Chapter 418: Breakthrough

Tuesday, June 25 to Thursday, July 24, 2008

Everything was going so great, and I especially loved the gains I was making from understanding my abilities better, so a couple of days later I did another round of upgrades with my Second-Tier Helpers. Last time I'd copied upgrades from the twelve lowest-minded helpers. This time I upgraded with all fifteen of them, leaving them with one of my minds but keeping the copies of all of theirs. That added 9,421 minds, giving me a total of 16,592.

I could already pipe information through to me from other dimensions, so why not the information from a sight blob too? I've worded that as if it was no big deal, but it wasn't that simple: what I was getting now was mostly meta-information about other dimensions rather than information about what was inside them. I worked on it. Having 16,592 minds plus whatever I was gaining from the current déjà vu(s), after some experiments, gave me the knowledge and especially the willpower to create and use a sight blob in another w-dimension.

I had collected so many w-addresses by now that I understood the addressing system enough to connect to an arbitrarily chosen dimension, not one of a Mark that I had a memorized w-address for. I created the sight blob at the spatial address that corresponded to 1,000 feet above the center of Corvallis. A quick look at the hilltop showed it was still a park. Our Peoria Road address didn't look anything like we'd left it, so if there was a Mark Anderson here, he was probably living in our original address. A quick check showed that another family lived in that house.

I expanded the link I had created and sent my sole proximity blob into this dimension. I had deliberately blocked myself from déjà vu'ing now, so my proximity had a radius of 12,444 feet (nearly 2.4 miles; 3.9 km) which covered the vast majority of Corvallis. Another mile or two of range would have been useful, but a déjà vu wouldn't have given it to me as my second-tier helpers didn't have many minds and proximity range is one of the slowest increasing of my abilities. Fortunately the proximity blob was easily moved.

Compared to the Andersons I lived with, the Andersons I was seeking now might be fatter, thinner or changed in other ways, and Mark - if he was alive - would certainly be WAY different than I was now, but my previous merges had shown me that people's proximity readings were recognizably the same across dimensions so I was pretty sure that this dimension's versions of my family should be recognizable in proximity. I couldn't find them just by using their w-address despite my earlier writing that those addresses were like telephone numbers with the dimension being the area code; I couldn't just change the area code and use the same suffix to find each person. Likening w-addresses to telephone numbers was a simile rather than the reality, especially as w-addresses are more analog. I need to use simplifications to explain things to you because there's no language for the concepts I'm discovering. I had to find this dimension's versions of my loved ones the 'hard way', which - with my current level of ability - was almost trivially easy.

Recognizing people in proximity is surprisingly quick and easy even when there are tens of thousands of people involved. The near ones don't block those farther away because proximity is one big sense organ that can 'see' everything inside itself. If you walk into a room of people, you don't have to consciously consider each person in turn to think about whether you know them or not, nor do you have to think about the list of everyone you know to wonder if each of them might be in the room - your subconscious does all the matching for you. You can glance around the room and your subconscious will let you know who it has recognized. Subconsciouses are amazingly capable! I dropped my proximity sphere over Corvallis and my 16,592 + déjà vu linked subconsciouses quickly letting me know who they recognized and where they were.

I recognized many people, but no Andersons. Prof and Vanessa were both in the location I knew their first home (as mentioned herein) was. I zipped the sight blob there. It was a Tuesday evening and they were sitting in the living room in front of the TV. They looked the same visually and in proximity, other than this Prof's health being noticeably better. I checked the house quickly. Julia's room was still Julia's room judging by pink still being a major color element, although it was less so than when I'd first seen the room so many lifetimes ago. To truly confirm it was her room, I checked her closet. It was packed with tiny clothes (meaning they were her size). Not that I expected to see anything, but I checked out the room that'd been converted into my study. It was still a spare bedroom, as were Andrew's and Robert's rooms now. If I wasn't in Julia's life, then my life was badly off the rails.

I could have borrowed a computer to do some searching for my family and/or to find out whether I'd suicided several years ago, but it'd be easier and almost certainly more productive to try another w-dimension, as I could search a Corvallis in only a few seconds using proximity, that name being of doubtful appropriateness now.

I checked more dimensions. After ten of them, I'd found Mom, Dad, Carol and Donna in eight dimensions, but no Mark. I didn't want to investigate whether he/they was alive elsewhere or dead, as I feared he was almost certainly dead. There are a billion 32-minded Marks, which meant 31 billion dimensions in which Mark had died.

The census experiment to find out how many five-merged Marks there were had arrived at its slightly lower than expected answer of one billion by now (we'd expected about double that, given that one of us had rolled twelve 6s). The various levels of lower-minded Marks were still working on getting their census counts, and wouldn't have results for months or even years yet. During my nearly two years as a five-merge Mark I had experienced several déjà vu's with smaller Marks, but I couldn't directly calculate how many of them there were because I couldn't allow for the propensity of déjà vu's to be with peers. We had often discussed how to calculate the propensities and no one had been able to suggest a method of determining them. The long-duration census counts the various levels of Mark were doing now had been our best idea, and that wasn't any good for the three- and two-minded Marks because they were merging upward faster than news of the census could get down to them, and they wouldn't want to put their improvements on hold for the number of years the census would take. What I was doing now was the best and quickest way for us to get reasonably accurate population-of-Marks counts. Once I've built up my sample size I'll have some information that all the Marks will be very interested in.

I had already heard a few grapevine stories about Marks that didn't live in Corvallis - most of those moving much closer to Washington DC after MAF was established [[I didn't yet know about any of the Marks living in England, as none of them had suicided in a déjà vu, or had later déjà vu'd with any of my two-minded versions]] - so I knew that my not taking the time to find out what happened to the current dimension's missing Mark would mean that my estimate of the percentage of dimensions that didn't have Marks would be overstated, but dead Marks weren't of any use to any of us. I was mostly interested in finding Marks and in seeing the number of minds they had. By searching quicker I'd get a larger sample size for that.

Being zero for ten so far was getting worrisome. I knew that 97% (31/32) of the dimensions that a five-merged Mark had been in were now empty of their Marks. I didn't know how many 16-, 8-, etc.-minded Marks there were, but the chance of a dimension having a dead Mark had to be between 50% (for 2-minded Marks) and 97% (for 32-minded Marks). I had hoped to find Marks in somewhere between 3% and 50% of dimensions, but early indications were that the value was going to be below 10%. Making calculating the proportion of Markless dimensions even harder was my having no idea how many 1-minded Marks there were who were living totally ordinary lives having never participated in merging, or how many dimensions in which a 1-minded Mark had suicided in a bathtub but out of déjà vu. Those two factors could totally distort the percentage of dimensions which had Marks, from nearly 100% if there were kazillions of 1-minded, never-suicided Marks; down to almost 0% if there were kazillions of suicided-outside-of-déjà vu Marks. I had no idea of the size of the W-Dimension - the addressing system unhelpfully not providing any clues for that - so almost anything was possible. From my current searching, I was gaining the feeling that lots of us were dead.

It took my checking twenty four dimensions until I found my first Mark, a single-minded version at home with his family. Like most Anderson families, they'd moved houses to a somewhat nicer place than the one I'd grown up in. This Mark had a bigger room, and he needed it for the many hundreds of sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks he had. I got his personal w-dimension address from my proximity sense, then created a déjà vu link with him. His social-life was about to take a turn for the better, and his sex-life was about to take a turn.

From 1 to nearly 17,000 minds would've been excessive for several reasons, so the moment they copied across to him, all but seven of my minds suicided, then I ended the déjà vu before the minds could recopy (easy upgrading was why I'd blocked myself from natural déjà vu's before starting my multi-dimension searches). Eight minds was a good starting number for him. He'd déjà vu with his peers every eleven days, which was often enough to be useful. He'd have a six-foot proximity range and 420 kilograms of force. He'll also be able to use several of the new techniques I'd learned during my Voyage. He'd be able to rapidly improve his body too. He was actually reasonably good looking facially, although without any physique to speak of, but that'd quickly change. He, his cute ass and his to-die-for waist would be a jaw-dropping hit at the Aquatic Center by the end of summer.

[When I'd first achieved eight minds about three years ago, my maximum NP force had been 51.2 kg. Eight minds gave 420 kg now not because seven of my minds had spent just over three years training how to increase that at a gain rate of 5% per month, as that would've made a total of less than 150 kg. During the Voyage of Discovery I'd discovered that the whole "+5% per month" gain rate was a particularly stupid limiting assumption, started probably because I'd unconsciously assumed Sensei's ki ability had increased linearly during his years of training. (If nothing else does, that should teach you how unquestioning and literal-minded subconsciouses are, especially when it comes to accepting preconceptions and prejudices. Our subconsciouses want to make us happy so they don't disagree with us, deliberately ignoring contradictory evidence. Take it from our subconsciouses: we prefer believing we are right to having our wrong ideas corrected. Thereby explaining the ongoing successes of religion, Hollywood's dream factory and most politicians. Prejudices are even more 'successful', as they also make us feel superior.) I'd discovered that the maximum the Universe enabled each human mind to consciously tap resulted in just over an eightfold increase over the normal subconscious amount, hence the 420 kg. I'd discovered ways around a few other limitations too, such as over the shape of my NP-fingertips, so the newly eight-minded Mark would be able to vary their size to a greater extent than I'd been able to back when I'd originally had eight minds. The slightly over 500-foot ki-effects range limit still applied to this Mark though, as that was dependent on the structure of human minds.]

I carried on scouting more w-dimensions' Corvallises. With the superb help my proximity sense provided it only took me several hundred dimensions to get a good feel for the main places where the Marks, if any, would be found. Once I had a good basis, I put 16,000 of my minds onto the job of simultaneously sight blob searching multiple dimensions for versions of me.

When I located a Mark, sadly a much rarer event than I would have liked, I sent my proximity blob to a place about sixty feet above him. That was deliberately beyond his proximity range even if he was up to sixty four minds, as all I wanted to do now was unobtrusively find out how many minds each Mark had and what his w-address was.

I'd started my search in a random w-dimension, and had moved in small increments from it to its near neighbors ("near" in this context clearly not referring to the usual x, y and z dimensions of space, but that their w-dimension addresses were similar). There was no discernable pattern across these 'neighboring' dimensions for whether there was a Mark, or his location if there was one. After fifteen minutes of searching one neighborhood of dimensions, I chose a very distant w-dimension and worked its neighborhood. The second group was indistinguishable from the first, producing much the same frequency of results in a random order. If there was any pattern to the variations in dimensions, I couldn't see it [[there are patterns, and often quite strong ones, but the physical laws that make those themes possible operate just as easily among distant w-dimensions as neighboring ones, and they're not restricted to just Earth either, so I saw random situations]].

After checking out several hundred thousand Corvallises, I had accumulated the following statistics. For all the 32-minded Marks I found, I also found:

• No Marks with more than 32 minds.

• Sub 1% as many 16-minded Marks. As I knew there are about a billion 32-minded Marks, there'd be a few million 16-minded versions.

• 30% as many 8-minded Marks, so there'd be about 300 million of them.

• 30% as many 4-minded Marks.

• 2% as many 2-minded Marks.

• 350% as many 1-minded Marks, so about 3.5 billion of these.

• 10% as many weirdly numbered Marks, with 3, 5, 6 or 7 minds.

• About 600 times as many Corvallises with no Mark.

I was surprised that there were nearly three-quarters as many Marks with 2 to 16 minds as with 32, as the five-merge Marks thought they were several times more common that the other sizes, excluding the single-minded Marks as we'd never been able to get any idea about their frequency.

More surprising and upsetting was that just over 99% of Corvallises had no Mark Anderson at all. Adding up the total number of Mark bodies that I'd found, and dividing by the number of Mark minds that I'd found, gave the result that merging had caused 85% of the dimensions to lose their Mark. That 99% of Corvallises seemed to have lost theirs implied that 480 billion dimensions had lost their Mark without him contributing to a merge. That was a freaky large number, but ALL these numbers were freaky - there are a BILLION 32-minded Marks! The Universe is WEIRD!

480 billion dead-and-lost Mark Anderson minds was hopefully overstating the case, as I was only counting Marks I found in Corvallis. Some of those dimensions would have a Mark who was elsewhere. Maybe he'd gone out of town to a Star Wars convention, or perhaps Jessica Alba had lured him to LA to be her sex toy - one of those possibilities being more likely than the other. [[In a significant number of dimensions I was living in England with Mom and her second husband, so VERY hard to find. There were several other reasons why the living Mark Anderson wasn't in Corvallis, although sadly none of them involved my giving sexual pleasure to Jessica Alba. The Universe wasn't big enough for that to have been possible.]] The way the numbers work out, if Mark existed in 5% of dimensions (rather than the 1% result of the figures above), then the number of dead-and-lost Marks would be 'only' 69 billion, the total population of ten Earths.

With sixteen thousand searching minds, it didn't take much longer than half an hour for me to collect the above statistics, after which I decided that enough time had passed for me to revisit the first Mark I'd found, to find out how his upgrade was working out. I expected he'd be happy - the copy of his mind that I had in me certainly was - but it was sensible to check first in case going from total ignorance of merging to being in a minority of eight minds so suddenly was causing him problems.

He did have one major problem: finding ways to adequately express his gratitude, happiness and excitement.

I let him have his gush, then, <All part of the service. Catch you later, bye.>

The seven minds I dropped off would've already told him what he should do when he déjà vu's with other Marks, and that I'd be checking in with him every day to make sure no unexpected problems were arising. His seven new minds were also helping him plan how to turn his life around. It'd be a fun project for them, especially knowing that his abilities were going to get rapidly better when he upgrades further after I give that the green light.

I spent the evening and night giving a varied assortment of seven of my minds to a total of 6,000 single-minded Marks. Most of them had been asleep but I figured they wouldn't mind being woken for this. It took me a total of ten hours to locate and upgrade them all, even using a hit-and-run approach. It was a natural consequence of the process that I picked up an additional 6,000 flabbergasted minds, taking my total to 22,592.

Especially at the beginning of the evening, I often went back and checked on quite a few of them to make sure the process was fine. It always was. I hadn't expected otherwise, but better safe than sorry.

During the following day I briefly re-contacted all of them. I told them I was checking that everything was okay, which was true, but the host mind didn't know what one of my checks was. The seven minds that'd been inserted had a secret mission: whenever I checked in they were to let me know if they thought their Mark was a bad person. I wanted to find out whether there were any Bad Marks before I started giving them awesome powers. It would be best to find that out now, before any of them had a chance to cause any trouble, and while he was so ignorant that I'd be able to do something about it. I didn't expect problems from these Marks because they were already outnumbered 7-to-1 with minds I trusted. What I worried about was that there might be a proportion of Marks that were bad, and if they somehow got enough of their minds together, that could escalate into trouble. The checking I was doing now was basically just random sampling to find out the proportion of Bad Marks.

I like to think of myself as a good guy - who doesn't, other than every female - but my worry about Bad Marks had a realistic basis. Way back when my autobiography started, it was my getting my second mind that had opened my eyes to many of the social interactions that I'd been missing with just one mind, and what I had learned then had changed me considerably. The single-minded Marks I was interacting with now had never had such a beneficial experience. They were what they naturally were, without any advantage over anyone else. It was therefore quite possible that some of them could've developed into bad people, perhaps out of bitterness at how much they thought their life sucked. Another source of worry was that I had done quite a few violent things since gaining power, such as cutting people's heads off! Maybe doing violent things like that is part of my basic character. I believe I'd had sufficient justifications at those times, but I imagined that bad people also believed their actions were justified.

I was very pleased that my spying minds reported that no single-minded Mark was an asshole. There were some that were excessively bitter about their lives, but their new minds confidentially reported, <He's not so bad and he's already improving just from being excited and optimistic about the future. Unless there are worse Marks than this guy, there's nothing to worry about.>

The not-so-good Marks were outvoted 7-to-1 in their own bodies, and it was hard for them to hang onto any bitterness they had in the face of so many other Marks' experiences and the wonderful things that were going to be happening to them very shortly. I'd been reasonably sure that the seven Marks I injected the hosts with, regardless of which seven they got, would sweep away any bad urges their host might have. Nor did any of the single-minded copies I picked up say anything that made me worry about them, but they were swamped by thousands of other minds and by our bizarre situation so their reactions weren't a good test of their goodness. But, as I said, everything seemed fine.

I did 6,000 more upgrades every night for a week, stopping on July 4 after upgrading a total of 42,000 single-minded Marks, leaving me with 58,592 minds. There'd not been a single Mark that needed any remedial action. I had enough knowledge and power to kill individual minds, leaving the other minds in charge of the body. I'd not expected to need to do that, but I was glad I never had to decide whether that counted as a murder, suicide, theft, hijacking or pre-emptive public service. I was faintly amused to be stopping on Independence Day, as I was actively in the process of making the Marks more dependent: eight minds in one body meant they had to depend on each other in a way no one else does.

I wasn't attempting to reach all the single-minded Marks. I'd calculated that at my current rate that'd take me a somewhat impractical sixteen centuries, not to mention that it'd leave me with a silly number of minds. The week of 6,000 upgrades per night was just proving the concept, doing a quality check on who we were giving power to, and doing it early enough to allow time for any problems to develop during the three-month trial before I gave the green light to start the massive W-Dimension-wide upgrades.

I won't do any more 'dabbling' during the trial period. Presuming no problems develop over that time, then the fifteen second-tier helpers and I will consider that we've proved that extremely high numbers of minds work fine, and that the upgrade from one mind to eight minds works fine too. The process should be pretty simple after that. Starting with the fifteen helpers that I'm déjà vu'ing among almost continuously, but also as new Marks arrive at the level where they get the ability to deliberately access the w-dimensions, we'll tackle the job of finding and upgrading all the low-minded Marks to eight minds. With eight minds, their déjà vu's will be eleven days apart on average. As most of their minds will know how to do upgrades, and presuming they have enough willpower to do so, they'll upgrade themselves quite quickly after getting that green light. With sixteen minds, it'll takes an average of only three days to déjà vu and upgrade again, and thereafter déjà vu's occur less than 24 hours apart. If they don't have enough willpower to get the Universe to cut the déjà vu links, then the higher-minded Marks will have to do one or more rounds of upgrades, until the smaller Marks can manage their own upgrades. It'll be quite easy, especially because I'm no longer worried about how many minds we end up with.

The w-address system isn't suitable for working through the W-Dimension in a logical, exhaustively complete fashion as it's too analog and not laid out in any obvious symmetry. We'll set up a signpost system - like a pile of rocks on a particular part of the Moon - to indicate to each other if a dimension has already been searched and if a Mark was found, not found yet after n attempts, or is known to have died. We'll probably search and re-search each "not found yet" dimension several times before we consider it hopeless. Even with those extra checks, it shouldn't take long before every Earth in the entire W-Dimension has been searched, especially because we'll get very good at tracking down Marks after some practice.

In between my nightly upgrading sessions, I was in and out of déjà vu's with my Helpers, and had discussed the census information I'd accumulated. Like me, they were surprised how many 2- to 16-minded Marks there were, and were saddened by the number of Markless dimensions. We were also surprised by how few 1-minded Marks there were, they outnumbering 32-minded Marks by a factor of only 3.5. We'd had zero information about their number previously, but there could have been anywhere between none of them if all of us had merged, or millions of times more of them if the chance of our merging the first time had been very low, and the W-Dimension was necessarily huge enough to hold that number of Earths. Given that the factor difference could have been between zero and millions, that it was only 3.5 was surprisingly low. We hoped that number would improve by there being a lot of Marks living outside of Corvallis. We wanted to know how many such Marks there were. Apart from our being curious about them, we'll want to upgrade them in three months, so they did need to be found. Unfortunately the proximity and sight blob search methods I'd used to find the Corvallis Marks weren't practical for an America-wide, or even an Earth-wide, search. However, I could create NP-fingertips in other dimensions if I wanted to, so in each dimension I could:

• Use a computer to maybe find an old local newspaper story about Mark Anderson's suicide.

• Snoop Dad's parents in Seattle to find out their email address, create a new email account, and email my grandparents to ask them about Mark and his family. I'd probably pretend to be an old schoolmate of Mark's.

• Hire a private investigator to do the research for me. Necessarily doing all our correspondence via email, and I could snail-mail him/her cash stolen from drug dealers.

There were several other possible methods, but they were all slow and had to be repeated many times. Depending on how many non-Corvallis Marks there were, I might have to do hundreds or even thousands of searches to get a statistically stable result of the proportion of such Marks. That would satisfy our curiosity, but wasn't useful. We had to find ALL the Marks to upgrade them, which would require a massive effort and it wasn't needed unless the W-Dimension-wide Upgrade got the green light, so it could wait until then, so a few million high-minded Marks can do it.

At the time of the start of this chapter, I had thought that having 16,592 minds was letting me make some really nice breakthroughs. Before then the insights had mostly been quite narrow, ability-specific ones, but after reaching 16,592 minds I had acquired much more powerful understandings which had enabled me to invent some extremely useful abilities, such as being able to search other w-dimensions. As very happy as I had been with the 16,592 minds' discoveries, I was even happier when I started having insights after acquiring 58,592 minds. That permitted some HUGELY fundamental breakthroughs. Things like:

• Creating matter rather than heat with my 'heat' blobs. It took about 100 seconds to make a kilogram of matter (pure E=MC^2 at 100% efficiency). Carbon came out as worthless non-diamonds, but the surprisingly small lump of pure gold made me smile.

• My favorite breakthrough was when I realized how space is structured. [[Actually, I still only had a partial understanding of its structure, but I had penetrated another layer of the Universe's construction, and it was still a fantastic leap forward.]]

The latter gave me TWO easy solutions for the ... wait for it ... SOUND BLOB PROBLEM! Yippee! They were:

1. My perceptual resolution and control was fine enough that I could ascertain the movement properties of the air at a particular point (where I wanted to listen, i.e., the 'microphone'), and I could use my willpower to get the Universe to appropriately 'vibrate' the space 'under' the air at another location (beside my ear, i.e., the 'speaker'). The relative vibrations at the speaker propagated to the surrounding air, so this approach worked, but it ain't worth beans compared to the next solution.

2. As I mentioned earlier, every pixel of space has a spatial address. It turns out that the Universe's pixels aren't rigidly structured: their spatial addresses can be changed simply by telling the Universe to do so, and even more amazingly, they can have more than one spatial address. Space can be in more than one place! That created several interesting possibilities, such as the same air molecules that are vibrating where the 'microphone' is, can also be vibrating where I wanted the 'speaker' to be, with the sound propagating from there to my ear. It wasn't a "Sound Blob" at all, but that didn't stop me celebrating the discovery. I was already keeping an eye on the appointment books of the President, CIA Director, FBI Director, and nearly thirty other powerful people, and watching those of their meetings that looked interesting, and now I'd be able to listen to them too.

Dual-locating the two spaces also meant sound went in the other direction, so the sound of my speech would travel through the connection. Being able to speak remotely might be useful, but having sound go both ways was a nuisance for eavesdropping - if I was eavesdropping on two or more locations, they could hear each other just as well as I could hear them. If I didn't want the other end to hear noises at my end, I put the speaker inside an airtight NP-box with one side of it pressed against my skull around my ear. I couldn't eavesdrop on more than two conversations at a time that way, but that would still be very useful. If I needed to eavesdrop on more than two places, I could easily redirect their sounds to a bank of tape recorders.