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– Yes? Who determined his appearance," the Master said with a smile, "Well… I really hesitated, I will not hide, I even believed in reality, when I saw the horror in his eyes, as well as in the eyes of the pursuers. And the fury of the pursuers finished me off.
A silent scene formed between them; the others were already waiting in the cars. They looked at each other thoughtfully and went there. Rangit's voice came from inside the SUV without a greeting; it was clear from his speech that he was watching the dialog. Watching the dialog as such and dialogs in general did not surprise anyone – everything was recorded in the memory of the supercomputer.
– The Commission, at the suggestion of your colleague, Dr. Maymun, has accepted, with your support, the idea to perform an unusual action, out of the usual series of events of existence, which should signal us, reflected in the influence of the quantum field.
– Rangit, that's not quite what I meant," the Master said, glancing at the doctor. – You have to admit that by creating you, we created these worlds.
– What do you mean?
– Agree, only you can know exactly where our visions come from, or rather, from what state.
– What do you mean?
– I mean, I mean," Ruthra jokingly teased, "only you can reliably know whether the subscriber is dreaming, in virtual reality, or… in some world. Isn't that right? We, for example, both in dreams and in virtual worlds, feel everything as reality. Don't we? And you know exactly where our consciousness is, in what state. Right?
– I'll admit it. But it's not my idea. You've given me these opportunities to help myself. Yourself as a human being. Isn't that right?
– Okay, let's move on," Ruthra signaled the end of the topic.
– It turned out to be in space, to the space station," the ISKIN signaled back.
– There was such a thing," the Magister confirmed, shaking his head and looking off into the distance, "but still, it's almost on Earth compared to the size we're going to flip to.
– Well, I don't have to tell you about the indifference of particles to any distance.
Ruthra looked at the doctor. She shrugged silently.
***
Several days of preparation passed quickly. The head of the center and the author of the methodology, like the inventors of vaccines once did, driven more by curiosity than by fear, was already habitually lying in the mind displacement unit to try out his revolutionary invention for the first time. This time there were no admonitions, explanations, recommendations, and even teasing from the luminaries of science – they lowered the optical block… and – whoosh! – bright beam, inaudible sound – and the body fell into coma, and consciousness… The whole matrix of connections, which makes up our consciousness, having passed the stages of conversion, influenced by millimicron changes in the back of some quantum substances on the same ones somewhere else… All this was done by technique, and in the organism, directly in the brain, there was an overload of the center of control over self-consciousness. This state was achieved by unexpected mental-emotional stress, which stopped the usual flow of thoughts and drove a person into a stupor caused by the reaction to horror and fear. The machine emitted infrasound at a frequency that the hearing organs could not perceive, and the optics broadcast an instantaneous transmission beyond the reach of the visual organs. Together, they caused a sharp fear, a tremendous fright, not perceptible to the conscious mind, but affecting the subconscious.
***
It was almost the same scenery all around. "Something about it has changed, it's become more natural or something," Ruthra pondered. The contours of the body of water and the trees were a little different… and the time of year didn't seem to match either. The heat felt more intense, and the grass that had been more abundant before was now, sparsely sprawled along the outskirts, scorched. Ruthra surveyed his surroundings out of habit. Silence. He walked scripted to a tree near the oasis and… was surprised: there was a carpet spread out under the tree. A small, worn one. Ruthra looked around for someone to lay it for a while. When he could find no one, as he had on previous occasions, he called to the invisible watchers, and when he heard no answer, he lay down under the tree, now on the rug, and waited. He thought about existence and time, about the worlds that must necessarily be in the vast expanses of the universe, and not just one. He thought about where everything began, about the root cause that served as a spark for the Big Bang of consciousness, about infinity, about what never appears and never disappears. This was difficult for humans to grasp, for our minds are accustomed to operating in dimensional units – whatever infinity we visualize, we are still defining something grandly great, but we cannot grasp the concept of eternity. Never… to think of it – something that never began and never will end.
Suddenly there were muffled footsteps. Ruthra stood up and looked around. The same Bedouin who had been in the last production was walking across the steppe in his direction. He came up and sat down on the carpet without greeting, and began to talk as if Rutra were his old acquaintance.
– I know everything you're gonna say ahead of time. Or almost everything.
Seeing the rather surprised look on Ruthra's face, created by his own statement, he continued without letting him object:
– Your doubts are valid. Everyone would have those doubts. Believe me, you were chosen for a reason. Think about it. If a person appeared here who was unfamiliar with your invention – the method of moving consciousness through space – then obviously the whole mission would be thwarted. The person would either be in constant disbelief, doubt, or fear, expecting a trick. Or he or she would consider us or himself to be crazy, at least insane.
– What are you talking about? And who are you, anyway?
– Everything you see is real.
– I can see it's real. What's the big deal?
– Think about it… if children were born with such awareness of the world as a child of five years of age, and this awareness was activated as independent breathing in the process of childbirth, wouldn't they be surprised at this metamorphosis? And isn't it strange why it is not so, because all the vital functions of the organs are working, but memory is not. If you were born into this world you are now in, it would be to you as your own, natural and only one. It wouldn't surprise you. So what makes you think that someone somewhere doesn't think the same way? Now think again: you humans have already mastered the technology of cloning, but you cannot yet clone a dead person. You can't make a child from his material, who would later have all the memory of the original person. Nor can you create a person as an adult and put a prearranged memory into him.
– We can! – Ruthra shouted reflexively, and then realized he was looking at the strange man's words from a different angle.
– Can you do it already? – He asked with genuine interest.
– Yes, we can clone and grow quickly using technology that, by the way, has long been used in animal husbandry. And then we can load into the clone pre-recorded algorithms of combinations of tactile-verbal code signals, causing chemical reactions in the brain. But for now, it's our secret technology. What's going on?
– That's great. It turns out your world is much simpler. Then for you, what's happening must be quite possible. And… so you're faced with the paradox of reality denial. Your world, I mean.
– What?
– The person you cloned will remember the world he lived in. The world is like the time of his life.
– Uh, uh," Ruthra hesitated, "does DNA retain conscious memory? We put a pre-recorded memory into the clone. We've experimentally cloned several people, and none of them retained any memory.
They looked at each other studyingly.
– What do you want? I don't understand," the Master asked with a slight indignation. – Are you a director? Actor? Why are you on a first-name basis with me? And what is my role?
– Think of me as a psychologist testing actors for mental compatibility. Here in this world, I play the role of rabbi. And yet I ask you to answer my question.
– Which one? What world?
– About the state of suddenly acquiring memory. The world afterward. Just don't contradict your theory, please.
– So?
– What is happening would not be surprising and unreal if a child was born with basic knowledge, adopted from mom, or dad, or both. After all, we are not surprised by the rest, – adopted by the child – character, predisposition to diseases, appearance.
– That's ridiculous. How can a child acquire memory? So he must be a prodigy…and could be out of school.
– That makes sense. So you're learning about the universe. This is one of the steps.
Ruthra looked around.
– Okay, it didn't work out, it didn't work out. God bless you, goldfish. What's all the drama for?
– Now, let's be clear. How did you expect to see the result of your experiment?
Ruthra looked around again, scrutinizing the distance, turned sharply on the Bedouin, studied him.
– And now imagine what we got this time," he suggested or stated.
– How am I supposed to visualize if it didn't work out in real life?
– And how did you in real life, as you put it, have to realize whether it worked or not? Do you remember the moment you fell asleep? You wouldn't have realized in the dream that you were in it.
– Okay.
– So imagine it like you're sleeping right now.
– Why?
– You did it. This is the real world.
– Ha.
– There's an anesthesia procedure. After all, a person may not come out of this state, which happens from time to time. Those subjected to such a procedure are not surprised by their "waking up" in the intensive care unit. If copying information, for example, your videotape, can move through time and space, why can't you record and move human consciousness? Although, as you said, you already have that technology. So why can't consciousness move from one world to another? Or do you not believe in worlds, but you do believe in transference? Yet, however, it is your own assertion that there is everything in infinity. You invented this technology yourself. Why do not you believe in the reality of realization of other worlds and your stay in them?
– Hmm," Ruthra looked around.
The surroundings were the same, or almost the same. And then he caught himself thinking… "It was exactly the same situation last time, and not just exactly the same, but… everything was almost exactly the same: the situation, and the Bedouin, but the dialog… The dialog was not the same. Could it be… deja vu?" – Ruthra thought. What the stranger said almost made him stutter.
– Agree, if you were transported to an unfamiliar place, to an unfamiliar country, to an unfamiliar society and environment while sleepy or in a coma state, say unconsciousness, you would have the same state of distrust of reality.
– Why are you repeating my thoughts all of a sudden? – Ruthra remembered that it had occurred to him to say the same thing last time.
– That's what you think," was the reply from the interlocutor, the same as last time.
– First of all, I haven't interacted with anyone here yet, except for you here, I see the same environment as I have a few times before, and....
"And I thought I answered the same way that time," Ruthra thought, "or…? Maybe there was no last time? Hell, no, there was…"
He was distracted from his thoughts by otherworldly noises. He turned, noticing the anxious, intense, beastly look of horror in his companion's eyes.
– So much for politicians," the rabbi's voice sounded depressed, just like last time.
"A master of the stage," Ruthra thought, only his doubts grew stronger.
And, trying again to tear his gaze away from the madness in the Jew's eyes, he looked at the scorched branding – the six-pointed star (magendavid) looked a little different, bigger and… it was a real scar from the scorched branding. Ruthra, feeling unconsciously anxious, turned around. What he saw gave him an answer, but it was from a different area, though Ruthra still doubted whether it was the right one: the same horde of Selekwid warriors were coming at them. He wasn't surprised by the director's idea, but the horror in his gaze… something instinctive… that spoke of reality.
"It's all very real," Ruthra reasoned with himself, "but it's still a production. Or…"
Everything repeated itself: a group of men approached the oasis with shouts and yells, pursued by another group, mostly horsemen.
Apparently our brains have senses other than sight and hearing, which were necessary to understand what we were seeing, so with some sixth sense Ruthra realized the reality of what was happening. Doubts or belief in the scene already played out remained, even when the riders caught up with the pursuers at the tree. Doubts remained even as scarlet hot blood hissed from the severed necks. Doubts still remained when the screams, the cries of the dying began to fade. Doubts remained when the mahaira, a variant of the xiphos, a short light sword for horsemen, glittered over the rabbi who had convinced him. Doubts remained when the rabbi was not quite a rabbi, for he drew his sicarius and fended off the blows of three opponents one after another.
"Sicarius," Ruthra said excitedly to himself, "he is a sicarius[4 - Sicarii – "daggers" – a militant Jewish group, a splinter wing of the Zealot movement; they attacked both invaders and collaborators.] . The short curved sword of the sica no doubt speaks volumes." This public, though from the pages of historiography, Rutra knew well. Knew, too, that "sicri" was the Latin nickname for secret assassins. It was not for nothing that the term had become entrenched in the vocabulary of the Latins as something derived from the word for assassin – sicarius in Latin. "And yet what is going on around here?" – Rutra wondered. Shrieks, screams, howls, cries, distraught moans, the wheeze of air escaping from their lungs through the shards of severed necks… it all sounded from one side or the other. And yet Ruthra still had doubts about the reality of what was happening. But suddenly those doubts were dispelled by the cold blade of a heavy akinak.
***
Perhaps in a moment, perhaps in a billion years, perhaps where he lay in the rig, perhaps in another universe… how do we know, since the existence of a parallel world identical to our own is real… Rutra "woke up".
– Your doubts are justified," Maimun said snidely above him, "perhaps we shouldn't get up now? Are you not too tired, your majesty?
– Back off," Ruthra replied gruffly and held out his hand to his assistant.
– That was reality," he said, "you woke up because of the death of the consciousness carrier in that world," he explained quite seriously.
Ruthra replied with a thoughtful look, weakly trying to hide his astonishment.
– It was real," Maimun said quietly, as if it were some kind of secret, patting his palms timidly.
Rutra paused, looking around at his colleagues and the laboratory staff. The staff took turns joining in the congratulations of the luminary of science – clapping softly, looking at Ruthra with admiration – and soon the room was filled with applause. Master Paschow was overcome with a look of amazement that turned to one of rapture.
Chapter 4: One of the worlds that has not fallen
"…and the other inhabitants of the universe have not fallen…"
(Book of Isaiah: chapter 26 verse 18)
After stretching his muscles and going through the hygiene and medical procedures, Ruthra returned to the room with the displacement units. This time he was curious to do a session himself. But he took his time, went over everything his mind had memorized with the analysts, and, trying not to show his concern, wondered if this was really some kind of world or if it was happening inside his brain. That it was no longer a staging – he knew – Rangit was an impartial arbiter, and yes the intuitive subconscious feeling we define as 'gut feeling' spoke of the reality of the event. "I wonder," thought Rutra, "in an actual logical line what the Indians of America had come to imagine the world to be like when they first saw the Europeans, Columbus and crew?" Another thought came next: how do we know what we dream in those dreams we don't remember? In fact, we don't remember at all what in our consciousness is going on in the dream. And is it in our consciousness? And is it in ours?
Ruthra lay down in the machine, and the process began: a bright beam, an indistinguishable sound, a slight but sharp reflex twitching of the body… and his consciousness was already seeing another reality. Whether it was a staging, a dream, hypnosis, trance, or an artificial coma, Ruthra didn't even want to find out. Everything that was happening around him felt real, natural. What made it real was that he was aware of his sensations in this state and remembered the events that had preceded his arrival here. "But how the hell how?" – he wondered, though he himself was proving the possibility of it. And yet, how could such a thing be believed, for everything around him was the same, well, almost the same, as it was there, in that world of his. And in that world? Is it yours? Is this world alien, is it different?
The same type as before was walking towards him again. As he approached, Ruthra pondered, "This type is a figment of my imagination, even if he is natural. After all, it was Rangit who pulled him out of my imagination, out of my mind, back when there were perception experiments. So it could very well be fictional now, too. It couldn't be the other way around. Then Rangit must have known about this world, about this Bedouin, to put his image into my consciousness… or the stage manager's perception." Ruthra grinned, saying to himself: "Yeah, right, all fictional, no matter how real it seemed last session. That's the trick – the identity of the man. Though… is he identical? And me… what am I like?" Rutra looked around himself… he was dressed the same way he was in the movie sessions and in the past… "God, is this really real? And the face…?" – he asked himself. Then he looked at the smoothness of the pond, walked towards it, not waiting for the Bedouin he thought the man walking towards him looked like. "One must take a look at oneself," he pondered.
– Your doubts are justified," he heard the familiar one. – There is no need to go there, you are not like yourself, can't you feel it by the sensations of your body?
– How am I supposed to feel, it's not that big of a difference.
– There you go. And yet there is a difference.
Ruthra ran toward the body of water, the stranger continued unperturbed:
– Consciousness takes up residence in the preferred body, which is more familiar. The law of subconscious logic is that this body should also be controlled by consciousness. You will choose a familiar vehicle than some unknown one if you are given a free choice. Moreover, you will not drive a locomotive if you are untrained.
– What the hell is going on? – Ruthra glanced at the water surface.
Oh, my God! It wasn't him.
– It's real, believe me. The politicians will be here soon. I hope you remember who they are.
– How…and how do you know that if it's not a production?
– And this is coming from the inventor of the method. Hmm. You think this is my first time here? You think this is your first time here? Or do you think you won't be in my role? You will be… come what may… in the future… your future, – everyone will be. It'll be as real as flying on an airplane to anywhere. Do you understand now?
Ruthra looked around:
– Let's say.
– So go ahead. At least even if it's a production, in your opinion, you have a chance to check out the reality around you anyway. Why go back to the lab over and over again?
– Who the hell are you?
– That's better. I'll tell you everything. I've gotten pretty good at these worlds.
– What?
