by Wil McCarthy
Table of Contents
Boulder Creek Apartments, Boulder Colorado, Present Day
University of Colorado Engineering Center, Boulder, Colorado, Present Day
PART ONE: The Deluge 1.1
1.2
1.3
1.4
1.5
1.6
1.7
1.8
1.9
University of Colorado Engineering Center, Boulder, Colorado, Present Day
PART TWO: The Monsters 2.1
2.2
2.3
2.4
2.5
2.6
2.7
University of Colorado Engineering Center, Boulder, Colorado, Present Day
PART THREE: The Garden 3.1
3.2
3.3
3.4
3.5
Foothills Hospital, Boulder, Colorado, Present Day
PART FOUR: The Voyage 4.1
4.2
4.3
4.4
4.5
Foothills Hospital, Boulder, Colorado, Present Day
Postscriptum
Notes on Part One: The Deluge
Notes on Part Two: The Monsters
Notes on Part Three: The Garden
Notes on Part Four: The Voyage
Notes on the Framing Story
ANTEDILUVIAN
WIL McCARTHY
Antediluvian
Wil McCarthy
What if all our legends are true? A rousing, fast-paced novel of time travel unlike any other, from acclaimed author Wil McCarthy.
What if our legends are older than we think? All the Stone Age has left behind are rocks and bones; all other materials have rotted away, leaving no trace. But what if “cave men” never existed, and the Stone Age was a time of great sophistication still preserved in our oldest stories?
In a brilliant and dangerous brain hacking experiment, Harv Leonel and Tara Mukherjee are about to discover entire lifetimes of human memory coded in our genes, and reveal ancient legends – from knights and trolls, to flood myths, to the birth of humanity itself – that are as real as they are deadly.
Before disaster erased the coastlines and river valleys of the Antediluvian age—before the Flood—men and women struggled and yearned and innovated in a world of savage contrasts into which Harv and Tara are thrust, unprepared. Will their science be enough to save them?
BOOKS by WIL McCARTHY
The Queendom of Sol Series
The Collapsium
The Wellstone
Lost in Transmission
To Crush the Moon
The Waister Series
Aggressor Six
The Fall of Sirius
Flies from the Amber
Murder in the Solid State
Bloom
Once Upon a Galaxy
ANTEDILUVIAN
WIL McCARTHY
Antediluvian
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by Wil McCarthy
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN: 978-1-4814-8431-2
eISBN: 978-1-62579-738-4
Cover art by Dave Seeley
First printing, October 2019
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McCarthy, Wil, author.
Title: Antediluvian / Wil McCarthy.
Description: Riverdale, NY : Baen, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2019020653 | ISBN 9781481484312 (hardback)
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Science Fiction / High Tech. | FICTION / Science
Fiction / General. | GSAFD: Science fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3563.C337338 A85 2019 | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019020653
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)
Printed in the United States of America
Electronic Version by Baen Books
www.baen.com
For Evangeline. Obviously.
Acknowledgments
I’m sure there are a lot of errors in this book, and I know there are some willful deviations from expert advice, for which the experts should not be held in any way accountable. Cool? That said, I’d like to thank: Dr. Jill Shapiro of Columbia University for tips on human evolution; Graham Hancock for information about ancient civilizations; Evangeline Jennifer Hoyer McCarthy for information about being a female human being; Linda Nagata and Sean Stewart for pointing out errors of logic and narration; The History Channel and The Discovery Channel for inspiring a lot of this through years of excellent documentaries; America’s robust publishing industry, for filling my bookshelves with reams of obscure knowledge; and the Internet, for putting every other knowable thing just a few keystrokes away. This story was first conceived in 2004, so I’d also like to thank my 2004 self for writing such a detailed outline, and Toni Weisskopf for purchasing it almost thirteen years later, largely on faith. In a real sense, it took a whole planet full of people to write this book, so thanks to the whole planet, too. You guys rock.
Antediluvian (adj.) / an tē dә ˈlü vē әn
1. Ancient.
2. Out of date, antiquated, outmoded, or primitive.
3. (lit.) Pre-deluge.
4. Of or pertaining to the time before the biblical Flood.
5. Of or pertaining to the extracted Y-chromosomal memories of Harv Leonel.
ANTEDILUVIAN
Boulder Creek Apartments
Boulder Colorado
Present Day
“Are you positive you want to do this?” Tara Mukherjee asked, as the two of them rose from bed to begin their momentous day.
“Positive?” Harv Leonel asked. “What a question. What have we been doing all summer?”
They brushed their teeth and showered and dressed, and still the question hung unspoken in the air: are you sure today’s the day you want to climb into the time machine?
And the answer, equally unspoken, hung just as loudly: there is no doubt, Tara my dear.
“Do you want eggs?” Tara asked him. He was usually the one to make breakfast, but today felt different—very different—and she wanted to mark the occasion somehow.
“Mmm,” he said, thoughtfully. “And toast. We’re going to need the carbs.”
They ate in near silence, speaking only of the weather (sunny) and the morning headlines (gloomy). There was a sense that none of that mattered, but what else was there to talk about? He was right: Tara had spent the whole summer helping him build his damned machine. Who was she to tell him (to ask him? to beg him?) not to use it?
As they piled the dishes in the sink, he grabbed her and kissed her hard, and she kissed him back even harder, because she was pretty sure she loved him. How else could she explain all this? She’d been postdocing in the Paleogenetics department of CU Boulder—a prestigious posting to be sure—and he’d come in on the last day of classes to ask her a question about the Y chromosome. Although he was clean-shaven, his black hair looked overdue for a visit to the barber, and like a lot of white Coloradoans, he had a tanned, vaguely weather-beaten look about him. But his crooked smile was catchy, and later that same evening she was kissing him deeply in a bar on The Hill, even though he reeked of bourbon and thic-nic
vape, and the day after that she was riding shotgun in his Jeep through the mountains at a hundred KPH, with her hand on his thigh the whole time, and that night she’d fallen into his bed and done things good Hindu girls were not known for doing.
And then somehow she was spending all her spare time in his lab, in the basement of the Engineering Center. How could she not? He wasn’t unusually handsome or charming, but he was scary smart, and a little dangerous, and he was interested in the quantum computing and quantum storage aspects of the human genome. The “quantome,” he called it.
“The potential number of memory states in a single chromosome is three-to-the-two-billionth times the number of genes,” he’d told her offhandedly, the first time she saw what he was building. “That’s ten to the thirtieth times more than the number of atoms in the known universe. A big number! But if the chromosome has four arms, the equations don’t balance and the coherent states collapse.”
Tara’s paleogenetics colleagues had expressed skepticism, to say the least. What did some EE professor know about genes? But Tara’s specialty was tracking the Y-chromosome haplogroups—the way they diverged from the original A00 group of Y-Chromosome Adam, and split and spread and died out and conquered the world. She knew that misshapen little chromosome down to the atomic level, and the more she listened and thought and looked up and confirmed with data, the more convinced she became that Harv Leonel was really fucking onto something. It did look like a trinary quantum compiler—or “ternary,” as Harv called it—in nontrivial and seemingly non-coincidental ways. Had evolution crammed such critical genetic functions into such a small, strange space because that structure, you know, did something?
The thought still sent shivers down her spine, and it had crossed her mind more than once, that she might conceivably share a Nobel Prize with Harv if she helped him prove his point. But that wasn’t why she’d helped him. No, that wasn’t why at all.
“You trust me?” he asked her as he gathered up his backpack and keys.
“Nope,” she said honestly. “But I want to.”
He was twenty-two years her senior, old enough that he could legally drink anywhere in the world on the day she was born. He probably had. He’d probably smoked pot all through her Indian school years, and fucked his way through more young women than she cared to think about. She knew that he was divorced, and that it had been ugly, and that he’d both vowed to never get married again and then, at some point, retracted that vow. She hadn’t asked him why or when, or what it might mean for the two of them.
“Ready?” he asked her at the door.
No, she wanted to say. Not at all. Not at all. But instead she forced a smile and a nod, because this was everything he’d ever dreamed of, and she didn’t want to be the thing that stood in his way. She particularly didn’t want to find out that the work was more important than she was, that he would press the activation trigger whether she was in the room or not.
He drove them to work, as always, and although the traffic prevented him from really opening up the throttle, she could feel him burning beside her with impatience and reckless energy. The experiment had been funded and approved by the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Electrical Engineering department’s own slush fund, mainly because Harv hadn’t quiiite disclosed that he was planning on using a transcranial magnetic stimulator to couple the output feed directly to the hippocampus of his own brain.
“It’s a sort of a time machine,” he’d told her on their third date. “Bringing information from the distant past and imprinting it in a living memory. Who knows? There could be a whole library in there.”
And somehow it hadn’t sounded crazy at the time.
Oh, Harv. God damn it.
* * *
The lab—their lab—was a bomb crater of wires and video displays and liquid nitrogen dewars. Over the course of the summer, the chaos had gradually faded into the background of Tara’s perception—just part of the normal mess of real-world science—but today she saw it with fresh eyes, as if for the first time. Electrical and fibe-op cables ran loose on the floor, not anchored with runners or even duct tape, but just hastily thrown from one gray box to the next, streaming precious power and data and femtosecond timing pulses to where they were needed. All around were comics and cartoons, taped to the walls and to the equipment: The Far Side, XKCD, Cyanide and Happiness, Calvin and Hobbes. Anything to do with time travel. Anything to do with quantum computing or brain stimulation. The lights were already on, and Gurdeep Patel was already here, carefully stepping from one spot to another and checking things off on a clipboard.
“Hey, boss,” Patel said, nodding.
“You’re here early,” Harv observed.
“You too.”
Patel was Harv Leonel’s actual assistant—a grad student slaving for his PhD and earning even less than Paleogenetics was paying Tara. He was a bright young man, but kind of blissfully acquiescent to whatever was happening around him. As far as Tara knew, he had no idea that what was about to happen had not been peer-reviewed or even peer-discussed. Harv had thrown some verbiage in the proposal that hinted in this direction—just enough that he could claim good-faith disclosure later on, but not enough to provoke any inquiry by the review committee.
The possibility should be explored, that the quantome interacts directly with the human brain, or that it can be made to.
Had Patel understood the deception? Would he be here if he did?
“Hey, Mukherjee,” Patel said to her.
“Hi, Patel.” Do you know your thesis advisor is about to fry his brain?
With surprising restraint, Harv picked his way over to the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance station—the heart of the time machine—sat down on the little wheeled office stool, and started powering up the systems one by one: Controller, check. Chiller, check. Gyrotron. Sweep generator and transmission line. Probe. Detector. Amplifier. Processor. Check, check, check.
Then he ran the primary diagnostics, and the full diagnostics, and the expanded diagnostics, and finally began reading signals from a dummy target—an actual trinary quantum compiler, roughly ten times the diameter and several thousand times the mass of the Y-chromosome target underneath it.
“Are you okay with this?” Tara asked Patel quietly.
Patel shrugged. “Sure. Why?”
“I have my doubts.”
“Mmm. A little late for that.”
She nodded. “Yeah. That’s correct.”
“Do you want me to hold your hand?”
That was a joke: Patel knew perfectly well that she and Harv were an item. Why else was she here? Last week Harv had finally managed to wrangle a small, retroactive stipend for her time in the lab, but it was little more than minimum wage, and she’d never specifically asked for it. No, she was here for Harv, with Harv, because she couldn’t have stayed away if she’d tried. And she hadn’t fucking tried.
“I just might let you,” she told Patel.
That was a bit much, and she regretted it immediately. The fact that Patel was attracted to her was nothing unusual—a lot of men were, and in her worst moments Tara thought perhaps all of them were. She wasn’t fond of her wide nose or wide hips, her acne scars and her too-deep voice, but she had all the right parts in all the right places, and that seemed to be more than enough to turn heads. But Patel—shy, polite, Indian to the core—was good at keeping his attractions under wraps.
True to form, Patel ignored the remark, and went back to checking items off on his checklist.
The NMR read the spin states of the Y chromosome’s atomic nuclei as though they were simply four billion quantum bits. Not quite a world record for quantum computing, but certainly one of the most powerful machines ever built. That was, if “built” were the right word for something whose key features had evolved naturally. Arguably, the Y chromosome itself was the computer, and the NMR was just a way of accessing its computations, or alternatively, of probing the information stored w
ithin it. Of course, reading these massively entangled states would massively scramble them, which is why the chromosome sat in the center of a special microchip bathed in liquid nitrogen; this staved off “decoherence” for just barely long enough to allow the NMR to probe all two billion qubits.
The machine had performed flawlessly in last week’s trials, basically proving that the Y chromosome (unlike any of the other twenty-two chromosomes in the human genome) could be made to operate as a quantum computer. That didn’t mean it was one, but if not, then it surely was an amazing coincidence. Since that time Harv—when he wasn’t drinking or vaping or being swept off to bed by Tara—had focused his attention on the Ultra High Resolution Transcranial Magnetic Stimulator and Electroencephalogram rig, known here in the lab as the TMS/EEG, or simply “the bathing cap.”
“The hippocampus of a human brain actually speaks a very simple language,” he’d told her, “The flow of information is basically unidirectional, with recurrent waves of inhibition and excitation tapping out the Morse code of our memories. In some minor ways it’s also a quantum-mechanical process, but it’s not the same language as the trinary compiler, so the signals need to be translated from what we call the frequency domain to what we call the time domain.”
Time domain. The phrase was sexy, and had resonated in her mind like a kind of poetry.