Meeting Infinity (The Infinity Project)

by John Barnes

  I told her I loved her during an entirely different snowstorm halfway across Hell Gate Bridge. She kissed me hard and told me she loved me too. “With interest,” she said. “I feel like I’ve been waiting for you my entire life.”

  The connection between us was real, until I broke it.

  DO THE DETAILS matter? The important thing is that I was young and stupid, and prone like all young and stupid people to actions that feel decisive but are impulsive and to be profoundly regretted later.

  By the time I realised that, she was gone.

  LITERALLY GONE, NOT even on Earth anymore. She had emigrated to the Moon, the only civilian colony we had back then, although that was changing fast. People were well over their fears of matter transmitters by then. D-mat had bugs, yes, small errors that were about as dangerous as being hit by cosmic rays, but its convenience trumped everything.

  Want to go to the Moon? Fine! Wait a year and we’ll have booths on the moons of Jupiter, too.

  I’ll admit I dragged my heels before following Cate. She wasn’t answering my messages, and I knew she might not appreciate me showing up out of the blue to apologise, repair the damage, start again from scratch – whatever I had in mind. Still: impulsive, remember? I just couldn’t let her go without a fight, sufficiently so that moving from Earth to the Moon seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea, despite me never having had any interest in space before that.

  Cate did. She told me of her dreams one night in the middle of an Australian desert, far over the horizon from the nearest d-mat station. I was following the transits of satellites, using my lenses to track the ones that weren’t visible to the naked eye. There was so much hardware in the sky, orbits webbing like the work of giant spiders, it was amazing Cate could see anything at all.

  “That’s where I want to live,” she said, pointing out and up.

  IN HINDSIGHT, I wonder if I held her back. Maybe she had come to the New Petersburg memorial to say farewell to life and family on Earth, preparatory to leaving for good. She never said so to me, but it was possible. Certainly, we never left Earth together, and what I found on the Moon was suggestive of an outward impulse I did not personally witness.

  By the time I arrived, three months behind her, she had moved on from the Moon, too.

  MOON TO MARS, outward alliteratively from Earth, and perhaps symbolically from me as well. I had no way of knowing what motivated her without engaging her in a conversation. Was she angry at me or perhaps frightened by her own feelings? She might even be grieving, as I was.

  If only she would read my messages and unlock her profile!

  The biggest step was behind me, so the second was much easier. Technically a tourist, although I had no interest in seeing the Red Planet, I stepped out of the booth and acclimatized myself to local gravity – not to mention to the many dozens of ways I might die if I wasn’t careful. Then I was on the move, looking for anyone who could help me find her.

  No matter where you go, there’s always a private detective or the equivalent. We’re naturally nosy, we mammals. “Other people’s secrets are always more interesting than our own,” Cate once told me. “But only because they’re secret. If we knew absolutely everything about everyone, we’d be bored out of our brains by breakfast.”

  I was far from bored. It had taken me three weeks to be absolutely sure that Cate wasn’t on the Moon, and it took me another eight weeks to be sure that I’d missed her on Mars, too. A major outreach program had just issued a call for explorers on the first wave of missions to nearby stars. The volunteers were going to be beamed by d-mat away from our solar system towards booths despatched ages ago, a journey that would take years thanks to the sluggish speed of light. It was a leap into the dark, clutching a thread as slender as finely woven silk. It didn’t seem like a good idea to me.

  She would have gone anyway, I’m sure, even if I had caught up with her in time to talk her out of it. But I didn’t have the chance. I arrived at the launch site orbiting far-off Pluto just hours after she left, and this time I wasn’t going to follow so readily.

  Only because they wouldn’t let me, though. The second wave wasn’t leaving until the program was absolutely sure that the people on the first wave, the pioneering dreamers brave, had safely arrived.

  Cate: a string of information encoded in triplicate on a fragile laser beam, her target Barnard’s Star six light years from Earth.

  I signed up for the second wave and resolved myself to wait a while longer before coming face to face with the love of my life.

  IT WAS AROUND then, I suppose, that catching up with her became something of a game.

  Yes, I know. Love isn’t a game. It’s much more than that. I was convinced – remain convinced – that what we had was real, but finding Cate in order to put that proposition to her was proving a challenge. I had stopped sending messages by then, seeing little point. It all came down to seeing her. And if that went nowhere, I swore to myself, I would walk away. My stalkery behaviour was a means to an end, not the end itself.

  Although I do acknowledge that it looks bad.

  So I waited, and as I waited I planned what I would say when we at last reconnected. First, I would apologise. And if that was as far as our conversation went, fine. I probably shouldn’t have thought even that far, because this wasn’t about the apology either. I wanted to see if the spark was still there. That was all.

  I barely dared imagine what would happen if things went well, but those were the scenarios that passed the time most entertainingly.

  As the first signals returned successfully from Barnard’s Star, I joined the others lining up for our turns to go. My stomach roiled in a way it never had going to the Moon, to Mars, or even to Pluto on the very edge of deepest night. The campfire of Earth’s sun was a great distance behind me, and it was about to retreat a much greater distance still, in time as well as space. A minimum of twelve years would pass before I returned, alone or with Cate.

  I felt a reprise of the experience in New Petersburg, when she and I had touched the wall together. Past and future intertwined. Ahead of me was a gulf as unimaginable as death itself.

  “Have you ever thought,” Cate asked me once, “how going through d-mat is the same as falling asleep at night? We stop... and then we start again. Doesn’t that freak you out, not knowing where we go in between?”

  I’ll confess to being a little freaked out right then, stepping forward and hoping against hope that both of us would be at the other end.

  I WAS.

  She wasn’t.

  Cate had left two months earlier, taking the opportunity to jump further outward on the next wave of exploration.

  THIS PROBABLY WOULD have been the time to give up. She was far, far ahead of me now. Furthermore, this next wave had added an extra twist: instead of each explorer risking all on one jump, this time he or she had been copied, and her copies were being spread out across multiple destinations. That way the explorers could be sure of getting somewhere for their troubles.

  So the Cate I had followed to Barnard’s Star had now become six Cates, all heading in different directions. There was no way to know which one was the original, as they were all identical. And was there a difference, anyway?

  These are the things I pondered as I explored humanity’s first colony around this far-off star, wondering what I should do next.

  By then, I had lost all contact with friends and relatives back home. Do I need to tell you that they thought me crazy? Cut your losses, they had advised me way back on Mars. She’s not worth it! But she was, or the effort was. And what else did I have to do? I didn’t need to work in this age of plenty, thanks to fabbers that supplied every item I desired; I had tried several vocations and stuck with none. Most importantly, I had met no one who entranced me as Cate did. If I had, my journey might have ended long ago.

  Cate was my vocation, now. The thought of finding another was more exhausting than the thought of pressing on.

  That equation didn’t chan
ge in principle now there were six of her.

  COPY.

  (I worried it might hurt. I don’t know why, or how. Like my soul would be sliced in numerous tiny pieces, leaving me and my identical siblings – if that’s the right word – reduced in some fundamental way. But I didn’t feel any pain, and neither did they. We exchanged messages before leaving on our separate journeys, all expressing the same relief.)

  Disperse.

  (Straight out of the six booths and on to the next stage – a perfectly ordinary booth with destination set to far, far away. I can’t recall where my siblings went. My target was an obscure reddish star that didn’t even have a proper name. Cate may or may not be there, I knew. Like all the other explorers seeking a new Earth, or a new thrill, or a new danger, there was only one way to find out.)

  Repeat.

  AND REPEAT.

  And repeat.

  And repeat.

  I’ll tell you one thing: Cate was consistent. Okay, two things: so was I. She kept going and I kept after her. Each and every time she wasn’t at our mutual destination, I copied and sent myself in her wake, sure that one day I would catch up. The odds were in my favour, after all, just as long as I didn’t give up. With each jump, we multiplied. There were more of her and more of me. More of us. It was only a matter of time before the two of us crossed paths, even if by accident.

  I wouldn’t call it destiny, but it certainly seemed inevitable.

  You must know some of this. We’re catching up on recent history, after all. The leading edge of humanity’s exploration advanced as quickly as we could seed the stars with d-mat booths, which was pretty fast, all things considered, although I quickly lost track of the year back home.

  Around 113,500AD I began to wonder what my other copies were getting up to, whether any of them had had any luck finding Cate. Because I certainly hadn’t.

  That was when the messages started arriving.

  LALANDE 25372: STRUCK out.

  Near miss at Wolf 294.

  Ross 128, no sign.

  Diddly squat at Struve 2398 A.

  She wasn’t in Groombridge 1618. Has anyone tried Epsilon Eridani?

  One of my earlier selves had created an interstellar bulletin board solely for the rapidly growing numbers of me, whereby we would communicate our progress – or lack thereof.

  I was always quick to check in with my own failures. It was comforting to know that I was not alone. But numbers never lie: some of us simply had to get lucky, or at least less unlucky.

  Partial success at Procyon B: found her but fluffed it.

  70 Ophiuchi A: alas “Fancy meeting you here” is not as witty as you think.

  Sigma Draconis is NOT a hellhole. Don’t call ANYWHERE a hellhole. This is where she WANTS to be, remember?

  If she’s traveling with someone called Caelan, forget it. They’ve hooked up.

  As the number of jumps behind me mounted, so did the number of messages. They were all brief and to the point, although sometimes they revealed puzzlement at the strange things we found out here in the black. We weren’t the only ones propagating. Humanity was moving en masse, taking root anywhere fertile and moving still further out. Everyone had their reasons.

  Some people were identical copies, like us. Some people changed themselves in order to make themselves fitter for the environments in which they settled. So far from the laws of Earth, what was to stop them developing thick skins for vacuum or bones of steel for high gravity? Or stranger things? I myself saw a breed of humans – so they called themselves – living in the corona of a fluffy, red star. They experienced life ten times faster than I did, flitting about like flames in a high wind. They were no help in finding Cate.

  Even in colonies inhabited by people I recognised as people, there was no skin colour, limb ratio, symmetry or gender that someone didn’t explore. The ability to take people apart and put them back together at will opened up a universe of possibilities – as uncountable as the stars in the sky.

  FINALLY, A MESSAGE arrived that said:

  Success! Long may you shine, Deneb. You are our lucky star.

  And I suppose I could have conceded then. One of me had achieved the goal of finding and winning back Cate’s trust: somewhere in the universe, we were a couple again! I was comforted, knowing that my certainty was warranted. My faith. And yes, my stubbornness, my refusal to accept defeat in the face of a rising number of rejections. One of us had atoned for the wrong we did. At last, the breach was mended.

  But that didn’t mean I personally was going to quit.

  There were other Cates still out there, an army of Cates to match an army of us. This one success gave me hope that I too might succeed. It gave all of us hope. Maybe, in time, we would achieve a heart as full as that lucky one in Deneb.

  We all started out determined. Random events and encounters did, for some, erode the certitude that had served us so well for so long. Some abandoned their searches in order to settle down with people who suited them better than Cate, hard though that is for me to imagine. Some of us discovered more productive vocations. Some died, by accident or by their own hand, from recklessness, carelessness, depression, or despair.

  Me, I kept going, even as the view around me grew stranger and stranger.

  I walked on a world identical in every way to Earth, except that it was on the far side of the galaxy.

  I whipped past a neutron star in a habitat made from crystal far more resilient than anything people dreamed of in my day.

  I slid across virtual membranes written on spacetime itself, coiled tightly around the event horizon of a black hole.

  I hopped from orbit to orbit in the chaotic swirl at the centre of the Milky Way like a child crossing a river on stepping stones.

  Always, always Cate was one step ahead of me, dancing onward just out of reach.

  WITHOUT KNOWING, I was battling an enemy I couldn’t fight or even see, one who might never let me succeed.

  That enemy wasn’t Cate. It wasn’t the me who found her and won her back; nor was it the other versions of me who came close but failed. It was not even the people she dated instead of me.

  My enemy was statistics.

  I’ve learned a lot about the science of large numbers in my travels. Given a sufficiently large amount of anything, the chance that even the most unlikely of events will happen approaches one. A perfect snowflake. Eighteen perfect holes in a single game of golf. Two people with fingerprints that perfectly match.

  As humanity in all its forms boiled out of the Milky Way and colonised its neighbouring galaxies, Cate and I spread with them. We numbered in the trillions. What are the odds, I asked myself, that I’d miss her in every single system I visit?

  Vanishingly small.

  But when the vastly large meets the vanishingly small, the result also approaches one.

  And as time passed, it looked more and more likely that I was going to be that one.

  A DEPRESSING THOUGHT, undoubtedly, but something Cate said kept me in good spirits, most days.

  “Fear is the most pointless emotion ever,” she told me. “Something bad will either happen or it won’t. Do everything you can to avoid it, sure, but after that, well, fear only punishes you for living in an imperfect universe.”

  A UNIVERSE WITHOUT Cate would certainly be imperfect. I kept circulating, following leads as I always had at first, but then seeking her more aimlessly. Being methodical hadn’t helped in the past, so why not trust in blind chance, to turn the tables on my enemy? My jumps through space and time became steadily longer, although not for me personally: instants only seem to pass between departure and arrival, except on those few times when my data was intercepted and ‘awoken’ to be analysed. D-mat was long ago superseded by better means of transport, although the backbone and ‘nerves’ of the old system remained. I have at times been mistaken for malicious code in that network, a relic of ancient information wars still reverberating across the universe. Sometimes people hoped I might be a time capsul
e, accidental or intentional. I’ve talked to soldiers, archaeologists, psychologists... none of them Cate, the only person who really matters.

  Around me, things have changed beyond comprehension. The skies grew dark as more and more stars were hidden behind hollow spheres that absorbed every iota of radiated energy, energy required to fuel humanity’s greatest works. I stood outside those works looking in. When I tried to understand even part of them, I failed. The concepts were too huge. Everything was too huge. I was a microbe swimming among whales the size of mountains. What passed as ‘human’ in those days was unlike anything I had ever seen. Only the word remained. And me.

  And then the messages began to stop coming.

  For years they had accompanied me from place to place, forwarded on by observers, disinterested bystanders, and routers that were as much relics as I am. These missives from my other selves gave me strength to persist through endless failures, particularly when two other versions of me reconnected with Cate in a meaningful way. I hoped to achieve the same, and I imagined that the others would, too. They were me, after all.

  But gradually, with the relentless passage of time, the messages grew fewer and less frequent. Once, I had arrived at every destination to find tens of thousands awaiting me, requiring weeks to read them all. I didn’t notice the decline until that number shrank to hundreds. Then mere dozens. Occasionally there might only be one or two.

  Just lately, none at all.

  I feel as though I am traversing a cave that grows ever larger around me. My jumps increase in size, but still I do not reach the end of my journey. The past retreats along with everything else. I am a ghost in the gloom, wondering where all the other ghosts have got to.