Chapter 8: What I Did on My Summer Vacation

Mid-June to mid-September, 2004

Summer vacation was fun. With both Mom and Dad having jobs that didn't permit them to take three months vacation, we kids spent a lot of unsupervised time doing whatever we wanted. Carol and Donna had their own social circles, and I socialized mostly with Brent as he lived just up the street from me. We were the same age and had some of the same interests, so that was good enough. We both had plenty of time to kill.

I had a summer job working in a warehouse that Dad had found for me a couple of years ago. It was a part-time job: some days they'd ask me to come in, some days not. They were flexible too, so if I preferred to come in one day because the weather was poor, or not to come in because I had a soccer game, they'd nearly always agree. It was fairly boring work but it was only for about two days per week and I could talk with myself now. I got some pretty decent pocket money for it, so was glad to have the job.

I spent quite a lot of time in the Public Library reading through books that caught my interest, mostly about psychology and brain development. I was particularly fascinated by brains, although perhaps that was because my brain was biased. It thought the brain was the third most fascinating part of a human body, just below breasts.

I tried other subjects that I thought might be interesting, such as philosophy, but found them to be too inapplicable and weird. There was one topic that I did find very interesting: interpersonal communication, especially in groups. I'd observed a lot of inexplicable behavior in conversations at school, as described earlier, and I was interested to see any explanation for it.

The books I read didn't provide me with the explanations I wanted because they were mostly talking about adult communications and what psychology the books gave didn't apply to kids my age. But where the books were interesting was in providing new techniques to study how people communicated in groups. For example, and there were many ideas like this, an observer of a group's interaction can use a piece of paper to write people's initials laid out to represent where they were standing or sitting relative to each other, and then draw a line between the speaker and who they're talking to, with an arrowhead to indicate which of them was being talked at. I surreptitiously did that, and several other techniques I'd read about, when I had chances to [mostly when school restarted] and it was amazing how such a simple thing could make me aware of layers of interpersonal dynamics that I'd had no idea about before. They were amazingly revealing.

Mainly I just browsed to find anything that seemed pertinent to my life. I didn't understand most of what I read, and what I did understand didn't seem to have much relevance to me. I didn't mind, as I was enjoying having a laid-back time with no bullies except on the infrequent occasions when I encountered them around town somewhere.

The most important event of the summer happened after a soccer game. Before the school year had ended, I'd gotten so good at soccer that the coach had invited me to join some of the high-school team's training, and had penciled me in for next year's team. The team had agreed to meet up occasionally during summer for fun games, and we had our first such game one Friday in late June. It was doubly fun as it was versus a girls' team. For the first time I regretted that soccer wasn't a contact sport.

We all had pizza together afterward and then went to a romantic comedy movie. It was a chick flick, but majority rules and the guys had voted in favor of sucking up to the girls. In the movie theater, the girls sat with the girls, the boys with the boys, and I wasn't forceful enough to be sitting on the highly competed-for border.

Fifteen minutes into the movie, IT happened: I got another déjà vu experience. Not just normal déjà vu - which is abnormal enough - but a four-way déjà vu. We (#1 and #2) were déjà vu'ing with another pair of Mark Anderson minds also sharing the one body. All four of us were gobsmacked! We only had two gobs between us, so they were VERY smacked (which makes no literal sense at all, but that's how that expression of Mom's goes. "Gobsmacked" means "thunderstruck" or "flabbergasted", the latter being another favorite of mine because I like silly sounding words).

It wasn't a normal déjà vu in another important respect too, as there was more and clearer communication in this one.

^

[[There being two minds at either end meant there was twice as much of the Universe's Consciousness that was changing during the déjà vu, so twice as much to refresh, which took twice as long. The time between the weird mentally disconnecting sensations caused by the refreshes was now long enough to allow communication. With only one mind, the copying time had been less than our mental reaction times, effectively prohibiting mental conversation, but with two minds on each end the copying time was longer than our reaction time, permitting a conversation that was like having a conversation over a phone line that disconnected every quarter second.

I'll put some numbers on it to illustrate the communication improvement. Let's say it takes 0.15 seconds to react to the opportunity to transfer a thought from one mind to another. With a single mind in a déjà vu link, the "refreshing copies" occur every 0.1 seconds, ruining any chance of communicating, as you know from your own déjà vu's. With two minds on each end, the copying takes 0.19 seconds (not quite double, as the copying time doesn't increase linearly), giving 0.04 seconds longer than mental reaction time in which to exchange some thoughts. That's short and very inconvenient, but conversation is doable.]]

^

What had happened to us - our half-successful suicide, déjà vu, merging, increased IQ, school advancement - had also happened to them. Same miracle, same result.

<What does it mean?>, <How do we stay in contact?>, <What do we do now?> Questions were flying, but long before we could make any real progress with the extremely difficult, stop-start conversation, the phenomenon stopped. <Damn!>

The rest of the movie I sat there with eyes open, facing the screen and not seeing a damned thing. I was totally involved in my thoughts.

Some of the conclusions were so obvious I should have thought of them before. Whatever dimension #1's mind had crossed was presumably a continuum, just as the X-, Y-, Z- and T-dimensions are. We decided to call our newly discovered dimension the "W-Dimension", as "X", "Y", "Z" and "T" were already taken and "W" for "Wow" or "Weird" seemed appropriate. Whether the W-Dimension's continuum of possible values extended forever we had no idea about, but it obviously had at least four possible instances, and almost certainly far more.

As déjà vu still worked across the W-Dimension, did that mean that déjà vu plus dying would work again? If I died during another déjà vu would I merge and have four minds? Did I want four minds? How much better than two would having four be? Was it worth the risk? If it was worth the risk, how could we do it? Oh boy!

Needless to say, I was not the best conversationalist when the movie finished; not that anyone noticed because I hadn't been one previously. I quickly made an excuse and went home. I distractedly wandered past whoever was at home and shut myself in my room.

I had HEAPS to think about:

• Would merging occur again if I died while déjà vu'ing? We thought it would, or at least, we could think of no reason why it wouldn't. Tonight's déjà vu involved all four minds, with all of us communicating with each other. If one body died, we thought both minds would "cross over", to use an appropriate phrase in a way we thought far more accurate than how it was usually employed.

• #2 asked whether it'd matter whether his body or the other body died? #1 thought it didn't matter, as not being in his original body wasn't disadvantaging him in any way, not even emotionally. We were, in every way that mattered, the same individual, and that'd be the case if we merged into another body or they merged into ours. On the bright side, it'd halve the number of virginities we had to lose, hopefully making losing them twice as easy. Unless it meant we'd make twice as much progress toward that goalmouth, because twice zero would be a very depressing lack of progress.

• Presuming the process was repeatable, did we want to "double up" again? It had a great deal of appeal, but it had some aspects that were so worrying that it wasn't the sort of question to rush. We put off deciding it for a while.

• If we wanted to, how could we possibly do it? Déjà vu doesn't come on demand, so we couldn't arrange a convenient suicide and then start a déjà vu. Nor does it operate on a known schedule. It's random as far as we could tell, and there'd been nothing in any of the medical literature we'd read that'd said otherwise. Everything we'd read blamed the infrequent irregularity of déjà vu for the lack of progress in understanding it. Our first merge had happened because we were lucky that we were already dying when déjà vu arrived, but the chance of that happening was far too low to hope for luck again. Deliberately having another merge could only be done by waiting for déjà vu to come and then trying to die. Dying on demand - at any random time and place - didn't seem like an easy task but at least it had some possibilities, whereas trying to create déjà vu on demand did not.

• Even if we could do it, did we want to hurt our family? To make this work, one body was going to have to die. That family would be hurt. There was no easy answer to that.

We had plenty of time to think about these issues as judging by our experiences so far in our two lives, déjà vu's never happened in rapid succession. They were highly erratic, and could arrive within a few months of the previous one - as had just happened - but in all likelihood the next one wouldn't be for at least eighteen months, and probably longer.

All things considered - both the good and the bad - I was enjoying my life now and didn't want to mess it up or lose it. I resumed my already abnormal 'normal' life.

As it turned out, I arrived at my most important answer in just a few weeks. I couldn't stop thinking about it. My minds would frequently wander into daydreams about merging again. There were three major issues:

First, my life was bearable and even enjoyable because I had an in-built friend. Merging again would triple the number of in-built friends each of us had (from one to three). As having one internal best friend was already making my life bearable despite all the bullying, rejection, loneliness, etc., having three best friends would make our life very happy. We doubted the improvement would be linear, but it still had to be MUCH more interesting and fun.

Second, going from one mind to two had dramatically improved:

• My apparent IQ. I knew my real IQ hadn't improved 120 points, but I was still blitzing school whatever the cause.

• My physical coordination. At least, I thought it had. I wasn't sure of this point, but it seemed likely.

• I was getting better at understanding people, although I still mostly kept to myself.

Would going from two to four minds improve those aspects even further? Maybe even enough to actually get a girlfriend? I made a mental note that if I did merge again, I should avoid doing any more IQ tests! A result of 450 or so might cause trouble.

Third, if I went to four minds and found that it was great, I'd then have the possibility of going to eight in another couple of years, then sixteen, etc. That was exponentially fascinating and mind-boggling, but it couldn't happen unless I took the next step.

It was a bit of an exaggeration to say, "I couldn't stop thinking about it," but it often felt that way. I sometimes had to force myself to live in the current world, as I was too easily distracted imagining an alternative one.

So after a few weeks it was obvious what my decision was. It was far too tempting and I couldn't imagine permanently turning it down. I was generally enjoying my life now, but I knew that was solely because of my in-built friend, and that my life actually sucked otherwise. Having three times as many of them was incredibly appealing. It was exciting, unique, wonderful, and potentially enormously rewarding. It would improve my life, so the sooner it was done, the better.

There was a risk that maybe I'd just die, but quite frankly that didn't worry me much. I wouldn't be around to miss it, so the choice between not missing something or having a wonderful life was an easy one, especially when I thought the odds were very much in favor of the merge happening again. So I stopped wondering about it, and decided to work on trying to make it happen.

I had a rather important practical difficulty: how to die on demand. I couldn't walk around with a razor blade ready to slit my wrists when I felt déjà vu starting. It would be too easy for a bystander to fix by bandaging my arms, and it was far too slow even if I was alone at the time. I felt sure I had to die while déjà vu was active, which gave me about twenty seconds. Carrying a gun with me every waking moment didn't seem too doable either, as my school tends to frown on students carrying guns in their bags; although it'd certainly help with my bullying problem.