Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [33]
Quoting Trout again: “The horse knew the way home.” But when the rerun ended, the horse, which might actually have been anything from a motor scooter to a jumbo jet, didn’t know the way home anymore. People were going to have to tell it what to do next, if it wasn’t going to be an utterly amoral plaything of Newton’s Laws of Motion.
Trout, on his cot next door to the Academy, was operating nothing more dangerous or headstrong than a ballpoint pen. When free will kicked in, he simply went on writing. He finished the story. The wings of a narrative, begging to be told, had carried its author over what was for most of us a yawning abyss.
Only after he had completed his own absorbing business, the story, was Trout at liberty to notice what the outside world, or, indeed, the Universe, might be doing now, if anything. And as a man without a culture or a society, he was uniquely free to apply Occam’s Razor, or, if you like, the Law of Parsimony, to virtually any situation, to wit: The simplest explanation of a phenomenon is, nine times out of ten, say, truer than a really fancy one.
Trout’s ruminations about how he had been able to finish a story whose completion had been so long opposed were uncomplicated by conventional paradigms of what life was all about, and what the Universe can or cannot do, and so on. Thus was the old science fiction writer able to go directly to this simple truth: That everybody had been going through what he had been going through for the past ten years, that he hadn’t gone nuts or died and gone to hell, and that the Universe had shrunk a little bit, but had then resumed expansion, making everybody and everything a robot of their own past, and demonstrating, incidentally, that the past was unmalleable and indestructible, to wit:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor a Line,
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
And then, on what was the afternoon of February 13th, 2001, in New York City, way-the-hell-and-gone up on West 155th Street, and everywhere, free will had all of a sudden kicked in again.
29
I, too, went from déjà vu to unlimited opportunities in a series of actions that were continuous. An outside observer might have said I exercised free will the instant it became available. But here’s the thing: I had dumped a cup of very hot chicken noodle soup into my lap, and had jumped out of my chair, and was with my bare hands sweeping the scalding broth and noodles from the front of my trousers right before the timequake struck. That’s what I had to be doing again at the end of the rerun.
When free will kicked in, I simply kept on trying to get the soup off me before it could seep all the way through to my underwear. Trout said, quite correctly, that my actions had been reflexes, and not sufficiently creative to be considered acts of free will.
“If you’d been thinking,” he said, “you would have unzipped your pants and dropped them around your ankles, since they were already soaked with soup. No amount of frenzied brushing of the surface of your pants was going to stop the soup from seeping all the way through to your underwear.”
Trout was surely among the first people in the whole wide world, and not just way-the-hell-and-gone up on West 155th Street, to realize that free will had kicked in. This was very interesting to him, as it certainly wasn’t to many others. Most other people, after the relentless reprise of their mistakes and bad luck and hollow victories during the past ten years, had, in Trout’s words, “stopped giving a shit what was going on, or what was liable to happen next.” This syndrome would eventually be given a name: Post-Timequake Apathy, or PTA.
Trout now performed an experiment that many of us had tried