“That sounds like a very full nothing,” Don said, trying to keep himself from laughing.
“No doubt. But it allows me to rewrite Sartre so I can believe in the idea of consciousness as a special kind of nothing: That sacred nothingness out of which comes everything, if you like.”
“Then it makes as much sense to think of physical reality as a hole in consciousness,” Don said, at first in mockery but gradually growing more serious, “as it does to think of consciousness as a hole in physical reality.”
“I hadn’t really thought of it that way,” Barakian said, pondering. Moving his hands through the control space, an old sorcerer conducting his apprentices in their work, Barakian began to smile beatifically.
“I knew you were right for the job!” he continued. “So you see, the risk of utter annihilation may almost be worth it. Not for whatever sort of informational superweapon the governments or corporations may be after. Not even for Tetragrammaton’s gateway singularity through the space-time fabric.”
“For what, then?” Don asked, more impatient than he had at first realized.
Barakian gestured. A triptych of images—of memory palaces and memory theaters—leapt onto the display screens. The largest of these was labeled The Memory Theater of Giulio Camillo, with Publicius’s Spheres of the Universe as a Memory System off to the right side. The enormously complex Memory System of Giordano Bruno stood off to the left, looking like some sort of Kabbalistic sunwheel-within-wheels.
Barakian juxtaposed these with uncaptioned Chinese ideographic scripts.
“Think about it. Maybe Jaron Kwok was trying to achieve something different. Another kind of hole through the wall. Through a transcultural clash between western mnemonics and Chinese ideograms. Between iconographic imagination and ideographic imagination.”
Looking at him, Don was struck by just how caught up in all this Barakian was. He looked a bit like a mad scientist, only without much of the scientist.
“An interesting speculation,” Don said, “but what makes you think that?”
Barakian called up images of the Dossi painting, as taken from the Kwok holo-cast, then allowed that image to morph.
“First we see the most readily recoverable caption—‘Hide insane plight in plain sight,’” Barakian said. “Then, we go much deeper. As the image-processing algorithms continue their number crunching, several steganographic symbols, computationally suppressed up to this point, begin to appear in the corners of the overall image, along with a glyphic script across the top.”
Don watched and nodded, although he could by no means read all of the glowing golden script which had begun to appear, like hidden letters on a magic ring.
“You should recognize the symbol in the upper left there,” Barakian said, highlighting that section of the painting.
“Pi,” Don said.
“Yes. The ratio of the circumference to the diameter of the circle—a transcendental number. Sixteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, but Phoenician in origin and related to the Hebrew pe. The symbol in the upper right there is aleph, first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In Kabbalah it represents the infinitude and unity of God. It is also the symbol the mathematician Georg Cantor gave to his infinities, or transfinite cardinal numbers.
“The symbol in the lower right hand corner is the Chinese ideograph yao, which the mnemotechnician and Jesuit missionary to China, Matteo Ricci, divided in such a way that it can be translated as both ‘necessity’ and ‘a woman from the west, who is a huihui or follower of a Western religion.’
“The script across the top center, the companion to the caption in English below, is the Akkadian word babilu, ‘Gate of God,’ from which we get the word Babel.”
“As in ‘Tower of’?”
“Yes.”
“Interesting,” Don said, trying to downplay his fascination. “Do you know how they relate to each other?”
“Not exactly. Nor their correspondence with the image of the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall as ‘memory palace,’ either. We do have some theories, however.”
“And?”
“We think they suggest what Jaron Kwok may have been after. Not the ‘who’s-on-top’ of information wars and superweapons. Not the vertical transcendence of the Tower of Babel. And not Tetra’s hole into godlike power.”
“What, then?” Don asked. He realized that this was just the way Barakian sorted through his thoughts, but he still found it hard to keep the impatience out of his voice.
“I believe Kwok was trying to make possible a transcultural amalgamation,” Barakian said. “A hypercultural chimera capable of contacting that ‘great mind’ or ‘archetypal power’ or ‘superconscious energy’—whatever you like—and restoring what was lost at Babel.”
Don peered at the screens and projections that stood before them, but saw nothing that resembled a “hypercultural chimera.”
“How does that fit with what we’re looking at?”
“We think what you’re looking at is somehow the ‘Gate of God,’ or at least part of the key for opening it. Listening to what you said about holes and minds and realities, it occurs to me now that the Gate of God may actually refer to a sort of trapdoor.”
“What do you mean?”
“Some theorists, extending Einstein’s work, believe that matter can be made to ‘degrade’ into energy much more readily than energy can be made to ‘upgrade’ into matter. There’s a break in symmetry. In information theory terms, it’s analogous to an asymmetric or ‘one-way’ function.”
“Okay,” Don said, “I see the analogy.”
“For those theorists,” Barakian continued, his hands continuing to fly this way and that, “matter and energy are just waypoints on an information spectrum. That spectrum also includes consciousness as a more complex form of information than matter or energy. Consciousness can be made to ‘degrade’ more readily into matter and energy than matter and energy can be made to ‘upgrade’ into consciousness. Another one-way function.”
“And the trapdoor…?” Don ventured.
“If you include a trapdoor in a one-way function, there’s secret information, a private key that makes it possible—perhaps even easy—to reverse the one-way operation. If our universe is a vast cryptogram, then maybe the Gate of God trapdoor allows the reversal of those one-way operations that keep us following a particular arrow of time. Maybe it allows a sort of horizontal transcendence, a translation into other universes. Travel through time and space, and other times and other spaces—and that would be very useful.”
“It sounds pretty metaphysical,” Don said, shaking his head, thinking of doors that were keys and keys that were doors.
“I never met a physics I didn’t like,” Barakian said with a wink, folksy yet sly, equal parts Will Rogers and Groucho Marx. “It sounds metaphysical because it is. The physical and the metaphysical are another entangled complementarity.”
Don frowned. Barakian tended to use “entangled” in a more metaphysical sense than he liked.
“But isn’t something missing?” Don asked, looking at a gap in the evolving pattern. “Shouldn’t there be a symbol in the fourth corner—the lower left—too?”
“Ah, missing information! Yes, most likely. But didn’t you say yourself that that’s where the surprises come from?”
“One of us did, no doubt.”
“Well, then,” Barakian said, slapping him good-naturedly on the shoulder. “Surprise! Now it’s your job to find the ‘insignificant’ incompletenesses others have overlooked. To find the stone the builders have rejected. To ferret out those not completely insignificant epiphanies that will give us the answers.”
Don nervously sat down and picked up one of the ancient books from the Huntington library, with which Barakian and his connections had apparently absconded.
“Look, when you come right down to it, I’m just a programmer,” Don protested. “On my better days I’m not a half-bad mathematician. But I’m no metaphysician. If you want epiphanies you shoul
d hire a priest.”
Barakian smiled, turning off the virtuality system and picking up his hat before stepping back down to the floor.
“A wise man once said that religions are systems of thought that contain unprovable statements, and they therefore require an element of faith. What Gödel taught mathematicians is that mathematics is not only a religion—it’s the only religion that’s able to prove its own unprovability. There’s no ‘higher’ priesthood than that.”
Don turned from the books and looked glumly at the hanging screens that mutely proclaimed the challenge that was facing him.
“I guess it’s true of mathematics,” Don said, “that faith is not required in order for you to believe that there are places in mathematics where faith is required.”
Barakian nodded. “Donald, you first thought this place was a bomb shelter, but you might also want to think of it as a temple, or lab, or virtuality studio. Most of all, it’s now your hermitage. We’ll keep food in the kitchen. Next to the backup battery room we’ve already got a place set up for you to sleep, and it’s quite comfortable. But, like a hermit in a cell, you’re going to be alone here most of the time. Do you think you can handle that?”
Don thought about it. As long as he didn’t have to get one of those funky monastic haircuts, it didn’t sound half-bad. He’d never been a particularly sociable person anyway, out in the meat world.
“Yeah, I think I can handle it.”
“Good,” Barakian said, putting on his hat. “On that note, then, I’ll take my leave.”
Don looked back toward the books and was struck by a thought.
“Wait a minute. What about scholars who might come looking for these books in that library down south?”
“If they know that these books exist at all,” Barakian said, glancing over his shoulder, “they will simply be told they’re being repaired, and aren’t currently available. A temporary inconvenience. A transient and insignificant incompleteness, you might say. And they’ll remain so until you no longer need them, and they are returned. Relax. We’ve already taken that into account. Accommodations have already been made—for you and for the world. Just stay focused on your work.”
“You don’t mind if I also try to figure out where my cell here actually is, do you?”
Barakian laughed.
“Not at all. You shouldn’t have much trouble. I’ve given you enough hints, after all. Disturb the universe, and me, whenever necessary.”
With that, Barakian tipped his hat and walked away. Don looked around the space of his new—what? Home? Sanctum sanctorum? Hermitage? Fortress?
Prison?
Before him, five telepresent technicians waited, remote yet expectant, waiting for direction. Absently Don scratched the knot of blue hair on his skull and placed an X in the Dossi painting’s fourth corner. He intended it as a placeholder for the unknown, but it looked surprisingly right there.
“All right, people,” he said at last. The gravity of his task settled on his shoulders, a burden he could not shrug off. “Let’s throw some pictures on the walls of this cave.”
GOING ORTHOGONAL
KOWLOON
Dammit, dammit, dammit! Mei-lin Lu thought as she walked swiftly from her lab, the containment box tucked under her arm. Poor Patsy! She must think I’ve lost my mind, running out like this. Patsy would just have to deal with it—and if anyone could, she could. Patsy Hon was the best tech Mei-lin had ever worked with.
On the other hand, everything else was going crazy. But Mei-lin could only blame herself for that. Despite what she had suggested to Ben Cho, she hadn’t really believed she would prove to be so right, so soon. Her hunches, however, had proven to be more true than she could have imagined.
“Cassandra complex,” she muttered to herself as she walked down the corridor. The paradoxical bane of prophets, futurists, science fiction writers, psychics—and now her. In the myth of Cassandra, her predictions were invariably correct—and invariably disbelieved. Correct because disbelieved: Cassandra’s predictions would come true only for those who didn’t really believe Cassandra’s predictions would come true.
But what about Cassandra, then? If Cassandra really believed her predictions about her own life, then those predictions wouldn’t come true. But if Cassandra didn’t really believe those self-predictions, then those predictions would come true.
Thanks for the warning, Cass, Mei-lin thought. But of course, I didn’t heed it.
She punched the stainless steel button for the elevator, reminding herself as she waited that, after all, it was just ordinary DNA, in ordinary blood she had taken from Ben Cho. The map of restriction enzyme action matched with a very high degree of accuracy. Gel electrophoresis of the Cho sample, in both agarose and polyacrylamide gel, with both ethidium bromide and radioactive markers, yielded results that matched as exactly as the tests would allow. Hybridization rates and homology, too, were very high. The patterns of VNTRs were virtually identical.
Jaron Kwok and Ben Cho might possess different dermatoglyphic fingerprints, but their DNA fingerprints matched precisely. Their genes proved it once and for all. They were identical twin sons of different mothers, of different “races,” just as she’d suspected.
The doors opened and she stepped inside.
It would have been wiser if she had just proved the connection, then stopped. But no. She’d gone ahead and followed some mad impulse—intuition? scientific curiosity?—and further tested Cho’s blood sample. Not just for its DNA, but also on an uncontaminated portion of the remaining binotech ash she still possessed.
Stepping out of the elevator and toward the rear doors that led out of the police station, Mei-lin thanked every god of every religion she could think of that she’d at least had the foresight to run the Cho blood/Kwok ash test under high-level containment conditions. Especially after she saw how Cho’s blood sample and the binotech ash interacted.
She couldn’t help seeing it again in her mind’s eye. Under the influence of the previous blood samples, the binotech ash had communicated among itself and replicated its numbers. Interacting with Cho’s blood sample, however, it built things. The somatids, bloodborne bacteria, structures housed in the erythrocytes—all such endobionts became strangely shape-shifting and pleomorphic under its influence.
Exposed to Cho’s blood, the binotech itself underwent an orthogonal shift, as if another dimension had been added to its behavior—a z axis added to the x and y, unexplained and uncontained.
With the box of mysterious entities clutched tightly under her arm, Mei-lin felt as if she, too, had shape-shifted: From Cassandra to Pandora. She wondered if the box she was carrying might contain parasites and pestilences potent enough to make the worst of Pandora’s gifts look like a summer cold.
Mei-lin strode into the parking lot and toward her carpool vehicle, an unmarked patrol unit with a low-profile lightbar in the passenger compartment, and sirens hidden behind the vehicle’s grillwork. She opened the driver’s-side door and got in, well aware that she was about to violate procedure yet again by heading into harm’s way without a partner. She had no choice. Time was just too short.
Lu placed the containment box carefully on the seat beside her and strapped it in with the seatbelt. Had Jaron Kwok intended to leave a legacy of disaster behind him, hidden in his ashes? That didn’t make sense. If all the man wanted was vengeance on an uncaring world, why go to the trouble of creating so elaborate a mechanism? Especially since the mechanism required a “trigger”—Ben Cho. As far as she could tell, Kwok hadn’t even known that Ben would be the trigger.
And if Kwok’s bequest to the world wasn’t a biotron bomb, then what might the tiny things in the box actually be? And what were they up to?
Looking through the windshield but seeing nothing, Meilin knew she had to reach Ben Cho as quickly as possible. To discover what he knew—and what he didn’t know. Despite the odds, she felt a growing certainty that Ben somehow was the unsuspecting “trigger man.” Unless Kwok
had other twins Mei-lin knew nothing about, Ben Cho was the only backup, the only living system with the requisite DNA key to complete whatever it was Kwok had set in motion.
That meant Ben might be both dangerous and in serious danger. There were other groups who, if they knew what she knew about him, wouldn’t hesitate to make Ben their captive. They might be after him already.
That thought was uppermost in her mind as she dialed the contact number Ben had given her. Somewhere in Sha Tin a woman’s voice answered, just familiar enough for Mei-lin to identify it.
“Agent Adjoumani, this is Detective Lu. I need to speak with Ben Cho. Is he there?”
“I’m afraid not, Detective,” Adjoumani said, sounding a bit peeved.
“You’re not with him?” Lu asked, surprised.
“I have other orders,” she said, sounding even more annoyed. “Look, why don’t you leave him a message.”
“No. I have to see him in person.”
“That won’t be possible. He walked out of here nearly half an hour ago.”
“Do you know where he was headed?”
“I’m not at liberty to disclose that, Detective.”
“Look, DeSondra, I’d love to play the game, but we don’t have time for it. I have reason to believe Ben may be in danger.”
Mei-lin could almost hear Adjoumani’s attitude adjusting itself.
“What sort of danger?”
“I’ll tell you in person, but only after you tell me where he went,” Mei-lin said, waiting a heartbeat, wondering how much she could trust the woman. When Adjoumani wasn’t immediately forthcoming, she continued. “If he’s within walking distance, odds are you’ll reach him before I do. Tell me where he was headed and when I meet you there, I’ll explain everything I can.”
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