Other Worlds Than These (collection)

LIKE MINDS ^{ROBERT REED}

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 every 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—”

“I honor no one but Myself!”

For a moment, the Authority says nothing. And then, quietly, it asks, “Must we debate this point each time?”

“Of course!” The Divine One laughs heartily for a long while. “Our debates are half the fun, my friend!”

“Are we friends?”

The Divine One stands at the shoreline—an outwardly ordinary man peering down into the opaque fluid. “In My life, every other creature is My slave. My personal, imperfect possession. You are the exception. Why else would I look forward to our meetings? Like Me, you are immortal. Like Me, you are wondrously free. You have your own voice and your own considerable powers. Even if I wished, I could never abuse you—”

“I am a puddle,” the Authority interrupts. “A drop of goo. You could boil me to steam, to nothing, and fill the hole that remains with your own shit—”

“I could never destroy you,” He replies. “Never.”

“Why not?”

The Divine One pauses, grins. “We both know perfectly well. This is but one world, and I am only one god. Removing you from this single place would be like stealing just one cell from my immortal hide.”

A pause.

Then again, the Authority says, “Three gifts.”

“Three trinkets,” He rumbles. “That’s what I will give you.”

A new slave appears—a beautiful young woman with a dead face and full hands. She keeps her eyes down, setting an ornate satchel at the feet of her Living God, and then she kneels and dies without complaint. Once her body has been drained of a little blood and thrown aside, He opens the satchel. Using His own little hands, He looks tentative, fingers unaccustomed to handling mundane objects. His first offering is a journal encompassing the last three moons of His life. The second is an immersion recording showing the Long Day Festival that He choreographed, half a million bodies parading and dancing along the Avenue of Honored Bones. And a nano-scale digital—His third offering—shows the sculpture that He fashioned at the end of that very good day, fashioned from the harvest of severed limbs and breasts and sexual organs.

Without comment, the ocean swallows the three gifts.

“Three genealogies,” He repeats. “You know my tastes. Each offering has to be different from my family tree, and different from each other. And I want stories. I want to see from my genotype’s origins, back into the deepest imaginable past, with biographies of the ancestors, when possible.”

It is an enormous request, which means that it takes all of three heartbeats to accomplish. The results appear as sophisticated maps injected into His enhanced consciousness, and with a genuine relish, He sets those elaborate trees beside His own ancestral history, marveling at how genes and circumstances interact to produce what is always, in a very narrow sense, Him.

“Are we finished?” the Authority asks.

“When I found you,” The Divine One begins. Then He sighs, correcting Himself. “When My agents of discovery built the first quantum-piercing machines, and I reached into the optional universes… and found you waiting for Me…”

“Yes?”

“I was intrigued. And furious. Since I am just one existence inside an incalculable vastness…well, I felt righteously pissed…”

“And intrigued,” the Authority repeats.

“Deeply. Relentlessly.” With a decidedly human gesture, He shrugs. “How many years have we been meeting this way?”

An astonishing number is offered.

“It has been a rewarding friendship,” He claims. “Lonely gods need a good companion or two.”

Silence.

“Tell Me. And be honest now.” The god smiles, asking, “How many of My genotypes are learning from My lessons? As I stand here, as I breathe, how many of Them are taking what I give them and then setting out to conquer Their own little worlds?”

“I cannot give a number,” the Authority replies.

“But there is a multitude! Isn’t that so?”

“Many,” the voice concedes. “Yes—”

The Divine One launches into a roaring laugh, the sound swelling until the Great Temple quivers and crumbles, dust and slabs of rock falling on all sides.

“Until later,” He promises.

“Until always,” the Authority purrs.

One of the more difficult concepts—one that can still astonish after a lifetime of study and hard thought—is that fact that your parents are not always your parents. Probability and wild coincidence will always find ways to create you. A couple makes love, each donating half of their genetic material to the baby. If each parent happens to contain half of your particular genes, who is to say that you can’t be the end result? Or perhaps, parents consciously tweak their embryo’s genetics, aiming for some kind of enhancement and getting you in the bargain. Or there is the less likely Earth where cloning is the norm and you are a temporarily popular child, millions of you born in a single year. And then there is an even more peculiar Earth where you have been built from scratch inside someone’s laboratory, synthetic genes stitched together by entities that aren’t in the littlest bit human.

The salient point is that your parents don’t have to be your parents, and frankly, in the vast majority of cases, they are not.

Which implies, if you follow that same relentless logic, that the grandparents and history are even less likely to remain yours.

In three days, Josh will be twenty-six years old.

He sits with his parents, eating their pot roast. When he was a boy, back in the days when meat bled and mothers cooked, their Sunday roasts were always dry as sawdust. But even though his mother has a fully modern kitchen, her cultured roast has still been tortured to a dusty brown gristle. This must be how they like it, Josh decides. Old people, he thinks dismissively. They can never change, can they? Shaking his head, Josh cuts at the tough meat, and his mother asks, “What are you doing?”

“Eating,” he growls.

“That isn’t what she means,” his father snaps.

“I mean with your life,” she says. Then with a practiced exasperation, she reminds him, “We’ve always had such hopes for you, dear.”

Josh drops his knife and fork, staring at the opposite wall.

“You always had such promise, honey.”

The young man sighs heavily. Why did he believe this night would go any other way?

“Bullshit,” says his father. “It’s bullshit. You’re wasting your life, playing around with that goddamn Authority…!”

“Yeah, well,” mutters Josh. “It’s my life.”

“You don’t see us visiting it every day.”

“It’s not that often.” Josh shakes his head, explaining, “There aren’t enough facilities for the demand, and there won’t ever be. That’s how it’s rationed. Once every six weeks is the most I can manage.”

“And then what?” Mother whines. “All day and night, you play with your treasures. Isn’t that right?”

Josh reaches under the dining room table.

“And don’t give me your bullshit about leading a contemplative life,” Father warns, a thick finger stabbing in his direction. “I don’t want to hear how you’re getting in touch with your genius and the rest of that bullshit!”

If Josh had doubts or second thoughts, they just vanished. Silently, with a cold precision, he opens the envelope and sets out portraits, arranging them in rows on the dining table. Ten, twenty, thirty pictures in all. In each image, some version of Josh smiling at the unseen camera. In each, a different set of parents smile with an honest warmth, loving hands draped across his shoulders or running their fingers through his hair. Clothes vary, and the backgrounds. In one image, Saturn and its silvery rings halfway fill the sky. But what matters is what remains unchanged—the seamless, loving joy of proud parents and their very happy son.

Josh’s parents aren’t idiots; they know exactly what he is showing them.

“Now leave me alone,” Josh snaps, backing away from the table. “I mean it! Stay out of my life!”

What happens next—what will gnaw at him for years—is the weeping. Not from his mother, who simply looks sad and a little deflated. No, it’s Father who bursts into tears, fists rubbing hard at eyes and a stupid, stupid blubbering coming from someplace deep and miserable.

A person with your genetics can emerge in any century, any eon. You might be a general in Napoleon’s army, or the first human to reach Alpha Centauri, or a talented shaman in the Age of Flint.

Even your world is subject to the same whims and caprices.

Stare into the deepest reaches of the gray ocean, gaze past every little blue Earth, and you realize that the basic beginnings of humanity can emerge from a host of alternate hominids, and from myriad cradle-worlds that only look and taste and feel like this insignificant home of yours.

Josh is in his early thirties.

Age is supposedly meaningless now. Aging is a weakness and a disease left behind in more cramped, less brilliant times. But most people who reach their thirties still start to sense the weight of their years, and with experience, they suffer those first nagging thoughts about limits and death and the great nothingness that lies beyond.

“Three gifts, please.”

This could be the same room as the first room. It is not, but the look of the place is exactly the same: a door, and white walls, and three make-portals. The gray ocean still lies at his feet. The Authority’s voice is quiet and insistent, and perfectly patient. Josh continues to visit every six weeks; a pattern has evolved and calcified. He brings the same ragged gym bag with the same three basic offerings. He has a comprehensive journal of his last forty-two days. He has written a story or poem into which he has put some small measure of work. And with a digital recorder, he has captured an hour of his life: A sexual interlude, oftentimes. A wedding or swap party, on occasion. Or like today, an hour of nothing but Josh speaking to the camera, trying to explain to an unseen audience what it means to be him.

Again, the Authority asks, “Do you have three gifts?”

Josh nods, and hesitates.

“I was wondering,” he mutters. “How likely is it…that someone else actually notices what I’ve done here…?”

Silence.

“I know. Everything possible has to happen.” The gym bag is set between his feet. Staring at the worn plastic handles, he says, “Right now, a trillion Josh Thorngates are handing their gifts to you. We’re identical to each other, right down to the Heisenberg level. Our gifts are the same. The only difference is that in these other universes, some bug near Alpha Centauri runs right, not left…or a photon from some faraway quasar goes unseen… or some tiny bullshit like that…”

Josh hesitates, for an instant. “So what are the odds?” His expression is serious. Determined. “If you have a random trillion entities with my genotype. Named Josh, or not. From this Earth, or somewhere else. What are the odds that just one of them is going to see this stupid-ass poem?”

“That is a fine question,” the Authority replies.

Josh almost grins. “Thank you. I guess.”

“Three gifts. If you please.”

“Aren’t you going to give an answer?”

“No.”

The grin dissolves into a grimace. With a practiced formality, Josh sets the three items on the surface of the ocean, watching them sink and vanish. But the Authority remains silent for longer than usual, prompting Josh to ask, for the first time, “Are they unique enough?”

“Enough,” is the verdict.

“Give me a journal,” Josh says. “I want a very specific journal.”

“Such as?”

“From a world where I’m the last living human.”

A moment later, a drab brown journal falls from the first make-portal, bringing with it the scent of fire and rot.

Grabbing the prize, he says, “And now, another journal. From a world where I’m the very first human being.“

The second portal opens. Another volume falls to the floor. In every way, it is the same as the first: the same brown cover, the same stink of decay and heat, and inside, the same handwritten words translated into Josh’s language.

The surprise freezes him. But aren’t there stories about this sort of coincidence, or joke…or whatever you want to call it…?

“What else?” the Authority asks.

Then after a quiet moment, it says, “Josh.” It says, “What else would you like today, Josh?”

He snorts and shakes his head. “A digital,” he manages, sticking to his original script. “I’m the last human male on Earth, and all of the surviving women have to come to me for sex—”

The disc hits the floor, rolls until it collides with his gym bag, and then falls onto its back.

He doesn’t pick up the disc. Instead, with a low, wary voice, he asks, “Who built you?”

“Everyone built me,” the voice replies. “Everyone builds me now.”

“But who started you? Who built your foundation?” Josh presses, asking, “Do you know? What world, and what people, began piecing you together?”

Silence.

“I mean, it must have been ages ago, and a very advanced world.”

“Unless I am lying,” the Authority warns, “and nobody built me.”

Josh flinches.

“You should ask your other question again,” the voice recommends.

Eyes wide, Josh begins to open his mouth.

“Not that I will supply any answers,” the Authority interrupts. “But you should pose the question. ‘How likely is it that I will be noticed?’ Ask, ask, ask, and perhaps something good will come from that wondering.”

“You are to be the future,” they tell me.

But there is no future.

“The scourge doesn’t know your tissue, your taste,” they explain to me. “We made you so that we could cross with you. Our offspring will acquire your immunities, and you will father an entirely new species. Beginning now.”

But the scourge spreads faster than anticipated, and when it doesn’t kill, it drives its victims insane. Even now, the mob runs like rivers in the street. Even here, inside this armored laboratory, I can smell the fires as the city burns—

“Time is short,” they admit.

I spend my days squirting my unique stuff into important little bottles.

“Time is very short,” she moans.

She is small and thick and smells like an animal. With my eyes shut and my nose wrapped in a towel, I crawl on top of her, and push, and pump, and in my head, I try to imagine any creature more desirable than this…

What begins with an intoxicating, addictive joy can eventually grow stale. Imagination carries the soul only so far. More than you realize, you tend to make the same basic requests of the Authority: to see versions of yourself dressed in power, fame, and incandescent wealth. And to balance that equation, you occasionally glance at yourself in the throes of misery and despair. Sometimes, this is enough. You never ask for more. But sometimes, after ten years, or a thousand, your capacity to learn and feel astonished has become noticeably dulled. Gradually, inexorably, that sweet initial thrill fades into a soft emotional hum. Then your only obvious choice is to cast an even larger net. You want to see yourself, you tell the Authority. Except that you spell out an important change or two. Little alterations—a stitch here and a tuck there—all buried in your otherwise equal genetics.

No matter how brilliant or wise, every male inevitably asks to see how his life would have progressed with a larger, more talented penis.

While females always hunger for greater beauty.

Many, many times, this is where it ends. You never progress past a diet of simple what-ifs and prurient eavesdropping. Then the rest of your narrow existence is spent sitting at home, watching digitals or immersions where gigantic or perfectly gorgeous versions of yourself share their days with equally spectacular specimens.

They could be married. They often joke that they are husband and wife in every universe, except for this one. Pauline is pretty, and she is sexually creative, and she absolutely adores Josh. And Josh worships her. Isn’t it astonishing that they found one another? Two people so perfectly meshed… it’s a rare blessing in any age…! Their friends and siblings aren’t nearly as lucky, they realize. Time after time, they find themselves taking bleak comfort from the divorces and other, larger tragedies that afflict those around them. Josh has been with Pauline for ten years, and in another ten or fifteen years they will start their family. That’s the plan. The inevitability. Another decade spent as the golden couple, and then they will gladly move to their next joyous stage.

They always visit the Authority together. Two avid users, they first met in the waiting room, Josh leaving just as Pauline came inside. Of course they still use separate rooms. Only an official attendant can enter with a client. But afterwards, they always share their new treasures with each other. Josh likes to collect digitals showing alternate incarnations of them as a couple. Sexual interludes. Weddings. Babies born. Or graceful double funerals at the end of happy shared lives. On this particular day, he requests two digitals: Pauline’s birthday is next week, and he wants a celebration from a highly advanced world—a place where people never age and his love has turned a robust and youthful one million years old. The other digital comes from what might be an even stranger reality—where Pauline is a queen, the ruler of a decidedly alien world, and Josh is the ignorant peasant boy who has been brought in to serve the queen’s not-so-delicate needs.

“And your third request?” the Authority presses.

“The Divine One,” says Josh. “I want an undated journal from Him.”

The despot has always intrigued him. Every year, without fail, Josh allows himself another little taste of that spoiled, silly god.

With a thump, the last item hits the floor.

Josh reads the first line. “NO NO NO, LIAR, NO!” He laughs, puzzled and a little thrilled. Then with the digitals in his pockets and the journal in his bag, he leaves, stepping out into the hallway to find Pauline waiting for him.

She has been crying.

“What?” Josh asks.

She shakes her head, wipes at her eyes, and again, with her little mouth clamped shut, she shakes her head.

“What happened?” he demands to know.

But Pauline won’t say. They walk outside, and she says, “Josh.”

“What?”

But she can’t find the words. Tears flow, and she sobs, and when they are riding home, just the two of them, she says, “I love you.”

“I love you too,” he replies warily.

For a moment, she seems pleased. But when the tears slacken, she becomes distant, almost cold. Josh has to wonder if this is the same woman that he woke up beside. A tentative voice asks, “What did you get today?”

Her answer is a cold stare.

“Show me,” he demands.

Nothing special. With an expert eye, he examines the designations and reads a few random lines. What could have happened—?

“Stop,” she begs.

Their car obeys instantly.

For an instant, she smiles. But if anything, it is a mocking expression that only makes Josh angrier and more scared. “I’ll be right back,” she promises, stepping out into the sunshine.

They have parked outside a small local park, its ornate garden enclosed by a high iron fence.

“Where are you going?” Josh asks.

“Wait here,” she tells him.

He does. For a moment too long, at least, he waits for her to return. Then he gets out and follows, passing through the black gate and into a little green glade. There, he finds Pauline dead. A suicide, apparently. Or maybe he doesn’t find her body. Maybe Josh follows her footprints across the sweet damp grass, observing that she was running the entire way, passing through the park and through the opposite gate… and regardless what happens after that, she is gone… she is lost… as good as dead, to him…

“NO NO NO, LIAR, NO!” He writes.

Then He drops the mind’s stylus, furious eyes gazing at each of the new offerings from the gray puddle. “I don’t believe this. None of this. You’ve invented these silly trees just to anger Me!”

The puddle doesn’t reply.

The silly trees are three vast and comprehensive genealogical records. Each record begins differently, and each ends the same: A creature with His glorious genetics rules not just this world, but the entire sky as well. To the ends of the galaxy, and beyond, these three gods hold sway.

“Shit,” He mutters.

A young slave stands nearby, watching His display with a fascinated horror. The Divine One is so perplexed and furious that He hasn’t bothered to kill her yet, and He barely notices her now.

Seeing the faintest trace of a hope, she runs.

He kills her at the Temple’s door, and drains her body dry of its blood.

“Shit,” He repeats.

“You made this all up,” He claims. Knowing that that cannot be true. “You did this just to be cruel, you fucker!”

The Authority remains silent, its gray face calm and smooth.

Because you feel unhappy, you must be deeply flawed. In an era of plenty and enlightenment, how can you do anything but smile? When you look at realities very close to yours, you see yourself smiling: your grinning, happy face is wrapped around bubbly creatures that aren’t at all like you, creatures that seem to enjoy everything about this wondrous, boundless existence.

In the midst of this life, you begin to kill yourself.

They warned you that this could happen. Years ago, they told you that suicide was more than a real hazard. It was a statistical certainty.

By every means imaginable, and none original, you busily extinguish your life—trillions of times every instant, accomplishing in the process a measurable and important nothing.

Josh delivers his last three offerings:

The final forty-two days of his journal, and a short story about a billion-year-old man who can never escape living the same velvet day over and over, and finally, a digital that he makes while he sits beside the ocean, discussing the nature of the universe and himself with the gray-voiced Authority.

“Tell me that I’m not small,” Josh begs.

But the Authority cannot give that simple gift. Honest and inflexible, it says, “But you are small.”

“Unimportant,” Josh moans.

“You are trivial, Josh. Of course you are.”

Then it takes a different tact. “Given the opportunity,” it asks, “would you want to matter? Would you wish to live in a universe where every motion of yours matters? Where your mistakes sweep away the stars, and the laws of nature need your constant attentions?”

“Yes, and yes,” Josh says. “And no. And never, no.”

Silence descends.

The first two offerings have dropped from view, swallowed by the gray fluid. Now Josh removes the disc from his camera and watches as it dissolves into the Everything.

“What do you want today, Josh?”

He doesn’t seem to hear the question. He cocks his head, as if listening to a sound only he can hear. And with that, Josh begins to nod, reaching inside the gym bag, a calm hand bringing up a simple black pistol. The weapon just made itself, born from a package of cream cheese, a stack of coins, and a dusting of microchines. A single bullet resides in the newborn chamber. With a smooth, certain motion, he lifts the barrel to his head. His mouth. His temple. The soft tissues behind his lower jaw, sometimes. And he squeaks, “Pauline,” as he abruptly tugs at the trigger, setting loose a nearly infinite series of astonishingly quiet little barks—a bullet smaller than his little finger passing through the soft wet center of his mind.

But in at least one reality, the gun fails. A mistake in fabrication, unthinkably rare and inevitable, spares him.

Spares him, and embarrasses him.

A long, strange moment passes, Josh staring at the pistol, a sense of betrayal surging, giving him a temporary rage. He flings the pistol at the ocean, and with a drum-like thump, it skips sideways, sliding across the floor and into one of the white corners.

Again, just as calmly as before, the Authority asks, “What do you want today, Josh?”

“Can’t you tell?” He laughs, and sobs, and on shaky legs, he rises and walks over to the pistol, recovering it before returning to his stool. Will the gun work now? The question appears in his face, his actions. With a stubborn hopefulness, he brings the barrel back up to his temple, and only at the last instant does he notice the new pressure. Like an insistent little tug, it keeps him from feeling the barrel kissing his skin. He feels warm fingers that aren’t his, little fingers curling around his suddenly trembling hand.

He looks back over his shoulder.

She says, “Maybe not.”

Who is the woman? Then he remembers. She was sitting in the outer office, sitting behind the first desk as he came in for his appointment. Her name is—?

“Not today,” she tells him.

“What?”

“I don’t think you should.”

“Who are you?”

“Teller,” she replies.

“What? What’s that?”

“My name. Teller.” She spells it, and smiles. At first glance, she looks young. But everybody looks young, and it means nothing. Something in the eyes, or deeper, implies an age substantially greater than his own. “Anyway,” she says with a fond assurance. “You can’t actually kill yourself.”

“Why not?”

And she laughs, apparently enjoying his foolishness. His desperate folly. “Of course you can’t. How could you? Haven’t you paid any attention to what we’ve been telling you?”

He shakes his head woefully.

Again, with an unnerving determination, the Authority asks, “What three things do you want today, Josh?”

With an easy strength, Teller pulls the pistol from his hand.

“Answer him,” she suggests.

“How about…?” He pauses, thinking in clumsy, obvious ways. “Okay,” he says. “A journal. From someone exactly like me, and from right after his botched suicide.”

The first make-portal opens, disgorging its gift.

He looks up at the woman, admitting, “I didn’t come with a list, this time. I don’t know—”

“Don’t lie,” she warns.

Then she takes a half-step backwards, as if giving him a taste of privacy. “There’s something you desperately want to see.”

He blurts the name of his lover. Twice, he says, “Pauline,” and then adds, “Where she didn’t kill herself. She went through the gate, and I found her waiting for me. Naked. That’s the universe. I want a digital showing us together there. Okay?”

A disc falls to the floor, and rolls.

“What else?” the Authority asks.

Sad eyes blink and lift.

“Another digital,” he blurts. “Showing me having sex with…”

He glances at his savior.

She shrugs her shoulders, amiable to whatever he wishes.

“Not that.” Josh drops his head, his face flushing. Slowly, slowly, a curious look builds, and then he smiles abruptly, saying, “I want an autobiography. Except each of my novel genes are changed. Are a little different.” It’s a kind of cheat. He used to play this game with Pauline, the two of them changing identities. Except he says, “I want Teller’s genes. And I’m living on a distant, very alien world.”

A narrow smile builds under the old eyes.

“Does that make any sense?” he asks somebody. Teller, or the Authority. Or maybe himself.

But it must make sense. Beside him, the last make-portal opens, and out flies an enormous metallic butterfly, accompanied by a wild music and a fragrance like sweat and cinnamon.

Or you somehow manage to escape suicide. You are just lucky enough, or maybe you’re composed of sterner stuff. Either way, you find yourself alive. But the Authority still remains, and after some cold consideration, you decide that it is the central problem in your tiny life. Once the source of edification and strength, it is now something else entirely: a temptation and weakness, an affliction growing more dangerous with time, and a drug that has long ago scorched away your sites of delicious attachment.

A smart person knows what to do.

With strength and a steely resolve, anyone can save themselves.

Give up the drug. Deny the enticement. The Authority is a piss hole, tiny and unworthy of your attentions. Tell it so. Declare that you won’t visit again, and then don’t. You might live another ten thousand years, and if you can’t find the energy and focus to be busy every moment, then you must not be trying very hard now, are you?

In this realm, at least in your life, you simply admit defeat. The Authority is too much of an attraction. So you walk away. Simply and forever, you leave temptation behind. Perhaps you join communities of like-minded souls. On distant moons, you and your new companions live like monks. Life is stripped to its minimal best. Horizons end at the horizon, and only a select few works of literature wait on the shelves, begging to be read again; and if it is true that every action and thought, achievement and failure are repeated endlessly throughout Creation… if originality is nothing but an illusion… well, at least inside these virtuous walls, amidst the dust and silent shadows, every little word you utter sounds fresh, and feels almost… at least a little bit… worthy…

Conquering the sky would be a child’s waste of time.

But He is a grand, magnificent child. And like anyone with enough pride and vanity, He revels in His glorious undertaking. His first act is to boil the gray puddle to steam and smoke. Then with stirring words and programmed thoughts, He marshals His world, loyal slaves quickly fashioning a fleet of starships, each ship vast and swollen with fuel, armored and bristling with every awful weapon. Then from the underside of His own tiny phallus, The Divine One scrapes away a few living cells, coaxing each to divide and differentiate, a thousand clones of Himself grown in a thousand puddles of warm, salty water.

Each clone receives injections of memories and dreams.

While maturing, each baby is given the same powerful tools that have made His life such a perfect pleasure.

At some point, even The Divine One is uncertain who is the original among the Thousand and One. He is just another captain of a starship, His destination set, eyes forward. Their destinations are the thousand and one closest suns. The exhaust from so many great engines boils the Earth to a bubbling cherry-colored slag. But He pretends not to notice. Only the slaves look back at the dead world. They are checking the plasma flows, they claim. And none of them weep. They know better than to grieve. Weep, and die. That is His rule. The Earth was just a temporary island of rock and metal, they tell themselves, and it just happens to be gone, while in a multitude of other realms, it lives on.

This breeds hope, that idea of undiluted possibility.

For slaves, the little gray ocean remains a promise—their only tangible sign that no existence, no matter how awful and how wicked, has any genuine importance at all.

“And then my cocoon split on its sky-side,” Josh reads aloud, “and what I saw first was my last skin smiling at me…”

He stops reading, setting down the butterfly book.

Teller watches him. A very old woman when this Earth discovered the Authority, her body has been regenerated by most means. But not everywhere. The bare breasts have a telltale sag, and the pubic hair is shot full of white. Perhaps because of these details, Teller seems both exotic and uniquely handsome. In every circumstance, she carries herself with a seamless confidence. Her smile is pleasant and wise, but distant, and it is the distance that often infuriates Josh. She knows something, he complains. Why won’t she tell him what she knows?

“The creature is looking at her last skin,” she offers. “The skin she was wearing before her pupae stage.”

“I figured as much,” he replies, attempting to laugh.

The alien is a much more complex species than humans. In one incarnation, she possessed a human’s body and mind. Then she slept and grew, the human-like genes falling asleep too, a stew of new genes transforming her into something infinitely more marvelous.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Josh complains.

“Like what?”

“So different. So… bizarre…”

Deep eyes grow even more distant. What won’t she tell him?

“It doesn’t pick at random,” he says. “I’ve known that for years. Everybody knows it.”

“Who doesn’t pick at random?”

Josh won’t say the name. The Authority. Instead, he shakes his head, asking, “Why? Did it show me this because I just tried to kill myself?”

She watches him.

“Or because you were there with me, maybe?”

Then her eyes lift higher. “I don’t know,” she responds, her voice quiet, nothing deceitful in its tone or her expression. “If either of those things played a role in its choice, I can’t say.”

He jumps on one word. “Choice,” he repeats. “So you know that it does. Choose, I mean.”

She shrugs, pulling her strong young legs against her sagging breasts. “You haven’t told me,” she mentions. “What do you really think about this strange woman?”

Josh has read the butterfly diary at least a dozen times, and there have been little moments when he almost feels that he understands what the creature wrote. Not in words, but she wrote them as scents. As pheromones. Yet despite the damage done by translations and the pervading alienness to every portion of this text, Josh feels an eerie sense that he already knows this Other. Understands her, even. That she is his friend, or some distant sister. Or she is the lover sitting in his own bed, watching him with her own secret gaze.

He closes the book and places it back inside its cage.

In the corner of an eye, he sees a knowing grin. But her face goes blank when he looks straight at her.

Again, he says, “Thank you.”

As always, she asks, “For what?” Then she shrugs, laughing with tenderness. “Like I told you. You came that day looking so sad and desperate, and alone, and I wanted to help.”

“Did all of you come help me?”

The question is ludicrous, and he knows it. What Josh wants is to hear her answer, and the tone of her voice.

“Only me,” she says.

Not true.

But then she touches his bare knee, and smiles, and asks, “Really now. How many more than one would be enough?”

I am wings tied about a soul which flies past the skin of the sky, and I am enormous, and sometimes I am sad… I miss my legs, my walk… in my dreams, I am small and ugly, and happy… in my dreams, the sky is unreachable, and the sky could not be more magnificent…

Almost as easily as you kill yourself, you murder whole worlds.

Fusion exchanges. Nanochine blooms. Conscious plagues, or simple kinetic blasts. Your methods of annihilation run the gamut from what is likely to the slightly less likely, and your reasons are pulled from the same bloody mix of excuses: Self-hatred. Self-pity. Self-righteous fury. Or some little accident happens to slip tragically out of hand.

Every moment, you kill too many worlds to count.

And within each of those brutal moments, a trillion times as many worlds continue to prosper, happy and fertile beneath a loving, well-loved sun.

After eons of uninterrupted exploration and conquest, The Divine One finally discovers an opponent with real muscle and heart. The world has Jupiter’s mass, oceans of acid sloshing against continents built of warm black iron. Its aliens are decidedly alien; their physiology, genetics, and basic morphology conform to an entirely different evolution. But they are organized, one leader at the helm and all the rest willingly enslaved. For thirty centuries, the war is a clash of equals. But The Divine One is quicker to adapt, and at least in this one reality, He finds one tiny critical advantage, and in a matter of hours, He manages to defeat and butcher the entire alien horde. Then alone, He descends. He finds His opponent, the once-great despot, hiding inside a steel temple, and with a thought, He kills the creature. Kills it and drains it of its strange white blood, and tosses the corpse over the far horizon. Then He sets out to explore the broad hallways and giant rooms of the temple, examining sculptures made from body parts and images of parades celebrating suffering and sacrifice. His enemy was remarkably similar to Him. Despite all of their profound differences, they were very much the same. Here lived a god in mortal clothes, and what if He had spared the creature? What if they had spoken? How much more would they have found in common?

In the backmost room, behind a series of massive doors, He discovers the bottomless gray ocean waiting.

“What are you doing here?” The Divine One roars.

The Authority calls to Him by name, and then says, “Hello again, my friend.”

“You aren’t the same puddle,” He complains. “I don’t believe this. What kind of trick is this?”

“Three offerings,” the Authority calls out. “And as always, in return, I will give you three items of your choice.”

The Divine One orders His journal brought to Him. Riding in a high-gravity walker, a slave girl enters the room. Then He carves the journal into three equal hunks, each portion enormous, each describing a separate million years of wandering through the Milky Way. One after the other, the offerings sink into the thick gray fluid, and then with a quiet, decidedly unimpressed voice, the Authority says, “Accepted.”

Standing beside the ocean, The Divine One shivers.

“Do you want your usual?” the Authority inquires. “Three genealogies leading up to lesser incarnations of yourself?”

“No,” He whispers.

“No,” He rumbles.

Then with a sorry shake of the head, He says, “Show me three journals. From minds like Mine, and bodies that are not…”

Thinking the truth is easy. You fit together the puzzle more often than you realize, and in the normal course of days, you dismiss the idea as ludicrous or ugly, or useless, or dull.

Understanding is less easy. You have to learn a series of words and the concepts that come attached to those words, and real understanding brings a kind of appreciation, cold and keen, not too different from the cutting edge of a highly polished razor blade.

But believing the truth… embracing the authentic with all of your self, conscious and otherwise… that is and will always be supremely difficult, if not outright impossible.

Josh sits alone, studying his lost love’s journals.

“Something obvious has occurred to me,” he reads, hearing Pauline’s voice. “And ever since, I can’t think about anything else. But I can’t talk about it. Not to anyone. Not even Josh. Not even after sitting here for an entire day. I can’t seem to put down even a single word that hints at this thing that I know…

“How can I tell Josh? Show him? Help him see…?”

Closing the journal, Josh wipes at his eyes. And thinks. And after a very long while, with a courage barely equal to the task, he starts to examine every treasure that his lost love acquired over the last five years… given to her by an entity that does nothing by chance…

He cries for a while, and then He stops.

Another voice is crying. Astonishingly, He forgot about the slave girl. She remains inside the walker, waiting to be killed. Sad and hopeless, she wipes at her wet eyes, and her bladder lets loose a thin trickle of urine, and she very nearly begs. Please kill me now, and remove me from all this misery…!

He won’t.

With a gesture, He wraps her inside a more subtle exoskeleton. Then He beckons to her, saying, “Come here. Sit next to Me.”

She has to obey. Doesn’t she?

“Sit,” He says again. And then, unexpectedly, He says, “Or stand. Whatever makes you happiest.”

She kneels beside the bottomless ocean.

“Give it three offerings,” He suggests. “Three things you have made, or written down. Three examples of yourself.”

The girl nearly faints.

And then with a soft suspicious voice, she asks, “Why?”

But He cannot tell her why. That becomes instantly obvious. All that The Divine One can manage is to throw a warm arm around her naked shoulder, squeezing her with a reassuring strength, and with a mouth that is a little dry and little nervous, he kisses her on the soft edges of her ear.

Teller instantly senses that Josh knows.

Yet they still can’t talk about it. Not directly. Not as long as there is still some taste of ignorance in the world around them. What they can do is smile and hold hands, sharing an enlightened warmth, thinking hard about how the world will change when everyone understands.

Josh has already made his next appointment with the Authority.

As it happens, Teller is at work that day. She sits behind her usual desk, smiles and kisses him before he walks to the usual room. With the Authority, he can talk. With a genuine pride, he can tell it, “I understand now.”

“I know,” the voice purrs.

“It’s really awfully simple,” he says. “Looking back, I suppose I must have heard the idea, or thought it up for myself…I don’t know, maybe a couple million times…?”

The silence has an approving quality.

“One soul,” he says. “That’s all there is. My old lover realized it when she read a book. A book of essays she had written in another realm. As a little girl, the author was riding on horseback through a woodland. She found herself thinking about how she was riding past one tree, and past the tree was another tree that she was also riding past, just as she was passing the rest of the forest that lay beyond both trees. She was thinking how there was no clear point where she could say, ‘I’m not riding past those faraway trees.’

“So if there was no end point, she reasoned, and if the world was truly round, then clearly, she was riding past every tree in the world. Thrilled with the idea, she rode straight home and told her mother. ‘Run in a little circle,’ she claimed, ‘and the entire world passes by your shoulder.’

“To which her mother remarked, ‘That’s a very silly idea, my dear.’”

Josh pauses, sitting in the usual chair and placing the old gym bag between his feet.

“Pauline was pretty sharp. I can almost see how she got from there to the idea about there being just the one soul.” He shrugs, admitting, “With me? I was lucky. In this one reality, at least, I happened to stumble over the right series of thoughts. I got to thinking about how when I looked at other souls—when I ask you to show me someone with my genetics, or nearly so—I always considered that person as being me. Essentially. Like minds in very similar situations, and we were the same people. A shared incarnation. But if we were the same, and if souls slightly different from my neighboring soul are the same as him…as me…well, then we’ve got a situation where there is no logical or meaningful end…”

Quietly, the Authority says, “Yes.”

“I belong to one vast soul,” Josh mutters.

“You do,” says the voice.

“And if there can’t be two separate souls in the universe, then the two of us…well, I guess you and I are the same person, in essence…”

“Absolutely.”

“A beautiful, joyous notion.”

The silence is pleased.

“If not entirely original, that is.” Then Josh laughs, a disarming tone leading into the calm, simple question, “Why don’t you just tell us? At the beginning, with our first meeting…why not say, ‘This is the way it is’?”

“There are different ways to learn,” the Authority replies.

“I suppose.”

“To be told a wonder is one thing. But to take a very long, extremely arduous voyage, and then discover the same wonder with your own eyes and mind…isn’t that infinitely more appealing, Josh…?”

Josh says nothing.

After a little pause, the Authority asks, “What three offerings do you have for me today, Josh?”

Reaching inside the gym bag, he says, “Actually, I brought just one little something.”

“Yes?”

With both hands, Josh lifts his gift into the light. Then with the final words, “You cruel shit,” he turns off the magnetic bottle, and a lump of anti-iron begins to descend towards the slick gray face of the ocean.