by Ted Kosmatka
“I don’t know.”
“These are strange days we live in. For in all of recorded history, it has never been possible to reconcile the husk with the spirit. And yet now here we find ourselves.”
I looked at him sharply. Husk with the spirit. It sounded familiar.
“You’ve talked to Robbins.”
He nodded. “I’ve whispered in his ear. Whispered enough to know that he won’t be a problem. But you”—he gestured in my direction—“what a world of problems you have created.”
He turned and looked out over the city again. “What kind of world have you created, Eric? Have you ever stopped to think? Your little test, you and Satvik, and all the nosy scientists who will come after you, checking and rechecking, until they find what you have found—that there exists a segment of the population who can’t collapse the wave. Do you think that information can be stopped now? Do you think a discovery can be undiscovered?”
“No.”
He shook his head. “Not easily anyway. Civilizations have lost knowledge before, but not without pain. Once your paper was published, it was all doomed, I think. The world spins on its axis, but it has more axes than you can see. Even now there are labs out there, setting up equipment, applying for funding. Even now there are people who have taken notice. The machine is in motion. If I close my eyes, I can hear the gears turning. They will push forward; they’ll find what you found, and then what will happen?”
“What do you mean?”
“What will happen to the human beings who are different? You must have considered this.” He turned his face toward me. “Robbins called it a soul, and others will, too, but no matter what name it goes by, the fact remains that your test has drawn a line. Exposed the paradox to the dissector’s scalpel.”
“What paradox?”
He cocked his head to the side in puzzlement. “The paradox of free will. Do you really not see?”
I didn’t see. Brighton’s face shone pale in the dim light. His expression solemn.
“Will people demand that their politicians be tested? Their judges? Their potential spouses? The process is already incubating—spurred by Robbins’s findings. The question is being asked, in churches, in mirrors. And where will it take us? These people who aren’t people … what happens to them? Can they be trusted? Are they fair game for work camps? Fair game for genocide?”
“You’re crazy.”
“These are extreme responses, I will admit, but consider. What about humankind makes you suspect that they are disinclined toward extreme responses? People kill each other over differences in religion, differences in culture, differences in race. What divides one tribe from another? Is it anything so significant? People look for any reason to believe in the inhumanity of their fellow man, and you’ve provided the ultimate justification. Villages will burn, if not here, then elsewhere. If not this year, then next. An old story writ anew, like the witch trials of Salem—tying stones to the backs of innocents just to see if they float. It’s in our nature. Do you even realize what you’ve started, Eric? You broke the world. You broke the illusion.”
A chill climbed slowly up my neck. “Who are you?”
“Ah, now you ask the question. I am one who has lived long enough to know.”
“And who are they?” I asked. “The ones you speak of. The ones who can’t collapse the wave. What are they?”
“They have a name. You haven’t guessed it yet, Eric?”
“What name?”
He turned his face away from me, looking out over the city again. “They’re born, they live, they die.” He turned toward me. “We call them the fated.”
* * *
Brighton led me back inside. He walked leisurely, keeping me beside him as we crossed the suite. The lights seemed bright after the darkness outside. We passed a library, where I saw Satvik sitting in a high-backed chair, two guards standing near the open doorway. Satvik sensed the movement and looked up. Our eyes made contact briefly before I passed the doorway. It was hard to read anything in that split second, but I thought I’d caught fear in his eyes. Fear for himself. Or perhaps for me. It was hard to tell.
At the far end of the hall, Brighton led me through a set of doors and into a large and dimly lit room. “Do you play?” Brighton asked.
In other penthouses this might have been called a bonus room. It might have held a big-screen TV, a full bar, several couches and stools. In Brighton’s version of luxury, the room held four pool tables. The windows were blacked out with dark paper. The pool tables themselves were ornate works of art. Leagues of plush green felt. Delicate woodwork. Against the wall was hung an assortment of pool cues. And here, at last, I saw the drink bar, set up tastefully at the far end of the room. That bourbon that Brighton had spoken of, along with every other kind of spirit. Glass bottles on thin glass shelves positioned in front of a long mirror.
On the pool table nearest the door, a strange assortment of equipment had been set up. I looked at it closely, trying to make sense of it. What looked like an audio speaker was lying on its back, with a white plate of some kind attached above. It was then that I noticed the stains on the second pool table. Leagues of plush green felt, yes, except for those places where the felt was darker. I tried to imagine the stains were something benign, but my mind kept filling it in. Huge, dried pools. A large circular stain at the far end of the table. Two smaller stains in the center. Another near the side pocket. As if a man had been laid out, bleeding from a dozen wounds.
Brighton noticed me staring. He walked past the stained table and stopped in front of the table with the equipment.
He motioned to his guard near the door. There was a click, and the light over the first table suddenly came on, and I could see the equipment clearly. It wasn’t a speaker exactly, I now saw, but something else. A black box with several knobs and some kind of mesh surface along the top. A handful of pool balls were spread out randomly across the table. Above the box, held by a metal bracket, was the small white plate—a flat disk of hard plastic. A two-pound bag of black sand lay tipped over near the box, splaying black specks across the table, ruining the felt.
“All great discoveries have their martyrs,” he said. “There’s always a price to pay for revelation.” He grabbed the cue ball off the table. “Wernher von Braun created the V-2 rocket. It killed tens of thousands in World War II, but it also led directly to NASA’s Mercury capsules.” He held the white cue ball up and then placed it on the table. “The moon,” he said and rolled the white ball. It bounced against the rail and hit the six-ball before coming to rest. “Before von Braun was Niccolò Tartaglia, the father of ballistics. Poor, stammering, smash-faced Tartaglia, who invented the parenthesis in mathematics and proved that trajectories had curves.” Brighton put his hand on the two-ball. “And here’s a parenthetical aside for you—all those people who died because of those trajectories.” Brighton rolled the two-ball across the table, where it clacked into other balls, which bounced off the rails. A ball hit the black box in the center of the table and got mired in the sand. “And then there was the discovery of fission, first detailed theoretically by Lise Meitner, who wondered what kind of chain reaction might be possible. A few years later, we got our answer, didn’t we? And so it always goes; the discovery of steel leads inexorably to the blade, and the martyrs bleed.”
He leaned forward and rolled the seven-ball away from its resting place near the box. Then he picked up the bag of sand and poured it on the white plate. “This is called a tone vibration plate. An old device, perhaps you’ve heard of it?”
“No”
He reached toward the black box. “This is the frequency modulator.” He turned the knob until it clicked, and I could suddenly hear a soft hum. He turned the knob a little more, and the hum grew louder—the pitch higher. On the white plate, the sand began to vibrate and dance, shifting and flowing as the plate vibrated. Slowly a shape formed. A pattern. Like a child’s rounded, looping scribble, an alien kaleidoscope. The sand gathere
d itself into curving black lines, while other parts of the plate were left pale and bare.
“The space around us seethes with waves,” Brighton said. “Around us, through us. Sound waves, radio waves, light waves. The waves of matter itself. They are mostly invisible to us, except where our consciousness pulls them into physical existence. Like the sand pulls the waves into physical existence.”
He turned the knob, and the hum grew higher. The sand on the plate responded to the new frequency by changing the pattern again, shifting from a child’s scribble to a series of concentric circles. Black dots on a white surface. These were mathematical shapes. Fractal dream catchers. Mandalas. Shifting, roiling, like a living, animated thing. Phasing from one shape into another as Brighton slowly turned the knob—first a honeycomb, then a series of parallel, wavy lines, like an abstract hieroglyphic. “These wave patterns extend upward,” he said. “The sand only captures a planar slice.” He turned the knob further—a tone like wasp wings, and the pattern shifted into a series of circles—like the face of a revolver, six small rings held in array around a larger, central circle. The black eye of a gun barrel.
Brighton removed his hand from the knob and picked up the bag. He poured more sand onto the plate—too much—pouring until it overwhelmed the pattern, spilling over the sides, making a mess on the table. He tossed the empty bag to the floor. On the plate, the sand vibrated and roiled, interfering with itself, struggling to organize, but there was no pattern. Nor room for one. Only shifting, featureless black.
“It’s all just waves and waveforms,” he said. “A vibrational tone—and it just takes a trick to see it. To cut that horizontal slice.” He straightened and looked at me. He wasn’t talking about the plate anymore. “Not a certain kind of eye but a certain kind of heart. That strange spark in your chest that pins you to this reality. That’s what makes all of this manifest. Everything around you. Are you a religious man, Eric?”
“I keep an open mind.”
“Have you ever wondered why the universe is constructed as it is? Gravity, electromagnetism, the various internucleic forces—their relative and absolute strengths and ranges, all balanced on a knife blade. Shift just a little, and all is vacuum.”
“The anthropic principle,” I said.
He nodded. “Those forces are as they are, or we wouldn’t be here to calculate them, sure. But there’s another way to look at it, subtly different; the universe must be just as it is, or it would remain unobserved.” He leaned over the table. “If unobserved, would it really exist at all?” He turned the knob on the box, and the tone rose in pitch, like a wasp near my ear. “Perhaps the universe needs us as much as we need it. A great collaboration. And without us”—he looked down at the plate of vibrating black particles—“it’s just a churning, writhing mass.” Without warning, he slammed his hand down on the table, and the whole apparatus shook.
The sand bounced off the plate, spilling everywhere, and what remained settled slowly into a new pattern, now clear and sharp as the white plate showed through. A series of gentle curves, like the wings of a butterfly.
“Do you think the universe wants to be observed?” he asked.
“The universe can’t want anything.”
“You’re so sure?”
“If you’re talking about some kind of awareness, then—”
“If the universe had awareness, it wouldn’t need you. No,” Brighton said, “I’m talking about something more elegant than that.” He moved around the table and turned off the black box. The hum went quiet, and the sand stopped moving, the pattern now frozen in place. He seemed to contemplate the pattern. “Heisenberg spoke of particles as potentialities rather than fact, yet here they sit.” He picked up the cue ball again. “I’ve found that when physicists talk about reality with precision, they do it with formulas; when they discuss it in general, they sound like monks.”
He was silent for a moment and then placed the cue ball back on the felt. “There is rock art in Australia thirty-eight thousand years old. More in Europe, separated by thousands of years, and yet of a common theme. Like there was a template.”
“What’s your point?” I didn’t understand the shift in subject.
“There are single caves that show continuous habitation for twenty thousand years. Shell middens with twenty-seven feet of strata, built up generation after generation for longer than civilization has existed, without a single new kind of artifact, a single new innovation. Can you imagine it? An unchanged village like Plato’s theory of Forms. Not just a village but the Platonic ideal of a village, with pictures on the wall no different in style from images painted eighteen thousand years earlier.”
He was losing me. “What does that have to do with any of this?”
“Things are moving more quickly now. Speeding up. There were people born into homes without electricity who had grandsons who walked on the moon. Now we have nuclear power, the microchip, wireless worldwide connectivity that fits into your pocket. So what’s changed? Look around you, and you can see it. It’s all broken open now. If you listen closely, you can almost hear it.” He closed his eyes, face serene.
“Hear what?”
He opened his eyes. “Gabriel’s horn.” He stared at me, and his smile broadened. “You asked why you were here, Eric, and that is your answer. The time of the eberaxi is upon us.”
31
The guards led me down the hall. We passed the library where Satvik had been sitting, but now his chair was empty. In the front room, we crossed the white shag carpet again, and this time I noticed the red ball was missing. I glanced around, but it was nowhere. They led me down another hall and around the corner from the kitchen to a heavy wooden door with a steel latch. The taller guard used a key to unlock the door, and then he shoved me inside. Behind me, I heard the click. I turned and kicked the door hard enough to rattle its hinges.
“Eric” came a voice.
In the near darkness, I could only see a shape.
“Satvik?”
“Afraid so.” The shape moved. “This is where they keep me at night,” he said. “My room. Now yours, too. I knew you were coming.”
“How?”
“They put an extra mattress on the floor. Who else could it be for?”
I felt my way through the darkness until my foot hit something soft. I bent and felt the mattress with my hand, then took a seat. The only light came through a small brass grating in the base of the door. A vent for air flow, I assumed.
“What is this room?” I asked.
“It was a pantry, I think, before they took out the shelves.”
“Explains the lack of windows,” I said. “And it’s in the center of the flat, so no one can hear us shout.”
“There was shouting last night,” Satvik said. His voice was low. “We’re high enough, I don’t think they care.”
“What shouting?”
“From the other room. I never saw him, though. They never brought him in here.”
I thought of the stains on the pool table. I decided not to mention it. “So what happens now?” I asked.
“We sleep.”
“No, I mean, what happens to us? What are they going to do with us?”
“I don’t know. They don’t tell me.”
The darkness felt suddenly claustrophobic. The air hot and stuffy. Even with the vent, I wondered if the air was enough for two, or would they find us blue and suffocated the next day. I pushed the thought away—useless paranoia. “How did they get you?” I asked.
“Off the street. I tried to run. They took my car, too.”
The car. That explained that night at the lab.
“And they used the boy,” he said.
“The boy from New York?”
“He’s with them now. One of them all along, I think. Brighton had me test him; he wanted to see.”
“What happened?”
“The boy didn’t collapse the wave, just like before. There have been others like him. I tested Brighton, too, though
he didn’t notice at first. I thought I was tricking him, but maybe he was tricking me.”
“Is he like the boy?”
“No,” Satvik said. “Brighton is something else.”
“What do you mean?”
Satvik paused. “It’s hard to say. He only looked for a few moments, so I couldn’t be sure.”
“Sure of what?”
“It was like he could choose,” Satvik said. “Like he could choose to collapse the wave or not.”
* * *
We were quiet after that, sitting in the darkness. Eventually, he told me of his trip across country, trying to understand what the two-slit was testing.
“But why go to High-throughput? I still don’t understand.”
“It was a message,” he said. “A note on my car, along with the address. Google showed the connection to your old research.”
“A message from who?”
“Just a name. Vickers. I thought I would learn more, but I learned nothing. I think it was part of the trap. They caught me the next day.”
After another long silence, I spoke. “We have to find a way out of here.”
“The guards are fast,” he said. “That’s what happened to my face.” I felt his body shift in the blackness. “Did you talk to my family?”
“No,” I said.
“I miss my daughter,” he said. “I worry what will happen if I don’t come home.”
“It’ll be okay, Satvik.”
“This is what I miss most—reading to her at night. When I was on the road, I did not do that.”
“You’ll read to her again.”
“I hope you’re right. She likes the stories. I tell stories, and she lies in bed and listens.”
“Did you ever tell her your story of the four princes?”
“She knows all the parts.”
“There’s more than just what you told me?”
“Much more.”
“So the fourth prince, the one who shot the bird’s eye, what happened to him at the end?”
“It is a long story.”
“And what happens?”
Satvik was quiet for a moment. “He dies.”
