Chapter 3: The Second Day

Thursday, November 20, 2003

I woke about 3am, having had enough sleep by then. I felt good, without any sense of weakness or tiredness. It was a good time to plan the future, and to start having quality time with my other self.

Planning the next day (today now) was easy, as I needed to stay at home. It'd be fairly easy to get one more day off school, but beyond that would be difficult as Mom would start insisting on taking me to the doctor. I felt good enough to go back to school, but the scars were going to take months to fade so would be a long-term risk. We agreed that we'd probably get away with it though. Between long-sleeved shirts being normal attire in November and December, and people not looking closely at the undersides of other people's forearms, I was probably safe until late spring. There was only one serious problem: PE (Physical Education).

After some back and forth discussion (can it be called that when no distance seems to be involved?) we worked out what we thought would be a good solution. It was to stretch the cover story I was already using. I'd make sure to show my parents that I was getting better, but that running or other vigorous physical activity still remained painful. I'd get Mom to write a vague note explaining my absence from school for some undisclosed medical reason, and to add that I was to be "excused from PE until further notice". I'd tell her that'd be when I judged I was cured enough, which I'd let her think would only be a few days, but I could delay for months if necessary. If the cuts healed fast enough I might be able to restart PE when the next term started after Christmas, but if not I'd keep relying on Mom's note.

I'd prefer not to restart PE at all, as I didn't enjoy it, but it'd be best to get back to it as soon as the cuts were discreet enough. If Mom ever found out that I was permanently skipping PE - and moms are too good at finding out stuff like that - then I'd be in hot water.

I had the idea of using the internet to research how to make cuts and scars heal as fast as possible. We've only got one computer and it's kept in a corner of the dining room so everyone can share it, so it'd be best to wait until everyone had gone to work or school.

I also made a mental note to remember to wash the bloodstained clothes in the bag under my bed.

Having two voices in my head might normally have been considered a problem, but we liked it. We thought our only problem was the scars. If they were recognized as suicide scars, they'd cause me a great deal of trouble. I started thinking of some possible solutions:

• Getting tattoos to cover/disguise/incorporate the scars. Putting a tattoo over the scar didn't seem likely to work as people would want to look at the tattoo, and I didn't think it'd be completely effective at hiding the scar tissue. I thought of getting some strong and prominent images on the top side of each forearm, with a low-key background that wrapped around my entire arm and obscured the scars on the underside. The strong image on the top side of my arm would draw people's attention away from the underside. The right matched pair of images, for both arms, could be artistically really cool, but I bet Mom wouldn't see them that way!

• Cover the scars with flesh-colored makeup.

• I'd seen skin-colored Band-Aids advertised on TV. I'd need so much of it I hoped I could find some flesh-colored tape.

All these ideas had disadvantages, but no decision was needed yet so we changed the subject and started talking about the big issue. Why were there two of us? How did it happen? What did it mean? How long would it last? What problems could we expect? Etc.

We had fun talking about our "merging", as we started calling it. I (as #1) was very pleased by that name, as #2's suggesting it implied he considered me as an equal partner in this thing.

We wondered about the likelihood of merging. How many other people had it happened to?

It seemed obvious that dying was involved in the process. We couldn't tell whether suicide was required or if any type of death would suffice. We thought that surely death was death, no matter how caused. It wasn't as if suiciding people wish their minds to leave their bodies because, judging from our experience, they just wished their current life to end. You'd think non-suicidal people would be more likely to have their minds live on because they'd be trying to hang onto life.

Merging can't be as simple as one person dying so his bodiless mind somehow finds a home inside a parallel dimension's twin (as avid science fiction readers, the idea that #1 might have crossed to a parallel dimension had quickly occurred to us). If it only took dying to cross to a new dimension, then it should be a widely known event. Although it could only be widely known if such twins lived independent lives, including dying at random times. That appeared not to be the case, as our and our families' lives were so remarkably similar that it seemed likely that everyone's lives and deaths were too.

Maybe cross-dimensional twins nearly always die at the same time, so even if one of them did momentarily have two minds, he'd die a moment later and have no time to tell anyone. It seemed silly of the Universe to do something so fantastic as to have a mind cross to a new dimension only to have it die a few seconds later. And wouldn't that presumably just result in their minds finding yet more twins, as it wasn't sensible to assume there were only two instances of parallel dimensions.

Our not having heard about merging before implied that when people died in one dimension, they died in ALL dimensions. The obvious problem with this sensible idea being that we hadn't actually done that ourself; we'd died in #1's dimension but not #2's. It wasn't as if #2 had done anything extraordinary to break a Universal Law to permit his living, so people dying at different times had to be possible.

Maybe the trick was to have the surviving twin extremely close to death when the other dies? That could be unlikely enough to explain why we hadn't heard about merging before.

We started by calculating the odds of two individuals dying at the same time by assuming that one of them is dying (certain to happen sooner or later), and asking what's the chance the other is dying at the same time. Dying time divided by a life's duration, would be say 30 minutes (about how long we thought it'd take to bleed out sufficiently to die) divided by 70 years (life expectancy), gives roughly 1-in-1 million. That was a generous chance because we were allowing a full 30 minutes rather than the "instant of death". Allowing some time seemed fair as our deaths would've been separated by several minutes if #2 had let his body continue to bleed out.

The above calculation was certainly wrong because every year of a person's life doesn't have an equal probability of their dying. We didn't know what the statistics for that were, but there was another factor operating which swamped that similarity: we didn't believe our assumption that the timing of the second death was independent of the first. Our two lives and two deaths were extraordinarily similar. It seemed far more likely that if one individual in one dimension was dying, then his partner in the other dimension was probably dying in very much the same way, at very much the same time. We only had one sample, so we were very much guessing in the dark, but we guessed that the chance of partners dying very close together was probably at least a thousand times more likely, so at least 1-in-1000 (0.1%).

It was probably even higher than that, but that value was obviously already far too high because it would've created millions of merged people. We hadn't even heard of similar fictional ideas, so our calculation had to be wrong somewhere.

We discussed blood loss being a possible prerequisite for merging. We knew lack of blood caused problems for the brain, so there was a faint connection, but it was hardly a clear cause-and-effect sequence.

While tossing around possible ideas, one of us mentioned that he'd been experiencing déjà vu immediately before our merging.

<Me too!> yelled the other, silently.

We instantly knew we must have discovered an important factor. A déjà vu is so freakily unlikely and our having two of them is dramatically more so, they do involve brains, and they even involve a mental echo effect. Déjà vu MUST have been involved in our merging.

We worked out the chance of one of us experiencing the phenomenon at any specific moment in time, such as when dying. How long it lasts versus how often it seems to occur, say 20 seconds per 2 years, or roughly 1-in-3 million. So the chance of both of us experiencing it at the same time was 1-in-3 million times 1-in-3 million, or about 1-in-1E13 ("1E13" means a one followed by thirteen zeroes).

Figure in the odds of us both dying at almost the same time - call it the 0.1% we'd already guess at - then we had a chance of a merge as 1-in-1E16. Wow. No wonder we hadn't heard of it happening before! I knew the population of Earth was about 6 billion (6E9). Not only was my experience likely unique on Earth, but it'd take nearly two million Earth's full of people to make one of me! That made us feel amazingly special. I was a nobody at school, but absolutely unique on Earth.

^

[[We'd made several mistakes in our calculation.

The first type of mistake was too quickly making a simple assumption. We'd guessed that two Mark Anderson's had a 0.1% chance of dying at the same time, but we'd not thought about how many parallel dimensions there are. If there are an infinite number, then other Mark Andersons dying at the same time would be a certainty. Or, for all we'd known at the time, déjà vu echoes might be caused by there being thousands of Marks linked together, and maybe every second Mark had gained an extra mind at the same time we had. There were several possible complications of this type, all of which we didn't think of.

By stupid luck, we'd accidentally been right to visualize the problem as being between the two specific Marks having déjà vu together. But we'd failed to realize that déjà vu IS two minds synchronizing. We'd calculated that one person's chance of experiencing déjà vu while dying is 1-in-3E6, which is roughly correct. But then we'd squared the result to be the chance of the two minds experiencing it at the same time. It was wrong to do that. If one person is experiencing déjà vu, then his partner is ALWAYS doing so too, as that's what déjà vu is. So we got this term wrong by a factor of 3 million; oops.

Our guess of the chance of partners dying close together being 0.1% was - quite frankly - ridiculous. We were just pulling a number out of our shared ass. There can be quite large differences between two different dimensions' versions of the 'same' person, but NOT if they're having a déjà vu experience, as the inter-dimensional synchronization process only works between extraordinarily similar volumes of Consciousness. In those cases it's virtually 100% that if one partner is dying, so is the other one. Multiplying a number by 100% achieves nothing, so this term is pointless. We should've left it up our ass.

There is a death-related term that we should've used: the type of death required. It didn't have to be a suicide (we were right about that), but it did have to satisfy these requirements:

• The process of dying must not erratically change the mindset of either partner while he is dying, or the déjà vu link would be ruined. In practice, that means both participants had to accept their deaths because panic, excitement, fighting for survival, etc., would quickly ruin the link.

• The surviving participant had to be close enough to death to have the same accepting-death mindset as his partner, but also far enough away from it that he had time to change his mind about wanting to die, and to be able to stop it.

Murders were too dramatic, and by definition rather difficult to call off, so they either failed to result in a merge at all, or the longest surviving partner outlasted his twin by no more than a second or two. Death by natural causes was even harder to call off, and suicides usually failed because they often couldn't be aborted (gunshots, hanging, etc.) or didn't want to be aborted. Not the true suicides anyway; the ones that were deliberately ineffective because they were really calls for help failed to create merges because neither partner died.

Deaths which created a long-lasting merge were extraordinarily rare, about 1-in-100 million (1-in-1E8).

Thus the chance of our having merged was: 1-in-3E6 (chance of a déjà vu) times 1-in-E8 (chance of dying in a suitable manner during the déjà vu but being able to survive thereafter), equaled 1-in-3E14.

We had calculated the chance to be 1-in-E16, so we were only wrong by a factor of 33. Surprisingly close, but only by luck because we'd been miles off base in our thinking.

In practice there was no significant difference between the two answers. We HAD merged so that chance didn't matter, and both numbers were so astronomically small that they might as well have been zero as far as our ever meeting anyone like us. There was no point in our running around the neighborhood asking if anyone else had merged.

However, we later GREATLY appreciated that sharing déjà vu was 3 million times more likely than we'd calculated. It made the GREATEST POSSIBLE difference to our life, and to a surprisingly large number of other lives too.

To put these numbers into context, the current population of Earth is 6E9. The last merge would NOT have been 3E14/6E9=50,000 generations ago because the Earth's population is rising rapidly. The total number of people who have EVER lived on Earth is approximately 1E11, the equivalent of just 17 generations of the current population, which gives you an idea how incredibly fast the population has been rising recently.

With a 1-in-3E14 chance of a merge ever happening, and 1E11 people ever having lived on Earth, there was a 1-in-3,000 chance of it ever having occurred before, but that was just the start of the issue. If it did happen, the person would still need to be very lucky because either the cause of the aborted death could resume (whatever it was), or a new cause could develop. For example, mankind always has been and still is stupidly superstitious, so it's very easy to imagine the merged person dying because he either killed himself thinking he was cursed, or if he talked about having two minds, someone else killed him out of superstitious fear. Given some of the later things I lived through, being killed for superstitious reasons was all too likely.]]

^

Having completed our calculation, and having patted ourselves on our shared back for being so unique, our internal talk continued. One important subject was that #1 claimed his life was 99.9% the same as #2's. That was very interesting in two respects: that it was so high, and that it wasn't higher. In other words, that there were so many similarities was amazing, and that there were differences was amazing too, which meant it was totally amazing.

If our lives had been completely different we might have thought that #1 was a ghost haunting #2 for some reason, or some other vaguely similar idea. But the enormous similarities in our two lives precluded that, to our mutual relief.

<Are either of us delusional?>, we had both thought to wonder about ourself and the other guy.

We were pretty sure we were not. We had talked together so 'intimately' that delusion seemed wrong (you can't get much more intimate than sharing the same brain). The only explanation we could think of was that some sort of cross-dimensional mental travel had happened.

Across which dimension? Obviously not the dimension of space (the x, y, z coordinates that we're all used to). We both lived at the same street number, street, city, state and country, went to schools with the same name, etc. To try and suggest that we lived in different places in the space dimension required a complete duplication of a great deal of geography, and was as silly as suggesting that the world contained two different United States of America.

We discussed the solar system, and both of us had the same understanding of it, and of our place in the galaxy. We knew about Alpha Centauri and knew it was four point something light-years away from both of us, we knew of the Milky Way, astrological sign shapes, Big Dipper, Pole Star, etc. Some sort of duplication of the xyz geography was clearly ridiculous.

The time dimension? We agreed on what year it was, and that George W. Bush was president. The same movies were playing, and the technology levels were the same. We'd already discussed when the Lord of the Rings movies came out, and many of our other comments made it obvious that our situation wasn't the result of some sort of time shift.

Not normal space and not time, so it must be some other weird dimension.

We checked a few physical constants. We both had pi memorized to twenty decimal places (told you I don't spend much time with girls), and they were both the same. We were happy about that, as the implications of living in a world where pi was different boggled both our minds. Our memories of the value of e were the same. The Periodic Table was the same ("Hi. He Likes Beer By Cupfuls, Not Over Frothing..."), the visible light spectrum was in the same order ("Virgins In Bed Give You Odd Reactions"; something I'm having to take on faith), and several other scientific lists were also identical.

We'd previously noticed some differences between our two lives: the bath faucets had moved, this dimension's girls were on average less sexy than my old dimension's because there was no Liz Jagger in this one, and several others. We both thought the existence of such differences was greatly significant.

We discussed science fiction books. My bedroom's bookshelves were overflowing with them (have I mentioned that I don't spend much time with girls?). Neither of us had previously thought parallel dimensions were a stupid concept, and now we accepted the reality of them, thereby adding a massive new concept to our knowledge of the Universe - how incredibly cool! We didn't have a clue what it meant, other than it had made our life pretty interesting. We had no idea of the practical consequences. We couldn't even think of a practical consequence. We couldn't think of a way of scoring chicks with it, although we assured each other that we'd give this a lot more thought. Regardless of there being no obvious practical benefit, we're now living with a true friend - it was hard to imagine how anyone could be truer - and that felt pretty damned good.

So we decided on parallel dimensions, across which #1's mind had passed while dying during déjà vu, to enter #2's body while he was also but not quite dying and also experiencing déjà vu. [[As you can tell, we didn't yet know as much as has been explained to you, my reader.]]

We couldn't see any way of learning more about the process, so our thoughts turned to other related matters. Although we had, between us, only experienced two instances of this new dimension, it did not seem at all likely that the Universe contained only two. Once we accepted the idea of multiple dimensions, there being just two instances was surely absurd. There certainly weren't only two possible values in the x, y, z or time dimensions! We didn't have enough information to decide anything meaningful about the number of parallel dimensions though, so that line of thought didn't last long.

What did it all mean? We thought it meant nothing. Neither of us thought the Universe existed to give meaning to man, either individually or collectively. To think it did - as so many people seemed to - was arrogance of cosmic proportions. With a life that'd been as unenjoyable as mine, I also preferred to think there was no meaning behind it. We decided that the merging process was part of the natural structure of the Universe, and we'd just been phenomenally lucky.

Could we think of any problems? Not really. We'd have to be careful not to refer to ourself out loud as "we", in case people thought we were trying to be the Queen of England. More seriously, we felt safe. We couldn't think of any reason why #1 might get 'sucked back' to his dimension. We were pretty sure he was dead there, so being sucked back seemed unlikely, especially as more time kept passing with no indication that #1's presence was weakening in any respect.

We couldn't imagine any circumstance where we'd separate. There might be a time limit on it, but we couldn't think of a believable reason for one and it felt too strong and solid. So much time had gone past by now that it surely had to be permanent. Cross-dimensional travel seemed to require death, so if our body didn't die, we should remain a we. Avoiding death was something we were definitely planning to do for now, and probably forever if this panned out as good as it seemed. Having a built-in best friend was going to be enjoyable.

The house was silent at this time of the early morning, but I still went to the lockable bathroom to check my wounds. They were fine, so I went back to bed.

I just lay there, musing about inconsequential issues. For example, we noticed that we both fell asleep and woke up at the same time. Did that mean anything useful or important? Other than it implied both our minds were tied to the same body (where else?), we couldn't deduce anything useful from it, but we chatted about it for a while.

We also noticed how well we cooperated. We didn't have arguments and we understood each other extremely well. We did, however, work out that we were capable of lying to each other, because:

• We each had knowledge the other didn't. Not much, but there had been cases of it, e.g., only one of us claimed to know that green vegetables were good for blood.

• We sometimes surprised each other with questions, suggestions, even jokes [later we competed on who could make our body laugh the most by telling each other jokes. It was fun as we had the same sense of humor. We knew many of the same jokes, but we each had some unique ones].

• We couldn't access each other's memories.

• We could control what we told each other.

So, logically speaking, deceit was therefore possible. Emotionally, it was never an issue, as we felt so natural together that trust was taken for granted.

Although we didn't think of it at the time, we later realized that one of the main reasons for our great compatibility was that we both knew that we were dealing with 'ourself', and we were both acting for our singular best interest. When dealing with other people you often suspect their motives, suspect that what they're suggesting is for their benefit rather than yours, wonder whether they're being totally honest, etc. When you're about to act on one of your own ideas, it'd be ridiculous to have those worries about yourself. We trusted each other as much as we trusted ourself, "unquestionably".

The house eventually came to life.

Mom knocked lightly and without waiting opened the door and popped her head in, saw I was awake and came in properly. I made a mental note to myself(s): be careful of exposing my forearms in my room. A closed door is not a guarantee of privacy from Mom.

"How are you this morning, honey?"

"I'm not sure, Mom. It still hurts a little, but much less than yesterday. I haven't tried walking yet, so I'll get up and see how it goes."

"Okay. Come to breakfast soon."

After making sure Mom closed the door behind her, I got up and walked around, bent over to touch my toes then stood upright again. The world stayed where it was, good.

I prepared to change my clothes, laying out the new ones so I could change as quickly as possible to minimize the time my arms were bare. With my foot blocking the door, I changed clothes swiftly. With my arms well covered, I went to the kitchen. It was still early, so most of the family were still showering, dressing, etc., but I wanted to minimize the number of people looking at me when I walked in.

I walked as if still sensitive in my nether region. Mom saw me and raised her eyebrow.

I sat at the table and told her, "It's much better, but I'd hate to have to walk around school like this. I'd get horribly teased and bullied. Can I please have one more day off?"

"Is there anything important happening today? Any tests, that sort of thing?"

"No, just the usual. I'll call Brent and ask him to bring me his notes after school so I can catch up before I go back tomorrow. It won't cause any problems. I really don't want to go like this."

"Do you think I should take you to see the Doctor?"

I know Mom is usually busy at work, and she'd much prefer to avoid wasting all the time visiting a doctor would take, so this should be easy. "Nah. I could barely stand yesterday and today is ten times better. I'm sure tomorrow will be fine. I know you're only a female, Mom, but if you ask Dad he'll tell you that when a guy gets hit there it just takes a while before it gets better. It's happened to me often enough that I know it's no big deal."

"All right, you've convinced me. Call Brent now," passing me the phone.

I called him. "Brent? ... Yeah it's Mark. I fell and hurt my arms yesterday," Mom's eyebrows rose, "and I've got today off too. Could you drop your notes at my home after school today? Mom wants me to catch up. I'll give them back to you tomorrow at school; I should be back then ... Thanks Brent, see ya." (Brent is in all of my classes, is a reasonably good guy, and lives nearby.)

Mom inquired about my lie, as moms do, "Arms?"

Early in my conversation with Brent, #1 had suggested I use my arms as the excuse. It'd give me a reason to be protective of my arms at school, and also provide an excuse if someone saw a bandage. I answered Mom, "I had to tell him something, and no way could I tell him the truth. I'd be ridiculed and probably beaten up at school."

"Okay. I don't like to hear you lie, but I must admit that even I can sympathize with you on that one."

"Thanks. Can I ask you a favor please? Can you call school and tell them it's okay I was off yesterday and today? And can you PLEASE not tell them exactly what happened? Just say it was 'a medical problem'. If you told them the full reason, it'd get out and everyone would pick on me."

"Okay, I'll do it from work." Mom put a bowl of cereal in front of me and I started eating, hoping she'd not tell them the reason as their ignorance of it would help my "no PE until further notice" idea.

Dad came in next, asking, "How are ya this morning, sport?"

"Way better, but Mom said I can take one more day off because it still hurts a bit and I have to walk really silly."

"Haha. Been there; done that. You should be more careful of those things. You're going to need them one day."

He doesn't intend to hurt me, but he really hasn't got a damned clue sometimes. No girl will let me even talk to her, let alone do anything that involves my balls.

The next event of interest was the arrival of my sisters. #1 sat up (mentally anyway) and took notice for his first sighting of them.

Carol walked in, asking, "Skipped school yesterday, eh?"

"Yeah, doing it today too." It's generally best for me if I simply agree with Carol. She's somewhat smarter than me, and often mean to me, so quick agreements make life easier.

Carol started talking to Mom about something else. She enjoys school and doesn't skip it, and she has no real interest in me, so my agreement ended our conversation. Whatever she was talking to Mom about (I'd tuned out) was more important than her brother's reason for missing school.

My other sister, Donna, ran into the room. Donna's a tomboy. Despite there being only thirteen months between the two girls, they're very different. Carol had been jumped a grade at school, so is two ahead of Donna and only one behind me, putting us in 8th, 7th and 5th grades respectively. Another difference is that Mom deems Carol to be a young woman, while Donna is still a girl. Puberty had messed me up, blessed Carol, and is so far ignoring Donna, who is ignoring it right back. Physically, mentally and emotionally, there are big gaps between the girls.

Both are quite attractive, although their bodies are totally different types. Carol is a lovely, young woman. Tall, a rounded face nicely framed by mid-shoulder-blade length, blond, wavy hair. Already an attractive figure, which is still developing. She is becoming quite something to look at, not that I get any chances to look at much of her.

Donna is also tall, that being the only similarity between the two girls' figures. Donna's hair and skin are darker, although that's often due to dirt. She had no body shape; from her shoulders down to her hips is a hard, muscular square. That block of bone and muscle runs, jumps, swims, kicks and hits - sporting equipment mostly, me if she's pissed off at me for some reason. She's good at sports. If she isn't required to be doing anything else, she'll be outside burning off energy one way or another. She got such a good dose of Dad's sporting genes that I suspect Mom and Dad didn't give me or Carol any, saving them up to give them all to Donna.