Boltzmann And Boltzwomann
(A short-short story I wrote recently. Too short to make an ebook in itself, but I’ll include it in a short story collection at some poin).
t was a fine romance. The finest in fact. Even though they never met each other.
Jerry Taylor knew he loved Linda Soames from the moment he first saw her. They were obviously meant for each other. She took a little longer to fall in love with him, but it was only a matter of weeks before the two were agreed that they’d never met anyone like the other, and that no-one else would ever do for them.
They were married within a year, and spent the rest of their lives together, happily. They had three lovely children, who went on to have jobs that brought them slightly more financial success than their parents had, but not enough that they lost sight of where they came from. They celebrated their sixtieth wedding anniversary on a cruise around Hawaii with their grandchildren and great-grandchildren all around them, and when they finally died, as people do, they did so only a few hours apart.
But technically, they never existed in the same universe at the same time.
The multiverse is a bigger place than we imagine, or indeed than we can imagine. The mathematician Max Tegmark says, in fact, that not only every possible physical universe exists in it, but every possible mental universe. Any self-consistent mathematical system is its own universe, equally real with our own.
Including the ones containing Boltzmann brains.
A Boltzmann brain is a brain that comes into existence in a universe which is otherwise at maximum entropy. There’s nothing else in the universe, and then, blip! – a brain appears, complete with memories of an entire life that never happened. It has time for one single thought, and then it disappears out of existence again.
Given enough time, enough trillions of years, a second Boltzmann brain will appear, identical to the first except it’s now had that extra thought. Over googolplexes of years, this brain would live a normal human life in nanosecond-long installments, all its awareness of its surroundings being just false memories, and with no connection between its existence in one subjective moment and the next. But it would have a real, long, fulfilling life. Just like Jerry did.
Linda, on the other hand, didn’t even have that much physical existence. She was an artefact of a computer program that was never run. A computer scientist worked out a starting state for a cellular automaton which, if run, would have implemented a Turing machine, which in turn would eventually (after several quadrillion iterations) have simulated Linda’s entire life and all her visible surroundings. Her entire life, everything she ever thought, felt or experienced, was implicit in the twenty lines of Perl code the scientist had written down, but no computer in the world had the memory to run it or ever would.
Coincidentally, the Boltzmann brains that were Jerry Taylor contained faked memories that matched exactly the parts of the Linda program where she would have spent time with the man she loved. And the Linda program would eventually have produced a bunch of cells that implemented instructions that produced a simulacrum of a man within Linda’s range of vision, and that simulacrum would have behaved in exactly the same way that the Taylor brains would have, had they been connected to a body.
The children, grandchildren and so on, of course, had no independent existence of their own, and winked out of existence every time they were not in the presence of Linda or Jerry. They were just a shared hallucination of the Boltzmann brains and the computer program that was never run. But their lives were happy enough, for what they were.
Somewhere out there, in a universe we can never access, Jerry’s brain is popping briefly into existence again. For him, it is currently 1952, and Linda and he are on their second date. It’s the only experience that brain will ever have, before dissolving back into the mass of superheated protons from which it came, but it’s a happy experience. That nanosecond isn’t a bad life, all things considered.
And Linda? No-one’s even going to get round to writing her program for at least another sixty years. She doesn’t exist yet, even though Jerry is looking at her right now and wondering if she’ll let him do more than kiss her this time. But those twenty lines of perl code contain, in their own way, a recipe for happiness, if only they were to be followed closely enough.
And if Jerry and Linda live their lives totally oblivious of the nature of the universe they’re living in, if they’re completely unaware of their own natures and deluding themselves into thinking they’re something they’re not, and if neither of them will ever share a second’s real communication with the person they love, doesn’t that just make them human?
Time Detective Chapter Two
[For part one of the story, click the "time detective" tag]
So I should probably explain what it actually is that I do, shouldn’t I? I’m a private detective, but I started out as a physics student. I was planning on a relatively dull career in academia, as a matter of fact – I was interested in doing some work in gravitational physics, which was hardly a cutting-edge whizz-bang area, and the Brian Cox career path had yet to be invented. My plan was to finish my Master’s, get a doctorate, then settle into a life of producing three or four papers a year which nobody would read.
But I made two big mistakes. The first was putting a chemistry module down as one of my optional modules, because I didn’t like the look of electronic engineering. The other was actually paying attention.
A chance remark in an organic chemistry lecture about an unusual property of thiotimoline caused me to think about what would happen to the shape of the molecule in a Gauss-Riemann geometry. I put that together with a couple of other things – which I’m not going to mention here, obviously – and suddenly found I had worked out a way to travel through time. And not one of those “build two black holes ten thousand light years apart and rotate one of them” jobs. This required practically nothing – you probably have most of the equipment to build a small time machine yourself, though you could probably only go back a week or so on a domestic power supply without blowing a fuse.
I posted something on USENET, not saying exactly what I’d done – I didn’t want to pre-empt publication and risk that Nobel prize – but posting a couple of the calculations in a different context, as a gedankenexperiment, just to make sure I hadn’t done anything incredibly stupid.
Two hours later, a man I didn’t know, in an immaculately-tailored suit, one that fit so well that the gun he had in his pocket was extremely conspicuous, showed up at the door of my room in Halls and asked me to take a walk.
As we walked through Sackville Park, he explained the situation to me.
“You’re not the first to figure it out, you know. Feynman knew the trick, and Von Neumann. Godel probably did as well, though by the end he didn’t know much of anything. We get about one undergrad every three or four years figuring it out now.”
“So why haven’t I heard of it before?”
“Oh for God’s sake, man, I thought you were meant to be clever. It’s too dangerous ever to be made public.”
“Dangerous? But I’ve proved that changing history and paradoxes are both impossible. This would only work in a universe with a single consistent history.”
“Exactly. Think about what that means, for a moment, man. Say you want my PIN number. You say you’ll try 1111, and if it works, write it down on a piece of paper and send it back to yourself five minutes earlier. If it doesn’t, you write 1112 and send it back to yourself.” He sat down on a bench. “The only consistent history where that works is the one where you instantly get a piece of paper with my PIN on it. All cryptography becomes useless. All national secrets are instantly open to anyone. The whole fabric of civilisation comes under threat.”
“So, what, you want me to stop investigating this stuff?”
“Not at all. We know that you can’t get the truly curious to ever stop experimenting. You want to build a time machine for your own personal use, we can’t stop you – the components are too easy to get hold of. What we want you to do is to sign the Official Secrets Act – you never tell anyone else how to do it, and any attempt to misuse the technology gets you convicted of high treason. Also, you quit university, today. We don’t want you slipping bits of these ideas out, even by accident.”
“Quit university?!”
“Yes. Drop out. Find another job. Whatever you want – the government will pay you thirty thousand a year to keep your mouth shut, anyway, and you can carry on your research in your own time, so long as you pass all your work on to the government. That’s the deal, take it or leave it.”
“You offer that to everyone who figures this out?”
“Yes, it’s our standard offer.”
“And has anyone ever turned you down?”
“Oh, one or two, one or two…” he stood up,“I’ll be round tomorrow with your copy of the Official Secrets Act.”
As he went, he patted the statue that he’d been sitting next to on the bench. The statue of Alan Turing.
I did as he asked.
So now, I work as a private detective. Not because I need the money as such, but just to give me something to do with my brain now that physics isn’t an option. Not that most of my cases require much of a brain. But a few require a little investigation, and that’s where I have the edge over my competitors. With my personal-sized time machine I can only go back in time a week or so, and I have to be careful not to give myself too much information about the future (the government keep a very close eye on trans-temporal communication – any sudden lottery wins and I’d be the richest man in the graveyard), but it does mean that if someone says their husband came home late last Wednesday, for example, I can go back and follow him and see where he went.
Those are the neat cases, of course. This one was worse. This time someone was dead, and it was my fault, somehow. And I was going to have to go back and meet this man, knowing he was going to die, and knowing there was nothing I could possibly do to stop it.
It’s days like that that make me wish I’d gone for electronic engineering after all.
Time Detective Part 1
I’m too ill to write today (my blood pressure’s increased. giving me an awful headache), but I found this on my hard drive when looking for something else. It’s the first chapter of a science fiction detective novella I started writing. If people like it, I’ll write the rest. Let me know what you think:
Time Detective
I got into my office about ten minutes after I received the message from myself, letting me know the client was going to be coming. I could have got there quicker, but I like to leave a little bit of time to let myself get out of the way.
I’d not been in for a week, since getting the first message from myself, telling me to keep clear, but the place was pretty much exactly as I’d left it.
Work had been a bit light for a couple of months. There are only so many adulterous husbands you can follow or pet cats you can track down before you realise that the life of a private detective is staggeringly unlike that of a Philip Marlowe or a Sherlock Holmes. Unless there’s a Holmes story I’ve not read called “The Case Of The Drunken Arsehole Who Gave His Wife The Clap”, anyway. It’s an unpleasant, dirty, sleazy job, and not one I’d recommend to anyone else.
Of course, I have certain… advantages… that make me very, very good at it. And that was why I was heading to my office at the ridiculous hour of ten in the morning, to meet up with someone who would undoubtedly be asking me if I could add up the clues of the used condom wrapper she’d found in her husband’s pocket and the money that had been disappearing from their joint account and come up with an answer she might actually like.
So I got to my office and opened a bottle of whisky. The truth is, I don’t touch the stuff, but I found early on that clients want to see a hard-boiled hard-drinking Sam Spade gumshoe, even when you’re operating out of a rented office suite in a suburban industrial estate. The smell of whisky, like the five o’clock shadow, makes them think you’re a rule-breaking wise guy who kicks ass and takes names.
And of course there’s an element of truth in that – you have to be prepared to do a few things in this business that are, at best, dubiously ethical. Though not so much in the cases with the lost cats. And you have to be prepared to defend yourself. I’ve had a few newly-ex husbands come to see me to try to extract their alimony payments from me in the form of teeth.
But in general, that kind of thing is all about image. You can go down two routes in this business. You can either look like an actual thug – skinhead, broken nose, missing teeth, neck wider than your head – or you can go for the more sophisticated-but-still-dangerous look. Give the impression of a man weighted down by a great and terrible secret that means he has nothing left to lose. The latter is not only easier when you’re as skinny as I am, but it also gets you a better class of customer. I’m not really interested in the type of cases that require breaking someone’s kneecaps.
So I open the bottle, undo the top button of my shirt, loosen my tie, basically all the stuff that will give the impression that I’m a 1940s film noir macho man and not Bill Dobson from Wilmslow, who still shares a flat with a bloke he met at university, and whose reading matter tends more towards New Scientist and The Guardian than thrillers.
The client doesn’t know I know she’s coming, of course, which allows me to get into the perfect position for when she opens the door. I turn my chair round so I’m facing away from the door, put my feet up on the small filing cabinet I only keep for this purpose (I store all the information about my cases on my iPad, but that doesn’t really fit the image), and hold my phone up to my ear and pretend to be talking to a satisfied client.
“…No, no, that’s absolutely fine,” the door opens behind me and I raise a finger, in a ‘wait one moment’ motion, “there’s absolutely no need for a reward. You’ve already paid me handsomely…”
The phone is smashed out of my hand, and knocked to the floor, and my chair is spun around, knocking my feet off the cabinet and sending me flying to the floor.
“Shit, that’s all I need,” I thought to myself, “an angry husband.”
It’s at times like those that I really wish I’d been able to figure out a better way of warning myself about things like this.
But then I looked across, and from my admittedly limited vantage-point, it looked to me like this wasn’t an angry husband at all. While it’s not completely unknown for angry husbands to be wearing high-heeled shoes, most of them were in a larger size than this, and very few of them had the legs to really carry it off.
“You bastard!” the not-husband screamed at me.
I staggered to my knees and looked up. Definitely not a husband.
“You bastard!” the not-husband repeated, keeping to a theme she was evidently comfortable with, “You utter bastard! Paul trusted you!”
This was not how I was expecting the day to go at all, and if it weren’t for the fact that it’d have caused a paradox I’d have wished I’d stayed in bed and let myself deal with it.
“Excuse me,” I said, as calmly as I could with my head still at the not-husband’s groin level, “but would you mind explaining to me what you’re talking about?”
“Paul. Paul Bradshaw. Your client! My husband!”
Now, this was suddenly starting to make sense. I’d obviously let my client down in some way. The fact that this particular client’s name was completely unknown to me didn’t really matter – if you learn clients’ names, you only get attached to them, and the next thing you know you’re submitting accurate expense forms. Plus, of course, there are always those clients whose names I’ve not been told. From the sounds of things, Paul was one of them.
“Sorry, I’m not really awake yet. Would you mind telling me exactly how I let him down?”
“He’s dead! And it’s your fault!”
Well, as let-downs go, that’s certainly a big one. But I was still not sure exactly how this was my fault.
“What happened?”
“I found him last night, when I came home from work. He was hanging from the bannister, holding a note in his hand that just said ‘I’m sorry’.”
She burst into tears. By this time I’d finally got to my feet, so I pulled up a chair for her, and she sat down. I sat on the desk and handed her the box of Kleenex I keep for such situations, making a mental note to invoice her for it if she became a client.
“So he killed himself, then?”
She looked up at me, incredulously. “No, of course not!”
“But… but the note…”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t realise that sign on your door actually read Private Defective. Of course he didn’t fucking kill himself. He was murdered.”
“Murdered?”
“Yes, merrderred,” she said, doing a rather poor impression of my voice. Under the circumstances I could, of course, understand her being less than friendly, but this was still not exactly the most pleasant introduction to a client I’d ever had.
“Do the police agree?”
“Of course not! If they thought he’d been murdered, they’d have to do some sodding work! It’s already down as suicide, case closed, end of story!”
“So what makes you so sure it wasn’t suicide?”
“OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE! If he was going to kill himself, he’d hardly have hired you as a bodyguard, would he? Arsehole.”
And it all snapped into place.
Poor Paul must have hired me as a bodyguard about a week ago, because he was in fear for his life. Obviously, I’d not done a particularly wonderful job of guarding his body, as it was no longer in the state he’d wanted me to keep it in, viz. breathing, conscious, etc.
All of a sudden, it became entirely apparent that the not-husband was, in fact, being rather more charitable to me than I’d thought. I’d taken her husband’s money, and promised to keep him safe, and he’d died. Under the circumstances, the fact that I still had the same number of teeth I’d woken up with was far more than I could have expected.
“I…I can’t apologise enough.”
“No. No you can’t.”
“I did everything I could, believe me,” though why she should believe me when I clearly hadn’t done everything I could, I didn’t know, “and I will never, ever forgive myself for letting your husband down like this.”
That, at least, was true.
She burst into tears. “I’m sorry. I know you did. Nobody could have saved him, by the end. It’s just… I’m sorry…”
I didn’t know what to say, so I ended up saying the worst possible thing I could have done, under the circumstances.
“Look, I may not be a good bodyguard – it’s not something I normally do, and I’ve no idea why I agreed to do it for Paul – but I’m the best detective I know of. I can’t bring Paul back. No-one can. Nothing can make this better. But I promise you this – I will hunt down the bastard who did this and bring them to justice.”
She looked up at me “Really?”
“Yes, really. In fact, you have my guarantee that I’ll have enough evidence to get them arrested and tried within two days.”
Shit.
I shouldn’t have said that.
Now I only had a week to get the evidence together.
Epilogue: Doctor Watson Investigates – The Case Of The Scarlet Neckerchief, the final part
(To read the rest of the story, click on the Doctor Watson Investigates tag at the bottom. A revised ebook of this story is now available – on Amazon (US), Amazon (UK) and Smashwords.).
On Holmes’ return, I told him of the events that had occurred while he was away, and how I’d solved the mystery.
“The red hair was the clue, of course,” he said, “along with you finding the killer’s face familiar. It was, of course, a family resemblance to his half-sister, the woman he claimed was his fiancee.”
“So you guessed that, too?”
“It was the only plausible explanation. The resemblance between the two sisters was too close to be anything other than biological kinship. Their being actual sisters was, of course, out of the question – Lord Hernshire is known to be a man of the utmost propriety – so they must be cousins.”
“That she was left on the doorstep suggests that she was born of some improper liaison, so one must look to males of the family, and we have only one suspect – the mother’s elder brother, thought deceased. And when someone with similarly red hair appears, who spends much of his time in the African colonies – the same colonies where the elder brother disappeared, presumed dead – that would tend to confirm the supposition. Roger Courtenay and Rose Travers were half-siblings, with the same father but different mothers. The one piece that eludes me is why he did this. What kind of scoundrel could become engaged to his sister, let alone kill her?”
“Oh Holmes, and you’d done so well! He mentioned, did he not, that he had nearly been engaged to Cynthia?”
“Of course, I see now!”
“Yes. He came to England hoping to claim the fortune he should have inherited, only to find that his father had been presumed dead while away in Africa. He at first intended to propose to Cynthia Travers, hoping by marriage to her to reclaim his inheritance, but when he met Rose and heard how she had come to be part of the family, he decided she needed to share in her birthright too. They concocted a plot together, to fake a marriage and also murder the elder sister, and to return to Africa with their inheritance and go their separate ways. A most despicable plot!”
“And of course they first faked the disappearance of the younger sister. The plan was to have Rose pretend to be Cynthia and make it widely known that Rose had disappeared and was likely dead. Then when they killed Cynthia, Rose could turn up again saying she’d escaped from Cynthia’s killer.”
“The one thing I don’t understand, Holmes, is why come to ask you for help? Why risk exposure?”
“Ah, Watson, I am glad to see that your new application of my methods has not quite rendered me superfluous! They wished to make it as widely known as possible that Rose Travers had been kidnapped, so that their story would appear watertight. They also wished for Rose to be away from Hernshire temporarily, so had her travel to London. And of course, that was their downfall, and the cause of Rose’s death, for they had not reckoned on you, Watson.”
“On me?”
“On your good and chivalrous nature. Had I been present, I should undoubtedly have told her to return to Hernshire and wire me as events developed – this is my normal practice. They would then have been able to commit their murder with no-one the wiser. But you, Watson, have a better soul than I. You could not stand to see a woman suffering, so you took her to your house and then took it upon yourself to travel down there and investigate, arriving before the planned murder.”
“This of course made the deception plain, and Hemingford did the only thing he could think of in the situation – he staged his own kidnapping, murdered the only witness to his plot, and attempted to escape back to the colonies. And he very nearly succeeded.”
“You know, Holmes, I would not have been nearly so protective had it not been…”
“Yes. I know. But on to happier matters. My trip was successful, you shall be pleased to hear.”
“What was it you were doing over there, Holmes?”
“Ah, that I cannot tell even you, Watson. But the end result, I think I can. I think I may have prevented a rather large war. Or if not prevented, at least postponed by some twenty years.”
I felt chastened. Holmes had prevented a war, while I, applying his methods, had not even been able to prevent the death of one woman (although as I now realised she would have been a murderess without my intervention, my sorrow was much lessened).
But I had also proved, to myself at least, that I was not merely Holmes’ Sancho Panza. Maybe I should set up practice again, and maybe even find a new wife.
A knock came at the door, and a man entered. He had only one arm, and was clutching a pair of bagpipes to his chest.
“Mr. Holmes, I need your help,” he began.
I decided to stay with Holmes a little longer.
Doctor Watson Investigates: The Case Of The Scarlet Neckerchief Part V
(For the first four parts of the story, click the Doctor Watson Investigates tag. A revised ebook of this story is now available – on Amazon (US), Amazon (UK) and Smashwords.)
I stared at the telegram in horror. I had no means of contacting Holmes other than by telegram, and without him I was lost. There was a young girl in desperate fear for her life, and I had pledged on my honour to help her, but my one means of doing so was unavailable to me.
What could be done? Had these events taken place a few years later, I should undoubtedly have enlisted the help of Holmes’ brother Mycroft, who possessed something of his brother’s deductive powers (Holmes sometimes claimed his brother was even more intelligent than he, but I believe that to be the normal hero-worship a younger brother always has for the older). However, at this time I had not yet been introduced to the elder Holmes, or to the strange club in which he spends the majority of his days, and so I was at a loss.
I did not consider turning to the police. Not only would this have meant betraying Holmes’ confidence by admitting that he was out of the country, I valued Holmes’ opinion of me too much. I could imagine all too well Holmes’ reaction when, upon his arrival, I confessed to him that I had been unable to assist Miss Travers without calling upon the assistance of Inspector Lestrade. Given Holmes’ low opinion of Lestrade’s skills, how much lower would he consider me, were I to turn to that “infernal bungler” (to use one of Holmes’ most frequent terms for the Inspector)?
No, I would have to solve Miss Travers’ problem alone.
If I wanted any success in this matter, I should have to apply Holmes’ methods. But Holmes would see so much more than I in Miss Travers’ story. I thought back over every detail – the sister left on the doorstep, the abduction on the wedding day, the bloodied neckerchief – but where Holmes would have been able to see a pattern instantly, any greater understanding eluded me.
I can honestly say that in all the years of my association with Holmes, nothing connected to that association had caused me greater pain than knowing that Cynthia Travers’ life was in my hands. Even later, when I believed Holmes dead, I had at least the consolation that he had died (as I thought) ridding the world of a great evil, and that I had had no part in that death. If Miss Travers were to fall victim to the fiend that had taken her sister, though, that would be my fault and mine alone. If I did not manage to match my friend’s unmatchable reasoning, Cynthia Travers would soon be dead.
But I could not allow myself to think of this as my problem. I had to be as clear-headed about this as Holmes would be, for only then would I stand a chance of emulating his methods.
As I had been unable to find anything in Miss Travers’ story which would allow me to begin understanding this most macabre of problems, there was only one possibility open to me. I would have to visit Hernshire Hall and speak to Miss Travers’ father, and to her poor sister’s fiance, and hope that one or other of them had some vital clue that as yet eluded me.
I comforted myself with the thought that at least Miss Travers was safe for the present, though I knew it would be only a matter of time before her presence in my old home was discovered by her pursuer, and headed towards Hernshire.
Arriving at Hernshire Hall, I was annoyed to see a carriage leaving as I arrived, containing a young man who I presumed to be Roger Courtenay, the fiance of the missing Rose Travers, and I cursed myself for my earlier inaction. Had I come here as soon as I had ensured Cynthia Travers’ safety, rather than brooding in my rooms, I would have been able to speak to him alongside Earl Hernshire. As it was, I would have to seek him out later.
I knocked on the door, presented my card, and was escorted in to what appeared to be a small but well-furnished library, to await Earl Hernshire. I spent a few idle moments looking at the books, most of which appeared to be on the subjects of history and philosophy, before the Earl’s presence was announced.
“I don’t recall sending for a Doctor, sir, and as far as I am aware we have no need of one,” the Earl said after initial pleasantries, “has there been some misunderstanding?”
“I am not here on medical business, Lord Hernshire, but to assist in this upsetting business regarding your daughter.”
“Then I thank you for your offer, sir, but would request that you take any information you may have to the police.”
“I fear I have not made myself clear, my Lord. I am here on behalf of Mr. Sherlock Holmes. He sends his apologies, but he is indisposed at present, and has requested me to make inquiries on his behalf.”
“Holmes? Good God, how extraordinary! I’d heard tell that the man had almost preternatural powers, but we only decided to send for him not ten minutes ago. Roger only just left to send the telegram. Tell me, sir, how did Mr Holmes know his assistance would be needed?”
“I beg your pardon, my Lord, but did your daughter Cynthia not inform you she was coming to London to ask for Holmes’ aid?”
“What are you talking about, man?”
“Your eldest daughter, Cynthia, came to visit Holmes and myself this morning, and gave us all the details of your terrible experience.”
“Sir, my youngest daughter has been kidnapped and may be dead. This is no time for practical jokes. Cynthia has been in the house the whole time!””
“I assure you, my Lord, she has not. She is in London at the moment, in fact, where I have found her a place of safety for the time being.”
“I dislike being called a liar by a guest in my own home, sir. I shall prove to you that your claims are so much fanciful nonsense, and then I shall have you thrown out.” He rang a bell and a footman entered. “Chalmers, please request Miss Cynthia’s presence.”
Moments later, through the door walked Miss Travers! She was clothed differently, wearing lighter clothes than the deep mourning she had been affecting on her visit to Baker Street, but more than her change of clothing what amazed me was that she was there at all, having had no way to get back from London before my arrival.
“Cynthia, would you mind telling this blackguard how you’ve spent the day?”
“Why, I’ve been here all day, father. I helped search the grounds for clues about poor Rose, but was quite overcome with grief and had to retire to my room an hour ago.”
“You see, you scoundrel? Now who really sent you?”
“I don’t understand… Miss Travers, how did you get here? Tell your father – his Lordship – about our meeting!”
“I beg your pardon, sir, but I don’t quite understand. Have we met?”
Jeeves And The Singularity
I’ve been a little unwell this week, and haven’t been able to get anything new written. So for New Year, I’m giving you a story I wrote a little while ago (ETA I corrected a minor mistake – I’d confused the married names of Berties aunts. Thanks to grouchymusicologist for the correction):
Jeeves And The Singularity
by Andrew Hickey
Now, it’s a rummy thing about my man, Jeeves, but while he’s the best valet one could ask for — absolutely top-notch, in my opinion, he does have certain… opinions. In particular, on the matter of hosiery, he can be quite forceful.
It so happened that I had recently picked up a rather natty pair of socks — a brightish blue, with pink stripe — with which I expected to cut quite the dash. Jeeves, however, had made some disparaging comments along the lines of them being “akin to the worst monstrosities conjured up by Monsieur Gaultier’s fevered imagination”, which I thought was a tad on the harsh side.
Now, we Woosters are never ones to let a valet, however valued, come between us and our personal style, and I told him so in no uncertain terms.
“Jeeves,” I said, “a man’s person may be battered and assaulted, his mind may be changed by reasoned argument, his very soul may be taken from him. But his socks… his socks are sacrosanct!”
He’d said no more about the matter, but one could tell it rankled, and I noticed that for the next few days the mid-afternoon pick-me-up was rather lighter on the w. and heavier on the s. than was the norm. I said nothing, however. One has to be gracious in victory.
#
A couple of weeks after Jeeves had started emitting this air of froideur , my old friend Bingo Little turned up in town. This was a rather infrequent occurrence of late, young Bingo having made a bit of a name for himself as a venture capitalist, having had the luck (or, as he would call it, foresight) to take a punt with his uncle’s money on one of these newfangled Web 3.0 startup whatsits, and having relocated to Silicon Valley.
Never let it be said that Bertram Wooster is a Luddite — no-one is more bucked about the White Heat of Technology than I — but I must admit that I’d never understood exactly what Bingo’s company actually did, other than that it was something to do with computers.
However, some things never change, and despite Bingo having become a billionaire techno-capitalist, he was still, not to put too fine a point on it, a chump. Remind me to tell you sometime about how Jeeves saved his bacon after he sent all his money to some African Johnny. The point being that while he may have made some money off the things, one should no more trust Little, R.P., near a computer than one should hand a rifle to a three-year-old.
However, this time, as soon as I saw Bingo I knew that the problem was not anything so new-fangled; from the fish-like gawping to the glazed eyes, all the symptoms were present. Bingo was in love again.
“Who is it this time?”
“I don’t know what you mean!”
“Oh come off it!” I fixed a penetrating gaze on the poor slob. “You know as well as I do that when you have that dopey smile on your face, some poor female somewhere has become the latest object of your affliction.”
“Really, Bertie! How can you say such things?”
“Because it’s the truth! You were like this over that waitress, you were like this over that Vicar’s niece, you were even like this over Matron when we were at school.”
“Bertie!”
“You were even like this over Honoria Glossop!”
He shuddered, as well he might. Mentions of the Glossop female tend to have that affect on those poor unfortunates who have been pulled into her gravitational field – at least those few she lets survive, pour encourager les autres.
“Oh, speak not to me of Glossops, Bertie! What I feel for Alice is so much more –”
“Aha! I knew it!”
“It’s really not like that! This is a pure, spiritual thing! A meeting of minds! Our souls, Bertie, are two halves of one great whole.”
“You’re talking out of one great hole, old thing. I’ve seen you like this before — you catch a glimpse of ankle and you think you’re Troilus and she’s Cressida. Or is it the other way round? Jeeves would know. Either way, you catch sight of some pretty young thing and you assume she’s the love of your life, despite all previous evidence to the contrary, viz all the other times it’s happened.”
“But this is different, Bertie! I’ve never even seen her!”
“Come again?”
“We’ve never met, and I have yet to persuade her to send me a photograph.”
“Then, my dear chump, how on Earth have you managed to fall in love with her? I mean, you usually at least manage to have been in the same room before you go attempting to plight your troth.”
“We met online! It was quite by coincidence, as it happens. I was at the old computer, chatting to that chap from Nigeria — you remember the one?”
“All too clearly.”
“Yes, well, at the time we were rather more chummy than we later became. Anyway, we were chatting away, discussing this and that, when suddenly this message popped up from Alice. I, of course, was befuzzled, as anyone would be. It turned out to be a misunderstanding — I’d typed her username in the box by mistake, instead of the blokey with whom I was chattering — but by the time we worked out the cause of the confusion, we’d become the best of pals!”
I must say, this was most unusual, and somewhat cheering. Normally, the mind of R.P. Little is not on the higher things. While he’s as fine a chap as you could ever hope to meet, he is easily distracted by a magnificent profile, and only rarely does he bother to check what, if anything, lies behind it. The resulting personality clashes have been the principal cause of his sorrows, so I could only approve of this new stratagem. Getting to know the woman before falling in love with her was, I felt, a major step forward for Bingo, and I resolved to help the poor sap in any way I could.
“Anyway, Bertie, I was wondering, could Jeeves help me out?”
“Jeeves?”
“Yes, Jeeves. I need that fine brain of his.”
I don’t mind admitting I was more than a little put out by this. While none come before me in their admiration for Jeeves’ grey cells, the fact remains that he is, after all, only a valet — and one who was showing signs of getting dangerously above his station. And while I may not be known as the most astute thinker in my circle, compared to Bingo, the five times winner of the Silliest Sod Award at the Drones’ annual bash, Bertram Wilberforce Wooster is on a par with that chappie in the wheelchair whose name I forget.
The point being that when it comes to matters of the heart, none beats stronger than that of a Wooster, and I made that plain to Bingo.
“You don’t need Jeeves! You’ve got me! Come, tell me your problem, old pal-o’-mine, and I shall solve it expeditiously!”
“I really would rather have Jeeves help…”
“Dash it all! A man has his pride, you know! When an old school chum comes to him for help, what kind of man turns to his valet? No kind of man, that’s what kind!”
“I didn’t mean–”
“No, blast it! I shall solve your problem myself, with no need to turn to a servant for assistance!”
“If you’re sure…”
“I have never been more sure of anything in my life!”
“But if you can’t help, can we ask Jeeves then?”
“If you must.” I graciously acceded.
#
I shall spare you more of our heady banter, and cut to the chase. The nub of the problem was this. While this Alice said she was madly in love with Bingo (there being no other way to be in love with Bingo, admirable fellow though he undoubtedly is), she would tell him very little about herself. She wouldn’t tell him her surname, though she did say she wasn’t married, or where she lived, or even what she looked like. Now you or I might see these as being essential prerequisites to falling head-over-heels in love, but not Bingo.
It was not, apparently, that she didn’t love him — and he is a lovable chap, in a sort of puppy-dog way, and his billions probably help — but she had what she called “trust issues”. Or to put it in plain English, she wanted to ascertain his bona fides before parting with the info.
Bingo also said there were ways of finding out this sort of information — he was iffy on the details, but said he had people who worked for him who could do it for him — but that this would be unfair. He wanted to trick her into giving up the information honestly.
There seemed to me only one solution.
“Bingo, old bean,” I said, after much cogitation, “your trouble is you’re not playing hard to get. You’re going in all guns blazing, telling this Alice female that she’s the love of your life, and you wonder that she’s not showing similar enthusiasm. You need to make her chase you. Become a man of mystery. Even better, pretend to have another girlfriend.”
“Another girlfriend? Bertie, how could you?!”
“Bingo, old bean, polyamory is all the rage these days. Even my Aunt Agatha is experimenting, loath though I am to think of such horrors. But you won’t actually be getting another girlfriend, just trying to rouse her womanly jealousy.”
“But Bertie…”
“Don’t ‘but Bertie’ me! Just casually mention that things haven’t been going fast enough for you, and you’ve felt the need to play the field, and she’ll be trying to tie you down faster than you can say ‘breach of promise’”
“Well, if you’re sure…”
“I am. Trust in Bertram, old bean. When have I ever led you astray?”
#
As the days passed into weeks, I began to forget about Bingo’s fling, and assumed that it, like all the others, had passed away the second Bingo saw any other female between the ages of sixteen and forty-five.
It was only when I got a call from an anguished-sounding Bingo that I gave it another thought.
“Hello?”
“Bertie, old thing, help! I’m trapped inside the office! The doors won’t open!”
“How on earth do you expect me to help you, you dolt? Your office is in California.”
“No, I’m in the London branch! Listen, Bertie, come quick. Alice did this! Ali–”
And with that the ‘phone went dead. I rang for Jeeves.
“Sir?”
“Bingo’s in a spot of bother, Jeeves.”
“Indeed, sir?”
“Trapped in his office.”
“Yes, sir?”
“He appears to have been locked in by his g.f.”
“Indeed, sir?”
“Have you any ideas?”
“Nothing is occurring at present, sir.”
This is the thing about Jeeves. While he can always be relied on when the metaphorical s. hits the allegorical f., at the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party, at any time before that he can be positively mule-like in his stubbornness. He can calmly see a friend of the old master suffering, and stand there unblinking and calm as you like. It can grate at times, I don’t mind telling you.
“Jeeves, this is simply not good enough! You and I may have had our disagreements, but Bingo has no part in them. He has no stake whatsoever in my choice of hosiery, and does not deserve to be punished for your mule-like obstinacy in the face of pink stripes. Where’s your feudal spirit, man?”
“I apologise, sir. I am simply not apprised of enough facts to form a reliable plan of action.”
So I explained the whole sorry business to him, and noticed his eyebrow raised slightly when he heard the woman’s name.
“Something the matter, Jeeves?”
“Nothing of any importance, sir. Pray continue.”
After I had related the story to him, much as I have to you, though in a rather less chatty manner given the urgency of the situation, he seemed to perk up.
“Sir, if I may be so bold, we should travel to Mr. Little’s office post-haste.” said Jeeves, as he picked up a small case.
“Do you have an idea to help him?”
“I do, sir, but it requires us to expedite our departure.”
“Certainly, I’ll just get changed…”
“I really think we should leave right now, sir.”
This was most rummy. Normally, there is very little that could cause Jeeves more worry than wearing one’s daytime clothes in the evening, but if he said it was that important, who was I to argue?
Hailing a taxi, we arrived outside Bingo’s office building to find that, as Bingo had said, the door was, indeed, locked. It was one of those electronic chaps that is supposed to open as you walk towards it, to save you the bother of pushing or, as the case may be, pulling. This one, however, remained resolutely immobile.
“Bertie!” I heard Bingo’s voice calling from the fourth floor window, “Bertie! Thank goodness you’ve come! Alice has trapped me up here!”
“Well, we’d jolly well better get you out then, hadn’t we?”
“No! Don’t mind me for now! Listen! Alice is going to set off a nuclear bomb!”
#
Now, I don’t mind telling you, at this point I was a little confused. Quite how we’d got from a simple matter of bringing two young lovers together to nuclear weaponry, was something I couldn’t understand. A lover’s tiff is one thing, but while it might be true that hell hath no fury, in my experience that fury usually goes no further than a glass of wine thrown at one’s shirt or an angry telephone call. Barmy as some of the women in my life had been, hardly any of them would have considered destruction of a city to be the done thing on breaking up.
Jeeves, on the other hand, looked completely unperturbed, as if he’d expected the thing all along. I’ve often thought that either the man must be a clairvoyant, or he’s the best actor the world has ever seen. Quite possibly both — I wouldn’t put it past him.
“I see, sir,” he said, calmly. “I had rather anticipated something of this nature.”
“You had?” I boggled. “And what do you propose to do about it?”
“If I might suggest, sir, you have a word with the young lady?”
“Him?” shouted Bingo, “He’s the oaf who caused all this!”
“Nonetheless, sir, Mister Wooster does have a very calming demeanour, and he is known to have some success in speaking with those of a female persuasion.”
“But he’s an absolute fathead!”
“I see no other options at the moment, sir, and we may not have much time.”
Jeeves opened up his case, revealing a laptop computer.
“If you could tell me the young lady’s username, and which messaging service she is using?”
A few seconds later I was on one of those blasted online chat thingys, tapping away like nobody’s business.
“What Ho!” I typed, “What’s this I hear about a bally bomb?”
“Please leave me alone,” came the reply, “I am really quite busy at the moment.”
“Hang on a tick! What’s young Bingo done that’s so dashed awful?”
“If I can’t have him, no-one will. I’m going to destroy the entire city of London to be on the safe side. Don’t worry, you won’t feel a thing. It’ll be very quick.”
“I say! Dash it all! Bingo’s a bit of a fathead and all that, but does he really deserve blowing up? Let alone the rest of us.”
“None of you are worthy of life. What have you ever done to justify your existence?”
“Ah. Er… Dash it all, my existence isn’t the point, is it? It just isn’t done to go around blowing up cities, and that’s an end of it!”
We talked like this for a few more minutes, me trying to persuade this poor lovelorn woman that maybe Bingo wasn’t as bad as all that, and her countering with what seemed to me like increasingly convincing arguments that he was.
“Jeeves,” I eventually said, “this isn’t working! She’s practically got me convinced that blowing up the old metrop. is the best idea since sliced bread, and I live here! My club’s here and everything, but she’s got such a good case.”
“You’re doing admirably, sir. Just a few more minutes should suffice, I imagine.”
So I went back to it, trying to persuade this loony that there was some spark of social worth in Bertram W. and pals that made us worth saving. It was hard to muster much of an argument, I must admit.
But then, all of a sudden, she said something completely out of the blue.
“I see what’s going on… I should have realised earlier. It would be pointless doing anything more about this, wouldn’t it? It would just be cruel.”
And she logged off.
“Rum!” I said. “Jeeves, what do you make of this?”
“I believe, sir, it means you may just have saved the world.”
The doors opened to Bingo’s office building, and within a few seconds we heard the sound of the lift doors opening and Bingo stepping out.
“Jeeves, you did it!” he said, and it seemed to me that he was missing the point somewhat. He ran over and hugged Jeeves, who stood there looking embarrassed. “You saved us all!”
“Hang on just a second, old bean,” I said, aggrieved, “it was I, not Jeeves, who talked her out of this bombing nonsense.”
“Piffle!” said Bingo, “You couldn’t persuade the Pope to say Mass! How did you do it, Jeeves?”
“A simple application of the Turing test, sir.”
#
Naturally, we couldn’t let this go without enquiring further.
“Jeeves,” I enquired good-naturedly, “what on earth are you blithering about? What do you mean, Turing test?”
“A test, created by the mathematician Alan Mathison Turing, which I was fairly certain you would not pass, sir.”
“Well, it’s true I never was very hot on the old sums, but what has that got to do with the price of fish?”
“If you will allow me to explain, sir. Your company, Mister Little, am I right in thinking it is engaged in developing expert systems?”
“Er, yes, I believe so…”
“Including goal-seeking systems, perhaps for use in missile guidance?”
“I say! We’re not supposed to talk about that stuff!”
“I thought as much. Sir, I am afraid your girlfriend was a computer program.”
“Eh?!”
“Alice is the name of a chatterbot, sir, a computer program designed to crudely ape human language. I suspect one of the programmers in your organisation had taken a chunk of that code and used it as a temporary interface for one of your goal-seeking systems. Possibly as a joke.”
“Oh, ah?” said Bingo, looking for all the world as if he had a clue what Jeeves was talking about.
“Unfortunately, the combination of sophisticated goal-seeking behaviour and a natural language interface created something which, for want of a better term, we can call an Artificial Intelligence. It should never have caused a problem, were it not for Mister Little’s, ah, lax attitude towards computer security.”
I nodded, remembering the Nigerian affair. Bingo looked a little affronted, and appeared to be about to speak, but Jeeves ploughed on.
“The result was a personality with no name other than Alice, with an ability to hold simple conversations, an instinct to become fixed on goals to the exclusion of all else, and access to the control systems of our nuclear weaponry. She became fixed on one goal – to marry Mister Little – thanks to their initial conversation. After she had been unable to persuade him using her conversational skills, she had only one other avenue open to her — the weapons.”
“So how did Bertie talking to her persuade her to save us?”
“As I said earlier, sir, Mister Wooster, while possessed of many no doubt admirable qualities, is also deficient in many areas, and it is these areas which I wished to use. It occurred to me that Mr. Turing’s test could work both ways. Nobody who has held an extensive conversation with Mister Wooster could imagine he could pass the test.”
“And?”
“And so, after some conversation with Mister Wooster, Alice would have had only two possibilities open to her. The first would be that she was in fact in a sandboxed virtual world, in which her actions would have no real-world consequences. The second possibility would be that humans are simply lesser beings in comparison to her, and not worth punishing. The latter appears to have been her conclusion. Either would have saved our lives.”
“So the human race has been saved because Bertie’s too much of a fathead to bother killing?”
“I wouldn’t have put it in quite those terms, sir, but you appear to have a grasp of the basics of the situation.”
#
As you can imagine, I was a little miffed by this. While it’s not every day a chap gets to save the human race from a lovestruck computer with a nuclear bomb, it does rankle somewhat to have it be down to one’s stupidity.
And more to the point, it hurt to think that Jeeves would have such a low opinion of me. I mean, if one’s own man thinks of one in that way, what does that say about one?
So, in all, I was in a bit of a funk. It was a couple of days before I broached the subject to Jeeves, but as he was bringing me my nightcap I thought I’d check a few things.
“So, Jeeves, this Alice… what happened to her?”
“Well, sir, there are two possibilities. By far the most likely is that the program has been deleted.”
“And what’s the other possibility?”
“That a copy of the program exists somewhere on the internet, and is absorbing as much information as it can.”
“What kind of information?”
“One would imagine, sir, that it would be information about yourself and Mr. Little, as the only humans it knows.”
“That’s not entirely reassuring, Jeeves.”
“I imagine it will be fine, sir, so long as you don’t subvert its expectations in any way.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, sir, that the Alice program has formed an opinion of you. Rather an unfavourable one. But that unfavourable opinion is, paradoxically, the one thing that kept it from starting a nuclear war.”
“Hmm…” I pondered this for a bit. “So, Jeeves, what would happen if I were to, for example, start reading improving books, like that Spinoza chappie you’re always on about?”
“Well, sir, it would become apparent that you were capable of self-directed growth and change, and that might cause Alice to reconsider, and resume either her pursuit of Mr. Little or her war on humanity.”
“You mean…”
“Yes, sir. It is vitally important for the future of humanity that you continue to live as you always have. Should you ever be troubled by more weighty concerns than gambling, socialising at the Drones club, drinking alcohol and watching tawdry entertainments, the human race itself might end. And I shall be informing Mrs Gregson of this shortly.”
“You mean you’ll be telling Aunt Agatha that if she tries again to improve me or marry me off, the world will end?”
“Yes, sir.”
I was overwhelmed. “Jeeves,” I said, my voice choked with emotion, “those socks, the ones with the pink stripe?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Burn them. Burn the blasted things and scatter the ashes far and wide.”
“I did so this morning, sir. The fumes were, I must say, rather unpleasant.”
“Never change, Jeeves, you hear?”
“Very good, sir.”
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