Brains in a Vat? Is that What this all Is?

Coping through imagination

Jan 13, 2026

Excuse me for one moment, but I’m seeking a literary-fiction-story-world building explanation for what the actual F*@king Sh!T is happening right now?

???

Are we living in an alternate reality? I’ve been saying this joking not joking to people for months, but now I’m looking for the story thread.

Alternative/Parallel/Multiverse

Speculative fiction: science fiction, fantasy, romantasy is chock full of alternative and parallel story lines.

Here is a list of alternative reality stories. Even if these books are not to your reading taste, you know many of them through movie and TV adaptations.

The story telling power of different timelines or converging timelines allows writers and readers to imagine what-if scenarios.

What if Al Gore had won the 2000 election? Maybe the United States would lead the world in clean energy with electric vehicles having two decades more technology - hello George Jetson.

What if (insert genocidal maniac world leader), had not come to power how many more brilliant minds would the world share, ushering in cures for cancer, dementia, crop failure?

That is the quickie look at this popular literary device. But I’m seeking, yearning for an understanding of what’s happening right now in my timeline.

The Way Back Years - College

Hello from Clark University. It’s 198—- mumble — and I’m a sprite undergrad liberal arts student (remember those days of exploratory degrees?) I’m taking media and society and an intro to philosophy class where I suffer through Thoreau living on a lake.

In media and society, we learn about the news report hierarchy.

Local
National/Regional
International

This is all pre-internet.

With the expansion of national and international wire services - AP, Reuters, etc. and the emergence of the 24-hour news channel, your local news is now populated with a homicide, bank robbery, kidnapping - insert horror du jour from different regions. Gotta fill the time.

The increase and speed of bad news heightens your sense of fear and you perceive the world is awash in bad actors - even if you live in statistically the safest city in the country.

Where it once took months or weeks for a news-worthy out-of- location crime to hit your attention, it’s now happening in real time. It feels like a local threat, even though it’s a thousand miles away.

Today, I would say the news is reel-time. (groans heard from audience.)

Across the quad, I shuffle into philosophy and one of the ideas we discuss is Brains in a Vat - which is the inspiration for the movie, The Matrix - cool right?

Somewhere in Space and Time - 2026

Time traveling back to now, and yeah…I have to hunt for my local news. But strange for me in Northern Virginia, national news, like the White House being demolished and the renaming of the Kennedy Center is my local news by proximity. I digress.

So…world news flings at us from every electronic orifice we own. And it’s weird. You wake up to learn the United States took over Venezuela. Leaders (?) want to Annex Greenland, and Iran has turned off the Internet. My apologies, everyone knows this. I don’t mean to add to the news noise and angst.

Hear me out! What if this is an alternate reality/parallel universe gone off kilter?

This is great plot making drama.

Take the 2001 Tom Cruise movie, Vanilla Sky. where a man is placed into a cryogenic space that should project nice images in his head until it goes horribly wrong. Think about that…

All the unbelievable global and domestic events (depending on where you are) are just glitches in the Matrix or a Vanilla Sky mix-up. Someone needs to find the escape pod and reboot the system before world leaders hit their big red easy buttons and trap us forever in this loop of despair.

I wish I were that type of writer. I’m not that optimistic. But I am a reader and I would eat that up. Please someone write that story for me. Then a Hollywood wonk can snap it up into a blockbuster hit.

Here’s Some Nice News - It Still Exists

I was honored to be interviewed by Maggie Smith, the best podcast host I know, for the 300th episode of the Women’s Fiction Writer’s Association’s Hear Us Roar. This is my favorite interview to date about my book The Pelican Tide and my writing journey. Tune into this weekly listen.