Transmission: Ragnarok: Book Two

by John Meaney

  ‘But mainly, the hyper-rotation has deactivated your biceps and triceps, and effectively screwed your joint into position, held by elastic tension in the rotator cuff. It’s because your upper arm can’t tense that I have nothing to work with when pulling down, because the use of your strength tends to bend your own elbow.’

  Roger put his proprioreceptive awareness into his arm, remembering the position.

  ‘The triceps,’ he said, ‘was hanging there loose. The biceps was stretched right out, which means … the Golgi reflex kicked in. Of course.’

  The same reflex that activates when someone loses an arm-wrestling match: the sudden switching off of all tension, the limb going floppy in order to protect muscles from tearing.

  ‘Well done,’ said Rhianna. ‘Well done. Now for fighting under extreme conditions, you really don’t want the Golgi reflex to work, because the other fucker will kill you in that moment.’

  Roger blinked at the strong language, so different from her normal speech.

  ‘So I’m going to teach you,’ Rhianna went on, ‘to disengage the reflex. Attack me.’

  ‘What kind of—?’

  The slap against his face was shocking.

  ‘Just fucking fight!’ she yelled.

  He went for it.

  Holy shit.

  The ceiling whipped past his vision, something massive hammered into his entire back – the floor – and her legs were across his chest and throat, his left arm extended and caught in her grip as she leaned back, pain flaring as the armbar technique hyperextended everything.

  He tapped twice, the traditional signal to acknowledge an inescapable hold was on, that he could not release himself short of allowing his arm to snap.

  ‘I didn’t say give up!’ she shouted. ‘I said fight!’

  ‘Holy … fuck.’

  He worked at it.

  ‘Put the pain aside,’ she said. ‘Leave it for later.’

  ‘I …’

  ‘Just fight!’

  A loud crack sounded as his forearm broke—

  Holy shit!

  —but his limb was no longer trapped, the armbar depending on the forearm’s integrity. He squirmed around and hit her in the jaw. She twisted away.

  ‘Good.’ She spat blood. ‘Good.’

  Rolling further, she made distance and rose to her feet.

  ‘Stand up,’ she said.

  He came up ready, covered in sweat, a predator about to kill.

  ‘And relax, Roger. Let’s take a look at that arm.’

  Blowing out a breath, he shuddered, stepped back, and regained control.

  Fuck, it hurts.

  Something told him this was not the most painful lesson she had lined up.

  Darkness, and the movement within it.

  Now.

  She was close behind him and he whipped back, an elbow-uppercut to the rear, using his good arm – contact – then his kidneys exploded with pain. They went down together, Rhianna and he, squirming on the floor until her legs scissored around his throat, his right arm caught between her thighs but not helping him, because his own shoulder, pressed into his carotid artery, enhanced the triangle technique. And then he was asleep.

  The lights were bright when she brought him awake.

  The ninth time, he gave as good as he got. Afterwards, Rhianna smiled a red-and-white smile, and pulled out the tooth his elbow-strike had broken. She stared at the quickglass wall, causing it to pucker then create a small alcove. She placed the tooth inside, and returned to the room’s centre as the wall sealed up.

  Rhianna’s going to make me pay for that.

  His pain was everywhere, but he would not let it matter.

  Here goes.

  Scarlet light blazed, and massive, thunderous vibrations drove through him – battlefield simulation – and Rhianna came for him at incredible speed.

  Fuck.

  He spun away growling and the fight was on.

  Again.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  THE WORLD, 5568 AD

  For two thousand nights and more, he Sought. Across the Sere Wastes and the Shattered Range, he followed Ideas, sharing those he captured with the villagers he came across, always receiving hospitality, always bidden farewell with relief: his difference was both useful and unsettling.

  Once, he skirted a settlement where a flux storm combined with a buried crystal lode had induced foam-mouthed insanity. They were raving and armed, too dangerous to approach. He wondered, sometimes, how long they had lasted before death took them. But most of the adults he met were normal, with names and remembered childhoods, so unlike him; for he was Seeker, and that was all he could be.

  Sometimes he walked past dawn, the rising sun shining red upon his burnished skin; but only if he was sure of shelter before the conditions grew deadly. There was some kind of enjoyment in not having the constraints that ruled villagers’ lives; but the true joy was finding Ideas like the one captured yesterday, swirling in his mind:

  **Vacuum is a phase of spacetime as ice is a phase of water. The properties of a vacuum are emergent, just as the properties of solids – the existence and hardness of surfaces – arise independently of the quantum attributes of constituent molecules.**

  Tonight, as he walked beneath the light of Magnus and Minissimus, both of them full-orbed, he wondered if this region harboured a Theme. Yesternight’s Idea resonated with one he had captured two nights earlier, and with another he had received in trade from a fellow Seeker on one of those rare occasions when two paths of Seeking crossed.

  This was the Idea that the other Seeker had given him:

  **Emergence is more obvious the wider one travels. It is rare to find two worlds whose organisms use the same molecule or group of molecules (the latter tending to feature one or more autocatalytic reactions) as the basis for replication. No planet besides Earth has ever shown evidence of DNA. Yet evolution occurs similarly in every biosphere, producing predator-prey relationships alongside symbiosis.**

  It was an old Idea, long-held in some crystal lode; but the one he had snagged himself two nights before featured even more archaic references, linkages to other deep Ideas that might or might not be lost to time, broken apart into random flux perhaps generations before Seeker’s birth.

  **Poor mad, suicidal Boltzmann correctly derived the behaviour of gases by considering their molecules to be small, hard, miniature billiard balls flying about at random. His ideal gas law is a decent fit to observed behaviour; while adding the concept of electrical charge gives the ‘real’ gas law, an even better match. This remains true even though molecules are clouds of probabilistic vibration, not billiard balls at all.**

  So much in common, with such tantalizing gaps, suggesting missing Ideas whose absence cried out for discovery. He was thinking these things as something bright arced meteor-like across the night and landed, or appeared to land, somewhere among the rippling ridges that lay ahead.

  The next day, he sheltered – having pushed himself too long into the hours of heat – close to a lode bearing an energetic Idea, but not close enough for him to catch it. Hunkered down, he ached with the need to take it, unable to sleep as it called to him. Finally, daring to move before dusk, he pulled the complex, twisting flux inside himself.

  **‘Phase transition’ and ‘symmetry breaking’ are synonymous terms, though it may not be obvious. In the very early universe, the electroweak force was singular. When it shivered apart, spacetime itself entered a new phase.**

  Unusually, the flux had tangled with a tenuous strand, leading him to a linked Idea embedded in the same lode. After a moment, Seeker realized it had been a single Idea broken in two, and a sense of rightness filled him as he pulled the second half inside himself.

  **Faster-than-light travel was long thought to destroy causality, allowing travel outside the light-cone. However, relativistic lightspeed performs two functions: the speed on which all observers agree, and the universal speed limit for motion. Finite FTL breaks this symmetry – dif
ferent observers will not agree on an FTL flight’s duration – and causality is indeed distorted from the Newtonian paradigm, but not to randomness, no more than distance and duration are destroyed by Lorentz-Fitzgerald transformations.**

  If this region did in fact contain a lost Theme, he should notify as many people as he could, in the hope that more Seekers would learn of it. But he was drawn by something else: the sight of that meteor, which lay a night’s journey ahead of him, or so he thought.

  In fact it was two nights later when he peered over a ridge and saw the strange, massive, shining craft on the sands below, with its soft-fleshed but human-shaped crew and their metallic, dragon-like companion, and the silver-skinned prisoner, bound and kneeling.

  It was the other Seeker, whom he had met so recently.

  There was a niche to hide in, though buried seams contained tangled flux – powerful but random, therefore dangerous – but he had to do it, to secrete himself and think, to work out what to do. He was terrified, that was the thing: too scared to imagine courses of action, never mind carry them out. They had overwhelmed the other Seeker; they could do the same to him.

  Vibrating in his hiding-place, he managed to form two questions: where had the awful-looking things come from? And why had they landed where they did?

  It was a craft, the huge device below; and as he thought of it – without having the courage to risk another look – the outside had been damaged, blackened and torn, much as the other Seeker’s skin would turn in daylight if they kept him out there. While from below the sand he had caught a sense of something archaic and huge, buried very deep, in place for a long time – many generations, maybe even fifty or more.

  A howl of agonized flux spun this away.

  They were torturing their prisoner.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  EARTH, 2033 AD

  Portrait of a scared physicist, one Lucas Woods, hiding out in a damp-smelling budget hotel room for which he had paid cash (no questions asked, this being the dodgy end of Bayswater), working on a fake-ID qPad likewise bought for cash (this time with raised eyebrows but acceptance, in a small Tottenham Court Road establishment), dividing his time between reading and thinking and puking up with fear in the en suite, before reading once more:

  It was nine years since a young, British-born researcher called Gus Calzonni – her legal name being Augusta – made her controversial discovery in Caltech. A laser beam that appeared broken, non-existent along part of its length, was significant in itself; but Calzonni’s claim was that the beam in fact remained continuous, with a segment inside another spacetime continuum that she named mu-space. What gave the claim some credibility was that she had calculated the transition requirements in advance, based on the fractal geometry of a hypothetical ur-continuum, and designed the experiment afterwards. However, it remained an open question: just because the beam behaved as if it had entered mu-space did not guarantee it actually had.

  The webAnts and webAgents that Lucas set loose returned an interesting picture, more high-tech entrepeneur (or entrepeneuse as several journal sites had it) than researcher. There was a small tradition of Oxford, where she had taken her first degree and DPhil both, producing academics who grew rich from spin-off companies; but Calzonni appeared to have a greater, un-English (or un-English-academic) drive for wealth. A mathematical prodigy, she had also studied a near-forgotten non-academic system called neurolinguistic programming, which she claimed produced useful psychological techniques and skills for business people, even as she denounced the system’s community as New Age schizoid delusional, with minimal knowledge of neurology, linguistics or software engineering, unable to see past their dogmatic constraints or test themselves with scientific rigour. Lucas removed the latter set of findings from his workspace – they seemed strident about an irrelevance – so he could concentrate on the physics.

  What he had set the ants and agents to search for had been the triplet of variables and values in the postscript of the note he had dug up from his floor, ruining the parquet: the note that appeared to have been secreted by his grandmother decades ago.

  You will see three. You will be wrong.

  G

  P.S. Pass it on! κ∞ = 9.42 ; λ∞ = 2.703 × 1023 ; μ∞ = .02289

  The values had no specified units and returned no significant matches from the web, but the triplet of variable names was distinctive: kappa, lambda and mu, each with an infinity sign as subscript. The webAgents found a match in Calzonni’s published papers, being three of the nine key parameters that she had set for the beam’s insertion into mu-space … if that was what she had achieved.

  Interestingly, despite the insertion parameter μ (as in mew like a pussycat), Calzonni intended mu-space to be named after the Japanese concept of mu (like a cow, not a cat). Physicists still failed to agree whether ‘quark’ rhymed with dark or dork, Lucas following the latter. But regarding mu-space, he decided he had been using the wrong pronunciation.

  As a child, during the evenings while her mother worked as an office cleaner, Gus Calzonni had taught herself logic by coding in Java. She wrote: Storing data in value objects, such as Strings and Booleans, was immensely valuable. It meant that if I declared a variable b of type Boolean, evaluating b.booleanValue( ) gave me three possible outcomes: true, false or NullPointerException. This made it natural for me to recast discrete mathematics as trinary logic when I began to …

  The Japanese mu, it seemed, could mean boundless or nothingness or neither/nor: concepts not normally synonymous in Western minds, but apparently in Calzonni’s.

  She was also an expert in something called jeet kune do. Rich, brilliant, masterful, and no one to argue with. The thought of meeting someone like that, especially a woman, was appalling.

  But then there was that note from Grandma – apparently – and the triple gamma-ray burster event, observed by separate astronomical set-ups, but deleted from them all via simultaneous worm attacks. That had been three days ago, and still he had not told anyone about the data he had copied to his memory flake, an offline replica of the destroyed Cloud data.

  Nor had he returned home, or seen Maria, because whenever he thought of her attitude as the mysterious message arrived on his holoterminal, the more he became afraid.

  Why would a musically talented, nympho beauty hang around with a geek scientist like me?

  Perhaps his low self-esteem was illusion; but he thought it was more likely realistic. And perhaps Maria’s calculating manner was just part of her personality – but what if she was only with him for a deliberate reason?

  The qPad had few of the facilities available to Imperial’s holoterminals, so before looking at the data again, Lucas used low-level reflection and introspection hacks, pulling open the component structures, before running data-projection extracts, retrieving subsets suitable for 2-D rendering. That initial dissection turned out to be fortuitous, for hidden inside the nested object aggregates were worm vectors, lying in wait and ready to go wild.

  ‘You little bastards,’ Lucas told them.

  As he popped up a flat still image containing the three shining dots among the stars, he remembered something from seeing the real time data as it arrived: in a subsidiary panel showing numeric data, two values were in familiar territory: the right ascension close to 6 hours, the declination close to +40°.

  A second image, with lower resolution – showing the triplet as a single unresolved dot, but with a greater visible area of sky – confirmed that the gamma ray bursters shone from a little to the left of β Aurigae, at the bottom of the distorted hexagon that was the Auriga constellation.

  From the direction of the galactic anti-centre.

  ‘So it has to be a hoax,’ he said aloud. ‘Has to be.’

  While the scared voice inside his head told him it was real.

  In the morning he travelled to Heathrow via a roundabout route: Victoria to Hounslow by coach, on to Slough by bus, then a second bus to the airport, paying via the touristToken he had bought for c
ash. Only at Terminal 7 did he revert to his legal identity, waiting as long as he dared before buying a seat on the next flight to Los Angeles.

  She won’t even see me.

  Perhaps it was better if he did not try. From all accounts, a copy of her original apparatus – or an early generation among variations – remained in the Caltech laboratory where she had constructed it, guaranteed a safe place due to her financial endowments. If he had to break into someplace, a university would surely be less challenging than some corporate headquarters.

  Grandma, I’m scared shitless.

  Had she ever been afraid like this?

  FIFTY-SIX

  EARTH, 1948 AD

  Gavriela’s war ended like so many others: in anti-climax, forbidden to discuss her work, without guarantees of the future. Only the continuing support from Rupert on Brian’s behalf – Rupert being rather better off – gave her any feeling of security in the colourless desolation that followed victorious national euphoria. How many years would it be before the ubiquitous urban bomb sites were replaced with new buildings? Ten years? Twenty? Industries were slow to regain a peacetime footing. Among ordinary people, initial talk of the end of rationing faded soon.

  But then there was Carl, the miracle of having a son.

  Carl started school today, she wrote in her diary. My boy is a schoolboy!

  She left no written record of her tears, of the wrench caused by his easy acceptance of the schoolyard, the difficulty of her walking away.

  Her own work was not what she had expected, and yet it provided both income and challenge: teaching physics at a 1930s-built redbrick grammar school for boys that was trying to come to terms with its changing identity. The pupils were almost entirely middle class – being so much better prepared for the Eleven Plus, the national IQ test for eleven-year-olds that was supposed to be impartial – but the working-class entrants were more numerous than before, and some of them had been de facto socially elevated during the evacuation years, living among rural foster families. They were often troubled by living once more with parents they had half (or wholly) forgotten; and when it came to fathers, that applied to other boys besides the returned evacuees: changed men coming home to changed wives, if they came back at all.