Page 70 - Effable Encounters
P. 70
Autologue
“Well, let me see. It didn’t happen to me, as I was then, or I would
have remembered it. You’re right about that. That can only mean one
thing: it didn’t happen to me.”
“Then you’re not me.”
“Not exactly. I’m you if you hadn’t received this call. That leads us
to the conclusion that alternative universes exist as a result of the
infinity of apparently possible cause-and-effect events occurring at
every point in space and time.”
“I don’t believe that at all. I’m a strict determinist.”
“I know. But you can only see the causality chaining together your
own universe. At the level of sub-atomic activity, nobody can say
why one path is taken rather than another; so the physicists deal with
those events in gross, statistically. You know that.”
“But some path is taken, and only that path, whether or not
anyone can get a method of observation fine enough to explain it.”
“Yes, but this proves that more than one path can be taken at the
point of quantum activity, and that point must be at a juncture of
spacetime enabling those multiplicities to pour out entropically,
following the arrow of time, into separate continua, forever out of
contact with each other—until now, until this conversation. I am
talking to an Irving Vielfrass who did not become me, precisely
because I have no memory of this conversation. You are living an
alternative life, branching apart from mine at some point not much
earlier than the moment you answered the phone.”
“Then, you are not me at all. Whatever you have done since 1965
has nothing to do with what I am henceforth going to do.”
“Perhaps. But your life could follow a path almost identical to
mine, the only real difference being a bizarre telephone call you
received one night.”
“So?”
“Don’t you see it? If we assume a very close fit between your
universe and mine, you could benefit from my experience, my
knowledge of history. Stock market, property values, things to avoid
at all costs.”
“Like what?”
“Like Vietnam. Johnson’s going to escalate the war again in a
couple of months. It will drag on for years. Hundreds of thousands
of draftees and fifty thousand of our boys are going to come back in
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