Well, almost never…
If they had simulated this me, they could have simulated that me, too—indeed, all the other possible mes: a me who had raped Connie Hughes in high school, when she hadn’t wanted to go as far as I’d wanted to; a me who had stolen a thousand dollars from Gideon Dillings; a me who…
Mary and I hated to even mention his name: my bête noire, the bane of my existence. Roscoe Harada, that goddamned son of a bitch…
Yes, the version of me who had done what I had fantasized about doing. The version of me who had caved in Harada’s brow-ridged cranium with an aluminum baseball bat…
And the version of me who had shot him in the face, watching his skull open up like time-lapse film of a rose blooming…
And the version of me who had pushed him off the Bloor Street viaduct, letting him fall to the Don Valley Parkway, his body going splat, and then being run over by car after car after car…
They were all conceivable memory states. And if they were possible, then perhaps they did exist in other iterations of this simulation.
And that was intolerable.
It took a while to work it out, but I could now slip between worlds. I rather suspect the designers of the simulation didn’t know I was doing it. Sure, murders were occurring as I eliminated other versions of myself—versions whose existence I couldn’t countenance. But murders happen all the time. And if there were billions of versions of reality, well, on any given day, the same person would be snuffed out in millions of them anyway.
As I’d guessed, the simulators apparently had constraints on how much memory they could use, and so had decided to reconstruct Earth but none of the rest of the universe—at least not in any detail. And since there were memory constraints, some sort of data compression was being employed. Whenever the operating system saw that there were two or more identical versions of any given object, rather than code them both twice, it apparently would code only one version and simply put a pointer to it in the other iterations of the simulation.
I’ve always had an eidetic memory and a vivid imagination—I dream in color, unlike Mary. By fully and completely imagining myself to be as I would have been in one of the alternative realities, by essentially convincing myself that I had killed Roscoe Harada, even for an instant, the operating system saw this me and the other version of me as identical. And then—don’t ask me how I did this; I can’t explain it any more than I can explain how I walk—I manage somehow to access the pointer registry, and slip into the version of the simulation in which that other me, the one I was imagining, does exist.
Granted, not everything I could imagine is possible. I could imagine—indeed, relish—an image of a world in which Harada had fallen down some stairs and broken his back and then, later, in which he and I had ended up in a knockdown, drag-out fist-fight in which I pounded him into a bloody pulp. But, of course, if he were paralyzed, the subsequent brawl wouldn’t have been possible. No, there was no pointer to that world.
But to other possibilities, the pointers did exist.
And I traveled to them, world after world, iteration after iteration, putting an end to the unconscionable versions of me.
“I’m sorry, Erik,” I said, “but I’ve got to kill you.”
Of course, the other me wasn’t in my office at CanScience—he couldn’t be. In any iteration in which I still had that office, cramped though it had been, Harada would still be alive. Instead, I was confronting him in the basement of our house; it was 10:00 a.m. on a weekday, but I guess his shift didn’t start until later today.
The voice of the other me was edged with panic. “Why would you want to kill me?”
“Because you murdered Roscoe Harada.”
The brown eyes darted left and right. There was only one way out of the basement—up the wooden staircase—and I was blocking that. “You can’t prove that.”
“I don’t have to prove it to anyone but me. I’m here—in this version of the simulation—because I imagined a world in which we’d killed Harada with a knife to the left kidney. If that wasn’t what really happened here, I wouldn’t have been able to transfer to this iteration.”
The other me hesitated, as if unsure what to say. Then he frowned. “So what if I did do it? You must have wanted to do it, too. After what he did to us—”
“I don’t dispute that he should be dead. But what makes us better than Harada is that we never did anything awful to him to get even. And I can’t live with the knowledge that a version of reality exists in which we did.”
“But if you kill me, then you’ll be a murderer, too.”
“Is it murder? Or is it suicide?” My turn to frown. “Perhaps it’s neither. Perhaps it’s just me setting things straight.”
“This won’t bring Harada back to life in this iteration.”
“No. But it will serve as a fitting punishment for his death, allowing me to enjoy my existence without guilt.”
“But, look, the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics says that—”
I cut him off. “It says that even in the real, non-simulated world that must have existed at one time, whenever an action can go two ways, it does go both ways, but in separate universes, spinning off new timelines for each possible version of reality.”
The other me nodded vigorously. “Exactly. So this vast multiplexed computer simulation is no different from that.”
“Except that John Cramer’s transactional interpretation solves all the quandaries of quantum physics without recourse to parallel universes. If this were the real world, I could believe that Cramer was right and Hugh Everett was wrong, and there was only one timeline. But here I know—know!—that there are versions of the simulation in which all the base things I’ve ever thought of doing actually happened. And if I’m going to have peace—”
“If you’re going to have peace,” said the other me, with resignation, “you’re going to have to put an end to me.”
I squeezed the trigger and said “Exactly,” but the bark of the Glock drowned out the word.
What did Roscoe Harada do to me, you might ask? CanScience was a small publishing company, and he was the buyer for a large bookstore chain. We solicited pre-pub orders for a book called Y2canucK: A Canadian Guide to Preparing for the Year 2000. For us, a thousand copies was a normal print run. Chapters had taken four hundred copies; Indigo, a hundred and seventy-five. And then Harada’s order came in for his company: 25,000 copies, by far the biggest order we’d ever had.
We printed the books and delivered them: five hundred and twenty cartons, all shipped at our expense to Harada’s warehouse in Oshawa.
And Harada had his people sit on them, never even putting them out into the stores.
And then, in January 2000, he returned them all. Every single copy. They were in the same cartons we’d shipped them out in; they’d never even been opened.
Y2K didn’t turn out to be a disaster—so said all the newspapers.
But it was a disaster for Mary and me.
Books are fully returnable, and Harada’s chain had used its buying clout to get not just CanScience but all publishers to offer them extended payment terms. The books came back before his company had ever paid a single dime on the original invoice.
And, of course, there was no longer any market anywhere for that title.
I couldn’t pay even a fraction of the printer’s bill, and the printer sued, forcing Mary and me into bankruptcy.
We lost our company.
We came within inches of losing our home.
Why had Harada done it? Because I’d spoken harshly about his company’s bullying practices in an interview in Quill & Quire, the Canadian publishing trade journal.
Why had he done it?
Because he could.
Of course maybe neither he nor I had ever really existed. We were merely possible combinations of genes, recalling possible permutations of memory. Maybe all these iterations of him and me have no basis in reality.
In which c
ase, killing him wouldn’t be so awful. After all, maybe he never was meant to exist. Maybe I was never meant to exist, either.
No, no, when you came right down to it, killing him would not be that bad. And it would be a way for me to regain mental peace, wouldn’t it? I didn’t like arguing with Mary; I didn’t like laying awake at night, haunted by what had happened.
If I killed Harada, if I made him pay for what he’d done to us, then maybe I could relax. Mary and I wouldn’t get our publishing company back, but at least I’d have the comfort that came with knowing he hadn’t gotten away with it.
And—let’s face it—there must be trillions of iterations of the simulation, if all theoretically possible humans have been generated. I’d made a start, to be sure, but I couldn’t possibly track down all the versions of me that have already gotten rid of Harada.
But if I killed him, too, in this reality—
Well, then, I wouldn’t be so tortured by the existence of other versions of me who had killed him, and—
No.
No, dammit, no.
Be honest with yourself, Erik.
I’m not tortured by them.
I’m jealous of them—jealous that they get to live in worlds without Roscoe Harada, and I do not.
But if I joined them…
If I joined them, I’d at last be free.
The smorgasbord of possibilities made me giddy. Stabbing? Gun shot? Electrocution? Drowning? Poison? Dismemberment? Running him over with my car? Hacking away at him with an ax…
I savored the options, but finally came back down to Earth. It didn’t have to be anything dramatic; indeed, I didn’t have to do it myself. In fact, I probably shouldn’t do it myself. When I need wiring done I call an electrician, because I’d just mess things up if I tried to handle it on my own.
So why not call a professional this time?
The phone call came a week later. Just two words, in a lilting Québecois accent: “It’s done.” I didn’t tell Mary, of course, but it was the lead story on the CityPulse News at Six: “Book company executive found shot to death.”
Mary and I made love that night like we hadn’t for years, like we were the only people in the universe.
I was free. At last, I was free of Harada.
Mary left for work in the morning—she, at least had a marketable skill; she’d found work at a midsize accounting firm. But I decided to call in sick—I worked as a clerk at the Chapters superstore in Bayview Village now, making not much more than minimum wage. But at least I was still in the book business—although nobody from the trades ever called to ask me for a quote anymore.
No, today was a day to kick back and, for the first time in years, it seemed, to relax.
I didn’t think much of it when I heard sounds coming from downstairs a few minutes after Mary had left; she often forgot her purse or gloves and had to come back to fetch them.
Still, I decided to head down. Maybe I could entice her to stay home, too. We could spend the day drinking wine and making love, and—
I should have seen it coming, of course.
Downstairs, in my living room, was another version of me, holding a gun. He looked into my eyes, and I looked into his.
“I can’t live knowing that what you’ve done is going to go unpunished,” he said.
“He deserved to die,” I said. “You know that.”
The gun was pointed at my chest, unwavering. The other me said nothing.
“You want him out of our lives—out of every version of our lives—as much as I do,” I said.
“But I can’t countenance what you did,” said the me with the gun. “It’s not right.”
“But it’s what we wanted.”
“But to live, knowing that you’ve done this and will likely get away with it…” he said. “I’m sorry, but there has to be a version of us that is at peace.”
And, as the gun fired, I realized, there was—or, at least, there was about to be.
And it was me.
Gator
Author’s Introduction
Josepha Sherman—one of my favorite people in the SF world—asked me to contribute to an anthology she was editing with Keith R. A. DeCandido of stories based on urban legends, like those described in the nonfiction books of Jan Howard Brunvand, such as The Vanishing Hitchhiker. Although this was to be a dark-fantasy anthology, I decided to do a science-fictiony take on the rumored alligators in the sewers beneath New York.
Jo and Keith loved the story, and used it as the lead piece in their anthology; the story also garnered an honorable mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.
Gator
Something scampered by in the dark, its footfalls making tiny splashing sounds. Ludlam didn’t even bother to look. It was a rat, no doubt—the sewers were crawling with them, and, well, if Ludlam could get used to the incredible stench, he could certainly get used to the filthy rodents, too.
This was his seventy-fourth night skulking about the sewers beneath New York. He was dressed in a yellow raincoat and rubber boots, and he carried a powerful flashlight—the kind with a giant brick battery hanging from the handle.
In most places, the ceiling was only inches above his head; at many points, he had to stoop to get by. Liquid dripped continuously on the raincoat’s hood. The walls, sporadically illuminated by his flashlight beam, were slick with condensation or slime. He could hear the rumble of traffic up above—even late at night it never abated. Sometimes he could hear the metal-on-metal squeal of subway trains banking into a turn on the other side of the sewer wall. There was also the constant background sound of running water; here, the water was only a few inches deep, but elsewhere it ran in a torrent, especially after it had rained.
Ludlam continued to walk along. Progress was always slow: the stone floor was slippery, and Ludlam didn’t want to end up yet again falling face forward into the filth.
He paused after a time, and strained to listen. Rats continued to chatter nearby, and there was the sound of a siren, audible through a grate in the sewer roof. But, as always, he failed to hear what he wanted to hear.
It seemed as though the beast would never return.
The double doors to Emergency Admitting swung inward, and ambulance attendants hustled the gurney inside. A blast of ice-cold air, like the ghostly exhaling of a long-dead dragon, followed them into the room from the November night.
Dennis Jacobs, the surgeon on duty, hurried over to the gurney. The injured man’s face was bone-white—he had suffered severe blood loss and was deep in shock. One of the attendants pulled back the sheet, exposing the man’s left leg. Jacobs carefully removed the mounds of gauze covering the injury site.
A great tract of flesh—perhaps five pounds of meat—had been scooped out of his thigh. If the injury had been another inch or two to the right, the femoral artery would have been clipped, and the man would have bled to death before help could have arrived.
“Who is he?” asked Jacobs.
“Paul Kowalski,” said the same attendant who had exposed the leg. “A sewer worker. He’d just gone down a manhole. Something came at him, and got hold of his leg. He hightailed it up the ladder, back onto the street. A passerby found him bleeding all over the sidewalk, and called 9-1-1.”
Jacobs snapped his fingers at a nurse. “O.R. 3,” he said.
On the gurney, Kowalski’s eyes fluttered open. His hand reached up and grabbed Jacobs’s forearm. “Always heard the stories,” said Kowalski, his voice weak. “But never believed they were really there.”
“What?” said Jacobs. “What’s really there?”
Kowalski’s grip tightened. He must have been in excruciating pain. “Gators,” he said at last through clenched teeth. “Gators in the sewers.”
Around 2:00 a.m., Ludlam decided to call it a night. He began retracing his steps, heading back to where he’d come down. The sewer was cold, and mist swirled in the beam from his flashlight. Something brushed against his foot, swimming through the fetid water
. So far, he’d been lucky—nothing had bit him yet.
It was crazy to be down here—Ludlam knew that. But he couldn’t give up. Hell, he’d patiently sifted through sand and gravel for years. Was this really that different?
The smell hit him again. Funny how he could ignore it for hours at a time, then suddenly be overpowered by it. He reached up with his left hand, pinched his nostrils shut, and began breathing through his mouth.
Ludlam walked on, keeping his flashlight trained on the ground just a few feet in front of him. As he got closer to his starting point, he tilted the beam up and scanned the area ahead.
His heart skipped a beat.
A dark figure was blocking his way.
Paul Kowalski was in surgery for six hours. Dr. Jacobs and his team repaired tendons, sealed off blood vessels, and more. But the most interesting discovery was made almost at once, as one of Jacobs’s assistants was prepping the wound for surgery.
A white, fluted, gently curving cone about four inches long was partially embedded in Kowalski’s femur.
A tooth.
“What the hell are you doing down here?” said the man blocking Ludlam’s way. He was wearing a stained Sanitation Department jacket.
“I’m Dr. David Ludlam,” said Ludlam. “I’ve got permission.” He reached into his raincoat’s pocket and pulled out the letter he always carried with him.
The sanitation worker took it and used his own flashlight to read it over. “‘Garbologist,’” he said with a snort. “Never heard of it.”
“They give a course in it at Columbia,” said Ludlam. That much was true, but Ludlam wasn’t a garbologist. When he’d first approached the City government, he’d used a fake business card—amazing what you could do these days with a laser printer.
“Well, be careful,” said the man. “The sewers are dangerous. A guy I know got a hunk taken out of him by an alligator.”
“Oh, come on,” said Ludlam, perfectly serious. “There aren’t any gators down here.”
“Thank you for agreeing to see me, Professor Chong,” said Jacobs. Chong’s tiny office at the American Museum of Natural History was packed floor to ceiling with papers, computer printouts, and books in metal shelving units. Hanging from staggered coat hooks on the wall behind Chong was a stuffed anaconda some ten feet long.
Iterations Page 5
