Chapter 401: My Sixth Merge, to 64 Minds

Tuesday, November 13 (Continued) to Friday, November 16, 2007

I was in the kitchen of the Kids' House, having gone there to make drinks for my girls who were doing their studies in the upstairs study.

#3: <Christ, that was intense! And we have to go through the whole thing again and again every few days?>

#45: <Yeah. Probably about every two weeks. It takes about ten days to say goodbye properly, and we don't want to tell them that's happening until we're sure we're leaving, so about four days to have déjà vu's and make sure the next room is one we want to go into.>

#23: <What does "next room" mean?>

#45: <It's a metaphor we invented to explain our Voyage of Discovery to our families. Like connected hotel rooms, we can open the door to see into the next room before we walk into it, but we can't see into the room beyond that. Merging is the same as walking into the room, which closes and locks the door behind us while we cross the room to look through the other door into the next room, which is the subsequent déjà vu's.>

#30: <Got it. It's a neatly accurate metaphor.>

[Except it proved to be slightly inaccurate fairly soon. Not in the way I MOST wanted though; not with my finding a way to open the door(s) behind me. Back there I had no minds so there was nothing to déjà vu with. Fairly soon I didn't have a body back there either, as it was in unusable pieces with teams of medical scientists more bewildered by what they were seeing than they'd ever been before in their professional lives. Nor could I reconnect with a dimension I'd left by déjà vu'ing with someone else similar to me in it. We knew similarity was required because we most often déjà vu'd with Marks having similar lives, and it was obvious that other people simply aren't similar enough. A different-person déjà vu had NEVER happened across all of the Marks, and we're talking of at least hundreds of billions of possible occasions, and probably many trillions of them. It's even less likely now as our minds are getting weirder. And even if we did déjà vu with someone else, the chance of them being in the dimension we wanted to contact would be infinitesimal. That door was shut and LOCKED. The metaphor's inaccuracy that I alluded to was minor and will be revealed in due course.]

#44: <Yeah. It was a good description without telling the truth. Tell us about your life?>

#12: <Absolutely fantastic! The Surveillance Problem was blown four days ago and the fallout from that is huge. The People are screaming to have the CIA shut down, the Director has been forced to resign, Cheney is history and it looks like Bush is going to be impeached. He's already been kicked out of his church, and out of the White House shouldn't take much longer. The members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence are being publicly vilified for failing in their oversight job so abjectly. The operational oversight processes for the FBI, CIA and every other TLA are going to be completely reworked to stop operations like that from being possible again - so the Government is promising anyway, and it's a promise they'll find very hard to break because there are powerful people breathing down their necks who're sure they and their families' lives are on the line if it's not done properly. It's a total victory for the good guys, and there's no reason at all for our life not to be wonderfully happy, loving and satisfying in every way, except you're going to kill us soon.>

#40: <It's a "For the Greater Good" thing.>

#12: <I know, fuck it. Five minutes ago I thought it was a great experiment and I was eagerly looking forward to hearing about its progress. I'm just pissed off at our bad luck. I'll keep telling you about our life... >

Over the next few minutes 6B learned about 6A's life. It took so long because our usual ability to access each other's memories didn't work across the A-to-B divide yet. That would take a while to develop, during which we could do a great deal of internal chatting.

6A's life was very much the same as 6B's, except:

• The "Seduce All The 11th and 12th Grade SCS Beauties Plan" was moving ahead faster than where I'd come from. Unlike as in 6B-land, 6A had resumed it shortly after returning from Noumea, although he'd kept it fairly low key because of the Surveillance Problem. It was a month and half into the school year, and four art teams - two per grade as they were popular - thought our family was wonderful, and that I was incredibly wonderful. A couple of days ago 6A had taken the first steps to put the SCS Plan into high-speed mode, but our killing ourselves in two weeks derailed it.

• Nevaeh wasn't living with us, but she openly visited very often. Julia was softening Nevaeh's parents up, and it shouldn't take long before Nevaeh is allowed to sleepover. That'll be a big step because her parents know Julia to be an active bisexual, although Nevaeh had naturally had to deny that there was any taint of that in her relationship with Julia. Nevaeh was working out even better here than in 6B-land because I was making more time for her and my SCS scheme, which she was actively and unjealously - because "sharing is good" - helping with.

• Donna was maturing into good company just as well here as 6B-land. She'd misbehaved with Chuck in this dimension too. For some reason 6B had felt that it might be a dimensional difference that'd only happened our old dimension, or perhaps in just a few others, but it was identical here which implied that Donna had been a universally naughty girl.

• A large dimensional difference was that Robert had married Ashley rather than breaking up with her. They were living in Massachusetts, where Robert was working.

• A major difference was that Dad was considerably more outspoken in our family life in this dimension than in any of 6B's previous dimensions. 6A was surprised to learn that Dad had ever been anything other than confident and outgoing in the family environment. They were quite puzzled by that because it seemed so unlike Dad's character to be quiet.

• I learned to envy Mick Jagger even more, as in this dimension's Lord of the Rings movies, Arwen was played by Marna Jagger, the gorgeous daughter of Mick Jagger and a Swedish model he'd met (briefly) during one of his European tours about thirty years ago. This was the fourth Arwen actress we knew about, and the third who was a daughter of Mick Jagger. The Universe has some weirdly similar differences, and some damned lucky rock stars.

• We discovered several minor differences, as there always are quite a few inconsequential changes. There was a different picture hanging in the living room, and 6A had different dinnerware than 6B, which no doubt Julia would consider a MAJOR difference. [We later discovered that the plaque Corvallis had mounted with the money the President had sent them was worded differently, one of the camera-weenie surveillers had been a different guy, and my car had done a thousand more miles. None of these or several other similarly innocuous things mattered in the slightest, especially with our leaving so soon. These were typical dimensional differences that we spotted every time we changed dimensions.]

From our very many earlier déjà vu's, we knew what our special abilities should be like. We could already see that proximity had improved exactly as we'd expected, so we went through the other abilities, checking them all. Assuming the next déjà vu was with a 32-minded Mark, which is what we thought was the most likely, then unless something had broken the simple mathematical progression it'd most likely happen between 6.5 and 10.5 hours from now, so it'd be nice to have something to tell that Mark.

Proximity was 48 feet and with the extra detail we'd expected, including sensing the consumption of large amounts of electricity. Not small amounts though; I couldn't detect my cellphone's consumption of power, for example.

We actually counted off to make sure there were sixty four of us, in case the failed attempts to send eight minds separately had messed something up. All sixty four of us were present and accounted for, which was a relief. We'd felt our previous body die so there was no possibility of any minds being left behind with it.

We had one mind create as many fingertips as it could, which was the expected 64. Our unconscious NP force should be 410 kg per mind. With the conscious tapping and projection training we've been doing for the last 31 months, that's now increased by 1.55 times, giving 410 x 2.55 = 1,050 kg per mind. We sent a sight blob into our garage and picked up a car with one mind, accelerating it in a way consistent with our NP force being the predicted 1,050 kg.

That confirmed that our maximum force would be nearly 67,000 kg, nearly 74 tons. Vanessa's BBJ2 weighed between 41,000 kg (empty) and 80,000 kg (maximum takeoff weight). If I was onboard it wouldn't need to carry any fuel. The pilots might be a tad nervous, and the Government might get suspicious, but it was doable, which would be good if an aviation emergency occurred in the next two weeks. The plane could dump its fuel and the angel could push it to safety. [[It actually takes far less force than the weight of a plane for it to fly because the moving wings generate lift. Very few planes have thrust-to-weight ratios over 1.0.]]

The NP-fingertip minimum size in any dimension (in the classical sense) was 1/32nd of an inch. The maximum size was 32 inches, making "fingertip" a somewhat misleading name.

The amount of force I have now means I should be easily able to exceed Mach one when I fly, providing the turbulence problem isn't too bad, which it shouldn't be any longer. Having frictionless surfaces and leading edges of 1/32 of an inch on my flying sled should help noticeably with turbulence, so a Mach one test flight is definitely on the agenda, since my job as the "Voyager" is to find out new things and report them to the rest of the Marks.

Not that I'd ever tested it, but many months ago I'd calculated that my maximum possible speed in my smallest possible flying sled had been almost exactly Mach two. Since then I'd trained myself to project 55% more force, and now I'd just gained a factor of eight, so I had about 12.4 times more force, which meant my maximum speed increase of the square root of that, being Mach 7. That was 5,300 mph (8,500 kph), plus there should be a speed boost from making the sled's exterior frictionless. The circumference of the Earth is 40,000 km, so if I could fly at Mach 7, then I could fly anywhere in the world in 2.4 hours. Corvallis to Washington DC in 35 minutes provided I didn't care about creating sonic booms. [And a large heat signature, as I discovered when I did some serious reading about super- and hyper-sonic flight.]

We sent a sight blob toward the Adults' House, sending it continuously farther away. It self-canceled at a point that was better than we'd ever achieved before, but not much greater. We estimated our new maximum ki-effects range was 542 feet.

#14: <Bugger! I didn't really expect otherwise, but I was hoping for more. That's just the increase from our proximity sense's expansion.>

#54: <On the bright side, our proximity sense will keep expanding. Not doubling unfortunately because we'll presumably only be merging with 32-minded Marks each time unless several of us rolled twelve 6s which is unlikely because we never heard about anyone else. Adding 32 minds added 24 feet just now and should continue to do so each time. If we can get three more merges done, we'll have gained an additional 100 feet. There have been several times in the past when that would've been very useful.>

A similar experiment with NP confirmed that the factor of four improvements in the Blinks Allowed Effect continued, giving us 128 seconds now. At this rate, especially if the amount of sleep we need keeps reducing, after a few more merges we might be able to have a good night's sleep and wake up to find that any NP effects we left going 'last night' are still active.

I couldn't practically test to see whether my light blobs were giving out four times as much light as before because the guards would've freaked. Testing the maximum output of my heat blobs was even less practical. I'd anticipated the problem though. Blobs smaller than a certain size have their maximum output reduced, so I created a very small light blob and had it radiate as brightly as possible. It looked to be four times brighter than that size blob had achieved pre-merge. A small heat blob was noticeably hotter too. That was a good enough confirmation, especially as my blobs now had more output than I was ever likely to use.

The maximum number of sight sources we could operate was still two. We had been sure it would be, but we still thought, #All: <Damn!>

The basic tests over with, and being fairly happy that we hadn't gone insane or our brain exploded under the load, we finished making the drinks and took them to the girls.

#63: <Seeing them is going to be uncomfortable.>

"We thought you'd forgotten," joked Julia, knowing what my memory is like.

"Sorry, I got distracted by something."

"Are you all right Mark? You look strange." 6A had been looking at 'his' girls with new eyes. In two weeks he was almost certainly going to be losing them, and that dramatically changes the way you look at your loved ones. 6B had been looking at them unusually too, as he'd just abandoned his girls to a lifetime without him. These weren't his girls, but they almost were, but only for a couple more weeks. So, regardless of whether 6A or 6B were influencing our face the most, it certainly had a strange look on it.

"Love does that to me. I love the three of you very much, and I'm amazed at how lucky I am to have each you in my life."

Expressing love isn't uncommon in our families, and there'd been quite a lot of it as the pressure of the Surveillance Problem came off, so the girls weren't suspicious. They got up, gave me some nice hugs and returned the sentiment, then returned to their work.

#22: <We should study too, but somehow my heart isn't in it.>

#50: <Wait until you've been through what we have. I either need to sit down and cry, or get out and do something. Let's go for a flight over the ocean and push Mach one.>

#24: <Now? At night? It could be dangerous.>

#50: <That's what I want. Not a foolhardy level of danger, but something that demands our intense attention and makes us feel alive. Either that or we go to bed so we can have a good cry.>

#13: <I disagree with flying. If we kill ourselves now the experiment will look like it failed and every Mark will be afraid to merge again.>

#50: <I didn't think of that.>

#23: <I suspect you guys aren't thinking too well at the moment, so it's probably not the best time to be a test pilot.>

So I went to the outside spa pool where I'd be able to cry without anyone hearing me or wondering at my face being wet. Even 6A wasn't going to have any trouble finding something to cry over. The flying could wait until another night.

We wallowed in the spa pool and in our emotions. We got the worst of it out of our systems - two different mental systems and one physical - before the girls came looking for me. I had forty eight feet of warning, so I was able duck my head under the water to wet all of it. While my face was underwater I scrubbed it with my hands for a few seconds. I wasn't sure why, it just seemed like the thing to do to get rid of the signs of crying. Then I sat up, wiped most of the water off my face, called out to the girls, put on a happy face, and smiled at them as they arrived.

"Have you been crying?"

#60: <They're very good at that stuff.>

"Just a little, Carol. The thing that distracted me when I was getting your drinks is sad. I'd like to spend a few days checking into it before I mention it because it may turn out to be nothing at all."

Julia looked at me suspiciously, "It's something big, isn't it?"

"Let me check it out first. It's not an active danger we need to take action about, or anything like that. I can take as much time as I need to make sure."

"You'll tell us as soon as you know?"

"When have I ever been able to keep secrets from you? I'll tell you when I know. It's not a threat like the Government doing anything bad. It's more like a research project. Has my cunning plan to look sad so three wonderful girls will strip naked and try hard to cheer me up worked?"

They stripped and joined me anyway, regardless of my plan's lack of cunning.

#23: <We either need no déjà vu's to happen ever again, or the next room to look so bad that we don't want to go there. What's the chance of either of those happening?>

#12: <Not nearly as high as I'd like.>

I put on an even happier face and tried to pretend everything was fine. My crying had the girls worried. I almost never cry. I swore a lot during the Surveillance Problem for example, but had never cried over it, so my doing so was not a good sign. I could read their emotions far better than I could before, and their putting on happy faces fooled me even less than my happy face fooled them.

An hour later the mental separation between 6A and 6B started being pierced. Within a couple of minutes of that starting, we were fully integrated, which was conveniently quick. We could access each other's memories as much as we wanted, and we did so, being interested in the other dimension's lives. We discovered several more dimensional differences:

• Some inconsequential, e.g., 6A's and 6B's Alexises had different tattoos on their right hips.

• Some relatively large, e.g., some of 6A, back when they'd been 3C, had spent a fair bit of time working on a Chinese girl over the 2005 summer vacation that Lily had been back in Hong Kong, hoping the new girl would be as compliant and useful as Lily. It turned out that she'd been initially easy, but once she'd thought her hooks were deep enough into me, she'd become a gold-digger. Her requests for me to repeatedly buy her stuff in return for sex - and she preferred the stuff first otherwise the sex was desultory - had quickly killed that-subset-of-me's interest in her.

None of the differences mattered though. Even the ones that might've mattered in the long run didn't matter because there wasn't going to be a long run.

We went to bed earlier than normal because the girls thought I needed cheering up. They weren't wrong.

I slept for an hour, woke up, then got up without disturbing the girls. They're used to me flying myself out of bed and have stopped being disturbed by it.

I went down to the living room to watch some DVDs while waiting for the DV. With déjà vu's presumably occurring with an 8.5-hour average - or 4.25 hours if there are other 64-minded Marks readily available - waiting for them was an easy option. We'd merged just before 7pm, so 3:30am was the likely average arrival time, and if one comes late, it'll almost certainly still be before breakfast.

[[The starting of a déjà vu is a cooperative process, at the level of the Universe cooperating with itself rather than needing our conscious cooperation - we'd NEVER been able to initiate a déjà vu on demand, and we'd tried that experiment many times. The Universe doesn't pick a 'spot' (an area of Universal Consciousness) in one dimension, then 'grab' a partner for it. If that was the case merging would only double the frequency of déjà vu's rather than the fourfold increase that occurred to me. It's more akin to areas of Universal Consciousness seeking a partner across the other dimensions, which is why we déjà vu four times more often after a merge than before, when linking with equally minded peers. When the déjà vu is with a partner with one less merge, it takes twice as long to déjà vu as with a peer, which implies the Universe 'waits' when it knows such a link will be established. Once I gained the knowledge given in this paragraph so far, I was quite curious about the 'wait' because if the Universe was seeking connections, many of those 'waiting' situations should be preempted by a peer being found in the meanwhile. I thought it meant some very strange and interesting implications about the nature of time. As it turned out, it didn't. The explanation was that the dimensions are linked far more and for longer than I thought, it's just that I was conscious of those links for only a very small proportion of the time. The link is made and retained long before the small portion of it that I'm conscious of.]]

I partly watched the DVD and partly mourned, the latter especially true for 6B, although "mourned" isn't the right word as we sort of hadn't lost anyone. I was mostly sympathizing with their loss of me. An obvious comparison was with the Casino Kidnappers. Half of us had died in their basement, and that Prof would've died shortly thereafter. Those families would've grieved a great deal more than 6B's families were now, plus there were numerically more of those 3B families too. 6B's four parents would be okay. They were proud of me for the journey I was going on, and they'd seen grief before and were strong enough to get through it. It'd be the girls that would be the most upset:

• Julia would be the most messed up initially, but I expected her to be much less affected in the long run as her drive and intensity would get her involved in other projects.

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