1Let me get this straight: being selected as a Decision Maker is not the joyride people make it out to be. You don't become some kind of petty God. Except that you don't really feel like a human any more, once you're suddenly required by society to do all those things that were the deepest taboos five seconds ago. Well, okay, so that's not really what we do, we're glorified data inputters with some programming experience, allowed to see some of the inner workings of the machine and pretend we have any authority whatsoever to make the slightest change. Just in case something goes wrong. Which it never does. Ever.
To think this used to be a joke. No, more like a nonsensical theoretical concept designed to demonstrate why the basic principle is absurd, of deciding not to kill, to avoid putting an end to the existence of anything, ever, that might have a soul. The Schrodinger's Cat of ethics, before quantum physics became a practical thing that was in everyone's computers and every Government's ethical calculations. I think it started out in an argument about abortion, about at what point a 'potential' child became a child, if there was a point at which the soul entered the body and consciousness began, about what level of self-awareness counted as consciousness and did babies even possess it fully anyway. Who decided what did and did not have a soul, anyway? If it was linked into human consciousness, why did some people refuse to eat meat because animals had souls, others avoid breathing in flies or tilling soil with worms in it or even eating anything but fruit? Where would it stop - how do we know the bacteria in our water, the viruses killed off by our antibodies, the things living in our dreams that fade away when we wake up, don't have souls?
In other words, nothing new.
"We can't justify anything, really, if we phrase it in terms of potential lives lost," went the argument, "Because it becomes even more messy when we talk about potentiality. We get into parallel scenarios. It's already joked that we're all murderers because we kill off entire other parallel worlds when we collapse an uncertainty by making a decision. All those worlds where we made a different decision, all the people in them... gone. And even if you count that they're exactly identical to ourselves, so they don't count as different people, how do we know for certain the decision we made wasn't the one that meant there were the absolute optimal number of people alive at the end of the day. But it's okay, we have to do our best," the speaker added, "Because we're existences in ourselves, living things with souls, and if we took all this seriously, we'd die of stress, not being able to do anything at all without being deemed a mass murderer. So let's break for refreshments, shall we?"
Only these days you can't just break for refreshments. Well, actually, you do, at the moment, because the Litany of the Perfect Clear specifies precisely two and a third full meals per day. The wording used to read 'mandated' but it was changed to 'specifies' because a mandate was a command from a person who another person could choose to obey or ignore. The Litany was merely the way it was now, the new coding for the program known as humanity. A formula precisely calculated almost as soon as quantum computing reached the processing power necessary to determine the effects of every decision in all possible worlds.
We're kinda fortunate that we discovered there was an actual limit to the number of possible worlds, I guess. We weren't sure how that could be, at first. All we could tell was that the map of possible worlds sort of tapered off after a while, in its signature hourglass shape, a double cone extending outwards in all directions. Was there an event horizon beyond which the scenarios involved became too wild and improbably for any laws of physics to support them? Was something actively destroying them? We hoped to all the deities that may or may not exist - the map of fate hadn't answered that one - that the culprit hadn't been us. We certainly the only agents affecting our destiny, though, which meant we were at least a little off the hook. As conscious agents capable of controlling our environment, though, it was decided that we were obligated to keep that environment in check. We decided - for now - to at least keep the radius to our solar system so that we didn't burn out all our resources trying to spread beyond our current means.
After a joint enterprise on a scale unheard of in history - having at least one beneficial side effect of finally prompting long term peaceful co-operation between nations - a path towards 'Perfect Clear' was calculated, a chain of decisions that would lead to as few casualties as logically possible. So, not really a true Perfect Clear, but the best we could manage. Well, there was another good side effect, I suppose: we discovered several paths that led straight off the edge of the map into annihilation, or absolute entropy, or whatever the hell the blank readings meant. We hadn't been that far away from them; as far as we can tell, the large majority of them had been caused by malfunctions of the quantum computer.
Persuading the remaining population - the computer was oddly strict about preventing overpopulation for a machine tasked with maintaining the existence of as many overall souls as possible down the billions of years it could calculate - to agree to the plan had taken a lot of work, mostly proving that the images on the screen were real and meant what they appeared to mean. After that, there was the slow and laborious task of actually transferring everyone to the state of consciousness where they literally did not make decisions, without actually putting them into a permanent coma. The trick lay in shifting people's perspective away from a first person viewpoint where they controlled themselves and were main character of their inner narrative. This was already a possibility in the human psyche and often happened in dreams. It had been reported in cases of spiritual surrender, intense religious experiences where the consciousness became the channel to a higher intelligence. Sometimes it hadn't even been religious, say, a dancer lost in the rhythm of the music. The phenomenon had been mistaken for autism as well, when a human simply performed a task, often ritual and repetitive in nature, to the length and preciseness that they became lost in it, existed for its sake alone. Reports of such experiences were collated and eventually standardised into a pattern where they could be introduced to the populace as a mass conditioning process, with the focus of the vision a satellite where the Akashic Records, as they had become known, and the pattern of the Litany were stored, a constant beacon of souls that up to now had been drifting around the sea of fate blindly, not even realising they had hit a rock until they suddenly sank.
Or at least, that's the official story. We've come to realise, here at Decision Maker HQ, that it's not exactly true, or at least, that certain updates to the situation had come to light.
Our records had begun changing. Despite initial accusations, we soon realised that it had nothing to do with us cheating or the machine being faulty; something was contacting us from the outside, something that knew a lot more than us. We still don't really know what, other than it thinks faster and more accurately than the damn computer and tells us about things happening so far outside our own solar system we still can't actually get there, we just have to take their word for it as the calculations all fit perfectly.
Oh so perfectly.
There is a true, genuine Perfect Clear, you see. An absolutely optimal situation for the Universe. It has nothing to do with saving lives - the end goal of the Universe was never to fill it up with souls - in fact, fate loathes overcrowding. No, this is a purer perfection, one where the end goal of everything is fulfilled to absolute satisfaction - not the immediate satisfaction of whims but its purpose in the Universe fulfiled, its final state of existence entered. There's such aesthetic perfection in the art, everything adds up so well, the song it plays when we run it through a synthesiser just makes me want to join the rest of the people who are now perfectly attuned to it, a lonely lighthouse keeper no more.
Oh, and there's such thing as perfect annihilation, but we're not too close to that at the moment. Besides, the Universe doesn't avoid it all that much. It sort of considers it the second best outcome. While it loathes the chaos of incomplete annihilation, once it dominates completely, everything is at zero, perfect zero, a satisfyingly round number that won't ever change back again.
Zero has a song in itself, explained those who had contacted the computer. If anything, its just the overwriting of this Universe with something else, something simpler that had existed before the Universe in any case. The only things that are silent do not happen in nature, they involve manipulation on a level beyond simple destruction, a deliberate aim at the worst outcomes, and it's not going to tell us how to do that even in theory, other than simply the opposite of everything we've been doing wouldn't work.
Not that I would ever mess with such a thing. The very thought of its existence makes me want to vomit. Maybe it's this part of me that makes me suitable to be a Decision Maker, why the formula selected me. As I said, I'd like to go back, but I'm also not sure I would stop worrying, if I would trust another. Our fate is my responsibility, now.
I wonder if this is what being an angel feels like.