Darwin's Bastards

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  The world, finally, is giving over to black.

  And now the hurry. Jamie stuffs the star into his rucksack and staggers to the edge of Utmost Perch. He frantically searches for footholds, finds one, loses it, and falls to a plateau some ten feet below, twisting his ankle on impact. Ignoring the pain, thinking of the rusty all-terrain vehicle behind the house, he clambers the rest of the way down, cutting his palms to ribbons along the way.

  An old man, he stumbles across the Hills. The skyliners rumble behind him, but he’s too terrified to look over his shoulder and gauge the speed of their approach. He trips, falls, and rolls over, resigned to abduction by one of their tractor beams.

  But they aren’t behind him. The rumbling was simply the dark preparing to stake its victory.

  He hurries home, using the glowing rucksack to light his way. Instead of charging indoors, he shuffles around the house, shaking the star free of the bag and slipping it into the engine of the ATV. The engine turns over, and Jamie shoves open the back entrance, yelling for Jimmy, telling the boy to hurry, for Christ’s sake, there’s no time to explain.

  Jimmy, his soft features bent by fear, comes rushing to the back entrance. Jamie throws a coat at him and tells him to put his boots on. Betty comes out, her mouth gaping, trying for a question. Jamie pushes past her, running into the kitchen to collect Jimmy’s books. He throws them at his son.

  “Take them!” he screams. “Go!”

  Jimmy stands there, uncertain.

  “Go to your school now, son,” Jamie says, his voice suddenly calm and commanding.

  “Um, okay,” Jimmy whispers, frightened and confused. “I’ll see you all at Reading Week, then, right?”

  “Yes, son,” Jamie maintains. “Of course.”

  He ushers the boy over the threshold and slams the door in his face.

  “Why did you do that?” Betty yelps.

  Jamie sees her in the fading light of yesterday’s catch. He takes her hand, still soft after all these years, and leads her to the kitchen table, sitting her down and preparing tea.

  “Why did you do that, Jamie?”

  The light flickers out before the tea is ready, and Jamie finds a seat next to his wife.

  “If he hurries,” Jamie says, collapsing into his chair, “they won’t find him. Besides, breaking the seal hurts the value. They might not even be interested anymore.”

  They link hands in the totality of the roaring night. The pirates will never find them, Jamie assures her.

  She squeezes his hand and strokes his thumb.

  “No, Jamie,” she says. “No one will.”

  SHEILA HETI

  conceived with Margaux Williamson

  THERE IS NO TIME IN WATERLOO

  EVERYONE IN WATERLOO was an amateur physicist, and they endlessly bugged the real physicists as the physicists sat in cafés talking to each other. The amateurs would approach and put questions to them; simple questions, obvious ones. Or else they asked questions that even a physicist couldn’t answer, or questions that weren’t in the realm of physics at all, but had more to do with biology or straight computation. People who know almost nothing about what they’re talking about are often more enthusiastic than the ones who know a lot, so they do all the talking, while the ones who know their shit stay silent and get red in the face.

  Whenever a real physicist would start to correct or explain a point, the amateur would smile and nod, and would loudly proclaim that they’d read something about that in a magazine or book recently. Then they would start explaining it and the physicist would listen, tight-lipped, or else abruptly put an end to the conversation in frustration.

  Then the physicist would return to the Perimeter Institute, which was built on the top of a gently sloping hill, and sigh in relief to be home again, standing at the chalkboard, working out equations.

  One afternoon in March, a rumour went around town that some boy’s Mothers had predicted that a kid was going to blow up the mall on the left side of town, so all the teenagers got on their scooters and sped off towards the parking lot there.

  As Sunni was leaving her apartment, her mother called out from her usual place on the couch and asked where she was going. Sunni returned and explained about the rumour, saying that she was really eager to see the mall be blown up; that she and her friends had so much pent-up energy—they were wild with energy and simply couldn’t wait.

  Sunni’s mother felt a bit of regret that her daughter was going to watch the mall explode, but she didn’t object. After all, if that was Sunni’s destiny, who was she to interfere?

  At the mall the teenagers spoke excitedly with each other, drawing together and apart, eager for the show to begin. They asked around to discover whose Mothers had predicted the explosion, but no one seemed to know. When after an hour the mall still remained standing, undisturbed, they each started checking their Mothers to see if they were the one destined to blow it up. It appeared that none of them was.

  Now they began to grow tense and upset. It was not the first time something like this had happened. A week before, some boy’s Mothers had predicted a fight, but no one had thrown the first punch. A month ago, there was supposed to have been an orgy in back of the other mall, the nice one, but after standing around awhile they had checked their Mothers and learned that the probability of their participating in an orgy was really low.

  It started to rain, as a weatherman had predicted. Dispirited, the teenagers began to drift off. Only Sunni and a few of her friends remained, to finish the conversation they’d been having about film. They each had their own distinct opinions about art, but came together in agreement that surprise in drama was an inaccurate reflection of life; the best stories followed the path of greatest likelihood. Indeed, when you thought about the best stories down through time, their greatness and terror came from the fact that the most predictable and probable thing always occurred.

  “Like in Oedipus,” Sunni said, watching her friend Danny as he lit up his cigarette with an old-fashioned butane lighter whose flame danced high in the air. As the boy tried to snap it closed smoothly, a fumbling occurred, and it tumbled, aflame, onto Sunni’s hand and her Mothers, igniting the casing in a sudden burst.

  “Oh, fuck!” Sunni cried, batting her Mothers into the air; it arced, smoking, and dropped on the pavement, the lighter clattering beside it.

  “Oh my God, Sunni—is your Mothers dead?” Danny gasped.

  “Nope! Nope! Luckily no!” Sunni replied, picking it up. It was burning hot, and she tossed it from hand to hand. Looking down as it cooled, she saw that the screen had been melted into a squinty little eye. The keys were matted down to their wires, and the casing was tarry and charred.

  “Still works!” Sunni announced. Then she got onto her scooter, feeling like she was about to faint, and rode to the parking lot around the other side of the mall, her Mothers propped behind the windshield. She kept glancing at it, but no glance transformed it from the twisted, charry mess it had been in the glance before.

  In the back parking lot, she stopped her scooter and got off and doubled over, hyperventilating a bit, then ran a distance to throw up. This vomiting might have been because she was pregnant. Most of her friends were; they knew that there was a greater probability of having a successful career and a nice-looking body if they gave birth while still young, and their Mothers pushed them in this direction.

  When Sunni returned at last to her Mothers and saw it there on the windshield, she was overtaken by a spell of vertigo. It wasn’t clear yet whether its destruction was the worst, most tragic thing that had ever happened to her, or if this was the most exciting moment of her life. She only knew that she had never felt such dizziness before, and upon asking herself what to do now, then glancing down reflexively at her Mothers for the answer, she grew overwhelmed by vertigo once more.

  Twenty years earlier, the citizens of Waterloo had grown enthralled by a book written by a physicist who had been invited to spend some time at Perimeter. The book was cal
led The End of Time, and its author had argued in a persuasive and beautiful way that time did not exist; the universe was static. There were a slightly less than an infinite number of possible moments hanging about, like paintings in an attic, all real but out of reach, and each person’s destiny was nothing more and nothing less than the most probable of these possible futures.

  The people most taken with this idea led fervent discussions on how to best realize the theory in one’s life. Like humans anywhere, they didn’t want to waste their time. They hoped to reach their destinies as quickly and efficiently as possible—not their ultimate destinies, just their penultimate ones. And so it made sense to try and act as much in accordance with probability as they could.

  The executives at the BlackBerry headquarters in Waterloo decided they would capitalize on this desire, and they began producing a machine they tagged The Mother of All BlackBerrys. It remained a phone you could email from, but it had an added, special feature: given ongoing inputs, it was calibrated to determine for each user what they were destined to do next.

  “It will be a device that determines a person’s most likely next action based on previous behaviours. If the input is one’s life, then the outcome is one’s life,” an executive explained to the rest as they sat around a table.

  “Brilliant!” said another executive, reaching for a Danish. And they all reached for Danishes, and toasted each other, smiling.

  The Mothers—as people began calling them—were at once a huge success. They eclipsed everything in culture at that moment, like any great fad down through time. People in Waterloo consulted their Mothers at every turn, and it quickly became as impossible to live without a Mothers as it had once been to not check email. People wondered how they had managed their lives before the Mothers. They even bought Mothers for their babies.

  If life became somewhat more predictable as a result, it was also more comforting, and soon the citizens of Waterloo didn’t even notice that they were going in circles; that it was always the same thing over and over again.

  The physicists, though nominally to blame for the proliferation of the Mothers, were largely skeptical and had a hundred doubts, so it was not unusual to be standing in a supermarket line-up and hear one of them testily provoke and challenge an amateur physicist who was checking his Mothers, if the physicist was having a particularly bad day. “So, do these Mothers calculate quantum or classical probabilities?” the physicist might ask; a question over which the amateur might stumble, only to regain his footing upon consulting his Mothers about whether continuing the conversation would be to his benefit, to which the Mothers would reply that the probability was low.

  What will Sunni do without her Mothers? I sometimes ask myself a similar question. What would I do if I didn’t know what was to come? If the inputs of my past were to disappear, I’d have no idea how I behaved in relationships past, and would not know how to behave in them now. I would play it all differently, not knowing how I was likely to behave. I might forget how much I once hated to be on a soccer pitch, but was forced onto the field, and have avoided soccer ever since. I might, while lounging in a park, say to the soccer players, while rising, Do you need an extra player?

  If you draw a line across a piece of paper, that is King Street. Now draw a small, perpendicular line crossing King Street near the centre. That is Princess Street. That is the part of town where losers, misfits, and orphans hang out. It’s where someone crosses the street drunk, and someone else crosses the street with ripped jeans and a lazy eye.

  On either end of King Street, draw a square. These are the two malls. The mall at the right end of town is in the richer neighbourhood, near the Perimeter Institute, the University, and the Institute for Quantum Computing—all those institutions representing the heights of Waterloo’s excellence. The other mall, the one the teenagers gathered at, is situated near the Old Town Hospital, City Hall, and the more run-down establishments that deal with humanities and the human body.

  Now watch Sunni speed along the long line of King Street, arriving within minutes at Princess.

  Sunni was like all her friends and all her friends were like Sunni. Their machines represented the part of the brain that sees patterns and nothing but patterns. To that part of the brain, everything fits. There is no randomness to life, no chance. If ever their Mothers missed something, or something not predicted occurred, it would correct for the future, learning from what had happened and fitting this new thing into a better, more complete image of the whole. In this way, if not everything was already accounted for, Sunni and her friends had faith that in time it would be.

  Sunni had always avoided Princess Street, since only losers hung out there. But since nearly every teenager whose Mothers broke wound up on Princess, it was where she decided to go now. She still had the instincts of someone with a Mothers, and wanted to waste no time before moving on to the likeliest next stage of her destiny. She parked her scooter and walked straight into one of the bars, pushing its red door open.

  Two teenagers she had never seen before were sitting on tall stools, smoking and drinking, and upon entering Sunni could hear them whisper: Doesn’t she look like Shelly? No, but she reminds me a lot of my grade-four gym teacher. Actually, today in its entirety reminds me a lot of grade four.

  Sunni went to perch on the stool beside them and said hi, placing her hand below her slightly heavy belly. They regarded her blankly. Without waiting for a sign of their interest, she explained that she had lost her Mothers that day.

  The boy nodded solemnly. Once your Mothers is dead, he knew, it’s gone for good. The factory had shut down years before due to a lack of demand for the Mothers beyond Waterloo, and not a single repair shop in town knew how to fix the machines. The boy explained that the very same thing had happened to him four years ago, but told Sunni not to worry; life would not be as different as she feared. Having said this, he turned to face his friend, finishing up the anecdote he had been telling about his childhood, concluding, “And I still feel its reverberations today.” Then the two of them put down their money and began packing their bags to leave.

  “Wait! Wait! Where are you going?” Sunni cried anxiously, and the boy sighed deeply and said, “Relax. Personality is as static as time; it’s a fixed law. People don’t change. As long as you remember that, you’ll be all right. Now we have to go and write in our diaries.” And they left.

  Sunni, still sitting there, glanced down at her Elders pin as it began to blink and beep. Then she jumped up from the stool and left.

  Time is a measurement of change. The change in the position of quantum particles cannot always be known, because they don’t seem to exist in any fixed spot. At the level of human bodies, we can see that time has passed because one moment I’m here at this bar, the next I’m at City Hall. But at the quantum level, everything is cloudy. This is the mechanism for the disappearance of time. The people of Waterloo liked the timeless theory because, deep down, they felt it. Their lives, in so many ways, reflected it. The science simply stamped their intuition with the air of authority and truth.

  “No,” said a physicist, standing in the park under the gazebo, to the twenty-odd citizens picnicking around her. “We don’t all believe that time is static.”

  The picnickers smiled up at the physicist. They continued to eat their bread and sandwiches and throw their strawberries into the grass.

  Though Sunni left for City Hall as soon as she received the call, she arrived a little later than everyone else. The other Elders were already there, waiting for the emergency meeting to begin.

  The teenagers of Waterloo, whose Mothers had been receiving inputs since the day they were born, were believed by everyone to have a more accurate grasp of what the future would hold. Compared to their Mothers, their parents’ Mothers were deeply lacking: twenty, thirty years unaccounted for. So a special place in Waterloo was reserved for the young. They were given much respect. They bore the official title Double Special Elders, since having a particular
destiny is the essence of being Special. They were paraded about on ceremonial occasions and called in to advise the city on all the important matters.

  Sunni crept quietly through the side door, up to her seat in the fourth row of the dais, which seated thirty across. Already Waterloo’s 250 native-born teens were in their seats, and they glanced at Sunni and watched her take her place, though she had tried to make her entrance subtle. The mayor, standing at the podium before them, was in the midst of explaining the current crisis, but after two minutes, Sunni was still totally lost, so she whispered to the boy beside her, asking him what she had missed.

  He replied quickly, “This morning Perimeter received word from Africa that all the problems in physics have been solved.”

  “What?” she whispered back. “Are you sure? The measurement problem and—”

  “Yes, yes, everything,” he insisted hotly. Then he rolled his eyes. “Don’t ask me.”

  Sunni slumped back in her chair, stunned. The mayor was now on to the mundane, municipal details, explaining how much it cost the city to fund the institute, claiming that it would be humiliating for Waterloo to carry on the project of physics when the field was now kaput. He gestured at the two physicists who had come to explain the proof, should anyone want to hear it. He said that they represented the physicists who believed the institute should be kept alive—not because the African proof was wrong; it wasn’t—but for reasons that he, the mayor, did not completely understand, though if one of the Elders wanted to hear their reasoning, the physicists could give it. As for the rest of the physicists, they were too preoccupied with going over the proof to attend the meeting that day.

  “Would any of the Elders like to see the African proof?” the mayor asked.