THE WAY IT WENT DOWN: MANNY HAD TO GO (Patreon)

No one knows. No one knows, Cal. I’m going to find out. 

I still have the phone message. He must have ditched the phone, because they never found him, or if they did, they never came to me about it. I listen to it, sometimes, when I’m lost in a problem and I can’t think my way out. I listen to my music and I listen to Manny, over and over again.  

And I think about Manny and his laugh, and his glasses and his pipe smoke. And I think, is there a thing that was once called Manny still here, somewhere? In the world? A mass of rotten meat, sleeping beneath winter-wet leaves that physics is slowly disasembling with maggots picking through his memories? Eating me.

Then sometimes I think, was there ever a thing called Manny? Was there a me? Or a pipe? Or glasses? Anything. Was anything more than a mere conception in the mind? And what was the mind, anyway? And on and on.  

It’s what we, uh, I do. We consider the physical world and its relationship to consciousness. We think aboout thinking and what it means. And for…oh…thirty years or so, that and some friends and occasionally playing squash was enough. It was an interesting subject which also just happened to pay my bills almost by accident. I wrote books, and gave lectures and taught classes and by all accounts, I was good at it. 

Then Manny. 

The thinking machine. His papers on self were fascinating, and he talked like he wrote. For some reason, we became friends with him finding me equally interesting for some reason, because of this, we ended up spending a lot of time together, especially after Clara died. Manny didn’t come at this the way I did, he was hard physics bleeding into to thoughts, waveforms, and collapsing functions. He ate up everything I could throw at him. 

Two years ago he showed me his work. 

He called it the problem. Later, he called it the choice.  

Now, Manny was funny, he was loud, he wasn’t too self-aware, he was strange looking and looked the part of a mad scientist, albeit a short one with a hang-dog face and dull, yellowed eyes, but Manny did not exaggerate. I looked at the room of boards. Chalkboards because he still hadn’t even signed in to his university computer. Blackboards filled with formulae, and numbers, and theorems and things I could never understand. 

“So, this is it.”

“What?”

“This is everything.”

Manny claimed he had rendered it all down. The whole thing. Physics. The grand design. It was all here, beginning to end, the overture of nature and spacetime. The music. 15 numbers from which this tune we call reality spun out from. But that wasn’t the intersting part, he told me. The interesting part was there were remainders. Everything worked as imagined, big and small. Simulations and estimates and projections run by the computer science guys. But there was this strange section of math, cordoned off from the rest.

“It’s almost predatory.” But he never told me what he meant by that. 

I certainly believed him. Manny. We had been friends for years. You know when your friend is putting you on, and Manny was not putting me on. We spent quite a few nights talking about the choice though. The choice, Manny said, was between the 15 numbers and the strange, sealed off string of numbers. Manny was certain that was…another place. Another reality. Not in some abstract sense, but a place you could go like you can open your front door in the middle of the night and walk away from everything. You could walk away from the world. From reality. 

And so he did. He left me the message, and at the end of the message his voice broke when he said 

“Cal, I erased it all. It’s all in my head anyway. No one would understand it. But I’m glad I met you, and I’m glad we’re friends. So when they come asking about me, would you do me a favor and just say you don’t know what the hell happened? If you could, that would be grand. Listen, I have to go Cal.  

No one knows. No one knows, Cal. I’m going to find out.”

Sometimes you meet someone that lives outside the rules. Life doesn’t seem to touch them, or if it does, it does so gingerly, as if it’s protecting some special piece of itself. Manny was like that. He could have been Einstein. Hawking. More than either of them. Instead, he’s just gone…and I’m happy for him, I think.