This week, things are somewhat strange for Futures, as there’s a sense of the inexplicable wrapped in the downright peculiar courtesy of Judy Helfrich’s new story Unreal. Regular readers will remember Judy from her previous stories Playing for keeps and The coupon. This time, things are a little bit different — well, actually, they’re a lot different… Fortunately, Judy is here to guide us through the creation of this new kind of world — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Unreal

No story comes to a writer fully formed — at least not to me. By the time I finish writing a story, my hard drive is littered with deleted scenes, pointless plot lines, and bodies (ahem: cut characters). Behind each polished story, there are veritable boatloads of dreck.

I was bemoaning this fact when it occurred to me that the same might hold true for reality. What if, to create our reality, we lived through numerous unrealities? Castoffs from our true reality that were tried out and discarded as being unsuitable?

And what if we went one step further (because why the heck not), and everything that didn’t happen in reality was played out in unreality? Who knows, somewhere outside the scope of our perceptions, the roads not travelled might lurk. Unrealities where we live out every horror, every joy, every unlikelihood that never happened; where things become more and more bizarre until we exhaust each possibility and wink out of existence.

Well, that gave me the willies (which is a good sign for a story), so I shooed the heads from my keyboard, gave my dodo bird a pat, and wrote Unreal.