The Literary Big Bang

“How would my life be different if X had happened instead of Y?” Is a question that almost everyone has asked themselves. Unless you’re one of those “never look back, never regret” type of psychos, of course. But I’m definitely not one of those. No, I’m more the “let’s lay awake at night and second guess every decision I’ve ever made” type, which is normally not good. But now my over active extrapolation centres would drive me to create rather than destroy. Like getting Sandman to make a giant sand castles in an attempt to alleviate the affordable housing cris, rather than trying to kill Spider-Man. The initial idea of a man looking at himself through a wormhole soon manifested as two divergent timelines, split by a seemingly trivial event at the end of the protagonist's school days. Ironically, although the majority of the timeline events for our main character would be based around happenings from my own life, the divergent event would be a completely fictional one, centred around a school crush.

From this one decision, our two versions of Mark Farringdon (our protagonist’s name being taken from the most incorrect any company had ever got Matthew Sowden on correspondence), would lead very different lives by the time they were abducted. To allow for differences in the characters, both Marks would be taken at the age of forty.

By this age, our initial Mark would be stuck in a dead end job, racked with regrets and “if onlies“. The reflection would be a successful yet arrogant businessman and fitness freak. He was everything our original Mark wasn't. Neither, importantly, would be that happy...