Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

  Now, by this point in his career, Philip had developed a number of different dog-and-pony shows about his research, with different degrees of granularity in the detail depending on his audience—specialists in the structure of spacetime, or particle physicists, or astrophysicists, or physicists in general, or scientists in general, or nonscientists. But one thing that all those talks had in common was a scrupulousness about their claims. This was especially the case in the presence of nonscientists, who were as likely to misunderstand what he claimed as they were to be deaf to words like “might” and “maybe” and “possibly.” When that happened (see, for instance, the tale of Edmund Taligent), things were inclined to go sour: the audience was likely to leave his talk thinking they lived in a science-fictional world that did not yet exist. So the more specialized his audience, the more comfortable he was with slightly stronger statements and slightly more fanciful speculations.

  But Philip had no idea what he was getting into here. On the one hand, his conversation with Mr. Cheever indicated that he or his shadowy superiors had knowledge of causality violation that significantly outstripped a layman’s; on the other hand, he felt certain that literally everyone in the world who had an understanding of the state of the field that was close to his own was someone he knew personally, and so there had to be at least a little bluffing behind Mr. Cheever’s pose of silent omniscience. The only thing for it would be to load up all the slides he had to a thumb drive, try to size up the audience before he began, and decide what to say to them on the fly.

  He took the Amtrak Silver Star down to Washington, feeling that this was his last chance. The rejections of his grant proposals were becoming increasingly desultory—he was more likely to get flat, form-letter nos instead of being strung along for a little while. He feared that his name was becoming known in a bad way, unfairly associated with the taint of past and future failure. Sure, he had several published papers and more stuff up on arXiv, but the journals in which his work had appeared were neither the sexiest nor the most storied. Worse, he was rarely cited these days, as if the appearance of “P. Steiner” in a bibliography or a footnote was not a mark of a paper’s credibility and rigor, but a symptom of infection, a sign that the best response to the article was a quiet intellectual quarantine. If other physicists had been willing to rebut him in public and in print, at least he would have felt like he was still in the game, but in his darker moments these days he believed himself to be the victim of an implicit conspiracy of silence. He’d seen it happen to others: without really talking about it openly, it suddenly became clear to everyone that to speak a certain scientist’s name without the necessary ritual expectoration would levy a curse upon your own career. The next you heard of the guy, you found out through the rumor mill that he’d taken a job as a hedge fund analyst. The unemployment rate of physics PhDs was always going to be zero, but Philip felt that a burgeoning bank account would be an inadequate consolation for his failure to convince others of the truths of ideas that were doomed to remain locked in his mind alone.

  The meeting took place in a featureless room in an equally featureless building across the river in Arlington. There were nine men seated at a round table about ten feet in diameter: they wore white long-sleeved shirts and dark ties, and most of them sported closely trimmed hairstyles and clunky plastic spectacles. They had the builds of people who felt that physical fitness was a moral and patriotic obligation. The table at which they sat was a neat piece of tech: its entire surface was a screen, and as Philip plugged his USB stick into the laptop they supplied (I must remember to dispose of that stick as soon as this presentation is over, he thought) and projected the first of his slides on a wall, the slide duplicated itself in miniature in front of each of the audience members. Several of them produced styluses from shirt pockets and began to make notations, scribbling directly on the table.

  Mr. Cheever was seated on Philip’s right. “I won’t introduce you,” he said. “We already know all about you—ha, ha! Just—we’re really excited about this. Just begin.”

  Philip looked across the table at the man seated there, who seemed thirty years older than everyone else, if well preserved—he had a thick white mustache that seemed to be the result of decades of careful grooming, and the frames of his eyeglasses were metal instead of plastic.

  As Philip stared directly into the other man’s eyes, the older man extended his hands over the table with their palms down and waved them back and forth, the gesture snappy and precise. Eight pieces of paper with messages that Philip couldn’t read materialized on the tabletop display; as Philip watched, they folded themselves into a phalanx of origami pigeons, which flapped their wings as they flew across the table to the other people seated there—that is, all the other people besides Philip.

  Huh.

  Once the paper pigeons reached their destinations, they unfolded themselves, and the audience members read the message from the person who Philip now assumed was their boss. A couple of them chuckled, and Mr. Cheever nodded with approval. “Yes indeed,” he said, as if to himself. “Definitely a thing to keep in mind.”

  They looked like students who couldn’t have cared less if the substitute teacher spied them passing notes, and what was worse, they wanted Philip to know they didn’t care. But this was clearly all theater.

  And Philip died a little inside when he thought this, but he realized that if these people were going to open their wallets, then he would have to deliver a little theater in return. Not too much: just a touch. An extra sentence or two would do.

  He went through the lecture as intended, opting to take the middle of the road: not so detailed as to bore and confuse, but not so generalized and simplistic as to come off as patronizing. He spent a good deal of time describing the difficulties of performing an experiment of this kind in an environment such as earth’s, one that was moving through space at a very high speed—audiences always seemed to find that sort of thing interesting.

  He found the conference table an extremely annoying distraction. He could see the others making notes with their styluses on slides that he had carefully designed to have just enough information, no more, no less. And the table’s large display made it more than apparent that there was a second, silent conversation going on while he was talking. Every once in a while someone would bring up a display of one of his earlier slides with scribbles all over it and send it gliding over to another listener with a flick of his finger, as if it were an air hockey puck. The person receiving it would trap it with his palm, read the notation, and make further notes. If there was something they wanted to say, they should have been able to say it to him, he thought.

  Philip saved his theater until the middle of the presentation. After explaining how the Planck-Wheeler clock worked, and how it would correct for the movement of the earth through spacetime when stitching the two ends of the wormhole together, he said, as casually as he could manage it, “Now would be a good time for me to limit my claims and tamp down any expectations you might have. It’s highly unlikely that what we’re doing will have any sort of technological application. The end result is going to be the accumulation of knowledge for its own sake.”

  He could feel his face wanting to twist into a wince.

  “It’s not like you’re going to be able to use this thing to go back in time and kill Hitler, or anything like that,” he said.

  That was enough. The assemblage of listeners remained completely poker-faced—maybe one of the eyebrows of the bossman in the back of the room lifted just a little—but first a message flew across the table on paper wings, then another, and by the time Philip had wound up his presentation (and made his other big gamble: leaving no time for questions) the table’s display was a blizzard of origami birds. “That was an excellent presentation, Mr. Steiner,” Mr. Cheever said, with the relief of a man whose ass had been on the line. “You’ll be hearing from us with an answer soon. Very soon.”

  Mr. Cheever escorted Philip out of the conference room (and
Philip could see that the people they were leaving behind couldn’t wait to burst into conversation). The bossman sent Philip on his way with a barely perceptible nod: Philip guessed that he’d be nearly silent during the dialogue that followed once the conference room’s door was closed, preserving his status as the taciturn authority figure, but he’d be the one who went to sleep tonight and dreamed of choking Hitler to death with his right hand and Stalin with his left.

  “I’m not going to lie to you,” Mr. Cheever said when he met Philip for breakfast the next morning in the tiny, overpriced café attached to the lobby of Philip’s Washington hotel. “A lot of people in that room figured you’d be really smart. But those same people thought you had a good chance of also being bonkers, that maybe you were going on some kind of wild goose chase. Those two states aren’t mutually exclusive, you know. And we agree with you that even if you are able to open a wormhole like you say, it isn’t likely to have any practical application—certainly nothing defense related. Sure, we made a couple of jokes, but nobody seriously talked about it.”

  Philip found it interesting that that was something Mr. Cheever felt the need to clarify, but said nothing.

  “But it doesn’t really matter to us if you actually make your wormhole, or whatever,” Mr. Cheever continued. “We feel like your laboratory is one with a lot of intelligence, a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of energy. And some of the most useful inventions in history have been those that came about entirely by accident, when smart, enthusiastic researchers were focused on another task entirely. Plastic wrap. Microwave ovens. Viagra. We feel like even if you don’t accomplish the goal you’re shooting for, something’s going to come out of that lab, something really good. Maybe something that will change the world. So we’re going to fund you—you’re going to get the grant. Probably not as much as you might like—it never is, is it? But enough. And the funding will be steady, and it’ll last for a while.”

  Mr. Cheever offered his hand. “Congratulations.”

  “One more thing,” Mr. Cheever said as he finished his coffee. “If anything, you know, unusual, happens with this project—and I mean not garden-variety weird, but really bizarre, the kind of stuff we’d be interested in—I want you to call this number.” He wrote a telephone number on the back of a napkin and pushed it toward Philip. “Copy that somewhere safe: somewhere analog, not digital. Multiple backups in multiple places: got me?”

  Philip nodded.

  “It’ll only work once: after that we’ll have to get you another one, and that’ll depend on whether you’re judged by my superiors to have wasted the first one. And burning one of those numbers is…nontrivial: that phone call entails no small expense. But dial it if something weird happens, and I mean only if it’s really weird. I won’t pick up, but the message will get to me fast.

  “I’m guessing you won’t need it. But you never know. It’s best to be prepared.”

  All things considered, Philip would have preferred a little more faith from his newfound patrons—one couldn’t help but find it slightly disheartening to be supported not because your goals were attainable but because your blunders were bound to be interesting. But their money was as green as anyone else’s, and far less subject to a private benefactor’s caprice. As he said to Rebecca over dinner once he got back from Washington, he expected to be able to purchase the equipment to do the initial modeling, and hire a couple of post-docs, and support the three of them on a salary—himself, Rebecca, and Sean—if they tightened their belts a bit.

  Something about the way he said that last thing made it clear to Rebecca that their good fortune, which they would share, entailed certain duties that would be hers alone, at least for the most part. Back then Philip still kept roughly normal hours: out of the house by nine, home by nine at the latest. Later, once he got deep into the project, it would be as if the causality violation device possessed the body clock and blind need of a newborn child, demanding undivided attention at the most inconvenient times: Rebecca would get used to Philip getting home or, worse, leaving the house, at four a.m., even as Sean’s sleep patterns settled down.

  But that duty, Rebecca repeated to herself, was not unpleasurable. Day by day, she watched her strange boy become more human, as he learned to speak in sentences and figured out how the world worked, enchanted by things as simple as heat and gravity (though Philip, when Rebecca told him this, would pedantically remind her that while these phenomena might be elemental, they were not so simple at all). Sean was happy to spend ten minutes watching an ice cube melt, whispering secret incantations to it as if he were seeing a spirit on to the other side; he was happy to stand on a chair with a square of toilet paper in his hand, repeatedly letting it fall to the floor and tracking it with his gaze as it turned end over end. He was endlessly fascinated by the tessellations of bathroom tiles, and the warp and woof of carpet, and the light that danced behind his lids when he turned with closed eyes to face the sun.

  At seven Sean was insatiably curious, and he swallowed facts like chocolate. He badgered his parents with questions until Rebecca began to rue the day he’d learned of how and why; when he found out new things in school, he would repeat them at home with a studied gravity, the idea apparently not occurring to him that his mother and father probably already knew this stuff, since they had been on the planet for decades longer than he had. Once he approached Philip at his desk and said, “Dad. If you want to tell if a number is dividable by threes—”

  Philip closed the lid of his laptop. “Divisible.”

  “Divisible. Here’s what you do. No matter how many digits it has, you add up all the digits, and then you divide that number by three. And if there’s no remainder, then the original number is divisible by three. You don’t have to waste your time dividing this super-long number.” Sean looked at his father with lidded eyes, as if he was thinking with sadness about other children who did not know what he knew, toiling away at their desks with needless long division.

  “That’s a cool trick,” Philip said, beginning to open his laptop again. “It’ll save you a lot of effort. Now I have to—”

  “If the last digit of a number is zero, or five,” Sean continued solemnly, “then the number is divisible by five. That’s all you need to know.”

  Sean was just as curious about colors and shapes and words and motions as he was about numbers, and because of this, Rebecca felt that he had the makings of an artist of some kind. She presented him with a constant supply of crayons and pencils and construction paper, and the things he drew were surprisingly complex for a boy of his age, even in their abstraction and their defiance of basic rules for portraying objects in three-dimensional space. One Father’s Day morning Sean entered his parents’ bedroom and presented Philip with a portrait that he’d spent a couple of days on, drawing and redrawing, making sketches and throwing them away. Philip took the sheet of paper from him and squinted at it. “This…this is very nice, Sean,” he said. “Thank you.”

  “Drawing you was really hard,” Sean said. “It was hard to fit everything in there that I wanted.”

  Still looking at the picture, Philip tilted his head and frowned. “What is this…on my head?”

  “That’s a football helmet,” Sean said with what Rebecca heard as just the slightest bit of pique, as if the fault here was not in Sean’s rendering of the image but in his father’s failure to perceive it correctly. “It’s also a cowboy hat. And it can be an astronaut’s helmet, sometimes.”

  “Huh. And…it looks like you spent a lot of time getting my hands just right.”

  “I did! Your left hand is a pair of handcuffs: that’s in case you need to take someone to jail. And your right hand is a knife, for when your enemies don’t want to go to jail and they get out of control. When you see your enemies you give them a choice: the handcuffs, or the knife.”

  Beneath the sheets, Rebecca squeezed Philip’s hand. This was a good morning: she was not yet thinking about drinking. The other day she had done a little reading onlin
e about alcoholism—she was just curious—and found that its cause wasn’t necessarily some kind of existential despair that needed booze for relief, but that it could also be genetic or chemical, the result of a smaller amygdala than the average person, or a skewed balance of neurotransmitters. It seemed unfair that you could have just about everything in life that you wanted and still have a chance of ending up an alcoholic. It seemed unfair that problems of the mind and spirit could arise from weaknesses of the body. And yet moments like this—seeing her son’s naive attempts at self-expression, free of the fear of criticism or embarrassment; watching his father, her husband, tentatively working out the best way to demonstrate his love—did provide some kind of relief. It was good to be unexpectedly reminded that merely being human had its pleasures and its beauties, and that they were best seen with clearest eyes.

  “One more thing,” Philip said. “What’s this circle you’ve drawn above my head? I’m already an astronaut, and a football player, and a cowboy, and a police officer: am I an angel, too?”

  “No, that’s the circle on the back of your head where you don’t have any hair,” Sean said. “I was drawing the front of you and didn’t have a place to put it, but it’s important, so I just drew it up there.”

  “That is a lovely portrait, Sean,” Rebecca said. “It is surprisingly true to life.”

  Please don’t ever draw a picture of me, she thought.

  Questions, questions, questions, and the boy couldn’t just deal in the kinds of inquisitions that could be dispensed with by straight answers: he had to go into counterfactuals and hypotheticals. One evening when the three of them were having dinner together—Thai takeout that Philip had picked up on the way home—Sean put down his fork and knife and announced, “I have a question.” Lately he did this almost every time he saw his parents together, as if he meant to set the two of them in competition, and was quietly weighing which of them was capable of providing him with superior truths.