Page 146 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

The Quantum Reticulator

alternative possible realities, then it might have been that his brain, at
the end of the reticulation interval, would have had to contain, within
its capacity for short-term memory, a potentially vast number of
outcomes for that brief period. And, were that so, his recall of the
character sets might well have proceeded as he began, with one
crowding out another as fast as he could disgorge them.
All well and good; but what about his breakdown? Was it simply
pure mental overload, a breached capacity threshold leading to
madness? Or was there a clue in his last words? Had he truly
considered the implications of perceiving all possibilities outside his
own normal world line? That is, not just variants of himself looking
at a briefly projected image, but also seeing something virtually
identical to his unshifted cosmos suddenly undergoing catastrophe.
An atomic explosion in the vicinity, experienced as a blinding flash an
instant prior to its witnesses’ vaporization, might well have occurred
elsewhere in the multiverse; quantum theory allowed that such
horrors might be happening, millions of them simultaneously, on
worlds just a tiny stretch of space-time away. What if Gibbons had
seen that happening in one of his perceived world lines and it had
driven him over the edge? What about every one of our alternate
selves, branching off at every quantum interval into a slightly
different region of potentiality—some of them spectacularly, even
apocalyptically, disastrous?
Needless to say, once having considered the implications of
Gibbons being correct, I did not dwell on them. I was content to let
other manifestations of myself go down that endlessly forking path. I
still had a bit of money to burn, and couldn’t believe in a parallel
existence where I would be behaving differently.

144