Backup Post 11

[macksting]

Tickets For Two, Please

For some reason, it has always been important to me to be able to look him in the eyes. As certain as I am of anything, I am certain of that. I remember hearing that the eyes are the window to the soul. Who said that? I can’t look it up anymore. Not with the last proton decaying sometime soon, and the last blackstar long since gone.

“Pitseleh,” my father says out of those soft, golden eyes, “as I understand it, we’re not long for this world.”

I guess they weren’t golden when I arrived at the hospital. ‘Rheumy,’ perhaps, is the term, and brown, like my own. My son’s eyes were blue. As his own father’s eyes were blue, and there aren’t blue eyes on my mother’s side, there’s some kind of Mendelian odds that says it’s just as likely my son got them from him. I’m sorry I’m not coming up with names right now. I know we all had names, but when it’s just the two of you forever, you forget eventually to use a name. It’s not like we’d had to speak to anyone else.

So he looked at me with those eyes, and I don’t know if that’s what 'rheumy’ meant, but those eyes were that. Those eyes indicated what we knew, and what the doctor would make clear when she entered the room: that my father was going to die.

The doctor said his odds weren’t good. I juggled numbers in my head, I’m sure. I used to fall back on math a lot, before it all became first habitual, then automatic. The estimate was sloppy, by countless orders of magnitude, but it told me enough. This was it.

It was going to be just me, but for that marvelous device. The doctor had seen people try to make miracles before, so she simply humored me; my father was frankly insulted, but didn’t tell me so until millenia later. I was convinced, though, and knew in the most important senses that it didn’t much matter if I was wildly wrong, since all I needed was it to work just once.

It wasn’t a very intuitive interface at first. A lot of click-and-drag, occasionally punching in parameters by hand. It’s flashbulb memory, so my memory of hands might not be accurate at all. I wasn’t sure it worked; there was no sound, not even the hard drive, just the hum of the fan and the air conditioner.

“Well,” he said, “I guess that’s it.”

“Yeah, see you in the next life.” I shrugged, went home. Only time would tell.

The next day, my father had made a full recovery. What did it matter whether the miracle occurred, or it was just another day? I’d set the parameters to get him out of the hospital and on his own two feet again. I wasn’t too worried about conservation at that time. We spoke on the phone as he was discharged, waiting for them to finish with the papers on his behalf.

“Probably worked. A local decrease in entropy either way: imagine now all the different configurations your body can get into.”

“That’s what she said,” he replied. At least that’s how I told it later. Maybe I just thought it would be funny, and convinced myself of it down the line. He remembers it that way, too, but we’ve each revisited the memory so often it has surely warped beyond all recognition by now.

I’m immortal. That much is obvious, of course. Every moment I’m alive is another in which I’m not yet dead. I used to think of them as universes, parallel universes in which I wasn’t yet dead, but now I think in numbers. You see, I hadn’t yet seen the limit. All I knew was there was a 20% chance he would live out the night, and an even smaller chance he’d ever set foot out of the hospital again, but a 100% chance that I was going to be conscious of the result. I sought that smaller chance, because why start small? So long as I could hit a button and change the world, I would never be alone again.

A year later, I had jabbed that button dozens of times. As I said, I wasn’t of a mind to conserve at that point, and I desperately wanted it to work. My laptop had to go in for repairs, professional repairs, and I nearly died myself. I couldn’t die, of course. Nobody can, not to themselves. For those few days, though, I was certain I would be alone forever. He would be hit by a car, or have a stroke, and would die in a ditch, slowly aspirating in a shallow puddle. Waiting for the computer to start up was maddening, and I was so palsied with terror that I misclicked twice aiming for the “Execute” button.

The odds that I’m still alive now are not easy to express. Some time ago I long since left behind my human body. There hadn’t been humans around for so long I wasn’t even sure it looked right anymore, but negentropy is the process of displacing entropy elsewhere. I started metabolizing my own body, my father having long since lost his, and it was time to look elsewhere.

If only I could go backward! To this day I have never found a way to reverse the arrow of time, except in the tiniest, most local sense, and I’ve never managed to scale it up. It had its uses for a time, but now only another phase change could possibly help, and even those must be limited. The revelation that I would have to give up my body was a shocking one, though. The sky was pitch black by then, and in all directions, but my body had always been easy enough to maintain. What I hadn’t reckoned with was that the number I was working with had an inverse, and I was finally approaching Planck scale. The odds literally couldn’t get smaller as it was… not if I wanted to bring him with me. Numbers can only get so small before they are no further divisible.

“Pitseleh, why not just let go?”

“Dad, I can’t. I literally can’t. Anywhere I’ve let go, I am not there, or near enough. I’m here because I’m hungry, and I’m hungry because I’m here.”

“But pitseleh, you’re eating probability.” He’d become pretty sophisticated over the eons. “You could just stop.” And I knew that he’d made the argument many times, and every time, it was as the odds grew rapidly smaller.

“Life is struggle, dad, that’s what we’ve always said. My shit is improbable, but I shit just the same.”

“Perhaps so,” he said, now indistinguishable from my own misgivings, “but the numbers keep shrinking. They’re growing, too, but that inverse will be the death of us.” I had no answers to that.

As the universe underwent phase changes, so too did I. Answers weren’t necessary to my continuity, just as my body no longer was, just as his body hadn’t been since before Earth had been swallowed by old Sol. I’d kept it around as long as I could, but his body had slowly distorted beyond recognition. His eyes turning first blue, then gold, were the last changes of all; by then he had no skull, no teeth, no body, just eyes. The wonders of modern medicine, while we still had it, had allowed me to keep him alive in such amazing states!

Now, though, the numbers have become too small, the asymptote too near. There’s only the two of us, and the abstract engine which keeps us alive, gaining what nourishment it can from scavenging the occasional release of energy as yet another proton goes before us into oblivion.

“I’ll see you in a few minutes, or I won’t,” I said, as, broadly speaking, I hit the button for the last time. My father at last, for the first time since before Earth itself had passed into the light, closed his eyes.