Chapter 421: Category #1; Revealing How I Became So Unique

Friday, July 25, 2008 (Continued)

In the two chapters above I briefly described some of the things I will be doing with and for humanity now that I'm God. They were just some of my initial thoughts rather than definite plans - apart from the few things I've already started - but they should have given you an idea of the types of things I'm capable of and interested in doing. They're CERTAINLY not a complete list of everything my trillion plus minds have thought of. Even though my minds are reasonably similar, that list is HUGE! I have many tens of thousands of ideas that I want to try, plus degrees and combinations of them. In the majority of those I'm uncertain whether the results will be good or not, so I'll be trying all sorts of things in small-scale experiments involving just a few dozen Earths at a time. I have a lot of experiments to conduct, so it's convenient of the Universe to provide me with so many dimensions to experiment with.

I want what is best for humanity, but it's not much of an exaggeration to say that I haven't got a clue what "best" means. I don't know what the goal is, how to get there, how to measure humanities' and my progress, how much time I have, what constraints I should put on myself, or pretty much anything else. I don't even know whether it would be best for the Universe if humanity wipes itself out. It's pretty hard to decide on definite plans under these conditions. To make it even more difficult, I'm barely out of my boyhood. I think I'm fairly mature for my age, but I don't think I'm mature and wise enough to be God of the Universe! I'm also sure that even if I already had specific plans for humanity, they will change anyway, as I mature and my perspectives change. The only thing I can state with certainty is that I am going to be conducting a phenomenal range of experiments on humanity, from which I expect to learn a great deal, including about myself.

I can, however, be much more specific about how I will be treating my loved ones. I am much clearer about how to make them happy, and more importantly, I'll be letting them tell me what they want to happen in their lives. For several very obvious reasons, I will NOT be letting humanity tell me what it wants. I have a lot of plans for my loved ones and myself, and the plans' implementations can start immediately. Why not? If my families don't like my plans, they can simply ask for changes. I'm sure Julia won't hesitate to make suggestions, and I'm particularly looking forward to hearing Prof's and Vanessa's ideas, initially and over the coming millennia.

In many dimensions what I'll be doing with my families will overlap considerably with the first stages of establishing my new relationships with humanity, while in other dimensions how I'm choosing to interact with humanity will considerably influence my families' lives. My families are part of humanity, so obviously there's an interaction there. To make it easy for me to explain them here, I'll initially describe my plans for my loved ones as if they were independent of humanity. Later I'll comment on the interactions.

Of necessity I have several different immediate plans for my loved ones because their circumstances vary so much across different Earths. For the purposes of this autobiography, I'll categorize those circumstances as follows:

1. I am alive and well with multiple minds, up to thirty two of them until the very recent results of the Voyage of Discovery made the number of minds in a body irrelevant. The path my autobiography took will make this category seem common, but it is the case in considerably less than 1% of the w-dimensions in which Mark Anderson ever existed.

2. I had been alive and well, but I'd told my families that I was going on a Voyage of Discovery and had then left. There are only five dimensions that this happened in. Five is a truly insignificant number, but this category will be described because of its prior inclusion in my ascendancy, and because of the unusual plans I have already started acting on in these dimensions.

3. My body died in either the Casino Kidnappers' basement or the CIA's underground lab.

4. I suicided as a depressed kid, either in the bathtub or menswear store.

5. I remained alive and single-minded, until very recently completely unaware of the importance of déjà vu's. Also included in this category because their family circumstances are similar enough to that of the single-minded Marks are two more small groups: the few remaining two-minded Marks, and the 42,000 Marks who were very recently upgraded to eight minds. The former additional group hasn't had enough power to change their situation, and the latter hasn't had enough time.

6. Mark Anderson, and often his entire family, never existed.

For the sake of completeness, I'll mention that there are dimensions in which Mark had experiences very different than those described herein. For example, dimensions in which Binion's Casino had gone out of business before I had a chance to play roulette there. Those Marks had tried other ways to make the money to buy a home large enough for both families, sometimes causing their lives to deviate considerably from the path you're now familiar with, and requiring different actions from me now.

There are other dimensions that are even odder, such as where Mom and Dad's first child - born about the same date as me - was a girl. Or when Donna was substituted with a boy, or where I fell off my bike at the age of eleven and was badly injured by a car whose driver was following too inattentively, or many other variations.

Each of the individual variations tends not to occur often, but there are so many different variations that it's impractical to describe them. In some of those dimensions I'll do nothing, in others my actions will be similar to one of the other above listed categories, or maybe my actions will be entirely different. In reality I have no need to categorize my actions as I have enough attention to do whatever I want in every individual dimension. The above categories are autobiographical simplifications required to present you with easily understood descriptions. By the time I've described the six sets of actions, you'll understand my style well enough.

The rest of this and the next few chapters are about Category #1, where: "I am alive and well with multiple minds, up to thirty two of them until the very recently." It will be the 32-minded Marks that you'll be most familiarity with, but this category also includes Marks with sixteen down to three minds.

Earlier in this document I made a metaphorical comment about the Voyage of Discovery "sailing into homeport, dropping anchor and paying off its captain." That'd been a month ago, just after exams had finished. I'd reached 1,792 minds, the number that I'd thought all the other Marks would stop just short of, whereupon we'd all live happily ever after. I'd honestly thought the Voyage was over, but subsequent gains in understanding the Universe and my abilities had restarted the Voyage. Not only "restarted", but had accelerated it to ever-greater achievements.

The last three days had given me an explosion of increased understanding of the Universe, and massively increased ability to control it by using that understanding and my vastly increased willpower. Godhood - where I could see the big picture so clearly that I understood and could manipulate the Universe's fundamental structure - had arrived only a few hours ago. (I paused after writing the previous chapter and before starting the events of this chapter. I took the time to think about my families more carefully before I started affecting their lives, and did a little preparation for it to, as you'll read.)

It was barely over a week ago that I'd exceeded a hundred thousand minds, and only a day ago that I'd exceeded a million. The final rush happened so fast and the power gained so incredible that my families' understanding of my abilities has been left far behind. Of the dimensions in this category, that's especially true for the families of Marks that'd had only three to eight minds until all of my minds were connected to my super-network a few hours ago.

Even less up to speed with me than my families is the general public. In those dimensions where we'd had thirty two minds and had assumed the identity of Ronald Fisher, we'd nearly always used the "Angel Plan" to bring Mark Anderson back. Part of that plan was having the Guardian Angel (we claimed) fly us around so we could use NP in public. The angel's flying service and our doing very well at OSU are the only ways the publics know of our uniqueness (I like the phrase "our uniqueness", as it's both true and a contradiction). In dimensions in which we had fewer than thirty two minds, the public - other than a few excited academicians - know nothing about our being special, so they're not up to any sort of speed about us.

In the following section, I'm going to quote from a conversation representative of what I told my families in the Category #1 dimensions. I've chosen a 32-minded Mark as that representative. He's not an average Mark for this category, but choosing a lower-minded Mark would mean his families were far less prepared for his being so special, so the conversation would include more expressions of disbelief, incredulity, amazement, etc. You'll read about those when I discuss some of the other categories, so I'll save you from them here. Most of the families of 32-minded Marks know he can fly himself and others around, and some of them - in the first few thousand dimensions which had their Mark connected to the super-network, which started with the Second-Tier Helpers - know that he has very recently learned to teleport and multi-task his mind FAR more than previously, but those abilities are the most impressive that they know about. Those Marks hadn't told their families how many threads he could consciously process, because "A trillion", would have been hard for anyone to swallow, and that value is conservative because if a Mark got busy, he could keep creating new minds. There was no practical limit.

As usual, in the following conversation I'll take the viewpoint of the Mark involved, calling him "I" and "me"; his mother will be "Mom", etc. It's effectively true now, in a weird way, because we all share everything. All of my minds throughout the Universe are linked, we don't care who controls our bodies, and there's nothing special about any of us. Each body has to have a mind attached to it, and from that mind's perspective that Felicity might or might not be his native mother, but more often than not one of the disembodied minds anywhere else in the Universe is controlling that Mark-body anyway. The super-network is collectively running our bodies, and somewhere in the network will be the Mark that can call each Felicity "Mom".

I requested a Family Meeting to start an hour before our usual dinnertime, also telling Mom and Vanessa, "Don't worry about cooking dinner tonight. I'll be providing that as part of the meeting's explanation."

Because this was taking place in a dimension of a Mark who has a very similar life to that of the Voyager's before he'd rolled those fateful dice, the definition of "family" now includes Nevaeh, making ten of us. From the Adults' House: Mom, Dad, Vanessa and Prof; and from the Kids' House: Carol, Julia, Ava, Nevaeh, Donna, and last but very definitely not least, me.

Speaking of me, as I tend to do in this autobiography (although this section is about a Mark who is representing this category of family circumstance), it will be the mind who was born in this dimension who will be leading the conversation during the family meeting. Our super-network's total sharing makes our previous number-name system irrelevant, but by the old system, it will be #1 who will be speaking. For the first time in any of our external conversations, it was important to get the right perspective - you'll see why soon. By the way, before the super-network invalidated the naming system, do you know what was the last number-name of the mind that is the focus of this autobiography? It wasn't #1 because he'd several times merged into other bodies; his very first merge made him #2, and that number had changed several times since. I find it amusing that for a long time this autobiography hasn't bothered identifying the individual person it's meant to be focused on. I won't give you the answer because it hasn't mattered for years, and totally doesn't matter since godhood was achieved. You've got no idea how many copies of that mind there are, how many of them have bodies, where in the Universe the minds and bodies are, and what they're doing. And even if you did know, many of the answers are constantly changing. Other than your not knowing who I am, where I am, what I'm doing, how many of me there are, and whether it's still me who is writing now, this autobiography is otherwise completely accurate.

As you might have noticed in the list of meeting attendees, Donna is part of the Kids' household. She's turning into a nice young woman whose company we enjoy more and more, so we recently made her very happy by offering a Kids' bedroom to her for one of her 16th birthday presents; 16 being the age when it's no longer illegal for her to have sex with me. Her birthday isn't for another week yet but from the above list you can see where she's already living. She unofficially moved in a week ago. She started moving some of her stuff down, telling Mom, "It's to make it easier for me later, Mom." One of the things she moved down was herself, which certainly will make it easier for her later.

Donna has her own bedroom in the Kids' House which she is meant to sleep in most nights so she doesn't intrude on the rest of our relationships, that instruction especially coming from Mom, but so far she's slept with all of us twice as often as she's slept in her room, plus the one night she slept in the Adults' house to keep up the pretense with the parents that she hasn't moved in with us yet. There's already so many of us sleeping in our room that one more doesn't intrude. To keep our individual relationships strong my girls and I frequently pair up, in all the possible combinations, and have "Quality Time" nights in one of the other bedrooms. There's no schedule for that, just whenever someone feels it might be a good idea with someone else, but it's become quite a frequent event since Nevaeh moved in because having five people seemed to tip a balance so that we all feel the need to deliberately have pairing-up times.

Our relationship with Nevaeh doesn't have the same emotional depth that we have with Ava, and certainly not the depth we have within the two families, but she's living with us and included in almost everything we do. To be candid, she's with us in part because she's pleasant and compliant. She totally believes that I can't do anything morally wrong, so she unquestionably does whatever I want and will swallow any explanation I give her, although it's rare that any is needed. There's one major way in which she's not part of my families: she thinks all 'my' abilities are performed for me by the very cooperative Guardian Angel. There'd been no pressing reason to tell her otherwise, and there'd been a very real risk that her learning that her relationship with us was built on a very big lie would make her angry enough to flip out and blab the secret to everyone. My newly gained godlike abilities include being able to totally control and edit minds of as many people as I want, so that risk has now been eliminated. I included Nevaeh in the invitation for the family meeting, happy that she'll finally learn the truth.

I started the family meeting by saying, "Nevaeh, what I'm going to talk about will be completely new to you so many of my comments will seem confusing. 95% of what I'll be saying will be new to everyone else too, and I'll be providing them with so much explanation that it should fill in the gaps for you. If you hear something you don't understand, please just let me carry on because it'll probably come clear to you a few minutes later."

"Okay. This sounds like it's going to be even more wonderful than you normally are." Nevaeh was the only member of my audience who was so easily optimistic. She'd missed out on the times when we'd been under serious threat from the Government's several surveillance operations and forceful intrusions, the crackpot snipers, the Mossad's operation, and other assorted threats. My families hadn't forgotten those times so they were more concerned now, despite my saying "Don't worry" when I'd rebuffed their earlier requests for more information about the purpose of this meeting.

"It's VERY wonderful, Nevaeh. My next comments won't make sense to you, but sit tight and they will eventually.

^-- To everyone else I said, "You know that I have refused to talk about the source of what has made me special. I kept it secret because if it'd become public knowledge it would've quickly led to the destruction of human civilization. I've very recently found a way to block that outcome from happening, so it's now safe to tell you how I became so unique." Prof's proximity reading showed GREAT excitement.

Because I haven't totally disabled déjà vu's, my publishing the autobiography of my path to godhood in some dimensions might lead some desperate people to commit suicide in an attempt to follow my path. I'm choosing to not stop such attempts because there won't be anywhere near enough of them to damage civilization to any degree, especially because no one in any dimension will be acquiring special abilities to demonstrate that such suicides work. As my autobiography becomes world famous on the millions of Earths where I'll publish it, some attention-seekers might lie about their being more powerful, but a simple EEG will debunk those claims.

I continued, "You know that several years ago I was a socially inept, unhappy boy. The following will seem strange to you and it's an unpleasant topic, but it's an essential part of how I became who I am, so I have to tell it to you straight. On November 19, 2003 I committed suicide. You may remember what happened on that date, Mom. I told you I had to take a couple of days off school because I'd fallen and hurt one of my balls and I'd messed my pants with the pain..."

"I remember," said Mom, "but what you're saying doesn't make sense."

"It will. I hadn't fallen and hurt a ball the way I said. What I'd done is sat in a bath of warm water and slit my wrists. I very nearly bled out and died, and was so weak that I couldn't go to school until I recovered, so I lied about the fall.

^-- "I gained my first abilities that day. They were small and I hadn't discovered things like NP or blobs yet. Mostly what I gained was what appeared to be a huge increase in my intelligence. My apparent increase in IQ wasn't actually to do with IQ. What it was caused by is something I'll explain shortly.

^-- "I felt even more cut off from other people after my IQ and observation skills rose, and I committed suicide again on February 22, 2005. I was better prepared that time and used a poison that I'd been carrying while I waited for the right time, which happened to be when I was in a menswear store. I had a fairly quick acting antidote with me too, which allowed me to recover within a few hours. That suicide increased my abilities even further.

^-- "This sounds illogical, but I truly did commit suicide on both those occasions, and I truly did recover from them too. What I'm saying is true because there was more than one 'I'. The Mark Anderson that walked out of the menswear store was the sole survivor of four near-identical Mark Andersons. Four of me had sat in four bathtubs and slit their wrists. Two had died and two had survived. The two survivors had both obtained the poison and antidote, and at the right time, they'd both taken it in the menswear store. One of the Marks died, the other - me - took the antidote and survived.

^-- "I can see that Prof is starting to suspect the idea. It's ALL about 'Parallel Dimensions'. I see that everyone else is looking blank so I'll explain what they are..." I went on to do so. It's surprisingly difficult to get people who don't read as widely as they should to grasp that concept, but I eventually managed to convey the idea. It was a tedious segment of our conversation and I'll assume you've managed to grasp that concept by this point in my autobiography, so I'll not record my explanation of it.

I continued, "Now you understand that there are billions of parallel dimensions, I'll supply a key piece of information: déjà vu. That's the very weird feeling you get when you think you've already lived something before. It feels like some sort of short-circuit in your brain. Do you all know what I mean?"

There were several nodes and comments that showed understanding, so I continued, "Good. Déjà vu isn't you experiencing something that you've done before. It's your mind being linked with the mind of another you in a parallel dimension. It's the confusion caused by having two almost identical but VERY slightly different minds in your head: your own mind plus a temporary copy of the other person's mind. You misinterpret the 'echo' as something you've done before, but it's really just two minds that are very slightly out of sync with each other." Most of the weirdness of the déjà vu experience for one-minded people is caused by the refreshing copies arriving, but I was simplifying the unimportant details.

^-- "When I committed suicide in the bathtub, out of pure luck I had a déjà vu very near the end, so I was linked to another me who was also committing suicide in a bathtub. He'd cut his wrists a little deeper than I had and he died during our déjà vu. Normally when déjà vu ends, the temporary copies of the minds in each other's heads are erased, but that wasn't the case if the owner died before the déjà vu ended. When the other Mark died, the copy of his mind stayed permanently in my mind.

^-- "I discovered the second Mark Anderson's mind in me, and our minds started talking together. Out loud initially, and later just by thinking words back and forth. We enjoyed it, so I wrapped clothes around my wrists to stop the bleeding, and I managed to clean up and get myself to bed. I kept it a secret, obviously. I had suicide cuts on my wrists and had a new voice in my head, so I would've been committed to a mental hospital if I'd said anything.

^-- "Over the next few weeks my apparent increase in IQ was mostly due to my having two of me to work things out. That's a huge help because I could discuss problems back and forth, which often popped up new ideas. The result of my IQ test was mostly because my minds leapfrogged each other down the questions in the test, so I got twice as many of them done in the same time..."

I was interrupted by Prof's chuckling, which gave Julia the chance to declare, "That's why you sometimes say 'we' when you're talking about yourself."

"Yep. We try not to, but it sometimes slips out."

Prof declared, "THAT'S why you could read so many computer screens at a time! There are more than one of you?"

"On the money, Prof. One mind per screen. Initially their memories were separate but we managed to overcome that separation, so what one mind learned we all learned."

"But you can read a phenomenal number of screens now, and you don't even have to be in the same room."

"I'll get to that."

"Did the one that died have a family, Mark?" asked Mom, suddenly grasping that aspect of the situation.

"Even worse than that, Mom, because it wasn't just one other Mark that suicided, but billions of them. Just over 170 billion, in fact. Déjà vu's occur at very similar times across similar dimensions, and about 68 billion of the suiciding Marks had déjà vu's as one of them died, so 34 billion of them survived with two minds in their heads, 34 billion of them had their bodies die but each of their minds lived on inside another body, and 102 billion of them simply died as people normally do when they suicide.

^-- "In every respect that matters, all of those suiciding Marks had lives which were virtually identical to mine. They had a mom called Felicity Anderson, and nearly everything else was the same too. Whichever one of their Carols or Donnas used the bathroom first after school that day would have discovered their brother's body in the bathtub..."

I'll spare you the next several minutes of the conversation. In my desire to make sure everyone understood the situation, I'd probably been unwise to mention Carols or Donnas finding my bodies. The Anderson family got quite upset and the conversation became very unpleasant for a while, especially after they remembered that I'd committed suicide again in the menswear store.

I strongly urged them to get over it, including saying, "It's ANCIENT history as far as our family's situation and my mental health is concerned. I don't have ANY reason to be depressed these days! I fully acknowledge that I've left a lot of pain behind me. The reason for this conversation is so I can start making good on some of that. I especially need Prof's and Vanessa's help with that, and they need to understand what the cost has been so they can make a good decision about something I'll bring up later. I know that it's an extremely unpleasant topic, but there are strong reasons why I have to be totally honest about it. There's a lot more explanation to come yet, so it'd be best if you please withhold your reactions as best you can until you've got the full picture."

Mom would've preferred to let her emotions vent, but she managed to restrain herself.

"The four minds I had at that point of my life weren't just four consciouses. They came with all their subconsciouses, memories, mental skills, etc. They were all Mark Andersons, but there were slight differences between them, not that those differences mattered much as we were more than 99% the same person. As well as making me seem even more intelligent, they also had a marvelous effect on my physical coordination. My agility and dexterity improved greatly because I could better control my body, so I got very good at sports.

^-- "You've heard that a positive mental attitude can help keep you healthy, or a negative attitude can lead to sickness. It's true that the subconscious has a large influence over the body, although it's at lower levels than most people claim. I had four subconsciouses and they had enough combined power to force my body to change in many ways. My subconsciouses knew what I wanted, so my pimples cleared up, I got stronger and fitter, my shoulders got wider, my broken arm healed faster, etc. Those changes were all achieved by natural processes, but pushed by so much subconscious mental force that my body had to cooperate. I did get somewhat more intelligent too, because brains are part of a body. My body got more efficient, so my brain got more efficient. It might've been worth something like an extra 10 IQ points. Increased physical coordination, body sculpting, and an apparently higher IQ - mostly from my having four minds capable of doing four times as much thinking in the same time - were the only abilities that I knew I had at that time.

^-- "A month after my second 'merge' - as I call them - one of the best events in my four lives happened: Annette Neumeyer tried to humiliate me at school, which led directly to Julia learning that my buttons were hers to press. Julia entered my life and pretty much took control of it, which I definitely needed at that time." To Julia, I solemnly said, "You changed my life TOTALLY, darling. I was desperately unhappy until you entered my life. I'll never be able to thank you enough for the help you've given me..."

Julia disagreed, "You've given me FAR more than I've EVER given you. I'm honored to be allowed to be part of your life. I'm nothing special, but you're INCREDIBLE..."

"And I owe it ALL to you! I'd be..."

"You would've done it anyway. You were too smart not to have woken up to your own potential..."

You know how it goes. After another back and forth and a mutual hug, I returned to the main thread, "Another MAJOR event occurred in my life a week after the MAJOR event that was Julia's and my first date. It was when I went to my first Aikido lesson. I still had my arm in a cast so I could only watch it, but I learned something incredibly important. There's a type of concentration that aikidoka adopt when they're training. They call it 'being centered', and it's a slightly altered state of consciousness very similar to meditation. When I tried it for the first time, I made an amazing discovery. I didn't understand it until recently, but the Universe is fundamentally conscious. It doesn't have a personality or think for itself, but it is aware and it responds to living creatures' consciousnesses. Prof, have you heard of Schrödinger's Cat?"

"Yes, but I can't remember what it was about."

"It's about the Universe not deciding on an outcome until it's observed. We'll have a talk about the science behind all of this later. For now I'll just say that the Universe treats consciousness far more importantly than anyone other than me knows. I had four consciousnesses, and when I was 'centered' in the Aikido style, my consciouses were able to interact with the Universe in ways no human mind has ever been powerful enough to do before."