by Peter Watts
“When did it happen?”
“I don’t know. A couple of hours.”
“Did anyone—” I ask, because of course I can’t say Did you— “No. I don’t think anybody else even saw it.” She releases the curtain. “She got off easy, all things considered. She walked away.”
I don’t ask whether the phone lines were up. I don’t ask if Janet tried to help, if she shouted or threw something or even let the woman inside afterwards. Janet’s not stupid.
A distant mirage sparkles in the deepening twilight: the campus. There’s another oasis, a bit nearer, over by False Creek, and the edge of a third if I crane my neck. Everything else is grey or black or flickering orange.
Gangrene covers the body. Just a few remnant tissues still alive.
“You’re sure it was the same guy?” I wonder.
“Who the fuck cares!” she screams. She catches herself, turns away. Her fists ball up at her sides.
Finally, she turns back to look at me.
“Yes it was,” she says in a tight voice. “I’m sure.”
I never know what I’m supposed to do.
I know what I’m supposed to feel, though. My heart should go out to her, to anyone so randomly brutalized. This much should be automatic, unthinking. Suddenly I can see her face, really see it, a fragile mask of control teetering on the edge of meltdown; and so much more behind, held barely in check. I’ve never seen her look like this before, even the day it happened to her. Maybe I just didn’t notice. I wait for it to affect me, to fill me with love or sympathy or even pity. She needs something from me. She’s my friend. At least that’s what I call her. I look for something, anything, that would make me less of a liar. I go down as deep as I can, and find nothing but my own passionate curiosity.
“What do you want me to do?” I ask. I can barely hear my own voice.
Something changes in her face. “Nothing. Nothing, Keith. This is something I’ve got to work through on my own, you know?”
I shift my weight and try to figure out whether she means it.
“I could stay here for a few days,” I say at last. “If you want.”
“Sure.” She looks out the window, her face more distant than ever. “Whatever you like.”
* * *
“They lost Mars!” he wails, grabbing me by the shoulders.
I know the face; he’s about three doors down the hall. But I can’t remember the name, it’s...wait, Chris, Chris something...Fletcher. That’s it.
“All the Viking data,” he’s saying, “from the 70’s, you know, NASA said they had it archived, they said I could have it no problem, I planned my whole fucking thesis around it!”
“It got lost?” It figures; data files everywhere are corrupting in record numbers these days.
“No, they know exactly where it is. I can go down and pick it up any time I want,” Fletcher says bitterly.
“So what’s—”
“It’s all on these big magnetic disks—”
“Magnetic?”
“—and of course magmedia have been obsolete for fucking decades, and when NASA upgraded their equipment they somehow missed the Viking data.” He pounds the wall, emits a hysterical little giggle. “So they’ve got all this data that nobody can access. There probably isn’t a computer stodgy enough anywhere on the continent.”
I tell Janet about it afterwards. I expect her to shake her head and make commiserating noises, that’s too bad or what an awful thing to happen. But she doesn’t even look away from the window. She just nods, and says, “Loss of information. Like what happened to me.”
I look outside. No stars visible, of course. Just sullen amber reflections on the bottom of the clouds.
“I can’t even remember being raped,” she remarks. “Funny, you’d think it would be one of those things that stick in your mind. And I know it happened, I can remember the context and the aftermath and I can piece the story together, but I’ve lost the actual...event...”
From behind, I can see the curve of her cheek and the edge of a smile. I haven’t seen Janet smile in a long time. It seems like years.
“Can you prove that the earth revolves around the sun?” she asks. “Can you prove it’s not the other way around?”
“What?” I circle to her left, a wary orbit. Her face comes into view, smooth and almost unmarked by now, like a mask.
“You can’t, can you? If you ever could. It’s been erased. Or maybe it’s just lost. We’ve all forgotten so much...”
She’s so calm. I’ve never seen her so calm. It’s almost frightening.
“You know, I’ll bet after a while we forget things as fast as we learn them,” she remarks. “I bet that’s always the way it’s been.”
“Why do you say that?” I keep my voice carefully neutral.
“You can’t store everything, there’s not enough room. How can you take in the new without writing over the old?”
“Come on, Jan.” I try for a light touch: “Our brains are running out of disk space?”
“Why not? We’re finite.”
Jesus, she’s serious.
“Not that finite. We don’t even know what most of the brain does, yet.”
“Maybe it doesn’t do anything. Maybe it’s like our DNA, maybe most of it’s junk. You remember back when they found—”
“I remember.” I don’t want to hear what they found, because I’ve been trying to forget it for years. They found perfectly healthy people with almost no brain tissue. They found people living among us, heads full of spinal fluid, making do with a thin lining of nerve cells where their brains should be. They found people growing up to be engineers and schoolteachers before discovering that they should have been vegetables instead.
They never found any answers. God knows they looked hard enough. I heard they were making some progress, though, before—
Loss of information, Jan says. Limited disk space. She’s still smiling at me, insight shines from her eyes with a giddy radiance. But I can see her vision now, and I don’t know what she’s smiling about. I see two spheres expanding, one within the other, and the inner one is gaining. The more I learn the more I lose, my own core erodes away from inside. All the basics, dissolving; how do I know that the earth orbits the sun?
Most of my life is an act of faith.
* * *
I’m half a block from safety when he drops down on me from a second-story window. I get lucky; he makes a telltale noise on the way down. I almost get out of his way. We graze each other and he lands hard on the pavement, twisting his ankle.
Technically, handguns are still illegal. I pull mine out and shoot him in the stomach before he can recover.
A flicker of motion. Suddenly on my left, a woman as big as me, face set and sullen, standing where there was only pavement a moment ago. Her hands are buried deep in the pockets of a torn overcoat. One of them seems to be holding something.
Weapon or bluff? Particle or wave? Door number one or door number two?
I point the gun at her. I try very hard to look like someone who hasn’t just used his last bullet. For one crazy moment I think that maybe it doesn’t even matter what happens here, whether I live or die, because maybe there is a parallel universe, some impossible angle away, where everything works out fine.
No. Nothing happens unless observed. Maybe if I just look the other way...
She’s gone, swallowed by the same alley that disgorged her. I step over the gurgling thing twitching on the sidewalk.
“You can’t stay here,” I tell Janet when I reach her refuge. “I don’t care how many volts they pump through the fence, this place isn’t safe.”
“Sure it is,” she says. She’s got the TV tuned to Channel 6, God’s own mouthpiece coming through strong and clear; the Reborns have a satellite up in geosynch and that fucker never seems to go offline.
She’s not watching it, though. She just sits on her sofa, knees drawn up under her chin, staring out the window.
“The securit
y’s better on campus,” I say. “We can make room for you. And you won’t have to commute.”
Janet doesn’t answer. Inside the TV, a talking head delivers a lecture on the Poisoned Fruits Of Secular Science.
“Jan—”
“I’m okay, Keith. Nobody’s gotten in yet.”
“They will. All they’ve got to do is throw a rubber mat over the fence and they’re past the first line of defense. Sooner or later they’ll crack the codes for the front gate, or—”
“No, Keith. That would take too much planning.”
“Janet, I’m telling you—”
“Nothing’s organized any more, Keith. Haven’t you noticed?”
Several faint explosions echo from somewhere outside.
“I’ve noticed,” I tell her.
“For the past four years,” she says, as though I haven’t spoken, “all the patterns have just...fallen apart. Things are getting so hard to predict, lately, you know? And even when you seem them coming, you can’t do anything about them.”
She glances at the television, where the head is explaining that evolution contradicts the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
“It’s sort of funny, actually,” Janet says.
“What is?”
“Everything. Second Law.” She gestures at the screen. “Entropy increasing, order to disorder. Heat death of the universe. All that shit.”
“Funny?”
“I mean, life’s a pretty pathetic affair in the face of physics. It is sort of a miracle it ever got started in the first place.”
“Hey.” I try for a disarming smile. “You’re starting to sound like a creationist.”
“Yeah, well in a way they’re right. Life and entropy just don’t get along. Not in the long run, anyway. Evolution’s just a — a holding action, you know?”
“I know, Jan.”
“It’s like this, this torrent screaming through time and space, tearing everything apart. And sometimes these little pockets of information form in the eddies, in these tiny protected backwaters, and sometimes they get complicated enough to wake up and brag about beating the odds. Never lasts, though. Takes too much energy to fight the current.”
I shrug. “That’s not exactly news, Jan.”
She manages a brief, tired smile. “Yeah, I guess not. Undergrad existentialism, huh? It’s just that everything’s so...hungry now, you know?”
“Hungry?”
“People. Biological life in general. The Net. That’s the whole problem with complex systems, you know; the more intricate they get, the harder entropy tries to rip them apart. We need more and more energy just to keep in one piece.”
She glances out the window.
“Maybe a bit more,” she says, “than we have available these days.”
Janet leans forward, aims a remote control at the television.
“You’re right, though. It’s all old news.”
The smile fades. I’m not sure what replaces it.
“It just never sunk in before, you know?”
Exhaustion, maybe.
She presses the remote. The head fades to black, cut off in midrant.
A white dot flickers defiantly on center stage for a moment.
“There he goes.” Her voice hangs somewhere between irony and resignation. “Washed downstream.”
* * *
The doorknob rotates easily in my grasp, clockwise, counterclockwise. It’s not locked. A television laughs on the far side of a wall somewhere.
I push the door open.
Orange light skews up from the floor at the far end of the hall, where the living room lamp has fallen. Her blood is everywhere, congealing on the floor, crowding the wall with sticky rivulets, thin dark pseudopods that clot solid while crawling for the baseboards—
No.
I push the door open.
It swings in a few centimeters, then jams. Something on the other side yields a bit, sags back when I stop pushing. Her hand is visible through the gap in the doorway, palm up on the floor, fingers slightly clenched like the limbs of some dead insect. I push at the door again; the fingers jiggle lifelessly against the hardwood.
No. Not that either.
I push the door open.
They’re still in there with her. Four of them. One sits on her couch, watching television. One pins her to the floor. One rapes her. One stands smiling in the hallway, waves me in with a hand wrapped in duct tape, a jagged blob studded with nails and broken glass.
Her eyes are open. She doesn’t make a sound—
No. No. No.
These are mere possibilities. I haven’t actually seen any of them. They haven’t happened yet. The door is still closed.
I push it open.
The probability wave collapses.
And the winner is...
None of the above. It’s not even her apartment. It’s our office.
I’m inside the campus perimeter, safe behind carbon-laminate concrete, guarded by armed patrols and semi-intelligent security systems that work well over half the time. I will not call her, even if the phones are working today. I refuse to indulge these sordid little backflips into worlds that don’t even exist.
I am not losing it.
* * *
Her desk has been abandoned for two weeks now. The adjacent concrete wall, windowless, unpainted, is littered with nostalgic graphs and printouts; population cycles, fractal intrusions into Ricker curves, a handwritten reminder that All tautologies are tautologies.
I don’t know what’s happening. We’re changing. She’s changing. Of course, you idiot, she was raped, how could she not change? But it’s as though her attacker was only a catalyst, somehow, a trigger for some transformation still ongoing, cryptic and opaque. She’s shrouded in a chrysalis; something’s happening in there, I see occasional blurred movement, but all the details are hidden.
I need her for so much. I need her ability to impose order on the universe, I need her passionate desire to reduce everything to triviality. No result was good enough, everything was always too proximate for her; every solution she threw back in my face: “yes, but why?” It was like collaborating with a two-year-old.
I’ve always been a parasite. I feel like I’ve lost the vision in one eye.
I guess it was ironic. Keith Elliot, quantum physiologist, who saw infinite possibilities in the simplest units of matter; Janet Thomas, catastrophe theorist, who reduced whole ecosystems down to a few lines of computer code. We should have killed each other. Somehow it was a combination that worked.
Oh God. When did I start using past tense?
* * *
There’s a message on the phone, ten hours old. The impossible has happened; the police caught someone, a suspect. His mug shots are on file in the message cache.
He looks a bit like me.
“Is that him?” I ask her.
“I don’t know.” Janet doesn’t look away from the window. “I didn’t look.”
“Why not? Maybe he’s the one! You don’t even have to leave the apartment, you could just call them back, say yes or no. Jan, what’s going on with you?”
She cocks her head to one side. “I think,” she says, “My eyes have opened. Things have finally started to make some sort of...sense, I guess—”
“Christ, Janet, you were raped, not baptized!”
She draws her knees up under her chin and starts rocking back and forth. I can’t call it back.
I try anyway. “Jan, I’m sorry. It’s just...I don’t understand, you don’t seem to care about anything any more—”
“I’m not pressing charges.” Rocking, rocking. “Whoever it was. It wasn’t his fault.”
I can’t speak.
She looks back over her shoulder. “Entropy increases, Keith. You know that. Every act of random violence helps the universe run down.”
“What are you talking about? Some asshole deliberately assaulted you!”
She shrugs, looking back out the window. “So some matter is sentient.
That doesn’t exempt it from the laws of physics.”
I finally see it; in this insane absolution she confers, in the calm acceptance in her voice. Metamorphosis is complete. My anger evaporates. Underneath there is only a sick feeling I can’t name.
“Jan,” I say, very quietly.
She turns and faces me, and there is no reassurance there at all.
“Things fall apart,” she says. “The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
It sounds familiar, somehow, but I can’t...I can’t...
“Nothing? You’ve forgotten Yeats, too?” She shakes her head, sadly. “You taught it to me.”
I sit beside her. I touch her, for the first time. I take her hands.
She doesn’t look at me. But she doesn’t seem to mind.
“You’ll forget everything, soon, Keith. You’ll even forget me.”
She looks at me then, and something she sees makes her smile a little. “You know, in a way I envy you. You’re still safe from all this. You look so closely at everything you barely see anything at all.”
“Janet...”
But she seems to have forgotten me.
After a moment she takes her hands from mine and stands up. Her shadow, cast orange by the table lamp, looms huge and ominous on the far wall. But it’s her face, calm and unscarred and only life-sized, that scares me.
She reaches down, puts her hands on my shoulders. “Keith, thank you. I could never have come through this without you. But I’m okay now, and I think it’s time to be on my own again.”
A pit opens in my stomach. “You’re not okay,” I tell her, but I can’t seem to keep my voice level.
“I’m fine, Keith. Really. I honestly feel better than I have in...well, in a long time. It’s all right for you to go.”
I can’t. I can’t.
“I really think you’re wrong.” I have to keep her talking. I have to stay calm. “You may not see it but I don’t think you should be on your own just yet, you can’t do this—”
Her eyes twinkle briefly. “Can’t do what, Keith?”
I try to answer but it’s hard, I don’t even know what I’m trying to say, I—
“I can’t do it,” is what comes out, unexpected. “It’s just us, Janet, against everything. I can’t do it without you.”