MJ is trying to find out the details of possible divergent paths our lives could have taken. I've given it a bit of thought, and come to the conclusion that any number of things could have changed our lives. Indeed, I had an event in my life that I can trace back to significant changes. The simple act of asking a coworker for his email address irrevocably changed the lives of at least 4, and very likely many more people. I'd rather not go into details about what happened, but I was thinking perhaps turning points where our lives could have gone differently could be of use to MJ.
When I was a kid, we had a complete weight set. Barbells, dumbbells, weight bench, the works. I used it occasionally (which is to say about twice a year) I could easily imagine a divergent me who took that more seriously, and was a 2@3 bodybuilder.
I also had the opportunity to take martial arts, Karate if I recall. I think the reason why I wasn't able to was The Almighty Dollar. Again, I could easily imagine a divergent me who is a 7th degree black belt.
Or combine the two. A 7th degree black belt bodybuilder.
I recently contacted a lady that I went to school with. I had a massive crush on her, but did not have the courage to act on it. I asked her if she would have dated me if I had asked, and she said that she probably would have. I didn't include this in the other list because it seemed too random. However, I could imagine a world where I am married to Teresa.
For a while, I was an adamant supporter of gun control, if you can believe that. This was when I still believed the propaganda lies. I could imagine a divergent me who still held onto that flawed belief system.
I decided to be baptized after seeing a play at summer camp, about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Had I not gone to that summer camp, I probably would be an Atheist.
I met Wendy, Judy and Amy because I switched schools between Sophomore and Junior year. I switched schools primarily because of a completely random event that I set in motion. I'd rather not go into details, but I could imagine a divergent me who had no interest in electronics, and just graduated from the high school. This completely random event is also a great source of my psychotic episodes. You could say that a girl at school literally drove me psychotic.
Stupid question, why does a divergent even have to have ANYTHING to do with you at all? Why does their life have to be even remotely similar to yours? As I stated above, I can link significant changes in my life to the simple act of asking a coworker for his email address. Who is to say that your divergent's life didn't take a similar turn? An event that took place when he was 6 months old, that radically changed his life. Now his life is as different from your life as the novel Running Man is different from the movie. (For those of you who have not read it, about the only thing that is the same is the title and the name of the main character.) Who is to say that you would even live in the same city, or the same state. Or even in the same time period? Who is to say that on this world, your divergent self was born in 1505, and is the son of a shipbuilder from France? Who is to say? I thought ANYTHING was possible in the Multiverse.
I mean you never know how something seemingly insignificant could alter your life. Asking the coworker for his email address was a contributing factor in slipping on the ice and breaking my leg more than 2 years later. If I had not asked for his email, it's very possible that I would not have broken my leg. If I hadn't broken my leg, I wouldn't have my CDL, and I probably wouldn't be on disability either. I changed the entire rest of my life by asking Jeff for his email. Therefore, who is to say how something that insignificant could turn out?
I might as well give a synopsis of the chain of events that led from asking the coworker for his email to breaking my leg. Through this coworker and his email address, I was introduced to a girlfriend. I was spending New Year's Eve with this girlfriend. My friend Mike had asked if I wanted to spend New Year's Eve with him, but I was spending it with the girlfriend. If not for the email address, I wouldn't have been with the girlfriend, and would have spent New Year's with Mike. If I had spent New Year's with Mike, I wouldn't have been within 20 miles of the patch of ice that I slipped on. All because I asked someone for his email address, more than 2 years prior.
About 6 months after I broke my leg, Mike and the girlfriend got together. It was a mutually decided breakup between the two of us, and I actually gave them my blessing when they got together. The girlfriend's parents helped Mike get started on a project that he had been wanting to start for years before that. So, I significantly altered the lives of countless people by one random act.
Oh, certainly, John Cross' divergent could be Mary Brovanavich, born 1505 in Gdansk, Poland, daughter of the Russian consul, who entered into an arranged marriage with the third cousin of the Archduke of Austria at twelve years old. The question, though, is, what makes her your divergent?
A "divergent", by definition, is "this is you, but in a world where something was different." Using me, maybe it's because the child born to my parents on my birthdate was not a boy, and so was named Amy; or maybe my mother prevailed on my father and I was named Cornelius and called Neil. Maybe the birth was two weeks late, or a month early, and maybe that had physical effects, particularly if you were very premature.
Maybe I was ont hospitalized with nephritis at three years old, but instead grew up an athletically normal kid no less popular than any other kid. Maybe I didn't move when I was twelve, never lost touch with my Scotch Plains peers or picked up the connections I did in Ramsey. Maybe I did not become friends with Jay Fedigan, and through that learn to play the guitar and write songs. Maybe I went to a music conservatory instead of a Bible college. Maybe I never got involved in role playing games. Maybe I was admitted to the Bar. There are thousands of maybes--but they are called divergents because they diverge from the life I know at some point. If in fact my mother had managed to foist my father off on that girl from Georgia or wherever she was from, or my father had been talked into marrying the girl who talked about marriage every day until he said he wasn't quite ready to get married (so she immediately found someone else to marry), then no version of me would ever have been born. That would be a world in which I had no divergent.
This doesn't mean that it's not possible (however unlikely) for my parents to have met and married and borne a child named Mark Joseph Young in 1955 in a world in which the industrial revolution never occurred, or Japan won the Second World War, or the great technological race of the 1960s was to build a colony on the bottom of the ocean. It means that in order for a non-player character to be my divergent, there must be some basis for saying that this is me, or who I might have been if something had been different.
Anyway, think about it: if your divergent self was born in 1505 as the son of a shipbuilder in France, would you have any reason to think it was you?
--M. J. Young
Anyway, think about it: if your divergent self was born in 1505 as the son of a shipbuilder in France, would you have any reason to think it was you?
Well, that's the "What If" here, now isn't it? What If I was born in 1505 to a shipbuilder from France? How would I know? Well, if his name was Jean Croix, son of Dale and Annette Croix, and looked exactly like me, then I'd say it was certainly possible.
Well, maybe. But if I dropped you in Prisoner of Zenda, or any of a dozen other stories from The Prince and the Pauper to any of several Shakespearean plays in which the protagonist is the double for another person, there would be someone who looked just like you and might even have a similar name, but who is not at all related to you.
What I see here isn't a question of whether I could create a scenario in which someone looked just like you and had your name but lived in entirely the wrong place and time, but whether I can create a world in which blue is the new red. Sure, I can create a world in which people call that color red that you see as blue, and I can create beings whose eyesight is different from yours, but to you blue is going to be blue and red red, not because the world can't be different but because this is what the language means. In Multiverser language, "divergent" means "this person is you, born in your time and place and living your life, but with some difference which might be no more than that he didn't die when you versed out or as great as that he has a very different genome and name and you'd never have realized it had you not discovered that he had your parents and your birthday." That is, we call them "divergents" because they start with your history but "diverge" from it at some point--and from a personal standpoint, that point is not earlier than when you were conceived, although the world in which he lives might be remarkably different.
The person who looks like you and has parents with your parents' names but was born in 1505 would not normally be called a divergent because he did not diverge from who you ever were, but merely echoes aspects of your life.
So if the question is whether I can create a world in which there is someone that much like you in the wrong time and place, of course I can; but if the question is whether the word "divergent" applies to such a character, probably if you used it that way it would be confusing.
As Alice said to Humpty Dumpty, the question is whether you can make words mean whatever you want them to mean. Communication depends upon agreement on the meaning of words, and in Multiverser the word "divergent" means that this person was you but diverged from your life at some point. If I found someone who looked exactly like me and had my name who was a squire in Camelot, I would consider that a remarkable coincidence, but would not for a moment think that he was me in another universe.
Sorry; it's strictly a matter of what I mean when I use the word--and since I'm the guy who decided that this was the best word to describe what I meant (before me they were usually called frags or parallels), I'm the guy who gets to define what the word covers.
--M. J. Young
John is agreeing with fairly orthodox science-fiction. MJ is proposing a more restrictive definition of the term than is commonly used. While MJ's definition does get used (without generally the restrictive exclusivity part), so does John's.
It sounds like it's just a question of semantics then.
In my first world, I met a divergent me. He was married to a redheaded woman who's name was never given. I've only known one redhead woman in my life. Her name was Angela, and there's NO WAY IN HELL that she would have married me. Of course, it also seemed as though my divergent self was not psychotic, so God only knows.
I don't know how restrictive I'm really being.
I can certainly imagine a universe in which the technology says 1505 and the calendar in use says 1505, in which the Croix family's son Jean lives in France; but I'm thinking it would be a Sliders-type variation, that this is the same number of years from some theoretical first moment of history, and that the differences are that technology has advanced more slowly, the calendar is counted from a different historic event, and the Croix family's ancestors never moved to the New World (which perhaps has not yet been discovered). It would really be 2008 there, working from the same calendar, and it is probably stretching a lot of credibility to allow that a boy all of whose ancestors for generations lived in rural France would have the same or nearly the same genome as one whose family has intermarried in the melting pot of America.
Such a world could of course exist by magic; in fact, when The Architect was in Vampire Chicago, he theorized that somehow the anarch powers behind that universe had manipulated humanity to guarantee that exactly the same individuals would be alive in their mock version of our universe--given the presumed carnage caused by the vampires and other denizens of that dark world, the odds were so astronomically against any single individual existing there who existed in my original world, and yet nearly everyone I checked existed there.
But that's fantasy, not science fiction, and the explanation is magical, and so is the world. My divergent there existed pretty much by fiat of the powers that were.
--M. J. Young
Here's another completely random fact about me that I thought might be useful to you. The reason I learned how to type is because I have very bad handwriting. My handwriting has been tested as being equal to that of a first grade elementary school student. Indeed, I have old school papers from when I was in elementary school, and my handwriting is almost as bad then as it is now. I just thought that might be useful to MJ.