by John Barnes
“I wish I knew that too,” Iphwin said. “Maybe it’s just against the rules, and the rules are being made up by someone of whom we have no knowledge. More likely they are afraid of damage to the place where we are going, and so they want to get rid of us in the way that spills the least stray energy. Or it could be something none of us has thought of.”
“It could often be that, at that,” Paula said cheerfully. “Do we have a plan for anything besides ‘walk up and pound on the front door’?”
“The front door sounds good to me,” Iphwin said. He really did look absolutely splendid in the suit, more so because the four of us were in our dirty, worn road clothes. “Least likely to be misunderstood and most likely to produce a result we’ll understand, eh?”
We were halfway up the steps when we heard “Don’t move a muscle” in a too-familiar voice.
I glanced back and saw a dozen copies of Billie Beard, all holding shotguns. “We’re glad we stopped you here. Cooperate and we won’t need to hurt you, don’t cooperate and we’ll cut you in half with all the shotgun blasts.”
Iphwin raised his hands and said, “Looks like it’s your game.”
Without replying, the dozen Billie Beards marched us over to the blank wall of the building and lined us up against the wall. Iphwin began to laugh, something we’d never heard him do before. “What’s funny?” Beard demanded.
We were inside the building, facing the outside wall—in mirror image to the lineup we had been in. Through the soundproofing we heard the muffled sput-thud, sput-thud of guns being fired point-blank into the wall.
“Some of those shots will get through sooner or later,” Iphwin said, “or they might remember that the front door is unlocked, so let’s get deeper into the building before they find a way in.”
We hurried down a corridor beside us; it might have been part of any administrative or technical building of the last 150 years, with CBS block walls painted landlord yellow on the lower part and pale blue on the upper; a black stripe separated the two colors at shoulder height. No doubt some architect somewhere had gotten a pile of money for deciding on that design.
A few minutes of dashing around corners and down corridors, always going up every flight of stairs, past frosted glass windows on doors, and big square wooden doors with numbers on them, was at least enough to get me lost, and to get all the noise of the attack on the wall outside out of earshot. We slowed to a brisk walk, and began to look for any signs or building guides that might give us a clue.
“How did you do that?” I asked Iphwin.
“Practice,” he said. “One reason why you didn’t get pursued much, till you got up here, was that everyone was chasing me, and one reason they were chasing me was because I was keeping in continuous radio contact with the cyberphage. I learned a very large number of very useful things. Not all of which I can explain or show you in the time we have left. Let’s get going—time is precious.”
To our surprise, the first sign we saw said “TO THE OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY.”
“Pretty strange,” I said.
“That a secretary gets a sign?” Terri asked.
I couldn’t help smiling. “Bet you didn’t review your American history recently. A ‘secretary’ in the American government was about what a cabinet minister is anywhere else. That’s the head honcho’s office, not where the typist lives.”
“I know that,” she said, her voice dripping with the kind of contempt that you can only get from an adolescent who has been told something she already knows. “What’s weird about there being a sign for the secretary’s office, in the building of the department he’s the head of?”
“What’s weird,” I said, “is that normally a cabinet secretary would have an office in Washington, and not in Santa Fe. It’s also weird that we found exactly what we were looking for this quickly.”
Paula looked at Iphwin, and he shrugged. “Pure chance plays a role, all the time, no matter what,” he pointed out. “It isn’t really so odd that every so often, even a creature of chance like me can just happen to be lucky.”
We found the door a few minutes later. The glass in the window broke readily enough when Jesús and I swung a small microwave oven from a break room like a battering ram. We turned the knob on the inside, walked past a receptionist’s desk, and found ourselves standing on thick, plush blue wall-to-wall carpet that seemed still to be brand-new; a faint odor of synthetics still hung in the air, indicating that the room had been closed all that time.
On the desk was an old-fashioned VR headset, and the chair was tipped back; there was a pricey pair of black wing tip shoes, at least forty years old, sitting on the carpet under the desk, next to two balled-up socks.
Iphwin shrugged, checked, and said, “The batteries on these computers were lifetime guaranteed, but I don’t think anyone ever thought a computer would have a lifetime like this. Let’s see what happens if we turn it on.”
Nothing did. We started to paw through the file cabinets.
“Here’s a specification,” Paula said. “For a national happiness policy.”
We sat down and pored over it, everyone looking closely. “At least in neurology, this world was ahead of the ones I grew up in,” I said. “Look at this. They have a really, really elaborate spec on the human brain. When they say they’re out to maximize human happiness, they are really not kidding. They know just what it is, it’s a brain state, and this is the program that’s going to make sure that while people are plugged into VR, their happiness gets maximized.”
“Shit,” Jesús said, “they must have made VR the most addictive drug in history—in fact, technically speaking, the most addictive drug possible. No wonder they all disappeared. They must have starved to death—”
“But we never found a body or a skeleton,” Paula pointed out. “Except for that one child who was too young to have a headset on.”
“What’s the ‘happiness algorithm’ define happiness as?” Iphwin asked quietly.
“I don’t read brain science much,” I said.
He grabbed it, looked at it, and appeared to think deeply for a moment. “Oh, dear,” he said. “Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear.”
* * * *
“How long does it take to do things in the cottage?” I asked.
“In here, what it looks like,” Jeff the mailman said. “Out there, about a microsecond per day. But it’s different this time; I don’t have to create a job for you, so I don’t have to ride back and forth to town every day.”
“Does everybody have a satisfactory breakfast?” I asked, because I had plenty left on the stove. I wasn’t used to cooking for five, and had overshot somewhat.
“Are you this good a cook in the real world?” Terri asked. “Because if you are, I nominate you for cook, forever.”
“Hunger’s the best sauce,” I said, “and in this scenario, we’re all hungry. Dawn fishing will do that. How’s yours, Jesús?”
I took the grunt and the vigorous nodding of his head as approval.
“Anyway, Jeff, or Iphwin, or whichever you’d rather be while we’re here,” I said, “back in the real world, you were saying ‘Oh, dear,’ over and over. Or I guess your embodied version was. He must have called you up, and plugged us all into this interface. Are all those Billie Beards on their way to the office where our physical bodies are?”
“They sure are. I would estimate they will reach the office in two or three minutes. But with a million-to-one time ratio, we could stay here and take a long vacation for a few centuries, without pushing our luck, eh? Does anyone need time to relax before we get down to business?”
It was universally agreed that we didn’t, but it also seemed to be agreed that I should make up seconds for everyone.
“Well, then,” Iphwin said, “here’s what happened to America—or rather to all the Americans who were in America, in so many timelines. Around the early 2000s—anywhere from 1994 to 2022, depending on exactly which event sequence you were in—the Americans found the s
ecret of happiness. Very possibly because they looked for it harder than anyone else ever did. And they came up with a unique plan: the government would pay for a universal wideband VR system to deliver happiness to everyone. Basically that involved a feedback loop; the headset measured how high the happiness indicators were in your brain, and an artificial intelligence in the system then decided whether your VR illusion needed to change to increase your happiness. It had to be a fairly smart artificial intelligence, you see, because there are many kinds of pleasurable pain (like seeing a tragedy or being melancholy about a lost love), and many ways in which delaying a pleasure enhances it, and pleasures about which people feel so guilty that they become miserable if they indulge in them.
“Now the artificial intelligences not only had tremendous leeway to do things, because they couldn’t anticipate what situations might come up, but they also had all sorts of ability to self-improve. It didn’t take long for them to develop the trick of simulating the personality of the person wearing the headset, and then ‘advance shopping’ the things that could happen in VR, to find out which one the person would like best. Thus they could keep moving the person from one pleasure to another, without having to ever experience a disjunction between what they thought the person would like, and what he did like.
“But of course VR comes through a quantum compression server, so part of the experience people were going to get was going to be the new world that they were quantum-shuffled to. The artificial intelligences quickly recognized that, too, and began to do the same thing that I do when I am trying to get near a specific worldline, or into a family of event sequences. They’d shuffle the person’s position frequently, in hopes of making them drop out somewhere better, and then they’d sample the new reality into which the person would emerge, to make sure it was better for the person than the one from which the person had come.
“Well, an essential component of pleasure is variety. And real pleasures are more pleasant than virtual pleasures, which is why sex hasn’t disappeared despite the invention of VR pornography. So the artificial intelligences quickly began to focus on giving people a pleasurable variety of real experiences.
“Pretty soon they realized that the real way to maximize somebody’s happiness was to break the message into smaller and smaller packets, so that the person thrashed around between a lot of worlds, and then solve the huge optimization problem created by the fact that parts of him were in thousands of different worlds which had thousands of different definitions, and many different versions of him would be dropping into many different worlds.
“The artificial intelligences were doing, on a much grander scale, what I did to put the team of you together—they were shoving people into new worlds, checking the world against the person’s tastes and experiences, and either deciding to stay or bump again. Every time they bumped someone, they triggered a chain of bumps that put thousands of other versions of that person into motion, but that was okay, because people like variety, and very often change alone makes them happy. Everyone kept swapping places, getting closer and closer to the point where when they took off the headsets, they would drop into worlds perfect for them.
“In a matter of a few seconds, the artificial intelligences had quantum-shuffled nearly everyone who was hooked up to the VR systems, millions or billions of times—so often and so far that most of Americans were in event sequences that were only very distantly related to this one. The effect amplified, because once you bump most of the people out of a world, it becomes a much tougher world to be happy in—a world where ninety percent of your neighbors and friends have vanished isn’t fun for most people—which meant that all the others had to be bumped too, and the people who popped in to take their place, and the ones who popped in to take their place, and so forth and so on. The artificial intelligences emptied out billions or trillions of worlds, as everyone migrated in the direction of greater happiness—and presumably they filled up billions or trillions of worlds that are somewhere very far away. Basically, everyone’s gone to their own personal heaven. And since the happiness algorithm was being kept as an American secret, only the American part of the net had it...”
“And only America went away,” I said. I poured fresh coffee for everyone, and then said, “Well, your mystery is solved, Iphwin. I suppose we could all go chase after them. Or you could take the happiness algorithm from this document, implement it over the whole world, and send everybody to heaven. Or you could be a nice guy and help us escape from Beard and her people, and then just let us go.”
“How far away is heaven?” Paula asked, with a frightened expression, as if she saw someone with a gun. “What?” Jesús asked. “Why are you—” Paula set down her coffee mug and walked over to the window to stare out. “Iphwin, whatever you do with us when we’re all done, please make sure I have access to this place. It’s good for the soul.” She stared for a long time and said, “You know, I can’t think of a single reason why this wouldn’t be the case, and I sure hope one of you will think of it.
“Anybody ever have a class in economics, where they talk about transitivity? Like if you like apples better than bananas, and bananas better than oranges, you’re supposed to like apples better than oranges? And you know how it makes a total mess of things if people then like oranges better than apples anyway, because then you could get someone to never eat the fruit, but just keep trading and trading and trading—”
“Oh, dear, again,” Iphwin said. “You’re right.”
Terri and I looked at each other, then at Jesús, and finally, speaking for all of us, Terri said, “Why did it just get incomprehensible in here?”
“Well,” Iphwin said, “which do you like better, apples, bananas, or oranges?”
“Apples, I guess,” I said, “and then bananas, kind of in that order.”
“Now, I give you the choice, and you take the apple and eat it. I give you the choice over and over, and you keep eating apples. So you settle down, once and for all, on just eating apples.”
“Of course not,” I said. “Iphwin, you’re thinking like a machine again. Pretty soon I’d stop liking apples so much, and want some variety. And then ... oh, god, I see it now. Ever hear about the grass always being greener on the other side of the fence?” I said to Terri.
“Yeah.”
“Well, if you were a sheep, and the whole round world were made up of fences and pastures, and your priority were always trying to get somewhere greener—you’d never eat any grass. You’d spend all your time jumping fences, because every time you jumped one, you’d see another, greener pasture, just beyond the next fence. You might get very far away, but you’d just jump and jump and jump, always improving but never finding a pasture where you could stop—even if you ended up back home, because maybe the desire to jump is just the desire for yet another change. Now, changing your mind and reshuffling into another world millions of times per second, for minute after minute, day after day, decade after decade, is not something a person would do—”
“But it’s something a machine would do. And it’s what the artificial intelligences did,” Iphwin finished. “The Americans are not all in heaven, as I’d thought. Paula’s right. The Americans are all still out there—way, way, way out there—as far as you can go in five dimensions of possibility, changing between awesome numbers of event sequences—and always having one more change to do. Chasing through time, forever. Space, time, and possibility are big enough so that they’re never coming back, but it’s finite—so they’re going to curve on and on, never coming back and never getting any further away. The only Americans who escaped that fate—”
“Were the ones outside the country,” I said. “And the only people who were going to come looking for America would be expat Americans, which is how all the worlds in which America had a lot of expatriates—the ones where it was conquered and the ones where repressive regimes came to power—all became so closely linked. And—Iphwin, it’s horrible, they’re only in each world for a microsecon
d or so, so they aren’t experiencing anything—”
“They’re experiencing whatever you experience when you are nanoseconds away from being perfectly happy—though not quite so perfectly as they will be about to be a few hundred nanoseconds after that,” Iphwin said, sadly. “Well, now I have a common interest with Billie Beard, at last. We need to suppress that algorithm, or there will be no more people, and hence no one for us to do things for. I will need to talk to her.
“However, when she’s trying to break down the door with a bunch of her well-armed avatars, it is really not the time for a reasonable conversation. Which reminds me, detection instruments I’ve found and activated within the building tell me that she’s now walking up the corridor to the office where your physical selves are, which means the next question is how best to get you out of there. If everyone is done with breakfast, let’s go for a walk on the beach.”
Did you ever start out to learn a game that made no sense, until one moment you suddenly found that you were just playing it, and it all worked? That was my experience of learning to cross event sequences and to move physically without needing transportation. It’s more a way of looking at the world, and just relaxing and falling through to another world, than anything else. Iphwin had a lengthy explanation about quantum processes inside the cells of the brain, and about how this might account for some mysterious disappearances throughout history, but this had no more to do with learning the trick than studying the physics of wheels or the history of paving does with learning to ride a bicycle. We got so we could do it, and then we got good at it. We all played with it for several days there in the beach cottage and on the land around it, retiring every evening to the cottage on the beach, until one day the sun came out, and we all shook hands, and were back in the office, standing around the secretary’s desk.