I smiled impressively and took another swig from the bottle of fermented seaweed. It was my fourteenth birthday and I was drunk. Or rather, it was
My brother and I were sitting on railings at one of the entrances to the passenger cannon, suspended hundreds of feet above the Atopian beaches. The steady thwump, thwump of the cannon discharging its nightly cargo shipments reverberated powerfully in the air around us. We weren’t supposed to be here.
“How did you override the security controls again?” asked my brother.
“Easy as pie!” I boasted. “Get your proxxi in here, I’ll download the details and show him.”
My brother looked away towards the breaking surf below.
“You always want to explain it to my proxxi,” he complained.
“Come on, seriously?” I chuckled. “You know you’re not good at security stuff.”
“I’m not good at anything,” he replied quietly. “How is it possible that you have such an easy time with everything, but I struggle so much? Aren’t twins supposed to be the same?”
“We’re not identical twins,” I laughed.
He looked hurt.
“Hey now, come on. Don’t exaggerate. You’re like the funniest guy I know. That’s a gift!”
He sighed. “It’s the same with everyone. Everyone wants to talk to my proxxi.”
“That’s not true, come on.”
He sighed again, but then he brightened up. “But you are amazing, Bob. You can do anything.”
I smiled. “See? Now that’s the spirit!”
1
I AM TEMUJIN, great warrior of the Mongol clan of the Ong Khan. The year is 1198 and the heat of the summer solstice has baked the steppes dry and cracked. We will soon replenish Mother Earth and soak Her with the blood of our enemies, and I will rise to my rightful and God-given place among my people as the Universal Ruler, the Ghengis Khan.
Opening my eyes slowly, I listened to the crisp snapping of our banners flapping in the breeze and watched the Tatars amassing in the dusty distance on the plains below. Sitting outside the royal yurt with my trusty saber balanced on my knees, my body was flowing and pulsing with the power of my ancestors.
Today would end in victory, or in glorious death.
“Bob, do you ever get the feeling none of this is real?” asked Martin, sitting over to my right with a great wad of half chewed venison dripping from his mouth. His eyebrows were cocked high as he leaned towards me with the question, waving the rest of the bloody deer haunch around in circles for emphasis.
While my brother had always scored great in logic and linguistics, he’d just as consistently scored extremely low in existential intelligence. I groaned.
“Dude, you are totally ruining this for me.”
I’d asked him to be my partner in the gameworlds today, at the urging of our mother, but I was feeling like I’d live, or die, to regret the decision. A sinking feeling settled into my gut.
“Yeah I know, but, you know what I mean,” he continued, enthusiastically diving in to rip another hunk of meat off the bone. “I mean, how can I know that I really exist?”
I studied him carefully, deciding what to say next, but right now I needed to prop up our audience stats. Sid and the rest of the guys were counting on me.
“In a nutshell, my friend, you can’t,” I replied, working up an angle to get his head in the game. “I think, therefore I am, as Descartes famously put it in 1644. Since then, really no progress.”
“Mmmmm,” was all Martin could add philosophically as he looked skywards. “So how can I be sure that you’re not just some gameworld zombie?”
“Again, my friend, you can’t,” I replied. “Although from my point of view, the issue is rather more about you.” I laughed and he joined in. “But if we’re worrying about whether people around us are mindless zombies, then the question is rather moot, no?”
Martin smiled at that, wiping his greasy face with the back of one hand. Before we could continue, Vicious rode up. Vicious was my best friend Sid’s proxxi. A seventies British punk rocker, in his best pasty whiteness, looked awfully comical with knobby knees poking out from under Mongol battle armor. The leather helmet must have been hell on his spiky hair.
A big smile spread across my face.
Vicious could sense my amusement and grimaced, but gamely soldiered on. Trying to keep in character, he leaned towards Martin and said, “Sire, Master Sid asked me to bring you your mount and…ah…ah fook it, mate, yer horse is ’ere.”
Right behind him rode up my proxxi Robert, also bringing my mount. Wisely, he said nothing as he tossed me the reigns, looking towards Vicious and smiling. Vicious scowled back, and they both trotted off to get Sid and themselves ready.
I sheathed my saber, Martin dropped the remains of his meal on the floor, and we stood to get ready.
“I mean, I know this is a gameworld,” said Martin over the top of his horse, “but don’t you ever get the feeling, back in the world, that all of this is impossible?”
I laughed.
Back in the world—now there was an idea fraught with complications. In a cosmos already sporting an infinite number of universes, in just one of these we’d begun spawning our own infinity of digital universes. Collectively, they’d begun calling the whole jumble the multiverse, on the assumption that infinity and infinity overlapped somewhere.
If there were an infinite number of universes, then logically one of them had to have exactly the train of events that an arbitrary gameworld, like the one we were in now, had going on. So when we flitted into a gameworld, in a sense we were creating windows into the parallel universe the simulation was tracking.
According to some, there was an equivalency of actually being there if a conscious observer couldn’t distinguish the difference. So, the question of the day was this: were we just creating simulated worlds, or were we actually tunneling past the event horizon of our own universe to create portals into parallel universes?
Perception was reality. Was therefore, reality equivalent to perception? A slippery slope if there ever was one. Thus the question of this world being real or not was rather more troubling than it may have seemed.
I leaned forward to pat and stroke my horse’s neck, calming it as it strained around to look at me. It knew today was going to be bloody. Taking a grip on my tall wooden-framed saddle, with one foot in a stirrup, I returned to Martin’s question.
“So what exactly do you mean—is all of this impossible?”
I knew it would be impossible to win this battle without settling whatever was on his mind. I looked towards him as I swung up onto my horse.
“Look, I’m not stupid, I know all the stuff about the infinite number of alternate bubbly universes, this one springing from that, all spawning into each other,” replied Martin. “Whatever. It still doesn’t answer my real question.”
I settled comfortably into my saddle and we started off. The Mongolian saddle was designed to allow the horse to choose its canter, leaving the rider free to deal with other tasks—it was more of a platform than a saddle, a fighting platform. These guys had been way ahead of their time. I twisted around to check my quiver of arrows.
“Which is?”
“Why something and not nothing?”
My patience was beginning, as often with him, to wear thin. Why was it that human beings had this God- shaped hole in their heads that needed to be filled when the mind grabbed at straws? God certainly wasn’t a part of my life, not anymore.
“What’s going on, you caught religion or something?” I asked, catching glimpses of the Mongol warriors praying to their shamanistic gods as we began trotting through the yurt city.
