Infinity's Illusion

by Richard Farr

  He tried again to explain how it had felt, then gave up. He remembered his dad’s old teacher, Derek Partridge, dismissing the idea that language existed to convey information. “A cliché. Our electronic toys have made us fixate on this idea of facts, information, data. Pah! Language didn’t evolve to convey what’s objectively out there. It evolved to convey what it feels like, subjectively, in here. Analogy and metaphor describing emotion, that’s the fundamental mechanism.” OK, Professor—but how’s that supposed to work when there’s nothing in any ordinary person’s experience to which you can make a comparison? When you’re talking about Anabasis, you might as well try to finish the sentence Being born is like—, or Watching your mother’s body fall from a mountain, when it’s you who cut the rope, is like—. Or even (was this, in effect, what had happened to him?) Having a conversation with God while he jingles His keys and shows you around the Infinity Suite is like—. No. Words were built with specific experiences in mind. There were no words to describe encountering everything and nothing at the same time.

  And oh, by the way, another question. Why wouldn’t this “memory” of what Partridge had said keep still in his mind? Why did it keep jumping around? It reminded him of the optical illusion with the cube—

  (“Necker cube,” Morag said. “You can’t just see it; you can only see it as a cube with the nearest face tipped down to the left, or as a cube with the nearest face tipped up to the right. It’s like the—”

  “Thanks. Thanks. Got it.”)

  —it reminded him of the optical illusion with the cube, because this was definitely Derek Partridge, a tall, skinny, elderly Englishman, his white hair flattened sideways by the wind, standing in a field next to a telescope, but the words were also, or equally, or alternatively, being spoken by a Japanese man, a man Daniel was certain he’d never met, in a rose garden.

  Who that was, Daniel found out by accident.

  When he first arrived in the caves of the I’iwa, and gave them Rosko’s printouts, which analyzed the patterns in the Phaistos Disks, they fell on the information like starving people on food. Their underground ziggurat, the great stone computer in which their own moving bodies were the software, became a frantic beehive of activity—a hundred or more of the strange pale figures at one time moving from place to place among the twelve levels like priests in the world’s most intricate ceremony. For thousands of years they’d been calculating, calculating, trying to find a way around the fact that parts of their ancient puzzle were missing. Now they had what they needed. By the time Morag recovered, the thing was done, and the result, the final output, was a single mass of symbols that the I’iwa would only refer to—if he understood their fluttering, all-body sign language correctly—as the Number.

  They’d written it up on a wall so perfectly smoothed that it looked like the original of all the world’s blackboards. They showed it to him proudly, hopefully. But it was in a notation as opaque to him as the allegedly Minoan “writing” that had puzzled his father, all those years ago, on the original Phaistos Disk. For Morag, naturally, it was a different story. She let out a yelp of glee, rubbed her hands, and asked for food and water.

  She spent almost twenty straight hours in front of it, muttering furiously. Then she said, “Ah, got it. Got it at last. Dead brilliant.” Then she ate a few bites, slept briefly, and spent another twenty hours muttering even more furiously while scribbling notes on the backs of Rosko’s original printouts.

  Even from his father, Daniel would have demanded an explanation, but then he had never quite trusted his father, and he trusted Morag absolutely. He forced himself to be patient.

  The I’iwa had provided her with a supply of exquisitely fine charcoal sticks. Gradually she began to accumulate, with exaggerated neatness, what appeared to be, yes indeed, a single gigantic number. Rows and columns in a ten-by-ten grid. Fifty pages of them. This was the first:

  1 9 9 7 8 5 2 6 6 6

  9 4 3 1 1 2 7 0 7 8

  1 5 0 6 9 9 4 7 7 9

  8 0 0 8 4 6 3 8 2 7

  2 0 9 5 1 8 3 4 3 0

  9 9 6 6 5 0 5 6 8 5

  3 3 8 6 2 5 2 3 3 4

  0 2 8 3 0 8 9 2 1 2

  2 6 2 9 4 8 9 8 9 3

  6 7 4 5 6 2 1 8 3 5

  “Look,” she said, pointing to the 666 at the end of the first line. “The Number of the Beast!”

  “Scary,” Daniel said flatly. “Only, you told me that if you’re Chinese it’s the number seven you’re supposed to hyperventilate about.”

  “Only half my DNA’s from Shanghai. The other half’s from Inverness. So I have to worry about both. Now be quiet while I check this.”

  He hadn’t thought to ask the I’iwa for drawing materials, but now that they were in front of him, he filched a few of the unused pages and passed the time by sketching some of his fading visions. The ability to draw well, which he’d picked up after Ararat, had not left him.

  “Done,” she said at last. “It’s a password, kind of. Or the key to getting a password, anyway.”

  “A strong password’s fifteen digits. This is five thousand.”

  “Same principle. It’s just that gods lock up their own minds with special care. There’s nothing too complicated about it. Just a very big number. But,” she said, pointing to the explosion of symbols on the wall, “I had to get a grip on the I’iwa’s numerical system. Remember when you saw the original Phaistos Disk in Heraklion? ‘Eighteen and twelve,’ you said. Moment of genius that was, D—the detail none of the experts noticed.”

  Yes, he remembered. Ten years old. Considered not too bright, and bored out of his skull in a Greek museum. But dyslexia had forced him to focus hard on patterns. His father—Professor William Hayden Calder, ancient languages rock star, woo-hoo—had such extreme confidence in his own brilliance (“Interestin’ theoretical possibilities pourin’ outta the man like piss from a feck’n elephant,” as Lorna had said once) that he’d never come within a mile of the truth. But credit where credit is due: when the famous prof’s slow-witted son had pointed out that the pattern didn’t look like a single spiral of thirty symbolic groups, as the books all said, but a horseshoe of twelve units, surrounding a separate spiral of eighteen, he’d said: “That’s clever, Daniel. Very observant. Could be significant.”

  Seven years later, Morag wasn’t inclined to give her mentor much credit. She’d loved Bill Calder passionately, but seen all his flaws too, including a talent for underestimating other people’s contributions. Daniel’s comment had been the key that allowed her to translate the I’iwa’s result. Not ordinary base 10; not binary, as computers preferred. She was prepared for weird, being familiar with the partly base-60 Sumerian system that gave the West its system for angles and minutes. But the I’iwa expressed all numbers as powers—23 was never twenty-three, but was “25 minus 32,” or maybe some other combination—and while every number was in a version of base 12, every power was expressed in a completely separate system, using its own notation, that was in base 18. So Morag had to give Bill this much: all those sessions with him, trying to translate Shul-hura’s cuneiform, was just the training she’d needed.

  Daniel wanted to know what the Number did, and she had no clear answer to that.

  “I don’t know how this works, D. But it’s a weapon. You expect to fight back against gods with maybe a magic spell, aye? Something scratched in runes on the arse of a dragon? Or you go into battle against them using an enchanted elvish battle-ax—one that glows blue in the dark, and never needs sharpening, and all that shite. But our ideas about gods and the supernatural are wrong, D. They were mathematicians, just like us. Digital-upload geeks with a thing about not dying, just like us. And now that we have this, all we need, I’m guessing, is really hairy decryption skills. God I wish Iona was here.”

  “Me too.”

  “Sorry. I just meant—”

  “I know. It’s OK. But I didn’t inherit those skills.”

  That was an understatement. Iona had been a twelve-cylinder mathem
atical genius; his brain, on the other hand, responded to a word like cosine by freezing over like a lake in winter.

  Morag leaned over to give him a hug. That was when she glanced down at his pile of sketches—his attempts to create a record of his visions.

  “Nice. Interesting. Nice. Oh, I like this one. And this—Holy fuck.”

  “What?”

  “Daniel! This is—. How—? Daniel, I don’t understand. This is—”

  It wasn’t one of his better efforts, even. Not much more than a cartoon. The subject was a middle-aged man in an open-necked shirt. Nearly bald. Smiling. You could tell he was Asian.

  “The man in the rose garden,” he said.

  “Whoa. That’s the man in the rose garden? The one you’ve been dreaming about?”

  “Not dreaming,” he said. The mental images, especially of the scene, the place, were exactly like a memory—but he was certain he’d never met the man in the scene. He shrugged, apologetic, unable to make it any clearer. “Hasn’t happened yet. A memory of the future? Anyway, yeah, that’s him. You know him or something?”

  “Remember what I told you about being in Mayo’s office at the Institute, just before we found Carl Bates?”

  “I remember being there. Most of that time’s a fog, but I remember standing in front of a glass board with you.”

  “We found a calculation about information density in quantum systems. Exactly what Iona’s research was about. And there was a crude quantum computer setup too. Mayo wasn’t just ‘studying consciousness.’ He already knew the big fancy computer downstairs could never do the job, that a ‘Route Two’ to immortality would require a totally different technology.”

  “Kit was ignoring us. I remember that.”

  Kit. It was like opening a hatch on a submarine: her brain flooded with images and emotions she was helpless to resist. Kit bored, with her hair flowing down over the edge of the desk. Kit the movie-beautiful super-villain, kicking down the locked door of the room marked “Mech.” Kit chucking up on the floor in front of the slumped body and masklike face of Carl Bates and saying “Sorry for puke.” Later, on the road in Ella’s van, Kit looking into her eyes. Kit lying curled against her, in a sleeping bag in the middle of nowhere. Later still, Kit in the forest, bashed in the head by Mayo’s gun, and falling.

  She blinked and tried to focus again. “I talked to Rosko about why the quantum stuff was significant. He pulled up an explainer video for me. Basically it said that the first person to perfect a quantum computer would become the most powerful person in the world, overnight, because they’d be able to break public key encryption and take over any digital system. Banking software. Military command and control. The whole Interwebs. He said cyber-warfare was the new nuclear weapon.”

  “And?”

  She pointed to the drawing. “The guy in the video was him. Hideo Murakami.”

  “The astrophysicist? The guy with the theory about the—uh—you mentioned it. The Substance?”

  “Substrate,” she said—but other people had started calling it the Murakami Field. Just as the Higgs Field pervaded all of space, and explained why some particles did and some didn’t have mass, the Murakami Field also pervaded all of space, and—according to Murakami—explained why some things did and some things didn’t have consciousness.

  “I’m starting to wish I’d taken him more seriously. ‘The Japanese Einstein,’ someone said.”

  “Crazy hair and a violin?”

  “No, but he looks like he puts his clothes on in too much of a hurry. Quotable too. He said, ‘Matter is the possibility of mind. Or mind is the possibility of matter. Or possibly both.’”

  “So I keep seeing this guy I’ve never met, and it’s clear that I’m meeting him, that I’m telling him something, and—OK, now I know what we have to do. We meet him, that’s all I could see before. But now I see why.” He picked up the stack of charcoal-inscribed sheets. “We’re giving him this. And he tells us what to do with it.”

  Finding him wouldn’t be hard, Morag thought. He taught at Kyoto University, a thousand miles due north of them.

  “So we get out,” Daniel said. “Find Jimmy and Lorna. And Kit—”

  “And Kit. Yes.” She couldn’t bring herself to be realistic, to say Find out what happened to Kit, or Find Kit’s body. There wasn’t time for grieving, not now. “And then we get to an airport, and it’s a couple of hours. No problem.”

  Daniel thought, but didn’t say: It’s going to be harder than that. The Architects’ power worked by the logic of the snowball. Ararat had given them enough new power to re-embody, temporarily at least, and they were coming for everyone now. There would be (had already been?) many more Ararats.

  Eight billion people to save, then. And if Iona was right, then in the past, in many, many other worlds, the Architects had always won.

  PART I: THE WORLD IN FLAMES

  CHAPTER 1

  A SMALL ARMY

  At least the I’iwa had anticipated an attack on the caves, and done what they could to prepare for it. But that was like saying of a Christian sect that they’d prepared for the Second Coming. There might be the brute fact of it, front and center in their narrative, but there was no detail—no infallible sign or official timetable; nothing beyond the certainty that the event was out there, in the deep, dark reaches of the future, arcing down for impact like a comet. So it wasn’t the I’iwa’s elaborately painted mythos that gave them a few minutes’ warning. It was the companion Daniel had brought with him into the caves.

  Dog.

  Evolution had not provided Dog with the capacity to think, exactly. Certainly not the capacity to reason. Its brain had not been empowered—or hindered—by the human craving to abstract the world into symbols. And yet there were ideas there, and connections between them, and what you might call concluding motivations. Above all, there was the exquisite sensitivity to human mood, honed over thousands of years of coevolution, that enabled Dog and its kind to see what humans were feeling, and even intending, often before the humans had grasped it themselves. (Why are they so stupid about themselves, so blind to themselves? This was a question Dog might have formulated, if it had been capable of language. But then, being capable of language would have doomed it to exactly their disabilities.)

  Anyway, the I’iwa were human too, even if they smelled different from the others. Just a different breed, from Dog’s point of view. Their mood had been feverish concentration, shot through with anxiety; they’d been like birds on a lawn, pausing constantly to watch and listen before returning to their machine-frantic pecking. But the mood had reached a tipping point and become fear. And Dog knew, as they did not, that this fear was connected somehow with the new smell, which only Dog’s brilliant nose could detect.

  The smell didn’t belong to the caves. Not bats. Not the fat burning in the lamps either, nor the I’iwa themselves. The only thing it resembled, slightly, was the humans Dog was used to, and belonged to, who called themselves Tainu. But this smell was not Dog’s master, Oma, or his daughter, Isbet, or anyone else from the village.

  Dog was capable of more initiative than humans gave it credit for. Now, seeing them preoccupied, it felt the best thing was to investigate on its own, so it padded swiftly upward along the tunnels.

  Despite the dark, and the passing of weeks, its own scent still lit the trail as clearly as a line of beacons. Up and up it went, exactly the way it had come with Daniel, following an invisible river of molecules. Near the entrance, it found the bodies of two I’iwa. It sniffed and salivated, enjoying the bright metallic smell of blood. But there was danger near, so it suppressed its hunger and hurried on, silent and alert.

  Not far beyond the bodies, among the trees, it found the huddled conference of invaders. A different tribe, it might have said casually, if it had been capable of speech. Or it might have said A small army, just to express the idea that it was a larger group of humans than it had been used to seeing in the village of the Tainu. But this really was a small ar
my. More than fifty people—and there were yet more, scouting the surrounding forest. All dressed in khaki and camo. All equipped with high-tech killing gear. All assembled and paid for by one elderly woman on a mission.

  Dog didn’t know anything about that, and didn’t even know that they’d been sent specifically to hunt for the girl—“to find out what she has learned, and bring her back to me.” Its instincts only ran as far as the fact that these people were a threat. It stood watching them for a while, invisible to them although it was only feet away, weighing them in its mind. Then it ran silently back down the tunnels, as fast as it could, to warn her. But Morag couldn’t make out what the animal was so excited about. It was the I’iwa—and Daniel, because he had had more time than Morag to study the I’iwa’s fantastically elaborate artwork—who guessed what the pleading eyes and insistent whimpering meant.

  Your enemies have arrived, Stripe signed. They will try to capture you, and our knowledge with you.

  Yes, Daniel signed, I understand. He remembered the specific images, inside the ziggurat, that Stripe was referring to: fire, explosions, I’iwa figures clutching their throats as if suffocating. At the time, Stripe had only said, This is in the future. The two of you must leave before it happens. But it was too late for that: the future had arrived.

  When they received confirmation from a surviving lookout, the I’iwa sprang into action with a grim, calm efficiency. In groups of three and four they radiated out along the tunnels. Others blocked stairways, or rolled out sections of the barbed netting that they used to harvest bats, or began to erase certain parts of the images and calculations that covered the tunnel walls.

  While all this activity was going on below ground, the I’iwa’s best, most agile hunters slipped out of the caves by various secret routes and spread out into the forest. Pale forms moving from tree to tree, half seen and half imagined. The Ghost People.