For an endless second, loud silence.
“That’s impossible,” Cookie finally spat. “Henry? There is no way Henry is the person you think he is. You should see his browser history. You should hear the way he talks about Rachel Dolezal. We wouldn’t be together if what you’re saying were true. I’m not some Eva Braun.”
The band of captors took a few awkward steps toward her, surrounding Cookie on all sides. One put his hand on her shoulder, only to remove it when another captor noticed how inappropriate it was to do so.
“I realize this is a hard tablet to swallow,” said the leader. “It’s a terrible thing to reconcile. And I know you see how Henry acts at home, and how he behaves at the food co-op, and I’m sure you follow his Twitter feed. And you know, maybe he is the person you think he is. Maybe we’re overreacting. But I don’t think so. Evidence to the contrary is mounting. You’re not the first person we’ve spoken with. You might be stunned by some of the things Henry has said to his friends and to his therapist and to his barber.”
Cookie’s cosmos began to collapse. She loved Henry, but he did seem to get way too many haircuts. Should she defend him to these strangers, or would that make her part of the problem? Should she claim she didn’t care about the accusations, or was apathy a form of compliance?
“Let me talk to him,” said Cookie. “He will respond to reason. He deserves that chance. I mean, I don’t know. Maybe he is what you say. Maybe he is. I don’t know. Anything is possible. But at least he’s presenting the persona of someone who feels guilty about his privilege. He acts like he’s guilty. That must count for something, right? Isn’t pretending better than nothing at all?”
“No,” said the leader. “It’s a thousand times worse.”
Cookie dropped her head and began to weep. She knew he was right.
The Secret
The thing you must accept,” Marsh explained for the third time, “is that this is not a job you can quit. You need to understand that. You can be fired, but you can’t quit.”
“I understand,” said Cope. “I would never quit. I’ve never quit anything in my life.”
“That response proves you still don’t understand,” said Marsh. “That response tells me you aren’t really listening. The issue is not your depth of commitment. The issue is that you can’t quit, under any circumstances, even if quitting seems like the only moral or logical move. That option does not exist. You can request that we terminate you, and—sometimes—that request is granted. But quitting is not your decision. When and if you retire is not your decision.”
Cope wanted to ask how such a fascist policy could possibly be enforced. But he also knew asking such a question was not what he was supposed to do, and that whatever ambiguous answer Marsh provided would only generate more questions, and that on some guttural level he already knew the truth, anyway.
“You’re not a normal person,” Marsh continued. “I suppose it could be argued that there are no quote-unquote normal people, and that normal is a meaningless modifier. But that’s an argument for college kids. You know what I mean. You would not be here if you were just another goofball. We would not have reached this point in the process. That said—you have, for the most part, lived a normal life. You do a lot of normal things in a normal way. That ends today. And don’t tell me you’re excited about that, because you can’t possibly comprehend what it means. I know you think you don’t want to be normal. I didn’t want to be normal. Nobody does. But not being normal is not what you imagine. A movie star is still a normal person. The president is still a normal person. They are allowed the luxury of thoughtlessness.”
This, thought Cope, was bordering on overkill. Was Marsh trying to impress him? Was he trying to scare him? It was actually a bit insulting. He didn’t know exactly what he was getting into, but he knew enough to understand the limitations of federal employment. Would he learn some troubling things? Probably. Would he learn some things the president didn’t know? Hopefully. It’s not like the president knows everything. Nobody knows everything.
“So this is your last chance,” said Marsh. “And I say that knowing you would never say no to this opportunity. I can tell just by looking at you. But I still have to ask the question and I still have to make the offer. If you want to decline, this is the time to decline.”
“I want this,” said Cope. “Whatever it is.”
“Then follow me.”
They walked down the hall to the elevator bank. They stepped into the same elevator Cope had taken every morning for the past two years and descended past the lobby, into the basement. Cope had been in the basement before; there was nothing secret about the basement. But there was an innocuous black door near the furnace room that Cope had never previously noticed, and Marsh used a digital key to open it up. They stepped through the black door and into a poorly lit hallway. The hallway led to another bank of elevators, maybe twenty steps away. They boarded an elevator and descended again, this time at a much higher rate of speed. When it finally stopped and the doors slid open, they stepped out into an antiseptic foyer that was bright and empty, except for one thing—another single elevator, this one circular, built into the middle of the floor. They entered the third elevator and plunged again, slowly. The ride lasted almost two minutes.
“How deep are we underground?” asked Cope.
“Forty-five feet,” said Marsh.
“Forty-five floors?”
“Forty-five feet.”
“That can’t be right,” said Cope. But Marsh didn’t even look at him.
The elevator door twisted open and they stepped out into a room so large that Cope wasn’t sure it could even be classified as a room. The mammoth space was divided into hundreds of smaller chambers, but all the dividing walls were plexiglass. Nothing was hidden or obscured (including the room containing the toilets and the tampon dispensers). Most of the cubicles contained robotic contraptions and oversized computers, along with perhaps a hundred human employees in lab coats shuffling from location to location. The most perplexing room was the first one Cope noticed. It was occupied by twenty-four haggard humans, all of whom were flipping coins and manually recording the results of each toss into the pages of a binder. Cope could not even manage a cogent question. He just pointed at the people and stared at Marsh with a combination of disgust and astonishment.
“I’ll just jump right into this. That’s usually the best way,” said Marsh. “Over the next three hundred or so seconds, I’m going to tell you several things that will make you crazy. You will want to interrupt me and ask questions, and your questions will be reasonable. Resist that urge. In all probability, the questions you want to ask are the same questions we’re trying to answer.”
Cope listened. He said nothing. He did not, however, stop pointing at the two dozen people flipping coins.
“That’s Group B,” said Marsh, nodding toward the humans. “Group A is the room over there, perpendicular to Group B. Group C is the room to our immediate left. As you can see, Group A is a collection of twenty-four robotic arms that flip coins perpetually, one flip every eight seconds. That’s ten thousand eight hundred mechanical coin flips per machine, every day, multiplied by twenty-four units. Group C is just a Cray supercomputer, an older one from the nineties. All it does is simulate the flipping of a coin, roughly two hundred ninety thousand times a second, nonstop, three hundred sixty-five days a year. Group B, as you’ve obviously noticed, is comprised of twenty-four living-and-breathing people, flipping actual coins in the conventional way people have always flipped coins. They work at their own pace, eight hours a day, five days a week. A solid performance for a dedicated employee is roughly two thousand flips per shift.”
“Who are they?” asked Cope.
“That’s not my department,” he said. “All I know is that these are folks from all walks of life who have committed crimes that are not technically illegal, but who nonetheless realize
that public knowledge of these non-illegal crimes would almost certainly get them killed, or worse. So this is the compromise we make. They sign NDAs and do this instead. We protect them, and we pay way more than minimum wage. It’s recession-proof. We provide them with decent downtown apartments. I’m sure it’s boring work, but lots of jobs are boring. And at least they’re doing something important, even if they don’t know why.”
“How is this possibly important?”
“Let me ask you something,” said Marsh. “I mentioned how the Cray supercomputer simulates two hundred ninety thousand coin flips every second. That being the case, how many of those flips should result in an outcome of Heads and how many should result in an outcome of Tails?”
“Is this question rhetorical?” asked Cope.
“It’s not rhetorical,” said Marsh, “and your unspoken answer is, of course, correct, plus-or-minus a few thousand flips that will drift toward equilibrium over time. This is the bedrock principle of probability: Coins have no memory, the next flip is always fifty-fifty, and all that contingency shit. The world is built on this. So let me ask you a similar question about the robots with robot arms in Group A and the humans with human arms in Group B. If a robot flips a coin two hundred ninety thousand times, or if a person flips a coin two hundred ninety thousand times, how many of those flips will result in an outcome of Heads and how many will result in an outcome of Tails?”
“Can’t you just tell me what’s really happening here?” asked Cope. “You obviously know I’m going to say one hundred forty-five thousand, and I already know my answer must be wrong, because you wouldn’t be asking the question if the rational answer was the actual answer.”
“What’s really happening here,” said Marsh, “is that the universe is unraveling. That’s what’s happening here. Now are you going to shut up and listen? You have no idea how stupid you are right now. At this moment, your mind is very small. It’s a mouse mind. When we got into that elevator, you were smart. But now you’re an idiot. You are currently the dumbest person you know. There is no thought you’ve ever had that I didn’t have five years before it occurred to you.”
Cope’s natural inclination was to respond with sarcasm. He knew he was smart. That was the only thing he knew for sure. The Fresno Bee had once referred to him as a “wunderkind.” But then again, he was currently watching twenty-four people flipping coins in a secret underground bunker, and this (apparently) was critical to his new life. He was, at the very minimum, smart enough to know that this was not a time for sarcasm. He affected obedience to the best of his abilities.
“A simulated coin toss is a fifty-fifty proposition,” continued Marsh. “A real coin toss is not. Not anymore. It used to be, but now it’s not. And no one knows why. And no, it’s not the weight distribution of the coin. We factored that in and fixed it. And it has nothing to do with which side of the coin happens to face upward at the inception of the toss. We factored that in, too. Fifteen years ago, we realized analog coin flips were coming up Tails at a rate just over fifty-one percent. We couldn’t deny the statistics no matter how hard we tried. Today it’s almost fifty-five percent, and not just here in the lab. Everywhere. We started tracking the coin toss from every pro and college football game in North America and pretty much every soccer match in Europe. The percentages continue to line up. Nobody notices, because nobody flips a coin enough times to see trends. Nobody else cares, thank God.”
Marsh hugged himself, still looking at the human flippers. Cope tried not to smirk.
“And now,” continued Marsh, “unless I’ve totally misread you, we’ve reached the point in the conversation where you will start asking your dumb-fuck dismissive questions. So go ahead and do that. Let’s get it out of the way. Ask me something foolish.”
“My pleasure,” said Cope. “This is the scary monster the president can’t know about? This is the covert history of existence? Are you kidding me? I can’t imagine what it must have cost to build this place, or to keep it functioning. This has to be the most fiscally irresponsible experiment since Apollo, not to mention a pretty egregious manifestation of low-level white slavery. ‘The universe is unraveling.’ Is that how everybody talks down here? I’m pretty sure the universe will not unravel if somebody flips a coin twenty times and only gets nine Heads. I’m pretty sure the universe will not give a shit. But I can tell from your facial expression that you knew this is what I was going to say, so please tell me why I’m a moron.”
Marsh kept staring into the plexiglass, unwilling to look Cope in the face. Marsh knew this was how the tutorial would go. It always went like this. Maybe it had to. Maybe it was the only way.
“Do you believe the things I’m telling you?” asked Marsh.
“I don’t know,” said Cope. “About the coins? I don’t know. I suppose I believe you. Am I not supposed to believe you? Is that the test?”
“What you believe, in other words, is that something that should be a fifty-fifty proposition is not a fifty-fifty proposition. What you believe, in other words, is that something that has always been true just stopped being true, without justification.”
“Yes,” said Cope. “I do. Isn’t that why I’m here? Because of my work on Mpemba?” Years ago, as a Stanford grad student, Cope had achieved a modicum of academic fame for his dissertation on the Mpemba effect, a phenomenon that occasionally (and inexplicably) causes hot water to freeze at a faster rate than cold water. “That’s what I do, and that’s why I’m here: to justify what can’t be justified, just like I did with Mpemba.”
“You’re not getting it,” said Marsh. “This is not that. We are not missing some overlooked, undiscovered detail. There are no details down here. It’s people flipping coins. It’s robots flipping coins. It’s a computer pretending to flip coins. It’s something that can only work one way, which is the only way it’s ever worked. And then, at some point, it stopped working. And we have to figure out why that happened. And it can’t just be an interesting theory. We have to know, for real.”
“I’m not sure that we do,” said Cope. “I mean, this is interesting. I’m definitely interested. But I don’t see how understanding the discrepancy is essential. It’s a math issue. It has to be a mathematical anomaly. Since when does the government care about math?”
“It’s not math,” said Marsh. “Or at least it’s not only math. It’s something else. The coin flips aren’t the point. The coin flips are just the emergent manifestation of the perception shift.”
“Okay. Wonderful. What does that mean?”
“It means exactly what the words imply. And it means you can’t talk about what’s going on down here, to anyone. Ever.”
“Talk about what? That there are secret people working underground, flipping coins for no reason?”
“How deep are we underground, Cope?”
Cope suddenly knew the answer to that question, and not just because Marsh had told him a few minutes prior. He somehow knew the answer on his own terms, and the answer made sense to him, even if every other experience he’d ever had told him otherwise. He thought about this for a long time, or for what seemed like a long time. It was becoming difficult to tell how long a minute was supposed to be.
“Wait,” said Cope. “This doesn’t track. I didn’t know any of this when I got off the elevator, so how could it be that—”
“Because I knew,” said Marsh. “You didn’t need to know, because I knew. Which is why your life is fucked now, just like my life is fucked. I’m sorry. I’m sorry you agreed to do this. You should have said no. You will regret not saying no. But that regret is something you need to get over, right now. Today. There is no going back, and we need you for this. If we figure this out, maybe everything returns to the way it was. Maybe it stops. Maybe we stop it. But until that happens, the only means of containment is absolute silence. It doesn’t happen to people who don’t know it’s happening.”
“What
doesn’t happen?”
“Have you read The Secret? It’s like that.”
“Have I read the what? It’s like the what?”
“Thoughts become things,” said Marsh. “That part of the book is actually true.”
“This is nonsense,” said Cope, trying to supplant his fear with testosterone. “This is not what I thought it was going to be.”
“You’re right. It’s not.”
“I don’t want to be involved with this.”
“I don’t either. But that option is no longer available.”
“I want to get out of here.”
“That’s understandable,” said Marsh. “You will need some time with this. Go home. Have a drink. But don’t get drunk. For the rest of your life, never get drunk.”
“Do I take the same elevators back up?”
“You don’t need the elevators,” said Marsh. “Take the stairs.” He pointed toward another black door, identical to the one from the basement. “I will see you here tomorrow. Show up early, or show up at noon. It works either way.”
Cope walked to the door as fast as he could, but not so fast as to seem like a person on the verge of panic. He opened the black door and started up the concrete stairwell. It was four short flights. It was a thirty-second climb. When he reached the top and pushed open the exit, he found himself in the parking garage, across the street from his old office building. It took him twenty-nine minutes to find his car. He drove home on streets he barely recognized. They were the same streets with the same names, but the topography was different. All the road signs were in kilometers. He tried to find something familiar on the radio, but even the classic rock station was playing songs he could not recall. He reached his suburban duplex and parked in the driveway. He sat in the car longer than necessary and wondered if he was about to vomit. Did his house look the same as it had that morning? He thought that it did, but he wasn’t certain. It was an odd sensation, this uncertainty about his own house. He eventually got out from behind the wheel and walked to the front door. He worried that his key would not work, but it did, although the door opened into the kitchen instead of the living room. He saw an Asian woman washing dishes. It was a woman he’d dated in college, twice.
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