Dream of a Beautiful Day
Ben woke up groggily as the train emerged from yet another tunnel. In a semiconscious state, Ben heard the engine rumbling far away to his left. Between the whispers of passengers coming and going, Ben could discern the ceiling fan hissing over his head. Then the pain, like a grenade, kicked in with a flash. The pain grabbed hold of his breath and heartbeat, wrestling with the primitive line of defense in his brainstem. The pain began from his feet and slowly crawled up his body like a centipede, refusing to neglect a square inch of his surface. When it advanced to his chest, Ben’s arms twitched violently, and he let out a strained, barely audible cry. And the pain was still moving upward in a straight line, a beam of laser scanning his body. Ben inhaled with visible difficulty, waiting for the pain in his head to subside—and now it’s completely gone. When he finally sat up, his bed sheet was soaked in sweat that luminesced vaguely in the pitch-dark night. Ben tilted his head and looked out at the muddy, dark green plains that stretched to the horizon—just vast, level, boundless fields fleeting by. He wondered where the train was heading.
Radium Intercontinental Inc. owns six major transcontinental railroads, this one being their oldest and longest by far, dating back to its early days before government-planned infrastructure was enforced. Even before that, the company had been working on railroad projects in third-world countries around the world. The popular theory held that this was a guise for a secret enterprise that aimed to construct the world’s first railroad circumscribing the globe, a project that had failed miserably after ten years of grueling effort. Despite the compelling narrative, no one had ever seen a segment of this railroad at places where it should have been built, and it was generally believed that the whole track had been altogether removed and recycled. Nevertheless, these rumors did not prevent Radium from becoming the single largest railroad company on Earth, and its chief executive E. M., an outspoken public figure, came to be admired by many aspiring young men from this generation who had just returned home from War, including the ambitious and traumatized 22 years-old Corporal Benjamin T. Kaczynski. Presently the train is scheduled to arrive in two minutes, and Mr. and Mrs. Kaczynski had been waiting in the waiting room since lunch, eager to see their war hero back home.
One of the things about waiting rooms that were unspoken but fairly well-known was that, if you put your ears close enough against the slightly yellower regions of the walls, you could hear faint sounds from the other side of the wall even if there was nothing there. The explanation was that from a particular perspective, all the rooms in the universe are aligned perfectly in a tightly-packed grid, and the faint sounds you hear comes from one of the cells across the galaxy that is adjacent to yours. This fact was taken full advantage of by Orwellian governments and grassroots organizations alike, and this was no exception for the notoriously powerful multiversal clique known as the Plutonics. Now Julian and Regina, two consuls of the Plutonics, are communicating across only 1064 multiverses and a yellowish concrete wall.
“... already begun the experiment.”
“So, are we expecting to see any results soon?”
“I don’t know. It’s the first time we did something like this on such a large scale. I mean, nobody’s ever imagined how one could subdue uncountable infinity. But it’s done, just like that.” Regina snapped her fingers, which Julian could neither see nor hear.
“Have we synchronized the copies yet?”
“Any minute now.”
“Just curious, would they feel anything during the synchronization? I mean, it’s not like I care at all, but I’m curious what it would be like from the subject’s perspective.”
“It’s certainly quite unpleasant, based on experiments done on smaller creatures.”
“...”
“It might be nauseating, painful, I don’t know. But in this setting they probably won’t even feel anything. We’ve given them a hell of a lot of Radium stabilizers and honestly they would just sleep through the whole process, which shouldn’t take very long anyway.”
“...”
“Plus, we could easily change the subjective experience of synchronization, but we felt no need for that. … Julian?”
“... waiting for your son? What’s his name? Oh, oh… I-I certainly hope he’ll be here soon.”
“Julian? Who’s that?”
“We’ve got a situation here. In a minute.”
Ben got out of bed and walked around in his cabin, inspecting the things around him. An important part of him was missing. To figure out where he was, he needed information about himself, of which there was practically none stored in his head. Ben looked around and searched for clues. The window seemed utterly dark due to the lack of light outside, and it did not emit any sound when Ben knocked—it was very thick. The door was framed in a rather peculiar, recursive way; Ben could not open it although it did not have locks or similar structures (cf. Alexander’s horned sphere). He kicked on it with his feet and grimaced in pain.
“For God’s sake!” And then he froze. Cautiously, Ben introduced himself to the window:
“Hello. Hi there. I’m, uh, I’m, my name is Wilson. Robert. Brandon... Benedict? Bennett? ...”
And so Ben starts to play this little game of verbal self-discovery, with renewed hope, on a train owned by Radium Intercontinental Inc. currently traveling smoothly at 1,100 kilometers per hour Eastwards from New York City across the Atlantic to Berlin, where it makes its first stop before crossing the length of Earth’s largest continent. In the quiet waiting room, the train is five minutes late for arrival. Mr. and Mrs. Kaczynski are talking to a stranger wearing a green uniform. There are few people in the room; around the corner, a homeless man sits on the floor and plays Caveball on the public computer. The afternoon passes indifferently as the man frantically presses buttons on the computer, trying to score a goal in his online match.
His opponent walks in a giant cubic stadium, holding four white balls of different sizes in its hands. The first two are roughly equal in size and mass, each approximately 1m in diameter, covered with small circular dimples like a golf ball. The third is slightly smaller and has multiple grooves carved on it. The last one is the smallest and the heaviest, perfectly spherical and smooth.
“Watch this, Ferry,” it says to its spectator.
The player picks up the first ball and throws it across the cube diagonal to the opposite corner. It picks up speed as it passes through the center of the cube, but it abruptly stops before hitting the stadium wall.
“Yahw, why is it changing color?” The entity named Ferry asks.
“That means it has potential energy stored in it. Hey, I think I’ve figured out how this works.”
Yahw picks up the second ball, then thought for a while, and puts it back down. The man on the public computer realizes something and forcefully hits the keyboard with his fist. Yahw crosses the stadium to the opposite side and puts the fourth ball beside the corner. It falls through the floor and reenters at the top, colliding with the first ball, then disappears, then reappears, bouncing around happily. Loud music starts to play, followed by fireworks that spell “You Win!” across the stadium. The man stares at the computer screen, then sighs and exits the game.
“Hey, don’t leave!” Yahw exclaimed with disappointment. “I guess that’s it.”
“Shall I take you back to Heaven, or do you want to stay in the Radium-zone for a bit more?”
“Nah, I’ll probably go back.”
“You know, there’s one thing I don’t understand about you guys. I mean, you don’t even experience time at all in Heaven, or Hell. How boring would life be?” Ferry asked.
“Well, it gets pretty boring. But you also don’t need to die, which I suppose is great. I’m guessing that you’re planning to expire around next month?”
“Makes no difference. It’s only a matter of repeating the cycle one more time.”
“Next time I come, could you also bring Satan and Mike and my other friends here? I need to buy them a little present, you know, for helping me repair these caveballs last time.” Yahw gathers the four balls and puts them inside his pocket.
“Sure. Let’s get onto the boat.”
The Ferryman slowly maneuvers the boat away from the pale shore into the lake. There is no color nor texture to the sky and the sand and the water: the Ferryman did not bother to add these features. Yahw touches the water with his hands, and the water wave sings a beautiful tune. The train is late for half an hour. The strange man in the green uniform is still conversing with Mrs. Kaczynski. Mr. Kaczynski is now playing the caveball game, the homeless man watching behind him.
Ben picked up his train ticket. The back of the ticket was densely packed with English words scribbled hastily over the printed text, and Ben’s handwriting crawled all the way onto the acrylic desk. Ben felt as if he was taking an exam for a course he learned ten, twenty years ago—a lesson on his own existence.
“I’m Ben Kaczynski, age twenty-something, born in some English-speaking country. I have brown hair, which I can see from my reflection in the window. I don’t think I’ve ever gone to college because I don’t know a great deal about anything. I don’t have any money. I have a mother and a father, (whose names I can’t recall,) and they probably didn’t earn much either. They love Jesus and I don’t. I don’t even know who this Jesus guy is. And—what else—I can speak a little Spanish, a little of something else entirely. That’s all, thank you!” Ben bowed to himself in the window.
It was approaching midnight, and Ben yawned snugly. He thought to himself: “It’s strange I don’t feel frightened or lonely when placed in a cabin like this. Maybe I was used to be this way.” Ben took off his shirt and climbed onto the bed again, staring at the ceiling.
It was only then when he realized that something was engraved on the wall opposite his bed. Squeezing his eyes, Ben slowly made out the light-yellow symbol carved on the cream-colored wall. It was indeed very hard to notice, but when looked at from a certain angle, the yellow paint reflected the desk lamp in a way slightly different from the wall paint. When he formed a mental image of what the symbol looked like, Ben gasped. The symbol was an artificial overlap between the letters L and P, with the two vertical segments identified. Ben immediately knew what it was.
The Plutonics. A collaboration of enigmatic artists who produced films using hyper-realistic techniques unknown to any other filmmaker. Ben had seen every one of their films ever since their debut, which came out when Ben was only five years old. It remained his all-time favorite. It was called Seven Days before Apocalypse, set in an alternative history where Nazi Germany successfully developed nuclear weapons before the United States and wiped out the Allies. Ben had watched the movie, again and again, for God knows how many times.
And as he pondered over the plot of that movie, something struck him. He remembered who he was. His fists clenched.
In front of a 1 cubic meter box, Sybil and Regina discussed how they should fire the third ball. The match was 3-2 in a best-of-7, with Mr. Kaczynski leading. The box was filled with a purple vapor (though they of course knew it was only a simulation), which seemed to exert random scattering forces upon anything that entered.
“But that’s not the problem. The biggest problem is that we don’t know where the hoop is.”
“You see...”
“We’ve already had two shots and we still don’t know anything. We don’t know where the first two balls are, we don’t know what the purple things do, and we haven’t located the hoop. They’re definitely going to win.”
“Maybe it’s the rules. Maybe this time the rules are just way too hard and they got lucky. You know what, we should just restart the game, and then we can play a new set of rules.”
“No, the thing is, they seem to be getting somewhere. You saw their last goal. They hit the hoop right at the center.”
Sybil and Regina circled around the game box.
“Wait! Look from this angle. There are words written here!”
“What does it say?”
“‘Two women entered the bar. They sat down and talked. Tasty said: “How is the wine?” Stacy replied: “It is very good.” Tasty and Stacy drank the wine. They left the bar.’ ...”
“Oh, look what I’ve found!” Mr. Kaczynski cried. “It’s an obligatory dialogue to pass the Bechdel test!”
“You never know what you’d find there. I tell you, this game is magic.” The homeless man replied, laughing hard.
“Who wrote this game? Who am I playing against?”
“Don’t know. This is the only computer I know that has this game installed. It says ‘Developed by Sybil’ on the home screen, but hell knows what Sybil is. And you know what, there seem to be zillions of possibilities to this game. Every time you restart it gives you a new set of rules.”
“Wow.”
The train has been late for over two hours now. Mrs. Kaczynski and the man in the uniform just finished talking and are walking towards the computer. Mr. Kaczynski and the homeless man stood up to greet them. The man in the green uniform pulls out a laser gun from his pocket and sweeps it across the room in a horizontal 360-degree turn. Devoid of half of their parietal and frontal skulls, the three Earthlings fall down silently, their skeleta and muscles shrinking rapidly until they become three tiny specks on the floor. The room smells of barbecue. The man walks across the room to the wall with yellow patches on it.
“Train station is clear.”
“What happened?” Regina asked anxiously.
“Ben’s parents were here, waiting for their son’s train. Observers for fuck’s sake.”
“Well, what happened to them?”
“Well, the usual method. Clean and painless and nobody knows it’s us.”
“Nice. We just won a game of caveball here. Our opponent suddenly decides to quit. Having Sybil here really helps our luck.” Chuckles.
“I’ll join you shortly. When is the experiment scheduled to end?”
“It ends when the train arrives,” Regina replied with full seriousness. “Which is about half an hour from now. Until then we won’t be able to see the results.”
Julian nodded. “The answer to the ultimate question.”
Ben was a glorious American soldier fighting on the battlefields of East Asia, fighting against those black-eyed Yellowskins who took away everything he had. He had been captured in a valiant fight and is now being sent on a train to Peking for execution.
And now he wanted revenge. Blood boils inside of him. He prayed and prayed to an entity he used to despise so deeply.
The door to his cabin opened.
Ben rushed out, knocking over everyone he met. He was a strong, robotic man, born and trained for battles. His fists landed again and again on every living being caught by his eyes. People started to scream and run away from him, but just as they disappeared from Ben’s sight they reemerged and fell down from the ceiling.
“What a carnage.” The Ferryman observed, musing at the description of the novel. “Yahw and Satan would love this.” He looked at his watch. “Oh, I nearly forgot I have an appointment to keep.”
As Yahw and Satan and Mike and Rafe and Gabe and Lucy stepped onto the colorless sand, the Ferryman fumbled in his pocket for his compass.
“Er… two steps in this direction, and five steps there. OK. Let’s jump. Angels and Demons, behold, the single largest inventory of all possible things, here in Hetingersed, Radium-zone—the Plutonics! Here we go. I just found a novel that you’d definitely enjoy.”
“What is it?”
“It’s called something something Beautiful Day. It’s about some guys who doubted their own existence and killed a bunch of people.”
Yahw and Satan both grinned. Yahw turned to Mike and Rafe and handed them the book: “Remember you always complained how boring life is in Heaven? Now we all have novels to enjoy. Take this as a thank-you for helping me fix the caveballs the time before last time.”
The book was very long. On its front cover printed several gilded letters that spelled “Dream of a Beautiful Day”. The book smelled of juniper berries. Mike opened the book to a random page.
“Uh-oh, you’ve got some pretty bad things going on.”
Ben walked from the back of the railcar all the way to the front, and all he saw were dead men.
“Mom, Dad, I’ll make you proud.” Tears ran down from his eyes. Stepping onto the next passenger car, Ben began to search for the driver’s cabin.
“Wouldn’t all the blood cause the fluid sim to break down?” Rafe commented. “I mean, isn’t the story set in a class E simulated reality as usual?”
Ben walked on and on and on, and the train seemed like it was never going to end. After seeing the same dead face five or six times, Ben knew what was going on. The simulation had indeed broken down, and the car was just repeating itself over and over. All was futile.
Ben returned to his cabin and closed the door. He slowly took off his bloodstained shirt, dropping it on the gray floor. It was getting lighter outside minute by minute. Soon the sun would rise.
Plutonics Headquarters, Ark City, Hartshorne, Sector θ, Andromeda, Multiverse #CXC-293. A conference was in progress. The experiment was over.
“We’ve synchronized all copies of Benjamin T. Kaczynski, across all multiverses, to the same initial position. We then followed the ensuing events up until Ben left the cabin.”
“We found that almost all copies of Ben followed the same track—looking around the cabin, doodling, taking naps at the exact same time. But there were always exceptions, where the world diverged according to chance events at discrete times.”
“Thus, we have found that the universe is always deterministic except at countably many discrete points where the different realities might diverge. Unfortunately, we were unable to determine the cause of these divergences.”
After the conference, Julian and Regina met in the waiting room of the train station, where they found the public computer with the game Caveball on. They stared at the monitor silently for a long while, and then Julian spoke.
“What if the experiment itself was a divergence event? Then we’d never know the true result.”
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind.” Julian sighed. “Have you ever thought why the train never came in this reality?”
“No. Why? It’s probably just lost somewhere in spacetime.”
“Yeah, maybe.” After a while, he added: “I hope it went to a nice and beautiful place.”
The train slows down as it’s about to arrive at its destination. It’s daylight outside. The morning sun shines through the window, projecting tiny glitters of gold onto the desk, the chair, the wall, and Ben’s dark-brown hair. The train is moving along a bridge over a sleepy town. Ben looks out at the scenery. The train passes by a kindergarten, and Ben hears little kids and their parents shouting and laughing as he thinks about his Mom and Dad. He wonders where they are. He tries to recall the details of his childhood but cannot remember much of it. The train passes a deserted nuclear power plant not far off the bridge, then it leaves behind the suburb and continues to pursue its straight, definite course.
Then all of a sudden Ben sees the end of his journey. The train slows down but does not stop its motion. In front of him is a vast sea, the tides gently washing against the white sand. The scene reminds him of paintings by Giorgio de Chirico. Objects from his life are scattered across the shore, being washed away one by one as the tide grows higher and higher. The train draws near to the water. Ben feels and breathes the moist air one last time, then locks up the door and the windows and closes the curtain. Ben lies down and turns off the light. He slowly drifts into a sweet, eternal dream.