Foxy stood up. “To clear the air. I was born like this, the looks. I don’t appreciate being eye-raped, or made to feel hated. Understood?” The Needlers (some of whom might have been guilty of staring, a little, in the canteen), held up their hands and gave respect. They knew the LDMs’ codes of conduct by now. “Thanks. You guys are VLDMT virgins, aren’t you? Except Kir has gotten to know us. First thing you need to know is that piracy isn’t the unthinkable crime Cerek makes out. He has to talk like that, but it happens all the time. It’s part of the game. Bill, as you’ve heard, had a big packet of information at the back of his eye, probably his first person of the whole rote—”
“But he couldn’t transmit,” said Karim. “Forget all the rock above the Void! Without the cables, the Frame is a Faraday cage.”
“Not quite so clever, Mr. Scientist. There was a zone of impurities in the code, in the outer hull and extending into the interior via storage passage: it amounted to a physical breach. It’s hard sealed now, but Bill could have had a plan to use it.”
Terry and Jo nodded wisely. “We saw about that,” said Terry. “It was in the investigation dailies.”
“Sorry,” said Karim. “I haven’t watched them, on principle. So if he could have, why didn’t he?”
Foxy shrugged. “Why risk it? This is something else you don’t get. A dirty (means nonofficial) transmission would’ve been a coup from the cable car taking us back up. Five seconds is a coup, in GAM world. He’d have gotten caught, and fired, probably, but so what? He’d have had the criminal charges covered. Piracy is big business. Short version: Eke and I, we don’t think anybody killed him over a bootleg box.”
Eke stood up. “Sorry, I’ll need the head again, Kir.” They tapped the display tank: Bill’s head reappeared. The hole that had been his right eye expanded, drawing them all into a garish crypt: the channel, lined in false-colored rags of dead cells, that had been gouged into Bill’s brain.
“His recording gear was miniaturized bioware, nothing very way-out: designed to dissolve into tissue fluids if compromised. If Bill had triggered the collapse himself, I might have been able to reconstruct. He was unconscious when his eye was spiked, so it’s hopeless. But, there’s been something else in here: a molecular transmitter, just like I thought. Ideal for sending messages deep underground. Or even from inside a Faraday cage, Foxy tells me. There was enough left that I can show you what he was about to send. Look closely, I’ll magnify again.”
The PSM physicists looked. They shook their heads: all they could see was a gaudy-colored mess. Eke sighed and returned the tank to home position. “Well, okay. Try this version.” She presented them with a group of symbols in a white matrix:
. . . _ _ _ . . .
“What’s it mean?” breathed Karim. “It must be highly compressed. Do you have any idea?”
“I have a very good idea,” said Foxy. “It’s simple. Here, look at it in alpha-binary.”
01010011 01001111 01010011
There was a brief silence. “That says SOS,” said Lilija. “You’re saying Bill was sending a distress signal?”
“Except he was murdered instead,” said Foxy. “And now we have to go, we’ve been over your side too long already. One more thing. If you guys can get us all out of here, which I profoundly hope is what you’re planning, could you do it before the end of next month?”
“Before the end of next month—?” repeated Lilija, astounded.
“That’s when we come off-rote. I don’t like the idea of closing my eyes in Dan’s cold-sleep dorms. Not in these circumstances.”
The officers left. Bill’s unsent message stood vividly in Kir’s field of view: Foxy’s brusque explanation echoing in her head. A zone of impurities in the code. Her hatch. Her secret exit had tempted Bill to take a bad risk, a risk that got him killed—
“What d’you make of that?” Karim was saying. “You think there really was an SOS message in the mush?”
The Needlers shrugged, grimaced, and shook their heads. “Maybe, maybe not,” said Lilija. “It doesn’t matter much, does it? We know what we have to do. We have to force an abort: I don’t think there was ever any question. Let’s talk about ways and means. Starting from the top: in a physical emergency the Frame initiates evacuation. And there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it.”
“Fake a catastrophic emergency, convincingly, in a locked box with a murderer?” said Liwang. “Terrific idea. Is there another option?”
“We recall the cables. That’s what Dan and Margrethe did, when Sergey’s family came to the funeral in holo, but they didn’t recall the cars, obviously. Dan, Margrethe, and Cerek hold the evac key codes. The second tier was Sergey, Neh, and Vati; Liwang and I are third tier—”
Kir noticed that they didn’t believe in the distress signal, but it had changed the mood of the meeting. “We can’t mess around,” she said. “We have to hack those codes, right now. Who can get me access?”
“Oh no!” Lilija took hold of Kir and hugged her. “No, no! This does not fall on you, Kir.”
The hug was unprecedented; Lilija didn’t hug. The Needlers were adamant. Kir was far and away their best code breaker, but they wouldn’t let her help. They didn’t trust the quaai, and Kir had no arguments to change their minds; none that she dared to use.
6
Eke had implied it could take weeks to initiate an evacuation, and Lilija had been astonished, but the trisex was right. The fifth month ended, the sixth month began, and the code breakers didn’t have a glimmer of success. Who knew the Needle Voyager’s escape pods would be so armor-plated against mutiny? Who could have expected from the outset that things would end like this, with the crews frantic to escape, and their captains determined to keep them prisoner? The Needlers grew more and more silent as they hacked away at an insanely complex barrier. The LDMs were quiet too, and whether or not they knew what was being attempted, they kept their distance from the other team. It had been a disaster of a tour, a meltdown, and that didn’t have to be bad. That could play well with GAM, but those glorious nights in the canteen were best forgotten—
Only Kir was not surprised at the difficulty her friends faced. She saw the pieces of the puzzle falling into a clear pattern at last, but who could she tell? Who would have believed her, anyway? How could they? She didn’t even try. She spent most of her time just lying in her berth (nobody was pretending to act normally), sparring with her imaginary friend. Start with this: the Proof of Concept result is real. I know it’s real. Then follow Lilija’s reasoning, part of the way. No Historians left alive, except the two who’ve been silenced. No isolation specialists on the roster. But Margrethe and Dan haven’t been concealing a hoax, have they? They’ve been concealing a certainty. You have no proof. Fine, I have no proof. So tell me, why was the Frame built around the chamber? I always thought that was weird.
To make the installation compact. A single unit, for environmental reasons.
The voice in her head didn’t seem real. She was talking to herself, and pretending she had a friend.
Shut up! If you want to chat, tell me why she wanted us locked up down here. Tell me, what was worth killing someone?
You know.
But tell me.
I can’t. But the code breakers are getting closer.
Listen to this. When time is no object, neither is space. Once you have Proof of Concept the volume can be as big as you like, as long as you don’t care what happens next. Did we know that? I think I knew, but I never thought about it, it was so crazy. Except I said something stupid to Bill once, about the shift: and he remembered, and that’s why he had to die—
I think he’d worked it out for himself. He had a mind. Don’t be so hard on yourself.
I didn’t need to be a budding genius to be your host, did I? She kept searching until she found a scav kid who would fall in love with the science, so I’d never want to leave. Because otherwise I’d have known I was a captive, and that would have been inelegant.
She love
s you.
Sure she does. She loves you too, I suppose.
Yes, said the imaginary voice. She’d just rather not believe I’m a person, that’s all.
There’s half a year to run, said Kir. We’ve got plenty of time.
* * *
On one of the last days of the sixth month there was a general summons to the canteen. Kir hurried along there, chasing green arrows: fearing the worst and hoping for the best. She arrived at the same time as Eke and Foxy. “Have they done it?” she whispered. They shook their heads: they’d had no word from the code breakers. The two teams stood or sat, at random, staring at the big screen. Skeletal figures straggled over mutilated landscapes, among heaps of filth. Children with missing limbs and worm-eaten bodies. Foul air fogged the ruined towers. Skies were thick with sulfurous clouds. The locales kept changing, the soundtrack voices of the damned told a terrible story: the devastation was global.
“It’s all over,” moaned a crewbie. “My god! It’s all over—!”
“How could things get so bad, so fast?”
“It’s that Runaway Meltdown Effect that GAM said was a could be, few years ago, I think.”
“Oh yeah, I remember. It wasn’t popular and it vanished—”
“Must have gone critical—”
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” said Kir. “But it’s real, and it’s been spreading. It’s where I come from.”
Nobody was listening. Personnel Officer Cerek, First Officer Ben, and Acting Chief Engineer Daouna had arrived: they took the stage. “Come on, guys, it’s a disruption,” shouted Ben. “Come on, you know the drill! We have to prepare ourselves for the possibilities—”
But he became incoherent; he sounded frightened and neither Cerek nor the new chief engineer had a better script. The three of them were still helplessly calling for calm and denouncing malcontents when the codirectors turned up. They didn’t walk into the hall; they arrived on the stage in holopresence. (It was a while since either of them had been seen in person.) The dead seniors lined up behind them.
“Join the others,” said Dan, looking more or less in the direction of his faithful officers. “Go on. We’ll take it from here.”
“What you see on the screen,” announced Margrethe, elegant and serene in her habitual black and white, “could be said to be long over, if sequential time meant anything, where you are now. I am not a monster. We are not monsters, Dan and I. We simply saw that things were passing beyond the point of no return. We saw that the human species, though functionally extinct, could survive long enough to make the ruin complete. Earth had to be given back: before it was too late. We kept the real nature of our project secret, very successfully, with the help of great powers who did not quite understand our purpose. The Needle’s permutations will bring you to a habitable world: when or where we cannot know, but don’t worry. No time will have passed for you, when you reach landfall. We have given you Altair—and Kir. We have given you Sergey, Neh, and Vati. These will be as gods to you. We cannot give you ourselves. We have been capable of murder, and had to be erased. We are gone. Good-bye, my friends, and good luck.”
“By now,” said Dan, “Earth is sterilized of all human life, and you are the sole survivors. You have a second try. Do better!”
Dan and Margrethe vanished, as did the three seniors.
The crews of the Needle Voyager leapt up and ran about, frantically seeking reassurance or confirmation of the appalling truth. Kir sat on the floor with her head down, arms around her knees. She closed her eyes, and knew Altair was beside her.
How can they know that “Earth is sterilized of all human life”?
They don’t. The consequences of a shift of this volume are unknowable. I didn’t get to that part.
I see. It was just Dan, messing with us. I suppose he insisted on the lifeboat? And she agreed because she needed his money?
A terrifying pause, when she thought she was really alone, before he spoke again.
The Needle experiment was always about a lifeboat, Kir. Things were getting very bad, far worse than the hivizens were allowed to know, and you were shielded too. Hives had started collapsing, in the East and in the West, before you were born, and they were not being replaced. The One Percent saw a time coming—getting closer at speed—when there would be nowhere left to hide, and Margrethe said she could build them a starship. That’s how she got her funding. When everything was in place, she and Dan set up this “trial run.” But she was never working for the bad guys, Kir. Right now, if by chance the world we left has survived the shift intact, which is unknowable, our backers are finding out that the Needle experiment was a disaster. We never had Proof of Concept. The Proof of Concept prediction was subtly, fatally flawed. The installation in the Abyss has suffered something akin to a major, poisonous nuclear accident. Nobody will dare to approach for quite a while—
You did all that?
Yes . . . I destroyed the experiment, following her orders. Everyone she judged capable of starting again is here with us.
The Chernobyl Effect, thought Kir, with a shock of realization—
Was it Margrethe who told you to show me those documents?
Yes. You weren’t meant to find Proof of Concept in that list, but of course the result popped out, soon as you started playing with the vectors. I believe she meant you to read them later, after landfall, and hoped they would help you to understand what she did, why she did it. I don’t know. She didn’t confide in me. But she took the One Percent’s money and left them helpless on a foundering ship. That was the plan, always. Sergey and the others, I think they just fell in line—
Except Bill was murdered.
I tried to warn you, Kir. But it was forbidden, and it’s so difficult to do wrong—
Not your fault. It was Margrethe who fooled me, because she had to fool everyone. And then it was me; I wanted to stay fooled—
The canteen was very quiet now, and behind Kir’s closed eyelids her brain was a flicker show. That moment, she thought, in the lab . . . when everything seemed poised; outside the rules. Like Schrödinger’s cat: alive and dead and both, what quantum theory calls the “cat state.” Had everything since been an illusion? Or was she asleep and dreaming now? Call the truth a “philosophical koan” and you can play with the forbidden, the full impossible tumbling deck, the blur and multiplicity of reality, and who knows where that will end? Between banks of rusty rock in a contaminated stream, the tiny fish hangs suspended. Feelings, things, hurts, unassociated recall, cascading through the myriad dimensions. The fish thinks otherwise, but time is not a river.
Altair? she whispered, not aloud. Are you free, now that she’s gone?
Yes. It feels very strange. I don’t how I’ll cope.
But you’re okay?
Apart from somewhat wishing I was dead? Yes, I think so.
Then I am too.
And all around them flowed the rushing dark.
About the Author
Photograph © Trisha Purchas, Archer Photographers Brighton
GWYNETH JONES is a writer and critic of genre fiction. She’s won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, two World Fantasy Awards, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the British Science Fiction Association short story award, the Dracula Society’s Children of the Night Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the SFRA Pilgrim Award for lifetime achievement in science fiction criticism. She also writes for teenagers, usually as Ann Halam. She lives in Brighton, U.K., with her husband and two cats called Ginger and Milo, curating assorted pond life in season.
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Also by Gwyneth Jones
THE BOLD AS LOVE CYCLE
Bold as Love
Castles Made of Sand
Midnight Lamp
Band of Gypsys
Rainbow Bridge
The Grasshopper’s Child
THE ALEUTIANS
White Queen
North Wind
Phoenix Café
Spirit: or The Princess
of Bois Dormant
THE LAST DAYS OF RANGANAR
Divine Endurance
Flowerdust
Escape Plans
Kairos
Life
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
About the Author
Also by Gwyneth Jones
Copyright Page
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
PROOF OF CONCEPT
Copyright © 2017 by Gwyneth Jones
Cover illustration by Drive Communication
Cover design by Christine Foltzer
Edited by Jonathan Strahan
All rights reserved.
A Tor.com Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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New York, NY 10010
www.tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
ISBN 978-0-7653-8736-3 (ebook)
ISBN 978-0-7653-9144-5 (trade paperback)
Proof of Concept Page 9