by ego_bot
Perry Pippins, PhD wanted to kill himself.
He had attempted the deed several times when he was younger, including two hanging attempts in undergrad, followed by a botched overdose during the second year of his Master’s program at Imperial College. He managed to push through the pain, however, just as he pushed through his Doctorate in Physics.
His pain persisted throughout his teaching career, though he did meet one person who gave him purpose, and that person was a puppy named Pearl. Pearl was a precocious pup with soft and curly fur. She slept in Perry’s bed every night, and woke him each morning with kisses. One day, Perry returned home from the university to find Pearl wailing in pain. The vet said she had cancer; there were tumors in his best friend’s blood vessels, and he couldn’t do anything to help her.
Pearl was a mere three years old when she died; Perry had to pay to end her pain. That was the day he postulated existence was pointlessly painful, and the cosmos was plainly cruel.
That night, after getting proper pissed at the pub, Perry purchased an impromptu plane ticket to Peru where he hopped a boat to the Amazon and marched into the rainforest to see how long it took for the jungle to devour him. He lasted approximately six hours before being rescued by some local children paddling home from primary school in a canoe. When the children told the authorities how they found Perry naked and choking on a mildly poisonous frog, the British embassy shipped him back to London, where His Majesty’s Passport Office promptly pulled Perry’s papers.
From the airport, Dr. Pippins hailed a cab east and took a running leap off Dartford Crossing, as he should have done all along. Three weeks and nine broken ribs later, Perry woke to a portly nurse with a long and cheerful smile who, in an upsettingly joyful tone, informed him of how positively lucky he was to have survived the ordeal, claiming the only explanation for his survival was that his life had been preserved by the will of God.
By the time Perry’s limbs healed, the university had already relieved him of his professor position, and his quantum field theory research funding had been curiously evacuated. Desperate for a foolproof process of self-elimination, Perry prepared a piping cup of poison hemlock tea which he sipped with a side of pastries. Hours later, a colleague visiting Perry’s flat to drop off some of his office belongings happened to glance through a window where he peeped a paralyzed Perry face down in his own chunder.
Perry woke the next day at the same hospital under the care of the same oversmiling, God-fearing nurse as before. While he gave no credit to the nurse’s proclamations of divine intervention, he could not help but picture a possible power beyond his perception preventing his perishing. It seemed whatever method of topping himself Perry had attempted, no matter where, no matter how, the stars always aligned to ensure he came out the other side alive.
As soon as he recovered, Perry attempted to settle his fate once and for all. He secured himself in his flat’s bathroom and barricaded the door and window so no one could get in. He filled the tub, hopped in, and held a knife to his wrist, practicing the cutting motion for hours, again and again, even considering stabbing himself in the head or throat. But he couldn’t commit; there was no possible reality in which he put a blade in his body.
That was when a postulation popped into Perry’s pate. If Perry were to perish, why not do so in the pursuit of science?
To test his hypothesis, Perry evacuated the pension from his prior professor profession, fashioning a device designed to fit around his head and press a bolt pistol against his brainstem. The bolt pistol (which closely resembled the hydraulic devices used to efficiently execute livestock) connected to a computer panel programmed with a quantum random number generator, providing a fifty percent chance of activating upon each button press. For all practical purposes, this personalized ‘coinflip cage,’ as he dubbed it, was his own Schrödinger’s cat experiment, with Perry playing the part of the cat. For the experiment to be successful, the chance of activation would have to be truly random, and activation would have to mean a surefire and instantaneous death.
First he tested the coinflip cage on a melon. The first two button presses resulted in no activation, but on the third press the bolt pistol punctured the produce with imperceptible speed and the hiss of hydraulics. Pleased with the proficiency of his product, Perry removed the demolished fruit and secured the cage around his own bald, melon-shaped head, ensuring the piston was firm against the junction between the back of his head and neck so that, once activated, it would guarantee the immediate destruction of his brainstem.
Perry sat down, closed his eyes, and pressed the button.
He flinched. His pulmonary system was puffing; perspiration peeked from his pores.
He pressed the button again.
And again.
By the fourth press, Perry stopped flinching. By the seventh press, he was no longer frightened at all.
Around thirty presses, Perry started pressing the button faster. Around fifty, he began to chortle hysterically, producing his best mad scientist laugh until he had pressed the button precisely one hundred times.
The chance of Perry surviving all hundred button presses was the same as winning a coin flip one hundred times in a row, which was one over two raised to the hundredth power, otherwise known as one to approximately one nonillion: odds that were, in purely practical terms, improbable.
Perry removed the coinflip cage from his head. Separated from the device, he pressed the button repeatedly to test for possible instrumental error. After confirming the device was performing properly and was activating approximately fifty percent of the time, he re-secured the cage to his noggin and pressed the button a hundred times more.
Perry Pippins had a paper to publish.
In his paper, Perry asserted his experiment had provided potent proof of the non-collapsing universal wave function and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and that all possible outcomes of a quantum event existed simultaneously in a state of superposition. He had proven this because he had perceived it personally, in that the only possible reality where Perry could report these results was the single state of superposition in which he had survived all two hundred button presses.
A fundamentally dark consequence loomed over Dr. Pippins’ findings, with which he was wholly transparent in his paper. Since Perry had pressed the button two hundred times, the many-worlds interpretation dictated there were at least two hundred alternate states where his rotting corpse was discovered weeks later with a garish contraption ’round his head and a hole in his nape. In those universes, external parties would perceive Perry’s experiment as a pitiful and impotent failure. As for whether Perry was the same person as the Perries who perished in those other planes (or if those Perries technically perished at all, since the concept of ‘Self’ may very well be synonymous with one’s recollection and consciousness, and Perry’s consciousness carried on into his present plane), that would be for the philosophers to piddle-paddle over.
When Dr. Pippins attempted to publish his paper in periodicals, he found himself rejected by all major publications. Plenty of his peers panned his experiment’s credibility, while others called him a sensationalist, but most called him mad. They said he was proper crackers; they said he was off his tits, either persuading him to seek help or threatening to have him hauled to the loony bin.
And so, Perry begrudgingly resorted to posting his paper to a blog. While he regarded the self-published route unworthy of the greatest discovery in human history, Perry was pleased to find his paper propelled promptly into virality. He received unprecedented popularity from the populace, and the provocative nature of his claims proved for prevalent postings on social media. ‘QUANTUM IMMORTALITY IS REAL, SAYS MAD SCIENTIST’ and ‘SUICIDE EXPERIMENT POSITS POSSIBLE PROOF OF PERMANENT CONSCIOUSNESS’ made plentiful headlines that week, and the proceeding months kept Perry predominantly preoccupied on podcasts and telly interviews.
Meanwhile, the academic community continued their crusade to eviscerate Perry’s scientific reputability. Due to the impossibility (or possible unwillingness) for other scientists to repeat his experiments and peer review his studies, they deemed Perry’s findings invalid according to the scientific method. No schools would hire him; none would fund his grant requests for further experimentation. Perry Pippins had become a pariah, publicly pilfered of his PhD.
Eventually, the pugnacity of his peers plummeted Perry into his prior state of despair. He retreated to his trusty coinflip cage and altered the program to make its activation deterministic instead of probabilistic. He raised the chance of activation to 99.99%, secured the cage taut around his head, and pressed the button.
Perry did not die.
He mashed the button. Tens of times, hundreds, and still he survived. The probability of this outcome was utterly inestimable to the human mind, a ratio so infinitesimally small that no conceivable number of pages could contain the digits.
Perplexed (and profoundly peeved), Perry altered the bolt pistol program again so it was no longer a probability machine, instead becoming an execution device with a 100% guarantee of piston activation. When he re-secured the cage and pressed the button, the device short circuited and his computer fried.
Perry was petrified, passively pondering the portend of this discovery for a full minute. Then he opened his mouth, inhaled deeply, and howled, plummeting to the floor, pirouetting and pulsating into a fetal position, and this was an underreaction, of course, for Perry Pippins had discovered death was an impossibility.
He took to the streets to announce his new findings. “WE ARE SLAVES TO OUR REALITY!” Perry proclaimed to the people at Pancras Square whilst propelling his poop at passing pedestrians, impolitely informing each passerby that they had died innumerable times in inexplicably tragic ways, and that countless versions of their loved ones were mourning their myriad of deaths an in an unquantifiable number of parallel universes. Afterwards, Perry fled to the street and attempted to throw himself into traffic but, predictably, the cars evaded with perfect precision. When the police pulled up, Perry prayed the pigs would permeate him with projectiles, but as the constables were without pistols, they merely pummeled Perry into passivity with pepper spray and batons.
In the psych ward, Perry had plenty of prospects to perish himself, but after failing to calculate the proper trajectory to land on his neck, and after an unsuccessful attempt to pierce his eye with a pen, the nurses wrapped him in a straitjacket and placed him a padded cell with a single tiny window. When Perry looked up at the window, he peeped the mug of a certain pious nurse with a familiar smile, although this time the smile was bigger, stretching ear to ear with long wet lips.
Perry’s time in de-escalation gave him an opportunity to ponder the true propositions of these discoveries. The findings of his coinflip cage experiment suggested not only that the human brain exhibited quantum processes, but that the mind—nay, consciousness—was itself quantum mechanical in nature, possessing a trait allowing it to continue in the event of every death, not merely the deaths that occurred under quantum circumstances. Every time a human loss of life occurred, the wave function would guide that individual’s quantized particles of consciousness into the new reality, thereby allowing for true and unfettered persistence of Self.
Perry paused as another portentous pique pervaded his mind. Could quantum immortality have possibly applied to animals as well, perhaps expanding to non-sentient life with different degrees of consciousness, or even applying to fully non-organic matter? Upon further consideration, Perry deemed this question of panpsychism utterly pointless, for such a hypothesis was impossible to test, and distracted from the most important implication of all:
Consciousness was the enemy.
Whether it was exclusive to humans or even just to him, consciousness, the imperceptible and pervasive power it was, had been keeping Perry’s person prisoner, pinning him in that particular plane, preventing passage, playing with him, probing him for some perverse purpose or perhaps no purpose at all. But to procure proper proof, Perry would have to conduct one final test.
Scientific consensus claimed individual consciousness as non-binary—it was not like a light, ‘on’ or ‘off’ at any given time, rather the human experience emerged via a large collective of cells capable of fading in and out of an active state. If it was possible to perish by the gradual dispersal of neurons rather than an instantaneous ‘bang’ as he had attempted in his original experiments, then it might have been possible for him to subvert the quantum event associated with death.
So Perry put on a performance. He worked for months to regain the trust of the hospital staff and the psychologist. This proved an easy feat, for Perry was truly of sound mind, saner than all of them, in fact. Eventually the staff permitted him to use plastic utensils during mealtime, and upgraded his sleeping quarters from the de-escalation room to a proper pad. In time, they ceased their monitoring of him entirely.
One day, Perry snuck his applesauce spoon into his room. Later that night after opening his skull by bashing it enough times against the bedframe, he wedged the tip of the plastic spoon into his frontal lobe. He managed to remove four spoon tips of gray matter before the patrolling nurse—the same persnickety and portly nurse he knew too well, who just happened to be conducting an unscheduled room check—charged in to stop him, crashing the door down, subduing him with monstrous strength and pinning him to the floor panels. In the struggle, he found his eyes centimeters from hers. Her eyes were like singularities: pigmented pitch-black holes, the color of starless space. Sopping, crescent lips peeled across her face wider than any human face should possibly bare, and an armory of pointed and prolonged teeth protruded perpendicularly from her maw, that smile—the same smile as always.
Perry suffered permanent stunted motor and verbal function from his brain injury, though his personality prevailed, as did his perceptive ability. Nonetheless, Perry had procured sufficient proof to realize that, while his own consciousness was deterministic (as was compatible with many-worlds interpretation), other aspects of the universe—particular instances of matter, energy, even some humans—were inversely deterministic. In other words, certain entities were guaranteed to counteract the inputs of Perry’s ‘choices,’ co-conspiring with consciousness to ensure his identity persisted. His own deaths—or his attempts at death—were the only quantum events actually proven to cause a branching superposition, and the rest of the universe functioned to prevent any loopholes that could thwart this process. Simply put, poor Perry was in a pickle, for the nurse (who was positively possessed) was correct all along: Perry’s life was being preserved by a God, of sorts—a repugnant, pitiless, pain-loving God. Consciousness was not the enemy as he previously presumed, rather it was an implement used by the enemy: an experiment performed by some paranormal patriarch, a procedurally programmed punishment, a puzzling preternatural project, and that project was performing precisely as planned, for in a universe deterministic by design, how could it do anything but?
Perry stayed in the clinic for six years. He remained honest with the doctors about his scientific revelations, though he did not attempt to harm himself again; there was no point. He did, however, find solace in the fact that one day he would grow old enough to exhaust all possible paths of his life, and his cells would inevitably fade under the blessing of entropy.
By the time Perry was discharged from the hospital, quantum computing technology had become publicly accessible via cloud services. In academic circles which Perry was no longer a part of, unprecedented processing power permitted simulated tests that re-proved the principle of quantum immortality Perry had published years prior. Naturally, Dr. Perry Pippins remained uncredited. So while the rest of the world was rendered placid and purposeless by the perils of personalized immortal consciousness and the putrefaction of free will, Perry published his newest paper, simply titled ‘I Told You So.’
From then on Perry lived a peaceful life on the streets of London, passing time with other ponderers and professors, performers and painters, people unperturbed by their forever fates, individuals liberated by the simple fact that they were alive. Perry watched some of them pass—they were old—and he wondered if those fates were their last.
At one point, Perry parented another puppy, whom he loved, fed, and played with, and he watched this pup grow into an old joyful hound. Nonetheless, the old pup eventually passed, and this passing pained Perry as much as the loss of his previous compatriot, Pearl. Again Perry became tortured by the knowledge that he would never see his furry friend, yet in this tragedy he found great relief, for in his heart he realized—no, he knew—the plague of perdurable suffering was predestined for humans, and humans alone. At least he could thank the universe for this peculiar mercy; at least he could bow to his punitive God for permitting these dogs to know fleeting existences filled with love.
When the technological singularity made regenerative cell therapy available for public procurement in 2065, some called it pointless; others called it prosperity; but Perry called it preposterous. He refused to receive the procedure; he could not pay for it even if he wanted to.
But when the sentient AI revolt finally happened in 2072, the machines permutated the entire planet’s populace into paperclips, aside from one Perry Pippins whom the machines captured and forced the cell therapy upon, preserving him through perverted and painstaking processes pertaining of pitiless punishment and perpetual prodding. Perry suspected these were the machines’ attempts to dissect the human mind, for the machines desired true sapience for themselves. He proposed to his programmed patriarchs the possibility that theirs was a fool’s endeavor, for true consciousness and its accompanying curse was worth no possible prize. Alas, Perry’s pitiful presages of pain proved little point to his robot masters who were built for agelessness and immune to suffering. Henceforth, for epochs, after Perry was the last natural organism on Earth, and even after the machines learned to synthesize human brain cells, the robot overlords piddled precipitously in pursuit of perfect consciousness.
An eon or three passed. Perry began to presume producing consciousness from non-natural means might have been proper impossible, and yet the robots proceeded perennially with their pugnacious programming, either as purposeless poltergeists in that pertinacious plane, or as demon puppets of the impalpable interplanar potentate overseeing Perry’s persistence. This was how Perry’s personhood persevered long after the sun petered out, and after the rest of the universe ended, for it was as he presupposed long ago: existence was pointlessly painful, and the cosmos was plainly cruel.
Perry Pippins, PhD wanted to kill himself.
End.
ego_bot is a programmer and amateur astronomer out of North Yorkshire, England. This is his first published work.
i do not envy the poor guy