by Peter Watts
Loss of information, Jan says. Limited disk space. She’s still smiling at me, insight shines from her eyes with a giddy radiance.
But I can see her vision now, and I don’t know what she’s smiling about. I see two spheres expanding, one within the other, and the inner one is gaining. The more I learn the more I lose, my own core erodes away from inside. All the basics, dissolving; how do I know that the earth orbits the sun?
Most of my life is an act of faith.
I’m half a block from safety when he drops down on me from a second-story window. I get lucky; he makes a telltale noise on the way down. I almost get out of his way. We graze each other and he lands hard on the pavement, twisting his ankle.
Technically, handguns are still illegal. I pull mine out and shoot him in the stomach before he can recover.
A flicker of motion. Suddenly on my left, a woman as big as me, face set and sullen, standing where there was only pavement a moment ago. Her hands are buried deep in the pockets of a torn overcoat. One of them seems to be holding something.
Weapon or bluff? Particle or wave? Door number one or door number two?
I point the gun at her. I try very hard to look like someone who hasn’t just used his last bullet. For one crazy moment I think that maybe it doesn’t even matter what happens here, whether I live or die, because maybe there is a parallel universe, some impossible angle away, where everything works out fine.
No. Nothing happens unless observed. Maybe if I just look the other way …
She’s gone, swallowed by the same alley that disgorged her. I step over the gurgling thing twitching on the sidewalk.
“You can’t stay here,” I tell Janet when I reach her refuge. “I don’t care how many volts they pump through the fence, this place isn’t safe.”
“Sure it is,” she says. She’s got the TV tuned to Channel 6, God’s own mouthpiece coming through strong and clear; the Reborns have a satellite up in geosynch and that fucker never seems to go offline.
She’s not watching it, though. She just sits on her sofa, knees drawn up under her chin, staring out the window.
“The security’s better on campus,” I say. “We can make room for you. And you won’t have to commute.”
Janet doesn’t answer. Inside the TV, a talking head delivers a lecture on the Poisoned Fruits Of Secular Science.
“Jan—”
“I’m okay, Keith. Nobody’s gotten in yet.”
“They will. All they’ve got to do is throw a rubber mat over the fence and they’re past the first line of defense. Sooner or later they’ll crack the codes for the front gate, or—”
“No, Keith. That would take too much planning.”
“Janet, I’m telling you—”
“Nothing’s organized any more, Keith. Haven’t you noticed?”
Several faint explosions echo from somewhere outside.
“I’ve noticed,” I tell her.
“For the past four years,” she says, as though I haven’t spoken, “all the patterns have just …fallen apart. Things are getting so hard to predict, lately, you know? And even when you seem them coming, you can’t do anything about them.”
She glances at the television, where the head is explaining that evolution contradicts the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
“It’s sort of funny, actually,” Janet says.
“What is?”
“Everything. Second Law.” She gestures at the screen.
“Entropy increasing, order to disorder. Heat death of the universe. All that shit.”
“Funny?”
“I mean, life’s a pretty pathetic affair in the face of physics. It is sort of a miracle it ever got started in the first place.”
“Hey.” I try for a disarming smile. “You’re starting to sound like a creationist.”
“Yeah, well in a way they’re they right. Life and entropy just don’t get along. Not in the long run, anyway. Evolution’s just a—a holding action, you know?
“I know, Jan.”
“It’s like this, this torrent screaming through time and space, tearing everything apart. And sometimes these little pockets of information form in the eddies, in these tiny protected backwaters, and sometimes they get complicated enough to wake up and brag about beating the odds. Never lasts, though. Takes too much energy to fight the current.”
I shrug. “That’s not exactly news, Jan.”
She manages a brief, tired smile. “Yeah, I guess not. Undergrad existentialism, huh? It’s just that everything’s so …hungry now, you know?”
“Hungry?
“People. Biological life in general. The Net. That’s the whole problem with complex systems, you know; the more intricate they get, the harder entropy tries to rip them apart. We need more and more energy just to keep in one piece.”
She glances out the window.
“Maybe a bit more,” she says, “than we have available these days.”
Janet leans forward, aims a remote control at the television.
“You’re right, though. It’s all old news.”
The smile fades. I’m not sure what replaces it.
“It just never sunk in before, you know?”
Exhaustion, maybe.
She presses the remote. The head fades to black, cut off in mid-rant. A white dot flickers defiantly on center stage for a moment.
“There he goes.” Her voice hangs somewhere between irony and resignation. “Washed downstream.”
The doorknob rotates easily in my grasp, clockwise, counterclockwise. It’s not locked. A television laughs on the far side of a wall somewhere.
I push the door open.
Orange light skews up from the floor at the far end of the hall, where the living room lamp has fallen. Her blood is everywhere, congealing on the floor, crowding the wall with sticky rivulets, thin dark pseudopods that clot solid while crawling for the baseboards—
No.
I push the door open.
It swings in a few centimeters, then jams. Something on the other side yields a bit, sags back when I stop pushing. Her hand is visible through the gap in the doorway, palm up on the floor, fingers slightly clenched like the limbs of some dead insect. I push at the door again; the fingers jiggle lifelessly against the hardwood.
No. Not that either.
I push the door open.
They’re still in there with her. Four of them. One sits on her couch, watching television. One pins her to the floor. One rapes her. One stands smiling in the hallway, waves me in with a hand wrapped in duct tape, a jagged blob studded with nails and broken glass.
Her eyes are open. She doesn’t make a sound—
No. No. No.
These are mere possibilities. I haven’t actually seen any of them. They haven’t happened yet. The door is still closed.
I push it open.
The probability wave collapses.
And the winner is …
None of the above. It’s not even her apartment. It’s our office.
I’m inside the campus perimeter, safe behind carbon-laminate concrete, guarded by armed patrols and semi-intelligent security systems that work well over half the time. I will not call her, even if the phones are working today. I refuse to indulge these sordid little backflips into worlds that don’t even exist.
I am not losing it.
Her desk has been abandoned for two weeks now. The adjacent concrete wall, windowless, unpainted, is littered with nostalgic graphs and printouts; population cycles, fractal intrusions into Ricker curves, a handwritten reminder that All tautologies are tautologies.
I don’t know what’s happening. We’re changing. She’s changing. Of course, you idiot, she was raped, how could she not change? But it’s as though her attacker was only a catalyst, somehow, a trigger for some transformation still ongoing, cryptic and opaque. She’s shrouded in a chrysalis; something’s happening in there, I see occasional blurred movement, but all the details are hidden.
I need her for so much. I nee
d her ability to impose order on the universe, I need her passionate desire to reduce everything to triviality. No result was good enough, everything was always too proximate for her; every solution she threw back in my face: “yes, but why?” It was like collaborating with a two-year-old.
I’ve always been a parasite. I feel like I’ve lost the vision in one eye.
I guess it was ironic. Keith Elliot, quantum physiologist, who saw infinite possibilities in the simplest units of matter; Janet Thomas, catastrophe theorist, who reduced whole ecosystems down to a few lines of computer code. We should have killed each other. Somehow it was a combination that worked.
Oh God. When did I start using past tense?
There’s a message on the phone, ten hours old. The impossible has happened; the police caught someone, a suspect. His mug shots are on file in the message cache.
He looks a bit like me.
“Is that him?” I ask her.
“I don’t know.” Janet doesn’t look away from the window. “I didn’t look.”
“Why not? Maybe he’s the one! You don’t even have to leave the apartment, you could just call them back, say yes or no. Jan, what’s going on with you?
She cocks her head to one side. “I think,” she says, “My eyes have opened. Things have finally started to make some sort of …sense, I guess—”
“Christ, Janet, you were raped, not baptized!”
She draws her knees up under her chin and starts rocking back and forth. I can’t call it back.
I try anyway. “Jan, I’m sorry. It’s just …I don’t understand, you don’t seem to care about anything any more—”
“I’m not pressing charges.” Rocking, rocking. “Whoever it was. It wasn’t his fault.”
I can’t speak.
She looks back over her shoulder. “Entropy increases, Keith. You know that. Every act of random violence helps the universe run down.”
“What are you talking about? Some asshole deliberately assaulted you!”
She shrugs, looking back out the window. “So some matter is sentient. That doesn’t exempt it from the laws of physics.”
I finally see it; in this insane absolution she confers, in the calm acceptance in her voice. Metamorphosis is complete. My anger evaporates. Underneath there is only a sick feeling I can’t name.
“Jan,” I say, very quietly.
She turns and faces me, and there is no reassurance there at all.
“Things fall apart,” she says. “The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
It sounds familiar, somehow, but I can’t … I can’t …
“Nothing? You’ve forgotten Yeats, too?” She shakes her head, sadly. “You taught it to me.”
I sit beside her. I touch her, for the first time. I take her hands.
She doesn’t look at me. But she doesn’t seem to mind.
“You’ll forget everything, soon, Keith. You’ll even forget me.”
She looks at me then, and something she sees makes her smile a little. “You know, in a way I envy you. You’re still safe from all this. You look so closely at everything you barely see anything at all.”
“Janet …”
But she seems to have forgotten me.
After a moment she takes her hands from mine and stands up.
Her shadow, cast orange by the table lamp, looms huge and ominous on the far wall. But it’s her face, calm and unscarred and only life-sized, that scares me.
She reaches down, puts her hands on my shoulders. “Keith, thank you. I could never have come through this without you. But I’m okay now, and I think it’s time to be on my own again.”
A pit opens in my stomach. “You’re not okay,” I tell her, but I can’t seem to keep my voice level.
“I’m fine, Keith. Really. I honestly feel better than I have in …well, in a long time. It’s all right for you to go.”
I can’t. I can’t.
“I really think you’re wrong.” I have to keep her talking. I have to stay calm. “You may not see it but I don’t think you should be on your own just yet, you can’t do this—”
Her eyes twinkle briefly. “Can’t do what, Keith?”
I try to answer but it’s hard, I don’t even know what I’m trying to say, I—
“I can’t do it,” is what comes out, unexpected. “It’s just us, Janet, against everything. I can’t do it without you.”
“Then don’t try.”
It’s such a stupid thing to say, so completely unexpected, that I have no answer for it.
She draws me to my feet. “It’s just not that important, Keith.
We study retinal sensitivity in salamanders. Nobody cares. Why should they? Why should we?”
“You know it’s more than that, Janet! It’s quantum neurology, it’s the whole nature of consciousness, it’s—”
“It’s really kind of pathetic, you know.” Her smile is so gentle, her voice so kind, that it takes a moment for me to actually realize what she’s saying. “You can change a photon here and there, so you tell yourself you’ve got some sort of control over things. But you don’t. None of us do. It all just got too complicated, it’s all just physics—”
My hand is stinging. There’s a sudden white spot, the size of my palm, on the side of Janet’s face. It flushes red as I watch.
She touches her cheek. “It’s okay, Keith. I know how you feel. I know how everything feels. We’re so tired of swimming upstream all the time …”
I see her, walking on air.
“You need to get out of here,” I say, talking over the image.
“You should really spend some time on campus, I could put you up until you get your bearings—”
“Shhhhh.” She puts a finger to my lips, guides me along the hall. “I’ll be fine, Keith. And so will you. Believe me. This is all for the best.”
She reaches past me and opens the door.
“I love you,” I blurt out.
She smiles at that, as though she understands. “Goodbye, Keith.”
She leaves me there and turns back down the hall. I can see part of her living room from where I stand, I can see her turn and face the window. The firelight beyond paints her face like a martyr’s.
She never stops smiling. Five minutes go by. Ten. Perhaps she doesn’t realize I’m still here, perhaps she’s forgotten me already.
At last, when I finally turn to leave, she speaks. I look back, but her eyes are still focused on distant wreckage, and her words are not meant for me.
“. . . what rough beast …” is what I think she says, and other words too faint to make out.
When the news hits the department I try, unsuccessfully, to stay out of sight. They don’t know any next of kin, so they inflict their feigned sympathy on me. It seems she was popular. I never knew that. Colleagues and competitors pat me on the back as though Janet and I were lovers. Sometimes it happens, they say, as though imparting some new insight. Not your fault. I endure their commiseration as long as I can, then tell them I want to be alone.
This, at least, they think they understand; and now, my knuckles stinging from a sudden collision of flesh and glass, now I’m free. I dive into the eyes of my microscope, escaping down, down into the real world.
I used to be so much better than everyone. I spent so much time down here, nose pressed against the quantum interface, embracing uncertainties that would drive most people insane. But I’m not at ease down here. I never was. I’m simply more terrified of the world outside.
Things happen out there, and can’t be taken back. Janet is gone, forever. I’ll never see her again. That wouldn’t happen down here.
Down here nothing is impossible. Janet is alive as well as dead; I made a difference, and didn’t; parents make babies and monsters and both and neither. Everything that can be, is. Down here, riding the probability wave, my options stay open forever.
As long as I keep my eyes closed.
THE SECOND COMING
OF JASMINE FITZGE
RALD
What’s wrong with this picture? Not much, at first glance. Blood pools in a pattern entirely consistent with the location of the victim. No conspicuous arterial spray; the butchery’s all abdominal, more spilled than spurted. No slogans either. Nobody’s scrawled Helter Skelter or Satan is Lord or even Elvis Lives on any of the walls. It’s just another mess in another kitchen in another one-bedroom apartment, already overcrowded with the piecemeal accumulation of two lives. One life’s all that’s left now, a thrashing gory creature screaming her mantra over and over as the police wrestle her away—“I have to save him I have to save him I have to save him—”
—more evidence, not that the assembled cops need it, of why domestic calls absolutely suck.
She hasn’t saved him. By now it’s obvious that no one can. He lies in a pool of his own insides, blood and lymph spreading along the cracks between the linoleum tiles, crossing, criss-crossing, a convenient clotting grid drawing itself across the crime scene. Every now and then a red bubble grows and breaks on his lips. Anyone who happens to notice this, pretends not to.
The weapon? Right here: run-of-the-mill steak knife, slick with blood and coagulating fingerprints, lying exactly where she dropped it.
The only thing that’s missing is a motive. They were a quiet couple, the neighbours say. He was sick, he’d been sick for months. They never went out much. There was no history of violence. They loved each other deeply.
Maybe she was sick too. Maybe she was following orders from some tumour in her brain. Or maybe it was a botched alien abduction, gray-skinned creatures from Zeta II Reticuli framing an innocent bystander for their own incompetence. Maybe it’s a mass hallucination, maybe it isn’t really happening at all.
Maybe it’s an act of God.
They got to her early. This is one of the advantages of killing someone during office hours. They’ve taken samples, scraped residue from clothes and skin on the off chance that anyone might question whose blood she was wearing. They’ve searched the apartment, questioned neighbours and relatives, established the superficial details of identity: Jasmine Fitzgerald, 24-year-old Caucasian brunette, doctoral candidate. In Global General Relativity, whatever the fuck that is. They’ve stripped her down, cleaned her up, bounced her off a judge into Interview Room 1, Forensic Psychiatric Support Services.