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sound, no light, no sensory input at all. The universe was formless and void.
"
Sensory deprivation
," Weaver thought. Okay, what happened?
He remembered stepping back to the gate. And a flash, he thought. "
Am I alive?
"
Well, sure, otherwise who is asking the question.
"What am I?"
he asked. Where am I? could wait. Get down to base principles.
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"I am a thinking being."
Good, so he at least existed in some form. But sensory deprivation was tricky.
The brain anticipated continuous feedback, little signals sent down the nerves
and received back like a computer network that is constantly sending out
packets. If it didn't get feedback it sent out more and more packets until it
overloaded. Which was why sensory deprivation was such a great tool for
torture.
"On the other hand, that assumes I have a brain," he thought. And nerves.
"This really sucks,"
he thought, bitterly. So, what had happened?
He and Miller had shot the cone thing as they were retreating out the gate.
Something had happened after that. There had been quite a few attack units in
the gate room, like they were staging for another assault.
So the cone thing was probably supposed to follow up the assault.
Maybe some sort of weapon. A nuke? Possibly. So had they predetonated it? If
so, as close as it was to the gate, the wormhole, it could have destabilized
it. If so, what did that mean to him? Maybe he was dead and this was the
afterlife. If so, where were the angels? Then he thought about a few of his
life experiences and considered the alternatives. Okay, where were the demons
with pitchforks?
"Neither a particle nor a wave,"
he thought. Caught in
Schrödinger's box. I'm a cat that might be alive and might be dead.
Now if I just had some equivalent of opposable thumbs, or, by preference, a
crowbar.
"Excuse me? Would you let me out of here?"
He suddenly found himself in a car, going down a winding mountain road. There
was a huge semitrailer in his rearview, riding right on his tail. He
instinctively knew that if he slowed down the semi was going to run him right
over and he really would cease to exist. But he couldn't go
too fast because around every turn there were low-slung police cars with
beady-eyed officers clutching radar guns. If he went too fast the police would
catch him and then he would cease to exist as well. He didn't know how he knew
that but it was an absolute certainty as strong as the fact that he had to
breathe.
He looked down at his speedometer and slowed down, slightly, but nearly ran
off the road, actually bouncing off a guard rail and barely regaining control
of the car. He got back on the road but by that time he had lost track of how
fast he was going and tried to look at the speedometer again. It was
impossible; he couldn't know how fast he was going and where he was at the
same time.
"Oh, shit," he muttered, careening around the twisty road, trying to watch the
road and instruments at the same time and failing miserably at both. "I'm an
electron."
The crazy road race continued for some time, sometimes uphill and then,
crazily, he would find himself going downhill without having reached a crest,
the semi always on his tail, crashing into him any time he slowed down too
much. When they were going uphill it would fall behind a little bit but it
would come barrel-assing up behind him on the downhills. And always there were
the police.
He got to a trance-state where he had a vague notion of where he was in the
road and also how fast he was going. Not a perfect control of either, but a
good approximation. He was all over the road though.
And then, suddenly, the road ended in a guard rail right around a steep
corner. He slammed on the brakes but the semi hit him from behind and he found
himself flying through open space. Then the car, nose down, hit a wall on the
far side and exploded.
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He came to, lying on the ground at the bottom of the mountain, pieces of the
car all around him. He could barely see them, out of the corner of one eye. He
tried to move his head but it was immobile, his vision skewed up and to the
left. He rolled his eyes and saw his torso, only slightly bleeding, lying on
the ground next to him with a leg on top of it. Then the leg jerked into
motion and slid over to the shoulder socket and attached.
"That's not right," Bill muttered, wondering how he could speak without lungs
to provide the air.
There was more thumping and bumping around him and then he could turn his
head. He got to his feet, clumsily, leaning slightly to one side, and looked
down.
He had one leg and one arm attached as "legs." He had a leg as his right arm
and his left arm was attached, backwards, on his right. One buttock was just
below him on his chest and he noticed that it wasn't his chest but his back;
his head was on backwards. And there was something tickling his hand.
He pulled the hand around, holding it upwards behind his back where he could
see it. What was tickling his hand was Tuffy.
"You're real," he said. He noticed then that there still was no sensation. He
hadn't felt the turns on the road or land under his feet. He could see, but
there was no sound of wind, no smell, no feel. Except for the tickling
sensation from Tuffy's fur.
"What is reality?" The words formed in his head. They weren't even words, just
the knowledge that such words had formed.
"I'm a physicist, not a philosopher," Bill replied. "You're real."
"At your level, what is the difference?" The words were like lead weights in
his mind.
"We're better at sums," Bill said. "And you're real."
"I thought that physicists hated it when people said 'sums'?" the creature
replied, honestly sounding puzzled.
"I'm supposed to have legs where legs go and arms where arms go and you're
arguing semantics?"
"Nonetheless, when all was uncertain you clutched for the certainty of
philosophy," the creature said.
"Descartes was one of the greatest mathematicians of all time," Bill replied.
"I didn't read about him in a philosophy course, I read about him in a
tensoral calculus course. His 'I think because I am' thing was just blind
panic."
"Yet you continue to use your mind, to apply logic, even when your
butt is sticking out of your chest. Many would have gone insane."
"I made my SAN check," Bill answered. "I was an electron, all that
'I can't know my velocity and location at the same time' bullshit in the car.
Now I'm a busted-up electron that has been badly reassembled. I
suppose it's a metaphor for something. I'm still trying to figure out the
cops. They looked just like Virginia State Patrol, except that Virginia
State Patrol doesn't usually have fangs that are dripping venom and yellow
eyes."
"Who do you think keeps an eye on the particles in your universe to ensure
they don't exceed the speed of light? And who destroys them when they do?"
"Cops with yellow eyes and fangs?" Bill said. "Makes as much sense as anything
Einstein ever said." Bill thought about something else and found himself
laughing out loud. "And blue lights!"
He found himself back in the car, in the race down the hill. Tuffy was hanging
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