But Wait...

by

F. J. Mackelroy

Smashwords Edition

* * *

Published by F. J. Mackelroy at Smashwords

But Wait...

©2010 by F. J. Mackelroy

for Algirdas

* * *

I got up this morning, and everything was fine, nice clear spring day, not as hot. Ran on the treadmill for a while, and then, you go, Chuck, my reward: coffee!

Logged on to my morning commute, then decided to go over there in person, fleshtime, smell the cohorts, bump brains.

Not sure how about them, but the air sure smells good. After the megacrash, almost nobody drives anymore, so that has to help. I remember going to Mackinac Island as a kid, out in the Great Lakes, a place where they didn’t allow cars. We rode around the island in a horse-drawn carriage, and I remember looking at a nice house with no glass in the windows. That seemed odd. More than odd—not really possible in that northern climate. Then I realized the windows were still there, just totally invisible. Without the exhaust from cars and other pollutants, there was no film or grime to stick to the windows and stop the light. I wonder if our windows will turn clean and transparent, if this keeps up.

Today’s the day Ed is going to crank up the probabilities generator again. If it all comes together, our new quantum chips are going to be kickass. It’s funny, even Deke, our main theoretical, can’t tell me precisely how this all works. Not surprising that I wouldn’t understand—hey, I’m just the tech writer guy— I only have to tell people how to use the finished product. I just I hope he knows. Or maybe that’s the probability part, ha ha.

Surprising, everybody was there doing fleshtime today, gathering around the worktable in the meeting room when I got there. Mysterious Rheena had the schematics arranged on the table, worried, as usual, that she had missed some piece, always the tight competent perfectionist.

But wait...

It’s just another ordinary day, so why do I feel this sort of mental, sort of physical strain? It’s suddenly almost overwhelming. What is it that I can’t remember? Odd. If I can just keep going, I can get through this. It will be ok. It will. More coffee.

>>>

I’m on my sofa watching the money channel. How did I get here? How can they be so smart? How can they have so many facts and calculations, get it so right, and then so wrong? Oil hit $525 a gallon yesterday. Everyone who still has a car is burning cognac.

Gold is 12 dollars an ounce.

One Chinese Yuan is 37,000 US dollars, give or take a pound or two of gold. Or flesh.

Side effects. Cheap jewelry and dental work. The smog over cities has almost dissipated. Sweet smellin’ air. Of course, people are dying from all the disruptions.

Ah, here it comes, the 10:37 segment: “Chaos and destruction— we’ll show you how to profit!”

I get out my notepad.

>>>

Sven, our CEO, who also does systems testing, (hey, we’re not a big conglomerate here!) is wrapping up his explanation of how this all works for our latest marketing plan. When did he start talking? Did I miss it? Was I spaced out again? Well, nobody’s looking at me, so it can’t be that bad. Ah, here, I have pages of notes on how it works, coherent writing, even some nice sketches. I can get those worked up for the manual.

OK, now to the editing. Maybe I can get the outline finished before noon.

But wait...

Something is not right. When I breathe. When I swallow. When I move my arms. I am not feeling good. I am feeling worse and worse. It is hard to work, to sleep. I think I’m dying again.

Hope it’s easier.

Than last time.

Last time?

>>>

Ed stops by my office, says it’s lunch at the pizza place today.

I look over my notes. We’re doing the stuff of science fiction here. Quantum physics, tunneling, other things I will not have to figure out—I just need to know enough to tell people how to use these gadgets, and give the marketing people a few hot phrases.

But wait...

Where am I?

What if there are indeed multiple universes, or dimensions, or realities, however the quantum people put it? What if I’ve slipped off my initial trajectory, and slipped over here into this odd situation, these odd eventualities. Too many eventualities.

Is my memory broken? Or what if memory serves me only too well?

What if I never had a trajectory at all?

OK, I’m home. How did I get here?

Ah, “Breaking News!” Watch the coruscating colors! Jagged flashing patterns! The hot disaster theme music! Wow! Do they call it breaking news because the news is broken?

The whole mega-media-establishment still promises what William Randolph Hearst did—

"You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war." Maybe we could use something like this in the next manual—have flashy, slightly menacing bulletins, to add variety. A little mystery. Some risk for you kids at home!

And here it is, another bomb has exploded. This time a boot nuke. Compact little guys. They’re becoming as common as tornadoes or floods. Near a remote village. Near a big city. Khartoum, Kongsberg, Kalkaska. Utica or the Ukraine.

And people, are there babies and uncles, moms and teens injured and dying? Only if they are OUR people. The OTHERS, we never hear. We never know. Peoria, Perth, Paris, Tehran, Texarkana, Tel-Aviv.

“Just think,” the guru of channel Q says, “if there are multiple branching quantum universi, there is no such thing as death!” Yes!!

Everyone pants with excitement.

I have had too many science classes. Or read too much O’Henry.

Instead, I think, this will mean that we die a thousand thousand deaths, as each universe unerringly serves us up our due. God bless us everyone.

>>>

Ed is still leaving my office. As he walks out the door, he glances back, and he becomes John for a moment.

But John is dead. How can John be gone? My oldest friend. I knew him so well, then later I just saw him intermittently, letters, email, and it all started to take on a kind of virtual reality. Is he real, this friend I rarely see? Will he live forever, in this auxiliary world? More real than this reality I usually feel around me?

He can’t be gone. No one that bright and big and cranky and smart and strong and idiosyncratic can just be gone.

Maybe if I keep writing, he will not be gone. It will be another chapter, and things will have changed, or returned, the dictatorship toppled, the time machine repaired, the moon station disassembled, the cancer just a false alarm. Like a Kurt Vonnegut story where the bombs rose back into the plane, to the factory, got disassembled and put back in the ground. We will wake up, and rethink, no longer through a glass darkly, we will see things clearly, and he will not be gone.

I am starting to believe in ghosts. So many people dead. I can’t tell who is alive and who is not. There are these overlays that I see, not always clear, shifting visual overlays, people I know, people I imagine, people I remember. It’s like a double negative. Doubling negativities. Negativity scenes.

The idea that he is gone, that is also is a double negative. Not not here with us. It cannot be true, not!

>>>

I look out at the garden. Should we plant more sunflowers? They seem to do well, given enough water, even though the summers are becoming almost unbearably hot.

We could harvest them for food.

Is there a we? Is this a dream? Am I asleep? How can I tell if this is a dream?

I do remember there was something at work. Something about a theory. It was only a theory...

But wait...

She is not what you would call beautiful.

She is not even plain.

She is odd looking, dignified, but vaguely asymmetrical. I cannot take my eyes off her. Tied in those crimson silk scarves. She never stops moving. The sheen of sweat. Rheena, we were at work together, how did this happen?

I never dreamed anything this intense could happen, her, like this, for me.

Her eyes burn into me, ready for the next stage.

>>>

Sometimes I think I’m going crazy.

Going, ha, ha, gone. Long gone. All the way gone. Solid gone.

But what’s really strange is that nobody else seems to notice.

It would be funny if we all undergoing this. Going under this. The same shifts and goings. Why don’t we talk about this? Somehow, it does not seem polite, or even reasonable to talk about this.

Money! Contracts! Jokes! Conquests! Narratives! We have plenty of important real things to discuss.

But you look at faces, everywhere, and there’s this strain, this thread of uncertainty and suffering everywhere, no matter how successful or handsome or wealthy people are.

So ok, maybe there are many worlds, dimensions, infinite worlds, all splitting off at each—at each what? At every choice a human makes? At every drop of rain that falls? Whenever Tinkerbelle clicks her ruby slippers?

And then what—these realities continuing and endlessly branching? But with some odd kind of bleed-through, some memory? Or collapsing back upon themselves, into this reality? This unreality.

>>>

I go to the kitchen and check the gauges. Most of us have cut back on heat and cooling and other pumps and engines so we can keep our all-important electronics going. I have a treadmill to top off the battery banks. One of the maintenance guys from work rigged up a wood co-generator to back up my solar power system. My solar system. As opposed to your solar system. Everyone has gangs of little windmills now, along the back fence or rooftop. The neighborhood is starting to look like a toy garden. I wonder if the change in surface wind speeds will have unforeseen effects.

Of course, any time even an infinitesimal percentage of our eleven billion people get the same idea, and do the same thing, you can predict unforeseen unpredictable effects.

This is confusing. I was at work, and now I’m not.

It sounds like that old Donovan song, “First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.” Nice song, but I never much went for that mystical stuff. But something does seem to be wrong with time. Two o’clock, three, then one, like the clock in my high school classroom, that I watched and watched, waiting to leave, the hand would crawl along, then jump back and forth, just whipping back and forth over the final minutes, at the very moment when I thought freedom was near.

Time gone whacked.

I feel John with me, right in the other room. I can hear him talking in the next room. I will turn the corner and he will laugh, break out into startlingly melodious song. Help me fix my bicycle.

It’s always been obvious that our brains are not adapted to the quantum world. Blame millennia of evolving on a planet of classical physics. Push this, it bumps into that, whack this, it makes that noise. Scratch me, do I not squeak?

None of this virtual stuff.

None of this fiction at a distance.

But what if our brains are actually very well adapted to the quantum world? After all. After all.

Humans are so irrational, the pundits say. We make wishes. Upon a star. We don’t trust statistics. We buy lotto tickets. We believe in ghosts. We try not to think bad thoughts.

And who knows what causes the bleeds, sets the stage, flips the realities.

But, obviously, all that alternate stuff usually doesn’t work much better than, or even as well as, push-bump-squeak. Maybe we are still evolving. Or maybe reality is.

Reality IS?

Not that a quantum world would necessarily be any more reassuring. Could be like Heinlein's hypercube house, one wrong move, an aftershock, and it all collapses inward on itself. Yikes!

>>>

Well, it’s almost noon. I seem to still be home, and not at work. So before lunch, I’ll go out and get wood for the backup generator. Water the vegetables. It’s good to do actual physical work that accomplishes something. Especially now, when... well, I don’t exactly know when.

I’ve always hated the idea of exercising, pumping iron and spinning, all those joules going to waste. Now, feeding the generator, pumping up the batteries, taking care of the garden, it’s not exactly fun, but it’s good.

How odd, that it’s all down to this, in my high-tech modern world, hip, hot, sophisticated everything. Yet here, a sunny morning, clouds of unknowing, sunflowers glowing in the wind. I’m not sure who or when I am, sweating, not unhappy, chopping wood and carrying water.

But wait...