Zeitgeber

by Greg Egan

  The tactic seemed to work, so he stuck to the same theme for the next few days, but there was only so much cryptography he could teach before it started squeezing out everything else. And then just when he thought he’d exhausted the subject, the Time Thieves dumped a truckload of new material into his lap.

  Sam gave in and showed excerpts from the videos. The biohackers had apparently spent months testing their products on macaques, and they were offering up thousands of hours of recordings as evidence that they possessed both the agent behind the syndrome and an effective cure. Every shot contained a bank of screens behind the cages, showing international news channels playing live, along with a certified time-stamped hash of a previous, rolling segment of the video, to prove that the backdrop was not just a recording. But that left only the narrowest of windows between the original broadcast and the time stamps, so if everything involving the animals had been added with CGI, it must have been generated in something close to real time—a feat most experts judged unlikely. If the images were genuine, then according to a team of biologists with the patience to watch much more of the footage than Sam had, they showed that the macaques had entered a free-running state at the start of the experiment, and then abruptly returned to a normal circadian rhythm three months later.

  “Maybe they put in brain implants before the experiment started—before the cameras started rolling,” Angela suggested.

  “Good point,” Sam conceded. There was always going to be some potential loophole; macaques were too long-lived for the experiment to stretch back to their birth, and shorter-lived species like mice were too different in their circadian biology.

  Ehsan said, “The technology didn’t exist two years ago, did it?”

  “Not that we know of,” Angela replied.

  “Yeah, but how many different things are these geniuses meant to have invented?” Ehsan retorted. “We’re talking about implants, now, because all the millionaires are getting them … but I bet it never even crossed these people’s minds.”

  “Forget implants,” Nora interjected. “They could have trained these monkeys to wake and sleep for any reason: some sound we can’t hear, some smell. They could be pulling all kinds of invisible strings.”

  Sam let the debate run on, only intervening when necessary to keep it civil. These kids’ lives were in the balance; he couldn’t tell them to drop the subject and get back to the things they’d be tested on.

  On the way home, after he’d dropped off Emma’s friends, he asked her if she had any questions about the Time Thieves. He’d done his best to give her a sense of why most people believed their claims, but he wasn’t sure if she’d really taken it in. “If there’s anything you don’t understand, I can try to explain it more clearly.”

  “I don’t care about of any of that,” she replied. “I just hope no one pays them, because it would be a big waste of money.”

  Sam kept his eyes on the road. “Why would it be a waste, to get back to normal? Don’t you miss seeing more of your mother?”

  “She’s still around. I still see her. She doesn’t have to hold my hand every day.”

  Sam fought to conceal his dismay. He’d wanted his daughter to adapt, to be resilient. And she wasn’t being cold toward Laura; this was just the reality she’d grown to accept, as surely as if the two of them lived on different planets that only came into proximity for brief stretches at a time.

  In the street ahead, there were lights showing through the windows of most of the houses. The traffic around them was barely less, at four a.m., than when they’d set out the evening before. And if none of that felt strange to him anymore, how could it feel anything but normal to someone who’d lived the last quarter of their life this way?

  “I don’t know what will happen with the money,” he said. The extortionists had made a trillion dollars sound like a bargain, which had to irk all the biochemists who’d been slaving away trying to understand the syndrome with a fraction of that as their budget. “But my hunch is it won’t be long before we can all have the sun on our faces again.”

  Emma was quiet for a while, and Sam thought she’d let the matter drop. But as they approached the house, she replied, “I already have the sun inside me. The one you see up in the sky doesn’t count.”

  7

  Three weeks after the ransom demands appeared, a group of neurologists, biochemists, and cell biologists from seventeen nations announced a cure of their own. Sam really didn’t care if this was just a cover for paying off the hackers; whether the Nobel committee handed out medals to the researchers and pronounced them the saviors of the world, or some investigative journalist unmasked their work as a recipe their governments had bought on the sly, it would make no difference to whether the antidote worked or not.

  But the timetable for the new, synthetic zeitgeber to hit the shelves kept changing. There had to be safety trials, starting on animals; no one could acknowledge prior experiments on monkeys, and in any case Sam wouldn’t have wanted the Time Thieves’ offering blindly accepted as benign. Then there was the question of manufacturing the substance in sufficient quantities for a fifth of the world’s population to take a few milligrams every day.

  With each delay, the old scammers bombarded his inbox with new fervor, now offering bootleg versions of the untested cure. Sam remained patient; so long as the end was in sight, he could get through another year the way he had the last two. He’d learned to cherish the brief, glorious “spring,” when he woke with the sun and Laura emerged from what seemed like hibernation, to share his bed, and two or three meals a day. And when it slipped away, and he was dragged into the season of broken sleep through the heat of the morning, he told himself: This is the last time. I can live with anything, one last time.

  8

  “I don’t want it!” Emma declared vehemently.

  “I know,” Sam replied. “But what if you try it for a week, to start with? Just to see what it’s like?”

  “No!” Emma was close to tears.

  Sam spun the bottle of pills on the table, seeing if he could get it to rotate like a top, but the rattling contents destabilized it. “Then talk to me,” he said. “What is it that you think will be so bad?”

  “Everything’s better the way it is,” she insisted. “Why do you want to force me to stop being a runner?”

  “Because all the other runners are going to stop. If you try to keep going, you’ll be all alone.”

  “Only because they’re being forced as well!”

  “Maybe some of them,” Sam conceded. “But we can’t keep the schools open all night for a couple of people. And if it’s been hard to keep up with your friends already, if you don’t switch back with them it will be even harder.”

  Emma stared sullenly into her cereal bowl. Sam felt a brief flicker of regret for declining the suggestion from well-meaning colleagues to grind the pills up and slip them into her food.

  She’d been awake since three a.m., but Sam had hardened his heart and insisted she not eat until six. This was Realignment Day, and all the zeitgebers had to be lined up in a row. In the end, he’d compromised; it was half past five, and the sky wasn’t dark anymore. Even on Sunday mornings, Laura usually woke at six, and Sam was hoping he could get all the drama over before she joined them.

  He rose from the table and switched off the light, then opened the kitchen blinds fully to let the dawn fill the room.

  He said, “Remember the time before this happened? You’d always wake up with the birds.” He paused to let her hear the singing from the trees. “And you’d be smiling, full of energy, brighter than anyone else at that hour. Would it be so terrible, going back to that? Were you unhappy then? Honestly?”

  Emma said nothing, but after a moment she picked up the pill from the table and swallowed it, then washed it down with orange juice.

  He heard the bedroom door open; Laura padded down the hall. “Don’t eat yet!” she implored them. “I want to make pancakes!”

  Emma glanced at her
cereal, already wet with milk. Sam leaned down and whispered to her, “It’s all right, you can have both. Just finish it while she’s in the shower.”

  9

  “So we factor this term in the denominator … into what?” Sam turned from the blackboard and looked around the room. “Come on, it’s easy! Anyone?”

  Half the class offered no acknowledgment that he’d spoken, while the rest stared back at him uncomprehendingly, as if he’d asked them to compute the square root of a fish. He was facing a new mix of students, but he knew quite a few of them from the runners’ classes, and he knew what they were capable of. “Elena?” he prompted. If she couldn’t answer him, who would?

  “You want to cancel one of the terms above?” she struggled.

  “Right,” he replied encouragingly. “And that would mean…?”

  She frowned and shook her head. “I’m sorry. It’s too hard.”

  Sam surveyed the room. No one looked sleepy; if anything, they seemed wired, jittery with nervous energy. The holdouts wouldn’t have shown up at all; any ex-runners here must have dutifully taken their pills.

  He glanced out the window. Walking to class beneath the blue sky, picturing the same scene repeating for a thousand days to come, he’d been as elated as if he’d returned from the dead. Surely he wasn’t the only one who felt that way?

  “How’s it going for you?” he asked Elena.

  “What?” She blinked, confused.

  “Are you getting used to the new routine?”

  Elena seemed lost for words. “Sure,” she managed eventually. “I’m sticking to the schedule.”

  In the staffroom at lunchtime, Dan compared notes with his colleagues. “Oh, the runners are hopeless!” Tom declared bluntly. “I don’t know what your special schools were teaching them, but it’s going to take them months to catch up.”

  Gloria said, “They do seem to be struggling. Maybe they’re still a bit jet-lagged from the shift.”

  Tom rolled his eyes. “Wasn’t the whole point of the magic potion we shelled out for that it was going to bring them absolutely back into synch?”

  Sam could only half follow the accounts of the cure; all he knew was that it helped phosphorylate some crucial proteins in the cells of the suprachiasmatic nucleus, a process that the syndrome’s sufferers had lost the ability to perform in response to the normal cues. Sunlight itself still couldn’t imbue them with wakefulness, but if they took the pill in the morning, the biochemical upshot was meant to be the same.

  “Everything takes time,” he decided. “Even if it’s only old habits that they’re fighting. A few more weeks, and they should be back to normal.”

  That night, the news showed thirty-eight people in handcuffs and orange jumpsuits paraded before the cameras in Shanghai. Prosecutors were claiming that they’d conspired to adulterate a fire-retardant chemical that had been applied to tens of thousands of different products: clothes, toys, furniture. If that was true, the cause of the syndrome might eventually be eliminated worldwide, as all the polluted items were identified and destroyed.

  Or just preemptively destroyed. Sam kept Emma distracted while Laura went through her room with a garbage bag.

  “What’s it like, seeing all your friends at the same time?” he asked. She’d hardly talked to him for the last few days, but however resentful she was at being pressured into taking the zeitgeber, the silent treatment couldn’t last forever.

  “They’re not my friends anymore,” Emma replied.

  Sam smiled at this hyperbolic declaration; playground politics could be tough for nine-year-olds, but the grudges rarely lasted long.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  She turned to Sam with a listless expression. “No one’s the same as before.” Her voice was flat; the last thing she was being was dramatic.

  “I think the ex-runners are all a bit…” He didn’t know quite how to finish that. No one was dozing off, or zoning out. But everything seemed to be harder for them.

  Emma said, “Before, it didn’t matter if it was day or night; we had our own sun inside us, and when it was up, it was brighter than the old one. Now you want us to pretend we don’t see it anymore.”

  “It’s a big change,” Sam conceded. “It will take time to adjust.”

  Emma smiled thinly. “The pills say wake up, and we wake up. We won’t ever fall asleep at the wrong time again. But it’s like being an animal in a factory farm, pushed along between the rails, going wherever you want us to go.”

  Sam’s gut tightened. “You don’t mean that. Everyone has to follow some kind of routine; that’s hardly the same as being in prison. You’ll get used to it again. You just need to give it time.”

  Emma gazed at him defiantly for a second or two, but then the energy she’d summoned ebbed away, and she turned back to the TV.

  10

  Laura shuddered fitfully, a sign that she was dreaming, but then she became ominously still. “Aren’t you ever going to sleep?” she asked Sam, exasperated. She turned to the clock beside her. “It’s a quarter past two!”

  “I’m sorry.” He didn’t quite know how he managed to disturb her just by lying motionless beside her, but her ability to sense his wakefulness even as she slept only made the prospect of him joining her even more elusive. “Do you want me to move into the office?”

  “Don’t be stupid. Those days are over.”

  “Maybe they shouldn’t be.”

  Laura raised herself up on the pillows and stared at him. The room was almost in darkness, but Sam’s eyes had adapted and he could see her face well enough.

  “We can’t just give in to her,” she said. “It was one thing when she had no choice—and when the whole world was willing to accommodate the runners. But if she goes back to it now, it’ll ruin her life. What kind of job could she have? What kind of family?”

  “And if we’re crushing all the joy out of her, what will that do?” Sam didn’t want to believe it himself, but he saw it on the faces of the other ex-runners every day.

  “This was her thing,” Laura replied. “It made her feel special, and now she’s missing it. It’s like when they moved the children out of London into the countryside during World War Two, to escape the blitz. It was an adventure while it lasted, but now it’s just … rationing and austerity and having to be normal again.”

  Sam couldn’t deny that there might be some truth to that. Even in his early twenties, the freedom to stay up all night had seemed sweeter than any other perk of adulthood. If he’d been granted the same ability at Emma’s age, it would have felt like he’d conquered the world, and he would never have given up the power willingly.

  “I’m not saying she’s dishonest, at heart,” Laura added. “But she’s nine years old, and she wants what she wants. When I was ten, I faked an illness for three months, without a moment’s compunction. Everyone thought I was an angel back then, but I would have said anything to get my own way.”

  At breakfast, as Sam poured himself a third cup of coffee, Emma glanced at him knowingly: The pills say wake up, and we wake up. But unlike him, she’d slept through the night; he’d tiptoed into her room to check, afraid he might find her on the floor making sketches in the dark.

  At school, his lessons went like clockwork, and not in a good way: he read from his notes, and transcribed them to the blackboard, barely thinking about what he was saying. His students dutifully wrote it all down. He didn’t pause to ask any questions, as much afraid that he’d lack the concentration to frame them properly as he was that nobody would offer an answer.

  In the staffroom, he sat at a table by himself, staring at the noticeboard on the opposite wall, not so much drifting toward sleep as hovering on the verge of a waking hallucination.

  Someone clapped him on the shoulders. “You look like shit,” Sadiq announced cheerfully, pulling up a chair.

  “But I showed up,” Sam replied. “That’s what we do, isn’t it? Because everything would fall apart if we all just followed our own rhythms
.”

  “Yeah, very funny. I’ve got to admit it, you proved me wrong: you and your friends made the whole thing work.”

  “We did, didn’t we?” Sam managed a bemused smile. “The Apollo missions, the Manhattan Project, Bletchley Park … and the runners’ schools.”

  But the government was never going to let them start up again. It was an open secret that they’d paid their share of the ransom, and whether or not they ever managed to claw the money back from the prisoners’ scattered cyptocurrency accounts, they expected that to be the end of it. No one wanted to hear that the cure that cost so much was worse than the disease. Sam didn’t want to hear it himself.

  That night, exhaustion broke the spell: he fell into bed at nine and slept soundly, until Laura shook him awake at half past six. He hadn’t even heard the alarm.

  His newfound clarity only made his classes more disturbing. He obtained an official list of ex-runners from the office, so he wouldn’t be relying on his own experience of who he had and hadn’t taught before—and the deficits they were suffering as a group went from anecdotal to indisputable. These kids showed up, more convincingly on some levels than any sleep-deprived caffeine zombie, but … screw the somnograms and the body temperature charts from the clinical tests that had given the green light to the zeitgeber, because his students were not okay, however wide-eyed and ambulatory the pills rendered them.

  When he raised his observations with Laura, she was skeptical. “Just because Emma’s not the only one dragging her feet doesn’t mean there’s anything more going on here than a collective sulk.”

  “Really? You think my seventeen-year-olds—with university admission and job prospects at stake—are willing to shoot themselves in the foot … because they want to spend their nights, not at wild parties, but with me or some other teacher, talking about exactly the same things as we talk about by day?”

  Laura was unmoved. “Some might be sulking, some might just be suffering from the disruption in their routine: a change of school, a change of teacher. You don’t have any evidence that it’s anything more.”