Brescoll leaned back and gripped the arms of his chair more tightly, although he couldn’t have said why.
“And what does this have to do with the fact that behavioral scientists, supposedly performing twin studies, purposely induced identity disorders—in children?”
Rollwagen glanced away for a moment, and emotion flickered across her face. Why should she be embarrassed, Brescoll wondered, if she wasn’t part of Tetragrammaton? But then he checked himself; both Tetragrammaton and the Kitchener organization could ultimately be traced back to the Instrumentality.
“Those disorders are important,” she said, “to the constellation of traits needed for creating the people who are supposed to lead us out of our evolutionary cul-de-sac. For creating the children of the catastrophe before the catastrophe occurs. For creating the tesseractors, the ravelers and knitters of the fabric of reality. Who will manipulate the fundamental stuff of worlds the way our ancestors manipulated the symbolic stuff of words. The exapted, who will make the great leap.”
Brescoll looked at her, unafraid of revealing the puzzlement that undoubtedly showed on his face. Mixed with the confusion, he felt a growing sense of dread.
“But what’s already out there, like the throat, waiting to be exapted?”
“Maybe childhood’s baby talk of imaginary friends, its stories of faerie lands,” Rollwagen replied. “Maybe all the schizoidal, schizophrenic, multiple personality, and dissociative identity disorders chronicled throughout history. Maybe even mad visions of angels and demons.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe those phenomena suggest a sensitivity to leakage from other universes, places next door,” Rollwagen said levelly. “But just as the speech-capable throat is prone to choking, a symbol-capable brain seems prone to madness. But maybe the madness-prone brain isn’t really a disadvantage, in the long view.”
“What advantage could there be in the potential to go insane?”
“An extraordinary talent,” she said, not really answering his question, “on par with the invention of language. That’s what the twin studies were after: The possibility of bringing to the surface such a talent. Of exapting something unexpected from our DNA.”
“Unexpected?” Jim asked. “Or just new?”
“Radically new, to say the very least. The chance to create splitters and dissociators. Split-children who, driven inward, would enable humanity’s drive outward.”
“How?” Jim asked. “And how do you mean ‘split-children’?”
Rollwagen nodded quickly.
“In the test subjects, massively parallel universes, multiple personality disorders, and multi-user dimensions would all coalesce. The idea, I gather, was to access the quantum computing capabilities latent in DNA.”
“For quantum cryptography?”
“No—not in the narrow sense. The plan isn’t about unlocking a door in the Great Firewall of China. It’s about unlocking all the doors to all the universes. Even here in our universe, it would open the way for us to achieve faster-than-light travel.”
“Wait a minute. When I hear ‘faster-than-light travel,’ I think of starships.”
“Except in this case we are the starships,” Rollwagen said, glancing at the pseudoholo but muting its sound. “We step through the Luxon Wall, the barrier that limits us to the speed of light. We teleport, every quantum state of every part and particle of us. The galaxy-spanning society imagined by the futurists would be made real. Innumerable worlds of a Semperium, an Empire of Forever. You have to admit, it’s a golden vision, in its way.”
Brescoll frowned, still disturbed by the idea of those “split-kids.”
“But at what cost? Intentionally inducing suffering in children. Again and again.”
“Ah, that’s the rub, isn’t it?” Rollwagen said, nodding. “It seems only those driven inward past the breaking point can reliably call forth the quantum nature of the code molecule, in a programmable and machine-accessible fashion.”
Brescoll stared at the now-silent pseudoholo as it continued its dance of images.
“At the heart of their Semperium’s greatness,” he said at last, “there would always have to be young people balled up in pain somewhere. Their Empire of Forever would be built on driving children insane.”
“Yes,” Rollwagen admitted wistfully. “Like the Athenian children sacrificed to the Minotaur, until Theseus came along.”
“What could possibly justify that kind of cruelty?”
“Only the highest and most dispassionate of causes, I assure you,” Rollwagen said with a small smile.
“What ‘cause’ could be that important?”
“Maybe their suffering and madness are part of a greater scheme,” Rollwagen said, assuming the role of devil’s advocate. “Perhaps certain universes are ‘favored’ because they yield conscious beings, through whom they produce singularities and offspring universes. Universes that can’t compete are destroyed long before their time. In such a scheme, the split-children might prove to be our saviors.”
Brescoll shook his head.
“Only a mad God could create such a hellish place.”
“Many of the Tetragrammaton adherents believe that our universe, and all the others, are only simulations. That we must be living inside a simulation. Otherwise, we can’t claim we’ll produce posthuman descendants.”
“How’s that?”
“Posthuman civilizations, so the theory goes, would have plenty of computing power to run a tremendous number of ancestor simulations. According to some of the Tetra types, our children have already ascended, and we are living in a simulation they have created. The alternative, they fear, is that we haven’t ascended and so our universe isn’t one of the ‘favored’ ones, and must be doomed.
“Humanity as we know it is at best only a stepping stone, at worst an abomination. Under such a scenario, we must take steps to make certain we are replaced by God’s true posthuman children.”
Strange, Brescoll thought. The best hope for the survival of something like humanity is that our descendants—our children—will torture their forebears—their parents—because their parents tortured them.
“That’s self-loathing to a degree I can barely wrap my mind around,” Brescoll said, shaking his head. “And the Tetra types are the only ones truly prepared to bring the kingdom of blessed posthuman existence, I suppose?”
“That’s how they see it, yes.”
“And Kwok and Cho were abused, so they might develop that kind of split-kid ‘talent’ and become ‘posthuman’?”
“In different ways,” Rollwagen said, switching off the pseudoholo display, “with different controls. Cho, at least, most likely was. On the ‘nature’ side of the equation, both boys were taken from the Kwok genetic stock, which showed a family history of personality disorders along both the maternal and paternal lines. On the ‘nurture’ side, Tetragrammaton operatives pulled strings so that Ben Cho could be embryonically adopted by a particular couple. The wife in that couple had previously been removed from eligibility on the foster-parenting rolls.”
“Why?”
“She had a history of psychological instability and charges involving sexual abuse of foster children placed in her keeping. She desperately wanted children of her own, but was infertile. So the Tetragrammaton twin study saw to it that, despite her record, she would finally have a child of her own.”
Brescoll stared glumly at his hands.
“I suppose that sort of thing has been happening in an unplanned way for as long as there have been families,” he said, “but the planning, the intentionality of it—somehow that makes it all worse. I hope the perpetrators are happy with their success.”
“On the contrary,” Rollwagen said, looking away from her computer screen, “I’ve uncovered reports that evaluated the effort as a failure, at least until the Kwok incident occurred.”
“A failure?”
Rollwagen nodded.
“Because neither Kwok nor Cho turn
ed out to be abnormal or paranormal enough to please the experimenters,” she said, switching off the machines and standing. Brescoll stood, as well. “True, each has, or had, a few relatively minor childhood sadisms, psychosexual kinks, somewhat fragile gender identifications. Both also showed themselves to be very bright and exceptionally good at pattern finding. Aside from that, however, they both turned out almost too normal to merit a second look.”
Jim walked with her as she strode out of the cubicle.
“But what’s happened since the Kwok incident has changed all that?”
“Yes. Very much changed it.”
“Then Ben Cho—who may possess the key to the universe, or who might be the key to the universe—may also be insane.”
Director Rollwagen sighed as they approached the workstation where Sotiropolis and Suarez were running final system checks.
“Or dead,” she said, stepping out of the techs’ earshot. “And almost surely in the hands of our opponents, in any case.”
Rollwagen’s cell phone rang, and she answered it, turning slightly away from her deputy director. Brescoll couldn’t make out the conversation, but he could read the concern on Rollwagen’s face when she ended the call and turned back.
“Paulin at the NRO,” she said. “The Reconnaissance Office has concluded that someone is commandeering our Keyhole- and Lacrosse-class satellites. Image and Mapping has confirmed it. They suspect the Chinese. Yet another reason why I don’t want you there. Things are going to get very hot. I need you here.”
Brescoll gave a small whistle. Those satellites were America’s sharpest eyes and ears on the planet. Without them, his country would be at very serious disadvantage. On the three-legged stool of hard-war, soft-war, and wet-war, one leg had just become thoroughly riddled by termites.
“Wait a minute,” Brescoll said, struck by a thought. “What if it isn’t the Chinese? What if the same thing has happened to them, as well?”
Rollwagen stared at him.
“Then I’m sure they suspect us. But why take out both nations? Who would benefit?”
“How about Tetragrammaton?” Brescoll asked. “Or terrorists? Would the chaos following a limited nuclear exchange between us and the Chinese be to their advantage? If any of those groups have Ben Cho, might they be using him to make that scenario happen?”
“Possibly, possibly,” Rollwagen said, thinking out loud. “But there may be something worse.”
“Such as?”
“What if he’s in their hands, but not under their control? What if Ben Cho is doing all this on his own?”
Brescoll felt as if the director had just hit him upside the head with a two-by-four. It took him a moment to recover.
“What do you mean?”
“Just what you were getting at a minute ago. What if he’s been ‘activated’ somehow—but he’s working on his own hook, and not for the Chinese?”
“Then what’s he after?”
“We may already have discussed it.”
“Revenge? For what they did to him and Kwok?”
“Maybe. Maybe much more.”
“Director,” Brescoll said, struck by a thought, “some time back, you said that someone who had the ability to break into channels the way Kwok did probably had the ability to eavesdrop on those channels. Might such a person also have the ability to take over SCADA systems?”
“I certainly hope not, but I’m afraid so. Given an infosphere presence possessing sufficient capabilities, who knows? They might commandeer not just satellites, but missile launch systems, too. Air traffic control. Phone networks. Oil pipelines. Power grids. Water systems. Nothing would be safe, if it runs open-loop and long distance. And today that’s everything from toasters to radio telescopes.”
“For years the Chinese and the United States have been working on soft-war attacks that hit hard-war assets—”
“Everybody’s been trying, but nobody’s been very successful with it.”
“What if Ben Cho is doing it—and successfully?”
Rollwagen nodded.
“This could be very bad,” she said. “We need to do something, and quickly.”
Despite the situation, Brescoll was excited with the prospect of action—of actually doing something, instead of just watching on the sidelines as events unfolded.
“What can I do to help?”
At that moment Sotiropolis broke away from his work with Suarez and stepped toward them.
“The simulation of the California power station is complete,” he said, so crisply that Jim almost expected the man to salute.
“Very good,” Rollwagen said. “Jim, the best thing you can do for now is get me the larger picture of what Cho or his captors might be up to. Work with Phil and Maria on that. You might want to bring Bree in on it, too, if she’s available.”
So saying, the director turned and departed. Brescoll found Suarez and Sotiropolis looking at him expectantly, apparently unaware of the variety of apocalypses he and Rollwagen had been contemplating.
“All right,” he said, trying to reorient himself to a world of smaller compass. “Show me what you’ve come up with on this place where Markham is hiding out.”
THE FORMALITY OF ACTUALLY OCCURRING
GUANGZHOU—AND ELSEWHERE
The presence which had been Ben Cho felt as if his entire life, up to that event-horizon point, had been a dreamlike stage play and he had been in the audience, watching. He had been called to step onto the stage, to speak lines he never remembered learning or memorizing, in a role for which he never remembered being cast.
At first it had the dreamterror of nightmare to it. The pressure of that audience’s unspoken expectations filled him with fear, even as the twin rails of that corkscrew rocket coaster converged inside a bright gate, where his consciousness passed into that light-flooded realm beyond wave and particle. For a dizzying moment it seemed as if his spreading mind’s narrow local time would be lost completely in that vastness, forever adrift, never able to “come back” to his life and times. Or that, if he did manage to somehow get himself back inside his head, it would not be as “Ben Cho” anymore.
All of that, however, was somehow in a lesser time and place. Now, in this higher dimension, his terror turned to exhilaration. He saw the cylindrical spiral he had passed through, but now in a form he recognized. Looking down on it from the height of angels, he saw the Earth and the Moon in their block-universe form. Both cylinder and spiral, the Earth’s movement curving toward a ring, the orbit of the Moon around it a spiral or corkscrew through space and time.
As he watched, the block serialized itself before him, separating into discrete instants, like Reyna’s innumerable snapshots. Like the pages of an old flipbook animation. Like a movie’s frames stacked together. Stranger still was his realization that each page, each frame, each slice was a universe. When he looked from one universe to another it was like looking from one slice in a loaf of bread and into another—only this bread wasn’t embedded with pumpkin seeds and raisins, but with galaxies and black holes.
In the next moment, Time itself appeared not as a flowing river or stream, but as a lake or ocean in which every instant was a cross section of the whole. Where there should have been a past or a future, there was only another universe.
Was this the God’s-eye view? Was the great weakness of ordinary human consciousness that it limited the universe to a single, specific reality? Could an omnipresent and omnipotent consciousness hold in its mind all possible states of all possible being, simultaneously?
Had Kwok been right? Did all those universes make up a labyrinthine palace of memory? A plenum, in which each room was a universe, finite and consistent in itself, yet also radically incomplete? Always leading onto other rooms?
“Not quite!” said a voice with laughter in it, simultaneously familiar and strange, as if Ben were hearing a recording of his own voice for the first time. How else to explain the access that speaker seemed to have to his own thoughts?
Suddenly he found himself plunged back into the lower world, into the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, yet still he retained that strange psychometric ability, that slice-of-space-time vision. Seen thus, every object in the Hall was filled with its own kind of consciousness. The place itself possessed a deep memory connected to every person and every thing that had ever come into contact with it.
The memory of all things resided in all things. So did their fates. In reading the traces of any object’s past, he was able to access a deeper level of reality itself. “Past” histories, as well as “future” histories—latent realities that had yet to undergo the formality of actually occurring.
“Far enough, for now!” said the voice, still speaking only to him. “You’re getting ahead of yourself.”
Bodiless, Ben didn’t have to turn to see the source of the words—the subtle form of Jaron Kwok himself, a small-winged wraith, living dead, dressed as a Chinese smith before a flaring foundry, his eyes glinting with a madness that burned more brightly than the furnace.
“Jaron,” he thought, “what’s going on?”
“Everything’s going on,” said Jaron, “as it always does. Even I’m going on, though I’m dead to the world I once knew.”
“I mean, what’s happening to me?”
“Oh, modulation and demodulation of binotech and quantum DNA,” said the wraith metalworker. “Spatially embedded algorithms. Coherent quantum superposition. Tuned laser pulses evolving the initial superpositions of encoded numbers into different superpositions. Substrate-independent wave of translation, made from all the holographic wave patterns of your brain and consciousness. Tangled and teleported. And like that.”
“Can I get back to Earth? Back into my life?”
“Life on Earth?” The voice boomed, laughing. “More like Earth on Life! Is like your brain on drugs, as they used to say. Grist for the mill, mist for the grill. Yet the stoned worm gathers no feathers, so yes, you must return, supertrypmaster. Not that you ever quite left. But not to be the envy of all your friends or the friend to all your envies. No.”
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