Behind The Story: "Watching Ghosts"

What if you could time travel through VR?!

I started the Alternate Timeline substack as a means of giving myself a more satisfying and creative writing activity than posting random jokes on Twitter. By the time I published the first short story about The Oscars in March, I had built up a level of personal momentum that I thought I could write a story every few weeks . Then, I unexpectedly hit a lull. Part of it was due to the intense rate of progression in technology. So many ideas that seemed sci-fi were suddenly just real. Another element of the lull was my own lack of vision when it came to how to write stories.

Alternate Timeline is all about short fiction inspired by current events. But tethering my imagination around those parameters started to seem too limiting, until one day, it it didn’t.

Of all the things that could have inspired me to get me back into the groove, it was this vintage movie poster for The Empire Strikes Back by Ohrai Noriyoshi:

I had never seen it before, and all of the beautiful, intricate, mysterious imagery packed into the frame reminded me that, before the movie ever came out, the sky was the limit in terms of what the story would behold. This is a poster that I can look at and invent hundreds of stories about about. Suddenly, I was able to open my mind up again to the joy of writing.

And that brought me to the second ever Alternate Timeline story, Watching Ghosts, which is loosely inspired by Apple’s June 5, 2023 unveiling of Vision Pro goggles.

To be fair, the goggles actually seem pretty cool. But they also worry me. The fact that there are little sensors in them that track eye movement means that the future of viewer data will get way more specific—and I’m not sure that’s a good thing. I’ve witness firsthand how the combination of algorithms and viewer data stifles genuine art.