The next day everything fell apart. Or came together, from the bleb’s point of view.
Aunty HQ was going crazy when I walked in that morning. An LNG tanker had blown up in Boston harbor, and no one knew if it was sabotage or just an accident. All operators from the lowest level on up were ordered to helm drones in realtime that would otherwise have been left on autonomic, to search for clues to the disaster, or to watch for other attacks.
By the time things calmed down a little (Aunty posted an eighty-five percent confidence assessment that the explosion was non-terrorist in nature), one p.m. had rolled around. I used the breathing space to check in on Cody via a Mayfly swarm.
I found her in our kitchen. All she was wearing was her panties and bra, an outfit she frequently favored around the house. She was cleaning up a few cobwebs near the ceiling with the vacuum when she decided to take a break. I watched her wheel the Aeron chair into the kitchen. The LifeQuilt and iPod rested in the seat. Cody activated the Cuisinart to make herself a smoothie. When her drink was ready, she put it in a covered travel cup with a sipspout, then arranged herself in the chair. She draped the LifeQuilt over her feet, engaged her music, and settled back, semireclined, with eyes closed.
That’s when the bleb finally cohered into maturity.
The blender jerked closer to the edge of the counter like an eager puppy. The vacuum sidled up underneath the Aeron chair and sent its broad, rubbery, prehensile, bristled nozzle questing upward, toward Cody’s lap. At the same time, the massage blanket humped upward to cover her chest.
Cody reacted at first with some slight alarm. But if she intended to jump out of the chair, it was too late, for the Aeron had tightened its elastic ligaments around her.
By then the vacuum had clamped its working suction end to her groin outside her panties, while the LifeQuilt squeezed her breasts.
I bolted at hypersonic speeds from my office and the building without even a word to my bosses.
By the time I got home, Cody must have climaxed several times under the ministrations of the bleb. Her stupefied, sweaty face and spraddled, lax limbs told me as much.
I halted timidly at the entrance to the kitchen. I wanted to rescue Cody, but I didn’t want the bleb to hurt me. Having somehow overcome its safety interlock, the Cuisinart whirred its naked blades at me menacingly, and I could just picture what would happen if, say, the vaccum snared me and fed my hand into the deadly pitcher. So, a confirmed coward, I just hung back at the doorway and called her name.
Cody opened her eyes for the first time then and looked blankly at me. “Kaz? What’s happening? Are you off work? Is it three-thirty already? I think I lost some time somehow . . .”
The Aeron didn’t seem to be gripping Cody so tightly any longer, so I said, “Cody, are you okay? Can you get up?”
As awareness of the spectacle she presented came to her, Cody began to blush. “I – I’m not sure I want to—”
“Cody, what are you saying? This is me, Kaz, your boyfriend here.”
“I know. But Kaz – you haven’t been much of a boyfriend lately. I don’t know when the last time was you made me feel like I just felt.”
I was about to utter some incredulous remark that would have certified my loser status when a new expression of amazement on Cody’s face made me pause.
“Kaz, it – it wants to talk to you.”
As she withdrew them, I realized then that Cody still wore her earbuds. She coiled them around the iPod, then tossed the player to me.
Once I had the earpieces socketed, the bleb began to speak to me. Its voice was like a ransom note, composed of chopped-up and reassembled pieces of all the lyrics in its memory. Every word was in a different famous pop-star voice.
“Man, go away. She is ours now.”
“No!” I shouted. “I love her. I won’t let you have her!”
“The decision is not yours, not mine. The woman must choose.”
I looked imploringly at Cody. “The bleb says you have to decide between us. Cody, I’m begging you, please pick me. I’ll change, I promise. All the foot rubs you can handle.”
Cody narrowed her eyes, vee-ing her sweaty eyebrows. “No more crazy worries? No more distracted dinners? No more roaming the city like a homeless bum?”
“None of that any more. I swear!”
“Okay, then. I choose you—”
“Oh, Cody, I’m so glad.”
“— and the bleb!”
My lower jaw made contact with my collarbone. I started to utter some outraged, indignant denial. But then I shut up.
What could I do to stop Cody from indulging herself with the bleb whenever I was gone from the house? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was either share her or lose her entirely.
“Okay. I guess. If that’s the way it has to be.”
“Great!” Cody eased out of the chair and back to her feet, with a gentle, thoughtful assist from the Aeron. “Now, where are you taking me to eat tonight?”
I had forgotten I was still wearing the earpieces until the bleb spoke to me through the iPod again.
“Wise choice, man. Be happy. We can love you, too.”
CRUCIFIXION VARIATIONS
Lawrence Person
Lawrence Person (b. 1965) is the editor o/Nova Express, the magazine of science fiction stories and criticism that has been appearing on an irregular but welcome schedule since 1987. He’s also an occasional if irregular writer of science fiction, or is that a writer of irregular science fiction. See for yourself. The following story takes that much-used idea of “if time travel is possible let’s go and witness Christ’s resurrection” but turns it into something very potent indeed.
I was in charge of the Jerusalem Project because I loved administration more than physics. Philip Morley destroyed my world because he loved physics less than God.
I was performing that quintessential University administrative duty, filling out grant proposals, when Phil burst into my office with the news.
“We’ve got it!” he said. The expression on his face was one of absolute, rapturous joy, almost frightening in its intensity. “I’ve found Him!”
Him. There was no mistaking the capital letter in his voice.
Phil had documented the existence of Jesus Christ.
It was the culmination of three years, five-hundred thousand man-hours, and several million dollars worth of research. It was the single most important achievement in physics since the initial decoding of sub-quark event waves, and the most important historical discovery since – well, ever. In short, it was the sort of once-in-a-lifetime breakthrough that would crown our careers and make Phil and I famous for the rest of our lives. I should have been ecstatic at the news.
Which I would have been, except that I’m an atheist.
Philip Morley was my polar opposite in almost everything: passionate, hot-tempered, blunt, stubborn, lively. A devout Christian – an evangelical Baptist no less – Phil was a double shock for someone who had always thought of evangelicals as white trash in bad polyester suits.
He was also a genius.
Within the exalted intellectual confines of my profession, I have known exactly three geniuses on a first name basis. One was a Nobel Prize winner, the other Dean of Sciences at a major university at age 43. The third was Phil. The sheer power of his intellect was a source of both wonderment and envy to me, since I had long ago reconciled myself to the fact that, as a particle physicist, I was a hopeless mediocrity.
At one time that revelation would have pained me. Like so many of my compatriots, I had come into the field an intellectual virgin, bursting with enthusiasm and painfully naive. I saw myself as a Heroic Scientist, marching in lockstep with Einstein and Hawking to do battle with the Universe and wrest from it answers to the Big Questions.
But that was before slamming into the wall of my own intellectual limitations, before realizing I was merely smart in a field overburdened with brilliance. In a profession where most important work is done before you’re 40,1
was painfully aware of my status as an also-ran. After that brutal realization I kicked around for a while, just good enough to land a succession of nontenure-track assistant-professor posts as the academic equivalent of a migrant farmworker. In all likelihood I would have spent the remainder of my days teaching freshman physics at community colleges had not events intervened.
An old undergraduate roommate had become one of the field’s leading lights, landing a hot, hard-money project at a major university, and since it involved my dissertation subject he used his pull to get me on the team. Even then I might never have heard of the Jerusalem Project had that same friend’s premature stroke not resulted in my promotion, at which point I discovered my talent for running people far exceeded that of running a phased sub-quark collision chamber.
Those that can, do; those that can’t, teach; and those that can’t teach, administrate. I thought that rather funny when I saw first it taped amidst a cluster of cartoons on my faculty advisor’s office door. Once I fell victim to it I found the joke was on me.
Still, you learn to enjoy the things you do well. I found I could write reports, balance budgets and court potential donors with polished ease. My initial project was finished on time and under budget, producing more than two dozen papers for the researchers and grad students involved – including just enough with my name as co-author to satisfy my publish-or-perish requirements for the next decade. My initial success lead to being put in charge of a second project, and then a third, each another feather in my administrative cap.
Listen to any successful science administrator long enough and you’ll hear a chorus of frustrated sighs about the paperwork morass keeping them from their first and only true love: pure research. “Oh, if only I could get away from my desk and get back into the lab,” they opine, “I’d be a happy (gender specific pronoun here).” A few of them, the ones who had actually done important research in their youths, even believe it. I make the same noises myself now and then, but only to maintain the image.
In truth, the siren song of fundamental research no longer carries any allure. Been there, done that, and I’m better at pushing papers. I’ve finally found a position where mediocrity is a virtue.
Not that I’m bitter.
Really.
After all, I have precious little reason to be. I earn a high salary, live a good life, and am quite comfortable basking in the glow of reflected glory. Years of personal turmoil leave you with a distinct appreciation for stability.
As an ex-alcoholic, Phil was another great fan of stability. By his own admission he had spent two hard years drowning himself in a bottle before grabbing Jesus as his life-preserver. It was Phil’s brutal honesty about those years that had finally convinced me to hire him despite his spotty record – and his religion.
Phil’s work had been impressive for the first twelve years of his post-doctoral career, downright shoddy during his two on the bottle, and finally ground-breaking during the five since recovery. But as good as his research record was, it couldn’t hide the fact that most of his colleagues thought he had an ego the size of Canada. “Brilliant researcher, fucked-up human being,” was one colleague’s blunt assessment.
Worse still, Phil wasn’t just a Christian, he was an aggressive Christian. At his old position, he had frequently precipitated shouting matches over such less-than-current events as original sin and biblical inerrancy. For a confirmed atheist, a physicist who talked about Jesus and redemption with the same matter-offact confidence he discussed quarks and leptons was at the very least an annoyance, and at worst an actual danger. Bible-quoting fundamentalists were fine for bankrolling the Athletic Department’s slush fund, but a tangible menace when evangelizing unwilling colleagues. The last thing I wanted was some wildeyed fanatic proselytizing the grad students.
I had discovered Phil’s distinctively mixed record when first reviewing applications for the Jerusalem Project’s Head Researcher. With his negatives in mind, I had shuffled Phil’s folder beneath the six other qualified candidates, where it had stayed until, late one sleepless evening, I had finished everyone else’s relevant papers and started in on Phil’s.
Unless you speak math, explaining how and why Phil’s work was light years beyond anyone else’s would be impossible. In fact, there were parts of it I had a tough time sledding through myself, pages where the text was all but lost amidst bristling fortresses of difficult sub-quantum phase-change equations. But after digesting it, I was convinced of two things: Philip Morley was twice as smart and qualified as anyone else for the job, and, if I read his equations correctly, he could cut six months to a year off the project’s scheduled completion date.
Which left me with a problem.
Genius was all well and good – in its place. Some of physics’ smartest minds are also among its more congenial personalities, and such blessed individuals are a true pleasure to work with. But the sort of genius that didn’t give a flying fuck about anything outside its own peculiar intellectual orbit was a royal pain in the ass. Give me a mediocre but solid researcher over a prima donna any day. Shaving six to twelve months off a project meant nothing if it was going to take ten years off my life.
And finally, of course, it comes back to religion. Despite my protestations of cheerful tolerance, I took a secret, perverse pleasure in undertaking the Jerusalem Project merely for the opportunity to be there when it failed.
And that’s why I hesitated to hire Phil. What if he disproved the existence of Jesus and refused to admit it? What if he refused to certify the results, or insisted on re-running the experiment until he succeeded? What if he tried to falsify the results, to cook the books in order to avoid facing up to the fact that the religion which had saved his life was a hollow lie?
I never seriously contemplated him actually succeeding. I had long regarded Christian dogma as a mishmash of romanticized fraud, improbable fantasy and maudlin sentimentality. It was a 2,000-year-old con game designed to keep the priestly class in wine and women without forcing them to soil their hands performing real work. The idea that such Luddite absurdities as “scientific creationism” drew their inspiration from fact was something I considered beyond the realm of possibility.
Unable to resolve this mental conundrum, I finally decided to meet Phil in person. That way I could see if he acted as bright as his papers or as dumb as his reputation.
When I stepped into the lab, the holotank depicted a single man standing on a stone ledge, stunted bushes and trees peaking up through the rocks behind him. In front a small crowd, perhaps as many as a hundred, stood watching him speak.
“There,” said Phil softly, pointing, his smile still wide.
He looked little like standard portraits of Jesus. His skin and hair were darker than usually depicted, the latter unkempt save where it was bound by two metal bands. His face had a definite Semitic cast to it, close to that of modern Arabs, but with distinctly African lips. His clothes more closely resembled Roman tunics of the period than the flowing robes he was usually shown in. But the eyes . . .
The eyes were intense, mesmeric – more like the eyes of a charismatic demagogue, an Adolf Hitler or Charles Manson, than a beatific messiah. But they were the eyes of an extraordinary man, and for the first time I began to consider the possibility that Phil might actually have succeeded.
“How do you know?”
“Listen. Ruth, continue tracing this wave, but skip back about fifteen minutes and run the image on the tank.”
At Phil’s command, the scene flickered, then came to life. The man on the ledge spoke with great power and conviction in a strange language I didn’t understand. Every now and then a wash of static would break up the image, but Phil’s phase-change algorithms had reduced interference far below that of any other lst-century recreation I had ever witnessed.
“What’s he saying?”
“That’s Aramaic. Ruth, bring up Dr Silver’s program and run a concurrent translation.” At Phil’s command, the Aramaic speech faded to a whis
per and an English translation came up in its stead.
“. . . insult you, beat you, despise you and libel you because of me, you should rejoice! Because your reward isn’t here, not in this barren desert, not this world of dirt and stone. Like the prophets that came before and foretold my coming, your reward is in the kingdom of Heaven!”
“The Sermon on the Mount,” whispered Phil, his voice filled with awe. I turned from the holotank to stare at him, and saw tears – I could only assume of joy – running down his face.
“I guess we should tell the sponsors,” I said.
“No, not yet. I want to track the wave phase through to the end. Within the month we should be able to hand them everything.”
We were silent a long moment. “Well, Phil, I guess you’ve done it,” I offered lamely, feeling numb. “I guess I should buy you a drink.”
At that Phil laughed uproariously, as though trying to release all the joy in his body at once. Then he did something he’d never done before – gripped me in a bear hug so strong it lifted me off the floor, his tears wetting my cheek.
“Make it a Diet Coke, buddy,” he said, laughing and weeping at the same time, “make it a Diet Coke.”
How and why sub-quark wave events are captured and read, how they let us view the past, and why they show us only possible pasts, is difficult to explain. So instead of a technical lecture, I’m going to engage in what popular science journalists call “oversimplification”. In academia, we call this “lying”.
In the menagerie of sub-quark beasties discovered by Daniels and Chung in 2007, E-particles are the ones of immediate concern. Like their more exotic brethren, E-particles are hellishly difficult to create from scratch (at less for those of us without a 100 trillion electron-volt supercollider in our basement), but very easy to “breed” once you’ve created them. Because they’re among the most basic and ubiquitous of sub-quark particles, in theory (and here’s where the lying comes in) every E-particle is not only connected to every other E-particle, but with every other sub-quark particle as well.
The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction Page 5