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This was bending my brain big-time.

“Why aren’t we seeing hundreds of them? Thousands?” Mickle asked, clearly finding it hard to believe he was even asking the question.

Dieter was our Rottweiler when it came to pure theory. “Our spaces aren’t that big. If more than one dupe meets – however many they are in total – they all vanish!”

“So if they appear in a clump, they cancel out immediately,” Wong said, firmly in the spirit of this gedanken discussion.

“Heisenbergian crowd control,” Mickle said. “Lovely.”

Tiflin was pinking brightly now and couldn’t bring himself to speak. My remark about the gum and the clothes had shaken him. Maybe he was starting to believe.

“Sorry,” Dieter said, smiling as if at a lovely dream. “One last thought. How many 8 Balls are there? Is our machine in a superposition with all the others? And how could that possibly be stable?”

“Shoot me now,” Tiflin said, pushing past my arm toward the door.

THESE DUPES, AS Mickle calls them, are us, smart or smarter. They find themselves in roughly the same environments, covering the same or very similar world lines, attending the same meetings – if they’re not yet clued in about such things – but never more than one per meeting, one per world line. The only way to survive is to avoid meeting yourself. Both will vanish. And their programs or parts of programs, in 8 Ball, might also vanish – which could help explain some weird irregularities in the output. The better programmers you or your dupe are, the more your vanishing affects the success of the standing wave.

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.

BLOOD, ASH, BRAIDS

Genevieve Valentine

GENEVIEVE VALENTINE’S (www.genevievevalentine.com) first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti , won the 2012 Crawford Award and was nominated for the Nebula. Her second, The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, appeared in 2014 to acclaim. Science fiction novel Persona appeared in 2015 and sequel Icon is due later this year. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, Fantasy, Tor.com, and others; several stories have been reprinted in Best of the Year anthologies. Her nonfiction and reviews have appeared at NPR.org, the AV Club, and The New York Times. She has written Catwoman comics for DC, and is currently writing a new Xena: Warrior Princess comic for Dynamite! Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable. 

1943

IT DIDN’T TAKE them long to find a name for us; almost as soon as they knew it was women inside the rickety planes they couldn’t catch, the Germans called us witches.

It was because of the sounds our idling engines made from the ground, the story went, as if the German soldiers had spent a lot of time with brooms and knew what they sounded like, engineless and gliding fifty feet above them in the dark.

The wires holding the wings in place made the whistle. The canvas pulled taut around the plywood made the hush. I still suspect the thing that sounded supernatural was the whirr of our engines starting up again, as they realized we had already struck them, and it was too late to escape the blasts.