Chapter 25: They're on to us, Guys!

Wednesday, April 6, 2005 (Continued)

We lay on Julia's bed, holding each other with our faces an inch apart. It's a wonderful position to talk with your girlfriend in.

Julia asked me, "How has your evening been?"

"Some things stand out. First, learning 8-ball so quickly was interesting, to put it mildly. Your brothers were shocked, so that was fun. Dad and Prof bet on me before my first game. Talk about having faith in me! When they gave me half their winnings your father said I should spend it on rubbers. Not the sort of suggestion I expect from my girlfriend's dad, haha.

^-- "Second, dinner was lovely. My favorite, perfectly done, and a LOT of it on my big plate. I couldn't ask for better than that. Dinner was perfect, and I really enjoyed the speeches we made praising Carol. She was horribly embarrassed but loved us for them. I was glad I had a good chance to thank your mom too. You missed most of that because you were away with Carol then, but knowing how you and your mother gossip, she'll fill you in.

^-- "But third, and most confusingly, I didn't understand your conversation with Carol in the hot tub. I didn't understand it at all. It's fantastic that Carol said today was the best day of her life, but I don't understand your thinking. Nor your generosity on behalf of your parents?"

Julia explained, "I should've talked to Mom and Dad before I told Carol, but I got too excited when I realized how good it could be. I believe I've acted in accordance with my parents' wishes so they should back me up. I think they'll persuade yours enough for Carol to spend a good amount of time here. Supporting Carol is the same as supporting you because you care for each other so much. By making her happy, I'm making you happy, which is what I live for! There's more to it than that but that's good enough by itself, and if more happens that's even better. I'm sure my parents will want to spend time with her too, so it'll work out perfectly."

After that explanation I still had more questions than answers, that being the typical result of listening to a female 'explain' something. "Honey, why is it so important for Carol to spend time here? And why would your parents be willing to spend so much money on her?"

"YOU are what's important. You're more than a prodigy and my family knows it. Especially Dad; he's getting very excited about you. Dad's a relaxed, dry sort of guy who doesn't get excited by much, but he is about you. Seeing you beat The Boys would've had him nearly wetting himself. My brothers have competed over that table for years and they're very good players. They've spent thousands of hours practicing that game, but you could beat them after a few minutes. I'm surprised Dad didn't really wet his pants.

^-- "In the last few days you've fascinated my parents. You started as a wonderful boy their daughter wanted to date - still does, in case you were in any doubt about that," the look on her face made having any doubts impossible, "and then they saw some of your abilities and your character. You're most of what we talk about in this house now. My parents think you're a good person with incredible potential, and they want to help you any way they can. They're excited about it.

^-- "I think the same, but much more so. I'm in AWE of you. I've had more experience of you and I know better how miraculous you are. I fully intend to spend the rest of my life looking after you. I will support you far better than a normal girlfriend would because I know you are far more than a normal boy."

#2: <They're on to us, guys!>

#3: <Because there's no other explanation, is there? We thought we were trying to keep it quiet, but we've not done a good job of that.>

#2: <I don't think beating the brothers first time up at 8-ball was "keeping it quiet".>

#4: <Whether or not we won at 8-ball probably didn't matter. Both Dad and Prof bet on us before we played. They've got way too much faith in us for them to think we're normal.>

#1: <Prof's pretty sharp, isn't he?>

#2: <Yeah, he certainly is. Dad's not slow in some ways either. He doesn't understand science stuff but he'd seen enough to know to bet on us. He got Robert to show us how to spin the cue ball even before we'd played our first game because he knows we can learn this stuff so fast. And remember Dad didn't hesitate to confirm we were ambidextrous and we've never told him that. He just observed it for himself.>

#3: <I wonder what gave us away to Julia. Shall we ask her?>

#4: <Might as well. I don't think we'll be confirming something they don't already know.>

"Julia, why do you think I'm 'more than a normal boy, ' as you put it?"

"Monday night's sex. Not the Sex Object game; that was ordinary boy-girl fun. You were hilarious and I loved it, even though I nearly wet my panties from it. It was after Andrew left that everything changed for me. You just flipped me over and starting fucking me. You had no doubt that you could go for as long as it took for me to beg you to stop.

^-- "After a while I could see that you weren't getting tired and you weren't intending to stop. I didn't believe it, but you kept going like a machine. I realized that something much more important than sex was happening, and then I realized that my view of our relationship was very wrong.

^-- "All my life I've dreamed of finding my Mr. Right. I'd found him and he loved me even more than I loved him, so I was gloriously happy with a head full of dreams and hopes for our future together. But then I began to find out that my Mr. Right was so fantastic and capable that he might be far beyond me. I had dreams of us being partners for life, but how could I be a partner to you when you were so much greater than me? I've seen how easily you do two grades at once, but I'd assumed that meant you were twice as smart as anyone else. Then you showed me that you seemed to have no physical limit. If you were superhumanly physical, you were probably superhumanly intelligent too, just without a chance to show it yet.

^-- "I didn't want to believe you were superhuman because I selfishly wanted you to be mine and I wanted to keep all my dreams for us. MY dreams! I hadn't even discussed them with you so I was being selfish. I knew it but I didn't want to give up on them. I refused to beg you to stop because it meant admitting that I couldn't keep up with you; that you were beyond me. It meant the end of my dreams, so I hung on hoping that you'd get tired or I'd be able to keep going for as long you did. After two hours it was obvious that neither of those was going to happen. I was worn out and you looked as fresh as a daisy.

^-- "I'm very ashamed that rather than acknowledging your superiority, I clung to a tiny shred of unrealistic hope. I refused to ask you to stop. I stupidly thought that if I never gave up, then you'd eventually have to. It took me hours to realize how stupid that idea was. That I hoped you'd fail was small-minded, selfish and stupid of me, so I'm glad I paid for it with as much pain as I did. Hopefully I'll never forget that punishment because I never want to behave so shamefully again.

^-- "Those hours opened my eyes. When my brain finally caught up, I changed every idea I'd had about my future. All the hopes and dreams I had are gone now. You destroyed them. MY dreams were selfishly mine. They weren't yours, and they can't even be ours because they'd hold you back. I love you more than I can express, especially now that I've had a chance to think about our future. I'm totally yours now but you aren't mine. I won't tie you down or hold you back in any way. You pursue your dreams and follow your path and I'll do everything I can to help you for the rest of my life, or for as long as you'll let me. The only dream I have now is to help you achieve your dreams."

#3: <Wow, Julia's a VERY intense person.>

#1: <I thought we were just having sex! Maybe helping her find the limits of her body, but this is extreme. How can she make such a big deal out of it? And her parents too, from what she said before.>

"Julia darling, it was just sex. You don't have to upset your whole life because I am fitter than you expected. I probably get it from playing soccer..."

She interrupted me, "It was NOT just sex. First your 'fitness', as you called it, is not natural. Maybe someone who'd spent months training or who had a great deal of sex every day could have that much endurance, but you haven't done that training. You never go to a gym, you play soccer once or twice a week but not recently. You've had no experience of sex to condition your body, and you have a broken arm for goodness sake. You are fit, but it's not natural.

^-- "Second, do you have any idea just how good you are at sex? You know EXACTLY how to push my buttons, which is amusing because that's what you told Annette I did to you..."

#4: <I've noticed that too. I think it's the same as how we look at social interactions. We've been doing the same to her body. Every time we've touched it, we observe her reactions without missing them the way a single-minded guy would, just as happens socially. One of us is running our body while the other three are free to observe.>

[[That explanation is partly true, but isn't the main reason. Everybody has an almost entirely subconscious sense of other consciouses near their body. For example, when someone is standing close behind you and staring at your back, you can sometimes sense it. With my having four subconsciouses, they picked up a lot more information than normal about Julia's reactions - sixteen times as much, as will be explained later. That greatly increased subconscious information helped me learn to manipulate Julia's "buttons" very effectively. I consciously discovered that sense soon after this point in my autobiography, and I named it my "Proximity Sense". It subsequently changed my life in many important ways, even more important than making me a good lover.]]

" ... I've talked to my family about this. They ALL assure me that NO 15-year old virgin learns his way around a woman's body the way you have around mine, or can have sex for six hours nonstop. My brothers are VERY envious!

^-- "There are many other reasons too. I see you at school every day. You'll be listening to a teacher, reading one of your textbooks from 11th grade, and still look bored because it's too easy. And I won't go on about how strange it looks when you do two things at once; that's VERY impressive!

^-- "You give really nice speeches. You know exactly what to say to the person, you sprinkle jokes through your speeches, so both the recipient and audience enjoy them. Fifteen-year old boys don't even notice the things you talk about, let alone give such great speeches about them.

^-- "You have an enormous range of abilities. Sex is included, and sex is what opened my eyes to just how special you are, but it's just an example. I would've enjoyed seeing you beat my brothers at 8-ball, but it wasn't necessary because I already have total belief in your superiority."

#1: <We're not going to convince her we're normal, are we? She knows the truth - not how, of course - but she knows.>

#4: <I agree we can't dissuade her, but even if we could, how could we hide our abilities from her afterward? We haven't done a good job of that so far. We'd have to leave town. Even if our parents agreed to that, which they wouldn't, I like our life now.>

#2: <It's not like she's threatening us with harm or anything. She says she wants to help us. I don't want to run away from her at all, and certainly not for being helpful.>

#4: <So we're agreeing to confess that we're special, but we obviously refuse to tell her how.>

#1: <Agreed. We never tell that to ANYBODY, no matter what.>

#3, #4: <Agreed.>

#4: <Let's shake on it.>

#1, #2, #3: <{Groan}.>

#2: <Julia hasn't even hinted at wanting to know how. She's got to be bursting with curiosity about the cause. If it comes up, I presume we stick to our prepared cover story?>

#1, #3, #4: <Agreed.>

#4: <Yeah, given a choice of lying to Julia or destroying humanity across innumerable Universes, I vote for lying to Julia.>

^

[We'd long since decided that our "Déjà Vu Merging" had to be a secret that we take to our grave. We'd even decided to kill ourselves if that's what it took to avoid divulging it; and I mean TRULY kill ourselves, all our minds as well as our body.

In case you haven't realized the reasons for our being so determined that it remain a secret, imagine what would happen if news of the effects of déjà vu merging got out. It provides amazing mental, physical and social advantages, which when they became known, would encourage some people to do the same as I have.

Most people wouldn't believe it initially, but when people turned up who could run marathons so far under the world record, who could have sex for hours on end, were apparently super-intelligent, could read two books at once, who presumably would blow the dial in MRI scans, plus God knows whatever else I haven't found out about yet, then even the skeptical people would have to admit it was real. That would cause a wave of new suicides, which would be rationalized as not being suicides because the minds would live on.

Those that managed to get to new dimensions would spread the knowledge throughout those Earths, starting new waves of mostly hysterical suicides in all of them. It'd quickly spread throughout all of the W-Dimension, however big that is.

Once it caught on in each Earth, it'd cause massive chaos and hysteria, especially among religious people. Because people turn into idiots when they get hysterical, especially religious people, there'd be people committing suicide all over the place, most of whom would stupidly do so outside of déjà vu. That wouldn't make any difference to their Earth because their bodies would still be dying whether or not their minds lived on elsewhere.

Because multiple minds make people far more capable, soon multi-minded people would be taking over everything: sports, business, government - EVERYTHING! Rather than an "arms race" there'd be a "minds race". How many minds would it take to be successful? 4? 8? 16? 1024? Reaching 1024 minds requires only ten suicides, by which time on 1024 Earths, 1023 versions of that person are dead. If the people average ten merges, every survivor would have 1023 bodies to bury, and he'd be too busy burying bodies to do anything else. The population of America would be 300,000 and would fit into a single small city: say Toledo, Ohio. Except that America and every other country in the world would've collapsed by then.

It'd be impossible to stop people suiciding. What could the Government(s) do? Pass a law against committing suicide? Make everybody live in padded cells 24/7? Ask people not to? Suicide is easy and the payoff for having more minds is huge. Everyone would think that no one else should be allowed to do it, but they'd still do it themselves, in an amusing variation of being two-faced.

Soon every Earth in every w-dimension would be experiencing massive social collapse as large proportions of their populations suicided. There'd be wars, famines, riots, crime waves and total anarchy. All of which would encourage people to suicide as a way of escaping from the misery, thereby making it worse for everyone else. It'd be a calamitous downward spiral.

If I let word of déjà vu merging get out, I'll be responsible for the destruction of human civilization and the death of billions of people on the Earth of every w-dimension. Depending on how many Earths there are, there'd be millions, billions, trillions, or God-knows-what-illions of people dying because I couldn't keep my mouth shut.

I'll kill myself rather than reveal that secret.]

[[So you might be a little surprised that I am including exact details of it in my internet-published autobiography! I've made a change to the way déjà vu functions. From a few minutes before I started typing my autobiography, copies of minds that déjà vu creates across the W-Dimension require constant renewal to continue to exist. So if one body dies, the copy of its mind will fade within a few seconds. The path I traveled has been closed.]]

^

I sat up cross-legged on the bed and looked at Julia square on, as it seemed more appropriate to look serious rather than cuddly. I said, "Julia, I'm blown away by your faith in me and your willingness to devote yourself to me. I find your attitude quite overwhelming, to be honest."

She butted in with, "Not half as overwhelming as I find you!"

I carried on, "Okay, I'll accept that. I don't understand why I am as I am..."

#2: <It's true we don't understand "why". Let's hope that'll put her off asking "how".>

" ... but you're right that I'm not 'normal', as you so flatteringly put it. I do seem to be better at some things than some people."

I was interrupted by a brief raspberry, a "{Brief Raspberry}."

I tried again, "How about, 'Better at MOST things than MOST people.' I think that's excessive, but are you happy with that?"