Oceanic

by Greg Egan

‘Pure karma,’ he announced. ‘I should have guessed.’ ‘Oh, very scientific.’ ‘I’m serious. Forget the Buddhist mystobabble; I’m talking about the real thing. If you stick to your principles, of course things go better for you - assuming you don’t get killed in the process. That’s elementary psychology. People have a highly developed sense of reciprocity, of the appropriateness of the treatment they receive from each other. If things work out too well for them, they can’t help asking, “What did I do to deserve this?” If you don’t have a good answer, you’ll sabotage yourself.

the growing sense of achievement I felt at having buckled down and cleared away these tedious obligations brought with it the corollary: someone infinitesimally different from me - someone who had shared my entire history up until that morning - had procrastinated instead.

The triviality of this observation only made it more unsettling;

I didn’t really care how hilarious it would have been if Marilyn Monroe had been involved in a bedroom farce with Richard Feynman and Richard Nixon. I just wanted to lose the suffocating conviction that everything I had become was a mirage; that my life had been nothing but a blinkered view of a kind of torture chamber, where every glorious reprieve I’d ever celebrated had in fact been an unwitting betrayal.

Die-hard members of the Penrose camp claimed that Olivia’s experiments proved nothing, because even if people behaved identically while all quantum effects were ruled out, they could be doing this as mere automata, totally devoid of consciousness. When Olivia had offered to let her chief detractor experience coherence disruption for himself, he’d replied that this would be no more persuasive, because memories laid down while you were a zombie would be indistinguishable from ordinary memories, so that looking back on the experience, you’d notice nothing unusual.

The delivery began in the early hours of the morning of Sunday, 14 December, and was expected to last about four hours, depending on traffic.

‘Gödel’s theorem proves that the non-computable, non-linear world behind the quantum collapse is a manifest expression of Buddha-nature,’ a neatly dressed youth intoned earnestly, establishing with admirable economy that he had no idea what any of these terms meant.

On his eighteenth day in the tiger cage, Robert Stoney began to lose hope of emerging unscathed.

They had never touched, never kissed. While half the school had been indulging in passionless sodomy - as a rather literal-minded substitute for the much-too-difficult task of imagining women - Robert had been too shy even to declare his feelings.

‘My name’s Helen.

We had the same war. The same Holocaust, the same Soviet death toll. But we’ve yet to be able to avert that, anywhere. You can never do anything in just one history - even the most focused intervention happens across a broad “ribbon” of strands. When we try to reach back to the ’30s and ’40s, the ribbon overlaps with its own past to such a degree that all the worst horrors are faits accomplis. We can’t shoot any version of Adolf Hitler, because we can’t shrink the ribbon to the point where none of us would be shooting ourselves in the back.

If there’s one thing a computer ought to be able to understand - as well as us, if not better - it’s arithmetic itself. If a computer could think at all, it would surely be able to grasp the nature of its own best talent. ‘The question, then, comes down to this: can you describe all of arithmetic, using nothing but arithmetic? Thirty years ago - long before Professor Stoney and his computers came along - Professor Gödel asked himself exactly that question.

‘The child knows, we all know, how a certain kind of object behaves. Our lives are steeped in direct experience of whole numbers: whole numbers of coins, stamps, pebbles, birds, cats, sheep, buses. If I tried to persuade a six-year-old that I could put three stones in a box, remove one of them, and be left with four . . . he’d simply laugh at me.

‘There is no Devil. And no God, either. Just people. But I promise you: people with the powers of gods are kinder than any god we ever imagined.’

‘That took strength: to admit that you needed God. But it takes the same kind of strength, again, to understand that some needs can never be met. I can’t promise you Heaven. We have no disease, we have no war, we have no poverty. But we have to find our own love, our own goodness. There is no final word of comfort. We only have each other.’

It was a curious feeling, familiar as it was: he cared, and he didn’t. If he’d been wholly indifferent to the outcome of the game there would have been no pleasure in it, but obsessing over every defeat - or every victory - could ruin it just as thoroughly.

given a choice between the then even-more-crowded Earth, the horrifying reality of interstellar distances, and an endlessly extensible branching chain of worlds which could be traversed within a matter of weeks, the decision wasn’t exactly baffling.

he spoke with fellow students of his chosen field on other worlds, or read their latest works. Though they were not researchers, they could still put a new pedagogical spin on old material, enriching the connections with other fields, finding ways to make the complex, subtle truth easier to assimilate without sacrificing the depth and detail that made it worth knowing in the first place.

They would not advance the frontiers of knowledge. They would not discover new principles of nature, or invent new technologies. But to Jamil, understanding was an end in itself.

‘This was . . . the Holocaust?’ She looked up at him, shaking her head, almost laughing at his naïveté. ‘Not even one of them. Not a war, not a pogrom. Just one psychopathic man.

They were opposed to immortality in principle.’ Jamil laughed. ‘Why?’ ‘Ten thousand years’ worth of sophistry doesn’t vanish overnight, ’ Margit observed dryly. ‘Every human culture had expended vast amounts of intellectual effort on the problem of coming to terms with death. Most religions had constructed elaborate lies about it, making it out to be something other than it was - though a few were dishonest about life, instead. But even most secular philosophies were warped by the need to pretend that death was for the best.

‘It was the naturalistic fallacy at its most extreme - and its most transparent, but that didn’t stop anyone. Since any child could tell you that death was meaningless, contingent, unjust and abhorrent beyond words, it was a hallmark of sophistication to believe otherwise.

every righteous struggle in history, every worthwhile sacrifice, had been against suffering, against violence, against death. Now, that struggle would become impossible.’ ‘Yes.’ Jamil was mystified. ‘But only because it had triumphed.’ Margit said gently, ‘I know. There was no sense to it. And it was always my belief that anything worth fighting for - over centuries, over millennia - was worth attaining. It can’t be noble to toil for a cause, and even to die for it, unless it’s also noble to succeed. To claim otherwise isn’t sophistication, it’s just a kind of hypocrisy. If it’s better to travel than arrive, you shouldn’t start the voyage in the first place.

would any great leader have sentenced humanity to eternal misery, for the sake of providing a suitable backdrop for eternal heroism? Well, some of them would have. But the downtrodden themselves had better things to do.’

Death never gave meaning to life: it was always the other way round. All of its gravitas, all of its significance, was stolen from the things it ended. But the value of life always lay entirely in itself - not in its loss, not in its fragility.

Historians had always understood that in the long run, technological progress was a horizontal asymptote: once people had more or less everything they wanted that was physically possible, every incremental change would take exponentially longer to achieve, with diminishing returns and ever less reason to bother.

It was not a matter of everything in mathematics collapsing in on itself, with one branch turning out to have been merely a recapitulation of another under a different guise. Rather, the principle was that every sufficiently beautiful mathematical system was rich enough to mirror in part - and sometimes in a complex and distorted fashion - every other sufficiently beautiful system. Nothing became sterile and redundant, nothing proved to have been a waste of time, but everything was shown to be magnificently intertwined.

there was only the emotion itself, overpowering but unembellished. It didn’t grow monotonous; I could have basked in it for days. But I understood, now, that it said no more about my place in the world than the warmth of sunlight on skin.

as long as you know that, you’re already free. As long as you’re ready to face the possibility that everything that makes your spirits soar, everything that lifts you up and fills your heart with joy, everything that makes your life worth living . . . is a lie, is corruption, is meaningless - then you can never be enslaved.’

Maybe if I’d grown up facing the truth, I would have been stronger. But when I woke in the night, knowing that my mother was simply dead, that everyone I’d ever loved would follow her, that I’d vanish into the same emptiness myself, it was like being buried alive.

‘As a child I did. Not any more. It was a nice idea . . . but it made no sense.’ He eyed me sceptically, still unsure of my motives. I said, ‘Then isn’t life unbearable?’ He laughed. ‘Not all the time.’