by John Barnes
“Why is that assumption important?”
“Oh, because all the inexplicable events we’re having would be perfectly explicable in a VR program that either had different reality rules or wasn’t fully enforcing the ones it had. For that matter it would explain all of Iphwin’s problems. Unfortunately, I guess, we seem to be real.”
She sighed and took a sip of her coffee, making a face because it was cold. “That’s a test right there. If we are inside a VR world, the world had no way to know I was going to reach for the coffee, and it made it the right temperature for the circumstances instantly, and gave the cup a different weight coming up and going down. That’s way too complex for most programs. Well, all right, then, we are in physical reality, and one easy explanation goes away. What other assumptions are we making?”
“Well, about the phone experiment,” I said, thinking hard— “you know what? We’re assuming that we want to hang up the phone and then we forget about it. But we have no way of knowing what we wanted at the time, do we? Suppose we take wanting right out of it—we’ll just have the computer record whatever comes through the phone, use the dialer on the computer to call the number, and stand clear across the room. This time we won’t listen.”
The result was oddly impressive; the computer dialed and then hung up, instantly, yet when we checked its logs, there was only a disconnect with no indicator as to which end had hung up.
“Hmm,” Helen said. “Now let’s see what happens if a tree falls in the forest and nobody’s there.”
We dialed the number on the handset, walked out of the room, and came back a minute later.
A tiny tinny voice was saying, “Hello, hello? Who the hell is this? I’m going to report this to the—” And the line went dead.
This was getting interesting, as I explained to Helen. “Hmm. It would appear that it responds faster to the computer than to us, which suggests it somehow knows the difference between us and the computer. And as soon as any information starts to come through—notice how the first few words there could have been anywhere, but at the moment when poor Mrs. Culver would have had to speak whatever the local noun for the local cops is in Miami, the connection broke?”
“Let’s pick on someone else next time,” I suggested. “What can we try next?”
Next we tried putting the call up on a speaker phone, with a recording of Helen saying, “Hello. Sorry to bother you. This is your phone company calling to determine whether there is a phantom ring problem on your line. We believe you may have been getting a large number of rings without anyone on the other end of the line. If you have been having this problem, please say ‘Yes’ and state your name clearly. If you have not been having this problem, please say ‘No,’ and feel free to tell us about any other problem that you may be having with your telephone service.”
When we were satisfied with the message, Helen said, “Well, shall we pick on Culver in Miami again, go back to Babbit in Chicago, or do one of the ones we’ve called less?”
“Culver. Definitely Culver. Very likely she’s at home, and we know she’s picking up the phone and yelling. If she’s called the cops, that’s even better—they’ll be on the line.”
“Seems like kind of a nasty prank to pull on an old lady.”
“How do you know she’s old? Maybe she’s a young widow. Maybe her husband forgot to wear his flameproof sheets and stood too close to the burning cross and was burned to death last week.”
“I guess we can always hope. Okay, we’re setting up Mrs. Culver to do her part for science.”
We set the message to play out loud in a few seconds, dialed the number, and left for ten minutes to get coffee from the cafeteria, to make sure we wouldn’t be anywhere near when the phone was picked up and the message played. The house recording system would pick up whatever was said.
We had just sat down to coffee and more fruitless speculation when the lights went out in the cafeteria. There was still plenty of afternoon sun through the window, so it wasn’t dark, but there was that weird hush that falls in a really big building when the power goes out, as if everything had suddenly been smothered in thick cotton.
An alarm screamed from the direction of our office, and a voice announced, “All personnel, Floor 188, Block C, please stand by to evacuate as needed. We have a fire in Room A-210. Fire suppression is being applied. Please stand by.”
Room A-210 was our office.
“Well,” Helen said, tucking a loose strand of chestnut hair back in, “I think we’re hitting Iphwin with something considerably more expensive than a phone bill. I don’t suppose either of us is willing to consider the possibility that it’s a pure coincidence?”
A minute later the voice announced that the fire in A-210 was out, and specifically asked Helen and me to go in and assess damage. Power came back on as we were walking back to our office.
We found what I might have expected: the computer and the phone, along with all the data cables, had become hot enough to partially melt. The robot sprinklers in the room had done their job, aiming the foam streams at the hot spots, and therefore though the carpet was a messy ruin, and one chair that had the bad luck to be behind the computer from the sprinkler’s viewpoint would probably never be the same, most of the place had been saved.
Up above, there was one burned ceiling panel. I got up on a chair and gingerly lifted it; a black cube fell out and smashed on the floor, scattering an assemblage of electronics components. “Betcha that’s the room recording system,” I said.
“No bet. I’m sure it is.” Helen crouched and looked it over. “Yep. In fact it’s more interesting than that. Charred microphone. Charred recording block. Charred everything between those two points. But nothing else even got warm.”
I climbed down off the chair and said, “This time I get to ask what’s the assumption we’re making.”
Helen sighed. “I think we’ve been assuming the universe is not out to get us. And I think all the evidence is, that it is.”
* * * *
After the office cleanup crew got done, there was only about an hour left, so we sat down to try to write our report. We both noticed that whoever was typing had a tendency to space out and stare into space, and now and then to type a few meaningless words before trailing off, but by dint of dictating to each other, and occasionally giving each other a gentle shake, we got it done. I almost erased it just as we finished, but Helen knocked my hand out of the way and we managed to send it to Iphwin.
We had accomplished the whole task list for the day, such as it had been, and we were exhausted, but there wasn’t any feeling of having put in a good day’s work. “Well,” I said, “want to go for an elevator ride?”
“You hopeless romantic,” she said.
We got into the elevator, rode down to our floor, and went into our apartment. The clothing I had ordered had been delivered, and the maid service had hung it all up; the fridge was stocked with groceries, and that little company apartment was now about as much home as it could be. A note on the table said that Helen’s remaining possessions had been gotten from her apartment in Auckland and were being held in storage until we moved into a larger place, and gave her an e-mail address for requesting that anything she wanted be brought out of storage and delivered here. “Maybe some of the naughty undies,” she said, “for when I need to revive your mood.” She was checking through her bureau drawers, and then said, “Ha, nope. They put ‘em in here. I guess they know more about us than I thought.”
“Well, speaking of which,” I said, “it is our second night living together, and tonight we are not dead exhausted, nor in fear of our lives.”
“If that’s a suggestion, the answer is yes. Provided that you cook dinner.”
I grabbed the apron and tied it on. I poached some fish in wine, threw some noodles and mixed vegetables on it so we could pretend we cared about nutrition, and had something edible in just a few minutes.
As we sat at the small table, eating, killing some of the white w
ine that hadn’t been used on the fish, and watching the sea darken as the sun set (so close to the equator, it was never more than a few minutes before or after six), Helen said, “Tell me about anything you remember, anything at all from your past.”
I shrugged. “It’s all pretty dull, as you must know. Are you curious about anything in particular?”
“Well, I’m not curious about you per se—” she began.
“Why, thank you.”
“I don’t mean that! I mean I’m curious about how many memories we don’t share, besides General Grant and the existence of the country where I grew up. For example, the history I teach in school is that after the German atomic bomb attack stopped the D-Day invasion and wrecked London, Washington, and Moscow, there was about a year and a half of disorganized fighting all over the world, and then a brief period of peace. Then Germany ordered eleven nations and regions to set up Reichs, and when they dragged their feet, the Germans went back to war in 1954 and really finished the job. They probably killed a fifth of the world population during the Lebensraum period in the sixties and seventies, and since then they’ve been relatively quiet, only occasionally threatening someone else or bullying the Japanese and Italians around. Right?”
“Right. That’s how I learned it in school.”
“Well, I told you what I grew up with. Now, can you name the American presidents?” she asked.
“If I couldn’t, my parents would have beaten the hell out of me. Washington, Hamilton, Washington again, Monroe for three terms, Perry—”
“Good enough. My list goes Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Burr, Madison, and on from there. You had Lincoln and a Civil War, didn’t you?”
“Yep. And he died, but we disagreed about when.”
She nodded. “All right, that’s just to start with. Now how about some minor details? Did your grandparents ever complain about having to learn to drive on the left when they came to Enzy?”
“Why should they? America was like all the English-speaking countries, it drove on the left.”
“When I grew up,” she said, “Americans drove on the right. So did Canadians.”
“Why would Canadians be different from people from any other state?” I asked.
“Define Canada.”
“Uh, the big state north of Lake Erie, between Michigan and Quebec.”
She nodded more emphatically. “Who made the first airplane?”
“The Wright brothers. Flew it at Kitty Hawk in 1903.”
“Who was the greatest baseball team of all time?”
“Well, I guess most people would say the 1927 Yankees— Ruth, Gehrig, those guys.”
“See, that’s the strange thing. These different histories we have tend to agree about trivia and disagree about big things, with about equal frequencies. Who was president during World War Two?”
“Franklin Roosevelt,” I said.
“Same here. You see? Drastically different patterns of what happened and all these strange details that overlap. Now what kind of assumption do we have to make, to make it possible to reconcile these?”
“I thought we weren’t working anymore today.”
“I don’t know that we get much of a choice,” Helen said, sighing. “The more I turn all this over in my head, the more I can’t leave it alone. We’re assuming something or other that won’t let us see what’s going on, I’m just sure of that.”
A thought suddenly hit me very hard, and I said, “How did we meet?”
“You don’t remember?” Helen said, looking cross.
“Humor me.”
“Well,” she said, not happily, “it was new faculty orientation at Whitman, and we were seated together because we were next to each other in the alphabet. There was a terribly dull speech by the bursar, and you started passing notes to me.”
I groaned. “We came in in different years. You had already been here a year. You joined the faculty in 2055 and I joined in 2056. We met when you posted the notice in the paper about Fluffy, just after I got hired.”
“Gee, I’d forgotten about Fluffy. Poor thing. But we were already dating when it happened, and it wasn’t that big a deal, Lyle, how would we have met about her? And why would I have run an obituary in the newspaper for my cat?”
“An obituary? I don’t mean two years ago when she died of old age.”
“She got run over just after I started dating you.”
“I met you because she got lost and turned up in my backyard. I had seen the ad in the paper so I captured her.. . .”
“I see what you mean,” Helen said. “It’s not just the big things, is it? It seems to be everything.” She stared at me. “We’re finding out something here, but I’m not sure I want to find it out.”
I had half a thought. “Let me ask something more directly relevant. Did you ever turn down an opportunity to become a really good shot with a pistol, or to learn to use that whole arsenal of weapons you had last night?”
She gaped at me. “Well, yes I did, now that you mention it. When I was in the second year of my master’s program, and thinking about going into Reich Studies, I was pretty broke and I applied to the intelligence services. They didn’t want me as an analyst but they offered me the chance to take the physical qualifier. Then I got a decent job, and dropped out and worked for a year, so I never went back to schedule the qualifier. I suppose if I hadn’t gotten that job just then, I might have taken the test and become a spy or a policeman or something, and learned all about using guns and knives.” She got up, gulped her wine, and went to stare out the window at the dark. “That was it, wasn’t it? Some little turning point in my life where I didn’t become the woman who was so good with a gun two nights ago. But then how did she show up just then, and why am I here? My memory includes you getting shot, Lyle, and I think you did. Or some of you did.”
There was a long, awkward silence, and then Helen began to cry, collapsing back onto the couch in a big, awkward tangle of limbs. “You know,” she said, “I have a horrible feeling that somewhere out there you’re dead, and I’m crying. And it doesn’t seem fair, because the me that killed Billie Beard saved your life, and she probably doesn’t have you. She could be the one crying. And it seems so unfair that I’ve still got you, and I didn’t do a thing—”
I got up and took her in my arms, and started kissing away tears and trying to soothe her, as I suppose lovers have been doing for upset lovers since the world began. Her wet face pressed against my neck, and then her soft lips began to move against my skin, and whether it was just stress, or a desperate need to reassure each other, or even just that we had been planning to make love anyway, that’s what we did.
Later, as we were lying in bed, waiting to drift off, I said, “Here’s an odd observation. Does it seem to you that people don’t talk about the past nearly as much as they used to? I mean, I notice nowadays that when small children begin to talk about what happened last year or last month, their mothers shush them as if they’d talked about bowel movements or their private parts. I don’t remember that when I was a child, do you?”
“No, come to think of it.” She rolled over and rested her head on my chest. “And I think I never bring the subject up, not because it would be impolite, but because I just don’t. Now and then some older person starts to talk about their life or things they saw or did long ago, and I find I always get very impatient and try to avoid hearing it. Isn’t that strange in a historian? And my memory is going, too. Every lecture, I go to the library and look up things I know by heart before I write that lecture. Isn’t it strange that I never noticed any of that before?”
“Strange, or maybe part of the pattern,” I said. “Which we seem to be getting better and better at talking about—we’re having fewer memory lapses and seizures, or whatever those were. As if practicing somehow makes it possible to think about the problem.”
“I wonder how many other people wandered in from how many other worlds,” Helen said.
“Other worlds?” I asked. Then I
got a blinding headache and passed out.
A moment later I woke up, my head still in pain, with Helen holding me and saying, “Here, take an aspirin. Are you all right?”
“I guess so. What happened to you when you said ‘other worlds?’ “ At the phrase, my stomach lurched and my head hurt.
“Nothing when I said it. I thought it a moment before, and felt sort of dizzy. Which makes me think it’s one of those ideas, like, like, like, the ones we couldn’t speak before. Well, then, all right, many of us are from different versions of the past...” She gasped. “Ooh, now there’s a thought that hurt. Which I guess is our indicator that it’s important. Not many of us. We all are.”
I swallowed the aspirin and said, “The thought didn’t hurt me because I don’t understand what you are getting at. But now I’m really, really curious.”
