People gave him grief about it in college,
gave him that nickname for the first time. He accepted such abuse
good-naturedly. He had an IQ of 189 and other things to worry about.
Coincidentally, he graduated with a doctorate in computer science in 1989.
Fuzzy logic was his specialty. At the dawn of the 1990s, he launched his
product, which he defined as, “A friendly HAL 9000 without the psychopathic
murder glitch.” That was a fairly accurate description, actually. He sold it to
the Defense Department, which immediately pulled it out of commercial
application. His product prevented a nuclear war, but they never told him. (Occasionally,
it tried to call him at night. Only silence on the line, but he could tell.) He
made a ton of money.
Then went on to the next thing. And made more
money.
And nobody gave him grief about socks or
gloves.
To his face, anyway.
Technology on the other hand …
Technology seemed to hate him. Odd,
considering his love affair with tech. But the love, evidently, was one-sided.
Light bulbs exploded when he entered a room.
Screens fibrillated. Hard drives crashed. Files disappeared. Orderly columns of
data were replaced with cuneiform gibberish.
His staff politely asked him to stay away
without saying it in so many words.
He politely stayed away.
Others would be irritated by his problem. Or
refuse to acknowledge that it was a problem.
He had a theory. Which he told to his wife in
his usual non-linear fashion.
Arranged in order and condensed, what he said
was:
The universe is an information system. (Strictly
speaking, our pocket universe, defined as U1.) Space-time is the
user interface: a constantly refreshed image on a phenomenological “screen” that
users interact with. (Users = conscious beings making choices.) The quantum
substrate is the hard (or fuzzy) drive outside space and time: all the possible
futures exist there. From nanosecond to nanosecond, the universe (U1)
rewrites itself. And the cloud of
possible universes narrows down to one actuality. The greater the number of
possibilities, the greater the chance for “hard drive” error. The greatest
source of uncertainty: the human mind—or any form of volitional consciousness with
the capacity for imagination. The mind is a map of the universe—more accurately,
it contains maps of X number of possible universes. The maps influence the
territory; the territory influences the maps; it’s interactive. The poor
quantum substrate has to generate all the what-ifs you imagine, and it doesn’t
have infinite memory. Thus, the smarter you are, the more scenarios you have
running in your head, and the more hard drive errors you generate. Hence,
vanishing socks and the like.
She noticed the digital recorder in his hand.
“You’re …”
“Yeah, you know. Lost files. I’m on a riff. This is …”
His eyes rolled up. Like a visionary. Or a
nut in a Stanley Kubrick movie.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “Is
there an application for this? A commercial
application?”
“Duh.”
So, he got to work. It was simply a problem
of generating sufficient mental complexity until he crashed the U1
system. Evidently, he did it all the time, unconsciously. Now, he would do it consciously.
Make the appearance/disappearance event happen deliberately. Crashing the universe boiled down to multiplying the
already multitudinous parallel scenario tracks in his mind (The chess track,
the politics track, the irritating family relationships track, etc.) It had to
work. Various audio and video recording devices would capture the event when it
happened. Then he’d do it again. Repeatable results confirming the model, and
all that.
He worked late into the night. For many
nights.
And, late one night, his wife heard a loud
BANG.
She knew, immediately, that he had
disappeared.
He fell head over heels like Alice tumbling
through the rabbit hole. The Zero-G experience went on for awhile. Then he landed,
not in Wonderland, but a kingdom of lost crap.
“Holy crap,” he said.
It seemed like the right thing to say.
But there he was.
Imagine a basement, attic, storage bin or
garage stuffed with boxes, bicycles, old lamps, magazines, faded posters,
yellowing plastic toys and the like. Make that space a seemingly infinite
space, extending in all directions. A seemingly infinite space stuffed with
crap.
He walked around, prayed, studied his
environment.
Apparently normal gravity. “Air” to breathe. Indeterminate
light source above. A floor, yes. As grey as his college dorm. Ceiling? Hard to
say. Just fuzzy up there. But on the “ground.” A planar surface stacked with
accretions of junk in files and rows. An infinite attic/basement. Not exactly Cartesian. But a grid with
definite pathways. Random? Designed?
He studied the crap so arranged if not
organized.
It reminded him of all those depressing
hoarder shows he tried to avoid on cable television.
No perceivable order, aside from the files
and rows. Worse …
Stuff randomly appeared. Like the old, discredited
Steady State theory.
Pop!
A ball of string. Occasionally with a cat’s
paw attached.
Pop!
The first edition of Action Comics.
The lost reels of The Magnificent Ambersons.
He noticed the common thread, eventually.
This crap wasn’t exactly crap.
The crap was all treasure. To somebody.
A random sampling confirmed this hypothesis.
That spool of thread wasn’t crap, if you collected thread spools. Bottle caps.
Old calendars. Everything he saw had value to somebody. That was the common
thread. Somebody wanted it. And somebody
else lost it.
Lost …
Loss is connected with desire, he reasoned. Desire
is the magnetic pull, drawing this stuff in.
Gradually, he discovered whose desire it was.
He wasn’t alone in here.
Muttering men, all men it turned out. Thought
he saw one out of the corner of his eye one time. Then a mob of them shuffled
up. Grey, obsessive, clutching men, who gravitated to the random crap, snatched
it up in their hands, and walked away muttering. Men of indeterminacy, neither
here nor there. Who wound up here.
He tried to strike up conversations. Futile.
But he kept at it for a long time.
He’d grab one of the human tumbleweeds by the
shoulders. Try to make eye contact. Recite a string or rational words, based on
their ad hoc reference frame. If the
man was reaching for a comic, he’d talk about comics. If the man reached for an
engine part, etc. Hey, watcha got there?
Occasionally, something seemed to float up in the man’s milky watery eyes. Like
a murky, octagonal answer in the window of a shaken Eight Ball. A flicker of
recognition. A spark that didn’t quite catch.
They were too absorbed. Something had a grip
on them. A powerful singularity in their heads: a black hole whose pull they
were powerless to escape.
The flicker of recognition would die. The
man’s eyes would dart around. He’d spot some lovely thing, shuffle over and
grab it like a crow gathering shiny stuff for its nest.
Collectors, of course. Collectors all.
Each man would clutch his treasure, his piece
of sacred crap.
Each man would mutter and walk away.
“Action Comics. Volume one, issue one.
Excellent condition. No tear or stain front cover …”
ASK AGAIN LATER.
Nobody home, yep. No dialog here.
He gave up his conversational efforts.
And limited his dialog to the confines of his
mind.
I’m
like them, he thought.
The next thought:
No.
I’m not like them.
Somebody up there loved him, he was certain
of it. Somebody out there did too.
The woman who loved him in U1,
His disappearance was well documented. She
watched the footage from multiple cameras at multiple angles.
He turned flat. Like a piece of paper. Seemed to turn flat.
Like General Zod in Superman II.
Folded at an angle. Slipped under the door of
the universe. Poof.
The Forbidden Zone. Yeah. He was in the …
It pissed her off that she knew these nerd
references.
He was gone.
That pissed her off more.
She picked up the digital recorder. Oh God, no … I can’t.
Don’t
kid yourself. Of course you can.
She pushed PLAY.
That conversation. Her voice.
“One probable universe becomes the actual
universe?”
Jesus,
does it sound like she’s humoring him? No.
“Yeah. But it’s not like there’s only one
possibility.”
His
nutty ideas usually turn out to be true. She knew that.
“There’s a range of possible universes, some
more probable, some less. The more uncertainty, the more forking paths.The more
uncertainty the more possibility for error. Yes or no. That’s cool. But yes,
no, maybe, kinda, sorta—uncool.”
Mind
games. Keep on playing those mind games forever. Focus.
“The human mind is. Uh. A quantum map of the
universe. But there’s a map inside the map. Which is interactive with the
actual. Uh. Territory. So…”
She wasn’t following it. But she had to
follow it.
The path he’d taken out of this world. She
had to find it. Whatever he went, she had to go there, too. Repeatable results.
It was going to be a long night.
He sat on a stack of old 78” vinyl records,
thinking.
My
God, My God, why have you forsaken me?
Blasphemous
dope. You’re not Jesus. You dug a quantum hole for yourself. Man up. But, on
second thought… God, if you wanna help, in no way am I saying I don’t want You
to help.
Reverse psychology. Doesn’t work on God,
stupid.
Made of dust. Fully aware.
Try to stay positive. Look on the bright
side.
What bright side?
You’re stuck. Creativity pops up in that
place where you’re stuck. Also, no apparent hunger, thirst, or need for
evacuation yet.
This was all true. Always an upside, yep.
There
must be some way out of here.
Yeah.
A man of dust shambled up to him.
Oh God.
An engineer. Working for EMI- Schlumberger.
As the nametag on his formely white coat
announced.
The company wasn’t EMI- Schlumberger
anymore. Just Schlumberger. Period.
When did it…? 1979?
The engineer of dust sat next to him. And
posed a question.
“How’s it going?”
“Eh.”
“Yeah…”
They laughed.
“Surfing the Dirac Sea, right?”
“You could say that.”
“
, … right?”
, … right?”
“No kidding.”
“Yeah. We were working on that.”
“How’d that work out?”
“Head of research winked out of existence.”
“You?”
“Yeah. Me.”
Long silence.
“Corporate pretended it didn’t happen. Wiped the files. I’m
assuming, OK? No rescue mission for yours truly, so I’m assuming. Liability
issues…”
“Youre not insane.”
“No. Not like those … whatever they are.”
“Collectors. I call ‘em Collectors.”
“Idiots. That’s what I call him.”
A sneer in the dust man’s voice. He resisted it. The attitude, the
implications. That contempt for the Collectors. Judge not. He didn’t want to judge the poor bastards. There but for
the grace of …
The dust man asked him another question.
“You believe in God, right?”
He shrugged.
“Yeah. You believe. And there’s somebody back home, right?”
He nodded. The dust man laughed.
“You think the cavalry’s coming?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. She’s trying … she’s repeating my experiment, OK? She’s
coming here, and she’s taking me home.”
“You say so.”
“She’s opening up…”
“Whatever you say.”
“Go to hell,” he said pleasantly
“But this is hell,” the
dustman replied, making the obvious statement. Ha-ha. There’s no way out,
stupid.”
“Every door …”
“Opens both ways. Screw you. There’s no way out, asshole.”
“There has to be.”
“No, man. No, you poor schmuck. I’ve been thinking about it, OK?
I’ve been working on the problem for the last … I don’t know how many years. You
think there’s a way out?” The dust man laughed. “I can’t even imagine…”
The dust man turned to dust.
He almost wept.
Hypothesis. At the moment of
seeing no possibilities, the man’s file was deleted. The loss of hope creates
the hopeless loss. When you can’t imagine a future there’s no future.
He could imagine that happening.
Another argument in his mind. Happening too much, lately.
The dust man’s voice. Still arguing with him.
Nobody’s coming. Bullshit. Truth, my friend. What makes you so important?
Hubris, that’s a bad thing. Face it. You ain’t getting out of here. No. She’s
coming, damn you. Uh-uh. This is your
fate, your karma, your eternal sentence. Your lovely wife isn’t coming.
And then she was there.
“Fancy meeting you here.”
“Ha-ha.”
“You did the math?”
“It wasn’t easy.”
“Great. Well. Welcome to purgatory, or
whatever the hell this is.”
She looked around with distaste.
“It reminds me of those depressing hoarder
shows.”
“Also my first impression.”
“Who’s hoarding?”
“These guys. I call them the Collectors.”
He shared his theory. All these losers
generate this universe. You mean the
Collectors? Well, they collect because they’ve lost. Their minds are
stuffed with multiple possibilities. Like
yours? Yes and no. They look back, like Lot’s wife. Keep thinking about all
the stuff they’d lost, doors not taken. It’s more real to them that the here-and-now,
so they get deeper and deeper into the maze of all the what-ifs and maybes.
Eventually, they pop out of U1 and wind up here. But they’re still the
same people. Whirlpools of desire, mourning for the lost stuff. Like a bag of
money in a dream you can’t take with you when your eyes open. But they want it.
They want it. They keep holding on.
Thinking, thinking, running multiple scenarios in their heads. Still wanting
and longing and needing. That want has
a pull. It’s a singularity, a vortex. People like me create cracks in reality.
The Collectors pull stuff in through the cracks, all the stuff they’re longing
for. But it’s never enough. It’s never the
same.
“Lost souls.”
“Yeah.”
“Whole new meaning.”
He shrugged.
“You tried praying?”
Stupid question, but he doesn’t point that
out. He was always praying. God, to him, was a fact, an obvious fact. So why’d
He let this shit happen? Clearly, that was her next question.
“God knows what He’s doing.”
“And let them create this crap universe?
“I spoke badly. They didn’t create it. I
think it’s a memory buffer or something. They’re just here.”
“With their crap?”
“Yeah.”
They shared a look. One of those nonverbal conversations.
Every
problem has a solution. An article of faith. Faith doesn’t generate solutions.
But it keeps you looking for them.
She spoke first.
“This reminds me of something.”
“Yeah. That old Lost in Space episode with Michael J. Pollard.”
“Yeah! And that depressing Victorian novel.
Water babies or something.”
“The vision recurs. There’s a reason. See the
mirrors?”
He pointed.
At random intersections, mirrors gleamed.
Mirrors. Windows. Cracks in the universe.
After a thousand years or so, they managed to
find the mirror in his lab. Cops were investigating Damnit to hell! and breaking things. They shouted and tried to get
the cops’ attention. No good.
But one cop kinda looked. Tapped on the glass.
Then snorted and looked away.
They tried to press through the mirror.
Unlike Alice, they were stuck. The glass was unyielding on their side too. But
he almost saw us.
Hypothesis: Various writers glimpsed the lost
souls in the corner of his mirror. Cute idea. How does it help? Because light got out. Observer affecting
the observed. The order in their minds…
“Of course!” he said. “It’s so simple!”
He was always saying that.
He laughed.
He was always doing that, too.
She looked at him patiently and finally asked
…
“So, how do we get out of here?”
“Ordo ab chao.”
“Ordo my ass. I didn’t take Latin you private
school assh—“
She figured it out.
“Order out of chaos.”
“Duh.”
Hypothesis: The multiplication of indeterminate/contingent reality models in the
human mind creates hard drive errors in U1. Lost files (i.e.: people
and stuff) wind up in the memory buffer universe. Said buffer isolates chaos
and indeterminacy. Corollary: creating order in the buffer universe will cause
lost files to be “found.”
“Thin.”
“Yeah. I know it’s thin. We create order and
we go home. If the hypothesis is wrong, we don’t. What’ve we got to lose?”
“N…”
“Yeah.”
So they stacked, sorted, arranged, tidied up.
And tried to create order in the universe of
chaos.
This was easier said than done.
The instant they started organizing, the Collectors
appeared. Order attracted them with a relentless magnetic pull. Then they
pulled it apart.
They’d stack up comic books by order of
publication. The Collectors would come, pull the stack apart, walk away.
They’d sort stuff by kind.
The Collectors would unsort it.
You get the idea.
It was futile. Sisyphus work.
Then, miraculously, they discovered it was
incredibly easy to kick the Collectors’ collective ass. Not fighters these
guys. Fighter that she was, she got the most licks in. He stacked stuff up while
she kept them away. Sorted it. Made it all nice and neat. Then neater and
neater still.
Bang!
And, just like that, they popped back in the
supposedly sane universe of U1. And fell on their rear ends on a
pile of crap in the garage. Old paper files from their first start-up,
fortunately.
“God, we got to get this place organized,”
she said.
“No kidding,” he said. “Put some of this
stuff in storage.”
He stood up with a gleam in his eyes.
“The practical … yes! The practical
application!”
“Stop,” she said. “Don’t.”
But he was smiling.
“Storage… Infinite storage!”
If his smile got any bigger the edges would
meet and the top of his head would fall off.
He got to work.
And they made even more money, creating the
network of N-space storage bins that we’ve come to depend on these days.
Occasionally, she wondered what would happen
if the storage space failed and all the crap dumped back into our universe. He
told her to have faith.
“In you?” she said.
“Yes. But I was referring to the math.”
He smiled an indeterminate smile.
“Have you seen my glasses?”
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