I have employees not on our team going over the tapes, tracking us or versions of us on the security system, letting us know where 8 Ball programmers are congregating. Word is getting out. This is spooking everybody.
Why aren’t there trillions of us, filling the Earth to capacity? First of all, there’s that problem of encounters. Second, there’s the probability that for every alternate world in the multiverse, we’re sharing dupes. One vanishes from one world and appears in another. Dupes are traded—filling in a hole, like a tunneling electron—but are not actually duplicated.
And perhaps not even actually destroyed. Who can say?
Who could ever know?
And for every alternate Earth, there is an 8 Ball, very little different from the one we made, going through the same processes, running the same Gödelian strings, with the same successful discovery of extraordinarily long primes, the same confirmation of the Enormous Theorem, the same ability to solve problems involving insane levels of number-crunching. If we could coordinate or discover or recover all those programs, running on all those 8 Balls (or their successors), we’d probably have at least a short list of every possible mathematical problem, run to exhaustion or even solved.
That success will generate more funding for more machines like 8 Ball—bigger machines, newer machines, better and better machines. And all the worlds of the multiverse will begin to fill with people like us at an even faster rate; a surfeit of smart people, clever people, people smarter than me, until perhaps the flash point is reached—more brilliant programmers than any Earth actually needs. Would the multiverse start weeding out these upstarts?
I don’t want to look at any more security tapes. I don’t want to go home and find my female self in the arms of my wife. And I don’t want to run into myself in Building 10 and pop out of existence.
I’ve packed a bag, taken a large sum out of my bank, kissed my wife, left a note for my “sister,” gassed up my VW, and pretty soon I’ll drive to a town I’ve never been to before, someplace I wouldn’t think of. If of course I can think of such a place.
How many of me will think the same? Where would I never want to live? What if we all flee to the same safe, awful hellhole? And is it worth my survival to live there? Between me and my dupes, there’s only one white VW Rabbit, and I seem to have the only set of keys. Dupes bring along their clothes but not their cars. Maybe her keys don’t fit. Maybe she drives a Volvo. Smarter, right?
Again, this bends my brain. I’m trying to imagine the mass exodus. We’ll empty the United States in our Teslas and Mercedeses and then rental cars and motorbikes and maybe bicycles and then just walking or running. A flood of the world’s finest programmers spreading out from North America. Biblical!
An even more frightening thought—
Perhaps every universe has trillions of worlds with intelligent beings on them that are only now beginning to build machines like 8 Ball. Will the entire mass of all these universes be converted into programmers?
There is of course a theoretical safety valve, a choke point that could make all these frightening machines moot. It was Gödel himself who proved that mathematics would never be perfect and logically complete. Will that save us? If that limitation, that very wise act of cautious creation, brings all of this to a soft end, do we say thank God?
Or thank Gödel?
I leave these problems to those who are smarter than me. Maybe I think too much, worry too much. But please don’t search for me. Don’t tell me where I am, where I have been seen, or who’s looking for me.
I don’t want to know.
The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has called Greg Bear the “best working writer of hard science fiction.” Bear was honored with the Robert A. Heinlein Award for lifetime achievement in 2006, and he is one of only two authors to win a Nebula in every category. Bear’s work has explored the changing fields of genetics and human evolution (1999’s Nebula Award winner Darwin’s Radio), nanotechnology and biological computers (1985’s Blood Music, based on Bear’s award-winning short story of the same name), interplanetary politics and colonization (1993’s Nebula Award winner Moving Mars), and the probable shape of real interstellar travel (Hull Zero Three). His many short stories, all newly revised, will soon be available in three volumes from Open Road. In his teenage years, Bear was part of the founding committee for the San Diego Comic-Con. Since the 1980s, Bear has served on many political and scientific action committees, consulting for Microsoft, NASA, the US Army, and the Department of Homeland Security. He’s a frequent guest at both science fiction conventions and scientific conferences around the world.
Elizabeth Bear
Skin in the Game
Peter was waiting for me when I got backstage.
I had been expecting the publicist to show up for weeks, ever since I started getting the sense that the tour numbers weren’t what the label had hoped. But as I walked out from under the glare and heat of the lights, it didn’t make me any happier to glimpse his hollow-cheeked, handsome scowl off in the wings. I ignored him for a few precious seconds, gratefully burying my dripping face in the snowy, chilled towel that Mitchell, my road manager and best friend, handed me. Sweat and makeup flattened the plush Egyptian terry cloth. I gulped water while I dropped the first towel, handed the glass back to Mitchell as I took another, and wiped myself down again.
I gave him a questioning glance. He waited until I pulled the Dampitronics from my ringing ears and handed them to him to roll his eyes toward Peter and murmur, “You want some backup with the cadaver, Nee?”
I shook my head. My ears shrilled like a temple bell despite the earplugs; my body trembled with exhaustion. A line of itchy soreness ran across my back where the low band of my costume had chafed because I’d lost weight on tour. I wanted: my dressing room, a shower, yoga pants, a sandwich, and my bed—in negotiable order.
I did not want: a conversation with Peter Sullivan.
But there he was, curly graying-blond hair atop a tall frame, a debauched cherub in a bespoke suit. Making me tired.
I was slumping. I spackled my best smile across my face (pin the grin on the clown) and hauled my tired spine upright to sashay over to him. Don’t forget to look spunky but demure. The patriarchy hates it when you’re not appropriately deferential.
It had been a so-so night, and I had just now, without so much as a glance at the time, given up on expecting it to get any better.
“Neon, sweetheart,” he said, and leaned in to kiss beside my cheek. He glanced at his phone, then dropped his hand to his side. “Great performance. You’re looking better than ever.”
“Glad to hear it,” I replied. “Lost weight?”
“Good suit,” he answered, with a self-deprecating flip of his hand he probably practiced in the mirror. His VIP pass fluttered in the breeze. “Can we talk?”