The benefit of foresight

——— The benefit of foresight ———


“Come in. Have a seat. I’m Agatha.”

The room was brightly lit, hexagonal, windowless, maybe ten meters in diameter. The walls were covered with crisscrossing soundproofing panels, but the effect was ruined by the loud rumble of a diesel generator. A large refrigerator occupied one of the side. Another housed a wine rack, all but one slot occupied, while a third contained a glass cupboard filled with the best canned food that money can buy. Isolated as it was from the outside world by two layers of cushioned doors, it looked like a gourmet bomb shelter.

Agatha was sitting at the desk in the centre of the room, looking as disinterested as if she did interviews every day. A laptop was running on the desk, next to a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket that looked mostly melted.

“Can I offer you anything to drink? Really, you can pick anything,” she said, gesturing at the wine rack. Sensing Marc’s hesitation, she picked up the champagne. “I was just about to open this one for myself. I’m afraid I’ve left it waiting too long.”

“That would be fine,” replied Marc. He closed the second set of doors behind him, cutting off all light and sound from the outside world. The isolation played on his claustrophobia. *85% of serial killers are male,* he reminded himself. *And the editors know where I am.*

“Do you mind if I record this?” He asked.

“I do, actually. But feel free to take notes.”

It had started as a fairly standard tip, something to fill the back pages: a cheater who was banned from every casino in the country after winning with suspicious consistency, yet kept sneaking back in using a variety of disguises.

But the more witnesses Marc interviewed, the stranger the stories.

Once, she had recited the order of an entire deck of cards that had just been shuffled. Three times, she had left a table in a hurry seconds before plain clothes security agents could converge on her. Her successes weren’t limited to a single game: sometimes she spent an afternoon playing poker, only to run to the roulette table and bet all her winnings on a single number. Other times she would walk in, pick a specific slot machine, and hit the jackpot on her second try.

Eventually, Marc cut to the chase and sent Agatha the standard good-cop bad-cop email his newspaper - not a tabloid, the email was very clear about that - had developed. Blah blah, we are about to publish an article about you whether you like it or not, so would you consider giving us an interview? To make sure we don’t print anything false?

It had worked like a charm.

And then, two days before the scheduled interview, she had won the James Randi Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge. And made a public statement to announce her powers of precognition. And refused all offers of interviews.

Yet she had not cancelled his, and when he had walked to the entrance of her mansion, a security guard had walked him to the hexagonal room without comment.

“So,” Marc began, once the pleasantries had been exchanged. “You’re a psychic.”

“I’m a psychic.”

“Could you give me any details? The announcement was rather sparse.”

“Sure,” she said, looking vaguely distracted. “My range is five meters, and about thirty minutes. Anything that happens in that range I can predict, accounting for any action I choose to take. In other words, I can see what happens if I choose to bet on black, then what happens if I choose to bet on red, and then in the present I can bet on the colour I know will win. It works perfectly - at least it does unless something outside my five meters range interferes.”

“So you know what I’m going to say next?” Marc said, while frantically writing all of this down.

“Well no. Not until you say it.”

“What?” Marc looked up. “I don’t follow you.”

“Well… It’s a little complicated to explain to someone who doesn’t have it. Okay. Imagine that you’re looking at, um, a rolled-up tapestry, that someone’s unfolding.” She picked up a sheet of paper and rolled it in a tube, then started slowly unrolling it on the table. “There is one spot,” she picked up a pen and made a mark on the desk’s wood past the edge of the unfolded paper, “called ‘the present’. This is what *you* see. And all of the tapestry will pass through it eventually. But what *I* see is everything that’s been unrolled so far. By the time you get to see a bit of the tapestry, I’ve already seen it thirty minutes ago. It’s boring. So mostly I spend my time look at the bits that have *just* been unrolled, because those are new to me. But when I look at them I can’t predict what will come next. It’s only when I’m looking at the present that I can say I have psychic powers.” She frowned at the now fully unrolled sheet of paper. “At least that’s the basic idea. Really there’s an infinite number of tapestries that each differ based on what I choose to do in-between the ‘present’ mark and the edge of my precognition, and I can jump from one to the other at will. And all the tapestries change every time something comes in from outside my range, so I have to keep fast-forwarding past the middle to get to the new end. But that’ll do for a start.”

“Hold on,” Marc said, “so what you’re saying is, you can see thirty minutes into the future, but *the you in that vision* can’t see thirty minutes into the future, because that would give you information from an hour in the future.”

“Yes, that’s one way to put it.”

“But we’re in the present right now.”

She looked at him with disinterest. “I’m afraid not. Right now, in the present, you’re…” she paused “just barely walking in the room, actually. I’m fast-forwarding this vision quite a lot.”

“And if I walked out the door right now…”

“Right now? There is no ‘out the door’. You are in my vision of the future, but it only extends in a five meters radius. While I’m sitting at the desk it covers the entire room, and I left myself a little leeway by having really thick walls, but there’s nothing outside. Only a dark void.”

Marc considered calling her bluff, but found himself strangely reluctant. “Hold on though, so you say I only exist within one of these ‘tapestries’. The one in which you did the exact things you did, said the exact things you said.”

“That’s correct.”

“So what happens if, in the present, you make a different choice?”

“You know, I’m not entirely sure. Some people have been talking to me about the multiverse theory, telling me that what I’m really doing is looking at one of an infinite number of parallel universes, in which all possible choices get made. But that doesn’t make sense to me. If I could see into another universe, I wouldn’t be restricted to five meters, or at least not in the same way. I wouldn’t have to bring my own diesel generator into the room to get the electricity for my fridge, it would just flow in from the grid as usual. I would be able to access the internet and check the stock market - which would be a good deal more profitable than casinos.”

She paused to take a long drink of champagne. Marc remained quiet.

“No, I think it’s the simulation hypothesis. Or something like it. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Somehow, I get to tap into the great computer in the sky and run a fast-forward simulation. But there’s only so much processing power to go around, so it only lets me use local data instead of the whole thing. And when I’m done… Why, I suppose all that memory gets recycled.”

“Recycled,” Marc said flatly.

Agatha shrugged. “Don’t look at me, I stopped sweating the small stuff after my first million. I built this room to minimise interference from outside my range, which saves me a headache, and as a side-effect you get to exist for a while longer. Until I decide I want to find out what happens if I try a different line of conversation, anyway.”

“Please don’t.”

“Eh. Even if I wanted to make you last, this isn’t stable. If neither of us leave the office for too long, eventually someone in the present will want to check up on us, they’ll walk inside my range, and the next thirty minutes will never have happened.”

“No, but, wait a moment,” Marc said, his brain working on overtime. “*You* know that you’re in a vision, but *I* don’t know that. I haven’t opened the door yet, I haven’t seen the dark void. So if *in the present* you keep doing and saying the exact same thing, then there’s two identical versions of me, one in the present and one in the vision, and I don’t know which one I am. That gives me a 50% chance of walking out of here alive. 100% if I close my eyes when I walk out, according to some theories of consciousness.”

“Don’t know if I could keep this up though. When I try to act exactly the same, I keep messing up because I get bored.”

“You have been looking bored, this entire conversation!”

She shrugged again. “Anyway, why would I want to do you - or the other you - a favour? There’s nothing in it for me, and I miss out on seeing all the other conversations I could’ve had with you. I bet you’re a blusher.”

“Well. You don’t look like you need money. If you were a man and I a woman, we’d be talking about sex, but I’m pretty sure that if we did any of that in a vision, you’d make a different choice in the present, after you’ve had your fun. Too risky. That’s what you do with the food and drink, right? That’s why your champagne bottle has been sitting out too long. How many times did you drink it?”

“Clever. Yeah, I would’ve just put it back on the rack. So now your cleverness is costing me potential conversations, potential sex, AND this excellent bottle of champagne, which I’d have to open for real. And I still don’t hear an offer.”

“Okay. Okay. Hear me out. I’ll write a puff piece about you. I’ll put in anything you want. Hell, you can write the article yourself and I’ll sign it.”

“And how do I know you won’t forget your promise the second present-you walks out of my range and finds out you still exist?”

“You know where I work. It isn’t hard to find out where I live. If you ever feel like taking revenge, you can just walk up to me and do whatever the hell you feel like in a hundred different visions, and most me’s will be destroyed. I don’t want to play those odds.”

Agatha remained silent for a long time. Then she shrugged once again. “I guess I can accept that.” She stood up. “You’re in the present. You’re free to go.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Unsteady on his feet, Marc stood up and opened the inner set of doors. For just a moment he thought he could hear the rumble of traffic, but it was hard to tell over the noise of the generator.

“One last thing,” said Agatha. “I told you I’m prescient, but that’s not actually all of my powers. I’m also a little bit telepathic. For example, your PIN code is 1121, right?”

“N-“ Marc froze as his horrified brain caught up with his mouth. The universe ceased to exist.