Just then a ping arrived from Nancy. Its loud chime drowned out the background noise of the pub.
“Go ahead and answer,” Alan encouraged, picking up his glass of cider and taking a sip.
This wasn’t a memory but a painstakingly reconstructed world that I’d created. I liked to venture off into it from time to time, to sit and chat with a simulation of my mentor of so long ago—replay conversations we’d had, or at least, what I thought I remembered of them—but the simulation was a pale reminder of what the man had been.
I authorized Nancy for access to this sensory space, and she resolved into view, sitting on a pew across from us.
“So you’re sure you want to go ahead with this?” I asked her.
Nancy was pressing me to release the Infinixx project ahead of the pssi launch. It had originally been my idea—something that would thrust Nancy into the spotlight and bring her own star onto the world stage, just as mine was fading. She could continue my work after I was gone, and I knew she had the inner strength to make sure that whatever happened, it would be for the right reasons.
“Absolutely!”
“Good. I’ll press on ahead on my side then. You’re keeping on top of the New York trials?”
“Yes, Aunt Patty,” she responded sheepishly. She would always be a child to me. “Of course I am.”
“Perfect. I’ll start a campaign with the board.”
She looked ready to burst, yet her eyes clouded over.
“There’s something else?”
She sighed. “What’s going on with Uncle Vince?”
Reports of his future deaths had been clogging the prediction networks. My guilt was overwhelming—Vince was one of my oldest friends. I’d managed to insert some clues, however, deep in the patterns we had chasing him. He was off around the world, hunting them down, and over time it would subside. A goose chase, but I had to keep him busy, and in the end it might even do him some good.
“Nothing is going on with Vince, nothing at all.”
“What do you mean?” She didn’t look convinced.
“He’s just fooling around.” I shrugged and looked toward Alan.
“Okay…if you say so.” She paused, but let it go. “Just tell me what I need to do to help with the board.”
“I will. Speaking of the board, will we be seeing you at the Foreign Banquet tomorrow evening?”
“I’ll be there.”
I hesitated. “Dr. Baxter said he might bring Bob along.…”
I really wanted to find a way to bring her and Bob back together, but I’d never worn Cupid’s hat comfortably.
“I think I’m going solo,” she replied with a smile. “It’s an official function, and those bore David to death.”
“I just thought I’d mention it.” Maybe I was better at this than I thought. “Now get back to your evening!”
She nodded excitedly as she faded away.
“A beautiful child,” Alan observed, smiling at me. “One thing though.…”
“About Nancy?”
“No, about what we were talking about.”
I waited. “Yes?”
“In these created realities you speak of, what controls the underlying conditions that make the reality possible?”
I considered this for a moment. “Just the observing entity.”
“And what happens if an organism escapes into a reality that it creates?”
At the time, I hadn’t understood that it could be possible, but Alan always had a gift for seeing further than anyone else.
“What I mean is, organisms are constrained by the physics of this reality, but what if they can create their own realities and escape into them?” He paused to let the question sink in. Alan had also been the founder of mathematical biology and studied its relationship to morphogenesis, the processes that caused organisms to develop their shapes. “If you change the body, Patricia, you also change the mind.”
I sat staring at him, saying nothing.
“What could an animal become if it were completely unfettered by any physical constraints?” he continued, staring directly into my eyes. “If it were able to drag other observers into these created realities of yours, against their will?”
This century-old question now hung in my mind.