The Complete Short Fiction

by Peter Watts

  “What cliff?” I ask her. “What breakpoint? What’s breaking?”

  “What, you don’ believe what they say?”

  They say a lot of things. With perfect hindsight, they moan about the inevitable collapse of an economy based on perpetual growth. Or they blame an obscenely successful computer virus, a few lines of code that spread worldwide and turned the global economy to static overnight. They say t isn’t their fault.

  “Twenty years ago they’d be blaming alligators in the sewers,” I remark.

  Janet starts to speak; her voice erupts in a great wracking cough.

  She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, winces. “Well, if you’d prefer, there’s always Channel six’s interpretation,” she says, pointing to the TV.

  I look at her, quizzical.

  “The Second Coming. We’re almost up to crucifixion plus two thousand years.”

  I shake my head. “Doesn’t make any less sense than most of the stuff I’ve heard.”

  “Well.”

  Mutual discomfort rises around us.

  “Well, then,” I say at last, turning to leave. “I’ll come by tomorrow, see how you’re doing—”

  She gives me a look. “Come on, boss. You know you’re not going anywhere tonight. You wouldn’t even make it to Granville.”

  I open my mouth to protest. She pre-empts me: “There’s a bus goes by around eight every morning, one of those new retrofits with the fullerene plating. Almost safe, if you don’t mind being a couple of hours late for work.”

  Jan frowns for a second, as though struck by sudden realization.

  “I think I’ll work at home for a few days, though,” she adds. “If that’s okay.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Take some time off. Relax.”

  “Actually, I doubt that I’ll really be in the mood to relax.”

  “I mean—”

  She manages another smile. “I appreciate the gesture, Keith, but sitting around just wallowing …it would drive me crazy. I want to work. I have to work.”

  “Jan—”

  “It’s no big deal. I’ll log on tomorrow, just for a minute or two. Should be able to download what I need before any bugs get in, and I’ll be set for the rest of the day. Okay?”

  “Okay.” I’m relieved, of course. At least I’ve got the good grace to be ashamed about it.

  “In the meantime”—she takes a wooden step towards the hall closet—“I’ll make up the couch for you.”

  “Listen, don’t worry about anything. Just go lie down, I’ll make supper.”

  “None for me. I’m not hungry.”

  “Well, okay.” Damn. I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do. “Do you want me to call anyone? Family, or—”

  “No. That’s fine, Keith.” There’s just a hint of caution in her voice. “Thanks anyway.”

  I let it lie. This is why we’re so close. Not because we share the same interests, or are bound by a common passion of scientific discovery, or even because I sometimes give her senior authorship on our papers. It’s because we don’t intrude or pry or try to figure each other out. There’s an unspoken recognition of limits, an acceptance. There’s complete trust, because we never tell each other anything.

  I’m down in the real world when I hear her name.

  It happens, occasionally. Sounds filter down from the huge clumsy universe where other people live; I can usually avoid hearing them. Not this time. There are too many of them, and they’re all talking about Janet.

  I try to keep working. Phospholipids, neatly excised from a single neuron, lumber like crystalline behemoths across my field of vision. But the voices outside won’t shut up, they’re dragging me up there with them. I try to block them out, cling to the molecules that surround me, but it doesn’t work. Ions recede into membranes, membranes into whole cells, physics to chemistry to sheer gross morphology.

  The microscope still holds its image, but I’m outside of it now.

  I shut off the eyephones, blink at a room crowded with machines and the pithed circuitry of a half-dissected salamander.

  The lounge is just down the hall from my office. People in there are talking about rape, talking about Jan’s misfortune as though it was somehow rare or exotic. They trade tales of personal violation like old war stories, try to outdo each other with incantations of sympathy and outrage.

  I don’t understand the commotion. Janet is just another victim of the odds; crime waves and quantum waves have that much in common. There are a million unrealized worlds in which she would have escaped unscathed. In a different million, she would have been killed outright. But this is the one we observed. Here, yesterday, she was only brutalized, and today it will probably be someone else.

  Why do they keep going on like this? Is talking about it all day going to get any of us into a universe where such things don’t happen?

  Why can’t they just leave it alone?

  “No fucking convergence!” she yells from the living room. The power is off again; she storms down the hall towards me, a frenetic silhouette backlit by the reflected light of distant fires. “Singular Hessian, it says! I worked on the chiasma maps for five fucking hours and I couldn’t even get the stats to work, and now the fucking power goes out!”

  She pushes a printout into my hands. It’s a blurry shadow in the dark. “Where’s your flashlight?” I ask.

  “Batteries are dead. Fucking typical. Hang on a sec.” I follow her back into the living room. She kneels at a corner cabinet, roots through its interior; assorted small objects bounce onto the floor to muffled expressions of disgust.

  Her damaged arm exceeds some limit, goes rigid. She cries out.

  I come up behind. “Are—”

  Janet puts one hand behind her, palm out, pushing at the space between us. “I’m okay.” She doesn’t turn around.

  I wait for her to move.

  After a moment she gets up, slowly. Light flares in her palm.

  She sets a candle on the coffee table. The light is feeble, but enough to read by.

  “I’ll show you,” she says, reaching for the printout.

  But I’ve already seen it. “You’ve confounded two of your variables.”

  She stops. “What?”

  “Your interaction term. It’s just a linear transform of action potential and calcium.”

  She takes the paper from my hand, studies it a moment. “Shit. That’s it.” She scowls at the numbers, as though they might have changed when I looked at them. “What a fucking stupid mistake.”

  There’s a brief, uncomfortable silence. Then Janet crushes the printout into a ball and throws it at the floor.

  “Fucking stupid!”

  She turns away from me and glares out the window.

  I stand there like an idiot and wonder what to do.

  And suddenly the apartment comes back to life around us. The living room lights, revived by some far-off and delinquent generator, flicker and then hold steady. Jan’s TV blares grainy light and faint, murky sound from the corner. I turn towards it, grateful for the distraction.

  The screen offers me a woman, about Janet’s age but empty somehow, wearing the shell-shocked look you see everywhere these days. I catch a flash of metal around her wrists before the view changes, shows us the twisted, spindly corpse of an infant with too many fingers. A lidless third eye sits over the bridge of its nose, like a milky black marble embedded in plasticine.

  “Hmm,” Janet says. “Copy errors.”

  She’s watching the television. My stomach unclenches a bit.

  This month’s infanticide stats crawl up the screen like a weather report.

  “Polydactyly and a pineal eye. You didn’t used to see so many random copy errors.”

  I don’t see her point. Birth defects are old news; they’ve been rising ever since things started falling apart. Every now and then one of the networks makes the same tired connection, blames everything on radiation or chemicals in the water supply, draws ominous parallels with t
he fall of Rome.

  At least it’s got her talking again.

  “I bet it’s happening to other information systems too,” she muses, “not just genetic ones. Like all those viruses in the net; you can’t log on for two minutes these days without something trying to lay its eggs in your files. Same damn thing, I bet.”

  I can’t suppress a nervous laugh. Janet cocks her head at me.

  “Sorry,” I say. “It’s just—you never give up, you know? You’d go crazy if you went a day without being able to find a pattern somewhere—”

  And suddenly I know why she lives here, why she won’t hide with the rest of us up on campus. She’s a missionary in enemy territory. She’s defying chaos, she is proclaiming her faith; even here, she is saying, there are rules and the universe will damn well make sense. It will behave.

  Her whole life is a search for order. No fucking way is she going to let something as, as random as rape get in the way.

  Violence is noise, nothing more; Janet’s after signal. Even now, she’s after signal.

  I suppose that’s a good sign.

  The signal crashes along the neuron like a tsunami. Ions in its path stand at sudden attention. A conduit forms, like a strip of mountain range shaking itself flat; the signal spills into it.

  Electricity dances along the optic nerve and lights up the primitive amphibian brain from an endless millimeter away.

  Backtrack the lightning to its source. Here, in the tangled circuitry on the retina; the fading echo of a single photon. A lone quantum event, reaching up from the real world and into my machines. Uncertainty made flesh.

  I made it happen, here in my lab. Just by watching. If a photon emits in the forest and there’s no one to see it, it doesn’t exist.

  This is how the world works: nothing is real until someone looks at it. Even the subatomic fragments of our own bodies don’t exist except as probability waves; it takes an act of conscious observation at the quantum level to collapse those waves into something solid. The whole universe is unreal at its base, an infinite and utterly hypothetical void but for a few specks where someone’s passing glance congeals the mix.

  It’s no use arguing. Einstein tried. Bohm tried. Even Schrödinger, that hater of cats, tried. But our brains didn’t evolve to cope with the space between atoms. You can’t fight numbers; a century of arcane quantum mathematics doesn’t leave any recourse to common sense.

  A lot of people still can’t accept it. They’re afraid of the fact that nothing is real, so they claim that everything is. They say we’re surrounded by parallel worlds just as real as this one, places where we won the Guerre de la Separatiste or the Houston Inferno never happened, an endless comforting smorgasbord of alternative realities. It sounds silly, but they really don’t have much choice.

  The parallel universe schtick is the only consistent alternative to nonexistence, and nonexistence terrifies them.

  It empowers me.

  I can shape reality, just by looking at it. Anyone can. Or I can avert my eyes, respect its privacy, leave it unseen and totipotent.

  The thought makes me a little giddy. I can almost forget how far I’m slipping behind, how much I need Janet’s hand to guide me, because down here in the real world it doesn’t have to matter.

  Nothing is irrevocable until observed.

  She buzzes me through on the first ring. The elevator’s acting strangely today; it opens halfway, closes, opens again like an eager mouth. I take the stairs.

  The door opens while I’m raising my hand to knock. She stands completely till.

  “He came back,” she says.

  No. Even these days, the odds are just too—

  “He was right there. He did it again.” Her voice is completely expressionless. She locks the door, leads me down the shadowy hallway.

  “He got in? How? Where did he—”

  Gray light spills into her living room. We’re up against the wall, off to one side of her window. I look around the edge of the curtain, down at the deserted street.

  She points outside. “He was right there, he did it again, he did it again—”

  To someone else. That’s what she means.

  Oh.

  “She was so stupid,” Janet’s fingers grip the threadbare curtain, clenching, unclenching. “She was out there all alone. Stupid bitch. Should have seen it coming.”

  “When did it happen?”

  “I don’t know. A couple of hours.”

  “Did anyone—” I ask, because of course I can’t say Did you—

  “No. I don’t think anybody else even saw it.” She releases the curtain. “She got off easy, all things considered. She walked away.”

  I don’t ask whether the phone lines were up. I don’t ask if Janet tried to help, if she shouted or threw something or even let the woman inside afterwards. Janet’s not stupid.

  A distant mirage sparkles in the deepening twilight: the campus.

  There’s another oasis, a bit nearer, over by False Creek, and the edge of a third if I crane my neck. Everything else is grey or black or flickering orange.

  Gangrene covers the body. Just a few remnant tissues still alive.

  “You’re sure it was the same guy?” I wonder.

  “Who the fuck cares!” she screams. She catches herself, turns away. Her fists ball up at her sides.

  Finally, she turns back to look at me.

  “Yes it was,” she says in a tight voice. “I’m sure.”

  I never know what I’m supposed to do.

  I know what I’m supposed to feel, though. My heart should go out to her, to anyone so randomly brutalized. This much should be automatic, unthinking. Suddenly I can see her face, really see it, a fragile mask of control teetering on the edge of meltdown; and so much more behind, held barely in check. I’ve never seen her look like this before, even the day it happened to her. Maybe I just didn’t notice. I wait for it to affect me, to fill me with love or sympathy or even pity. She needs something from me. She’s my friend. At least that’s what I call her. I look for something, anything, that would make me less of a liar. I go down as deep as I can, and find nothing but my own passionate curiosity.

  “What do you want me to do?” I ask. I can barely hear my own voice

  Something changes in her face. “Nothing. Nothing, Keith. This is something I’ve got to work through on my own, you know?”

  I shift my weight and try to figure out whether she means it.

  “I could stay here for a few days,” I say at last. “If you want.”

  “Sure.” She looks out the window, her face more distant than ever. “Whatever you like.”

  “They lost Mars!” he wails, grabbing me by the shoulders.

  I know the face; he’s about three doors down the hall. But I can’t remember the name, it’s … wait, Chris, Chris something … Fletcher. That’s it.

  “All the Viking data,” he’s saying, “from the 70’s, you know, NASA said they had it archived, they said I could have it no problem, I planned my whole fucking thesis around it!”

  “It got lost?” It figures; data files everywhere are corrupting in record numbers these days.

  “No, they know exactly where it is. I can go down and pick it up any time I want,” Fletcher says bitterly.

  “So what’s—”

  “It’s all on these big magnetic disks—”

  “Magnetic?”

  “—and of course magmedia have been obsolete for fucking decades, and when NASA upgraded their equipment they somehow missed the Viking data.” He pounds the wall, emits a hysterical little giggle. “So they’ve got all this data that nobody can access. There probably isn’t a computer stodgy enough anywhere on the continent.”

  I tell Janet about it afterwards. I expect her to shake her head and make commiserating noises, that’s too bad or what an awful thing to happen. But she doesn’t even look away from the window.

  She just nods, and says, “Loss of information. Like what happened to me.”

  I
look outside. No stars visible, of course. Just sullen amber reflections on the bottom of the clouds.

  “I can’t even remember being raped,” she remarks. “Funny, you’d think it would be one of those things that stick in your mind. And I know it happened, I can remember the context and the aftermath and I can piece the story together, but I’ve lost the actual … event …”

  From behind, I can see the curve of her cheek and the edge of a smile. I haven’t seen Janet smile in a long time. It seems like years.

  “Can you prove that the earth revolves around the sun?” she asks. “Can you prove it’s not the other way around?”

  “What?” I circle to her left, a wary orbit. Her face comes into view, smooth and almost unmarked by now, like a mask.

  “You can’t, can you? If you ever could. It’s been erased. Or maybe it ‘s just lost. We’ve all forgotten so much …”

  She’s so calm. I’ve never seen her so calm. It’s almost frightening.

  “You know, I’ll bet after a while we forget things as fast as we learn them,” she remarks. “I bet that’s always the way i’s been.”

  “Why do you say that?” I keep my voice carefully neutral.

  “You can’t store everything, there’s not enough room. How can you take in the new without writing over the old?”

  “Come on, Jan.” I try for a light touch: “Our brains are running out of disk space?”

  “Why not? We’re finite.”

  Jesus, she’s serious.

  “Not that finite. We don’t even know what most of the brain does, yet.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t do anything. Maybe it’s like our DNA, maybe most of it’s junk. You remember back when they found—”

  “I remember.” I don’t want to hear what they found, because I’ve been trying to forget it for years. They found perfectly healthy people with almost no brain tissue. They found people living among us, heads full of spinal fluid, making do with a thin lining of nerve cells where their brains should be. They found people growing up to be engineers and schoolteachers before discovering that they should have been vegetables instead.

  They never found any answers. God knows they looked hard enough. I heard they were making some progress, though, before—