said Michiko. "If we're not going to go through with the wedding, we have to tell
people. You've got to make a decision."
She didn't understand, thought Lloyd. She didn't understand that his decision was
already made; that whatever he would do/had done was described for all time in the
block universe. It wasn't that he had to make a decision; rather, the decision that
had always been made simply had to be revealed.
And so -
16
It was time for Theo to go home. Not to the apartment in Geneva that he'd called
home for the last two years, but home to Athens. Home to his roots.
It also, frankly, would be wise for him to not be around Michiko for a while. Crazy
thoughts about her kept running through his head.
Theo didn't suspect that anyone in his family had anything to do with his death -although,
as he'd begun reading up on such things, it became apparent that it was
usually the case, ever since Cain slew Abel, ever since Livia poisoned Augustus, ever
since O. J. killed his wife, ever since that astronaut aboard the international space
station had been arrested, despite the seemingly perfect alibi, for having killed her
own sister.
But, no, Theo suspected none of his family members. And yet, if any visions were
likely to shed light on his own death, surely it would be those of his close relatives?
Surely some of them would have been doing investigations of their own twenty-one
years hence, trying to figure out who had killed their dear Theo?
Theo took an Olympic Airlines flight to Athens. The seat sales were over; people
were flying again as before, assured that the consciousness-displacement would not
recur. He spent the flight time poking holes in a model for the Flashforward that had
been emailed to him by a team at DESY, the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron,
Europe's other major particle-accelerator facility.
Theo hadn't been home for four years now, and he regretted it. Christ, he might
be dead in twenty-one years --and he'd let a span of one-fifth that length slip by
without hugging his mother or tasting her cooking, without seeing his brother,
without enjoying the incredible beauty of his homeland. Yes, the Alps were
breathtaking, but there was a sterile, barren quality about them. In Athens, you
could always look up, always see the Acropolis looming above the city, the midday
sun flaring off the restored, polished marble of the Parthenon. Thousands of years of
human habitation; millennia of thought, of culture, of art.
Of course, as a youth, he had visited many of the famous archeological sites. He
remembered being seventeen: a school bus had taken his class to Delphi, home of
the ancient oracle. It had been pouring rain, and he hadn't wanted to get off the bus.
But his teacher, Mrs. Megas, had insisted. They had clambered over slippery dark
rocks through lush forest, until they came to where the oracle had once supposedly
sat, dispensing cryptic visions of the future.
That kind of oracle had been better, thought Theo: futures that were subject to
interpretation and debate, instead of the cold, harsh realities the world had recently
seen.
They'd also gone to Epidaurus, a great bowl out of the landscape, with concentric
rings of seats. They'd seen Oedipus Tyrannos performed there --Theo refused to join
the tourists in calling it Oedipus Rex; "Rex" was a Latin word, not Greek, and
represented an irritating bastardization of the play's title.
The play was performed in ancient Greek; it might as well have been in Chinese
for all the sense Theo could make of the dialog. But they'd studied the story in class;
he knew what was happening. Oedipus's future had been spelled out for him, too:
you will marry your mother and murder your father. And Oedipus, like Theo, had
thought he could circumvent destiny. Forearmed with the knowledge of what he was
supposed to do, why, he'd simply avoid the issue altogether, and live a long, happy
life with his queen, Iocasta.
Except ...
Except that, as it turned out, Iocasta was his mother, and the man Oedipus had
slain years before during a quarrel on the road to Thebes had indeed been his father.
Sophocles had written his version of the Oedipus story twenty-four hundred years
ago, but students still studied it as the greatest example of dramatic irony in western
literature. And what could be more ironic than a modern Greek man faced with the
dilemmas of the ancients --a future prophesied, a tragic end foretold, a fate
inevitable? Of course, the heroes of ancient Greek tragedies each had a hamartia -a
fatal flaw --that made their downfall unavoidable. For some, the hamartia was
obvious: greed, or lust, or an inability to follow the law.
But what had been Oedipus's fatal flaw? What in his character had brought him to
ruin?
They'd discussed it at length in class; the narrative form employed by the ancient
Greek tragedians was inviolate --there was always a hamartia.
And Oedipus's was --what?
Not greed, not stupidity, not cowardice.
No, no, if it were anything, it was his arrogance, his belief that he could defeat the
will of the gods.
But, Theo had protested, that's a circular argument; Theo was always the logician,
never much for the humanities. Oedipus's arrogance, he said, was only evidenced in
his trying to avoid his fate; had his fate been less severe, he'd never have rebelled
against it, and therefore never would have been seen as arrogant.
No, his teacher had said, it was there, in a thousand little things he does in the
play. Indeed, she quipped, although Oedipus meant "Swollen Foot" --an allusion to
the injury sustained when his royal father had bound his feet as a child and left him
to die --he could just as easily be called "Swollen Head."
But Theo couldn't see it --couldn't see the arrogance, couldn't see the
condescension. To him, Oedipus, who solved the vexing riddle of the Sphinx, was a
towering intellect, a great thinker --exactly what Theo felt himself to be.
The riddle of the Sphinx: what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon,
and three in the evening? Why, a man, of course, who crawls at the beginning of life,
walks erect in adulthood, and requires a cane in old age. What an incisive bit of
reasoning on Oedipus's part!
But now Theo would never live to need that third leg, would never see the natural
sunset of his span. Instead, he'd be murdered in middle-age ... just as Oedipus's real
father, King Laius, was left dead at the side of a well-worn road.
Unless, of course, he could change the future; unless he could outwit the gods
and avoid his destiny.
Arrogance? thought Theo. Arrogance? It is to laugh.
The plane started its descent into nighttime Athens.
"Your parents long ago booked flights to come to Geneva, and so did my mother,"
Michiko had said. "If we're not going to go through with the wedding, we have to tell
people. You've got to make a decision."
"What do you want to do?" asked Lloyd, buying time.
"What do I want to do?" repeated Michiko, sounding stunned by the question. "I
want to get married; I don't believe in a fixed future. The visions will only come true
if you make them do so --if you turn them into self-fulfilling prophecies."
The ball was back in his court. Lloyd lifted his shoulders. "I'm so sorry, honey.
Really, I am, but --"
"Look," she said, cutting off words she didn't want to hear. "I know your parents
made a mistake. But we aren't."
"The visions --"
"We aren't," said Michiko firmly. "We're right for each other. We're meant for each
other."
Lloyd was silent for a time. Finally, gently, he went on. "You said before that
maybe I was embracing the idea that the future was immutable too readily. But I'm
not. I'm not just looking for a way to avoid guilt --and I'm certainly not looking for a
way to avoid marrying you, darling. But that the visions are real is the only
conclusion possible based on the physics I know. The math is abstruse, I'll grant you,
but there's an excellent theoretical basis for supporting the Minkowski
interpretation."
"Physics can change in twenty-one years," said Michiko. "There was a lot of stuff
they believed in 1988 that we know isn't true today. A new paradigm, a new model,
might displace Minkowski or Einstein."
Lloyd didn't know what to say.
"It could happen," said Michiko earnestly.
Lloyd tried to make his tone soft. "I need --I need something more than just your
fervent wish. I need a rational explanation; I need a solid theory that could explain
why the visions are anything but the one true fixed future." He stopped himself
before he added, "A future in which we aren't meant to be together."
Michiko's voice was growing desperate. "Well, okay, all right, maybe the visions
are of an actual, real future --but not of 2030."
Lloyd knew he shouldn't push it; knew that Michiko was vulnerable --hell, knew
that he was vulnerable. But she had to face reality. "The evidence from newspapers
seems pretty conclusive," he said softly.
"No --no, it's not." Michiko sounded increasingly adamant. "It isn't really. The
visions could be of a time much farther in the future."
"What do you mean?"
"Do you know who Frank Tipler is?"
Lloyd frowned. "A candid drunk?"
"What? Oh, I get it --but it's Tipler with one P. He wrote The Physics of
Immortality."
"The Physics of what?" said Lloyd, eyebrows rising.
"Immortality. Living forever. It's what you always wanted, isn't it? All the time in
the world; all the time to do all the things you want to do. Well, Tipler says that at
the Omega Point --the end of time --we will all be resurrected and live forever."
"What kind of gibberish is that?"
"I admit it's a whopper," said Michiko. "But he made a good case."
"Oh?" said Lloyd, the syllable pregnant with skepticism.
"He says that computer-based life will eventually supplant biological life, and that
information-processing capabilities will continue to expand year after year, until at
some point, in the far future, no conceivable computing problem will be impossible.
There will be nothing that the future machine life won't have the power and
resources to calculate."
''I suppose."
"Now, consider an exact, specific description of every atom in a human body:
what type it is, where it is located, and how it relates to the other atoms in the body.
If you knew that, you could resurrect a person in his entirety: an exact duplicate,
right down to the unique memories stored in the brain and the exact sequence of
nucleotides making up his DNA. Tipler says that a sufficiently advanced computer far
enough in the future could easily recreate you, just by building up a simulacrum that
reflects the same information --the same atoms, in the same places."
"But there's no record of me. You can't reconstruct me without --I don't know -some
kind of scan of me ... something like that."
"It doesn't matter. You could be reproduced without any specific info about you."
"What are you talking about?"
"Tipler says there are about 110,000 active genes that make up a human being.
That means that all the possible permutations of those genes --all the possible
biologically distinct human beings that could conceivably exist --amount to about
ten to the tenth to the sixth different people. So if you were to simulate all those
permutations --"
"Simulate ten to the tenth to the sixth human beings?" said Lloyd. "Come on!"
"It all follows from saying that you have essentially infinite information-processing
capabilities," said Michiko. "There may be oodles of possible humans, but it is a finite
number."
"Just barely finite."
"There are also a finite number of possible memory states. With enough storage
capacity, not only could you reproduce every possible human being, but also every
possible set of memories each of them could have."
"But you'd need one simulated human for every memory state," said Lloyd. "One
in which I ate pizza last night --or at least had memories of doing that. Another in
which I ate a hamburger. Et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam."
"Exactly. But Tipler says you could reproduce all possible humans that could ever
exist, and all possible memories that they could ever have, in ten to the tenth to the
twenty-third bits."
"Ten to the tenth to the ... "
"Ten to the tenth to the twenty-third."
"That's crazy," said Lloyd.
"It's a finite quantity. And it could all be reproduced on a sufficiently advanced
computer."
"But why would anyone do that?"
"Well, Tipler says the Omega Point loves us, and --"
"Loves us?"
"You really should read the book; he makes it sound much more reasonable than I
do."
"He'd pretty much have to," said Lloyd, deadpan.
"And remember that the passage of time will slow down as the universe comes to
an end, if it eventually is going to collapse down into a Big Crunch --"
"Most studies indicate that's not going to happen, you know; there isn't enough
mass, even taking into account dark matter, to close the universe."
Michiko pressed on. "But if it does collapse, time will be protracted so that it will
seem to take forever to do so. And that means the resurrected humans will seem to
