Our stories, now shared

We all have our own stories, right? The stories that have actually happened in our lives, acted out by what we’ve said or what we’ve done.

The stories that we’ve imagined in our mind. The fictional ones that we’ve only considered in our thoughts.

It is from all of these stories, yours and mine, that when combined, make an even greater story.

Now, what happens when we consider these stories so much that it impacts our life? What happens when the stories purely in our imaginations cause us to change the stories of our future? I’d like to share with you two stores that reveal when this change happened to me.

One of the stories happened in my imagination. The other happened in reality, because of that imagination.

Here they are:

A vast expanse of empty air taunted my feet as they dangled towards the Earth below. The narrow beam that I sat on, was all that separated me from terminal velocity.

Looking out, I could solidly see the curvature of the planet as tempestuous clouds lit up with veins of lightning to electrify the horizon.

I glanced back over my shoulder, to reaffirm that my perch was firmly attached to the giant ship that I lived on. The arc was my home. It was the home of everything that still lived. Interwoven metallic-carbon-fiber roots created this floating lifeboat. Our home swayed in the upper atmosphere in its race to preserve all knowledge of our existence.

Violent winds threw their Invisible hands against me, pushing me with all their might into the hungry belly of gravity below. Something was going to happen.

Instinct told me that despite the vast security that future’s technology had provided us, things would soon change. What would happen would be neither bad nor good. It would be big.

It is was the future that would come to all that survived.

It was the our future that narrowly extended past a singular, powerful threat, that would attack the entirety of our existence.

I woke up! Yeah, that was the outline of a dream I had a few years ago.

My imagined reality was so amazingly vivid that I had to preserve it.

With inspiration coming from every story that I had ever read or seen, whether I remembered them or not, I wrote my dream into words. And as I wrote, I learned. I enhanced my studies other areas beyond my core background in biophysics. I focused more on Artificial Intelligence and machine learning to a greater depth as I worked to understand the dire threat that my dream had shown. That dire threat made me realize that I needed to do more than what I was doing in research in academia. I needed to generate the tools that could help to protect against this threat. Now, What was this imagined threat that I had in a dream, that inspired me to join Roche, and put me on track to sharing this story with you now? I’ll tell you.

It was called a hybrid virus, one that directly combined warfare in the domain of biology as we’re used to, with warfare in the domain of memetics. In my dream, this virus would be the greatest threat to our future. And now it seems that this threat threat of a virus that might actually exist.

This imagined story that I had, writing it down on paper, caused me to change my own story in reality.

Just as this unreal story affected my life, your stories that you share, will do the same.

It is our stories, now shared, that contribute to the symphony of understanding that makes life better for all who will listen.

Now, I would like to thank you for your stories now, and the ones that you will continue to create.

Please, write on!