Limited Wish

by Lawrence, Mark

  ‘But it didn’t happen around the anomaly this time.’

  ‘Helen,’ I said. ‘She has a name.’

  ‘Helen.’

  ‘No.’ I set the ball down and reached for a T-shirt from the clothes heap by my bed. ‘Curiouser and curiouser!’

  ‘What’s for breakfast?’ Simon emerged fully clothed from the mounded covers on the floor.

  ‘A brisk walk to the Winston Lab. And we need to be away from there by one if we’re going to catch the train.’ On Fridays I caught the train home for the weekend. Mother considered sixteen too young to fly the nest completely and it meant I could keep going to the D&D sessions at Simon’s house.

  ‘But breakfast . . .’

  ‘You’re welcome to stay here and make some. Kitchen at the far end of the hall, bread and peanut butter in my cupboard just behind you.’

  Simon glanced around at the room as if wondering whether he might be the next thing to be turned inside out. ‘I’ll come. Mum says I need a diet and exercise.’

  We marched to the Winston Lab. Well, I marched, determined to be on time for once, and Simon dawdled, gawping at the city, which admittedly is rather grand the first few times you see it. The walk took us out of the pretty parts and turned out to be much longer than Simon had anticipated. He started to get mutinous and ask about buses. I suggested I could borrow a bike for him. That got the silent treatment.

  ‘So, what is this place?’ Simon asked as we finally approached.

  The building looked more like a space-age warehouse, but a discount one – Blade Runner rather than Star Wars. A low-roofed building with plastic sidings, loitering on the edge of an industrial estate.

  ‘It’s a private lab funded by . . . someone.’ I didn’t know who. ‘Anyway Halligan knows an experimentalist, a big name from the uni, who does some of his work there.’

  ‘But your stuff is all theory. You don’t get your hands dirty.’ Simon shuddered. His own interest in maths stemmed from a revulsion for physical labour of any sort, and that extended to physics practicals as well. He was fine manipulating the equations of gravity to solve problems, but ask him to hang a pendulum and measure its period and Simon got as truculent as if you’d suggested he retile the bathroom.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to roll up my sleeves at some point. It’s not a page of equations that sends Demus back to us. It’s some massive construction that drinks electricity like a dozen capital cities with all the lights on.’

  The place had a locked gate, and no fewer than three hefty security guards came out from their hut to eye us through the chain link fence. In my limited experience laboratories didn’t have security. You could walk unchallenged into any of the university labs as long as you looked the part. These guys weren’t messing around though. No pass no entry. They wouldn’t even open the gate to discuss the matter. We didn’t get through until Professor Halligan himself came out to sign us in. He suggested that Simon wait outside, and I suggested he get a new research assistant if he was going to be like that. Halligan clipped the security badge on to Simon himself, and on we went into the cavernous warehouse.

  If George Lucas wanted to make a fourth Star Wars film then the Winston Lab would have been a great place to start filming. Huge pieces of equipment littered the space, strewn across an acre of concrete floor, arranged on benches, draped over scaffolds. Power cables ran hither and thither like the confusion of roots in a mangrove swamp. Things resembling half-built rocket engines rested beside curved electromagnets that looked capable of picking up a locomotive. A bank of computer terminals glowed near the middle around a closed hut that presumably housed a mainframe.

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Wow,’ I echoed.

  ‘I’ll show you “wow”.’ Halligan waved us on, his enthusiasm lengthening his stride to the point where Simon almost had to jog to keep up.

  Halligan wove a path around various benches and partitions, nodding to the scattered researchers at work in ones and twos. The white-coated academics were almost lost in the organised chaos of the huge lab. Occasionally the professor would wave at one or other piece of equipment. ‘A capacitor bank. We use that. And those loops are for measuring stray magnetic flux. Those over there monitor the power flow. That thing’s been here years. An old Tesla-inspired experiment trying to make ball lightning.’

  A man who looked old enough to be the famed Nikola Tesla himself stood soldering away beneath the metal tower emblazoned with HIGH VOLTAGE signs. Wildly asymmetric tufts of white hair and a stained lab coat completed the image, making him a walking mad scientist cliché.

  Halligan took us into an area surrounded by its own chain link fence and with its own security guard. Within this inner sanctum, hidden from external view by extra-tall office partition screens, he introduced us to his experimentalist colleague.

  ‘Nick, this is Dr Ian Creed. You’ll be familiar with his work, of course. Dr Creed, Nick Hayes – the remarkable young man who can take a good share of the credit for this breakthrough. And this is his . . . uh . . . friend, Simon.’

  Dr Creed looked me over with an intense dark stare. He was a short man, a little older than Halligan, maybe in his forties, with black hair and a thick black beard untouched by grey. If you took off the lab coat and set him in a sou’wester he would have fitted in fine on a trawler. ‘Come and see this.’

  Clearly, that was all the welcome I was going to get. I shrugged and followed. He led us through a small maze of partitions, neglecting to mention the cables alternately positioned to catch the ankle or the throat of anyone much over five foot. The grand reveal was a large bench set around with heavy electromagnets. On the bench was a Perspex box big enough to hold a car engine, and in fact holding something much more complex.

  ‘It’s an atomic clock.’ Creed gestured at the monster of tubular steel and aluminium cylinders inside the box. ‘The computers outside pulse the electromagnets in the sequence determined by your variant of the Violander equations, cycling phase and beat frequency while building the amplitude in waves.’

  ‘Can you do a run for Nick?’ Halligan sounded as excited as a schoolboy with a new Atari.

  Creed frowned. ‘I can show him the results . . .’

  ‘Oh come on, Ian! This is as much Nick’s baby as ours.’

  Creed’s frown deepened. ‘Those capacitors take nineteen hours to recharge and each cycle degrades the—’

  ‘I’ve talked to Guilder-Johnson.’ Halligan offered a broad smile. ‘Funding going forward is not going to be a problem, Ian.’

  Creed shrugged, then shouted at a remarkable volume, making both me and Simon jump, ‘Run the sequence!’

  Someone outside clearly heard. The sound of a heavy lever being manually thrown was followed by a low hum and a creaking as powerful electric currents began to magnetise the chunks of iron set all around us.

  ‘I guess I should have checked that none of you have a pacemaker,’ Creed said. He reached out to tap Simon’s digital watch. ‘That’s not going to work any more.’

  The hum built to a pulsing whine and the huge magnets began to rock in their housings.

  ‘How come the atomic clock still works?’ I raised my voice over the increasing noise.

  ‘Shielding,’ Halligan said.

  ‘Very costly shielding,’ Creed added.

  My vision started to blur. My teeth ached.

  ‘I feel . . . strange.’ Simon held his hands out before him, staring at his fingers.

  I felt it too, a weird kind of pressure, as if my consciousness were breaking free of my body.

  ‘Temporary effects of the magnetic fields!’ Creed shouted over the rattling, buzzing roar. ‘Different for everyBODY.’ Suddenly the racket cut off and he was shouting into silence.

  Creed walked forward and set his hand to an old-fashioned cold cathode numerical display of the sort that liquid crystal had made obsolete. Presumably it weathered the magnetism better. He flicked a switch and the number 0056 appeared in flickering red.


  ‘Incredible!’ Halligan clapped a hand to my shoulder. ‘That’s the best so far.’

  ‘Fifty-six what?’ I asked.

  ‘Fifty-six nanoseconds’ difference between the clock in there and the clock on the far side of the lab,’ Creed said.

  ‘You slowed time down in that box?’ Simon asked.

  ‘We sped it up!’ Halligan declared. ‘Which is even more remarkable!’

  I tried to look impressed. It really was remarkable. Earthshakingly remarkable. We were rewriting physics! On the other hand it was just fifty-six nano seconds and in the wrong direction, and I’d already seen a man come back from twenty-five years in the future . . . and the man was me. So I was the toughest of tough audiences for this kind of thing.

  ‘Nice,’ I said. ‘I’ll get back to my desk on Monday. There might be some useful tricks to be squeezed out of the Andretti-Vesentini work on separation of cohomology groups of coherent sheaves.’

  Halligan opened his mouth. I cut him off. ‘But right now I have a train to catch.’

  ‘A train?’ Creed looked bewildered. ‘I don’t think you understand. We’ve just—’

  ‘I do and it was great!’ I started backing along the exit maze, remembering to duck the first set of powerlines. ‘We really do have to go, though!’ My hard stare finally got Simon to begin moving in the right direction. ‘Thanks again! Really impressive! Really!’

  Halligan glanced at Creed, shaking his head. ‘He’s too young. The young have no frame of reference to understand how momentous something is.’

  I turned a corner and lost sight of the two of them huddled over the timer.

  ‘C’mon.’ I grabbed Simon’s arm. ‘Or we’ll never get out of here.’

  We started to hurry, pursued by Halligan’s raised voice. ‘Everything will change now. Mark my words, Nick. Everything will change!’

  We made it through the inner sanctum and across the cluttered expanse of the outer laboratory. The security guard at the main door unlocked it using a combination on a keypad. As he opened it I saw Helen outside, just ten yards away across the bare tarmac that lay between the lab building and the exterior fence. She was watching the door, her expression unreadable.

  Immediately alarms began to echo in the cavernous lab behind me. Something anchored my gaze to Helen though. Maybe the intensity of her stare, or the way she didn’t look quite the same as last night. Her hair was different. Also the air between us seemed to shimmer.

  ‘Nick!’ Simon physically hauled me round so that I was aiming back the way we had come. Almost every bench was lit up now, every light on every piece of equipment blazing. Warning lights flashed back and forth across the drained capacitor bank that had supplied the power for Dr Creed’s demonstration. It should take nineteen hours to refill but instead seemed to be sparking with stray energies. The computer terminals on the other side of the inner sanctum glared, then died, blue smoke rising from them. In one sudden burst of brilliance all the overhead lighting burned out and glass fragments showered down into the patchy gloom. And in the next moment lightnings began to writhe over the outdated Tesla tower, searing blue-white snakes of electricity etching themselves across my retina. Suddenly one knotted itself and instantly a pulsing violet ball of lightning hung there. Then another, and another, and another, all beginning to drift out above the benches buzzing like angry hornet nests.

  I blinked and the afterimages were not the usual random flashes but the shapes of people, converging on me.

  ‘Run!’ I shouted.

  ‘We . . . we need to help them.’ Simon wasn’t given to heroism, but when it came to it, he wasn’t one to abandon people in need. Unless it was in a D&D game, and then he totally would.

  It was my turn to do the grabbing. ‘I’m causing this. We need to get away.’

  Out in the daylight I saw the ghosts as I had seen them when Demus first approached me. Grey shapes taking on more detail by the moment. People I recognised – Helen, Mia and John. Simon was there, his ghost cowering as if from the heat of a conflagration. My older self, Demus, trying to tell me something but making no sound. Even the psychopathic and thankfully dead Ian Rust who had carried the severed head of a man as he stalked us through London. And others, unknown figures advancing behind the ones I knew: men in suits, moving with purpose. I ran through them all, trying to keep the flesh-and-blood Helen in sight. She was sprinting away with not so much as a backwards glance.

  The electronics that kept the outer gate secure had been scrambled and I opened it without permission. The guards, already emerging from their hut, hesitated, unsure whether to pursue us or see to the emergency in the laboratory. The gap we managed to open between us and them decided the matter and they hurried off to help their employers.

  ‘Where is she?’ I turned the corner into a residential street. I’d seen Helen run this way just thirty yards ahead of me. I spun in a full circle. ‘Where?’

  Simon came up breathing hard and grateful for the chance to stop. ‘We lost her?’ He didn’t sound upset.

  ‘She must be hiding.’ The end of the street seemed too far for her to have gone before I rounded the corner.

  ‘Why . . .’ Simon heaved in a breath. ‘Why are we chasing her?’

  ‘She caused all this.’ I waved towards the Winston Lab, now out of sight.

  ‘I thought you said you caused it.’

  ‘We both did. Her and me. Together.’

  Simon looked doubtful. ‘She stood right next to you last night and nothing happened.’

  He had a point. The fruit punch hadn’t boiled. No champagne glasses exploded. Not so much as a hint of a ghost.

  ‘Why did she run then? Why was she even here?’

  ‘Well, the place sort of exploded a bit,’ Simon said. ‘I would have run.’

  ‘Come on.’ I led off. ‘Perhaps we’ll see her on the way to the station.’

  ‘Are you sure we shouldn’t, you know, go back and help?’

  ‘And maybe set everything off again?’ I shook my head. ‘They had plenty of guys there to help clean up.’

  Simon hesitated, then followed. ‘I guess.’

  We reached the station in time for our train to London and without sight of Helen. On the walk there Simon had almost convinced himself that the bizarre effects had been a result of Dr Creed’s experiment. Some kind of aftershock. He hadn’t seen any of the ghosts, just the light show.

  ‘You’re sure it was Helen?’ he asked, as we took our seats in one of the second-class carriages.

  ‘Yeah . . .’ I was ninety per cent sure. Her hair had been different, but girls do that.

  ‘Who’s Lady Gaga?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Lady Gaga,’ he repeated.

  ‘Dunno. It sounds made up. Why?’ The train began to pull away in a series of lurches.

  Simon shrugged and watched the scenery slide past the window. ‘She had it on her T-shirt.’

  I echoed his shrug. Simon had an eye for details and a memory that never let go. ‘Just some new band, I guess. She’s really into those.’

  CHAPTER 6

  On Saturday Simon pulled his front door open, leaving my attempt to knock swinging at empty air.

  ‘There’s something important you should know,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a guest character this session.’

  ‘And . . . ?’ I followed him into the hall.

  ‘And things are going to get really awkward.’ Simon started up the stairs.

  ‘Because . . . ?’

  ‘It’s a paladin!’

  A perfect holy knight, champion of all that’s lawful and good. I could see how that might inconvenience Simon’s character, Fineous, who specialised in theft and the occasional spot of backstabbing, both the treacherous and the fatal kinds.

  I followed Simon into his bedroom where John and the new guy already sat at the table opposite Mia, who was still unfolding her various books and maps behind her foot-high cardboard screen.

  Our new player smiled at me pleasantly enough. H
is dark, possibly permed, hair was piled forward, sweeping across his brow like a New Romantic pop star. The face below was just a touch too fleshy to pull off the look, though he had made an effort with some eyeliner. A lavender shirt with a broad collar completed the ensemble. He reminded me of a boy that Elton had got off with at the Arnots’ party where I first kissed Mia.

  I took a chair and sat, leaning down to get the stuff I needed from my bag.

  ‘This is Sam,’ Mia said.

  I sat up at that. ‘Sam as in . . .’ I couldn’t stop the words escaping. Sam as in her new boyfriend Sam. Sam as in the seventeen-year-old star of three TV commercials. Sam who attended the same school of performing arts that the eldest of Elton’s brothers went to. Sam who could have dated any number of hot dancers but instead had taken ‘my’ Mia . . .

  ‘Mia’s boyfriend,’ Simon said, taking the last seat.

  Next to me John rolled his eyes. Clearly Simon had been briefed to forewarn me in order to minimise the upcoming awkwardness, and in Simon’s world that had meant warning me about the paladin and the thief rather than the fact my ex-girlfriend had invited her new boyfriend to play D&D with us.

  ‘Right,’ I said. What I wanted to say was what the hell were you thinking? ‘Right,’ I repeated.

  ‘So.’ Mia tapped the table with her pen. ‘The party – the group of adventurers – have been stuck in this multidimensional complex known as The University for several months. Sam, your character—’

  ‘Sir Algernon de Pommefrite!’ Sam declared dramatically.

  ‘Sir Algernon,’ Mia acknowledged, ‘has been released from a sarcophagus in Mercuron’s halls of experimentation.’

  Simon had been extremely proud of defeating all the locks both on the sarcophagus itself and those required to reach the inner laboratory. The fact that it contained a live paladin rather than a dead king mounded with grave goods was perhaps Mia’s way of telling him that crime doesn’t pay. The fact that the paladin was now being played by her boyfriend was Mia’s way of saying something else. I wasn’t quite sure what.