It Came from the North

by Carita Forsgren

  “Helena’s condition is no better, then.”

  I shook my head. “It must be because of her illness, we’ve found no other explanation. She’s not able to control the oscillation. She instinctively starts to oscillate and always crashes with the same results.”

  “But she is clearly talented, too?”

  I nodded. “Just wait till she starts again to solve the computing problems we’ve left on her table. Last week she deciphered the traveling salesman’s problem with fifteen cities. You would need a supercomputer to do that. If she didn’t have that defect in her brain, who knows what she might accomplish.”

  I couldn’t help it; my attitude toward the patients was awe. In a sense they were omnipotent; in the medieval times their deeds were the stuff of ballads, or they were burned at the stake. I’d even wondered why no military idiot had yet come to the university and demanded Helena for their experiments. But most likely the oscillators were able to keep such probabilities far away from their life. And fortunately, life wasn’t a movie.

  “The team has already given up,” I clarified. “Except Salvatore who still wants to study her case. But then Salvatore is new.”

  “He’s ambitious. If he could prove something he’d be able to get funding.” Salvatore’s predecessor had suddenly quit a month ago; they said he’d won a big sum in the Euro-lottery. Salvatore had been in the house for only two weeks and he already expected to be able to find something the Institute’s veterans hadn’t yet explained. Salvatore thought Helena a freak that ought to be cut into thin slices if necessary to get answers.

  Salvatore’s predecessor had experimented with tighter control, but irritating the oscillators just led to trouble. Helena had been tied fast in her hospital bed, but even that had not kept her back. If the oscillators were allowed to live as they wanted and research was only done in the laboratory with machines, nothing weird happened to anybody. But who would listen to me.

  Everybody except Salvatore was tired of Helena. She was really of no benefit to the research at all. At the most, there was the boys’ fun in betting at what stage she’d escape her room again. It was very difficult to define the exact moment, since even our most sensitive movement control devices were unable to monitor her movements. That’s why they sometimes bet on the moment the cameras would stop working.

  “But you must be excited about that little boy, anyway?” Manuel continued.

  I sat up straighter. “He has developed enormously, but he’s not yet old enough to understand what it’s about. Salvatore dares not leave him alone even for a moment, so that his abilities won’t develop too far. His parents visit him almost daily.”

  “I guess they must be shocked.”

  I shrugged. “They consider it a religious miracle.”

  “It would be fantastic to get to know him.”

  The incident had even made the news. In the countryside, they’d found a five-year-old boy who was able to perform miracles. Various small things had happened in the boy’s family: a fire started by the gas stove had gone off by itself, and a huge crowd of butterflies had appeared inside the house whenever there was nobody else to watch. Then once it happened that the parents had woken up in the middle of the night because of awful screams downstairs. They found their sleepy son standing on the kitchen floor, and outside the back door, a burglar bawling in pain, one of his hands melted fast with the door handle. The miracle was so obvious and so public that it interested the media only for a week, after all, and the whole matter was accepted as just a tall tale. We were able to contact the family in peace and quiet and convince them of the importance of the research. The parents were so hysterical, they were happy to resort to the Institute. Anything, to cure the boy.

  Manuel chuckled. “We haven’t achieved any results yet, either, but we’ve invented new approaches.”

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  “Next, we are going to try blind testing with a comparison group. Everyone will try to affect the random series of numbers the computer will generate.”

  The lab boys liked to boast of their plans. Manuel, too, always tried to make an impression on me, since he was one of the lucky ones to be chosen as a test person. He let them pump various stimulating substances into his body, and afterwards sit for hours in a closed room observing whether there’d be any changes in him. I wasn’t impressed by experimental research and their boasts about it—it was sheer madness to strive to oscillate. I had watched Helena long enough to know that oscillation wasn’t meant for humans. When I’d spoken about my doubts, they just told me Helena’s condition was an exception.

  When Helena crashed she forgot everything. The boy was quite all right, as long as he stayed inside the Institute and close to the restrictor. And if he crashed, he always remained aware of his special abilities. Helena’s problem was caused purely by some memory disturbance, possibly an early stage of hereditary Alzheimer’s disease that nibbled at her brain piece by piece and made her forget what she ought or ought not to do.

  I shied away from speaking aloud about my doubts. I believed Helena and the boy’s condition was impossible to replicate artificially. Oscillation is a mutation only one person in a hundred million carries, and it certainly couldn’t be attained through experimental research. But even in that, there’s the damn probability, and probabilities are dangerous.

  “Well, see you again,” said Manuel. He disappeared into the long corridor that led to the multiple security doors and from there to the rooms of the scientists.

  It was like we all fumbled in the same darkness, trying to find a light switch, and maybe the house had no electricity, even. And being blind, we shouldn’t even be trying. We hardly knew what kind of bush we were sticking our heads into, and yet we just had to stick our heads in the bush. But perhaps I shouldn’t always have doubted; after all, I was paid to study the reports of the experimenters and try to see some logic in them.

  Helena

  I look again at the furniture in my room, all its details. Cameras have been skillfully planted in the corners. They are small but easy to find. Maybe they haven’t even tried to hide them, just made them as unnoticeable as possible so I wouldn’t be disturbed and worried.

  I don’t want to have an anxiety attack, although that’s ridiculous, too; who is there to be hurt, even if I cry? But some ways have been engraved in my spine as the only proper ways to behave, and a memory from my childhood surges up to pester my mind. I’m in a bus, traveling to my aunt in the mountains; I desperately want to pee but I dare not go and ask the driver to stop. I dare not, for I’ve been taught that it simply is not done. Finally I leak under myself and my skirt gets thoroughly wet. I only cry after I’ve run off the bus, when nobody can see me.

  They ask me a lot of questions. Do I remember what happened before I was brought here? Sure, I was working, quite normally. What about my giving notice, when did that happen? In my old life, when I was working in the veterinarian’s practice. So I do remember the practice? Of course, I specialized in the care of small pets, guinea pigs, mice, but also the more ordinary pets like dogs and cats. Did anything special happen there? I can’t say, what are you actually looking for with these questions of yours? Did I feel myself somehow different from others?

  I realize I’m now in the condition they call my clear moment. And when I have my clear moment, I’m something more. I’m able to do things that are impossible for them. If I want to enjoy my power, I have to hurry, but where would I fly? Is this instinctive feeling of mine enough, that even if I’m in no danger, I still have to leave, as quickly as possible?

  And how do I escape?

  Mireia

  The night shift was informed of the current research situation, and whether any problems were expected. That went with the terrain, of course: unexpected results, unforeseen expenses, and decisions that got stuck in the wheels of the university bureaucracy. The temptation to falsify research results was great. Presented on paper, the results sounded so unbelievable they made the spon
sors keen to follow the situation on the spot.

  I took leave of my colleagues and went in the dressing room to change. I skipped the shower; I could wash at home before going to bed to watch TV.

  At first, I noticed the bowl on the floor. It was filled to the brim with dry cat food, somebody’s joke, obviously. Then I saw the cat. She stood at the end of the corridor and stared at me, her tail bristled up. I stopped in my tracks, careful to make no sudden moves. Cautiously I tried to shuffle closer, at the same calling to the cat.

  I’d never gotten close enough to touch the cat and now, as always, she flung herself around the corner. I took a few running steps after her, but to no avail. Once again, the ghost of our Institute had gone on her way.

  I took up my bag, signed myself out, and closed both the sliding doors and the courtyard gate behind me. I fastened my bicycle with its shopping basket firmly on the fence. I’d already started to struggle with its cranky lock, but on a moment’s impulse, left the bicycle leaning against the railing. For once, I could walk home—it was only a couple of kilometers anyway and the evening was clear. Even the full moon had risen in the sky.

  The cat shouldn’t have been in the building at all. Señor Cañedo had, of course, accused one of us of keeping an illicit pet on public premises, but I don’t think anybody had smuggled her in. Who knows but that Cañedo had brought her himself? Or else she really was just an accidental stray cat that had found an open window (unlikely), and noticed an open door to the inner research premises (quite unlikely), and made her way to the apparatus past all security systems (impossible). When the morning shift arrived, they’d found the cat lying among the equipment. The cat had been approached with extreme care. Even if the restrictor under construction was safe and its radiation not dangerous, the cat might harm the sensors. Sleepily, the cat had turned to look at the arrivals, and at just the moment when she was about to be caught by the researchers, she had vanished without a trace.

  The boys named the cat Schrödinger, after the scientist who, in his imaginary experiment, put a cat in a box with a death machine. In the thought experiment, the cat was simultaneously both alive and dead, until an observer opened the box and verified what had happened to the animal. The point was that the wave function of every particle oscillated, and it crashed to a certain position in the very moment it was observed. Quantum theories had for a long time been just that, theories, with ridiculous inherent contradictions and impossibilities; but we’d got ahold of the things the theory described. We’d found people who were capable of controlling the particle-waves, transporting particles into a superposition state, and choosing the probability they wanted among several branching possibilities.

  To our knowledge, the cat was the only animal that was able to oscillate. But it was impossible to test her, or to observe what happened in her brain. When you caught her and started to connect her into the research apparatus, she slipped out of your hands and either disappeared behind the bookcases or literally dashed through the wall. Like the imaginary cat in the Schrödinger experiment, our stray was simultaneously both there and not there, but you could never know where and what she was doing.

  It was scary to think about what the cat might be able to do. If she could pass through a wall, she could also instantaneously jump through a person. Fortunately, so far she had been content to just disappear and reappear as she liked. There were employees who hadn’t seen her even once, and there were people to whom the cat repeatedly showed herself. I’d seen so many miracles in the Institute that I believed the cat to be real and no delusion. The matter need not even be anything kind of lofty and systematic; perhaps the cat was just playing cat-chess. She wanted to see everyone else, but no one was allowed to see her. Perhaps that was why she was such a damn good oscillator.

  My steps had taken me to my home alley almost without my notice. I glanced at the wine bar in the corner; the first customers were there already, enjoying the evening and good company. I went through the lower gate to the inner courtyard and closed the gate behind me.

  My life was like a sordid replica of Helena’s situation. I lived alone, imprisoned by my recurring rhythm; after a day off I always returned to my research room. The only difference was that I remembered every day and that could be painful, to remember one’s own loneliness. But that was my own conscious choice, anyway; at least that was how I justified it to myself. I did not care about other people and their company. I’d tried dating, but living together had proved impossible. I was irritated by the other’s different rhythm of life, by the clothes left on the floor, by the blue cheese in the fridge, and by the closed bathroom door when I wanted a shower. When you lived alone, you could be the mistress of your own life. Or at least imagine that you were.

  I made a cup of hot tea and stretched out on the couch for a while. There was a re-run of a popular quiz on the TV, but I couldn’t care less about it. I turned the lights off and climbed upstairs to sleep.

  I laid my head on the pillow but couldn’t get to sleep. At this hour the environment was still in full sway. The woman next door was nagging her husband to fix the washing machine, a TV bawled aloud, and a cricket kept squeaking irksomely right next to my window.

  Maybe I ought to do something about my loneliness.

  Helena

  I can’t get to sleep; little ants of thoughts are darting to and fro in my head. I have these clear moments and I never understand enough to hide or conceal them in time from other people. It might even be that I have nothing more to hide, that they already know everything about me and just want to verify one of their theories. Who’s to know? I’m a feather drifting in the room’s air, swaying to and fro but finally ending down on the floor. I can’t escape, because I’m too airy even to fly away on the wind, I just idle.

  And yet I’d like to have at least a small private moment for myself, when I could be myself with dignity, without anybody’s watchful gaze observing me. I do not like to be watched. I want to walk among people without anybody seeing me.

  I just stare at the ceiling, at the forms of twilight and the darkness oozing in from the window. The night wind waves the curtains, but it’s still broodingly hot: there’s going to be a thunderstorm on the sea tonight.

  The apprehension inside me grows, moment by moment; it seethes and swells.

  What will happen if I somehow get out of the door? How do I? And the answers start to roll open in my mind like a bundle of threads with several differently colored bits. Many of them are dark but there are some white ones among them. I just have to hide all the dark threads and concentrate on the white ones, and the door will open.

  But I have to be extremely careful. I’m in danger. I can get out of the door, but never out of the building, unless I carry some protection with me. I’m unable to avoid all those webs and strands interwoven with me, the thoughts of others and the invisible encounters, unless I protect myself from their crossfire.

  And for that I absolutely need the cat. She immediately appears close by and jumps at my calf. She’s my grey-furred friend, the once-abused foundling whose bruises I treated at the clinic. I laugh with happiness and lift her up in my arms, and she stares past me with complete indifference. But she’s there, anyway, as my safeguard.

  I stroke the cat’s head. She pushes at my cheek and her whiskers sweep my skin. Hurry no time for hello. Must get away. Yes, but how? The door is definitely locked and the patio window is so small there’s no room for me to sneak through it.

  What would be the easiest way to get out of the house? How would I get the door open? The cat stares at me as if waiting for something. Then I decide to try the door; perhaps the nurse has forgotten to lock it. The white threads. Thin, silky strands. I tremble with eagerness, for now at last I’m strong enough to make an effort.

  “Let’s go,” I tell the cat. I snatch a coat off the rack and put it over my simple housedress.

  I catch the handle in my hand. I pull at the door and it isn’t locked. The locking system is obviously
playing up and the doors are open for the moment. There is no one in the corridor, but at any time somebody might open a door and rush into the corridor, in front of me, and then I’d have to go back to my room and they might harm me.

  Go they not see us. The cat suddenly makes me bold; she radiates power there in my arms. I feel light, I know no one will come, no one will see me, I just need to walk out of this building and go wherever I want. I walk the way the white threads show me and let them lead me on.

  I hurry to the lift, and from afar I see a white-coated man approaching in the opposite direction along the corridor, but he turns a corner just in time and never notices me. That’s how easy it is. Lift downstairs, through several other doors. Elation dances to my pulse inside me.

  The gate, inner courtyard, outer gate. Movement sensors and alarms, but they are blind and mute, all of them. I laugh at them.

  Immediately outside the building, the situation changes. Out here, there are so many crisscrossing thoughts, feelings, and people who may sense me. I turn to look . . . there is something in the house that has protected me. The cat lifts her head and sniffs at the environment. Machine do not worry I protect.

  There’s an old bicycle in front of the gate, with a lock even, but that opens easily and falls down in bits and pieces. Someone’s been trying to snatch the bike and has broken the lock already, but has been disrupted in the middle of it. I put the cat in the shopping basket, get on the bike, and tread on the pedal.

  I ride along the winding streets, through an overflow passage, and walk the bike directly to the water’s edge. I sit on the sand, to think. The sea beats at my toes. Lightning embroiders the sky but everything’s silent; the thunder stays far off over the sea. The lights of a luxury ocean liner are visible somewhere far away. The cat sits on the sand looking important and scratches the ground with her forepaws. She sits down to lick herself, before she steps up beside me. We go.