Chapter 228: I'll Get You Out Prof, I Promise

Monday, May 23, 2005 (Continued)

Dying wasn't painful, as it wasn't a heart attack in the usual sense. Our body demanded oxygen, and filling our lungs didn't appease that demand, so that was very unpleasant. It didn't last for long though, as our brain had already been on its last legs. We quickly died, it happened during déjà vu so the other Mark knew it, and he commanded his heart to start pumping again, please. It did so.

#1: <I'll just say, "Welcome guys." That's horribly inadequate, but I'm VERY glad to have you here. We've exhausted everything we can think of, and seeing twelve hours into our future was a very scary experience. But for that single glass of water, we'd be in the same situation right now.>

#3: <I guess I'll be calling myself #7 from now on. Yeah, it was pretty horrible, especially seeing poor Prof going down first. You're automatically hopeful at the beginning - you just assume that everybody always gets out of situations like these. But when the realization sinks in that you're not going to get out, and that you're going to die so horribly, it's an unbelievably wretched feeling. God knows how Prof accepted it so calmly. I wanted to scream.>

#8: <I wanted to unload the gun into the assholes' faces and bodies, spit and piss on them, kick them all around the room ... Well, you get the idea.>

#2: <Are you ready to try centering? By the way, how come you weren't centered when déjà vu started?>

#7: <We'd just woken up, and speaking for myself, I hadn't thought of it. There wasn't any point anyway. I imagine we all wanted to get as much reality as we could, even if it was very unhappy reality, rather than going on duty and tuning out.>

#2: <Yeah, much the same as this end. We were often not on duty. It just didn't seem important. I'll go on duty now. Good luck guys, and I'll appreciate it if I'm in a kitchen when you relieve me.>

I centered.

We were immediately struck by how our body felt: like every cell of our body was vibrating a little. It was a WEAK sensation, but it was VERY attention getting because it was so incredibly weird.

#4: <That's weird! Are you all feeling {image of our whole body vibrating}?>

#5: <Yeah. It feels pleasant. Weird mostly, but a little pleasant too.>

Obviously it was impossible that our impression was literally true, because to feel all our cells vibrating we'd have to have tactile nerves next to all of them, which was obviously very silly as it takes thousands(?)/millions(?) of cells to make a single nerve. We decided that there was something going on that our brain didn't know how to interpret, so it was giving a misleading sensation. It was probably something to do with our getting energy from the Universe, in the way we did when we could run up to our optimal speed without fatigue. We hoped that was the case, because we would welcome more energy. After so many days of not having any food, we felt drained and limp the whole time. It hadn't been an urgent problem before as we'd been chained to a chair, so not doing any physical exertion, but we REALLY hoped to be able to discover a way out of this place now, which might need some physical activity.

#1: <Let's find out if NP is any stronger.>

We turned our head to look for the heaviest object in the room to test our NP on. This was the first time we'd moved our newly-eight-minded body since centering, and the movement's intention ki was immediately apparent. And BOY did we ever sense it! Proximity was FAR more detailed than it'd been before. Previously arms and hands had no detail at all, as if someone had painted a body using one single stroke with a very thick brush to represent the arm and hand. After some very quick intended movements, we learned that we could now sometimes differentiate fingers! Even our missing finger, as our brain could still intend to move it, not being used to its absence yet. If we hadn't previously discovered EKP, seeing ki flow from the end of where our missing finger would have been might have led to the discovery anyway. The increased resolution was cool. I noticed that I could also distinguish my gender, but only just, and only when I thought about moving my 'gender'.

[[I have sometimes used a pixel metaphor in this biography, but only in comments from the future-me. It was not something that had occurred to the current me yet because I'd not discovered centering and the proximity sense until I'd had four minds. This was my very first experience with a different level of proximity ability. In the metaphor, one mind gave the equivalent to a 1-pixel (maybe 2-pixel) black-and-white 'picture'. Two minds gave a 10-pixel gray-scale picture, and four minds gave 100-pixels in color. The new eight-mind version was 1,000 pixels of rich color. Color is part of the metaphor, not how proximity seemed to me, so "rich color" is just meant to convey the nuance that there was some added 'depth' to the sense that I didn't understand yet.]]

We formed an NP-fingertip beside the heaviest object in the room, Goon, and started trying to push his shoulder up.

#6: <That's strange. I can't tell whose fingertip that is. Who created that?>

#1: <I did.>

#3: <I can still tell it was #1's.>

#4: <Me too. One of you create a fingertip, but don't tell us who did it.>

#5 to #8 quickly agreed who would do that by using private messages - which did work as normal - and #8 created a new fingertip.

#4: <Nope, I can't tell.>

#1, #3: <Nor me.>

We hadn't known who owned NP-fingertips when we first discovered NP (or TK, as it was back then), but we'd gained ownership knowledge after a few days, although we could only guess how we knew that information, as fingertips are invisible in normal sight and appeared identical in proximity. Our guess was that we weren't sensing each other's NP-points or blobs, or even our own, but were reading each others' mental images of what we were doing, and that also came with ownership information because we subconsciously knew which mind supplied the images. We'd gotten used to knowing the owner, even though being able to sense ki-effects outside our proximity range was strangely inconsistent with there being a proximity range. We were rather upset to lose the ownership information now, because it had made coordination easier. In the situation we were in now, we didn't want ANY of our abilities to get harder to use, in case it made a life-or-death difference in the wrong direction.

[[Our guess about how we sensed each other's ki-effects was more wrong than right, and the proximity inconsistency was because we didn't understand what that was either. Fortunately we didn't need to understand what was happening in order for our increased number of subconsciouses to get coordinated again. The loss of ki-effect ownership information corrected itself about half an hour from now. We didn't notice it, but at the same time as the subconsciouses made the connections necessary to share ki-effect ownership information, they also made memory sharing between 3A and 3B possible. The subconsciouses already knew how to share information, they just needed to make a few new connections between the incumbent and newly arrived minds.]]

#5: <But we can. So it doesn't cross the ... whatever we call it. "Generation" isn't right.>

#3: <How about "Immigration Wave". You guys are the third wave of immigrants into this body.>

#1: <Shall we get back to the NP test? I'll try rolling Goon over to check his rear pockets properly, and we'll see how it goes and how many of you have to join in.>

#7: <We called him "Goon" too. "Goon" and "Boss", right?>

#1: <Yep. The collective noun being "Fucking assholes", although that doesn't come close to expressing the contempt and anger I have toward them.>

#1 started pushing up on Goon's shoulder.

#1: <It feels the same for how I do it normally, but the tactile feedback feels like I'm supporting quite a lot more weight.>

#3: <That's good, I'll join in.> #3 started doing so.

#4: <Hang on! I'm not sure we want to roll Goon over. That might show up somehow when the police investigate, which I hope we'll be around to worry about.>

#1: <You're right. It was stupid of me to use him. I'll start weak and ramp up a push against our thigh. That'll give us a much better idea.>

#1 moved his NP-point to above our thigh, and started pushing down lightly, then slowly increasing the force. After a few seconds, #1: <That's it; that's my full force. That's a VERY nice increase. I figure about 4 or 5 kilograms. What do you guys think?>

#6: <You use kilograms? We always used pounds.>

#1: <We got sick of doing calculations with the stupid imperial units. SI units are much better for physics, and it was convenient that g is about 10 because so many of our calculations were about gravity.>

#6: <Your America still uses imperial units though doesn't it? It'd be a pain getting used to metric.>

#7: <It'd be a pain I'd LOVE to go through, because it'd mean we got out of here.>

#3: <America uses imperial. About the only country in the world that does, apart from a couple of tin-pot countries. Except that most science is done in SI units these days. But back to our current experiment, it does feel considerably harder than the previous maximum of 1.6 kg used to feel. Three or four times harder, is my guess. It's difficult to tell.>

#1: <That piece of wood was close enough to 1.6 kg. I'll pick it up now and test to see what sort of acceleration I can give it.>

#1 formed two pairs on NP-fingertips, one pair at each end of the beam, as that's our usual way of lifting something.

#7: <How many fingertips can you create?>

We all saw the answer emerge. The previous limit of four appeared simultaneously, then: pop, pop, pop, pop. After a brief pause, #1: <That's it: eight. That's cool. It gives us MUCH finer control. Rather than 3 minds times 4 fingertips, we've now got 7 minds times 8 fingertips, so 12 increases to 56. That's a very nice increase.>

#6: <We'll be able to create some much more realistic light blob sculptures too, although that's probably not our top priority at the moment.>

#1: <No, light blobs aren't going to get us out of here. I'll get back to my lifting test. I'll accelerate it straight up.>

The wood shot up to the ceiling, making a loud thump, and another one when #1 let it hit the ground.

#1: <That was WAY under one second from floor to ceiling. Under half a second too. Call it a quarter or a third of a second. If it rose 2 meters in a quarter of a second what does that make the acceleration? Ahhh.>

We struggled for a couple of seconds until, #8: <There's no need to do the calculation. Create 8 NP-points, but lift the wood with only 4 of them. Before this merge that only gave us half power. We should test that on our thigh. Then you can try 3 and 2 NP-points if you find the wood's balancing point first. If 3 can lift the wood but 2 can't, then we know we're more powerful by about 8/2.5.>

#1: <You're right. Guessing sub-second times is too inaccurate anyway. I'm a little freaked out that I was having so much trouble doing that calculation. It's such a simple one and we've all easily done it countless times before.>

#4: <Yeah, our brain isn't working well. It must need water as a conductor, and probably for lots of other reasons too. We know the "No Glass" guys weren't TOO bad before, so we've got at least twelve hours of good work ahead of us, but let's not stop for some long naps.>

#1: <I'll try four of the eight fingers pushing the wood up. That's an easy test to do.>

#8: <Hang on. Check the assumption that it reduces total force first. I'll do it.>

#8 created eight NP-points, and used one of them to push down hard on my thigh, then canceled one of them and repeated the thigh push, then canceled another one, etc. We all felt the pressure get higher each time.

#1 then accelerated the wood upward using four of his eight fingertips. It still accelerated rapidly.

#1: <I'll try three fingertips. This will be a bit trickier because I can't hold it with just one NP at one end, and I need to have a reasonably balanced thrust.>

#3: <There's a better way. I'll hold it vertically with my NP-point boxed loosely around it so it can slide up and down freely, and you push up from the bottom. That way you can use 3, 2 or 1 fingers without worrying about finding the balance points.>

#1: <Good idea.>

Three of eight NP-fingertips accelerated the wood. Two of eight barely moved it.

#1: <That's a fourfold increase in force per mind then. 6.4 kg each by 8 minds is 48 plus 3.2, so 51.2 kg. That's a shit load more than 6.4 kg!>

#5: <I'll say! Fourfold for each mind and twice as many minds. That's about 110 pounds. What a bummer that's less than we weigh. If we'd somehow got a 16-fold increase rather than an 8-fold, we'd be able to fly.>

#6: <Once we got out of this fucking chair, yes. Julia and Prof will both weigh less than 110 pounds. If we get out of these chairs but Prof is too sick to move, it's good to know we'll be able to carry him with NP. I'm damned well NOT going to lose this Prof!>

#8: <We'd have to be careful. Remember we dropped that phone because we had a delusion. I wouldn't like to gamble with catching Prof before he hits the ground.>

#4: <We'll be able to partly carry ourselves too. With our broken leg we're not going to be walking too well ourselves. Using our new NP force and that very useful piece of wood the assholes kindly left for us, we should be able to walk a bit, then pick up Prof and move him forward, then us, leapfrogging each other. That's presuming we have to walk to get help. Phoning or driving would be better.>

#6: <With that much force our eyeball popping just got a WHOLE lot better! We can do two at the same time too, which would have avoided the hassle we had with Goon hiding his second eye from us until Prof tricked him. Did you guys - the "One Glass" guys - have that problem? We've GOT to get an easier way of saying "The One Glass Guys", or "The No Water Guys.">

#3: <Yes to your question about Goon. Prof told him to look behind him so we could get his second eye, right?>

#6: <Yep.>

#4: <Why don't we steal from Julia's pipeline numbering system... >

#8: <You've still got the pipeline! That means we're rich, right? We've got millions of dollars, are buying a mansion, and have HUGE numbers of girls chasing after us, right?>

#1: <Yes to all that. It's a good life, apart from being tortured and starved to death. And whatever it's called when you die of thirst, cause that's what's killing us now.>

#8: <"Terminal Dehydration", I guess. I'm glad to hear you guys have the same lifestyle as us. It's mostly obvious now that I think about it, because we wouldn't be here if it wasn't for Boss and Goon seeing us win at Vegas, but for future reference, we should remember to ask the potential merge-mates whether they are rich and have dozens of girls available.>

#4: <I'm somewhat more concerned about this merge than any future ones. Speaking personally, if we get out of here, I NEVER want to leave the side of anybody in our two families ever again. We can walk around in a little huddle from now on. I CERTAINLY don't want to die on them, like the "No Water" guys had to. Which reminds me about my system. This is merge number 3. The guys who were here before the merge are 3A, the new guys are 3B. I'm in 3A, and I was in 2B. #1 was obviously in 1A, 2A and 3A.>

#8: <I got it. 3A and 3B will be good, because there will probably be more "Did you guys have this happen?"-type conversations. My earlier merges never had anything significant change, but we've already discovered the glass of water and metric units. Thank God the important things are the same.>

#6: <Back to the eyeball popping thing. That depends on total force, which is now 110 pounds, which is AWESOME, but it also depends on contact area. Our NP-fingers were limited to between half an inch to two inches. That was the same for 3A, right? Whatever that is in metric.>

#3: <We used inches for that. We never did any calculations with it, so inches worked fine. And yes, half to two inches was our range. That's easy to check.>

#3 created an NP-point in front of us. We tend to create them with about a one-inch diameter unless there's a reason otherwise, as that's a good size for holding something, pushing, etc. If we need a different size, they can be shrunk or expanded virtually instantly. He shrank it as far as it'd go, then expanded it.

#3: <It looks like a factor of two improvement in both directions, as that looks like a quarter inch minimum and four inch maximum. A force of 110 pounds on a quarter inch diameter circle is going to pack a SERIOUS impact. Unfortunately, it isn't going to drill through steel padlocks or make a hole in the ceiling to lift a cellphone through.>

#5: <What a pity we couldn't measure the size of our fingertips the same way we did last time. A glass of milk would go down VERY well about now.>

3A: <Huh? What glass of milk?>

#5: <Didn't you get Carol to bring you a glass of milk to do the fingertip experiments in, including seeing their size?>

#1: <No, we used a ruler. We're finding quite a few minor differences. Let's hope we can manufacture a HUGE difference by getting Prof and ourself out of here.>

#All: <You can say that again!>

#1: <Back to work: We could hardly change the shape of NP-fingertips before. They were circular, or we could make them slightly oval shaped. We had more control over how long the fingertip was, but nothing dramatic. Was that the same in 3B?>

#6: <Yeah. There appear to be differences in our lives, but no differences in our ki abilities. We probably don't need to keep double-checking that with each other. We'll speak up if something seems weird.>

#1: <Okay. But one issue is that we discovered some of our abilities by accident. You know about blobs, don't you? Light blobs and heat blobs?>

#6: <Yep, and we call them the same names too. Obviously our lives have a huge amount in common, even down to tiny details, yet hugely important things can be different. If we get out of this alive that glass of water is going to mean that in your dimension Mark Anderson is going to live his life and make God knows what sort of amazing differences to God knows how many people, but in my previous dimension, Mark Anderson is already dead. In ten years time our two dimensions could have incalculable differences.>

#8: <Yeah, it's weird what the differences are. They don't seem to follow any pattern that I can see. Thank God it's not like the time travel stories where there's a force that makes history repeat, otherwise I'd be terrified that our death in "No Water" land would predestine us to die in this dimension. It's VERY reassuring to have already done other merges, so we know our death in one dimension doesn't force our death in others.>

[[There was no way we could see any pattern in the dimensional differences, especially because there'd been chains of causes and effects preceding the changes that we'd noticed. For example, the reason "One Glass" got their glass of water was because Boss brought one down from the kitchen on his return from looting Prof's garage. The reason he did that was because a couple of years ago he'd been in a situation where the victim hadn't been able to talk properly and it'd lost him some money. Dom King back in the "No Water" dimension had managed to get the money anyway because the victim hadn't hidden it as well. That victim behaved differently than in this dimension because... (you get the idea: the causal chain goes back). The chain of causes and effects makes seeing the original deviations impossible, so seeing the pattern in those deviations is even more impossible. Plus, the initial deviations are mostly semi-random. "Semi" for two reasons. First there aren't an infinite number of w-dimensions, so there is a natural limiting function (whereas truly random would be unbounded). Second, "probabilistic" is a better word than random, with some of the influences on the probabilities following natural laws that you're not aware of. They constrain the range and frequency of different outcomes. As previously mentioned, Mom and Dad's firstborn was a male in 95% of the dimensions, not the 50% full randomness would have resulted in.]]

#1: <I brought up NP shape just in case we can make something useful now. A lock-pick would be a good example.>

We experimented for a couple of minutes. We discovered that we had more control over the NP shape than previously, but FAR short of what a lock-pick would require.

#1: <Next of the list is blobs. Presumably we can make eight per mind now, but what about size, brightness and heat?>

We soon discovered that the maximum diameter of a light blob had doubled to twelve feet. The maximum light output from a single blob seemed to be four times what it had been previously, which was curiously not the eight times expected from doubling a blob's diameter. Walking from shade into sunlight can easily be a factor of a thousand change in the amount of light being seen, so the fourfold blob output increase was no big deal. Whereas each mind's being able to NP four times more forcefully was a BIG DEAL!

Thinking of our abilities as weapons made us reexamine the idea of blinding someone with a light blob, but they were still pretty much useless for blinding someone. Distracting them would work, but weren't bright enough to temporarily blind someone, assuming my vision was normal, which it had been before. The problem was that the light radiated from blobs evenly in all directions, without a super-bright point source like a filament. There was no reflector sending all the light in one direction either. Reducing the size of the blob in an attempt to make it brighter only had limited success, as at a certain point the maximum output reduced too. [[I was assuming that was because only a limited amount of light could be excited from the molecules within the light blob. That was wrong, because the light wasn't being created from molecules, but was being tapped directly into existence inside the blob. There were energy gradient issues, but they were mostly my preconception, so were artificial until the sizes got much smaller than I thought. Another reason I didn't appreciate for why light blobs were ineffective blinders, was that the human eye is AMAZINGLY tolerant to ranges of light intensity.]]

If we said that a mind's previous output was equivalent to the light output of 16 lightbulbs (that's a guess, but as merging involves multiples of 2, I'll choose that as an appropriate, roughly correct number), then one mind could now output 64 bulbs' worth. We were in a large room, about fifteen feet long by eight feet wide, so one of my minds could light it very well now. If one mind created more than one blob, the maximum output scaled down, exactly as it did for the force from NP-fingertips. Two blobs each had a maximum of 32 bulbs' worth. If one of those two blobs was set at "very dim", the other blob's maximum was still 32. In other words, the maximums added up to 64, not the current output. I could produce 8 minds by 64 bulbs = 512 bulbs' worth of light throughout the room. I didn't see how it would help, unfortunately.

Heat also went up by what felt like a factor of 4 per mind. One heat blob - from a mind not creating any other blobs or NP-points - used to produce heat the equivalent of somewhat less than one lightbulb (call it three-quarters of a bulb's worth). So one blob could now output as much heat as three bulbs. With all 8 minds I could make as much heat as 24 bulbs. That's about as much heat as a small electric bar heater. It'd be pointless trying to warm the entire room, but I could create eight 4-foot diameter blobs and superimpose them all over Prof, and that'd warm him nicely. Prof was suffering discomfort from the cold. The room itself was cold, he was lightly dressed, and he'd had no food for four days now to generate body heat with.

#6: <Do you think we could start a fire with a heat blob now? One option might be to start a fire and hope the firemen arrive before the fire gets to us. If we create a pile of timber by smashing the wall by ramming it with the 2-by-4 repeatedly, and make a bonfire near the staircase in the other room, the flames should rise up the stairs and set fire to the top half of the house. They're not going to cross over all this concrete and affect us.>

#3: <Where's our oxygen to breathe going to come from? The fire's going to consume all the oxygen down here, and the only way for more to get in is through the doorway, which will be on fire. We'd suffocate LONG before any firemen get here.>

#6: <You're right. It was a stupid idea.>

#1: <Can we use heat or some other electromagnetic frequency to damage the chain or padlock? Maybe by heating it and letting it cool repeatedly. That might cause it to stress fracture, or expand so things don't work properly, or something.>

#3: <We obviously can't melt them. If we could make a truly tiny heat blob and still produce the same heat output, that might have a powerful effect, but we're at least a factor of a thousand away from being able to do that. Light obviously isn't going to affect them, and we've got no idea how to produce any other frequency. Even if we knew gamma rays destroyed metal, we wouldn't have a clue how to create gamma rays. I very much doubt that a repeated heat/cool cycle will do anything. We'd be producing less heat than you could get from the sun on a sunny day, and I can't imagine a big, tough padlock like the one under us having trouble with the heat from sunlight. It'd be wonderful if warming it up made it possible to pull it open, but I can't see it. We can certainly try, but I'm not hopeful.>

#1: <If we've finished with blobs for the moment, the only other ki abilities I can think of are proximity and ki healing. Proximity obviously hasn't expanded enough for us to sense Prof, but let's measure it.>

That was simply a matter of doing External Ki Projection and seeing how far away from us we could see the ki projection extend. We learned two things: Our proximity range was now six feet, and we radiated four times as much ki as before.

#3: <I think we'd be pretty good at soccer now!>

#6: <Let's hope we get a chance to demonstrate it, and that our leg heals properly. Six feet is a pretty useful distance for general life, but I can't see how proximity is going to get us out of this jam.>

#1: <That leaves ki healing. We've certainly got some serious healing to do after this, and if having more ki makes our healing REALLY amazing now, maybe we can even regrow our lost finger, but healing isn't going to help our escape.>

#5: <Maybe it'll help us live a little longer. It'd be nice if we could heal whatever damage dehydration is doing to us, but we don't know what organs are affected, how, where, etc. And healing must require the body to create healthy new cells, but we've got no raw materials to build new cells from. Cells are mostly water too, so we're really in trouble when it comes to that. We've avoided blood loss, pain and shock from our breaks and the amputation, but I don't think we can do anything better than that.>

#7: <I've got a request. Even if we can regenerate our lost finger, I'd like us not to. I'd like to keep the finger missing to remind us that everyone we loved in our dimension has lost Prof and us. It's from the same event, and it's something missing. The gap of it will remind me of the gap they've got.>

#1: <That's PERFECTLY fine by me, and it's my body so I'll pull rank to insist on it. That finger has more value as a reminder of love than any practical use. Not to mention that even if we could regenerate it, doing so might cause some unwelcome attention.>

#5: <Thanks. I appreciate that.>

#6: <And me.>

#8: <To show my appreciation, I'll give you my share of the roll of Dom's money. Be a good fellow and go get some drinks for us.>

#7: <Thanks #1. It's going to mean a lot to all of us 3B'ers that we don't forget the people we've left behind. I know yours are going to be very similar, and maybe even indistinguishable, but there are a dozen loved ones back in our dimension who are never, ever going to see Prof and us again. If we get out of this, we won't have lost anything, but THEY sure will have! I can't imagine how their lives are going to change now, and that cuts me up BIG TIME. Dying SUCKS!>

We took a couple of minutes for personal thoughts.

We'd all been watching Prof a great deal. The 3A'ers were looking because they'd learned from the déjà vu how bad Prof was going to get in a few hours, and how real and unpleasant his death was becoming. The 3B'ers with very different and mixed emotions. Partly to remind us of our loss in 3B-land (with morbid fascination, the way your tongue keeps returning to the gap of a missing tooth), partly because we'd given up on our Prof in order to help this one. There were a whole bunch of pretty mixed up and intense emotions involved.