She broke away from me and disappeared into the night. And so, having scared off the two most remarkable women of my life in one night, I found myself alone again.
It was past 2 A.M. when I finally reached my apartment. I was exhausted, more tired than I had ever been even after working the washing machine assembly line as a summer job, putting the output hose on the pump on the baseplate 1,200 times every night.
But tired as I was, I could not sleep. I needed to find out about Stuart Glennan. And Gary.
I started with Gary. It should have been easy to find him on the Web, there couldn’t have been too many Garys who had died recently at the intersection of Telegraph and Durant. I searched the obituaries for all the local Berkeley and San Francisco news sites, and quickly came up with… nothing. Big zippo. No one by that name had died at that location in the history of the Web, much less in the past year. Could “Gary” have been a nickname? No, that didn’t help either: no one by any name had died at that intersection in the last year. Another mystery. I was too tired to curse.
I struck pay dirt with Stuart Glennan, though there was a lot of regular dirt to shovel first. Over a dozen Stuart Glennans had postings out there. After beating the pages till I was blue, I found one, a professor of philosophy, specializing in hermeneutics, who dabbled with the occasional piece of music.
He happened to be on-line. I could hardly type coherently by this time, much less think a straight thought. But I couldn’t stop, driven by my twin mysteries. What else could I do, except chat him up?
>>Sir, are you the author of a song with these words? My girlfriend just sang this dynamite song for me and told me you had written it.<< I typed in a passage from Karly’s refrain.
The response was a bit more vehement than it should have been. >>How the Hell did you find that lyric! I just came up with that passage last week, and I haven’t shown it to anyone! Not even my girlfriend.<<
That set me back. >>Are you sure? My girlfriend sang the whole song for me.<<
I could tell Stuart needed to get some sleep; he was losing it. >>What did your girlfriend do—come back in a time machine?<<
I chuckled. >>I suppose we shouldn’t rule it out. I just met her today… or rather, yesterday, at this point.<< I thought about it for a moment. »Would you, ah, like to hear the rest of the lyrics? Just so you can get the words right, so we don’t accidentally screw up the future? :-) <<
That finally got a smile out of him. >>»Thanks for the offer, but no thanks :-) I think I’ll struggle along on my own.<<
>>OK, but please forgive me for pestering you one last time. What about this song?<< Now I sent him a bit of Cory’s lyric; just typing it made me shudder with cold.
Another long pause ensued. At last he answered, >>I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. That’s another song I started but never finished. I… wasn’t… sad enough… to finish it. Besides, it was unsingable. No one in the world has the range to sing it properly.<<
I shook my head. Unsingable? Cory had not only sung it, she had filled it with life! I went back in my mind over her performance. I tried to separate her voice from the music; so strong, so clear, such crisp, lilting highs… such hauntingly powerful lows. Yes, Stuart was right. No normal human voice could sing this song. Now I understood why the melody had such an eerie, otherworldly quality. The mystery of Cory was no longer even who she was, but what.
By this time the Sun was coming up, and I was brain-dead. I fell into bed to sleep for a couple of hours before going back to the conferences for another day of mystery, beauty, and intense confusion.
Even before meeting the mysteries of Karly and Cory, I had always done my best thinking while asleep. For tough physics problems, where other people would bang their heads all night long, I would just knock off early, drifting off to sleep with the equations dancing lightly in my head. When I awoke, I didn’t necessarily have the answer, but I usually had its scent.
As it was with physics, so it was with my twins. Understanding the twins would require the strictest application of my own personal favorite logic, a piece I liked to call Occam’s Hammer: If there are two reasonable and simple explanations for a phenomenon, but each explanation conflicts with at least one fact, then a third explanation, much more complex, is required. Complex, counterintuitive explanations are the very stuff of quantum physics, and so my quantum physics courses had prepared me well for this situation.
I could theorize all I wanted to about split personalities, twins, and secret cloning technology, but there was only one place in spacetime where Karly and Cory could have learned songs that had yet to be written. I raced to Virtuality to confront Karly with my insights.
I spotted her coming out of a seminar on resolution illusions and eye focus tracking. She looked grim… and then she saw me. She transformed as I watched, as the grimness evaporated. I think I flushed as I realized just how much I personally had the power to change her mood.
She skipped up to me. I spoke first. “I need your help,” I said. I retreated with her down the hall, looking for a quiet place. It was pretty hopeless: the marble floors and tiled walls made a giant acoustic lens, carrying garbled echoes to every nook in the place.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“Investments,” I explained. She looked puzzled. I continued. “What do you think of JouleView Corporation as a VR company to invest in?”
She gave me one of those “you’ve got to be joking” looks.
“I see. How bout VThink Inc.?”
Another stare.
“What about DreamPaint?” I asked, holding my breath.
She lit up. “Now that’s a company to invest in.”
“I see.” I looked into her eyes. “Karly, DreamPaint hasn’t even been founded yet.”
Her chin quivered. “It’s a secret,” she said defiantly, “You just haven’t heard of them!”
“Karly, anyone who could make the DreamPaint 2020 wouldn’t keep it a secret. They’d IPO and become billionaires.”
She just stared at me.
“Tell me about the future, Karly. Tell me why you came back.”
She sobbed. I gathered her in my arms, to support her… and to make sure she didn’t go anywhere. “You must tell me, Karly. Let me help you.”
And so she told me, a rich tale of the future, a future in which DreamPaint exploded onto the scene, bringing totally immersive virtualities into every home and office. Oh, they weren’t perfect at first, and the first DreamPaints cost too much to put in a box of Crack-erjacks. But after the initial breakthrough, evolution was breathtaking, even faster than the takeoff of computing power in the heyday of the microcomputer revolution.
Not only did individuals depart into Virtuality—whole communities disappeared, for all intents and purposes, into full immersion worlds, worlds far more satisfying than any reality.
These immersive otherworlds left their people remarkably well positioned when the Millennial Depression wiped out the economy as we know it. Instead of raging at the politicians, the virtual communities ran millions of social experiments outside the reach of traditional power-seeking con artists. From the stew of alternatives they explored, they assembled a body of insights, and bound together in a small Webdoc: The Principles of Self-Organizing Groups. The Principles allowed the members of a group to build a civil society without government intervention.
Self-organization swept the impoverished planet, trampling traditional governments and their hugely expensive bureaucracies. Soon wealth started growing again, ever faster till it reached a staggering pace. Wealth led to innovation, and in this context, the quality of immersive virtuality leapt ahead—and this time everyone participated.