by Liz Harmer
“You talked to Zahra this afternoon?”
“She’s got questions, and, frankly, so do I.”
“I love it when you are frank,” Doors said. “But don’t forget, also, that curiosity killed the cat.”
Did curiosity really kill the cat? had been one of Doors’ favorite slogans, one of his own additions to the ad campaigns. Brandon’s face was warm, his feet prickly with discomfort. “Did it?” The man didn’t mean a thing he said. “Curiosity built the world.”
“True. Okay. We’ll agree to disagree.” Doors spoke casually, as though nothing were at stake.
A series of shrieks and hollers rang out, then a conga line formed and began to snake around the table.
“This is fucking beautiful,” Doors said.
Brandon nodded. Zahra, at her nearby table, nodded back at him, as though to encourage his conversation with Doors.
“I’ll go in the next group,” Brandon said. “You’ll put me in the group.”
“What if I need you here?”
“I want to see it for myself.”
“You want Zahra to see you as a hero.”
“Maybe.”
“We’ll talk about this later,” Doors said. “Get up. Get up.” He raised his hands in his conjuring way, as though a touch-free screen were within range, and a few more people lifted out of their seats. Suzanne broke from the conga line and took Doors’ arm and the two of them cha-cha-chaed away.
* * *
—
Back when Brandon still had some influence over Zahra, she had told him that thirst was the reason people believed in God. Desire doesn’t go away. And thirst was more primitive than any other desire. You can’t make water.
“Doors’ worst nightmare,” Brandon said. “To imagine that there is anything he cannot reproduce.”
“Doors doesn’t have nightmares,” Zahra said. “It’s what makes him dangerous.”
“Doors knows his limitations.”
She had snorted at this. “You can’t create a thing like port and not have it go to your head. His ego is untrustworthy now, if it ever wasn’t. Every great leader, inventor and CEO has been a little psychotic. Certainly delusional.”
Brandon resisted her ideas about Doors, but a germ of suspicion was worse than a seed. It spread before you could root it out or deprive it of water.
“Doors probably thinks,” she said, “that he could make water.”
Brandon had shaken his head. One of the first things you asked if you were studying Classics and Philosophy is how to be certain that anything was real. “Maybe we’re brains in vats,” Brandon said, referring to a famous thought experiment. His favourite, the problem of not being able to know whether things were real. This was also the favourite of his Matrix-loving, then Matrix-hating geek friends at Yale. Brandon had always thought people were, sort of, brains in vats: brains seated in the fluid of the body, joysticking the limbs and face around from some deep and inner place that couldn’t quite see itself. Doors had said that eventually tech would come full circle and return to biology, and that what we thought of as biology was just some other nerd’s sophisticated tech from a far-gone past.
Zahra was, in those days, still inclined to kiss him. She did so, luxuriously, and he put his hand on the fine smooth line of her jaw. The kiss, the fact of her body: had they been lies, too? “The question is,” she had said, “are we safer with Doors or through the port?”
“Do I want to be here?” he asked himself now, after midnight, the party still booming and chugging its muffled way through the layers of glass as he made his way back to the archive. Going over the notes again would surely confirm that he’d overreacted, seen nothing at all. There would be no mysterious circumstances.
In the darkened stairwell, Brandon knocked into Suzanne. Silvery moonlight coming through the outer windows illuminated her fetal-curled body pushed up against the wall of the third-floor landing.
“Why aren’t you at the party?” He sat down next to her, awkward and unfamiliar despite their several nights of intimacy.
“I don’ party,” she said.
“Kind of seems like you do.”
“Immalacholic, Peter. Peter, I don drink.”
“Brandon. And I was drinking with you yesterday. And you’re drinking right now.”
“Onedayatatime.”
Darkness surrounded the buildings. The outer glass was soundproof, but he put his ear to it anyway, thinking that he might hear the hoot or howl of something out there in the ever-expanding wild.
“I’ll help you to your room,” he said.
She grunted. He lifted her by the armpits to standing and then hoisted her over his shoulder.
“Yerstrongerthanyoulook, Peter,” she moaned into his ear, as he lifted his heavy feet up one stair and then another.
“Brandon.”
“BrandonBrandonBrandon. I bet you like it. Like this. Caveman.”
He flopped up a stair, up another stair, Suzanne’s dead weight pinning him down. Was there a woman in Stable who wasn’t pretty and fit and of reproductive age? Was that, too, part of Doors’ plan? He finally got her to her room and tapped it open with the card he found in her back pocket.
No, not all the women. Sandra, he counted, Becky and Georgia: all grandparents. Plus married couples, dozens of children.
“Thisprettymuchexactlylikecollege.” Suzanne slumped into her bunk.
“Only nerdier.” Brandon went to the window and winked her blinds closed, though no one was out there. “It’s like some nerd’s wet dream.”
On the bed, Suzanne muttered and moaned. “Kiss me,” she said. “Caveman.”
He stood above her. Her eyes were closed, her mouth moving soundlessly. “Good night, Suzanne.” He shrouded her in a thin blanket and then stepped into the hallway, ensuring the door was locked behind him, just like a gentleman.
Chapter
7
THE INVENTORS
Port was never supposed to succeed.
It wasn’t even supposed to make a difference to the decline of the age. But the last breaths of the gasping economy had been accompanied by a sudden surge in product development. This was mainly because of funding from a government that was finally terrified. The climate had once again become an enemy, as though a pantheon of angry gods had arrived to punish man for his—not hubris, but stupidity.
PINA had been trying to buy rights to any technology that might save the world. Technologies to make Mars livable were the most exciting ones. More depressingly, many people had concluded that the world could not be saved except by drastic cuts to population. Some fanatics had reintroduced the language of eugenics, but this was forbidden inside PINA. Famous for his humanitarian-environmentalism, Doors had his employees’ e-mails and phones tracked, and people were fired or given sensitivity training upon discovery of keywords like weed out or sterilize or higher IQ or better genes or even overpopulation. That this process of selecting the bad seeds in the PINA population resembled eugenics in analogy (though not in fact) was not, according to Doors, ironic. Praise poured out in media headlines: “Albrecht Doors Heroically Stands Up Against Eugenics” and “PINA Helmsman Cares About Your Future” and, with less flourish, “Company Not Population, Says Famous CEO.”
Doors was reluctant to be called a CEO, with its almost universal connotation, by then, of corruption and laziness. He protested that he had not grown slovenly with success; there were no concubines feeding him grapes. His still-sharp genius was behind early prototypes of the CarbOskin, designed for plugging your PINAphone or knockoff directly into your skin, where it would use stored caloric energy to charge; and the BioBark, which inhaled carbon dioxide and converted it to energy. In retrospect, Doors said, the apocalypse could have happened a hundred different ways: aside from the many climate-related possibilities, people in their abundant stupidity could have replaced trees with BioBark. Or the overproduction of CarbOskin, instead of solving the obesity epidemic might have caused peopl
e to drastically over-farm. What had happened with port had been the best of all possible outcomes. This Doors proclaimed with practiced optimism.
And what had happened happened only because of that optimism. Not everyone in those days believed in the multiverse. Not everyone, not even the physicists, agreed that overlapping universes or dimensions, or whatever you might call them, explained quantum behaviour. And physicists sometimes got tangled up in the names for things, the precise definitions; this is what allowed Doors to step in. Doors didn’t just think; he acted. He tried things before the math was worked out. He was not concerned with nuances, such as whether to designate certain masses as planets or debris. So he took what little he needed to know about quantum particles and dazzled with ideas. He was known to wax on about how quantum particles, these smaller-than-microscopic furballs, behaved so strangely: they seemed to communicate with one another from enormous distances; they could be in two places at once. When delivering a talk he raved over the possibilities that these paradox-exploding particles represented: everything was random, and nothing was.
“The other scientists are in a childish snit, wringing their hands, Brandon,” Doors said backstage, after he was done. “But I know we can make a quantum computer. Everyone wants to prove things. But the more interesting question is what this might mean about reality. What it might mean if the quantum world is real, and we are a projection. If it is real, and we are not.”
Unlike so many others, Brandon had never feared the blaze in Doors’ eyes, or the obsession that led Doors to live at the PINA offices instead of in his mansion on the coast, where he might have been throwing Gatsbyesque parties with all the luminaries of the time.
One night, as the story went, alone in his office in the expanse of buildings that was very much like a compound, Doors was conducting an invisible orchestra with his touch-free keyboard—(“the elegance of it, Brandon!”)—and had taken several hits of high-grade ADHD meds, when the meaning of his name hit him. Doors. He was surrounded by prototypes, by a thin arch shaped out of CarbOskin and BioBark that he had, a few days earlier in a fit of whimsy, combined. At first the three-foot high arch had throbbed a little, as an aroused body does, he thought, responding and rising to touch, and then not much had happened for a while. Doors sat in his office, baroque organ music pounding out of speakers, until he noticed, suddenly, that the prototype was communicating with him. He was confronted with an ancient problem: Was it inside my head, that voice I heard; or did it come from without? He dwelt on this even as he considered the command, the urging idea: So lay another screen along it. He sat there with the touch-free screens at his bidding, awaiting input for the commands he’d been building toward all afternoon—and those screens, too, were throbbing expectantly, in their way. So we lay another screen along it, he thought, dropping commands into the touch-free keys. Doors had always been the kind of chef to mix first, measure never. Doors. He was thinking A.I. He was thinking biotic A.I. He was thinking: here it is, maybe, here it comes, the singularity. The A.I. is beautiful, and it can speak, and it will be our glory. And then again, he was thinking doors.
He went to one of the labs with his not-yet-fully-formed-thought (Doors, Doors, Doors), humming, singing, jumping down the stairs three at a time. He grabbed mice and rats from the experiments, thus ruining those experiments. Running back to his office, box of rodents under his arm, he pointed at the surveillance cameras blinking at him on their thin necks. “We’re not scientists, we’re inventors, dammit! Science has gotten us exactly nowhere! I’ll get us somewhere. Doors will bail you all out!” He said these words aloud, maybe, or maybe he thought them. Thoughts were streaming through his mind, now. He had fucking solved the problem of energy use, and he knew that the universe was multiple, even infinitely multiple, and so of course, of course! Now the machine had the ability to generate its own power, the converting adapting power coupled with the quantum knowledge, and all you had to do was make the machine biological—already it knew how to think—and what was a person but a member of a cognitive system who obeyed algorithims and believed in its own uniqueness—here it was, the solution to all problems—
Mouse 1 scurried around in circles under the arch-shaped prototype for a few minutes.
“Ah, you are confused, my good rodent?” Then, while Doors was watching, it disappeared. Vanished. No trace. He touchlessly tapped in commands, searching, and got the same result. Mouse DNA: zero. Mouse DNA: zero.
No trace? “Speak to me,” he said, and heard nothing. Tried another mouse and a rat, and then, faced with the enormity of his discovery and his certainty about what had happened, he stood up and went to the window. Moonlit greenery spread out endlessly toward the far-off lights of the city. The universe was so vast that the ocean was by comparison a puddle, a droplet, nothing. He looked back at the shimmering skin-thing he’d sculpted. A tree in some new and wonderful garden. He nursed his high and turned it over in his mind. Being alone with knowledge no one else had was the best thing there was.
He had made a door.
* * *
—
“But it doesn’t make any sense.”
Doors called his (then) group of nine together for an emergency meeting the next morning. He was still wild-eyed, pupils barely points, irises oceanic in their blue. He was dishevelled and smelled of the splash of mint cologne he’d used to poorly mask his body odour, and now he swung around to stare at Benji, the one who’d spoken. Benji with his builder’s body, biceps and pecs swelling pouch-like beneath his thin v-neck tee.
“It doesn’t make sense, Al,” Benji said.
“Al? Is that what you’re calling me now?
“Pardon me, um, sir. But how could the COs and the BB combine with TFT to make, well—what? A portal to another universe?” Benji gulped.
“My God, Benji! My God! You want this to make sense? I am telling you the singularity—I am telling you that what you think of as sense is already obsolete!” Doors collapsed into his chair and buried his face in his hands for a full five minutes, during which the others attempted to communicate via barely audible whispers, shrugs and nose-wiggling.
“I’ve never seen him like this,” Brandon whispered to Zahra. They all worried about his drug use and his delusions.
Zahra widened her eyes.
Benji shook his head, then shrugged.
Finally, Dawn, in one of her power-suits and power-bobs of yore, said hesitantly, “Well, if this is true, it could be the invention of the millennium. I can’t think of another thing more potentially world-changing.”
“The wheel, fire, mathematics, air travel, rocket ships,” said Benji, counting on his thick, squat fingers.
“Glad you mentioned those,” Doors said, finally lifting his head. “Because fire and mathematics, those weren’t inventions, right? Those were discoveries. Did not a god named Prometheus come out of the heavens and hand the fire right to us? If you think of a door to another universe being an accidental discovery, then it makes perfect sense. If you think maybe this is a gift? If the universe is a multiverse, perhaps there must be access points? Reality is flimsy.”
“But we’re not saying,” said Benji. He and Dawn were the only two willing to contest Doors back then. (“That’s Benji’s value,” Doors had said to Brandon on more than one occasion.) “Surely we’re not saying that this portal just happens to be in the middle of your office, right? It can’t be place-dependent, if—if—we’re saying this is happening. Because the odds of that are staggeringly small.”
“How do we test it?” Dawn said.
“I did test it. I tested it fifty times last night. Mice, rats and then a raccoon vanished whole.”
“How’d you find a raccoon?” Brandon laughed.
Doors winked at him.
Brandon had the feeling of being at a museum after closing. Most of the programmers wouldn’t be in for several hours. There were long shadows on the still-dewy turf of the quad.
“Then all we know is that they vanished, right?
” Dawn said.
Doors stared at her. Brandon knew he hated her getups, the high-heels and blazers, which he thought too prim and old-fashioned for PINA “Yes. And?”
“Well, we don’t know where they went.”
Doors walked to the window. “We have our best guess.”
“Other worlds is our best guess?” Benji said.
Doors glared at him, a look that Brandon knew, from experience, meant, I’m the genius, remember. Don’t fuck with me.
“Another possibility is that they were destroyed,” Dawn said.
“Destroyed as in killed? Are you suggesting that I murdered fifty innocent mammals last night?”
“Fifty?” Joni gasped.
“He’s hysterical,” Brandon barely whispered. They stood around the table, bodies still, as though worried that movement would catch the eye of a predator.
“Listen, you fuckers. Without me, there would be no PINAphone, no CarbOskin. I mean, there are some problems with the CarbOskin. So it needs to be retooled. My point is: You need to trust me when I say I can see what is happening here. Vision. This is about vision. Which you either have or you do not.”
Brandon couldn’t help his laughter. Doors was a drunk uncle, or he was a genius. It was contagious, and soon they were all bent over, chuckling and giggling, squeezing out tears, cramping in the gut. What if! What if this were true!
“Listen, you fuckers,” Brandon said in his best imitation of Doors’ accent. Part of Brandon’s role as good puppy was to keep things fun, to keep them light. Doors’ eyes alighted on each of the nine in turn, but he did not correct them as they grew more hysterical.
“I can’t stop laughing,” Dawn gulped, whispered. “Why can’t I stop?”
Doors left the room with a wave of the arm that meant they were to follow, which they did, falling into line behind him, still after-shocking with laughter, which died into strange somber quiet as they stood silent in the elevator, Doors’ odour filling that small space, daring them to wince. They marched silently down the hall to Doors’ office and piled in, surrounding his immense worktable.
