Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 168

by Neil Clarke

  You have come back here because you want to know. Reflecting on the incident years later, it made no sense. But in this moment, washed up on the shore, you believe so much that Reno had saved you, that he had dove into the water and dragged you from your doom. But did it really happen that way? Are you certain?

  Your Iris wakes you up the next day, swelling gentle orbs of light onto the inside of your eyelids until it becomes uncomfortably bright. You sit up and it takes a minute for you to realize where you are, fine mist still clinging to your eyelashes.

  As you’re pulling on your socks, you hear the golf cart outside rev its dinky engine. You open the door to the parking lot, where Celine is waiting for you. You look to your right and you see Lomas squinting in the sunlight as well.

  The lab is deserted when you walk inside, and you remember that it’s a Saturday. Celine leads you and Lomas to the elevator once again, but this time she swipes her ID and quickly presses the first floor button three times. The elevator jolts into motion, and your head becomes light. The ground through the glass begins to rise, shrouding you in darkness and confirming that you are, indeed, moving downward. Your body still hurts for sleep, but the descent drops your stomach and you shudder.

  The elevator settles and the doors slide open. Lomas steps out first, his head craned up, and lets out a low whistle. He glances back at you and Celine. “Damn.”

  The first thing to notice about this place is the height. The chamber you step into is huge, confusingly so: it seems just as tall as the lab when you were on its telescoping ground floor, as if in the time you’ve been in the elevator a large stage crew was replacing everything in sight, while you weren’t even moving at all. But this can’t be so. You grapple with the fact that this place must truly be underground, another vast space stacked right below where you were just standing.

  The three of you walk to the middle of the chamber, much smaller than the plaza of the first floor. Encircling you are black walls that seem to glow; you realize upon second glance that what you are looking at are actually many, many computers, stacked up on one another to form steep cylindrical surfaces. Cool air circulates around the room and brushes against your skin. On the floor, thick desks are strewn with paper and sag under the weight of massive monitors.

  In the opposite corner of the room, like the north notch of a compass, lies a small cavity with a sloping ceiling that converges at a flat, blank screen. Other monitors with tiny blue text hug the walls’ beveled corners. In the middle of this space you spot the Director, sitting in a black chair with his legs kicked up on the desk. He turns around and watches you approach, grinning and loosely holding a mug.

  “Good morning, guys. Welcome to the office.”

  Lomas’ expression stays steely. He eyes the mug, and you recall he hasn’t had any coffee today. “Is the explanation for how this works going to hurt my brain?”

  “Jumping right into things, are we?” The Director shrugs and then looks at Celine. “I’ll let the principal researcher do the talking.”

  Celine looks back to you and Lomas. “How familiar are you two with modern physics?”

  You exchange glances. “Yeah, not very.”

  She nods. “Okay. Um, I’ll give my best high-level description and just stop me when you have any questions. So this project—Laplace’s machine—has been in the works for decades. The theory was first proposed back in the nineties by the previous Director of this lab, Sergey Novikov. He imagined a machine built on a single, irrefutable truth: that the universe is inherently causal, and therefore deterministic. The world we live in is a product of the world that came before it, and it is the only possible product. If we gave our creation everything there is to know about the state of the universe, even for one instant, any instant, the rest of time and space could be known to us by extrapolation.

  “The idea was pretty controversial at the time. Concurrently, Novikov was in the process of dismantling the canon that was quantum mechanics, disproving it with his own radical experiments—most of them done here at the lab, actually. Quantum logic inherently went against Novikov’s idea because it introduced randomness into the universe, an existence in which some things we could not definitively compute. But Novikov pioneered a new theory, seed theory, which broke quantum particles into smaller, more fundamental vectors, and developed equations that, while seemingly erratic, made the outcomes of their interactions predictable.”

  She stops to catch her breath, leaving you to stare at her dumbly. You glance over at Lomas to see if he’s doing any better. He’s gazing at the machine, lost in thought.

  “That’s a pretty big if, isn’t it?” He looks to Celine. “You said if you captured an instant where you knew everything about our universe, then you could extrapolate from there. Sure. But we just don’t have that kind of information, do we? I mean, we don’t even know what’s at the bottom of our oceans.”

  Celine nods for a moment, collecting her thoughts. “Okay, good question. Well, that’s the other component of seed theory. It states that there exists a beginning of the universe, a point zero on the proverbial axis of time. This ‘seed’ of the universe occurs before what we call the big bang, when everything was at its most dense, when there was the most order. We pooled all our efforts and computational resources into identifying the seed, testing and refining combinations of particles until we extracted the true one. Once found, the rest was just a matter of implementation and design—now Laplace’s machine has grown into all that you see around you.”

  Everyone takes a moment to soak up the machine again. You gaze at the glittering sky of blue lights and let out a low breath.

  “You want to see it in motion?” the Director pipes up, reading your mind. He spins around in his chair and starts to type. The whole chamber surrounding you starts to hum and flicker, every inch of this massive computer coming to life. The blank screen flickers to life and illuminates a slate gray rectangle. Small, white numbers pour into the screen until it is filled, their values morphing into each other seamlessly. You walk closer and strain your eyes as each number blinks in and out of existence, replaced with one just as equally arbitrary. You look back at the Director, not sure what you should say.

  “This is it?” You wince as the words come out of your mouth. Not that.

  The Director lifts an eyebrow. “What, numbers?” His face, previously full and handsome, looks gaunt in the harsh illumination. “These numbers represent vectors of particles, their energy and their momentum, their position in reality. These numbers in particular show the obliteration of Earth when it is engulfed by the expanding sun, five billion years from now. These numbers can show you the trajectory of your life, the fate of your bloodline. These are the numbers, Jules.”

  You nod your head tightly at him. Celine pipes up from behind you. “That being said, we do understand visualization would be nice,” she says, advancing toward the screen, turning and leaning on the desk so that her back is illuminated. “I’m leading a project designed to do just that.”

  You try to wrap your head around what that would mean, everything that you could witness. A shiver runs through your body. “So we can see everything.”

  “Well.” The Director leans back into his chair. “Not everything. We know the nature of every fundamental particle at every instant of time. That explains the formation of planets, the minutiae of a rainfall. But even with a perfect snapshot of someone’s brain chemistry, I cannot explain why they feel the way they do. The one thing my machine cannot understand—emotion.” He fixes his eyes on Lomas intensely. “That’s where you come in.”

  The room freezes with those words. Lomas cannot speak for a moment, dumbstruck. “What?”

  The Director’s calm demeanor doesn’t waver. “You loved someone, once,” he says brazenly. “Using Celine’s visualization algorithms, I want to give you closure, show you the truth. And in exchange, I want to study you.”

  The two men stare at each other, with Celine the first to intercept. “I’m s
orry, sir, but you didn’t tell me that we’d be performing a personal query today.” She glances at you, too, but you can’t give her any answers.

  Lomas forces a burst of laughter, but quickly drops his smile, still in shock. “I don’t think this is a good idea,” he says softly.

  “You’ve come all this way,” the Director replies.

  “I thought this was about—you made it sound like—” Lomas, becoming more and more agitated, doesn’t finish his sentence and just shakes his head in silence. “I’m not interested,” he says, finality evident in his voice. “I’m sorry.”

  The Director’s expression is indecipherable, but it strikes you as thoughtful rather than anything else. He swivels his chair away and shrugs. “Of course. I won’t force you into anything.”

  Lomas looks taken aback. “I—I appreciate it.”

  The Director waves his hand at Celine, his eyes glued to the screen. “In that case, then. Why don’t you show them more of the lab?”

  Celine is similarly duped. “Should I—what?”

  “Start with the library,” the Director says. “I need to finish up some work here.”

  After a beat, Celine stands up and smoothes down her lab coat. She looks tersely at the both of you before heading back toward the elevator shaft. Inside, Celine presses the button for you and stands there wordlessly. You can tell that her bafflement has morphed into ire, though you’re not sure to whom it’s directed. After a moment, her glare pierces through her Iris, flickering to life. Lomas stares at his feet the whole way up.

  The elevator slows to stop halfway up the building, and you follow Celine down a deserted hallway. Sturdy, industrial-looking doors pass by on your left, while on the right you’re walled in by a thick pane of glass. Peering through it, you can see floors with near-identical hallways spiraling below you, the same speckled tile and harsh LED lighting.

  You catch Lomas’ eye in the reflection. “Are you okay, sir?”

  He exhales loudly and rubs his eyes. “Shit, I need coffee.”

  You are reminded of Axiom #3: Lomas cannot function without caffeine. The first thing you would do in the mornings is get him some coffee, so this does not bode well.

  Celine stops in front of a door suddenly, and you halt alongside her. The placard beside the door is embossed with the letters #L0B. She says something about being big fans of Borges here, a statement so witty it momentarily breaks Lomas out of his spell and makes him chuckle. Then she swipes her card, the door handle lighting green, and lets you inside.

  You get the sensation that you’ve just stepped back into Cambridge, sent somewhere on campus to fetch Lomas a book. The room is around two levels high, with rich mahogany bookshelves that curve around you. What you see filling them are not the spines of books, however; it takes a moment for you to figure it out, but you realize they’re brimming with piles of scrolls, bound paper spirals that bloom like a bouquet of roses from each chamber. The air is warmer here and smells woody and sweet. It’s all very jarring from the sterile hallway outside, but drastic tone shifts at the lab aren’t anything new anymore.

  “Welcome to the library,” Celine says, leading you down the shelves to the open space in the center. “Here we keep a record of every simulation we’ve run on Laplace’s machine.”

  You look around, taking in the heaps of scrolls. Glancing at Celine for permission, you slide out a tube from the nearest shelf labeled Ferns. The scroll itself is sealed with a strip of tape that has a large, scrawled number. You undo the tape and gingerly unroll the thick paper. Inside is a wall of small, inky numbers, just like the ones you saw flash on the screen down in the machine room. It’s exactly what you were expecting and still a perplexing sight.

  “Don’t tell me you can read this,” you say.

  She shrugs. “Once you get the hang of it, it’s not as hard as it looks. The syntax has a top-down design, so events are easily abstracted.”

  You study the scroll again, the numbers still meaningless. Behind you, Lomas mumbles something about wanting to look around on his own, and Celine lifts a yielding hand. He wanders off and disappears into an aisle. You roll the scroll up carefully and slip it back, suddenly very aware it’s just you and Celine.

  “I don’t want to sound rude, but . . . why print all of this? Can’t it just be saved on a computer?”

  Celine smiles dryly. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the Director likes his theatrics.” Her mouth twitches as she stares at the walls of scrolls surrounding her.

  You chuckle weakly. “Yeah, whatever just happened back there—that was theatrical as hell.”

  You instantly wish you hadn’t said it. Celine flushes red. “He really should have told me he was going to do that,” she says apologetically. The contempt you saw in the elevator floods back into her expression. “God, I wish he would tell me anything. Sometimes I don’t know how he expects me to do my job.”

  You cast your eyes above you, where Lomas has gotten himself onto the second floor and is now lurking through shelves. You think back to Axiom #1.

  “Somehow I think I know exactly what you mean.”

  Celine exhales, studying you carefully, and then she seems to soften. With a blink, she closes her Iris and motions you down an aisle. “Come on, let me show you some of the things we keep around here.”

  Celine leads you around the first floor, showing you various scrolls of interest. She tries to teach you how to read them, too, dissecting what she calls the “parent vectors,” but after a couple fruitless efforts on your part she drops the cause. Her explanation of what each represents is more than enough. You find the difference in magnitude striking; some, like the one you randomly plucked off the shelf, record endearingly short events. Things like the life cycle of plants or a bird egg hatching can be verified easily within the lab’s walls, Celine tells you. And then there are the big events, ones that recount the formation and destruction of stars, the beginning of the universe. When you read the labels of these scrolls, which droop under their own weight, your stomach can’t help but drop. Celine points out a particularly battered scroll, already splayed open on a table, and mentions that the destruction of the Earth is one of the Director’s favorites.

  You stare at the scroll’s contents, the numbers a little faded from repeated unrollings. You wonder how anyone could work on this machine and keep sane. “Can I ask, um. Are you—”

  A crashing sound from upstairs interrupts you. Lomas peeks his head out behind a railing from the balcony. “Sorry, sorry,” he says hurriedly. “I just—I tried to—”

  “It’s okay, they’re really heavy,” Celine says. You follow her up the stairs. Lomas is stooped down and picking books off the floor, the first actual books you’ve seen in this library. They do look pretty hefty, with thick bindings in rich colors.

  He shoves them back into the shelf, looking embarrassed. “I can’t read them,” he offers. Celine tells him it’s fine another time and then Lomas slinks off again.

  You approach the bookshelf as one book threatens to tumble over. You catch it before it does and hold it up to the light. It’s dark blue, embossed with a single word in gold. Celine.

  You stare at the letters. Then you look at her. She looks back awkwardly. “You can look,” she says finally. You open it and thumb through a few pages, each covered in an unyielding mass of numbers, stacked like bricks.

  “If you’re really special, you get a book,” Celine says softly from behind you. She points to the first book on the bookshelf, where there’s around five in total. “That red one’s the Director. And then the one after that is the previous Director, Sergei.” She touches a green book, slimmer than the rest. “This last one is for the Director’s late brother, Theo. You saw a picture of him earlier.”

  The weight in your hands feels paralyzing. “Have you read all of it?” you ask her.

  She glances back at the book in your hands. “I’ve read some,” she says, chewing her lip. “Once you get past the present, it’s a little add
icting. But I made myself stop, eventually. I had seen enough.” You notice there’s a thin gold bookmark sticking out the top, what you gauge to be sixty percent into it. You turn the book in your hands over and over, simultaneously impressed by her self-restraint and horrified by what she could have read to make her stop. A fresh sense of alarm is unfolding out of your body, all the anxiety that has been collecting since your arrival suddenly becoming unbearable.

  “How can you deal with this?” you ask, unable to keep your voice from exposing your dread. “How can you go to work every day knowing that this book is here, too? Knowing that you can’t change anything it says. That none of your choices matter.”

  Celine blinks, stunned by your reaction. She’s quiet for a while, considering the question. “All of my choices matter,” she says finally. “Our actions are always informed by the circumstances of our past. That means there is a reason for everything, a world I am building. That book right there is proof of that. It gives me intention. It hands me a promise.” She walks over to your side and takes her book from your hands, re-shelves it next to the others. “It’ll be okay,” she says. “I promise.”

  Your knuckles burn where her fingers had momentarily brushed them. But it’s enough to siphon away your fear, like a lightning rod grounding you to reality. When you experience it this time, you are surprised at how quickly the moment passes, how briefly her hand touches yours, an action sewn together with the lightest thread. You go back and feel it again.

  There’s a day you have in mind, many years in the future. Here, reading is seen as an antiquated skill, but you are old and used to your ways. You scroll through news articles on your Iris, now called OEIs (Ocular Enhancement Implants) per the new government regulations. The name has never felt right to you, and the interface is foreign, unnatural. Your generation once pioneered this technology, and now it slips more out of your grasp with every update cycle.