by Peter Watts
Thomas waits until the door swings shut. “So, Jaz. What’s the mass of the Higgs boson?” She blinks.
She smiles.
She turns to look at him.
“Two hundred twenty eight GeV,” she says. “All right. Someone actually read my thesis proposal.”
“Not just your proposal. That’s one of Tipler’s testable predictions, isn’t it?”
Her smile widens. “The critical one, actually. The others are pretty self-evident.”
“And you tested it.”
“Yup. Over at CERN. So how’d you find his book?”
“I only read parts of it,” Thomas admits. “It was pretty tough slogging.”
“Sorry. My fault,” Fitzgerald says.
“How so?”
“I thought you could use some help, so I souped you up a bit.
Increased your processing speed. Not enough, I guess.” Something shivers down his back. He ignores it.
“I’m not—” Thomas rubs his chin; he forgot to shave this morning “—exactly sure what you mean by that.”
“Sure you do. You just don’t believe it.” Fitzgerald squirms up from between the sheets, props her back against a pillow. “It’s just a semantic difference, Myles. You’d call it a delusion. Us physics geeks would call it a hypothesis.” Thomas nods, uncertainly.
“Oh, just say it, Myles. I know you’re dying to.” “Go on,” he blurts, strangely unable to stop himself.
Fitzgerald laughs. “If you insist, Doctor. I figured out what I was doing wrong. I thought I had to do everything myself, and I just can’t. Too many variables, you see, even if you access them individually there’s no way you can keep track of ‘em all at once. When I tried, I got mixed up and everything—”
A sudden darkness in her face now. A memory, perhaps, pushing up through all those careful layers of contrivance.
“Everything went wrong,” she finishes softly.
Thomas nods, keeps his voice low and gentle. “What are you remembering right now, Jaz?”
“You know damn well what I’m remembering,” she whispers. “I — I cut him open—”
“Yes.”
“He was dying. He was dying. I tried to fix him, I tried to fix the code but something went wrong, and…” He waits. The silence stretches.
“…and I didn’t know what. I couldn’t fix it if I couldn’t see what I’d done wrong. So I— I cut him open…” Her brow furrows suddenly. Thomas can’t tell with what: remembrance, remorse?
“I really overstepped myself,” she says at last.
No. Concentration. She’s rebuilding her defences, she’s pushing the tip of that bloody iceberg back below the surface. It can’t be easy. Thomas can see it, ponderous and massively buoyant, pushing up from the depths while Jasmine Fitzgerald leans down and desperately pretends not to strain.
“I know it must be difficult to think about,” Thomas says.
She shrugs. “Sometimes.” Going… “When my head slips back into the old school. Old habits die hard.” Going… “But I get over it.”
The frown disappears.
Gone.
“You know when I told you about Core Wars?” she asks brightly.
After a moment, Thomas nods.
“All viruses replicate, but some of the better ones can write macros— micros, actually, would be a better name for them— to other addresses, little subroutines that autonomously perform simple tasks. And some of those can replicate too. Get my drift?” “Not really,” Thomas says quietly.
“I really should have souped you up a bit more. Anyway, those little routines, they can handle all the book-keeping. Each one tracks a few variables, and each time they replicate that’s a few more, and pretty soon there’s no limit to the size of the problem you can handle. Hell, you could rewrite the whole damn operating system from the inside out and not have to worry about any of the details, all your little daemons are doing that for you.”
“Are we all just viruses to you, Jaz?”
She laughs at that, not unkindly. “Ah, Myles. It’s a technical term, not a moral judgement. Life’s information, shaped by natural selection. That’s all I mean.”
“And you’ve learned to— rewrite the code,” Thomas says.
She shakes her head. “Still learning. But I’m getting better at it all the time.”
“I see.” Thomas pretends to check his watch. He still doesn’t know the jargon. He never will. But at least, at last, he knows where she’s coming from.
Nothing left but the final platitudes.
“That’s all I need right now, Jasmine. I want to thank you for being so co-operative. I know how tough this must be on you.”
She cocks her head at him, smiling. “This is goodbye then, Myles? You haven’t come close to curing me.”
He smiles back. He can almost feel each muscle fibre contracting, the increased tension on facial tendons, soft tissue stretching over bone. The utter insincerity of a purely mechanical process. “That’s not what I’m here for, Jaz.” “Right. You’re assessing my fitness.” Thomas nods.
“Well?” she asks after a moment. “Am I fit?”
He takes a breath. “I think you have some problems you haven’t faced. But you can understand counsel, and there’s no doubt you could follow any proceedings the court is likely to throw at you.
Legally, that means you can stand trial.”
“Ah. So I’m not sane, but I’m not crazy enough to get off, eh?” “I hope things work out for you.” That much, at least, is sincere.
“Oh, they will,” she says easily. “Never fear. How much longer do I stay here?”
“Maybe another three weeks. Thirty days is the usual period.”
“But you’ve finished with me. Why so long?”
He shrugs. “Nowhere else to put you, for now.”
“Oh.” She considers. “Just as well, I guess. It’ll given me more time to practice.”
“Goodbye, Jasmine.”
“Too bad you missed Stuart,” she says behind him. “You’d have liked him. Maybe I’ll bring him around to your place sometime.” The doorknob sticks. He tries again.
“Something wrong?” she asks.
“No,” Thomas says, a bit too quickly. “It’s just—” “Oh, right. Hang on a sec.” She rustles in her sheets.
He turns his head. Jasmine Fitzgerald lies flat on her back, unblinking, staring straight up. Her breath is fast and shallow.
The doorknob seems subtly warmer in his hand.
He releases it. “Are you okay?”
“Sure,” she says to the ceiling. “Just tired. Takes a bit out of you, you know?”
Call the nurse, he thinks.
“Really, I just need some rest.” She looks at him one last time, and giggles. “But Myles to go before I sleep…”
• • •
“DR. DESJARDINS, PLEASE.”
“Speaking.”
“You performed the autopsy on Stuart MacLennan?”
A brief silence. Then: “Who is this?”
“My name’s Myles Thomas. I’m a psychologist at FPSS. Jasmine Fitzgerald is— was a client of mine.” The phone sits there in his hand, silent.
“I was looking at the case report, writing up my assessment, and I just noticed something about your findings—”
“They’re preliminary,” Desjardins interrupts. “I’ll have the full report, um, shortly.”
“Yes, I understand that, Dr. Desjardins. But my understanding is that MacLennan was, well, mortally wounded.” “He was gutted like a fish,” Desjardins says.
“Right. But your r— your preliminary report lists cause of death as ‘undetermined’.”
“That’s because I haven’t determined the cause of death.”
“Right. I guess I’m a bit confused about what else it could have been. You didn’t find any toxins in the body, at least none that weren’t involved in MacLennan’s chemo, and no other injuries except for these fistulas and teratomas—”
The phon
e barks in Thomas’s hand, a short ugly laugh. “Do you know what a teratoma is?” Desjardins asks.
“I assumed it was something to do with his cancer.”
“Ever hear the term primordial cyst?”
“No.”
“Hope you haven’t eaten recently,” Desjardins says. “Every now and then you get a clump of proliferating cells floating around in the coelomic cavity. Something happens to activate the dormant genes — could be a lot of things, but the upshot is you sometimes get these growing blobs of tissue sprouting teeth and hair and bone.
Sometimes they get as big as grapefruits.”
“My God. MacLennan had one of those in him?”
“I thought, maybe. At first. Turned out to be a chunk of his kidney. Only there was an eye growing out of it. And most of his abdominal lymph nodes, too, the ducts were clotted with hair and something like fingernail. It was keratinised, anyway.” “That’s horrible,” Thomas whispers.
“No shit. Not to mention the perforated diaphragm, or the fact that half the loops of his small intestine were fused together.”
“But I thought he had leukaemia. “
“He did. That wasn’t what killed him. “
“So you’re saying these teratomas might have had some role in MacLennan’s death? “ “I don’t see how, “ Desjardins says.
“But— “
“Look, maybe I’m not making myself clear. I have my doubts that Stuart MacLennan died from his wife’s carving skills because any one of the abnormalities I found should have killed him more or less instantly. “
“But that’s pretty much impossible, isn’t it? I mean, what did the investigating officers say? “
“Quite frankly, I don’t think they read my report,” Desjardins grumbles. “Neither did you, apparently, or you would have called me before now. “
“Well, it wasn’t really central to my assessment, Dr. Desjardins. And besides, it seemed so obvious—”
“For sure. You see someone laid open from crotch to sternum, you don’t need any report to know what killed him. Who cares about any of this congenital abnormality bullshit? “
Congen— “You’re saying he was born that way?
“Except he couldn’t have been. He’d never have even made it to his first breath.”
“So you’re saying—”
“I’m saying Stuart MacLennan’s wife couldn’t have killed him, because physiologically there’s no way in hell that he could have been alive to start with.”
Thomas stares at the phone. It offers no retraction.
“But— he was twenty-eight years old! How could that be?”
“God only knows,” Desjardins tells him. “You ask me, it’s a fucking miracle.”
• • •
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?
He isn’t quite certain, because he doesn’t quite know what he was expecting. No opened grave, no stone rolled dramatically away from the sepulchre. Of course not. Jasmine Fitzgerald would probably say that her powers are too subtle for such obvious theatre. Why leave a pile of shovelled earth, an opened coffin, when you can just rewrite the code?
She sits cross-legged on her husband’s undisturbed grave. Whatever powers she lays claim to, they don’t shield her from the light rain falling on her head. She doesn’t even have an umbrella.
“Myles,” she says, not looking up. “I thought it might be you.” Her sunny smile, that radiant expression of happy denial, is nowhere to be seen. Her face is as expressionless as her husband’s must be, two meters down.
“Hello, Jaz,” Thomas says.
“How did you find me?” she asks him.
“FPSS went ballistic when you disappeared. They’re calling everyone who had any contact with you, trying to figure out how you got out. Where you might be.”
Her fingers play in the fresh earth. “Did you tell them?” “I didn’t think of this place until after,” he lies. Then, to atone:
“And I don’t know how you got out.”
“Yes you do, Myles. You do it yourself all the time.” “Go on,” he says, deliberately.
She smiles, but it doesn’t last. “We got here the same way, Myles. We copied ourselves from one address to another. The only difference is, you still have to go from A to B to C. I just cut straight to Z.”
“I can’t accept that,” Thomas says.
“Ever the doubter, aren’t you? How can you enjoy heaven when you can’t even recognise it?” Finally, she looks up at him. “You should be told the difference between empiricism and stubbornness, doctor. Know what that’s from?” He shakes his head.
“Oh well. It’s not important.” She looks back at the ground. Wet tendrils of hair hang across her face. “They wouldn’t let me come to the funeral.”
“You don’t seem to need their permission.”
“Not now. That was a few days ago. I still hadn’t worked all the bugs out then.” She plunges one hand into wet dirt. “You know what I did to him.”
Before the knife, she means. “I’m not— I don’t really—”
“You know,” she says again.
Finally he nods, although she isn’t looking.
The rain falls harder. Thomas shivers under his windbreaker.
Fitzgerald doesn’t seem to notice. “So what now?” he asks at last.
“I’m not sure. It seemed so straightforward at first, you know? I loved Stuart, completely, without reservation. I was going to bring him back as soon as I learned how. I was going to do it right this time. And I still love him, I really do, but damn it all I don’t love everything about him, you know? He was a slob, sometimes. And I hated his taste in music. So now that I’m here, I figure, why stop at just bringing him back? Why not, well, fine-tune him a bit?”
“Is that what you’re going to do?”
“I don’t know. I’m going through all the things I’d change, and when it comes right down to it maybe it’d be better to just start again from scratch. Less— intensive. Computationally.”
“I hope you are delusional.” Not a wise thing to say, but suddenly he doesn’t care. “Because if you’re not, God’s a really callous bastard.”
“Is it,” she says, without much interest.
“Everything’s just information. We’re all just subroutines interacting in a model somewhere. Well nothing’s really all that important then, is it? You’ll get around to debugging Stuart one of these days. No hurry. He can wait. It’s just microcode, nothing’s irrevocable. So nothing really matters, does it? How could God give a shit about anything in a universe like that?”
Jasmine Fitzgerald rises from the grave and wipes the dirt off her hands. “Watch it, Myles.” There’s a faint smile on her face. “You don’t want to piss me off.”
He meets her eyes. “I’m glad I still can.”
“Touché.” There’s still a twinkle there, behind her soaked lashes and the runnels of rainwater coursing down her face.
“So what are you going to do?” he asks again.
She looks around the soaking graveyard. “Everything. I’m going to clean the place up. I’m going to fill in the holes. I’m going to rewrite Planck’s constant so it makes sense.” She smiles at him. “Right now, though, I think I’m just going to go somewhere and think about things for a while.”
She steps off the mound. “Thanks for not telling on me. It wouldn’t have made any difference, but I appreciate the thought. I won’t forget it.” She begins to walk away in the rain.
“Jaz,” Thomas calls after her.
She shakes her head, without looking back. “Forget it, Myles. Nobody handed me any miracles.” She stops, then, turns briefly. “Besides, you’re not ready. You’d probably just think I hypnotised you or something.”
I should stop her, Thomas tells himself. She’s dangerous. She’s deluded. They could charge me with aiding and abetting. I should stop her.
If I can.
She leaves him in the rain with the memory of that bright, guiltless smile. He’s a
lmost sure he doesn’t feel anything pass through him then. But maybe he does. Maybe it feels like a ripple growing across some stagnant surface. A subtle reweaving of electrons. A small change in the way things are.
I’m going to clean the place up. I’m going to fill in the holes.
Myles Thomas doesn’t know exactly what she meant by that. But he’s afraid that soon— far too soon— there won’t be anything wrong with this picture. ■
Ambassador
FIRST CONTACT was supposed to solve everything.
That was the rumour, anyway: gentle wizards from Epsilon Eridani were going to save us from the fire and welcome us into a vast Galactic Siblinghood spanning the Milky Way. Whatever diseases we’d failed to conquer, they would cure. Whatever political squabbles we hadn’t outgrown, they would resolve. They were going to fix it all.
They were not supposed to turn me into a hunted animal.
I didn’t dwell much on the philosophical implications, at first; I was too busy running for my life. Zombie streaked headlong into the universe, slaved to a gibbering onboard infested with static. Navigation was a joke. Every blind jump I made reduced the chances of finding my way home by another order of magnitude. I did it anyway, and repeatedly; any jump I didn’t make would kill me.
Once more out of the breach. Long-range put me somewhere in the cometary halo of a modest binary. In better times the computer would have shown me the system’s planetary retinue in an instant; now it would take days to make the necessary measurements.
Not enough time. I could have fixed my position in a day or so using raw starlight even without the onboard, but whatever was after me had never given me the chance. Several times I’d made a start. The longest reprieve had lasted six hours; in that time I’d placed myself somewhere coreward of the Orion spur.
I’d stopped trying. Knowing my location at any moment would put me no further ahead at t+1. I’d be lost again as soon as I jumped.
And I always jumped. It always found me. I still don’t know how; theoretically it’s impossible to track anything through a singularity. But somehow space always opened its mouth and the monster dropped down on me, hungry and mysterious. It might have been easier to deal with if I’d known why.
What did I do, you ask. What did I do to get it so angry? Why, I tried to say hello.