‘Not all skills rely on episodic memory. Do you remember learning how to walk? Sure, if I’ve grown better at manipulating eigenstates, then that skill must be embodied in some kind of neural structure, somewhere in my brain—but certainly not as a conventional memory, and probably not in any form which could ever make sense to me, or be of use to me, while I’m collapsed. I mean, the eigenstate mod is a neural system which only works when it’s smeared, so there’s no reason why other parts of my brain—pathways which formed naturally, during the course of the experiment—might not also work only when smeared.’
‘You’re saying that when you’re smeared, you know how to work the eigenstate mod—but the knowledge is encoded in your brain in a way that’s unreadable when you’re collapsed?’
‘Exactly. The knowledge must have been stored in the brain while I was smeared… so it’s hardly surprising that I can only decipher it when I’m smeared again.’
‘But… how can information about being smeared survive from one time to the next, when the collapse wipes out every last trace of every eigenstate but one?’
‘Because it doesn’t! That’s only true if the eigenstates don’t have a chance to interact—and the eigenstate mod means they do interact. There’s nothing new, in principle, about smeared systems leaving proof that they’ve been smeared; half the critical experiments in early quantum mechanics relied on it. Indelible evidence of multiple states co-existing is more than a century old: electron diffraction patterns, holograms… any kind of interference effect. You know, the old photographic holograms were made by splitting a laser beam in two, bouncing one beam off the object, then recombining the beams and photographing the interference pattern.’
‘What’s that got to do with smearing?’
‘How do you split a laser beam in two? You point it at a sheet of glass with a very thin coating of silver, angled at forty-five degrees to the beam; half the light is reflected to the side, while the rest passes straight through. But when I say “half the light is reflected,” I don’t mean every second photon is reflected—I mean every individual photon is smeared into an equal mixture of a state where it’s reflected, and a state where it passes straight through.
‘And if you try to observe which path each photon takes, you collapse the system into a single state—and you destroy the interference pattern, you ruin the hologram. But if you let the beams recombine, unmolested, giving the two states a chance to interact, then the hologram remains as tangible, lasting proof that both states existed simultaneously.
‘So, maybe interactions between different versions of my brain can leave some kind of permanent record of the experience of being smeared. And just as a laser-light hologram is an indecipherable mess to the naked eye—bearing no resemblance to the object whatsoever, until the image is reconstructed—this information stored in my brain may be incomprehensible to me, but presumably it comprises skills that are useful to the smeared Po-kwai.’
I digest this. Okay. But even if there is this way for “the smeared Po-kwai” to learn things that you don’t know about… what did you actually do to encourage her to learn what you wanted her to learn?’
‘Chanting the ion deflections may have helped. But I suspect that just wanting the experiment to work, badly enough, was all it took. The more I wanted it, the greater the number of versions of me who’d still want it, once I was smeared—and so the total smeared Po-kwai must have ended up wanting it, too. Anything else would have been highly undemocratic’. She says this tongue-in-cheek, but not entirely.
I say, ‘At last—a rigorous definition of seriousness of purpose: when you diverge into multiple selves, how many stick to your stated goal, and how many abandon it?’
Po-kwai laughs. ‘Sure. You could quantify anything at all that way. How do I love thee? Let me count the eigenstates…’
At home, deprimed, I wonder about my own goals, my own seriousness of purpose. Nothing that happened on the two occasions when I was (noticeably, memorably) smeared was anything that I wanted. And now? I may fervently wish to serve the true Ensemble by learning to steal the eigenstate mod—but once I’m smeared, how does the voting go?
I’ve never deluded myself: I’ve never pretended for a moment that I’d be the same without the loyalty mod. But from what Po-kwai has told me about the meaning of the wave function, I’d have assumed that the very fact that the loyalty mod works, reliably, must reflect a high probability for those quantum states in which it keeps on working. Smearing may create some versions of me for whom the loyalty mod has failed—but they ought to be massively outnumbered by versions for whom it still functions.
And yet… I deprimed with P3 still running; I saw Karen without invoking her. In both cases, the same argument should apply: the majority should have been backing the status quo. But the status quo was not maintained.
So what exactly is going on when I smear in the anteroom and try—or think I try—to sway the random numbers being spat out by von Neumann? Nothing of consequence… or a virtual war between a billion possible versions of who I might become? Pitched battles for the eigenstate mod, the super-weapon, the reality shaper? All I end up knowing about is the subsequent stalemate—but maybe the balance of power is gradually shifting, maybe there are ‘holograms’ in my head which record the changing state of play.
The thought that there might be versions of me coming into being who act against my wishes, who fight against everything I’m living for, is so repugnant that all I want to do is mock it, dismiss it as absurd. And even if it is true… what can I do about it? How can I make a difference to the outcome of these battles? How can I reinforce the factions which remain in the grip of the loyalty mod—which remain loyal to me?
I have no idea.
I give up on von Neumann; there’s something highly dubious about aiming to influence neurons in my own skull. In a junk market close to my building, I find an electronic dice generator, about the size of a small playing card. The heart of the device is a tiny sealed unit containing a few micrograms of a positron-emitting isotope, surrounded by two concentric spherical arrays of detector crystals. This set-up is immune—the seller’s know-it-all hologrammic spruiker assures me—to both natural background radiation and any deliberate attempts to tamper; no external event can be confused with the characteristic pair of gamma rays produced when a positron is annihilated within the device itself.
‘Of course, if the gentleman would prefer a model more amenable to discreet persuasion…’
I buy the tamper-proof version. The software can produce any desired combination of polyhedra; I select the traditional pair of cubes, and spend an hour testing the thing. There’s no trace of bias.
I take it with me on duty, and when Po-kwai is asleep, I sit in the anteroom, deprimed, smeared and collapsed by Hypernova, trying to imbue my virtual selves with a sense of purpose that might survive the wave function’s inexorable dispersion. I feel a twinge of guilt about intentionally depriming, abandoning my responsibility to Po-kwai, but I can’t risk having P3 interfere with the collapse in unpredictable ways. And I tell myself: if the Children ever do find out that ASR is engaged in blasphemous research, they’ll simply bomb the building, and there’ll be nothing I can do about it, primed or not.