by Ian McDonald
Everett leaned back his chair and breathed the paint fumes deep inside him.
“Okay, I came down into London after school to meet my dad…”
All the way up the A10, through Dalston and along Stoke Newington High Street, Laura didn't speak. Not a word. She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel and mumbled mangled bits of lyrics from the smooth-listening MOR radio station until Everett wanted to punch his fist at the radio, punch any button, hit any station with a bit of noise and beat and life. Anything rather than listen to his mum getting the lines wrong.
See that girl, hear her scream, kicking the dancing queen. It's not that! Everett seethed inside. Clown Control to Mao Tse Tung…Major Tom! Everett wanted to shout. Major Tom Major Tom Major Tom. Get it right. The song was forty years old, but Everett knew it better than his mum. There was a word for misheard lyrics. Everett had come across it online: a mondegreen. He'd liked the word. He remembered it.
By the time they got to Evercreech Road to pick up Victory-Rose, Everett understood. This was anger, of a kind he had seen once—only once—before. He'd seen it the day he came back from football practice and found all the lights on in every room and every door open and the radio blaring through the entire house and his mum in the kitchen, mopping the floor, mopping and mopping and mopping. Something kind of ooh ooh, jumping up my tutu, she'd been singing along to Girls Aloud.
“Mum what are you doing?”
“This floor is disgusting. It smells. That's disgusting. Kitchen floors shouldn't smell. There's ground-in disgusting things between the tiles. And I'm not having those things over my nice clean floor.”
She had pointed at Everett's football boots. He slipped them off. Stocking feet on cold concrete step.
“Are you all right?”
“Fine fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes I'm sure. Absolutely sure.”
“You cleaned that bit of floor three times.”
“No I didn't.”
“Yes you did.”
“Well, what if I did? It needs cleaning. It's disgusting. This whole place is disgusting. I can't keep anything nice; why can't I keep anything nice?”
“Mum, are you okay?”
“Yes I'm okay. Okay? Here's me saying: I. Am. O. K. Why do you keep asking me? Of course I'm okay, I'm always okay. I have to be okay. Someone has to and that's always me. Oh shut up shut shut up; shut up your stupid blabbering…” Laura had screamed at the radio, slapped at the tuning buttons, then ripped the radio plug from the wall. Everett felt embarrassed, ashamed, scared. This was not a thing he should see. It was like the walls of his safe and predictable world had turned to glass and through them he could glimpse huge, monstrous, threatening shapes.
“I'm sorry, Everett,” his mum said. “Everett, me and your Dad. He's taking…he's not coming…Well, we think it might be better if we spent some time apart. I don't know how long. Maybe quite a long time. Maybe…permanently…”
That was how Everett Singh found out that family life as he had always known it had ended, standing in his sock soles on the cold concrete back step, his school blazer over his goalkeeper kit. Boots in hand. Mum holding a squeegee mop. The radio blaring Girls Aloud. It had ended long before, he had realised. It had been ending for a long time. His parents had been lying to him for years.
He had seen the Angry nine months, two weeks, three days ago. He had hoped never to see it again, but here it was in the car with him. Granny Singh had taught Victory-Rose a Punjabi song, which she sang loudly and badly as Laura strapped her into the backseat. Laura put on Singalong with Beebles.
“Shall we sing our song, Vee-Arr? Our favourite song? Shall we? Shall we?” They sang, loudly and badly, all the up through South Tottenham and Stamford Hill.
I'm not the one to punish, Everett thought. There's no one to punish. But you need someone to ground your anger, like a lightning rod, so I'll do. I always do. Everett understood the mondegreen thing now. If his mum could sing her own words, her own interpretation, she had control, even if only of a pop song.
He went back over the details of his police statement in his memory. “At approximately 17:45 on December 15, I was waiting outside the Institute of Contemporary Arts on the Mall,” Moustache Milligan had read from the report sheet. “I was waiting for my father Dr. Tejendra Singh to meet me at six o'clock for a public lecture on trends in nanotechnology. I saw my father proceeding up the Mall from Horseguards on his bicycle. He was coming from his office at Imperial College and was clearly, distinctively, and appropriately dressed. I noticed that he was being followed by a black car with darkened windows, of German make, possibly an Audi. I noticed that the car was driving abnormally slowly and that my father seemed oblivious of it. About a hundred metres from me the car abruptly pulled out, overtook my father, and pulled in front of him, causing him to swerve and stop. Three men exited the vehicle—”
“They got out of the car,” Everett had said.
“Three men exited the vehicle,” Moustache Milligan had continued. “Two of the men seized my father and forced him into the backseat. The third man put the bicycle into the boot. The car then drove off up the Mall in the direction of Constitution Hill. I took a series of photographs on my mobile phone, but I did not call out or attempt to alert any other passersby.”
“Is that correct?” Leah-Leanne-Leona had said.
“Suppose.” It sounded thin and full of holes. There were no witnesses, no corroboration, only Everett's own word and a shaky mobile phone photograph that, if you looked at it cold and hard, could be anything.
“Is that correct, Everett?”
“Yes.”
“Sign here. Press hard—you're making a couple of copies.”
In his room, in his space, away from the noise. Everett opened up Dr. Quantum. Tejendra had given him the tablet computer for his last birthday. It was a good present, the best present. Too much computer for his age—he'd still been a kid then. Laura had immediately forbidden him ever to take it to school, even to show it off. Everett concurred, for once. He had good senses and was fast—faster than anyone would think a Known Geek to be; it was what made him the goalkeeper for Team Red.
Into the mail. Open subject: mall kidnap. A swipe with the finger here, a tap there, and it was into his pictures folder. Everett spread his fingers like a bird opening its wings. The photograph opened up to fill the screen. Everett zoomed in on the tiny scrap of fluorescent yellow in the backseat. Tejendra: that was Tejendra; he could almost read the black Assos logo on the weatherproof jacket.
Rules for twenty-first century living: Never give the police your only photograph.
The doorbell rang. Everett, exploring the photograph pixel by pixel, half-heard it. Someone was always ringing the bell, trying to sell something, despite the sign that said, politely, We don't buy door to door. Then he heard the voice, and shoes on the wooden floor in the hall. Dragging feet; a low Northern Ireland accent. Paul McCabe. Everett went to the bedroom door, opened it a crack. Paul McCabe stood in the hall, hunched over in his raincoat. No one had worn coats like that for forty years. It made him look like a cheap private detective. He always seemed round-shouldered, skulking, guilty of something. Even in his office at Imperial College he never looked at home, as if he had wandered in one morning in the 1980s and was waiting for the day when someone official would discover he was a fraud and throw him out. His voice, talking to Laura, was soft and hesitating. He always seemed to be apologising in advance. Paul McCabe must have heard the bedroom door open, because he turned and looked straight at Everett.
“Everett. Yes yes yes, are you well? Good good. Terrible affair, terrible. Sincerest good wishes. The police called; everyone at the department is terribly upset, terribly. Colette is distraught, quite distraught.”
No way back now. Everett had grown up a physics brat, running free between lecture halls and labs, whiteboards covered in symbols and high-powered research equipment with exciting yellow warning stickers: Lasers! Radi
ation! Nanohazard! The faculty staff was his alternative family, but he had always found Paul McCabe, Tejendra's Head of Department, too jolly, too much the embarrassing uncle. Paul McCabe pursed his mouth, as if tasting unpalatable words.
“Actually, Everett, it's you I've come to see.”
Paul McCabe looked uncomfortable in the living room, seated in the middle of the sofa, hands draped over his knees. He hadn't taken off his coat. In the kitchen Laura made tea, a thing she normally never did after nine o'clock. The caffeine kept her awake. Only table lamps were lit, and the flickering lights on the Christmas tree cast an insane shine over the scientist.
“The police called me about your father, Everett. Incredible, simply incredible. On the Mall. In broad daylight—well, you know what I mean. But it's incredible, incredible, in modern London, that it's not been caught on some CCTV camera somewhere. We are the most surveyed nation on earth.”
“I got a photograph of the car. I got the registration number.”
Paul McCabe sat up.
“Did you? Really?” You look like a meerkat, Everett thought. “That's good work, they should be able to do something with that.”
“So what did the police ask you about?”
Laura pulled out a side table and set a mug of tea on it. Paul McCabe waved away a KitKat.
“Thank you, thank you, but chocolate gives me terrible migraine. Terrible. The police? Oh, just the usual procedural stuff. What where when, had your dad been suffering from unusual stress, had we noticed any…uncharacteristic behaviour recently.”
“Had you?”
Paul McCabe spread his hands apologetically.
“Everett, you know me. I'm the last person finds out what's going on in my own department. Though, if you don't mind, perhaps I could turn your question back on you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Had you noticed your dad behaving…uncharacteristically, recently?”
Everett pictured Tejendra in his mind, flicking through moments, memories, Saturday afternoons, Sunday mornings like snapshots. The moments on the Skype calls when Everett found himself talking to dead air, Tejendra distracted, somewhere else. The time on the stand at White Hart Lane when he completely missed a sweet Danny Rose goal because he'd been frowning at a message on his iPhone. The time he'd pedalled straight past Everett outside the Tate Modern when they went to the opening night of the Rothko exhibition. Moments, memories, little snapshots when Tejendra seemed in another world entirely. A common thread held all those moments of strange together.
“You know the double-slit thing?”
“What? The experiment?”
“The classic experiment. That's what Dad said. The classic experiment that shows that reality is quantum. It starts just asking what light is made of, is it a particle or is it wave, and it's so simple, just light and shadows. But when you get really close in, really up tight and detailed, it's not one or the other. It's both and. Both and neither. He really wanted me to get it, to see how it worked. He'd explain it to me again and again. It's not the particle going through two slits at the same time; it goes through one slit in this universe, and through the other in another universe.”
“When was this, Everett?” Paul McCabe held his mug in two hands, watching Everett over the top of it like a clever bird. He took a sip of tea.
“Back just after school started again. I mean, we always talked about physics and stuff, but just all of a sudden he really needed me to understand it. Maybe it was going into year ten. And you know something? I did understand it. I saw how it worked, I knew what it meant. I understood the Many Worlds Theory.”
“Now you know what Richard Feynman said, Everett.”
“'I think I can safely say that no one understands quantum mechanics.'” Everett held Paul McCabe's gaze. The scientist looked away. Nothing was ever direct with Paul McCabe. Everett had been to the department enough times to see how he worked with his staff: a suggestion here, a hint there, a glance. “But what if I do?”
“You'd be the greatest physicist of your generation,” Paul McCabe said. “Or any generation, I think.” He set the tea mug down on the table without so much as rippling the surface. He slapped his hands decisively on his thighs. “Well, I'd best be going. Just to say, this is a dreadful time, dreadful, and everyone at the department wishes you all the best, the very best. It's not knowing, that's the worst bit. The worst. I'm sure it'll all work out all right, Everett.” He stood up, straightened the coat he had not taken off. “Thank you, Laura. If there's anything any of us can do to help…”
Paul McCabe turned at the front door. Behind him the rain slashed in silver horizontals. The evening's evil weather had deepened.
“Oh yes, Everett one last thing. Your dad, did he give you anything recently?”
“Like what?”
“Like a memory stick, or a data DVD, or even a file transfer?”
“I don't think so.”
“Are you sure?”
“I'm sure.” Everett felt Laura behind him. The cold wind from the street got under the Christmas cards, lifted them, sent them fluttering to the ground.
“Well, as long as you're sure.” Paul McCabe turned up the collar of his coat. “Oof. Dirty old night. Everett, if you do get something from your father, would you be so good as to let me know? It may not make any sense to you, but it might to us. It could help. You will let me know, won't you? Thanks. Good night, Laura.”
He pulled the door hard against the wind.
“Well, what was that about?” Laura asked. “I always thought he was a strange little man.”
That's what that was about, Everett thought. Those last two questions. The rest was just polite games.
The visitor had left almost all his tea.
How Everett had missed the ping from the drop box: he had been trying to identify Paul McCabe's soft voice at the front door. He hadn't used it much recently anyway: file swapping at school had gone quiet since Aaron Leigh got a threatening letter from Viacom's lawyers. But there was the button bouncing up and down on the tool bar at the bottom of the screen. A file was waiting. A touch took Everett to his drop box on a server in Iceland.
“Everett!” Laura had this way of putting an emphasis on the end of his name and going up in tone when she wanted him to know she was exasperated. Everette. “Lights out. School day tomorrow.”
“Okay, Mum.” It was nothing to knock off the light and dive under the duvet to read by screen glow. It reminded Everett of when he was a small kid, face lit by screen-shine, the duvet propped up like a tent by his clunky old netbook turned up on its side like a proper book, the display switched to vertical, watching the Dr. Who rerun on iPlayer. It had always been best on winter storm nights like this, with sleet slashing across the windows and the wind rattling the gutters. Down under the duvet had been another world then. Everett-world.
There was a single folder in the drop box. Infundibulum. No sender information in the check box. Date: eight pm this evening, as Everett was sitting across a table from Leah-Leanne-Leona and Moustache Milligan in Belgravia police station. Size: thirty gigabytes. He opened the folder carefully, ready to back out should anything computer-eating spring out. Inside was a data folder, an executable, and a note in Notepad. It didn't look like a scam. Malware liked to disguise itself as a game or an update. Malware disguising itself as anti-malware was as clever as it got. This just sat there, a big obvious executable. Everett flicked up a clever piece of software he'd traded from Abbas in school. It tracked IP addresses. From that he could identify the sender. Abbas's software came up blank. The address had been made anonymous. Something like iPredator, Everett thought, a Swedish site that encrypted IP addresses and kept them safe from prying eyes. This was starting to get exciting.
Nothing else for it. Everett clicked the download button. There was no save or run option. The executable installed as it downloaded. The screen went crazy with dozens of green timer bars, filling in the blink of an eye, unpacking and unfolding into ne
w icons and menus. Data was downloading from the drop box as fast as the wireless link and the house broadband could handle it.
“Whoa, whoa,” Everett said, trying to click close-boxes. It was fast, too fast even for him. This was a full metal assault on Dr. Quantum.
“Everett? Are you still on that computer?”
Say nothing. Admit nothing. Everett tried to catch the hurtling installation panes. For every one he hunted down, trapped against the edge of the screen, and closed, a new one opened. The screen went dead.
“No,” Everett whispered, filled with dread that he had truly killed his computer.
Dr. Quantum blinked, then rebooted. There was a new icon on the desktop, front and centre. A single white tulip. Infundibulum. Everett breathed out, a long, slow sigh.
“What are you?” Everett breathed. He tapped the icon twice. The tulip blossom unfolded into digital petals. The screen filled with moving translucent veils of light, folding around each other, merging like slow waves breaking, passing through one another, spilling off sprays of ghostly silver pixels. Everything was movement and change. As soon as Everett began to grasp a pattern the banners of light morphed into something unpredictable and new. Everett thought of dragonfly wings, eerie jellyfish, translucent flower petals, the clouds of interstellar gas you saw in photos from the Hubble Space Telescope, ghosts of ghosts. He thought of the shimmering, flickering curtains of the aurora borealis high above the Arctic night. Then he saw the scale, a hair-thin cross at the centre of the screen. It drew three dimensions: left to right, down to up, front to back. A small palette of tools hovered at the edge of the window. Everett picked the magnifying glass and zoomed in on the horizontal axis. At each level of magnification, the images were the same: veils of light, like wings, or angels, or the glowing tendrils of vast space gods. In and in: the same. It looked no different. Big patterns were made of smaller patterns were made of tiny patterns. It was veils of light all the way down.