December 1

I woke up suddenly this morning.  In a room that I thought at first was the copying room.  It was soothing, with wood and leather.  But I was in a bed, with wires and tubes attached to me.

I sat up suddenly and they all broke off when I did.

 

A note was on a table next to me.  “Dear Mark,” it began, and I read about the past few days.  “…We are working on the solution,” it said as it came to its end.  “In the meantime, we were worried about you.  So you and nano Mark are isolated now  to permit the superprobabilities and, hopefully, keep each of you in a conscious state.  Two of you, working on this, will probably solve it quicker than all of us on the outside.

“Love you buddy.  I will see you soon.  Jim.”

A pile of books was next to the note.  “No Man Is An Island” by Thomas Merton was on top.  Bastard. 

I knocked them off, pissed at what had happened.  The most incredible fucking development.  I am in a fucking box.  A large fucking box.  No one knows if I am awake or asleep.  No one knows if I am alive or dead.  I am Schrodinger’s fucking cat, writ large.

I don’t even now if it’s worth writing this.  Will any one read it?

I got up and explored the rest of the room. 

There is a bed and the usual stuff here, and the other rooms have food and more books and a bathroom and in the back there is water recycling equipment like the astronauts have and workout equipment and food and food and food cause I’m not gonna be able to show anyone out there that I am consuming anything, that water is running into here, that electricity is being used,  that the Internet is active, that I am accessing websites, etc. etc. etc.  that I am taking a shower or peeing or eating cause any knowledge would collapse the probabilities. 

Or at least Jim and the others think.  I am back now reading the synopsis again more carefully and slowly.  “We have taken probably excess precautions to make sure that you are safe,” Jim wrote.  “Mark is in another room just like this one; we set both up in an attempt to isolate you as much as humanly possible.  No one has said it outright, but we are worried that entanglement could be life threatening to you.  We can’t have your consciousness deteriorating.”

“Hopefully you can read this.  We had put you in the room on life support that was designed to break away if you woke.  The difficult thing is that we won’t have any indication if you have and, speaking for me, I can’t really let you go on without even knowing your state.  You might be pissed at that, interfering with your experiment and all, but I can’t let you go on without knowing, consciously, the alternatives.  So after a lot of thought I’ve told everyone we are going to break the seal two days from when you’ve been put in here, which is the only way we can ascertain if you have recovered.  But we aren’t going to break Mark’s seal then, hoping that, if we are right, you will be conscious.  He probably will collapse then because the entanglement will work in reverse – you will be up and he will be in a coma state.  He knows, and we have identical times in each room, so he doesn’t just collapse on the floor, he’ll know to get someplace comfortable when he can pass out.  If all goes well I will talk to you about two days from when you read this.  The timer is on the wall. “

I glanced up.  47:32 it read in big red numerals.

“All my best bud.  You will be pleased to know that aside from this small glitch, every other thing has gone right.   There are no anomalies whatsoever.”

Right.  No anomalies.  I am a fucking rat in a cage – no a fucking cat in a box – and he says there are no anomalies.  I threw his fucking note down.

 

November 1 later (44:12)

I’ve been pacing through the rooms.  I should try to start to get to work but I’ve been pacing.  Back and forth back and forth.  What the fuck?  Of all the things that could go wrong, of all the things we planned for, it’s entanglement?  Really?  And entanglement as cause of consciousness?  Fuck me.  Fuck fuck me.

I am the probably absolute reductionist.  We are nothing but bits and pieces of matter, thrown together at random over 4 billion years, forces beyond our comprehension.

And that is all life is too, the mice proved that.  When we copied Jekyll and made Hyde we proved that too, that life was just a set of reactions we could copy.  And man is just an animal writ large. 

There is no noise, no noise from the outside world and I imagine, none from me.  No sense of others around because if they sense me I’ll go back into my coma and, if I sense them, the experts think, like though an undetectable one way mirror a video feed over the internet, I will soon go crazy seeing but not touching, not being able to communicate with them.

We can’t even communicate on a time delayed manner, sending them this notebook, using a computer or anything else…even time delayed communication would collapse the probabilities, according to entanglement theory.  It even works through time and probably on an indeterminate basis – we wouldn’t know exactly how then would affect now aside from probably random blackouts.  Oh efff me.