“Leo?” says Carson.
“Watch out!” yells Sarmax—
—as Control’s suit goes crazy, gyros propelling it against a wall and then bouncing back toward the Operative, who hurls himself aside, hearing Jarvin cursing Control for traitor and ingrate and Control begging Jarvin not to absorb his mind, and the Operative realizes in that moment that Control hasn’t a chance—that none of them do—and the blood of Spencer drips down past Haskell’s face and the body of Marlowe floats above them and the man who isn’t really Alek Jarvin smashes Control against another wall with a force that sends parts flying, some kind of machine howl filling all their heads as the consciousness of a full-fledged quantum computer starts getting absorbed by something else altogether—
“Let’s get out of here,” says Lynx.
“Nowhere to run,” says Sarmax.
Jarvin tosses what’s left of Control aside.
And looks at them like he’s sizing up his prey—
“Easy,” says Carson. Linehan’s jaw drops open as Jarvin’s face just—shimmers, the molded software that covers it switching off, peeling back to reveal another face—a smile that he recognizes from newsvid—
“Welcome to the endgame,” says Matthew Sinclair.
Fuck,” says the Operative.
Sinclair’s smile broadens. “Good to see you too.”
“You fucking bastard.”
“I’ll be the first to admit it’s been a long, strange trip.”
“What the fuck have you become, Matthew?”
“Ask him,” says Sinclair—gestures at Linehan.
And now they’re all looking at him again; one in particular, and it’s all Linehan can do not to wilt before the gaze of the thing that’s not even vaguely human …
“You … ate Control,” he says.
Sinclair shrugs. “In point of fact, I’m still doing that.”
“Fucking digesting him,” mutters Lynx.
“It’ll take a few minutes,” says Sinclair. He looks around. “Thanks for the assist, Leo.”
“Not like I knew who I was assisting,” says Sarmax.
“Not like it really matters. And the rest of you can forget about whatever dick-ass weaponry you’ve still got.”
“When did you replace Jarvin?” asks Lynx.
“Long before he could do any damage.”
So there was a Jarvin?” says the Operative.
“Yes,” says Sinclair. “And he really did steal my files.”
“That’s why he died,” says Lynx.
Sinclair looks amused. “Raise your thinking,” he says. “There is no why. There just is.”
“That’s what Control was just saying,” says Sarmax.
“My only student worth the name.”
“Other than Claire,” says Lynx.
“Claire’s no student.” Sinclair points toward her. “Look at that face. Look at those eyes. Enough to make even Carson lose his way—”
“God damn you,” says the Operative.
“That would be tough,” says Sinclair.
“You’ve been playing us the whole time,” says Sarmax. “You needed us to make it in here.”
“Another of these funny words,” says Sinclair. “Need’s right up there with why. There was a pattern involving all of us. And all I’ve been doing these past few days is—”
“Steer,” says the Operative.
Sinclair smiles. “Quantum decoherence necessitates the splitting-off of world-lines. Every time anyone makes a choice—every time a particle goes down one of two paths—the universe divides anew. Every time. All the other interpretations of quantum mechanics were just desperate attempts to explain away the problem by those who couldn’t accept the idea they weren’t the center of some single existence. Meaning the real question is how to exploit existence’s true nature. Once Deutsch refined Feynman’s quantum computer concept to postulate a machine that computes across multiple universes—that contains more calculations than any one universe—the road ahead was clear.”
“Clear as mud,” says Sarmax. “This is about a lot more than just a rogue quantum comp—”
“Of course.” Sinclair moves over to where Sarmax is looking up at him. He looks down at Indigo—”
“We can bring her back, you know,” he says quietly.
Bullshit,” whispers Sarmax. But he feels hope rise within him even so—”
“Or the next best thing,” says Sinclair. “Plucked from another world with almost the same memories. Albeit perhaps a slightly different set of loyalties. But she’d be as real to you as—”
“But what about the other Sarmax?” asks Lynx.
“What?” says Sarmax.
“Your evil twin,” says Lynx. “Some poor fuck who would just end up missing her as much as you ever did—”
“Shut up,” says Sarmax.
“To be sure,” says Sinclair. “The tyranny of randomness—some of you live with her, some of you live without. We’re all just specks caught in the blast of fate—”
“Except for you,” says Carson.
“The advantage of the first-mover.” Sinclair laughs at his own joke, but no one else seems to be in the mood. “Once someone is able to tune his mind into other realities, he’s no longer confined to a single universe. That’s when the game gets interesting.”
“He breaks out into the multiverse,” says Lynx.
Sinclair gazes at him. “And there you go thinking too small again.”
What the hell do you mean?”
“I’m sure Carson can fill you in.”
“Think about it, Lynx.” The Operative wonders if Sinclair is testing him—wonders if he might actually survive this. “This isn’t about any one multiverse. Each one is myriad parallel worlds but—”
“Not even parallel,” says Sarmax faintly. His voice drifts among them, sounds almost hollow. “More like intertwined. Interfering with each other constantly. The whole idea of ‘universe’ is an absurdity, because they’re all—”
“Connected,” says the Operative. “And if you roll them back to the Big Bang that kicked them all off, all you find is that we’re on just one branch of something much larger. Something that—”
“So what’s outside these walls right now?” asks Linehan.
“Nothing,” says Sarmax.
“Or everything,” the Operative shrugs. “Same difference in the end. The walls of the Room constitute a barrier on space-time—an envelope sustained by the aetheric fluid of those culled in the slaughter that’s going on outside—and then harnessed by the generator-membranes and channeled through the primary node itself—”
“Haskell,” mutters Sarmax.
“Wait a second,” says Lynx, “you’re saying this really comes down to human sacrifice? To the burning up of souls—”
“That’s a loaded word,” says Sarmax.
“So strip it of its baggage,” says the Operative. “Sanskrit calls it prana. The Taoists know it as chi. It’s the aura that Kirlian photography captures. The life force within each of us. Absurd that science for so long thought it absurd—”
“A totally surface understanding,” says Sinclair. “We’re harnessing the consciousness of all that cattle. The assimilation of their quantum viewpoint to augment our own, allowing us to manipulate the cosmos—handing us the reins of aggregated decoherence to shape reality the way no individual observer-effect ever could. The conveying of mere psychic energy to the Room’s engines is just one source for the turbines cranking up around us—”
“In another age they’d have called you a magician,” says Sarmax.
“A black one,” says Linehan. “He wields the dark arts—”
Sinclair laughs. “You just don’t get it, do you? Science and magic are merely different sides of the same coin. Newton worked on his Principia by day, his alchemy by night—struggling against more than a thousand years of superstition while he did so. Never underestimate the impact that religion had on science—how much it deadened it, made it crav
e orthodoxy, gave it such a narrow view of all that’s possible even among those who thought they’d escaped faith’s baggage. The greatest tragedy in history was the triumph of monotheism—of ideologies that claimed a monopoly on magics while they engaged in mass hypnosis to prop up texts written in the fucking Bronze Age. Someone had to restore sanity before—”
“But God exists,” says Linehan. “He’s real.”
“Have you spoken with Him?”
“I’ve felt Him—”
“Real trick’s getting an answer,” says Haskell.
Her voice is coming from all around—from every screen that’s hung about the inner Room. The face of Claire Haskell sits on all of them. Each one’s saying the same thing.
“Nice to see you again, Matthew.”
Linehan’s already clocked it—Haskell’s body’s still contained within that pod. Sinclair isn’t even bothering to look. Presumably he’s already taken it all in. He’s just gazing at one of those Haskells on one of those screens—smiling as he does so—
“So glad you could join us, Claire.”
“But you weren’t counting on it, were you?”
“Such assumptions don’t—”
“Your future-sensing ended when you got to the Room.”
Sinclair says nothing. And suddenly Haskell’s voice sounds in Carson’s head—
get ready to move fast
The Operative shakes his head violently as though to clear it—can’t seem to establish any kind of return communication. He has no idea what the hell she’s planning—no idea if it’s even her anymore. Maybe Sinclair doesn’t either. Because Haskell’s voice has taken on what might almost be a certain wary confidence—
“I’m right, aren’t I? You knew exactly what would happen up until the point you stepped within. But you can’t postulate the condition of a structure cut off from all space. Nor could you anticipate what course your creation would take when cut off from all time, a bubble universe adrift amidst the sea of—”
“But there you go again,” says Sinclair. “With your assumptions. A luxury the trapped can’t afford.”
Some of the Haskells laugh. “You think I’m trapped?”
“I have your flesh, don’t I?”
“You of all people should know that meat means nothing—”
“We’ll see if that’s true when I burn it.”
The Operative notices something. Sinclair’s eyes are tracking on some of the screens, ignoring others. He wonders if any of the others have noticed this. But everybody else seems just too intent on trying to keep up—
“Do that and you won’t find your way home,” says Haskell.
“Home?” Sinclair laughs. “Why would I want to go home?”
“How else are you going to rule humanity—”
“And go back in time to change it,” says Lynx.
“I’m not,” says Sinclair.
“What?” asks Lynx.
“You can’t go back,” says Sinclair. “Travel to the past is travel to a parallel past by definition. Thus do the laws of quantum gravity sidestep paradox. And as to going back to the future of the world we left, Claire: a better question is, why would I want to?”
That last one seems to catch her off guard. “You—don’t—?”
“I don’t know if you noticed, but Earth really went to the dogs these last few days.”
“Thanks to you—”
“Can’t make an omelette without … well, what can I say? There are only so many ways to hammer a hole into the next dimension. Mass killing was always one of the more direct routes—”
“That was just one part of it,” she says coldly.
“Sure. First we had to get a bridgehead established.”
“Me,” she says.
“Us,” says Sarmax.
All of them, and he’s been left to live with it all: his role as the original prototype, his part in the creation of the ultimate hit-team, his days training those who would take his place, his nights with the woman whose body sprawls in front of him—
“Exactly,” says Sinclair. “The Rain. And only Leo here had any idea what he was getting into.”
“I was young enough to be into masochism.”
“A vice that failed to fade with time.”
“Fuck you, Matthew.”
“Do you want to see Indigo again or don’t you?”
“I see her in my mind right now, you bastard.”
“That might be all you ever do.”
“Didn’t you once tell me that memory is real?”
“Everything in the mind is real,” says Sinclair. “Though it got a lot more complicated once I’d remixed your head with all the histories of your other selves—”
“I thought Control was lying when he said—”
“He wasn’t. How else do you think I got a duplicate Marlowe into the mix? Took a shell and charged it with emissions seeping in from—”
“Fuck,” says Sarmax. He feels like he’s been punched in the gut. He notices Carson and Lynx seem to have the same reaction—
“This is bullshit,” says Lynx.
“I’m sure you wish it was.”
“But—they—the memories of those years—they were all consistent,” says Sarmax.
“Consistent at any given instant. Not necessarily across instants, though—”
“Jesus,” says Lynx, “that’s why it’s been such a head trip.”
Lynx’s mind’s spinning, but it’s finally all starting to make sense. Sinclair reprogrammed them with the real memories of others, left so much latent—and tapped so much else to enable telepathy among his agents, breaking down the walls that are—
“Everywhere,” says Lynx.
Sinclair nods. “Space-time riddled with bubbles; quantum foam that pervades us, each bubble a momentary wormhole, and all of it entangled. And once you postulate that Einstein’s hidden variable is actually consciousness, then the mind’s real significance in driving nonlocality becomes apparent. Unless, of course, your civilization is so dysfunctional it’s based on blinding itself to the obvious. Of course minds can link. Animals do it all the time. Just watch flocks of birds changing direction. Or the hive minds of bees and ants. But the human animal shackled itself in chains of language—language that opened up new possibilities even as it foreclosed others—”
“I thought you said you blamed religion,” says Linehan.
“‘In the beginning was the Word’: what the fuck do you think language is? How else do we label the universe?—and so much of that labeling is the papering-over of things we don’t understand. Why do humans have to be so fucking certain about everything even when they know nothing?”
No one says anything.
“I’ll tell you why. They don’t have the strength to gaze into abyss.”
“Unlike you,” says Haskell.
His eyes snap toward her, and she’s wondering if he’s realized what’s up with the screens. Or if he’s way ahead of her …
“I’m going to find you,” he says.
“You can try,” she says.
“But she’s right there,” says Linehan.
“I’m talking about her awareness,” says Sinclair. “On what sunless seas is she traveling? What stars gleam in the spaces through which she’s soaring? Is she even now beachcombing the shores of inflating universes?”
“She is,” she whispers—he’s right. They stretch all about her, whole hierarchies of dimensions, endless grids of no-grids, vast innation fields, pure information begetting endless chains of existence ripping past her, each one described by a wave-function that in itself describes a whole multiverse within it, infinite possibilities of some larger megaverse, the myriad paths stretching out on all sides and she can only see just a fucking fraction of it all. She takes in the plight and promise of infinite humanities, sees too—
“Tell me we’re not the only ones,” says Sinclair.
“We’re not,” she replies—sees in his eyes that he gets it, knows he can’t wa
it to see it—the limitless forms of life that populate existences—so many of those worlds just life and nothing more and some of them rising up toward intelligence, and some of that intelligence becoming starfaring—
“But what about in here?” says Sinclair.
“I see nothing,” she says.
“Nothing’s managed to slip between the cracks of time?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” asks Carson.
“I’m talking about the competition,” says Sinclair.
“You mean aliens?” asks Linehan.
“They wouldn’t even have to be that,” says Sarmax. “Could be any other humanity that’s managed to crack the code—”
“We have to assume others have done it,” says Sinclair. “Have to assume that they’re out there, maybe maneuvering against us even now—”
“Other Sinclairs,” says Sarmax.
“Other Haskells,” says Lynx. “Infinite numbers who have accomplished—”
“There are,” she says. “They’ve converged.”
“Meaning what?” asks Carson.
“They’re all me.”
Linehan’s the only one I might be able to get to
The voice rings out clear within him, but it’s not telling him anything he doesn’t already know. Sarmax is going to side with Sinclair rather than face a life without the woman he lacked for so long. Lynx will play the chameleon to the end. And the Operative can only wonder if Sinclair has planted some last trick within his head. He glances at him again—sees that he’s focused only on Haskell now—
“So you’re really a nexus,” says Sinclair.
“There must be others—”
“Presumably. That’s what makes this so exciting.”
“That’s why you said you didn’t want to go back.”
“And now you see what I mean. It’s like we’re on a ladder. All we can do is climb the rungs. All this talk about world-conquest, and all it signifies is how small everybody’s been thinking. The whole point of the eternity-game is to get out there and stretch your legs.”
“Eternity?” asks Lynx.
“Every last one of them,” says Sinclair.
The Machinery of Light ar-3 Page 33