The Quantum Garden

by Derek Künsken

  Of the forty or fifty found by humanity, the large patron nations controlled all except for two.

  The Puppets controlled one.

  In the back of The Calculated Risk, Belisarius carried the other.

  Forty years ago, an Expeditionary Force of Sub-Saharan Union warships had been sent by the Congregate, their patron nation, deep into Middle Kingdom space. They never returned. The Union Force had been assumed destroyed, but had in fact gone into hiding.

  They’d discovered a pair of wormhole mouths that in the ancient past had collided with each other, disrupting their normal function and structure. One side of the conjoined wormholes led into the past, the other into the future. And rather than give this time travel device to their patrons, the Union Force had fled for deep space, to try to figure out how to send information into the past.

  The Expeditionary Force did find a way, and spent forty years creating new propulsion systems and weapons, achieving ten times the progress by sending their research results back to themselves in the past. But after forty years, they found themselves at the opposite side of the only other wormhole not owned by a patron nation: the Puppet wormhole. And the problem was that the Puppets had wanted the Union fleet as much as the Sub-Saharan Union had wanted to get home.

  Four months ago, with no military or political options, the Union hired Belisarius Arjona, a con man, to get the Expeditionary Force through the Puppet Axis by tricking the Puppets. Three weeks ago, Belisarius and Cassie, with the help of a half-dozen others, had gotten the Expeditionary Force through.

  But three weeks ago Belisarius had also physically entered the Union’s conjoined wormholes, traveling through the immensity of the interior to emerge about ten minutes before he’d entered, allowing him to steal the time gates from the Union.

  The Union breakout from the Puppet Axis had handed the Congregate a major military setback and had torn apart the Puppet Free City’s port. Belisarius had expected to become a wanted man among the Puppets, and eventually to the Congregate.

  He hadn’t thought they’d fire a nuclear weapon on his home. His people were contemplatives, pacifists. They didn’t have his skills. The explosion of ten minutes ago was his fault, something so enormous that it bordered on the unreal. And in fact, its reality was in question. Belisarius, as much as Cassie, was wired for quantum logic, and the quantum world interacted with the macroscopic world in many strange ways. If they could navigate that interaction, they might save the Homo quantus.

  Belisarius and Cassie sealed their suits and cycled through the airlock into the hold. The time gates were hard to see from this angle. They were two ovals, fifteen meters on the long axis and ten on the short axis, with millimeters of apparent depth. At times they displayed the properties of solids, and at times, the properties of liquids, with tensions and elasticities that hinted at previously unknown quantum gravitational phenomena. The conjoined wormholes suffered themselves to be bent to fit inside the curved hold of The Calculated Risk.

  Belisarius and Cassie had to edge along the curved floor of the racer’s hold to get to the futureward face of the gates. Faint blue Cerenkov radiation hovered over the austere surface of the opening like a mist of light. Within the dark surface, streaks of purpled light snaked like shadows from some other present. The patches of dim colors flexed—hypnotic, elusive and inscrutable.

  It was now him and Cassie against extinction. But he didn’t know if his idea could even work. Extinctions happened all the time in the grand scheme of things, and if the Homo quantus really vanished, where did the blame stop? His mistakes were the immediate cause, but his mistakes were themselves engineered into his behavior by earlier generations in braided chains of cause and effect. Maybe, in all the genetic tinkering and false starts and frenetic striving to evolve the Homo quantus, the only meaningful emergent property to rise from that chaos was a species-level suicide switch, which he’d triggered. Maybe as a species, the Homo quantus would exist and vanish, like a virtual particle in the quantum foam of empty space-time. Unless he and Cassie could thread their way through the chaos to find the Homo quantus some other fate.

  Cassie’s helmet came close to his. Through two layers of glass, expressions were not so hard to endure. She was worried too.

  “We have time,” she said unironically, clasping his glove with hers.

  “What am I supposed to do by myself?” Saint Matthew demanded.

  “When Cassie and I enter the time gates, you go back to the hideout and wait for our signal. It might not be long.”

  The bottom corner of a monitor showed the date and time. March 13th, 2515, 11:12am, Indi Standard time. Belisarius’ pulse throbbed faster, not with fear for his people, but with excitement. He hated his instincts.

  Cassie slipped into the quantum fugue, the rational nirvana of the Homo quantus, where self, subjectivity and consciousness extinguished. The intellect occupying her body could perceive probability and quantum superposition without collapsing them. Cassie, the woman who had his heart, ceased to exist, and yet in a very strange sense she was more satisfied and fulfilled than when she’d been a person.

  Yin and yang. Mutually exclusive. Subjective and objective. Person and object.

  The quantum intellect in Cassie would need a few seconds to prepare for crossing the futureward mouth of the conjoined wormholes. In some ways, he envied the careless joy with which Cassie threw herself into the quantum fugue. He had a complex relationship with the fugue. His instinct to learn had always outweighed his instinct for self-preservation, which would have eventually killed him.

  He’d fled the Garret at sixteen in hopes of surviving. He’d become a con man, burying himself in the patternless economy of human greed to avoid his addiction to mathematical patterns. But his skill as a con man made the Sub-Saharan Union seek him out to move their warships across the Puppet Axis. And that put him near the time gates they secretly carried, a cosmological and mathematical temptation no Homo quantus could ever pass by. To steal the time gates Belisarius had needed to travel through them, backwards in time. That had done more than show him the naked hyperspace within.

  The transit had precipitated a crisis that changed his nature. He was no longer like Cassie or any other Homo quantus,capable of being one of two mutually exclusive things: a conscious subjective being or an objective collection of interacting algorithms. The quantum fugue ran constantly in him now, in a partitioned part of his brain; the subjective Belisarius, the con man, coexisted simultaneously with the quantum objectivity. He hadn’t figured out what that meant yet, how the objective and subjective would interact with the world. He didn’t even know if this weird new coexistence was sustainable and survivable. In the past, to access his quantum perceptions, he would have simply extinguished his self like Cassandra had just done, replacing his intellect with another. But now, he negotiated with that other intellect inside him?

  The Homo quantus and all they’ve learned are in danger, he said to the quantum intellect running in his brain. We need to navigate the interior of the time gates again, to travel back in time two weeks. While you navigate, the Cassandra objectivity will record all it can of the hyper-spacial interior.

  The quantum intellect lacked consciousness, but like any computer program or set of algorithms, it possessed fundamental operating parameters and objectives. Through these, it could be manipulated, like all non-conscious things, and many conscious ones. The quantum intellect couldn’t conceptualize team work or value the lives of the Homo quantus, but it valued the knowledge possessed by the Homo quantus in ways reminiscent of kin selection in evolution.

  Acceptable, the intellect responded in Belisarius’ thoughts.

  Belisarius pushed them off the deck and they floated past the surface of the time gates, and for only the second time, he was a watching passenger, riding a life he had handed over to something alien.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  EVEN IN THE remoteness of prehistory, humanity had created temples by which to mediate brushes with the
mysteries of the universe. From inaccessible cave paintings and megalithic observatories to widely-scattered pyramids to the great cathedrals and mosques, builders designed mirrors to reflect the infinities beyond human understanding. Those reflections inspired awe.

  The time gates in the hold of The Calculated Risk were the cathedral to these first tentative generations of the Homo quantus and perhaps fittingly, they possessed the unplanned structure of the first caves. Two wormhole mouths had collided in the ancient past and stuck together. The interference of their throats had uncurled the seven dimensions of space that were curled into undetectability in normal space-time. Physics worked differently in eleven dimensions.

  Belisarius had been protected from the alien strangeness on his first passage through by the fact that he hadn’t been a conscious being at all. For most of his trip, he’d been a piece of flesh driven by his own quantum intellect. For the last portions, once he and the objectivity had figured out how to coexist simultaneously, most of his senses had been routed through the quantum intellect. He’d experienced only what he could see with his eyes.

  Now, his eyes struggled to focus on eerie purples and faint blues, shining light coming from dimensions his brain could not quickly model. Perspective bloated, as if lenses migrated between him and a misty scape of gray leavened with kaleidoscopic glints of orphaned colors. Weird sounds echoed faintly outside his helmet, phantom sensations. Electromagnetic fields pattered over the magnetosomes embedded in the muscle cells of his arms and legs, hinting at the higher-dimensional enormity of space-time within the gates that eyes could not perceive. Insignificance skewered him, causing even his guilt over his people to diminish and recede. Worldly concerns and even self-preservation withered in this cosmological temple.

  His most precise sense, the magnetic one, was faint. The partitioned region of his brain where the thinking objectivity expanded its quantum perceptions hoarded the magnetic sensory input. He only glimpsed the vast world, but even this limited sharing of two intellects was something his genetic engineers had never intended.

  The quantum intellect fed him navigational instructions which he followed as if he were nothing more than the drive program on a shopping drone. Six hundred meters forward. Full stop. Rotate forty-five degree through the x-axis. Two hundred meters. Full stop. Rotate ninety degrees through p- and m-axes.

  The misalignment of the wormhole interiors sent some directions to spatial or temporal dead ends, minor singularities that even his quantum intellect could not yet model mathematically. The complex space-time topography generated strange forces, currents of gravitation and electromagnetism that required avoidance or circumnavigation. While inconvenient for travel, those imperfections would be the lenses through which the Homo quantus would decipher the fabric of the cosmos.

  Belisarius risked a brief glance at his helmet dashboard. They’d slaved Cassie’s suit to his, and her cold jets pushed her in his wake. Her temperature had risen to forty-one degrees. His own fugue fever had gone past forty. Since his change three weeks ago in the time gates, his body now ran a low-level fever of thirty-eight and a half degrees all the time, but the quantum intellect in him was running hard, processing enormous amounts of information and generating heat. He could last for a while longer, long enough to lead them out of the time gates, but Cassie’s fever was becoming dangerous.

  He triggered an injection of neural inhibitors in her brain, a packet of molecular agonists to force a hard exit from the fugue. She could have survived a higher, longer fever, but they didn’t know what they’d need of each other in the past and a fever could slow them down.

  Cassie gasped and resumed a panting human rhythm of breathing, instead of the slow, shallow breaths of the quantum intellect. She groaned.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “It’s so beautiful,” she said wonderingly, “and there’s so much.”

  “I know.”

  “There’s more.” She sounded breathy, struggling with the nauseous come-down from fugue fever. But like him, she might also be working despite the vastness of the awe. “I have to verify the math.”

  “We’re almost through,” Belisarius said.

  “I don’t want it to be a false positive, Bel,” she said with a longing, plaintive note.

  The genetic engineers who had built the Homo quantus for generations had dialed up mathematical and geometric ability and pattern recognition. Capable of tremendous theoretical discoveries, false positives and heart-breaking chimeras nonetheless haunted the Homo quantus.

  What had she seen that had pulled that plaintive note from her?

  He stopped on cold jets again, in a region of the hyperspace where streaks of iridescent green shot through the darkness like veins beneath skin. Belisarius and Cassie rotated ninety degrees across a final axis, bringing into sight a line before them. As they rotated, the line fattened, assuming texture and misty detail, growing into the oval they recognized as one of the mouths of the time gates, hovering dark against a gray, formless background.

  “This should open onto three hundred and forty-eight hours ago,” Belisarius said. “Ready?”

  “I haven’t felt ready for anything,” she said distantly, her fevered breathing becoming more shallow in his earpiece, “but that hasn’t stopped me yet.”

  They drifted through the pastward mouth of the gates. Belisarius’ perceptions narrowed. From eleven dimensions of hyperspace, his world shrank to three dimensions of space and one of time. Despite his Homo quantus nature, palpable relief washed through him. Every Homo quantus would ache to worship at the hyperspacial cathedral, but it was an experience to withstand, not delight in.

  Their helmet lamps lit the hold of The Calculated Risk, as if they’d never left, except now they faced the external bay doors instead of the floor. And they had weight, the third of a gravity he was used to. Belisarius wrapped his glove around a handhold. Three hundred and forty-eight hours in the past, The Calculated Risk sat in the hold of a large Puppet freighter Belisarius had rented at Port Blackmore.

  The Belisarius and Cassie of this time would be asleep, zipped into sleep sacs near the cockpit as they waited for clearance to leave the port. The Saint Matthew of this time would be in the cockpit. Belisarius hooked into the ship’s systems, which would immediately suggest to Saint Matthew that he had a security breach.

  “Saint Matthew, this is Belisarius,” he said. “Don’t set off any alarms, or wake me or Cassie, because you’ll produce a causality violation.”

  “What?” Saint Matthew replied, at the same time that the lights clicked on in the hold. Cameras focused on Cassie and him. Saint Matthew’s automata woke and skittered along the walls, towards the door, then away, then towards the door again. Belisarius waved. Multispectrum cameras swiveled their way.

  “One way to confirm what I’m saying is to check the suit IDs,” Belisarius said. “These identical suits should be in the locker.”

  Long moments of silence dragged out. Then a long-suffering sigh sounded in their ear pieces.

  “Good morning, Mister Arjona,” Saint Matthew grumbled.

  “You aren’t asking me for more proof of who I am?” Belisarius asked.

  “No one else would do this to me,” the AI said.

  “It’s a mark of our friendship,” Belisarius said.

  “I won’t be party to a causality violation,” Saint Matthew said tersely.

  “After all this is done, you could become the patron saint of time travelers, not just the patron saint of banks.”

  “That’s not funny!” Saint Matthew said. “What are you doing? Are you from the past or future? Wait! I take that back. Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me anything!”

  “We won’t. Cassie and I just need to get out of here and into the Free City. Can you help?”

  “We’re still on the wreckage of the Free City port,” Saint Matthew said.

  “Great. You can open a hatch for us, somewhere, right?” Belisarius asked.

  “If it gets you farther
away, I can get one of my automata to open something for you.”

  “We’ll get out of your hair.”

  “Very funny,” the AI replied. The bald head of Caravaggio’s Saint Matthew shone as a hatch opened at the stern of the hold.

  “Thank you, Saint Matthew,” Cassie said.

  “Good luck,” the AI said with the tone of someone looking to close the door quickly.

  Belisarius and Cassie stepped to the hatch and peeked into the big hold. The Calculated Risk was just a small part of the cargo in the big cylindrical freighter. Iron beams, finished steel plates, aluminum plating, cabling, and satellite struts filled the hold, as well as two small tugboats. Belisarius and Cassie climbed out and closed the hatch behind them.

  A hundred and eighty meters away, on the far side of the hold beside an emergency outer hatch, one of Saint Matthew’s spidery automata signaled them with a flashing red light. The disapproving face of Caravaggio’s Saint Matthew bloomed in miniature over the automaton. Belisarius and Cassie moved along the webbing that held The Calculated Risk in place, past stacks of beams. By the time they reached the automaton, the hatch was open and Saint Matthew’s glower had deepened.

  “We get it, Saint Matthew,” Belisarius said.

  The view beyond was ugly. The normal chaos of the port had been blown to pieces. Above them, where once the mouth of the Puppet Axis had opened into a cavernous space of cleanly-chopped ice bristling with gantries, bays, doorways and cannons, all under the umbrella of immense armored doors, the points of stars now shone in a black sky. Lines of scorched black or shining pink-white criss-crossed the walls of the port from the Axis all the way to the surface. Layers of weapons were melted or buried in sudden flows of ice, or simply incinerated. The observation and passenger waiting areas of the port gaped like empty egg shells.