Everything you know is wrong

Having read a little science fiction, I'm familiar with fictional characters discovering that the reality they thought they were experiencing was in fact an illusion and finding themselves in a very different reality. The experience must be disconcerting, to say the least, but you have to experience that sort of disorientation for yourself to appreciate just how disturbing it is.

We've all (I imagine) had those Proustian moments when some taste or smell brings a memory of things past vividly back to life. Yesterday, just for a brief moment, I had a Philip K Dick moment. This was scarier than a Proustian moment and didn't include tea and cake. I was driving through Milton Keynes just about to negotiate one of the many roundabouts for which our local conurbation is justly famous, when I noticed a smell. Faint at first, it quickly grew in intensity - it was the odour of whatever disinfectant gives hospitals their distinctive and unmistakable smell. Why I got a sudden and intense whiff of this on an urban road, I don't know - maybe some fell off or leaked out of the back of a van, maybe someone had just cleaned up at the site of an accident or spillage, maybe it was even some sort of olfactory hallucination triggered by I don't know what. Whatever the reason, real or not, for a short period, I was driving along experiencing the concentrated smell of a hospital ward.

The smell was so strong that for a moment I was overtaken by a frightening thought - maybe I wasn't actually driving along at all. Maybe I'd just been involved in a road accident and was lying in a hospital ward remembering my last moments of consciousness before the accident...

A second or so later, the smell faded and I continued my journey to meet my partner and son at a "teddy bear's picnic" event organised by his nursery, a trip which was completely uneventful apart from the torrential downpour which started when I reached my destination. But for just one second there, I was really shaken, overtaken by the thought that what had seemed like solid, commonplace reality a moment before was a memory, an illusion and I was somewhere else entirely, waking up to a new and frightening reality. Maybe, in some alternate world in an infinite number of alternate worlds another version of me, as real as the one sitting here at this computer keyboard is waking up to precisely that frightening reality. The possibility that this is true is neither more or less than it was before, but the plight of the character who finds that "everything you know is wrong" seems more real today.

It would certainly give an added edge to re-reading one of my favourite science fiction novels, Quarantine, by Greg Egan (recommended to me by the entity known as Meridian, who recently upgraded our PC by giving the little calculating demon inside three shredded wheats and adding a shiny silver case and blue LEDs ... mmm ... blue LEDs ....). Quarantine starts off in appropriately Blade Runner-ish territory with a mid-21st century Chandleresque private eye taking on a puzzling missing person case. In the future of Quarantine, the new technology isn't android replicants (which, like the android replica in Hawkwind's Spirit of the Age are, always playing up) but neural modifications which allow people to modify their own realities. But just when you've got your head round that one it turns out that the real mystery at the heart of the book involves the nature of reality at a far more fundamental level. It's hard sci-fi at its best, recommended to anyone who wants to have their mind well and truly blown. Even if the universe turns out not to be the way it is in Quarantine, the very possibility that it could be is one of those things which would make your head explode if you thought about it for too long. Which is why I'm going to crack open another cold beer, just in case I get tempted to think too hard about it.