Further Adventures in FTL: The Ganymedan Lottery Winner
Some folks have expressed further misunderstandings based on my previous post. As my lectures go, that one was particularly impenetrable, and I am sorry. I muddied it up with all that origin talk. I will demonstrate the danger of FTL travel again, this time with smaller distances, and a more compelling character.
Joe Palmer is an IT professional from Ganymede City Five. That's right: Ganymede City Five. In the last three hundred years or so they've made some serious progress on Ganymede. He doesn't make much money; the machines have had IT tied up since 2015. The machines use him when it comes to swapping out memory, wiping old hard drives, and so on. They call him an IT monkey behind his back. He lives in a 160 square foot apartibox, part of a ziggurat complex of six million 160 square foot apartiboxes on the outskirts of his city, with his wife Mandy and three semiclones. His youngest semiclone is profoundly deaf because they have no kind of nationalised health service on Ganymede and Joe and Mandy can't afford ear drops.
Joe has been sent to Earth on the FTL shuttle to grab a few yottabyte sticks of memory for GANY-23, a water purifier with an IQ of 11!. (Notice the punctuation there. GANY-23 has an IQ of 11 factorial.) The trip to Earth is no big deal. They have those Branefudger engines now. The journey takes just three minutes, with a boarding/unboarding time of one minute on either side. The shuttle runs every five minutes. It's generally standing-room only, but a quick hop on a Branefudger shuttle beats the hell out of a three-week trip on one of the old fusion ferries.
Jupiter is at its closest to Earth. Light from Earth takes about 35 minutes to reach Jupiter.
Joe arrives on Earth, walks to the nearest hardware repository, hands over his requisition form and picks up the pair five-hundred ton memory sticks in their antigravorite wheelie-case. He drags them back in the direction of the shuttle. It's just turned noon and the fat and cruel Earth sun is high in the sky; Joe starts sweating up a storm. He feels about in his pocket and finds some sol-creds. He decides to take a detour via the mall near the shuttle depot and pick up something to drink.
Near the entrance to Baikonur Hyper-mall Six, Joe happens to pass a System Lottery stand. A mustachioed holoman invites him over with a cry of "roll up, roll up! Try your luck!" Joe shuffles over. "Everyone wins the System Lottery," boasts the holoman. "The winner is decided by quantum decoherence! Everyone's a winner!"
"Everyone's a winner?"
"That's right, son," says the holoman. "Your number is guaranteed to come up in at least one branch of the multiverse. You only need one ticket--just three solcreds! Trillions play the System Lottery. You give me three solcreds today, I'll give you back eleven trillion--guaranteed! That's enough to buy yourself a Saturnian pleasure moon! Are you ready for that? Three solcreds. No tombola, no numbers, I just need your System ID. Quick now, the next draw starts in ten minutes."
Joe hands over three solcreds without another thought. He waits by the lottery stand; the holoman announces the start of the draw. A drumroll sounds. The holoman flickers for a second, then points at Joe.
"Ladies and gentlemen, our winner: Joe Palmer of Ganymede 5! Your account has been credited, Mr. Palmer. Please allow--"
"HOLY FUCKOLA!" wails Joe. "You mean--oh god--HOLY FUCKOLA!" He drops the antigravorite case and gives it a stout kick. The case opens, the contents scatter over the floor of the mall, smashing the tiles and sinking through the concrete beneath like hot lead through butter. "I'm rich! Rich! Ha! HA!" He sprints for the shuttle. "Wait 'til I tell Mandy! Ear drops for little Maurice!"
"...Please allow time for the results to propogate throughout the system," says the holoman, but Joe is already well out of earshot, pushing past the queue to the shuttle and into the cabin. "I'm absurdly rich!" The pilot congratulates him and agrees to take off immediately for a million solcred fee to be paid upon arrival.
They lift off and Branefudge their way to Ganymede in record time. The shuttle lands, the door cracks open, and Joe spills out laughing, guzzling a bottle of the shuttle's emergency champagne. From Joe's point of view, he has been a multi-trillionaire for ten minutes. He calls home to tell Mandy to bring the kids and meet him outside the apartibox. He has a big surprise for her. Then he bangs on the roof of the nearest taxi. "I'm Joe Palmer!" he says.
The taxi driver steps out. "Would you mind not banging on my roof like that?"
"I'll buy you a new one. A new one! I'm Joe Palmer--I won the System Lottery!"
"Last week, you mean? I thought that Venusian sewer guy won last week."
"No--this week. There now. I won it there now."
"No you didn't," says the taxi driver. "I'm still in with a chance. The draw won't happen for another...oh...twenty-five minutes."
Joe sags slightly. "But I won," he says.
"I see what's happened," says the taxi driver. "Oh dear me. Oh dear me. You are in a pickle, my friend. Didn't you wait for the draw to propogate? They always tell you to wait for the draw to propogate. The event propogates at the speed of light. You overtook it!"
"They didn't tell me!"
"Well--hop in." The door flickers out of the way and Joe climbs in. They set off for Joe's ziggurat. The driver turns up the radio. They listen to the droning preamble before the draw. Eleven trillion solcreds to be won. Then the draw kicks off...drumroll...the winner is...
The taxi is a hundred metres up skirting over the jagged obsidian hills outside Ganymede 5. It banks and dips when Joe lunges for the controls for the passenger door, wailing insensibly. The driver engages the passenger taser until he calms down.
"But I won! It was all mine! Mine!"
"Maybe you did win," says the driver. "But you outran that. That civil servant from Mars won instead. Now sit still, we're almost there." They land on Joe's level. "Look, I'll tell you what--there's no charge. Next time you find a favourable corner of multiverse...for god's sake, stick with it until it can propogate through the system."
Mandy and the kids meet him as he leaves the taxi. "What's happened, Joe? Some pilot just called the house. He says we owe him a million solcreds. How can that be, Joe?"
"Listen, Mandy, I..."
Joe's pocketphone flashes. The machine on the other end uses his machine-level authority to engage the phone's speaker remotely. "Joe, it's GANY-394. GANY-23 tells me that you haven't shown up with his memory yet--are you delayed somehow?"
"Fuckola."
---
Joe Palmer is an IT professional from Ganymede City Five. That's right: Ganymede City Five. In the last three hundred years or so they've made some serious progress on Ganymede. He doesn't make much money; the machines have had IT tied up since 2015. The machines use him when it comes to swapping out memory, wiping old hard drives, and so on. They call him an IT monkey behind his back. He lives in a 160 square foot apartibox, part of a ziggurat complex of six million 160 square foot apartiboxes on the outskirts of his city, with his wife Mandy and three semiclones. His youngest semiclone is profoundly deaf because they have no kind of nationalised health service on Ganymede and Joe and Mandy can't afford ear drops.
Joe has been sent to Earth on the FTL shuttle to grab a few yottabyte sticks of memory for GANY-23, a water purifier with an IQ of 11!. (Notice the punctuation there. GANY-23 has an IQ of 11 factorial.) The trip to Earth is no big deal. They have those Branefudger engines now. The journey takes just three minutes, with a boarding/unboarding time of one minute on either side. The shuttle runs every five minutes. It's generally standing-room only, but a quick hop on a Branefudger shuttle beats the hell out of a three-week trip on one of the old fusion ferries.
Jupiter is at its closest to Earth. Light from Earth takes about 35 minutes to reach Jupiter.
Joe arrives on Earth, walks to the nearest hardware repository, hands over his requisition form and picks up the pair five-hundred ton memory sticks in their antigravorite wheelie-case. He drags them back in the direction of the shuttle. It's just turned noon and the fat and cruel Earth sun is high in the sky; Joe starts sweating up a storm. He feels about in his pocket and finds some sol-creds. He decides to take a detour via the mall near the shuttle depot and pick up something to drink.
Near the entrance to Baikonur Hyper-mall Six, Joe happens to pass a System Lottery stand. A mustachioed holoman invites him over with a cry of "roll up, roll up! Try your luck!" Joe shuffles over. "Everyone wins the System Lottery," boasts the holoman. "The winner is decided by quantum decoherence! Everyone's a winner!"
"Everyone's a winner?"
"That's right, son," says the holoman. "Your number is guaranteed to come up in at least one branch of the multiverse. You only need one ticket--just three solcreds! Trillions play the System Lottery. You give me three solcreds today, I'll give you back eleven trillion--guaranteed! That's enough to buy yourself a Saturnian pleasure moon! Are you ready for that? Three solcreds. No tombola, no numbers, I just need your System ID. Quick now, the next draw starts in ten minutes."
Joe hands over three solcreds without another thought. He waits by the lottery stand; the holoman announces the start of the draw. A drumroll sounds. The holoman flickers for a second, then points at Joe.
"Ladies and gentlemen, our winner: Joe Palmer of Ganymede 5! Your account has been credited, Mr. Palmer. Please allow--"
"HOLY FUCKOLA!" wails Joe. "You mean--oh god--HOLY FUCKOLA!" He drops the antigravorite case and gives it a stout kick. The case opens, the contents scatter over the floor of the mall, smashing the tiles and sinking through the concrete beneath like hot lead through butter. "I'm rich! Rich! Ha! HA!" He sprints for the shuttle. "Wait 'til I tell Mandy! Ear drops for little Maurice!"
"...Please allow time for the results to propogate throughout the system," says the holoman, but Joe is already well out of earshot, pushing past the queue to the shuttle and into the cabin. "I'm absurdly rich!" The pilot congratulates him and agrees to take off immediately for a million solcred fee to be paid upon arrival.
They lift off and Branefudge their way to Ganymede in record time. The shuttle lands, the door cracks open, and Joe spills out laughing, guzzling a bottle of the shuttle's emergency champagne. From Joe's point of view, he has been a multi-trillionaire for ten minutes. He calls home to tell Mandy to bring the kids and meet him outside the apartibox. He has a big surprise for her. Then he bangs on the roof of the nearest taxi. "I'm Joe Palmer!" he says.
The taxi driver steps out. "Would you mind not banging on my roof like that?"
"I'll buy you a new one. A new one! I'm Joe Palmer--I won the System Lottery!"
"Last week, you mean? I thought that Venusian sewer guy won last week."
"No--this week. There now. I won it there now."
"No you didn't," says the taxi driver. "I'm still in with a chance. The draw won't happen for another...oh...twenty-five minutes."
Joe sags slightly. "But I won," he says.
"I see what's happened," says the taxi driver. "Oh dear me. Oh dear me. You are in a pickle, my friend. Didn't you wait for the draw to propogate? They always tell you to wait for the draw to propogate. The event propogates at the speed of light. You overtook it!"
"They didn't tell me!"
"Well--hop in." The door flickers out of the way and Joe climbs in. They set off for Joe's ziggurat. The driver turns up the radio. They listen to the droning preamble before the draw. Eleven trillion solcreds to be won. Then the draw kicks off...drumroll...the winner is...
The taxi is a hundred metres up skirting over the jagged obsidian hills outside Ganymede 5. It banks and dips when Joe lunges for the controls for the passenger door, wailing insensibly. The driver engages the passenger taser until he calms down.
"But I won! It was all mine! Mine!"
"Maybe you did win," says the driver. "But you outran that. That civil servant from Mars won instead. Now sit still, we're almost there." They land on Joe's level. "Look, I'll tell you what--there's no charge. Next time you find a favourable corner of multiverse...for god's sake, stick with it until it can propogate through the system."
Mandy and the kids meet him as he leaves the taxi. "What's happened, Joe? Some pilot just called the house. He says we owe him a million solcreds. How can that be, Joe?"
"Listen, Mandy, I..."
Joe's pocketphone flashes. The machine on the other end uses his machine-level authority to engage the phone's speaker remotely. "Joe, it's GANY-394. GANY-23 tells me that you haven't shown up with his memory yet--are you delayed somehow?"
"Fuckola."
---
The dangers of superluminal travel, my friends. Events in the rearview mirror may be less certain than they appear. Outcomes can be outrun, event fronts encountered more than once. You can be re-re-re-versioned by the same act of decoherence.
5 Sub-deposits:
We'll just have to pretend that Joe has never heard of the System Lottery before his trip to Earth.
See, this is why you have to dedicate some time to getting this stuff down, into some form which is able to be published (the internets don't count). Really - you could go on, spinning this out, and somebody would buy it. And people would read it. And you'd get to write something all the way down, with enough time and space to really get into it.
BTW, Tanita says that you don't have any means of being contacted except through the awful medium of this public venue. Thus, she hadn't shared this link with you, despite the fact that she says it reminded her of you. She excused the fact because, well, you were on about something else entirely, and she didn't want you to think she wasn't paying attention.
So.
Where in the hell is your rejoinder to my comment? If, that is, you're paying attention?
I'm paying attention! Well--yesterday I wasn't paying attention as I spent the morning working on some things, then I was in town, and then the rest of the day was lost to playing Uncharted 2 in a state of wide-eyed glee. But I'm here now.
To Tanita: My email address is in my profile! I'll not repeat it here out of fear of the creeping spambots. Plus...you guys are at least peripherally aware of Twitter, right? Get on it! Of course that might finally kill off any activity on the comment threads here but it'd be worth it.
Anyway, the rejoinder: I am working on other things at the moment, things that don't get reflected on the blog. Current irons in the fire are as follows:
-- A most excellent engine for really easy to deploy, platform independent text-based adventures based HTML/Javascript/XML, and a most excellent text-based adventure to go along with it. This is geekery of the highest order.
--Art art art--I have a full 7-page comic to produce (art only) before December. Will actually provide more info on that later as I'm pretty excited about it.
--More art.
--A gritty/fun science-fantasy tale that I am spinning out in the wee hours.
Busy busy!
I did not tell half of what I saw in that game, for I knew I would not be believed.
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