Think about this. Homeopathy has been around for 200 years, and over that period every homeopathic remedy that has ever been formulated has been taken on countless occasions by millions of people. The potency increases with each dilution. So when you drink a homeopathic medicine it gets diluted in your total body water, then you pee it out and flush the toilet, so it gets diluted in the sewerage system. The sewage is treated in a sewage farm and pumped offshore where it is diluted in the sea. The sea water evaporates to form clouds, with the water returning to earth as rain and collecting in reservoirs. We drink the water and the cycle starts all over again. Each step in the process involves a form of natural succussion. You see where this is going. With each dilution the original medicine gets stronger. Over 200 years every homeopathic remedy ever formulated has been diluted and blended over and over and over again, millions, maybe billions of times. At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century a critical dilution threshold was reached. Now any glass of water from any tap anywhere in the world is the most powerful all-purpose drug ever created. No more cancer, infection, inflammation, degeneration; everyone will now live for ever in perfect health, unless they are unlucky enough to suffer a sudden overwhelming physical injury. Immortality! What a disaster.
The world is rapidly overpopulating. There are simply not enough resources to go around. We may be immune to all known diseases and resistant to ageing but we still have to eat. House prices are stratospheric as every available space fills up. Water is the universal panacea and now universal panic’s here. The world has been thoroughly shaken.
In India and the Far East, where population growth is the fastest, vast suicidal religious cults have emerged and are massively popular among the young and naive. Euthanasia for the Youth in Asia!
Here we have a solution based on our own massively popular mystical belief system — the National Lottery. Everyone has been allocated a unique set of numbers and the draw takes place twice weekly. It means we have been able to find important new work for all us unemployed doctors. We used to bring succour. Now no one wants a house call, but it’s vital we force our way in, scalpel at the ready as we point the finger and proclaim the new Hypocritical Oath.
It’s you!
Trust me, I’m a doctor.
Steve Longworth lives in Leicester, which in 2007 was voted curry capital of Great Britain.
After Experiment Seven
Michael W. Lucht
‘Experiment 6. Apparatus: Smith & Wesson Model 13.’ Having written thus, Professor Hillabin began searching for the gun among the piles of books, papers and assignments. His students believed him to be disorganized — Hah! — little realizing that the mess afforded perfect concealment. Besides the gun, it presently occluded vials of cyanide, assorted knives, a parrot and even an electric chair. If the vice-chancellor found out, she would throw a fit — especially about the parrot. Faculty policy strictly prohibited pets in academic offices.
Eventually, Hillabin unearthed the weapon from beneath a pile of decaying term papers. After meticulously filling the chambers with bullets, he faced a problem. His methodology required him to test it, but a gunshot might be noticed, even in the philosophy department. He glanced at his watch; it was past 11 p.m.. Deciding to risk it, he pointed the gun at the wall, aiming between a soaring stack of old journals and an even taller tower of unmarked exam papers.
Missing the gap, the thunderous bang was accompanied by a cloud of confetti. Oh well, only exam papers …
Hillabin had barely replaced the spent shell when Professor Forthington stormed in. “Hillabin! What the hell are you up to now? You’ve ruined my desk!”
Hillabin reflected on his bad luck that his neighbour, famous for heading home on the dot ever since the great philosophers’ strike of ’00, had selected this of all nights to work late.
He carefully recorded ‘Apparatus working’ in his notebook before glancing up. “Sorry old chum. I’m conducting a series of quantum suicide experiments.”
“Sounds positively ghastly! Why don’t you do some real work on Kierkegaard’s spiritual angst?”
Hillabin sighed. It was hell for an experimental metaphysicist to have an existentialist as a neighbour. “I am probing,” he said, trying not to sound excessively pompous, “the nature of reality!”
“Yeah, I’m sure people will find that enormously helpful when dealing with the general meaninglessness of life.” Bug-eyed, Forthington stared at the gun. “So, you’re trying to kill yourself then?”
“Quantum suicide — duh!” Hillabin replied, using the vernacular of his students.
Forthington raised an eyebrow. “May I watch?”
“Why not?” Hillabin shrugged, placing the barrel in his mouth.
“Wait!”
“What?” Hillabin asked, gagging.
“Any last words?”
Rather than dignifying the question with an answer, Hillabin pulled the trigger. The hammer clicked — and that was about it.
“See?” Hillabin asked triumphantly.
“I don’t know.” Forthington pinched his lower lip. “Could be a fluke.”
“That’s the whole point!” However, to strengthen the result, Hillabin pulled the trigger five more times, producing five more clicks. He turned the gun around. When he again aimed at the wall, the gun emptied without a hitch.
Forthington’s initial reaction was to scream: “My poor office!” followed in rapid succession by: “That’s amazing.”
“It sure is,” Hillabin agreed, recording ‘Success’ in his notebook.
Flipping to the next page, he wrote: ‘Experiment 7. Apparatus: Cyanide.’ Hillabin uncorked one of the small vials, poured a drop into a tiny bowl and offered it to his parrot. A pity, really, but Hillabin had to eliminate the possibility that the chemistry department had appeased him with some harmless liquid. It had been known to happen.
But not this time. The parrot, stressed by the loud bangs, badly needed a drink. Ten seconds later, it keeled over.
“It’s dead,” Hillabin muttered.
“No, it’s not!” Forthington retorted instantly.
As much as he enjoyed gratuitous Monty Python references, Hillabin was beginning to suspect that his colleague was not treating his work with the gravity it deserved. As there was not much to be done about that right now, he downed the poison in one gulp and leaned back on his chair. After five minutes, he wrote ‘Success. Probably survived due to some peculiar immunity. Must remember to ask a biologist.’
“So, you really can’t commit suicide?” Forthington asked.
“Not just me. Nobody!”
“Really? Wow!” For once, Forthington looked impressed. “You know, this is so remarkable. Who would have thought? I almost wish that I could give it a try.”
Hillabin reloaded the revolver and held it out. “Be my guest.”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
Hillabin once more tried shooting himself, with the same result as before. “This is exactly what you will observe. I guarantee it.” He again held out the gun.
“Well, in that case…” With his arm shaking, Forthington finally took the weapon and aimed it at his head. “Should I really?” he asked, sweating.
“Don’t be such a logical positivist!”
The shot killed Forthington instantly, making the huge mess in Hillabin’s office significantly less palatable.
Despite this, Hillabin was pleased with the progress achieved that day. He had successfully established that the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics was correct. Each time he had tried killing himself, the universe forked into many. In the bulk of them he died. However, as it stood to reason that he could not observe universes in which he did not exist, his consciousness — his point of view, if you will — would always find itself in a universe in which he had survived, no matter how unlikely the odds.
Looking down on Forthington’s body, Professor Hillabin felt an unanticipated tinge of guilt. Should he have told him that in the va
st majority of universes he would die? Surely, even he must have known?
Then again, did it matter? In at least one parallel universe, Forthington was no doubt already annoying another version of Hillabin by going on and on about how amazing it was that he still lived.
But not in this universe, thank God. Shrugging, Hillabin dialled security.
Michael W. Lucht is an Australian/German/Singaporean writer. (Long story.) He hopes either to create artificial life or to publish a novel — whichever is easier. See luchtonline.com.
Escapism
Nick Mamatas
Piotr was in prison for life for a crime he could not help but commit. He was a scientist, and his theories were borne out by the evidence. The Universe is holographic, two dimensions inscribed across the cosmological horizon.
The Politburo thugs, and they were all thugs to a man, could not tolerate the idea of presiding over a Universe where things were not what they seemed — where they could not stand at least a tiny bit taller than the rest. This wasn’t what Piotr meant, but that is what the government heard. Piotr could not recant. He would not. A boot on the back of one’s neck was not data, threats were not evidence, torture not proof.
They put Piotr deep underground, in a hole in a honeycomb prison from which no one had ever escaped. His papers were burned, an axe taken to his computers, and his assistant taken away in the night. Like Galileo, Piotr thought, but there was no Inquisition for Piotr, no nobles who had taken his side, no eventual reprieve and exile to a far-off villa. For Piotr there was just a black hole and the rest of the world in all directions on the other side of the dark.
Piotr licked the condensation off the walls to live. He ate worms and rats and fought the other rats for those tiny bits of flesh he pulled from their comrades’ papery bones. Strong enough to stand for longer than any guard or warden would have imagined, Piotr tried to escape.
He pressed himself up against the hewn stone walls of his cell, which had been built around him, and pushed hard. There was a chance, a small chance. A quantum chance. One in ten quadrillion, but it was there — Piotr could just flow through the wall. His mostly nothing and its mostly nothing, meshing perfectly. Well no, Piotr told himself, even as he pushed hard against the dark. I am just insane. My cosmological horizon stops at my now-blind eyes. It was those New-Agers with their breathless speeches and ridiculous websites, they’re the ones who believe that rot. The Politburo let them run free, those “harmless kooks” (Piotr snorted as he thought those words), because the silly husbands and foolish wives of the powerful were taken with the pleasing notion of a reality that reorders itself to one’s wishes. That attribute of the Universe was even an objective and observable phenomenon as far as the sufficiently wealthy (and sufficiently limited in imagination) were concerned.
The black hole he was in, Piotr reminded himself, was not a black hole. He was not a particle contained in the fluctuations of an event horizon. This wasn’t a cage of maximum entropy, or a divot in the field of space-time. And there wasn’t some other particle somewhere else on the other side of the wall to which Piotr was bound by ghostly chains of instantaneous information transmission. Piotr’s home was just a hole dug by men so that other men could die in private for the public peace.
However, Piotr had nothing else to do. And he could run his lips and tongue against the wall, sucking up what little water there was. And he could push, alone in the dark, waiting for the cosmos to fall apart around him.
Piotr pushed for days, months. He stopped only to eat and to eliminate. At times he felt a groove in the wall, a groove shaped like his body. It was a trick of the dark — and his desperate mind, he thought at other times. Sometimes he scraped against the cool rock with his fingernails, seeking a seam or even imagining scratching his way to freedom. Perhaps there was only a five in one quadrillion chance of that. Double my odds, he thought. But he was tired, his limbs and digits weak from the diet of brackish water and rats that could squeeze through the cracks he never seemed to find in the wall.
One day — or was it night? — Piotr pushed hard against the wall, limbs spread, chest and groin pressed against rock, his own hot breath hanging like a cloud. There was a shift. He was no longer explicate — a thing to be moved about by the deeper reality of political expediency, of dark forces and unseen hands and subtle strings like those bound to the joints of a marionette. Piotr was the implicate, the thing at the dark centre reaching and expanding outwards across the plane of the world. He was the Unmoved Mover of non-locality and all that which could be called locality both, the logarithmic shadow on the horizon of his black hole and that which cast the shadow as well. Sistemi del mondo! Piotr didn’t think. He was. In and out. Information everywhere, written across the whole of the cosmos.
With a whoosh of cold air, something gave way, and there was a yowl and an impact that shook the cell, warping its walls like a soap bubble. Light! Grey and coruscating like a far of explosion seen from under ocean waves, but light. “I did it!” shouted Piotr’s assistant, a man of rags and bones and wide red eyes. “I’m free! I fell right through the floor of my cell and…” he trailed off and squinted up at Piotr. “Oh.”
Piotr offered his congratulations, colleague to colleague.
Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including Love is the Law and The Last Weekend. His short fiction has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Tor.com and many other venues. A native New Yorker, Nick now lives in California.
Hard Man to Surprise
David Marusek
On Wednesdays after work, Adam meets with Vera and Pete at a bar across the street from his office.
“My man,” he says, sliding into the booth. “Where’s Vera?”
“Running late,” Pete says. “No, wait, here she is.”
Vera exacts a kiss from each of them and squeezes in next to Pete. “What a day!” she exclaims. “First I’m late for a meeting, then I lock myself in the stairwell. I had to climb down 20 floors to find an exit!”
The men guffaw, and Adam says: “Kinda like that weekend we spent trapped on the Prudential roof, right?”
“Yes!” Vera shrieks. “Like that, only much shorter.” She waves her hand to summon the waitress. “You know, I haven’t thought of that in years.”
* * *
Later, as they part company, Pete asks Adam about plans for his birthday, and Adam says he enjoyed the so-called surprise dinner they threw for him at Chili’s last year.
Pete says, “Sounds like a plan. I’ll make secret arrangements for three tables.”
Vera winks. “I’ll quietly handle the guest list.”
* * *
That weekend Adam runs into Hector and Sylvester at Starbucks. He asks them if they’re coming to Chili’s on Friday.
“No doubt,” Sylvester says, but Hector gives him a blank look.
“My birthday?” Adam prompts him. “My ‘surprise’ dinner?”
Hector pats his jacket pockets and hands Adam a blue card on which is printed:
Hello. It may seem strange that I don’t recognize you, but I have recently undergone a memory extinction treatment to selectively erase a traumatic event from my mind. Quite possibly, you were also involved in that event, and the procedure has inadvertently wiped you as well. If this is the case, I apologize and wish you well.
Hector waits for Adam to finish reading. “All right then,” he says and leaves the coffee shop.
Adam is floored. “What the hell just happened?”
“I have no idea,” Sylvester says. “I’ll go find out.”
Adam is left holding the blue card. He flips it over and finds the logo of Clean Slate Salons.
The thing is, a few years back Adam handed out one of these cards himself. One night, on what must have been the world’s worst first date, Adam and his date were mugged on their way back to his car after a show in the city. They were not physically hurt, but for weeks afterwards Adam’s bowels would loosen each time a gun w
as shoved in his face, which was every time he closed his eyes, and all through the night.
So Adam went to Clean Slate where he drank a carton of Protatter and lay on a couch in a booth with his head resting on a microtrode-encrusted pillow. A certified facilitator in Mumbai talked him through a complete ‘narrative’ of his ‘incident’, prompting him for every traumatic detail. Adam scrubbed the entire humiliating evening from his memory and tossed his date out with the bathwater. Hence the eventual blue card.
* * *
On Wednesday, Adam is waiting in the usual booth, but Pete and Vera are no-shows, and their icons fail to pop up on any of his maps. When he calls them he gets voicemail.
While he waits for them to call him back, he calls Sylvester to ask about Hector. It has occurred to him that if something bad happened to Hector, why hasn’t he heard about it? He gets Sylvester’s voicemail. He calls Rosemary to see what’s up with Sylvester and gets voicemail. He tries Frank, Claudia and Conor. Finally, a little ticked off, he twitters: WHERE THE BLEEP IS EVERYONE? HELLO? Then he notices that no one is following him anymore. Followers: 0. He stares at the hollow digit in astonishment. How can such a number even be possible? He has a sinking feeling and calls Chili’s to confirm his reservation for Friday and learns there is no such reservation. Or, rather, there was one, but it was cancelled.
* * *
Adam is standing outside Pete’s building. He has pressed the bell and is waiting to be buzzed in, but instead the intercom crackles. “Yes?”
“It’s Adam.”
“Adam who?”
“That’s not funny.”
“Just a sec.”
Adam waits for the heavy door to buzz, but a moment later Pete peers at him through the glass, opens the door a crack and says, “You Adam?”
“Stop that!”
Pete hands him something and shuts the door. It’s a blue card. “What did I do?” Adam shouts at the door. “Just tell me what I did!”
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