Ms. Smith: Part 2

"We're all stories in the end."

- the Doctor, "Doctor Who"

First Contact finally took place, but they were frustrating.  They didn't want to conquer us, or colonize us, or trade with us.  Instead, they made it clear that they'd take care of us.  No, not by giving us tech, but by making sure that we each had all we needed for happiness.  The masses loved this idea, the wealthy wunpers, not so much.

Not that this had stopped the appearance of an automatized hospital for each 1,000 people on Earth, that a single visit to would put you in the best health you'd ever been in.  Or the simultaneous appearance of automatized stores for each 1,000 people on Earth that would give you enough food for a week, just for asking.  Including many foods that people thought they were making up, but were provided without fanfare anyway.  Something the first jesting human had called a McMammoth was now the most popular sandwich on Earth, and some scientists had noted that it was somehow actually Mammoth meat.

Even travel was now provided for free, as odd arches had appeared all over, and if you said a destination before entering it, you would end up there.  If you said nothing, you'd just pass through the arch.  

And all of these hospitals, stores, and arches were impervious and immovable, and resisted all attempts at analysis.

But most galling was their casual attitude of our handicapped status.  For you see, it turned out we were all mabbled, but we had not known it.  And mabbled, we could not balb, not so much as a fimp, let alone a glemmen.  And having not those abilities, had never developed the enhancers that would let us scan daths.

Who we liked to call the Ambassador, but who they regarded as just another patient of our sick world, waved his cane side to side in front of him as he made his way to the meeting room.  It had been found that this one blind Ambassador in the United Nations was more able to speak to the Titan (she'd gave another name, but was inevitably labeled after where her and her kind had first arrived) than most.  It was still only two months since their arrival on the UNS Newton and her then simultaneous address to every single human on Earth.

"You're here to tell us that your industries and such are being disrupted, because your populace no longer desires to work for the elite, when they can live in perfect health and travel as they please." the Titan said without waiting to hear of that from the Ambassador.  "Further, you desire to try to delicately let us know that you believe you'll be 'forced' to compel your former workers to return to their tasks if we do not aid you in getting your economy back to how it used to be."

This was the difficult thing about dealing with this Titan, the Ambassador thought.  Their kind were five dimensional - "in a way", she'd say.  But regardless as to what that meant, her ability to see every possible alternate universe meant that she could see alternates where time passed a bit quicker or slower.  Which gave her the virtual ability to see into the future or the past.  It was more complex than that, an individual of their race could only balb a few glemmens out before it got fuzzy, but they had things that let them see as short an interval as a 'fimp' and as far out as 'daths'. 

He had heard that fimps were like microbes.  Just the ka-jillion or so meaningless variants along the lines of "did this dust particle go up or down?" or "did one coin flipped on a planet of 7 billion people land heads or tails?" 

And if they had tools that could let them discern fimps, they also had tools that let them balb out daths, which were analogous to light years.  Vast differences such as if their sun came to be in one era or another, thus depending on how focused they wanted to be, they could see the likely future of any race they ran into.  An advantage that he feared humanity would not be able to overcome.

"We are going to have to get our economies back on track", the Ambassador said.  "Any aid you can be in that would be appreciated.  Surely my son, Captain Delacourt, could have confirmed this by now."

"We are sorry", the Titan said, "For any personal distress this may cause you, but your old economies were exploitative of the majority of your race, and we cannot participate in what, to us, would be their re-enslavement.  If you want them to work for you, whether it be pyramid building or rocket ship research, you must offer them some value that they honestly desire.  Arranging for your planet's food and fuel to be artificially scarce so as to encourage them to endlessly strive will not be indulged.  And what Captain Delacourt related to me is not a topic I'll discuss."

"Fuel?", the Ambassador asked, diplomatically (and sadly) not inquiring further about his missing son, or the missing delegation that had been sent four years ago, and only returned - with the Southeast Asian looking Titan - recently.

"Mindful of how so many have chose to travel to the warmer parts of your planet", Ms. Smith answered, "We will be providing a power unit for every town in the temperate and colder regions.  And a power unit for every town, period.  This will let everyone live where they desire in comfort."

"And make the problem even worse.  Surely you know that while I might find it distasteful, others of our leadership will use force against the workers.  We aren't just going to let our race sink into idleness.", the Ambassador said.

"They are not 'your' race, though we know that the 1% of your species has always felt that they are.  That you somehow feel you have a proprietary interest in arranging things so that those born with less than you must do your bidding, toil on your tasks, work on your dreams.  And that you feel you have the right to use force to compel this shows that you truly do think of your fellow man as so much cattle.  This will be ending now."

"How?", the Ambassador asked, not bothering to dispute the indisputable assessment.

Rather than answer him personally, the Titan just cocked her head and raised a finger, and the voice went out to all Earth again, like when they had first arrived.  "People of Earth.  If any of you try and hurt another, you will be translated into an alternate Earth in which you will be the only person.  It is unlikely you will last long, as all the animals that man did not make extinct will be alive and well in such versions.  If you kill another, you will be translated to an alternate Earth in which life did not even develop and the atmosphere is mostly not oxygen.  From now on, no one will hurt or coerce another.  For any reason."

Distressingly, over half of humanity perished in the next few days.  Some just had to test it.  Some just couldn't help themselves.  Some were just wondering where the line was.  Those left behind had mixed feelings.  But as there was nothing to be done about it, they settled in - and most, though grief stricken over the loss of loved ones, felt it was for the best.

Ms. Smith insisted this was not genocide, or mass murder, as all those translated still had analogs alive and well a glemmen or so over.

The Ambassador returned a week later, this time without the cane.  "I availed myself of your automatized hospitals.  I suppose I should thank you.  It is a wondrous thing, this sight.  I wanted to ask if you could cure our race as a whole, though.  We're all apparently mabbled, as you say, but we'd like not to be.  Can this be remedied?"

"Individually, maybe.", Ms. Smith replied.  "But it would be a price that we think most of you would find too high.  You see, you have to be a different type of entity to be able to balb - or "see" - the various alternate universes.  Only then can the machine aids that let you see very tiny differences only a fimp away, or very large differences daths aways, be used.  And those machines are not so freely available as the machines we provided you.  They are vastly more complex, and not something that even all of us have access to."

The Ambassador pondered this.  "What would an individual have to do?  What is the too high price?"

Ms. Smith said, "You and your race believe in free will, that this exact slice of you, in space, time and alternates, is 'you' and that anything else would only be a copy.  Thus instead of installing transporters that would beam you from point to point on your planet's surface, I gave you arches.  Few of you would have gone for 'dying' at one end and a copy of you carrying on at the other end.  But simply walking through an arch, with no dissolution of your slice, that let all of you use it."

"But you're saying", the Ambassador interjected, "That we are copies, or 'slices' of what is real?"

"Not quite.", she answered.  "You who I am talking to is but a slice, a tiny part of a four dimensional worm that stretches back to your birth and continues on to your death - you get that, right?"  And seeing the Ambassador nod his head, she continued, "But you now know that the four dimensional worm is itself multi-dimensional, as it also has a 'width' so to speak, of all the alternates involved from your birth to death?"

Again the Ambassador nodded his head in the affirmative.  "We balb then that whole blob, with all the fine gradients of differing thoughts and viewpoints and outlooks.  The 'you' as you think of yourself is only one thin line of that whole blob, other lines of 'you' think entirely differently, raised as they were by Monarchists or Nazis, Democrats or Communists, Pagan or Jew, Catholic or Buddhist.  You see that?"

"Yes", said the Ambassador, "But that means my line on that blob is at least unique, no?"

"No", Ms. Smith said.  "The blob is vast, and a given line that thinks like you and so you'd think of as 'you' has millions of lines very near it, for all intents and purposes making it a very thick line of lines.  Of 'you' through all the millions of fimps that are slightly different from each other, but not sufficiently different to mean that 'you' are thinking in some notably different way.  In other words, the 'you' that came here today at 12:01:24 and the 'you' that arrived here a fimp over at 12:01:23 are identical, in any way that matters."

"Not to me!" said the Ambassador at once.  To which she nodded and said, "Aware that this is the opinion - false as it may be - of the majority of your race, we have done things as we've done.  But know that in reality, only unique consciousnesses matter, and in truth, very few of those do."

"Why what do you mean?", asked the Ambassador.  "If unique consciousnesses exist, don't they all matter?"

"How could they?", she replied.  "And do you even treat your own like you believe that?  Picture one of your former manual workers who used to have to toil away in a palm oil field in Indonesia.  He worked all day, longer than he cared to, forced by those he cannot get free of.  He then took such enjoyment as he could in the near rape of 'his' wife, and drinking too much of some poison that briefly numbed his pain and made him feel good with his friends - those in a similar predicament.  Could you tell one of those 'unique' consciousnesses from another?  Does your race even try?  Or when he would die of overwork, did it not pass unnoticed with another taking his place at once?  And who of you could tell that one had replaced another?"

"So you're saying", the Ambassador said, "That only great minds are unique personalities?"

"How well that would go with some of your race's misconceptions about previous economic hierarchies.  But it's not so much who has the most money or who invents the most things, but who perceives things in a broader or a more in depth way.  Granted, most of those then do invent things, compose songs, write, paint, and yes, create large enterprises that 'make money'.  Assuming they are in the correct socio-economic circumstances.  But those just tend to be the some of the effects, the cause was their unique personalities.", she explained.

The Ambassador nodded his head absently then exclaimed, "But what is the too high price?  We got away from that, no?"

She said calmly, "Any individual human could be 'fixed' to be able to balb, but they would not then be what you think of as themselves.  It wouldn't just be something like correcting someone's eyes or their appendix or their leg.  It would mean creating the type of being that can balb, then making it have 'their' personality.  Their way of perceiving things.  Such an entity would be able to balb, it could even be made to look like them, and it would think of itself as that person - but the 'original' would either be destroyed at that point, or left to walk about unharmed, knowing that it's copy was balbing, but still being unable to do so himself."

"So that's a 'no', then", said the Ambassador bitterly.  "After all that build up."

Ms. Smith said, "No one is trying to disappoint you.  You view 'personality' differently than we do, you have this concept of 'soul', some kind of uniquely ethereal aspect of yourself apart from your body.  Or so I learned from your son.  If you do, we have not detected it.  In an infinite multiverse, we pragmatically get that such a thing must surely be the case in some universe or the other, that a "soul" must exist somewhen that could have as a feature undetectability to our instruments, but whether that is this particular universe, we obviously cannot know."

"I can, though", she continued, "Make a gift to your race that might aid.  It's a kaleidoscope, of a sorts.  Or so I grok it.  Have you seen a kaleidoscope?"  The Ambassador shook his head.  "View one of those first", she said, "It's a means of various random and aesthetically pleasing patterns forming over and over, that sighted people enjoy.  I can give you a television of sorts that can show various views of other glemmens and daths.  It is not something given to tuning or control, at least not your tuning or control.  But I can calibrate it for your sector, so you can maybe gain some insights about how your race and the individuals in it deal with various things."

"Our sector?", the Ambassador asked.

"Yes", she answered.  "You understand that in your history, there may have been some of you living on an island, thinking the island was all, and how surprised they were to learn of the entirety of the planet?"  The Ambassador nodded his head.  "And", she continued, "You are aware of how vast the change in perception of man and his place in things changed when you went from a geocentric model to a heliocentric one, and discovered that all the points of lights were stars virtually infinite distances away?"

The Ambassador nodded again.

"It's much bigger in space and time then even you think now.  Your known universe is but a part of a larger universe, in space and time, and that a part of a 'larger' construct, so to speak, in what was and is before and now of your own."  The Ambassador looked a bit lost, but she continued, "I mean that there is a 'place' where your universe came from, it's what the universe is expanding into, not that I'm describing this correctly, just as best your words allow.  But even that is not the whole of it."

She paused then continued.  "You know we see the multiverse, which is but all the varieties of the way this universe can be.  But you cannot yet grasp how truly infinite such is.  Your species typically pictures an infinity of nothing, with the something of stars dotting it.  But more correctly, we are in an infinity of somethings, and 'nothing' is quite non-existent.  There is always something, even if it is a vacuum.  The infinity of just you in all your dimensions and incarnations is more than you are picturing, and the infinity of the multiverse is moreso.  You can have no idea of how far you must balb just to get to somewhat noticeable differences."

"Look out the window", she interrupted herself.  "See those mountains in the distance?"  The Ambassador nodded.  "Good.  That's the idea.  See how tiny they are, how fuzzy, when you know them to be big?  That's what it's like for us balbing.  I might 'see', I balb, the variety of me's having virtually the same conversation with you.  I see minor differences further out.  At about as 'far' off as those mountains appear to you, I balb some noticeable differences.  Like if you'd been rude, or I'd been rude, or you asked something different, or said something different.  I'd need an aid - think of it as glasses or a telescope - to balb those differences, or to see any real amount of glemmens away."

"You say you balb out far enough to know of conversations where I was rude or such.", the Ambassador said, "But what does that mean, do you hear the whole conversation simultaneously with this one?"

"A fair question, but somewhat unanswerable.  I know of it, yes.  How I know of it would be like you trying to explain your new found knowledge of 'green' to a blind person who has not been cured.  I could bore you yet more with glemmens and daths and fimps, but you'd not know what I meant any more than a conversation on the electromagnetic spectrum would let a blind man know about color.  Some of your scientists had been grasping towards 'otherness' of things, of "many worlds", but even then, very haphazardly."  

"And I don't 'see' it, really, that's just the word we use to aid you in understanding.  It's more just 'knowing' of the differences.  Like I have the memories of each way of it happening, while you only have the memory of one track.  I have the memories of thousands of tracks, most of them so similar as to make no difference, some different enough that it gives me perspective on what could have been.  This makes me, and our whole species, more 'rounded', is how I think you'd describe it.  More wisdom from our sidewise memories.  More perspective.  We cannot get as excited about things as you do, when we can remember them happening each way.  Each 'election', each game, each choice.  They all did and did not happen.  Life continues on, and generally continues to grow."

"You've given me much to ponder.  And much for our own savants to ponder.  But at a given point, I, and I'm sure others, would appreciate knowing what happened when you met our delegation, and why only you made it back on that ship.  If you have learned even about our belief in a soul from my son, you must also have learned that we aren't likely to cease inquiring.", the Ambassador said, as delicately, but firmly, as he could.

"Indeed.", Ms. Smith said - wryly?  "It is the persistence of your species that your son conveyed most abundantly to me, and why I have chose this solution to our minor problem of not wishing to be disturbed.  In most instances, it would be most optimal to simply cleanse all life from the planet of the potential interferers.  If it helps you and yours to know, it was my lengthy conversations with your son that persuaded me that this would be the more - kind - course.  As your concerns today show, this effectively stops all progress your race could make towards becoming a truly space-faring civilization.  If it goes as well here as I hope, then we may choose to do this in future cases.  Or we may not.  Do you understand why it does not matter?"

The Ambassador pondered that.  The silence stretched out.  Finally he looked at her and said, "Because from your balbing, you see all the choices.  Where you exterminated us, and where you simply gifted us into stagnation.  And every other option.  It does not matter to you, as if you had exterminated us here, then it would simply be that in another incarnation we'd be living in the utopia you're giving us.  So from the broadest of perspectives, no more or less of us are dying then if you did one thing or another, or even if you'd never arrived."

"Yes", Ms. Smith said.  "You are your son's father.  You grok.  So did he.  But it was his personal plea that it be this incarnation preserved.  And yes, he was smart enough to know it really didn't matter.  I felt affectionately enough about his endearing entreaties to indulge him all the same."