Twelve Tomorrows - Visionary stories of the near future inspired by today's technologies

by Neal Stephenson

  Latifa closed her history book and moved the laptop to the center of her desk. If the binding problems were easy for her now, when it came to the much larger challenge she’d set herself the instincts she’d honed on the site could only take her so far. The raw computing power that she acquired from these sporadic prizes let her test her hunches and see where they fell short.

  She dug out the notebook from her backpack and reviewed her sketches and calculations. She understood the symmetries of crystals, the shifts and rotations that brought any regular array of atoms back into perfect agreement with itself. She understood the thrillingly strange origins of the different varieties of magnetism, where electrons’ spins became aligned or opposed—sometimes through their response to each others’ magnetic fields, but more often through the Exclusion Principle, which linked the alignment of spin to the average distance between the particles, and hence the energy they needed in order to overcome electrostatic repulsion. And after studying hundreds of examples, she believed she had a sense for the kind of crystal that lay in a transition zone where one type of magnetism was on the verge of shifting to another.

  She’d sketched her ideal crystal in the notebook more than a year before, but she had no proof yet that it was anything more than a fantasy. Her last modeling run had predicted something achingly close, but it had still not produced what she needed. She had to go back one step and try something different.

  Latifa retrieved the saved data from that last attempt and set the parameters for the new simulation. She resisted the urge to stab the CONFIRM button twice; the response was just taking its time weaving its way back to her through the maze of obfuscation.

  Estimated time for run: approximately seven hours.

  She sat gazing at the screen for a while, though she knew that if she waited for the prediction to be updated she’d probably find that the new estimate was even longer.

  Reluctantly, she moved the laptop to the floor and returned to the faded glory of the Sassanids. She had to be patient; she’d have her answer by morning.

  “Whore,” Ghamzeh muttered as Latifa hurried past her to her desk.

  “You’re ten minutes late, Latifa,” Ms. Keshavarz declared irritably.

  “I’m very sorry.” Latifa stood in place, her eyes cast down.

  “So what’s your excuse?”

  Latifa remained silent.

  “If you overslept,” Ms. Keshavarz suggested, “you should at least have the honesty to say so.”

  Latifa had woken at five, but she managed a flush of humiliation that she hoped would pass for a kind of tacit admission.

  “Two hours of detention, then,” Ms. Keshavarz ruled. “It might have been half that if you’d been more forthcoming. Take you seat, please.”

  The day passed at a glacial speed. Latifa did her best to distract herself with the lessons, but it was like trying to chew water. The subject made no difference: history, literature, mathematics, physics—as soon as one sentence was written on the blackboard she knew exactly what would follow.

  In detention with four other girls, she sat copying pages of long-winded homilies. From her seat she could see a driveway that led out from the staff car park, and one by one the vehicles she most needed to depart passed before her eyes. The waiting grew harder than ever, but she knew it would be foolish to act too soon.

  Eighty minutes into her punishment, she started holding her breath for ever longer intervals. By the time she raised her hand there was nothing feigned in her tone of discomfort. The supervising teacher, Ms. Shirazi, raised no objections and played no sadistic games with her. Latifa fled the room with plausible haste.

  The rest of the school appeared deserted; the extra time had been worth it. Latifa opened the door to the toilets and let it swing shut, leaving the sound echoing back down the corridor, then hurried toward the chemistry lab.

  The students’ entrance was locked, but Latifa steeled herself and turned into the warren of store rooms and cubicles that filled the north side of the science wing. Her chemistry teacher, Ms. Daneshvar, had taken her to her desk once to consult an old university textbook, to settle a point on which they’d both been unsure.

  Latifa found her way back to that desk. The keys were hanging exactly where she remembered them, on labeled pegs. She took the one for the chemistry lab and headed for the teachers’ entrance.

  As she turned the key in the lock her stomach convulsed. To be expelled would be disastrous enough, but if the school pressed criminal charges she could be imprisoned and deported. She closed her eyes for a moment, summoning up an image of the beautiful lattice that the ChemFactor simulation had shown her when she’d awoken that morning a week earlier. Since then, she’d thought of nothing else. The software had reached its conclusion, but in the end the only test that mattered was whether the substance could be made in real life.

  Late afternoon sunlight slanted across the room, glinting off the tubular legs of the stools standing upside-down on the black-painted benches. All the ingredients Latifa needed—salts of copper, barium and calcium—sat on the alphabetized shelves that ran along the eastern wall; none were of sufficient value or toxicity to be kept locked away, and she wouldn’t need much of any of them for a proof of principle.

  She took down the jars and weighed out a few grams of each, quantities too small to be missed. She’d written down the masses that would yield the right stoichiometry, the right proportions of atoms in the final product, but having spent the whole day repeating the calculations in her head she didn’t waste time now consulting the slip of paper.

  Latifa mixed the brightly colored granules in a ceramic crucible and crushed them with a pestle. Then she placed the crucible in the electric furnace. The heating profile she’d need was complicated, but though she’d only ever seen the furnace operated manually in class, she’d looked up the model number on the net and found the precise requirements for scripting it. When she pushed the memory stick into the USB port, the green light above flickered for a moment, then the first temperature of the sequence appeared on the display.

  The whole thing would take nine hours. Latifa quickly reshelved the jars, binned the filter paper she’d used on the scales, then retreated, locking the door behind her.

  On her way past the toilets she remembered to stage a creaking exit. She slowed her pace as she approached the detention room, and felt cold beads of sweat on her face. Ms. Shirazi offered her a sympathetic frown before turning back to the magazine she’d been reading.

  Latifa dreamed that the school was on fire. The blaze was visible from the balcony of her apartment, and her grandfather stood and watched, wheezing alarmingly from the toxic fumes that were billowing out across Mashhad. When he switched on the radio, a newsreader reported that the police had found a memory stick beside the point of ignition and were checking all the students for a fingerprint match.

  Latifa woke before dawn and ate breakfast, then prepared lunch for the two of them. She’d thought she’d been moving silently, but her grandfather surprised her as she was opening the front door.

  “Why are you leaving so early?” he demanded.

  “There’s a study group.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A few of us get together before classes start and go over the lessons from the day before,” she said.

  “So you’re running your own classes now? Do the teachers know about this?”

  “The teachers approve,” Latifa assured him. “It’s their lessons that we’re revising; we’re not just making things up.”

  “You’re not talking politics?” he asked sternly.

  Latifa understood: he was thinking of the discussion group her mother had joined at Kabul University, its agenda excitedly recounted in one of the letters she’d sent him. He’d allowed Latifa to read the whole trove of letters when she’d turned fourteen—the age her mother had been when he’d gone into exile.

  “You know me,” Latifa said. “Politics is over my head.”

  �
��All right.” He was mollified now. “Enjoy your study.” He kissed her goodbye.

  As Latifa dismounted from her bicycle she could see that the staff car park was empty except for the cleaners’ van. If she could bluff her way through this final stage she might be out of danger in a matter of minutes.

  The cleaners had unlocked the science wing, and a woman was mopping the floor by the main entrance. Latifa nodded to her, then walked in as if she owned the place.

  “Hey! You shouldn’t be here!” The woman straightened up and glared at her, worried for her job if anything was stolen.

  “Ms. Daneshvar asked me to prepare something for the class. She gave me the key yesterday.” Latifa held it up for inspection.

  The woman squinted at the key then waved her on, muttering unhappily.

  In the chemistry lab everything was as Latifa had left it. She plucked the memory stick from the port on the furnace, then switched off the power. She touched the door, and felt no residual heat.

  When she opened the furnace the air that escaped smelled like sulfur and bleach. Gingerly, she lifted out the crucible and peered inside. A solid gray mass covered the bottom, its surface as smooth as porcelain.

  The instruments she needed to gauge success or failure were all in the physics lab, and trying to talk her way into another room right now would attract too much suspicion. She could wait for her next physics class and see what opportunities arose. Students messed around with the digital multimeters all the time, and if she was caught sticking the probes into her pocket her teacher would see nothing but a silly girl trying to measure the electrical resistance of a small paving stone she’d picked up off the street. Ms. Hashemi wouldn’t be curious enough to check the properties of the stone for herself.

  Latifa fetched a piece of filter paper and tried to empty the crucible onto it, but the gray material clung stubbornly to the bottom where it had formed. She tapped it gently, then more forcefully, to no avail.

  She was going to have to steal the crucible. It was not an expensive piece of equipment, but there were only four, neatly lined up in a row in the cupboard below the furnace, and its absence would eventually be missed. Ms. Daneshvar might—just might—ask the cleaners if they’d seen it. There was a chance that all her trespasses would be discovered.

  But what choice did she have?

  She could leave the crucible behind and hunt for a replacement in the city. At the risk that, in the meantime, someone would take the vessel out to use it, find it soiled, and discard it. At the risk that she’d be caught trying to make the swap. And all of this for a gray lump that might easily be as worthless as it looked.

  Latifa had bought a simple instrument of her own in the bazaar six months before, and she’d brought it with her almost as a joke—something she could try once she was out of danger, with no expectations at all. If the result it gave her was negative that wouldn’t really prove anything. But she didn’t know what else she could use to guide her.

  She fished the magnet out of the pocket of her manteau. It was a slender disk the size of her thumbnail, probably weighing a gram or so. She held it in the mouth of the crucible and lowered it toward the bottom.

  If there was any force coming into play as the magnet approached the gray material, it was too weak for her to sense. With a couple of millimeters still separating the two, Latifa spread her fingers and let the magnet drop. She didn’t hear it strike the bottom—but from such a height how loud would it have been? She took her fingers out of the crucible and looked down.

  It was impossible to tell if it was touching or not; the view was too narrow, the angle too high.

  Latifa could hear the woman with the mop approaching, getting ready to clean the chemistry lab. Within a minute or less, everything she did here would take place in front of a witness.

  A patch of morning sunlight from the eastern window fell upon the blackboard behind her. Latifa grabbed an empty Erlenmeyer flask and held it in the beam, tilting it until she managed to refract some light down into the crucible.

  As she turned the flask back and forth, shifting the angle of the light, she could see a dark circle moving behind the magnet. Lit from above, an object barely a millimeter high couldn’t cast a shadow like that.

  The magnet was floating on air.

  The door began to open. Latifa pocketed the crucible. She put the Erlenmeyer flask back on its shelf, then turned to see the cleaner eyeing her suspiciously.

  “I’m all done now, thanks,” Latifa announced cheerfully. She motioned toward the staff entrance. “I’ll put the key back on my way out.”

  Minutes later, Latifa strode out of the science wing. She reached into her pocket and wrapped her hand around the crucible. She still had some money Amir had given her last Eid; she could buy a replacement that afternoon. For now, all she had to do was get through the day’s lessons with a straight face, while walking around carrying the world’s first room-temperature superconductor.

  2

  Ezatullah was said to be the richest Afghani in Mashhad, and from the look of his three-story marble-clad house he had no wish to live down that reputation. Latifa had heard that he’d made his money in Saudi Arabia, where he’d represented the mujahedin at the time of the Soviet occupation. Wealthy Saudi women with guilty consciences had filed through his office day after day, handing him bags full of gold bullion to help fund the jihad—buying, they believed, the same promise of paradise that went to the martyrs themselves. Ezatullah, being less concerned with the afterlife, had passed on their donations to the war chest but retained a sizeable commission.

  At the mansion’s gate, Latifa’s grandfather paused. “I promised your mother I’d keep you out of trouble.”

  Latifa didn’t know how to answer that; his caution came from love and grief, but this was a risk they needed to take. “Fashard’s already started things rolling on his side,” she reminded him. “It will be hard on him if we pull out now.”

  “That’s true.”

  In the sitting room Ezatullah’s youngest daughter, Yasmin, served tea, then stayed with Latifa while the two men withdrew to talk business. Latifa passed the time thinking up compliments for each rug and item of furniture in sight, and Yasmin replied in such a soft, shy voice that Latifa had no trouble eavesdropping on the conversation from the adjoining room.

  “My nephew owns a clothing business in Kandahar,” her grandfather began. “Some tailoring, some imports and exports. But recently he came across a new opportunity: a chance to buy electrical cable at a very fair price.”

  “A prudent man will have diverse interests,” Ezatullah declared approvingly.

  “We’re hoping to on-sell the wire in Mashhad,” her grandfather explained. “We could avoid a lot of paperwork at the border if we packed the trucks with cartons labeled as clothing—with some at the rear bearing out that claim. My granddaughter could run a small shop to receive these shipments.”

  “And you’re seeking a partner, to help fund this venture?”

  Latifa heard the rustle of paper, the figures she’d prepared changing hands.

  “What’s driven you to this, haji?” Ezatullah asked pointedly. “You don’t have a reputation as a businessman.”

  “I’m seventy years old,” her grandfather replied. “I need to see my daughter’s children looked after before I die.”

  Ezatullah thought for a while. “Let me talk to my associates in Kandahar.”

  “Of course.”

  On the bus back to the apartment, Latifa imagined the phone calls that would already be bouncing back and forth across the border. Ezatullah would soon know all about the new electrification project in Kandahar, which aimed to wire up a dozen more neighborhoods to the already-struggling grid—apparently in the hope that even a meager ration of cheap power would turn more people against the insurgents who bombed every convoy that tried to carry replacement parts to the hydroelectric plant.

  International donors had agreed to fund the project, and with overhead cables stru
ng from pole to pole along winding roads, some discrepancy between the surveyed length and the cable used was only to be expected. But while Fashard really had come to an agreement with the contractor to take the excess wire off his hands, with no family ties or prior connection to the man he had only managed to secure the deal by offering a price well above the going rate.

  Latifa didn’t expect any of these details to elude their partner, but the hope was that his advisers in Kandahar would conclude that Fashard, lacking experience as a smuggler, had simply underestimated his own costs. That alone wouldn’t make the collaboration a bad investment: she’d structured the proposal in such a way that Ezatullah would still make a tidy return even if the rest of them barely broke even.

  They left the bus and made their way home. “If we told him the truth—” her grandfather began as they started up the stairs.

  “If we told him the truth, he’d snatch it from our hands!” Latifa retorted. Her words echoed in the concrete stairwell; she lowered her voice. “One way or another he’d get hold of the recipe, then sell it to some company with a thousand lawyers who could claim they’d invented it themselves. We need to be in a stronger position before we take this to anyone, or they’ll eat us alive.” A patent attorney could do a lot to protect them before they approached a commercial backer, but that protection would cost several thousand euros. Raising that much themselves—without trading away any share in the invention—wasn’t going to be easy, but it would make all the difference to how much power they retained.

  Her grandfather stopped on a landing to catch his breath. “And if Ezatullah finds out that we’ve lied to him—”

  His phone buzzed once, with a text message.

  “You need to go to the house again,” he said. “Tomorrow, after school.”