Iterations and other stories (collection)

I’ve always had an eidetic memory and a vivid imagination— I dream in color, unlike Mary. By fully and completely imagining myself to be as I would have been in one of the alternative realities, by essentially convincing myself that I had lulled Roscoe Harada, even for an instant, the operating system saw this me and the other version of me as identical. And then—don’t ask me how I did this; I can’t explain it any more than I can explain how I walk—I manage somehow to access the pointer registry, and slip into the version of the simulation in which that other me, the one I was imagining, does exist.

Granted, not everything I could imagine is possible. I could imagine—indeed, relish—an image of a world in which Harada had fallen down some stairs and broken his back and then, later, in which he and I had ended up in a knockdown, drag-out fist-fight in which I pounded him into a bloody pulp. But, of course, if he were paralyzed, the subsequent brawl wouldn’t have been possible. No, there was no pointer to that world.

But to other possibilities, the pointers did exist.

And I traveled to them, world after world, iteration after iteration, putting an end to the unconscionable versions of me.

“I’m sorry, Erik,” I said, “but I’ve got to kill you.”

Of course, the other me wasn’t in my office at CanScience— he couldn’t be. In any iteration in which I still had that office, cramped though it had been, Harada would still be alive. Instead, I was confronting him in the basement of our house; it was 10:00 a.m. on a weekday, but I guess his shift didn’t start until later today.

The voice of the other me was edged with panic. “Why would you want to kill me?”

“Because you murdered Roscoe Harada.”

The brown eyes darted left and right. There was only one way out of the basement—up the wooden staircase—and I was blocking that. “You can’t prove that.”

“I don’t have to prove it to anyone but me. I’m here—in this version of the simulation—because I imagined a world in which we’d killed Harada with a knife to the left kidney. If that wasn’t what really happened here, I wouldn’t have been able to transfer to this iteration.”

The other me hesitated, as if unsure what to say. Then he frowned. “So what if I did do it? You must have wanted to do it, too. After what he did to us—”

“I don’t dispute that he should be dead. Rut what makes us better than Harada is that we never did anything awful to him to get even. And I can’t live with the knowledge that a version of reality exists in which we did.”

“But if you kill me, then you’ll be a murderer, too.”

“Is it murder? Or is it suicide?” My turn to frown. “Perhaps it’s neither. Perhaps it’s just me setting things straight.”

“This won’t bring Harada back to life in this iteration.”

“No. But it will serve as a fitting punishment for his death, allowing me to enjoy my existence without guilt.”

“But, look, the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics says that—

I cut him off. “It says that even in the real, non-simulated world that must have existed at one time, whenever an action can go two ways, it does go both ways, but in separate universes, spinning off new timelines for each possible version of reality.”

The other me nodded vigorously. “Exactly. So this vast multiplexed computer simulation is no different from that.”

“Except that John Cramer’s transactional interpretation solves all the quandaries of quantum physics without recourse to parallel universes. If this were the real world, I could believe that Cramer was right and Hugh Everett was wrong, and there was only one timeline. But here I know—know!—that there are versions of the simulation in which all the base things I’ve ever thought of doing actually happened. And if I’m going to have peace—”

“If you’re going to have peace,” said the other me, with resignation, “you’re going to have to put an end to me.”

I squeezed the trigger and said “Exactly,” but the bark of the Glock drowned out the word.

What did Roscoe Harada do to me, you might ask? CanScience was a small publishing company, and he was the buyer for a large bookstore chain. We solicited pre-pub orders for a book called Y2canucK: A Canadian Guide to Preparing for the Year 2000. For us, a thousand copies was a normal print run. Chapters had taken four hundred copies; Indigo, a hundred and seventy-five. And then Harada’s order came in for his company: 25,000 copies, by far the biggest order we’d ever had.

We printed the books and delivered them: five hundred and twenty cartons, all shipped at our expense to Harada’s warehouse in Oshawa.

And Harada had his people sit on them, never even putting them out into the stores.

And then, in January 2000, he returned them all. Every single copy. They were in the same cartons we’d shipped them out in; they’d never even been opened.

Y2K didn’t turn out to be a disaster—so said all the newspapers.

But it was a disaster for Mary and me.