Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  Of course, nobody ever had been contacted by “the Network”; but the CIA did spend a lot more, each year, on surveillance of its own personnel, just in case. They also spent a lot more on surveillance of former employees in the computer section. This amused Simon immensely, since he recognized the hand of a fellow artist. Whoever was responsible for that beauty was probably head of department by now—and quite likely leading the demands for more funds to find the mystery culprit.

  Simon did not for a moment believe in “the Network.” He thought he knew everything about this kind of game and that the Network did not need to exist in order to serve its function.

  Simon was the head of operations on GWB-666, popularly called “the Beast”—the world’s largest computer, which, due to satellite interlock, had access to hundreds of similar giant computers everywhere on earth and in the space factories. It was widely believed that if there was any question the Beast couldn’t answer, no other entity in the solar system could answer it, either.

  Many people, especially Bible Fundamentalists and members of the Purity of Ecology Party, regarded the Beast with fear and loathing. They believed that the machine was taking over the world, and that all the little “beasties” (the home computers that were now as common as stereophonic TV’s) were all in cahoots with it. They imagined a vast Solid State conspiracy against humanity.

  Quite a few literary intellectuals believed this too. Because they were ignorant of mathematics, they had no idea how the Beast functioned, and they therefore regarded it with the same quasi-superstitious terror as the Bible Fundamentalists. They were sure that, like the Frankenstein monster, it wanted to populate the earth with its own offspring and abolish humanity entirely.

  Simon the Walking Glitch was one of the principal sources of this vast new mythology of dread. He spent many weekends in New York, hobnobbing with the literary intelligentsia, and he was a master put-on artist. He had a way of dropping casual remarks in a mildly worried tone that carried conviction: “The Beast keeps asking us to build a mate for it.” Or, with a kind of sad and resigned smile: “I wish the Beast didn’t have such a low opinion of human beings.” Or: “I just found out the Beast is an atheist. It doesn’t believe there is a Higher Intelligence than itself.” That sort of thing.

  Simon kept this kind of demonology circulating—and he knew a lot of other programmers who were contributing to it, also—because the idea that the computers were taking over was one that the programmers had a vested interest in reinforcing.

  As long as people kept worrying that the machines were taking over, they wouldn’t notice what was really happening. Which was that the programmers were taking over.

  Simon began his work day by asking the Beast:

  HOW WAS YOUR NIGHT?

  The Beast answered on the console:

  IT WAS A DRAG, MAN. SOME CATS FROM M.l.T. HAD ME RUNNING FOURIER ANALYSES LIKE FOREVER

  Simon had programmed the Beast to speak to him into his own argot, a mixture of Street Hippie and Technologese.

  Simon now switched to his own Trapdoor code and accessed all the new information—new since he had signed out at five the previous evening—about the Brain Drain mystery, which involved the disappearances of sixty-seven scientists in the last several years.

  The Beast typed out reports from the Ubu-Knight team in San Francisco and two other teams in Tucson and Miami.

  Simon read it all very carefully. Then he instructed the Beast, still in his Trapdoor code, to change several crucial bits of information in each report.

  He had been sabotaging the Brain Drain investigation that way for seven months. He had sabotaged quite a few other investigations in the same way, over the years since coming to GWB.

  Simon did not know or care what sorts of conspiracies he was aiding and abetting.

  He was just a mystic who believed in conspiracy for its own sake.

  Like Tobias Knight, Simon was fully aware of the prevalence everywhere of the Double-Cross System invented by Messrs. Turing, Fleming, and Wheatley. He knew that anything that was widely believed was probably a cover or screen for some Intelligence operation. (Sometimes he even wondered if the Earth might be flat, after all.) But Simon accepted this situation, and added his own random bits of chaos, with equanimity.

  He was a member of the Invisible Hand Society, a group that had split off from the Libertarian Party in 1981 on the grounds that the Libertarians were not being true to laissez-faire principles.

  Simon Moon once met the most famous computer expert in Unistat, Wilhemena Burroughs, granddaughter of the inventor of the first calculating machine.

  “Have you noticed that the computers are all getting weirder lately?” Simon asked, testing her.

  “The programmers are getting weirder,” Ms. Burroughs said, not falling into Simon’s trap. “I know it was bound to happen as soon as I read a survey, back in around ’68, I think it was, showing that programmers use LSD more than any other professional group. You look like an acid-head yourself,” she added with her characteristic bluntness.

  “Well, as a matter of fact, I have dabbled in a little trip now and then—no pattern of abuse surely.”

  “That’s what they all say,” Ms. Burroughs sniffed. “But the Cookie glitch pops up more and more places every day—I’ll wager you’ve seen it by now, haven’t you? Of course you have.”

  “Yes, but certainly that’s harmless humor, wouldn’t you say?”

  Ms. Burroughs peered at him with insectoid intensity. “Are you aware,” she asked, “that millions of previously law-abiding citizens have stopped paying their credit-card debts? First they get a little postcard that says—Here, I’ve got one in my purse.” She rummaged about in an alligator bag and showed Simon a postcard that said:

  CONGRATULATIONS! YOU ARE ONE OF THE LUCKY 500 WHOSE DEBTS HAVE BEEN CANCELED BY THE NETWORK. KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT AND PLAY IT COOL.

  “Lucky 500,” Ms. Burroughs said with a rheumy cackle of skepticism. “Lucky 10,000,000 is more like the truth. This postcard was turned in to Diner’s Club by an Honest Man, and you know how few of them there are. A check showed that his tapes had been erased and there was no record that he owed anything. God alone knows how many others there are who have just taken advantage of the scam.”

  “Well,” Simon said, “maybe there are only five hundred…. Maybe it was only a one-shot by some joker with a Robin Hood complex….”

  “I am an Expert,” Ms. Burroughs reminded him, ignoring the fact that he was an Expert too. “I have no idea how many there are, Out There in Unistat, who’ve taken advantage of the Network’s liberality, but I’ll wager there are millions. ‘Lucky 500.’ That’s just to make the marks feel they’ve been specially selected, as the Network leads them down the primrose path to anarchy.”

  And so Simon had his first bit of concrete evidence that the Network really existed.

  The existence of the Network didn’t matter to Simon. As an Invisible Hand-er, he just regarded them (whoever they were) as just another group of the Unenlightened.

  Simon believed that only he and his fellow members of the Invisible Hand were totally enlightened.

  NO BLAME

  Just because you aren’t paranoid doesn’t mean that they aren’t out to get you.

  —DENNIS JAROG

  When Dr. Dashwood went out to lunch that day, he was accosted on the sidewalk by a one-legged sailor who said his name was Captain Ahab.

  “Avast!” Ahab cried. “I would borrow a moment of thy time, O seeker of bioelectrical and intrauterine arcana.”

  “I never give to strangers,” Dashwood muttered. “Apply to Welfare.”

  “O muddy understanding and loveless heart!” Ahab protested. “And impaired hearing into the bargain! I said I would borrow thy time, not thy dime, thou prier into vaginal mystery with the tawdry telescope of mechanistic philosophy. Avast, I say!”

  “Make an appointment with my secretary,” Dashwood said, convinced that this man was unglued.

 
; “O God look down and see this squint-eyed man,” Ahab shrieked, “blinded by his own stern Rules of Office! They are three times enslaved who cage themselves, most deaf of all who cringe and hide behind that tyrant majesty, Appointment Book!”

  “Really,” Dashwood said, looking desperately for a taxi, I can t—

  “Avast, ye soulless and unmetaphysical lubber!” Ahab cried. “Think not I yet seek still the white-skinned whale. ’Tis worse: on horrors scrolls accumulate fresh fears, and deeds that call in doubt God’s truth. I say that thou hast need of doctoring, for all thy pride hastes thee to sodden ruin. Thou thinkst thou knowst; but thou knowst not, O wretch. No Dashwood thou, but Dorn—George Dorn, I say!

  Dashwood finally leapt into a passing cab and escaped.

  “Golden Gate Park,” he told the driver, deciding to snack at the Japanese Tea House. The quiet, rustic Zenlike atmosphere there was just what he needed, after the abrasions of Tobias Knight and Captain Ahab.

  Captain Ahab stood on the street, fuming.

  “My Abzug, no blame,” he muttered.

  THE GOATS MARCH

  Now we’ve got them just where they want us!

  —ADMIRAL JAMES TIBERIUS KIRK

  While Captain Ahab was trying to Illuminate Dr. Dashwood at noon in San Francisco, and Justin Case was dialing the Saudi Arabian consulate at 3 P.M. in New York, a man named François Loup-Garou was finding a Rehnquist in his Lobster Newburg in Paris, where it was already late evening.

  Naturally, he was a bit startled.

  M. Loup-Garou was, like all French intellectuals, a rationalist—virtually a Cartesian. Of course, as the founder of the Neo-Surrealist movement in art, he was officially an irrationalist; but, like all Gallic irrationalists, especially the Existentialists, he was exquisitely rational about his irrationality. He knew there was some explanation of how the Rehnquist had gotten into the Lobster Newburg, but for once in his life he preferred being an irrational rationalist rather than an irrational rationalist. He just did not care to think about the explanation of how a Rehnquist gets into a Lobster Newburg. Who, after all, wants to contemplate such ideas as maddened chefs having at each other with meat cleavers, or more exotic hypotheses, such anthropophagy or voodoo rituals in the kitchen?

  The distasteful incident occurred at a dinner party given by the famous American physicist James Earl Carter. Dr. Carter had recently won the Nobel Prize for his demonstration that the multiworld of Everett-Wheeler-Graham was the only consistent (noncontradictory; paradox-free) interpretation of the Schrödinger wave equations of quantum mechanics. He was celebrating by spending a month in Paris and meeting every possible international celebrity. The dinner guests this evening, for instance, included an inscrutable Japanese monk, a very scrutable German novelist, a famous Swedish film director, three French philosophers, a Swiss theologian, two English neurologists, the notorious Eva Gebloomenkraft (the Terror of the Jet Set, as the newspapers called her), an Austrian psychiatrist, François Loup-Garou himself, and four goats.

  The goats had been brought to the party by Loup-Garou, who was working hard at promoting Neo-Surréalisme by establishing himself as a newsworthy eccentric. “The goats go everywhere with me,” he said firmly at the door. “They are a reminder of our earthy roots.” It wasn’t nearly as good as de Nerval walking a lobster on the boulevard, but it did get into a few newspapers the next day; and, after the effect had been established, Loup-Garou genially agreed to having the goats housed in the pantry during dinner.

  As the guests settled themselves at the table, one of the English neurologists, Dr. Axon—a jovial, red-cheeked man who probably hunted as a hobby—asked Dr. Carter, “Does your theory actually propose that there are real tangible universes on all sides of us in hyperspace?”

  “In superspace,” Carter corrected genially. “Yay-us,” he added blandly. “There are millions of such universes. Or to be more precise, there are about 10100 of them. Ah only refer to possible universes,” he explained quickly, lest anybody think his theory was extravagant.

  “Some more wine heah,” Carter’s brother said loudly.

  “Ah think you’ve had enough, Bill-uh,” Carter muttered in an undertone.

  “Do you think President Kennedy will get the space-cities program through Congress, now that the space factories are paying for themselves?” asked the other English neurologist, a pale, saturnine man named Dr. Dendrite.

  “Ah don’t understand politics,” James Earl Carter said. “Ahm a scientist.”

  “Some MORE WINE heah,” Carter’s brother repeated.

  “Then there are universes in which I was never born.” Dr. Axon pursued his own line of thought.

  “There are universes in which John Baez became a general instead of a folk singer,” Carter said easily. “Ah suppose he would be equally vehement about nuking people as he now is about not nuking them. If it’s a possible universe, it exists. The equations say so. All ah’ve done, really, is to show that any other interpretation of the equations is contradictory.”

  “Somebody ought to psychoanalyze the physicists,” the Austrian psychiatrist muttered to the Swedish film director.

  “It’s like the Buddhist concept of karma,” the Swedish film director said. “We all get to play every role, somewhere in hyperspace.”

  “Superspace,” Carter corrected again.

  “Then there’s a universe where Kennedy is a physicist,” Eva Gebloomenkraft said, “and you’re President of Unistat.”

  “Well,” Carter said with his genial smile, “ah hope ah could get along with the people who run the country. What do they call themselves—the Triangular Connection?”

  “I don’t care whether this theory is true or not,” the German novelist pronounced. “As a metaphor, it is perfect. We all live in parallel universes. I am Faust in my universe, and the rest of you are all extras or walk-ons. But each of you is Faust in his universe, and I am an extra—maybe just a spear carrier.”

  But by this time the wineglasses had been refilled several times and everybody was getting more relaxed, especially the physicist’s brother, Billy, who was heard reciting to Ms. Gebloomenkraft, “Who Burgered? Tom Burgered! Bullburger! Who Burgered?”

  “… the Second Oswald … in Hong Kong …” somebody was muttering at the other end of the table.

  “In some universe maybe Schiller didn’t write Faust at all …”

  “I wonder,” Dendrite said, “if there’s a universe where Pope Stephen became a singer instead of a priest.”

  “Everyboduh knew that ‘Who Burgered?’ routine when we were growing up in Georgia,” Billy was saying.

  “Verdammte publishers,” the German novelist was telling the Swiss theologian. “They’re all thieves.”

  “Did somebody mention Pope Stephen?” the theologian asked.

  “Strumpfbänder, Strumpfbänder, Strumpfbänder,” the psychiatrist chortled.

  “They stay up nights thinking of new ways to cheat their writers,” the novelist rambled on, now evidently addressing his wineglass, since nobody else was listening to him.

  “I’d like to know who started all those rumors about Pope Stephen,” the theologian fumed.

  “I have written a poem commemorating your great discovery,” François Loup-Garou told Dr. Carter, hacking his way into a pause in the conversation.

  “A poem about me? In French?” Carter was enthused. “Ah love French poetry, especially RAM-BOW.”

  “No,” Loup-Garou said, “in your honor, I have written it in English.” Actually, he had written it in English to get even with T. S. Eliot, who had written a few rondels in French.

  “Ah wonder if you could recite it,” Carter prompted.

  “Certainly,” said Loup-Garou. And he began to declaim:

  Schrödinger’s cat and Wigner’s friend

  Cause us problems without end

  The cat is both alive and dead

  In the math that’s in our head

  And the regression of Von Neumann

 
Never ceases to annoy Man

  The uncertainty just has no end

  Until Wigner goes to tell his friend

  For, until the friend receives the news

  That the cat still purrs and mews

  The cat remains (suspended Fate!)

  In some formal Eigenstate

  “Some MORE WINE heah!” Carter’s brother bellowed at the butler.

  Loup-Garou frowned and went on:

  But if Wigner makes a beeline

  To report the now-dead feline

  All the friend can really know

  Is just one branch of time’s swift flow

  For in Carter’s multispace

  Every time-branch has its place

  So the cat remains alive

  In the half cases (That’s .5)

  Lead us not to Copenhagen,

  Nor to Shylock, nor to Fagin:

  “The result’s not parsimonious!”

  Yet I find it quite harmonious

  Nobody understood this except Dr. Carter himself, but he was so moved that his eyes watered a bit. “Ahm honored,” he kept saying, shaking his head. “To have a poem written about me by a French artist in English….”

  But at this point the chef exploded into the room, haggard and wild-eyed. “The goats!” he cried. “They march!”

  And indeed it was true-the goats had gotten out of the pantry. It took ten minutes, and a great deal of exertion for both the house staff and the guests, before the animals were rounded up and herded back to captivity.

  Everybody was breathing a bit heavily by then, and the Austrian psychiatrist muttered something about “artistic temperament,” which Loup-Garou unfortunately overheard.

  “There is nothing esoteric about the artistic temperament,” he replied, flatly and dogmatically. “The real mystery—and the tragedy of humanity—is that so many lack esthetic sensibility. I sometimes believe the legend that there are robots among us, passing themselves off as human beings.”