Clambering out upon that mirror surface, Ben understood what Jaron had meant by the snake eating its tail, by time’s twisted, labyrinthine looping. Everything that had happened since Kwok’s holo-cast had been a closed timelike curve. A true labyrinth too, in that only one course could be followed through it.
In that, it echoed the universe itself. His home universe—heavenly memory palace, consistent and essentially finite in extent, but radically incomplete—was a unicursal labyrinth, without dead ends but also without choices.
But the multiverse—heavenly memory palace of heavenly memory palaces, complete and essentially infinite in number, but radically inconsistent—was a multicursal maze, necessitating choice but also offering dead ends.
The many possible quantum superposed states were a maze, and the quantum maze was always collapsing into classical labyrinth. Mazes precipitated into labyrinths, but labyrinths sublimed into mazes as well…
The misty maze of quantum possibility made Ben think of Reyna’s favorite poem—about the path out of the misty dream. The fork in the road, too, befit a maze, in that a decision had to be made.
To save Reyna.
That was what Jaron had said. Ben saw it now. Saw it in the holo-cast with which this loop had started, and where this loop had always been going: a Möbius labyrinth, where past and future were in fact indistinguishable, where only human habit caused people to perceive a direction to time.
To save Reyna, Ben would have to catalyze his own ascendence. He would have to step back to that slice of time where Newcomer first appeared to a still-human Jaron Kwok. To create the impression of the Tetragrammaton project gone out of control.
To thereby create the situation in which the American and Chinese machine-intelligences, puppeteering She/Cherise, would fire the virtual kill-bullet to destroy Jaron outside his DIVE as well as within it.
Which would thereby result in Ben Cho’s being brought into the investigation, which would in turn ultimately lead him to now.
Two become one so that one becomes three—or more, Ben thought. If that could come of human love, then what of the divine?
Without fanfare, Ben remembered what that Mind always knew. In the plenum, the differences between labyrinth and maze were reconciled. In the plenum of all possible universes, infinite number was reconciled with finite extent. An infinite number of possible universes—all mutually inconsistent, all bounded by infinitude—were holographically encoded in the surface of a space spherical, finite, unbounded, and consistent. Each labyrinthine universe was reconciled with the mazed multiverse, in a single plenum allowing for endless choices. Ein Sof elided with Ein Sofia, one allowed to become the other and the other allowed to become one.
Ben thought of Tetragrammaton and smiled. Perhaps the set of all possible universes was itself the best of all possible universes, for it contained somewhere in itself the best possible universe for everyone and everything—and for nothing, too, as the infinite set always contained the empty set.
The smile widened to laughter, splitting Ben open and free, the adult form erupting out of the husk of what it had once been. The scales fell away and, like a mature caddis on a mirror-lake waiting for its wings to dry, Ben floated on the surface of the home universe. Staring out at all the universes, he saw networks that did not live in space and were not made of matter, but from whose very presence arose the kaleidoscopic processes and patterns of space and time, energy and matter—geometries in which waves, forkings, meanders, spirals, Möbius figures, and labyrinths figured prominently. Quantum computers and universal simulations were only crude metaphors, pointing vaguely in the direction of this transcendent reality.
Ben’s wings spread, less like feathered oars than like hovering, still flames, lambent and sensitive, in the field of some great invisible power. The white of reflection and glow showed the wings to be neither fiery nor feathery, but structures of frozen light, seamlessly intricate.
What Ben Cho had become now assumed the role of Metatron, the lesser Tetragrammaton, who could look upon the Divine Face. Ben Metatron flew away, moving backward and forward among innumerable times and spaces, among all the labyrinths of mirror universes in which divine light was forever reflected.
Joining manifold higher-dimensional beings, Ben spoke the secret passwords and gained admittance to all their heavenly palaces, their treasure-houses of technical theologies and theological technologies, to find among them the disk-shaped enhancement wafers which he would bring back from another space and time, to suffuse Jaron and fast-forward the evolution of his binotech, before the kill bullet could hit, and thus prevent Jaron from simply dying.
Even those stops, however, were just stations on his way to prostrating himself in thanksgiving, before that absolute undifferentiated infinite being with neither will, nor intention, nor desire, nor thought, nor speech, nor action, yet outside of which no thing could exist.
SYMPATICO
CRYPTO CITY
Although Jim Brescoll had once considered himself the vice mayor of Crypto City, he was now locked up in the equivalent of the town jail—a holding facility overseen by the Special Operations Unit/Emergency Response Team.
Had he been wrong? Pulling a gun on Janis Rollwagen might have been a bit of an overreaction, a little too impulsive—but it had felt so right, in his gut. And yes, it had felt good. If her assessment of the situation had been the correct one, though, then he would be paying for it, from here on out. At the very least he could kiss his career in civil service good-bye. Even prison time didn’t seem too unlikely a possibility.
Pondering such a glum future, he heard the sound of many footsteps approaching the holding cell. Two heavily armed SOU/ERT commandos opened the metal door and entered the room, followed by General Retticker, National Security Advisor Hawkins, and an apple-cheeked, gray-haired bouncy little man who looked familiar somehow, but not so much that Jim actually recognized him.
“Director Brescoll!” said the short, energetic man. “I’m David Fahrney. A pleasure to meet you!”
Brescoll almost said “The billionaire?” but restrained himself. At least now he knew why the face—above a suit colored and patterned like TV static—looked vaguely familiar.
“Good to meet you, too,” Brescoll said, as he stood and, awkwardly, shook the man’s hand, “but I’m afraid you’re wrong—I’m not the director.”
“No, Mister Brescoll,” Fahrney said, smiling broadly. “I’m afraid you’re wrong—something that hasn’t happened much in the course of this whole Kwok-Cho matter, thank heavens. You’ve shown very good judgment, actually. I’m sure Hawkins’s boss will be happy to see to it that you’re soon director in name, as well as fact—he owes me a little favor or two.”
“You know about Jaron Kwok and Ben Cho?”
“Oh, yes. I’ve been following that situation for quite a while. That holo-cast intrigued me, especially the man with the eye patch and the fedora. Felix Forrest. I already had an interest in him and his work. Maybe just an odd simpatico, stemming from the fact that each of us lost an eye in a childhood accident.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Ah, we’re all still adjusting to circumstances. Let’s just say that no one has any secrets from your Ben Cho, now—not even me! There have been a number of unsourced leaks to the media already—the right words in ears that were, perhaps, never intended to hear. An increased transparency between nations, even mirrors held up to particular souls—all enough to get things moving in new directions. I don’t doubt there will be shake-ups and resignations in intelligence communities throughout the world over the next several months. Maybe longer.”
“But what about the attacks on SCADA systems? The satellite takeovers? The domes of force in California and Tri-Border? The dead-stop on the Chinese headed toward Taiwan?”
“And their little surprise in trying to move south of Tibet, too. Yes, all of that is ongoing. Your Doctor Cho, whatever he is now, has returned control of most systems to their owners thro
ughout the world—though he’s also made it clear he’s still keeping an eye on things. We’re fairly certain he is in no way malevolent. That doesn’t mean, however, that we’re not still scrambling to make it clear to the Chinese that there need not be a World War over his intrusions.
“That’s where we need your help, Mister Brescoll. I gather you’re good at providing assurances? Please follow us, if you will.”
Jim Brescoll had many questions and suspicions, but the prospect of freedom trumped all of them, for the moment. So he followed.
THAT FACE, IN THAT MIRROR
“What can I do to help?” He asked His recently arrived double. As lightning flashed around Them, the Newcomer pulled two wafer-thin disks out of the folds of His robe.
“Eat one of these binotech enhancers, and you’ll know everything you need to know!”
A particularly strong earthshock hit them just as He reached out toward the Newcomer. Knocking Him down, She snatched the machine pistol out of His hands.
“Do, do!” She said, pointing the weapon from one of the men to the other. “I don’t know which of you is the serpent, but the serpent is always doing something. Don’t just do something, stand there, for once! And listen to me! I’m not going to take the blame this time. You and your ‘several hundred 4-bit device’! Did you ever stop doing long enough to think that if we ‘bust this sim,’ if we decode what it is that the Mind is trying to remember, we eliminate the very reason for the continued existence of this ‘room’—our home universe? Do you want to just blot out everything, drop us all into oblivion, like none of it ever happened?”
He stared hard at Her, then took a binotech wafer from the Newcomer’s hand.
“Mights and maybes,” He said. “What about you, trying to climb back into the Tree of Life through your wellness plague? We’re both just trying to get back what’s been lost, each in Our own way. Can’t you see that? This virtuality isn’t running me—I’m running it. No one will blame you this time, I promise. I take full responsibility for what I’m about to do, by my own hand, in my own head.”
He took a binotech disk, put it on His tongue. Feeling as if He were dying in fire, He wondered for an instant if He had been shot by Her.
Jaron looked down at his translated self and saw a wound, but no blood, no bleeding. He tried to look where She and the Newcomer had been, but he couldn’t. A blinding light—somehow single and multiple—emanated from where they had stood. Jaron had to avert his eyes and hold up his hand against that overwhelming brightness as he spoke.
“Turn down the albedo on that tuxedo, would you, buddy?” he said, trying to make light of the light—and he heard a faraway sort of laughter. “Did it work? The deadman switch? The kill-switch?”
“In ways you barely imagined,” said a voice out of the undiminished light, both male and female, and neither male nor female. “The deadman is switched.”
“But what about the hunter-killer programs?”
“What defends, attacks. What attacks, defends. The closed timelike curve into and out of the labyrinth. The serpent in the Garden is the snake that eats its tail, and the snake that eats its tail is Ouroboros.”
“I don’t understand,” Jaron said, shielding his eyes more than ever.
“The binotech you took in simulation functions like a two-way mirror, a duress code, a birefringent crystal. The attack by the combined hunter-killer programs, in conjunction with the binotech, causes a bifurcation: your displacement brings Ben Cho into the investigation, and leads him down a path to a place where he will become the being capable of traveling physically among all the times and spaces of infinite universes.”
“If Cho can do all that,” Jaron asked, “why doesn’t he just stop my ‘murder’ in the first place?”
“Preventing your death means that Cho never investigates your murder. If you simply died, without leaving behind the ashes—by far the most likely outcome of your efforts—then even if he had investigated, he wouldn’t have become capable of preventing your death.”
“The bifurcation, again?”
“Yes. The very fact that this space-time loop exists proves that your death has been prevented as far as was possible—by being assured as far as was necessary.”
“That’s why we have to go through these temporal acrobatics, then?”
“That, and to open up new possibilities. If human beings were only programs running on a great machine, their two choices would be the closure of death, or the infinite loop. Both tend toward meaninglessness.
“But there are other choices. Endless choices. What was lost to mortality can be restored through mortality. The infinite loop of the Möbius strip is cut, and cut again. The maze not only collapses into labyrinth, but the labyrinth reopens to maze. Again and again. Endlessly.”
The brightness from which Jaron had sheltered his eyes grew still more intense, its glare becoming overpowering. In that moment he knew he was in the presence Ginsburg had called the Prince of the Divine Face, the Angel of the Covenant. Jaron also knew that the human being who had once been Ben Cho had managed to polish his soul like a mirror, until it reflected the truth without distortion, and that the overwhelming light was the reflection of that Face in that mirror.
When at last the light dispersed, Jaron found that he was living in a new world—or rather, many of them.
A SEASON OF MIRACLES
“Given the type of tumor that you have,” the neurosurgeon told Reyna and Ben, “and given its aggressiveness and malignancy, your life expectancy isn’t going to be what you might have otherwise expected. Statistically, the odds aren’t in your favor that you’ll live to be an old woman.”
“Which means what, exactly?” Reyna asked.
“Median survival time for GBM is counted in months, rather than years. Still, we don’t know where you’ll fall on that survival curve. You could fall near the median, or at the long end—say as much as three years.”
“Or at the short end?” she pressed. “A few months? Even weeks?”
“Yes,” the neurosurgeon said with a sigh. “That too is a possibility. So it’s important to be realistic, but remain hopeful. Prepare yourself for what’s coming, but stay as positive as you can, knowing that we’re trying to keep you as well as we possibly can, for as long as we can.”
“Doctor,” Reyna said, her voice quavering slightly, “do you think miracles are possible?”
“I’d like to think so,” he replied, “but the chances are pretty small—statistically speaking.”
“Yes,” Reyna said with a weary shrug. “Almost by definition.”
When Ben came to see her the next morning, however, she seemed happier.
“I had the strangest dream last night,” she said, clasping his hand a little too tightly.
“Oh? What’s that?”
“I thought I saw an angel, bright wings and all, putting something in my painkiller bag. The strangest thing about it, though, was that the angel looked kind of like you, Ben.”
“Now there you’ve got it backwards,” Ben said with a smile. “You’ve always been my angel, and you know it.”
They laughed and gave each other a hug.
Soon thereafter, Reyna’s symptoms began to abate. The headaches, seizures, nausea, and vomiting all disappeared. The doctors saw no further evidence of the papilledema, cellular pleomorphisms, mitotic figures, or multinucleated giant cells, all characteristic of glioblastoma multiforme.
Reyna’s neurosurgeon was cautiously optimistic—impressed with himself that he had managed to remove her tumor so thoroughly, yet careful to warn them that microscopic tumor cells, too small for any surgeon to see, were almost always left behind. GBM grew back the most quickly of any brain tumor, he said. So they would have to be careful.
Reyna’s health steadily continued to improve, so much so that she spoke enthusiastically of completing the Muir Trail hike over Mount Whitney during the coming summer. Ben began to wonder about his wife’s miraculous remission, the neurosurgeon’s
explanation, even Reyna’s “angel vision.” He didn’t obsess on it, though, for it was a season of miracles.
A scandal had broken in the media, as a result of which Ben had learned that he had a twin, or maybe more than one.
FIFTEEN
ANOTHER PATH, IN ANOTHER UNIVERSE
In the months that had passed since Ben Cho vanished, Meilin Lu had been seeking answers, or at least asking questions. The result of her efforts had finally led her here, to what had once been a New Territories Royal Park. In postcolonial times it had become simply the Sha Tin town park, a palace garden that had misplaced its palace.
As she walked the paths bordered with formal fences, amid the lawns broken up by ponds and geometric hedges, Mei-lin wondered again why DeSondra Adjoumani had chosen this place for the meeting Lu was to have with the anonymous NSA official, who was reportedly willing to answer at least some of her questions.
“Why there?” she’d asked Adjoumani.
“I went there once with Ben Cho,” the FBI chief legat replied. “He thought it related to the Kwok holo-cast. The person you’re going to be meeting with thinks it’s an appropriate place to meet, too.”
Lu shrugged. Fearing this meeting might come to nought, she had at least brought something to read: her father’s last novel, Widows and Bad Breaks, with its private investigator working a case set in the publishing industry—“PI to the PI”—published at last.
Specimen stones rose from low-hedged mounds, their vertical thrust echoed by the screen of palm trees nearby and the high-rise apartment blocks farther off, beyond the Shing Mun River. A waterfall plummeted past sharp-edged stone tiers into a pool that eventually flowed into a small lake of greenish water, in the midst of which stood an island topped by an open, red-roofed pagoda gazebo. A moon bridge connected island to shore, its high arch reflected in the water of the pool such that arch and reflection together made a circular whole. Turtles sunned themselves on the banks and on the exposed rocks in the lake. A rainbow of fish moved through the murky water while a small flock of equally colorful escaped parrots flew overhead, creating a perfect Escher moment in which the worlds on either side of the lake’s mirroring surface seemed indistinguishably real and alive.
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