“Jumpy, have you ever heard the name, [Goncharov]?”
-Goncharov… Can’t say it rings a bell. Is that some sort of scientist?
“It’s a movie, actually. About the Italian mob. Goncharov is the eponymous protagonist.”
-Hang on a second, Italian? I thought Goncharov was a Russian name.
“Well, yes. But the movie takes place in Italy. That’s not important right now. What’s strange about this movie is, although it was supposedly released in 1973, it only gained attention in 2022.”
-Almost five decades later… marketing really flubbed that one, huh?
“That’s not it. The movie doesn’t exist.”
-Wait, what? What do you mean it doesn’t exist?
“It never did. There was never a movie called Goncharov. Only one day in 2022 the internet started talking about it as if it was real. As if everyone had already seen it.”
-That… that has to be a prank, right? I mean it wouldn’t be the first time the internet took a liking to spreading lies, would it?
“That’s true. Especially on tumblr, where the phenomenon originated. But what if there’s more to it? What if the knowledge of that movie was "plucked” from some alternative timeline where the movie was critically acclaimed, and “transmitted” to our timeline through fields invisible to the naked eye?“
-C'mon. That’s insane. Isn’t it way more likely that tumblr was, y'know, being tumblr?
"Maybe. But isn’t it strange that the name of the movie, its director, its cast of characters, the actors playing them, and the year of its release was unanimously agreed upon by one of the most inconsistent and chaotic blogging websites out there?”
-Th… that’s…
“I’m not done yet. Not only that, but the events of story, the relationships between the characters, interviews with the cast, audio recordings of the movie score, fandom discourse, and multiple gifsets of the movie footage started appearing on everyone’s dashboards. And none of the information contradicted each other.”
-!
-(Could that really be? A movie that was transmitted to the public consciousness from another timeline…?)
