The Private Life of Elder Things

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  So, being a female academic who had displayed, I was told, more than a little untoward arrogance, of course my career fell into a spiral. Not dismissed, no, but overlooked, talked about, made the butt of all those little jokes, the way people do. Not so different to the way things were before, to be honest, but now they had ammunition. And the Rigolo Transformation, that goldmine of useless equations, sat idle and gathered metaphorical dust.

  One by one my crackpot supporters fell away, leaving me on my much-preferred own. I got on with my life, with my lessened prospects and straitened resources. What happened next was Schochtauer.

  I had not had an email from him in four months. I had forgotten to delete them on sight. And when he contacted me again, it was with something different. He sent me a problem. I looked at it briefly – the numbers alone had earned the right to my time. It was nonsense, so unbalanced and off it looked like a first-year student’s work. I deleted the mail and moved on. Next week he re-sent the problem with the line “Show me the R Transformation”.

  Perhaps I felt flattered that anyone still remembered. The mathematical world had moved on, after all, even if the name Anne Rigolo was still a byword for levity in certain academic fields.

  And so I indulged Albrecht Shochtauer. Even after a few months the equations remained second nature to me, like a tune I’d heard long before, but could always bring to mind. I sent Shochtauer’s numbers into Rigolo space and solved his equation, and I sent him the answer both ways: the perfect solution in my notation, and the nonsense it became when you returned it to the realm of numbers we knew.

  The next week he sent me another, and another, as though I was playing some one-sided game of postal chess. I solved them for him. In truth, the simple act of manipulating the numbers gave me pleasure, just as I imagine a pianist must feel, playing a complex piece with skill.

  He called me within hours of the third solution. He had my mobile number, which I give out to almost nobody. His voice was rough with smoking, still with a little touch of Austrian to it. He told me he represented interests who were impressed with my work. They wanted to meet me. They would fly me to their offices at their expense.

  I wondered what misrepresentations he could have made to his employers. “You’ve seen the work of Doctor Han…”

  “My employers aren’t interested in Doctor Han,” came Shochtauer’s voice. “They are interested in you.” There was travel laid on. There was compensation for my time. Everything was very neat. I didn’t believe it; it might be some final prank by the world of mathematics, to put down the woman who had dared to overstep the line. In the absence of adequate data I had a hundred unwelcome scenarios.

  But by then I knew Albrecht Schochtauer, by vicarious reputation. He was not well regarded in mainstream mathematics. He would not be serving as the front man for a practical joke played by the orthodoxy. I had read about him not in peer-reviewed journals but in sensationalist rags that dealt in ancient astronauts and theories about the antiquity of the pyramids. Schochtauer’s field had been to take the proportions and the measurements of ancient wonders, or the numbers and patterns found in old folk tales, and spin that straw into mathematical equations. While respectable mathematicians discovered the real secrets of the universe, Schochtauer prostituted his poor numbers in the name of some elder secret maths “known by many names to the people of antiquity”. His name still found its way into mathematical journals, but only as a greater joke than even I had aspired to.

  So I told him no. Of course I did. I had a career to rebuild, and being associated with a man like Schochtauer would do me no favours.

  The next morning a fresh email was awaiting me. It contained seventeen scanned pages, equations in Schochtauer’s execrable handwriting. They set out a sub-transformation in Rigolo space, a small but elegant expansion of my useless theory. The numbers were beautiful. I guessed even then that they were not his, but that wasn’t the point.

  When he called later that day, I was already packed.

  *

  Schochtauer’s employers spared no expense. A helicopter picked me up from Providence and flew me north. Schochtauer himself was the pilot. He was a paunchy, balding man with a black spade of a beard and he welcomed me with a degree of bonhomie I felt quite misplaced. Our destination was a building in the hills beyond Montpelier, Vermont. The lights of the city were visible from the helipad when we landed, but this place – some corporate retreat, I guessed – was set well away from any other structure. Once the blades had stopped and the engine noise had fallen into a disappointed whine and died, the night air was surprisingly quiet. I could hear only a distant whisper of traffic from Montpelier itself, and the dark, wooded slopes around us were deathly silent.

  On the pad, Schochtauer continued with his over-familiar manner, trying to take my arm, which I wouldn’t give to him, and then making a grab for my hand, which I kept out of reach. At last, with a reinforcement of his smile, he resorted to broad gestures towards the interior of the building.

  “Why two helipads?” I asked him, for as well as the roof-space we had landed on, there was a higher platform, a tower at least another two stories up, and unlit. Shochtauer made some comment about their being busy sometimes, with comings and goings. There was no stair, no rungs that would allow access to that height from where we were. It was just a dark square cut from the stars.

  We descended into a windowless realm of sterile-looking office rooms and corridors. Everything was very white and surgically clean, and un-peopled. It was night, and perhaps the staff were not simply in their beds, and that the company policy tended towards the Spartan. Still, the utter abandonment of the place began to weigh on me, despite my normal heedlessness. Our footsteps sounded hollowly, the echoes rolling away until they merged with a faint and omnipresent background hum. Mazes of cubicles lay vacant, cable-ends showing where terminals had never been installed. Even the security desk we had passed when we entered had been unstaffed, the screens showing view after view of empty spaces. This was valuable corporate real estate, but it seemed to be all for outside show, as if Schochtauer’s employers had bought the place but were yet to find a use for the interior beyond bringing Providence mathematicians in to interview.

  I was taken to a boardroom with a big screen on one wall, and mirrors on another. There was no other human being present, but I guessed those mirrors would look like windows from the other side. More cloak and dagger, but I knew that big companies could be very secretive when money was involved. I was assuming they had found some way of monetising the Rigolo Transformation, or why would they want me?

  Schochtauer explained that I was going to be tested on the applications of my transformation. He relentlessly called me “Miss Rigolo”, and I just as relentlessly corrected him to “Doctor”. I also explained that Rigolo space had no applications.

  “My employers beg to differ.” Schochtauer’s smile was very wide and white.

  I found that I was profoundly uncomfortable. Partly it was just his over-familiarity and condescension, although that was hardly a novel experience when dealing with a male colleague. The room was not small, but without windows it was claustrophobic, and there was a curious vibration that I ascribed to the air conditioning. It seemed to resonate at an uncomfortable frequency within me, producing an emotional response that was entirely reasonless, but also entirely negative: a dread which bypassed the rational centres of the mind entirely. I had difficulty concentrating.

  But then Schochtauer began his tests, throwing up equations on the screen and asking me how I would go about this business or that in Rigolo space. They were not questions of his invention, I could tell, and I was far from sure at first that he actually understood the answers himself. I acquitted myself admirably, dealing swiftly with each problem. My very terseness seemed to become a challenge to Schochtauer, whose attitude devolved into the adversarial. He began challenging my answers, requiring that I showed how I arrived at each. He came very close to hinting that the entire business of
Rigolo space was a fraud. I pointed out that I was no longer claiming anything more for it.

  Then the other voice broke in.

  It came from the screen, which had bloomed into grey static. It was not a woman’s voice, though I was intended to think of it in that way. It reminded me of nothing so much as that voice they gave to mobile phones: those calm, assured and artificial tones. Schochtauer’s corporate overlords were being extremely cautious with me. They did not even want me to hear them speak.

  “Doctor Rigolo,” the screen addressed me. “Forgive Doctor Schochtauer. He is having difficulty following your reasoning.”

  Schochtauer bristled, but I was far more interested in his employer just then.

  “We, however, understand,” the voice informed me. There was a backing of static that rose and fell behind the words, not matching their smooth cadence but following a weird rhythm all of its own, a buzzing interference. Its pulse rose and fell against the background drone of the air conditioning, and I felt that the interaction of the two was not random, but guided by some subtle arithmetical pattern. Numbers, it all came down to numbers.

  “In your proof of the P vs. NP within your mathematical space,” that pleasant machine voice said, “can you elaborate on the effects of incremental reductions of the quantity r?”

  I could and did, at some length, discovering that the proof could be salvaged by adjustment of several other factors. They followed up with three similar questions, each pushing the capabilities of Rigolo space further. Shochtauer shuffled and fidgeted, but of my unseen interlocutor I sensed only an abiding patience. I realised I was grinning, because I was learning more about my own theory through their questions.

  “Examine these equations,” the voice told me. “How would you determine e?”

  The new display showed me something that felt like real world physics already transformed into Rigolo notation. By then I was back in love with my numbers and my own cleverness, and I did not stop to think that none of my peers had really been able to implement the transformation quite as elegantly as this – which is to say as elegantly as I. And the world of international mathematics is not so very large. I knew all the minds on a level with mine. So who was the wizard behind the curtain?

  I worked swiftly through their calculations, turning the numbers this way and that. The problem was an order of magnitude greater than my previous outings in Rigolo space, but that was just meat and drink to me. I had their solution, and in reaching it I had a sudden flash of what the original equation might represent. The abstract quanta that I had been working with could be descriptions of time and space, distance and speed … travel at a speed incalculable in ordinary mathematics or quotidian physics.

  I presented my solution to them, deciding it was not my place to ask questions. Besides, it didn’t matter. Even if I had reached a theoretical solution for travel beyond the speed of light, that carriage would turn back into a pumpkin as soon as the numbers underwent the reverse transformation.

  The voice did not sound impressed, of course, but it told me I had done well. Shochtauer broke in, then, saying, that was enough of the test, and I should hurry to get back to the helipad for my return journey. Noyes would show me the way.

  I opened my mouth to ask what he meant and started as I saw another man in the doorway, the first in all the time we had been here. This Noyes was a tall, lean man, seeming around my own age and younger than Schochtauer, but he carried himself gingerly, as though he was ill at ease with his own body or far, far older than he looked. A sense of years was about his eyes, too. They stared at me and through me, like a veteran whose experiences had half-severed him from the world. He wore a brown suit of oddly antique cut, or possibly it was just some recent retro fashion I was unaware of.

  I had the impression that Noyes and Schochtauer didn’t like each other, but the newcomer showed me a quaintly old-fashioned courtesy. His voice, when he spoke, was hoarse and rough, as though he hadn’t used it much in a while. I could sympathise. I could work for days without feeling the need to exchange a word with another human being.

  “You’re very lucky, Doctor Rigolo,” he told me. “They don’t show this kind of interest in just anything. When they make you an offer, you should know it’ll be like nothing you’ve ever known.”

  I was going to make a sarcastic remark to the effect that probably every corporation felt that way about its benefits package, but the words seemed trite. Instead, I tried a very frank question. “Dr Noyes, have I been speaking with an artificial intelligence of some kind?”

  “It’s just Mr Noyes,” he corrected me mildly, with a wry smile that suggested he had been privy to Schochtauer’s dropping of my own title. “And no, Doctor. Intelligence, yes, but nothing artificial about it.” Only later did I consider just how unsurprising he had found the question.

  We arrived at the security desk, still with its empty chair, and Noyes went up to ensure the helicopter was ready for takeoff. I stared at the screens as they showed office after vacant office, and then abruptly I saw Shochtauer, back in the boardroom I had come from. The curious thing was that he was engaged in a discussion – an argument even – but with nobody. He was not looking at the dark screen nor the false mirrors, and he was … oddly placed, pushed almost into a corner, as though his antagonist was face to face with him and dominating the room. At one point he even threw up his hands as though anticipating a blow, and yet the camera saw only him.

  I examined the desk’s controls and found how to bring up the volume so that sound joined image. Schochtauer was saying, “Her transformation made her the mockery of the academic world. She’s a joke. You’re wasting your time with her.”

  It hurt to hear it said so bluntly, even though I knew it already. I reached out to kill the sound, and the other voice broke in and froze me.

  It was not the polite Siri-like voice that had tested me, but simply all that background noise, that droning murmur of static and buzz, twisted in some way to form words. It was not an artificial intelligence, because any mind made by man would have a voice like ours, if it had a voice at all. What I heard was a mash of audible vibrations in some awful conspiracy to form intelligible language.

  It said: You do not grasp her work. She does not grasp what her work truly describes. For too long we have made do with those who have only a partial grasp of Sothic space. We have had to dress our instructions in the language of ritual and religion, invocation and spell, because that was the only doorway to the true universe that you could understand. But she—

  And then Noyes was clattering back down from the helipad and, spasmodically, I shut off the volume and smiled at him, and went meekly back to the helicopter with a hundred questions. The pilot who took me home made no attempt at conversation.

  *

  And then I went back to work. I would like to say that the whole Montpelier episode was behind me, but instead I was waiting for a call. I had, I thought, impressed Shochtauer’s secretive employers. Perhaps they were military; perhaps there was some billionaire eccentric behind the screen. Whoever it was, they had an appreciation of numbers that spoke to me – more than the daily derision of my colleagues, more than Schochtauer’s blustering. For the first few days I practically waited by the phone for them to contact me. And yet no call came. I know why, now, but at the time I felt only bitter. Perhaps it had all been an elaborate joke after all.

  Two weeks after my trip I dreamt of that buzzing, droning voice, the weird tones that had rebuked Shochtauer over the security desk speaker. It told me that all the world and space and numbers I knew were contained within Rigolo space, and that the failure of my notation to translate to the real was not a fault of my mathematics, but merely showed the crippling limitations of regular matter and the few dimensions that were allowed to me. In my dream I saw the great coils of String Theory like a worm burrowing through the fabric of the universe; I saw the worlds that exist within the kernels of black holes and the radiance that awaits on the far side of the light b
arrier. I woke in the small hours, realising that the buzzing voice was just the vibration of my phone at my bedside.

  That calmly artificial voice was there, when I answered.

  “Doctor Rigolo,” it said, “would you like to travel?”

  I made some sound in reply.

  “Doctor Rigolo, we have a proposal for you.” I could hear the wax and wane of that buzzing static behind the urbane tones. “We value your affinity with numbers. In all the world there is no other who can manipulate what you call Rigolo space with your facility. For this, we invite you to join us.”

  “In Montpelier?” I asked, still half asleep.

  “At first. Doctor Rigolo, what is important to you?”

  “Numbers,” I said immediately.

  “What of your work? Your colleagues? Your home?” The buzzing swelled suddenly, as though I was hearing alien thoughts behind the human words. “What would you leave behind to pursue the truth of your numbers?”

  I was confused. “Are you offering me a job? Then I’ll need to…”

  “This is not a job,” that calm voice said. “We are offering you the chance to travel. We are offering you the chance to realise your dreams.”

  And I was desperately afraid, because those dreams were real and vibrant in my mind still, just as had been the dream that brought the Rigolo Transformation to me. Right then, I would have believed that the voice knew exactly where my sleeping mind had been.

  “No,” I whispered. I am ashamed now, but fear got the better of reason, for just that moment.

  But then the voice said, “We will show you how to make your transformations real.”

  Why did I believe the voice? Because it fit with everything else. It was the only explanation for why they were so interested in a mathematical curio the rest of the world had written off long before – and yet that remained a stone about my neck. I would always be the woman who had become the laughing stock of the world for my phony theory. Unless it wasn’t. Unless the Rigolo Transformation really was the key to the gates of the universe.