Sergio De La Pava - A Naked Singularity

“I agree but we don’t have any of that.”

“Hence the fucking gaping fucking hole in our case right?”

“Perhaps but seemingly not one we can remedy.”

“Why not? I know these people, they’re all idiots. It’s just a question of getting the right idiots to wax idiotic on our behalf.”

“Any potential evaluator will want money to make an evaluation and write a report. We don’t have any money to give said evaluator thus we don’t have any resulting evaluation.”

“How do we not have money? This is a country of organizations. Everywhere you look people are organizing themselves into groups, one joining many and many morphing into one. They have money, let’s have at some of it. What’s up with our little parent organization there in Alabama?”

“I tried but they’re over-budget for the year.”

“Over what ? The year just fucking started.”

“He also said they have to allocate resources where they feel they will do the most good. I believe the terms lost and cause were used in conjunction.”

“They’re lost all right. That’s okay, there’s more where that came from. I’m sure there’s a Humans for the Ethical Treatment of Retards somewhere or something isn’t there?”

“Sorry, I looked.”

“I bet if we were raising money to prevent an endangered condor from flying over a municipally-funded, baseball-only stadium dressed in a banner advertising Joe Camel to impressionable twerps we’d have considerably better luck.”

“Maybe.”

“Wait a minute Toom how stupid are we? We work for one of these very organizations. Let them pony up the dough. After all, they got us into this mess.”

“I tried but they say they can’t for this kind of thing.”

“Christ. Well let’s get one of these chumps anyway, I’ll pay for it.”

“You’re going to do what?”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“You have that kind of money lying around? Those experts charge considerable fees.”

“No, but I’ll get it. I’ll have it by the time they bill us anyway.”

“Remarkable.”

“I know but what am I supposed to do? I’m aware that it’s probably not going to make a difference but what about the small but discernible chance that it will, or already has.”

“Already has?”

“I’m not prepared to live with that unexplored chance, not here with this.”

“Already has?”

“Yeah, never mind.”

“No, what did you mean because I get the feeling you meant something.”

“Look I don’t want to spend a ton of time on this but that’s the thing about chance.”

“Chance?”

“Correct, chance. I have something like a chance theory if you’ll just give me a chance to give it to you.”

“Proceed.”

“Here goes: I say there’s a chance that retaining a psych expert will prevent Kingg from being executed right? What I seem to be saying is that if I take a certain action, create a certain event, then a later desirable event may occur as a result. We say these kinds of things all the time and the statements are primarily a function of how we experience Time, that is, in a linear fashion. But of course as many have shown we have no legitimate basis for believing that how we experience the world, including things like Time, corresponds perfectly to ultimate reality, that is, the things causing, in a manner of speaking, the experiences. In fact we can provide many examples of verifiable phenomena, such as the particle/wave duality of certain entities, that seem to contradict the manner in which experience tells us the world works. Similarly, with Time the fact that we experience it as a linear procession of events does not mean that’s what Time truly is; or that it even exists for that matter. So let’s posit a possible description of true Time. Basically, imagine a vantage point with respect to Time whereby you can see all events at once. When you observe it from this vantage point, Time is not linear. Instead, from this view, you see that events that exist in spacetime do not really precede or follow each other and therefore probably cannot be said to cause each other either. They exist all at once so to speak. Now what if within that matrix of spacetime events you’re observing there exists both the acquisition of a psychiatric expert and consequent psych report on Kingg as well as the court granting a stay and Kingg surviving? Now what if more than one of these matrices exist on some level, with one representing me spending money and Kingg living and another the converse?”

“This is basically possible worlds as a way of explaining possibilia right?”

“Kind of but slightly different. We don’t have the time to delve thoroughly but I’m not really talking about possibility so much as I’m talking about this weird view of Time. Bottom line is I’m intrigued by what goes on when I come to recognize that there is a chance an action by me might result in something I want. If Time is actually configured the way I set forth but our limited minds are unable to grasp this true nature of it, then my palpable experience of this chance may be more than just a purely mental exercise and may actually be my admittedly limited experience — since I don’t have the omniscienty vantage point I spoke of earlier — of the actual existence of these two events; the retaining of the expert and the subsequent, so to speak, saving by the bell. In that sense, the reason I perceive, on a weak level, that the chance exists that retaining an expert will be relevant is that it really is relevant and actual as I will later discover. Of course it only seems later to me, someone who is trapped into a myopic view of the whole of Time. The point being that this feeling I now have, the feeling that there’s a chance that might be actualized but only if I pay that expert, may actually be a glimpse into, and evidence of, this matrix where the two events exist. Who am I to fuck with the order of the universe? You get it? It’s like a workable chance theory. There’s a chance here that I can’t now ignore. Chance.”

“Fat chance maybe.”

“Exactly, it might, unbeknownst to us, be a fat chance, so we have to give it a try.”

“No, fat chance as in fat chance , as in little or no chance. Understand?”

“No, a fat chance is good. The fatter the chance the more of it there is and obviously the more chance of something good, in this case a legal victory, the better. You want your chance to be fat, a slim chance would be bad.”

“You can’t modify our language to suit your needs Casi. Fat chance is bad and always has been. And, by the way, I think that your true and inapposite bottom line is this. If one could step back out of Time so to speak and learn the truth as you claim to intuit it, that is, that events don’t really precede or follow or cause each other but rather they exist as it were simultaneously and independently, then there would be even less reason for you to retain a psych expert since such acquisition or failure of same bears no relation to Kingg’s ultimate fate and in fact such decision, the decision whether or not to retain an expert, already exists, and is in some sense predetermined, on some real if unknowable level. So your theory, and I use the term generously here, of Time and Chance actually ends up putting everything under the auspices of chance in the strict sense of the word and thus you should save your money. If you’re right about chance I mean.”

“True, but what are the chances of that?”

“I come bearing gifts and it’s all gold too, none of that corny myrrh or frankincense whatever that is.”

“Frankincense is like a gummy substance you get from trees, presumably prized back then.”