So unlikely, in Soziere’s sense, that you end up in a circus or a research ward? Do they clone you a fresh body? Do you end up as some kind of half-human robot, a brain in a bottle? And in the meantime the world changes around you, everything familiar is left behind, you see others die, maybe millions of others, maybe the human race dies out or evolves into something else, and you go on, and on, while the universe groans under the weight of your unlikeliness, and there’s no escape, every death is just another rung up the ladder of weirdness and disorientation…”

I hadn’t thought of it that way.

Yes, the reductio ad absurdum of Soziere’s theory was a kind of relativistic paradox: as the observer’s life grows more unlikely, he perceives the world around him becoming proportionately more strange; and down those unexplored, narrow rivers of mortality might well lie a cannibal village.

Or the Temple of Gold.

What if Deirdre was too pessimistic? What if, among the all the unlikely worlds, there was one in which Lorraine had survived her cancer?

Wouldn’t that be worth waiting for?

Worth looking for, no matter how strange the consequences might be?

News items that night:

NEURAL IMPLANTS RESTORE VISION IN FIFTEEN PATIENTS

“TELOMERASE COCKTAIL” CREATES IMMORTAL LAB MICE

TWINNED NEUTRON STARS POSE POTENTIAL THREAT, NASA SAYS

My sin was longing.

Not grief. Grief isn’t a sin, and is anyway unavoidable. Yes, I grieved for Lorraine, grieved long and hard, but I don’t remember having a choice. I miss her still. Which is as it should be.

But I had given in too often to the vulgar yearnings. Mourned youth, mourned better days. Made an old man’s map of roads not taken, from the stale perspective of a dead end.

Reached for the clonazepam and turned my hand away, freighted every inch with deaths beyond counting.