“You have faith, but I don’t, and these things don’t necessarily work unless you believe in them.”
He smiled. “If it doesn’t work, I will be amazed!”
“If it doesn’t work,” she said doggedly, “you will be crazy.” There: she had said it.
He glanced more intently at her. “You believe I am not sane?”
How she hated this. “Darius, I think I love you, but I’m a realist. I think you are deluded. I think you have a dream that’s a wonderful thing, and you’ve spent years perfecting it, but somehow you got out of the institution and I found you, and now it’s my dream too, but I know that’s all it is. When you try to use that key, the dream will be over. Because I’m not crazy, and I’m not going to be. So what do we do, after you try that thing and nothing happens?”
“You do not wish to try it, and discover the truth of it directly?”
“Discovering the truth directly can be a whole lot of trouble,” she said, pushing down memories that were trying to rise, like bodies buried in muck. “I’d rather know what I’m getting into first.”
“What would persuade you to try it?”
“If there were some way it could be believed. I mean, I don’t believe in ghosts either, but if one came in here and said ‘Boo!’ to me, I’d sure check it out and maybe change my mind. Same thing for a flying saucer, a UFO.” Here it took some time for her to get the concept across, and they finally settled on Ship Containing Alien Creatures. “But if one landed beside my house, I’d consider it. Can you show me anything to make me believe you?”
“I fear I can not. But perhaps I can clarify the rationale.”
“How about this: if you try it, and it works, we’re both there and we see about getting married or whatever. If you try it and it doesn’t work, you turn yourself in for mental treatment.”
He laughed. “If they provide food and shelter, I will not mind if they think I am deluded! If I can not return, my life will not be long in any event.”
“Because if they cure you, I’ll still marry you,” she said. And there was another crazy thing she was doing! Seriously talking of marriage to a man she believed to be crazy! But crazy or not, he was a lot better for her than death.
“Let me clarify the rationale,” he said. “Because then I can use the key, and it will be done. There are an infinite number of Modes, in which different people live and different fundamental laws obtain. The Chips enable us to establish contact with the others. In mine, magic—”
“Like computer chips,” she said.
“You know of the Chips?”
“A chip is a sort of section of a computer that enables it to do what it does,” she said. “To address a lot of memory, for example. The fancier the chip, the more sophisticated the computer. Take the 86 series, for example.”
“There are eighty-six of these ‘computers’?”
She laughed. “No, silly, that’s what they’re called! The 8086, 80286, 80386, and so on. There was an 80186 but I think it was the same as the 8086. Anyway, they may seem similar, but the amount of RAM they can manage is—”
“Ram? A male sheep?”
She laughed so hard she let herself fall over backwards, which was fun. She tended to be happy when she was with him, which was an exhilarating experience. Then she remembered that she wasn’t in her blue jeans now; she didn’t want to freak him out. Not right at this moment anyway; better to save it for when she needed it. He had endearingly quaint notions of propriety. She drew herself up and forced herself into sobriety. “No, RAM stands for random access memory. Memory you can change about, any which way you want. So you can do a lot with it. But that’s irrelevant. The point is that when you said you had chips to make contact with other realities, well, I thought of the way our computer chips make contact with a lot of memory, among other things. It’s just an analogy.”
“Perhaps,” he said seriously. “But it sounds so much like an aspect of what I was discussing that I think I had better learn more of it. Exactly what is a computer, and how does the chip relate to it? The chip is an integral part?”
“You really don’t know?”
“I really don’t know, Colene, and it may be important.”
“Okay. We use computers in school for homework papers and math problems and things. Oh, we still use books, but the computers make it easier. We can set up our problems and push a few buttons, and it’s much faster. We can write papers on the screen, and edit them, and print them out when they’re all done.”
“Where do you get these devices?”
“We make them. There are companies in California and Japan and all over. Where do you get your chips?”
“They are ancient relics apparently deriving from some other Mode. We do not know their origin, only their power, and we understand only a little of that.”
“Gee—mysterious ancient otherworld science! I like it!”
“You like everything. You are wonderful.”
She felt a warm thrill. When she was with him, that was the way she felt. If she could be with him forever, would she become normal? It was an intriguing notion.
But there was business to handle. She had to go into some detail about exactly what problems and papers were, and how they were done with computers. Then they got down to the essence: “So the 186 chip addressed one megabyte RAM,” she said. “One million bytes. Maybe 165,000 words if you used up all the space in writing a noveclass="underline" one pretty solid book. But the software only addressed about two thirds of that, six hundred and forty kilobytes. Then the 286 chip addressed sixteen megabytes RAM, but the software was still limited to six forty K. So what was the point? They had to develop a new operating system to catch up with the hardware. The way I see it, the 186 was like a line: it did a lot, but was sort of limited. The 286 was like a square, adding a whole dimension to computing. Then the 386 was like a cube, because it addressed four thousand megabytes RAM and could do stuff the other chips only dreamed of. So it’s the 86 series, with the numbers telling how many dimensions: one, two, or three. And then four, for the 486, and so on. But each one is based on just that key chip.”
“Dimensions,” Darius said. “How many points does it take to establish a dimension?”
“Huh? We were talking about computers!”
“We were talking about an analogy. Chips, computers, and dimensions. In my reality, when we deal with a line, it requires two points to establish the orientation of that line. Is it the same here?”
“Oh, sure. You can measure a line with two points, marking it off.”
“And three points for a plane? Defining it in space?”
“You mean like balancing a tray on three fingers? Sure.”
“And four points for a three-dimensional object.”
“Sure, I’m with you. Length, width, thickness, and time, ‘cause if it doesn’t exist for some time, it’s not there at all. What’s your point?”
“Five points for a four-dimensional Mode,” he continued. “To fit it in space and time. The Cyng of Pwer mentioned that. The infinite number of Modes are each fixed in their own places, like planes in a cube, and one of these is mine and another is yours.”
“Oh, you mean like—like mica. That rock you can just peel apart?”
“Mica,” he agreed, after she had clarified the nature of the stone for him. “Each layer infinitely thin, but a universe to those who are of it. The Chip enabled me to cross vertically, from my layer to yours. Because it addresses many megabytes. But my finding you was essentially random, because there are only a few parameters we could specify, and infinity to choose from.”