Chapter 414: Tenth Merge to 320 Minds; With Duplicate Marks

Saturday, May 17 (Continued) to Saturday, May 24, 2008

Our head didn't explode from the sudden arrival of 160 new minds, most of whom were duplicates, so that was good. Now that my fingers had done their job so well, I uncrossed them.

^

[[(a) Copies of those minds had spent fifty hours in my head over the last couple of weeks, so there was no "sudden arrival" involved. (b) It's not as if duplicate minds were matter and anti-matter, especially because they're not matter at all. Nor are they anything else that's mutually destructive or incompatible. They're just information, and information doesn't mutually self-destruct.

While I think to mention it, nor does information interact unless made to do so, by which I mean that although my proximity range was so large now that it included many other people's minds, we didn't get déjà vu together, nor could we read each other's minds, or anything weird like that. The déjà vu sensation is caused by the Universe's Consciousness actively creating copies, overlapping them, and changing the destination minds to resemble the copies. Just having two people's minds in the same large volume of space doesn't do anything because they aren't similar enough, aren't synchronizing, and there's no interaction between them. 3D space being not quite as real as we think it is, it's even possible to consider brains as overlapping, but there is still no interaction between them. Had telepathy functioned between me and any other minds within my proximity range, then my experiences would have been VERY different indeed, especially if people near me could read my MINDS as easy as I could read theirs!

A related digression that I can't resist is that there is one type of information that does destructively interact: religion. Two people can easily hold incompatible non-religious beliefs, and often do. For example, I might think Jessica Alba is sexier than Jessica Biel, and you might hold the opposite view, but other than our beliefs being logically incompatible there is nothing actively destructive about those views. Religion is different. Adherents of one religion believe not only that all other religions and even variations on their own are wrong, but that those religions should be destroyed. Preferably the heathens and heretics should be converted first, but killing them is also a morally virtuous choice. There's nothing in my thinking that Jessica Alba is the sexiest that makes it a virtue for me to kill the fools who believe otherwise, but because religions are a Big Lie they stridently and deliberately call for the destruction of all their 'opponents' - who don't even need to be in "opposition" as uncaring ambivalence also justifies attack and destruction - lest those opponents expose the lie or the lack of need for it.

That destructiveness is solely a political necessity. As previously mentioned herein, many American Christians believe in reincarnation without experiencing spiritual difficulty - indeed, they believe as they do because it makes them feel better - so inconsistent spiritual beliefs certainly aren't mutually destructive. But should a religious institution decide for its own political purpose to make an issue out of that heresy, then a considerable amount of destruction could result. Christians who had happily believed in both sets of spiritual comfort would suddenly find themselves in self-destructive internal conflict, and if they spoke up in defense of their beliefs, they'd very quickly find themselves in external conflict too since Christians hate heretics even more than they hate people having sex, as proved by the hundreds of years of the Church knowingly letting priests continue to be active pedophiles, but if any one of those priests had given a sermon supporting reincarnation, they would have had the wrath of the Church descend on them.

Imagine what the world would be like if all the politically motivated "Fight Evil" rhetoric had been left out of religions, leaving only "Try to be a Good person." I imagine a far better society would have resulted, and I consider the enormous intolerance, hatred and conflict caused by the world's popular religions proof of the unreality of their claimed gods. The best that could be said about them is, "If the views urged by their holy books are divinely inspired, as they claim, then I want nothing to do with those gods."]]

^

My brain didn't feel physically, intellectually or emotionally pressured; or full, short-circuited, insane, or any other bad things. It just seemed like business as usual, except more than usual. Even when the duplicate minds addressed conversations back and forth directly at each other, it didn't feel unusual, other than we'd expected it to feel unusual in a way we've never expected before, so that was unusual. We're usually pretty accurate in our expectations, so getting this one wrong was unusual too. But other than that unusual number of unusual feelings, nothing felt unusual, as is usual after the déjà vu's we usually have, which are very unusual ones compared to the usual ones everyone else usually has, although even their usual ones feel unusual enough. To summarize: if we hadn't known that the minds were duplicates, we'd never have detected it conversationally. We just seemed like yet another Mark-mind to each other.

We confirmed that our abilities were the same as we'd experienced in the déjà vu's. The last time I gave exact values was when I had 128 minds. Having 320 now was an increase of 2.5 times, so my abilities had risen by factors of 2.5, 6.25 or 15.625, depending on the ability:

• My proximity range is now 240 feet and even more INCREDIBLY detailed. Especially biologically, but I'm getting a great deal of information about energy and matter now too. [Although I wasn't yet consciously aware of it, I was also becoming extremely accurate at estimating distances especially within my proximity range, and was developing a much better sense of time.]

• My maximum ki-effects range is 734 feet. Every increase is welcome as this limit is often inconveniently short.

• There are 320 fingertips per mind, so over 100,000 in total now. Maximum width is 160 inches (over 13 feet or 4 meters!). Minimum width 1/160th of an inch, which is VERY sharp, as my thumb can attest. Fortunately I heal very quickly.

• The Blinks Allowed Effect is 53 minutes. I could create an NP-effect and damn near fly around the world to find it still working when I got back!

• My maximum force is nearly ten million kilograms (11,000 tons).

• The amount of heat and light I can radiate is 4800 x 60 W lightbulbs of heat, x 2.85 (with the training bonus) x 320 minds = 263 megawatts. That's 22% of the output of the newest nuclear reactor to go online. Another mental double-up - not that there currently seems to be anyone to double-up with - would increase my total output by a factor of 8, so well past that of the reactor. There are several small countries that use less power than I can output now! Thinking about that was almost enough to give me a meltdown.

• Déjà vu's with 32-minded Marks should - I hope - occur every two and a bit hours, and have durations of about 5 minutes. We'd learned from the 160-mind to 32-mind déjà vu's that the durations weren't as long as we'd expected mathematically. We guessed that the link was being lost earlier than expected because the 'weak' Marks couldn't hold it open. [[A bad guess.]]

#209: <The frequency of a three-way should be 5 minutes (duration) / 120 minutes (how often they occur on average) / 5 (how much less likely than average a very early one is), being 1-in-120, times the frequency of a two-way. With about 2 hours between two-ways, that means 240 hours, or 10 days, between three-ways. The previous merge-level's expectation had been 50 days.>

<Provided linking to five-merge Marks is no harder. We should find out about that in a couple of hours.>

#320: <Yeah. If the numbers work out that way, then four-ways should occur roughly every 10 days x 120 = 1,200 days, about three and a third years. Somewhat less than that because we can join an existing one two-way, but that doesn't have much effect so call it "nearly three years". Still too long to wait, but trebling our number of minds might be attractive after one more cycle. It leads to some interesting possibilities for the step after that. Potentially even five- and six-way merges might become possible, although the number of minds involved in that is bizarre beyond belief.>

#43: <As if having 320 minds wasn't bizarre already.>

About two hours later, more or less on schedule, we entered into a déjà vu with a 32-minded Mark.

To put it mildly, he was surprised. One Of Them: <MY GOD! Your proximity is FUCKING INCREDIBLE. What are all those lumps? Are they what I think they are? Are you the poor bastard that rolled the twelve 6s?>

One Of Us: <Yeah I am. Proximity is picking up energy and matter. Matter looks like a 3D image, like the scanners they use on luggage in airports, only much better.>

One Of Them: <Looks like your experiment is working fantastically. How many minds are you up to?>

One Of Us: <320 at the moment, with our abilities being bumped up by linking to you of course.>

One Of Them: <Christ on a biscuit! Argh! You're not going to merge with me, are you?>

One Of Us: <No. You're safe... >

One Of Them: <Phew!>

One Of Us: <You're the first five-merge Mark we've déjà vu'd with since we arrived at 320 minds, so this is what I want you to spread... >

[[The déjà vu occurred roughly at the time we'd calculated because the chance of déjà vu'ing with a 'lower' Mark wasn't any less when there were no peers to 'compete' with the process. Peers are highly favored for linking because they are so similar, but if there are no peers, then linking downward is necessary, with them still occurring at the time they should, as the universe 'knows' the next déjà vu is a downward one (it has already made the link's precursor, just not the part of it that we're conscious of because no content is copied across until the times we're used to). Identicality between participants necessarily becomes less important as the number of potential link partners reduces. The Universe balances seeking volumes of consciousness which are as similar as possible with the rates of change between dimensions and the time since their last synchronizations, so sometimes only roughly similar is good enough. In my current case, "as similar as possible" wasn't very similar anymore.]]

Déjà vu's with 32-minded Marks continued to occur roughly every two hours, all starting with my partners' minds being blown by the new level of proximity ability, as I've quoted above. We waited to see if a three-way would occur in ten days, more or less.

Having to wait ten days, and having far more minds, I put some solid effort into seeing if I could develop new abilities or improve our existing ones even further. My NP-fingertips were now strong and flexibly-shaped enough that I could make machines out of them, such as an NP-wheelbarrow, complete with a wheel and frictionless axle. I had easier ways of carrying stuff than pushing it in an invisible or mirrored wheelbarrow, but I enjoyed that I could make a very good one. I even gave it a 'spring' suspension, just because it was fun to invent two different ways of doing that which didn't require my conscious management to operate (I'll leave imagining how I did that as an exercise for the reader).

Proximity let me notice that my body's sleeping mechanisms were operating at low levels continually. With that, and with Mr. No One so capable of running things without my real minds involved, I tried an experiment where for an extended time I didn't order the body to activate its sleeping mechanisms and none of my individual minds put themselves to sleep. There were no apparent effects, ill or otherwise, so my body and minds seemed to have improved enough that sleep was no longer needed.

I wasn't sharing these things with my girls. I'd be leaving soon and stability seemed better. It'd be easier on me to live without their excitement now, and after I'd gone they'd have less uncertainty about what had been going on. They weren't strong reasons, but I didn't have a strong reason to show them my ability improvements. As I had been every night since I'd discovered how to rotate my sleeping, I was still going to bed when my girls did. I'd told them that I liked going to bed with them and that I'd do some study before I fell asleep (I didn't tell Nevaeh the latter point), which was true, with "before I fell asleep" meaning much longer than they thought. I enjoyed being in bed with my girls while they dropped off around me, and I was happy to tell them that I enjoyed it.

I was hiding my new abilities from everyone, even Sensei. All the five-merge Marks had restarted Aikido in all their w-dimensions after the Surveillance Problem had been solved, so I 'walked into' that after each of my Voyaging merges. In each dimension, once I'd told my families I was leaving, I'd stopped Aikido and all other external activities to spend more time with my loved ones, and I'd stop it here at that time too, but for the present I kept training once a week. I didn't need Aikido in any practical sense, but I did it for the enjoyment. I was still learning new Aikido principles from time to time, and was enjoying being impressed by them. I was hiding nearly all of my ki from Sensei simply by radiating the vast majority of it out of the top of my head, leaving only the amount for techniques that 10A had previously shown Sensei. That was extreme enough.

Speaking of flying - which I wasn't but I often think about it - I no longer needed to use my watch to navigate with because I quickly became much better at knowing exactly where I was, including altitude. It wasn't quite the same as having a built-in GPS because it worked by keeping track of my movements with an extraordinarily accurate sense of direction, but it seemed just as precise. I also didn't need my watch to tell the time as my brain started keeping perfect track of that too. There were several other minor improvements in existing human abilities like that, but none of any real significance, and knowledge of how to do them couldn't be passed on through the grapevine.

A week later, while I was still waiting for the first three-way déjà vu to occur to confirm that they were possible in my new situation, I was having my usual succession of two-hourly déjà vu's when the next one was late. After three hours I started noticing its tardiness. No big deal as that sometimes happened. After four hours it was very noteworthy as déjà vu's are almost never this far apart (as a multiple of the expected time), but maybe I was going to have a déjà vu with an even lower-minded Mark although I thought that event to be extremely unlikely. After five hours I was becoming worried. The previous déjà vu's had been normal; boringly so because all the Marks had reacted the same excited way. There'd been no hint of any internal or external trouble. It wasn't possible that I was waiting to déjà vu with a four- or three-merge Mark because all five-merge Marks had died. Enough of the five-merge Marks were in lives sufficiently different from each other that there couldn't possibly have been a fatal threat that'd taken them all out. Much more likely was there being a simpler cause, the two obvious ones being something to do with the déjà vu process itself, or with me. As more time passed without a déjà vu, my money was increasingly on me.

I studied my proximity sense's image of my brain very carefully, but I couldn't sense anything wrong. My resolution is roughly at the cubic millimeter level (a cube 1/25th of an inch in each direction), which is small - there are a HUGE number of cubic millimeters in a human body - but it's still too large to see what's going on inside a brain. I could see my heart operating in wonderful detail, but brains aren't big lumps of working organic machinery. (If you think proximity sensing at the cubic millimeter level is so mind boggling as to be impossible to manage, ask yourself what resolution your eyes see down to. Most computer panels have 96 dots per inch, so nearly 4 per linear 25th of an inch, making about 15 per square millimeter. You have no trouble managing blocks of 15 pixels, and can manage considerably smaller areas than that. Processing all the square millimeters you see doesn't boggle your mind, and neither does my proximity sense cause any of my minds to do any boggling.)

There was more blood flow around my higher-thought centers than normal, but not to a large degree. I created a zero emission light blob while watching my brain carefully. I noticed that the area of my brain involved in creating ki-effects was smaller than normal, which immediately made that area of my brain that registers fear get very busy. With considerable fear that I was losing them, I quickly tested my special abilities. They all worked perfectly, but didn't use as much of my brain as before.

<We're not losing them; they're getting more efficient.>

#126: <Then why has our déjà vu ability stopped?>

<Search me. I don't think déjà vu qualifies as an "ability", as such. We could déjà vu back when we had one mind, as can everyone else. I'm just saying that our ABILITIES don't seem to be going away. What's happening to those areas of the brain might be completely unrelated to the missing déjà vu.>

The special abilities' area of my brain continued to slowly get smaller while I scratched my head for the next two hours, getting nowhere.

The abilities area kept getting smaller, and then the NP-fingertips I was using on the downstairs study's scrolling keyboard self-canceled. I tried to recreate them in the downstairs study and failed. I tried creating them right in front of me and failed again. More minds tried and failed, again and AGAIN!

<FUCK!>

Blobs and other things still worked - I had been studying and could still see the screens - but NP was dead so I couldn't scroll them, which was the least of our worries right now.

#142: <FUCK. This is very, very bad.>

Ten minutes later, the sight blob canceled and couldn't be restarted.

<FUCK. SHIT. FUCK.>

Other than frantically failing at restarting my special effects and swearing a LOT, I ranted at myselves and tried desperately to think of an explanation which might lead to a possible solution. Everything got me precisely nowhere.

Fifteen minutes after that, my proximity sense blanked out. Five minutes later the last special ability I had left, my sense of location and direction, failed.

I spent the next several minutes being equally successful at thinking of ways to get my abilities back as I'd been at stopping them leaving in the first place.

<Our ability to study faster than anyone else just got flushed down the toilet.>

#173: <At least we still have each other. So far, anyway.>

#185: <We got too greedy and pushed it too fucking far. We should've known that 320 minds was a fucking ridiculous number to have. We could've had a wonderful life with 32... >

<The other Marks are going to send more 'lucky' winners after us. I hope they don't lose too many of them before they learn to stop short. It's a real fucker that déjà vu's were the first thing lost; it would've been so much better if they went last so we could've gotten the warning out.>

We spent some time trying to convince ourselves that life wouldn't be TOO bad. We'd probably lost our superhuman endurance, so our sex-life was going to take a dive, but we still had go-hards and go-softs (we tested them briefly, without enthusiasm), and our body should retain its great physique. We were rich, healthy, had a high IQ and two wonderful families around us, so it wasn't TOO bad.

#89: <We should retain our superhuman endurance. That's mostly because we're getting energy from the Universe. We must still be getting it otherwise our lack of red blood cells would be causing big problems.>

#55: <Good point, and a scary one. If we'd lost the ability to get energy from the Universe, we probably would've died from oxygen deprivation and there wouldn't have been any warning or anything we could have done about it. Even breathing bottled oxygen wouldn't have helped.>

#89: <Yeah, scary.>

We started planning the changes we'd have to make, and the conversations with our families that we'd have to have. Fifteen minutes into that, a déjà vu arrived.

One Of Them: <MY GOD! Your proximity is FUCKING... >

All Of Us: <SHUT UP! LISTEN, we may not have much time. We rolled the twelve 6s and got to 320 minds... >

When this autobiography quotes a déjà vu conversation, for the benefit of my readers I normally write things like "One Of Them" or "One Of Us", but that's not what we think at the time. We just use our number-names, which can get confusing because there are two #1's, etc. In the following conversation, the names of the participants are exactly the way we thought at the time.

#32: <320! WOW! That's... >

#118: <SHUT THE FUCK UP! We've lost ALL of our abilities. No NP, no blobs, no proximity sense, no nothing! Déjà vu was getting infrequent and you're almost certainly our last... >

#13: <But your proximity is FUCKING INCREDIBLE! What're you talking about?>

#86: <Huh? You can sense it?> Every one of our many déjà vu's since we got high-minded had started with our 32-minded partner raving over the proximity sense, and we'd got into the habit of tuning that repetitiveness out, so we hadn't actually listened to him when this déjà vu had started.

#13: <Sure. It's fantastic; I've never seen anything like it.>

#16: <I can't sense it. Wait, yes I can, but it's around me. We're dressed differently and I can tell which is me. Why did I have to make an effort to pick up my own proximity sense? I should've been able to sense it all the time easily.>

#16: <Are you the #16 of a Mark with 320 or 32 minds?>

#16: <32. Why?>

#16: <Because I am. I can sense my fantastically improved proximity sense no problem, so who are you?>

#16: <Huh?>

#16: <I'm the #16 for the unlucky 320 guy.>

#16: <So am I, and this is the first time I've spoken in this link.>

#All: <Huh?>

<There's no communication echo like there's always been before, but now there's an echo in the number of us there are.>

I'll not quote the rest of the conversation because it was a chaotic mess for a while, until we'd worked out that there were four of each mind from #1 to #32, and two of every higher numbered name. Of the four of each of the low numbered Marks, two of them identified themselves as belonging to the 32-minded Mark, two to the 320-minded Mark. Of the two that belonged to the 32-minded Mark, and the two that belonged to the 320-minded Mark, one of them was as closely connected to his body as always, but the other had to make an effort to connect to it. If the latter opened 'his' eyes, he saw a Mark wearing the clothes worn by the other Mark's body, so he was apparently in that body. For the pairs of minds from #33 on, they both identified themselves as being from the 320-minded Mark (of course), but when they looked out of what seemed like their body's eyes, one of each pair saw the differently dressed Mark.

We imposed a new naming convention on ourselves: our usual number - which Mark we came from - whether we were in our normal Mark now, for example, #1-32-Home, or #16-320-Away. There were 352 of us with "Home" in our name, and the same number with "Away". There were also "Home" and "Away" Mr. No Ones, but they weren't saying much now, as normal when the individual personalities were heavily involved in something.

Once we could talk without tripping over ourselves, we repeated our warning again and in more detail because it was VERY important to get it out. Then we started discussing what the fuck was going on now.

One point that seemed very important was that Mark32 had 352 minds' worth of special abilities, and he thought they were AWESOME; while Mark320 had no abilities at all, and you know what I thought about that fucking disaster. Mark32 tested his level of abilities, and they were consistent with there being 352 minds in the link, not the 704 our new naming convention identified.

Another point was there being a lot less echo in our communication than we expected. Talking to each other during déjà vu has always been an awkward business because of the echo effect. (I've always left that out of the déjà vu conversations I've quoted because you would have found verbatim quoting a HUGE pain in the ass.) Although the frequency of that nuisance has diminished since our early merges, and we've long since adopted a certain way of talking to minimize the confusion it causes and to handle what problems we couldn't get rid of, its extra reduction now was still very noticeable and welcome, a nice change from the confusions and worries we had. We decided that the most likely explanation was that my déjà vu ability was half destroyed and it was behaving erratically in its last few minutes. Mark32 prayed that whatever had wiped out my abilities wasn't contagious through the link.

We had two obvious theories for the cause of our "disability": either 320 minds were too many, or merging with duplicates was to be avoided at all costs. There were no clues which hypothesis was more likely, for example, we didn't get a pounding headache when duplicates talked to each other. Of the two hypotheses, we guessed the most likely cause was that having 320 minds was too many, but that was only a guess based on the duplicates not seeming to cause problems whereas 320 was a fucking ridiculous number of minds to have in one head.

I cautioned the other Mark to spread the word that I'd spent only ten days with 160 minds, so maybe 160 might be too many minds too, although I'd spent five months with 128, and that'd seemed fine.

The link ended after the expected time for 352 minds, not the significantly longer duration 704 minds would have given us. I checked and confirmed that I had only one set of 320 minds, proving the mess with the two sets of 352 minds had been some sort of déjà vu glitch.

I repeatedly tried to get my abilities back, but they were all totally absent. I kept internally moaning about that, kept thinking about the conversations I was going to have to have with my loved ones and planning the changes I'd have to make to my life. And then I moaned some more. It was a very unpleasant prospect for several reasons, such as the parents had let me kill people because of how important they believed I was, and all that had just flown out the window. Another worry was my complete inability to defend us from any further Governmental or other intrusions. I felt HORRIBLY defenseless. I did a LOT of moaning.

An hour later my proximity sense came back on. I thought that was quite nice of it, so I thanked it VERY MUCH!

I immediately tried my other abilities, but without any success. Proximity seemed fully back to normal though. It had just as much detail and as it had before I'd lost it. I touched wood, crossed my fingers, said a prayer, and tried to work out if I knew of a virgin I could sacrifice to the gods to get my other abilities back.

Fifteen minutes later my location sense returned. Shortly after that so did everything else. I gave a HUGE sigh of relief. It may not have been too bad to lose my abilities, or it may have been, but it was WONDERFUL BEYOND WORDS to have them back again! After dancing for joy - and I wouldn't have cared if anyone had seen me - I tried to work out what the hell that'd been about.

I didn't have a clue. Or, more accurately, I had only one clue: the areas of my brain that got busy when I did my special abilities had shrunk significantly. The abilities worked just the same, which I guess meant that the new system, if there was a new system, was more efficient. If anyone had asked me, I would've FAR preferred not to have gone through that scare to reduce the workload on a few million brain cells, especially because the Universe was providing the energy to fuel them anyway.

I was still very happily playing with my highly appreciated abilities when the next déjà vu arrived.

One Of Them: <MY GOD! Your proximity is FUCKING INCREDIBLE! You must be the poor bastard that rolled the twelve 6s? What are those lumps?>

We quickly found out that the déjà vu glitch of there being two sets of us was STILL messing things up, but I was pretty sure it wouldn't take long to fix itself. My brain is amazingly adaptable, sometimes too much so.

After teaching the linked Mark about the new naming convention we had to use, I gave him the good news to spread about losing my abilities then getting them back, One of Us: <It appears to have been some sort of brain reorganization, but a fucking scary one. I know you will do so anyway, but stress that this news overrides the news I gave the previous Mark. It has scared the crap out of us though so I'm not sure what we're going to do about the Voyage of Discovery. Obviously we're not going to put ourself through another merge while déjà vu is so screwed up because our minds might get lost or messed up when crossing the dimensions, but even when that gets untangled we're still going to have MIGHTY cold feet. At the very least, we're going to wait until we're positive that everything is working perfectly before we even start to think about doing anything else. It was a HELL of a scare.>