by Peter Watts
The test results are inconclusive. It’s as though she’s laughing up from the page at him. True or false: I sometimes hear voices that no one else hears. False, she’s checked. I have been feeling unusually depressed lately. False. Sometimes I get so angry I feel like hitting something. True, and a hand-written note in the margin: Hey, doesn’t everyone?
There are snares sprinkled throughout these tests, linked questions designed to catch liars in subtle traps of self-contradiction. Jasmine Fitzgerald has avoided them all. Is she unusually honest? Is she too smart for the tests? There doesn’t seem to be anything here that—
Wait a second.
Who was Louis Pasteur? asks the WAIS, trying to get a handle on educational background.
A virus, Fitzgerald said.
Back up the list. Here’s another one, on the previous page: Who was Winston Churchill? And again: a virus.
And fifteen questions before that: Who was Florence Nightingale?
A famous nurse, Fitzgerald responded to that one. And her responses to all previous questions on historical personalities are unremarkably correct. But everyone after Nightingale is a virus.
Killing a virus is no sin. You can do it with an utterly clear conscience. Maybe she’s redefining the nature of her act. Maybe that’s how she manages to live with herself these days.
Just as well. That raising-the-dead shtick didn’t cut any ice at all.
She’s slumped across the table when he enters, her head resting on folded arms. Thomas clears his throat. “Jasmine.”
No response. He reaches out, touches her lightly on the shoulder. Her head comes up, a fluid motion containing no hint of grogginess. She settles back into her chair and smiles. “Welcome back. So, am I crazy or what?”
Thomas smiles back and sits down across from her. “We try to avoid prejudicial terms.”
“Hey, I can take it. I’m not prone to tantrums.”
A picture flashes across the front of his mind: beloved husband, entrails spread-eagled like butterfly wings against a linoleum grid. Of course not. No tantrums for you. We need a whole new word to describe what it is you do.
“Debugging,” wasn’t it?
“I was going over your test results,” he begins.
“Did I pass?”
“It’s not that kind of test. But I was intrigued by some of your answers."
She purses her lips. “Good.”
“Tell me about viruses.”
That sunny smile again. “Sure. Mutable information strings that can’t replicate without hijacking external source code.”
“Go on.”
“Ever hear of Core Wars?”
“No.”
“Back in the early eighties some guys got together and wrote a bunch of self-replicating computer programs. The idea was to put them into the same block of memory and have them compete for space. They all had their own little tricks for self-defence and reproduction and, of course, eating the competition.”
“Oh, you mean computer viruses,” Thomas says.
“Actually, before all that.” Fitzgerald pauses a moment, cocks her head to one side. “You ever wonder what it might be like to be one of those little programs? Running around laying eggs and dropping logic bombs and interacting with other viruses?”
Thomas shrugs. “I never even knew about them until now. Why? Do you?”
“No,” she says. “Not any more.”
“Go on.”
Her expression changes. “You know, talking to you is a bit like talking to a program. All you ever say is go on and tell me more and—I mean, Jesus, Myles, they wrote therapy programs back in the sixties that had more range than you do! In BASIC even! Register an opinion, for Chrissake!”
“It’s just a technique, Jaz. I’m not here to get into a debate with you, as interesting as that might be. I’m trying to assess your fitness to stand trial. My opinions aren’t really at issue.”
She sighs, and sags. “I know. I’m sorry, I know you’re not here to keep me entertained, but I’m used to being able to—
“I mean, Stuart would always be so—
“Oh, God. I miss him so much,” she admits, her eyes shining and unhappy.
She’s a killer, he tells himself. Don’t let her suck you in. Just assess her, that’s all you have to do.
Don’t start liking her, for Christ’s sake.
“That’s—understandable,” Thomas says.
She snorts. “Bullshit. You don’t understand at all. You know what he did, the first time he went in for chemo? I was studying for my comps, and he stole my textbooks.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Because he knew I wasn’t studying at home. I was a complete wreck. And when I came to see him at the hospital he pulls these bloody books out from under his bed and starts quizzing me on Dirac and the Bekenstein bound. He was dying, and all he wanted to do was help me prepare for some stupid test. I’d do anything for him.”
Well, Thomas doesn’t say, you certainly did more than most.
“I can’t wait to see him again,” she adds, almost as an afterthought.
“When will that be, Jaz?”
“When do you think?” She looks at him, and the sorrow and despair he thought he saw in those eyes is suddenly nowhere to be seen.
“Most people, if they said that, would be talking about the afterlife.”
She favours him with a sad little smile. “This is the afterlife, Myles. This is Heaven, and Hell, and Nirvana. Whatever we choose to make it. Right here.”
“Yes,” Thomas says after a moment. “Of course.”
Her disappointment in him hangs there like an accusation.
“You don’t believe in God, do you?” she asks at last.
“Do you?” he ricochets.
“Didn’t used to. Turns out there’s clues, though. Proof, even.”
“Such as?”
“The mass of the top quark. The width of the Higgs boson. You can’t read them any other way when you know what you’re looking for. Know anything about quantum physics, Myles?”
He shakes his head. “Not really.”
“Nothing really exists, not down at the subatomic level. It’s all just probability waves. Until someone looks at it, that is. Then the wave collapses and you get what we call reality. But it can’t happen without an observer to get things started.”
Thomas squints, trying to squeeze some sort of insight into his brain. “So if we weren’t here looking at this table, it wouldn’t exist?”
Fitzgerald nods. “More or less.” That smile peeks around the corner of her mouth for a second.
He tries to lure it back. “So God’s the observer, is that what you’re saying? God watches all the atoms so the universe can exist?”
“Huh. I never thought about it that way before.” The smile morphs into a frown of concentration. “More metaphoric than mathematical, but it’s a cool idea.”
“Was God watching you yesterday?”
She looks up, distracted. “Huh?”
“Does He—does It communicate with you?”
Her face goes completely expressionless. “Does God tell me to do things, you mean. Did God tell me to carve Stu up like—like—” Her breath hisses out between her teeth. “No, Myles. I don’t hear voices. Charlie Manson doesn’t come to me in my dreams and whisper sweet nothings. I answered all those questions on your test already, so give me a fucking break, okay?”
He holds up his hands, placating. “That’s not what I meant, Jasmine.” Liar. “I’m sorry if that’s how it sounded, it’s just—you know, God, quantum mechanics—it’s a lot to swallow at once, you know? It’s—mind-blowing.”
She watches him through guarded eyes. “Yeah. I guess it can be. I forget, sometimes.” She relaxes a fraction. “But it’s all true. The math is inevitable. You can change the nature of reality, just by looking at it. You’re right. It’s mind-blowing.”
“But only at the subatomic level, right? You’re not really saying we could make
this table disappear just by ignoring it, are you?”
Her eye flickers to a spot just to the right and behind him, about where the door should be.
“Well, no,” she says at last. “Not without a lot of practise.”
What’s wrong with this picture?
Besides the obvious, of course. Besides the vertical incision running from sternum to approximately two centimetres below the navel, penetrating the abdominal musculature and extending through into the visceral coelom. Beyond the serrations along its edge which suggest the use of some sort of blade. Not, evidently, a very sharp one.
No. We’re getting ahead of ourselves here. The coroner’s art is nothing if not systematic. Very well, then: Caucasian male, mid-twenties. External morphometrics previously noted. Hair loss and bruising consistent with chemotherapeutic toxicity. Right index and ring fingernails missing, same notation. The deceased was one sick puppy at time of demise. Sickened by the disease, poisoned by the cure. And just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse...
Down and in. The wound swallows the coroner’s rubberised hands like some huge torn vagina, its labia clotted and crystallised. The usual viscera glisten inside, repackaged by medics at the site who had to reel in all loose ends for transport. Perhaps evidence was lost in the process. Perhaps the killer had arranged the entrails in some significant pattern, perhaps the arrangement of the GI tract spelled out some clue or unholy name. No matter. They took pictures of everything.
Mesentery stretches like thin latex, binding loops of intestine one to the other. A bit too tightly, in fact. There appear to be—fistulas of some sort, scattered along the lower ileum. Loops seem fused together at several spots. What could have caused that?
Nothing comes to mind.
Note it, record it, take a sample for detailed histological analysis. Move on. The scalpel passes through the tract as easily as through overcooked pasta. Stringy bile and pre-fecal lumps slump tiredly into a collecting dish. Something bulges behind them from the dorsal wall. Something shines white as bone where no bone should be. Slice, resect. There. A mass of some kind covering the right kidney, approximately fifteen centimetres by ten, extending down to the bladder. Quite heterogeneous, it’s got some sort of lumps in it. A tumour? Is this what Stuart MacLennan’s doctors were duelling with when they pumped him full of poison? It doesn’t look like any tumour the coroner’s seen.
For one thing—and this is really kind of strange—it’s looking back at him.
His desk is absolutely spartan. Not a shred of paper out of place. Not a shred of paper even in evidence, actually. The surface is as featureless as a Kubrick monolith, except for the Sun workstation positioned dead centre and a rack of CDs angled off to the left.
“I thought she looked familiar,” he says. “When I saw the papers. Didn’t know quite where to place her, though.”
Jasmine Fitzgerald’s graduate supervisor.
“I guess you’ve got a lot of students,” Thomas suggests.
“Yes.” He leans forward, begins tapping at the workstation keyboard. “I’ve yet to meet all of them, actually. One or two in Europe I correspond with exclusively over the net. I hope to meet them this summer in Berne—ah, yes. Here she is; doesn’t look anything like the media picture.”
“She doesn’t live in Europe, Dr. Russell.”
“No, right here. Did her field work at CERN, though. Damn hard getting anything done here since the supercollider fell through. Ah.”
“What?”
“She’s on leave. I remember her now. She put her thesis on hold about a year and a half ago. Illness in the family, as I recall.” Russell stares at the monitor; something he sees there seems to sink in, all at once.
“She killed her husband? She killed him?”
Thomas nods.
“My God.” Russell shakes his head. “She didn’t seem the type. She always seemed so—well, so cheery.”
“She still does, sometimes.”
“My God,” he repeats. “And how can I help you?”
“She’s suffering from some very elaborate delusions. She couches them in a lot of technical terminology I don’t understand. I mean, for all I know she could actually be making sense—no, no. Scratch that. She can’t be, but I don’t have the background to really understand her, well, claims.”
“What sort of claims?”
“For one thing, she keeps talking about bringing her husband back from the dead.”
“I see.”
“You don’t seem surprised.”
“Should I be? You said she was delusional.”
Thomas takes a deep breath. “Dr. Russell, I’ve been doing some reading the past couple of days. Popular cosmology, quantum mechanics for beginners, that sort of thing.”
Russell smiles indulgently. “I suppose it’s never too late to start.”
“I get the impression that a lot of the stuff that happens down at the subatomic level almost has quasi-religious overtones. Spontaneous appearance of matter, simultaneous existence in different states. Almost spiritual.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s true. After a fashion.”
“Are cosmologists a religious lot, by and large?”
“Not really.” Russell drums fingers on his monolith. “The field’s so strange that we don’t really need religious experience on top of it. Some of the eastern religions make claims that sound vaguely quantum-mechanical, but the similarities are pretty superficial.”
“Nothing more, well, Christian? Nothing that would lead someone to believe in a single omniscient God who raises the dead?”
“God no. Oh, except for that Tipler fellow.” Russell leans forward. “Why? Jasmine Fitzgerald hasn’t become a Christian, has she?” Murder is one thing, his tone suggests, but this...
“I don’t think so,” Thomas reassures him. “Not unless Christianity’s broadened its tenets to embrace human sacrifice.”
“Yes. Quite.” Russell leans back again, apparently satisfied.
“Who’s Tipler?” Thomas asks.
“Mmmm?” Russell blinks, momentarily distracted. “Oh, yes. Frank Tipler. Cosmologist from Tulane, claimed to have a testable mathematical proof of the existence of God. And the afterlife too, if I recall. Raised a bit of a stir a few years back.”
“I take it you weren’t impressed.”
“Actually, I didn’t follow it very closely. Theology’s not that interesting to me. I mean, if physics proves that there is or there isn’t a god that’s fine, but that’s not really the point of the exercise, is it?”
“I couldn’t say. Seems to me it’d be a hell of a spin-off, though.”
Russell smiles.
“I don’t suppose you’ve got the reference?” Thomas suggests.
“Of course. Just a moment.” Russell feeds a CD to the workstation and massages the keyboard. The Sun purrs. “Yes, here it is: The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead. 1994, Frank J. Tipler. I can print you out the complete citation if you want.”
“Please. So what was his proof?”
The professor displays something akin to a very small smile.
“In thirty words or less,” Thomas adds. “For idiots.”
“Well,” Russell says, “basically, he argued that some billions of years hence, life will incorporate itself into a massive quantum-effect computing device to avoid extinction when the universe collapses.”
“I thought the universe wasn’t going to collapse,” Thomas interjects. “I thought they proved it was just going to keep expanding...”
“That was last year,” Russell says shortly. “May I continue?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Thank you. As I was saying, Tipler claimed that billions of years hence, life will incorporate itself into a massive quantum-effect computing device to avoid extinction when the universe collapses. An integral part of this process involves the exact reproduction of everything that ever happened in the universe up to that point, right down to t
he quantum level, as well as all possible variations of those events.”
Beside the desk, Russell’s printer extrudes a paper tongue. He pulls it free and hands it over.
“So God’s a supercomputer at the end of time? And we’ll all be resurrected in the mother of all simulation models?”
“Well—” Russell wavers. The caricature seems to cause him physical pain. “I suppose so,” he finishes, reluctantly. “In thirty words or less, as you say.”
“Wow.” Suddenly Fitzgerald’s ravings sound downright pedestrian. “But if he’s right—”
“The consensus is he’s not,” Russell interjects hastily.
“But if. If the model’s an exact reproduction, how could you tell the difference between real life and afterlife? I mean, what would be the point?”
“Well, the point is avoiding ultimate extinction, supposedly. As to how you’d tell the difference...” Russell shakes his head. “Actually, I never finished the book. As I said, theology doesn’t interest me all that much."
Thomas shakes his head. “I can’t believe it.”
“Not many could,” Russell says. Then, almost apologetically, he adds: “Tipler’s theoretical proofs were quite extensive, though, as I recall.”
“I bet. Whatever happened to him?”
Russell shrugs. “What happens to anyone who’s stupid enough to come up with a new way of looking at the world? They tore into him like sharks at a feeding frenzy. I don’t know where he ended up.”
What’s wrong with this picture?
Nothing. Everything. Suddenly awake, Myles Thomas stares around a darkened studio and tries to convince himself that nothing has changed.
Nothing has changed. The faint sounds of late-night traffic sound the same as ever. Gray parallelograms stretch across wall and ceiling, a faint luminous shadow of his bedroom window cast by some distant streetlight. Natalie’s still gone from the left side of his bed, her departure so far removed by now that he doesn’t even have to remind himself of it.
He checks the LEDs on his bedside alarm: 2:35a.
Something’s different.
Nothing’s changed.
Well, maybe one thing. Tipler’s heresy sits on the night stand, its plastic dustcover reflecting slashes of red light from the alarm clock. The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead. It’s too dark to read the lettering but you don’t forget a title like that. Myles Thomas signed it out of the library this afternoon, opened it at random:
