The Oedpial situation in the zone these days is terrible. There is no dignity. The mothers have been masculinized to old worn money bags of no sexual interest to anyone, and yet here are their songs, still trapped inside intertias of lust that are 40 years out of date. The fathers have no power today and never did, but because 40 years ago we could not kill them, we are condemned now to the same passivity, the same masochist fantasies they cherished in secret, and worse, we are condemned in our weakness to impersonate men of power our own infant children must hate, and wish to usurp the place of, and fail ..... So generation after generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone, silent redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying, desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them, however useless, ugly or shallow, willing to have life defined for them by men whose only talent is for death.

Hartle and Gell-Mann already establish that the cognitive functioning of the IGUSes (Information Gathering and Utilizing Systems) presupposes conditions of stability and the mutual exclusion of sequences of events. For an IGUS observer, whether natural or artificial, only one branch of universe can be endowed with a real existence; if this conclusion does not exclude in any way the possibility of other branches of the universe, it forbids any access to them to a given observer: to use the quite mysterious but synthetic expression of Gell-Mann, "On every branch, only this branch is preserved." The very presence of a community of observers, even reduced to two IGUESes, was thus proof of the existence of a reality.