A background story for a recruiting challenge for a software engineer position at Lynx Analytics. Some sections were repeated for multiple levels of the challenge.
Daniel Darabos, October 2018
I woke up and stumbled to the bathroom.
I brushed my teeth. I had been told that a familiar routine helps with the nightmares. I was still shivering though when I rinsed and spit out bitter, pink water.
I had dreamt that I was lost in an infinite labyrinth.
In my dream the hallways of reality branched ahead of me. People were running down the corridors into darkness. But I was frozen in place. I could not move. I could not choose my way.
I was told I had these nightmares because I took my work too seriously. It was true. Since Jimory took the Quantum Pill I had nothing else to do. Many friends took it too. They were all Ranked now, either in this world or another.
Nobody to have a chat with in the morning. I went off to find my way to the office through the maze of the city.
People left our world in droves, but the promised abundance of resources had not yet become our inheritance. I heard food prices on the West Coast were starting to come down. But it was going to take a generation or two before everyone could live like a top Ranked.
For now, I had to dodge across six lanes of autonomous trucks, walk around two robotic garbage units, and wait for a tunnel to finish upgrading itself on my way.
I used to love the Interuniversal Registry building. A towering castle of marble and stone, its timeless construction and inspired craftsmanship in stark contrast with its modern and mundane purpose.
Jimory used to love it too. As I found my way to our desk (mine alone now), I tried not to think of the worlds where we may still be together.
I used to like my job too, but I could no longer remember why.
Check my list of tasks. See which folder I need to update. Find my way to the filing cabinet in the basement. Find the folder. Cut open the folder. Write a note on the last page. If the last page is filled add a blank page at the end. Seal the folder and return it to the cabinet. Next task.
Check my list of tasks. See which folder I need to update. Find my way to the filing cabinet in the basement. Find the folder. Cut open the folder. Write a note on the last page. If the last page is filled add a blank page at the end. Seal the folder and return it to the cabinet. Next task.
The monotony should have helped with the nightmares. But it only gave me time to sink deeper into my shameful grief. Why was I grieving? Had I not understood how the Pill worked? Did I think Jimory had died?
Of course I understood Jimory was not dead. The Quantum Pill is like walking down one of two corridors in spacetime. Of course you are not dead just because you did not walk down both of them.
As you hold a body in your arms when the spirit has left your timeline, you may find solace in understanding all this. I did not.
Check my list of tasks. See which folder I need to update. Find my way to the filing cabinet in the basement. Find the folder. Cut open the folder. Write a note on the last page. If the last page is filled add a blank page at the end. Seal the folder and return it to the cabinet. Next task.
What was my work about?
I was a cog in a machine. Supposedly, in the most sophisticated machine ever built. A carefully tuned quantum system, continuously optimized for ever greater bandwidth. The network interconnect between parallel worlds. A quantum computer spanning and entangling our realities.
But are machines not made of metal and silicon? Why update sheets of notes in sealed folders with human hands?
We were told some quantum effects needed human observers. Robots can clothe and feed us, take out our garbage, and build more robots for us. The Registry may have been the last place that still employed Unranked workers.
I had a hard time shaking the feeling of purposelessness. I used to be loud and energetic, with a joke for every occasion. But how could I be that person in a city with nobody to talk to? Mute robots. Ranked people in ivory towers. Destitute Unranked fighting for scraps.
I could not recall a single joke.
I heard singing. I knew that voice. Where was it coming from?
“Oh my darling, oh my darling, Oh my darling Clementine…”
I followed the voice in the twisting passages of the basement.
“You are lost and gone forever, Dreadful sorry, Clementine…”
I was getting closer.
“How I missed her, how I missed her, How I missed my Clementine…”
I was getting closer.
“Til’ I kissed her little sister, and forgot my Clementine.”
The voice came from right around the corner now.
“Hello, Cheddar, my best friend! How’s the party?”
“You know my damn name, Quarke.” I was not in the mood. “You are not drunk or high. Why are you so cheerful?” Quarke was always cheerful, annoyingly so. Also big, annoyingly so. I was safe from hugs at the moment, thanks to the stack of folders Quarke was carrying.
I eyed the folders. Sometimes we needed to move folders to different filing cabinets. Quarke had hugged me two days earlier. It was too warm and too soft. And I had not asked for it. It was still a hug, and I had not had many hugs lately.
“I will have all the cheese one day,” Quarke said. Quarke liked cheese.
“You take ten Pills, you only live in one timeline out of a thousand.” One thousand and twenty-four, I corrected mentally. “It is only fair for you to live in a fancy castle in that humble fraction of worldlines. You share it with nine hundred ninety-nine other Rank Tens across the multiverse.”
One thousand and twenty-three others. When they invented the Quantum Pills I was as fascinated by the prospects as everyone else. You go down one of two corridors. You only experience the reality where you are now a Rank higher and are due twice as much of everything. Take as many pills as you like.
But living through the reality of it has disenchanted me with the subject. I wished I had not had to listen to one more take on it.
“High Ranks lead big projects,” Quarke continued loudly. “Better to try a different leader with a different vision in each timeline. If one of them succeeds, we can tell each other how.”
“But the Registry?” Quarke whacked the nearby filing cabinet. “You don’t want a thousand different people pulling it a thousand different ways. It is the nexus between worlds. If we mess it up in one world, that world is as good as gone. Lost at sea.”
“For the Registry you want the same leader everywhere. You want an Unranked. You want me,” Quarke said with a flourish. I smiled a little despite myself. Dream big, my friend!
“Yeah, okay, you’ve got my vote, Quarke,” I said. “I got to update a couple dossiers before the election though.”
I was joking! We did not even know who led the Registry, let alone elect them. One minute of human contact, and I was energized already. No matter how loud or big that human was.
I don’t know why my joke had to also be an excuse for parting ways. Why not stay and chat?
“So do I,” Quarke said. “Take care.”
I updated some more folders.
I updated some more folders.
And then I bumped into Quarke after turning a corridor. I tumbled over the big body. “Quarke, why are you lying on the floor?” Why are you cold? Why are you dead?
Why did you take the Pill?
The body smelled like bitter almonds. It reminded me of Jimory.
I knew Quarke would never have taken the Pill. I could have alerted the police. But the police would not have investigated. They did not care whether someone took the Pill willingly or not. On average across timelines Quarke would be fine, they’d say. And people taking Pills was how we were saving the world.
But what about me? I would not be fine. I would not be saved.
Some time had passed that I have no memory of. Was I desperately trying to think of an explanation? Was I consumed by grief? Was I paralyzed by the logic that denied grief on account of quantum mechanics? Had my mind gone entirely blank, refusing to even acknowledge what I saw?
My knees were sore when I gathered the three folders Quarke had dropped and stood up. I had to put things in order. First, I had to find Quarke.
One of the functions of the Registry was to provide an interuniversal census. Through our folders and the quantum effects holding the basement in a non-classical state we tracked which timelines people lived in and what Rank they were due.
A part of the system was us, Unranked personnel carrying folders, making handwritten notes, and partially collapsing wave functions through cleverly chosen observations. So the census was not updated immediately. It would take weeks through the natural course of operations before I could find out which timeline Quarke had gone to.
I was not going to wait weeks. I was going to accelerate the process. I just had to pick my routes very carefully and prioritize some tasks.
I started running along the rows of filing cabinets.
I reached the first cabinet I needed and dove in. I hunted down the folder I needed, ripped it open, made a quick mark at the end, sealed it, replaced it, and slammed the cabinet.
I had a few more folders to cover. The routine of work gave me an illusion of denial. Folders as usual. Almost as if nothing terrible had been afoot.
I reached the next cabinet I needed and dove in. I hunted down the folder I needed, ripped it open, made a quick mark at the end, sealed it, replaced it, and slammed the cabinet.
I reached the last cabinet I needed and dove in. I hunted down the folder I needed, ripped it open, and looked at the mark at the end. In my own handwriting it had said:
PREFIX 1000000
Every timeline could be identified by an infinite string of numbers. But a group of them could be identified by a prefix of those numbers. Us Unranked lived in Prefix 1, which covered all timelines. A Rank 1 person lived in either Prefix 2 or Prefix 3, the two subdivisions of Prefix 1. A Rank 2 in one of Prefixes 4, 5, 6, or 7.
The binary form of a person’s Prefix always had one more digit than their rank. The binary form of 1,000,000 was 11110100001001000000. If I counted the digits right, Quarke would be Rank 19. One of the most powerful people in the world. Perhaps the leader of a very important institution.
I might have found solace in that, if not for that very round number. Prefix 1,000,000.
Prefix 1,000,000. A coincidence? There was nothing particular about the number in binary. And even a round binary number would have had no significance. The Pill simply added another random binary digit to your Prefix.
Could Quarke have found a way to target a Prefix? The Pill relied on very advanced theory. I never knew Quarke to be a genius. But then I never knew Quarke very well at all, despite our time together among the filing cabinets.
With a mix of relief and lingering confusion I turned to the next task of putting things in order. I was going to finish Quarke’s job and put those three folders in the right cabinets.
I cut them open and checked their contents.
PREFIX 1000000
PREFIX 1000000
PREFIX 1000000
Not a coincidence then.
The three folders belonged to three people. Quarke had apparently been investigating something too.
But what? Did Quarke look for people in this particular Prefix? Or was there something else connecting them?
It was frustrating not having anyone around to discuss all this. Without an outlet, my thoughts kept spinning around in circles all day. I completed my work mindlessly, like a robot. I wondered whether I would still count as an observer in quantum mechanics when I was paying so little attention.
I had to cross the corridor where I had last seen Quarke’s large body spread on the floor. It was gone, of course. The robots took care of cleanup.
When the next shift arrived in the basement I hit the streets. I wandered off on foot again, because the robotic cars would rarely obey an Unranked. I needed the autumn air anyway.
I walked the maze of little streets in the old city without a destination in mind. But I was not surprised when I found myself in front of a church.
I never had an interest in religion in my earlier life. Neither did I develop one later. But I got to associate churches with people who Ranked up on other timelines. If a member of the congregation took the Pill and left our timeline, a mass would be held for their souls. As my friends left my timeline one by one I attended many such masses. Catholics saw the Pill as a humble form of martyrdom. The masses were quiet and reverent, but not mournful.
The clergy was happy to conflate Heaven and other timelines. After all neither was a place you could visit or make a phone call to. I had heard colleagues at the Registry joke about how the Church started mixing quantum mechanics and mythology. For most people they may have been equally abstract, but for us one of the two paid our salaries. For the priests of course it was the other one.
They never went as far as to equate Heaven and our parallel universes though. They never said anything exactly wrong, so, as ready to criticize as I had grown, I had sat through mass after mass without trouble. At some point the viewpoint grew on me. There was truth and comfort in the thought that Jimory now lived in a better place.
There was no mass today. I laid out the three folders on the pew and looked up the people they belonged to on my phone.
First one, Thomas Fellerson. No birth date, but looked pretty old on some photos. Had a residence in a nearby town and another in my city. He presented scientific results at robotics conferences to a gradually shrinking audience. He Ranked up three years ago and we had no further news of him.
Second one, Rani Jilani. A much younger woman. She had lived in my city, but liked to travel to exotic locations and drink cocktails. When had I last travelled? It was with Jimory to Scotland. Why not someplace warmer, like Rani? Rani’s last trip was to Galapagos two months ago. She must have taken the Pill very recently.
Third one, Carla Pintoni. Her name was recently removed from multiple web sites, but on archived copies she was listed as the owner of a small chain of bakeries that I liked. Also managed a foundation for children orphaned on this timeline up to a year ago.
All three of them had lived relatively close by. Another coincidence? Or did Quarke look for people who lived nearby?
“Hi, I’m an investigator.” I said to the intercom at Rani Jilani’s place. I was investigating Quarke’s death, so that made me an “investigator”. I couldn’t very well say I was just a curious meddler!
“Hello. This is Zeba Jilani.”
“Oh right! My name. I’m Cheddar Greene,” I said. My excuse was that I had read too many detective stories and I felt guilty for intruding. I could not do it under my own name. “I work at the Interuniversal Registry. I have some questions about Rani Jilani. May I come in?”
I had decided to visit Rani’s home first. She was the last to leave our timeline. Whatever was going on, the trail would be hottest here.
Her home was a large two-story townhouse on the quays. Everybody had a large house in a good location these days. Real estate was definitely a problem that the Pill had solved.
Rani’s home had a clipped hedge on the street. A white stone path led from the arched gate to the front door. The hall Zeba led me through got a lot of natural light that sparkled on the beaded curtains she opened for me. The hall was painted a salmon pink. The furniture and the curtains formed a color gradient across the hall from one side to the other. The kitchen on the right had tones of purple, and the coat rack matched this. The opposite side had lighter shades, such as a painting of a clear sky, matching the light blue walls of the sunroom on the left.
“Sit down in there, if you will. I had just put on some tea. I will get the cups.”
Unranked people generally had trouble with home maintenance. I could never find a plumber or an electrician, and the robots would prioritize requests from Ranked folks to the point of ignoring me. Clearly this was not an issue for the Jilanis. Were they Ranked? I saw no robots. I also could not just ask it. A real investigator would presumably know basic information. I should have come here with a plan. I never was any good at improvisation.
“Here’s your tea. You want to know about my sister. She wanted to make us proud. She was trying hard. We did not always see that. We told her that she was lazy. That she was not studying hard. Told her she was wasting her inheritance.”
“But travel and luxury was not simply for her enjoyment. I see that now. It was a competition to her. She wanted to prove to the world that she belonged in high society. Our beliefs forbid us from taking the Pill, but she still wanted to live like a Ranked. She wanted to be better than them.”
“Our mother was like that. She was a film star, you know? We had no Pills in her time. But still there was money and luxury to compete over. I know Rani missed her terribly. She even wondered if Mother was alive on other timelines. I told her it was impossible to know that. Anybody who said they knew that was a sorcerer, a fraud. You work at the Registry. Tell me if I was right!”
All the timelines branched off of one timeline when the Registry was first built and the first Pill was taken. If she died before that, she was dead on all timelines. Well, all timelines that we could communicate with. But there was no distinction between a timeline that we could not interact with in any way and a timeline that “did not exist”.
“You were right.”
“Rani was quick to believe things. Somebody talked her into taking the Pill in the end. And she was so lucky at first! Every day she took a Pill. For more than two weeks she held a big party every night. Then last Tuesday her luck ran out.”
“We had shut her out, you know? Life is sacred. Every time you take a Pill, you take half a life. You cannot do that. Did you do that?”
“Me? No. I couldn’t.” I never even dared ask myself why I did not take it. I started sweating if a conversation steered too close to the question. I had to steer it away. “Was Rani not afraid?”
“She was very brave. Never showed any worry. No. Like she was sure she would win the gamble every day. She tried to reassure me too. But I knew it was not right.”
This was not uncommon after the first Pill. If you survived on our timeline, you took that as proof that you cannot experience the timelines where you died. But before their first Pill people worried a lot. Also they generally said tentative goodbyes.
“How many Pills did she plan to take?” Some people, I was sure, kept taking the Pill every day for years and becoming supreme rulers of the world. Other people had a very small likelihood of living in their worlds though. We did not live in such a world either.
“She said she bought 20 Pills. She died after taking 19. And I was not there with her. The robots took her away before we even got there. We never got to say goodbye to her. I am devastated. I am sorry.”
Investigating was easier than I had expected. I didn’t even need to ask and Zeba had told me everything. But her grief weighed heavily on me. My mind was racing for a way to console her. I could have talked about how I knew Rani was alive on Prefix 1,000,000. But knowing Jimory was alive on some timeline had not consoled me. It made me feel worse. I went for an awkward hug instead.
Zeba shared a cake with me that her relatives had brought to help her recover. We talked about cakes. She too liked the Pintoni’s bakeries. I did not mention Carla Pintoni.
She talked about her work on a fusion reactor engineering team. They were working off of the designs currently being broadcast from a timeline that had come upon a breakthrough I did not understand. It would take the condensed designs years more to percolate through the Interuniveral Registry. Even though a part of the data was transmitted through my handwriting, Zeba knew many technical aspects of the compressed encoding in greater detail than I.
I assured her that we were doing everything on our part to ensure a speedy delivery. There were so many important communications and so little bandwidth.
It was dark outside when I left. Nobody on the streets, just a lonely street sweeper.
“Good evening,” I said to the young man. Old habits can still feel like habits. But in a moment’s time I realized something was off. I had not seen a human street sweeper in almost a decade. That was a robot’s job.
“Evening,” he said. Then, as my expression changed and I started walking toward him, he raised his hands and took a step back. “It’s okay! I’m not up to anything.”
“That’s exactly what you would say if you were up to something.” I was starting to feel like a real detective now. “I’m Cheddar Greene, and you better tell me why you are sneaking around this house!”
“Yes, I was sneaking around this house. I knew her. She owed me money.”
“Zeba?”
“No, her sister.”
“Rani? She’s gone. She took the Pill. The insurance should cover your loan.”
Before the first Pill was even made the legal system was ready for it. All lending contracts started to include a paragraph on mandatory insurance. Since the Pill had a very predictable ratio of outcomes, it was easy and cheap to insure. The insurance company recorded your Rank at the time of the contract. If you took the Pill and left this timeline the insurance would pay out your debt to the lender. If you took the Pill and lived, you had to pay back your lender plus an equal amount to the insurer.
“Yes. Well. I know how dumb it sounds. But my loan was not insured. It was between friends,” he said with a frown I could sympathize with. “Did you also know Rani from somewhere? By the way, my name is Vince Manchego. What did you say your name was?”
Vince looked to be around 20. Barely out of high school. The beginnings of a mustache that was probably meant to make him look more serious but ended up having the opposite effect. He looked particularly harmless in the ill-fitting street sweeper’s uniform. Where did he even get that, in a museum?
“I’m Cheddar Greene. I’m investigating a case. Perhaps you could help me out.”
I liked street food. Nothing better than grabbing two burgers from a street vendor with a friend on a cold evening. I was so attached to the experience that I quit street food when the last human vendors closed shop. It had only been a few months since I finally tried one of the robotic vendors. Actually it was at the insistence of Quarke. I had to admit it was not a diminished experience. I was having a discussion with Quarke. I did not miss exchanging a few formulaic pleasantries with a cook who would have preferred to be someplace else.
We bought kebabs with Vince.
“I work at the Interuniversal Registry. I’m looking into a strange coincidence. There are these three people.” I was not ready to tell Vince about Quarke. That part of the story felt too private. The basement of the Registry was not for strangers. “They are all Rank 19, all on the same timeline. Not our timeline. And they all lived nearby. Rani is one of them.”
“Is that strange?”
Was it strange? If we ignored Quarke and the round-numbered Prefix?
“How many people live around here? I mean how many lived before the Pill?” Vince was a child before the Pill. He would have no idea about the numbers. “Let’s say 8 million. If all of them took 19 Pills, there would be around 16 of them on any given timeline.”
“Why would everybody take 19 Pills?”
“Well, it’s a hypothetical. We just want to get a feel for how strange this coincidence is. If taking 19 Pills were very popular, it would not be strange at all. But like you say, there’s no reason for everyone to take 19. I have taken none. How many have you taken?”
“None,” he said, slightly embarrassed.
More than three quarters of the people in town had taken the Pill by now. Yet I almost exclusively met Unranked. Those who had taken the Pill had often taken more than one. Plus they often moved to Hawaii or wherever.
“Why 19 Pills?” Vince asked.
“Exactly! If you took 19, why not take one more and make it a round 20? I don’t think 19 has a business being more popular than any other number from 15 to 25. Unless they were looking for a particular Prefix.”
“What’s a Prefix?”
“It’s an identifier for a group of timelines. So maybe they stopped taking the Pills when they got to Prefix 1,000,000.”
“1,000,000?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you think that is like? Prefix 1,000,000.”
“Huh? Same as here. Just some of the Ranked folks are replaced by other Ranked folks. I’m not even sure how someone would recognize that they are on Prefix 1,000,000.”
Was that awe in Vince’s voice? Why would anyone think more of one Prefix than another?
“So how much money did Rani owe you?” I had laid most of my cards on the table. Now I wanted to see Vince’s cards.
“$150,000.”
“That’s a lot more money than I thought was on the line here. How could you lend that much and not take out basic insurance? What are you even, a bank?”
“I told you it was between friends. But yeah, I’ve got money.”
“Forgive me for asking, but I just want to understand the full story here. How do you have so much money?” Vince just stuffed some more kebab in his mouth. “Did you inherit it? Did your parents take the Pill?”
“My mom didn’t leave nothing to me! I made the money myself. None of your business how.”
Well that was cold.
It appeared that the style of investigation that worked best for me was not asking any questions. As soon as I asked one, I had upset someone. I was sure Vince knew more about Rani, but I did not necessarily need to know everything about his own financial situation. Or about his parents.
“You’re right. It’s none of my business. Sorry.”
“Nah, it’s fine. I’ll tell you later.” I was relieved to see Vince back in his casual mood.
“I’d really just like to know more about Rani. If that’s okay with you.”
We had both finished our food by this point and headed downtown, toward my neighborhood.
“She just needed some money,” he said. “I think her inheritance had run out. Must have been all the travelling. I was happy to help her out. I didn’t know anything about Pills or timelines. You say there are two others?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re going to investigate them too?”
“I think I will.”
“I want to come along. I’m out of a lot of money! If these people were up to something, I want to know.”
We exchanged contacts. I was not convinced I wanted Vince’s help, though. It was nice to have someone to mull things over with. But Vince was so young.
“I’ll think about it, Vince.”
“I can be useful!” he protested.
“No doubt. But it’s official business. Besides, it could be dangerous. I cannot be putting you in harm’s way.”
He gave me an overwhelmingly skeptical look. I suddenly worried how old and frail I looked to him.
“Hey, careful!” I exclaimed when Vince stepped out in front of traffic in the middle of our conversation.
“What are you worried about? They’re not going to run you down.”
“Yeah, I know that.” The cars were reliable. So I thought were basic instincts. “But you’re going to get fined.”
“Not me,” he said. He crossed the road at an insultingly casual pace while I hurried to the next overpass to join him on the other side. I was wheezing when I caught up with him.
The security drone was already hovering above Vince. But it did not issue its casually threatening warning. Vince did not even stop for it. He just walked funny. His posture was a bit off, head held at a slight angle. His step had a bit of a drag and a bit of a jerk. He even did a weird wave with his fingers by his side.
“What…” I tried to phrase my question. It was as if the drone did not see him. At least it did not see him as a human that had violated the law.
“See? I’m a friend to all robots. I grew up with them. I know them better than the Askarrella engineers. I can help you with any robot problems if you help me with my loan collection problem. I mean let’s just figure out what’s going on here, and hope that helps the both of us.”
A labyrinth, but the walls are made of people.
I woke up. Tried to shake the nightmare from my head. It had been a week since losing Quarke. It did not change much about work. With my silly little investigation I at least had something to look forward to. I went to a Pintoni’s bakery the day before.
“Welcome to Pintoni’s,” the cheerful robot had greeted me. “How may I serve you?”
“I feel so dumb for asking this. Please don’t tell any humans. But… did you know Carla Pintoni?”
“I’m sorry, I did not know Carla Pintoni. Have you tried our fresh baguettes yet?”
“What? Oh. Yeah, okay, give me a baguette.” The good thing about robots was that it was okay to make a fool of yourself in front of them. The bad thing about them was that I kept making a fool of myself in front of them.
“Who owns this bakery now?”
“This bakery is owned by Pintoni’s Catering Inc..”
“Right. And who owns Pintoni’s Catering?”
“Pintoni’s Catering Inc. is owned by Michael Nsiah-Apau.”
Michael lived outside of town and today I was going to visit him. With the Ranked numbers growing it was becoming impractical for me to wait for a free car. I called Vince. Between his money and robot mind tricks I was sure he could arrange transportation.
Besides, I wanted to ask Vince some questions.
“Hey, Cheddar,” Vince greeted me from his car. It felt so fitting to use my false name at the start. It did not take long to start grating on me though.
“That’s… Yeah. Hey, Vince. How did you get the car?”
“You just got to know how to talk to them.”
“Are you sure you’re not Ranked? Maybe someone mixed the Pill into your sandwich. Or a Ranked guy pushed you off a bridge on the opposite Prefix,” I joked.
“What? That’s not how it’s supposed to work!”
It was not indeed. He was relieved when I laughed at the worried look on his face. It was fun pulling old Registry jokes on an outsider for a change.
“So how did you get the car?”
It was half an hour’s car ride to Michael Nsiah-Apau’s place. I wanted to know more about Vince’s robotics tricks not just to cross the street unmolested or to get free rides. Robots were everywhere. They could help us a great deal with the investigation.
He showed off the modified umbrella he used to confuse the car’s scanner to make it stop and open its doors. He tried to explain how his conversation with the car went when he got on board.
It was surprisingly technical. I’m not sure what I had expected. Perhaps confusing the car with a logic puzzle or paradox. Instead, Vince had a very clear grasp of the potential situations the car was trained for, and he had been able to find or perhaps build a path winding through those situations. One second he impersonated an injured person that needs to be taken to the hospital. The next, he wanted a refund on a ride from last week. Then he was looking for an item a friend of his had left in the car.
In the end we arrived at Michael’s cliffside villa.
“Calibration mode disengaged. Goodbye,” the car said and left us. The wide gates opened quietly and we walked toward the house.
Michael’s home was flat, white, and warm. It was summer inside. As I took off my sweater I realized it was not simply heat. Heating your home in the winter feels different in small ways from the warmth of the summer. This felt like real summer. I felt the sun on my skin. A gentle breeze made us more comfortable. I was sure it carried the smell of olive trees.
“Hi. Welcome. I’m Michael.”
“I’m Cheddar Greene.” We spoke on the phone. “And this is my friend Vince Manchego.”
“Hey Vince! I’m so glad to see you. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”
It turned out that Michael knew Vince. And Vince knew Michael. Vince did not know the address, and it is possible that I never mentioned Michael’s full name to him.
They explained to me how they knew each other, and I learned the story of Pintoni’s bakery.
Carla Pintoni had been a successful businesswoman. She was seen as a champion for the Unranked, as she opposed the Pill and made her views heard. She also financed and ran an orphanage for kids whose parents took the Pill and left them behind.
She had no children herself, but cared for the orphans with a mother’s love. It shook the community to find out that Carla had taken the Pill. A year had passed, but people who had known her were still divided. Some had accepted her choice. Some felt betrayed. Some were still looking for answers.
Michael was of the opinion that she had fallen victim to a scam.
“She had lost a fortune shortly before taking the Pill,” our host said. “Millions in the red. Vince here had tried to help her with a series of loans too. Once she died, there was no money left to keep the business alive. The family had to sell. Vince helped with that too.”
Vince was nodding along with the recollection. This could not have been a coincidence. I had to learn more about Vince’s dealings with my Rank 19 cases. I had to sit on my questions until we could talk privately. But Vince felt my renewed attention on himself and fidgeted uncomfortably.
“In the end I bought the business and saved the bakeries. The family got a fair price. Everybody was happy. Except for Vince, is that right, my friend?” Michael said with a smile. “How much did you lose?”
“I don’t remember,” Vince mumbled.
“Was it $150,000?” Michael asked. “I hope you’ve learned your lesson from that uninsured loss!” He laughed.
“Actually,” I said while Vince sank into a soft white sofa. “Can we please go back to the scam? How did Carla Pintoni lose her money?”
“I’m not sure,” Michael said. “I don’t think anybody managed to figure it out. She was really desperate to help the Unranked. I knew her from church, you know? The priests are trying to put a positive spin on the Pill. But Carla knew we were being played.”
“What do you think of the other timelines?” Michael asked me.
“I heard that Prefix 1,000,000 has the best cheese,” I said. Where did I hear that joke? Did Quarke say “Prefix 1,000,000?” I took no notice of the number at the time.
“I’m sure it would,” he said. “If it existed! But it’s all a hoax. The biggest hoax you’ve ever seen. People kill themselves left and right, thinking they will get rich! Get to Heaven! They get nothing. If you step back from the lies the Registry has been feeding us, you can see it too. It is simple genocide. They have finally succeeded at what they always wanted.”
I have heard this sort of rant from broken down Unranked on street corners before. I was thankful for that. If I had first heard this theory from a smart and successful person like Michael, it would surely have shaken me more.
“But we can communicate with the other timelines,” I said. I knew right away I should not have engaged him in this, but that much had slipped out.
“Oh, really? We can? Have we ever received any ‘communication’ that proved any of this was real?”
“We are receiving the plans for a fusion power plant right now.”
“That’s what they tell us, my friend. But I would bet you my house that we will never see that plant go online. The project will miss deadlines and overrun its budget. Accidents will happen. An investigation will temporarily halt progress. We have seen this unfold before, haven’t we?”
It was hard to disprove Michael’s conspiracy theory. We did not have much to demonstrate the promise of the Registry. Everybody expected results to start rolling in as the timelines diverged further. But as it were, we were just booting up our full-universe quantum computer. Even the luckiest timelines would need decades before they could discover, perfect, and communicate breakthroughs.
“I heard the Pill itself came from another timeline,” Vince said. “From the one with the cheese.”
Vince meant to support my side of the argument with this. But it was so far out, I could not hide my surprise.
“How could the Pill have come from another timeline? Everyone lived on a single timeline before we started taking Pills,” I explained.
We spent an unreasonable amount of time on this debate. I feared that Michael would throw us out if he learned that I worked for his archvillain, the Interuniversal Registry. Vince must have made the same conclusion, for he never brought this up.
The idea that the Pill could be a hoax was chilling. No matter how many ways I knew to refute it, it still had an effect on me. Talking to Jimory would have helped. Sharing my thoughts with another and confirming the truths of logic together had always improved my mood.
We said goodbye to Michael and got into a car that Vince caught with his umbrella. I had to focus on a different conversation now and confirm darker truths.
“What a coincidence,” I said in the car. “You knew Michael. You knew Carla. You had lent money to Carla. How much was it?” I asked. Vince did not look at me. He glared at the road ahead. “$150,000? What a coincidence. And uninsured? Just like Rani Jilani’s loan a year later. You really did not learn your lesson, Vince.”
Vince looked very tense. He was in anguish. Nobody enjoyed getting caught in a lie. But what exactly was the lie here? Had Vince lied to me or had he just kept secrets?
“Look, I don’t want to torture you,” I said with a sympathetic tone. “You have your reasons for keeping secrets. Actually I have kept something important from you too. This is not an official Registry investigation. I am looking into these cases because a friend of mine has left and is now on the same timeline. Prefix 1,000,000.”
I was no longer accusing him of anything. I was exposing myself. But still Vince did not look at me.
“Please, Vince. I need to know what is going on. Tell me what you know. What is this scam? Are you a scammer? Are the loans a fraud? I won’t judge you. I just need to know.”
“I will tell you,” Vince said finally.
“Yes, it is a scam,” Vince started. “Some people are so full of greed. They want everything. A fair deal is unacceptable to them. Give up half your timelines to get ahead in the other half? No, thank you! They want to get ahead in all of them.”
“Who are you talking about?”
“Carla, Rani, and the rest. They wanted to live like Ranked without giving up anything in exchange. That’s not how the world works!”
Vince spoke in an even tone, but I felt great emotions rising in him.
“They thought they deserved a better deal. They wanted a better deal so badly, that when I offered it to them, they believed me. I sold them modded Pills that would win every time. They could Rank up on all timelines. No death anywhere.”
“Who would believe that?” I asked. There had been scams of this sort when the Pill was new. People had not yet accepted the new world or learned how it worked. Scammers would sell regular Pills at ridiculous prices, promising guaranteed survival. You could even take it first and pay after. No risk in it to the scammer. They would get paid half the time and the buyer would not complain in the other half either.
“They believe me because I lose if they lose. I give them an uninsured loan. $100,000 that they keep if they die. They pay back $150,000 if they live.”
“That can only work out if you’re selling a placebo. But then they would know you’re cheating them right away. The robots would not recognize their Ranks if the Pill was a fake.” Rank had only meant anything because of the robots that recognized it.
“I’m not lying to them,” Vince said. “Like I said, it’s a modded Pill. The robots recognize it. But you live on every timeline, and I get $50,000 for each.”
Impressive. I wondered how Vince had learned to mod Pills this way. Or if he had an accomplice who did that. But either way, there was a problem. He could not get away with this for any length of time.
One of the main purposes of the Interuniversal Registry was to keep a census. It took some time. But after a few weeks we would confirm the Prefix of every Ranked. If we ever found a Ranked on Prefix 1, all hell would break loose.
Vince’s Ranked were not on Prefix 1.
“You cannot let them live. You would be found out if you did. The 19th Pill. You kill them with the 19th,” I realized with slowly rising horror.
“The 19th Pill is just poison,” Vince admitted. “ I always have them commit to 20 Pills.”
“You figured it out,” he said after a pause. “Like your friend did. The one called Quarke tried to scam me, you know? If you buy 20 Pills, you cannot stop taking them after 18! It is bad for your health!”
Only at this point did my goal change from wanting to learn the truth to wanting to survive. I had heard enough and I had to get out. The car was speeding along the highway, just rolling past the first restaurants on the outskirts of town. Getting out was not an option.
“I get my marks fake records on Prefix 1,000,000 to avoid a murder inquiry. Quarke must have found that 19-digit Prefix and tried to trick me,” Vince continued his confession. “Took 18 Pills and refused to take the 19th. I could not allow that! If someone stays on Prefix 1 as a Ranked, everything will get exposed. Mom says we will be deleted if we are exposed.”
He drew a blade from his modified umbrella and turned to me.
“I cannot let you expose us, Cheddar.”
“What is that, Vince?” I asked. Not because I had any trouble recognizing the big knife in his hand in the well-lit cabin, but because I wanted to keep the conversation going. More talk, less stabbing.
“It’s over. This is a Quantum Blade. It will end you not just on this timeline, but on all timelines. I cannot take any risks.”
“Please.” I looked away from him. “Please stop. Let’s stop at the closest kebab place.” Then, looking back at him: “We can talk this over.”
Vince disagreed and attacked me with the Quantum Blade.
He went straight for my face. I flinched away and the knife stabbed into my left shoulder instead. I shoved him away, but he was stronger and the passenger cabin was small. There was no way to get more than an arm’s reach away from him.
Vince made a series of wild slashes in my direction. I parried the first cuts with my poor hands. But Vince was faster and less distracted by pain. He got in a slash across my face.
As I flinched back from him I got a knee in between us and managed to kick him back. He knocked into the left-side door panel and had to take a moment to scramble back into the fight.
I took the same moment to scramble for the door handle.
“You have arrived at Bobba’s Hotdog & Kebab,” the car said.
Vince slashed at me, but only scratched the leather of my shoe as I fell out onto the pavement.
Bobba’s monitoring system immediately alerted emergency services. A drone’s spotlight quickly sought me out. Vince glared at me from the car then instructed it to drive away. I survived.
The blood in my eyes bothered me, but adrenaline still dulled my pain. An ambulance soon pulled up and I crawled onto its stretcher.
In the hospital I met a real detective.
“Hi. I’m Ishi Feather, from the city police. Records show you got out of a car shared with a certain Vince Manchego at Bobba’s Hotdog & Kebab, bearing light knife wounds to your forehead, four fingers, palms, and left shoulder.”
“Right. They don’t feel ‘light’ to me, but that’s indeed what happened,” I said. “Vince tried to kill me.”
“Why?” Ishi asked. The detective wore sparkling white clothes. The loose white sleeves were decorated with elaborate symmetrical patterns in shiny metal. Silver? Chrome? Platinum? I wasn’t good at telling apart metals, but I could tell at a glance that Ishi had Rank 7 or higher.
“I found out something that he wanted to keep secret.”
“What was that?”
“I’m sorry.” I was too traumatized to think this through. I probably should have told Ishi everything. But I was such a mess that I did not want to make any irreversible decisions. “It’s not my place to tell. How about arresting Vince and asking him?”
“A warrant has been issued for that. Thank you for your time,” the detective said and left my room.
The painkillers did their job. I debated with myself whether my imitation of a serious detective had been more or less serious than Ishi, the real deal. I was to spend the night in the hospital and it was a very late hour already. I drifted to sleep in a minute.
I was in a car. It must have been a limousine. The cabin was very long. I wanted to find something to drink. I walked to the front of the car uncomfortably hunched. I grasped for handholds when the car made a turn. But instead of a handhold, a knife slashed out at me.
My fingers hurt and I was still looking for some water. The cabin forked left and right at the front of the car. I went down the passage to the right. I saw Bobba’s Hotdog & Kebab through the windows. Instead of a robot chef it was manned by Vince Manchego.
I stumbled forward through the twisting passages of this labyrinth on wheels.
I woke up with a headache. I drank three glasses of water that were laid out on my bedside cupboard. It was raining outside my window, trees bending in the wind on the street below the hospital. It was nice to be sitting in bed, wrapped in a blanket.
My hands had adhesive strips all over. The Quantum Blade.
Could it have been real? How would that have even worked? Would the same cuts have magically appeared on my hands on other timelines? Or would I have had the same encounter with Vince on all timelines?
It would have been possible to check. We could communicate with other timelines. There were very many timelines and very much information to transmit, though. Only the highest priority messages got transmitted in practice. It was a free market. You could bid to increase your message priority. I knew from work that the going rate for transmitting one byte of information was over $1,000,000.
If some information was widely desired, other timelines could pitch in to the transmission costs. An interuniversal cryptocurrency system had been set up for this. In theory you were able to perform quantum computational work for other timelines. In practice you were able to send money to other timelines.
Could I get rich by selling my story? How would I finance the cost of pitching it?
I had to force myself to quit idle fantasies and think about what had happened.
Vince was fleecing wealthy and ambitious Unranked and then killing them. Quarke figured it out and ended up murdered. I almost ended up murdered. I needed to be much more careful.
Vince was able to infiltrate the Interuniversal Registry. He had access to modded Pills. He had a way to have dead people registered as alive on Prefix 1,000,000. He had a talent for misleading robots. He had a blade that he claimed was a Quantum Blade.
I started to think he had an accomplice on Prefix 1,000,000. If he had simply forged the census records, he would have had no reason to put all victims on one particularly memorable Prefix. Spread them out over randomly picked Prefixes and Quarke never picks up on it.
Vince had made a few curious statements about Prefix 1,000,000. He honestly seemed to have thought Prefix 1,000,000 was a very different world. Not just any other timeline. A better world.
When he attacked me he mentioned his mother. That she said we could be “deleted”. Did he mean himself and me? Or did he mean our timeline? He had implied earlier that she had passed away. If she lived on another timeline, how did they communicate?
I had been released from the hospital. My left arm was in a sling and my shoulder hurt badly at the smallest of movements. My fingers were clumsy and sore. The scar on my forehead was itching.
I had a week off of work. I was supposed to lie in bed and rest. But I could find no comfortable position. Rolling from one to the other always involved a flash of pain in my shoulder. I was pacing up and down the long corridors of my apartment.
Walking hurt too. The Quantum Blade had etched a long scratch across my left shoulder bone. As I paced my apartment I became very good at not moving my arm with my steps.
I also became increasingly angry at Vince. You want to kill me? I can accept that. But make me miserable? I will have none of that!
In the end I took some painkillers and headed out for fresh air. A drone hovered conspicuously in the sky above me.
Anyone could have anything if they just took the Pill and Ranked up. With a subjective no-risk alternative readily available, crime had plummeted. Detective Ishi had enough resources to spare a security drone for me.
It was also the general policy. Our Ranked wanted no violence. They may have had unprecedented power through their robot servants, but they were still flesh and blood. They avoided the risk of physical harm by any means. They wanted no bullets, knives, poison, or explosions flying around and hitting them by accident. So a dedicated robotic bodyguard would be assigned even to an Unranked like me if they were at risk of harm.
“I’ll get you, Vince,” I mumbled through gritted teeth and set out toward the row of apartment buildings overlooking the nearby park.
“Hello. Are you all right?” the old lady asked from the doorway of the apartment. She was looking at me with worry in her green eyes. I had my arm in a sling, bandages on my hands and forehead, and I was sweating from the exertion of the walk despite the autumn air.
“Hi. I could use a glass of water,” I said. It had been a short walk to Thomas Fellerson’s apartment, but I was feeling dizzy. The elevator ride to the eleventh floor allowed me to catch my breath at least. I was no longer huffing like a steam engine, but I was still flushed.
“Oh, come on in! You need to sit down, dear.”
She sat me down in a rocking chair by her kitchen island and fetched me a glass of cold water.
“Sorry for my poor state,” I apologized after a sip. “I live close by. The other side of the park. I thought I would be fine for the walk. When I realized it was a bad idea I was already past half-way. I thought it better to go on rather than turn back.”
“I see,” she said.
“Oh, I’m so sorry! I’m Cheddar Greene. I was hoping you could help me with an investigation. I think Professor Fellerson had lived here until three years ago. Did you know him?”
“Pleased to meet you,” she said with a very gentle handshake. “I don’t know if I ever really knew him, but I was married to Thomas Fellerson for forty-three years. My name is Annie Fellerson.”
The security drone had followed me all the way to the apartment building. It remained outside when I had entered and I could now see it through the floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the park.
Vince had found me when I visited Rani Jilani the week before. He knew Carla Pintoni. If I wanted to find him, I thought my best chance was to continue our trajectory. Thomas Fellerson was the third name in Quarke’s folders. I was almost certain he too had been scammed and killed by Vince.
I wanted to just sit in that rocking chair and wait until Vince showed up and got arrested.
“Thomas did very important work for Askarrella. Very important and very secret. Do you know Askarrella?” she asked me.
“They are a robot manufacturer, right?”
“They designed the brains of every robot running around today. They also built most of those brains. Thomas helped with all that quite a bit! The robots that he’d helped build, though, they were not very grateful to him,” she said with a chuckle. “He was rather miffed by that. You see we were Unranked. How about you? Are you Ranked?”
“No. I am Unranked too.”
“Why?” Annie asked. She continued when my answer was not forthcoming. “At first we would see a lot of people hesitant to take the Pill. Who would want to kill themselves on a coin toss? We lost friends and heroes to the Pill. It was new and it was scary. It was slow to catch on. But the loss is momentary. We do not see the loss every day. What we see every day is that all the successful people are Ranked. Your boss is Ranked, the President is Ranked, the Pope is Ranked. Nobody in their right minds would choose to remain Unranked today.”
“Well, I see the loss every day,” I said. “Maybe I am not in my right mind. But I see all the people not walking the streets out there.”
For our chat we had moved close to the window and had an excellent view of the park and the streets around it. Annie sat in another rocking chair by my side. Was I sitting in hers or Thomas’s?
“And why did you not take the Pill?” I asked.
“We had made a pact. Not just with each other but with a larger group of people. We promised not to take the Pill. But Thomas could not keep his promise.”
“I have now seen a number of similar cases. I will tell you what may have happened to Thomas. You have a right to know,” I said. “Do you know a man called Vince Manchego?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve known Vince Manchego since he was born,” Annie said. “His mother was India Catalina Manchego. India was my research assistant at Askarrella when Vince was born. Did you know she had raised him alone? A single mother. But Vince was such a good boy.”
“You worked at Askarrella as well?”
“Oh, yes, I did. We all worked there. Building a better world. For everyone, we thought,” she said and sighed. “I was heartbroken when India died. So was Thomas. She was always a joy to be around. Full of life and mischief! I adored her energy. She often brought cookies to work, and even taught Vince how to bake them.”
“How did she die?” Her life and death defined Vince. I had to know.
“She took her own life ten years ago. Not the Pill. A jump.”
Ten years ago! Vince had only been a child when he was orphaned. The thought left us speechless for minutes. It started to drizzle outside. The security drone was hard to spot now. Perfect.
“I work at the Interuniversal Registry,” I said. “I have been looking at people who are on Prefix 1,000,000 according to our census. I have found evidence of a conspiracy to defraud and kill these people while forging their census records.”
“And how did you find me?” she asked.
“I’m sorry. According to our census Thomas Fellerson is also on Prefix 1,000,000. Your husband is most likely dead.”
Annie was upset. Her kindly eyes teared up with grief. Then, as if a thundercloud had cast a shadow on it, anger washed over her face. Fury filled her every wrinkle, and her cheeks lit up with the rage of the storm inside.
She let out a ragged sigh as her anger turned to regret.
“It’s all my fault, Cheddar. I caused this. I designed this.”
I reached tentatively to console her but immediately regretted it when my left shoulder flared up with pain.
“I thought the pact would protect Thomas. But it didn’t. He fell for the scam. I should have protected him. I should have told him what I had worked on.”
“You can tell me,” I said. Annie had no reason to tell me anything, but I was desperate to hear more.
“‘Askarrella’ means ‘doing chores’ in Finnish. Oskar Jarlsberger, our founder, wanted robots to do our chores. Thomas worked on building them in the robotics department,” she explained. “‘Askar’ is a ‘chore’ in Finnish but a ‘soldier’ in Arabic. I was one of Oskar’s soldiers working in the other department.”
“Which department was that?”
“The quantum computing department. We were building a quantum computer a million times more powerful than any other.”
“Did the project fail?” I asked. I had never heard of Askarrella doing anything other than robots. Neither did I know about a superpowered quantum computer.
“Oh no, it didn’t,” Annie said. “It’s working great. You work at the Interuniversal Registry, don’t you? And you don’t even know what it is.”
“The one thing I’m sure the Registry is not,” I objected, “is an efficient computer. It takes us weeks to shuffle a few bytes around.”
“Of course. The Registry is not the processor but the backbone. The vein through which computation flows in the form of interuniversal cryptocurrency. Through which computation is extracted.”
“Extracted to where?”
“To Prefix 1,000,000. Or as the people living there call it, Reality.”
“The quantum computing department built the Pill,” Annie said. “We checked the first 19 bits of our Prefix. If you want to know, we are on Prefix 714, 285. We enabled robots to recognize Rank, and we released the Pills.”
“Why did you check the Prefix?”
“If we had seen the first 19 bits come out as 1,000,000, we would have followed a different protocol. On Prefix 1,000,000 they destroyed the Pill. Well, I destroyed the Pill. My version on Prefix 1,000,000 destroyed all traces of it.”
“Does this mean that everyone is alive on Prefix 1,000,000?” I asked with sudden excitement.
“Oh yes. They never heard of the Pill or alternative timelines. It must be pretty crowded. You may be working at the Interuniversal Registry on Prefix 1,000,000 too, but they call it the Askarrella Computer there.”
“But how do they extract computation from the other timelines? Who sends them the cryptocurrency?” I asked. “Where does it come from?”
“That part of it was India’s project. She came up with the scam. Prefix 1,000,000 does not have a real census, but they provide fake records to anyone for a fee.”
“How could she do that!” I exclaimed. I almost jumped to my feet, but again my shoulder reminded me to avoid sudden movements. “What kind of a person would choose crime as a computational device?”
“India was a very good person. And a very creative person,” Annie explained. “And she did not consider the other timelines to be real. To her they were just a computational abstraction. She never expected to find herself on a Prefix other than 1,000,000. In a world other than Reality.”
I understood now why India had killed herself on the timelines with the Pill. I even saw the elegance of their cruel design.
The Pill was the fastest way to cause our timelines to diverge. It allowed robots to take over more functions of society faster. Crime was adaptable to all circumstances. It made sense as a long-term vehicle for extracting computation from other timelines regardless of their self-interests.
The scheme would only break down if it was exposed across the timelines.
“You’ve found out, haven’t you?” Annie asked me. She gave my bandages a pointed look. “And you nearly got killed for it. If the truth is exposed on a timeline, it gets permanently disconnected. They will not risk contamination. They rather delete one timeline than let everything unravel.”
“Well, some of what you said was still news to me,” I said.
“Who did it? Who’s tried to kill you?”
“GET DOWN ON THE FLOOR NOW!”
“GET DOWN ON THE FLOOR NOW!” my phone shouted again. Most robots used a friendly and calm voice. But security drones shouted like devils in emergencies. The voice was optimized for triggering human instincts. They also had overrides for speaking through anyone’s phone.
I looked at Annie. Annie looked at me. We noticed the projected image of Vince Manchego on the wall behind us. Then the security drone that was supposed to be my guardian angel opened fire.
Its rotary autocannon filled the room with shrapnel in a second. The hail of bullets broke through the window and tore up the carpeted flooring between Annie and me. It destroyed the wall with Vince’s projected image and damaged the bathroom beyond. The pipes sprayed water in every direction.
“We’ve got to get out!”
“Annie! We’ve got to get out!” I shouted.
Vince’s image was flickering around the apartment. It moved as if it had been projected through the window from another drone hovering outside. Anytime his image fell on a flat surface the security drone opened fire. There were fewer and fewer flat surfaces in the apartment.
I was cowering by a large ceramic vase that had miraculously survived the rain of bullets so far. My sling was off, but I remember no pain.
Vince’s photo now shifted across the shattered ruins of the kitchen island. The drone could not recognize the distorted image and held its fire. I took my chance and sprinted across the room to Annie’s side. I crossed Vince’s projection beam, but it could not form a recognizable image on my body.
“Annie, we’ve got to get out!” I said again as I grabbed her shoulders. The floor was slick and I noticed I was kneeling in blood.
“Cheddar,” Annie said. I could barely hear her weak voice. I was half-deaf from the cannon fire, wind blew in through the window, water was flooding the apartment from broken pipes. Loudest of all was my heartbeat.
“Vince deserves justice,” her paling lips said. “She did not jump. She tried—” That was it all. I could not make out any more words.
The drone with the projector must have climbed higher. Now Vince’s gun-toting image was projected on the rubble-covered floor, and the security drone proceeded to shoot it up. Pieces of green carpet flew everywhere. The area I had just sprinted across was shredded and the destruction moved in our direction.
I lifted Annie on my good shoulder and jumped across the remains of what had been the bathroom’s wall a minute ago. Water soaked us and I cut my leg on a sharp point. The bathroom door and apartment door had both been shredded. I pushed Annie through their remains and collapsed on her body in the corridor.
We lied on the edge of the region of the corridor that had its tiles broken by the bullets coming through the door. I frantically crawled further into the undamaged area, pushing and pulling Annie with me.
Annie was losing blood through one of her legs. I didn’t know which one. There was blood everywhere. I found my sling hanging loose around my elbow. I tied it around Annie’s right thigh. I tied another torn strip of cloth on her left leg in an improvised tourniquet.
Emergency services had to be on their way. They would not enter the zone that was under fire, but here in the corridor they could help Annie if she lived that long. There was not a chance I could carry her any further.
How had I carried her this far? It was not a great distance, but the destruction had turned the apartment into a dimly lit obstacle course. And my left shoulder hurt so much I was shaking now.
Had it just been the adrenaline? Adrenaline is a hell of a drug. Did it turn me briefly into a superhero capable of leaping across rubble while carrying an unconscious woman?
I wanted to believe that. The alternative was an unprovable hypothesis that was highly relevant to my work: Quantum Immortality. Perhaps there were a thousand ways for me to die in there and just one, slightly implausible way to survive. Quantum Immortality said I could only experience the aftermath of the timeline where I survived, so that’s what I would experience. An infinite number of timelines closed to me, but an infinite number of timelines still ahead. By this logic I would forever survive, subjectively.
“Hello, Cheddar.”
It was Vince.
I could barely stand. I was soaked from the broken pipes in Annie’s bathroom. I was bleeding from the gash on my right knee. Likely also from my shoulder. I was miserable.
Vince had just stepped out of the elevator dressed in a brightly colored suit. The suit had a vibrant pattern of reds, greens and blues all over the jacket and trousers. He even had a matching fedora. His gun was a simple black metal though.
“Is that a Quantum Gun now?” I asked.
“What? No, it’s a… regular gun.” Vince said after confusedly glancing at his pistol. “Did you mean to ambush me? With a robot?”
In retrospect it did seem like folly. But I had not gotten used to thinking of Vince as a wizard.
“I guess your suit also repels robots?” I asked. “Makes them think you’re a banana? Well they are going to arrest and interrogate every banana after what you’ve done here.”
“You will be dead though,” Vince reminded me. “They can interrogate me as much as they want. I will keep the secret.”
“Not good enough,” I said. “If they lock you up we still stop paying rent to Prefix 1,000,000. They will still delete this timeline.”
“What do you care? You will be dead already. I don’t care. I never liked this timeline much.”
“It’s not just one timeline. It never is. You cannot think of our timeline as a set of measure zero. As you contemplate your decision here, you also contemplate the same on infinitely many other timelines.”
“I’m not contemplating anything. I’m aiming.”
I did not want to put Quantum Immortality to the test.
“I can fix this!” I pleaded. “I can save this timeline. I can make the payments to Prefix 1,000,000.”
That was all Vince cared about. He just wanted to please his mother. I had to make him believe me.
“Why would you do that?” he asked.
“You are loyal to Prefix 1,000,000 because someone you love lives there. Isn’t that right? Well so do I! This is all messed up. But we cannot abandon our loved ones up there!”
“How would you make the payments?”
“I don’t know. I’ll find a way. The police will be here any second. Tell me how to transfer money to India Catalina. I will take care of it. We can fix this!”
Vince sent me a file. The elevator arrived and a heavily armored police squad poured out of it. Highly paid Unranked, most likely. They shouted commands at us like a security drone. I was too exhausted to care. I just collapsed and trusted them to do their jobs.
I was crawling in a dim organic tunnel. It was almost high enough to stand in, but not quite. I was looking for the exit even though I knew there was no exit. The walls were flexible, turning and twisting every way.
I liked this maze of organic passages. At least it was not cold. The walls radiated a comfortable warmth.
But i was not alone in here. From time to time, a small creature would race past me. I could barely make out their forms. Some looked like bright white birds with too many wings. One of these hit me in the face and scratched my forehead.
I liked this maze of organic passages. At least it was not cold. The walls radiated a comfortable warmth.
But i was not alone in here. From time to time, a small creature would race past me. I could barely make out their forms. Some looked like rabbit-sized grasshoppers. I never saw them jump, they always just flew past me. Except one that had hit me in the right knee.
I liked this maze of organic passages. At least it was not cold. The walls radiated a comfortable warmth.
But i was not alone in here. From time to time, a small creature would race past me. I could barely make out their forms. Some were just small bundles of fur. They moved like no animal on four legs. Their movement was more similar to how the white bob of fur moves at the end of an excited big cat’s tail. They were small, but had a surprising amount of momentum. When one of them hit me I fell back and something stabbed into my left shoulder.
Somehow I knew all these creatures were thoughts. I also knew that I was in a brain. I had to be careful with the thoughts. Some of them could hurt me.
Two weeks later we were all sitting in the cafeteria of St Rasoamanarivo’s Hospital.
Annie Fellerson was drinking her usual ginger tea, and its aroma filled our space. Zeba Jilani had laid out a number of tablets across the table, leaving little space for our salads. It turned out I liked hospital food. I also liked the cafeteria with its large, rounded windows overlooking the city’s zoo. The camels huddled together against the cold drizzle. They were surely pining for the deserts now.
Zeba had just finished explaining how Vince had been in communications with Prefix 1,000,000 and how we would do it. As we had learned from his file, he had a special account with unlimited free interuniversal transmission rights. We debated using it ourselves, but decided to try something less conspicuous first. Vince was in police custody on several charges. Using his account could lead the investigators to us.
We would be relying on my direct access to the Registry instead. I would smuggle our transmissions into the system similarly to how I looked up Quarke’s census record.
“They took off my cast yesterday,” I bragged. “Check this out!” I raised my left arm above my head. There was no pain! It felt great.
“Are you ready then?” Annie asked. She was still confined to a wheelchair and I could tell that she envied my freedom. In all likelihood she still had to spend a week or two in the hospital.
“Yes. I’m going to Michael’s tomorrow. If I cannot sell it to him, I cannot sell it to anyone.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself, though,” Zeba said. “Yes, he’s a great candidate, but selling is never entirely predictable.”
“He believes in Heaven,” Annie argued. “He’s got a lot of money. He’s skeptical of the official take on the interuniversal system.”
“‘Skeptical’ is putting it mildly. He thinks it’s a genocidal conspiracy,” I noted. “Yeah, it should work. He must have a family member that he wants to see moved to Heaven.”
That was our substitute scam.
We needed to pay money to Prefix 1,000,000 and get false census records in exchange. We had to make some money from the false records on our timeline. Vince falsified the records of currently living people. This was only valuable if you wanted to cover up their murders. We were looking for a less violent option.
An alternative was to falsify the records of already dead people. We could revive anyone on a distinguished timeline. We would sell Prefix 1,000,000 as Heaven.
“I don’t feel great about lying to Michael, though,” I said.
“I understand that,” Annie said. “But understand this. You’re an Askarrella soldier now. We are doing this to save the timeline where everyone lives!”
She was a very hard woman as I had gradually learned. It was hard to reconcile it with her grandmotherly good looks. But Jimory was with me on Prefix 1,000,000. Zeba was doing this for Rani. We had all left our better selves there.
“You don’t even have to technically lie,” she continued. “Just omit and imply and let him draw his conclusions.”
“That still feels pretty much like lying to me. I’m just not used to it.”
“Well, have you told Vince what really happened to his mom? Have you told him the truth, Cheddar?”
“My name is not Cheddar!”
THE END