Mountain Qualia

NaNoWriMo Day 25

Tipi felt guilty. He had let Julian down. He took a sprinter train to the center of Amsterdam and went for a long walk. Solitary walks in the city could be just as cathartic as walking alone in nature. There would be equal social interaction. It is a superposition of isolated lives passing through each other. He passed Anne Frank's house, where she and her family had been hiding for years from the nazis to be ultimately betrayed and deported. All that was left of daughter Anne was her diary, her pu.
It occurred to Tipi that he had never visited the house turned museum even though he had been living for most of his life in the vicinity.
He decided to take his chances but a long line till far outside stripped him of his hope. This multi-ethnic string of tourists had tickets and a time slot. All Tipi had was a desire and a spontaneous moment in time. He decided this was enough and sidestepped the line to talk to someone at the ticket desk.
"Dio you have a ticket, sir? If you don't have one pre-booked, then we can't let you in," the girl behind the desk said like she had done a thousand times before.
"So it's all booked up then?"
"Yes, there has been a cancellation for the entry in about five minutes, but we are fully booked."
"So do ther others fill in the place in the missing gap?"
"No, it would become a mess to keep track of all the shifts."
"So then I could take place in the gap?"
"No, it would not be fair, sir."
"Why not?"
"because you can only enter with a ticket which you don't have."
"So sell me a ticket for that time slot."
"We can't. We sold those tickets already."
"But they cancelled them."
"Yes, but cancellations are not part of our policy so the tickets are still officially valid."
"Then I will claim that I own one of those tickets."
"Very good, sir. Can you show me your ticket?"
"Alas, I left it at home."
"Then you can not enter."
"Don't you believe me?"
"No, because you just admitted you did not have a ticket."
"So you believed me then, but not now? In both cases it is just my word against, well, nobody else's."
"It was more likely that you spoke the truth first, sir, and lied later to get in for free."
"So now probabilities decide whether or not someone can enter this museum?"
"No, showing a valid ticket does."
"It is now nearing the time of my time slot and nobody has claimed my place so it seems very probable that this place belongs to me. I would never steal someone's place or enter without a ticket that has been paid for."
"We have rules, sir."
"But your rules are based on decency, maintaining a business and aligning with your mission."
"If you say so, sir."
"What is the mission of this museum, miss?"
"To bring as many people as possible in contact with the story of Anne Frank and her family in the wider context of raising awareness about what happened in the Holocaust so it will never happen in the future."
"Lovely, other than your mission has already failed regarding preventing genocides you are now also preventing a person from getting into contact with the story."
The girl tapped on her keyboard. "Not true, sir, there is an opening in three weeks on a Thursday at ten forty-five in the morning. You could buy a ticket for that time slot."
A senior woman gathered behind the girl and asked "Is there a problem here?"
"No, not at all," Tipi said. "This girl is making some excellent points why I should not be able to visit your museum."
"Oh, but you could visit now. There just happens to be a gap in our schedule and they have already paid for the ticket."
"No, sorry," Tipi said. "I don't have a ticket to show."
"What if I don't ask for the ticket? In that way I don't have to know whether or not you can show me the ticket."
Tipi thought hard on it.
"The offer stands now, do you want to get in?"
"Yes"
"Then you need to get in."
There was the closing argument that sealed the deal. If we wanted it then he needed it, wile ala wile.
"Done," Tipi said, and he thanked both the girl and the woman for a lovely conversation.
He went inside a browsed the displays while people before him and after him moved with him along the designated path through the museum. Now that he was inside he wondered why he wanted and therefore needed to be inside. The curiosity of entering a famous landmark he had never visited before was a valid reason for the wanting but not so much for the needing. He was not much of a guru if the two did not always align.
Maybe it was unknowable, Some things have the infuriating quality of being fundamentally out of our reach. Not only our reach but also out of the reach of a superintelligence. Not even the fastest and futuristic AI of Piran's imagination and stories could compute a fundamentally unknowable fact. But to Tipi not all was lost. Maybe the reason for needing to enter was unknowable, the fact that it he needed to enter is true, because he wanted to enter. For now, that was enough for Tipi.
What he certainly not wanted or needed was to read all the displays and information. He had read Anne's diary as a youngster and knew the story of her life and this house enough to not be very interested in more details. Instead, he decided to finish his round without pushing the people in front of him too much. This wasnot such a big issue because most of the tourists did not seem very interested in all the text and artefacts either. They were soaking up the experiences and collecting evidence through selfies. To them, this sufficed.
He had of course been interested in the famous bookcase, behind which an entire miniature apartment was hidden. And so he intended to spend some time there to soak in the history.
"Pssst," hissed someone inside the backroom of the bookcase. "Psst, Tipi."
"Kalisa?" Tipi said. "What are you doing here?"
"You know I like to pop up in sad places," she said. "But I need to know whether you have made your plans to go to Antartica."
"No, I have not. I don't see why I should go to this inhospitable place with inhospitable people and climate to find a computer model that wants to take over my consciousness."
"But what about your missing two years? Maybe you can get those memories back?"
"Are you really concerned about me getting those memories back? And if the theory is correct that those memories only make sense to the joint consciousness and not to either mine or its, I see no way of getting them into my mind in any meaningful way."
"I also want to go there for myself, and my world," she said. "I want to see how they made it so I can bring the technology home. I have the neural interface and thanks to Piran the design for the random number generator transmitters hidden all over the world, but I am missing the intelligence part.""So why don't you go there yourself. That is your thing, right? To travel the lines system to anywhere you like."
"You know I gave some of that up when we integrated. I can still do that but only if the lines either connect with you or your energy trail. It does not seem to reach that far south sadly. We could separate again, but then you'd be the depressed and anxious wreck you were before turning all guru."
"And what about you? What happen to you if we disintegrated?"
Kalisa was silent. "That is the shadow that is too dark for me to see and you have not seen me enough in my world to introduce me to my shadow. But I think it is safe to say we are both better of as a spinning flywheel unity. So please, try to get to this South Pole research station."
"But then I need to know what you want with the plans for all these machines?"
People cluttered behind Tipi and they uttered polite coughs, nudging Tipi to get a move on.Kalisa did not respond and so Tipi finished his round through the house and exited the museum.
He was still reluctant to go down south, but hee had an unwavering trust in Kalisa. Because he had no clear plan yet how he might find his way into this research facility, he decided to pass by the child services in Utrecht to inquire about what happened to Julian.
He entered the building in the late afternoon and asked about what happened with the young boy that walked in a few days ago. They were of course reluctant to give out any information. Especially since Tipi was a perfect stranger and a potential danger to the child. When Tipi said he knew they had sent him by plane to New Zealand, the man's eyes twitched ever so slightly. "Curious, he said. I'm not supposed to tell you any of this, but you must be mistaken."
"How so?" Tipi asked.
"He was picked up by his parents, which we managed to find pretty quickly using our worldwide network. So I am very certain they are well on their way now to their home in Austria. When you say New Zealand, you are probably mixed up with Australia which is an altogether different country than Austria."Tipi sighed. "Yes, that must be it."
He made way for the door but asked one last thing.
"How did you know they were his parents?"
"that's basically our job, sir."
The next two days, Tipi tried out another two hotels. In the evenings he checked the news. The pandemic was worsening and worsening. There were alternative theories about people being infected without the tests showing a positive result and people could get infected multiple times, sometimes without symptoms and then suddenly with severe and lethal symptoms. They could not find a logical reason for the continuous exponential increase of the number of deaths in communities where social distancing was adhered to. The curve should flatten off, but it didn't. Within a month the entire world could be infected and doomed, the news anchor said. She brought the news with either a lot of objectivity or she was used to package news facts with fear mongering stories that turned out to be taken too far.
The following night, Tipi's woke up from hin ringing phone. He answered with his eyes still closed. "Hi?"
"Tipi?" a male voice said. "It's Ford. Remember me?"
"Ford. the black automobile?"
"The black man," Ford said. "We helped you when you stumped your toe." A voice in the background started complaining. "Make it short! I still don't understand why you had to use my phone. This is costing me a fortune."
"Is that Lenny?" Tipi said, and then he woke up enough for all the relevant recollections to come together. "Ford! Lenny! So it worked! Kathy's publisher actually managed to bring you guys into contact with me. Wow, I had not expected that at all."
"Uhm, sure," Ford said. "Look, we still want to help you. We're sorry for kidnapping you all the way to Austria but we hope you found back your enlightenment so you can be our guru again. We'd hoped that you would fly back to Canada again so we can set you up in a pleasant house and you can lead a regular life as a respected leader."
"That sounds pretty good. The mountain climb was certainly an illuminating experience. Is Alex also around?"
"Yes, of course," Ford said. "Or no, not right now."
"Oh?"
"He's on a holiday, on a fancy cruise. But he will be back soon."
"Good for him!" Tipi said.
"Great, then we will start to make arrangements and call you back in a few days with your ticket information."
"Fine by me, I don't really have anything here that binds me. If you talk to Alex, tell him to take it easy on those Caribbean islands and have a cocktail on my behalf."
"Will do, although he's not cruising the tropics but down in Argentina, Patagonia."
"Ford!" Lenny called out in the background.
"Yea yea, I got to go, Tipi. Talk to you soon!"
"Bye!" Tipi said and then he went back to sleep.
In the morning he woke up with a single word in his mind. Patagonia.