by Julian Gough
She examines the DNA structure of each cell in the disc.
The arrangement of the cells.
Brilliant. Oh, this is brilliant . . .
It should work . . .
But, for some reason, some unforeseen interaction . . . it didn’t.
He’s an incredibly clever kid, but he’s a teenager; and he thinks you can solve every problem through logic. His design lacks the painfully acquired wisdom of Naomi’s work. It’s brave; trying to solve a dozen different, difficult problems in one reckless leap. But he simply hasn’t made enough mistakes to know what he’s doing.
He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.
Her vision blurs.
She stops studying the blueprints, blinks till she can see again. Oh it doesn’t even matter why. It didn’t work.
And this is going to kill him.
55
That night she begins an experiment on the new caterpillars, with no clearance.
But even working as fast as she can; without clearance, without filling in the forms; the results take so long to come in. The caterpillars take so long to transform.
One afternoon, days into the experiment, she realizes she has been studying the caterpillars for hours, in a chair, her face up against the glass of a vitrine. And she realizes she isn’t studying them like a scientist any more; she is looking at them like someone waiting for a sign.
Silently pleading with fucking insect larvae.
She stands, and pushes back her chair so hard it skids across the polished wooden floor on its tiny polyurethane wheels, rotating as it goes, and slams into the side of her desk. She walks away from the vitrine, back to the desk, the chair; sits.
DNA is too slow.
Evolution is too slow.
Life is too slow.
She can’t wait for the results of the experiments. He is going to die. If she is cautious, he is going to die.
She rings New York.
56
‘Non è vero, ma ci credo.’ (It is not true, but I believe it.)
— Italian saying
Next day, she leaves plenty of time to get to the airport, in case the traffic is bad on Tropicana.
Traffic is fine, so she gets there early.
She goes to Arrivals anyway, and waits for Yaakov to come through the hissing glass doors.
A figure who might be him approaches the frosted glass; her calves tense, and she rocks forward onto the balls of her feet; the doors hiss apart; it’s not him.
It happens again.
Again.
Each time she tenses, till the tendons at the back of her ankles feel like she’s been dancing in high heels.
An old man comes through the doors. A small silver wheeled case follows close behind, like a dog.
She glances at the man; is about to glance back to the doorway, when the man raises his left hand, and a bracelet of red thread slides down his wrist to his cuff. Startled, she raises her hand. She had thought she would run, and embrace him. But she just stands there, swaying, till he gets to her. Her legs feel rubbery, exhausted, and she’s done nothing.
‘Yaakov.’
‘Naomi.’
They touch cheeks. Left, right.
The man who had seemed so vigorous in New York, dominating his own territory, with high status in the group, is just another old man now, in the desert light, on the slow walk to the car. Bleached out, washed away.
The flight was too long for him. I shouldn’t have made him come.
‘So, tell me about Colt,’ says Yaakov, as the car starts.
Naomi opens her mouth, but the subject is too big; there’s too much at stake.
Magical thinking. Like Colt, as a kid. If I don’t name the monster, it doesn’t exist. She pulls out onto the road.
‘You’ve examined the scans I sent you?’ she says.
A hesitation. ‘Yes. Do you want to tell me . . .’
Naomi’s eyes prickle, and she shakes her head. No, it’s too much. Not while she’s driving. She could go to self-drive . . . No. She doesn’t trust the Pontiac to drive itself in the traffic around the airport. Crazy neighbourhood, full of artists and hackers and libertarian drop-outs. Kids stealth-driving old, uninsured gasoline cars that don’t even have safeties or self-drive or trackers.
No. That’s not it.
She just doesn’t want to talk about it yet. Saying it will make it true.
‘I’ll tell you in the lab,’ she says. ‘I want to show you some tissue samples first.’ Some kid overtakes her in a tiny ancient Prius that he’s customized by covering in LED strips. A rainbow ripples the length of the Prius, again and again, on the beat, as De La Soul’s ‘Me Myself and I’ booms out the open window.
‘Tell me about your research,’ she says.
‘You’re sure?’
‘Of course. I’m sorry, I haven’t been keeping up with it. But it’s causing a stir, no?’
‘Well, my research group, not me. And we are building on Lee Smolin's wonderful work. But, well, yes. OK, I’ll tell you a story.’ He settles back in his seat. ‘Let’s imagine human beings are red blood cells.’
Naomi snorts. ‘Sorry. Go on.’ Yaakov does like his red blood cells. He studied them for his PhD; the mathematics of their production and circulation.
‘I know, I know,’ sighs Yaakov. ‘Again with the red blood cells. But, you know, it really is remarkable how similar they are, mathematically, to human beings circulating in a city. Bringing oxygen to a cell is very much like bringing your brain power to an office, or your muscle power to a construction site. You go there, pass through a barrier membrane, a security system, you deliver what you have, and you leave again, depleted, to recharge elsewhere . . .’
She has heard a certain amount of this before, but it is so remarkably pleasant to have Yaakov talking beside her again. To have someone beside her who doesn’t want her, or need her, or love her, or hate her. Who just accepts her as she is.
‘. . . So, let’s imagine human beings are red blood cells, in a bird, say. An albatross! It soars through the skies for months at a time, without needing to land. Now, the red blood cells have no idea they’re inside a living creature. It isn’t alive on their scale: it’s alive on a totally different scale, at a vastly more complex level that isn’t meaningful or comprehensible to a red blood cell, even though every red blood cell is part of that, ah, aliveness.’ He glances across, to see if she’s listening. ‘Now, let’s say one brave, scientific red blood cell tries to work out where everything came from. He . . .’
‘She,’ says Naomi, and Yaakov smiles.
‘She – through much ingenious research – discovers that the world – the albatross – used to be much smaller, much simpler – a single cell.’
‘An egg,’ says Naomi.
‘Yes,’ says Yaakov, ‘but the concept of a fertilized egg, of DNA, the logic of mitosis, is beyond the comprehension of the red blood cell. Bear in mind, mature red blood cells have no nucleus, contain no DNA. To him . . . to her, a cell is a cell, is a cell. They understand the world, they see the world, at their own level, as a collection of discrete objects, on their scale. As a huge cell. But this cell has grown extraordinarily in complexity and size.’
‘The big bang . . .’ says Naomi, and Yaakov smiles again.
‘You are racing ahead of me. Yes . . . From this single cell has emerged the vast, integrated, multicellular world of the albatross. And the red blood cells who inhabit this world – who are part of this living universe – wonder, how did this dead matter, merely obeying the laws of physics, get so complicated, so integrated? Blind chance, directing chemical actions? But that seems so unlikely . . .’
‘Because they don’t understand the mechanisms of evolution . . .’
‘Exactly. Yes. And as far as the red blood cells are concerned, outside the albatross is space, is a lethal, empty space where you die. The bird is the world, and the world is the universe . . .’
Naomi drives carefully around a sharp bend, as th
ough Yaakov will snap in two if she accelerates or brakes rapidly. Perhaps he would. ‘Go on.’
‘But then they make a terrible, wonderful discovery: there are other worlds out there, very like their own! Floating in space are other albatrosses. And terns, gulls . . . worlds of other sizes, but very similar in design.’ Yaakov pauses, looks out the window. Naomi is about to speak; but then he goes on. ‘Far beyond them all is an ocean; but that is just a distant boundary, where observation ends. There can be nothing beyond the surface of the ocean. It is just the strangely curved boundary of their new and unimaginably larger universe.’
They’ve left the airport, the city, behind. Naomi studies the road, the smooth familiar curves, up into the hills.
On the inside of the approaching curve, a long, plump garter snake, the head and mid-body crushed flat by truck tyres. Final few inches of tail still thrashing, but it’s already dead as Latin.
She swings out to avoid hitting it.
‘And the moral of your story?’ she says.
‘My research group is coming up with more and more evidence – which some members of the group are resisting vigorously – that our universe is alive. Is an evolved entity. Is the complex product of evolution, not at the level of the gene or the meme, but at a more fundamental level.’
Naomi glances across at him. He’s leaning back in his seat, eyes closed. He looks half dead, but his voice is engaged, excited, alive.
‘Evidence . . .’ says Naomi. ‘Empirical? Mathematical?’
‘Both! The mathematics are persuasive. Previous approaches had the problem of explaining how this particular universe came into being, when any small change in any parameter would have made the stability of matter impossible. This approach explains it. The universe seems unlikely for the same reason the eye, or a giraffe, or a kelp forest seem unlikely; because each is the result of a long evolutionary process of selection. This incredibly complex, yet stable universe didn’t just come into being. It evolved into being, through a long line of earlier, simpler universes. And presumably countless earlier universes, not in the direct line of descent of our universe, did indeed fail . . .’
‘A living universe . . .’ She feels a throb of hope, that it’s true. That the sky isn’t dead. That she’s not alone. But the scientist in her resists. ‘You really believe that?’
‘Yes! In simple, purely mathematical terms, our approach fits far better than the old dead-matter models. A dead-matter universe no longer matches what we can see out there. The peculiar distribution of galaxies, or the way the spiral galaxies simply refuse to wind tighter as they rotate; even the ridiculously rapid expansion rate of the universe . . . I mean, the old models don’t explain any of it.’ Yaakov loudly snorts his opinion of the old models.
‘Well, you can hardly attack physicists for not having a perfect model of the universe. All theories have their problems . . .’
‘Of course. But what do they claim, to fix these problems? That the vast majority of matter in the universe is totally invisible! That dark energy tugs everything magically into shape! But – oh yes – please ignore the unimportant fact that we cannot detect this dark matter, this dark energy, with any instrument . . . Absurd! Yet I know a number of very fine physicists – oh, some in MIT! – who still can’t see that this simply isn’t science.’
Naomi smiles at how animated he’s become. ‘Well, it must be hard to admit you’ve wasted your career on a theory that hasn’t worked out.’
‘No doubt.’ He snorts again. ‘But the lengths they will go to, to avoid admitting they are staring life in the face . . . I swear, some of these men would posit the gravitational tug of dark matter at the top of their house, to explain how their child is able to make its way upstairs to the toilet.’
Naomi laughs. She doesn’t want this holiday from her own thoughts to end. Doesn’t want to deal with her own dark energy, dark matter, just yet.
Yaakov, grinning now, looks younger and younger. ‘No, an evolved, living-matter universe solves all these problems, with no need for any magical, invisible nonsense. Life directs its own energy. It acts! It moves! It grows! Nothing mystical about that. We have simply been looking for answers at the wrong level, ignoring emergent complexity. A dog moves very differently to the sack of chemicals that makes up a dog.’
She wants it to be true. Please, if she can’t have God, then let the universe be a huge, mysterious, happy, black mutt . . . ‘Are you actually finding signs of life?’
‘Well, once our biologists force our physicists to see what is in front of their faces, we find the evidence everywhere. The magnetic fields inside stars, between stars, have all the attributes of life. Homeostasis, dynamic cyclical complexity, self-similar structure, meaningful patterned detail at all scales—’
Naomi takes a hand from the steering wheel and waves at him, to slow down, to explain, not rant, and he ducks his head in apology.
‘Sorry . . . But it’s just so fascinating! Magnetic fields clearly control and direct plasma. It’s not random movement, it’s directed, it’s meaningful. Like muscle fibres, or neural networks. Or circulatory systems! Stars have, at their core, self-sustaining dynamos—’
‘That sounds familiar,’ says Naomi, and frowns.
‘Ah, yes, we biologists have self-sustaining dynamos on earth, which remain stable over long periods. They are called—’
‘Hearts,’ says Naomi, and without thinking she takes a hand from the wheel, places it over her own beating heart.
‘Yes . . .’
‘Huh.’ Naomi tries to process this. ‘But if it is so obvious . . . why didn’t we see this before?’
Yaakov shrugs. ‘The sheer scale of the universe makes it difficult . . . the immense timeframe . . . After all, the flocking behaviour of birds, we can see as it happens, in an instant, above us. The flocking behaviour of stars . . . that’s a trickier business to spot. Stars call to nearby stars, down magnetic field lines. Structures are built; energy is transmitted; information is transmitted, that changes behaviour at the other end. But those signals can take many human lifetimes.’
Naomi glances involuntarily at the sky. ‘But how is all this, ah, complexity . . . coded? Where’s it come from? What’s the equivalent of the DNA of the universe?’
‘Well, the fundamental particles, and their rules of interaction, can be seen as a code-set. The DNA of matter. With a tiny set of symbols, a simple set of rules . . . you can create anything. Anything. You can build a program, to do anything at all, out of mere zeros and ones. On, and off. Yes and no. There, and not there. Positive and negative.’
Something has struck Naomi, and she slows the car down automatically as more and more of her attention is required to think about it. A truck behind her beeps and overtakes, as the dash flicks a red warning, that she braked too hard in traffic; and the self-drive takes over. She shrugs, lets go the wheel. It pulls back, folds into the dash.
‘If you’re right,’ she says, turning to face him, ‘that means there can be processes inherent in this universe, coded for in this universe, which have not yet been expressed.’
‘Yes. Exactly. Yes.’
‘The whole universe could just suddenly . . . change. All over, all at once. Like a kid going through puberty.’
‘Yes!’ cries Yaakov, like she’s come up with a Grand Unified Field Theory all on her own. ‘Or it could be even more dramatic, total, rapid; like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. A complete transformation.’
She’s looking for weak points in the argument now. ‘Your albatross metaphor . . . But an albatross, in real life, interacts strongly with the ocean, dives, eats fish . . .’
‘It’s just a metaphor,’ says Yaakov. ‘Everything we say is just a metaphor. Even the new math my research group has come up with; that, too, is just a metaphor for a reality we can’t grasp.’ He glances up at the sun. ‘The sights we think we see: just metaphors. Pictures we build in our head.’ And he glances across at Naomi. ‘The emotions we imagine we feel. Metaphors
. Just metaphors.’
This new knowledge about the universe is too much, it’s giving her vertigo, nausea. Naomi wants to shrink the conversation, to bring it back inside the car.
‘What’s the red thread a metaphor for?’ she says. She taps the dash. The wheel re-emerges, and she takes over driving again.
He glances down at the thin bracelet on his wrist. ‘Oh,’ he says, as though he’d forgotten it existed. ‘What isn’t it a metaphor for? Theseus escaped from the Minotaur, from, ah, the labyrinth, by following a red thread he’d been given by Ariadne . . . And in Japan, and Korea too, they believed the gods tied a red thread to your pinkie – at birth – and the other end to the pinkie of someone,’ he raises both his little fingers, flexes them, ‘who will one day be important to you.’
‘Your soulmate?’
‘Well, you could marry them. Or they’ll save your life. Or even make history, sometimes.’
‘Oh,’ says Naomi, remembering. ‘At my father’s funeral . . . his brother left red threads on a table. Dozens of them. You were supposed to tie one to your finger as you left, and “accidentally” lose it, on the way home. To stop spirits from following you.’
Yaakov laughs. ‘You see, yes, every culture has a red thread myth. A Hindu colleague at MIT wears one, he says it controls mood swings . . . And did yours work, or did spirits follow you home?’
‘My mother didn’t approve, it wasn’t a Catholic thing. So I didn’t take a thread, and my uncle got mad at me.’
Yaakov nods. ‘I wear this because my mother always wore one, and of course I loved my mother. It’s a Kabbalah thing; I believe it comes out of Genesis. It wards off the evil eye.’
‘Maybe I should have taken a red string,’ says Naomi, looking across. ‘If it has so many uses.’
‘I’ll give you one,’ says Yaakov.
‘I can’t take your bracelet!’
‘I have spares! You have to replace them, when they eventually fall off. My sister sends me them from Jerusalem.’ He pulls out an old leather wallet, roots deep, plucks out a thick red thread, five or six inches long.