12 There was a squealing of tires on tarmac and a sickening bounce as we touched down at Tucson International Airport, followed by the usual shambling out of the plane and long wait at the baggage carousel. Mark was waiting for me when I ��nally emerged into the desert heat. He took one of my suitcases as we walked out towards his car. “Pretty heavy! What’s in here?” “Notebooks.” “Notebooks?” “Yeah. My psychologist said it’d help if I kept a journal.” “A journal? It feels like you’re writing an encyclopedia.” “Twelve hundred pages, more or less, in eighteen notebooks. It’s pretty much all I was doing this whole time.” He laughed. “At least it seems like it kept you busy.” Sweat seeped into my shirt and underclothes, and my tread felt sof� and sticky, almost as if my shoes were melting on the asphalt. Why did they always make air conditioning so cold that you had to wear a jacket? And taking it o�f didn’t make sense just for a walk across a parking lot. Thankfully, my disgruntled thoughts were interrupted by Mark halting beside one of the cars. It was bright green, and one of the new electric ones with the solar-paneled roofs. He grunted as he heaved my luggage into the back, then gestured for me to get in. “Where’s Liz?” I asked as we set o�f into the city. “She had some kind of department social.” The ��at landscape rolled by, all shrubs and little trees and short buildings. Mountains shimmered in the distance. “To be honest, I don’t think it’s important. I think she just doesn’t really want to see you again. She’s still unhappy that I took part in those experiments, and you’d remind her of that.” “I see.” There wasn’t really much else to say. 13 “If I’m being really honest, I’m not even sure that I wanted to see you. You being here, alive. It creeps me out.” I laughed. “I can see why. Well, thanks for meeting me anyway.” “It was the least I could do, even if it feels like sitting next to a ghost.” “That’s funny, I could say the same about you, you know. You’re one- in-two-to-the-��f�y-thousandth of the Mark who went away back then. ‘You’ are almost entirely experiencing other realities, where I’m dead.” “Well, I feel pretty damn real.” He pulled the car into a sharp turn. “You know, at ��rst I thought you might have gotten cold feet, and that was why you didn’t die. Then you published that phage-therapy paper, and it all fell apart. I read that stupid thing a hundred times over, trying to ��gure out how you could’ve done it without the Oracle.” “I did use the Oracle, so good luck with that.” “That’s just it! There’s no way to get that kind of data without the Oracle, and there’s no way you could’ve used the Oracle without being immediately killed. So what possibilities are lef�, then? That I’m halluci- nating or something?” “Maybe. I mean, from your point of view it’s just a simple application of Bayes’ theorem...” “I know. Math proves that I’m insane, and all I can do is to go along with it all. Here we are.” We pulled up in front of a low, wide, brick build- ing decorated in a pleasant southwestern style. “My little oasis. They’ve given me almost an entire wing.” Mark gave me a short tour of the department, where, through care- ful use of his newfound wealth and reputation, he’d conjured up a world- class physics laboratory in record time: row upon row of fancy equipment humming away, poster presentations lining the walls, students scurrying about or sitting before glowing monitors. But there was a chill to the air that manifested whenever we entered a room. The students always fell 14 silent and looked warily ��rst at me, then at each other. Some short intro- ductions were made, but the mood did not lighten,“Nice to meet you” was just about all anybody said. “What do you think?” Mark asked as we lef�. “I couldn’t have built that lab without you.” “They’re afraid of me.” He shrugged as he started the car, which blinked on with a sof� whirr. “They’re just a little nervous talking to you. They heard about what hap- pened back in Boston.” “Ah yes, the legend of Andrew Ellenberg, star scientist gone mad.” “I told them you were feeling better now, but you can’t blame them for being a little skittish at ��rst.” “I’m not feeling better.” “Well what the fuck was I supposed to tell them? That you’re planning to kill yourself?” His knuckles whitened. “By the way, I’m going to talk you out of that.” “You didn’t object when you lef� last year.” “That was di�ferent. You were doing it to accomplish something. I thought, and you thought, that you’d be happy at the end of it all. I’d have never let you go on if I knew it’d be like this.” “And you think I should continue to be like this?” “Absolutely not. But I don’t think making the same damn mistake all over again is the answer.” “Sometimes the way you come in is the only way out again.” “Hmpf. We’ll see af�er I’ve cheered you up with some dinner. We’re going to a little Mexican place I found.” Dinner was a quiet a�fair, and I enjoyed a nice tostada despite myself. It was too crowded for us to talk about my decision—nobody wants to over- 15 hear the word suicide at dinner—so we passed the time discussing Mark’s new research and catching me up on his life with Liz. The drive back to Mark’s place was silent, save for the whoosh of pass- ing cars. It was a sprawling villa, made in the Spanish style. Mark sat me down at a picnic table in the cactus garden, and went in to get drinks. “Will Liz be here?” I asked as he returned with my gin and tonic. “No, I told her to go out for the evening so we could discuss things in private. We’ll probably be asleep by the time she gets back.” He pulled a few rumpled sheets of paper out of his pocket and sat down. “Why’d you write a letter, anyway? It’s the twenty-��rst century, you know. There is such a thing as email.” “I thought it best to keep all our communication o�f the record. It’ll make it easier for you when I, uh, move on.” He sni�fed. “Very considerate. Andy, explain again what the hell you’re thinking?” “I told you, it’s the only way out.” “How so? It’s not even possible to really kill yourself from your per- spective. You’ll just end up back here with even worse guilt.” “What about the fundamental constants of the universe?” “What?” “Your own research! With Li-Ling Zhang and those astrophysicists from U Penn. Showing that the laws of physics can change.” “I... give me a moment.” He picked up his glass and stared into the depths of his bourbon. “What if those changes were a random process? Themselves di�ferent in di�ferent realities?” “That’s all speculation, Andy. We only showed that the gravitational constant changed slightly, some time in the past nine billion years. We have no idea how or why it happened.” 16 “Speculation is all I’ve got. Suppose I’m right though, and I set things up so death is guaranteed. No two-to-the-negative-thousand bullshit, I’m talking layers of exponents.” “You’re going to intentionally cause a wild event?” “Yes. The wilder the better. The less recognizable the world is af�er- wards, the better. No Julia Andersen, no Mark DeBruijn, no Andrew Ellenberg—I’d become someone else, something else, entirely. I might even get the laws of physics to change.” He stared. “Your main regret is hurting Julia with your experiments. Isn’t this just going to put her—the Julia of this reality, I mean—through exactly the same thing?” “Compared to what I already did, it’s nothing. It would take a million digits just to write down the di�ference between the two. I just want out. No memory. No guilt.” “Listen, Andy, I’ve already told you that impossible or not impossible, I still feel real. Julia still feels real. What’s past is past. She’s the only Julia you’ve got now.” I shook my head. “I can’t even look at her without having a break- down. She could never be happy around me like that. There is no point in my sticking around, miserable, making everyone around me miserable. I can’t work. I can’t be with her. I have to move on, even if it means I end up as a dung beetle or something.” The setting sun cast the land and houses and trees in shades of orange. The ice in my gin and tonic had melted already, but it still a�forded me a moment of coolness amidst the desert air, which remained hot despite the late hour and the breeze which rustled the palm leaves. Mark broke the silence. “A wild event is a scary thing, isn’t it? No telling what kind of world you’ll end up in.” 17 I shrugged. “It’s unavoidable. Without wild events, death is guaran- teed. Since death is impossible, a wild event will have to happen sooner or later. It’s not a question of sticking around here versus gambling on the unknown; it’s whether I’d like to stick around for ��f�y more years or so, or just get on with it.” He nodded slowly. “I see the logic, but it doesn’t feel right to me. Don’t forget, I did all those experiments with you, and I’m not beating myself up over it. Even if you put together every possible branch starting from the day you were born, it would be nothing, proportionally speak- ing. The universe has been branching since the beginning of time. There’s only one reality around me now, and I intend to make the most of it.” “So why not just keep using the Oracle if that’s how you feel? There’ll always only be one reality around you.” “The same reason I quit last year. Liz.” “But don’t you see? Imagine how terrible it would feel if you played a trick like that on Liz. That’s exactly how I feel about Julia. My view of the matter is not that di�ferent from yours.” He sighed a long, drawn-out sigh that seemed to go on and on. “I still hope you’ll change your mind. Whatever e�fects your past actions had on other branches, there are many people here who are very grateful for the work you did on phage therapy. Are they less real than Julia was two years ago?” He gulped the last of his bourbon and brought the glass down on the table. “Anyway, if you didn’t want to discuss it and weren’t open to changing your mind, why did you come here?” “To give you the notebooks. It’s not just a journal, it’s a memoir of everything we did. You’re the only one who can understand what I wrote. Maybe someday you can even explain it all to Julia.” “Maybe,” he said. He didn’t seem convinced.
Enter the password to open this PDF file:
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-