But there was an odd note of worry in her voice.

Of course I read it.

Deirdre was right about You Will Never Die. It had been published by some private or vanity press, but the writing wasn’t crude. It was slick, even witty in places.

And the argument was seductive. Shorn of the babble about Planck radii and Prigogine complexity and the Dancing Wu-Li Masters, it came down to this:

Consciousness, like matter, like energy, is preserved.

You are born, not an individual, but an infinity of individuals, in an infinity of identical worlds. “Consciousness,” your individual awareness, is shared by this infinity of beings.

At birth (or at conception; Soziere wasn’t explicit), this span of selves begins to divide, as alternate possibilities are indulged or rejected. The infant turns his head not to the left or to the right, but both. One infinity of worlds becomes two; then four; then eight, and so on, exponentially.

But the underlying essence of consciousness continues to connect all these disparate possibilities.

The upshot? Soziere says it all in his title.

You cannot die.

Consider. Suppose, tomorrow afternoon, you walk in front of a speeding eighteen-wheeler. The grillwork snaps your neck and what remains of you is sausaged under the chassis. Do you die? Well, yes; an infinity of you does die; but infinity is divisible by itself. Another infinity of you steps out of the path of the truck, or didn’t leave the house that day, or recovers in hospital. The you-ness of you doesn’t die; it simply continues to reside in those remnant selves.

An infinite set has been subtracted from infinity; but what remains, remains infinite.

The subjective experience is that the accident simply doesn’t happen.

Consider that bottle of clonazepam I keep beside the bed. Six times I reached for it, meaning to kill myself. Six times stopped myself.