By Keenan Quantum
Entry #1 - Who Am I?
Since the day I was born I knew something was wrong with me. This is no exaggeration, by the way. I’m an extremely accomplished scientist of many topics, not because I’m smart, but because I had time. I was born with basic knowledge and got a great head start. But that wasn’t what was wrong with me. There was one thing I knew that wasn’t basic.
I knew that I was being watched.
We all are.
Now, I don’t mean to sound foreboding and dramatic when I say that, despite what the page break and paragraph formatting might lead you to believe, no I mean that in the literal sense.
Speaking of paragraphs, I somehow got a few in before mentioning my name, though that being said, it does say it on the entry, so why be redundant? That being said, why write a whole paragraph about how it's redundant instead of just getting it over with?
This sentence is the in-text equivalent of me clearing my throat.
I am Keenan Matthew Quantum, acclaimed physicist, both of the normal and quantum variety (I succumbed to nominative determinism, yes, carrying on), biologist (though people often forget that, including me), chaotician (I watched Jurassic Park once and decided to study chaos in order to quote Ian Malcom more frequently in my scientific papers), film major, and my proudest accolade of them all, voidphysicist.
Don’t get me wrong though, I am still a complete and total moron through and through to my core, though this is purely by choice, as being stupid is simply more fun that being smart.
Voidphysics by the way was a field of science pioneered by a good friend of mind, Doctor Cora Harvey from Central City, Latalus, space-time-dimension coordinates SWL-220.
She's a Hermit Crab.
We’ll get into that later, I promise.
Here’s the thing about me, that you may have already noticed.
I’m all over the place.
I want you to absorb that sentence for a bit. Taste it. Let it sit in your mind. Because I mean it both literally and figuratively.
I’m all over the place.
There is no structure to my thoughts.
I have no home.
I am a Void Jumper, even in retirement.
My mind is fundamentally connected to the Nova-Storm. And so, because of that, I find it to be my responsibility to tell you about it. Even if it means you have to wade through all these tangents and sift through the nonsense to gleam even a bit of information from this text.
It'll be fun, I promise! *
*It’ll be fun for me…
Okay, so here we go, let’s get this started, here’s where we’re going to begin… at the beginning, duh.
In 1996, I, Keenan Matthew Quantum, the second of the three Quantum Brothers, was born. I was born in Big Bear, California. Wow what a weird place, huh? It’s on Earth, dimension coordinates EQS-169. It’s a small place to grow up, a small place to live. Living in a valley on a mountain is sort of like living on an island. I thought… (we’ll get into that later.)
From the moment I was born I had enough mind to know that I was born. I understood what was happening. It wasn’t some huge, big brain, smart man oh I see the numbers moment, no it was something more like…
Imagine being in your 20’s, then waking up one day just… with no memories, and also you’re a baby now. It felt like that.
From that moment I knew I had a huge head start.
I got to elementary school and the school was like woah this kid’s a genius let him skip some grades, and when I was 9 years old, I was in high school taking college courses on the side.
It was hilarious, actually, because everyone treated me like this pinacle of intelligence, this child prodigy with a brain unlike any other, when actually, I just kinda already knew this stuff on like a high-school base level, and I didn’t even know it well.
But when you’re six months old and can do multiplication about as competently as a high school dropout that’s still hugely impressive, comparatively.
So yeah, I got a head start. I had time to work on things.
But the whole time, like I said, I felt like I was being watched.
But watched by who?
I watched a lot of movies as a kid. Lots of TV shows, too. A lot of basic stuff, a lot of general consumer normal people stuff, I didn’t have much time for the obscure things.
But whenever I watched movies, the feeling I had of seeing them, I realized, was the exact opposite of the feeling I had whenever I felt like I was being watched.
And then it clicked for me.
I was watching The Truman Show when it happened, a favorite movie of my older brother, Jonathan, and I connected with Truman a lot. And there this moment where he’s already learned that he’s being watched, and he sort of starts to accept it, he’s on his way out, why not put on a show? And the way he is… this knowingness, you have an audience, so play to them.
It's what I felt. So, I did some digging. I found something interesting.
Sometimes people write stories and then they happen. Life imitates art, you know the saying.
But I don’t mean it in a sense that, someone writes Jurassic Park and then some guy goes hey I bet I could resurrect dinosaurs, too! And then it happens because of the inspiration. That’s not what I mean. (No… I did not try that… That wasn’t me… You have no proof...)
I mean it more like this:
In 1838 Edgar Allan Poe published a story called The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.
In the story, three men are stranded on a ship with a man named Richard Parker. They eat a turtle because they’re starving, and then the lads eat Richard Parker, as you do, because it’s an Edgar Allen Poe story.
But THEN, get this, a bunch of years later or something this guy’s like hey wait a minute, this exact thing happened to my dad.
What?
Yeah, so this guy, Richard Parker, was stranded on a boat with three other guys and they ate a turtle because they were starving and then they ate him.
What? Huh?
Okay. Coincidence. I get it.
No.
It wasn’t a coincidence.
Was it prophecy? Did Poe have some like, future vision?
No.
Stories do not influence reality - at least not like that - not on a level that is outside of the bounds of inspiration. That doesn’t make sense. But I had another hypothesis, one that melded with my knowingness of my audience quite well, and one that, if you’re reading these entries, you’ve likely already heard of.
Every story ever told is real, to a certain degree of accuracy.
Now of course this can’t be true.
This can’t be true in a single universe. Sometimes it is. Sometimes you get an Edgar Allen Poe story that connects with a real life event.
But sometimes, a story someone tells might be true in a galaxy far far away, but further away than simply a few light years.
For this to be true, you would need a Multiverse.
And I knew that my story was told somewhere. I had the privilege of recognizing when something I was doing was being adapted for the page or the screen.
From that day forward, when I was ten and every day since then, I decided to put on a show.
If I had the chance of being seen, if I had the chance of being known, I would bolster it, I’d turn myself into a story beacon - a magnet of narrative potential - to become immortalized, to be seen by as many universes, hoping that one day it would mean that I could travel them.
If I forged my own path, forced my life to become a story, then surely, I’d be told, somewhere, somehow.
I put on the suit and tie, I picked out the top hat, and I slapped on a fake mustache before I could grow a real one, and I made it my personality.
I addressed the fourth wall whenever I could, whenever I felt that I was being watched I made sure to give the phantom audience a wink and a nod, and I made that my whole thing. This sort of annoyed my older brother, Jonathan.
My younger brother, Daquan, who was around five at the time, was too young to understand that I was being annoying and just found it charming, ya know? My… eccentrics sort of created a divide in the family.
Jonathan Randy Quantum was actually smart. Not like me, who got lucky, no this guy was a genius. He truly was a prodigy, ahead of his class, and he earned it, he really did. He was going to go places, great places, I imagine.
Daquan Fredrick Quantum was smart too, for his age.
But I drew all the eyes. I put the Quantum family name on the map.
As young brothers we started our scientific empire early. We outfitted our log cabin house into a decked-out lab, despite our parents’ initial objection to it, and we tried our best to change the world.
Jonathan built a rocket that could leave the atmosphere while remaining small and fuel efficient, Daquan invented a robot that picked up dog poop when he was 13 in an effort to convince our parents to get us a dog, and my nonsensical advertisement I uploaded to YouTube for it that I used to pitch the idea to our parents accidentally ended up making us hundreds of thousands of dollars.
We were going places.
I invented a sword that could play whatever sitcom noises I wanted it to in order to make my fourth wall breaks more obnoxious - canned laughter - gasps, the works.
People loved it in our YouTube videos.
Daquan was the lovable kid genius.
I was the marketable lanky goofball.
And Jonathan was just… there.
Really, if any of us should have been the most successful of the three, it was him. It should have been him. The success of the dog poop robot slowly dwindled. We were kids, we didn’t patent the thing, and corporations got their hands on it, so the money well ran dry.
Jonathan and I had long graduated college. For me, I had already done it twice.
Jonathan was developing weapons for the United States’ military, Daquan was writing his dissertation, and I was jobless, at home, trying my best to make robots, but deciding instead to rip off the movie Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, and make one of my own food-making machines, starting with a toaster that created its own toast.
I figured it was possible because, sure it was a kids’ movie, but assuming I was right, assuming that every story ever told was real somewhere, and that in some alternate universe that movie’s plot actually happened (to some degree of accuracy), then the technology should be possible.
Lots of great progress was made on that. I could produce all our own food from only water. I was working on putting together a presentation of the tech for the public.
And then, quite possibly the biggest thing that could have happened to our reality happened.
Up until this point in the timeline, 2015, our world had been largely comparable to other Earths I’ve studied.
Besides the Quantum Brothers, the only main differences I could discover were that in most other realities Elijah Wood plays Frodo in the Lord of the Rings, whereas in ours Elijah Stone plays him. Other notable differences are that people actually largely agree that Hawaiian Pizza is good actually, in our reality, where in most others they don’t, and also there is a Target somewhere in Amarillo Texas that is slightly to the left of where it is in most other realities.
That’s about it.
I mean, the Quantum Brothers are a pretty big deviation from most other realities but still, I’m getting off topic here, something big happened right at the end of 2015, something massive.
I wasn’t the only Quantum brother to have been inspired by The Truman Show.
Jonathan discovered this cube in the woods. Orange, about ten inches tall and wide, it glows, maybe you’ve heard of it.
It could teleport anything. It was also a time machine, but Jonathan’s dumb-ass didn’t care, all he wanted to do was teleport a whole lot of stuff overnight and instantly, which he did.
Somehow, over the span of just five years, as he apparently discovered the thing in 2010, he had created, in secret, a massive atmosphere simulator in space.
He teleported a bunch of massive chunks of American land into this space cube of atmosphere and let them float there as sky islands.
He also teleported our house there, stranding Daquan and I on a little tiny island with our lab and front yard, and that’s about it.
We didn’t know it, because we were stranded, but Jonathan had just put together his big calling card, his thing that would make him famous.
People loved my YouTube videos. Daquan had grown a bit jaded of the whole schtick, but I’d never turn down the chance for an audience. I guess YouTube was beneath Jonathan. Jonathan wanted his own Truman Show, on a massive scale.
The Exquisite Quantum Showdown forever changed the trajectory of our Earth.
Two years. Two years, millions of people were stranded on these islands, fighting for survival, warring with each other.
It was horrible.
And people liked it.
On Earth, despite having a bunch of land stolen, people were obsessed with the show, they loved it. No one stepped in to stop it.
Jonathan used mind control tech in the show to keep people hooked. What the hell, Jonathan, you sick twisted bastard oh my god.
Sorry, still mad about it. That's not what science should be used for. Disgraceful.
Anyway, so long story short Daquan and I escaped our little island to check out what was up. I built a sky boat called the Hot Air Ba-Boat, best name I’ve ever come up with, and we sailed that thing across the islands, befriended this lady who overthrew San Francisco, learned of our brother’s shenanigans, upgraded the Hot Air Ba-Boat into a spaceship called the Mach Ba-Boat, best name I’ve ever come up with, and then we flew up to the fake moon / sun space-station running the whole show, kicked Jonathan’s ass, returned all of the land to its rightful place, and stole that teleporty cube for research purposes.
That teleporty cube had an immense amount of history behind it that we didn’t even know of, but what we did know was that it was more than what Jonathan realized. It was a time machine, for one, a teleporter, for two, and for three, it was the key to interdimensional travel. It was confirmation that the Multiverse was real, that my hypothesis had more credence that Daquan wanted to admit.
And here’s where I go real fast.
I used the information in the cube to upgrade the Mach Ba-Boat, allowing it to travel into the space between worlds, which the cube’s code referenced as being called the Nova-Storm. My boat secret secret secret secret secret secret secret secret secret secret secret secret secret secret secret secret secret secret secret secret of Doctor Cora Harvey, the Hermit Crab spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler Mr. Johnson, very cool dude, and together, he, the Elf, the crab, and I, redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted aim was to explore and catalogue the Multiverse as well as protect it and save it from evil.
Stop peeking stop peeking stop peeking stop peeking stop peeking the creator of that teleporty cube,AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH turned into this whole thing where we had to like, not die or whatever.
STOP LOOKING AT THE FRIGGIN SPOILER WALL THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE HERE MOVE ALONG PLEASE THANKS cataloguing reality and having fun, mostly.
And I learned a lot. I was humbled quite a bit.
My life, what a majority of these pages have been thus far, felt small, insignificant in the grand scheme of things. It was fun. I needed it. And now, as an old, old man, I’m uncertain of what lies ahead.
And I only just now realized that I had neglected to write any of it down along the way.
I spent my whole life knowing that one day my story would be told, but I never thought to sit down and tell it.
So, there it was, the short of it.
And now, here is my guide to the cool things I saw in my adventures.
