Chương 1: Start Reading

These books were originally published online as eight novellas starting in 2018 and continued into 2019. But it began much earlier than that. Around 2010 my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. No real surprise, it runs in the family, and there had been signs the preceding five years or so. That led me on a journey reminiscing with him about my earliest memories. Those distant memories were still in there, much deeper than the more recent memories that seemed to have vanished completely.

Our long conversations as I spent time with him gave me an idea: What if someone could remember the future? What if they could remember every possible permutation of the future they could conceivably experience? That led to extensive research over the next decade as I compiled a timeline and hundreds of browser bookmarks. From technologies to important people and dates.

Special thanks to Wikipedia for this, as this was still many years before you could just ask the google AI about history and get detailed research handed to you. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings. Writing finally began in 2018 as my Dad continued his steep decline. The person he was had mostly left us, but there were still glimmers of the old him there.

He passed just as the series was coming to an end, a full eight novellas and more than six months of intensive writing. The last part was unfortunately shorter than I had intended, as I found it impossible to write for a time after his death. Beginning in 2025, I dusted off this early work, and revamped it completely, adding significant amounts of dialog and story. I've also broken it down into chapters, as the original novella's were often just continuous text.

This first volume in the series went from a 28, 000 word novella to a full novel of over 46, 000. Perfect Choices is the first of many novel sized volumes in the new series. As of starting the serialization of the first book on Royal Road there are a total of six published volumes, with more scheduled for publication, and even more in the final edit stages. Note: While it may be inspired by my own memories, the primary characters mentioned are entirely fictional characters, with no relation to reality.

However, where historical figures are used, every effort has been made to follow the rules of Alternate History, where real life figures, living and dead, are used for the verisimilitude and world building, not cheap laughs or critical commentary. I very much hope you enjoy this story, it means so very much to me. PT Brainum