I walk into the V to find G35 sitting in the corner. He's wearing an old Atheist Resistance t-shirt, clutching a tattered shopping bag, eyes darting left and right, right leg bouncing up and down. Very inconspicuous like.

Me and G go way back. In our formative years, we were both members of the short-lived and often contentious Spectator Liberation Front. After a couple of years living off the grid, with only the thin consolation of a stark moral stance to keep us warm at night, we predictably traded in our principles for a semblance of comfort.

Both of us now work as aural enhancement designers for the food industry. G35 is very talented. While, over the years, my share value has remained relatively stable, his has gone through the roof. Last time I checked, Warner–Unilever owned 55% of him and rival Universal–Monsanto 34; he even owns 8% of himself. Occasionally, we meet up for drinks and talk about "the good old days" (which, to be honest, at the time, did not feel like "the good old days").

G35 comes from a long line of explorers. Lore has it his great-grandfather discovered the first authentic causa sui AI in an Atlas Copco database while working night shifts in a cellar, changing tapes on mainframes. They found him one morning, plugged in, flatlined, and fried.

G35 is also an explorer of sorts. He sometimes still "flips the switch". Flipping switches is not for the faint-hearted. We are all haunted by sequences: those we want to continue, those we wish we hadn't started, and those we never began. But life is not sequential. We merely move from one track to the next; we flip a switch.

A number of things are possible. It's only a matter of finding a way to tap into the potentials, the variants. Taking a turn will lead you down one path, but all the others remain, just merely out of sight. "Reality" is only the path most sung.

The methods used in the past were cruder. With time, we have refined them. Granted, they still remain very approximative; one never knows where one might end up. It's a kind of spiritual Russian roulette, rapture and terror forever rubbing shoulders in the melee.

Travel can leave you burnt or spent. Most of us will follow a single path and only occasionally wander. Those who often flip switches tend to develop behavioural patterns that can be perceived as psychotic by single pathers. Very few can ride the waves and maintain a semblance of normality. None can elude the sequential logic. The downside is social inadequacy.

G35's rambling state does not always make for very fluid conversation. He has a bagful of pet themes, most of which I file under delusional paranoia. This time he claims he has proof: minutes from the last TC144 meeting. TC144 meetings are organised by the AFSCA-SABAM on a quarterly basis to update CWA610 as a normative standard for the aural enhancement of food. The lowering of assessment red lines could potentially constitute proof of the knowledge of the noxious side-effects of certain enhancements by both industry and the public authorities. When I ask him how he had managed to obtain the incriminating minutes, he tells me he had somehow found his way to a variant of the meeting during one of his walkabouts.

It's hard to bring something back from a walkabout. Only the more seasoned travellers think to store data. G35 saved the minutes in a strand of hair. When he flipped the switch back, he immediately downloaded the data and cut his hair. Now, he would have to find a valid excuse for cutting his hair before his next screening. The authorities are wary of people with short nails and hair, and they are subject to more frequent screenings. Accidental amputees are deemed highly suspicious and generally imprisoned as a cautionary measure.

G35 is evasive when I ask him why he has chosen to share this information with me, of all people. After all, I am no longer seditious in any shape or form. He remains elusive, so I insist. Finally, he admits I was also at the meeting, or at least a variant of me was. All of the others were strangers. So, if push came to shove, I could always flip a switch and perhaps - with a bit of luck - make my way there too, or somewhere else along that path. He adds that he had the impression that in that variant I was relatively well-placed in the food chain.

G35 had gone the extra mile and contacted another attendee he deemed trustworthy. He'd somehow talked him into giving him the annexes to the meeting's working document addendum. They inventoried decades of simile-diabetic diseases developed by people with a "sweet-ear". He has to meet him in half an hour, and he needs someone to serve as a lookout while he takes care of business. I ask him if he has any chemical incentive to spare. He confirms with a smile and discretely slides his fingers across the touchscreen he has hidden in his bag. Request, blink, download, blink, execute.