by Victor Milán
He waved a cigaretted hand as she joined him at the window. “You’ve served your time in academe. You should be accustomed to intrigue.” He had the rich brown eyes of an Arab horse; oddly feminine lashes matched the softness of his hands.
“Too bloody right. You should try holding down a chair in a university in a police state sometime, if you want intrigue.”
He drew in smoke. “I have.”
She grimaced. “Yeah.” Christ, what a diplomat I’d make. Too late she recalled O’Neill’s team psychologist was a double refugee, once from Israeli-invaded Lebanon, later as a “political undesirable” from the tender mercies of America’s prewar Federal Police Agency.
Too much a gentleman to let silence stretch too uncomfortably, he rapped the window softly with the backs of his knuckles. The technicians on the other side, elephantine in bulky insulated suits, paid no attention. “I understand the work they do in here impinges on your field as it does my adopted one. I trust you comprehend it better than I.”
Beyond glass heated by hair-fine filaments to minimize condensation, wall-spanning banks of equipment surrounded an arrangement of very thin pipes. Michiko could not decide whether it more closely resembled a plumbing school final exam, a low-G jungle gym, modern sculpture, or a Habitrail for snakes. The spacesuited techs moved about it with the air of high priests attending the Holy of Holies. “As a matter of fact,” she said, breath misting the window, “it’s very much in my department. Just not a branch of experimentation I’ve followed. What this cubist spaghetti is, or so everybody hopes, is a macroatom. It’s a single tube of superconducting alloy, cooled down to spare change over zero absolute. The tube’s not of uniform thickness. You look at it in section, at one point it thins to a width it’d take an electron microscope to see.”
She took a pack of cigarettes from a buttondown pocket over her left bicep, shook one out for herself, poked another at Hassad, who’d smoked his own to a nub. He accepted, produced a lighter, and lit for both. “The pinching comes in according to a principle worked up by Brian Josephson, the man who invented the Josephson junction they use in a lot of Gen-5 machines. You generate a standing Schrodinger wave of probability representing the superconducting electrons—here they’re using a heavy-electron superconductor, which passes on electrons from shells way down deep; works better with the magnetic fields they use to manipulate the wave. The idea is to make the whole assembly imitate the behavior of a subatomic particle. That means a quantum transition from one energy state to another takes place instantaneously, throughout the entire apparatus, in blatant violation of the laws of relativity.” She sampled smoke. “Works, too.”
Hassad smiled sheepishly. “I’m afraid software’s my forté in the computer field; I don’t pretend to have much operative understanding of what you’ve told me. But I gather, if such a phenomenon can be adequately controlled, it will mean a huge increase in operating speed for computers.
“Yeah. Put J-junction machines and the molecular circuits we use in the shade, by doing away with the light-speed delay.” She grinned. “Funny to think of the speed of light as a delaying factor, especially considering the distances involved in computer circuitry.”
She brushed a threatening fleck of mascara from an eyelash with a thumbnail. “I remember when the team at the University of Sussex first made a macroatom that worked—tiny thing, a ring half a centimeter across, but still infinitely above the level you normally find quantum effects. It was like a birthday present; one in the eye for old Albert”
“You said this research was closely related to your specialty. I thought you were a particle physicist”
Her nose wrinkled. “A butterfly chaser? Not me. I want to be a sorceress; I want the stars. I want to bend the rules of what we fondly imagine to be the real world. I’ve no interest in looking for new specimens to pin to a board.” The stars—could we have made it? Franz, Eileen, Richard, me: we seemed so close. If only—She shook her head, pointed two fingers with cigarette between at the apparatus. “Here’s the sort of thing that turns me on. Breaking the rules.”
“I’m surprised your father didn’t ask you to supervise this research.”
Quickly she looked away. The thought never crossed his mind. Not that I’d’ve accepted. She cocked an eye at him. “You’re almost as good at not getting to the point as a Japanese, Doctor. I’m impressed.”
He laughed, a startling, robust sound. “People where I come from aren’t exactly amateurs in circumspection, Doctor.” She turned, leaned back. Glass chill touched her bones. “So. Why doesn’t Dr. O’Neill want me in her lab?”
He rubbed a cheek. “We’re at a crucial stage in the work. She’s afraid any distraction—”
“Bullshit.”
His eyelids fluttered like hummingbird wings. For a heartbeat she thought he might burst into tears. “Excuse my bluntness, Doctor. But that’s no reason, and we both know it. Dr. O’Neill doesn’t like me. I want you to tell me why.”
White teeth worried plump underlip. “She’s very sensitive. She feels you are, uh, intruding.”
“That much I got. Again, why?”
“Frankly, I’m unsure.”
Crossing her arms, she arched an eyebrow. “I thought you were the psychologist”
“Research, Doctor, not clinical. Aberrant—oh, screw euphemism; crazy people depress me.”
Her turn to laugh. “Life in the modern world must be trying for you.”
“As for everyone.” He smoked for a few moments. “Dr. O’Neill is not in the habit of confiding in anyone—anyone human.”
“Human?”
“I gather she speaks quite freely with TOKUGAWA.”
Michiko felt eeriness bunch at the nape of her neck. Why should I be surprised? I’ve talked to him—dreamed with him. He’s as much a person as anyone I’ve ever known, and more than some. Still, the notion of having a computer—program, she reminded herself—as sole confidant took getting used to. “I see.”
Hassad studied her a moment. “Yes. I think you do.” He stubbed his cigarette in an ashtray protruding from the wall by the window. “So perhaps you can understand, Doctor, that I believe she’s jealous of you.”
“Jealous?”
“Yes. Your work played a role in winning her the chance to carry out this project—and believe me, Doctor, it means far more to her than her own life. You’re daughter of the lord of the manor.” She winced. “Finally, you have certain physical advantages over Dr. O’Neill. Is it surprising she feels threatened?”
She pushed off from the glass sheet, paced half a dozen steps down the anechoic corridor. “But I’d so much like to talk to her! What she’s doing here—I find it incredible. She has demonstrated that the insight so many of us quantum-physics folk have had so long is right, that consciousness is itself a quantum function. That we’re more than mechanism. That randomness—uncertainty—makes us what we are, that we aren’t damned Newtonian robots.”
He was frowning puzzlement. “But I thought most scientists rejected Dr. O’Neill’s hypotheses.”
“Most scientists. For God’s sake, Bohr and Heisenberg understood that true randomness wasn’t just a fact of the universe, but an underlying fact, better than three-quarters of a century ago. Most scientists haven’t been paying attention” She stabbed a finger at him. “They were afraid to. It’s why they shunted us quantum mechanics into a ghetto of our own, before the war. Our truth struck at the roots of the state, you see; if uncertainty was, then grand central plans to direct everybody’s destiny were bullshit. Newton’s universe—and Einstein’s—was all one big machine. If wise men—emphasize that, men, though a lot of women bought into the idea—if they could just get a handle on it, they could make us all move at their direction like battery-powered toys.
“But we said, hey, there’s no machine. Knowledge goes so far, and can go no farther. That’s sedition. The socialist ideal, the spring that winds fascism and communism alike, that the wise and powerful leaders can choreograph an op
timum dance of everybody—it just breaks. And when the state’s justification comes apart, people might just start asking how governments differ from any other gang of thugs with guns. Most scientists depend on the state for their living, and no few have notions of grabbing the handles themselves; technocracy’s a long way from dead, my friend. We preach heresy—the same heresy as your Dr. O’Neill, just in different terms.”
She halted, breathed deep, rubbed her face. “Excuse me, Doctor. Sometimes I get a bit worked up, grinding my favorite axe with reality.” She peered over manicured fingertips. “Actually, I had the impression psychologists were among the worst determinists around.”
A smile showed teeth. “They are. Call me apostate; many have. My own contemplation of consciousness led me in a similar direction to the one Dr. O’Neill was going. A path you and your colleagues have already traveled, it seems.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Elizabeth—Dr. O’Neill and I have so much we could say to each other.”
He moistened his lips. “It could be.”
“I’ll give you something to prime the pump, get things flowing between us. If Dr. O. plans to try generating any more artificial awarenesses, she doesn’t need to use those damned unwieldy Foucard functions. A randomness generator based on atomic decay would do the trick, and be a lot simpler. No one can say when a given atom is going to shed a photon and drop an energy level, or an unstable nucleus calve. Hell, those were the dice old Albert said God didn’t play”
Rubbing his beard, Hassad nodded. “I’ll see what I can do. If Elizabeth knew just how fully your work—your whole branch of science—supported her… It’s going to be tough to broach the subject. She’ll be hurt that I’ve even spoken with you. She’ll think it disloyal.”
Michiko looked at him with her head tipped one way and half a smile another. “You’re all terrifically loyal to her, aren’t you? I halfway suspect it was protectiveness that got you to meet with me, concern as to just what I wanted from your precious doctor.”
His gaze had hooded. “Yes. We feel tremendous loyalty to the doctor. She has—she has helped us work a miracle.”
“Good. She deserves your loyalty.” Tension gusted out of him in a sigh. “Go tell her I don’t plan to interfere with her in any way. I just want to talk to her.”
“I shall.”
“And—thanks, Doctor.”
“My pleasure.”
Behind glass the involute apparatus perpetrated another felony against relativity. With Japanese reserve the researchers nodded and spoke to the Gen-5 steno keeping the research log. Michiko said goodbye to Wali Hassad and they went opposite ways.
And she was thinking: They all feel fanatical devotion to O’Neill. A good sign in a lab. But isn’t it, maybe, just maybe, the old bushido rap again?
* * * * *
“You fool!” Elizabeth O’Neill screamed at her fifth assistant “What in hell did you think you were doing, talking to that woman?”
Apparently meditating upon the ash growing at the end of his cigarette, Wali Hassad said. “I thought somebody from the lab ought to speak with her. We’ve been stonewalling her a great deal; I didn’t think we should risk alienating her. She’s in a position to do us harm.”
Doughy fingers kneaded the arms of the powered chair without strength. “You thought. Are you sure? How do you know she doesn’t already intend to try something?”
He sighed. “One hesitates to resort to pop-psych terminology—but, really, aren’t you being a touch paranoid, Elizabeth?”
“Don’t take that tone with me, you son of a bitch!”
He stared at her. The pain bleak in his eyes thrust some of the rancor from her. She settled deeper in her chair.
“I’m sorry, Wali. I shouldn’t yell at you.” A good thing I don’t have strength to rub my eyes; it’s bad for them, and they hurt all the time, anyway. “Tell me, please, what did she say she wanted?”
“To talk. To share information with you.” Seeing her muscles tense feebly, he hurried on, repeating what Michiko had told him, finishing with her suggestion about the random-number generator.
Pale beneath pallor, O’Neill fumbled off her glasses and scrubbed them compulsively with a tissue from the dispenser on her desk. “I knew it,” she whispered through a throatful of gravel. “She wants the lab. She wants TOKUGAWA.”
Hassad lurched forward in his chair. “Elizabeth! What are you saying?”
She fluttered fingers at him. “Go away, Wali. I know you mean well, but… please leave me now,”
Unsteadily he rose. He stared at her for the space of several breaths, lips moist and tightly packed together. He turned and went out.
O’Neill floated in a crimson haze of fluorescent light filtered through closed eyelids. “Shosei,” she commanded. “Connect me with Yoshimitsu-san. Immediately”
I’ve got to get that woman out of here.
* * * * *
Elizabeth O’Neill sat in her wheelchair on the lower floor of TOKUGAWA’s lab, near the hemisphere of the IPN, the Kliemann Coil nearby, humming with promise. She wouldn’t be occupying its chair today.
She cast a resentful eye upward at those assembled in the gallery to watch this, the crucial test of the TOKUGAWA Project. Aoki Hideo had informed her, ever so gently, that she was by no stretch of the imagination to make the maiden voyage into full rapport herself. This was an unorthodox application of the little-understood Kliemann technology; no one could predict what might happen. She’d ridiculed the possibility of danger, but Aoki remained immobile as the granite cliffs at the base of Mount Takara. Kim Jhoon had declined the honor of being the first to try the rapport device; he was more interested in monitoring the experiment. So O’Neill’s second assistant, Ito Emiko, was the one fidgeting impatiently in the chair while the swarm of technicians affixed vital-signs monitoring devices to her arms and head.
Nor was this moment going to be as private as O’Neill wished. They were all up there in the gallery: Aoki; old Yoshimitsu Akaji, looking ineffably smug; Shigeo and his sycophants, floating off to the side like dumpy black clouds; Yoshimitsu Michiko, in jeans and a loose silvery blouse with short sleeves and a high soft collar sprawled around her graceful neck, looking like something you’d have seen in a soft drink commercial before they were banned from the American airwaves, a few years before the war. O’Neill tried not to glower up at her. I shouldn’t resent her so much. She’s part of the family; she has a right to be here, since Yoshimitsu Akaji insisted he was going to make a public event of this.
But she’s too damned interested in TOKUGAWA.
The white-coated technicians finished wiring Emiko. She looked over at O’Neill. “I’m ready, Doctor.” Her cheeks glowed pink with anticipation. She was clearly savoring this moment, and O’Neill tried not to hate her for it.
“Very well.” The audience up in the gallery no doubt expected her to make some kind of a speech, words of explanation, or simply commemoration of this historic event. The hell with them. “Whenever you want, Emiko.”
Emiko spoke softly. The gleaming helmet descended. Kim hovered over the console of the coil’s monitor, too wrought up to rest in the padded swivel chair set before it. “All coil functions operational,” he reported. “The interface is ready, Dr. Ito.”
“Open it up.” Emiko’s voice rang from within the silver dome. An expectant murmur circled the gallery.
A beat later she began to scream.
* * * * *
Michiko sat on her futon watching a ballet broadcast from Indonesian-occupied Auckland on the wall entertainment screen. Or rather, looking at it; she couldn’t force her vision past a millimeter short of the shifting images. She hoped The Firebird would leach the poisonous pictures from her mind. If only she could bring it into focus.
The instant the interface opened Ito Emiko had begun shrieking as though she were on fire, thrashing, flailing at the sensors on their cables as though they were a monster’s tentacles. She had banged her head twice agains
t the helmet before Kim hit a button on his console that lifted it; instantly she began clawing for her own eyes, her nails gouging red furrows down her cheeks. The technicians had grabbed her, though she fought them like a mad thing. She’d raked one man’s eye out of its socket—he’d probably lose the sight of it, despite emergency treatment in the citadel’s excellent infirmary—and dislocated another’s jaw before they wrestled her to the floor and got somebody’s lab coat wrapped around her arms. All the while she screamed, her voice vibrating at a single unbearable intensity; she didn’t even seem to be drawing breath. By the time they brought a gurney up and strapped her into it, she’d lost her voice, but her mouth still gaped like a bullet’s exit wound, and the cords on her neck stood out like cables.
Michiko shook her head. No more. She tried by sheer willpower to force her eyes to resolve the blobs of color moving on the screen into human forms.
The door’s annunciator chimed. “Who is it?”
A familiar bearded face appeared in the small screen inset next to the door. “Miguel. Feel like some company?”
Michiko moistened her lips. “Yes. Please come in.”
At her command the door slid open. Miguel García stepped inside, and it slid noiselessly to behind him. He glanced over at the screen, then looked away, incurious. “I heard about what happened.”
Michiko wore a short black kimono printed with a pattern of reeds and red blossoms, really more Western than Japanese, caught at the waist with a cloth belt. She was making more production than necessary out of lighting a cigarette. “Pretty bad?” he asked.
“I’ve never seen anything worse.” She moved her head deliberately from side to side. “I don’t know why this has hit me so. I’ve seen some pretty awful things. They broke up a riot at the university two years ago with machine guns, killed three hundred people. I watched it happen from the physics building. It was horrible, worse than anything I’d imagined. But somehow this hit me harder.”
