“Shit,” Jesús said, “they must have made VR the most addictive drug in history—in fact, technically speaking, the most addictive drug possible. No wonder they all disappeared. They must have starved to death—”
“But we never found a body or a skeleton,” Paula pointed out. “Except for that one child who was too young to have a headset on.”
“What’s the ‘happiness algorithm’ define happiness as?” Iphwin asked quietly.
“I don’t read brain science much,” I said.
He grabbed it, looked at it, and appeared to think deeply for a moment. “Oh, dear,” he said. “Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear.”
“How long does it take to do things in the cottage?” I asked.
“In here, what it looks like,” Jeff the mailman said. “Out there, about a microsecond per day. But it’s different this time; I don’t have to create a job for you, so I don’t have to ride back and forth to town every day.”
“Does everybody have a satisfactory breakfast?” I asked, because I had plenty left on the stove. I wasn’t used to cooking for five, and had overshot somewhat.
“Are you this good a cook in the real world?” Terri asked. “Because if you are, I nominate you for cook, forever.”
“Hunger’s the best sauce,” I said, “and in this scenario, we’re all hungry. Dawn fishing will do that. How’s yours, Jesús?”
I took the grunt and the vigorous nodding of his head as approval.
“Anyway, Jeff, or Iphwin, or whichever you’d rather be while we’re here,” I said, “back in the real world, you were saying ‘Oh, dear,’ over and over. Or I guess your embodied version was. He must have called you up, and plugged us all into this interface. Are all those Billie Beards on their way to the office where our physical bodies are?”
“They sure are. I would estimate they will reach the office in two or three minutes. But with a million-to-one time ratio, we could stay here and take a long vacation for a few centuries, without pushing our luck, eh? Does anyone need time to relax before we get down to business?”
It was universally agreed that we didn’t, but it also seemed to be agreed that I should make up seconds for everyone.
“Well, then,” Iphwin said, “here’s what happened to America—or rather to all the Americans who were in America, in so many timelines. Around the early 2000s—anywhere from 1994 to 2022, depending on exactly which event sequence you were in—the Americans found the secret of happiness. Very possibly because they looked for it harder than anyone else ever did. And they came up with a unique plan: the government would pay for a universal wideband VR system to deliver happiness to everyone. Basically that involved a feedback loop; the headset measured how high the happiness indicators were in your brain, and an artificial intelligence in the system then decided whether your VR illusion needed to change to increase your happiness. It had to be a fairly smart artificial intelligence, you see, because there are many kinds of pleasurable pain (like seeing a tragedy or being melancholy about a lost love), and many ways in which delaying a pleasure enhances it, and pleasures about which people feel so guilty that they become miserable if they indulge in them.
“Now the artificial intelligences not only had tremendous leeway to do things, because they couldn’t anticipate what situations might come up, but they also had all sorts of ability to self-improve. It didn’t take long for them to develop the trick of simulating the personality of the person wearing the headset, and then ‘advance shopping’ the things that could happen in VR, to find out which one the person would like best. Thus they could keep moving the person from one pleasure to another, without having to ever experience a disjunction between what they thought the person would like, and what he did like.
“But of course VR comes through a quantum compression server, so part of the experience people were going to get was going to be the new world that they were quantum-shuffled to. The artificial intelligences quickly recognized that, too, and began to do the same thing that I do when I am trying to get near a specific worldline, or into a family of event sequences. They’d shuffle the person’s position frequently, in hopes of making them drop out somewhere better, and then they’d sample the new reality into which the person would emerge, to make sure it was better for the person than the one from which the person had come.
“Well, an essential component of pleasure is variety. And real pleasures are more pleasant than virtual pleasures, which is why sex hasn’t disappeared despite the invention of VR pornography. So the artificial intelligences quickly began to focus on giving people a pleasurable variety of real experiences.
“Pretty soon they realized that the real way to maximize somebody’s happiness was to break the message into smaller and smaller packets, so that the person thrashed around between a lot of worlds, and then solve the huge optimization problem created by the fact that parts of him were in thousands of different worlds which had thousands of different definitions, and many different versions of him would be dropping into many different worlds.
“The artificial intelligences were doing, on a much grander scale, what I did to put the team of you together—they were shoving people into new worlds, checking the world against the person’s tastes and experiences, and either deciding to stay or bump again. Every time they bumped someone, they triggered a chain of bumps that put thousands of other versions of that person into motion, but that was okay, because people like variety, and very often change alone makes them happy. Everyone kept swapping places, getting closer and closer to the point where when they took off the headsets, they would drop into worlds perfect for them.
“In a matter of a few seconds, the artificial intelligences had quantum-shuffled nearly everyone who was hooked up to the VR systems, millions or billions of times—so often and so far that most of Americans were in event sequences that were only very distantly related to this one. The effect amplified, because once you bump most of the people out of a world, it becomes a much tougher world to be happy in—a world where ninety percent of your neighbors and friends have vanished isn’t fun for most people—which meant that all the others had to be bumped too, and the people who popped in to take their place, and the ones who popped in to take their place, and so forth and so on. The artificial intelligences emptied out billions or trillions of worlds, as everyone migrated in the direction of greater happiness—and presumably they filled up billions or trillions of worlds that are somewhere very far away. Basically, everyone’s gone to their own personal heaven. And since the happiness algorithm was being kept as an American secret, only the American part of the net had it...”
“And only America went away,” I said. I poured fresh coffee for everyone, and then said, “Well, your mystery is solved, Iphwin. I suppose we could all go chase after them. Or you could take the happiness algorithm from this document, implement it over the whole world, and send everybody to heaven. Or you could be a nice guy and help us escape from Beard and her people, and then just let us go.”
“How far away is heaven?” Paula asked, with a frightened expression, as if she saw someone with a gun. “What?” Jesús asked. “Why are you—” Paula set down her coffee mug and walked over to the window to stare out. “Iphwin, whatever you do with us when we’re all done, please make sure I have access to this place. It’s good for the soul.” She stared for a long time and said, “You know, I can’t think of a single reason why this wouldn’t be the case, and I sure hope one of you will think of it.