Smoke, Mirrors and Deep Space Read online

  “…wherein, though light energy and other objects may travel along the surface of this curve in the usual continuous ongoing sequence of events we call time…”

  He ran his hand along the outside of a section of the arc.

  “…it may also be possible for things to leap across the arcs of this curved continuum.”

  He demonstrated this concept with his hand, jumping from one point on the circle straight across to another.

  “Such ‘jumps’ might thus shorten the time needed to travel between two distant points in space along this circle significantly. As a matter of fact, if this area inside the circular universe is considered to be a void of non-time and non-space, then it’s theoretically possible to bend our space in a way to make two distant points meet…”

  He demonstrated this last idea by pinching together two parts of the flexible circular rod.

  “…and make the journey nearly instantaneous.”

  Alex, who was seated three or four rows up from the front of the room, slowly raised his hand.

  “Professor?”

  The professor nodded at him and, a little self-consciously, he rose.

  “What about the pi factor?” Alex said.

  “What about it, cadet? You have the floor.”

  “Well, if pi is integral to the measurement of all circular objects, where pi times the diameter gives you the circumference, pi times the radius squared gives you the area, and four-thirds pi radius to the third—”

  “Equals the volume of a sphere,” the professor interrupted impatiently. “Yes, yes, we’ve all taken elementary geometry. Get on with it please, what is your point?”

  Some of the other cadets snickered, a few whispered to each other behind the shield of their hands.

  “My point is,” Alex licked his lips, “that pi is an infinite number: it never ends, it never closes, it just gets smaller and smaller.”

  “So?”

  “So, doesn’t that prove - mathematically at least - that a circle never truly closes either, that it just spirals infinitesimally closer and closer? And wouldn’t your circular universe actually be as infinite as a linear one in that case? Think about it: even though this pseudo circular universe can encompass great areas outside of time and space across which instantaneous travel, possibly even time travel, might occur, it still just goes on and on and on without a beginning or end!

  The professor hesitated for a moment, taken aback by the depth of this observation; then opted for an attitude of cynical authority.

  “This is astrophysics, Cadet, not metaphysics. I suggest you take that issue up with the chaplain.”

  Everyone laughed, as Alex blushed furiously and sunk back down into his seat.

  * * *

  “Pi,” Alex said to Uriel, remembering.

  “An infinite, unending number…and it’s used to determine…”

  “The dimensions of anything circular, like the orbit of a moon around a planet, or an electron around its atomic nucleus. The shape and movement of virtually everything in this universe is built on a circular pattern, isn’t it?”

  Uriel nodded. “As is the universe itself. But, as you intuited back in college, a circle never truly closes, it just approximates closure.”

  “So you have an approximately circular universe that goes on for infinity with no closure… And thus no overlaps in time,” Alex realized. “That’s what makes it possible for me to play any number of roles at the same time without overlap?”

  “Had a linear universe been conceived, such leaps back and forth across time wouldn’t be possible,” Uriel explained. “Even though finite lifetimes might still be meaningless against infinity, time itself would always be moving forward. But in a circular universe time perpetually repeats itself.”

  “So past, present and future are equally accessible,” Alex finished the thought. “But if you played different life roles in the same exact segment of time, you might get an overlap of their sensory perceptions…”

  “Like feedback from a mike,” Uriel nodded. “Pi is the little glitch in our circular universe, the imperfect infinity which creates this tiny degree of separation—infinitely small, growing ever smaller, and yet able to hold everything in its place and keep it from becoming unity again.”

  “Again?” Alex grabbed at the meaning. “So there was a beginning?”

  “There was to this particular game, this holographic universe…not to you.”

  “And when will it end?”

  “When pi ends.”

  “But it’s an infinite number, it goes on forever.”

  “If you say so.”

  Alex sat down in one of the chairs of the auditorium, resting his chin in his hands. He stared at the floor a long time, before asking, “And you, who exactly are you?”

  “You. A part of you… but separate too.”

  It wasn’t the answer he wanted. Maybe he’d misunderstood.

  “A part of me?” he questioned. “But separate? Then you mean there’s us, you and me?”

  “No, just you, ultimately,” Uriel responded. “ I’m the one running the projector.”

  “So you’re me? I’m playing you right now? As well as playing me Alex? Or, am I you playing you playing me?”

  Alex laid his head back in the chair, and began to laugh. “That means I’m talking to myself? I’m talking to myself! That’s absolutely fuckin’ psycho!!”

  Suddenly laughter filled him like a nuclear explosion, every cell, every pore, every atom upended and turned inside out before disappearing into the brilliance of realization. His face opened in a howl of laughter, ecstatic in some unnamed, indescribable and senseless sense of pure joy that mushroomed out to fill a vast infinity that was only as large as he.

  He stopped laughing after a while, his face slowly becoming grave again. He turned to look up at Uriel with an expression of inestimable sadness.

  “Then I’m really…alone? I’m all alone?”

  “Well, technically, as far as the game goes. Alone…yes.”

  “I’m totally alone,” Alex said in bewilderment. “There’s just me, just me in this whole damn universe, only me. Alone.”

  “In this holographic universe. It’s not that big, really. But it is all there is. You’re all there is.”

  “So, I’m…God?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Uriel said. “Do you feel like God?”

  “Not particularly. But maybe this is how God feels.”

  There was a long silence.

  Alex looked over at Uriel doubtfully. “So, you’re me? You’re sure?”

  Uriel nodded.

  “Then that means you’re God too? And Andy? My little Andy is God? Wait a minute, that means I was little Andy?!”

  “Yes. And Gena as well,” Uriel allowed.

  “So, let me get this straight,” Alex said. “I, as Alex, made myself, as Andy, miss my own Little League playoffs?!”

  “Yes,” Uriel nodded.

  “And I, as Andy, resented my Alex self for that?” He began to smile. “Then I, as Gena, betrayed myself as Alex, by fucking myself as Ray Petersen!!”

  “Uh, yes. Almost, anyway,” Uriel agreed.

  “And I as James Earl Ray shot myself as Reverend Martin Luther King, simultaneously making myself into one of the most beloved national martyrs and most despised racial bigots in U.S. history!”

  Alex had begun to laugh again, edging toward hysteria. Then he caught himself on a nail of hope and stopped abruptly, to ask, “What about my dad?”

  “Your dad?” Uriel responded. “What do you think?”

  * * *

  Instantly Alex found himself sitting in a straight-backed chair, flanked on either side by small but brutal men whose muscle—all they needed—was size forty-four magnum, worn just below their small dead hearts. At the moment one of these weapons was pressed up against the base of Alex’s skull, getting his full attention.

  The man he faced behind the desk looked a little softer than his bodyguards; he was
smiling at Alex, but his eyes were snake-cold. There was another man standing on his right side that Alex recognized from an earlier briefing, an FBI agent in even deeper than he.

  “What makes you think—” Alex protested, his palms wet against his blue-jeaned knees.

  “Cayate!” the man at the desk ordered. “Lemme give you some advice, cabron. When you’re swimming in a cesspool, up to your neck in shit, keep your mouth shut. Now, one last time,

  who else?”

  “I don’t know what—”

  The jefe pulled out a photograph of Ronnie in his police cadet uniform, taken on graduation day fifteen years earlier.

  “You’re a fucking cop, cabron…and I know you’re not working alone. Give him up, maybe we’ll let you go back to that wife and kid of yours…last chance, fucker.”

  Ronnie looked down at his hands, at the pale band of skin where his wedding ring had been. He could smell the other agent’s sweat, feel the cold sick rush of his adrenalin, the acceleration of his heart. He didn’t want to see the man’s face when he spoke, so he kept his head down.

  Slowly, deliberately he said, “There - is - no - other - agent.”

  The shot exploded through his head. Time slowed. A great fireworks show was being performed in back of his eyes, startling beautiful, despite the sense of dread that accompanied it, the black cloud that rolled through like silent thunder to extinguish the last remnants of light.

  * * *

  “Oh, Dad,” Alex sighed, “even you were just me?”

  He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  “They are all me, aren’t they?” he said at last to Uriel.

  “Everywhere I look, there I am.” He shook his head. “What am going to do?”

  “What else is there?” Uriel asked quietly.

  Alex broke down at that point, sobbing like a child. “I’m alone. I’m truly all alone. There’s only me…” His certainty of this was like an ancient memory, something he’d known all along.

  He reached his hand out to touch Uriel’s face, but it went right through. The man seemed to be disappearing.

  “Don’t leave,” he begged it. “I’m so lonely. There’s no one here, no one else at all.”

  He spoke urgently to the fading image of Uriel, even though he now realized he was simply talking to himself. “I feel like I miss Gena and Andy, but then I realize I’m simply missing myself.” He shook his head, tormented. “What am I to do? What can I do?”

  “Nothing,” The translucent image of Uriel advised softly, “or anything. You can quit, you know.”

  “Can I?”

  “You figured out the game,” Uriel shrugged. “So by your own rules you can now end it. But then it would be as before: Endless, timeless, bored out of our mind, with nothing to do and no one to do it with.”

  “So I have to go on with this game.”

  “What else is there, really?” Uriel asked gently

  “If…if I go back into my former life right now, will I remember this?”

  “Usually you’ve chosen not to.”

  “So this has happened before.”

  “From time to time, so to speak.”

  There was a long pause, while Alex considered something. “But. This can’t be…all. I can’t be…”

  “What?” Uriel prodded gently fading back in, his features as he did so morphing into a mirror image of Alex. Alex appeared not to notice, his mind elsewhere.

  “God. I can’t be all there is to God! How fucking disappointing.”

  Uriel/Alex just raised a brow, waited.

  “I always thought He would be so much more.”

  “Omnipotent?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Omnipresent and omniscient?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Alex paced and nodded. “All knowing, all powerful…”

  “You are…taken all together.”

  Alex stopped his pacing and looked at the other man sharply. His brows raised in sudden recognition of his mirror image. Then he smiled and shook his head, accepting.

  “What do you mean ‘taken all together’ ?” he asked.

  Uriel/Alex shrugged. “It’s like you said once, ‘’The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.’”

  “So you’re saying, right now I’m just a part?”

  “No. Well, yes and no. You are all there is. Just one being. But let’s just say you’re kind of…scattered.”

  “All these parts I’m playing…”

  “So many parts, so little time.” Uriel/Alex managed a wry grin. The expression that might have looked out of place on the old Uriel looked right at home on him now.

  “So even now I’m like, not altogether here.”

  “Right. You are, and you aren’t. It’s that small degree of separation. Pi?”

  “So, like I was saying, what if I go back to my former life…and what if this time I choose to remember all this?”

  “Well,” Uriel/Alex said, “it would definitely give you the advantage in any game.”

  “Yes, but then, what if I choose to tell?”

  “Tell…what?”

  “Tell myself—tell all my selves, all the different roles I’m playing —the Truth.”

  “The truth?”

  “That we’re all just one being. That there is only ‘I,’ and it’s the same ‘I’ in every one of us: the same Self, the same eternal being. The Truth that ‘I’ am everyone, and that I am thus no one in particular. That no matter which role I think I’m playing, everyone in that game is also ‘I’ , playing a different role in a slightly altered moment of time, and that I-you-we are still ultimately all alone.”

  Alex paused a minute thinking, then went on: “ And what if I tell my various selves that this is only an imaginary universe of our own creation, a hologram where we—I—can play an endless

  game of life against myself in an infinite number of guises, and none of it is real and none of it really matters in the end…that Truth.”

  “Oh, that Truth.”

  “And what if I tell this Truth in such a way that all my different life roles, all my different ‘I’s’ suddenly realize we really are the same being? What would happen then?”

  “I don’t know,” Uriel/Alex admitted.

  “Have I done it before? Told?”

  “No, not really,” The other said. “You’ve talked around it many times, given hints in allegory—as holy prophets, various poets, Stanley Kubrick. But you’ve never stated it outright, in black and white like this.”

  “And if I do? What will be the results?”

  “I’m not sure, probably some good will come, probably some bad…if either of those terms truly has meaning anymore. You tell me.”

  Alex contemplated this for a moment before answering. “I think people might stop fighting, stop killing, stop stealing from and betraying each other,” he said, “if they realized they were just doing it to themselves.”

  “You mean you’d stop? That’s who this is about. Do you feel like you—all those different yous being played—would suddenly begin to treat everyone else fairly and kindly, give all their alternate views and desires the same respect as your own, since you now realize that they actually are your own? You’d realize that since everyone is, in essence, you, their opinions and desires, hopes and dreams are as important and valid as your own, right?”

  Alex looked at him a moment, rubbing his jaw. His lips pursed into a quirky little smirk.

  “On the other hand,” he mused, “I might just figure that it didn’t matter what I did to others, since ultimately I was only doing it to myself…no hurt, no foul.”

  There was a long thoughtful pause while both considered this.

  “It could end up in chaos, couldn’t it?” Alex said after a moment. “A horrible reign of selfishness, crime and betrayal….”

  “In which case,” Uriel/Alex smiled, “you’d simply re-invent organized religion to get yourself back in control.”

  There was another long pause for contemplati
on. Then Alex smiled, looking up at his mirror image again “Or maybe I’d start to get some of that old omnipotent omniscience thing going again.”

  “Anything’s possible,” the other grinned.

  “Might be interesting to find out.”

  “This was getting a little tedious,” Uriel/Alex admitted.

  “Hmmm,” said Alex.

  “If it doesn’t work out, you could always put it back the way it was by replaying this moment, and reversing your decision….”

  “I could?”

  “Well, actually I’m not totally sure about that…. You are God,” Uriel/Alex said. “But then again, maybe the way you’ve set up the rules it would change things irrevocably.”