Divergence

by Tony Ballantyne

  —At least she could walk, Judy. She could join in a game of Aeon. We’ve seen far worse, haven’t we? People at the end of life. People crippled by disease. And we’ve asked, why can’t the Watcher cure them? Come on, Judy, this girl wasn’t so badly off. Her brother just didn’t understand.

  Judy rolled herself up into a sitting position on the bed. “That’s not why I’m so upset, Jesse,” she sobbed. The shadowy figure that stood in her room tried to place an arm around her shoulder. She wriggled it off angrily.

  —There are worse things than being ugly, Judy.

  “It’s not that…”

  But she couldn’t explain further because she was overtaken by another bout of racking sobs. She was being ridiculous.

  The mother and girl had joined in the game. The two existing players were cracking jokes, teasing the daughter, making her smile. Judy had herself begun a conversation game with a husband and wife who were trying to construct an idea path from Kant to the resurrected fugue form. They were skillful players and Judy had needed to keep her wits about her in order to participate, and yet her attention was constantly drawn across to the four Aeon players, and the ugly little girl. Judy could feel something building up inside her, something unrecognizable and edged with danger.

  “What is it, Jesse?” she had whispered to her shadowy brother, but he had made no reply at the time, merely frowned and tilted his head questioningly, not understanding her problem.

  Jesse sat by her bed now, rubbing his insubstantial hand across her shoulders. Still, she couldn’t stop crying. The moment was approaching again…

  It was the end of the evening, and Judy’s conversation game had finished. Her partners shook her hand and headed off to bed. Judy had stood up and stretched, and yet still that sense of danger was bubbling up inside her. The Aeon game was ending. The mother and daughter were in the lead, and Judy caught the warm edge of emotion from the mother as she smiled across at the other two players, who were letting the little girl win. There was a bubble of kindness centered on that table that made Judy feel painfully happy inside.

  And then it happened. The little girl, the ugly, nervous, buck-toothed little girl, had turned to look up at her mother and had given her such a smile of delight that, to Judy and her hyperaware emotional sense, it felt almost like the collapse of a small star. Such a feeling of warmth and kindness and contentedness and belonging flowing between the pair, two faces turned towards each other alight with something so essentially human.

  And not knowing why, Judy had felt something dissolve inside herself and she had begun to stumble off through the corridors of the ship towards her room.

  She had undressed and lain down in bed and drifted off into an agitated sleep where she had dreamt, as she did so often, of the hand reaching down from above to cover her face….

  She had woken up crying. And she still didn’t know why.

  On board the Eva Rye, the only sound was the clink of the knife on glass as Edward chopped potatoes. Judy’s gaze was lost in the shiny black depths of the dining table.

  “I don’t understand,” said Edward.

  “Shhh.” Edward flinched as both Maurice and Saskia turned to hiss at him.

  “But I don’t. Who is Jesse? Why wasn’t he really there?”

  “Judy works for Social Care,” Maurice said brusquely. “You know what that means, Edward? She takes MTPH to help her feel other people’s emotions. Sometimes that drug causes phantom personalities to arise in the mind. Jesse isn’t really there. He doesn’t really exist.”

  “Oh,” said Edward.

  Edward still didn’t understand, but Maurice was already moving on. “Well, Judy?” he said, impatiently.

  “I’m sorry,” said Judy. “I was just thinking about something.” She closed her eyes. “I suppose I should start from when I woke up in my cabin.”

  —Judy. Something’s wrong.

  “I know, I can’t help it.”

  —No, I mean with the ship.

  Jesse was a shadowy shape at the edge of her consciousness. She could never quite make out his appearance. Sometimes he seemed far away, a man viewed at a distance; sometimes he was nothing but a child. Like Maurice had said, he was the phantom residue of the drug that she had once taken in her work as a Social Care operative, a construct of her imagination; he lived out his own life in time slices snatched from her brain and senses. He was stalking her cabin now, pressing his hands against the terra-cotta walls.

  “I can’t feel any vibration,” he said. “I think the engines have stopped.”

  Judy rose from her bed. She wiped the back of her hand across her face, which was still puffy from crying, and then pressed it against the wall. Despite appearances to the contrary, Jesse had no existence outside of her mind. For him to think the engines had stopped, Judy must have sensed the cessation of vibration for herself, and then Jesse would have acted out a scenario to illustrate this. Nonetheless…

  “You’re right,” she murmured, “the engines have stopped. But we were Warping. I didn’t notice our reinsertion into flat space….”

  —We didn’t reinsert, replied Jesse.

  Judy raised her voice. “Ship. What’s going on?”

  Jesse tilted his shadowy head when no reply came.

  “Ship! Speak to me!”

  Judy dived across the bed and snatched the loose rope belt that was the form currently assumed by her console. She ran her fingers along the chameleon device, raised it to her lips and called out again.

  “Ship, I think there is a fault with the senses in my cabin.”

  The console was dead. Jesse had pressed his ear to the wall again.

  —Now I’m worried.

  Judy pressed her hands together and concentrated. It was twelve years since she had given up working for Social Care, but the training was ingrained. In circumstances such as these she would automatically calm herself, center herself.

  —I can hear something outside. I think someone is screaming.

  “Let me dress.”

  Quickly, she pulled on her black passive suit, the material tightening around her. A pot of white makeup sat by her bed and she dipped the first finger of each hand into it, touched them to her face. A white tide covered her skin as she breathed deeply.

  —I think I know what is going on, said Jesse.

  “Don’t say it! Do not say it!”

  —Shit. Look on the bed.

  Judy did so, and saw humanity’s last nightmare lying there.

  Three little black cubes, each the size of the first joint of her finger, sat in the middle of the twisted sheets. Dark Seeds.

  Something close to panic poured through the corridors; it drained from the rooms into the social areas, a hysterical babble of voices mixed with the half-comprehending cries of children.

  Many of the passengers had come from Earth, but that would have been before the dark tide had risen to its current extent. The vast majority of people would have boarded the Deborah without ever coming face-to-face with the fascinating emptiness that could grow from the Dark Seeds.

  Judy took a deep breath. Dark Seeds. Don’t look at them. No matter how much they call to you, don’t observe them in any way: touch, sound, taste. Don’t observe them, or they will begin to grow. And then come the Black Velvet Bands…

  Judy pushed open the door of her cabin and stepped into the corridor beyond.

  Somebody called out to her.

  Judy…

  “We’re too late,” said Judy tonelessly. “I can hear them calling me already.”

  —I can’t hear anything, said Jesse after a pause. —Odd, that. Are you going to kill the other passengers?

  “In the end, yes. What else can I do?”

  She felt that Jesse had tempted fate with his question, because just at that moment the ugly little girl came running down the corridor, shaking with terror over something that hadn’t been explained to her properly. She saw Judy and ran towards her, snot streaming from her nose.

  “Help
me!” she called. Judy took her hand weakly.

  “I’ll help you,” she whispered.

  “You were going to kill her?” said Saskia.

  “I did kill her,” said Judy.

  The Deborah had been an evolving thing, the fabric of the hull and engines and furnishings constantly changing as the vessel made its journey, always seeking out the optimum form for a spaceship. Now it was dead. As the first Dark Seeds had flickered across its senses, the ship’s AIs would have begun to look away, desperate to avoid gazing into the endlessly fascinating spaces that lay inside them.

  Nonsentient nullification routines would have cut in, in an attempt to neutralize the threat, but if the flux of Dark Seeds through this area of space had been too great, then the AIs would have not been able to avoid seeing them. They would have no choice but to shut themselves down.

  There could be no better indication of the cessation of AI activity than the unchanging nature of the floor and walls of the corridor along which Judy now ran, jerking the ugly child along by the hand. The patterns in the carpets no longer moved to soothe her passage or indicate where to go. The walls were frozen in unsightly lumps, caught halfway in changing from one form to another.

  Judy turned a corner and a frozen rain of black cubes confronted her. For a moment they appeared to hang in the air, fixed in position as their quantum paths through the universe were interrupted by observation; now they began to fall, pitter-pattering to the floor and vanishing as they left her awareness. The little girl froze, gazing at one of the little black cubes that lay on the floor, a thread of dark light already emerging from its base. Judy clapped a hand over the child’s eyes and dragged her backwards.

  “Don’t look at them!” she called. “Never look at them.”

  They began to run back the way they had come, Jesse in the lead. He suddenly hesitated.

  —Group of people coming this way. Fifteen or twenty. I think we’re trapped.

  “Of course we’re trapped,” snapped Judy. “We’re on a dead spaceship drifting in Warp. Where can we go?”

  The little girl looked up at her.

  “Who are you speaking to?” she said, wiping at her pale face with a shaking hand.

  “My imaginary friend,” said Judy.

  “Are you Social Care?” asked the little girl, her eyes filling with hope.

  “Yes,” lied Judy. Okay, half a lie: she used to be, until her sisters were killed.

  “Right,” said the little girl. Judy was touched to see that she wasn’t shaking so much now. Poor little thing. The girl’s misplaced trust would be her only comfort in the next few hours.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Grainne.”

  “I’m Judy.”

  A group of passengers came running around the corner. They hesitated when they saw Judy. A naked man at the front spurred them on.

  “Run!” he called to Judy. “There is a long-distance sense array back there. It has Dark Plants growing around it already.”

  “There’s no point going on,” said Judy. “The flux is too heavy all through the ship.”

  “Then we’re trapped.” The naked man seemed to deflate, his overlarge stomach drooping down over his skinny legs.

  “Judy is a Social Care operative,” said Grainne confidently.

  The passengers visibly relaxed at that. Strained smiles played over strained faces.

  “Okay,” said the naked man, “then what should we do?”

  “We need to empty our minds,” said Judy. “Sit down.”

  “What, here in the corridor?”

  “Can you think of a better place?”

  The carpet had evolved a low-pile walkway down the center. The lost passengers now sat down in the fluffy comfort that piled up around the edges of this. There was a sudden lurch.

  “What was that?”

  “We’ve finally dropped out of Warp,” said an old woman, rubbing her elbow where she had knocked it on the wall. “I recognize the sensation. It used to be common on the old Warp Ships.”

  “How could the Dark Seeds find us in Warp?” asked another passenger.

  “That doesn’t matter now. The important thing at the moment is not to think.”

  “Close your eyes,” said Judy. Seventeen pairs of glittering eyes turned towards her, and she thought back twelve years. There was a voice, a way of framing commands. “Close your eyes,” she commanded. This time the passengers did so.

  “Now, think back to your childhood. Try to remember your first week at school.”

  “I can’t,” someone muttered the words in panicky frustration. “I can’t!”

  “Yes, you can. Do you remember Mr. Jacks? He came to visit your class on the third day. Mr. Jacks wore a red-and-yellow suit and carried a machine made of mirrors.”

  “Oh, yes…”

  “I remember…”

  “How could I have forgotten…”

  Because Mr. Jacks visited every classroom, and Mr. Jacks made everyone forget about his visit and the subtle social programming he performed.

  “…and he pressed a button and the mirrors began to turn and you all fell asleep…”

  In the corridor, a burst of dark boxes dropped out of the air. Judy looked in the other direction, but more fell over there. Everywhere she looked, Dark Seeds were forming. It was too late. She closed her eyes tightly and felt with her hand for the first of the sleeping bodies. She touched a tiny foot, followed it to a spindly leg. Grainne.

  Judy…

  She heard the word again at the edge of consciousness. It was almost too late. She hit an internal switch and turned off her emotions. Her hands were already fastened around Grainne’s throat as she felt for the right spot.

  “You killed her. I don’t believe you can just sit there and describe it so coldly.”

  Saskia didn’t sound disbelieving. Judy had a well of anger rising in her stomach that she could have ridden to the heights of self-righteous satisfaction, but one look at the mechanism in Saskia’s mind—as viewed by the meta-intelligence—and she forgot all that. What did it all matter, anyway?

  “Saskia, what do you know of how the Dark Plants propagate?” Judy said, her voice distant and serene.

  “Only the rumors…”

  Judy shook her head. “No one really knows, Saskia. We don’t know if they evolved or if they were made, if they are real or virtual. They seem to contradict themselves at every level. They exist in the quantum world but are visible in our world: their seeds behave more like electrons than macroscopic objects; they drift through space having no fixed position or direction until they are observed. That’s Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. And when a suitable intelligence observes them, and fixes them in position in space, they germinate.”

  “Yes, I know that. We all know that.”

  “And then come the BVBs. Black Velvet Bands. Black loops that just form in unobserved space and shrink down to nothing. They catch around your arm or leg, and they can’t be cut. One could form around your lungs, and you would breathe out and it would shrink along with them, and then you’d find you couldn’t breathe in again….”

  “You killed the girl.”

  “I had to. There were too many intelligent observers on that ship. I had to shut them down. Being asleep wouldn’t have protected those passengers; the Dark Seeds can infiltrate dreams. They can cut right down to your subconscious mind.”

  Maurice gave a cold laugh. “They say the worst thing is to have one of the seeds come upon you in your dreams. To be sleeping in your bed while a plant grows nearby, feeding on your nightmares…”

  “Do they look for us?” asked Edward nervously.

  “No,” said Judy, staring at Maurice. “Definitely not, Edward. But we seem able to sense them, no matter what we do. The AIs on the planet Gateway committed suicide rather than face them, do you know that? They were too frightened of what the seeds would become if they were allowed to grow.”

  Saskia opened her mouth; Judy held her hand up to quiet
en her.

  “Grainne’s upper mind was shut down in sleep, and yet still there was a part of her deep subconscious sensing the world. Do you know what the plants are made of, Saskia? I’ll tell you: nothing. They aren’t really there; they are a recursively defined space, like the Sierpienski Gasket. The seeds look like cubes, but their fascinating structure draws your attention in, as it is intended to. You look at a cube and you can see little holes in its structure. So you look closer at the structure around the holes and you see that it is made of holes, too. Everywhere you look you see holes, never actually the seed itself. You look closer and closer and the stuff that makes up the seed is always tantalizingly out of your reach, and you begin to suspect that the seed itself isn’t actually there.”

  “What’s so bad about that?”

  “Do you believe in the soul, Saskia?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “No. And yet those who have ever looked at the plants all say the same thing. They felt as if their soul had become lost amongst the intangible substance of the plants. I’ve known people who have been saved from the plants—pulled back from the brink. They walk and eat and…and that’s about it, and…”

  Judy gazed at her hands, remembering her fear on the ship. She was trying to feel something, anything, more than just the effects of the mechanism that made up her brain. “…and all the time the seed is growing and growing. Making a plant out of nothing. And that plant is even more fascinating, and it is pulling at the fabric of the universe, inflating loops of cosmic string larger and larger to make BVBs…”

  “They’ve used the Sierpienski Gasket as decoration on the walls over there,” said Maurice quietly.

  Maurice saw Edward turn to look where he was pointing, at the white shape like a square split into nine little squares by a Tic-Tac-Toe grid.

  “See how it’s made, Edward?” he said. “Take away the middle square and then split each of the remaining squares into nine, and take away the middle squares again, and repeat that process forever.”