Afterlife Crisis
Page 8
“Disappeared?”
“That’s right. Stolen. And once the police got involved the doctor said he was no longer allowed to release any patient records at all.”
“That’s a shame,” I said, for it never hurts to strike a note of sympathy.
“It is — and quite a blow to my work. But I can understand the reasons. All of the stolen records pertained to Napoleons, and all the Napoleons had escaped from Detroit Mercy some months earlier. Peericks felt the mass escape and the theft of the records might be linked.”
I was pleased to see that at least some parts of this information squared up with my own data. As you’ll recall, provided that your memory contains the same information as mine, I — along with Ian Brown and Zeus — had been among the escapees who travelled with the Napoleons when we decided that we’d spent quite enough time cooped up in the hospice. The Napoleons had been instrumental in the escape. And as I said, I was pleased to learn that this particular sequence still appeared in my biography. I’d started to worry that the Author had rewritten me as an insurance salesperson or actuary, or some other goshawful flavourless specimen, and was relieved to discover that at least one spot of colourful derring-do had survived the Author’s cull. But while I did recall, rather vividly, the Napoleons’ flight from the hospice, I’d heard nothing about the theft of any records.
“Very odd,” I said. “Peericks didn’t mention that to me when last we spoke.”
“He didn’t?”
“No, not a word.”
“So why did he send you?”
“He didn’t. Not directly, at any rate. Peericks has a patient who has a brace of bizarre memories which Dr. Peericks thinks are delusions. But the patient, who goes by the name of Oan, says you can verify her bizarre claims, thereby sliding her from the ‘insane’ side of the ledger into the ‘sane.’ Whether this is true or not, who can say? But Peericks’s diagnosis of this patient would be assisted if you’d chime in with your own version of the events which she describes.”
“What does she remember?” said Isaac, keen as ever to keep abreast. And as he once again leaned forward in his chair, hanging on the Feynman lips, I could see this was another of those times when a spot of caginess was the order of the day. I mean to say, I knew my own memories jived with Oan’s and that both of us remembered Isaac’s presence in the cavern. But based on our earlier exchange about Norm Stradamus, Isaac didn’t seem to recall that I’d been present on that occasion. It was for this reason that I responded with a touch of wariness in my voice, hoping to suss out the boundaries of this scientist’s recollections.
“Oh, something or other about a turn of events in a cavern some months back. Pretty apocalyptic stuff involving the City Solicitor, some chap named Ian, a bird named Tonto, and the previously mentioned Norm Stradamus cheered on by a berobed flock.”
“Egad!” he said, which surprised me. I mean to say, I myself am a fairly frequent egadder, but apart from me you don’t bump into many. It was nice to meet another chap from the club, as it were. And now that we’d established that Isaac, too, was one of the boys, I felt a sense of camaraderie and kinship which I hitherto hadn’t felt when rubbing elbows with this gifted twerp of science. I leaned forward, too, my interest in this chump having been intensified.
“She must be referring to the struggle between the City Solicitor and Ian Brown’s wife,” he said. “An ultra-powerful entity named Penelope. No wonder Dr. Peericks thinks this friend of yours is mad. If I hadn’t seen those events myself I’d have a difficult time believing they happened.”
“So your memory jives with Oan’s?” I said.
“Of course it does. I was there. And those events would be impossible to forget. It was the events this Oan describes that inspired me to pursue my current research.”
“So you’ll help Oan?” I said, hope swelling within my bosom. “You’ll go to the hospice and add your voice to Oan’s, convincing Peericks to whip out his ‘certified sane’ stamp and apply it directly to Oan’s head?”
He frowned deeply and shook the pumpkin.
“I’m afraid I can’t,” he said. “It’s impossible. I’m at a highly sensitive stage of my most important work — work that could shake Detroit to its very foundations.”
Chapter 7
“But dash it, Isaac,” I said.
“I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do,” said the arithmetical poop. “The loss of the Napoleons’ records was a blow. If I had access to them, any of them at all, I might be able to fill the gaps in my research and make the time to help this Oan person you mentioned. But as it stands I have to remain here and focus on my work.”
“But why do you need the Napoleons’ records?”
“To further my work on human memory.”
This floated past me, and I must have looked befogged, for Isaac chipped in with additional data.
“It’s because of their unique memory patterns,” he said. “All Napoleons have a highly specific pattern of memories — or rather a highly specific pattern of false memories, I should say. They claim to remember not only living in the beforelife but also making multiple visits to it. Reincarnation, they call it. They claim to remember dying multiple times and remanifesting in the Styx. Die, manifest, reincarnate, and repeat. Highly unusual, yet replicated across virtually all Napoleonic subjects. If I had access to a Napoleonic brainscan or two — or better yet, access to a live Napoleon — I might be able to save myself hundreds of hours of work.”
“It’s too bad I didn’t know about this earlier,” I said. “There was a pair of Napoleons on the bus with me today. I could have brought them to you.”
“You saw a pair of Napoleons? I was told they’d disappeared!”
“These ones hadn’t. Although, now that you mention it, a pair of coppers seemed to be trying their level best to disappear them.”
“Can you get in touch with these Napoleons?”
“Sorry, no. We were ships passing in the night, as the expression is. Just fellow travellers doomed to share innumerable trouser-wrinkling hours on public transit. I wouldn’t have met them at all if the IPT hadn’t disappeared.”
This was another of those moments when I’d let the Feynman tongue get too far ahead of my mental filter, briefly forgetting that the existence of the IPT was one of those things best left unmentioned now that the Author had expunged it from His text. But I hadn’t imagined how this particular statement would land on the science nib blinking at me across the tea-tray.
He took it big. Indeed, he dropped his teacup the moment the IPT was mentioned, punctuating my remarks with the tinkle of breaking china.
“What do you mean, IPT?” he said.
“Oh, nothing. I must have been thinking of something else.”
He stared at me intently and unleashed a bit of logic in my direction.
“No. You said you were only on the bus because the IPT had disappeared. And you’d only have said that if you knew what the IPT was.”
“Independent Premium Taxis,” I said.
“Mr. Feynman—”
“Interesting Passenger Trains?”
“Please, Mr. Feynman,” said Isaac, “it’s very important that you tell me the truth. What do you know of the IPT?”
“What do you know of the IPT?” I asked, goggling.
“I asked you first,” said Isaac, which of course he had. And I could see that we’d be at this all day if one of us didn’t give up the goods. I took a chance and rolled the dice.
“Fine then,” I said. “The acronym refers to a teleportation thingummy, a device one used to whoosh from spot to spot throughout Detroit. The letters stand for Instantaneous Personal—”
“Transport!” said Isaac, chiming in and harmonizing quite well for an amateur.
“You know of it, too!” I said, rejoicing, for I’d been finding it rather lonely to be the sole repository o
f prior drafts of the Author’s work.
“Of course I do. But the question, Mr. Feynman, is this: how are you able to remember the IPT?”
“Ah, now there you have me,” I said. “Perhaps some hidden whatsit in my character sketch. But for whatever reason, I seem to be the only one who notices when history is rewritten.”
Once again my words had caught this Bunsen-burner enthusiast off guard. But this time the surprise appeared to have been an agreeable one. He sat back in his chair, gazing up at the ceiling, before running a hand through his hair and repeating my words back at me.
“History is rewritten,” he mused, savouring the words. “An excellent way to put it, Feynman. History is being rewritten. And you can perceive the changes. That’s fantastic. But why, Feynman? That’s the question. That, and more importantly, what do you plan to do about it?”
“The only thing one can!” I said. “Just keep calm and carry on. However history is rewritten, I shall have to bear the burden of my perceptions and do whatever I can to serve the Author’s will.”
This seemed to come as yet another spot of exciting and welcome news. I don’t remember ever meeting anyone so moved by every word that crossed my tonsils.
“Most excellent, Feynman! That’s the spirit,” he shouted, punching the air. And so merry was his mood that I think he might have uttered a “yippee” if the expression had been known to him.
“Wonderful news!” he continued. “So you’ll help me with my work!”
Now I was the one surprised. The chap’s most recent remarks seemed to qualify as one of those non sequitur things you hear about in logic lectures. I mean to say, I’m always happy to chip in with a spot of aid for those in need, but I didn’t see why Isaac felt my resolve to carry out the Author’s will would translate into an offer to lend a hand with Isaac’s own scientific fiddling. Perhaps he assumed, rightly or wrongly, that the Author wanted me to give a leg up to science.
It was while I pondered this that another thought occurred. Follow this closely, for it’s dashed clever. It seemed to me that, if I could make myself useful to this blighter, then he might pitch in back at the hospice and shill for Oan’s release, thus convincing Dr. Peericks to lift the veil on Zeus’s current coordinates. Weighing against this, of course, was the fact that Abe had warned me Isaac’s work would imperil the fabric of Detroit, or words to that effect, and here I was being offered a role in pushing this work along. This was a time, I could see, to watch one’s step.
“Help you?” I said, that touch of wariness resurfacing in my timbre. “Perhaps.”
“Perhaps?” said Isaac.
“Yes, perhaps. I suppose the answer depends on what you’re doing. Nothing dangerous, I presume?”
“No, no! Not dangerous, Mr. Feynman. Necessary, and fundamental!” he said, applying a goodly amount of weight to the final word. “It’s what drives all of my work — my work on quantum superposition and waveform collapse. My work on time travel. Even my work on neurochemistry and memory. It’s all aimed at the same, worldwide problem: the failure of empirical observation to conform to calculation.”
I eh-whatted.
“Nothing works like it’s supposed to.”
This had been my experience, too. I’d purchased blenders, lawnmowers, roller skates, and any number of other goods which had gone phut moments after their warranty periods had expired. The habit of goods giving up their ghosts just when you needed them unbroken is the whole reason my friend Vera — the medium and small-appliance repairperson whom I think I mentioned earlier — had any career at all. But it seemed a goofy focus for serious scientific thought.
“So you want to fix broken thingummies?” I said, stringing along.
“I want to fix the world,” said Isaac. “The whole universe.”
I raised a couple of eyebrows and encouraged annotations. I mean to say, you can’t go about the joint saying you want to fix the whole universe without offering up a slab of explanation.
“Consider the planets,” he said, rising slowly from his chair, lifting his arms and slipping into what I might have called a soliloquy but for the fact that he was saying it to me. Perhaps “lecture” is mot juster. But whatever you want to call his little slice of exposition, its contents ran as follows:
“I’ve spent hours calculating projected planetary orbits. I’ve taken account of every conceivable variable. My results are indisputable, my equations elegant, my solutions perfect. And yet the orbits we observe — those actually followed by the planets — deviate from those predicted. Unacceptable. And take the rate of the expansion of the universe,” he continued, now pacing around the room. “Based on the models I’ve developed and the calculations I’ve run, the universe should expand more quickly than it does. My calculations also predict observable supersymmetry, dark matter, cosmic strings, and detectable multiverses. Yet none of this is observed. Black holes behave incorrectly. And I’ve found similar discrepancies in the context of cellular regeneration, DNA mutation, chemical decomposition, weather patterns, light refraction, stand-up comedy, folk music — phenomena from every field of inquiry. In every context I examine, phenomena fail to correspond to my calculations.”
“Perhaps your calculations are off,” I said.
He gave me an austere look. It was the look of a chap whose calculations are never off.
“No,” he said, gravely. And then, even gravelier, he added, “It’s reality that’s wrong.”
Now, I don’t know how this last slab of dialogue landed on you, but it struck me as a bit thick. I mean, setting aside the narcissism of it all, it seemed churlish to shake one’s fist at the universe simply because it was bad with figures. “Give it a break,” I might have said, had Isaac and I been on matier terms, “I’m sure half of the things I do in a given day fail to square up with your ruddy calculations.” But I kept these thoughts to myself. I suppose the failure of the universe to string along with your mathematical thingummies might vex any chap who draws his weekly envelope by fiddling with numbers and occupying Lucasian Chairs. I therefore refrained from interrupting and let this overconfident number cruncher press on, hoping he might soon sum up, as it were. Besides, I could see that he was enthralled by his own speech. His eyes were alight with a fire I had hitherto observed only behind pulpits or under tinfoil hats.
“Virtually nothing behaves as it should!” he continued, now displaying something you might call ecstasy — a word I wouldn’t have thought could come within several nautical miles of maths. “Even some of my own inventions follow this pattern. My own I-Ware! Wherever I relied on observation in creating my devices, rather than designing them through pure mathematical models, I saw the same pattern. These devices shouldn’t work, but they do. My subsequent calculations, based on after-acquired data, consistently prove these devices shouldn’t have ever functioned at all. They were doing things that ought to have been impossible! Just as it was with the IPT! It worked in practice, but calculation proved it impossible. The inescapable conclusion is that there’s an unexplained wrongness in the universe. A wrongness that touches everything — physics, chemistry, biology, the very building blocks of reality. I couldn’t fathom its source until I observed the City Solicitor’s battle within the cavern.”
“So what’s the source?” I asked, intently.
“That’s not important,” he said, waving off the inquiry like a picnicker shooing away a wasp he hadn’t invited. “I’ve determined that we can exclude any reference to the source from our solution. What matters, Mr. Feynman, is that I’ve found a way to correct these errors: I can adjust the world itself — the very fabric of reality — so that it corresponds to my calculations. I can make it work as it should! Thus far, I’m able to make only slight adjustments — correct minor discrepancies and marginal deviations. But my methods are improving. I continue to refine them. With your help, I’ll soon have the power to change everything all at once.”
“Change everything?” I said. “You wouldn’t care to amplify that, would you? Explain precisely what it is you propose to do?”
He levelled an icy gaze at me — and if you’d care to describe this icy gaze as piercing, or as one that featured several black holes’ worth of gravity, you wouldn’t hear an objection from me. Only after subjecting me to this piercing, icy, gravity-laden stare for several heartbeats, apparently peering through my physical person and assessing the Feynman soul, did Isaac finally surface and come across with the goods.
“It’s the most ambitious experiment anyone has ever conceived,” he said, as though reading from a grant application. “What I propose, Mr. Feynman, is nothing short of universal readjustment. The wholesale reweaving of the fabric of Detroit.”
“Golly!” I said.
“I’ve seen beyond the veil,” he continued, in a rapturous sort of way. When he spoke again, his voice was husky with emotion. “With your help, I’ll achieve my goal of changing Detroit at the quantum level.”
My ears perked up. I sat up straighter. What he had said had set my glial cells aflame.
“The quantum level, you say? Your goal — all of this work you’re pursuing — is aimed at changing Detroit at the quantum level?”
“It is!” he said.
“This great experiment — this reweaving of which you speak — you mean to tell me your efforts are focused exclusively on quantum whatnots? Those thingummies that whiz around, unseen, inside everything, but which can’t be detected without several thousand quid worth of government-funded lab equipment?”