textfiles/stories/charlie.txt

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Cosmic Charlie
by Colin Campbell

	Cosmic Charlie pulled Lilla by the hand down the steps through 
flying rice and confetti toward his car-but his car wasn't there. 
Instead, a red Porsche sat at the curb next to the church. It was 
covered in paper flowers. 
	Charlie stared at the car and then Lilla's father was standing 
there grinning and pressing car keys into Charlie's  hand. "This is 
our surprise wedding present for you. Congratulations, kids." 
	"Oh daddy thank you," Lilla said and she kissed Charlie and 
they climbed into the car. 
	The reception was at a picnic grove in the mountains behind 
Santa Barbara. Charlie marveled at how well the car handled as he 
drove up San Marcos Pass. He was amazed that he was married. He was 
20, and he and Lilla were both still virgins. He was proud of that. 
He stepped on the gas a little bit more and the Porsche surged 
ahead even faster.  
	Then at the turnoff he misjudged the curve and misjudged his 
speed and the car went skidding off the edge and there was a long 
endless plunge with Lilla's scream surrounding him as he uselessly 
stomped the brake and then there was a stupendous impact and a 
bounce and then Charlie was upside down with blood dripping across 
his eyes and he couldn't move to wipe it aside and the only thing 
he could see was Lilla staring blankly, her white dress spattered 
with red, and a metal rod sticking through her head from one ear to 
another like a Steve Martin joke arrow. 
	Lilla's white dress was all he could see. The dress became 
brighter and brighter and he was roaring through a tunnel of 
darkness toward a bright light. And then he passed through. He 
floated dreamily out of consciousness into a shouting cascade of 
dream imagery. His heart stopped. 
	His complicated biomechanical sensory systems failed, and the 
whole organic machine of Charlie's body came to a halt.	
	Still, each individual cell hoped to survive. A good competent 
muscle cell is still alive hours and hours after the coroner signs 
the death certificate. Cut an arm off and wait twelve hours and put 
it back on--it can live. It's been done. 
	The cells are tough-the delicate part is the control system. 
When that fails, everything goes to hell in a hurry and each muscle 
cell sits there dimly in the dark muttering "C'mon, gimme a pulse 
of blood and I'll run like hell, we can still get out of this 
mess."
	But the pulse of blood never came. 
	It was several days before the bodies were found and then the 
families gathered for the funerals. 
	At the funeral Charlie's father found himself talking to 
Lilla's parents. "Charlie had such big plans. His pal Zepp always 
called him "Cosmic" Charlie, his plans were so big....now he's 
gone. Poof."
	"Unless he's reincarnated," said Lilla's mother. 
	"Reincarnation is a silly notion," said Lilla's father. He was 
a mathematician. "There's not a chance in a quintillion that a 
person could be reincarnated." 

	Charlie  was unable to see the tears at the funeral, nor the 
mourning that preoccupied the families for weeks. Charlie knew 
nothing about it because the unique biochemical sensory device his 
DNA had built was no longer reporting to his consciousness: the 
complex organs and interconnective systems were dead. 
	But his DNA was still alive. 
	DNA is not a static thing. It's a complex assemblage of 
billions of atoms writhing and vibrating and accomplishing tasks at 
the core of the cell. 
	Trillions of Charlie's cells were still alive, still waiting 
for that pulse of oxygenated blood, still conducting a purposeful 
internal activity, his stubborn DNA still maintaining a kind of 
consciousness. Charlie dreamed he was still alive.
	But weeks passed and the planet continued to spin around the 
sun, and Charlie's last surviving internal cells began to shut down 
their processes. 
	Six months after the funeral, Zepp and a dozen of Charlie's 
other school pals met at his gravesite overlooking the Pacific 
ocean. They drank too much and didn't mention Charlie. 
	Charlie's DNA still vibrated and communicated to the other 
strands of DNA inside each demised cell; DNA is like a virus and 
can survive even if crystallized. And so part of Charlie's 
consciousness dreamed on, unaware of the passing time.
	On the first anniversary of the crash, Charlie & Lilla's 
parents met at the gravesite on the cliffs above the Pacific ocean, 
and once again they remembered Charlie. It was the last time anyone 
visited Cosmic Charlie's grave.  
	Charlie's school pals graduated and scattered; Lilla's pals 
were were all back on the East coast. 
	Lilla's mother and father died together in a plane crash nine 
years later. Twenty years after that, Charlie's mother died of 
cancer, and then within days his father shot himself. 
	Both of Charlie's brothers died in the Pacific Attack by the 
Asian Hegemony. After 60 years Charlie's sister was dead, too. Soon 
after that everyone in the world he had known was dead. 
	The Earth continued to spin, and the offshore winds ruffled 
the grasses growing on his grave. Some of Charlie's DNA still 
twirled and vibrated down below.
 	A century after Cosmic Charlie died, a severe earthquake split 
off a sliver of the cliffside cemetery, and Charlie's gravesite 
slipped toward the sea.	
	A thousand years after that, a new ice age began. Humanity 
retreated toward the tropics as glaciers covered North America with 
mile-thick ice. The coastlines of Europe receded and England and 
France were once again a single land as the English Channel turned 
into a narrow river. Charlie's gravesite was now a dozen miles from 
the shore. 
	A hundred thousand years passed. A comet smashed into the 
Pacific ocean and 2000 cubic miles of water flashed into steam and 
the resulting storms and climactic disruptions killed 90% of all 
life on Earth. Charlie's cliff tumbled into the newly risen ocean 
and began to be subducted by plate tectonic activity.
	A few humans survived the comet impact and they regrouped to 
again cover the world with cities. 

	Millions of years passed and the continents shifted and 
drifted. Los Angeles scraped north past San Francisco and piled 
into Alaska. Charlie was now part of a geological stratum far below 
the surface, but a few strands of his DNA still vibrated with a 
sense of self-identity.
	The Sun drifted into a cloud of hydrogen gas and flamed 
briefly brighter; huge solar flares erupted and boiled the Earth's 
surface and dense clouds formed. Now Earth looked like Venus.
	In the heightened electromagnetic field of the more active 
sun, the Earth's spin rate declined rapidly. The day was now 30 
hours long and the rotational energy transferred into heat made the 
continents erupt with volcanoes. After hundreds of millions of 
years, no humans were left on earth, although many survived in 
orbit and on planets of other stars. Charlie's molecules were now 
thoroughly reduced to traces of carbon and organic matter in a vein 
of rock. 
	After a few billion years the sun began to run short of 
hydrogen and started burning helium instead. The sun ballooned into 
a red giant 70 million miles in diameter and Earth was scorched to 
a cinder of iron. Mercury and Venus were consumed by the fire. 
	Now Earth was the innermost planet. Then the sun raced through 
the fusion progression as it ploughed through another rich cloud of 
virgin hydrogen gas, and then went supernova. 
	Earth was vaporized. The remnant of the sun was a white dwarf 
star that dimmed gradually over billions of years into a dark, 
barely warm lump of dense matter. 

	By this time the universe had expanded to its limits and began 
to shrink. All matter compressed toward the center and after a 
hundred billion years the universe was once more a zone of 
furiously compacted energy smaller than the diameter of an atom. It 
reached the limits of smallness and exploded outward again. 
	At first the new universe was nothing but boiling quarks and 
leptons. It expanded, and then went through the era of inflation in 
which it hyperexpanded into a hundred trillion quadrillion 
universes, each as big as Charlie's original universe. 
	Each universe cooled as it expanded and hydrogen and helium 
gasses formed. In a few hundred million years there were trillions 
of new galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars, and the 
stars raced through evolution to explode into supernovas to form 
new elements. Hydrogen and helium were joined by concentrations of 
carbon and oxygen and nitrogen and silicon and sulfur. 
	As soon as these elements were available, dirtball planets 
began to form out of the clouds around most suns.
	Universes formed solar systems the same way everywhere. Bode's 
Law-the curious periodicity of the orbits of the planets. The 
biggest planet was always in the Jupiter spot. Earth's spot turned 
out to be a resonance with water. In every star system, a water 
planet formed at the distance where it could, given the heat of the 
sun. Always it was a double planet, and the tides of the close 
large moon kept the waters churned and sloshing.  
	The third stone from the sun was always awash in water and the 
tidal and heliomagnetic churnings mixed and separated various kinds  
of muds. 	
	There are only a few ways for quarks to fall together into 
hydrogen atoms. Hydrogens can combine to form other elements, but 
they were the same elements everywhere. There are only about a 
hundred kinds that could stay together long enough to look at. 
	Well you rub these elements around with running water for a 
few billion years and they organize themselves into DNA. They can't 
help it, any more than a hydrogen atom can help it when it mixes 
with another hydrogen and changes to helium. That's the starting 
point. Helium is the building block for life chemicals. Three 
heliums make one carbon. 
	Every solar system had pretty much the same history.  Every 
life world evolved some kind of dinosaur while probing the land 
masses. The designing and launching of land mass probes was an 
absorbing hobby for life, and then the comets and asteroids wiped 
things clean and it was always the smaller, cannier designs that 
survived. The comets smashed things up every few million years.
	Just as there's only one way to put a solar system together, 
there's only one kind of DNA pattern that will bring about the 
specialized organ, the human brain, that has been developed to 
transmit and receive information from other consciousnesses, and to 
store data. The problem with consciousness is that you need a 
memory, and memory can be stored only in a physical system. A 
consciousness can access and use memory, but only if the hardware 
is working. 
	Although a given DNA structure is unique in its own universe, 
it is bound to occur in another universe sooner or later if you 
have enough universes. Since there are infinite number of 
universes, there are an infinite number of universes with identical 
DNA structures.  In each universe, after ten billion years there 
were 10 trillion galaxies, each with 100 billion stars and 100 
billion water planets. 
	A small percentage of solar systems didn't pan out, but of all 
the solar systems in a given universe, 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 
had planets just about like Earth. Somewhere in the high 
quintillions. And as luck would have it, as life evolved on one of 
those worlds, one of them developed exactly as had Earth. And 
Cosmic Charlie was born again.	
	His life proceeded exactly as before and then there was a red  
Porsche at the foot of the stairs and Lilla's dad was there with 
that strange smile and he was holding out the car keys to Charlie.
	Charlie was filled with a sense of deja vu. He started the car 
and drove up San Marcos Pass, and once again skidded off the edge, 
only this time he survived, paralyzed from the chest down. 
	He went through rehabilitation and learned to live in a 
wheelchair. Two years later Charlie was visiting at a friend's 
house and the friends were invited to a party, but it was on a non-
wheelchair-accesss boat, and Charlie couldn't go. By this time he 
had a drinking problem. He stayed home to take care of the host's 
dog and parakeets for a weekend. On Saturday night he opened a 
liter of Stolichnya and sipped it as he poked around the house. He 
opened a drawer and there was a big pistol, a .44 Magnum just like 
the ones Dirty Harry used. He took out the big black steel thing, 
it was as long as his forearm, and he took a long drink of vodka,  
and he waved the gun around and pulled the trigger a few times and 
it clicked, and on impulse he put it to his head and pulled the 
trigger. Brains splattered on the wall, and Charlie's DNA awareness 
plunged blindly ahead once again into the foamy chaos of the Big 
Bang. 
	A billion quadrillion years went by and another universe 
evolved a copy of Charlie's DNA and it produced another copy of him 
and the universe propelled him through exactly the same red Porsche 
crash, and there he was with the pistol in his hand once again and 
he put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger and the gun 
clicked, and clicked, and clicked. 
	Then Charlie opened the gun and felt a sudden chill and his 
stomach churned when he saw the dull brass of the single cartridge 
in the cylinder, and the circular pit in the cartridge's primer 
where the firing pin had struck. It was a dud. 
	If there are an infinite number of duplicates of you, your 
consciousness won't notice the loss of an individual body or two. 
If you pile your motorcycle into a tree and crush your head, a few 
bodies out of the infinity might die, but all consciousness would 
still exist. The consciousness would not be aware of the dead 
bodies, no more than we are aware of the fingernails and feces we 
shed each day. 
	There were endless identical universes in which his every 
alternative choice was lived. 	His DNA structure could be developed 
during a 100,000 year window: from the start of the Cro-Magnon era 
until humans learn how to program the DNA themselves, after which 
the baton of consciousness is carried forward by silicon and teflon 
creatures and mankind joins the dinosaurs. 
	Sometimes the DNA was identical but the society was primitive: 
when Charlie was born into a Stone Age family, he rarely lived 
longer than a few days, due to a low Apgar rating and a lack of 
sophisticated medical attention. If he did manage to survive 
infancy he almost always died in childhood due to clumsiness. 
	True human consciousness doesn't emerge until the connection 
between the right brain and the left brain, the corpus callosum, 
knits together around age 10; Charlie's DNA was rarely able to get 
a complete, fully developed brain into existence, let alone a 
sexually mature body. 
	Each time Charlie's DNA replayed in a new universe, the events 
of his life were depressingly similar. Even with the best foods and 
nutrients available, his DNA structure was unable to build a 
strong, dextrous body, and he fumbled through life after life with 
the same clumsy embarrassments scarring his emotional development. 
	Not only was Charlie's DNA a less-than-perfect plan, 
susceptible to early disease and death, but also the greatest 
number of human births takes place in the last millennium of human 
existence. The likely places for Cosmic Charlie's DNA to occur and 
survive turned out to be societies that had equalled the medical 
advances of the mid-20th century. That was the only place where 
Charlie's DNA came to full adolescent bloom. And each time he drove 
the new red Porsche off the cliff.
	 So far, in how many billions of iterations, he had yet to 
live long enough to reproduce. He was always the one asleep in the 
back of the car coming home from the prom when the drunken driver 
piled into the parked road grader. He was always the one drowned in 
two feet of water during the Cub Scout canoe trip. 
	There were untold billions of universes where Charlie drove 
drunkenly onto the freeway in the wrong direction and suddenly 
realized it just as the oncoming car smashed the world into 
oblivion, and a quintillion years went by and another Charlie woke 
at home in his own bed with a terrible hangover and he didn't 
remember the crash. In his universe he'd gone home by a different 
route when a traffic light turned red instead of green as he 
approached the intersection. He sat at the red light and passed out 
instead of going onto the freeway, and woke at 5am slumped over the 
wheel, head aching, back stiff, the motor still running and the gas 
gauge on E. He was still drunk but he drove safely home and flopped 
into bed and never even remembered that he'd passed out. He never 
did figure out where the gas went. 
	In all the universes there wasn't a Cosmic Charlie who made it 
to his 24th birthday. But the Charlies kept on relentlessly coming 
into existence.
	It was true that the assemblage of his particular pattern of 
DNA was unlikely; but every few quintillion universes or so, it 
would pop up again. Not always the same situation; sometimes the 
DNA structure showed up in days of Wyatt Earp and Jesse James of 
the old West, and sometimes the DNA structure was born on the moon, 
but all seemed to come to grips with the universe in the same 
inefficient manner. 
	Consider  a cube one light year on a side.  Now set off a 
flashbulb inside it once every hundred billion years. Now imagine a 
being so long-lived, and so slow, that it perceived the flashes as 
a continuous glow. That's what Charlie was: a collection of 
miniature flashes of DNA existence, one  per universe, that pile up 
until they appear to be a continuous beam of light. 
	To the pervasive consciousness of the universe, Cosmic Charlie 
is a window, a hardware assemblage. The assemblage blinks on every 
few billion years, and to the viewing consciousness it is as though 
the time gap did not exist. 
	As trillions to the trillionth power of universes blinked in 
and out of existence, a resonance built up across a timeless 
dimension, and when the number of individuals with the Cosmic 
Charlie DNA reached the high quintillions, the resonance linked 
with itself into a higher consciousness, aware of itself in the 
same way that the pubescent brain becomes aware of itself when the 
corpus callosum is finished and the time differential between the 
two lobes become the "now" that our consciousness resides in. 
	UltraCharlie became more and more aware of the huge network of 
his being, but he couldn't control the individual cells well enough 
to discuss it or cause a change in the life-pattern. Might as well 
ask a neuron to explain a thought that has passed through it as a 
chemical pulse. He still kept driving that red Porsche over the 
cliff. 
	Charlie rode through googolplexes of universes from big bang 
back to coalescence, and it seemed that the bangs were happening 
faster and faster, subjectively, while in his childhood the orbit 
of one planet around a sun was nearly infinite. His consciousness 
was limited to that of the particular body he grew in, and his 
consciousness merged only with others of his exact DNA structure.
	But as his experience grew, the infinity of other individuals 
with his DNA structure became apparent. The more he learned, the 
further away his particular childhood seemed. Now he resonated with 
the consciousness of all the members of his genetic structure-the 
old man and the young boy, the gnarled and maimed ones, and the 
ones hopelessly mired in pretechnological poverty. 
	And suddenly he was walking down the steps toward the red 
Porsche, and this time when Lilla's dad gave him the keys, he 
handed them to Lilla, and she drove flawlessly over the mountain to 
the reception. A year later Cosmic Charlie, Jr, was born, and then 
the infinite flicker of DNA combinations began again.
	Except that this time, the super-consciousness gained contact 
with subtler variations of the DNA cognates, rather than merely 
with the exact-duplicate Charlies.  Charlie's cross-universal 
consciousness reverberated along with the DNA of his offspring, 
too, and Charlie moved up a notch on the Karmic wheel.