The collapse-inhibiting mod turns out to be camouflaged, hidden inside a cheap-and-nasty games mod called Hypernova (Virtual Arcade, $99). Hypernova is to von Neumann what, in my childhood, a dedicated games machine was to a personal computer. I flip through its menus and help text. It can be loaded with software from ROMs or on-line libraries, either through an IR mod like RedNet, or the crude, old-fashioned way: modulated visible light.
I might as well make the camouflage plausible; nobody has a games mod with nothing in it. I phone Virtual Arcade’s library. The current best-seller is an historical war game for brain-dead weapons fetishists called Basra 91, boasting authentic missile’s-eye views of the genocide. I pass on that, and download last week’s favourite, Metachess. ‘Every configuration of pieces generates a unique set of rules.’
I play the game for a while (losing badly on novice level), trying to invoke all of the mod’s facilities in turn, but after twenty minutes I still haven’t found the trapdoor into the real thing. I’m beginning to wonder if some elaborate sequence of commands is necessary, when I realize that there’s still one function that I haven’t touched. I go back to the downloading menu and invoke the archaic visible light option. Instead of receiving the expected complaint—that I’m not staring at an appropriate data source—a new menu appears, bearing only two words: OFF and ON. There’s a tick mark beside OFF.
I hesitate, but the fucking thing has to be tested, sooner or later—and if it’s going to malfunction horribly, I’d rather find out about it here and now than in the anteroom of Po-kwai’s apartment.
The distinction between idle visualization and an active command to a mod is hard to describe—but it’s as easily mastered, and forgotten, as the difference between real and imagined actions of the body. Only under stress does it cease to feel like second nature. As I picture the tick mark reappearing beside the word ON, I’m acutely aware of the fact that the mental image I’m manipulating is the menu itself.
Nothing happens, nothing changes—which is exactly as it should be. I hold my hand up before my eyes, and it conspicuously fails to dissolve into a blur of alternatives. The whole room remains as solid, as ordinary, as ever. So far as I can judge, my mental state is entirely unaltered—except for a predictable surge of relief to find that I’m still not paralysed, blind or detectably insane. Lui might have known what he was doing, after all. The mod might even be working.
In which case, I am now smeared—even if there are no observable consequences whatsoever. The uniqueness, the solidity, the utter normalcy of everything, is a product of the fact that I will be collapsed at some time in the future—this time, without Po-kwai’s eigenstate mod to distort the probabilities, or to mix and confuse the alternatives.
I will be collapsed? Perhaps it makes more sense to assume that I’m ‘already’ being collapsed—at a time which only seems to lie in the future—and this whole experience is arising ‘retrospectively’ from that process. When the spin of an ion is measured, Po-kwai assured me, that is when it becomes definite, not before.
I laugh out loud. In spite of everything—Laura’s feats of escapology, Po-kwai’s success with the ions, my own impossible mod failures—it’s still not real to me. And in spite of the fact that I know that this is the heart of the true Ensemble… it still sounds like a load of pretentious, inconsequential, undergraduate philosophical crap. For all I know, I’ve just installed the Emperor’s new mod.
I bring back the menu, tick the OFF switch —
— and wonder: what about all of the versions of me who didn’t just do that? Have they been destroyed by the wave-collapsing pathways in my skull… even though half of them may have been scattered around the room—or across the city—by now?
They must have been—destroyed by me, or destroyed by some other observer.
All of them?
Forget the collapse-inhibiting mod—that changes nothing but the timing. The ordinary course of events must add up to normality. However frequently or infrequently the brain performs the collapse, it must reach out and destroy even the most far-flung, improbable states. If not, then these untouched states would persist indefinitely. There’s no point appealing to other observers to clean things up; they’d do the job imperfectly, too. If the collapse were not all-consuming, then the single, solid branch of reality wouldn’t be unique at all. It would lie in the centre of a huge void of depleted alternatives, but that void would be finite—and beyond it would lie an infinite thicket of fine branches, the ghosts of improbabilities too remote to have been destroyed. And that’s just not the way things are.
I start my own experiments while Po-kwai is still waiting for the next phase of her work to begin. Perhaps that’s pointless, given that—so far—the most dramatic effects have occurred on those nights when she’s actually used the eigenstate mod successfully. But I can’t see the harm in trying—and I might as well be optimistic. If my own use of the eigenstate mod remains tied absolutely to hers, it could end up taking me years to achieve the simplest tricks—let alone any massively improbable cross-town burglaries.
Po-kwai developed her skills working with the simplest possible systems: silver ions carefully prepared to consist of an equal mixture of just two states. I don’t have access to anything so pure, but I can still work on the same basic principle: taking a system which would normally collapse according to well-known probabilities, and trying to skew the odds. Both von Neumann and Hypernova have facilities for true random-number generation—as opposed to the deterministic pseudo-random sequences produced by purely algorithmic means. They employ groups of neurons specially tailored for the purpose, balanced on a fractal knife-edge between firing and not firing, stuttering chaotically in the sway of nothing but intracellular chemical fluctuations and, ultimately, thermal noise. Ordinarily, the system should collapse in such a way as to generate random numbers spread uniformly throughout a specified range; any skew, any bias, would mean that I’d succeeded in changing the probabilities—favouring one of the system’s states to make it more likely to be the sole survivor of the collapse—just as Po-kwai succeeded in increasing the probability of the up state in her silver ions.
I spend three nights trying to influence von Neumann’s random numbers, with no success… which is no great surprise. The combination of visualization and wishful thinking I employ—for want of anything better—seems more like an exercise for aspiring psychics than an attempt to give a precise command to a specific neural mod, whoever’s skull it happens to be in. Lui is no help; he’s never so much as caught a glimpse of a description of the eigenstate mod’s interface. So, I laboriously steer a conversation with Po-kwai onto the topic (and probably succeed in sounding far less natural than if I’d just asked her, out of the blue).
She says, ‘I’ve told you: I don’t remember using that part of the mod; I just switch on the collapse-inhibitor, then sit back and watch the ions. The two functions are independent. The whole thing was installed as a single package, but in effect, it’s two separate mods. The eigenstate mod only works when it’s smeared… and while I’m smeared, I can—evidently—operate this smeared mod. After the collapse, though, I know nothing about it.’
‘But… how can you have learnt to do something that you don’t even remember doing?’