So I say, “Hey, Rita,” and she says, “Guess what,” and I say, “What.” And she smiles even bigger and says, “I got a new leg.” And she whips off the blanket, and she picks her new leg up and puts it on the table in front of her.
And I will not lie: I was kind of horrified at first. It looked like a Terminator leg! Not flesh and bone, but this shiny metal skeleton, with cables wrapped all around the rods. Real elaborate. It had a metal rod and joint for just about every bone and joint in a human leg, a human foot. Definitely not a make-do, half-assed job.
Listen, though. Rita says, “Look at this.” And she frowns her face up and starts staring at this metal leg.
And I say, “Rita,” because I don’t understand what’s going on. And she says, “Shut up, I’m concentrating.” And get this: the big toe, this metal big toe, it starts moving. Then the one next to that, then the one in the middle. And pretty soon she’s wiggling them all, even the little toe, and I’ve never been able to do anything with my little toe except break it playing football.
Turns out that’s what the headband’s for. This thing reads her brainwaves, and sends signals to the electronics in this mechanical leg. And even though her old leg is gone, the part of her brain that controlled that leg and told it what to do is still there. Soon, Rita says, with enough practice, she’ll be able to walk without looking at it or even thinking about it, just like you don’t think about your real leg. Then they’re going to wrap it in this plastic sheath—apparently they have this plastic that feels just about like skin if you touch it, it’s got hair and everything, though Rita said she told the doctors not to put any hair on it if they could help it, because she didn’t want to look like she hadn’t shaved. Then it’ll be like her old leg again: not exactly, but ninety percent. As long as she wears that headband. But that’s no trouble at all, considering. I’d never take that headband off if I was her: they’d bury me with it.
This company that makes prosthetic limbs made the whole setup for her. Taligent Industries. The rig is kind of experimental, so they want people to try it out, so they can gather data. And Rita got picked to try it out. I bet it tells the company where you are and what you’re doing all the time, but I guess that’s the cost of doing business.
She was so happy! I haven’t seen her that happy since I don’t know when. She said, “You know, day after day I sit here and I think, Well, I guess this is going to be as good as it gets. And I still think that. But now the meaning has turned around for me. I say to myself, This is as good as it gets. And I have to thank God. Because I’m amazed.”
We’re in a time machine, Terence, you and I, right now. It’s stuck in one gear and it’s slow as hell, but it works. It’s bringing us into the future. And I think that future might actually be good. I think it might be okay.
You should see that thing, Terence. Give her a couple of months and she’ll be playing guitar with it.
3. ALICIA
I have an interesting idea. Why not go back to basics: a double-slit experiment. I’m surprised I didn’t think of this until now. Mount an electron gun in the top of the causality violation device, behind a metal plate with two slits. Install a screen in the bottom. Fire the electron gun for an hour while the CVD is activated. Take a look at the screen and see if there’s any deviation from the expected diffraction pattern.
I can give that to my grad student Adam to do. It’ll give him some hands-on time with the CVD, and he probably won’t screw it up. He’s smart, but he needs to build up his confidence if he’s going to become the kind of scientist who can run his own lab. This is a good task for him. I can tell him what needs to be accomplished and leave him to figure out how. The method should be self-evident, but if he gets it done without any handholding, he’ll have that good feeling that comes from taking point on a project and seeing it through to completion. Even if the results are negative, which they probably will be. Negative results: something else he’ll need to get used to.
I like Adam. He reminds me of me, when I was a graduate student. Though I think he got into physics because he wants to have that eureka moment that scientists always have in movies, when they’re looking at a blackboard full of equations, and the music swells, and then they say A-ha! and dance a jig. I hate to tell him what I had to learn for myself: it almost never works out that way for any of us. If you are expecting that from physics, it will almost certainly disappoint you.
There was a graduate student in my cohort, this guy I dated, who told me he came to realize that doing physics is like this: there’s a concrete wall twenty feet thick, and you’re on one side, and on the other side is everything worth knowing. And all you have is a spoon. So you just have to take a spoon and start scraping at the wall: no other way. He works in a bookstore now.
But I think of it this way. There is a jigsaw puzzle. It’s infinitely large, with no edges or corners to help you out. We have to put it together: it’s our duty. We will never finish, but we have to find our satisfactions where we can: when we place two pieces together that suggest we may have found the place where the sky touches the sea, or when we discover a piece that is beautiful in and of itself, that has an unusual color or a glimpse of an unexpected pattern. And the pieces that do not join together also tell you something. If there are very few eureka moments, then at least there are a thousand little failures, that point the way toward a hundred little joys.
I like Carson. I really like Carson. I can hand an idea to him that’s still a little rough, and he can turn it over and tumble it and hand it back to me shining. And I can do the same for him.
He could run his own lab if he wanted to. He’s going to have to look for positions soon. We will either have to split up, or become one of those long-distance academic couples that are the rule rather than the exception. There will be ethical issues when I have to write a recommendation letter, but this is a special circumstance—it’s only a bad accident of fate that I’m running this lab anyway.
He could get out of physics. I don’t think he’s as happy doing physics as I am. But he seems to have talked himself around to a kind of contentment. Still, if he left, I wouldn’t complain and I wouldn’t judge. It would make things easier for us.
He likes to wake up at eight. That’s a ridiculous time! I get up and go for a run and come back and he’s still in bed. We need to fix that. It would be better for both of us if he made a habit of waking up at six fifteen, like I do.
I’ll wake him gently tomorrow morning, so I don’t startle him. Then I’ll tell him about my new idea.
4. THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
Hello, Tracey Wilson, from the great state of Illinois! I think Fanny and Alexander is a great choice for a weekend rental. It’s one of the best Christmas movies because it’s about so much more than Christmas. But I’d go with the five-hour cut instead of the three-hour theatrical version: the longer cut is far superior. Don’t worry: it has three intermissions, so it’s not too taxing on the attention.
Hello, Bernard Gregory, from the great state of Oregon. It would be my honor to say a soothing word to your father in his final moments. Please hold your phone next to his ear.
Muriel Fox, from the great state of Utah: you definitely want to use bleached flour for your angel food cake, not unbleached. I’m glad I stopped you before you made a fatal mistake!
Matthew Reichl, from the great state of Maine: I want to share a story with you, in these tough times. I wasn’t the richest kid growing up: you’re certainly better off now than I was back then. When other kids were getting PlayStation 2s for Christmas, I had to make do with a PlayStation Negative One. So one day my father gave me a piece of advice that I’d like to pass on to you: it may be cold comfort, but it’s true. He said, The man who has learned to be happy with what he has is the man who lives in the best of all possible worlds. It’s true! Think about it!
To the insurgents in the great state of North Dakota: I ask you one final time to lay down your arms. Those who have committed no crime
s against America will be welcomed back with pleasure into this nation’s embrace. You have my personal guarantee.
Grace Lanier, from the great state of New Mexico: one of the elementary strategies of go is expressed by the statement “A group with two eyes lives.” But a group of stones can have what’s called a “false eye”: a group with a false eye is vulnerable, and can be captured if surrounded. May I show you some examples?
Rebecca Wright, from the great state of New Jersey: hey, I don’t have a lot of time. Just: I’ve noticed that you’ve kind of changed a little lately? The past couple of weeks you’ve had this kind of couldn’t-care-less, go-for-broke attitude? And…look, I’ll just say it. If you’re about to do, you know, something, stop and make sure it’s the right thing first, alright? Okay I gotta go: someone’s coming.
To all the citizens of all the great states of America: good night, good night, good night. Know that I continue to work while you sleep, continuing to act as the manifestation of your collective will.
Sleep, citizens, and dream the American dream.
5. WOODY
Lord, I come to You in silent prayer, honest in my doubt, uncertain of Your shape.
I believe I could bear almost any of the hundreds of versions of what the stories say You are. The benevolent father; the Three-in-One; the blind watchmaker. I could even bear Your absence or Your nonexistence, or the possibility that You are an artifact of humanity’s collective imagining.
But I cannot accept a vision of You as an engineer who spends His days maintaining the machine of morality. I cannot take the idea of You as an optimizer, introducing evil into human affairs in an attempt to create the best of all possible worlds. I cannot bear this cold mathematician’s God who sees all the universe as nothing more than an elaborate problem to be solved. Such a world is a world with no meaning, one in which one history is no more or less preferable to any other.
Let us find our own paths; let us make our own attempts at fashioning this world; let us bear the sting of our own inevitable failures. To do otherwise would be to fail Yourself. And the only thing You cannot do is fail.
6. SEAN
My father keeps telling me new stories, stories inside other stories, stories on top of other stories. And I draw them in this place. I could stay here and draw forever, but I can’t. I have to show my mother soon.
This place is mine. The sky over me is mine, and the jail underground is mine. The jail has fire and water. But if you end up there you can’t have both, only more than you want of one. And that’s too bad for you: you should have stayed out of jail.
In the forest there is a tiger. He has needles for claws and his teeth are made of knife blades. He says and does whatever he wants, and if he doesn’t like you, he’ll bite into your throat and shake you all around. But when my father appears the tiger puts his head down, and covers it with his paws, and does whatever he’s told.
The forest is my mother’s hair. The tiger lives in her hair.
My father is here in a thousand shapes. My mother is made of the earth and the sky.
I’m going to show her now.
7. REBECCA
Nothing is as it should be. Everything is upside down.
But I know I can fix this. I can do it.
38
GRAND DESIGN
The first unusual thing that Alicia noticed when her retrofitted, autonomous VW Beetle pulled into Rebecca’s driveway on Saturday morning was that Rebecca had apparently left the driver’s-side door of her car wide open the last time she got out of it. As she passed the vehicle on the way to Rebecca’s front door, Alicia peeked inside: the car stereo was still there, and the door of the glove box hadn’t been forced. She shut the car door, which looked as if it had been left ajar overnight: the dashboard showed no electronic signs of life, suggesting a depleted battery. Wouldn’t Rebecca have heard the car’s insistent beeping?
Another odd thing was Rebecca’s eagerness to have Alicia come over so they could go for a morning run. Alicia usually got up before sunrise anyway, and so she didn’t necessarily mind phone calls at six fifteen, and was in fact liable to forget that most other people did. So when Rebecca had said that she wanted Alicia to drop by her place first to see “something cool that Sean had made” before they went for a run at eight, Alicia assumed that the professed need to display her son’s juvenile artwork (when she could just as easily have snapped a picture of it on her phone and shown it to Alicia later) had been a pretext to begin their usual Saturday-morning run from Rebecca’s apartment, instead of a place Alicia would pick that would lead to challenging terrain. Which was fine: not every run needed to kick your ass. Gentle slopes and asphalt were okay sometimes when you needed a break.
Rebecca answered her door, clad in running gear: she looked quite cheerful. “Come in,” she said, ushering Alicia inside with a gentle hand on her shoulder (though Rebecca usually didn’t touch her). “Come on in the kitchen: I made us some smoothies to have before we run, like you suggested. I whipped them up last night and put them in the fridge so they’d be cold.”
“Hey, you left your car door open last night,” Alicia said.
Rebecca paused in the entrance to the kitchen door. “Oh shit. I…I’ll guess I’ll figure out what to do about that after we go running. I won’t need it today.” She shrugged. “Some trouble I couldn’t use, I guess. But whatever.”
In the kitchen, Rebecca removed the smoothies from the fridge: two glasses covered with Saran Wrap. “Papaya, mango, and coconut water,” she said, tearing the cellophane off each glass and inserting a stainless steel straw retrieved from a drawer. “And I mixed some of that cricket powder in yours.”
Weirdly chatty, this woman, this morning. Alicia tasted her smoothie: it was good, and refreshing. Rebecca had added a dollop of honey to it as well: thoughtful.
“So how are you doing,” Rebecca said, as if she hadn’t seen Alicia in a while. Alicia was doing quite well, all things considered: she told Rebecca that she’d come up with the idea of mounting an electron gun in the roof of the CVD to perform a double-slit experiment, and even if it didn’t explain why the CVD wasn’t behaving as theories and simulations said it should, maybe it would tell them something interesting. There was always hope.
“But what about that idea you told me about in the diner?” Rebecca said. “That if the time—the CVD, I mean—that if it actually worked, you might not be able to prove that it worked?”
“That’s just conjecture, at this point,” Alicia said. “Elaborate conjecture, with some decent reasoning behind it, but conjecture just the same.”
“But it’s still on the table.”
“Until we find some evidence that proves otherwise, of course it is. But if we’re talking about unprovable propositions, lots of things are on the table.”
“But out of all these possible but unprovable propositions—”
“Of which there are an infinite number,” Alicia interrupted.
“Okay, got it. But this is the most plausible out of those.”
“Yes, I suppose it is,” Alicia said. “But that’s why we have to keep working, and trying to find evidence to prove otherwise. Because I’d really prefer it to not be true. You can see why.”
“I can,” Rebecca said. “And I’m glad you’re keeping at it. Hey, how’s your smoothie?”
“It’s nice. I…I appreciate it.” Alicia smiled and looked at Rebecca, who looked back at her as if she expected her to keep talking, or sought a more convincing demonstration of her approval. “This is…a good mix of nutrients? Good for running, once we take some time to digest it.”
“Well, while that’s digesting and filling us with nutrients, I want to show you what Sean made. He’s sleeping, still: he sleeps in on Saturdays. But I’ll show you his…installation, I guess you’d call it. It’s amazing.”
Installation? Alicia thought.
“Sit over there,” Rebecca said, indicating a plush footstool on the side of the room opposite its single door. �
��That’s the best place to see the overarching pattern. Look how he’s divided the space into four quadrants: earth, air, fire, water. There’s not a clear line between each element, but you can start to see the boundaries if you pay attention to the way he uses color. Greens and browns in that corner, mostly; reds over there near you; blues on your other side; and air is suggested by his use of negative space. See?”
Feeling like she could have stood an extra half hour in bed—this whole random situation with Rebecca was starting to make her tired—Alicia sat on the footstool and looked out at the room before her. The artwork covered the entire floor from wall to wall, except for a narrow stripe in the middle that was clearly intended to spare the rest from being smeared by footsteps. The colors also crawled about four feet up the walls: Sean must have started there, working back toward the middle of the room, always leaving himself a path out.
“See how he’s integrated a history of technology into the four elements,” Rebecca continued. “That goes counterclockwise, starting with the earth: the people in that section are using rocks and spears and things. Then someone discovers fire and you’ve got cooking and kilns and gunpowder; then the water section is dedicated to the steam age, all engines and gears. And see that plume of steam drifting upward? That draws your eye from water to air: that last section represents the Information Age. See those dotted lines that are connecting those two heads together? See how one is standing on a miniature outline of the U.S., while another is in Australia?”
Alicia continued to stare at the riot of hues before her. “Sean did all of this?” she said.
“He’s been working on it for about a month, pretty much nonstop. Though I called him out sick from school for a week, near the end.”
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