Engineering Infinity

by Charles Stross

  I opened the vid and went straight to the appearance of the guy who looked like me. And the kids, horsing around. I ran it twice, then went to the kitchen cabinet and opened another bottle of Jack Daniels.

  "Your mother's a toboggan-time slut," the smaller kid had yelled, or something like that. And then he reached into his raggedy grey shirt and pulled out a sheet of glistening white paper, except that it looked more like an impossibly thin, flexible iPad, held it up for just thirty frames, jammed the thing back under cover again, and they were away.

  The iPad that wasn't an iPad held several... what? Hieroglyphs? No, mostly Roman and Greek letters, upper and lower case, with some other items that might have been Arabic or for all I knew Assyrian. And a few numerals, subscripts and superscripts, and brackets. Equations, okay. The only equations I'm familiar with are the bogus propositions of Jacques Lacan, psychiatrist and Freud-fraud. I did a screen capture of the clearest frame, pushed it up to 400%. Blurry, but I felt sure a mathematician would have no trouble recognizing it. Or a physicist, or cosmologist, or the creature from Bulgaria, whatever.

  The trouble with Google is that you can't easily search for equations, or at least I couldn't. I tried to cut and paste the bit-mapped string of symbols and that didn't get me anywhere. I went laboriously into Word, found the symbols one by one, but half of those on the screen were unknown to Microsoft, far as I could tell. I plugged in the fragment of the single equation whose parts I could find and hit "I'm Feeling Lucky."

  This first and simplest equation popped onto the monitor, embedded in an only moderately incomprehensible paper on a site called arXiv, which I assumed was an archive for people from the Other Culture who couldn't spell, like Bev's current creature.

  |ψ> = Σ (ai exp(jφi) | xi,yi,zi,υi,ωi >)

  It was dated 2009. The paper was titled "Ordinary Analogues for Quantum Mechanics," by one Arjen Dijksman, and it began: "Upon pondering over the question 'What is ultimately possible in physics?' various interrogations emerge. How could one interpret ultimately? Is there an ultimatum, a final statement in physics, after which one could say 'Physics is finished'? Are there issues, for instance fundamental principles, beyond which we could not go past? How can we describe the boundary between the possible and the impossible in physics? Anyway, does such a boundary exist? And if so what is at the edge?"

  I ran the whole video file again, and this time the Jack Daniels didn't keep me warm. The kid hadn't shouted "toboggan." My skin crawled. Jesus Christ. He'd said "teabaggin'." And the emphasis was subtle, but it wasn't "teabaggin'-time slut." It was "teabaggin' time-slut."

  Teabaggers in 1931? Give me strength. Had they even invented teabags that long ago? Back to Google, fingers stiff and clumsy on the keys. Yes, a form of silk tea-bag was used as early as 1903, but today's rectangular teabag came along as late as 1944. Let's not be too literal, Lee, let's try a lexical search.

  Before the current burst of radical crazies calling themselves the Tea Party, mocked by their foes as "teabaggers," the term had another and more scabrous sense. Urban Dictionary told me "teabagging" meant "To have a man insert his scrotum into another person's mouth in the fashion of a teabag into a mug with an up/down (in/out) motion." I squeezed my eyes shut. Oh-kay. Whatever floats your boat. But that had to be a recent coinage, didn't it, post-1944 at least? Maybe not. Old slang from society's undergrowth tends to seep up again and again, then vanish for a time. But "time-slut." And the arXiv abstract. Urchins didn't know about quantum theory in 1931. Maybe nobody did. I felt my ignorance yawning at me.

  I was in a sort of numb dissociated state, trying to remain amused at this obvious Photoshopped fake someone had shoved in my pigeon hole to mess with my peace of mind, but increasingly angry at whoever treated me with such scorn. Even if, face it, I was a barely controlled drunk two or three steps away from the same skids as those bums in the 1931 movie.

  But that was the point, it wasn't a 1931 movie, of course, it was a bricolaged fake. Well, maybe not the whole thing. Mostly it looked highly authentic to my well-seasoned eye. They'd rendered my face into the image of the young man, and somehow worked in that iPad thing for a few frames. Maybe in the original the kid had waved a newspaper headline, or a cloth cap. So why the hell bother? Who was trying to tell me something, and what? A disgruntled student? A post-postmodern gag to piss me off, get my goat? One of Bev's sardonic tame "artists"?

  I shut the machine down, carefully backing everything up first to the university cloud, and biked over to the other side of town to see Bev. Virta and Crump and impending divorce be damned. I just couldn't cope with this shit by myself, and besides I was developing a suspicion or two.

  When I first met Bev Peacock during my guest lectures at Chicago's School of the Art Institute, her father owned a small chain of health food stores with corporate headquarters in Sacramento. Bev took a couple of summer courses at UC Davis, including my sessions on Julia Kristeva and other psychoanalytic deep thinkers on their way to superannuation. During her last two years in Chicago, emails fled between us; we talked on the phone at least twice a day. By then, I was separated from Sheila, and visited Chicago when I could, strolling with Bev in Lincoln Park, visiting the art museum where I spent more time looking at her than at the daubings. Everyone could see we were in love; for the first two years, anyway. As I sank ever deeper into gloom at the gibberish I was required to teach, Bev discarded her dreams of great art. The renunciation changed her, bit by bit. She built her separate life, embarrassed to be seen with me: my moods, my drinking, the way I dressed.

  Barry Peacock sold the health food store chain six months after Bev and I married, netting $6.2 million. Barry and Ruth wanted their daughter to enjoy at least part of her inheritance while they were still around, so they bought the house in Davis for a little over a million dollars. The house remains owned by the Beverly Peacock Watson Separate Property Trust, but I had no claim to it under California's community property law. And now I was doubly alienated: evicted, replaced by the atom-tweaker from Bulgaria.

  I leaned my Koga StreetLiner against a pillar of the porch and dropped my helmet into the saddlebag. I felt queasy about leaving the Koga unlocked, even in this neighbourhood, but one of the reasons Bev threw me out was my habit of parking bicycles in the house. The creature opened the door and gazed down at me benignly. He drew in a deep, energizing breath, then wrinkled his patrician nostrils at the eau d'Jack.

  "Lee. I see the flesh seems a little weak today, but the spirit smells strong."

  I winced. I hadn't drunk that much, although I'd weaved a little on my ride; it was probably just as well no cop had pulled me over to check my sang froid. My sang réal. I sniggered. "And how's your cat today, Schrödinger? Alive or dead?"

  Tsvetan Toshtenov, D.Sc. (Ruse) blocked the doorway. "Both, of course. As a matter of fact, we've just done a..." He shook his head. "Of course you don't want to know. What do you want, Lee? I assumed Bev had a restraining order."

  "Ha ha, very droll." I made myself small and went under his arm, then galumphed down the hallway. Two small boys glanced up from their Playstation 4 and gazed at me impassively. So now she'd moved in the entire family. Those faces. Something went ping in a buried part of my brain but I was too aerated to catch it, although I half-stumbled for an instant. It would come back to me. I jinked through our bright metal-clad kitchen warm with the odours of Bulgarian fare, and made for the studio out back. "Honey, I'm ho-o-o-ome," I yodelled.

  It wasn't a studio, of course, despite the artfully placed and prepped canvas on its easel awaiting the first lick of oil. It had been waiting for years. When I'd married Beverley and moved in here with her, she was in the last drawn-out ebbings of her passion to be a painter, heading step by inexorable step toward curatorship and a safe doctorate in Mapplethorpe and de Kooning (Elaine, naturally, not Willem). These days she organized elegant or bizarre installations, events, displays, online video performances. If anyone was likely to know a scamp capable of torturing me with a fake or
phan movie, at her instigation, it was Bev. She of all people knew my own passion for orphan footage. Yet it seemed a bit beneath her, and perhaps beyond Bev's currently limited quotient of whimsy.

  "Drunk! For heaven's sake, Lee." My wife rose from her persuasive replica somethingth century oak Chateau Something credenza and advanced in her forceful and menacing way toward me. "What are you doing here?"

  "Hardly drunk," I said without conviction. "The sun's well and truly over the yardarm, Bev."

  "I had a call from Hattie Patterson several hours ago. She wondered if I knew where you'd got to."

  "Why would she expect you to know?"

  "We are still married, Lee. Have you signed the documents yet? Hattie said you didn't show up at the faculty meeting convened to consider your candidacy, and it had something to do with your daughter. Is Mandy okay? Oh, wait, of course she is - I should have taken it for granted you were lying."

  The spring, such as it was, had quite left my step. I looked for somewhere to sit, and found a deck chair rather ruined by splashes of house paint leaning against one wall. As I started to open it, Bev gave a strangled cry.

  "Not that, you idiot. Good god, man, it's an early Rauschenberg."

  I backed away smartly. So it was, or could be. How the hell did Beverley get her hands on something like that? She was loaded, but not that loaded, or Virta and Crump, P.C. were lying through their teeth. Of course that was the specialty of divorce attorneys. Or maybe she'd brought it home from some exhibition for a couple of weeks of private gloating. I opened my mouth to ask, an instant too late.

  "Come on, inside the house with you, and then please leave. I don't want the children to see a drunkard shambling about." She shepherded me out of the studio and along the small vegetable garden and ample green lawn where we had once rolled naked. Her creature was waiting in the kitchen, coffee mug in hand. He passed it to me and I burned my mouth.

  "That place is the death of the soul, Bev," I told her. "You know that much yourself. I mean, it's not as if you stayed around to build your academic..." I trailed off, blowing across the top of the mug. A teabagging time-slut? I couldn't imagine Bev and the creature from Bulgaria engaging in reckless sports of that kind. Not that she and I hadn't enjoyed, when we were first together, our share of -

  The two little boys crouched in the next room noisily killing aliens and cavorting in three-dimensional havoc with imaginary super-weapons were not her children, not ours, but Tsvetan's, and nobody of my acquaintance had ever seen their mother, save the creature himself. Beverley had met him at a soiree of daubers and their hangers-on. He'd pronounced himself a cubist. No doubt Bev raised an eyebrow. Hardly au courant. No, no. Forgiving urbane laughter over a simple error. A QBist. A Quantum Bayesian. Whatever that was, I'd never bothered to ask. As for his prior woman, the mother of his brats, maybe she was a time-slut. Whatever that might be. After all, how else - ridiculous, I told myself, slurping and blowing. I'm delusional. This is worse than the DTs. Those kids can't be older than five and seven. I couldn't remember their names. Something eastern European. Ivaylo and Krastio? But the little one did look horribly familiar. I could all too easily imagine him whipping out an advanced display unit from under his shirt. In five or six years from now. Christ.

  "I'm sure you'd like a drink," the creature said, and handed me a large glass not quite brimming with a deep, rich pinot noir. I remembered those glasses; they'd been a wedding gift from my aunt Hilda. I considered quaffing it in one hit and then flinging it into the fireplace, but that doesn't really work with a top of the line gas cooking range. I sipped in a gentlemanly manner, sat at the new kitchen table, and told them in a not especially accusatory tone about the Rev. Willard D. Havard and his unusual sidewalk congregation.

  "You can access this video, presumably?"

  "If I'd brought my laptop with me, Bev, I'd be delighted to show it to you."

  The creature was gone; he was back almost instantly with a gleaming titanium-shelled Apple. He pushed it in front of me. The university log-in box was displayed.

  "Oh hell, why not?" I pulled my orphan out of the cloud and ran it as they stood behind me, watching with a blend of avidity (Tzvetan) and amused contempt (my faithless wife). At the end of the three minutes I said, "Again?" and reran it. Then I found the screen capture and blew it up on the rather nice large display.

  "Well. That's obviously ket quantum notation. Dirac didn't invent it until 1939, so clearly this film isn't from 1931, did you say?"

  "Sweetheart," Bev said in a strangled voice, "didn't you notice? Those were Wolf and Chris." I looked up; her face was totally pale, and her eyes were fixed on Sweetheart. "Those were your boys, grown up."

  "Distant relatives, perhaps." Tsvetan was doubtful, but I trusted Bev's curatorial eye, and I imagine my own face was as bloodless as hers. "In 1939, my own parents and their siblings were still under Hitler's boot." Or working for the Gestapo, I didn't quite mutter aloud. I had no reason to think badly of the man's antecedents. For all I knew they had indeed been subjected to the banality of evil. "Show me that equation again, I thought I recognized it."

  "I found it here." I opened the arXiv paper.

  "I've heard of Arjen," the QBist said thoughtfully. "Young Dutch theorist with an interest in the foundations of physics, lives near Paris. He's a serious scholar, wouldn't have anything to do with a silly game like this, I assure you. Here, let me find his number." He had his iPhone out, with a finger sweeping.

  "Please don't," I said. "I'm sure you're right. It's a prank by one of Bev's students."

  My wife's jaw dropped. "Excuse me?"

  "Who else has the skills to paste my head on some ancient young geezer's body, let alone do something to the appearance of the boys? Age shifting or whatever the forensic cops call it."

  "Anyone over the age of 10," Bev said frostily. "Mandy, for that matter, or one of her friends. Have you been upsetting your daughter, Lee?"

  "Oh for god's sake, I wasn't making it a personal accusation. My point was -"

  "No, that's right, she's made it clear she doesn't want you in her life any longer. Sensible child."

  I shoved the chair back with a nasty screeching sound. That wouldn't have helped the parquet floor. Tsvetan slipped into its seat like a large muscular eel and started pounding the keyboard. I noticed that he used only four fingers, but his typing was faster than I could manage with ten. Then again, scientists don't have to stop and think what they're about to be writing, it's all formulae and algorithms and canned knowledge, isn't it. Unless they're Einstein. Or Dirac, whoever he was. Dirac, I thought. Diracula.

  "We're hungry." Two little boys with the same face as their father and no resemblance to Bev stood at the open door between the kitchen and the hall. They were amazingly well-behaved, nothing like the scapegraces they'd been in 1931. But it was them, they, I knew it, on the orphan footage. Had been. Would be. No question. Time was out of joint big time. I thought I was going to throw up.

  "In a moment, darlings. This man was just leaving."

  I shook my head sadly at the perfidy of women, children and creatures, swigged down the last of the red in my glass (my glass!), put the glass, stem first, in my jacket pocket, and walked in a dignified fashion to the front door, pursued by imprecations.

  I warmed up some refried beans, which I suppose made them re-refried, and googled quantum theory, grinding my teeth from time to time. It was the sort of thing I'd have expected Carl Jung to get excited about, and of course he had been involved in a sterile collaboration with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli before Pauli came to his senses and decided synchronicity was a lot of hogwash. Bohr thought nothing was until it was observed, which might not have appealed to Freud, who thought all sort of unobserved items got up to no end of mischief. Granted, the way to eradicate and heal the mischief was to haul out the unobserved into the open, but then Bohr and Heisenberg (it said on my screen) insisted that you couldn't really get away with that, or only a bit at a time. I gave up, washed my p
late, made some coffee, and called Mandy. That meant dealing with her mother first, but somehow I got through that ordeal and onto my sweet daughter.

  "What do you want?"

  "Don't you mean, 'What the fuck do you want, Daddy dearest?' Don't answer that. Can't a man call his own -"

  "I'm hanging up."

  "Mandy, did you or one of your friends make that video of me? And the Toshtenov boys?"

  In the background I heard someone incredibly famous and fatuous, someone observed at every moment of the day and night by hundreds of millions if not billions, of whom I knew nothing beyond their unlikely names. Beyoncé, or Lady Gaga, or Rihanna, or Bran'Nu. (I try. It makes my brain itch, but I do try. Fourteen year olds are feral.) Talk about quantum observers and ontological status. If anyone existed on the planet because of being observed, they were it. Talk about the evil of banality. After a long moment, my daughter said: "What?" Another silence. I waited. Then, with acid adolescent contempt: "Who would make a vid of you?"

  "That's what I'm trying to find out, my good-natured offspring. Okay, look, I'll send you a tinyurl. The orphan's short."

  "What?"

  "Just let me know what you think. Okay? This is really important to me, Mandy."

  "Whatever." She clicked off.