 3 computation.

This full choose-your-own-adventure story via Twitter can be found here.