Fast Forward

by Lou Anders

I drive into town along the main drag. There, the traffic thickens, and soon I'm waiting at stop lights. Off to my right, in a strip mall dojo with a holo proclaiming KICKIN’ KARATE, young kids in white pajamas leap energetically, ineffectually around.

  Behind me, a horn sounds.

  I wave sorry. The lights are green, and there's a long gap in front of me. I drive on, take the next turn, and continue to the bookstore, where I park. Inside, I pick up two thin hardcopy books, Funakoshi's My Karate and Bronowski's Science and the Imagination, and carry them into the coffee shop.

  Sometime later, I put the Bronowski down, staring into space with espresso in hand, considering telepathy. In reading, I've just shared insightful thoughts of a man who no longer lives.

  I place the book facedown.

  It was a cold January morning, with gray mist pressing against the windows, when I went to UCL to talk to Yukiko's fellow grad students. They were neuroscientists with AI experience, so I used concepts from software design to explain the new physics.

  “All right,” I said to the group. “Everyone whip out their mobiles.”

  After a moment, they grinned and took out their cell phones.

  “Now imagine,” I continued, “that we're all software objects. Bear with me, this'll be painless.”

  “You sure about that?” asked a slight woman.

  “Positive. Now, the thing about objects in software is that you can only send them text messages, using their reference or pointer. It's their address in computer memory, like a phone number. Got it?”

  “Er…” One of the researchers raised her hand. “Isn't object orientation a bit old-fashioned? I mean, I've been hearing about coevolutionary skeletons that—”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but this is for the purposes of illustration. We're really here to talk quantum, right?”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  Yukiko rolled her eyes. Someone snorted.

  “Let's pretend”—I cleared my throat, then nodded toward Yukiko—“that she's a software object representing, uh, let's say an airplane in the real world. So she's got properties like a certain speed, altitude, direction—”

  “Color,” said Yukiko. “Am I a pretty color?”

  “Of course.”

  “Hey, nice properties,” muttered a bearded guy. Then he looked at me. “Sorry.”

  “This is going to be a long morning,” I said. “Okay, if you have Yukiko's phone number, you can text her a message. You can only ask certain questions, like what height she's at, and send certain commands, like change heading.”

  A couple of them were nodding. All you can do with an object is invoke its defined functions. Its internal data remains hidden.

  “You and you”—I pointed—“are two controller objects. So if you have Yukiko's number, you can send her messages. Otherwise, you don't even know she exists.”

  A big woman called Evelyn laughed. “Yukiko's got your number, sonny boy.”

  “Okay.” I decided to go along with this. “And if you don't know my number and want it, darling, you could ask Yukiko for my identity, and Yukiko could send it to you. Just my phone number, not the real me.”

  Evelyn nodded. “The map is not the territory. The object's address is not the object.”

  “You've got it.”

  “So what,” Evelyn asked, “has this got to do with quantum?”

  “When two particles are entangled”—my skin prickled as everyone's attention zeroed in—“they appear to change properties instantaneously, no light-speed limitations, no matter how far apart they are.”

  This time only a couple of people nodded.

  “But if you tell Yukiko to change speed”—I pointed—“and then two people ask her new speed, they'll get the same answer, because they've texted to the same telephone number, right?”

  “Wait a minute. You're saying that electrons and photons and shit aren't real? Two entangled electrons are actually one thing?”

  “That,” I said, “is exactly right.”

  “Then…”

  “Djikstra said you can solve every problem in software engineering by introducing an extra layer of indirection.” I spread my hands. “It works in quantum physics, too. Particles are pointers to an underlying ur-stuff, somewhere we can't get hold of. Reality is encapsulated.”

  “Like parallel universes?” said Evelyn.

  “No,” I told her. “That's not…Well. Actually. There's no reason the ur-stuff couldn't support other continua at the same time.”

  Evelyn looked from me to Yukiko and back.

  “Did I just say something clever?”

  “I think so.” I kissed Evelyn on the cheek, and Yukiko grinned. “I think you did.”

  Movement snaps me back into the moment. A lithe, blonde-haired woman is pointing to the other chair at my table.

  “Is it taken?”

  “Um, no.” I glance down at the Bronowski book, then around me. Several tables are completely vacant.

  “I'm glad.” She sits down, and briefly touches the book. “I loved The Ascent of Man, didn't you? My father used to own it.”

  “Right.” I get to my feet, and slide the book towards her. “Enjoy.”

  I leave without looking back, wondering when it was that bookstores morphed into singles bars. Or perhaps I misunderstood.

  Outside, I climb into the Bronco and then I do look back. Inside, the pretty woman is bent over the table, reading something that might be the Bronowski.

  I miss you, Yukiko.

  There's nothing to do but put the truck into drive and head home.

  The next evening, after a shorter than usual working day, Lintral Teldrasso escorted his young servant back to her quarters. Stopping outside the door, he listened to the trilling, burbling notes from inside.

  “You're looking after your moth well, Shama. It sings prettily.”

  Shama's face dimpled in a smile. “Yes, Master.”

  “Now you'll be fine overnight. If you need anything, call Mistress Dilva in the kitchen.”

  “Yes, M—”

  “Or Kigfan, he can help. And make sure Mistress Dilva gives you supper.” Teldrasso mussed Shama's white-blonde hair. “And study hard tomorrow. I'll be back the day after. You never know, I might test you.”

  Shama nodded.

  “Good. You will be fine.” It was almost a question.

  “I'm eight and a half, Master.”

  “Yes. I keep forgetting. Take care of the place for me.” Teldrasso sighed.

  Then he turned and walked away to his own chambers, running through a mental checklist of things to pack for the overnight stay in House Sildrov, on the seventh deck. Tomorrow he would accompany Master A'Queran, discussing new commissions.

  Shama waited until Master Teldrasso was out of sight before opening the concertina door to her chamber. She slipped inside. The purple-winged dodecamoth fluttered in the center of the room, making no attempt to escape.

  “Wait,” Shama said. “Just wait.”

  She locked the door from inside, then dug in her tunic pocket and pulled out a handful of twisted black slivers: crushed parma leaves, the moth's favorite delicacy. Shama spread the leaves on the old tabletop, then stood back to watch as the moth descended, folding up its twelve-sided wings. It hummed as it fed.

  The sound dipped in tone as Shama reached towards a built-in cupboard.

  “Hush,” said Shama. “I'm just checking.”

  She peeked inside. All three cocoons were soft, furry, yellow, and intact. With a serious, adult expression, Shama nodded to herself and closed the door.

  “It's fine,” she told the moth. “Everything's fine.”

  The musical burbling resumed as the moth bent back to its meal of black leaves.

  “Yes, everything is fine.” Opening another cupboard, Shama folded back her spare work tunic, revealing the heavy crystal shard she had recovered.

  Most of the grime was gone now, the flaw more obvious. But the rest of the crystal was sublime. And Shama had learned, observing
Master Teldrasso, how to shear fragments.

  Shard in hand, Shama clambered onto her bed and sat cross-legged. She opened her orange eyes wider, then closed them, controlling her breathing. Her mental picture sharpened in focus: picturing her goal before she got to work.

  The best dreamweb, she promised for her master's sake, that anyone has ever seen.

  Back at the house, I open my eyes to see that late afternoon is rendering the pale walls gold. How long have I been daydreaming?

  From my study I fetch pastels and sketchpad, and a portable makiwara pad. With everything under my arm, I walk out of the house and across the grass to the forest's edge.

  “Jaysus, sure isn't that old-fashioned?” Yukiko had said when I told her about my karate, learned from a traditional sensei called Conan O'Brian in County Clare.

  None of Yukiko's friends in Tokyo had trained in such quaint disciplines. Martial arts were approximately as cool as Irish dancing: something your grandparents might have done.

  (And the strip mall dojo karate looked like dancing. That's why I train alone.)

  I fasten the brick-sized makiwara pad to a birch tree and begin to punch. Soon I am movement, rhythm without thought, clothes soaked in sweat as I strike. I'll stop only after a thousand thrusts with each hand.

  Afterwards, sweat cooling, I sit on a laser-cut tree stump and stare at the tree line, and begin to sketch. But I am tired, and the day seems to drift away from me….

  Oh, Yukiko.

  …until the sun is molten gold behind silhouetted trees, and I take deep breaths of the evening air then stop, seeing the strange web I have drawn on the sketchpad. A translucent web, shimmering with strangeness, in which nonshapes swim.

  You still think this is a game?

  We were holed up in a basement of Imperial College, where Yukiko and her neuroscientist colleagues were making use of physics lab facilities. The persistent entanglement kit was a mess of chaotic innards, made tidy by stuffing the lot inside an old fridge casing. Most physicists don't care what their labs look like, but their test subjects are electrons and the like. Ours were people.

  I was the first to go under the particle spray, closing my eyes against the warm mist enveloping my head. Something smelled faintly of oranges.

  After a time, Yukiko and a small woman named Maria worked the console, and Yukiko said, “Tell me what you see.”

  I closed my eyes.

  “A wire,” I said. “Hundreds of glowing, fuzzy green electrons sliding through a lattice—”

  There were sounds of controls adjusting. “Go on.”

  “—speeding as they're pushed closer together.”

  “And you see this in color?”

  “Vividly, and all around me”—I gestured, eyes still shut—”I feel the inverse square law compensating wherever the wire narrows. Over there”—pointing—“is a glowing yellow equation, I = dq/dt. Current is the rate of charge flow…”

  Part of me realizes they're not physicists. They can't appreciate that I'm simply describing ordinary electric current.

  “And does this equation move?”

  “Well, yeah…. It kind of pulses.”

  “And do you hear any sounds?”

  “I'm not sure….”

  And so on, with Yukiko continuing the questions until she had a full description to correlate with the equipment's readings. Finally she closed the session down.

  “Well,” said Yukiko.

  I rubbed my eyes, opened them. Maria was smiling.

  “What?”

  “Come on, Ryan.” Maria spread her hands palm-up. “Is that really what the inside of your head looks like?”

  “Um, yeah….”

  And Yukiko said, “But you never hear music? Doesn't everyone hear music in their mind, changing mood as the day goes on?”

  Maria and I both looked at her.

  Evelyn came in later to go through the lab results. While Yukiko and the others were discussing how everyone is unique, Evelyn remained quiet.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked eventually.

  “You know, every human being is different, but nearly any man and any woman, darling”—Evelyn winked at Yukiko—“can collaborate to build another human being, right?”

  “So we're not doomed to failure?”

  “I'd say we're guaranteed to succeed.” Evelyn looked around the group. “Listen, I go to a slightly weird pub called the Crescent Moon. Bit of a New Age crowd.”

  “Uh-huh…”

  “You mind,” Evelyn asked, “if I bring in a couple of new test subjects tomorrow?”

  “All right.”

  The next day, she introduced us to Jade and Helen, professional mediums—“Shouldn't that be media, plural?” Maria said later—who agreed to be scanned in turn.

  To demonstrate the harmless nature of the scan, I went first—again—and described my vision of photons flying across the room, and the magic that lets me see someone in front of me, while people to either side of me can see each other, via crisscrossing light without interference.

  “Bloody hell,” said Jade afterwards. “I'm glad I'm not inside your head. You're scary.”

  “Um…” I looked into her shining green eyes. “You see dead people, and you think I'm scary?”

  “God, if I could see them, I'd be petrified.”

  “Then…?”

  “I hear the voices.” Jade pointed to her own head. “In there.”

  “That's very—”

  “Oh, but I can see dead folk,” said Helen. “All the time. Really vivid.”

  I avoided Yukiko's glance. “So how,” I asked, “do you know they're not real?”

  “You mean not alive?”

  “I suppose—”

  “Because the colors are really, really bright. Oh, and…I see them through my eyelids. When I've shut my eyes, I mean.”

  Yukiko gave a peaceful Zen smile.

  “That'll be a clue,” she said.

  Persistent entangled tomography revealed no difference between Helen's visions and my own, in terms of neural activity. Yukiko asked me what I made of that.

  I had no answer.

  Leaning against the kitchen wall, flash-heating a coffee, I microsleep, coming back to awareness with a fading vision of a shadowed chamber where a big electric oven glowed orange-red. Beside it, Shama knelt, waiting for the moment, for the exact conditions when she could plunge the crystal shard inside.

  The best web—her thoughts or mine?—that anyone has ever seen.

  Soon she would begin to form the dreamweb.

  My parents worked all hours, as teachers and devout churchgoers who spent a lot of time in charitable work and not so much at home. Grandfather Jack, self-taught, was the one who took me through integral calculus when my schoolmates were solving simple quadratics.

  Mum wanted me to be a writer or a poet. Dad saw a future in civil service, something respectable. But Grandfather Jack showed me that magic resides everywhere, that new theories and theorems come from lightning inspiration no different than a poet's, while linear logical proof forms a reality test, confirming intuition. At the same time, he taught me to question everything. I never stepped inside a church after my fourteenth birthday.

  I was the only member of the family to attend his funeral, in pouring rain on a Wicklow hillside in coldest November.

  We went cycling on the Thames. Evelyn rented float-bikes with pink stabilizers. Seven of us set out, cycling along the placid waves, close to the Embankment. Evelyn's boyfriend Colin was beside me, puffing with effort, when a pink float sheared off his bike.

  As Colin tipped, the safety shield snapped into place. Faceted, domelike, and formed of glass, it would keep him breathing as he bobbed helplessly on the water. His mouth opened and I had to laugh, along with the others. Evelyn was laughing so hard I thought she'd be the next to fall in.

  Then I realized the glass shield was cracked.

  Water swirled inside, surrounding Colin, and his face was pale as I tried to grip the wet
glass, my fingers slipping off. I tried again.

  “Help me!” I called.

  Colin's voice joined in, muffled and dead inside the filling shield.

  Soon Yukiko was with me, then the others, as we tugged and rolled the sinking cycle closer to the stone wall of the Embankment. A ring-shaped lifesaver came sailing down from above. Some twelve or fifteen feet overhead, atop the wall, passersby were staring down.

  The lifesaver had a rope attached, its other end fastened somewhere up above.

  “What's the point of that?” muttered someone, but Yukiko was already moving.

  She slipped off her bike, took hold of the rope, and dived beneath Colin's sinking bike. I leaned over, thinking to tie a loop, then saw I could fit the lifesaver ring around the broken float shaft.

  Soon, with help from the people above, we were pushing and hauling the water-filled shield and bike onto an abbreviated jetty, clear of the water.

  Except that Colin was trapped inside a water-filled glass bubble. There was air at the top, but he had already slipped under, his hair waving like fronds. He was no longer breathing.

  “Shit shit shit.”

  Yukiko tried to work the safety release. Nothing. Behind Yukiko, her face pale as death, Evelyn stumbled onto the jetty, unable to speak.

  I sank into a deep stance, my spine vertical, and did what Sensei O'Brian had taught me, so much easier now, since I had played awareness games inside the lab. I placed my consciousness metaphorically in my body's core, at the tanden, the center of gravity. I breathed in, allowing the world to slow.

  “Colin—” Evelyn, finding her voice.

  Slowing.

  And when I exhaled, my hand slammed forward, heel of palm first, aiming three inches inside the glass. I struck. The facet shattered, a spiderweb of cracks tearing open as water poured out.

  I stepped back as the others took over, kicking at the shattered shield, tipping it to empty out the water. Finally they broke internal catches so the shield collapsed in shards across the unconscious Colin.

  An air ambulance descended, its rotors beating the air, vibrations thrumming subsonically through my guts as it hung above the water. Then it touched down on its floats.