Whatever

What if everyone but you was zombies?

What if everyone but you is a robot?

What if all the people that you know are paid to act like your friends and family?

What if you woke up one morning and your partner was a different person and everyone but you acted like they hadn't noticed?

What if life is just a pre-life? A short feature before the main presentation. Or;

What if this is just life on demo mode and what we call heaven is the perfect life we all lead once we've tried out all of the main features?

What if you died years ago? Heaven or hell, this is it.

What if you woke up and you were another sex? Or:

What if you woke up with a sexual preference you didn't go to bed with? Or;

What if you woke up to find the last eight years of your life were a dream? What would you do differently? Anything?

What if you had a superpower? What would it be?

What if you were invisible?

What if you could make statues come to life, just by touching them? Or walk into paintings with a thought?

What if all the water in all the oceans disappeared one night and left behind nothing but a pile of dead fish and mammals and rotten cadavers and seaweed and scuttled battleships and sunken treasure and mountains? Imagine the smell!

What if you were a photon, deep inside the core of a star, by-product of the fusion process? So crowed into that dense space that you bounce from atom to atom over ten millennia, till finally breaking free, emerging in seconds, racing through the photosphere, across the vastness of space, to fall on one random retina orbiting one random star in a civilisation unborn when you set out on your interstellar journey.

What if you were a wave, crashing against the shore, ebbing and flowing? Or:

What if you could be a flock of starlings for an hour?

What if you could be in your favourite TV show? Like it was real!

What if you could travel back to the point of a person's death and download their consciousness to a computer drive?

What if all your imaginary friends came to life?

What if you could make anyone appear on your couch just by concentrating on them? Or you could instantly be in your home, wherever in the world you were, and with whatever (or whoever) you were holding?

What if everyone else sees colours different from you?

What if, for one day only, everyone was compelled to act as they say?

What if we never find intelligent life out in the universe? What if intelligent life downloads itself first chance it gets and explores cyberspace instead? Far simpler. Far safer.

What if every plan you fail to see through is brought to fruition by another you in another universe?

What if you could live out all your unrealised dreams and day dreams and fantasies and ambitions in a day?

What if all the dark matter in the universe is all the thoughts that have occurred to sentient life in the last thirteen billion years? Or;

What if dark energy was released as part of an ambitious project by an ancient civilisation to prevent the imminent collapse of our universe? The universe survives but the civilisation went the way of Pyrrhus.

What if you could live the life of a famous person, go through their meteoritic rise, catapulted to fame overnight, a household name, recognised in the street, cried at and fawned over and loved and adored and abused and dependent and hooked and receding, a shrinking violet, a where are they now in the annals of living memory and only disgraceful death to look forward to? Would it be worth it?

What if you could be anything?

What if money were no object? Or space? Time?

What if wishes were horses? Or unicorns came crashing across the scene as you read these words?

What if we track down the meaning of the universe and it turns out to have been created solely to house some 1960s US sitcom that was cancelled after one, poorly received, season? Or a soap opera set in Karachi that's been on air for fifty years?

What if your reality is completely different to mine? Or;

What if the universe came into being at the moment of your birth and the shockwave travelled backwards through time to set the conditions at the moment of the big bang as just right for your existence? You are as a god to us.

What if our universe is nothing but one of those God Games, where you build a city or an ancient civilisation. The one we're in was a Roman Empire god sim, but the kid's accidentally left it playing overnight. The Visigoths came over the hill about 2am and Rome fell. The Renaissance took place around dawn and the Industrial Revolution happened just after 6. It is now just gone half seven and his mum'll be calling him for school in a moment. He'll wake, rise, check his computer and turn the program off without even bothering to find a save poi

Anyway, that, in summary, is why I forgot to do the dishes.