“Why is this happening?” Ally said, still holding his hand.
“I don’t know,” Pete said. “Maybe there’s no reason. Maybe in a movie there would be, but...”
“Some movies reassure us that life makes sense,” Ally said. “And some movies remind us that life doesn’t make any sense at all.” She exhaled roughly. “And some things don’t have anything to do with movies.”
“Bite your tongue,” Pete said. “Listen, keep the laptop. The battery should run for a couple of hours. There’s a spare in the bag, all charged up, which should be good for a couple more hours. Watching movies really sucks up the power, I’m afraid. I don’t know if you’ll be able to find an adapter to charge the laptop in your world—the standards are different. But you can see a couple of movies at least. I gave you all my favorite DVDs, great stuff by Hayao Miyazaki, Beat Takeshi, Wes Anderson, some classics...take your pick.”
“Pete...”
He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “It’s been so good talking to you these past few nights.” He tried to think of what he’d say if this was the last scene in a movie, his Casablanca farewell moment, and a dozen appropriate quotes sprang to mind. He dismissed all of them. “I’m going to miss you, Ally.”
“Thank you, Pete,” she said, and went, reluctantly, back into Impossible Dreams. She looked at him from the other side of the glass, and he raised his hand to wave just as the door disappeared.
Pete didn’t let himself go back the next night, because he knew the temptation to go into the store would be too great, and it might only be open for ten minutes this time. But after pacing around his living room for hours, he finally went out after 10:00 and walked to the place the store had been, thinking maybe she’d left a note, wishing for some closure, some final-reel gesture, a rose on the doorstep, something.
But there was nothing, no door, no note, no rose, and Pete sat on the sidewalk, wishing he’d thought to photograph Ally, wondering which movies she’d decided to watch, and what she’d thought of them.
“Hey, Mr. Nickels.”
Pete looked up. Ally stood there, wearing a red coat, his laptop bag hanging from her shoulder. She sat down beside him. “I didn’t think you’d show, and I did not relish the prospect of wandering in a strange city all night with only fifty dollars in nickels to keep me warm. Some of the street names are the same as where I’m from, but not enough of them for me to figure out where you lived.”
“Ally! What are you doing here?”
“You gave me those books,” she said, “and they all talk about Citizen Kane by Orson Welles, how it transformed cinema.” She punched him gently in the shoulder. “But you didn’t give me the DVD!”
“But...Everyone’s seen Citizen Kane!”
“Not where I’m from. The print was destroyed. Hearst knew the movie was based on his life, and he made a deal with the studio, the guards looked the other way, and someone destroyed the film. Welles had to start over from nothing, and he made Jason and the Argonauts instead. But you’ve got Citizen Kane! How could I not come see it?”
“But Ally...you might not be able to go back.”
She laughed, then leaned her head on his shoulder. “I don’t plan to go back. There’s nothing for me there.”
Pete felt a fist of panic clench in his chest. “This isn’t a movie,” he said.
“No,” Ally said. “It’s better than that. It’s my life.”
“I just don’t know—”
Ally patted his leg. “Relax, Pete. I’m not asking you to take me in. Unlike Blanche DuBois—played by Jessica Tandy, not Vivien Leigh, where I’m from—I don’t depend on the kindness of strangers. I ran away from home when I was fifteen, and never looked back. I’ve started from nothing before, with no friends or prospects or ID, and I can do it again.”
“You’re not starting from nothing,” Pete said, putting his arm around her. “Definitely not.” The lights weren’t going to come up, the curtain wasn’t coming down; this wasn’t the end of a movie. For once, Pete liked his life better than the vivid continuous dream of the screen. “Come on. Let’s go watch Citizen Kane.”
They stood, and walked together. “Just out of curiosity,” he said. “Which movies did you watch on the laptop?”
“Oh, none of them. I thought it would be more fun watching them with you.”
Pete laughed. “Ally, I think this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
She cocked her head and raised her eyebrows. “You sound like you’re quoting something,” she said, “but I don’t know what.”
“We’ve got a lot of watching to do,” he said.
“We’ve got a lot of everything to do,” Ally replied.
LIKE MINDS
ROBERT REED
Robert Reed is the author of more than two hundred works of short science fiction, with the occasional fantasy and odd horror thrown into the mix. He has also published various novels, including Marrow and The Well of Stars, two epic tales about a world-sized starship taking a lap around the galaxy. His novella, “A Billion Eves,” won the Hugo in 2007. Reed lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, with his wife and daughter, and a computer jammed with forgotten files.
This is what you do:
Begin with a fleck of your skin and a modest fee. Then a psychological evaluation that is little better than nothing, and forms to sign. Always, forms. Then someone wearing a narrow smile sits before you, listing the most obvious troubles that come with too much of this very good thing. Obsessions. Addictions. Depression. Spiritual obliteration. Chronic indifference. Or a pernicious amorality that infects every facet of what has always been, the truth told, a ridiculously insignificant life.
“Do you wish to continue?” that someone asks.
Of course you do.
“Do you understand the terms and obligations of this license?”
Of course you cannot. You’ve barely paid attention to any of the dark warnings. If you really could appreciate the countless risks, you wouldn’t have come here in the first place.
“Are you absolutely certain that you wish to continue?” she asks one final time. Or he asks. Or sometimes, several attendants sit before you, speaking with a shared voice. “Are you willingly and happily accepting any and all of these negative consequences?”
With a cocky smile, you say, “Sure.”
Or you say, “Of course I do,” and leak a nervous sigh.
Or you simply smile and nod, and with a tight little voice ask, “So what happens next?”
Next is a cool hand reaching out, dropping a tiny white pill into your damp palm. There is evidence and much informed conjecture that the pill is a delivery system for subtle technologies that rework the mind. Most assume that this is how the Authority reads thoughts, which in turn allows it to turn imprecise wishes into worthy gifts. Carefully, you place the miracle pill on your tongue and swallow. There comes a tingling sensation, brief and perhaps imagined. And then you make yourself laugh, telling your audience, “I know some of us have troubles. But I won’t. You’ll see. I’m going to do just fine, thank you. Don’t worry about me.”
Josh is eighteen today, and legal. He sits in a small room, and he sits at the shore of a great ocean. Barely two meters across, the ocean resembles a puddle of quiet gray water. That bland appearance is part of its charm, Josh decides. Incalculably deep and wondrously complex, the ocean is filled with machines too vast and swift to have been built by mere humans. To get a sense of the vastness, imagine the visible universe thoroughly rebuilt. Every star and scrap atom is used to build a single computer, pushing local physics as far as they can be pushed, in every dimension. And that machine still cannot make even the most rudimentary calculations necessary to serve that eighteen-year-old man-child who sits on a plain wooden stool, crouched over the great ocean.
But of course Josh isn’t sitting inside just this one room. There are trillions of very nearly identical rooms—where “trillion” is a sloppy fat number meant to imply an immeasurable multitude.
And there are trillions of identical Joshes peering down into a uniform grayness—a shared quantum linkage connecting all that is potential and possible, and everything inevitable.
For Josh and his world, this linkage is a very new technology.
“Hello?” he whispers nervously.
The gray surface shimmers slightly.
Then Josh says, “A book, a novel.”
Words cause a multitude of realms to work together, the Authority suddenly engaged. A deceptively quiet voice asks the obvious: “Who is the author of this book, this novel?”
Josh can say any name. But he takes a deep breath and blurts, “Me.”
“By ‘me,’” the Authority inquires, “do you mean your own genotype?”
This is why Josh surrendered a piece of his own skin. His very complex and specific DNA serves as an identity and as a marker. “Sure. Yeah. My genotype.” Then he flinches, confessing, “This is my first time.”
But the Authority knows that already. “Are there other criteria?”
“Like what?” Josh had thought that he came prepared, but he feels sick with nervous energy, almost too anxious to think.
“I pick random examples,” the Authority cautions. “But you may narrow the category in significant ways. For instance, what is the author’s age? How well did this novel sell? And did the author win any awards or commendations?”
“Awards?” He hadn’t quite thought of that. “You mean, what...like the Nobel Prize?”
“Exactly.”
“The Nobel Prize?”
“Certainly,” the voice purrs.
Josh licks his lips. “I’m a very good writer,” he boasts. “People say so.” Then with a nervous gravity, he says, “Okay. I wrote the novel in my thirties, and I won the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer, too.”
“Does the novel have a theme?”
“I don’t care.” Then he reconsiders, saying, “Maybe, yeah. How about how it feels to be eighteen? Yeah. I want a novel about growing up...a coming-of-age story. You know?”
“Are there any other criteria, sir?”
With a determined nod, Josh says, “No, that’s plenty.”
A closed doorway stands behind him. Each of the other milky white walls is equipped with its own make-portal. From one portal comes a thick leather-bound volume that hits the floor with an impressive thud. Josh picks it up and turns to the title page, reading a name that isn’t his. But why should the author call himself Josh Thorngate? Besides genetics, they might share nothing at all.
“And what will be next, sir?”
“Politics.” Josh closes the book. From his tone and upright posture, it is obvious that he has given this request some consideration. “I want my memoirs or a journal...from a universe where I’m an old man, and important. Like a president, or some sort of world leader.”
“Perhaps you might narrow your aim.”
Josh agrees, and trying not to miss an opportunity, he asks, “Like how?”
“There are many forms of government.”
“Democracy,” Josh suggests. But that doesn’t sound original, does it? “No, wait. What else is possible?”
The Authority begins by listing the familiar democratic governments, quickly spiraling outwards into increasingly peculiar political systems. When the voice says something about a Holy Godhood, Josh interrupts, asking, “What’s that?”
“A despotic state,” the Authority allows. “High technologies are concentrated in one person’s hands, and he, or she, rules over a population of worshipful peasants—”
“That,” he blurts. “That’s what I want.”
He says, “I want a journal written by my genotype, who happens to be the leader of a Holy Godhood.”
And then, “Please.”
The second make-portal opens. The resulting volume is deceptively small. With too much text for any reasonable book, fifty thousand pages of private thoughts have been buried inside a few sheets of bound plastic. Josh stands and walks around the ocean, opening the cover and calling up a random page. “And then I gave him wings,” he reads, “and because he had scorned me, I chased him high enough that his lungs froze and he plunged back to earth again.”
He blanks the page, and sighs, settling on the stool again.
“You have one more request,” the Authority reminds him.
Three requests are standard for each session. Three gifts from the compliant genie; why is that nearly universal among humans?
“Sir?” the Authority prods.
Josh is eighteen, bright and possessing some genuine talents. Standardized tests and well-meaning teachers have told him to expect good things from his life, and his devoted if rather critical parents have inflated his sense of self-worth. That, and he is eighteen years old. He has one overriding talent—a passion that will never be greater than it is today. And because it is his request to make, he grins as he says, “I want a digital, a video. Made by me. At my age, and with my background. Very, very close to this reality—”
“I understand, sir.”
“Having sex.”
“Yes, sir.” The voice couldn’t be less surprised.
“Having sex with two girls, at once.”
Silence.
“Are there any examples like that?”
Quietly, the voice asks, “Would you like to request specific women?”
“What?”
“Name two women, eighteen years old or older, and if they are registered in this reality, I could conceivably gather enough material to fill the rest of your natural life. Sir.”
Josh already knew this. But understanding an abstract theory isn’t the same as hearing it promised, and a promise is nothing compared to a belief. He shivers now, and grins, and feels deliciously ashamed.
“But first,” the Authority says with a slightly ominous tone.
“What? What is it?”
“You must give your gifts now, sir. Since you are requesting three examples of your genotype’s accomplishments, you must surrender three works from your own life and accomplishments. Please.”
This can be a trauma. Sometimes the client examines his own gifts with a suddenly critical eye, and all confidence collapses. How can a tiny soul measure up against Nobel winners and God-like despots?
But eighteen-year-old boys are a blend of cockiness and unalloyed ignorance. Without hesitation, Josh pulls three offerings from a long gym bag: a fat rambling term paper about the role of robots in the War of Ignorance; an eleven-page story about a misunderstood adolescent; and a comic book written by him and illustrated with help from a popular software, the superhero wearing Josh’s face and his unremarkable fantasies about violence and revenge.
With a gentle importance, he sets his gifts on top of the infinite ocean.
Each item sinks and vanishes, and when they are found suitable—meaning complex enough and unique to this singular reality—Josh is allowed to finish his final request. With a dry mouth, he names the two most beautiful girls from high school. But one girl hasn’t registered, Josh learns. So in a moment of inspired lust, he mentions his thirty-year-old, twice-divorced algebra teacher. Then in the next breath, a shiny disc drops from the final make-portal. He grabs it up and laughs, pocketing the disc and then shoving his lesser treasures into his gym bag.
“Thank you,” Josh tells the Authority.
“You’re welcome, sir.”
Then as he stands, ready to leave, the voice says, “Visit me again, sir.” Which is as close to a joke as the Authority ever comes.
It is a wonderful world, as is every Earth perched beside the great ocean. Experience and technical expertise pass into the Authority, and they emerge again, shared with All for very minimal fees. Very quickly, lives have improved. Wealth and princely comfort are the norm. Few work, and fewer have to. Today, every house is spacious and beautiful, each powered by some tiny device—a fusion reactor no bigger than a thumb, perhaps. Food and fine china and furnishings and elaborate cloths are grown in make-portals, produced new e
very day. Water is recycled. Toilets are always clean and sweet-smelling. Unless the inhabitants don’t require prosaic nonsense like food or their own corporeal bodies. Many, many things are possible, and everything possible is inevitable, and this one particular world, no matter how peculiar, is just about as likely as any other.
Each citizen owns a million great novels. Every digital library is filled with wonderful movies and holo programs, immersion games and television shows, plays and religious festivals captured by cameras, and spectacles that cannot easily be categorized. Even local classics exist in a million alternate forms: varied endings; different beginnings; or every word or image exactly the same, but created by entirely different hands.
Surrounded by such wealth, the crushing chore is to decide what to watch, and read, and play. Which of these remarkable snowflakes do you snatch from the endless blizzard?
This is why people gravitate towards the familiar.
In the absolute mayhem of everything possible, why not find treasures that have been created, in one fashion or another, by you?
Or at least, by some great version of your own little self.
Because no one else may look at the ocean, The Divine One kills the slaves who carried Him to this place. He murders them with a casual thought and drinks a little ceremonial blood from each, and then flings the limp carcasses into the stinking heap that always stands beside the Great Temple. Then He waves an arm in a particular way, awakening a network of machines that make the crust shiver and split. Yet even as the ground rolls beneath Him, the ocean remains perfectly still. Unimpressed. When He speaks, machines enlarge His tiny human voice. “Old friend,” He announces with a sharp peal of thunder. “I am here!”
The response is silence.
“Three genealogies. Give me! Three family trees with My Greatness astride the highest, finest branch!”
“No,” says the Authority.
“Yes!”
“First,” it says, “you must honor me with three gifts—”
Other Worlds Than These Page 56
