They began their session with some small talk; Dana got the sense that Jorge had something he wanted to say. She looked at him expectantly, and he said, “After our session last week, I went to one of those prism brokers, Lydoscope.”
Dana was surprised. “Really? What for?”
“I wanted to see how many versions of me acted the same way I did.”
“Tell me more.”
“I asked them to send questions to six versions of me. Since it’s such a recent departure point, it was cheap, so I asked for video. This morning they sent me a bunch of video files, recordings of what my paraselves said.”
“And what did you learn?”
“None of my paraselves have punctured their manager’s tires. All of them said they’ve fantasized about it. One came really close on the same day that I did it, but he stopped himself.”
“What do you think that means?”
“It means that my puncturing his tires was a freak accident. The fact that I did it doesn’t say anything important about me as a person.”
Dana knew of people using prisms in a similar way, but it was usually someone justifying their actions by pointing out they might have done something worse. She hadn’t encountered this particular version of it before, where the defense was based on their parallel selves behaving better. She certainly hadn’t expected it from Jorge. “So you think your paraselves’ behavior is a reflection on you?”
“The branches they checked, they were all ones where the departure point was just a month before the incident. That means that those paraselves were just the same as me; they hadn’t had time to become different people.”
She nodded; he was right about that. “Do you think the fact that you vandalized your manager’s car is canceled out by the fact that your paraselves didn’t?”
“Not canceled out, but it’s an indicator of the type of person I am. If all of my paraselves had punctured his tires, that would indicate something significant about my personality. That’s something Sharon would need to know about.” Jorge hadn’t told his wife about what he’d done; he’d been too ashamed. “But the fact that they didn’t means that I’m fundamentally not a violent person, so telling Sharon about what happened would give her the wrong idea.”
Getting him to tell his wife everything was something they’d have to build up to. “So how do you feel, now that you’ve gotten this information?”
“Relief, I suppose,” said Jorge. “I was worried about what it meant that I had done that. But now I’m not so worried.”
“Tell me more about that feeling of relief.”
“I feel like…” Jorge fidgeted in his chair as he searched for the words. Eventually he said, “I guess I feel like I got the results of a medical test back, and I’m in the clear.”
“Like you might have been sick, but it turns out you’re not.”
“Yes! It was nothing serious. It’s not something that’s going to be a recurring thing with me.”
Dana decided to take a chance. “So let’s think of it as a medical test. You had some symptoms that might have indicated something serious, like cancer. But it turns out you don’t have cancer.”
“Right!”
“Of course it’s great that you don’t have cancer. But you still had those symptoms. Isn’t it worth figuring out what it was that gave you those symptoms?”
Jorge looked blank. “If it’s not cancer, what does it matter?”
“Well, it could be something else, something it’d help you to know about.”
“I got the answer I needed.” He shrugged. “That’s good enough for now.”
“Okay, that’s fine,” said Dana. No sense in pushing the issue. She was sure he’d get there eventually.
It’s a commonly held belief that you would have been born in any branch where your parents met and had children, but no one’s birth is inevitable. Silitonga intended his yearlong experiment to show how the act of conception was highly contingent on circumstances, including the day’s weather.
Ovulation is a gradual and regulated process, so the same egg cell emerges from the follicle no matter whether it’s raining or shining that day. The sperm cell that reaches that egg, however, is like a winning Ping-Pong ball siphoned from a lottery drum as it rotates; it’s the result of utterly random forces. Even if the external circumstances surrounding an act of intercourse appear identical in the two branches, it takes only an imperceptible discrepancy to cause one spermatozoon to fuse with the ovum rather than another. Consequently, as soon as weather patterns are visibly different in two branches, all instances of fertilization are affected. Nine months later, every mother around the globe is giving birth to a different infant in each of the two branches. This is immediately evident when the child is a boy in one branch and a girl in the other, but it remains true even when the children are the same sex. The newly christened Dylan in one branch is not the same as the Dylan in the other; the two are siblings.
This is what Silitonga demonstrated when he and his parallel self exchanged the DNA tests of infants born a year after activating a prism, in a paper titled “The Effect of Atmospheric Turbulence on Human Conception.” He had used a different prism from the one in his “Error Propagation” paper to avoid the question of whether the publication of that experiment’s results had somehow created divergences that wouldn’t have otherwise occurred. At the time of these children’s conceptions, there had been no communication at all between the two branches. Every child had a different chromosomal makeup than their counterpart in the other branch, and the only possible cause had been the outcome of a single quantum measurement.
Some people still argued that the broader course of history wouldn’t change between the two branches, but it became a more difficult case to make. Silitonga had shown that the smallest change imaginable would eventually have global repercussions. For a hypothetical time traveler who wanted to prevent Hitler’s rise to power, the minimal intervention wasn’t smothering the baby Adolf in his crib; all that was needed was to travel back to a month before his conception and disturb an oxygen molecule. Not only would this replace Adolf with a sibling, it would replace everyone his age or younger. By 1920 that would have composed half of the world’s population.
Morrow had started working at SelfTalk around the same time as Nat, so neither had been an employee back when the company was thriving. When prisms were something only corporations could afford, people were happy to go to a store to communicate with parallel versions of themselves. Now that it was possible for people to buy their own prisms, SelfTalk had only a few locations left, and their customers were mostly teenagers whose parents didn’t let them use prisms or senior citizens who were unsophisticated enough that they still found the idea of paraselves a novelty.
Nat had been content to keep her head down, but Morrow had always had plans. He was promoted to store manager after coming up with a way to get new customers. Every time they got a new prism, he checked the accident reports from a month after a prism’s activation date and sent targeted advertisements to the people involved. They were often unable to resist the chance to get a glimpse of their lives if things had gone differently. None of them became long-term customers—most of them were depressed by what they learned—but they were a reliable way of generating revenue from every new prism acquired.