Ragnarok 03 - Resonance

by John Meaney

  Whatever the reason, he found it easy to be friends with Augusta ‘Gus’ Calzonni, the rich and often feared scientist-turned-entrepreneuse (as the smarter zines had it) who had discovered mu-space. For some it remained a metaphor – a visualisation to aid understanding of the equations – while others believed she had uncovered something real: the actual ur-continuum, the ultimate context.

  ‘Consider the universe as a net curtain, if you’ve ever seen such a thing,’ Lucas said in the hotel’s lounge to a handful of attendees, ‘which is what you get if spacetime is quantised at the Planck length and time. Now drape it across a pointy landscape, so miniature mountain peaks insert through some of the holes, giving the curtain the possibility of shape. That’s what context means, in this, er . . . context.’

  One of the group – her fluorescing name-badge read Jacqui Khan – stared at him with the deepest, most intelligent gaze he had ever experienced. She was a little overweight and not pretty, but as they abandoned the mu-space discussion, standing up in response to the next talk being announced, as everyone’s qPads chimed in time, Lucas could not take his eyes off her.

  Not pretty, but beautiful.

  The next speaker was a computer scientist, a grey-haired fellow Brit with a background in cyber-forensics who might have been in his fifties, though he looked so fit it was hard to tell. His name was Gavin Case, and he surprised Lucas by referencing C.P. Snow, whose once-famous 1954 lecture Lucas knew of by chance and expected no one else to have heard of, not these days.

  Snow had talked about two cultures, how people educated in the humanities were proud of their ignorance of, say, the second law of thermodynamics, which was the same as a scientist not knowing about Shakespeare. ‘Although he later amended that,’ said Case, ‘to the equivalent of not being able to read.’

  There were chuckles from his no-doubt biased audience, as he continued to criticise Britain’s Ministry of Computation for its short-sighted views on commercial quantum crypto – and criminal cryptanalysis – before stepping everybody through mathematical formulations of the latest advances, together with a demo of working software.

  Someone asked, when the time for questions came, why Case and his team had not used open source technology; his reply mentioned client requirements, which seemed to satisfy. Lucas wondered if he was the only one to realise what that really meant: this was defence-funded work, with mathematical models – but not the working code – publicised here as part of a deliberate effort to spread anti-criminal techniques to the wider technical world.

  The talk finished with another scathing anti-anti-science remark, about the famous quantum scenario that was the Schrödinger’s cat paradox – because a real cat is alive or dead, no middle ground, which is exactly the point – and how few people grasped the significance.

  ‘Present company excepted, of course,’ Case concluded. ‘You understand that subatomic particles are weird, but the real mystery is how they behave in a non-quantum way in large numbers.’ He held up his qPad. ‘Except in these.’

  For decades, researchers had been entangling larger and larger collections of particles, which meant that qPads and qPins were an advance that people should have seen coming, although investors had spectacularly failed to do so. It was a steady advance, unlike graphene, say, whose discovery – as far as Lucas knew – came from nowhere, luckily for him.

  Or I couldn’t have sent a message six centuries ahead.

  Unless he and Gus had deluded themselves, and consigned a memory flake to simple destruction. That would be a shame, since it had contained perhaps the last uncorrupted copy of observational data from the gamma-ray burster event. All other copies around the globe had been subject to cyberattack – hence, presumably, Gus’s newfound interest in crypto and leading-edge countermeasures.

  But Lucas had just found his own reason for being here.

  Jacqui Khan’s applause, as the lecture ended, seemed half-hearted. Lucas wondered if commenting on this was the best way to begin a conversation; then he stopped second-guessing himself and allowed the words to flow.

  ‘You don’t look entirely happy with the talk.’

  ‘There’s a difference between assuming specialist knowledge and, well, not talking down to people. He didn’t get it right for me, but then I’m no physicist. More computers-by-way-of-psychology.’ She held out her hand. ‘I’m Jacqui, by the way.’

  ‘Lucas.’

  When they shook, it was like completing a high-voltage circuit.

  ‘I could tell you my opinions,’ he finally went on, ‘over coffee.’

  He no longer cared about the conference, and was willing to bet that she didn’t either.

  ‘An excellent idea,’ she said.

  Because the real conversation was occurring far below the verbal level, and some important conclusions had already been reached. They were both smiling as they left the conference centre and came out onto the pavement – sidewalk – in downtown Denver.

  ‘Have you been there yet?’ She pointed to the Rockies, visible through a gap between buildings. ‘Or are you local?’

  Most conference attendees had flown in for the event.

  ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘And I’m definitely not local. You?’

  ‘LA.’

  ‘I live in Pasadena.’ He was tempted to add something stupid about quantum entanglement and destiny, but instead gestured across the street. ‘Coffee shops and civilisation are pretty much synonymous, I’ve always thought.’

  Vehicles moved quietly past, flywheels humming. As Lucas and Jacqui headed for a crosswalk, she said: ‘If you think it’s hard to breathe here, try Pike’s Peak.’

  Lucas had noticed a shortness of breath during the past hour and particularly the last few minutes; he doubted the altitude had much to do with it.

  ‘Up in places like Fairplay,’ Jacqui added, ‘they call Denver folk “flatlanders”.’

  ‘And what would they call people like me?’

  ‘Oh’ – smiling – ‘a weird foreigner, I should think.’

  Waiting at the crosswalk, he said, ‘Where I come from, jay-walking is not a concept. Everyone has the freedom to cross where they like.’

  ‘The freedom to get squished?’

  ‘Our life in our hands. Germany’s like this, though.’ He pointed at the temporarily empty street, while fellow pedestrians waited on the other side. ‘The concept is very, well, Teutonic.’

  ‘Is that what you Brits call “taking the piss”?’

  Lucas could not help his laughter.

  ‘You’re obviously a world traveller.’

  A transcript of their conversation might contain apparent insults; but anyone observing their body language or hearing their tone of voice would conclude that something else entirely was going on: more dance than dialogue.

  Over iced mochas, Lucas explained the cat paradox in greater detail, ending with, ‘When Schrödinger and Heisenberg did their work, young people were dancing the Charleston and the Great Depression was years away from happening.’

  Jacqui rubbed her forehead.

  ‘Iced coffee headache,’ she said. ‘Or maybe it’s quantum.’

  ‘My friend Arne, back in Imperial, who’s a bloody great Viking and into martial arts, says that aikido and Japanese karate date from the 1920s also, and they’re considered traditional. So why don’t people realise that quantum physics is old?’

  There was a distinction between Japanese and Okinawan disciplines, but that was not what Jacqui picked up on. ‘Imperial? As in London’s answer to MIT?’

  ‘Or Caltech, right. I went there in—’

  Sharing life history already, he outlined his modest upbringing, and she talked about growing up in Alaska where moose bolognese was part of the staple diet – that, or taking the piss was not a purely British art – and how she could shoot with either hand, but preferred not to.

  ‘I’m more into reading, chatting and sunshine, thanks all the same. Why I moved to California.’

  ‘That’
s good,’ he told her. His own reasons for ending up there, involving a possibly imaginary conspiracy, a memory flake and breaking into Caltech at night to use Gus Calzonni’s mu-space apparatus, could wait until another day. For now he just told her how much at home he felt on the Left Coast; and he meant it.

  Exiting the coffee shop, his old feelings of paranoia and fantasies about quantum-entangled minds came tumbling back, but the apparition across the street was no coincidence: it was simply that Maria, bloody Maria, had finally taken it into her mind to track him down.

  His name had been on the membership list for the conference – probably his first appearance in public cyberspace – as opposed to corporate and government systems – since he had scarpered from London.

  ‘Shit crap bollocks,’ he said.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘That’ – he pointed at Maria – ‘is my very, very ex-girlfriend.’

  Jacqui gave a start, and clutched Lucas’s upper arm.

  Balls. She’s coming over.

  Whether Brazil possessed the concept of jay-walking, Lucas had never learned; but what he did know was that Maria Higashionna belonged among São Paulo’s upper classes, and she could blaze with full-on haughtiness when she chose – as she did now, crossing the street without regard to anything, including traffic, and dismissing Jacqui with a glance.

  ‘Lucas, meu amor. You left the flat in a mess.’

  Like the parquet flooring he had dug up. Understood.

  ‘That’s what first-month deposits were invented for.’

  The natural thing would be to introduce Jacqui, but for some reason he wanted to keep her out of Maria’s awareness. Luckily Maria’s gaze was fastened on him. She had never seemed so reptilian.

  ‘I always wondered what you dug up.’

  ‘Everything I had was on a memory flake,’ he told her. ‘And it’s gone. Doesn’t exist, anywhere in the universe.’

  Those chestnut brown eyes had always seemed so beguiling. Was this the first time he was actually seeing her for what she was?

  ‘You’re telling the truth.’ She looked like someone at home in the sun, but her voice was icy. ‘And you’ve left everything behind.’

  ‘Everything, Maria.’

  So very cold: not just her voice, but her eyes, when she turned to Jacqui.

  ‘All yours.’

  Maria went back across the street, climbed into her shiny car, and hauled away from the kerb. At the end of the block she turned right, and that was that: Maria was gone from sight.

  Gone from his life.

  There was a delay that felt like hours and like nothing at all before the world re engaged, and he realised that Jacqui was still holding his arm in a fashion that was exactly right, the way things were meant to be.

  ‘I’m not into New Age schizotypal thinking.’ She was staring down the street where Maria had driven. ‘No one walks around with a glowing aura, not literally.’

  ‘Er . . .’

  ‘But there’s such a thing as synaesthesia, and when I see a strange sort of darkness surrounding your ex-girlfriend, I’m inclined to think I’ve picked up on something real.’

  ‘You mean Maria?’

  It seemed a convoluted way of calling his former lover an evil witch, but the oddest thing of all was how deeply he agreed with Jacqui. Like the quantum collapse of a wave function to a single eigenvalue – as though it had always been that way – history seemed to have changed in retrospect, as if Maria had all along been reptile-cold, a lizard sharing his life for her own logical ends.

  Their qPads chimed.

  ‘The conference,’ said Jacqui. ‘The next talk. Did you want to go back in?’

  ‘Not really. I’m already where I’m meant to be,’ he told her. ‘Does that sound weird?’

  ‘It sounds exactly right.’

  ‘You want to walk around downtown?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I want.’

  So arm in arm, they did.

  NINE

  LABYRINTH, 2603-2604 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)

  After the first extended training exercise, four of Roger’s class mates were hospitalised because he had put them there. This was an environment designed to break people down before reconstructing them: a place where controlled sparring meant beating up anyone who tried to dominate you; where endurance runs through strange, shifting landscapes involved doing your best to leave your mates behind; and where games of deception in simulated social situations were always zero-sum – the only way to win was by ensuring the others lost.

  None of this, presumably, was accidental.

  Some of his classmates were highly talented in areas strange to him, and some possessed a great deal of experience in the soft skills arena of influencing new contacts, which would eventually involve recruiting assets, even running agents on hostile territory; but Roger was ‘serious as a bastard’, as he overheard in the dorm block, determined to be implacable, even when others took advantage of unobserved moments to slacken off.

  He was making up lost ground, and more.

  The history of espionage was one of their classroom subjects, and Roger chose to present a paper on the paramilitary aspects of intelligence organisations upon twentieth-century Earth. It was the variation that struck him, and became the paper’s thesis: how some organisations relied on infiltrating diplomatic bureaucracy and mixing at the right parties, while others stood somewhere further along a sliding scale that, at the far end, featured the KGB (later the FSB) and GRU. Those two services maintained their own spetsnasz companies: special forces trained beyond Spartan standards, every soldier a master of rokupashniboi, a combat discipline as close to Pilot fighting methods as realspace had ever seen.

  Perhaps that was why, during the tracking exercise, when his classmates closed the trap in a deserted alley (role-playing an opposition cell who had seen past Roger’s anti surveillance tricks in a simulated cityscape), Roger responded in the all-out way he did. Or perhaps they simply misunderstood the consequences of not leaving an escape route for an ambushed rat.

  There were eight of them in total, closing in, relying on hand-to-hand because his solitary smartmiasma was equal to all theirs combined, neutralising the femtoscopic threat. What remained was primitive, and his first whipping kick destroyed an attacker’s knee joint, curving elbow fracturing the same poor bastard’s jaw, dropping him in another’s path; and a lunging strike came at Roger, a near instantaneous closing of distance, but Roger entered the cyclone’s heart, spinning the man – no, woman – face first into the wall and driving a horizontal elbow into her spine. The wall and two fallen enemies helped close off angles, but the danger was high regardless, and when a big guy grabbed two-handed, Roger dropped his weight to keep on balance, shovel-hooking hard, left-left-right in half a second, to the holy trinity of liver-bladder-spleen, which did it: third bastard down.

  The maelstrom was upon him then, but he drove them back, strangling one cobra-like, his inner forearm striking the carotid so fast that unconsciousness was instantaneous, then a tangled mess of in-fighting until a gap appeared – there – so he broke clear with sweeping forearm blocks that shattered joints, thanks to old-school conditioning, then he drove palm heels into jaws and temples followed by long thrusting kicks to make distance and that was it: five opponents down, one limping away, the other two running.

  Calm. Assess.

  Before the training officers descended to sort things out – everyone’s tu-ring had received the exercise suspended signal – he reviewed the downed opposition and his own self, going through the protocol, putting his hands inside his clothes, rubbing his torso and groin and neck, and checking for blood on his palms, in case he had been stabbed and not felt it.

  Nothing.

  His ribs were broken on both sides and his nose was pointing off to his right, against the cheekbone. Trivial, and the only reason he noticed was that two of his attackers had fallen to similar blows, giving up the fight in psychosomatic surrender.

  They ha
d not been through the mill with Rhianna Chiang; that was the difference.

  However, ‘If you damage your classmates like that again, you’re off the programme,’ the lead instructor, Eira Magnus son (who according to Corinne should have been Magnusdóttir) told Roger during their one to one afterwards, her voice flat and hard in the conference chamber.

  ‘Ma’am.’

  He could have argued that the programme was designed to be harsh, to cause people to fail instead of incrementally building confidence; but she would know that. His response to the chewing out was just one more test, stoicism the key as always.

  ‘Redeploying drop-outs,’ she said, ‘is someone else’s problem. I don’t care who leaves the programme, or how. Except that’ – with a hint of softening in her voice – ‘when the most promising fighter I’ve seen in years comes along, I want him to succeed. We like strength, and so long as you can keep the aggression hidden in civilised surroundings, maintaining your cover, just keep on doing what you’re doing, and ignore the complaints from your classmates, because there will be a shedload. Understood?’

  ‘Er, yes, ma’am.’

  Not strictly true, but he could dwell on her words later. Attitude in the moment was paramount: right now, she was looking for his determined obedience.

  ‘Keep the wolf controlled inside you, Roger.’ A momentary hint of a smile: ‘Except when it’s time to slip the leash.’

  He nodded, knowing that she was right, that he was the wolf – at ulfr ek em – and control was entirely possible.

  ‘Resolve the paradox of fighters not fighting,’ she concluded, ‘and you’ll go far. Dismissed.’

  ‘Ma’am.’

  He fastpath rotated out of there.

  It could be argued that the only way to excel in the programme was to become monstrous, at least for the duration; but humanity was here as well, and of the few classmates who increasingly admired Roger, the one whose friendship-and-more he appreciated most was Corinne Delgasso. Roger knew from Jed, whom he had not seen in person since entering Tangleknot, that Leeja Rigelle, Roger’s older lover from Molsin, was to be relocated to a realspace orbital, somewhere safe, while Alisha Spalding, his earlier almost-girlfriend from Fulgor, who had forgotten him following cognitive rollback therapy, was officially among the dead; but they belonged to a closed off past.