Chapter 434: Single-Minded Marks; The Williamses at Refuge

Friday, July 25, 2008 (Continued)

Before they could get worried that I was some sort of alien out to kidnap them, I kidnapped them, teleporting them and Prof's walking stick to their Refuge's living room. I also teleported myself, making me appear standing behind a sofa several feet away from them, at human-normal size and with the face and body shape that I'd used in my 32-minded dimensions, although the fine details of my body were hidden under my clothes.

The room's décor and the spectacular views outside - it was after dinner but there was still light because it was summer - distracted everyone initially, then Julia spotted me. She questioned, "Mark?"

"Yes. This isn't how you remember me looking, but this is a combination of how I naturally look, my idealized vision of myself, and alterations ordered by many Julias, such as wanting me to be four inches taller than I had naturally been and a number of other changes. I could look like whatever I wanted, from a tiny homunculus to someone the size of a planet, but for everyday use all the Marks have standardized on this appearance. Apart from anything else, their Julias insist on it.

^-- "To explain where we are now. I recently built this for the three of you and for my family to share and use whenever you and we want. I call it 'Refuge', which isn't a name that has much relevance in this dimension. In other dimensions - where Mark slowly gained his powers - he, his family and your counterparts had some very bad experiences with the Government and other troublemakers, so the name 'Refuge' has more meaning for them.

^-- "There are a number of aspects to this home which are very unusual, in addition to its being 9.6 million light-years from Earth. It's highly adaptable, highly intelligent, and each room is spread north and south roughly in the same longitude, connected by an instant teleportation service..." I went on the give them the Grand Tour, including the excursion to see aliens but concentrating only on those Refuge rooms which were relevant to this family.

One major exception from the Grand Tour described earlier was that I'd not bothered to create the floating castle yet because this Julia had her own bedroom. Although what most caught her attention was her closet full of clothes duplicated from the closets of all the high-spending Julias. This Julia was BLOWN AWAY by the clothes, especially after I assured her that they really were all hers, and that she could come here whenever she wanted to choose an outfit to wear for the day back on Earth. This Julia, if she was anything like the Julia I first got to know, doubtless spent far too much money on clothes. But however much she spent, she was still very financially limited as well as mostly restricted to the range offered in Oregon. Her closet now provided her with thousands of outfits chosen from the best the world had to offer, and without regard to cost. She thought she'd died and gone to Heaven. (To be fair, maybe not "thousands of outfits"; it just seemed like it.)

While she was rapturously looking through her outfits, I added, "Whenever any Julia in another dimension buys a new dress and brings it into her Refuge closet, a copy of it will appear on this rack here," I pointed at an empty section "in every other Julia's Refuge closet, including yours. If one of you likes it chances are all of you will, but if you don't just tell the house to dispose of it. Your closet can hold millions of outfits though, so I'll imagine you'll keep nearly all of them. The only clothes I won't be duplicating are those that would cause problems, such as unique creations that someone else in your dimension has bought." I couldn't resist ending with, "Imagine how much shopping time this'll save you!"

Julia was confused by my last comment, no doubt because she was already thinking that now she had to spend even more time researching the fashion market, because she had vastly more clothing choices and therefore much more difficult decisions to make. There were some major changes of image possible because of this array of clothing, and as you know, image is very important. Once this Julia is wealthy and used to the "New Clothes Automatically Appear" system, I expect she'll ask for a time delay on it, to give her time to enjoy buying them herself.

Prof understood an important implication though, and thought it was well worth double-checking. He asked, "And save money too. I understand that correctly, don't I?"

"Yes. You won't have to pay for any of those dresses, and there'll be more than enough of them that Julia won't need to spend anything on clothes in the future. Unfortunately that's predicated on Julia's shopping being from need rather than enjoyment. Knowing Julia the way I do, she'll still do just as much shopping and you won't save a dime.

^-- "The good news is that you'll have an infinite supply of dimes so it won't matter. You can be as rich as you want to be now. When you get back home, buy the mineral rights to an area of land somewhere and I'll create some incredibly valuable mineral deposits under it. Or go deep-sea fishing and I'll make sure you catch a large shark. In its belly will be several huge uncut diamonds of perfect color and clarity. If you go shopping at someone's garage sale and buy a couple of paintings, I'll make sure there are highly valuable lost masterpieces behind them. You get the idea: if you want more money, let me know and I'll arrange for you to trip over it. It's very easy for me: in some of the first dimension in which a meeting like this is happening, the crystal vase that Vanessa's rose appeared in was made out of diamond, but none of the Vanessas noticed so we stopped bothering with that, just copying an existing vase we'd like the look of. My point being that making diamonds is very easy."

^-- They had doubts, so I added, "As diamonds are a girl's best friend, and seeing as how there are two girls here..." I created two giant diamonds, with the same height, width and depth as each 'girl', Julia's with a pink and Vanessa's with a blue sheen. That was a LOT of diamond - over half a million carats in each of them! The Williamses were very impressed.

^-- "It'd probably be more social trouble than it's worth, but to give you an idea of what I can do, I could easily create a spectacular diamond which is beautiful in the usual way diamonds are and more believably sized at something like 100 to 200 carats, but which gives out more light than it should, in proportion to how much in love the person holding it is. I would imagine that one magically unique 'Love Diamond' would keep Julia in dresses for a VERY long time. Possibly even in shoes as well." It'd be extremely easy to create, merely by putting a micro-version of my mind in the diamond, with it reading the amount of love in the mind of the person holding it, and proportionately powering a light blob inside the diamond.

"That's a WONDERFUL idea," said Julia, visibly impressed by the romanticism of it. She wasn't romantically swept away by me; only the Love Diamond idea. This Julia had no romantic thoughts toward me yet, and I was making no effort whatsoever to encourage her to have them. I was treating all of her family equally because it was far too early for me to single out Julia for romantic attention. It would have been counterproductive to attempt anything at all until she liked me. One thing I've learned about girls is that while one-night stands can be for purely physical reasons; high quality, long-term relationships have to start with a very solid foundation of mutual liking, respect and then affection. The more time you put into preparing a good foundation before introducing sex, the better the relationship will likely be.

Prof asked, "Why would you go out of your way to make us rich?"

"Because your family and mine will become extraordinarily good friends. That's happened in every one of billions of dimensions where our families overlapped. That was in the days when I was only slightly unusual so there might be a different dynamic now, but I doubt very much that'll make any difference. With that assumption understood, there are two reasons I'd make you rich:

^-- "First, billions of your counterparts have been incredibly helpful and supportive for me. I know you personally haven't done anything, but you're the same quality of people so you would've done the same if you'd had the opportunity.

^-- "Second, because many other Williamses said I should include families like yours. They're very important to me, so what they want, they get; especially when it's so easy and fun for me to provide it. I'm going to enjoy thinking of all sorts of strange ways to make millions or billions of dollars."

Vanessa pointed out, "People will get suspicious if more than a couple of those types of unlikely good fortunes occur to us."

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean they'd all be used on your family, but on all the other Williams families that are in the same situation that you are now. I've got a terminology problem. When I think 'I', I'm not real thinking about the physical Mark you see standing in front of you. I create and cancel my bodies so often that I no longer identify myself with them..." I created four more Marks, all differently dressed, then removed the original and all but one of the others, who kept on talking.

^-- " ... Which only leaves identifying myself with my mind. But it's permanently linked to trillions of other minds and we're also constantly creating and canceling individual minds. My minds don't care about canceling themselves when they finish their tasks because they're not invested in themselves at the individual level. It's the trillion-mind collective that I identify with, so when I said, 'I was going to enjoy thinking of strange ways to make billions, ' the 'I' I was referring to was however many of those minds that want to participate in thinking up those strange moneymaking ideas for you and all the other Williams families that other versions of me are having this conversation with. I probably should refer to myself as 'we', but if I said, 'We should do something, ' then you're going to think the 'we' means you and me, which would confuse you even worse. The English language doesn't have the plural form of 'I' or the other things it needs to handle my situation.

^-- "At the risk of turning this into somewhat of a mini-lecture, let me add a couple of thoughts about my mind cancellations which will give you some extra understanding of my situation. I - or I should say 'we' as that plural will work better in this context - cancel our minds willy-nilly. We're no longer worried about making sure the original mind from each dimensions' Earth stays alive as all of those memories are now stored in the collective. We recently set up a sort of memory repository, so we don't have to keep track of the existence of individual Mark-minds, and we've even more recently added a function so any of us can instantly adopt the knowledge and personality of any other one of us by copying it out of the memory bank.

^-- "Our personalities were similar to start with and are now averaging into a few dozen of the most common versions depending on which set of memories they most identify with, so there's nothing unique about most of us. With so many dimensions involved, there are usually a few exceptions to my general descriptions, so there are a few unique Marks for special reasons, but none of them apply here. The individual mind that's talking to you right this instant isn't the one that was born in your Corvallis, but I've got access to his memories so it makes no real difference. There are several copies of this dimension's original Mark-mind doing various things. When they're finished their tasks, and finish any subsequent tasks they take on, they'll cancel themselves and there'll be none of the original mind for this dimension left, and it won't matter. With nothing to make any of the Marks individually important, any of them can be canceled without a moment's regret. Or maybe they'll hang around just to participate in this conversation from time to time. All of my minds share all of our bodies, so it's like a very cooperative version of Musical Chairs, it's especially cooperative because my minds don't care whether they have a chair or not.

^-- "To be complete, quite a few of my minds aren't sharing their memories. Those are minds that are collecting information private to other people. There are mainly two types of minds that have their memories inaccessible to the rest of us: butlers and bodyguards.

^-- "There's a mind in charge of each of the rooms in this house. For your privacy, the house's minds don't share their observations or memories with any other mind. They've been edited to have zero prurience, certainly don't have any distracting hormones, are totally trustworthy, etc., so they can be thought of as utterly discreet butlers. It's not unreasonable to think of them as computers that run the rooms.

^-- "In the dimensions where the families have known Mark for some time, every member of those Anderson and Williams families has a Mark-mind floating invisibly overhead of them as a bodyguard. They're VERY good at that job. We've looked through every coroners' report we could find as a double-check, and there isn't a single cause of death I've ever heard of that the bodyguards won't be able to stop in time. Whether a firearms attack, accidental food poisoning, or even if World War III starts with a surprise attack on Corvallis, no cause can kill anyone that my minds are protecting. Even minor problems such as car accidents and bee stings will be guarded against. If your lives and this dimension's Andersons get intertwined, I'll offer bodyguards to you too. Let me show you a few more rooms, and then I'll introduce you to versions of yourselves so they can tell you about their experiences."

When their Grand Tour was over and we were back in Refuge's living room, I said, "I'd like to introduce you to some of my best friends." I teleported in a Williams family that'd agreed to help convince an 'ignorant' family. The three pairings were differently dressed so I didn't have to put red armbands or something similar on my helpers to prevent them losing track of each other.

I explained, "I don't think the traditional introduction process has much point here, so I'll just say that the new arrivals are copies of a Williams family from another dimension. They fully experienced my life over the last few years. Sometimes too fully, but I'll leave them to talk about that. You should all find this conversation rather interesting, and hopefully it'll be a useful way for the inexperienced-about-me Williamses to learn about me."

Imagine if you and your family were suddenly face to face with your identical clones: there was some initial disorientation and confused/amused greetings. Once everyone had accepted the situation, the two pairs of parents settled into facing sofas and the experienced Vanessas ordered coffees and nibbles in preparation for a long chat.

The experienced Julia wasted no time grabbing her about-to-be-enlightened counterpart, pulling her to the far end of the living room where she ordered the house to create a two-seater sofa, Experienced-Julia having had no difficulty grasping the concept of her being able to tell my minds what to do. She sat her twin down, opened her satchel to extract her prepared notes and many items of memorabilia - photos, letters, newspaper articles, TV recordings, etc. - and set about the task of educating the Inexperienced-Julia about how wonderful I was.

It'd make the conversations go easier if I left, so I announced, "I'll leave you to it. Experienced-Julia, please don't overload Inexperienced-Julia too much. You don't have to turn her world upside-down immediately. The education process can occur over weeks or months."

Experienced-Julia replied, "She wouldn't forgive me if I didn't explain what she's missing out on as quickly as possible. She's lost three very important years of her life with you already, and I'm not going to allow that tragedy to continue any longer."

"My godhood certainly hasn't changed your loyalty or obedience I see. I'll leave her to your tender mercies then."

"Godhood?" queried Inexperienced-Vanessa.

I answered, "By any practical definition, Vanessa, because of the extent of my powers. As you heard, my claiming godhood doesn't stop Experienced-Julia telling me how she wants some things to be done, so you don't have to worry about me being a megalomaniacal madman. I'm a teenage boy who has recently acquired godhood and I can't imagine anyone more in need of guidance about life than me. I have some amazing ways of accessing information and learning things, but I'm sure there are ways of thinking about them that have never occurred to me. But for now, I'll leave you to your discussion."

Experienced-Julia said, "We'll need you back in about an hour Mark, so you can take us to bed."

Inexperienced-Julia hadn't been thinking about me in that way AT ALL - not even a little bit - so hearing that her other self's statement came as a considerable surprise. She stated very firmly, "I DON'T think so! I've got a boyfriend who..."

Experienced-Julia interrupted, " ... who isn't as good at ANYTHING as Mark is! Trust me on this: whoever your boyfriend is, you're dumping him as soon as you get home."

"You don't even know who he is."

"That doesn't matter. It's like I've got a wedding dress being designed for me by the top five designers in the world working together, and they're doing an absolutely incredible job, but you're complaining that I haven't looked at a dress you've seen in the local Kmart's bargain bin. There's NO point in my looking at what you've got, the dress or the boyfriend.

^-- "From what I understand of the way dimensions work, I probably know your boyfriend, but I don't care who he is. He's irrelevant. The only thing that's going to happen here is my explaining how wonderful Mark is until you understand, and then you're going to give yourself to him for the rest of your life. The only doubt I have is over how long it'll take me to get that across to you. I think that an hour should do it."

<Experienced-Julia doesn't doubt we'll accept the new Julia. We will, of course, I just find it amusing that Julia doesn't think to question that.>

<What I find amusing is our belief that we needed to take things very slowly and carefully with Inexperienced-Julia so we built a good foundation to our relationship with her. A minute ago I would've sworn that the Experienced-Julias made it possible for us to learn that lesson, but apparently it doesn't apply to the Julias themselves.>

Inexperienced-Julia wasn't sure how to respond to herself's ridiculously extreme statement, so I seized the momentary gap to tell Experienced-Julia, "First, you don't need to tell me a time you want me back; just tell the house when you want me to come and I will. It doesn't matter if I'm busy because either another of my existing minds will step in, or one of me will create a new mind to do so.

^-- "Second, the reason I got the two families together was to help bring the inexperienced family up to speed in an interesting and effective way. Go easy with pushing your agenda please, Julia. You can be quite fearsome when you're on a crusade you believe in strongly. I understand you think you're helping your counterpart, but she's already frazzled and you've barely started."

^-- I turned to Inexperienced-Julia, telling her, "This is your family's Refuge, so you can un-invite your counterpart if she pressures you too much. Just tell the house to send her back to her own Refuge. Either that or ask the house to dump a bucket of cold water on her. Okay?"

"I thought the house was run by copies of you. You wouldn't really do those things to your girlfriend would you?"

"It's important that your home is YOURS, so the minds here will obey you unless the reason not to is much stronger than another Julia getting wet.

^-- "It feels strange to warn you about your own personality, but you Julias can get very carried away sometimes. Don't let your enthusiastic twin pressure you more than you're comfortable with."