The Long Earth

congressional investigators, totally exonerating you, which will be received by the authorities on the day we depart.’
    ‘Am I worth that much?’
    Lobsang laughed again. ‘Joshua, what is worth? What is value now, when gold is valued simply for its lustre, because every man can have a gold mine for himself? Property? The physics of the Long Earth means that every one of us can have a world entirely to himself, if he so wishes. This is the new age, Joshua, and there will be new values, new ideas of worth, including love, cooperation, truth – and above all, yes indeed, above all, the friendship of Lobsang. You should listen to me, Joshua Valienté. I intend to travel to the ends of the Earth – no, to the ends of the Long Earth. And I want you with me. Will you come?’
    Joshua sat there, staring at nothing. ‘Do you know, the crackling of your fire now sounds absolutely random?’
    ‘Yes. Easy enough to fix. I thought it might put you a little more at your ease.’
    ‘So if I come with you, you’ll get that congressional review off my back?’
    ‘Yes, certainly, I promise.’
    ‘And if I don’t choose to go with you, what then?’
    ‘I’ll deal with the review nonetheless. You did everything you could have done, I believe, and the loss of those people was definitely not your fault. Evidence of this will be presented to the panel.’
    Joshua stood up. ‘Right answer.’
    That night Joshua sat in front of a screen in the Home and read up about Lobsang.
    Apparently, so it was believed, Lobsang resided in extremely high-density, fast-access computer storage at MIT, and therefore not in the premises of transEarth at all. When Joshua read that, he felt a warm certainty that whatever was in a super-cooled box in MIT, it wasn’t Lobsang, not the
whole
of Lobsang. If Lobsang were smart, and he was most surely smart, he would have got himself distributed
everywhere
. A hedge against an off switch. And he’d be in a position where nobody could command him, not even his super-powerful partner Douglas Black.
There
was somebody who knew the rules, Joshua thought.
    Joshua switched off the screen. Another rule: Sister Agnes held it as a matter of faith that all left-on computer screens exploded sooner or later. He sat back in the silence, and thought.
    Was Lobsang human, or an AI aping humanity? A smiley, he thought: one curve and two dots, and you see a human face. What was the minimum you needed to
see
a human being? What has to be said, what has to be laughed? After all, people are made of nothing but clay – well, metaphorically, although Joshua was not too good at metaphors, seeing them as a kind of trick. And you had to admit that Lobsang was pretty good at knowing what Joshua was thinking, just as a perceptive human would be. Maybe the only significant difference between a really smart simulation and a human being was the noise they made when you punched them.
    But … the ends of the Long Earth?
    Was there an end? People were saying there must be a whole circle of Earths, because the Stepper box took you either East or West, and everybody believed that East must meet West! But nobody
knew
. Nobody knew what all the other Earths were doing out there in the first place. Perhaps it was time somebody tried to find out.
    Joshua looked down at the latest Stepper box he had just finished, using a double-pole, double-throw switch he had bought over the internet. Sitting on the desk beside him it was red and silver and looked very professional, unlike his first box, which had utilized a switch taken off Sister Regina’s elderly stairlift. He had carried a Stepper ever since it had dawned on him that since he did not know how he stepped, the sensible thing would be to carry a Stepper box
anyway
; a talent that had come suddenly and inexplicably might just as easily disappear the same way. And besides, a box was cover. He didn’t want to stand out from the stepping crowd.
    Turning the box over in his hands, Joshua wondered if Lobsang realized what was the most interesting thing about Stepper-box construction. He’d noticed it on Step Day, and it was obvious when you thought about it; it was a strange little detail nobody seemed to think was important. Joshua always thought that details were important. Officer Jansson noticed details like this. It had to do with following the instructions. A Stepper would only work for you if you built it yourself, or at least finished its assembly.
    He drummed his fingers on the