This brought me up sharply.
“You’re having funding problems?” I asked, immediately wondering why I was so surprised by the idea. It was the last thing
I’d expected to hear, yet when I thought about it in the context of everything else he’d been saying it made sense—of a kind.
Dave’s image on the screen looked flustered for a second, as though he’d said more than he should. “Don’t worry about it.
I’m pretty sure we’re going to get renewed for another year—and a year in our time hasn’t got anything to do with a year in
your time. And even if they pull the plugs you won’t feel anything. You’ll just never have existed. But what I’m saying is,
as long as you do exist, we have to iron out this glitch. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, “I guess. So what happens? Do
I
get to kill
him
next time around?”
He looked faintly disapproving at this suggestion, as though I wasn’t taking the situation seriously enough. “It doesn’t work
like that,” he said.
“How does it work?”
He thought a moment, as though searching for the best way to express whatever he was trying to say. It didn’t look easy.
“Listen,” I said, in an effort to be helpful though still unsure quite what my role was, “is this the only way we can communicate?
Through this screen? Is there no way we can talk face-to-face?”
“Sure there is. I just figured we should take things kind of gradually. But if that’s what you want, why don’t you step through
that door in front of you?”
“Okay.”
I got to my feet, moved around the table and across to the door that I had noticed when I came in—or, more accurately, when
I had materialized there. As I turned the handie, I already knew from experience that it wasn’t going to be like going from
one room to another, or stepping out of a building into the fresh air. I would be going from one state of being to another.
This time I was ready for it.
In fact it was not a very dramatic change. I found myself in the middle of a relatively modern campus. It made me think of
Pepperdine in California, or Berkeley, though it wasn’t entirely either. Dave was waiting for me, leaning against the low
wall surrounding an ornamental fountain. He held out his hand, and I took it a little hesitantly, not knowing what to expect.
It felt absolutely real.
“George, it’s a pleasure,” he said, “a real pleasure.”
“Thanks,” I said lamely, not knowing what else to say. “Where are we?” I asked, looking around at the open spaces and the
long, fluid buildings beyond them.
“Oh, just some place.” Dave shrugged. “Nowhere special.”
I looked at the students coming and going in all directions, some hurrying purposefully, others with all the time in the world,
just like on any campus I’d ever been on.
“Can these kids see me?” I asked as a group walked right by us, talking and laughing among themselves.
“You don’t get it yet, do you, George? There’s nobody here. There’s not even me, or you. There’s no ‘here.’ There are no colors,
tastes, smells, or sounds. It’s all just information. Part of the program.”
I looked at him. “But there is a
real
you somewhere, isn’t there?”
He thought a moment before saying, almost reluctantly, “Yes, sort of.”
“What d’you mean sort of?”
“Well, to be absolutely frank with you, we’re not even sure that we ourselves aren’t part of a computer program in somebody
else’s world, the same way you are in ours. All the same signs are there. Nobody’s ever gotten to the bottom of this question,
and probably nobody ever will. Maybe it just goes on forever, like Chinese boxes or Russian dolls. And in the end it doesn’t
matter much. You are where you are, and that’s all you’ve got. And it’s the same for us.”
It wasn’t a view I found either appealing or encouraging. As I thought about it I glanced down and noticed that once again
I was wearing the same clothes, Larry’s clothes, that I’d had on when I was kidnapped and killed. By now I was getting so
used to these surreal quick changes that I didn’t even react.
“Okay,” I said, “so where do we go from here?”
“We go back and we unpick this thing.”
“You mean back to where Larry and I met this morning?”
He shook his head. “I was trying to tell you—it doesn’t work that way. I know it feels to you like no time has passed, but
quite a lot of time has passed in the world you left.”
“How come?”
He screwed up his face as though searching once again for a way to explain an unusually complex matter. “There are factors
governing these things that we can do nothing about.”
“Like what?”
He gave a shrug that lengthened out into a squirm of deep unease. Either he didn’t know the answer to that question, or the
answer was impossible to put into terms that I would understand. “It’s to do with probability,” he said eventually. “Certain
things have got to happen before we can go back. They will. They must. But we have to let them.”
“Certain what?” I asked, then hazarded a guess. “Coincidences?”
“Yeah, basically.” He looked at me as though mildly surprised by my perspicacity.
“Hey,” I said, “not a tough call, given the circumstances.”
“You’re right,” he said, and chuckled softly. Then he frowned, serious again. “Why don’t we take a walk,” he said. “There’s
some stuff you need to know about before we do anything else. I have to warn you, you may not like it.”
As we strolled, he told me everything that had happened in my absence.
I felt sick.
F
or some moments after George had finished, the only sound I could hear was my own breathing. The two of them, George and his
mysterious friend Dave, just stood there, waiting for me to say something. There was no sense of impatience or urgency about
them. It was as though they had all the time in the world—which apparently they had, as I could still see from the window
where the rest of the world remained frozen. Yet they had obviously come here with specific things to accomplish, and as soon
as I was ready we would move on to them.
“Are you all right, Larry?” George asked.
“He’s fine,” Dave said. “I think we can wrap this thing up. What I propose is that the two of you go sit over there, and then
we can do what we have to to get this situation resolved.”
He indicated two soft leather armchairs placed at an angle to each other before a vast abstract painting by one of Sara’s
artists. George started obediently for one. I, with my mind spinning and a sense of having alarmingly little fight left in
me, headed for the other.
“And George,” Dave added, “you can take your glasses and the hat off now.”
“Oh—yeah, sure.”
He did so, and we both sat there looking up at Dave, waiting.
“Before we get started,” he said, “I have kind of a confession to make. I already indicated to you, George, that we’ve had
some funding problems on this project lately. Which has meant we’ve had to cut a few corners here and there. The fact is,
and I haven’t wanted to mention this so far for reasons I’m sure you’ll understand, we’re going to have to cut another one
now. Normally in a case like this—they happen inevitably from time to time—we’d have to go through a lengthy process that
would involve starting up Larry’s program over again and introducing him back into it. Unfortunately, in this instance we
aren’t going to be able to do that.”
George was listening with polite, reasonably untroubled interest. I shifted in my chair, wondering uneasily where this “confession”
of Dave’s was going.
“So the thing is,” Dave continued, looking down at his feet as he took a few steps across the thick cushion of carpet, “we’re
not going to be able to unpick this situation in the way we normally would. In fact we’re not going to be able to unpick it
at all. We’re simply going to have to cut, as it were, the Gordian knot.”
He stopped pacing and looked at both of us.
“The fact is,” he said, and paused a moment to make sure we were both still paying close attention, “that for all practical
purposes, Larry’s world has come to an end, so there’s no way he can go back to it. As a result, the two of you are now in
this world—George’s world—which has created a logically impossible situation. You’re not twins and you’re not clones. You’re
two blueprints living one life. The only solution is that one of you is going to have to be eliminated.”
“Wait a second here, Dave, I’m not sure I understand…”
The interruption had come from George, his brow furrowing with a crease of sudden concern.
“When you say eliminate, in what sense are you meaning that?”
“In the usual sense I guess,” Dave said.
George continued to look puzzled. “But d’you mean… are you saying that one of us will have to… to cease to be?”
I said nothing. Something in my gut told me I already knew the answer to that question only too well. So did George: He just
wasn’t ready to face it yet.
Dave, I have to say, for the first time had the grace to look a little embarrassed, even shifty.
“That’s about it, I’m afraid,” he answered, avoiding George’s gaze. “Strictly speaking, what we’re about to do is illegal,
and I could get into a lot of trouble for it. But then I have to balance that against the project and the importance of keeping
it going. We can’t afford to have it brought to a halt by mishaps like this. Frankly, this research is too important.”
“But Dave,” George persisted, in the reasonable tones of a man unable to acknowledge that his argument was already lost, “you
assured me that this whole problem could be ironed out—unpicked, you said—and everything put back to square one. That’s what
you told me, isn’t it?”
“That’s what I told you. That’s how I would have liked it to be. That’s how it would be in an ideal world. Unfortunately,
we’re not in one.”
“So what exactly are you saying, Dave? And why have you chosen to wait until now?”
The question came from George, but Dave directed his reply to me.
“For technical reasons, you’re going to have to settle this between you. One of you has to displace the other—face-to-face
and without any help or interference from outside. Nobody else can do it for you. Not me, not my supervisor, not even the
head of the department responsible for this computer.”
“For God’s sake, what you’re talking about sounds like—”
Dave ignored George’s whiny-voiced interruption and plowed on, addressing both of us now.
“The problem is that because you’re a conscious entity you have a very significant element of free will, which by definition
only yourself—these two versions of yourself—can use. And you’re going to have to use it now.”
“This is getting a little out of hand, and it’s certainly a long way from—”
George started to push himself up off his chair as he spoke, but fell back as though held by some invisible restraint.
“What the—? Why can’t What is this—?”
Dave shook his head, and his voice reflected genuine regret. “I’m sorry, but you can’t get out of those chairs, either of
you, until this is over.”
I tried. What Dave said was true. It wasn’t a feeling of being strapped down, no straining of muscle and sinew against confinement.
My body just wouldn’t do what I wanted. I felt disconnected from it.
“I’m not pretending I like this,” Dave was saying, “but I don’t have any choice, given the circumstances.”
Then I realized that I had no sense of smell. Not that there was ever much to smell in that room, just the hazy, agreeable
odors of comfortable living. But now I could smell nothing at all. I could hear and I could see, but I was aware suddenly
that I wasn’t breathing. Not holding my breath, just not needing to breathe. I was still in my body, but disembodied.
“I repeat,” Dave said, “that the only way we’re going to resolve this situation is by having one of you eliminate the other.”
George started blustering as panic took hold of him. “This is outrageous! Barbaric! I never agreed to anything like this…”
Dave simply carried blithely on like a game show host explaining the rules to a couple of fresh contestants.
“If you’ll both look down at the right arm of your respective chairs, you’ll find that a button has been fixed near to where
your hand is.”
I dropped my gaze. Sure enough, a disc of stainless steel had been embedded in the leather, with a central plunger raised
almost an inch. I couldn’t imagine how I hadn’t noticed it when I sat down, though I was so accustomed to a general and pervading
sense of dislocation by now that little could surprise me any longer.
“Whichever of you hits that button first will eliminate the other,” Dave said, and stood looking down at both of us as if
his role were over and from now on it was up to us.
“This is against every notion of decent civilized…”
I noticed George appeared to be physically struggling as he blustered and protested, not simply detached from physicality
in the way I was. Perhaps it was a subjective thing; it was impossible to know.
“By the way,” Dave cut in on George’s tirade, “I forgot to mention, for the purpose of hitting this button, you will both
be physically quite free, neither of you at any disadvantage with regard to the other.”
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “Whichever of us hits this button first eliminates the other—as in ‘dead”
“Complete nonexistence.”
“And the other?”
“Will live on—as George Daly, from the point where you meet in the park.”
“That first time or this morning?”
“Oh, this morning, I’m afraid. It’s too complicated to go back and unpick everything that’s happened since the first time.”
“No!” George shouted. “This is a scandal and a travesty. Larry, listen to me, we have to stay together on this and play no
part in any such—”
He ranted on, but I had ceased to listen. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation, they were irrelevant. In real life
things happen too fast to be sure you’re doing the “right” thing. Life and death decisions are made on gut instinct. George
was a jerk if he didn’t understand that. But then I already knew that George was a jerk, period. He didn’t deserve his life.