Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

  “I still don’t see what you people are talking about,” Kate said, and then the President’s visage changed again: this time both of his eyes turned purple and then, as if to prove a point, a third eye opened up in the middle of his forehead, colored a gleaming goldenrod. “And if we got that right,” he said, “and I think we can all agree that America got that right, then why couldn’t we do what no country on earth had done before us, and get empire right?”

  “I told you,” said Dennis.

  “Yeah, okay, oh em gee,” Kate said.

  “It’s the TV,” said Philip. “The ’shopping chip in the TV. It’s having trouble resolving his face.”

  “I’ll tell you one of the things that makes me think we are getting empire right. Look at the strength of American science.” The color of the President’s tie shifted from red to blue to green and back to blue. His eyes and nose disappeared for a moment, leaving an empty stretch of skin marked only by a moving mouth; then they blinked back into being.

  “Rebecca, turn off the ’shopping,” Philip said.

  “But then everyone’ll look gross,” said Kate.

  Rebecca brought up the TV’s remote-control app on her phone and pressed the button that seemed most likely to get something done. The image on the TV screen became overlaid by a menu littered with cryptic hieroglyphics, the myriad branches of a decision tree blooming in three dimensions. Tint and tone; aspect ratio and time delay. “Look at history,” the President said, “and you’ll see that when empires start to fall, the science and the art are always what go first. In a dying empire people can’t innovate anymore; they can’t think new thoughts; they can’t see the world for what it really is.”

  “Rebecca,” Philip said, “turn off the ’shopping.”

  “I heard you the first time.” She pressed a couple of other buttons, and the audio of the President’s monologue switched to the Spanish play-by-play of a soccer game.

  “That’s not right,” Philip said.

  “Well since you know so much why don’t you—”

  “Because I’m not the one who watches this TV: you do.”

  “Hey, girl,” Kate said softly. “I have an idea. Maybe we can just watch it like it is? It’ll be funny, to see Philip on TV without a face. It’ll make things seem not so serious. Isn’t that a good idea, Carson?” Kate looked directly across the room at him.

  “Um,” said Carson, pinned by Philip’s glare. “Yeah.”

  The audio switched back to the President’s voice as the screen’s menus twirled and expanded.

  “…Romans and philosophy, or the Turks and their math,” he said. “But you can look at science shows like the one you’re about to watch, and see that even as we aim to do all the things those past dead empires tried and failed to accomplish, and even as we succeed in those aims beyond the dreams of the Founding Fathers, the state of our science is strong! We are getting empire right!” There were two extra mouths on his face where his eyes should have been, and they were widened in surprise.

  “If you can’t get it straight,” said Philip, “we’ll just have to watch it like it is.”

  “Ten physicists in here and not one of you knows how to operate a television, I guess,” said Rebecca.

  “I don’t watch TV except when I’m at someone else’s house,” said Dennis, munching on tortilla chips.

  “Shh,” said Kate quickly. “Wait—there it is. Rebecca. Look. Revert to factory settings. Just try hitting that.”

  “I make my sons watch science shows,” said the President. “I sit them down in front of the TV, and I make them watch. Because I want them to believe in this.”

  The menu’s branches collapsed into themselves and vanished. The screen brightened considerably and the audio’s volume increased, but the surreal artifacts decorating the President’s face quickly winked away.

  Philip said nothing as Alicia leaned over to whisper something into his ear.

  “Hey, you got it,” said Kate to Rebecca. “Now sit down with the rest of us and watch the show. And relax!”

  As Rebecca made her way around the group to sit down next to Philip, with Alicia on Philip’s other side, the President finished his monologue: “…and I would ask you to have this thought in front of your mind, always. Say it aloud if you feel like it. Don’t be ashamed to say it.

  “We are getting empire right.”

  Philip’s project would be the subject of the second of the show’s three segments; the first, according to the show’s narrator, who slid her rimless eyeglasses up the bridge of her nose, was about “collective intelligence.” The screen switched to footage of a flock of thousands of birds in flight, over a lake whose mirrored surface reflected the snowcapped mountains rising above it. “Collective intelligence,” the announcer breathed huskily, and all at once, as if in response to an angel’s unseen signal, the direction of the flock’s flight snapped from west to north.

  “She sounds like she’s in a porno,” said Kate. “And she needs to button her blouse.”

  “I think that’s the point,” Dennis said.

  “I doubt she has any idea what she’s reading,” said Alicia.

  The image cut to a headshot of a scientist explaining the principle of collective intelligence in a laconic drone. “One way to explain this that’s not perfectly accurate, but at least has the benefit of being easily understood by the general public—”

  “He sounds so condescending,” said Kate.

  “I’m sure he doesn’t mean to come off that way,” said Rebecca.

  “—is that the information of collective intelligence is contained in the gaps between the birds of a flock that’s in flight. It allows a group of myriad discrete entities to present the illusion of behaving as a single mind, with a single purpose.” Footage followed of thousands of bats flying forth from the mouth of a cave, rising to swirl in a perfectly formed midair spiral, backlit by the morning sun. Then the birds again, switching direction as if choreographed from on high.

  Now they were seeing the interior of a laboratory that looked the way labs used to look in summer blockbuster movies, everything clean and polished and angular, the lighting harsh and the contrast high. Technicians in spotless white coats walked purposefully down white-walled corridors, on their way to perform astonishing feats of intellectual endeavor.

  “Not a roll of duct tape to be seen there, I’d bet,” said Carson. “No empty soda bottles. No takeout boxes.”

  “The Defense Agency for Pure and Applied Science,” the announcer said. “Created by the merger of a division of DARPA with divisions of Homeland Security and the Department of Energy, it is now one of the most well-endowed patrons of scientific research in the world.”

  In three-quarter profile, an Army two-star general in a service uniform, his left breast sporting three rows of insignia. “That collective intelligence project—that’s a call I helped to make that I’m really proud of. Let me give you a little background. Look back to the twentieth century, and you’ll see that universities used to have the money to support science that didn’t have any apparent real-world application—cosmology; string theory; you know, sense-of-wonder stuff. But those times are gone—state schools are strapped, and just about all of the second-tier private universities have reorganized into for-profit organizations. You see the same thing with corporations—once upon a time they’d make donations to pure science just for the PR, but now they’re busy trying to add that last few miles to a car’s range before its battery needs a charge, so they don’t have time for this final-frontier business.

  “But defense is always doing well financially: I wouldn’t say we have more money than we know what to do with, but when we pick projects to back, we don’t have to be too risk-averse. We can throw money at research that might seem esoteric, or even crazy. Because you can never tell what pure research will turn out to have some kind of military application in the long run. And if that project that everyone else thought was useless pays off? It will pay off big. Big enough
to pay for all the research that didn’t have potential for military use, that just advanced science for its own sake.

  “Collective intelligence, that bird project—that was one of our long-shot bets. We couldn’t even see how to make it work at first—we just had a hunch. And it paid off.”

  On a clean white table, what looked at first like a small, silvery mound of sand. The camera moved closer to it, closer still, switching seamlessly at some unidentifiable point from digital video to a computer-generated image. Magnification revealed that each of the seeming grains of sand was a strange little robot; the tiny, insect-like devices crawled friskily over each other like fire ants in a bed that had just been poked by a stick. Each had a pair of telescoping antennae, and six legs that ended in needle points, and two wide, translucent wings that nervously flicked open and shut like Japanese paper fans.

  “Nanobots,” purred the announcer.

  “Now what we can do at DAPAS,” the general said in voiceover, “is take research from several different highly specialized fields and combine it together to create new applications. Collective intelligence? Wasn’t much use to us on its own, but when we put it next to nanorobotics, we developed some prototype nonlethal weaponry that’s showing a lot of promise. It’s done well in the field when deployed against the Dakotan secessionists, and soon we’ll be shipping these out to our troops in the Middle East.”

  A cut to computer animation of an unmanned reconnaissance drone, flying low over a barren landscape. A hatch in the drone’s belly slid open and ejected a vacuum-sealed plastic bag that burst as it collided with the ground. The camera quickly zoomed into the swirling cloud of dust that emerged—Rebecca saw the same nanobots, now arrayed in hundreds of purposeful phalanxes, like squadrons of Allied planes in the final act of a World War II movie.

  “We can control the swarm by remote from the rear,” the general said. “Their size makes it nearly impossible to defend against them—seriously, your chances would be better against a horde of wasps. But they can work together with a single purpose that’s far larger than their size. We can tell them to clog the barrels of enemy weapons. And if the enemy isn’t wearing a nanobot-secure helmet, which is prohibitively expensive for a lot of the people we’re going up against, that gives us lots of additional options for nonlethal incapacitation. We can send the swarm down the nose to play havoc with the respiratory system; we can tell it to enter through the mouth and start working on their digestive tracts. We can tell them—and this is absolutely fantastic for interrogation purposes—to work their way beneath an enemy’s eyelids. Watch this.”

  The image looked like surveillance footage of a camera mounted to the ceiling of a holding cell; a superimposed digital clock jittered in a corner of the screen. In the cell was a pale, shirtless, emaciated, screaming man, probably not more than twenty-three; across his hairless chest was tattooed, in a neat sans-serif script, the phrase MAGNETO WAS RIGHT. He moaned nonsense as he staggered across the floor and swatted at the air before his face, his eyes squeezed shut, his face pulled into a grimace. “We loaded about eighty thousand of those things in there with him. Gave him pure hell.” A tear tinged with blood ran down his cheek, and in a moment when he opened his eyes and stared directly into the surveillance camera, Rebecca could see that they were now colored a featureless, shining silver.

  Rebecca tried to imagine what that would be like—even an eyelash trapped beneath a contact lens was enough to drive most people crazy. But hundreds of those little things, so small you couldn’t make them out without a microscope, crawling all over the surfaces of your eyes. Digging into the flesh of your eyes with their little needle legs until you said the secret thing to make them stop.

  “Collective intelligence,” the general said in voiceover. “Beautiful stuff.”

  “Fucking awesome,” said Dennis.

  The program cut to a commercial.

  Philip stared at the floor.

  As the second segment began, Rebecca reflected that Philip wasn’t coming off quite as coldly as she’d feared he might. It helped that in addition to getting him to sit for an interview, the crew had shot a good deal of additional B-roll footage of him working in the lab, and though it was clearly staged, it served to humanize him. (“They asked me,” he said in high dudgeon after coming home from the lab one evening, “to sit at a desk, a clean desk with nothing on it, and write. On paper. With a pencil. They said: Don’t look at the camera. Just make up some equations or something. Throw some Greek letters in them, and maybe we can get a shot of the paper, too. It was laughable, Rebecca. It was fatuous.” But fatuous or not, here was Philip sitting at his desk, dutifully scribbling away, looking like a dinner-theater actor playing the part of a scientist.)

  “Here at Stratton University in New Jersey,” the announcer cooed, “Philip Steiner and his small but devoted team are hard at work on an idea that has captivated the imagination of humanity since the novelist H. G. Wells first conceived of it in 1895.”

  “Oh, no,” said Alicia. “Oh no.”

  “Philip calls it a causality violation device,” the announcer said.

  Sitting next to Rebecca, Philip bristled. “I call it that because that’s what it is!” Rebecca reached over and patted his hand.

  The screen showed Philip in the lab, speaking past the camera to someone out of the field of view as Carson fiddled with machinery in the background. “There’s Carson,” said Dennis. He had finished the entire bowl of tortilla chips and wiped the bowl of salsa clean.

  “I must have removed and reattached that robotic arm a dozen times in front of those guys,” Carson said. “That’s not even from our lab. We got it from another building.”

  Onscreen, Philip was wearing a lab coat. He never wore a lab coat. It looked fresh from its packaging. He was cradling a robot in both arms, an eight-legged contraption of steel and plastic with a digital clock strapped to its back. “This is Arachne,” he said. “Our little causality violation detector. For all the work that’s going into this experiment, the central concept is actually pretty simple.”

  “You’re doing good here,” said Rebecca. Despite Philip’s protestations before the party that he was generally unconcerned, he was clearly worried—he’d gone pale and tight-lipped.

  “So,” the onscreen Philip continued, “Arachne’s clock is synced by radio to the atomic clock in Boulder, Colorado, one of the most accurate timekeeping devices in the world. Here’s the idea: We send Arachne into the causality violation chamber, retrieve her a few moments later, and see if the clock she’s carrying is still synced to the clock in Boulder. If Arachne’s clock is running faster—and if all works perfectly, we’d expect her clock to be about an hour faster—then that’ll mean that she’s existed for a longer period of time relative to the scientists who are observing her. Which would mean, in turn, that we had successfully created a causality violation.”

  “In short—” the announcer said.

  “Oh no,” said Alicia.

  “—if Philip Steiner is successful, he will have built—”

  “She’s actually going to say it—”

  The announcer gasped. “The world’s first time machine,” she said.

  “Goddamn it,” Alicia said. “I knew they’d take that corny angle.”

  They saw a rapid series of clips from twentieth-century movies: an open-shirted Rod Taylor rescuing Yvette Mimieux from a rubber-faced Morlock; the USS Nimitz appearing in Pearl Harbor a day before the fateful attack; Michael J. Fox stepping out of the gull wing door of a modified DeLorean.

  “This is so embarrassing,” Alicia said, while Philip quietly clenched his fist and the rest of the physicists stared at the television in despair. “And oh hey look, without even telling us, they went out and got an interview with Anne Lippincott for this dog-and-pony show. Ridiculous.”

  Anne Lippincott, according to the banner displayed at the bottom of the screen, was a representative of the Committee for Ethical Restraint in Science. “Well, of course it’s
unethical,” she said, gesturing wildly with one long-fingered hand while she brushed a flaxen lock of hair back behind her ear with the other. “If these positively amoral people are going to go and honest-to-goodness rip a hole in the spacetime continuum, then that’s something that affects everyone—we all have to live on this planet together, and it’s something they shouldn’t even think about doing without first consulting the American people, so we can put it to a vote. You got all sorts of stuff going on now that’s unethical, that’s amoral—you got that business with the stem cells, you got people eating steaks that didn’t even come off a cow—and now we’ve got these absolutely reckless people who just can’t imagine that there is even one piece of knowledge that God just might have chosen to place off-limits for a reason, that maybe God made space and time the way they are for a reason—”

  “Turn this off,” Philip growled. “I don’t want to see any more.”

  Rebecca quietly pressed a button on her phone. The television burped a little ditty and went black, shutting off Lippincott’s rant in mid-sentence.

  “That’s it,” Alicia said to the rest of the silent group. “We’re screwed.”

  2

  GOOD CATCH

  The next morning, Rebecca came up out of another series of disquieting dreams (capsizing ships; snakes with human faces) to find Philip already out of bed, grunting his way through his daily exercises on the floor nearby. For the next few days, until he placed that disastrous television appearance at the back of his mind, he’d be more difficult to deal with than usual.

  For as long as Rebecca had been married to Philip, he had started his day by scooping four heaping tablespoons out of a tub of low-fat vanilla yogurt and plopping them into his mouth, dropping to the floor wherever it was convenient, and doing push-ups to the point of failure. His record before collapse was fifty-five.

  Rebecca stared at the bedroom ceiling, listening to her husband mutter numbers through clenched teeth. “Nnnng: thirty-nine. Nnnn: forty. Nnnn! Forty-one.” His arms were probably trembling already. She had pointed out to him more than once that he ought to rest for a day or two between his workouts, so that he could give his torn muscles time to knit themselves back together, bigger and stronger. He’d nodded at her and continued to do things the same way he always did, year after year, his pecs and triceps always sore.