“Honey, would you get Spooky Boy off the table?”
“Yeah,” Don said, turning. “Off the table, Spooks!”
Too late. Spooky Boy had brought his well-furred backside too close to a candle flame. His fur-jodhpurred legs and feather-duster tail instantly went up in a blue and yellow blaze. The cat, startled at discovering it was aflame, darted off the table and under the Christmas tree, which also promptly caught fire.
Kari leapt up in pursuit of the cat at precisely the moment Don went vaulting one-handed over the couch’s back, headed for the kitchen and the fire extinguisher they kept there. The couch tipped and crashed onto its back behind him as Don, oblivious, ran to the cabinet under the kitchen sink and yanked out the extinguisher.
Kari was running around the living room, trying to catch poor rattled Spooky Boy—who, although still smoking a little from his backside, was apparently no longer ablaze. The tree, however, was just getting a good roaring fire going. Don yanked the plug on the Christmas lights and hit the tree itself with blasts from the fire extinguisher, sweeping back and forth through the flames. It took almost the whole contents of the extinguisher to do it, but at last he put out the fire.
Standing amid the smell of burnt cat hair, smoking balsam fir, melted plastic, and ammonium phosphate, Don wiped sweat from his brow. About a third of the tree was ruined, but the rest was mostly untouched. He flipped the couch upright again, then turned to see Kari approaching him, carrying the twitchy Spooky Boy in her arms, stroking the wild-eyed cat, trying to calm him.
“How’s he doing?” Don asked.
“He’s okay,” Kari said, kissing the cat on the head. “Didn’t burn too much of his fur, actually. Just took off the long ends on the backs of the legs and tail, see? He’s got plenty left.”
They surveyed the damage. Realizing that none of it was fatal, or permanent enough to merit their landlord’s attention, they turned to each other, relieved and grateful. Before long, they were laughing about the cartoon-crazy chaos of what had happened. That night Spooky Boy got his new name: Smokey Boy.
Don sighed and shook his head, remembering it. Here in the hall of the mountain king, Karuna and Smokey Boy seemed very far away. Eager to distract himself from his holiday loneliness, Don threw himself back into trying to decipher the meaning of the Kwok imagery. He was thus occupied when Nils Barakian videophoned him, returning a call. The old man, with a peaked red elf-hat perched atop his shocking wealth of wild hair, smiled out from the screen, as if Wavy Gravy of ancient hippie fame had been recruited to play one of Santa’s senior helpers.
“Merry Christmas, Don!” Barakian said. “Hey, I’ve been considering what you said about Kwok’s holo-cast.”
“Hm?” Don asked, still focused on unraveling an aspect of the Chinese “necessity” ideogram that had been hidden in the bottom right-hand corner of the Dossi painting.
“About the fact that it stole elements from your expansion of the jauntbox program.”
“Oh. Happy holidays to you, too. Any ideas?”
“The Besterian jauntboxes do what, exactly?” Barakian asked, leaning forward, toward the camera on his end of the conversation.
“They allow virtual reality e-bodiments—personae, avatars, what have you—to transition smoothly from one virtual environment to another.”
“And your flying-island program was an expansion of that?”
“That’s right.”
“What do you know about quantum teleportation?” Barakian asked.
“Enough to know that nobody’s been able to make it scale up into a Star Trek–type transporter,” Don said, surprised by Barakian’s mention of it.
“Right. QT doesn’t transport a whole particle from one place to another. You can, however, teleport the quantum state of a particle at one location to a particle at a different location. The quantum state of the original particle is destroyed, but that same quantum state is reincarnated on another particle at the destination, without the original having to cross any intervening distance.”
“Sounds great. Why aren’t we using it to beam around the galaxy?”
“It’s limited by the speed of light, for one thing. Not instantaneous. Moving around everyday objects like human bodies requires moving around very large amounts of information, too. To describe the physical components of one entire human being down to the atomic level takes roughly 1032 bits.”
“So it’s a dead end, then?”
“Maybe not,” Barakian said. “I want to show you a message we’ve just obtained.”
Before Don could agree or disagree or even comment on this interruption to his work, an image appeared before him of a man in heavy ceremonial robes. The robed personage called himself Marflow and stood in a library dim with the vastness of those distances into which it stretched away. He spoke of the similarities of libraries and memory palaces. Of unread books. Of definitions and examples of keys and labyrinths and ciphers, up to and including the universe itself.
“Interesting,” Don said when the message had played itself out, and Barakian reappeared on the screen, “but what does it have to do with quantum teleportation?”
“Think about how quantum states are destroyed and reincarnated,” Barakian said. “Or die, in order to be resurrected. There’s a long tradition connecting labyrinths with resurrection, as well. Medieval Christians saw the story of Theseus and the Minotaur as a prefiguration of Christ’s harrowing of hell, for instance. Theseus stood for Christ and the Minotaur stood for Satan. The passage through the labyrinth was a type of descent into the underworld. People in many cultures and at many times in history have believed that dancing the winding path of a labyrinth mimes the wanderings of the newly departed soul.”
“I don’t—I don’t quite follow you.”
Nils Barakian laughed.
“Because I speak not only of labyrinths,” the white-haired man said, his laugh stopping at a wheeze, “but in labyrinths—like Daedalus himself! The labyrinth has long been considered a window or door onto eternity, a link between the individual human being and the ground of all being. Remember what I said about the Gate of God? About how that might refer to being transported or translated into other universes?”
“I remember thinking that kind of talk scored high on the mystic woo-woo meter.”
“Yes,” Barakian agreed with a smile, “but what if that’s precisely why Kwok wanted that deep hack into the worldwide computershare? The one that you and Karuna Benson put together for him?”
“I’m not even going to ask you how you know about that,” Don said, shaking his head, “or about Karuna, either. But you’re wrong. That’s not what Kwok said he wanted the hack for.”
“What did he say he wanted it for?”
“To simulate the way a quantum computer can ‘pick’ a complex cipher lock by trying a kerjillion keys at the same time, instead of having to try each of those kerjillion different keys one after another.”
“A plausible cover story,” Barakian agreed with a nod. “Yet isn’t it also possible that tapping in through the computershare would enable him to move enough information to teleport his quantum state?”
That came from so far out of left field that Don abandoned the necessity symbol altogether, and focused entirely on what Barakian was saying.
“I don’t suppose it’s impossible. But then, why did he set up his holo-cast program so that when it invaded my system, it could swipe my Besterbox code?”
“Think about it, Donald,” Barakian said, fixing him with a hard stare. “You said the Besterian jauntboxes smooth the transition from one virtual environment to another. I’ve talked with physicists who say our universe is ultimately ‘an informational process being run on the system of all possible informational processes.’ If our universe is, at bottom, a simulation among other simulations, then what better way can you imagine for stepping out sidewise from the virtual environment of this universe and into another?”
“‘There’s a helluva good universe next door,�
��” Don said, shaking his head. “‘Let’s go.’”
“Ah! Maybe e.e. cummings was right!” Barakian said, smiling at the allusion. “Maybe Jaron Kwok knows, because he’s already gone there. An end, but not a dead end.”
“I don’t buy it,” Don said, shaking his head vigorously and rather impolitely, he knew, though Barakian didn’t seem to notice. “It’s like time travel. Not real.”
“But what if they’re the same thing?”
“What if what are the same thing?”
“What if, where there should be a past, there’s only another world?” Barakian asked. “What if traveling into the past or the future merely means traveling into another universe? A physically plausible process, involving serial frames in a single universe, or interconnected branching universes paralleling each other in a vast plenum? What if transit between universes is indistinguishable from time travel?”
“Why don’t we encounter time travelers all the time, then?” Don asked.
Barakian seemed primed for the question.
“Kwok’s holo-cast suggests that, for those existing physically within any given universe, only that universe is real. All the others are virtual. Maybe the other universes—past, future, parallel, what have you—can only be interacted with virtually, subtly. Maybe the fact that only the quantum state is teleported means that the travelers can only interact through phantoms—through ‘subtle bodies.’ That’s a term many religions use. Maybe it has a basis in physical fact.”
“Too many maybes and what-ifs,” Don said, skepticism flooding into his voice. “Or do you know something about this I don’t know?”
“Maybe,” Barakian said, arch and sly, before breaking into laughter.
“Talk like that,” Don said seriously, “makes me feel like I’m working for a lunatic with delusions of being a mastermind.”
Barakian laughed harder, then quickly grew sober, if not somber.
“I didn’t believe in such mad creatures when I was your age either,” he said. “I thought it was all too melodramatic. Superheroes and supervillains. The stuff of comic books, spy novels, and action-adventure movies, where spectacle is more important than a plausible story. But evil masterminds do exist, Don. We’ve allowed the politics of our age to become their politics—the politics of spectacle, and rage.”
Don glanced toward him, thinking Barakian had finished, but he had only paused, deep in thought.
“Those who still value human stories and humane reason can no longer stand idly by, Don. If they ever could.”
Don thought about that, the “necessity” symbol flickering in his vision.
“So? Why are you telling me all this?”
“Because it’s easier to find what you’re looking for,” Barakian said, “when you know what you’re supposed to see.”
Don gazed again at the necessity symbol embedded in the Dossi image. Then he got an idea.
“If you want me to look into what Kwok might have done with the hack we did for him,” Don said, “then I’m going to have to bring Karuna in on this.”
Nils Barakian nodded.
“Yes, I’ve already considered that,” he said. “We’ve cleared her for that—but only because we’re as certain as we can be that your work in the infosphere is untraceable.”
“What if I need to have her work here, with me? At this location?”
Barakian frowned.
“I was afraid you might want that, too,” he said. “I suppose it could be arranged. Like you, however, she wouldn’t be told anything about your location.
“If you truly need her help, I suggest you contact her immediately. But see first what you can accomplish with her remotely.”
With that, he signed off.
No sooner had the conversation ended than Don went searching through the infosphere for Karuna. Finding her took some doing, but eventually he was able to locate the signature of Cybernesian space, its darkly gleaming islands built from the white-noise chaos of the datasea.
The datasea itself, however, had changed since Don had last ventured into Cybernesia. Or perhaps he had changed. He’d stopped going there because he felt it was too insecure. Now he wondered if the Cybernesians might have recognized the security problems, too—and relocated to different nodes in the worldwide grid. Double-checking to make certain he wasn’t being watched or eavesdropped on, he pinpointed her location and opened a secure channel.
Karuna’s site was still faux voodoo. But he almost didn’t recognize the madwoman who appeared in his virtuality: a flamboyantly dressed fortune-teller with fright-wig hair and a face paint-streaked gray and red where it wasn’t covered by a creeping, batlike persona mask. Karuna’s eyes opened—holes in the wings of the bat—and she rumbled, “The future’s not pretty, and neither am I!” When she realized who her visitor was, however, she quickly dispensed with the witchwoman e-bodiment.
Don laughed. He was happy to see her—happier than he would have guessed.
“Donald! Thank God you’re all right!”
“Never better. And you?”
“Oh, don’t let the freak show scare you. It’s just a defense I’ve adopted. It’s for the rubes who come to consult ‘Madame Karuna.’ Cybernesia’s different, too. We’re further underground—shielded by clandestine servers out of Tri-Border, even.
“But enough about me—what about you? Where are you? I’m not seeing any address for you. Where did you disappear to?”
“I’m not exactly certain, Kari,” he said, “though I have a few good guesses. I’ve gone deep underground, myself, in more ways than I would have guessed. Even if I were sure where I am, I’m not sure I’d be allowed to tell you.”
Her face darkened for an instant.
“Why not?”
“My benefactors—the ones we discussed—are no longer anonymous,” he said, deflecting her question, “but they still have their secrets, and now I’m one of them. Did you check into that stuff I told you about last time we met?”
“I did. Good thing you warned me to be careful. I set up Potemkin addresses and identities for that search, just in case. A lot of my straw men got burned by some very high-level counterprobing. You owe me a bunch of autonomous/anonymous remailer programs.”
“Well? Still think I’m crazy?”
“Oh, you’re crazy, all right. But I think the world may just be crazier than you are. So what have you been doing with yourself? Last time we talked, you were planning to go to Philadelphia to look at a painting—something you saw in the Kwok holo-cast. Did you ever find what you were looking for?”
“I found a lot more than what I was looking for.”
With that, Don tried to bring her up to speed on what had happened to him and his work. The encounter with Colbeth and Barakian. The flight to California and the helicopter jaunt to lake and mountain and hidden powerhouse. The disappearance of Cho, who was investigating the disappearance of Kwok, who was investigating the disappearance of prototype QC devices.
Don had to augment his descriptions with text and virtual records when it came to the imagery embedded in the Dossi painting, which had in turn been embedded in the Kwok holo-cast, which was in turn embedded in all the data of the infosphere. Don even played her his record of the message Barakian had shown him just moments before—the strange little ’cast from “Marflow,” with its libraries and labyrinths, its cipher and key.
“Wait a minute,” Karuna said. The Marflow replay paused in midspeech at one side of the screen, while the X on the Dossi painting stood glittering on the other. “Tell me again why you put that X on that corner.”
“To represent an unknown,” Don said with a shrug. “It just looked right to me as a placeholder there.”
“And that’s the only reason?”
“That’s right.”
Karuna shook her head.
“Man, you should be the fortune-teller—not me,” she said. “We don’t break the pattern to recognize the code, we recognize the pattern to break the code. The only problem
is, you don’t know what you’re doing right, especially when you do it right!”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You do know what an autokey is, don’t you?”
“A coded message,” Don said, growing uncomfortable, “in which the message itself is its own key. Marflow mentions it.”
“Did you ever think you put that X there because the Kwok holo-cast is an autokey? That’s what this Marflow guy is talking about.”
“I don’t get you.”
“Good! The shoe is on the other foot, for once. That X looks right because it is right. Here, let me throw some pictures into your space. That meander pattern at the heart of the labyrinth is a Greek key, right? X in Greek is chi, pronounced like ‘key’ or like ‘sky.’ Kwok’s X marks the spot. You saw it without seeing it.”
Associations began to cascade in Don’s head. Kwok’s X. His ex-roommate, Benjamin Cho. The woman who would have been Kwok’s ex, but became his widow—Cherise LeMoyne. The name Jaron wrote under in college: Kwok X. In Chinese, chi—in most orthographies spelled, though not pronounced, the same as the Greek—meant “vital force.” The Holevo chi, the mathematical concept used for simplifying the analysis of more complex quantum phenomena, in much the same way Shannon’s entropy enabled classical information simplifications. Entangled photons and the DNA double helix too, each and both making a Möbius-twisted X, a lazy 8, a twisted halo infinity sign….
“Kari, I need you,” he blurted.
“I’m flattered,” she said with a laugh. “Always nice to be needed.”
“No—really! You just handed me a major breakthrough. You’ve got to help me with this. What I’ve been working on is too important for me to continue to tackle it by myself, even if I could. I was thinking about that Christmas when the cat caught the Christmas tree on fire, and I realized I need you here.”
She looked at him a long moment, in silence.
“I’m visiting my folks for the holidays,” she said, thoughtful, “but say I wanted to join you. How would I get there? You don’t even know where your ‘there’ is.”
“Yes—but the people I work for know where I am, and they know where you are. They can bring you here.”
The Labyrinth Key Page 30