Down the Long Tail

“Once you have been spaghettified, it takes all the pressure and worry about what might be, and all the heartache about forgetting what was.” The phase of Bertram that sat in front of Hathabet, the blur, seemed to pause in his statement. The glass of pale whisky in front of him rose, enveloped in that blur, and came back down to the table diminished in content and clearer for having been released from the Singlatarian’s grip.

Hathabet, reporter for the Lalond Station Grid, a thriving community of stations orbiting Lalond 21185, forging an economy out of the rocks and planetoids around that red dwarf system, dutifully jotted the words into her touch pad with a practiced finger. This was an interview she had been thrilled to land and terrified to screw up. Visitors came and went at Lalond Station, usually on their way out to the Gleise Network, but few stayed, and fewer were as interesting as one of the crew of the Toy Pony Maru—the famed crew of the Toy Pony. The only crew to cross the uncrossable barrier and come back to tell the tale.

To say they lived is probably not the most accurate statement, because they lived and they died. And seated across from her in the fab court just outside the array of docking ports was Bertram. He was one of the few Singlatarians who came back to population centers (like Lalond Station) and one of the only ones who would talk about what passing through a black hole was actually like. No one really knows where most of the rest of the crew had gone. Insane, was the most reasonable assumption, insane from living their whole lives all at once.

“I cannot tell you how amazing it is for you to be here with us at L Station.“ Hathabet gushed. “The news can be rather dull here: New ore finds. Local politics.” She threw her hands up in the air in mock terror. “Oh no! The supply transport is going to be a rotation late. Again” She giggled for Bertram’s sake.

“Well,” The blurry man started with a long enough pause to make Hathabet nervous that she had come across too eagerly. “I must admit, of all the paths I could follow, this one has given me the longest tail yet.” Hathabet tried to work that out. Had she mis-heard him? She had done her research. She had read the previous interviews. She knew these people were a little strange. Unlike anything or anyone. They were blurry. They existed in probability. Not like a rogue might flip a coin, go left or right, put it all on black. Singlatarians somehow existed where time and space changed places. To them, time was a place, and the space they occupied was time. Regular humans interacted with them, but for the regular folks, living in space, the Singlatarians could only be perceived as probably there. And it is because, in truth, the Singlatarian was only probably then. And because time was linear for Hathabet and the rest of humanity, they could walk away from a Singlatarian in only one singular possible outcome. For the Singlatarian, it would have been but one of all possibilities.

Interactions were rare, hence the news-worthiness of Bertram’s arrival at Lalond Station. And rarer still was a Singlatarian sitting still enough in the possible to settle for a conversation.

Now, in the blurry form that occupied the spot where Bertram’s head probably was, Hathabet discerned two spots of concession, two areas of resolving clarity surrounded by the blur of probability, two eyes coming into the focus of right now. They held Hathabet, who remained silent and sank deeper into her expression of strange fascination.

“Hathabet, is it?” Bertram asked, his eyes in full focus. She had read that this will happen. It was supposed to be an honor, as they mostly inhabited the probabilities of each and every choice they could make, cutting their inverted path through space time. A nose swished left, right and then left again as he asked her.

“Hathabet Filbist,” she waited until his face resolved completely to go on, it seemed the polite thing to do. “But everyone on the ring calls me Hathy.” She had read how important it was to be gracious and polite if a Singlatarian settled into one’s now, especially if they settled their attention. “I came to Lalond as a pinky in the tube train. So, born and bread out here, I’d reckon.”

His face regarded her. He was an older man, but not much older, could have been her older brother, or a young uncle. She was transfixed, watching more and more of his features settle in, like a radio tuning into a clear channel. He had dark hair on his head, cut short without style, but greying at the temples, which lent a shine of wisdom to his features. Stubble speckled onto his chin like a snowflake grows spires under a microscope.

Hathy realized the pause was dragging.

“Ask your questions, Hathy,” he politely pushed her.

“Well, Mr. Bertram,” she had prepared this bit: “You and your crew are singular,” He saw that coming and rolled his eyes as she said it. For her part, she contained an unprofessional giggle, “singular in that you can see the future.”

There was a pause.

“Did you know I was going to ask that?” She offered, a bit meekly.

“I did,” Bertram let her face light up a bit. “But everybody asks me that.” She sagged, realizing she was just another ore-chomping rube, keeping the prospectors distracted with tales of weird deep space. “Now, now, don’t fret. I will answer your questions.” His smile settled into the now. “Firstly, the crew of the Toy Pony and I are not in accord. We are not all of the same mind. And as regards to the future, we don’t just see it. We are in it. I am there now. It’s the long tail, like a streamer blowing in the wind.”

She brightened at this and scribbled a note into her pad with her finger.

“Now,” his fuzzy form leaned in across the table and his elbow came into view, propping up a less fuzzy hand to his now clear jaw. “Ask me a real question.”

“You see possibilities,” she started. “You see what could be, not what will be.”

“That’s correct.”

“How do you use this? Seeing all the possibilities at once must be maddening.”

“You get used to it,” Betram saw her face in this instant that this was not the answer she wanted. He saw disappointment. In other instances, he saw shock, glee, a bitten lip. “Ask me a better question.” She bit her lip.

“How do you have sex?” she did not stammer; it had obviously been on her mind. Bertram stammered like a Singlatarian stammers in that he immediately went fuzzy. This was off-putting for Hathy. Singlatarians were notoriously flighty and she was sure this question caused offense. But she was afraid that her more mundane questions would lose his attention. She needed to grab hold of it.

But he laughed.

“My dear, I haven’t laughed that hard in a long time.”

“What is so funny?”

“You mean when do we have sex?” He laughed again. “The future isn’t set. We Singlatarians weave about in all the futures based upon the choices we make and the choices those around us make.” He replied as if they both understood. “For example. I followed a possibility where you and I flirt, get drunk, fall to bed.”

“What?!?” She was not prepared for her question to spin that quickly.

“Oh, my dear, you were not there for it yet.” His hand, more clear than shimmering, slowly dropped to hers on her pad. “I have not taken advantage of you. You were willing, we had fun.” She was not sure, although she asked the initial question about sex more because it was provocative. “And it was deeper than that.” He let his hand linger and it vibrated on hers, going in and out of focus as the choices he made moved it about its most probable place in the now. “At one point, we fell in love and you stayed with me down my long tail, aging as you went, we, spending our twilight years together until death did we part.” She was shocked indeed by this and pulled her hand back.

“I was asking about you,” she allowed. “But it was mostly because no one asks. I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t—”

“It has already happened, my dear.” He intoned with finality. “That and more. Every possible path of buying you a drink and talking though these hours, what would happen if I said this, or did that. Your own responses and choices.” Her expression darkened, not to anger, but to a novice attempting calculus. “My long tail has whipped through all those scenarios, certainty allowing my flittering form to coalesce in your space so that we could experience our love. Or grow apart at a different choice. Or die together, fleeing your family like Bonny and Clyde. It has all happened and I have explored each possibility.”

“Already?” She asked biting her lip again.

“It is happening now, all of it,” he replied flatly. “Well, as I perceive things.”

“Would you do it again?” She asked coyly, not sure if any follow up questions could have any weight next to this man who had explored their possible lives together, had experienced her in full, and came right back to the now. The realization, the implications of how this man Bertram must feel his way through a revealed life struck her. “How do you get up in the morning?” Was all she could manage, realizing the linear bias of the question.

“Because I know what happens if I don’t,” his answer was weary, but not in any way she could empathize. “We don’t exist in space; we exist in time, stretching into a possibility, and experience, the whole of it, from the moment we first spaghettified, through now, until our possible deaths, bounding our sense of being between what you call ‘then.’”

She traced a note into her pad, but the words were difficult to choose, to put it in a way she (and her readers) might understand. This was a being who experienced the totality of the rest of his possible lives, experienced them, and yet she could barely select the words to describe it. She kept searching.

“Where do you go, when you follow your—”

“Long tail?”.

“Yes, your long tail,” she found her journalist’s pace again, having passed through that odd epiphany.

“I haven’t gone anywhere,” he puzzled. “I can’t call it space for your sake, and really it isn’t any place. I am literally at every place in time that I will be perceived in space. Seeing it all, hearing it all, feeling it all. From now until my life ends—this way or that.”

“How are you here with me now?”

“I have settled,” he replied matter of factly, his mouth quirking into a half smile. “With a little effort I can sit still, pin this possibility-- this probability, I should say--closer to one, call it zero point nine nine nine.”

“Pinned?” Hathy jotted.

“Yes,” Bertram’s face completely resolved and Hathy started at its suddenness. “I have committed to this time with you, here in your now. This connection—our conversation--is not only probable, it is.” He put clear hands, palms down on the table as if he had just gently landed there. “In all of the possible long tails between the singularity and my death, I will experience, I have experienced this nexus of reality, this time and space.” He paused, searching her face. “It is my gift to you.” At this point, his whole body rendered, still and there, sitting on the chair across from Hathy in the recycled air of Lalond Station, a bubble of space falling predictably around a planet, itself falling around a bright, but small red dwarf.

Hathy was a young woman, not a rarity on the station, but her journalist job kept her out of the hard living of drop ships and pressure suits and rock busting, so she had retained an unspoiled softness about her that was itself rare.

She knew a proposition when she heard one.

“Mr. Bertram,” she put her pad down. “I don’t think—”

“No no no, young lady,” Bertram replied, almost laughing at her. “I am not selling my presence here as some cheap gambit for sex. Like I said, I have already explored those possibilities.” Hathy was relieved, but also a little hurt.

Bertram, in all his alien relationship to space-time, was still human and he reached again for her hand. “I do not mean to be rude or cruel, my existence is not naturally settled and I do forget how differently you—normal time-bound people—feel regret or doubt.” She drew her hand back at being othered, but Bertram was not perturbed. She looked right at him professionally and he went on. “I am giving this interview because I need a certain ship’s captain to read that I am now and to rendezvous with me.” Hathy squinted, fingered a note in her tab, then looked quizzically at him.

“Now? What ship captain?”

“Her name is Captain Feldspar of the long runner Fast and Loose. She is due to make birth at one of the Glieses in a few days and I want her to know I am settled at Lalond Station and to know that I intend to book Fast and Loose for a long shot to Gaia BH1.”

“What’s Gaia BH1?” She asked him, flipping at the surface of her pad. She looked up at him when she as she found the answer. “A black hole.”

“A black hole.” He replied. “You see, I can follow the long tail of myself, whipping through the wind of possibilities, each landing at my possible deaths, bouncing me back and forth from the singularity to my eventual demise. And that has some comfort. I can make the decisions that live in the bends and ripples of my long tail and live the terminus of my choice.” He could see her working the concept in the furrow of her brow. “Much like I explored all of our possible lives together.”

“You have lived all those lives?” She asked more as a revelation to herself that this being sitting in clarity before her was more than just one being, he was all the possibilities of that being. He was a million beings, uncountable beings living all of the choices to their reveled conclusion, then coming back—already being back—to live a completely different set of choices. “How can one mind handle it all?” The question lolled out of her like a tongue going slack.

“I would say I am exhausted, but I do not know anything else anymore.”

“What’s at Gaia BH1?” She swiped some notes on the system that held this black hole and dropped them into her working draft. “Why are you going there?”

“I am already there in all the possible ways,” he replied with a growing anxiety that bore its mark deeper on his face than she thought it should. “In all the possible ways but one.”

She leaned in.

“I can see all ends of my long tail except for the one that has me falling into that black hole.” He smiled without his eyes. “It seems almost elementary, but for once, I don’t know.”

“Are you looking to cure your condition? Return to space?” She asked, again, her reporter’s urges impelled her.

“I am not sick, to be cured, like some hypochondriac,” he snapped. “No, I want to experience the unknown again. I want to wonder at what will happen. I want to walk around the corner and not know who is coming, what they will say. There is no chaos in my life and I need it. It must be in that black hole.”

“But what if you die?” She asked, more clinically fascinated than concerned, because she already knew the answer.

“I have died so many times and in so many ways.” It was his resignation. His hands began to flicker and blur and up his elbows. Hathy could sense that the interview was coming to a close. It was a somber note to leave it on. But she had come to learn, even from their short time together, her short time with him, that he had already said goodbye to her a million times in a million ways, that for him, it was unimportant what she chose to do because now he had become blurry with the probability again. He was no longer settled. His glass sat empty between them, hers untouched, more ceremonial in a shared thing than a thing consumed for she herself felt emptied. What she had initially conceived as a great opportunity for her to interview one of the most singular humans in the known universe had ended with her being simply an advert in a column. She would make for herself out of it what she could, not knowing her own fate, its fortunes incumbent on her gambling the outcome.

All that remained, it seemed to her, was to be professional.

“Mr. Bertram, thank you for your, time,” even now she stumbled on the word. “I can send you a draft if you’d like to read it?”

“I already have,” he replied simply and stood up from the table in a blur, leaving Hathy alone with her drink, his eyes gone, probably focused down his long tail, into the black hole at Gaia, looking as hard as he could again into the dark unknown.