Pathfinder (Pathfinder 1)

“Ask your question.”

“Did you really kill all the other versions of myself when I ordered you to?”

“Of course we did,” said the expendable.

“I just thought—it occurred to me that perhaps you disobeyed me, and all the other copies of myself are doing and saying exactly the same things I’m doing and saying.”

“If that were true, then we would also be lying to all the other versions of yourself and telling them that they were the only one.”

“I think I want that to be true,” said Ram.

“But it isn’t,” said the expendable.

“I think you think I want it to be true because I feel some pang of conscience over ordering the death of eighteen highly trained pilots. But legally they were my property, so I could dispose of them as I wished.”

“Or you were their property.”

“My point is that I have no moral qualms. It was essential that you and the other expendables and computers be obedient to a single human being, so there would be no confusion.”

“We agreed, and that’s why we obeyed you.”

“But there was a side effect . . . an unintended consequence that I do regret.”

The expendable waited.

“Aren’t you curious about the unintended consequence?”

“All the consequences were intended,” said the expendable.

“All nineteen of these . . . cells, these walled-off habitats, whatever we call them.”

“You decided on ‘wallfold,’ by analogy with the small pens constructed by shepherds.”

“All nineteen of the wallfolds will start with exactly the same combination of genes—except one.”

“The one that has you,” said the expendable.

“And yet I’m the one that you all claim had some kind of influence over the jump backward in time, and the duplication of the ships.”

“We do not ‘claim’ it. It’s a certainty. Your mind, cut off from the gravity well of any planet, destabilized the combination of fields we created in order to make the jump past the light barrier. Theoretically, all nineteen computers on the original ship made a slightly different calculation, but your mind caused all of them to be executed at once, resulting in nineteen equivalent ships making the same bifurcated jump.”

“Bifurcated?”

“Bifurcated means ‘split in half.’ The theory of the jump is that one vehicle jumps forward through space while an identical vehicle begins to move backward in time, retracing the entire journey. The backward-moving vehicle is incapable of changing the universe in any way; we have no idea whether the persons or computers on the backship are even aware of their existence. Their existence is required by the mathematics, but it is undetectable.”

“So there were always going to be two ships after the jump, one with its timeflow reversed,” said Ram, puzzled.

“Theoretically.”

“So what my mind did was cause us to split into nineteen ships that reached our destination.”

“That, and causing us to arrive 11,191 years before we made the jump.”

“But still moving forward in time.”

“It was a very complicated thing that you did, and you did it without any awareness of what you were doing.”

“Is this ability to influence timeflow and divide matter into nineteen copies—do other humans have this ability?”