The Machinery of Light

by David J. Williams

  What the hell do you mean?”

  “I’m sure Carson can fill you in.”

  “Think about it, Lynx.” The Operative wonders if Sinclair is testing him—wonders if he might actually survive this. “This isn’t about any one multiverse. Each one is myriad parallel worlds but—”

  “Not even parallel,” says Sarmax faintly. His voice drifts among them, sounds almost hollow. “More like intertwined. Interfering with each other constantly. The whole idea of ‘universe’ is an absurdity, because they’re all—”

  “Connected,” says the Operative. “And if you roll them back to the Big Bang that kicked them all off, all you find is that we’re on just one branch of something much larger. Something that—”

  “So what’s outside these walls right now?” asks Linehan.

  “Nothing,” says Sarmax.

  “Or everything,” the Operative shrugs. “Same difference in the end. The walls of the Room constitute a barrier on space-time—an envelope sustained by the aetheric fluid of those culled in the slaughter that’s going on outside—and then harnessed by the generator-membranes and channeled through the primary node itself—”

  “Haskell,” mutters Sarmax.

  “Wait a second,” says Lynx, “you’re saying this really comes down to human sacrifice? To the burning up of souls—”

  “That’s a loaded word,” says Sarmax.

  “So strip it of its baggage,” says the Operative. “Sanskrit calls it prana. The Taoists know it as chi. It’s the aura that Kirlian photography captures. The life force within each of us. Absurd that science for so long thought it absurd—”

  “A totally surface understanding,” says Sinclair. “We’re harnessing the consciousness of all that cattle. The assimilation of their quantum viewpoint to augment our own, allowing us to manipulate the cosmos—handing us the reins of aggregated decoherence to shape reality the way no individual observer-effect ever could. The conveying of mere psychic energy to the Room’s engines is just one source for the turbines cranking up around us—”

  “In another age they’d have called you a magician,” says Sarmax.

  “A black one,” says Linehan. “He wields the dark arts—”

  Sinclair laughs. “You just don’t get it, do you? Science and magic are merely different sides of the same coin. Newton worked on his Principia by day, his alchemy by night—struggling against more than a thousand years of superstition while he did so. Never underestimate the impact that religion had on science—how much it deadened it, made it crave orthodoxy, gave it such a narrow view of all that’s possible even among those who thought they’d escaped faith’s baggage. The greatest tragedy in history was the triumph of monotheism—of ideologies that claimed a monopoly on magics while they engaged in mass hypnosis to prop up texts written in the fucking Bronze Age. Someone had to restore sanity before—”

  “But God exists,” says Linehan. “He’s real.”

  “Have you spoken with Him?”

  “I’ve felt Him—”

  “Real trick’s getting an answer,” says Haskell.

  Her voice is coming from all around—from every screen that’s hung about the inner Room. The face of Claire Haskell sits on all of them. Each one’s saying the same thing.

  “Nice to see you again, Matthew.”

  Linehan’s already clocked it—Haskell’s body’s still contained within that pod. Sinclair isn’t even bothering to look. Presumably he’s already taken it all in. He’s just gazing at one of those Haskells on one of those screens—smiling as he does so—

  “So glad you could join us, Claire.”

  “But you weren’t counting on it, were you?”

  “Such assumptions don’t—”

  “Your future-sensing ended when you got to the Room.”

  Sinclair says nothing. And suddenly Haskell’s voice sounds in Carson’s head—

  get ready to move fast

  The Operative shakes his head violently as though to clear it—can’t seem to establish any kind of return communication. He has no idea what the hell she’s planning—no idea if it’s even her anymore. Maybe Sinclair doesn’t either. Because Haskell’s voice has taken on what might almost be a certain wary confidence—

  “I’m right, aren’t I? You knew exactly what would happen up until the point you stepped within. But you can’t postulate the condition of a structure cut off from all space. Nor could you anticipate what course your creation would take when cut off from all time, a bubble universe adrift amidst the sea of—”

  “But there you go again,” says Sinclair. “With your assumptions. A luxury the trapped can’t afford.”

  Some of the Haskells laugh. “You think I’m trapped?”

  “I have your flesh, don’t I?”

  “You of all people should know that meat means nothing—”

  “We’ll see if that’s true when I burn it.”

  The Operative notices something. Sinclair’s eyes are tracking on some of the screens, ignoring others. He wonders if any of the others have noticed this. But everybody else seems just too intent on trying to keep up—

  “Do that and you won’t find your way home,” says Haskell.

  “Home?” Sinclair laughs. “Why would I want to go home?”

  “How else are you going to rule humanity—”

  “And go back in time to change it,” says Lynx.

  “I’m not,” says Sinclair.

  “What?” asks Lynx.

  “You can’t go back,” says Sinclair. “Travel to the past is travel to a parallel past by definition. Thus do the laws of quantum gravity sidestep paradox. And as to going back to the future of the world we left, Claire: a better question is, why would I want to?”

  That last one seems to catch her off guard. “You—don’t—?”

  “I don’t know if you noticed, but Earth really went to the dogs these last few days.”

  “Thanks to you—”

  “Can’t make an omelette without … well, what can I say? There are only so many ways to hammer a hole into the next dimension. Mass killing was always one of the more direct routes—”

  “That was just one part of it,” she says coldly.

  “Sure. First we had to get a bridgehead established.”

  “Me,” she says.

  “Us,” says Sarmax.

  All of them, and he’s been left to live with it all: his role as the original prototype, his part in the creation of the ultimate hit-team, his days training those who would take his place, his nights with the woman whose body sprawls in front of him—

  “Exactly,” says Sinclair. “The Rain. And only Leo here had any idea what he was getting into.”

  “I was young enough to be into masochism.”

  “A vice that failed to fade with time.”

  “Fuck you, Matthew.”

  “Do you want to see Indigo again or don’t you?”

  “I see her in my mind right now, you bastard.”

  “That might be all you ever do.”

  “Didn’t you once tell me that memory is real?”

  “Everything in the mind is real,” says Sinclair. “Though it got a lot more complicated once I’d remixed your head with all the histories of your other selves—”

  “I thought Control was lying when he said—”

  “He wasn’t. How else do you think I got a duplicate Marlowe into the mix? Took a shell and charged it with emissions seeping in from—”

  “Fuck,” says Sarmax. He feels like he’s been punched in the gut. He notices Carson and Lynx seem to have the same reaction—

  “This is bullshit,” says Lynx.

  “I’m sure you wish it was.”

  “But—they—the memories of those years—they were all consistent,” says Sarmax.

  “Consistent at any given instant. Not necessarily across instants, though—”

  “Jesus,” says Lynx, “that’s why it’s been such a head trip.”

  Lynx’s mind’s spinning, but it�
��s finally all starting to make sense. Sinclair reprogrammed them with the real memories of others, left so much latent—and tapped so much else to enable telepathy among his agents, breaking down the walls that are—

  “Everywhere,” says Lynx.

  Sinclair nods. “Space-time riddled with bubbles; quantum foam that pervades us, each bubble a momentary wormhole, and all of it entangled. And once you postulate that Einstein’s hidden variable is actually consciousness, then the mind’s real significance in driving nonlocality becomes apparent. Unless, of course, your civilization is so dysfunctional it’s based on blinding itself to the obvious. Of course minds can link. Animals do it all the time. Just watch flocks of birds changing direction. Or the hive minds of bees and ants. But the human animal shackled itself in chains of language—language that opened up new possibilities even as it foreclosed others—”

  “I thought you said you blamed religion,” says Linehan.

  “‘In the beginning was the Word’: what the fuck do you think language is? How else do we label the universe?—and so much of that labeling is the papering-over of things we don’t understand. Why do humans have to be so fucking certain about everything even when they know nothing?”

  No one says anything.

  “I’ll tell you why. They don’t have the strength to gaze into abyss.”

  “Unlike you,” says Haskell.

  His eyes snap toward her, and she’s wondering if he’s realized what’s up with the screens. Or if he’s way ahead of her …

  “I’m going to find you,” he says.

  “You can try,” she says.

  “But she’s right there,” says Linehan.

  “I’m talking about her awareness,” says Sinclair. “On what sunless seas is she traveling? What stars gleam in the spaces through which she’s soaring? Is she even now beachcombing the shores of inflating universes?”

  “She is,” she whispers—he’s right. They stretch all about her, whole hierarchies of dimensions, endless grids of no-grids, vast innation fields, pure information begetting endless chains of existence ripping past her, each one described by a wave-function that in itself describes a whole multiverse within it, infinite possibilities of some larger megaverse, the myriad paths stretching out on all sides and she can only see just a fucking fraction of it all. She takes in the plight and promise of infinite humanities, sees too—

  “Tell me we’re not the only ones,” says Sinclair.

  “We’re not,” she replies—sees in his eyes that he gets it, knows he can’t wait to see it—the limitless forms of life that populate existences—so many of those worlds just life and nothing more and some of them rising up toward intelligence, and some of that intelligence becoming starfaring—

  “But what about in here?” says Sinclair.

  “I see nothing,” she says.

  “Nothing’s managed to slip between the cracks of time?”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” asks Carson.

  “I’m talking about the competition,” says Sinclair.

  “You mean aliens?” asks Linehan.

  “They wouldn’t even have to be that,” says Sarmax. “Could be any other humanity that’s managed to crack the code—”

  “We have to assume others have done it,” says Sinclair. “Have to assume that they’re out there, maybe maneuvering against us even now—”

  “Other Sinclairs,” says Sarmax.

  “Other Haskells,” says Lynx. “Infinite numbers who have accomplished—”

  “There are,” she says. “They’ve converged.”

  “Meaning what?” asks Carson.

  “They’re all me.”

  Linehan’s the only one I might be able to get to

  The voice rings out clear within him, but it’s not telling him anything he doesn’t already know. Sarmax is going to side with Sinclair rather than face a life without the woman he lacked for so long. Lynx will play the chameleon to the end. And the Operative can only wonder if Sinclair has planted some last trick within his head. He glances at him again—sees that he’s focused only on Haskell now—

  “So you’re really a nexus,” says Sinclair.

  “There must be others—”

  “Presumably. That’s what makes this so exciting.”

  “That’s why you said you didn’t want to go back.”

  “And now you see what I mean. It’s like we’re on a ladder. All we can do is climb the rungs. All this talk about world-conquest, and all it signifies is how small everybody’s been thinking. The whole point of the eternity-game is to get out there and stretch your legs.”

  “Eternity?” asks Lynx.

  “Every last one of them,” says Sinclair.

  “You can make me live forever?”

  “Been wondering when you’d get around to asking that.”

  “Stefan,” says the Operative, “back off.”

  “What do you mean?” asks Lynx.

  “I mean he’s tempting us with whatever we most desire.”

  “More than just tempt,” says Sinclair.

  “You can really deliver?” asks Lynx.

  “Haskell’s already cheated death. No reason the rest of us can’t either.”

  “Has it occurred to you that might be a bridge too far?” says the Operative.

  “No need to get all mystical,” says Sinclair. “Death is merely the ultimate event horizon. And Claire’s already crossed it. She’s seeing things that no one has a hope of seeing until they expire. Access to states of consciousness that one typically has to give up the body to get to—”

  “I did give up my body,” she says.

  “But I have yet to cut the cord,” he replies.

  Which you’d be a fool to do.”

  Except she’s nowhere near as confident about that as she’s trying to sound. Even though her body seems just like a fiction to her now, she’s under no illusions that it gives Sinclair advantage. She feels like a balloon on a tether that he’s controlling—feels like all her purview is merely a function of his sufferance, that everything that’s happened is still part of the way he intended it. She takes in the Room, an anchor far beneath her—takes in the way it hangs amidst nothing, superimposed against the core of the Moon of one universe in particular, superimposed against all those other Moons in all those other universes—all of them resolving themselves into Sinclair’s face. She can see he’s only looking at a few of the images on those screens now—that many of the remaining screens are starting to wink out. That he’s almost narrowed down her coordinates. That as soon as that happens—

  “You’re mine, child. You can’t escape that—”

  “But whose are you?”

  “I think you know the answer to that.”

  But she doesn’t. Not when the real question is how this all began. Did Matthew Sinclair become the tool of some entity that reached in from beyond to give him guidance as part of some unholy barter? Or did he accomplish this all on his—

  “What makes you think there’s a difference?” he asks.

  “What?”

  “Whatever I summon, I consume.”

  “Just like he did with Control,” says Carson.

  “I thought you built Control,” says Lynx.

  “I did,” says Sinclair. “In my own image, I might add. Same with all of you. Endlessly scheming, endlessly rebelling, and all of it really just furthering my own purpose. But in the end, everyone here is going to have to make a choice. A genuine one. I was born human like all of you, but we’ve broken beyond all frameworks now. The lives you left behind were plotted through one particular universe. That’s what made the Autumn Rain hit-teams so unstoppable. They made the right choice every time—threading their way through the most advantaged world-line, navigating the forking paths of multiverse to get the drop on their enemies.”

  “And those versions of the Rain that didn’t?” asks Sarmax.

  “Got left behind in the dust,” says Sinclair. He shrugs. “You have to shift your th
inking. Multiverse is a matter of probabilities. Everything happens. Some things happen more than others. Once we had a mind that could ride existence like a water-strider rides liquid—that was when things got interesting. That was what laid the groundwork for steering one universe in particular toward—

  “A singularity,” says Haskell.

  any moment now

  The Operative breathes out slowly, relaxing his body, preparing his flesh. It seems to him that Lynx and Sarmax are doing the same thing—like they know what’s about to happen even though they don’t know which way everybody’s about to jump. Linehan seems to be off in a world of his own. Most of the screens are blank now. There are only a few left. And Sinclair just seems focused on whatever duel he’s waging with the thing that Haskell’s become—

  “Exactly,” he says. “A real singularity. Not the low-rent kind they envisioned back at the dawn of the networked era. Paltry imaginations capable only of conceiving some kind of mass-uploading—like we’d ever take the masses—some silicon version of the Heaven they’d been conditioned to think of as their birthright—or some machine overmind to act as the God they’d been promised as children and which their subconscious was still bleating for. Infantile’s the only word to describe any of it.”

  “What was infantile about it was the conflation of the fate of the self with the fate of the species,” says Haskell. “The lust for personal immortality. The same thing you’ve been offering—”

  “And the prize which everyone here can claim. We’ve already broken through all the barriers humans were never meant to cross. This meat we inhabit is of no more significance than flea-bitten clothing. And I’ll have need of servants as I explore the ultimate. Why would I deny them attributes worthy of their station?”

  “But that’s not the real reason you brought us here,” says the Operative.

  “You’re the ones who’ve done that,” says Sinclair. “Came here under your own power, of your own initiative—the strongest members of the Rain—the survivors … all of you converging upon this point along a precise sequence of events in which you mirrored each others’ actions, ebbing and flowing against one another, running point and counterpoint in games of byzantine complexity played out across the Earth-Moon system, patterns so intricate no single mind could possibly divine the probability clouds that define them—”