The Stopped Clock: A Calculated Risk
Jul. 11th, 2011 11:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hwrnmnbsolThe whole summer had been a scorcher, even by local standards, and a guy can get powerfully thirsty just driving around and running errands. It was therefore perfectly understandable that I found myself in my favorite time-travelling dive The Stopped Clock on a Friday, in the portion of the afternoon that we shall charitably call 'evening', drinking large amounts of Hordo on tap.
Hordo is not what I would call a good beer, precisely, but it is plentiful and cheap. I understand it was named after comet Hordo 18546 which was apparently going to hit Mongolia in the year 3661. The comet, as it happened, had picked up just enough interstellar bugs for fermentation to act upon its organic components, so the entire thing was basically a big beersicle. Time travelers opted to divert the comet by tapping it from the inside and routing the beer to certain watering holes, where if it were to be drunk in sufficient quantity, humanity in my far future could be saved. It's rare when you have an opportunity to drink beer and save the world at the same time, and when such a situation arises I believe one has a duty to seize the day.
I was playing a drinking game with Retro Retro, which apparently involved him drinking my beer and me paying him for the privilege, when I happened to look down the bar at TIME-ASSAYER-3400. He was slumped over a gin and tonic, sitting all by himself, the communication screen that served as his face angled to look into his drink.
I pointed. "Does he ever drink that thing?" I asked.
Retro gave me a look he usually reserved for idiots and cheapskates. "Of course not," he said. "He's an android."
"Then why does he have a drink in the first place?" I pressed.
"Because he's depressed," said Retro Retro. "Shit, boy; you really don't understand this bar business, do you?"
"All right," I said. "I'm dying to know. Why's he depressed?"
"He's always depressed," said Bobby Saturday, sliding into the stool on the other side of Retro Retro. "Hey, want to play three-handed?"
Retro Retro's eyes narrowed. "Okay," he said, "but we should trade stools."
"Deal," said Bobby Saturday, and they swapped seats. I didn't know why they'd done it, but they looked very satisfied.
"What," I asked doggedly, "makes an android chronically depressed?"
"Did he say 'chronologically depressed?'" whispered Bobby Saturday.
"No, and you owe me your beer," Retro Retro whispered back. He turned to me with Bobby's drink in his hand.
"That's a very sad story," he said, foam covering his upper lip. "It has to do with the downfall of an entire culture – a group of people who were thriving and industrious right up until the dawn of time travel. And then, by a series of tragedies outside their control, they perished."
"Wow," I said. "What are we talking about? One of the great civilizations of history? Or maybe an entire race lost to our knowledge?"
"Something even bigger than that," said Retro Retro solemnly. "I'm talking about the insurance industry."
I glowered at Retro Retro, waiting for him to smirk. He didn't. I turned to Bobby Saturday. "Do I owe him a beer or something?" I asked.
"No," said Bobby Saturday, and swapped beers with Retro Retro. "Oh, well played," murmured Retro Retro grudgingly.
"The insurance industry," I mused. "Yeah. I can see how they would have a problem right off the bat. I mean, when you sell an insurance policy, you're basically just making a bet that something bad won't happen, right? So if people can time travel forward and see that a barn is going to be struck by lightning in a month and burn down, they're going to take out a policy and collect. It would be like insurance fraud, only it's not really fraudulent."
Retro Retro nodded. "Now you're catching on," he said approvingly.
"The insurance company had a hell of a time in the beginning," said Bobby Saturday, finishing Retro Retro's beer before he could take it back. "They were old school; they had a tough time transitioning out of the old way of doing things. At first they didn't even realize how they were losing money so rapidly."
"*I* got rich," Retro Retro admitted.
"Then they made the mistake of trying to change the laws of the land to prosecute people who used time travel to gather information about future coverage," continued Bobby. "Of course that didn't work."
"Information wants to be free!" trumpeted Retro Retro, pounding a fist on the counter. He shrugged. "Of course, it also wants a pony," he added.
"Wow, now that you put it that way, I can't see how insurance could possibly be a viable thing in a world with time travel," I said. "Betting on risk and reward can't possibly ever make a profit."
"That's true," said Retro Retro patiently. "And yet it is not. Please buy Bobby Saturday another beer."
I frowned. "Why?" I asked.
"Because he is on my right," Retro Retro explained.
"Shit," I said, fishing bills out of my pocket.
"You're right that the insurance industry had to retool to remain profitable," said Bobby Saturday. "There was no way they could continue doing business the old way. They said: we have to evolve or perish."
"How'd they do that?" I asked. I attempted to swap beers with Retro Retro, but he waggled a finger at me, demonstrating that he had placed a coaster on top of his mug. I didn't get this game at all.
"Well, they said: what do we have? A large organization. And a lot of money. What can we do with this? Well, if other people can time travel for their own purposes, then we can do it too, only on a grander scale, and more often. So the insurance companies invested heavily in jaunting infrastructure and started traveling widely through the chronoverse."
"Why would that matter?" I asked. "All they could do would be to gather the same information that policy buyers were taking out."
"They weren't just gathering information," said Retro Retro, removing the coaster guardedly from his beer and drinking it. "They were changing things – changing things to protect the properties they were insuring."
"Take your example of the barn," said Bobby Saturday. "The insurance company goes into the future and sees that, yes, lightning strikes the barn and it burns down. Now they go back a few days from that point and build a lightning rod next to the barn. Lightning doesn't hit the barn after all and it doesn't burn down. Barn is saved."
"But then the insurance buyer would see the change and not buy the policy," I argued.
"No, because the insurance company has an infinitely quicker response loop," said Retro Retro. He tried to steal my beer but I put a coaster over the top of it. Bobby Saturday quickly stacked his beer on top of my coaster, and triumphantly claimed both drinks. "You're just one guy. They're a million wonks with a million time-travelling computers making a million jaunts every milliono-second."
"No units of time," growled Edgar, polishing mugs.
"How's a 'milliono-second' a unit of time?" sneered Retro Retro.
"So, in effect," I concluded, "the insurance companies set themselves up as a protection racket – only one that really worked. And they weren't protecting people from themselves; they were protecting them from the rest of the universe."
"That's right!" said Bobby Saturday, nodding approvingly. "The insurance companies got even bigger and richer than they ever had been before. If you looked up and saw the sun and said, shoot, it would be terrible if that thing blew up in the next aeon, then you could take out an insurance policy, and the companies would make sure that come hell or high water it would still be there at the end of the term. They never lost money, because the more money they got, the bigger and more sophisticated their jaunting banks became, and the better they got at diverting disaster in the future."
"And it was that success," added Retro Retro, waggling his eyebrows, "that proved their undoing."
"That's all great," I said, "but I don’t see what any of this has to do with TIME-ASSAYER-3400."
"Ah," said Bobby Saturday, sneaking a peek over my shoulder at the glum android. He hadn't budged, and the ice in his drink had completely melted. Bobby leaned in closer.
"TIME-ASSAYER-3400," he said, "was a remote computational unit. It was his job to work through the increasingly complex calculus of future lost value."
"The what who huh?" I asked. "Edgar, I'm going to need several more beers to understand any of this."
"Look," Retro Retro said, "every choice we make has consequences. Those consequences ripple forward in time."
"Sure, the Lorenz effect," I said.
"Who cares what you primitives call it," said Retro Retro dismissively. "The important thing is, if you put up a lightning rod to spare a barn, then that lightning might ground out and kill a gopher. And if that gopher was insured too, then you'd have a decision to make. Do you save the barn, or the gopher? But of course no decision is as simple as that. Consequences ripple strongly forward in time; altering future history is very sensitive to initial conditions. It takes a lot of brain-power to figure out how to maximize your money."
"That was TIME-ASSAYER-3400's job," said Bobby Saturday. "He would assess all of his company's insured properties in a given region of timespace and determine what should be done to minimize the company's payout. He was supposedly good at it, too. The King of the Calculated Risk, they called him. Although of course there was no risk involved. TIME-ASSAYER-3400 knew the consequences of his actions down to the gnat's ass."
"What, there's no quantum indeterminacy in time travel?" I asked. "No built in uncertainty?"
Bobby Saturday chucked. "Kid," he said, "God doesn't play dice with the universe."
"Not anymore!" Retro Retro crowed, fishing a couple of dice out of the pocket of his Space Marines Reserves jacket and shaking them in his fist.
I looked down the bar at TIME-ASSAYER-3400. He didn't look like a super-genius insurance adjustor. He mostly looked like a sad bum with a TV for a head. Of course, Retro Retro looked like a bum too, but I had it on good authority that he had shot Kennedy from three different angles, so you never really know.
"So how did it go wrong?" I asked. I handed one of my beers to Bobby Saturday before he could take it. Crestfallen, he handed me a folded-up dollar. I was confused.
"Well," said Retro Retro, "the insurance companies made the classic blunder. They forgot about the second law of thermodynamics."
"Aw, who cares what us primitives call it?" I hooted. Edgar whistled and shook his head, still polishing glasses.
"They overinsured," said Bobby Saturday. "Pretty soon, more or less everything was covered under a policy. And then TIME-ASSAYER-3400 began to discover that no matter what decision he made, the company lost money. Anything that saved one thing would invariably destroy two more – if that decision's consequences were projected out until the collapse of the universe. He made heroic efforts to right the sinking ship; he tried to sell futures for beyond the collapse of the universe; he sacrificed several costly properties and tried to tie up the payouts in litigation; he even tried to sell his company short by taking out a policy on his employer going bankrupt. Nothing worked; one by one the insurance companies went under, and TIME-ASSAYER-3400 was out of a job."
"There's nothing worse than being out of a job when you're an android," said Retro Retro sympathetically. "Gimme that dollar."
I looked down at the bill Bobby Saturday had handed me. "Why?" I asked.
Retro Retro rolled his eyes. "Because I'm on your LEFT!"
I handed over the dollar and looked down at TIME-ASSAYER-3400. His slice of lime had sunk to the bottom of the glass. The communication screen was canted downwards at the precise angle necessary to suggest a profound sense of despair. I got up from my stool.
"You guys can fight over my last beer," I said, and Retro Retro and Bobby Saturday proceeded to do just that. I moved down the bar and sat down next to TIME-ASSAYER-3400. He didn't move.
"You can't save everything," I said quietly.
TIME-ASSAYER-3400 slowly turned his communication screen towards me. "NO….I….CAN'T…." he scrolled.
"That was your first mistake," I continued. "You're going about this all backwards. As smart as you are, you're still too old school. You have to change to survive. Evolve or perish."
"PERISH…." the screen scrolled. His head turned back to peer into his drink.
"What you need to do," I said, leaning in, "is sell policies to destroy things. Protecting things works against entropy. Destroying things works with it."
TIME-ASSAYER-3400 sat up straight. He turned to face me but his screen said nothing.
"It's like pari-mutuel gambing," I said. "The game's stacked in the house's favor. Destroy a barn, sure. Or destroy a gopher, yes. And maybe if you play your cards right…."
"I…CAN…DESTROY….THEM….BOTH…." scrolled TIME-ASSAYER-3400.
"And don't think there will ever be a shortage of people willing to pay you for it," I said. But TIME-ASSAYER-3400 wasn't listening. He got up from his stool and moved purposefully through The Stopped Clock, other patrons parting ways to let him through. He seized the handle of the door, threw it open to reveal a miasma of color and a riot of white noise, and dove through. The door closed and the bar was quiet once more.
I returned to my old stool. Retro Retro and Bobby Saturday stared at me. I reclaimed my beer from Retro Retro. There was even a little left in it.
"Why do you hate the universe?" Retro Retro asked softly, getting out of his stool.
"I don't hate the universe," I said, not looking him in the eye.
Bobby Saturday got up too and whacked me on the back of the head. "Do you realize what you've done?!" he asked.
"Sure I do," I said, grinning. I turned to show Retro Retro and Bobby Saturday that while they were having their spazz attacks, I had snagged both their beers, put coasters on top of them, and then balanced my beer on top of both.
Bobby Saturday gaped. "Hey!" he exclaimed.
"Kid's a natural," grinned Retro Retro.
"Twice a day," Edgar said under his breath.
"TWICE A DAY!" replied the entire bar.
Hordo is not what I would call a good beer, precisely, but it is plentiful and cheap. I understand it was named after comet Hordo 18546 which was apparently going to hit Mongolia in the year 3661. The comet, as it happened, had picked up just enough interstellar bugs for fermentation to act upon its organic components, so the entire thing was basically a big beersicle. Time travelers opted to divert the comet by tapping it from the inside and routing the beer to certain watering holes, where if it were to be drunk in sufficient quantity, humanity in my far future could be saved. It's rare when you have an opportunity to drink beer and save the world at the same time, and when such a situation arises I believe one has a duty to seize the day.
I was playing a drinking game with Retro Retro, which apparently involved him drinking my beer and me paying him for the privilege, when I happened to look down the bar at TIME-ASSAYER-3400. He was slumped over a gin and tonic, sitting all by himself, the communication screen that served as his face angled to look into his drink.
I pointed. "Does he ever drink that thing?" I asked.
Retro gave me a look he usually reserved for idiots and cheapskates. "Of course not," he said. "He's an android."
"Then why does he have a drink in the first place?" I pressed.
"Because he's depressed," said Retro Retro. "Shit, boy; you really don't understand this bar business, do you?"
"All right," I said. "I'm dying to know. Why's he depressed?"
"He's always depressed," said Bobby Saturday, sliding into the stool on the other side of Retro Retro. "Hey, want to play three-handed?"
Retro Retro's eyes narrowed. "Okay," he said, "but we should trade stools."
"Deal," said Bobby Saturday, and they swapped seats. I didn't know why they'd done it, but they looked very satisfied.
"What," I asked doggedly, "makes an android chronically depressed?"
"Did he say 'chronologically depressed?'" whispered Bobby Saturday.
"No, and you owe me your beer," Retro Retro whispered back. He turned to me with Bobby's drink in his hand.
"That's a very sad story," he said, foam covering his upper lip. "It has to do with the downfall of an entire culture – a group of people who were thriving and industrious right up until the dawn of time travel. And then, by a series of tragedies outside their control, they perished."
"Wow," I said. "What are we talking about? One of the great civilizations of history? Or maybe an entire race lost to our knowledge?"
"Something even bigger than that," said Retro Retro solemnly. "I'm talking about the insurance industry."
I glowered at Retro Retro, waiting for him to smirk. He didn't. I turned to Bobby Saturday. "Do I owe him a beer or something?" I asked.
"No," said Bobby Saturday, and swapped beers with Retro Retro. "Oh, well played," murmured Retro Retro grudgingly.
"The insurance industry," I mused. "Yeah. I can see how they would have a problem right off the bat. I mean, when you sell an insurance policy, you're basically just making a bet that something bad won't happen, right? So if people can time travel forward and see that a barn is going to be struck by lightning in a month and burn down, they're going to take out a policy and collect. It would be like insurance fraud, only it's not really fraudulent."
Retro Retro nodded. "Now you're catching on," he said approvingly.
"The insurance company had a hell of a time in the beginning," said Bobby Saturday, finishing Retro Retro's beer before he could take it back. "They were old school; they had a tough time transitioning out of the old way of doing things. At first they didn't even realize how they were losing money so rapidly."
"*I* got rich," Retro Retro admitted.
"Then they made the mistake of trying to change the laws of the land to prosecute people who used time travel to gather information about future coverage," continued Bobby. "Of course that didn't work."
"Information wants to be free!" trumpeted Retro Retro, pounding a fist on the counter. He shrugged. "Of course, it also wants a pony," he added.
"Wow, now that you put it that way, I can't see how insurance could possibly be a viable thing in a world with time travel," I said. "Betting on risk and reward can't possibly ever make a profit."
"That's true," said Retro Retro patiently. "And yet it is not. Please buy Bobby Saturday another beer."
I frowned. "Why?" I asked.
"Because he is on my right," Retro Retro explained.
"Shit," I said, fishing bills out of my pocket.
"You're right that the insurance industry had to retool to remain profitable," said Bobby Saturday. "There was no way they could continue doing business the old way. They said: we have to evolve or perish."
"How'd they do that?" I asked. I attempted to swap beers with Retro Retro, but he waggled a finger at me, demonstrating that he had placed a coaster on top of his mug. I didn't get this game at all.
"Well, they said: what do we have? A large organization. And a lot of money. What can we do with this? Well, if other people can time travel for their own purposes, then we can do it too, only on a grander scale, and more often. So the insurance companies invested heavily in jaunting infrastructure and started traveling widely through the chronoverse."
"Why would that matter?" I asked. "All they could do would be to gather the same information that policy buyers were taking out."
"They weren't just gathering information," said Retro Retro, removing the coaster guardedly from his beer and drinking it. "They were changing things – changing things to protect the properties they were insuring."
"Take your example of the barn," said Bobby Saturday. "The insurance company goes into the future and sees that, yes, lightning strikes the barn and it burns down. Now they go back a few days from that point and build a lightning rod next to the barn. Lightning doesn't hit the barn after all and it doesn't burn down. Barn is saved."
"But then the insurance buyer would see the change and not buy the policy," I argued.
"No, because the insurance company has an infinitely quicker response loop," said Retro Retro. He tried to steal my beer but I put a coaster over the top of it. Bobby Saturday quickly stacked his beer on top of my coaster, and triumphantly claimed both drinks. "You're just one guy. They're a million wonks with a million time-travelling computers making a million jaunts every milliono-second."
"No units of time," growled Edgar, polishing mugs.
"How's a 'milliono-second' a unit of time?" sneered Retro Retro.
"So, in effect," I concluded, "the insurance companies set themselves up as a protection racket – only one that really worked. And they weren't protecting people from themselves; they were protecting them from the rest of the universe."
"That's right!" said Bobby Saturday, nodding approvingly. "The insurance companies got even bigger and richer than they ever had been before. If you looked up and saw the sun and said, shoot, it would be terrible if that thing blew up in the next aeon, then you could take out an insurance policy, and the companies would make sure that come hell or high water it would still be there at the end of the term. They never lost money, because the more money they got, the bigger and more sophisticated their jaunting banks became, and the better they got at diverting disaster in the future."
"And it was that success," added Retro Retro, waggling his eyebrows, "that proved their undoing."
"That's all great," I said, "but I don’t see what any of this has to do with TIME-ASSAYER-3400."
"Ah," said Bobby Saturday, sneaking a peek over my shoulder at the glum android. He hadn't budged, and the ice in his drink had completely melted. Bobby leaned in closer.
"TIME-ASSAYER-3400," he said, "was a remote computational unit. It was his job to work through the increasingly complex calculus of future lost value."
"The what who huh?" I asked. "Edgar, I'm going to need several more beers to understand any of this."
"Look," Retro Retro said, "every choice we make has consequences. Those consequences ripple forward in time."
"Sure, the Lorenz effect," I said.
"Who cares what you primitives call it," said Retro Retro dismissively. "The important thing is, if you put up a lightning rod to spare a barn, then that lightning might ground out and kill a gopher. And if that gopher was insured too, then you'd have a decision to make. Do you save the barn, or the gopher? But of course no decision is as simple as that. Consequences ripple strongly forward in time; altering future history is very sensitive to initial conditions. It takes a lot of brain-power to figure out how to maximize your money."
"That was TIME-ASSAYER-3400's job," said Bobby Saturday. "He would assess all of his company's insured properties in a given region of timespace and determine what should be done to minimize the company's payout. He was supposedly good at it, too. The King of the Calculated Risk, they called him. Although of course there was no risk involved. TIME-ASSAYER-3400 knew the consequences of his actions down to the gnat's ass."
"What, there's no quantum indeterminacy in time travel?" I asked. "No built in uncertainty?"
Bobby Saturday chucked. "Kid," he said, "God doesn't play dice with the universe."
"Not anymore!" Retro Retro crowed, fishing a couple of dice out of the pocket of his Space Marines Reserves jacket and shaking them in his fist.
I looked down the bar at TIME-ASSAYER-3400. He didn't look like a super-genius insurance adjustor. He mostly looked like a sad bum with a TV for a head. Of course, Retro Retro looked like a bum too, but I had it on good authority that he had shot Kennedy from three different angles, so you never really know.
"So how did it go wrong?" I asked. I handed one of my beers to Bobby Saturday before he could take it. Crestfallen, he handed me a folded-up dollar. I was confused.
"Well," said Retro Retro, "the insurance companies made the classic blunder. They forgot about the second law of thermodynamics."
"Aw, who cares what us primitives call it?" I hooted. Edgar whistled and shook his head, still polishing glasses.
"They overinsured," said Bobby Saturday. "Pretty soon, more or less everything was covered under a policy. And then TIME-ASSAYER-3400 began to discover that no matter what decision he made, the company lost money. Anything that saved one thing would invariably destroy two more – if that decision's consequences were projected out until the collapse of the universe. He made heroic efforts to right the sinking ship; he tried to sell futures for beyond the collapse of the universe; he sacrificed several costly properties and tried to tie up the payouts in litigation; he even tried to sell his company short by taking out a policy on his employer going bankrupt. Nothing worked; one by one the insurance companies went under, and TIME-ASSAYER-3400 was out of a job."
"There's nothing worse than being out of a job when you're an android," said Retro Retro sympathetically. "Gimme that dollar."
I looked down at the bill Bobby Saturday had handed me. "Why?" I asked.
Retro Retro rolled his eyes. "Because I'm on your LEFT!"
I handed over the dollar and looked down at TIME-ASSAYER-3400. His slice of lime had sunk to the bottom of the glass. The communication screen was canted downwards at the precise angle necessary to suggest a profound sense of despair. I got up from my stool.
"You guys can fight over my last beer," I said, and Retro Retro and Bobby Saturday proceeded to do just that. I moved down the bar and sat down next to TIME-ASSAYER-3400. He didn't move.
"You can't save everything," I said quietly.
TIME-ASSAYER-3400 slowly turned his communication screen towards me. "NO….I….CAN'T…." he scrolled.
"That was your first mistake," I continued. "You're going about this all backwards. As smart as you are, you're still too old school. You have to change to survive. Evolve or perish."
"PERISH…." the screen scrolled. His head turned back to peer into his drink.
"What you need to do," I said, leaning in, "is sell policies to destroy things. Protecting things works against entropy. Destroying things works with it."
TIME-ASSAYER-3400 sat up straight. He turned to face me but his screen said nothing.
"It's like pari-mutuel gambing," I said. "The game's stacked in the house's favor. Destroy a barn, sure. Or destroy a gopher, yes. And maybe if you play your cards right…."
"I…CAN…DESTROY….THEM….BOTH…." scrolled TIME-ASSAYER-3400.
"And don't think there will ever be a shortage of people willing to pay you for it," I said. But TIME-ASSAYER-3400 wasn't listening. He got up from his stool and moved purposefully through The Stopped Clock, other patrons parting ways to let him through. He seized the handle of the door, threw it open to reveal a miasma of color and a riot of white noise, and dove through. The door closed and the bar was quiet once more.
I returned to my old stool. Retro Retro and Bobby Saturday stared at me. I reclaimed my beer from Retro Retro. There was even a little left in it.
"Why do you hate the universe?" Retro Retro asked softly, getting out of his stool.
"I don't hate the universe," I said, not looking him in the eye.
Bobby Saturday got up too and whacked me on the back of the head. "Do you realize what you've done?!" he asked.
"Sure I do," I said, grinning. I turned to show Retro Retro and Bobby Saturday that while they were having their spazz attacks, I had snagged both their beers, put coasters on top of them, and then balanced my beer on top of both.
Bobby Saturday gaped. "Hey!" he exclaimed.
"Kid's a natural," grinned Retro Retro.
"Twice a day," Edgar said under his breath.
"TWICE A DAY!" replied the entire bar.
