by Neil Clarke
Even state politicians were in on the feeding frenzy. Aides from the governor’s office had called, reminding Jerry of nice dinners he’d attended, honors he’d been granted, favors he’d received. Reminding him he was representing their state, as a kind of biz-tech-science celebrity. They told him in grandiose tones that they wanted Arizona to continue to attract future investment.
But it wasn’t any of those pestering people that bothered Jerry, in these late hours, when he roamed the halls like a ghost. It wasn’t even the shame of his failure. It was the problem itself—the taunting, impenetrable, impossible problem that dogged his entire career.
Damn it, the process should work. It should be viable. Everything Jerry knew about physics, about science, about biology, about humanity—everything led to the firm conclusion that his concepts and methods were sound.
So why were they struggling? Why were they floundering, stagnating, running the same futile trials again and again?
Jerry stopped. As if by chance, he found himself at the door of Lab B–15. The metal was painted green, windowless and featureless. An LCD on the wall displayed the room schedule. Nothing unusual that Jerry could see. Nothing problematic.
Jerry stomped away. He went back to the admin office, where, like a dog returning to a funny odor, Jerry checked the logs again. He took a tour through the entire institute, searching the silent rooms. One of the techs might be playing a prank.
But no one was here.
As always, Jerry was alone.
The featureless door of Lab B–15 summoned him back. It vexed Jerry, teased him with its mute inscrutability. It seemed to represent the universe at large, the stubborn laws of physics and physiology, defying his intellect and will.
Or rather, it was like a barrier erected in his mind itself. A dumb and offensive obstacle, impenetrable and obscure. An instantiation of his ignorance.
He slammed a palm to the ID pad, and with his other hand he jerked the handle down, violently, as if giving in to a bully’s taunts. And with his jaw set in anger, Jerry Emery pushed open the door.
And he was in his car, easing up the drive, blinking in the powerful sun.
The young man was sitting outside the parking garage, and right away Jerry thought that was weird. This was the Arizona desert, middle of summer. People never sat . . .
A squeal of brakes cut through the desert air. Jerry stopped short. He shouted out loud, almost banged his chin on the wheel as he jerked in alarm. The kid—Arvin Taylor—rose slowly from the curb where he’d been sitting, peering with concern into the car. Jerry sat back, gulping deep breaths. A gathering panic gripped his lungs.
The same. This was exactly the same.
He’d lived through this moment before.
Arvin came forward, squinting in the sun, and tapped the passenger window. Jerry sat as if numbed, unresponsive. Jerking into startled motion, he brought the window down.
“Hey, Doctor Emery? Are you okay?”
“I think . . .” Jerry held his breath, waiting for the tightness in his chest to loosen. “I think I’m having the world’s worst case of déjà vu.”
“Oh.” Arvin seemed unsure what to say. He glanced into the desert, squinting at the suburbs below. “I wanted to tell you—”
“Lab B–15.” Jerry looked up into the tech’s blinking face. “Let me guess. You think I should check out Lab B–15.”
Arvin’s face twitched, lips pulling back, as he winced in the merciless sun. He pawed at the back of his neck, self-conscious. “Uh, that’s right. It wouldn’t take long. But I really think you should take a look inside.”
“And find what, Arvin? What’s in the lab?”
Another spasm contorted Arvin’s face. Confusion mingled with compulsion, as if Arvin were a machine, programmed to obey two forceful but conflicting imperatives. “Lab B–15 . . .” he said falteringly.
Shaking his head, Jerry drove by, leaving the young man blinking on the curb. When, after a moment, Jerry checked his mirror, Arvin had disappeared.
With the intensifying quiver of terror in his chest, Jerry drove up the levels of the parking garage, locked his car, and ran to the coping wall.
The desert. The solar farms. The town.
All spread out below, the acres of solar panels in black, neat rows, and the curling arabesques of streets, with their identical houses on neat square lots.
Everything ordinary, orderly—but wrong.
Yes, it was true. Something in the scene, the layout of the houses, the grids of the solar farms, the desert itself—something was undoubtedly, ineffably wrong.
Jerry bit his knuckle, feeling the sweat burst out on his brow.
Underground, in the institute, Kim Naylor sat at her optical scanner, zapping away at her batch of slides. Tissue samples, sliced ultrathin, vanished into a fat red box, where the angled beam of a pulsing laser kicked them, whiff by whiff, into a centrifuge. Jerry hovered in the doorway, listening to the muted churn of the nearby S&D machine. Everything was ordinary, typical. A humdrum afternoon at the lab.
After he’d lingered in the door a moment, Kim turned and pushed up her glasses. “Hey. Jerry? Something wrong?”
Jerry backed away, rocking on his derbyshoe heels.
“You know,” Kim said, “as long as you’re here. I wanted to tell you. Lab B–15—”
“Lab B–15,” Jerry echoed, shrilly, hearing the hysteria rise in his voice. He pushed away and ran down the hall.
Jerry stumbled to a halt at the door of Lab B–15. The LCD inset was a colorful blur, smeared by the fear that distorted Jerry’s eyes. Jerry’s head was such a whirl that he had to stare for three seconds, forcing the display to resolve into clarity. Already he knew what it would say. Nothing unusual. Nothing out of sorts. Everything typical, everything ordinary, orderly and exact as a chessboard.
Jerry placed his palm to the scanner, listening for the beep.
And gripped the handle. And pushed down.
As the latch clicked open, Jerry stopped.
Wait. No. Not like this.
Take a deep breath. There, good. Another. Hold it.
Now. Step back.
Pause. Collect yourself. Think this through.
Jerry turned, smoothing his shirt with unsteady hands. He walked back down the hall.
Kim, at the end, was leaning out of Lab B–11. “Jerry? What in the world are you—?”
“Lab B–15,” Jerry said, cutting her short. “Kim—what exactly did you want to tell me?” Kim narrowed one eye, glasses askew, as she angled her head to indicate puzzlement. She seemed at once defensive and perplexed. “Well, I guess—just to take a look inside, that’s all.”
“At what? At what, Kim? What’s going on?”
The chief biologist’s eyes blinked rapidly. Her attention slid away, back to the optical scanner, the waiting stack of unfinished work. “You know, I should get back to these chemical assays. I think if I finish with the Bogstrand inputs, we can have volumetric analysis by Friday morning—”
Jerry grabbed her wrist. “Lab B–15, Kim. What’s going on in Lab B–15?”
Kim’s eyes were wide, flicking through alarm, fear, disbelief, settling at last on irritation as she glanced at the hand he had clamped around her wrist. “Jerry,” she said sternly.
He let go, struggling to calm himself, gulping air until his chest felt swollen, his heart like a piston, driving hard. His head became a buzzing blank of confusion; he couldn’t breathe enough to think clearly, couldn’t find the oxygen. “Sorry.” He was mumbling. “I just—you know how I am. I like things to be clear. I don’t like . . . drama.”
“I know how you are, Jerry.”
“It bugs me when things are—” He gave up. “Never mind. So you want me to check out Lab B–15?”
“I really think it would be a good idea.”
Jerry surrendered. He let Kim return to her work. He paced the hall, panting. Deep breaths, he told himself. Hold them in.
Déjà vu. Isn’t that what he’
d said to Arvin? It could be nothing more than a particularly inflamed case of déjà vu.
But no. Jerry knew it was more.
He paused outside his office. He’d been working on it for years, one challenge, one problem. Every day, he’d come in at 5 P.M. He’d greeted the staff, checked the logs, run the trials, reviewed the day’s results. And he’d ruminated on his failure.
The hum of equipment. The whirr of the surgical blades. The near subliminal whine of the CPU cooling fans.
It all iterated by imperceptible degrees, ticking with the inexorable subtlety of a processor clock. Monday to Sunday. Different staff schedules, but always the same regimen. Long hours of cogitating, pacing, muttering. Same actions, futile actions, repeating ad infinitum. Could Jerry have gotten confused? Time became strange, on a project like this. Monday blurred into Wednesday, Saturday into Sunday. Days dragged like years. And yet, paradoxically, an entire decade could pass without yielding measurable results. For they had taken on that transcendent task—
To have squeezed the Universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all. . .
Jerry entered his office. Notes blazed at him, red-marker traces of past and recurrent frustrations.
+2 TB for ephaptic arrays?
genetic expression states: more data? Less?
Noise reduction—still important!
And the calculations of nanometer volumes, data compression, interprocessor transmission speeds.
The computer—Jerry tapped a key. The logs were all here. He’d studied them, day after day, until his eyes were glazed, ciliary muscles no longer able to focus, mind running numbly over familiar numbers.
Full model failure occurs within five hundred seconds.
Irreversible degradation occurs at twenty-seven seconds.
Critical fragmentation begins at twenty seconds.
How many times had he ground through the same estimations, proposed and rejected the same solutions? More processing power. New scanning methods. Maybe the technology just wasn’t there.
And always he came to the same closed door.
Jerry left the computer and stood in the hall. Years of cudgeling his brain had yielded nothing. Cudgeling—how apt, that old cliché. Jerry felt beaten, breathless. People always told him he worked too hard.
On a hopeless whim, he moved down the hall, to the unforthcoming door with its LCD screen, its mocking green placard. Lab B–15. Jerry pressed the scanner. He flung the door open. He passed through—
And was back in his car, pulling up to the parking garage, eyes already shifting, by reflex, to the young man who would be sitting there, waiting on the curb—
“Doctor Emery?”
No, no, no!
“Doctor Emery, what’s wrong?”
2
Jerry pushed aside papers, rubbed his eyes, and held his throbbing head.
He stretched out a nerveless hand, tapped his computer. And for the thousandth time, he brought up the test results.
Concentrate, Jerry told himself. He had to think this through.
Jerry sat in his office, wallowing in the somnolence of the midnight hush. He had run through the time loop five more times before accepting it as a new feature of his reality. Every time he passed through the door of Lab B–15, the course of time reset; the night began again. That had been empirically verified—it was, from his limited and subjective point of view, a demonstrated fact.
With this established, Jerry had settled here, in his office, with his notes and records, locking the door and holing up in a secure and contemplative privacy.
Jerry was a scientist. His strength, his weakness, and his signature trait was a lifelong penchant for methodical thinking. Even in a state of panic—and what situation better justified a state of panic?—Jerry would do what he did best. He would pause and reason. He would work this out. He would, at the very least, form a hypothesis.
So, when Arvin made to address him, Jerry had shrugged the boy off. He had ignored everyone who tried to accost him. He had come straight to his office and turned on his computer and forced himself to concentrate, as best he could.
And he might—just might—have found an answer.
Jerry trained his weary eyes on the test results. For the millionth time, he ran the numbers. He flipped to the imager. With the lazy precision of habit, Jerry ran recorded trials at different speeds, different resolutions, viewing the results from different angles. In the data-visualization schematics of the imager, observations played out like abstract art, branching bolts of color-coded lightning.
Glimmers on water, Jerry thought. Streaks of reflected light. Shimmering traceries, cycling and swirling.
Cycling.
Repeating.
Jerry sat back, light-headed. It couldn’t be true.
But was it?
He pushed back his chair, shuffling through his piles of papers. Images flurried in Jerry’s frightened brain. Curling patterns of housing parks. Notes in red marker. Electric traceries.
A tightening in his chest.
What was it Henri Poincaré had said? The famous mathematician, in an anecdote often recounted, had been mulling over a math problem, contemplating key concepts without ever arriving at a result. And then, one day, he had put aside his work, gone for a walk, stepped onto a bus—and a brilliant discovery had come to him, in a flash of unexpected insight.
It was as if the answer had been there all along. Waiting, buried, like hidden treasure, somewhere in Poincaré’s subterranean mind.
Jerry pushed open his office door. Stumbling down the hall, he saw that everything was still hushed, vague, muted, unreal. Machines hummed softly—this was the only sound he heard.
If Jerry’s conjecture was right, he didn’t have long. A few more cycles, a few spins of the wheel. A few more ticks of the cosmic clock.
Jerry checked the rooms. Silence. The other employees had gone home for the night.
Jerry knew exactly how to summon them back.
He set his hand on the door of Lab B–15.
“I’ve called you here, tonight, to consider a hypothesis.”
Four faces looked up from the conference table below. Arvin and Kim sat on Jerry’s right hand. Facing them were Chris Lister and Marjorie Cheong, two computer scientists who handled the hardware setup and modeling software. Jerry waited to see how they’d respond.
They didn’t. The conference room was a scene of utter silence. As Jerry had expected.
“I want to run through this together,” Jerry said. “Now, be candid. Don’t hold back. If I’m right, we might have an answer to the problems we’ve been seeing. Questions?”
Arvin raised a hand.
“I have a question, Doctor Emery. Um—what happened to you?”
Jerry was taken aback. “Pardon?”
The young man dropped his hand. “You must have gotten engaged or something, right? Or you got a dog? Something’s changed.”
Jerry hesitated. After driving to the compound, this latest time through the loop, he’d grabbed Arvin’s hand and effectively dragged him to the institute. Jerry had done the same with Kim, then gone on to collect Chris and Marjorie, the only other colleagues who were still in the office. Upon recruiting these followers, Jerry had made sure to keep them in sight. No one was going to disappear on him tonight.
Not this time.
Not while he needed them.
Jerry drew a breath. “I’m afraid I don’t follow you, Arvin.”
The boy glanced around the table, making himself seem even younger by grinning lopsidedly. “Well, it’s just—we never do this. We never have meetings.”
“He’s right.” Kim nodded. Chris and Marjorie were nodding too. “This is probably the first staff meeting,” Kim said, “even a partial staff meeting, we’ve had in six years.”
“You never talk to us,” Chris put in. “Yo
u never want to hear our opinions.”
“You just give instructions,” Marjorie said.
“Then go into your office.”
“With your papers. Your notes.”
It was difficult to tell who was speaking, now. They chattered at once, finishing one other’s sentences.
“You run the same tests, again and again.”
“You get so annoyed when we do anything different.”
“Then you stay here alone.”
“All night.”
“Pacing.”
“Talking to yourself.”
“We never have social events.”
“I know, I know.” Jerry swallowed. “I know how things have been. In my defense—” He hesitated, wondering if it was worthwhile to explain. “In my defense, we’ve been in something of a crisis situation.”
“You mean because the tests aren’t working,” Arvin said.
“I mean because we don’t—because until now,” Jerry corrected himself, “we haven’t known why the tests weren’t working. We had no actionable theory. No useful hypothesis.”
“We might have figured it out,” Chris said, “if you ever talked to us. Even casually. We could have, you know, talked through the process. We might have found something different to try.”
“We’re doing that now,” Jerry said and held his breath. “Listen. You all have been trying to tell me something, and I . . . well, let’s say I’ve been a little preoccupied. But I want us all—”
They had that look on their faces. A dullness, a vagueness, as if a strange and adventitious notion had come to them. “Lab B–15,” Chris said, and the others nodded.
“Forget about Lab B–15,” Jerry said. “We’ll get to Lab B–15. Right now I want to talk about the work we’ve been doing here.”
Uncertain glances flitted from face to face. Jerry prompted them:
“We’ve had a total of twenty-seven test subjects. Five hundred and fifteen trials. What have we seen?”
“Well . . .” Arvin held his hands up. The answer was painfully obvious. “They fail. Every time.”