Chapter11B

Richard
I think I've been dreaming about the distant past. Zoë was there and I had my full original complement of body parts. I do still dream about those times, as well as others: my charmed life as an indestructible playboy, the collapse of what they used to call civilisation, the period I've taken to calling the wilderness millennia as the last of humanity gradually died out, and my bizarre continued survival in a post-human world... it's very hard to be sure how much of that really happened... and so on until my present state in which so much of my body has ceased to function that I can no longer tell what is happening in the outside world, or whether there even is one, and can no longer even begin to distinguish reality from dreams – in fact I wonder if it's a valid distinction to make. But somehow I feel that this one is the real, waking reality.
I tell myself again and again that I have to accept my present state – there's no way back. Hell, perhaps surprisingly, turns out to be boredom; eventually every immortal being is going to a universe where he or she is the only conscious entity that's left. Not much social life.
I begin again the ritual I've repeated billions of times already, of playing cards in my head. I want to beat every single permutation of the cards – that way I can play at least eighty million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion games before I run out of things to do.
King of spades, three of diamonds, three of clubs... no, it was the four of clubs. It takes me some time to work out the order of the cards, and I live in perpetual fear of losing my place in the sequence of permutations. On the other hand, that might be a blessing in disguise – starting all over again would provide another few aeons' entertainment.
Obviously it has to be a solitaire game, and one where knowing the order of the cards doesn't matter, the all-face-up kind. There are a few that I know – this one's Free Cell, a game that enjoyed a brief burst of popularity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries of the Gregorian calendar. When I've finished that I can start again with a slightly harder one, Baker's game, or with the fiendish game of Montana, which I learnt from a monk of the Mathematician order. Or at least I think that's where I got it from, although I find it a little hard to believe that the Mathematician monks ever really existed. I could even invent my own game, experimenting with different variations over the ages until I'm satisfied that it's worthy of being played by... me again.
In the end I'll still be left with nothing to do though. I have discovered a great truth, which amounts to this: eternity is terribly dull.
The seven of clubs can go on the eight of diamonds, the six of clubs on the seven of hearts, the ten of diamonds on the jack of clubs... I could do with a red five really... I run over the sequence of cards again to refresh my memory. What would happen if my memory went the same way as my senses?
Move the eight of hearts and four of spades into the free cells to get at the nine of spades, that goes on the ten of diamonds revealing the five of hearts, then bring the four of spades back down and the eight of hearts onto the nine of spades.
It's almost automatic, I've been playing this so long I can visualise the cards perfectly. Mind you, where the hell is the queen of hearts?
Maybe this too is just a dream though. Maybe the immortality thing was a load of bollocks after all. Come to think of it, Tegmark was probably right about the fallacy of the quantum immortality argument, about the gradual fading away of consciousness. It can't really be possible to survive like this, after the extinction of humanity, even after the end of all life on Earth or of the Earth itself... can it?
The idea of the card games was to keep my mind off the philosophical speculations. It isn't working – I'm playing almost without thinking while I ponder my awful fate with the rest of my mind.
I'm approaching the end of the game now, jack-ten-nine-eight-seven onto the queen via the free cells, king in the space releasing the ace of clubs, get rid of the two as well, pile up the six-five-four-three-two, then it's just a case of moving the three and two onto the four and everything can be neatly piled away.
If I've counted right the score is now two billion, three hundred and ninety two-million, four hundred and seventy-six thousand, one hundred and twenty-three. To nil. I grin inwardly – it's been an awful long time since I was able to do so outwardly.
If this is all in my mind, as it unquestionably is, then what else is? The cannibals, the monks, the terrorists? The weird dystopian but egotistical world of the playboy era? Maybe I'm really back in the old days, in the world where Zoë lives – or one of the many worlds where various branches of Zoë live – and just dreaming all this. Mind you, by now I'm very unsure whether there's any rational justification for believing that I, as far as I'm aware the only conscious being left in the universe, exist at all, or for that matter that anything else does.
I fall on through the maybe-existent void, alone with my thoughts. If only I could dream up a new universe, instead of just packs of cards... I might be real there...