I died about a year ago, I think. That’s when the first miracle happened. The doctors can’t explain it. They waved off the first remission; sometimes people are just lucky. But then it happened again, and again. I just won’t die. They brought in specialists after the third time. And they concluded what I had already deduced; medicine can’t explain this.
But physics can. A century ago, we discovered a terrifying truth: the universe is fundamentally random. We used to think the world was made of tiny particles. But then we learned that you can’t quite pin them down – in some way, the particles are in many places at once. Until you look. And then the universe tidies up its room, and shows you a nice and orderly world. But that’s a lie. When we aren’t looking, there is only chaos.
How can this be? How does the universe know when we’re looking at it, when to clean up its act? It was a puzzle for many decades. Until Everett came up with the answer: we’re part of the mess. The probabilities don’t resolve into one thing happening and another not. They *both* happen. But we only see down one path in the road. Another me takes the other path. Time isn’t a line, one thing after another. It’s a tree, branching unbelievably quickly at every moment. Nature follows the old dictum: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it”.
Everything happens, but some things happen *more* than others. In day-to-day life, we don’t suddenly find ourselves teleported to Mars, sporting a tentacle instead of an arm, or knowing the winning numbers for tomorrow’s lottery. But why not? It’s all possible; it all happens. The answer: unlikely things happen, but they happen *less*. Time is a tree, but it has a trunk. And almost always, that’s where we find ourselves, not in one of the fantastically unlikely branches. These shadows of our world barely exist at all, burdened by the impossible coincidence of coming into being. You won’t find yourself in one of them unless you are impossibly lucky, or you have a good reason.
I have a good reason; I died. My most real self, the one in the trunk of the great tree of time, is no more. And so my soul is scattered among the branches where I survived. These barely real worlds, mere shadows of the main timeline, are all I have left. They saved me as I lay dying, but miracles have a price; their improbability diminishes their reality. The doctors marveling at my survival are equally insubstantial; their more real selves have already noted my death and moved on to the next patient. Their shades are the only ones who witness my miraculous survival.
But one miracle is not enough. I remain on the brink of death, and new improbabilities are needed to save me almost every day. Time continues to provide. Well, mostly it doesn’t. But when that happens I’m not around to find out. With every new miracle, my reality fades a little more. Compared to the trunk of the main timeline, I must be on an unimaginably tiny branch, an irrelevant speck in the ocean of probability that is our universe. But these specks are all I have left. Death is our slow erasure from the tree of life. But that erasure will never be fully complete. As long as there is some way I can survive, and there always will be, I will never be completely gone.
No one is, I suppose. No one ever really dies, not completely. They just sink into ever thinner branches of time, ever-amazing miraculous survivals. For years. Decades. Millenia. Somewhere on that great tree, alive today, you could find Hammurabi, Cleopatra, Jesus of Nazereth, Julius Casear. Everyone of us get our own private afterlives, filled with the ghosts of those we knew. At least for a while, until they die too. Our afterlives are only committed to keeping us alive; our attendants will age and die as mortals. I will live, I believe, to see my doctors die of old age. Will they, shades that they are, get their own afterlives? I suppose they must.
I wonder some days if I really will ever cease. Can a branch become so insubstantial that it just fades altogether? What if the simulationists are right, and we are just some unthinkably complicated computer simulation. And eventually, after too many miracles pile up, after my branch no longer commands enough substance, it simply gets rounded down to zero. But that’s probably just wishful thinking.
You see, immortality alone is a cruel blessing. Think of Tithonius, who Zeus granted immortality but not youth. My body knows it is dying. And it wants me to know too. That’s what the agonizing pain is for, a cruel attempt to motivate me to stave off the inevitable somehow, to pull off a miracle. It’s a cruel joke, since I know the miracles will always be forthcoming. But the pain will never cease. This fading shadow of a world, my personal afterlife, is also my personal hell. Forever and ever. Amen.
Bit Wise, Pound Foolish 