Something is wrong, it occurred to me a while back. I’m not sure when it all began. Not during my carefree twenties. And not during the building off my life—those busy thirties. Perhaps it started in my early forties. This gnawing feeling, a disquietness, a tossing and turning at night. Facing the partner who shared my bed and feeling different. Outside myself.
But I brushed it off. A child was crying. Another whirlwind of a day waited between family, work, home, husband etc. Who had time to think if something is very wrong? I had no time to navel gaze.
Alt Control Delete
Then we moved to the south of France. I quit my job, my life, all that I had known. And now I had plenty of time. Strip away the distractions and you finally face yourself, the scariest monster. Problem was all other monsters crept out. Monsters that were always there but that I never saw. Now they were widely grinning: Welcome to Something is Terribly Wrong Land.
The scariest horror film is real everyday life.
The man I married became callous and self serving and I finally saw myself for what I was to him all those years.
The beautiful house we bought and painstakingly decorated turned into a horrific ‘escape room’ from which there was none. The last place I wanted to be, but forced to inhabit day after day for my children.
The friends I spent the last 15 years of my life, travelling and celebrating life’s big and small moments, turned the other way, preferring peace and quiet instead of formulating opinions. Who were these people I had pool parties with and summer bar-b-qs? Friends? Or time fillers?
A covid divorce
So I got divorced, and then came covid. Or I should specify that I got divorced during covid. The divorce stripped me of my old life and forced me to march naked as the day I was born into the unknown. But covid sabotaged my victory march and stuffed me into a room to stare onto four walls. For two years.
The covid years felt to me at best like an episode of Black Mirror, and at worst, like the whole world was against me or at least like I was living inside a simulation. I was real and everything else was fake.
Everybody was a stand in—my ex, my kids, my so-called family, friends of sorts, zoom buddies, officials, people on the street, the supermarket clerk, the guy who fixed my boiler…
And I was part of some grand experiment. Conducted by whom? Who would do this? An alien? A government? An alien government? Maybe it was me, my other me. That exists in a parallel universe in a quantum reality. Am I reaching out from beyond to my other self who is stuck and I’m trying to help? Is my successful me in another place trying to pull me out of the gutter?
Help me. Help me from myself.
And so that’s how The Correction was born.
Why The Correction?
What are we trying to fix? On a macro level, the story follows ‘a correction’ of a future version of Earth in the year 4855 where our beloved planet has become the abode of the privileged, while the general populace has been purged to live on Mars.
What is so broken in the year 4855? You’ll have to read, to find out.
On a micro level, all characters are trying to correct some aspect of their lives. But at the heart is the protagonist soldier Michael La who has been entrusted with the correction mission for over a 1000 years without success. He is being reinserted again and again into the Old Earth simulation (our Earth in the year 2000) which holds the key to the final correction of Earth in 4855.
Is that how we all feel these days? Running around just putting out fires? Fixing things, setting them right, only for them to misalign again? Being reinserted into the same situation again and again?
Again, it’s broken.
Again, we fucked up.
Again, we didn’t know.
Again, alone.
Again, on our knees.
Again, my sword missed the target.
The many versions theory
Looking back to our past, our child version, teen version, young adult version. Who were these people? They seem so removed. Like a movie we saw a long long time ago. Did we live these lives at all? Are they all gone or still connected somehow? If our younger self, our past—our ‘baggage’, is influencing our decisions today, why does it flow in only one direction—forward? It cannot be. There must be a way for the future to communicate with the present or the past. And I believe it is whispering to us, sending us clues. They may come in the form of “deja vu”s or—more likely in strange episodes of synchronicity.
Synchronicity
Synchronicity was originally introduced by the psychologist Carl Jung. This theory holds the view that the structure of reality includes a principle of acausal connection which manifests itself most conspicuously in the form of meaningful coincidences. Jung is criticized for his pseudoscience and acceptance of the paranormal in everyday life as—completely normal.
Listen and you will be heard. Observe and you will see it all. Coincidence does not exist. Lucky or unlucky does not exist. Just happen to run into someone—no. Nothing just happens.
Just the other day, I thought of something as I was guiding clients in Avignon. The wind was strong and I opened my mouth to warn them of projectile objects which the wind may hurl towards them. And just as I parted my lips to speak, a huge painting in the market went airborne and missed my client by inches!
The man having narrowly avoided the emergency room was visibly shaken. But not less than me. My future self warning me? Or did I possess some supernatural powers to divert the painting enough to avoid injury?
Carl Jung would call this typical synchronicity. And at the heart of The Correction synchronicity lives.
The experiment of men
The human condition is so unique and precious in all of the milky way and beyond. Yet we are the most destructive and inefficient. We long to be interplanetary if only to escape our own humanism. But we keep waddling in the sinking mud of general pettiness and egoism.
The first big complex life on earth was not us, but the massive dinosaurs. We were an evolutionary mistake. Or not. A huge meteor slapped into the ocean and obliterated our giant ancestors. Coincidence? A lucky shot which wiped the slate clean and cleared the path for the rise of men? Or maybe another experiment conducted by some far away consciousness? To reboot and restart. And to see what all these new brainy creatures of Earth can accomplish with their minds.
Violence. Destruction. War. But also art, and music, beauty and philosophy. It is the paragon of our species. To be two faced: to hate each other and ourselves, and yet be so viciously protective and loving. What have we done for thousands of years? The cities we built? And what will we do? Will we live long enough to break out of our prison planet? Or will another meteor be sent to wipe the slate clean?
The Correction Novel Series
So all these ramblings. What does this have to do with my book? Everything.
The Correction is one man’s attempt to correct Earth for over a thousand years by ‘rebooting’ his life inside simulations or copies of old versions of Earth.
We may actually be living in one copy of Earth someone made a long time ago. For what reason? [shoulder shrug] To study the past, to study us, to test, to play. For nostalgia or a longing for a world long gone…
Just like we hold onto faded photos from 50 years ago.
And like Michael La, everyday we wake up, we relive the same life, face the same actors, we are reinserted into the same world—same, but slightly different.
