Are WE the Mirror Universe?

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A popular sci-fi trope is that of alternate realities, and time travel. The world we live in is not right, somehow. Either we found our way Somewhere Else, or Something Changed. We’re stuck with the certainty that if something were different, it would all be better…or we did something wrong somewhere along the line, and everything is now worse. 

You go back in time, keep Edith Keeler from being run over, and despite your best intentions, in the future everyone’s a Nazi.

Or perhaps you do nothing, but an occurrence of events changes the way things are supposed to go. The shift is sudden, and most don’t realize anything is wrong…but some have the feeling “This is not the way things are meant to be.” Then it’s up to you to change it back, even if you don’t know how or what’s on the other side.

It’s not just Star Trek™️, of course, the idea of The Other Reality is much older than that. 

But doesn’t it seem like the world has suddenly gone…off? Don’t you feel, like Guinan in Yesterday’s Enterprise, that you are inhabiting a reality that has left the rails?

I was pondering this in the shower this morning (you know, as one does,) about the transtemporal possibilities that could have landed the planet in the predicament that it is now in. It just seems too sudden, too weird, too much like someone flipped the crazy switch somewhere.  

Are we in the Mirror timeline: doomed to run our course into tyranny, human enslavement, and global Empire? Did events spiral out of control at just the right time, in just the right measure, for the STHTF? Is a future time-traveller to correct things and set them aright, but after we’re long gone?

Are we in a loop, where time travellers have already attempted to fix the future, but because past events inform future events, history is immutable–what has happened always will have happened–so any attempted change has already been made, without effect?

Are we the result of a changed future, where an alteration has been made to the time stream to correct it, but because the events to precipitate the alteration need to have happened for the change to happen, the sequence of events ‘forked,’ and we are living in the doomed stub of time before the change, parallel to ourselves living idealized events, and giving us dreams of how wrong things have become?

Or are we living in the parallel fork, where the original events were so bad, so catastrophic, so ruinous, that this IS the best possible version?

I know, we have been through far worse in the recent past. I can’t imagine living through WWI or WWII; we’ve had it too good for too long. But things were going so well. Despite the best efforts of the socialist media complex, President Trump was changing this country for the better in every conceivable way. Economic progress, employment, investment, pride, were all on the rise. Racial division, crime, poverty, on the decline. We were poised for a second term: the first stage booster had given us altitude, now the second stage would get us into orbit. Just around the time of The China Cough and Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread, something happened, not just in the US but globally. It wasn’t natural, it wasn’t coincidence, it didn’t even seem real. Cities burned, elections were stolen, evil prevailed, and everything (everything) collapsed into a heap, all over the world, simultaneously.

Of course, I know that the problem isn’t an aberration in spacetime, the problem is that

“·More than anything else [^TAbove all things], ·a person’s mind is evil [^Tthe heart is deceitful; ^Lthe heart is devious/crooked] and ·cannot be healed [^Tdesperately wicked; ^Lit is perverse/sick]. Who can ·understand [know] it?” (Jeremiah 17:9, EXB vers.)

and 

“Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it” (William Pitt the Elder, 1770)

Fortunately, we don’t have to rely on time-travellers to fix our future, for One who is eternal and omnipresent is already there, and has given us His assurance that it may be a shitshow down here now, but He has it all worked out in the end if we trust Him, and it’s gonna be all right. I find great comfort in that, and encouragement that we must continue to work for what’s right, and death is not the enemy.

Put in another, less spiritual (but no less true) way by J.R.R.Tolkien, Eru Iluvatar will overthrow Morgoth at the Dagor Dagorath, the last battle at the end of days, the day of doom when Arda will be remade.

So there’s that.