“Q says a forest green Ford Explorer full of kids will arrive for family counseling just before Brieanna.”
“Look again, Doc.”
Alan turned. The number that had been less than one was rising rapidly.
“Damn!” He tapped his screen like it was an analog gauge and vibration would free its sticky pointer. “Her success probability’s rising.” Frantic, Alan wheeled on Morgan. “What’d you do?”
Morgan pushed a dreadlock out of his eyes. “Told you you’d need me.”
“Check the feeds!”
“Won’t help.” Morgan let lose a mad scientist’s maniacal laugh. “She’s the parking goddess of urban legend.” He lowered his voice dramatically, lifted his arm, and pointed at Alan. “She’s coming for you!”
Alan turned on his assistant, “If you can’t be professional, get out!”
Morgan frowned. “Sorry, Doc. Checking feeds.” Morgan hovered over Q, touching each cable with ritual precision.
Confused, Alan watched the number continue to rise. He swiveled his chair. “Morgan?”
“Q’s happy with the universe.” He crossed from Q to his workstation. “So am I, by the way.”
“Don’t give me attitude, just give me a new simulation.”
Alan swiveled back to his screen. He didn’t understand what had happened. Q had given them the answer. He released the adjustment. The mice shifted the causal matrix and changed her arrival time. It all worked, but it only worked for a moment.
For the probability of success to rise so fast and so far, her influence would have had to be…
No.
Impossible.
That was many orders of magnitude beyond the influence of any other subject.
Brieanna’s number passed 80 percent and continued to rise.
****
Marguerite, still in lingerie, finished her coffee. She couldn’t keep her eyes off the briefcase full of secrets on her kitchen table, nor could she get it open.
God! Even when he was gone, his work made her miserable. Hadn’t she had friends at Livermore too? Hadn’t she warned him about how he sounded? Did he care? No! He argued funding policy in public and got them exiled. He only cared about being right. She couldn’t believe she’d supported him while he wrote those stupid grant proposals. She had thought the obsession would pass, that he’d settle into a teaching job at some community college. How could she have known LURC would be stupid enough to give him money?
He thought she didn’t understand his work. She understood. She understood that the probability of getting spontaneity out of Alan Dickson was zero.
Staring at his bag only fueled her anger. It was so damned important, and he’d left it under the table. He’d blame her. He’d say, “You put on that getup and attacked me.” Well, screw him. She’d put the case back in the closet. She’d bury it under sweaters and let him think he missed it.
She grabbed the case. Under her assault, the aged handle broke. The case fell to the tile floor. A seam split. Photographs and plane tickets spilled onto the floor.
She stared. The photographs were of a very young, very blond woman. Long, silky hair cascaded over her broad back and teased the curve of her young rear. Her tube top barely covered breasts gravity hadn’t touched. The girl couldn’t have been more than twenty.
In one picture, she was beside a red truck in a sunny spring yard full of budding rhododendrons. She was bent over picking up a yellow cat. Short shorts rode up her too-smooth backside. In another shot, she was pushing her long hair up over her head and smiling like some vixen from a shampoo commercial.
The ticket jackets showed tanned women in grass skirts undulating under palm trees.
Marg picked up a photo that had landed face down. The blond was sunbathing. Topless!
“Alan Dickson, you son of a bitch!”
Marguerite scooped up the pictures and tickets, dug her trench coat from the closet, wrapped it over her lingerie, and stormed through cool morning air to the curb and her little white Honda hatchback.
****
Searching for solutions, Alan organized his thoughts out loud. “I have eighty-seven adjustment teams. The sensors are fine. I designed the experiment myself.” He tugged on his starched cuffs. “We’re getting good, real-time data.”
“That’s the problem, Doc,” Morgan said. “Q measures here and now. He’s doing what you told him, but you think the causal matrix exists in unidirectional, linear time.”
“Your point?”
“The time vector goes forward and backward. Your adjustments create a causal ripple, but the universe has already set its own adjustment canceling adjustments in motion; so, the number rises immediately. Your adjustments are readjusted before Q thinks of them.”
“The universe can’t anticipate complex future potentials.”
“Why not? You think you can.”
“That’s different.”
Morgan laughed. “Oh,” he said. “That explains everything.”
“We have work to do.”
“Q, you, Brie, me; we’re all inside this universe, not outside watching. Everywhere, every when, and everyone are part of the system.”
“I’m going to make several adjustments at once.”
“Let it go, Doc. You can’t predict the ripples. Don’t make things worse.”
Alan reached for the microphone toggle.
****
A teat- worn beagle and three pups bolted into the street. “Whoa, Big Red!” Brie stomped the brakes to keep from flattening them. A man in a dark trench coat and silvered glasses slipped into the bushes where the dogs had appeared. “Figures,” she said to Valdez. “There’s a perv in their bushes. I won’t run in this park on weekends.”
When the last pup was clear, she pulled forward. At the next intersection, the traffic light was out. In fact, as far as she could see down the street, all the traffic lights were out. She checked both ways and ventured across.
A white hatchback zipped in front of her, narrowly missing her bumper.
Big Red lurched. Valdez said, “Mrower.”
“I guess some people have very important things to do this morning,” she said.
****
“Not enough!” Alan pressed loose hair over his bald spot. He tore at his sleeves. The number headed up again. “Get my briefcase! I need my secondary causal relationship tables.”
“Where is it, Doc?”
Alan scanned the lab. Cool sweat broke out on his forehead. He remembered breakfast, setting the case beside his chair, Marg throwing herself spread-eagle over the table and saying filthy things. “No,” he whispered.
“Where?” Morgan asked.
“I left it home.” Alan closed his eyes, tried to visualize the numbers and corresponding actions on the secondary tables.
�
�We can’t just make random adjustments, Doc. The results are unpredictable. Someone might get hurt.”
“Most adjustment ripples are self-canceling.”
“Most. Not all. Your own protocols say we shut down if something like this happens.”
Morgan was right. An adjustment might ripple through the matrix and amplify into a catastrophe. He couldn’t risk the damage random manipulations might cause.
Or could he?
He called his teams. “Seven?”
“Monitoring, base. What do you need?”
“Status on the mice.”
“She almost hit one. One’s in the sewers. Bookstore cat has one. Two disappeared. One went back in the cage. He’s eating a leftover pellet. One’s under a bush by the curb.”
“Kill one.”
“Doc!” Morgan protested. “That’s just mean. It’s not in the protocols. Don’t mess with-”
Alan waved Morgan to silence.
“Mouse in the cage is dead,” Seven said.
“Bad karma,” Morgan said. “Very bad. Wouldn’t want to be you when the universe sends out that bill.”
Alan muted his microphone and studied the numbers on his screen. Brieanna’s probability of success dipped then rose to nearly 100.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Alan said. “She was past team seven, and the mouse death caused a dip. The ripple of an event that should have been behind her had affected her potential-even if only for a moment.”
“Doctor Dickson.” The good humor was gone from Morgan’s voice. “This whole thing is cruising left of center.”
“Whole thing,” Alan echoed. In his mind, the universe twisted, dissolved, then rebuilt itself with new clarity. He jumped up and looked out the window. Below, a small group waited for Brieanna’s coffee. “Morgan, have you had your coffee?”
“You know I buy from Brie. I can’t stomach the camel-”
“Get out!” Righteous, white fire filled Alan’s mind. He grabbed Morgan’s chair and rolled him toward the door. “Get everyone in this building a cup of coffee.”
“Killing mice not enough?” Morgan jumped up and faced Alan. “You want to steal Brie’s business?”
“Morgan, you’re right. I was inside the box. I missed a control! She isn’t isolated.”
Morgan squinted from behind his dreads.
“Customers account for the strength of her effect. They expect her to be in that slot at seven-thirty. They amplify her influence. Eliminate them, and she’s alone.” Alan opened the lab door and pushed him. “Go! Do!”
“The protocols! There’s no coffee in the protocols! You can’t predict-”
“Giving people free coffee is good karma! Q will record everything. We’ll do the analysis after we stop her!” Alan thought he was going to explode. He screamed at Morgan. “Go!”
Morgan headed out.
Alan called teams 85 through 87. “Get coffee! A lot of coffee. Report to the Leeman building. Keep bringing coffee until every person in the building has a cup. Move it!”
All three teams acknowledged with a crisp “Yes, sir!”
****
At 7:10, Morgan entered the lab, breathless. He poured a paper cup full of black coffee into Alan’s mug. “Last cup,” he said. “Everyone has some, and you owe Java-Roast four hundred twenty-two dollars.”
Alan stared at his numbers. “Beat that, Brieanna!”
“What?”
“We have a stable outcome. There’s an EMT vehicle in her slot. It’ll stay for two hours.”
“Wanna bet?”
Alan spun in his chair, spilling coffee on Morgan’s purple shirt. “Q gives her almost zero chance. Those EMTs are teaching CPR to the web geeks down the hall.”
“Fifty bucks and two almond-vanilla lattes.”
Alan laughed. “You’re on!”
Morgan flipped dreadlocks over his shoulder and smiled.
The smile made Alan nervous. He checked his screen. The number that had been steady at practically 0 was rising. The right side of the decimal was a blur. “How the hell?”
“She’s a force of nature, Doc. Measuring her influence is like trying to trap the position of an electron. The harder you try, the crazier things get.”
“This isn’t a quantum effect. She’s an air-headed coffee vendor.”
“Not everything makes sense within our limited perspectives.” Morgan patted Alan on the back. “Before I learned to surf reality waves, I was like you. I thought I could figure it all out, nail it all down.”
“Don’t patronize me.” Alan spoke in low tones. “Get back on your machine. We need this data point, and by God, I’ll have it.”
“You won’t get what you want. Brie’s a spooky constant.”
Alan’s pulse pounded against his tight tie. What if Morgan was right? He pulled at the knot then checked out the window. The EMT truck was still there. He sighed and sat down. He had a moment before the rising probability would require the EMTs to leave.
He had to get Brie’s number. If he didn’t, he’d be labeled a failure by every legitimate research facility in the world, he’d spend his life working with idiots like Morgan, and he’d lose Marg.
A chill shook him. He had no choice. He toggled the microphone. “Forty-seven, break the water mains! All teams-”
Morgan leapt from his chair, dove across Alan’s workstation, and muted the microphone. “The ripples could screw the whole city. Hell, the whole country! Maybe the world!”
“Get off my desk!”
Morgan planted himself between Alan and the console. “If she’s a constant, the ripples won’t touch her, but they have to go somewhere. You don’t know what’ll happen.”
“Get out of my way!” Alan tried to push Morgan aside, but the younger man was too strong. “Chill, Doc. She’s unstoppable. She’s a statistical superhero.”
“You’re insane!” Alan pushed hard, but Morgan held fast. Alan collapsed back into his chair, suddenly regretting years of letting Marg go to the gym alone.
Morgan swiveled Alan away from his workstation. “Hear me out, Doc.”
“You’re fired.”
“You proved she’s a negative result. She’s an anomaly. Log it and let it go.”
“My contract says I complete the model or pay back the funding.”
“You think I’d work for a company that allowed indentured servitude? That service clause only makes sure you believe completely in what you’re doing. You fulfilled the contract. LURC has more useful data than they dreamed possible.”
Alan considered. Morgan might believe what he was saying. He seemed sincere. But he was a LURC employee.
Alan relaxed his shoulders and dropped his hands to his lap. “Of course,” he said quietly. “You’re right.” He looked up. “I’m okay. Let me up.”
Morgan stepped back. Alan stood, put a hand on Morgan’s shoulder, and said, “Fifty and two lattes.”
Confu
sed, Morgan stared.
“The bet,” Alan said, taking Morgan’s elbow and leading him to the door. “One outlier doesn’t invalidate the study.” Alan unbolted and opened the door. He smiled as they passed into the hallway. “I suppose,” he said. The door closed behind them. “We’ll have to accept the Nobel together.”
Morgan laughed. “No way, Doc. I hate flying.”
Alan chuckled and patted his pants pockets. “My wallet,” he said. “I’ll get my coat.”
Alan opened the door, stepped into the lab, slammed the door, and threw the bolt.
“Doc!” Morgan screamed from the hallway. “No!”
Alan called back. “I’m not risking my future on a LURC employee’s word that their lawyers are ethical.”
Morgan’s muffled words came through the door. “She’s a stable statistical anomaly in chaos. You can get the Nobel for just discovering her, but you can’t stop her. Don’t screw yourself. Don’t hurt her!” Morgan pounded on the door. “Doc! Please! Don’t hurt her!”
Alan went to his workstation and called his teams. “Eleven, light the matches. Twelve, open the hoses. Thirteen, hit…” He went through his list like a machine. Each adjustment forced the probability closer to zero.
Then, after each drop, no matter how deep, the number rose.
At 7:25, he realized he had to drive the probability so low it couldn’t rise above one before 7:30. Frantically, he called out adjustments.
Morgan pounded on the door.
****
Brie swerved, just missing a shuffling old woman in a pink running suit. In the back of the truck, Bessie spit out a plastic jug of milk. It split. Brie twisted in her seat to look. Valdez headed for the treat. Brie turned back to the street. A fireman pulled a hose across the road toward a burning boat and trailer. She stomped both feet down on the brake pedal.
Jim Baen’s Universe Page 15