Engineering Infinity

by Charles Stross

  I fiddled about with my notes for the next day's lecture, thoughts skittering everywhere, and finally abandoned that as a really pointless exercise. Manfully, I kept away from the Jack Daniels. My daughter didn't call back or email me or text me or instant message me or tweet me, hardly to my surprise, but it was a bit disheartening. My Tivo was showing me a light, so I watched the ep of Californication it had grabbed while I wasn't paying attention ("Mr Bad Example," which seemed somehow oracular), then had a shower, took a sleeping pill, and went to bed. At five in the morning I woke up with a headache and a woman standing in my dark bedroom. She said something.

  "Hmngh?"

  "She put it on the web."

  I climbed out of bed naked, clawing for my trousers. The woman didn't shift her gaze from my face. "Who the hell are you and how did you get -"

  "Went viral."

  I clapped my hands and the bedside lamp came on. The woman was medium height, with a dark razor-brush 'do, and looked incontestably Bulgarian: long elegant nose, broad brow, widely spaced eyes. I had fancied to discern the creature in the immature features of the boys Wolf and Chris, but now I found the other half of the taller kid's genome, if not his half-brothers's. Good god, was the creature devoted to spreading his seed across the world? I said, "You'll be the time-slut, then."

  She said, "Beg pardon?" All the women I'd met recently appeared to have formed a secret club dedicated to taking umbrage at everything I said to them. Except Lissa, I thought muzzily, and rubbed grit out of my eyes.

  "I apologize, Mrs Toshtenov. Having a hard time lately, not thinking all that clearly. Forgive me for being naked in my own bedroom."

  "Is nothing haven't seen before."

  "No doubt."

  She clucked her tongue. "Radka. Not married. Am mother to Ivaylo."

  I nodded. "Wolf."

  "Means 'wolf,' yes."

  "You sent me a message," I said, and finished getting dressed. "Then my bad-tempered daughter put it on YouTube, I take it. If that was your intention, why not just do it yourself? I thought it was fake, but now I -"

  "Not much time," Radka told me. She bounced on her toes, almost vibrated with tension. "Listen. Am professor theoretical physics, Sofia. Not yet, soon. Listen, listen, keep mouth shut. Bohr wrong, of course. Bohm, wrong. Heisenberg not even wrong. QBists, half right." She went out like a light. I hadn't clapped my hands. A young woman in her early twenties stood several inches to the right of Radka's last jitter. Her hair was cropped close, a sort of tie-dyed version of the Bulgarian fashion statement. I recognized her at once.

  "Mandy," I yelped, and took a hesitant step, afraid to embrace her. The ghost of Christmas Future.

  She stayed still, also vibrating. "Amanda. Hello, Dad. No, stay there. Everyone's observing this, see, that's the point. Everyone. Everything. Forever, probably. Well, near enough."

  I sat down on the edge of the bed again and put my head in my hands. "I hope you're not going to tell me the Reverend Willard sent you."

  "What?"

  "Oh my god, are we back to that again?" I peeked through my fingers. Amanda sent me a wry grin.

  "That was then. See, I do remember. Oh, I suppose it's now, too, if you look at it that -" She cleared her throat. "It's an entanglement excursion," Amanda told me. "Probability waves bouncing around an attractor, making the droplets walk, you know? We're just walls of flesh, Daddy, wrapped around bars of bone. And tangled."

  A fragment of an old Bob Dylan song twanged in the back of my defeated skull. "Tangled up in blue." I let some words slip out, out of key but maybe that's how you have to sing Dylan: "All the people we used to know, they're an illusion to me now."

  For a moment I thought my daughter was going to say "What?" again, but she caught herself and grinned again, more broadly this time. "Some are mathematicians," she said. It made me happy. Mandy the teen brat despised Dylan. "Tzvetan, for one. Go and talk to him."

  "I thought he's a phys -" I started and she winked away. The creature of science stood in my bedroom, regarding me from a superior vantage. I couldn't quite keep my eyes on him. After-images flickered around the man. Christ, that's all I need, I told myself. Epilepsy. Or migraine, was it? Auras, battlements, fortification figures on the retina or, rather, deep inside the screwed-up brain. Jerry Lehman's chapter had something on the topic. I couldn't recall what. I'm so slack, I thought. And I used to be the boy wonder of psychoanalytic semiotics, back when that was the sexy thing to be a boy wonder in. "Can I help you, Dr Toshtenov? It's rather early, a mug of coffee? Heart starter? I was just talking to your..." Your what? I trailed off.

  "Radka," he said. "Yes. No coffee. Sit down, Dr Watson. I can't stay long, and we have a lot to cover." Tzvetan Toshtenov, with surprising levity (of a rather heavy-handed kind, I supposed, although I had no notion what it meant), wore a tee-shirt urging me to Please adjust your priors before leaving the QBicle. "What do you know about quantum entanglement and Bayesian probability theory?"

  I gave him a sour look. "If we're going to play one-upmanship, Schrödinger, what do you know about, oh, the imbricated relationship between the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary?"

  He looked at me suspiciously. "As in imaginary time? The teh dimension? Yes, that's relevant."

  "As in the Lacanian orders of - oh, never mind. Think of them as the three rings of a Borromean knot. That's three tangled rings that fall apart if one of them is cut. Like the middle rings in the Olympic symbol, but more so, or maybe not quite." I knew I was babbling, but I could see where that item of gibberish had popped up from: the entanglement Mandy mentioned. Future Amanda. And Bob Dylan.

  "Chain. Borromean topological chain," the creature said, looking mildly astonished. "That's exceptionally astute, Watson, I didn't think you had it in you."

  "No, it's a knot." He looked pained, as if once again I'd fallen in his estimation, and I quickly babbled: "Lacan argued that psychosis is what happens when the Borromean knot unravels, unless it's held in place by a fourth ring."

  "A sinthome," Tzvetan the mathematician-physicist-smartass said. "Exactly. An extra link to the ring chain, a double curve. One ring to rule them all, as my boys would put it." He smiled fondly. "A bond through teh supertime. That's what holds the chain together. Holds everything. Do you see, Watson? Everything is nothing but uncertainties, latencies, probability pilot waves perhaps, vapors threaded in fog - until it is observed into definiteness and clarity."

  "They teach you this stuff in Bulgaria, do they?"

  He was gone. "Ha ha," I said weakly. "I unobserved you." I lay down and covered my eyes with one sweating forearm. Obviously I was ripe for the laughing academy. My Borromean chain had been pulled, and I was sliding down the cloaca maxima. I just wanted to go back to sleep, but when I made a feeble attempt to clap the light off there was already too much morning illumination coming in through the blinds. A voice said, from the centre of the room, "Watson, come here, I need you." Bev's voice. Our old joke, and thank you, Alexander Graham Bell. She wasn't there. I put my socks and loafers on and started for the front door and my bike. Everything happened at once.

  It wasn't the Rapture, and it wasn't the Cloud of Unknowing. This was the Cloud of Knowing Too Much, the silver lining of the dark night of the soul blazing like a thousand suns, like the Buddhist ten thousand things, the unity and diversity of everything bonded into its clasp, and I stood at the middle of it all but that was also at the edge, and at every point in between. Walls of flesh, bars of bone, gates of light, opening.

  Mandy in my trembling arms, so tiny, so ugly, so incomprehensibly beautiful, eyes squeezed shut, head still slightly deformed by the terrible passage through her mother's body to this cold, brilliantly lit place. Sheila, holding up her arms for the baby, her own face shiny with sweat, exhausted, exultant. I bent to kiss her, Mandy cradled - an old lady with frosted hair and a look of synthetic peace on her harsh face, stretched in an open coffin. I bent and could not bring my lips to touch hers. The eyes of a hundred students locked to
mine or skittering away or dully drooped to their laptops as I stood at the fulcrum of the lecture theatre teasing them with text and context. "There is no outside-the-text," I said. "So we are told inside a text by Derrida: Il n'y a pas de hors-texte. So we carry that meaning outside, away from his text, reading it, observing it from as many angles as we can, remake it as our text, or discard it as waste, order into ordure, or vice versa, as supplement, so that it becomes, paradoxically -" With Beverley, young love redividus, I stood, I stand, I will stand before paintings, etchings, constructs, texts that are all at once or seem to be, even as the eye skips and snacks and rebuilds, Picasso's wonderful African contortions, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, his cubism, his late hideous, marvellous Nude Woman with a Necklace, and of course the once-fashionable distortions and visual paradoxa of Dali, Escher, Magritte, the decompressions into art that denied itself as art, Rauschenberg, Johns, Lichtenstein, the comic antics of Warhol and Koons and a thousand others, Dadaists, Fauves, frauds, Freudians, unpeelers of pretence and its practitioners, and through it all the slowly ebbing passion, the curdling of my cynical eye observing everything into nothing... All of this a millionfold, birth, copulation, and death.

  "Bev," I said, "help me," and tears flooded down my face. I took a step and stood in the morning kitchen of our old house, our renovated house, the Edenic garden from which I'd exiled myself. Two little boys looked up from their bowls of cereal. Observing my manifestation from nowhere, the younger let out a piercing scream. The older yelled, "Tátko, that man has come back," and flung a spoonful of milk-soaked Rice Krispies at me, splashing my pants, like Luther hurling his ink bottle at the Devil. If it had been ink, a text in potentia, a zany part of my mind thought, it could have written a long bill of particulars, my crimes, every one. "Hush," I said. I held out my open, tear-wet hands. "Your daddy invited me here for breakfast, boys. Look, here he is now."

  I am seated at the table, Bev's table, now his table. The boys have been driven to school. Tzvetan is saying, "I have to thank you most humbly, Dr Watson. I couldn't have done it without your tip. And the boys, of course. But that's later." Nobody is in the room to look at us, but we are observed. The very air hums with the intensity of their gaze. Their gaze contributes, their gaze elicits, their gaze is the terrible look of a million million angels, more, vastly more, without judgment or pity, it seems to me. They do not act beyond the activity of their Tat tvam asi, their spectatorship. This is just the blather of my discipline, which I hardly credit any longer, but that is the function, obviously, of my own reciprocal gaze, and the mirror that is... well, the universe, the specular everything. And -

  Appalling compression, emphatic dark clarity, in the infinitely protracted nothingness that awaits a first crystalline instant of precipitation. It is an eye in utter darkness. Something breaks, ruptures, breaches, raptures, bursts forth into its going and coming, fecund, a spray of light flung into the endless sphere of eyes gazing from within and without, making manifest, tumbling faster than light into categories that render themselves under that impossible gaze from the far ends of itself, from everywhere, forever. The sky foams with explosions boiling with a froth of stuff that swirls and settles and catches new light, a heaventree of galaxies, photonic dust etching their eidolons upon the eyes that watch and select and shape and build. My own eyes are there also, watching the lights redden and dissipate and fall away into night unendurably cold and empty. But that is the way of the thing, that is the story, all the eyes can do is witness until they are folded back into the great silence and void. Tzvetan is murmuring in my ear. "My experiment with single particle self-interference proved that a macroscopic extended object can be made to deviate through an instability threshold and surf its own pilot wave. But it can only do that because we chose to place it in that apparatus. We observe it from our own Bayesian priors, and its activity is objectively determined by the interaction between us and the particle. This is not mystical, Watson, stop curling your lip. It is the basis for everything that ever happens, to eternity and infinity."

  I am aghast at the hubris. "So we're... engineering infinity?"

  "No," he tells me, sharply. "Precisely not. We are nothing until we are observed by the universe. Infinity is engineering us."

  Amanda handed me an old musty suit and a cloth cap. Of course I had seen them before. The world shimmered slightly, as if it were uncertain of itself. Two youngsters came into the studio - oh, that's where I was - dressed in Depression era knickerbockers suitable for urchins. The younger boy pushed a flat, flexible machine under his grey shirt, and winked at me.

  "You're sending yourself a message, Lee," he said. "This is the moment we've all been waiting for."

  I sent my daughter out of the room and dressed, dazed. "Who is going to send the orphan film to me?" I said.

  "The universe," my ex-wife Bev told me at some time in the near future. She looked plumper, and a lot happier. Was she pregnant? Did the man pepper the planet with his offspring? "But I've found out who sent me that Rauschenberg, Lee, and I thank you. Of course, it will be a lot cheaper to buy it in 1951."

  The universe looked at me, and I looked back, and found myself blinking in bright snowless winter afternoon light in New York, an older New York with far fewer of the great mirroring skyscrapers that will someday be built. Were. Up ahead, I saw the Reverend ranting, and I strolled past. Some nameless amateur cinematographer was cranking a Ciné-Kodak, and as I passed him I remembered the kid's cheeky wink and slipped the fellow one of my own. The two boys were horsing about, an irritated old geezer slapped out with his cane, but Krastio, the younger, had his eye focused on the middle distance. An intent, lovely woman in a long dowdy 1930s dress appeared out of nowhere at the entrance to a laneway. Quantum tunnelled, I suppose Tzvetan would call it. Nobody but the younger boy and I saw her, except everyone and everything, forever. Krastio yelled out hoarsely to Ivaylo, "Your mother's at teh - begin time slot." He pulled out his display and flashed a page of equations to the rolling film. I walked briskly past, and took Radka's hand. The universe observed us in silence amid the rumbling noise of the city.

  Mantis

  Robert Reed

  Robert Reed was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1956. He has a Bachelor of Science in Biology from the Nebraska Wesleyan University, and has worked as a lab technician. He became a full-time writer in 1987, the same year he won the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest, and has published eleven novels, including The Leeshore, The Hormone Jungle, and far future science fiction novels Marrow and The Well of Stars. An extraordinarily prolific writer, Reed has published over 180 short stories, mostly in F&SF and Asimov's, which have been nominated for the Hugo, James Tiptree Jr. Memorial, Locus, Nebula, Seiun, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial, and World Fantasy awards, and have been collected in The Dragons of Springplace and The Cuckoo's Boys. His novella "A Billion Eves" won the Hugo Award in 2007. Nebraska's only SF writer, Reed lives in Lincoln with his wife and daughter, and is an ardent long-distance runner.

  Infinity windows were installed two months ago, but technical troubles, nebulous and vexing, delayed their coming on-line. The tall squidskin sheets were left transparent, revealing white walls and assorted cables leading back to the building's servers and power plant. Mr Pembrook is our club manager, and whenever he bounced past he made the point of apologizing for any inconvenience. But I didn't particularly miss the mirrors that used to hang here; staring at my pained, sweat-sheened face was never an attraction. And I didn't pine for the giant televisions tuned to sports I didn't follow and the 24/7 crime networks. White and bland suited my task, and after the first week it felt as if this was the way it had always been.

  My club sits ten storeys above the apartment where I live with my son. Fifty machines of various designs fill a long, narrow, well-ventilated room. My favourite machine is near the back corner, and it's usually unoccupied in the early afternoon. As a rule, I avoid the newer models. I'm avid but lazy, and their "miles" feel long to me. I know what to expect when I w
ork the pedals and swing the long arms, the onboard computer interfacing with a heart and lungs it knows as well as any. I prefer hill workouts while watching history programs from my own library, and one hard hour is usually enough to cleanse a brain evolved to chase antelope across a grassy plain.

  Mostly the same faces haunt the club every day, and we know each other on sight and sometimes by name. A few regulars are passing acquaintances. Not Berry. I know her name only because somebody once called her that in front of me. Berry might be her first name, or last, or a nickname. Or I didn't hear things right, and she's somebody else entirely.

  Whatever the name, the woman seems to be in her late sixties. She has a long face framed with hair dyed a luxurious, unnatural black. She never asks anything of her machine except a lot of easy minutes. She watches old hospital shows, turn-of-the-century stuff. Like me, she has her favourite machine or two, and she always wears the big smile of somebody who is relentlessly nice and almost certainly boring.

  One afternoon while my son was at school, I arrived to discover the infinity windows working. The room had been transformed, and I laughed out loud. Happy Mr Pembrook explained that in the end the problem was nothing mechanical. "Inspiration at the AI level," he said, whatever that means. It seems that the windows aren't just hybrids between two ordinary technologies - teleconferencing and digital entertainment. Some level of bottled genius was at work here. The new-generation squidskins are energy frugal and startlingly realistic, but instead of piping in a scenic overlook of some great city or Martian canyon, we were being treated to a downtown corner in some cookie-cutter city. The most prosaic setting possible, which startled me as much as anything, and that's another reason why I laughed and why I kept chuckling until I was perched on top of my usual apparatus.

  Berry's favourite machines were occupied, which was why she happened to be riding the old warhorse on my right. "Yes, the window's working," she said, throwing her simple smile my way.