I continued to watch, however, as my body fell, head blown almost off, into the lime pit. The strangest part of it was that I couldn’t quite make out where I was watching it all from. It seemed as though I were seeing the same thing from several different angles simultaneously—multiple views of the same incident, like looking at a Cubist painting. But where was the singular “I” who was doing this multiple observing? That was a question that crossed my mind, but that I had neither time nor inclination to explore at that moment.
The scene began to fade as I watched. The last thing I saw was my own body sinking gently into the corrosive whiteness that would soon absorb every last trace of its existence.
Yet what, not only where, was this “I” that watched? Instinctively I looked down to where my body should have been—and found it there. In one piece. I was myself again. I could see my hands, my feet, and I noticed I was still wearing the clothes I’d had on just now when I was thrown into the lime pit. All quite impossible, of course, but that’s what I saw.
At the same time I became aware that the scene I’d been watching, the scene of my own death, had started to fade into a kind of darkness that was closing in around it. Now another area began to lighten somewhat, enough to show me that I was in some kind of tunnel. I was moving through it, with no effort on my part, toward a light at the far end.
Pretty standard fare, I thought. Tunnels with light at the end were familiar images from all the descriptions of near-death experiences I’d ever read, though I still had no doubt that what I was going through was a real and not any kind of “near” experience of death.
Interestingly, that knowledge provoked neither fear nor anxiety in me. It left me feeling as though I’d been given one of those shots you get before local surgery, when you are perfectly aware that something very peculiar is being done to some part of your anatomy, but it doesn’t worry you in the slightest. I found myself casting a curious glance over the walls of the tunnel I was traveling through. At first I had thought they were of stone, but now they seemed to be of a softer, almost fleshy substance. The notion flashed into my mind that I was traveling through one of my own arteries, though I knew that the more likely explanation was that I was remembering the trauma of birth. That, so far as I had always understood it, was where the tunnel motif in death came from, neatly wrapping up our human life span at both ends.
Quite suddenly, but without any jolt or sense of dislocation, and well before I had reached what appeared to be the end of the tunnel, I found myself out of it and standing in what looked like a vast medieval hall or perhaps anteroom to an even greater hall. The floor and walls were of stone—real stone this time—and the ceiling was high and vaulted. Tall windows threw diagonal slabs of light across the scene, illuminating a scattering of different figures, all in period costume, mostly alone, some conferring. On the far side of the room one of them turned in my direction and made a gracious gesture inviting me to approach a door beside which he was standing. I started toward him, finding myself walking quite normally. Nobody paid me the slightest attention despite the oddness of my dress in these surroundings. The man bowed as I approached and held open the door for me to go through.
I stepped out into what I at first supposed was a garden, but quickly realized was something more. The gentle rolling landscape was made not of earth and grass but of a soft cloudlike substance. In some strange way it seemed to crystallize here and there to form the shape of a tree, or some delicately woven gazebolike structure, while in the distance it dissolved into an impressionistic rainbow-hued landscape of indescribable beauty. Above it all hung a great dome of porcelain-blue sky, patterned here and there by clouds of pure whiteness.
Scattered throughout the scene were figures walking or conferring in groups of twos or threes, much as they had been in the room I had just left, except that here they all wore white garments that hung in casually elegant folds. I turned around, taking it all in, and to my amazement found that the door I had just stepped through was no longer there. Nor was there a wall or any other sign of the building that might have housed the great room I had just left. It was as if I had materialized out of nowhere on that spot.
I looked down at my feet, which I now saw were bare, and I was wearing the same kind of white smock or robe that everyone else had on. But it was not the suddenness of the change nor the unseen sleight of hand by which it was effected that took my breath away. The thing that did that was the sight of what I was standing on—or, rather, not standing on.
When I looked down, I saw only space beneath my feet. Space that turned a darker shade of blue as it receded, until it formed a deep and distant cobalt, with a darkness at the center that was more than black: It was the absence of even the possibility of light.
It was then I realized that, to all intents and purposes, I was in every child’s, and for that matter every cartoonist’s, notion of Heaven. Which meant I had to be mad. Or hallucinating. Or something. But for the moment all I could do was throw back my head and roar with laughter.
“It’s all right, don’t be alarmed. We’re talking you down.”
I couldn’t tell where the voice had come from. There was nobody anywhere near me, and yet it seemed so close it could almost have been in my head. Which is perhaps where it was. Which would make it just another aspect of the whole crazy episode of madness I was going through.
“George, look up—to your right.”
I did so. That was when hysteria took over. I found myself looking up at a massive figure sitting on a huge throne. If you’ve ever looked up at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., you’ll know what I’m talking about. Except that, unlike Abe Lincoln, this figure wore long white robes and had a white beard, and bore an open book on his head, balanced, facedown, as though he’d just put it there to protect himself from a sudden rain shower. It was this that was the cause of my mirth, because I remembered, as a small child, how this had been my first conception of God.
So that’s how it was: Your whole life really did flash before you. Though I had to admit it seemed less like a flash than a leisurely procession in my case. That was my first real taste of the fact that time had lost its meaning.
“Just let yourself fall back on everything you’ve ever been, George. You don’t have to remember all the details, not all at once. You’ll be able to recall any part of it when you need. Your life hasn’t gone away. It’s just going to be different, for a while.”
“For a while… ?”
I had spoken the words aloud, and the sound of my own voice made me jump. I looked around for whoever it was I had been speaking to. It wasn’t “God,” because He had vanished.
Which should probably be pronounced vanished,I thought, and giggled—once again aloud.
“It’s okay, George, everything’s fine. Why don’t you just come over here?”
Turning in the direction that “over here” for some reason suggested to me, though I could not think why, I saw a small rectangle of silvery light in the midst of a vast gray blue nothingness. Once again all concrete reality had faded, and I was in some womblike space created from a kind of wispily intangible ectoplasm. When I walked toward the bidden rectangle of light, I experienced the physical sensation of crossing a floor, feeling a hard surface beneath my feet, though in relation to my surroundings I had no sense of movement at all. Yet I saw, after only a few steps, that the rectangle had grown larger and therefore by implication closer. Suddenly, though again without any sense of shock or loss of equilibrium, my surroundings underwent another instantaneous transformation.
I found myself this time in a bare, functional office. It had one window over which a blind was pulled, a door, and no furniture other than a chair and a table on which sat a computer. The computer screen, I now realized, was the silvery rectangle I had been moving toward. On it I now saw the image of someone—a man—looking out at me.
“Hi,” he said. “My name’s Dave. We need to talk.”
Chapter 33
I d
on’t know how long I sat in front of that screen. As I had already observed, time seemed to have lost its sense of urgency.
Dave explained the situation with admirable clarity. I was not dead. I was caught up in what he called “a loop.” He told me about the quantum computer that had generated my world, and how it worked on the principle of the “many worlds” theory, with reality splitting off into endless variations of itself at every quantum branch—parallel universes, as they were generally called. Coincidences were the points at which these different universes touched. They were usually unimportant, though sometimes dramatic for the people involved. But if you began to pay unusually close attention to them, thereby introducing your own consciousness into these quantum events, as I had done, then strange things tended to happen.
“You can wind up unpicking the fabric of your own reality,” he said, giving me the line that I later embellished and used on Larry.
He went on to explain how Larry and I were two characters made out of the same bit of program but kept safely apart in our different worlds—until I started playing with synchronicity.
“Let me just be sure I’ve got the logic of this,” I said.”I drew Larry into my world, not myself into his.”
“That is correct.”
“And he took my place in my world.”
“Right.”
“So what’s happening in his world right now? Is there just a hole where he should be?”
“In his world he’s dead. Killed by the guys who blew your head off. In his world it was his head, and his body that was dumped in the lime pit.”
“I’m getting a little confused,” I said.”Was he murdered in his world, or was it me?”
“He was murdered in his world.”
“But I was murdered in my world, in his place.”
“Correct.”
“So what am I doing here? Why aren’t I dead?”
My view of Dave on the screen was basically just his head and chest, but as I watched he shifted his position and reached behind him to scratch the buttock on which his weight had previously been resting.
“That’s a little tricky. It’s to do with formal logic, which still applies on one level even in a quantum computer…”
As he droned on, I nodded thoughtfully from time to time to signal some kind of understanding, however abstract, of his words. There was what looked like a fiberoptic camera at the top of the screen on which I assumed he was watching me from wherever he was. To be honest, everything he said made perfect sense, and yet was meaningless. Because I had nothing to test it by. I was in limbo.
The one thing he’d said that had stayed in my mind as some kind of beacon of sanity was his original remark about “talking me down.” This, I told myself, is just the way you would talk down someone like me—talk them down from the staggering discovery that life continues unbroken after death. This is the sort of way you would choose, in the circumstances, to talk down a skeptical science writer—skeptical about everything, including “official” science’s blanket dismissal of all methods and philosophies that fell outside its limited perspective. This was the way you would talk down such a person after death: by the use of these metaphors. I had little doubt that was the proper way to regard them—as metaphors. I remember thinking that everybody probably got their own individual metaphors for the purpose—whichever were appropriate, given their personal interests and preoccupations.
“So what now?” I asked. “You’ve described how this has happened. What are we going to do about it? Are we going to do anything? Or is this just the status quo from now on?”
“No, it’s not the status quo. We have to take care of the problem that brought you here.”
“My being murdered?”
“The loop. Your character is looped with Larry’s. You’re going to go on running around each other indefinitely, with whatever minor variations the computer can throw in each time. But nothing will really change. You’ll never break out. You’re locked in.”
“And what will that mean—being locked in?”
“In a sense it means you’ll go mad. Only it’s worse than mad, because there’s no time, which means you can’t ever die. The most you can hope for is that our funding runs out and my supervisor pulls the plug on the whole program.”
This brought me up sharply.
“You’re having funding problems?” I asked, immediately wondering why I was so surprised by the idea. It was the last thing I’d expected to hear, yet when I thought about it in the context of everything else he’d been saying it made sense—of a kind.
Dave’s image on the screen looked flustered for a second, as though he’d said more than he should. “Don’t worry about it. I’m pretty sure we’re going to get renewed for another year—and a year in our time hasn’t got anything to do with a year in your time. And even if they pull the plugs you won’t feel anything. You’ll just never have existed. But what I’m saying is, as long as you do exist, we have to iron out this glitch. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, “I guess. So what happens? Do I get to kill him next time around?”
He looked faintly disapproving at this suggestion, as though I wasn’t taking the situation seriously enough. “It doesn’t work like that,” he said.
“How does it work?”
He thought a moment, as though searching for the best way to express whatever he was trying to say. It didn’t look easy.
“Listen,” I said, in an effort to be helpful though still unsure quite what my role was, “is this the only way we can communicate? Through this screen? Is there no way we can talk face-to-face?”
“Sure there is. I just figured we should take things kind of gradually. But if that’s what you want, why don’t you step through that door in front of you?”
“Okay.”
I got to my feet, moved around the table and across to the door that I had noticed when I came in—or, more accurately, when I had materialized there. As I turned the handie, I already knew from experience that it wasn’t going to be like going from one room to another, or stepping out of a building into the fresh air. I would be going from one state of being to another. This time I was ready for it.
In fact it was not a very dramatic change. I found myself in the middle of a relatively modern campus. It made me think of Pepperdine in California, or Berkeley, though it wasn’t entirely either. Dave was waiting for me, leaning against the low wall surrounding an ornamental fountain. He held out his hand, and I took it a little hesitantly, not knowing what to expect. It felt absolutely real.
“George, it’s a pleasure,” he said, “a real pleasure.”
“Thanks,” I said lamely, not knowing what else to say. “Where are we?” I asked, looking around at the open spaces and the long, fluid buildings beyond them.
“Oh, just some place.” Dave shrugged. “Nowhere special.”
I looked at the students coming and going in all directions, some hurrying purposefully, others with all the time in the world, just like on any campus I’d ever been on.
“Can these kids see me?” I asked as a group walked right by us, talking and laughing among themselves.
“You don’t get it yet, do you, George? There’s nobody here. There’s not even me, or you. There’s no ‘here.’ There are no colors, tastes, smells, or sounds. It’s all just information. Part of the program.”
I looked at him. “But there is a real you somewhere, isn’t there?”
He thought a moment before saying, almost reluctantly, “Yes, sort of.”
“What d’you mean sort of?”
“Well, to be absolutely frank with you, we’re not even sure that we ourselves aren’t part of a computer program in somebody else’s world, the same way you are in ours. All the same signs are there. Nobody’s ever gotten to the bottom of this question, and probably nobody ever will. Maybe it just goes on forever, like Chinese boxes or Russian dolls. And in the end it doesn’t matter much. You are where you are, and that’s all you’ve got. And it’s
the same for us.”
It wasn’t a view I found either appealing or encouraging. As I thought about it I glanced down and noticed that once again I was wearing the same clothes, Larry’s clothes, that I’d had on when I was kidnapped and killed. By now I was getting so used to these surreal quick changes that I didn’t even react.
“Okay,” I said, “so where do we go from here?”
“We go back and we unpick this thing.”
“You mean back to where Larry and I met this morning?”
He shook his head. “I was trying to tell you—it doesn’t work that way. I know it feels to you like no time has passed, but quite a lot of time has passed in the world you left.”
“How come?”
He screwed up his face as though searching once again for a way to explain an unusually complex matter. “There are factors governing these things that we can do nothing about.”
“Like what?”
He gave a shrug that lengthened out into a squirm of deep unease. Either he didn’t know the answer to that question, or the answer was impossible to put into terms that I would understand. “It’s to do with probability,” he said eventually. “Certain things have got to happen before we can go back. They will. They must. But we have to let them.”
“Certain what?” I asked, then hazarded a guess. “Coincidences?”
“Yeah, basically.” He looked at me as though mildly surprised by my perspicacity.
“Hey,” I said, “not a tough call, given the circumstances.”
“You’re right,” he said, and chuckled softly. Then he frowned, serious again. “Why don’t we take a walk,” he said. “There’s some stuff you need to know about before we do anything else. I have to warn you, you may not like it.”
Coincidence Page 17