Authors: Robert Kroese
In add
ition, the further we go into the heart of Yin, the more it seems like Yang; and the further we go into the heart of Yang, the more it seems like Yin. This fact is represented in the Yin-Yang symbol as a white dot in the black swirl and a black dot in the white swirl: each aspect contains the seed of the other and literally turns into its opposite. Pure volition in the absence of determinism becomes a sort of determinism, and pure determinism in the absence of volition becomes a sort of volition. So I may think of myself as a volitional being struggling against determinism, but the only way determinism can successfully thwart my intentions is by anticipating my intentions and replacing them with its own. Passive becomes active; dark becomes light; Yin becomes Yang.
It is a mistake, though, to think of the intentional Yang
as somehow being pitted against the deterministic Yin. The activity of Yang cannot be understood except in relation to the passivity of Yin. What we call “reality” is really the interplay of these two elements, the line between dark and white. And yet, if we look closely, we see that there is no line, only the beginning of one thing and the end of another. Until the 20
th
century, science had been content to take the existence of the line as a given, but quantum mechanics has forced us to look at the border between two, between passive and active, being and becoming, physical and mental. The closer we look, however, the clearer it is that there is no line to be seen. There is no reality except the interplay of these two elements.
I can’t tell if this part is really deep or if it’s more pseudoscientific nonsense.
I return to Heller
’s house the next day. He’s sitting in front of a monitor in the workshop, half in a trance. He barely looks up when I walk in. I stand there awkwardly for a few moments while he works. I notice an obituary for a “Dr. Emil Jelinek” tacked to the wall. Apparently Jelinek was a colleague of Heller’s at Stanford who died in some kind of accident a little less than two years ago. That’s as far as I’ve read when Heller speaks.
“Gotta keep an eye on that one,” he says.
I walk up next to him. Most of the monitor screen is taken up by what I eventually realize is a map of the Bay Area. Superimposed on the map are a dozen or so red dots with a series of numbers next to them. He taps a dot in Hayward, just across the bridge from here. The dot appears a little larger than the others.
“
Is something going to happen there?” I ask.
“
Maybe. The intensity of the measured disturbance is a function of several variables. Probability of occurrence, proximity of the event to the detector, number of catastrophic neural shutdowns …”
“
You mean the number of people who will die.”
“
Yes.”
“
So all you have is a single number to go by? And all of those factors feed into that number?”
“
Correct. We call it the psionic disruption coefficient, or PDC.”
“
Any word from Tali?”
He turns away from the monitor, shaking his head.
“Has she ever disappeared like this before?”
“
No. She’s very conscientious about such things. I think she … that is, I suspect she might be gone for good.”
That sounds ominous, but I don
’t press him on it. He seems pretty upset. I’m trying to make out the numbers on the map behind him. “So this PDC number … you say that a bunch of variables factor into it, but you don’t have access to those variables. All you see is the output of the function, right?”
“
That’s right.”
“
So,” I say, trying to make sense of this, “does that mean that an event that has a one hundred percent chance of killing five people looks the same as an event with a fifty percent chance of killing ten people?”
Heller seems glad to be off the subject of Tali
’s disappearance. “The function is more complicated than that, but that’s the idea. Below a threshold of about five people dying for certain, though, there’s usually too much noise to separate out a probable event from random psionic behavior. Although you have to take into account proximity to a detector, as well. One time we got a very strong reading that turned out to be a man being shot directly underneath a street sign to which Tali had affixed a detector. We thought it was a fluke, because usually disruption events register on at least two detectors. That’s how we can get some idea of the scope or probability of an event, as well as pinpointing its location.”
“
How far can you know in advance about an event?”
Heller sighs.
“If an event occurs, you will see the PDC increase gradually as you approach the spacetime coordinates of an event, until it eventually spikes dramatically upward a few seconds before the event actually occurs. When the event occurs, the PDC will reach one and then begin to gradually fall off. If an event does not occur, you will usually see the PDC increase gradually and then gradually fall off a few minutes before the non-event, and then continue to fall off afterward at around the same rate. We filter out disturbances with a PDC below point one eight, because so many of them are non-events. Just noise. So, to answer your question, anywhere from eight hours to a few seconds. The ones where we only get a few seconds’ notice are events where only a few people died, or where they died outside the range of the detectors, or there wasn’t sufficient trauma to create a catastrophic neural shutdown in all the victims. As I say, there are a lot of variables. Theoretically, if there were a massive event affecting hundreds or thousands of people in the Bay Area, I could know about it a day or more in advance.”
“
So how big is that event in Hayward?”
“
We call it a ‘case,’” says Heller. “Until it happens, it’s only a probable event. If it happens, it’s an event. If it doesn’t happen, it’s a non-event. Until we know which it is, we refer to it as a case. Right now this case is registering on three receptors, at point one nine, point two four and point two eight. That puts it in this area.” He taps the screen with his finger.
“
Do you know when it will happen? I mean, if it happens?”
“
Three thirty-five p.m. today, give or take a minute.”
“
How likely is it to happen?”
“
It’s either very likely that a relatively small event will occur, or somewhat unlikely that a relatively large event will occur there, or somewhere in between.” He grins. “It’s not an exact science. I’ll keep an eye on it, and if the PDC spikes …”
“
What?”
“
Well, ordinarily Tali would go to the crux …”
“
What do you mean, crux? Tali used that word the other day and I didn’t know what she was talking about.”
“
Oh,” says Heller. “That’s the neatest part of this. The cruxes are the only reason we’re able to sometimes prevent these events from happening. You see, there are often pivotal events that either allow an event to happen or prevent it from happening.”
“
Like the couple tossing a coin at the pier to decide where to go for lunch,” I say. “Heads, they go to a Mexican restaurant, tails they head down the pier. Tali made the coin come up tails, so they went down the pier, and as a result, the guy stops the killer on the pier.”
“
Exactly. That was actually an interesting case, because there were two cruxes. That hardly ever happens. Of course, at the first one she failed to …” He trails off, remembering that Tali nearly sent me to my death by screwing with my coin toss.
“
Are the cruxes always coin tosses?” I ask.
“
Yes,” he says. “Well, they don’t have to be. But coin tosses are the easiest to pinpoint, because they’re binary, and the two possible results often lead to two very distinct futures.”
“
Is this more of that probabilistic future stuff? There are two possible futures; heads, the universe takes one path, tails, it takes the other?”
“
Sort of. The fact is that coin tosses aren’t really random; they’re pseudorandom. Whether the coin lands on heads or tails is primarily determined by …”
“
The starting location of the coin, how hard you toss it, air pressure ... yeah, Tali went over this.”
“
OK, so the important thing to understand is that although coin tosses are
almost
completely deterministic, there is just enough objective randomness that a coin toss can create a non-zero probability of an alternate future occurring. This non-zero probability shows up in our data as a seemingly arbitrary drop in the PDC. When these drops first started to show up in our data, we thought it was some sort of noise that we hadn’t accounted for. They didn’t always show up, but when they did, they were persistent, and they almost always centered on spacetime coordinates near the case site. What we eventually realized was that for many events, there was a related event that the main event was dependent on – an event that had to happen before the main event could occur. Tali investigated some of these pre-events and found that at the specified spacetime coordinates, someone was invariably tossing a coin. Coin tosses seem to have a very distinct probability signature that shows up in our data.”
“
So if the coin comes up heads, the event happens, and if it comes up tails, it doesn’t happen.”
“
Right. Of course it’s completely arbitrary; the event may be dependent on the coin coming up heads or on it coming up tails. And whichever it is will occur with a probability exceeding ninety-nine percent, because as I say, coin tosses are almost completely deterministic.”
“
Um, OK.”
“
You don’t have to understand all the details. The important thing to understand is that we know, because of the drop in the PDC, that the coin toss has to come up a particular way in order for the event to happen. If we don’t tamper with the outcome, the coin will almost certainly come up with the result that allows the event to occur. But if we tamper, we have roughly a fifty percent chance of preventing the event from occurring.”
“
What if someone stops the coin toss from happening?”
“
Most likely they would fail. But if they succeeded in preventing the coin toss, then they would probably cause the crux to collapse to the most likely future.”
“
Meaning that the event would occur as if the coin toss had happened.”
“
Yes.”
“
But then your data was wrong. Your data indicated a coin toss that never happens. Or happened, whatever.”
He shrugs.
“Sometimes there are errors with interpreting data. If you prevent a coin toss that seemed to be required for the event to occur and the event occurs even though the coin toss didn’t happen, then we were wrong about the data. Maybe it was the
possibility
of a coin toss that produced the alternate future. Or maybe it was just noise in the data that looked like a coin toss. Like I said, this isn’t an exact science.”
This sounds kind of like bullshit to me, but maybe I just don
’t understand it. “I still don’t really get why you can’t interfere with the event itself. Like, why couldn’t Tali have called in a bomb threat at the pier? The police would have shown up and cleared the area. There’s no way that guy could have gotten away with shooting a bunch of people.”
“
The simplest explanation I can offer you is that Ananke would have anticipated that action and prevented it from interfering with her plans.”
“
And the complicated explanation?”
“
The universe is a deterministic system. Any action that Tali took would have been a result of other variables in the system. The ultimate outcome of the event at the pier was dependent on the full set of all variables in the system, which includes Tali’s actions. If Tali had tried to prevent the shooting, her efforts would have been factored in by Ana … that is, by the system. You can’t change the output of a deterministic system by being a cog in the system.”
“
You mean that if Tali had tried to prevent the shooting, it would have ended up happening in a different way. And maybe her actions would somehow bring about the shooting. For that matter, it wouldn’t have to be a shooting, would it? Maybe something she does sets in motion a chain of events that starts a grease fire in the kitchen of Maggiano’s, and it’s the fire that kills all those people.” I think I’m finally starting to understand this stuff.
“
That’s one way of looking at it,” he says. “Thinking in counterfactuals will drive you crazy, though.”
“
Counterfactuals?”
“
Hypotheticals. What-if scenarios. Ultimately, asking ‘what if Tali had acted differently at the pier?’ is a meaningless question. Tali is part of a deterministic system. She
couldn’t
have acted differently. You might as well ask ‘what if Martians beamed the shooter into space a second before he pulled the gun.’ They didn’t, because it’s impossible.”
“
You’re saying there’s no such thing as free will.”
He sighs again.
“You know those posters that appear at first glance to be a sort of abstract painting? But then, if you unfocus your eyes a little and sit there for a minute, it turns into a picture of Marilyn Monroe? That’s what free will is like. If you look at it too closely, it disappears.”
Free will is like Marilyn Monroe.
Got it. “So if you can’t interfere with the event itself, how can you interfere with the coin toss? Isn’t that part of the same deterministic system?”
“
Excellent question,” he says. “Yes. The coin toss itself is part of the system. The reason we can interfere with the result has to do with
how
we interfere.” He goes to a drawer in the workbench and pulls out a rectangular metal box a little larger than the receptor doodad he showed me earlier. He hands it to me. The thing is featureless except for a little clear plastic panel that hides a recessed button. Next to the button is a glowing green LED light. I press on the panel and it slides open.
“
Don’t push that!” Heller shouts, suddenly panicked. “You’ll wipe out all my data!”
I slide the panel back.
“OK, OK. What is it, some kind of electromagnetic pulse weapon?”
“
Not a weapon, but it does generate an EMP. In any case, wiping out magnetic media is a side effect. The purpose of the device is to disrupt the central nervous system.”
“
But it’s not a weapon,” I say dryly.