Divergence

A fellow Brit that Kevin works with was surprised, since I am English, that Kevin wasn't familiar with the term Poets' day for Friday. I suppose it's one of those terms you use with colleagues rather than at home. For anyone else who isn't familiar, Friday is 'Piss Off Early Tomorrow's Saturday' day.

The subject of divergence is something that is pre-occupying me because of the book* I'm reading. The Earth has been recreated in an experimental network, and it followed the same course of world history as our Earth until 1940. On E2, the Second World War didn't happen, the German army were defeated in the Ardennes. Because of this, Germany didn't develop high altitude rockets, the same technology that went on to put people on the moon and start the space race.
The atom bomb never existed. The results of that are more controversial, less tangible, but arguably the nuclear threat has kept superpowers on their toes developing technology.
Lastly, the enigma machines used for encoding led to the invention of computers and ultimately to the extremely computerised world we live in today. Food for thought.

But Earth, our Earth, has moved forward. Computers have continued to get ever smaller. Nano-technology, machines so small they can live in our blood stream, in our brains, was used to manage the weather, to reverse our own destruction of the planet, which they did, until like Asimov's humanoid robots, they evolved the ability to transcend their own programming and operate independently of our instructions.

The Cylons in Battlestar Galactica are another example, although in some ways they are a convergence, because they were created as different from humans and yet they are becoming more human and as that happens, the question of treating them simply as machines, becomes more muddied.

So you can see my problem with the old TV set making its own choices of programme. The TV has its own computer sitting beneath it, hard drive, CPU, memory. Kevin has fortunately backed up all the music, pictures and movies that are on there, because now that he is trying to upgrade it, get rid of the bugs, it's all gone pear-shaped. How much we get used to. The news currently isn't scrolling across the screen of the slim server in several rooms as it usually does. Our alarms aren't working. We only have one old-fashioned clock with hands, and frankly, were it not a beloved heirloom of Kevin's family, that would be gone, but then I'd just be reliant on the clock in the corner of the computer screen to tell the time. Oh, or the sun, as I did this morning.

What if, in another compossible world, (Leibniz) a different version of me had stayed in England. My life by now would possibly have been simpler, the future more certain. But oh my goodness, what I would have missed out on. What SHE has missed out on. The moment of divergence by definition has to be a significant one, even though maybe impossible to pinpoint. And the results are unlikely to be clear until those muddy waters clear.
But they will.

*Century Rain by Alistair Reynolds