The Complete Short Fiction

by Peter Watts

  “Nothing more, well, Christian? Nothing that would lead someone to believe in a single omniscient God who raises the dead?”

  “God no. Oh, except for that Tipler fellow.” Russell leans forward. “Why? Jasmine Fitzgerald hasn’t become a Christian, has she?” Murder is one thing, his tone suggests, but this …

  “I don’t think so,” Thomas reassures him. “Not unless Christianity’s broadened its tenets to embrace human sacrifice.”

  “Yes. Quite.” Russell leans back again, apparently satisfied.

  “Who’s Tipler?” Thomas asks.

  “Mmmm?” Russell blinks, momentarily distracted. “Oh, yes. Frank Tipler. Cosmologist from Tulane, claimed to have a testable mathematical proof of the existence of God. And the afterlife too, if I recall. Raised a bit of a stir a few years back.”

  “I take it you weren’t impressed.”

  “Actually, I didn’t follow it very closely. Theology’s not that interesting to me. I mean, if physics proves that there is or there isn’t a god that’s fine, but that’s not really the point of the exercise, is it?”

  “I couldn’t say. Seems to me it’d be a hell of a spin-off, though.”

  Russell smiles.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve got the reference?” Thomas suggests.

  “Of course. Just a moment.” Russell feeds a CD to the workstation and massages the keyboard. The Sun purrs. “Yes, here it is: The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead. 1994, Frank J. Tipler. I can print you out the complete citation if you want.”

  “Please. So what was his proof?”

  The professor displays something akin to a very small smile.

  “In thirty words or less,” Thomas adds. “For idiots.”

  “Well,” Russell says, “basically, he argued that some billions of years hence, life will incorporate itself into a massive quantum-effect computing device to avoid extinction when the universe collapses.”

  “I thought the universe wasn’t going to collapse,” Thomas interjects. “I thought they proved it was just going to keep expanding …”

  “That was last year,” Russell says shortly. “May I continue?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Thank you. As I was saying, Tipler claimed that billions of years hence, life will incorporate itself into a massive quantum-effect computing device to avoid extinction when the universe collapses. An integral part of this process involves the exact reproduction of everything that ever happened in the universe up to that point, right down to the quantum level, as well as all possible variations of those events.”

  Beside the desk, Russell’s printer extrudes a paper tongue. He pulls it free and hands it over.

  “So God’s a supercomputer at the end of time? And we’ll all be resurrected in the mother of all simulation models?”

  “Well—” Russell wavers. The caricature seems to cause him physical pain. “I suppose so,” he finishes, reluctantly. “In thirty words or less, as you say.”

  “Wow.” Suddenly Fitzgerald’s ravings sound downright pedestrian. “But if he’s right—”

  “The consensus is he’s not,” Russell interjects hastily.

  “But if. If the model’s an exact reproduction, how could you tell the difference between real life and afterlife? I mean, what would be the point?”

  “Well, the point is avoiding ultimate extinction, supposedly. As to how you’d tell the difference …” Russell shakes his head. “Actually, I never finished the book. As I said, theology doesn’t interest me all that much.”

  Thomas shakes his head. “I can’t believe it.”

  “Not many could,” Russell says. Then, almost apologetically, he adds: “Tipler’s theoretical proofs were quite extensive, though, as I recall.”

  “I bet. Whatever happened to him?”

  Russell shrugs. “What happens to anyone who’s stupid enough to come up with a new way of looking at the world? They tore into him like sharks at a feeding frenzy. I don’t know where he ended up.”

  What’s wrong with this picture?

  Nothing. Everything. Suddenly awake, Myles Thomas stares around a darkened studio and tries to convince himself that nothing has changed.

  Nothing has changed. The faint sounds of late-night traffic sound the same as ever. Gray parallelograms stretch across wall and ceiling, a faint luminous shadow of his bedroom window cast by some distant streetlight. Natalie’s still gone from the left side of his bed, her departure so far removed by now that he doesn’t even have to remind himself of it.

  He checks the LEDs on his bedside alarm: 2:35a.

  Something’s different.

  Nothing’s changed.

  Well, maybe one thing. Tipler’s heresy sits on the night stand, its plastic dustcover reflecting slashes of red light from the alarm clock. The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead. It’s too dark to read the lettering but you don’t forget a title like that. Myles Thomas signed it out of the library this afternoon, opened it at random:

  . . . Lemma 1, and the fact that, we have

  which is just (E.3), and (E.3) can hold only if …

  —and threw it into his briefcase, confused and disgusted. He doesn’t even know why he went to the effort of getting the fucking thing. Jasmine Fitzgerald is delusional. It’s that simple. For reasons that it is not Myles Thomas’s job to understand, she vivisected her husband on the kitchen floor. Now she’s inventing all sorts of ways to excuse herself, to undo the undoable, and the fact that she cloaks her delusions in cosmological gobbledegook does not make them any more credible. What does he expect to do, turn into a quantum mechanic overnight? Is he going to learn even a fraction of what he’d need to find the holes in her carefully constructed fantasy? Why did he even bother?

  But he did. And now Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead looms dimly in front of him at two thirty in the fucking morning, and something’s changed, he’s almost sure of it, but try as he might he can’t get a handle on what it is. He just feels different, somehow. He just feels …

  Awake. That’s what you feel. You couldn’t get back to sleep now if your life depended on it.

  Myles Thomas sighs and turns on the reading lamp. Squinting as his pupils shrink against the light, he reaches out and grabs the offending book.

  Parts of it, astonishingly, almost make sense.

  “She’s not here,” the orderly tells him. “Last night we had to move her next door.”

  Next door: the hospital. “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “Not a clue. Convulsions, cyanosis—we thought she was toast, actually. But by the time the doctor got to her she couldn’t find anything wrong.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Tell me about it. Nothing about that crazy b—nothing about her makes sense.” The orderly wanders off down the hall, frowning.

  Jasmine Fitzgerald lies between sheets tucked tight as a straitjacket, stares unblinking at the ceiling. A nurse sits to one side, boredom and curiosity mixing in equal measures on his face.

  “How is she?” Thomas asks.

  “Don’t really know,” the nurse says. “She seems okay now.”

  “She doesn’t look okay to me. She looks almost catatonic.”

  “She isn’t. Are you, Jaz?”

  “We’re sorry,” Fitzgerald says cheerfully. “The person you are trying to reach is temporarily unavailable. Please leave a message and we’ll get back to you.” Then: “Hi, Myles. Good to see you.” Her eyes never waver from the acoustic tiles overhead.

  “You better blink one of these days,” Thomas remarks. “Your eyeballs are going to dry up.”

  “Nothing a little judicious editing won’t fix,” she tells him.

  Thomas glances at the nurse. “Would you excuse us for a few minutes?”

  “Sure. I’ll be in the caf if you need me.”

  Thomas waits until the door swings shut. “So, Jaz. What’s the mass of t
he Higgs boson?”

  She blinks.

  She smiles.

  She turns to look at him.

  “Two hundred twenty-eight GeV,” she says. “All right. Someone actually read my thesis proposal.”

  “Not just your proposal. That’s one of Tipler’s testable predictions, isn’t it?”

  Her smile widens. “The critical one, actually. The others are pretty self-evident.”

  “And you tested it.”

  “Yup. Over at CERN. So how’d you find his book?”

  “I only read parts of it,” Thomas admits. “It was pretty tough slogging.”

  “Sorry. My fault,” Fitzgerald says.

  “How so?”

  “I thought you could use some help, so I souped you up a bit. Increased your processing speed. Not enough, I guess.”

  Something shivers down his back. He ignores it.

  “I’m not—” Thomas rubs his chin; he forgot to shave this morning “—exactly sure what you mean by that.”

  “Sure you do. You just don’t believe it.” Fitzgerald squirms up from between the sheets, props her back against a pillow. “It’s just a semantic difference, Myles. You’d call it a delusion. Us physics geeks would call it a hypothesis.”

  Thomas nods, uncertainly.

  “Oh, just say it, Myles. I know you’re dying to.”

  “Go on,” he blurts, strangely unable to stop himself.

  Fitzgerald laughs. “If you insist, Doctor. I figured out what I was doing wrong. I thought I had to do everything myself, and I just can’t. Too many variables, you see, even if you access them individually there’s no way you can keep track of ’em all at once. When I tried, I got mixed up and everything—”

  A sudden darkness in her face now. A memory, perhaps, pushing up through all those careful layers of contrivance.

  “Everything went wrong,” she finishes softly.

  Thomas nods, keeps his voice low and gentle. “What are you remembering right now, Jaz?”

  “You know damn well what I’m remembering,” she whispers. “I—I cut him open—”

  “Yes.”

  “He was dying. He was dying. I tried to fix him, I tried to fix the code but something went wrong, and …”

  He waits. The silence stretches.

  “. . . and I didn’t know what. I couldn’t fix it if I couldn’t see what I’d done wrong. So I—I cut him open …” Her brow furrows suddenly. Thomas can’t tell with what: remembrance, remorse?

  “I really overstepped myself,” she says at last.

  No. Concentration. She’s rebuilding her defences, she’s pushing the tip of that bloody iceberg back below the surface. It can’t be easy. Thomas can see it, ponderous and massively buoyant, pushing up from the depths while Jasmine Fitzgerald leans down and desperately pretends not to strain.

  “I know it must be difficult to think about,” Thomas says.

  She shrugs. “Sometimes.” Going … “When my head slips back into the old school. Old habits die hard.” Going … “But I get over it.”

  The frown disappears.

  Gone.

  “You know when I told you about Core Wars?” she asks brightly.

  After a moment, Thomas nods.

  “All viruses replicate, but some of the better ones can write macros—micros, actually, would be a better name for them—to other addresses, little subroutines that autonomously perform simple tasks. And some of those can replicate too. Get my drift?”

  “Not really,” Thomas says quietly.

  “I really should have souped you up a bit more. Anyway, those little routines, they can handle all the book-keeping. Each one tracks a few variables, and each time they replicate that’s a few more, and pretty soon there’s no limit to the size of the problem you can handle. Hell, you could rewrite the whole damn operating system from the inside out and not have to worry about any of the details, all your little daemons are doing that for you.”

  “Are we all just viruses to you, Jaz?”

  She laughs at that, not unkindly. “Ah, Myles. It’s a technical term, not a moral judgement. Life’s information, shaped by natural selection. That’s all I mean.”

  “And you’ve learned to—rewrite the code,” Thomas says.

  She shakes her head. “Still learning. But I’m getting better at it all the time.”

  “I see.” Thomas pretends to check his watch. He still doesn’t know the jargon. He never will. But at least, at last, he knows where she’s coming from.

  Nothing left but the final platitudes.

  “That’s all I need right now, Jasmine. I want to thank you for being so co-operative. I know how tough this must be on you.”

  She cocks her head at him, smiling. “This is goodbye then, Myles? You haven’t come close to curing me.”

  He smiles back. He can almost feel each muscle fibre contracting, the increased tension on facial tendons, soft tissue stretching over bone. The utter insincerity of a purely mechanical process. “That’s not what I’m here for, Jaz.”

  “Right. You’re assessing my fitness.”

  Thomas nods.

  “Well?” she asks after a moment. “Am I fit?”

  He takes a breath. “I think you have some problems you haven’t faced. But you can understand counsel, and there’s no doubt you could follow any proceedings the court is likely to throw at you. Legally, that means you can stand trial.”

  “Ah. So I’m not sane, but I’m not crazy enough to get off, eh?”

  “I hope things work out for you.” That much, at least, is sincere.

  “Oh, they will,” she says easily. “Never fear. How much longer do I stay here?”

  “Maybe another three weeks. Thirty days is the usual period.”

  “But you’ve finished with me. Why so long?”

  He shrugs. “Nowhere else to put you, for now.”

  “Oh.” She considers. “Just as well, I guess. It’ll give me more time to practice.”

  “Goodbye, Jasmine.”

  “Too bad you missed Stuart,” she says behind him. “You’d have liked him. Maybe I’ll bring him around to your place sometime.”

  The doorknob sticks. He tries again.

  “Something wrong?” she asks.

  “No,” Thomas says, a bit too quickly. “It’s just—”

  “Oh, right. Hang on a sec.” She rustles in her sheets.

  He turns his head. Jasmine Fitzgerald lies flat on her back, unblinking, staring straight up. Her breath is fast and shallow.

  The doorknob seems subtly warmer in his hand.

  He releases it. “Are you okay?”

  “Sure,” she says to the ceiling. “Just tired. Takes a bit out of you, you know?”

  Call the nurse, he thinks.

  “Really, I just need some rest.” She looks at him one last time, and giggles. “But Myles to go before I sleep …”

  “Dr. Desjardins, please.”

  “Speaking.”

  “You performed the autopsy on Stuart MacLennan?”

  A brief silence. Then: “Who is this?”

  “My name’s Myles Thomas. I’m a psychologist at FPSS. Jasmine Fitzgerald is—was a client of mine.”

  The phone sits there in his hand, silent.

  “I was looking at the case report, writing up my assessment, and I just noticed something about your findings—”

  “They’re preliminary,” Desjardins interrupts. “I’ll have the full report, um, shortly.”

  “Yes, I understand that, Dr. Desjardins. But my understanding is that MacLennan was, well, mortally wounded.”

  “He was gutted like a fish,” Desjardins says.

  “Right. But your r—your preliminary report lists cause of death as ‘undetermined.’”

  “That’s because I haven’t determined the cause of death.”

  “Right. I guess I’m a bit confused about what else it could have been. You didn’t find any toxins in the body, at least none that weren’t involved in MacLennan’s chemo, and no other
injuries except for these fistulas and teratomas—”

  The phone barks in Thomas’s hand, a short ugly laugh. “Do you know what a teratoma is?” Desjardins asks.

  “I assumed it was something to do with his cancer.”

  “Ever hear the term primordial cyst?”

  “No.”

  “Hope you haven’t eaten recently,” Desjardins says. “Every now and then you get a clump of proliferating cells floating around in the coelomic cavity. Something happens to activate the dormant genes—could be a lot of things, but the upshot is you sometimes get these growing blobs of tissue sprouting teeth and hair and bone. Sometimes they get as big as grapefruits.”

  “My God. MacLennan had one of those in him?”

  “I thought, maybe. At first. Turned out to be a chunk of his kidney. Only there was an eye growing out of it. And most of his abdominal lymph nodes, too, the ducts were clotted with hair and something like fingernail. It was keratinised, anyway.”

  “That’s horrible,” Thomas whispers.

  “No shit. Not to mention the perforated diaphragm, or the fact that half the loops of his small intestine were fused together.”

  “But I thought he had leukaemia.”

  “He did. That wasn’t what killed him.”

  “So you’re saying these teratomas might have had some role in MacLennan’s death?”

  “I don’t see how,” Desjardins says.

  “But—”

  “Look, maybe I’m not making myself clear. I have my doubts that Stuart MacLennan died from his wife’s carving skills because any one of the abnormalities I found should have killed him more or less instantly.”

  “But that’s pretty much impossible, isn’t it? I mean, what did the investigating officers say?”

  “Quite frankly, I don’t think they read my report,” Desjardins grumbles. “Neither did you, apparently, or you would have called me before now.”

  “Well, it wasn’t really central to my assessment, Dr. Desjardins. And besides, it seemed so obvious—”

  “For sure. You see someone laid open from crotch to sternum, you don’t need any report to know what killed him. Who cares about any of this congenital abnormality bullshit?”