Chapter 10: Two's Company; Four's Even More Company

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

[[I ended the last chapter with a small digression. Being in the mood for them, I'll add another one, more relevant to my recent merging.

Earlier, I calculated the chance of someone merging to be equivalent to 1-in-3E14; 3E14 being 3,000 times the number of people that have ever lived on Earth. There are considerably more than 3,000 w-dimensions, so it's certain that I was not the first person to have merged (this logic is wrong as the dimensions aren't independent, but it's simple and the conclusion is roughly correct for more complicated reasons, so I'm using it as is).

Merging once is useful, but its effects aren't profound. What is far more important is whether anyone has merged at least twice. The first merge just requires luck, while the second merge requires a completely different approach, which if mastered can be used in any number of subsequent merges.

The first requirement for anyone to merge twice, is that they first merge once. That just required luck, and statistically speaking is certain to have happened many times throughout the Universe.

The second requirement, is that the newly two-minded persons had to survive the months or years after their first merges. In many historic societies, recovering from the source of death that had enabled the first merge would have been very unlikely, as none of the usual causes - wounds, diseases, starvation or exposure - were effectively treatable near the point of death. That wasn't possible until very recently. The surviving two-minded individual might last a few minutes or possibly even hours, but would very likely die long before he could merge again. Those few who managed to overcome the initial causes of their partners' deaths might then be killed by new causes, especially if they thought themselves insane and/or superstitious issues got involved. They could easily have been murdered, driven from their community, or these days, locked up for their own good, the latter removing nearly all opportunities to merge again. It's difficult to judge the probability of someone surviving the period between déjà vu's as there are so many unknowns but I have to think the chance of it is very low. I'd confidently guess it to be sub-1%.

The third requirement is that they had to want to, and then successfully accomplish, a second half-suicide during a later déjà vu. Arranging for the second half-reversible death to occur during an unpredictable déjà vu would have been extremely difficult even just a few years ago.

It's very difficult to imagine how anyone before the modern age could create a suicide that met the requirements of a merge. For my second suicide, I had the assistance of the internet and modern pharmacology, those being unavailable to virtually everyone even just a few years ago. Most methods I can think of that would cause a person's death within the thirty seconds required (e.g., falling on a sword) would almost certainly sever the déjà vu link, and would require modern medical care to recover from. In other words, I believe it is virtually impossible for anyone to have achieved a second merge. I believe the third probability to be zero, or so close to it that it makes no difference.

In summary, the modern age being such a tiny proportion of humanity's existence, I believe I am the first human to have achieved two déjà vu merges.]]

^

We soon learned that having four minds was everything we'd experienced from the first merge, only much more so.

Communicating among myselves was a richer, more complex, more interesting process than it had been before the latest merge. For example, we could generate ideas quicker than we had before, sometimes even without all of my minds participating. Previously if something was happening that kept one mind busy (something tricky at school say), the other mind was effectively on its own. Now something that kept one mind busy still left three to do other things.

So a new mental structure became possible: we could form committees! Unlike the jokes I'd heard on TV, our committees will be very effective. We'll be able to divide up our mind-power in the best way possible, depending on the structure of the task or tasks to be worked on. School was going to be even easier now.

Starting after our 3am half-breakfast, we tried several types of tasks, and we were definitely much improved at some of them. We were up to date with our schoolwork, but we redid some old work just to see how it went. Being able to leapfrog four steps at a time, for example, made some work doable in an astonishingly short time, provided there wasn't too much writing involved.

Not that I was going to test it when Mom might get up to check on the noise, but I could easily imagine that I was now the world's best Minesweeper player! Riches, fame and beautiful groupies awaited me!

We learned that the w-dimensions we had personal experience of - four now - all had slight differences, which #3 and #4 had also previously spotted for themselves. Lord Of The Ring's Arwen was played by the same actress in #3's dimension as here (Liv Tyler), but by a third girl in #4's dimension; yet another daughter of Mick Jagger's although she didn't call herself a Jagger. He seems to have sown his oats (and that wasn't all) in lots of dimensions, the lucky bastard!

Some of the differences weren't minor either. In #3's dimension the minimum age to get a driving license was fifteen, so #3 and #4 had their license, although they'd failed to bring it with them (their first merge had occurred at the same time as mine and #1's, shortly after we'd turned fourteen). Other than #3, the rest of us had sixteen as the minimum ages in our original dimensions, including the one we were in now. Surely that'd make a huge difference to what happened in each dimension? Imagine all the different road deaths and the ripple effects of those. Girls might date different guys because they had a cooler car, get married differently, have different children, etc. We (#1 and #2) had assumed the differences would always be minor, but that one was astonishingly large in its flow-on effects.