“I’ll be around after the presentation,” she said. “Serving coffee in the marquee. Maybe I’ll see you there?”
“You can count on it. Then maybe afterwards—” Casey was interrupted by someone over by the door to the main hall making an announcement.
“Could all delegates please make their way into the main lecture theater. Professor Blackwell’s presentation begins in ten minutes and the doors will be closed in five …”
“Looks like I better go,” he said.
“See you later?” “See you later …” she said and smiled.
*
Given the events at MIT and elsewhere, Casey was not surprised at the level of security. Added to the sense of siege from fundamentalists felt by the scientific community, the whole of Europe seemed to be in shock: the Red Sea Massacre, as it was now widely known, had set fire to the Middle East once more and the supporters of the European Greater Integration Act were now fighting for its survival. Even the Italians, British and Bulgarians, who had been the principal motivators behind the Levant Accession, accepted that the violence that had erupted as a consequence of the massacre made accession impossible for the foreseeable future. The European Union had declared that the terrorist attack alert throughout its territory had been raised to red.
Probably because he had never before seen one in the flesh, Casey had always imagined British policemen to be cheery bobbies on bicycles two by two, armed only with a smile and an out-of-sight Victorian truncheon. The cops who stood guard at the entrances to the Martin Wood Complex were anything but: baseball-capped, Kevlar-vested and with Heckler and Koch machine pistols strapped across their chests, they glowered suspiciously at all who arrived at the event.
Burly private security men in cheap suits, tattoos and earpieces guarded the exits, and once all the delegates were assembled in the lecture hall the doors were closed and locked behind them, making Casey feel oddly claustrophobic.
He sat halfway up the tiered seating, next to Franke. The avuncular German’s jollity did something to take the edge off Casey’s indistinct anxiousness. He felt very aware of Professor Gillman’s absence. The plan had been for the two MIT scientists to fly to England together. Casey had wanted to talk to Gillman about the Simulists and Gabriel Rees, and the flight would have been an ideal opportunity to ease into such a sensitive subject. But the explosions at MIT had put paid to that: Gillman’s body had not been separately identified, but as he’d been in the lab at the time of the blast and had not been seen since, he was now officially listed among the dead. Gabriel would remain a mystery unsolved.
Looking around the lecture hall, Casey realized that he knew almost every one of the one hundred and seventy delegates; and not just by reputation. Particle physics at this level was a small community, even if it was spread across the world. It was an impressive assembly: the brains in this room were the best of the best, and Casey felt a thrill of proud excitement as he took his seat. He sensed the same electricity course through the entire audience as a tall, gaunt man of seventy entered through the side door, locking it behind him, and walked across the stage. As he took his place at the podium, the three large screens suspended behind him flickered into life and were filled with the same image. In this hall of Science, Michelangelo’s God reached out and gave Adam life with a touch of fingertips.
“Ladies and gentlemen …” Blackwell’s voice croaked slightly and he sipped some water before starting again. “Ladies and gentlemen, first of all, I want to thank every one of you for coming. I know some of you have travelled great distances and interrupted important work to be here, and that is hugely and humbly appreciated. I must also thank you for bearing with the unusual security strictures to which you have been subjected. I am sure that you will forgive this when you understand the enormity of what I have to tell you here today. I promise you that this place and this day will be marked as the most significant in the history of science.”
Blackwell paused and took another sip of water. Casey noticed that his hand trembled, something he’d never seen before in any of the many Blackwell lectures he had attended. Something about that tremor made the hair on the nape of Casey’s neck bristle. He had also noticed that the Englishman’s delivery was less assured than normal. Whatever he had to tell the assembled audience, it was of a magnitude to humble the world’s greatest living scientist.
“You are all here by specific, personal invitation,” Blackwell continued. “My colleagues, my peers, my friends. Assembled here before me are the finest minds on this planet, each and every one of one you dedicated to the quest for knowledge, for understanding. There has been no nobler calling in mankind’s history and I am proud, honored and humbled to have been one of your number.”
Blackwell paused and pressed a button on the podium. The two outer screens remained unchanged and God still gave Adam life, but the center screen now bore the title THE PROMETHEUS ANSWER, in plain white lettering against a blue background. The mere appearance of the words sent another pulse of electricity through Casey’s spine.
“We all know who Prometheus was,” said Blackwell. “The Titan who sneaked into the Chamber of Zeus and, setting light to a reed from an ember, stole fire from the gods and gave it to mortal man, whom Prometheus himself had fashioned from clay and whom Zeus had forbidden from having knowledge of fire. Prometheus’s punishment for this theft was eternal torment, chained to a cliff while an eagle ate his liver each day, only for it to regenerate at night for the same anguish to follow the next day, and the next, and the next for all time.
“In that tale lies a warning, I suppose, that perhaps some knowledge is beyond knowing, or too dangerous to be known. All of us here, as quantum physicists, are familiar with the concept of a knowledge that lies beyond the limits of expression, even beyond the limits of human understanding. We seek to build machines to augment our intellectual capabilities, to help us to know the unknowable and understand the supra-comprehensible. Each one of us here is a Titan who has spent a lifetime trying to sneak into the Chamber of Zeus.”
Blackwell paused. He gripped the edges of the podium, suddenly focused, intense.
“I have brought you all here to tell you that I succeeded. I built such a machine and because of it I know the unknowable. It allowed me to gaze into the smallest moment of universal creation. I saw written in it the history and the destiny of everything we know and everything we are yet to know. I have seen how it all begins and how it all ends. I have been in the Chamber and I have stolen from the gods that which they did not want Man to know. I have the Prometheus Answer.” Blackwell scanned the audience, the intensity gone and replaced with something like sorrow.
“I am a man of science. As a physicist, I have scrutinized two universes: the inconceivably vast universe around us and the inconceivably minute universe of the quantum realm. Each of these universes works following completely contradictory laws, yet exists concurrently with the other … dependent on the other. We have known for decades that there must be some connection we have missed, some mechanism we have overlooked, that unites them.”
A heartbeat’s pause.
“I have found that connection, I have seen that mechanism at work.”
The excited buzz from the audience exploded into applause and cheers, but Blackwell held up a hand. It wasn’t the physicist’s gesture that stilled the audience, however, it was the sight of tears seeking out the furrows on the scientist’s gaunt cheeks.
“I am sorry, my friends …” Blackwell’s voice shook with emotion. The silence in the audience was now total, absolute. “I am so terribly sorry. What I have found out is that everything to which I have devoted my life – to which you have devoted your lives – is a sham. I sat in front of a computer screen and watched a bad, bad joke play out. I sought to steal from the gods and all I came away with is the sound of their laughter in my ears.”
“My God …” Franke whispered to Casey. “He’s completely lost it. It’s like he’s having a breakdown …”
&n
bsp; Casey shook his head impatiently, his focus on the tall, frail figure at the podium. He thought about Gabriel Rees, and what Macbeth had told him about the research student’s state of mind.
“Prometheus,” continued Blackwell, “was the most complex scientific project ever undertaken; a complexity far beyond that of the moon landings. We have achieved things in the pursuit of the Prometheus Answer that were, in themselves, answers to major scientific challenges. I can tell you, for example, that we solved the decoherence problem and created a quantum computer of unprecedented power …”
Blackwell had to pause again and hold up a hand to restrain the clamor from the audience.
“Please … please …” He waited until quiet was restored. “What Prometheus allowed us to do was to look at the complete fabric of the universe, at its origins. At its ultimate destiny. Prometheus gave us the answer. The complete, unequivocal, terrifying answer …” Blackwell’s voice faltered. “And the result of my theft from the Chamber is the phenomenon we have all experienced, all around the world. What we have experienced as hallucinations hasn’t been hallucinations at all. It is time folding in on itself as the fabric of our universe collapses at the quantum level.”
There was an even greater clamor from the audience, questions shouted to the podium. Again Blackwell held up his hand.
“The reason for these events lies in the knowledge we now have, the technology we now create. We are becoming … We are become as the gods themselves, but it cannot be allowed. The gods will not accept it. You see, what I have discovered is that everything I have been striving for, everything I have believed, that we all believed, is a lie … My life has been wasted in pursuit of a pretense. I have found the great knowledge …” The tears now streaked the scientist’s cheeks, his voice that of a trembling, frightened old man. “And now I have to share that great knowledge with you. And for that unforgivable sin, my friends, I am so sorry … so terribly sorry …”
*
Emma Boyd spent the free time she had sitting on the grass, enjoying the last of the evening sun, revising from the books she’d taken from the shoulder bag she had stuffed behind the trestle table in the marquee, where everything was now set up for the coffee to be served after the presentation.
There were a few physics students helping out at the event, dressed in white shirts and black trousers or skirts, and Emma wondered how many of them, like her, would be trying to eavesdrop on conversations between delegates and get some hint of what it was that was of such magnitude to attract the top brains in physics from around the world.
She was thinking of something else, too: the American she had met. Casey. Maybe he would share some secrets with her; she knew that there was something about him that made her want to share her secrets with him. But there was no future in it: he was Boston-based and she was anchored here, in Oxford. Why was she even thinking that far ahead? It was mad: they had only exchanged a handful of words. They were strangers. And, anyway, he was too old for her. She had worked out that he must be much older than he looked.
She sighed. Maybe they would be out soon. If he asked her, she would go on somewhere with him afterwards.
Sitting cross-legged on the grass was her favored posture for study, but the stupid skirt made it difficult, cutting the circulation to her legs and making her stiff, so Emma stood up and stamped the cramp out of her foot. She walked across the grass towards the Martin Wood Complex. For a modern building – and it was very recently built – it was very attractive and light years better than the 1960s gray concrete monolith of the Denys Wilkinson Building, where Emma seemed to spend half her life attending Astrophysics lectures.
One thing about the symposium Emma found strange was the security. Two men who looked less like University Security and more like nightclub bouncers stood in front of the large glass doors of the Martin Wood Lecture Theatre. Why were they needed?
*
She saw it pulse.
The thing she would remember most, afterwards – in the hospital, during the months of recovery and rehabilitation, in the darkness of her life afterwards – was that she actually saw the plasticity of the glass. Emma would never be able to work out how her brain had been able to detect the pulse that swelled the glass for an immeasurably short time before the blast lifted her off her feet, tossing her fifteen feet backwards. Her eardrums shattered and the pain in her head immediate and monumental. She knew clothes had been ripped from her body but she felt no intense heat or burning. The blast was percussive, not thermal. She actually registered the thought as she lay there on the grass, blinded, deafened by the blast, choking on her own blood, as a million crystals of shattered glass rained down on her.
A bomb. Someone had put a bomb in the lecture theater. She could not speak, but her brain formed the name immediately before she lost consciousness.
Casey.
part three
REVELATIONS
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a persistent one.
Albert Einstein
51
ONE YEAR LATER.
JOHN MACBETH. COPENHAGEN
There was a new dream. It was now his only dream and always started the same way, with his sudden becoming. In the dream Macbeth came into existence from nothing, instantaneously and totally. He had no body but was a thing of energy with no substance. To start with he had few thoughts but his mind filled, connections flashing and sparking, each new thought and idea an exploding supernova in a universe that expanded faster than could be measured. And beyond his mind there was nothing. A void that was not even darkness, because to be darkness was to be something.
Then there was something: a context, an environment. Although he had no eyes with which to see, he knew he was in his father’s study. His father, Marjorie Glaiston and the Eyeless Man looked up at him with awe, and he wasn’t afraid of the Eyeless Man.
“We’ve built a mind,” his father said to the small boy at his side, whom Macbeth recognized as Casey. “We are becoming gods because we’ve built a mind.”
Every morning when he woke from this new dream, it took Macbeth a full forty to fifty panicked and amnesiac seconds to remember who he was, where he was and why he was there. Always it was Boston that came to mind first, then he remembered that he was back in Denmark; that he had been there for a year.
A year.
It was an expensive piece of real estate in an expensive city. Even more than with his choice of hotels, Macbeth needed his permanent living environment to be just right. The address was in Tolbodgade, but the building in which Macbeth had his apartment actually faced out over the cobbled wharf of Larsens Plads and the harbor beyond. It was a massive building, literally: its original function as a quayside store being to contain as much bulk as possible. The converted red-brick warehouse with its blue pantiled roof was one of three that stood on Larsens Plads, like stocky doormen guarding the city. It might have looked stark and functional to some, but something about the building’s solidity and robust geometry had appealed to Macbeth. Added to which, his fourth-floor apartment offered great views over Copenhagen on one side, the harbor on the other.
Macbeth stood at his window and watched the rain. Denmark was, for him, a place of constancy: nothing much seemed to change there, other than in measured, discrete stages. The same was true of the weather that, unlike the markedly four-season Massachusetts climate he’d grown up with, seemed to ease gradually and indistinctly from one season to another. It was now late spring, and he was hoping for a good summer. He needed a good summer.
It had been a year.
A year since Casey had been murdered in Oxford. A year since Macbeth had taken over as Project Director of the Copenhagen Project. A year since the hallucination epidemic had stopped.
There were still occasional instances of hallucinations. Oddly enough, most of these lingering cases had been close to Macbeth, in Denmark and northern Germany; but even these had been isolated and involved individuals or small groups of no more than two or thr
ee. Despite Casey’s and Newcombe’s theories of some other element at work, it was beginning to look like the hallucinations really had been the result of some kind of psychoactive viral outbreak now diminishing into localized, tail-end clusters.
Yet Macbeth remained unconvinced.
The problem was that others also remained unconvinced: the Religious Right, Islamic Fundamentalists and Anarchoprimitivists all pointed to the destruction of the Prometheus Answer and the simultaneous wiping out of the world’s greatest physicists as the reason order had been restored to the world. God’s, Allah’s or Gaia’s will was triumphant over the false gods of science. Man’s arrogance had been checked and punished.
The truth was that while the religious fumed righteous indignation, no one rational liked to admit that the coincidence of the two events really was striking. In the meantime, stem cell research centers continued to burn, particle physics labs continued to be bombed, individual scientists were attacked.
Blind Faith declared the New Inquisition.
Even more than the increased terrorism, the most concern around the world was caused by the increasingly bizarre pronouncements of US President Elizabeth Yates. As Senator Yates, she had courted controversy during her campaign with her strong religious beliefs and apparent hostility to secularism and any faith other than her own Southern Baptist Christianity; as President Yates, she had caused unease with ambiguous statements on homosexuality, multi-faithism and moral standards, and her key appointments had been conspicuously traditionalist. There was talk of evangelical prayer meetings in the White House.
And since the hallucination outbreak, Yates’s rhetoric had become more pulpit than politic. The phrases ‘God’s Hand’ and ‘God’s Will’ had crept increasingly from her political oratory and into actual statements of policy. Her condemnation of Blind Faith was seen as grudging; and she created a diplomatic rift between the US and the newly unified European Union by declaring ‘God’s Hand’ had been behind the breakdown of the Levant Accession to the EU, echoing the statements of the soldiers responsible for the massacre during their trial in Tel Aviv.
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