Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

  How weirdly calculated and yet inexplicable that last disclosure was, following so soon after Alicia’s previous revelation: Alicia’s attempt to make it sound offhanded was so clumsy that it unwittingly came off as charming. Why now and why to her? Surely Alicia must have been at least half aware that Rebecca and Kathryn were lifelong friends, and that by speaking she therefore ran the risk of her declaration making its way to Kathryn’s ears in one form or another. Was this some test of loyalty: was the information that Alicia had in hand the kind of thing that would make Rebecca beholden to her? Or was Alicia secretly hoping that Rebecca would tell Kathryn, because that would surely cause Kathryn and Carson to break up? Or maybe this wasn’t a wheels-within-wheels, soap-opera kind of thing: maybe Alicia just wanted to share, and wasn’t considering the consequences. Maybe she didn’t think whatever she had to say was interesting enough to merit repetition out of her earshot.

  Or maybe whatever was in Philip’s comment code, which Alicia had seen and Rebecca had not, had given Alicia the impression that she and Rebecca were bonded in some elemental way.

  “The whole thing is nonsexual,” Alicia said.

  Each drawn breath made razor blades bounce around inside Rebecca’s lungs. “Wait: are you just lying in bed next to each other? Taking naps?”

  “We take naps sometimes after sex. But it’s all nonsexual. I’m aware of how that may sound to you. But it’s true. Working on this project for years together we’ve developed an intense but entirely intellectual connection, and it turns out that sex is the best way to express that. But the sex doesn’t mean what sex usually means to most people. It’s hard to explain.”

  “What does Kathryn think about it? Have you or—”

  “Well obviously I don’t know what Kathryn thinks about it because I haven’t told her about it: that’s not my business. It’s Carson who’s dating her and if he wants to tell her about it that’s his job. But I’d hope she’d understand that what we’re doing shouldn’t mean anything to her. Or at least she’d accept it if she didn’t understand it. I’d understand it if I were in her position, knowing what I know.”

  Was Alicia picking up the pace a little? Yes: she was, even if it wasn’t a conscious decision to do so. Rebecca, despite her best efforts, began to fall farther behind.

  “It shouldn’t mean anything and it doesn’t matter at all,” Alicia said, and Rebecca thought that if Alicia ran so fast that Rebecca was too winded to speak, then Alicia would leave herself free to interpret her silence as consent.

  As if reading her mind, Alicia sped up again: now she was nearly sprinting. “I said you need to get it in gear!” she hollered over her shoulder; then she turned from Rebecca and obstinately drove herself up the towpath’s grade, breathing heavily, stretching out the distance.

  28

  UNEXPECTED CALLOUT

  At work the following day, still sore all over from the punishing run that Alicia had led her on, Rebecca was a little off her game as a pilot of Lovability’s romantic avatars. None of the marks tipped to the idea that they were communicating with fictional constructs—the People Peeks were fixed at ten minutes, Felix’s skills as an animator were getting better every day, and, unlike photographs, which people had learned to distrust, moving images still tended to be accepted as conveyors of unvarnished truth.

  But Rebecca was not inhabiting her performances in the way she did when she was fully invested in the work: though the facial expressions of the avatars signaled engagement and interest, their voices seemed a bit distracted, and the conversations that Rebecca had with the marks regularly trailed off into confused silence, the two of them staring at their cameras until the clock ran down. Halfway through the day Felix had asked her if she was okay, and she’d said she just hadn’t gotten any sleep the night before. But if Felix could pick up that something was wrong, then who knew what these eager suitors were thinking, inclined as they were to read the gravest import into every twitch and sigh and eyeblink.

  Why was she not particularly eager to find out what Philip had written in the comment code: why was she, in fact, a little afraid? First of all, there was Alicia’s troublesome warning that she’d “want to prepare.” And presumably Philip had made those notes for himself alone, and had never expected Rebecca to read them. So it wasn’t quite right to call this a “message from beyond the grave”: such a label implied intent that wasn’t there. But to find a lingering unread missive from someone no longer living, and someone whose life had been so deeply entwined with one’s own, raised the possibility that the past could never be a fully settled matter. It meant that your own past could be altered without your action or consent, that the story of your self that you continually told back to yourself could be revised by force, making you into another person who you would, perhaps, prefer not to become.

  “…but I have to say, I really have to say, that Sidney Poitier really has gotten a bad rap from history. If you go back and really look at those movies where he was pretty much the only black actor in Hollywood: sure, he had to play tokens and magical Negroes because those were the only parts he could get. But really look at those movies: at the way he walks and talks. You can see this kind of smoldering rage against the role that’s been forced on him: behind his eyes you can see this subversiveness—”

  “Marcus.”

  Rebecca suddenly realized she didn’t actually remember what she’d been saying for the past thirty seconds: she’d just been babbling on autopilot, riffing off the Wikipedia entries that Felix had been pulling up on one of her monitors. She wasn’t sure she’d even ever seen a Sidney Poitier movie. What was the name of this woman she was talking to? Something lilting, what was it, think fast—

  “Catalina.”

  “Marcus. I mean this in the nicest possible way: please cut the bullshit. We have had three of these People Peeks now, and you have gone on and on about Sidney Poitier and Lucille Clifton and Wu-Tang Clan, and you must have done enough peeking by now to know whether you actually want to see me or not. What’s the holdup?”

  Rebecca looked offscreen to try to catch Felix’s eye, but got pulled back when Catalina said, with a playful hint of menace, “I’m over here.”

  “I really need to have my secretary schedule something for us, yes—” Rebecca stammered.

  “What, you’re so manly that you aren’t even allowed to keep your own appointment book? You have to ask your secretary for permission to go on a lunch date?”

  “It’s unfortunate, but I have a very busy—”

  “You need to straighten her out. You need to tell her she works for you, not the other way around.”

  “Ha—I—” This was rapidly going south.

  “Unless you’re chicken. A lot of people are chicken these days: shy as a mouse, but can talk a good game if you put them behind a keyboard. Look at you. With your gleaming clean head and your neck about to bust out of that shirt collar, and you’re just as chicken as anybody.”

  “I’m not chicken!” Rebecca squeaked to her own surprised embarrassment, and Marcus’s bass tones rose in tandem.

  Catalina tucked her fists into her armpits, flapping her elbows in a mimicry of vestigial wings. “Buck-buck-ba-kaw!” she cried, and then began to guffaw so heartily and shamelessly that she had to wipe away a tear.

  As Rebecca sat and fidgeted and Marcus looked on with a half smile as if he hadn’t actually been insulted, Catalina caught her breath and said, “Okay. We have a minute left. Time to be serious now. I like you, Marcus, you seem like a nice guy, but don’t waste my time. If you don’t want to go out with me, just say so, and I can spend the ten minutes I’d’ve spent with you chatting with some other man. But if you do want to, then you need to get out from in front of that camera and let me see your face. Do you hear me?”

  “I hear you,” Rebecca said.

  “Well, alright then. I guess we’re done for now. But I’m telling you, you’d better—”

  Mercifully, the call ended.

  Rebecca waite
d until after she returned home to check her e-mail. The expected message from Alicia was already in her inbox, with a sizable PDF attached. Even when she saw it, she left opening the file until after she’d made dinner for Sean (sausages and mashed potatoes: easy and English, and he was looking a little thin anyway), talked with him about his homework (really, the only thing in the way of him skipping a grade was that he’d be even more certain to come off as the runt in the class), and looked in on the video game he was still playing (the endless labyrinth that the schoolkids were running through had now taken on the ghoulish appearance of a back-alley crime scene, with garbage-strewn pathways and barriers made from strands of yellow police tape). She put him to bed (and she had the distinct impression that he was slightly peeved at the unusual amount of parental attention) and then, with nothing else to delay her, she sat back down in front of the computer in the living room.

  For a long moment she thought about deleting the e-mail without opening it, and never mentioning it to Alicia again. Though never a day went by when she didn’t miss her husband dearly, she thought it might be wise to let the past stay in the past. Reading this was like digging the man out of the ground and cutting his skull open to look inside it, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it sacrilege, of a kind? Wouldn’t it just be best to—

  Unless you’re chicken. A lot of people are chicken these days. Look at you.

  She had poured herself a double shot of Woodford Reserve before she sat down, but maybe that wasn’t the right choice. She went back into the kitchen with the glass, pulled the bottle of bourbon off the shelf, uncorked it, and poured the contents of the glass back in. If she had determined to read this thing, and deal with whatever it said, then she was going to let herself get hit by the full force of whatever secrets might be contained within those pages, her emotions unblunted by booze.

  She returned to the living room (her glass now empty; her mouth suddenly dry), seated herself before the computer again, and opened the file, to see what she would see.

  Father arrived just as Sean was drifting off to sleep, wearing the clothes of a hundred heroes. Eighty silver medals of honor hung from the front and back of his purple toga; twenty more dangled from the wide brim of his sombrero, jingling as he walked. As a smoldering cigar shifted from one side of his mouth to the other, his machine gun transformed back into his super-strong robotic hand.

  “Hey, Dad,” Sean said. “What’ve you been doing?”

  “There was a tiger and a shark and I was fighting them both. Both of them were snapping their jaws at me! So I ripped off the tiger’s head and stuffed it in the shark’s mouth and made him choke on it and then I said, Now how do you like that: you should have let me put you in jail when I gave you the chance. Now guess what I’m going to do.”

  “What?”

  “I’m going to change the shape of the world now. I’m going to take the whole world in my hands and I’m going to squeeze.”

  29

  PATHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

  My name is Philip Steiner, and if you’re reading this

  —

  But you wouldn’t be reading this unless you’re me. If you are in fact someone else, looking through these notes embedded in my private version of the software that drives the causality violation device, then two possibilities suggest themselves. Either the CVD has been a success, my reputation as a physicist has been secured, and you are a historian of science who is looking through these documents, which, in retrospect, have been deemed to be of great import. Or spacetime behaves differently than I initially expected, and through the invention of the device I have perhaps made the single worst mistake that any human has made in the history of the world.

  But that second possibility is absurdly unlikely. If you are reading this then you are probably Philip Steiner. A future version of myself. The ax head and handle changed but somehow still the same.

  —

  If I could only pass a message back in time. That’s the fantasy. Not even going back yourself, just sending a message. You could warn your stupid past self of future pitfalls.

  But think about it the other way. As you move through time you forget what you once were. Ax head and handle change. But you can send a message to remind your future self of what you once were. What you avoided becoming. What you might still become.

  —

  My name is Philip Steiner. I attempted to commit suicide nineteen years ago, when I was a graduate student at Nicolls College in New Jersey. My adviser there was Peter DeWitt. He has since passed away. I was invited to a conference in his honor on his 80th birthday, but chose not to attend.

  I cannot blame him for my suicide attempt. But I feel safe in hypothesizing that he was a causal factor.

  —

  Now I’ve gotten that out of the way.

  Though let me flatter myself. Let me imagine that these words will in fact be read by someone else, one of those historians of science who are persistent interlopers among our tribe. Let me tell you of a now-forgotten research cul-de-sac I found myself in nearly twenty years before I make these notes, and of how I came to be there.

  As a graduate student coming into the physics department at Nicolls, I was attracted to the DeWitt lab because I thought the work he was doing was elegant and difficult, and I wanted to do elegant, difficult science. Peter DeWitt was attempting to directly detect gravitational waves. Theories need these waves to exist in order to explain why planets do not spin out of their orbits instead of sticking to predictable paths around their suns. But these same theories also say that gravitational waves must be extremely faint, because these waves are the result of a conversion of mass to energy. If gravitational waves were not extremely weak, we would be able to infer their existence merely from the continuous loss of mass of all objects, including the sun, and the earth, and our own bodies. It is easy to see the apple fall from the tree, but the force that pulls the apple to earth is nearly impossible to see.

  Physicists had been attempting to directly observe gravitational waves since the 1960s. The founder of the field of gravitational wave research, Joseph Weber, devised the earliest detector, a bar of aluminum alloy studded with piezoelectric crystals that was designed to be sensitive enough to pick up the tiniest of trembles as an exceptionally strong gravity wave passed through it, a wave resulting from some powerful one-time astrophysical event like a supernova. But even a strong gravitational wave would still be extremely weak. And in order to be effective, the bar of aluminum alloy would also have to filter out the background noise of the world. It would have to be deaf to both seismic tremors and footsteps in a nearby hallway, and it would have to pick out one particular wave from the many, many other varieties of energy that constantly buffeted it.

  This proved to be quite difficult. Weber’s claims that he directly detected gravitational waves with his bar did not survive the scrutiny of the physics community. They had doubts about the validity of the data he produced, and the way he processed and interpreted it. Over time Weber’s claims became stronger and more insistent: the skepticism of his colleagues only served to embolden him. Eventually the community as a whole decided that Weber was observing things that weren’t there, that his bar had in fact detected nothing but the constant background noise of the universe, and that he’d convinced himself that this noise exhibited patterns that he, and only he, could see. In the corridors outside of conference halls, Weber was quietly accused of practicing “pathological science,” what the physicist Irving Langmuir once called “the science of things that aren’t so.”

  And so the physics community quietly and collectively decided not just that Joseph Weber was wrong, but that he was uninteresting. When he could find a home for his papers, they were no longer cited, and a paper that is not cited may as well have never been written. In his late career he became a forgotten figure, with those who did remember him more likely to recall the controversy that surrounded him, not the science that he did. But nonetheless, the field he founded lived.

  The phy
sicists who followed in Weber’s wake refined his technology. When I began my graduate studies, there were two descendants of Weber’s bar that were in competition with each other for funding and attention.

  The first, which was the variety of detector that Peter DeWitt used in his lab, was a cryogenic bar. The idea behind it was that Weber’s original design for a bar that worked at room temperature could be significantly improved upon by cooling it to near absolute zero, making it more sensitive still as its molecules stopped dancing, and more likely to be able to distinguish the one true voice it sought amid all the noise of the world.

  The other kind of detector was an interferometer. Its basic concept was that it would be far easier to observe the jostle of a beam of light as a gravitational wave passed through it than it would be to observe the tremble of a Weber-type bar.

  The important distinction here is that while cryogenic bars were small science, interferometers were big science. While a cryogenic bar could be funded with hundreds of thousands of dollars, interferometry at the scale necessary to observe gravitational waves required hundreds of millions. While a cryogenic bar could be kept in one room, an interferometer required the building of a structure that could house two laser beams that would be fired at right angles to each other, and whose paths would both be four kilometers long. Big science makes a lot of money for a lot of people. Small science usually does not.

  —

  I was naive at twenty-three, and unaware. I did not know that in the halls where science policy is dictated, the fate of the cryogenic bar with which I would soon have hands-on experience had already been determined. Interferometers were new, and sexy, and very, very expensive, while cryogenic bars were old hat, and their direct lineage from Weber’s original work meant that they carried some of the taint of Weber’s past failure. Purses opened and shut, and one technology began to suck money from the other. In science cash is lifeblood.