The Infinite Assassin by Greg Egan

Author:Greg Egan [Egan, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 1991-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

I avoid the major roads, but even on the side streets it’s soon clear that the word is out. People run past me, some hysterical, some grim; some empty-handed, some toting possessions; one man dashes from door to door, hurling bricks through windows, waking the occupants, shouting the news. Not everyone’s heading in the same direction; most are simply fleeing the ghetto, trying to escape the whirlpool, but others are no doubt frantically searching for their friends, their families, their lovers, in the hope of reaching them before they turn into strangers. I wish them well.

Except in the central disaster zone, a few hard-core dreamers will stay put. Shifting doesn’t matter to them; they can reach their dream lives from anywhere—or so they think. Some may be in for a shock; the whirlpool can pass through worlds where there is no supply of S—where the mutant user has an alter ego who has never even heard of the drug.

As I turn into a long, straight avenue, the naked-eye view begins to take on the jump-cut appearance that the binoculars produced, just fifteen minutes ago. People flicker, shift, vanish. Nobody stays in sight for long; few travel more than ten or twenty metres before disappearing. Many are flinching and stumbling as they run, balking at empty space as often as at real obstacles, all confidence in the permanence of the world around them, rightly, shattered. Some run blindly with their heads down and their arms outstretched. Most people are smart enough to travel on foot, but plenty of smashed and abandoned cars strobe in and out of existence on the roadway. I witness one car in motion, but only fleetingly.

I don’t see myself any where about; I never have yet. Random scatter should put me in the same world twice, in some worlds—but only in a set of measure zero. Throw two idealised darts at a dartboard, and the probability of twice hitting the same point—the same zero-dimensional point—is zero. Repeat the experiment in an uncountably infinite number of worlds, and it will happen—but only in a set of measure zero.

The changes are most frantic in the distance, and the blur of activity retreats to some extent as I move—due as it is, in part, to mere separation—but I’m also heading into steeper gradients, so I am, slowly, gaining on the havoc. I keep to a measured pace, looking out for both sudden human obstacles and shifts in the terrain.

The pedestrians thin out. The street itself still endures, but the buildings around me are beginning to be transformed into bizarre chimeras, with mismatched segments from variant designs, and then from utterly different structures, appearing side by side. It’s like walking through some holographic architectural identikit machine on overdrive. Before long, most of these composites are collapsing, unbalanced by fatal disagreements on where loads should be borne. Falling rubble makes the footpath dangerous, so I weave my way between the car bodies in the middle of the road. There’s virtually

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