The Counterpart Files

« Toutes les vérités deviennent plus lumineuses les unes par les autres. » —Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle

Hello, dear trans-world friends! Hello, Counterparts! I am so excited to be reaching out to you for the first time!

You will already be familiar, just as I am, with the theoretical and technological basis of this new variety of telecommunication, which I suppose I’ll agree to call by its common name of “metacommunication”, even if I still have some considerable qualms about that way of speaking.

Short story, just in case you need reminding: there is no collapse of the wave function, as every possible outcome of every event simply branches off onto its own “timeline” (another common way of putting things that I can’t stand). Reality then is the total probability distribution across all of these timelines. Another more elegant way of putting this is to say, with Fontenelle, or indeed with David Lewis who consciously echoes him, that there exists a “plurality of worlds”.

This much has of course been among the theoretical possibilities ever since Hugh Everett’s 1957 paper, “The Theory of the Universal Wave Function”. What made it part of all of our daily lives, however, was the sudden technological revolution triggered by the discovery, in our world, of a viable room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor, known as LK-99, in a lab in South Korea in the summer of 2023. By that autumn, as you no doubt know, quantum computing was already a familiar feature of our new tech landscape, with numerous industrial, military, and entertainment applications. And by the end of that year the qubit processors themselves made the profound breakthrough that I am relying on here to send this missive, a breakthrough none, not Lewis, not Everett, not Fontenelle, not even the great Leibniz, had ever thought remotely possible: contact, or “metacommunication”, between worlds, which would now enable us to learn concretely, by a sort of “mapping”, all the infinitely many different ways things might have turned out for us, and indeed did turn out for our Counterparts, in other possible worlds.

By early 2024 they were offering commercial services, somewhat on the model of what we had seen a few years earlier from Ancestry.com and from 23andMe, where you could send away for such a map, or what they were now calling a “Counterpart File”, that would exhaustively spell out, for anyone willing to pay around $200 USD, all the different fates of a particular client’s infinitely many Counterparts in infinitely many other possible worlds.

We can all recall, with some embarrassment, the confusion that reigned in those first few months, all the naive questions that proliferated on social media, all the innocent trepidation about whether, in having your File done, you might risk seeing something you don’t want to see. None can forget the much-maligned Trunk from a certain “Heidegger-Dee-Dog”, who timidly asked, in February, 2024, whether any of his Counterparts in other possible worlds have “died by now”, followed by that one withering reply that set Heidegger-Dee-Dog straight as it racked up over 20 million likes: “Brace yourself, bro. I just got mine done, and there are more than eight billion worlds in which I have already died in the infernal embrace of a boa constrictor.” Add to that, our respondent went on to clarify, the possible worlds where you are finished off by malaria, or diarrhea, or war, and you begin to see just what kind of information you’re going to be processing: practically infinitely many scenarios in which you, had you ended up with any one of these Counterparts’ fates, would already have died a gruesome death.

Still, people were into it, and whatever stark reckoning the extinguished branchings forced them to undergo, many continued to delight in seeing so many different versions of themselves, unrealized in our actual world, and by no means all of which were particularly grim. A new kind of social clout began quickly to emerge from the public sharing of one’s own Counterpart File, where the greater proximity of a possible world in which a person was enjoying great wealth or celebrity constituted something like ersatz wealth or celebrity in itself. I’ll never forget Kimbee from Tulsa, who at 36 was still showcasing her modest songwriting talents at open-mic venues around her native city, and who discovered that less than 20,000 possible worlds “away” —I don’t like it when they speak like this, as if the relationship were a spatial one, but I can’t keep language pure all by myself— she was out-selling Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. The next thing you know, Kimbee, now restyled as “Kimboo” for reasons of copyright infringement, was blowing up.

Of course, most people who used this service kept their Counterpart Files secret, and very quickly a consensus “normie” view emerged according to which those who share their results are guilty of “MWI TMI”, and are almost certainly motivated by a desperate hunger for status and advancement. I was well aware of this myself when I got my own File done very publicly in late 2024, as a guest on Dr. Lloyd Gideon-Su’s hit show, Many Worlds. I could scarcely decline the invitation, as I had been among the first theorists in mid-2023 to predict this particular application of our new quantum-computing technologies. I was already, in this actual world, something of a celebrity, and it seemed fitting that I should be a good sport and help Dr. Gideon-Su demonstrate this remarkable new procedure.

So there I was, a few months back, sitting face to face with him on the set of Many Worlds, reclining comfortably on the upholstered couch as he projected on a wall-sized screen behind us a summary of my Counterparts’ several fates. The File, as you will likely know by now (though when I went on it was the first time I had seen such a thing), allows you to click and magnify any given region of the “map” indefinitely, zeroing in on a cluster of similar results all occurring in “nearby” possible worlds, as for example the 6 billion (in my case) worlds in which I die while being suffocated by a boa constrictor, or the 6.5 billion in which I receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

“How does it make you feel? To see this?” Gideon-Su asked.
“Good, overall, I guess.” I stumbled. “Kind of awe-struck.”

Of course they mocked me ruthlessly in the Trunks afterwards, and I admit indeed that some of my numbers were pretty scandalous. While there were 6.5 billion worlds in which I was a Nobel laureate, there were over 400 billion in which I was a proven plagiarist — and over half of these were found in the “red zone” less than 10,000 possible worlds away from our own. And I am ashamed to say there were over 50 billion in which I was serving a life sentence for murder, among which we also find, curiously, a full 16 million in which Dr. Gideon-Su was my sole victim. Particularly troubling for some in the Trunks was the finding that one of the possible worlds in which I killed him was only eight away from our own. He’s a pretty unflappable character, as we all know, but honestly, when we zeroed in on that particular result live on camera — that’s the one time I’ve ever seen Dr. Gideon-Su lose his cool.

I will not enter here into the thorny issues currently being debated in the lively subfield of tech ethics now known as “Counterpart responsibility”. It will suffice to say here that I am broadly in agreement with Jason Fefferman’s influential argument, in The Ethics of Trans-World Identity (OUP/CostCo, 2024), according to which several tremendous absurdities follow when we insist on holding any actual-world moral subject responsible for the actions of their possible-world Counterparts. For one thing, Fefferman reasons, all of us would be infinitely culpable, since there is simply no one who will find zero immoral actions among the infinitely many Counterparts in their map.¹ For any evil deed at all, you’ve got at least one Counterpart who has committed it.

Anyhow I let them talk all they wanted on the Trunks, and really only found out about it at all when my lawyer recommended we send a cease-and-desist letter to “The Stephen Miller Band” for having posted a screen-shot of the part of my map where one of my Counterparts has degenerated into a radical anti-vaxxer, and has permitted one of his own children to die of rubella. “Sick Fuck”, The Stephen Miller Band had commented. “Who is the ‘Sick Fuck’ [le cinglé]?” my lawyer, the legendary Geneviève Coëtquen de Boisteilleul, reflected in an open letter published in Le Monde in June, 2024. “In the actual world my client does not even have any children he might fail to have vaccinated.”

Throughout most of this fuss I was hidden away in my country home in Qu***, passing my days, hour after hour, in focused exploration of my map. I was delighted to have my complimentary file from Gideon-Su’s producers, which unlike the standard commercially available Files features unlimited zoom functionality — I can go in just as narrow, or go out just as wide, as I like. This option would cost over $10 million USD on the open market, which I never could have afforded. But since I am now held to be one of the “founders” of the field of possible-world mapping, I have been given the lifetime gift of unlimited detail, and unlimited maximally wide-scoped zoom-outs.

I’ve been spending a good deal of time with my Counterpart File, likely more than anyone else has yet done, and with a version of the file, thanks to Gideon-Su Production Ltd.’s open format, that enables an in-map mobility as great as any that has been enjoyed up until now. Just the other morning, on the Epiphany as it happens, I was sitting in my front yard in the damp chill of a Breton morning in January, with my coffee and my laptop, erring rather mindlessly through the subdirectory of over 18 million worlds in which I am the victim of an aviation disaster. By some sudden whim for which I can provide no account, I decided to hit “random”, and found myself in the “Raised by Non-Human Animals” subdirectory, which featured a surprising 300,000 entries. And it gets even finer-grained than that. There are, for example, 17,000 entries in which I am “Raised by Arctic Marine Mammals”, 4,000 in which I am “Raised by Walruses”, and, much to my surprise, a full 7 worlds in which “Victim of an Aviation Disaster” and “Raised by Walruses” turn out to be the same world — the implication being, as near as I can make out (at this level of detail the data are sometimes hard to interpret), that I survived the fall from a mid-air explosion as an infant, landed in a soft snow bank along the Arctic Coast of Canada, and just happened to gain the notice and sympathy of a gregarious assemblage of pinnipeds.

This is the first thing you never quite recover from learning — that every single possibility for your life, even the most outlandishly implausible ones, is realized in some world or other.

So there I was on the Epiphany, just cruising around, and I decided to go and explore for a while the subdirectory, with 4 million entries, in which I had been “Switched at Birth”, and ended up adopted by parents who assumed I was their own. In most of these, of course, my subsequent life unfolds in the vicinity of Reno, Nevada, yet there are as always a surprising number of worlds in which I fall considerably further from the tree. There are 16, for example, in which I end up as a Feldenkrais instructor in Wuppertal — when I clicked “Go Live” on one of them, I caught a glimpse of someone unmistakably “like” me, but clearly not me, sitting cross-legged on the floor of some kind of dance studio, saying to a group of students in identical posture: „Hören Sie auf Ihren Körper, bewegen Sie sich in Ihrem eigenen Tempo und tun Sie nur das, was sich angenehm anfühlt.” There are also, surprisingly, 4 worlds in which I am a homeless alcoholic sitting on a heating vent outside a metro station in frozen Novosibirsk, growling Ёб твою… to indifferent passersby, and even one in which I am a Dolgan nomad on the Taimyr Peninsula, I am gazing proudly at my children, who have been feasting on late-summer blueberries, and I declare with joy, Бугдии буоллулар, that their cheeks are all stained.

Now when I arrived on the peninsula my clicking had been so casual and desultory that I almost failed to notice the very thing that I am now prepared to call my “epiphany”. Those children of mine —and I knew, with a certainty you just have to experience for yourself when you explore your own map, that they were mine— looked nothing like the actual-world version of me, born in Reno, Nevada, in 1972, to parents of 100% Northern European ancestry. They were, if I may put it so bluntly, entirely North Asian — black hair, glabrous skin, epicanthic folds over the eyes. And just as luck would have it, at the very instant I clicked “Go Live” my Dolgan Counterpart was holding up his Huawei smartphone to take a picture of the berry-stained kids, and had accidentally turned the camera lens towards himself, revealing a face that was likewise entirely North Asian. Whatever was happening here, this was not a case of “Switched at Birth”, no matter what the subdirectory’s name implied. My Counterpart, in this case, was a natural-born Dolgan with a beautiful stable of Dolgan kiddos.

This meant, I quickly understood, that something was seriously wrong in our deepest theoretical elaborations of Counterpart theory. For one thing, it seemed to constitute a direct refutation of Kripke’s idea that my Counterparts across worlds are those who are “rigidly designated” by the same name, which may be traced back to a shared “baptismal” event. But there was nothing shared in this case — my Dolgan self and my actual-world self had never been “together” at all, did not set out from the same starting point… or at least from the same starting point in our empirical reality. If they are “identical” to one another, there must be some deeper ground for this identity than anything having to do with language or reference.

A sinking feeling set in as I took the measure of this new discovery. I zoomed out, way out, and I noticed again something that had caught my eye before, but whose significance I was not previously in a position to appreciate. It is widely known that in the commercially available Files there is a vast portion of the map that is flagged as having “restricted access”, and there is no widely accepted theory of what this portion contains. I had noticed on previous wide-scoped tours of my map that these parts were not marked, as they ordinarily should be, with a 🔒. But it was not until after my epiphany that I dared to click on one of them, and I discovered something I really never should have discovered: that Gideon-Su’s production people forgot (or “forgot”) to block access to the forbidden regions of my map.

I feel, though this comes with some great personal risk, that it is my responsibility to tell you what I found there. It seems that the Counterparts who do not share the same circumstances of our birth and who have never been “rigidly designated” in the same way we have, such as my Dolgan nomad with his berry-stained children, are all just the beginning of the story. There are in fact trillions of worlds in which my Counterparts are born to other parents, which should by itself induce in any sensitive person at least a bit of that same feeling the immortal Pascal experienced upon considering the infinity of celestial “worlds” and acknowledging that « ces espaces infinis m’effraient. »

But not only are there trillions of worlds in which I am so to speak not me, but am nonetheless still human. There are, it would seem, around 10²⁰ counterparts of me in which I was never born human at all, but only as a non-human animal, plant, or, what is vastly most likely, some kind of unicellular organism — most of which, I was surprised to learn, spend their lives not in the Earth’s oceans or in its deep soil, but riding on comets and asteroids and other scraps of matter throughout the observable universe. And there are 10⁹⁰ Counterparts of me —considerably more, that is, than there are physical particles in any actual world—, that simply exist, I can’t quite say how, without living, as creatures, in any narrow sense at all. I imagine these are something like what was once meant by « monades nues », little more than dim points of view on the order of coexistence. Though for now this remains pure speculation on my part.

I said 10⁹⁰ a moment ago, and this is of course in itself an astounding quantity. But the truth is I was only dodging a more frank reckoning that I fear I myself am not in a position to understand, even if circumstances force me to acknowledge the truth of it. For in my unrestricted File, I discovered on the Epiphany, there is nothing at all to prevent you from zooming out so far that you will now see not just myriad but transfinitely many Counterparts of yourself — and I mean this in the full Cantorian sense of infinite orders of infinity without end, where ∞ denotes not the completion of the series but only its modest first step.

Even this might be enough to bear, without any of that Pascalian dread that began to sink in almost immediately after the shattering of our cozy Ptolemaic cosmos — this might be enough to bear, that is, were it not for this other most singular feature of our Counterparts at this level of wide-scoped zoom. For here the way the dazzling orders of infinity are to be explained, you see, the ultimate account of the astoundingly large numbers of our Counterparts, I have come to believe, is this: at a sufficiently zoomed-out level, taking into account every portion of any given map, including those that are ordinarily blocked in our commercially available Files, what we inevitably see is that every File is exactly the same. What is called “my File” or “your File”, I now strongly suspect, is really only a particular region carved out of the universe of worlds that is everybody’s File. It’s all the same File.

Don’t you see what I’m saying, my dear Counterparts? There’s only one of us!

Gideon-Su knows this of course, and I believe his people left my access unrestricted on purpose, so that I might discover it and reveal it to the world. I do not know, at present, what kind of risk I have brought on myself, having done so, but I am bracing for the worst. Nor can I quite overcome the suspicion that this special role, for which I have for some reason been chosen, also explains in part the alarming proximity of a few of the possible worlds in which I find myself with Gideon-Su’s blood on my hands.

He’s surely one step ahead of me here. Gideon-Su is a very smart man, but not so smart that I can’t keep up with his maneuvers. All I have to do is to think very hard, and I see the fog lifting on my Breton winter morning, and I find that everything is now so clear as to collapse the difference between him and me, so that now I may say that I know Dr. Lloyd Gideon-Su as truly and deeply as I know my own person.

—JSRₚᵥᵥ₁₀₉₈₀₋₇₂₁₄₉₃₁
Qu***, France

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1. Some religious traditions have of course seized onto just this same implication, arguing that we are in fact infinitely culpable, and that the recent proof of the truth of modal realism is at the same time a proof of the doctrine of Original Sin.