Character Name:
My name isn’t mentioned anywhere.
Which book/world do you live in?
I live in the year 10.000.002 in a small house we share with my wife Trudy and our pet frog Rupert. Like everyone else, I keep a battered time machine in our garage. Since I’m constantly busy with work, we don’t travel much.
The university I work at is run as a for-profit corporation, where science and progress are just side-effects of a cut-throat fight for personal advancement and prestige. At the university, there’s a lab where scientists grow universes to experiment upon. There’s an old, baroque-like fountain spewing streams of time instead of water in the university’s courtyard. There is also a site with portals connecting different universes, much like the Four Corners Monument in the US. It’s frequented by tourists taking selfies with a hand in one universe and a leg in another. Everybody keeps a time machine in a garage.
I relate the time travel history in one of the appendixes.
Tell us about yourself:
My name is not important. Neither is what I do — I’m an investigative ontology researcher. It’s a field you’ve probably never heard of, at a comparatively undistinguished university you’ve definitely never heard of.
In my line of work, I periodically declare scholarly pronouncements in the form of scientific articles no one has any interest in, except my fellow academics who cursorily thumb through and subsequently evaluate my work based on their ever-fluctuating level of pettiness and professional jealousy.
Long story short, I’m an alcoholic …
What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?
I’m persistent, I’m an idealist, and, despite all evidence pointing to the contrary — I’m exceptionally good at what I do. You’ll have to take my word for it. As for weaknesses, I’ve none. I do have a nemesis, though — Scott — my ex-PhD fellow student, currently a quantum semantics investigator at the Bauer-Richter Academy of Speculative Sciences — our direct competitors.
Here’s Scott’s short bio. Not long ago, Scott bursts out of an abyss of ignorance and joins the ranks of our university as a PhD student. He spends his time doing absolutely nothing apart from toadying to our supervising professor. All the while, he turns my life into an unendurable Gehenna. The reason? No reason at all. Eventually, Scott defects to Bauer-Richter, taking with him many collectively developed ideas, which he then claims as his own.
Now I’m left to fight for the scientific truth, which I will, whatever it takes.
Name three important people/creatures/institutions in your world (such as lovers, pets, government institutions, leaders, gods etc).
Here are the three characters living in 2022 who caused the Great Convergence.
Larry: a highly-regarded professional art critic who projects his frustrations onto the artworks he doesn’t even bother to see. Unbeknownst to him, Larry is a singular. A singular denotes an object or a person that can only inhabit a single universe at a given moment. In other words, only one version of Larry exists in the whole multiverse. Larry often switches between several universes wreaking havoc as he goes. Larry’s spontaneous flings between different realities are exacerbated by the crude creations produced by a tormented sculptor — Geoffrey.
Geoffrey: an aspiring — yet essentially talentless artist living in denial. Geoffrey’s sculptures, he cranks out to impress a girl he fancies, act as interdimensional portals, swapping things and people between realities. All of this happens without Geoffrey’s knowledge. A series of seemingly-random occurrences culminate in creating a perfect inter-dimensional portal connecting all the universes in existence. Geoffrey’s perfect portal brings about the most dramatic transformation of the multiverse — the Great Convergence.
Timothy: a genius astrophysicist suffering from severe schizophrenia. Timothy fights a host of his versions from alternate realities — who want to take over his universe. It remains unclear whether Timothy’s versions are real or exist in his imagination. One way or another, Timothy’s actions bring about a real-life catastrophe no one could have prevented.
What does ‘heroism’ mean to you?
Perseverance in the face of adversity. I’m not afraid of hard work, however daunting the task at hand. I believe in the triumph of science and that it’s possible to learn the principles governing the Great Convergence. To master the quintessence of existence. Unearth the building blocks of nature. Look into the eyes of the beast. Hypnotise it. Discover … everything!
What do you think of your ‘creator’?
What creator? I’m not a character in a book. Unlike fictional characters, I control the reality around me. Everything I do has a real impact on the real world.
Give us your favourite piece of advice:
Keep fighting the good fight. You’re always right, and everyone else is wrong. If you do, the truth will prevail!
Links to the book:
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B099Z5KH33
*****
Library of Erana 