Chapter Nine
Consequences
Devan wakes up to the sound of his very annoying alarm, which he keeps in the other room to avoid going back to sleep. He gets up slowly, robotically, moving methodically to the other room to turn off the alarm. Relishing this accomplishment, he stares at the wall talking to himself out loud.
“Damn that was a long sleep. I can’t tell whether I feel refreshed or beat up. Well, coffee. Coffee, coffee, coffee, that’ll help.”
Devan looks out the window of his apartment overlooking the street that divides downtown from the industrial area of the city. Everything is a dull shade of grey-tan. It almost looks sandy, like a desert landscape.
“Oh, well. Baby steps, right. At least the air is clean indoors.”
As Devan contemplates the feeling of his own breathing, he notices the time.
“Shit! I’m going to be late for class.”
Devan rushes to get dressed and out the door. Riding his racing bike at top speed, frantically maneuvering through completely empty streets dodging a combination of fast-moving trash and large debris from broke down and abandoned industrial machinery and vehicles. He arrives at the trade school anxious about teaching his first course in space-time quantum entanglement. It’s an easy enough topic but Devan has a little stage fright. He enters his classroom and hears the class murmuring with a variety of responses. Mostly positive but unenthusiastic.
“Alright. Hey. Um, how is everyone this morning? I’m Devan Anderson and I’ll be teaching this course for the next few weeks. The topic covers entanglement of space-time histories as it relates to safe arcade operation. Don’t worry, everything we cover will be applied. This isn’t going to be a boring class on theoretical nonsense. So, ah… why don’t we just get right to it. When dealing with multiple copies of a space-time region, bound and compactified but evolving in parallel with our world lines there is a chance of quantum interference of histories. Now this you already know, and know how to deal with using extra dimensions to bleed off any tunneling effects. Once a game is finished the changes that occurred in the copy need to be erased, reset. This is accomplished by resetting the initial conditions in the copy and letting it continue to evolve. This is critical and needs to be done correctly. If this part of the process is not done correctly the evolving copy will change and, through an entanglement effect, cause unexpected changes in our reality. So the reset is very important.”
Devan notices a student with their hand up. “Yes, question?”
“Yeah, thanks. Why is it that important? I mean weird things don’t happen during the game while things are changing?”
“True, excellent question. You see, as you know, the game happens in near zero time in our reality. Really there is a Plank scale delta in time here. During that time some “spooky” things can happen and that’s why we regulate things with extra dimensions. This is done under our control, with reactors. We have the technology to prevent entanglement effects from occurring during the game. But when it’s done, if we didn’t reset the game, we would have to keep making extra dimensions essentially forever! This would be huge drain on resources and as you all know the Ache sucks pretty bad right now. Just imagine the entropy increase and the effect on your body if you just kept doing that. We don’t have the technology to regulate things that way. So, we do this for the small delta time when we need it and then clean up by hand afterwards. Perhaps someday we will have the technology to just let it all run without resets but that’s not the case now. Does that answer your question?”
“Yes.”
“Great. Well, if there are no other questions, I have a lot of gamers waiting so this is the end of this lecture. See you tomorrow.”
The class gets up and disperses. As Devan walks outside the inquisitive student in his lecture catches up to him.
“Dr. Anderson! Can I follow you and ask another question?”
“Sure. Have you ever seen the arcade from the control area?”
“No. I’ve been to arcades a lot but no, I’ve never seen the controls. Can I?”
“Yeah sure. You’re gonna be in control of one a few more months.”
“Cool, thanks!”
“What’s your question?”
“Yeah, I forgot. Uh, well it has to do with entanglement. What actually happens if initial conditions are not reset properly?”
“Well that’s hard to say. It’s a coin toss, right? Basically, anything can be changed relative to the reality you know. It can be a small change, almost unnoticeable. You might be a few ounces lighter or heavier. Or it could be something big, something major like…, like, I don’t know the sun is missing.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. And the really cool thing is that while there is entanglement, active entanglement between alternate parallel realties you can retain memories of both. Your previous history isn’t erased or interfered with in any way. That’s why people remember who they are in the game. They can enjoy playing in the alternate dimensions without forgetting this reality. It wouldn’t really be any fun to meet King John, or Prince Siddhartha, or Jesus, and not remember that you were from the future.”
“So, if you forget to reset or reset wrong and that causes mixing of realities…”
“Yes?”
“I can’t really think of the right way to ask the question. Ah! First question, can we fix it by resetting extra dimensions.”
“Yes.”
“Ok. I guess the second question would be… once it’s fixed do we remember all the “spooky” stuff that happened? Would we remember the sun being gone?”
“No. That is a deep question. But no, you would not remember a thing. It’s a common mistake to think that you would but what you’re doing with the reset is essentially collapsing the wave function. So, you’ve “observed” a reality and everything else is erased.”
“Wait. That contradicts something that we already know about memory. How do gamers remember the game after the reset?”
“Wow. Great question. Well you see, spoiler this is actually next week’s lesson, they don’t retain their own memories. We could never retain actual memory of what happened in the game but while it’s playing we can record it. I mean a real physical recording not a space-time copy or anything. We can send and receive signals from the copy. So once a gamer comes back and while we’re resetting the game, we implant a recording of the game in their brain.”
“Wow! I never knew that. I’ve played thousands of games. Does that mess with your brain function? Is it safe?”
“Yeah, yeah. Everything’s safe. It’s actually in the waiver everyone signs before they play, but I guess nobody reads that. We’ve had the technology to implant memories for a long time.”
“Again, wow. That means our game memories aren’t real.”
“Well I think that’s a matter of semantics. We don’t implant false information, we implant actual data from the game.”
“But that means there’s no way, no way at all that you can remember what happened during entanglement once the wave function is collapsed.”
“Nope, not at all. It’s a common misunderstanding. But no. It is as if nothing ever happened. That is unless someone you interact with observed the other state or states of the same wave function. But that is highly unlikely.”
Devan and the student arrive at the arcade and enter the game control room.
“Wow… Holy shit this is cool.”
“Yeah it is. You get used to it though. It wears off. Hey, you want coffee?”
“Sure thanks.”
“Can you make some? Right over there.”
“Ha ha. Ok, I guess everyone starts at the bottom.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll teach you how to set up and run a game. That’s easy. I’ll do the reset this time so nothing goes wrong. After a few games you’ll be ready to try a reset.”
“Awesome! Coffee’s on the way.”
After a long day Devan returns home and sits down to read the mail and his evening paper. The front-page news reads,
Devan throws the paper in the trash. The WGO kills everyone, eventually. Devan was surprised at the news of Jacob’s indictment but this is crushing, his whole family dead. Genocide by forced suicide. Devan prepares dinner for himself, eats, sleeps and continues to live his life running an arcade, teaching physics and mourning the loss of his best friend Jacob.