The Labyrinth Key

by Howard V. Hendrix

  When she asked what his own occupation was, Ben was taken off guard. Lately, he’d been much occupied with reading and researching Jaron Kwok’s notes. Saying anything about his work, however, might get him in plenty of trouble.

  “I’m on leave from my professorship at Berkeley,” he said. “Spending too much time doing crossword puzzles and playing computer games.”

  “Really? And what do you do when you’re not on leave?”

  “Mainly I work with undecidability and complementarity in informational and physical systems,” he said. “In quantum states before observation. In Turing’s halting problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Sort of a ‘law’ of computing. Say you want to run a particular program on a particular computer. You can’t know beforehand whether, for a given input, the computer will halt—that is, come to closure and output—or end up working endlessly on the input you gave it. The only way to find out whether or not the system halts or goes into some kind of infinite loop is to run it. You can’t know it until you do it.”

  “Sounds like a rule of thumb for everyday life,” Kimberly said, smiling and looking almost as if she cared. “How do you know what can or can’t be done until you try, y’know?”

  “Very true!” he said, the alcohol and her attention further loosening his tongue. “Undecidability and complementarity reflect the deep structure of the universe, if you ask me.”

  “How so?”

  “Everywhere you look you find incompatible properties not simultaneously observable,” Ben said, thinking of definitions and examples from the Kwok notes. “Yet, despite their incompatibility, each is essential to whole understanding. Observation is ‘either/or,’ but understanding is ‘not only…but also.’ You see it in Heisenbergian uncertainty on the position versus the momentum of a particle, even in the wave/particle duality itself.”

  “What’s that?”

  His physics-machismo challenged, Ben tried to think of a way to explain it. Finally he came up with one.

  “Easier to show than to tell,” he said. “If you can get me scissors, a sheet of paper, and tape or paste, I can make you a model….”

  Kimberly gave him an odd smile and stood up.

  “Never let it be said I don’t go the extra mile for my clients. I’ll be right back.”

  She returned from the women’s dressing area with scissors, paper, and tape. As Kimberly looked on, Ben cut a long rectangular strip of paper, gave the paper a half twist, and taped the ends together.

  “Okay,” he said, holding it up to her. “This is a Möbius strip. It’s a one-sided object. The outside becomes the inside and the inside becomes the outside, because it has only one side. The same is true of the edge. It looks like it has two but in fact it only has one. A single surface and a single edge. Take a right-handed glove, embed it in that surface, send it on a trip around the Möbius, and it becomes a left-handed glove, its own mirror image.”

  “My geometry teacher in high school showed us one of those,” Kimberly said, nodding. “And a weird shaped bottle, too.”

  “Right. Probably a Klein bottle, which has one surface and no edges. Cutting a Klein bottle into mirror-symmetric halves results in two Möbius strips, while attaching the edge of one Möbius strip to its mirror image twin forms a Klein bottle, topologically speaking. For our purposes we can keep it simple and say that the Möbius strip is analogous to the quantum state before observation.”

  “That’s ‘simple’?” Kimberly asked, cocking an eyebrow.

  “Sure. The Möbius is neither a sheet nor a loop, yet it’s both a sheet and a loop. Neither wave nor particle, but always potentially both. Cut it crosswise, and it collapses into a simple rectangular sheet, a strip of paper. Let’s call that a ‘wave.’

  “But cut a Möbius strip lengthwise down the middle like this, and you get a longer, double-twisted loop. Cut it lengthwise again and you get a pair of interlocking double-twisted loops. You can keep cutting those loops lengthwise, finer and finer, more loops and twists again and again, until infinity runs out. We can call those ‘particles.’”

  “I think I get it,” Kimberly said. “And this is evidence of what, again—Professor?”

  “Incompatible properties not simultaneously observable, yet coexisting at a deeper level nonetheless. You find it in mathematics and quantum computing—‘ones’ and ‘zeroes,’ if you like. You find it in language, particularly in code writing, where each letter in a transposition cipher retains its identity but changes its position, while in a substitution cipher each letter changes its identity but retains its position. It’s so universal it almost seems like a pattern in the mind of God.”

  “And that sounds like science fiction,” Kimberly said. “I don’t read the stuff.”

  “What do you read?”

  “Henry Miller and Virginia Woolf, lately.”

  “Really! What Woolf have you been reading?”

  “I just finished Mrs. Dalloway. I’m reading To the Lighthouse right now.”

  “Have you read The Waves?” Ben asked. “I highly recommend it. Stream of consciousness, kind of like James Joyce. Have you read any Joyce?”

  “Just Dubliners. I haven’t been able to make time for Ulysses or Finnegans Wake.”

  “You should, sometime in your life,” Ben said, wondering if the booze made him sound too professorial. “If you like Miller, you might want to try Pynchon and Burroughs and Wallace, too.”

  Glancing at the screen, she stood up and leaned over in front of him.

  “We’d better get down to it,” she said, crouching and spreading his knees apart, looking up at him from between them.

  “Right,” he said, taking a large bill from his wallet. “Will this cover it?”

  “No need. Your friend’s already paid.”

  “Oh, that’s right.”

  Kimberly squeezed her breasts together and rubbed their exposed tops against his head, face, and upper body. Soon she was undulating her entire torso against his. Dropping her tight shorts, she gyrated her pantied crotch in front of his face. Pulling at the sides of her panties, she revealed a cartoonishly cute image imprinted on the skin, left and slightly south of her right hip.

  “Is that a ‘Hello Kitty!’ tattoo?” Ben asked.

  “Bingo,” she said. “I grew up in San Diego—lots of tattoo parlors. Really loved ‘Hello Kitty!’ when I was thirteen. Then it was ‘Sailor Moon.’ Eventually it was ‘Hello, Sailor!’”

  He laughed in surprise. Turning around to face the wallscreen TV, she rubbed her buttocks vigorously against his crotch, then ended with one last breast-press against his face, before cupping his smile in her hands.

  He enjoyed it more than he felt he had any right to. They exchanged thanks, and she told him again what nights she worked.

  “Check out my dance before you go,” she said as they made their quick good-byes. “I’m no Möbius stripper, but I can shake it as well as anybody in town. Come see me again soon.”

  Ben nodded and watched her go, then got up and made his way back to the table.

  “Well,” Ike said when Ben returned, “how was it?”

  “Great,” Ben said, then smiled crookedly. “We talked about the intersection of quantum mechanics, topology, and information theory, and about modern and postmodern novels. Not exactly what I expected in a strip club, but fun.”

  “You sure know how to show a girl a good time,” Ike said wryly. “I’m glad you approved of my choice.”

  “Definitely. She’s eager to see me again soon.”

  Ike’s eyes narrowed, then he laughed.

  “Just don’t say ‘I think she really liked me!’ I’ll never be able to look at you with a straight face again.”

  They laughed. Soon Kimberly danced onto the stage and they took seats at the bar rail around the stage. In the course of her act she showed off her tattoo again, and fully revealed her breasts.

  “See?” Ike said. “I knew they were real. No implants—I could tell.”

/>   They staggered out to Ike’s car not long after Kimberly finished. Ben rambled on about the two biggest types of implants, cosmetic and electronic, before passing out on the way home. He had a quick flash of a dream about a woman whose breast enhancements flashed corporate logos from just beneath the skin, subdermal neon tattoos. He awoke to find Ike shaking him.

  “Oakland Hills,” Ike said. “All passengers must exit the vehicle. See you at jiu-jitsu.”

  Ben gave a groggy good-bye, then watched as his new friend’s car slid away. He stared at the late-night lights of Oakland and San Francisco spread out on the plain below, glitter marching toward the ocean under the moon. Turning and staggering up the steps to his front door, he fumbled with his keys and nearly fell into the house when the door finally swung open.

  Woo, he thought. Road of excess. Palace of wisdom. Life is like spelunking. Sometimes you have to go through some mighty dark places before you can really appreciate the light.

  “Life is like spelunking,” he professed drunkenly to himself, having no small difficulty with that s word while making his way down the entry hall. “Life is like spelunking….”

  He repeated the small mantra until he almost managed to believe it. Almost made it to the master bedroom, too, before the guilt hit and he began thinking confusedly. Of Reyna. Of those few bad months, after he broke off all communication with his parents, but before he met Reyna. Of his nights spent drunk in strange hotel rooms, pissing in the sink, drinking from the toilet, after yet another failed pursuit of still stranger women. Of his mother bitterly protesting, “Everybody always blames the mother, especially when she’s black.”

  Reyna had saved him from himself, then. But now she was gone—because he hadn’t been able to save her. With Reyna, he’d been able to put away all the darkness of his past, avoid the behaviors he might otherwise have fallen into—like becoming a pay-for-play strip club habitué. Without her to be his anchor now, was he drifting toward disaster once again?

  He sat on the edge of the bed—fully clothed, full of remorse, and in a very dark place—until he fell backward, asleep.

  Ben is standing in front of a hall, lecturing to a class filled with women, all of whom look like Reyna or Kimberly or Jaron Kwok’s widow, Cherise. Before him on the podium stands a copy of the US Army’s April 1976 publication, The Art and Science of Psychological Operations: Case Studies of Military Application, opened to page 666, “The problem of the unintended audience,” by an author also known as Felix C. Forrest.

  “The quantum undecidability of the nature of light prior to measurement arises from a true indeterminateness,” he says, apropos of nothing on page 666. “‘Neither wave nor particle’ asserts that, prior to measurement, light is neither one nor the other. ‘Not both wave and particle’ asserts that light, prior to measurement, isn’t a combination of one and the other. ‘Neither/nor’ functions distributively, positing a doubled negative. ‘Not both…and’ functions collectively, negating a singled positive—”

  A woman—whose name he somehow knows is Sophia, but who looks far too much like Reyna as a grad student—jumps up, interrupting him.

  “In matters of privacy and quantum mechanics,” she says, pointing her finger fiercely at him, “what is invisible to the naked eye is also naked to the invisible eye!”

  —lefty loosey, protect the male—

  —when I touch you there, when you touch me here—

  —sisters fighting, ants burning—

  The child Ben is crouching beside anthills with magnifying glass turned burning-lens in hand, bewildered victims twisting, smoking pismire, catching fire, but as he stands up years pass and he believes he is leaving childish things behind. Alone and naked and afraid to look at himself under the open night sky, the lights of Oakland and San Francisco spread out before him.

  He looks down, and in the void he sees a sky, and in the sky there is a void dark with excess of bright, formless yet turning, an immense whirling black fog of heat, an enormous and terrible storm of the eye, blotting out the stars, uncreating the world as it moves, unsaying the word that was in the beginning. The Golden Gate Bridge disappears into it. The lights of the cities go dark. Block after block the hot silencing darkness spreads.

  No barrier made by reason, order, or life can stand against the silently turning void. Waxing and growing, the eye of the invisible devours everything in its path. Before it, he is boy to wanton gods, powerless to run or hide from the tornado extending down from the body of the clouds, looking male from the outside, female from the inside.

  In the last instant, even as it engulfs and melts him, even as its endarkening silence absorbs and disperses his consciousness, thinking beyond thought he understands that last time, there were victim-heroes enough to send it back. All of them haunted by the feeling that, next time—this time, his time—there would be no one to stop it, none who could prevail against it….

  Ben roused to the sound of what he thought was an autumn birdsong. More than half asleep, he sat up in bed, still feeling obscurely guilty. Too wild a night of drink and debauchery, he thought. That, and too damned much time spent working with Kwok’s documents. Unlike Jaron Kwok, however, he could still appreciate wild nights. He wasn’t stone-cold deaf to the world of birdcalls and sunshine. Not yet.

  As Ben came more awake, the “birdsong” resolved itself into the ringing of his doorbell. Shrugging on a red silk robe, Ben stumbled to the front door. A courier waited there, with an electro-pen and pad for him to sign, and a thumbprint reader waiting for an impression. When Ben had done all that was required, the man handed over a slim, high-security message cylinder. Ben thanked the courier, then closed the door as the man disappeared down the front walk.

  The cylinder was from Marilyn Lu. He pressed his thumbs into both ends and the flash of a retina scan—annoyingly bright—read his eyes, despite their bloodshot condition. An instant later Lu’s talking head spoke to him.

  “Something interesting about that ‘ash,’” Lu said. “You suggested that it might be data, but I think it’s more than that. By accident I spilled blood on some ash samples, and they reacted strangely. So I’ve been ‘growing’ them—if that’s the word—on blood media. Here’s what I’ve been finding.”

  On the screen inside the message tube, light-micrographs and videos appeared, showing labyrinths of dark, spiral waves, some still, others in motion. They reminded Ben of cell colony synchrony, and of carvings in neolithic passage graves. The shimmering undulations of the dark waves, in video, were psychedelic enough to make Ben faintly queasy.

  He fought down an impulse to look away. A good thing, for what appeared next was strange indeed. Electron micrographs, and further videos, recorded at high-enough resolution to show in action the individuals making up those waves: busy subcellular, submicron organic mechanisms in action. Had to be. Bits of data could never move and work like that. Ben had never seen anything quite like what he was looking at, but he suspected immediately what they were.

  Binotech.

  The characters in the holo-cast had been talking about it—it was the leak that had so bothered his NSA masters. Jaron’s notes and the audio-cleaned version of the ’cast linked the stuff to quantum DNA computers, to information density that increased as 4N, where N was the number of “4-bits,” the quantum DNA analog to gates or transistors….

  Shit! Jaron must have had some new binotech prototype in his implants! He was gone, but the tech was still here, rising from his ashes.

  The memory of the silently turning void overlaid itself on the image of the shimmering dark waves in the video Marilyn had sent him, until finally he had to look away.

  IN PLAIN SIGHT

  NEW ORLEANS

  Don Sturm entered the All You Zombies coffee bar, then stood looking over the patrons until he found Karuna. Her silky chocolate skin and braided black hair—his hands had known both well enough that at the ends of his wrists they seemed heavy, clumsy, empty now. As she looked up and spotted him, the mass of mu
lticolored beads on her myriad tiny braids clicked together like a fall of soft rain hitting parched earth.

  “So what brings you to the city below sea level?” Karuna asked, standing and offering Don a hand. He shook it awkwardly. “Must be important—it’s been weeks since anyone’s heard from you. Then the message you finally did send was so cryptic…”

  Don glanced around the largely empty coffee bar, hoping he wasn’t being too obvious—just enough to clue Karuna in. He suspected the place had the usual panoply of security devices endemic to public spaces in twenty-first–century America.

  “No more cryptic than it needed to be,” he said, leaning closer to her. “If I’d thought I could say what I needed to without a meat meeting, I would have.”

  “Why couldn’t you?” Karuna asked. She cocked her head forward and to one side, and its load of rainbow-beaded braids shifted correspondingly.

  “I don’t trust our security,” Don replied, glancing at the polished metal of the tabletop. His blue-dyed hair was reflected there, cut short in the shape of the Celtic knot tattoo that lay beneath. “Some of what I’ve got to say uses key words that show up on too many watch-lists.”

  “So you don’t think we’re secure? Even in Cybernesia?”

  “Especially in Cybernesia. Medea-Indahar has too much of a presence there, and knows too much about my connection with P-Cubed.”

  “Well, that’s gratitude for you!” Karuna hissed, annoyed now. “Medea saves Cybernesia from an NSA attack, and that doesn’t count for anything?”

  “Our ‘savior’ as good as admitted to having NSA connections, Karuna. I tell you, M-I’s not to be trusted.”

  “Well, I seem to recall that you were thinking about working for NSA yourself, once upon a time.”