Afterlife Crisis

by Randal Graham

  We took our respective seats and Isaac rang a bell for tea. Some species of domestic person manifested himself, took Isaac’s order, and shimmered off. When Isaac returned his attention to yours truly he found me perusing a small, leatherbound notebook which I’d spotted beside my chair.

  “One of yours?” I said.

  “Why, erm, yes,” said Isaac.

  I detected a note of caution in his voice, like a police detainee wary of being hornswoggled into what is known as self-incrimination.

  “Not your usual output, what?”

  “No, no!” he said, chuckling. “Pseudo-scientific stuff. Just some thoughts I was exploring some months ago to fill an idle hour — musing on non-verifiable phenomena. It’s a hobby of mine. Why, I once wrote an entire book on alchemy, not that I expect anyone to read it. Merely an interesting diversion. That notebook runs along the same lines — a simple exercise for the mind, letting it focus on flights of fancy.”

  “I see, I see.”

  “An amusing distraction from my work.”

  “Nifty title,” I said, examining the cover. “Principia Pre-Morta. A book about the beforelife, then?” I hazarded.

  “Well spotted!” said Isaac. “But again, nothing of consequence. I merely posit a hypothetical world in which the beforelife is real for the purpose of exploring an impractical thought experiment.”

  I thumbed my way through the journal’s pages while he spoke — a procedure which seemed to make him sweat for reasons unknown to me. The fruit of my thumbing was the discovery of a series of printed pictures tucked away within the volume.

  “Norm Stradamus!” I said, great-scotting and withdrawing the first pic which caught my eye.

  “You know him?” said my host.

  This surprised me. I mean to say, the last time I’d hobnobbed with this maths fancier, we’d both been in the presence of Norm Stradamus and his gang of loony disciples. This Norm, if you’ll recall, serves as the High Priest and chief prognosticator of the Church of O, a cultish group devoted to belief in the beforelife and the worship of someone or other said to live there. But the point for present purposes is that Isaac ought to have known I’d recognize this chap at first sight, the three of us having been spinning in each other’s orbits in the fairly recent past.

  It didn’t take more than a couple of ticks for the famously keen Feynman powers of deduction, honed by recent experience, to discern just what in Abe’s name was going on. Perhaps you’ve figured it out too. No? Well, let me connect the dots. It’s about all of these bouts of Rhinnick-centred amnesia: Peericks & Co. forgetting who I was, Oan failing to recall that I’d been a patient in the hospice, Isaac forgetting that he and I had once stood cheek-by-jowl with Norm Stradamus — these weren’t episodes of amnesia at all! These apparent episodes of forgetfulness were, I could now perceive, simple editorial changes, not unlike the Author’s choice to erase all references to the IPT network. For whatever reason, the Author was making retroactive revisions in His work and had deleted various tidbits from my history. Things I remembered having experienced were no longer strictly canon, as the expression is. As for why the Author would leave my memory of these non-canonical episodes intact, who can say? Perhaps as a safeguard, or backup, in the event He wished to restore a previous version. But what mattered now was that I was hep to a timeline Isaac Newton hadn’t experienced, and I shrank from the prospect of revealing this to him. I mean to say, having tried to explain the Author and his Works to various parties in the past, I’ve come to learn that these conversations generally lead to strange looks being exchanged, a series of whispered conversations, a couple of surreptitious phone calls, all finally culminating — if culminating means what I think it does — with self being sent on a forced vacation at some quiet retreat featuring straitjackets and ten to twelve sessions of psychotherapy. I decided I should put a lid on any discussion of my prior association with Norm Stradamus, keeping all related data under the hat.

  “I know of him,” I said, which seemed to land as a safe response.

  “Interesting fellow,” said Isaac. “Leads a congregation of devotees who believe in the beforelife and worship someone called ‘the Great Omega.’ He claims to have done some revelatory research on the boundaries between our own world and the beforelife. I’ve looked into it — purely out of curiosity and professional courtesy, of course, one researcher looking in on the work of another, I mean. All hogwash in the end, but I’ve never shied away from a line of inquiry.”

  “So you really don’t believe in the beforelife, then?” I asked, knowing Isaac had — at least in the version of history currently stored in the Feynman bean — been rather thoroughly wrapped up with events which had, for anyone paying attention, conclusively drained the bath on any notion that the beforelife wasn’t the genuine goods.

  He cleared his throat and stammered a bit, doing a passable impression of an academic bullfrog. “Ahem. Well, I mean, there’s just no evidence on which to found any such belief,” he said, and I perceived that he blushed a little. “No evidence at all. Why, even if it did exist, we’ve no way to observe it. No, no, any question of the existence or non-existence of the beforelife is best left out of any description of the observable world. But now, I’m curious,” he said, once again leaning forward in what you might call a marked manner. “Do you believe in the beforelife?”

  “Oh, ah,” I said, unprepared for this sudden dose of table-turning. But we Rhinnicks are quick thinkers. “I have a pal who does,” I said. “Chap named Zeus. Thinks he’s been there and back a number of times, sometimes as a man, once as a dog — a Yorkshire Terrier, if that’s of any interest. A complicated case. But turning back to this journal of yours,” I added, thumbing through it rather freely, “it seems to suggest that you had at least some faith in the possibility that the beforelife—”

  “It’s purely hypothetical,” he snapped, if you can snap a word as long as “hypothetical.” For some reason not revealed, this number-pusher seemed to be growing rather hottish under the collar, and he carried on in what you might call a harried tone.

  “As I said, I merely employed the assumption that the beforelife was real in pursuit of a thought experiment aimed at assessing human thought processes, decision-making, and memory in a climate of non—”

  “Quite, quite,” I said, waving a placating notebook, for it was clear that I was steering this man of science toward a spot of uncomfortable terrain. I hadn’t wished to unsettle the old egg. My goal, after all, was to gain this bimbo’s trust, inquire about his experiments, and see how his scientific musings stood to damage the here and now, all while convincing him to lend a hand in bringing an end to Oan’s incarceration. His thoughts about the beforelife were a side issue at best.

  I was saved the effort of assuaging the old gumboil’s rankled feelings by the return of the domestic chap with tea. He did his noble work, adding here a lump of sugar and there a splash of milk, before he shimmered off and left us.

  I set the notebook aside as though it didn’t matter a single damn, which of course it didn’t.

  “Talking of scientific whatnots,” I said, adroitly steering the conv. toward less controversial topics, “I’m interested in what you were working on back there.” I punctuated this by aiming a thumb over my shoulder toward the lecture theatre with the crowded blackboards.

  “Of course you are!” said Isaac, his enthusiasm springing back so forcibly that he almost upset his tea. “Some of my most interesting work. A pair of problems, in fact, which keep bumping into each other in unexpected ways. On the western blackboard, as you might have noticed, I’m grappling with the problem of quantum superposition: the hypothesis that the state of nature we perceive is comprised of multiple, different substates that collapse into what might loosely be called reality — the state that we perceive through scientific measurement or sensory observation. And on the eastern board I’m working on what a layperson might de
scribe as the ostensibly unidirectional nature of time.”

  He then uttered a bit of gobbledygook which might have been an equation, for it featured a larger number of exes, deltas, taus, and references to entropy than you usually hear.

  “Time, eh?” I said, keeping up as best I could.

  “That’s right. One of my most recent diversions is the problem of time travel — moving from one set of temporal co-ordinates to another. I toyed with the idea that a device might be constructed that would allow us to perceive the flow of time in what might be called the reverse direction — seeing effects precede causes, endings before beginnings, even peering into the past. It’s through this work that I managed to develop the basic precepts of time travel.”

  “Hmmm,” I said, stroking the chin and undertaking to show a hint of interest. Of course I was thinking, as you probably are, that here was a scientific babbler who’d fallen off his nut. Effects preceding causes, forsooth. But I didn’t see any harm in feigning interest and encouraging the man with word and gesture. By doing so I might even get on this science booster’s good side and convince him to let me in on whatever dangerous experiments he might have in the hopper. I continued hemming and hawing, giving the ass the run of his tongue.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” said the professor.

  “You do?” I said, surprised.

  “Of course I do! You think travelling through time might be dangerous.”

  That hadn’t occurred to me at all. Why, on reflection it seemed to me that I often travel in time without perceiving the slightest risk. Yesterday, for example, I was situated in yesterday, and today I am firmly grounded in today. I fully expected that tomorrow I’d be in tomorrow, travelling from one bit of time to the next without ever breaking a sweat. I must have mused on this for quite a number of ticks, effortlessly travelling through time once again, for Isaac decided to interrupt my bit of musing.

  “Going back in time and interfering with history, I mean. Changing the order of things. Becoming the first man in Detroit and preventing Abe from ruling. Or stopping important scientific discoveries. Interfering with causality — all sorts of perils that have been posited by those who’ve explored the notion of travelling back and forth through time.”

  I uttered a mild “oh, ah.”

  “But those perils don’t arise,” Isaac continued, and I found myself unable to tell whether he thought this was good or bad. “You can’t change history by moving backward in time,” he added. “It’s just not possible. The only feasible form of time travel I’ve struck upon is useful for observation and little else. The time-stream, at least insofar as physical interference is concerned, seems to have an inherent self-correcting mechanism built into it, preventing anything from moving into the past and changing history. Theoretically, one might step back through time and observe historical goings-on, but there’s no risk of treading on butterflies and unravelling history.”

  He’d rather lost me with the butterfly remark, but he didn’t seem to notice, for at this point he threw in another equation or two, as if I’d been stringing right along and needed some maths to complete the picture I’d been developing.

  “I’ve gotten as far as producing a prototype device,” he continued, dipping a hand into a pocket and producing something which I might have called a Swiss Army watch, being a timepiece bedecked with all manner of bits and bobs which had been tacked on for some undisclosed purpose, probably scientific.

  “It ought to work,” he said, brow furrowing deeply, “but it doesn’t.”

  “Too bad,” I said.

  “All of my calculations are in order. All of the principles are sound.”

  “No doubt,” I said.

  “But it consistently fails to work.”

  “How like life,” I said, philosophically.

  “I keep testing it by trying to go back in time to observe my installation as the Lucasian Chair — a day that’s seared into my memory more than most. A banner day for science. The university set the date to coincide with the 300th manifestival of the department’s founding Chair.”

  “The founding Chair, eh?”

  “That’s right! Galileo. Clever man. I’ve set this chrono-device to that date for testing purposes and tried to move myself through time so I can watch the goings-on, but nothing happens.”

  I mourned in spirit for the poor fish. I could imagine his frustration.

  “Perhaps it’d work in the beforelife,” I said, feeling that it never hurt to shove an oar in.

  This seemed to catch the Lucasian Chair off guard.

  “The beforelife? What in Abe’s name makes you say that?”

  “Time’s different there.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “It runs out. If I understand the basic set-up, your average chap puffs along for a space of eighty years or so, and then poof: no more beforelife. His time aboard the mortal coil comes to an end, and he winds up here. Surely that affects your equations.”

  The serial leaner leaned toward me once again and raised a baffled brow or two, and my heart swelled at the thought that I was holding my own with a named Professorial Chair at old DU. It’d have done my old schoolmasters and schoolmistresses proud to have seen me debating what I believe are called “temporal mechanics” with a chap who, whatever his faults, was good with figures.

  “Explain,” said Isaac, eyeing me warily. And something in his manner made me shrink an inch or two and left me feeling a good deal less certain that I had any notion of what I’d been driving at.

  “Oh, just making conversation. You see where I’m going though, surely. From a human chap’s perspective, time’s infinite in Detroit. Shorter for the recently manifested than for Abe, I suppose, but infinite nonetheless, if you follow. Keeps ticking along forever. It doesn’t end. But that’s not true in the beforelife. Each chap gets a shortish chunk. And if I remember anything at all about mathematics, it’s that infinite math and finite math are two wholly different things, they being offered in two completely different semesters. I didn’t go in for either of them, but I do remember seeing both appear on the class schedule.”

  This seemed to strike the man amidships. He just sat there looking stunned for a couple of ticks, before fishing a scrap of paper out of his pocket and scribbling down a note or two. And as he scribbled he aimed a fishy eye at me as if he wasn’t sure what to make of the handsome blighter staring back at him. I wasn’t sure whether he was about to clap his hands and shout eureka or, by sharp contradistinction, cuff me on the earhole and banish me from his sight. He seemed to choose a middle course, steering the conv. in a new direction.

  “You’ve given me much to think about. Perhaps I’ll explore that notion later. For the time being—”

  Here I laughed heartily, for I had assumed he’d intended this as comedy. “Time being,” I mean to say. But Isaac didn’t seem to get it, for he shushed me with a glare and carried on.

  “I’m approaching the issue by reference to quantum superposition,” he said.

  I mmm-hmmmed politely, though I hadn’t the foggiest notion of what he was saying. But he carried on in this vein, wantonly unleashing an assortment of monstrous phrases like “orthogonal function,” “density matrix,” and “multiple eigenstates” until I thought my head might spin off its axis, fall off my shoulders, and roll out the door. The whole thing reminded me forcibly of poetry — it sounds well enough, but doesn’t mean anything.

  “But enough about that,” he said at length. “I appreciate your willingness to indulge me, but none of this is why you’re here.”

  “It isn’t?” I said.

  “No, no! You want to know all about my Stygian expedition.”

  “Oh, you went to the Styx, did you?”

  I seemed to have said the wrong thing. He goggled at me.

  “Didn’t you know I’d launched a Stygian expedition?”


  “Nobody tells me anything.”

  “I should have thought they’d have briefed you at the office. Seems silly to send a reporter all the way out here to investigate a story without telling him what they’re sending him for.”

  I’m pretty astute and I saw there’d been a mix-up somewhere.

  “Were you expecting a reporter?”

  “Of course I was. Aren’t you here from The Detroit Review of Neurological Science?”

  “Sorry, no.”

  “I thought you must be the fellow who was coming to hear all about my work on the neural flows. I had a fleet of drones plumb the deepest regions of the Styx, gathering data for over a month. But if you’re not a reporter, who are you?”

  “Rhinnick Feynman!”

  “Feynman? Never heard of you. Why in Abe’s name are you here?”

  I saw the time had come to get down to the res.

  “Now that you ask, I’m here for not one, but two reasons. First to ask about any dangerous experiments you might be designing, and second to ask a favour for a friend.”

  “Friend? What friend?”

  “Dr. Everard M. Peericks.”

  “From Detroit Mercy Hospice?”

  “Oh! You know him?”

  “Of course I do. I met with him weeks ago to negotiate the release of patient records in support of my work on memory. Records relating to mindwipe victims, princks, Napoleons, any patient who has atypical memory patterns.”

  “And did he give them to you?” I said, a bit more eagerly than I’d planned. The reason for this sudden rush of enthusiasm will, I expect, be clear to all. If this earnest professor had gotten hold of these patient records, he might have copies of records pertaining to Zeus. Opportunity was knocking, and Rhinnick was keen to open the door.

  “No, he didn’t. It was odd, really. We’d spent hours discussing appropriate measures to protect his patients’ confidentiality while still allowing me to carry out my work. We had put plans in place to redact names and to exclude any personal data that wasn’t relevant to my study. But when Peericks went to examine the records I needed he found that several had disappeared.”