This is what you do:
Begin with a fleck of your skin and a modest fee. Then a psychological evaluation that is little better than nothing, and forms to sign. Always, forms. Then someone wearing a narrow smile sits before you, listing the most obvious troubles that come with too much of this very good thing. Obsessions. Addictions. Depression. Spiritual obliteration. Chronic indifference. Or a pernicious amorality that infects every facet of what has always been, the truth told, a ridiculously insignificant life.
“Do you wish to continue?” that someone asks.
Of course you do.
“Do you understand the terms and obligations of this license?”
Of course you cannot. You’ve barely paid attention to any of the dark warnings. If you really could appreciate the countless risks, you wouldn’t have come here in the first place.
“Are you absolutely certain that you wish to continue?” she asks one final time. Or he asks. Or sometimes, several attendants sit before you, speaking with a shared voice. “Are you willingly and happily accepting any and all of these negative consequences?”
With a cocky smile, you say, “Sure.”
Or you say, “Of course I do,” and leak a nervous sigh.
Or you simply smile and nod, and with a tight little voice ask, “So what happens next?”
Next is a cool hand reaching out, dropping a tiny white pill into your damp palm. There is evidence and much informed conjecture that the pill is a delivery system for subtle technologies that rework the mind. Most assume that this is how the Authority reads thoughts, which in turn allows it to turn imprecise wishes into worthy gifts. Carefully, you place the miracle pill on your tongue and swallow. There comes a tingling sensation, brief and perhaps imagined. And then you make yourself laugh, telling your audience, “I know some of us have troubles. But I won’t. You’ll see. I’m going to do just fine, thank you. Don’t worry about me.”
Josh is eighteen today, and legal. He sits in a small room, and he sits at the shore of a great ocean. Barely two meters across, the ocean resembles a puddle of quiet gray water. That bland appearance is part of its charm, Josh decides. Incalculably deep and wondrously complex, the ocean is filled with machines too vast and swift to have been built by mere humans. To get a sense of the vastness, imagine the visible universe thoroughly rebuilt. Every star and scrap atom is used to build a single computer, pushing local physics as far as they can be pushed, in every dimension. And that machine still cannot make even the most rudimentary calculations necessary to serve that eighteen-year-old man-child who sits on a plain wooden stool, crouched over the great ocean.
But of course Josh isn’t sitting inside just this one room. There are trillions of very nearly identical rooms— where “trillion” is a sloppy fat number meant to imply an immeasurable multitude. And there are trillions of identical Joshes peering down into a uniform grayness—a shared quantum linkage connecting all that is potential and possible, and everything inevitable.
For Josh and his world, this linkage is a very new technology.
“Hello?” he whispers nervously.
The gray surface shimmers slightly.
Then Josh says, “A book, a novel.”
Words cause a multitude of realms to work together, the Authority suddenly engaged. A deceptively quiet voice asks the obvious: “Who is the author of this book, this novel?”
Josh can say any name. But he takes a deep breath and blurts, “Me.”
“By ‘me,’” the Authority inquires, “do you mean your own genotype?”
This is why Josh surrendered a piece of his own skin. His very complex and specific DNA serves as an identity and as a marker. “Sure. Yeah. My genotype.” Then he flinches, confessing, “This is my first time.”
But the Authority knows that already. “Are there other criteria?”
“Like what?” Josh had thought that he came prepared, but he feels sick with nervous energy, almost too anxious to think.
“I pick random examples,” the Authority cautions. “But you may narrow the category in significant ways. For instance, what is the author’s age? How well did this novel sell? And did the author win any awards or commendations?”
“Awards?” He hadn’t quite thought of that. “You mean, what…like the Nobel Prize?”
“Exactly.”
“
“Certainly,” the voice purrs.
Josh licks his lips. “I’m a very good writer,” he boasts. “People say so.” Then with a nervous gravity, he says, “Okay. I wrote the novel in my thirties, and I won the Nobel Prize
“Does the novel have a theme?”
“I don’t care.” Then he reconsiders, saying, “Maybe, yeah. How about how it feels to be eighteen? Yeah. I want a novel about growing up…a coming-of-age story. You know?”
“Are there any other criteria, sir?”
With a determined nod, Josh says, “No, that’s plenty.”
A closed doorway stands behind him. Each of the other milky white walls is equipped with its own make- portal. From one portal comes a thick leather-bound volume that hits the floor with an impressive thud. Josh picks it up and turns to the title page, reading a name that isn’t his. But why should the author call himself Josh Thorngate? Besides genetics, they might share nothing at all.
“And what will be next, sir?”
“Politics.” Josh closes the book. From his tone and upright posture, it is obvious that he has given this request some consideration. “I want my memoirs or a journal…from a universe where I’m an old man, and important. Like a president, or some sort of world leader.”
“Perhaps you might narrow your aim.”
Josh agrees, and trying not to miss an opportunity, he asks, “Like how?”
“There are many forms of government.”
“Democracy,” Josh suggests. But that doesn’t sound original, does it? “No, wait. What else is possible?”
The Authority begins by listing the familiar democratic governments, quickly spiraling outwards into increasingly peculiar political systems. When the voice says something about a Holy Godhood, Josh interrupts, asking, “What’s that?”
“A despotic state,” the Authority allows. “High technologies are concentrated in one person’s hands, and he, or she, rules over a population of worshipful peasants—”
“That,” he blurts. “That’s what I want.”
He says, “I want a journal written by my genotype, who happens to be the leader of a Holy Godhood.”
And then, “Please.”
The second make-portal opens. The resulting volume is deceptively small. With too much text for any reasonable book, fifty thousand pages of private thoughts have been buried inside a few sheets of bound plastic. Josh stands and walks around the ocean, opening the cover and calling up a random page. “And then I gave him wings,” he reads, “and because he had scorned me, I chased him high enough that his lungs froze and he plunged back to earth again.”
He blanks the page, and sighs, settling on the stool again.
“You have one more request,” the Authority reminds him.
Three requests are standard for each session. Three gifts from the compliant genie; why is that nearly universal among humans?
“Sir?” the Authority prods.
Josh is eighteen, bright and possessing some genuine talents. Standardized tests and well-meaning teachers have told him to expect good things from his life, and his devoted if rather critical parents have inflated his sense of
