by Lavie Tidhar
“The what?”
“It’s just a thing we learn to do in Brazil,” Raitek explained. “How to do things with whatever you have at hand.”
“Oh, you mean a kludge,” Jonathan said.
“No, not a kludge,” Raitek corrected him. “Kludges are for electromechanical things. A gambiarra goes for anything. Even abstract stuff.”
“And how do you propose we use this gambiarra of yours…?” asked Patel, already feeling very uncomfortable. The Brazilian guy was insane.
“First, assuming that everything you experienced was absolutely real, and not an illusion provoked by extreme immersion, what probably happened was that a bubble formed inside the carriage. Not a spherical, topologically perfect bubble, but an extradimensional structure, or better yet, an n-dimensional structure according to the parameters of the Calabi-Yau Manifold.
“Theoretically, a Calabi-Yau space can project itself beyond the borders of our, let’s say for lack of a better term, ‘traditional’ space. Kähler manifolds could also apply, but the calculus involved seems to make it a poorer choice. Right now, it doesn’t matter: we should be able to repeat the experiment with no problem at all and no harm to the test subjects.”
“Test subjects? What do you mean, test subjects?” said Patel.
“May I go again?” asked Jonathan.
Damn, thought Patel. This is getting out of control.
* * *
As Raitek explained to them, the Calabi-Yau Manifold (if that was what really formed inside the elevator) opened not a window, but a kind of excrescence, something like a vesicle, a ballooning organ with only one end stretching towards our so-called normal reality. So, one could enter and exit the CYM via this stretch the same way one could use a door—probably, in this case, the elevator doors. Maybe they would not even need to do alignment procedures.
“We’ll probably have to do lots of calibrations for years and decades before going for something bigger,” Raitek said. “That is, if the mechanism isn’t already locked in 2011.”
“What makes you think so?” asked Patel.
“Nothing special,” said Raitek. “Science fiction stories. And wormhole theories.”
“I thought you were pretty sure about the manifold.”
“Well, quem tem dois, tem um. Quem tem um, não tem nenhum.”
“Come again?”
“It’s an old Brazilian saying. If you have two, actually you have only one. If you have one, you have none. Bottom line: you better be prepared and have a spare—a spare tire, a spare sonic screwdriver, a spare condom, a spare of anything you can possibly think of, because you will most probably need it.”
“A spare theory as well?”
“Yep. That too.”
* * *
In the second controlled experiment, the elevator fell four decades in three seconds.
Naturally, it wasn’t the elevator that was really falling, as it was mounted on a spring-based shock absorber structure. But the principle seemed to remain, as Jonathan reported being taken to a different decade each time. They weren’t able to calibrate the instruments well enough to account for years.
Another precaution they took this time was securing Jonathan to the carriage by rappelling equipment, harness, static rope attached to the guardrail. It wasn’t necessary in the end, but they did it all the same. All that Jonathan did was to get out whenever he happened to be, take a couple of steps, recording every sight and sound for no more than five minutes, then get back to the interior of the carriage, close the doors and pray to return to this own era. Which he did both times.
The only occasion nothing happened was when they decided to turn the immersion environment off.
“Okay, one thing we can be quite sure of,” Raitek concluded after the second experiment, “is that the immersion machinery is somehow the key. Now, another question: can we use it outside the elevator with the same result? Or can we use another elevator and different immersion machinery to the same effect?”
“This last question I can easily answer,” Patel said. “No, we cannot. We had two elevators and half a dozen immersion machineries running in parallel. Only this one presented this result.”
“Then we could normally say that something is wrong with this particular setting,” Raitek said. “Therefore, it’s an anomaly.”
“We already knew that.” This time Patel smiled.
Raitek turned back to him and said, “Hiran, I already know something else: you are a top-notch robotic expert who does not like to have your time wasted and is deeply pissed off by my very presence at what you consider to be your lab, even though you’ve worked for this company for much less time than I have. So I will propose a deal: don’t be smug with me and I will tell you what you don’t already know. How about that?”
Patel remained unamused. But this time he replied.
“As long as we can reciprocate.”
Raitek just nodded. And extended his hand.
* * *
What didn’t they know? First off, they couldn’t ascertain if the bubble inside the car was the byproduct of the Calabi-Yau Manifold or a portal to a wormhole, but the former theory held more water than the latter—issues of mass and gravity pertaining to wormholes made it almost impossible to think of them as a viable option.
The second thing: they never could reproduce the experiment outside the elevator. And the car had to be in motion, if only at a small rate of acceleration.
Acceleration. Raitek wondered if it played a major role in the events after all.
At the end of the day, he took the elevator in the central shaft and pushed the button for the top floor.
Raitek stepped out of the elevator and into the penthouse of the 400th floor. It was a sparsely furnished space, all-white, with very few interior walls. He liked the lofty aspect of the place, its half-spartan, half-samurai cleanliness. It reminded him a bit of his summer refuge in Rio; the concrete-and-woodplank house in the middle of Tijuca National Park was very different structurally, but the silence was almost the same. It gave him freedom to think.
He took a long, hot shower and lay on the queen-size futon in the bedroom. He closed his eyes and initiated the memory palace walkthrough.
The meditation technique took less time and was less cyberpunkish than he'd described it to Patel. Instead of spiky buckyballs, all he could see this time were cubes: cubes fitting inside each other, like an ancient 3D version of Tetris he’d played at his grandpa’s house as a kid—only in his vision they penetrated each other, almost as if they were having sex.
Then, suddenly, they all snapped into a giant megacube which started to slide down along an axis, and this axis was a shiny metal cable with no discernible end in sight. Raitek couldn’t see the interior of the cube. He did know, however, that the cable ran inside it as well, and anyone who touched it would be hurt by its speedy passage through the cube. The faster the cable ran, the bigger the chances someone would be badly cut or burned by the friction.
Acceleration mattered.
It was then that Raitek called Patel and Jonathan for an emergency meeting.
* * *
“Are you kidding?” Patel said.
“Is this what you called gambiarra?” Jonathan asked, amazed.
“This is one of its many possible variations, yes,” Raitek said. “Are you willing to try?”
“What are the risks?” Patel asked him.
Raitek spread his hands in the air.
“Honestly? No idea. All I know is that acceleration seems to be the key, here. I may be wrong; in which case, nothing out of the ordinary will occur. Hell, the fact the we will be using a different elevator means it probably won’t result in anything at all, so why not?”
Patel stopped a bit to consider. Indeed, why not? Wasn’t it to get out of the sameness of Old Europe that he had come to Ghana? Deep inside, didn’t he want to take chances, to take risks? Indeed, why the fuck not?
“Okay, but on one condition.”
“Na
me it.”
“I will go.”
* * *
The next day, a teary-eyed Jonathan was beside Raitek in the control room, following the preparation for the third experiment.
They had spent the previous night transferring the whole immersion machinery array to the elevator shaft at the center of the floor. It was a good thing that Raitek had the necessary clearance to bypass the proper channels.
“Too convenient, if you ask me,” Patel grumbled as they mounted the wafer-thin screens of the array inside the carriage.
“Hey, it’s all in the name of filthy lucre,” Raitek said half-jokingly. “They don’t want to jeopardize their investment. We live in the Golden Age of Science, blah blah blah.”
“You don’t believe that?”
“I believe in everything, Hiran,” he said. “The world is a big place, and everything you can possibly imagine exists. I’ve seen many strange things with these eyes.”
“Such as…?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“I do. Really.”
Raitek just shrugged. “Nothing that you haven’t seen in India.”
“I grew up in England.”
Raitek went mute for a while. Wow, that’s a first, Patel thought.
“Sorry,” he said after a minute. “I meant no prejudice.”
“It’s all right.”
“No. My grandfather hated it when some guy from the US called us chicanos or tried to talk to us in Spanish. Same thing, no excuse. Do you drink?”
“Not much. But a beer, occasionally, yes.”
“When this is all over, will you let me buy you a pint?”
Patel wobbled his head in a slight amusement. “Yes, sure. Thanks.”
“Thank you, Hiran. Thank you.”
That was then. This was now: a sweaty Patel checking his harness, his wraparound recording glasses and the impromptu emergency kit Raitek had given him at the last minute, checking them two, three, four times. He looked like a man with OCD. He didn’t give a fuck. He just wanted to know he was safe.
“All systems go, Hiran,” Raitek’s voice came over the elevator’s intercom. “Ready when you are.”
“Okay,” he replied. “Wish me luck.”
“Boa sorte, meu camarada,” Raitek said.
Patel breathed deeply and remembered what they had discussed in the last meeting: in the previous experiments, they had been very cautious, pressing buttons for no more than fifty floors, even though the feeling of acceleration wasn’t exactly corresponding.
This time, though, what should they do? More of the same could only bring the same results. More floors down could provoke an accident if they jumped to a past when the elevators hadn’t been invented yet. More floors up, on the other hand, could mean an incredible future—but what if they ended up in an ecologically improved Earth, one with no arcologies? What then? More importantly, would any of these scenarios affect the bubble and anyone inside it?
They just didn’t know.
In the end, they had reached a decision.
Patel pushed the button for one hundred floors up.
It was no big deal. The communication with Raitek was cut up immediately, but that was to be expected. The acceleration was smooth, but noticeable.
Then, full stop. The doors started to open. Patel felt immediately a freezing cold.
And the dark of space.
He was sucked to the void instantly, but felt the tug of the rope just before he could fall into the blackness. The only reason his eyes didn’t explode in their orbits was that the glasses were watertight, but he knew they wouldn’t resist for long. He gasped; not only he couldn’t breathe but he felt his trachea burning cold.
This is it, he thought. I’m going to die here.
His hands were already fumbling in the emergency bag.
And found the small oxygen unit there.
He quickly secured it over his mouth, but he couldn’t adjust the rubber strap: he started to feel numb, his fingers losing their grip. He should close the doors before he could inhale safely. He closed his eyes for just a second. Focus, Hiran, Focus. Then he opened his eyes and caught the rope, starting to pull himself painfully with one hand while still holding the oxygen mask with the other.
Then the mask slipped off; it started to drift away slowly, but by then he had already turned to the inside panel of the car, lifted a hand and pushed the emergency button. The doors closed. The car was a vacuum: would he survive when he got back?
* * *
He did.
“We were worried about you, mate,” Raitek said to him, sitting by his bed in the building’s small medical ward.
“I wonder why.” Patel managed a shadow of a smile.
Jonathan looked at him from a distance.
“He won’t admit it, but he was scared shitless,” Raitek said.
“I know,” Patel said. “I was too.”
“We all were.”
“How did you know?”
“I didn’t. It was an educated guess.”
“Too educated.”
“Here’s the thing: it turns out that acceleration wasn’t really the issue after all. You have think in systems of coordinates and geolocation tools. Later that night, I started wondering, what about the Earth’s orbit? Shouldn’t we be calculating to compensate the transit of Earth around the Sun? You’d be traveling in space as well as in time, after all, so your bubble would be slingshot towards Mercury, probably.”
“Probably.”
“I had too much on my mind to do all the math.”
“That makes sense.”
“Then I figured, hell, it’s too late for that, but not too late to take some precautions, just in case.”
“In case.”
“Exactly.”
“Thanks.”
“No. Thank you. You were the hero.”
“Are you fucking kidding me? You conned me into doing it. I won’t forget this!”
“We’ll discuss it over a beer as soon as you get better, all right? I’m going now,” and he started to get out of the room.
“One more thing,” Patel said.
“Yes?”
“Is Raitek a common name in Brazil? I must confess I don’t know much about your country aside from football, but I’ve never even heard of such a name before anywhere.”
Raitek smiled.
“Say it out loud again. This time slowly, separating the syllables. And don’t forget to exaggerate the initial R.”
“Like a roar.”
“Exactly.”
Patel did it.
“Fuck. Fuck.” He couldn’t help it.
The other man shrugged. “My mother was a sucker for puns. And for hi-tech too, of course. How’s that for a geek, huh?”
“One more thing,” Raitek said, coming back to the bedside. “I took the liberty of filing the whole project under a FAIL tag. I already had a talk with the rest of the team. They were pretty shaken up after what happened to you, and they all agreed with it.”
“Wait, why? After all we did?”
“Because a FAIL tag is better than a DANGEROUS one. A DANGEROUS tag means it’s a good project, ready to be revived at a later date with the right team and the right equipment. That is…”
“Not us.”
“Exactly.”
“But then what? Did I work in vain?”
“Not at all,” Raitek said. “I have clearance with failed projects. What would you say if I got you a transfer to Brazil? We have an arcology in São Paulo that’s a bit higher than this, and you’d have everything you needed to start working right away—including a better paycheck.”
Patel squinted. He could feel a massive headache coming.
“What’s the point? What can we do there we can’t do here?” he tried to keep his voice down.
“We have a good aerospace agency in Brazil,” Raitek said.
“I still don’t understand.”
Then Raitek smiled again that devious smile of his.
“Why, Hiran, you wanted to open a travel agency, and so does the company. But, after what happened to you, I was thinking of aiming a little higher. Why not the stars, Hiran? Why not space travel?”
* * *
Hiran Patel and Raitek da Silva arrived in São Paulo three weeks later—time enough to move the necessary equipment and transfer everyone in the team who wanted to go with them (a condition Patel imposed to close the deal). Jonathan was among the group.
In Brazil, the team doubled in size, as did their workload. They had better working conditions, better equipment, an almost stress-free environment and lots of money.
“We can do better, Hiran,” Raitek told him when the lab was finally ready to work. “We can change the game for good.”
“The company will back us in this?” Hiran asked him.
“Never mind the company,” he said. “I’m applying the gambiarra method here too.” Suddenly he stopped smiling and said, “Want to know why?”
Hiran stared at him.
“Why the gambiarra? Of course I do.”
“No. The gambiarra goes without saying. I meant why Brazil.”
“Oh. Okay, carry on.”
“In Ghana, as well as in Europe, Hiram, space exploration is still the domain of the military. Not in Brazil.
“We also had a military space program here in the 20th century, did you know that? No, you didn’t. Almost nobody didn’t. It was no big secret. It just happened people wasn’t that much interested in anything coming from a banana republic then. Until 2003, when a rocket intended to get two satellites in orbit exploded on its launch pad. It killed twenty-one civilian techs.
“After what was considered a thorough military enquiry—to which no civilian had access—the official investigation report said that the explosion was caused by dangerous buildups of volatile gases, deterioration of sensors and electromagnetic interference at the launch site. Nobody could prove if it was true, but after that our space program pretty much stopped. The military one, that is.”
“You mean that there are civilian companies working on space exploration now?”