Singularity

by Bill DeSmedt

  Was everyone seeing the same thing he was, or was each individual consciousness following its own path through the hyperspatial maze? If the latter, that would make the Singularity the first-ever quantum wave function that didn’t collapse to a determinate eigenvalue under observation. No wonder Sasha was going along with this: there had to be a Nobel Prize, or three, in it for him!

  Knox was discovering he could influence the flow of impressions, or attune his awareness to specific sequences within the jumble. Concentrating, he could see . . . Rusalka, her deck lights ablaze under the stars of a summer night. A stray impulse, a flicker, and he was playing voyeur in his own stateroom, watching himself and Marianna in their first brief, disastrous tryst. Another random thought, and he stood looking over Marianna’s shoulder as she paced through the secret lab five nights ago.

  So that’s how Grishin had tracked them down so effortlessly. “Extraordinary means,” indeed! It worked both ways, though: another instantaneous transition and he hovered unseen in a dimly-lit chamber where Grishin conferred with Sasha, their lips moving soundlessly.

  Forget about changing the past! Just being able to view it made the Singularity an espionage device of unparalleled power and scope. No secret in the world, past or present, could be hidden from its all-seeing eye. The ultimate destabilizer. If such a thing ever fell into the wrong hands—

  No, he kept forgetting: it already had.

  There were other temptations as well. To lose oneself in memory, in regret. Weathertop’s greatroom, whole and inviolate, swam into view. For a moment Knox stood once more peering into a plasma screen filled with snow as Mycroft, alive again, called up canned speculations about what one might see if one gazed into a naked singularity.

  With a flash, the peaceful scene dissolved in flames. Again he watched his friend stagger out of the smoke and into a hail of bullets. There was something wrong with the images the Singularity was conjuring up. Images of Mycroft wandering lost midst the wreckage, his body seeming almost to pass through the now-canted beams of the greatroom.

  No more! Knox forced his eyelids open and found himself staring again into the Singularity’s undifferentiated opalescence. It felt as if he’d been gone for hours. The countdown display, its digits nearly lost in the uniform, ubiquitous glow, showed twelve minutes twenty seconds still on the clock. Less than three minutes had passed since the Portal first opened.

  “Lock on target spacetime confirmed,” the synthesized voice proclaimed. “Commencing insertion sequence.”

  A plasma screen, lost till now in the gloom, came alight with an image of a microwave oven. A digital display above the glass door gave the date and time as 2:00 A.M. August 5th. The picture was fuzzy, warped by the screen’s proximity to Vurdalak’s magnetic field. Even so, Knox could recognize the probe receptacle Marianna had videoed in the secret lab.

  He heard the computer-controlled crane arm screech as it reconfigured itself, inching a slender extension down into the heart of Vurdalak’s containment chamber. A digital readout mounted on the body of the crane tracked how the force was rising on the arm as it drew ever closer to the Singularity:

  5.0 meters: 1.50 gravities

  4.5 meters: 1.85 gravities

  4.0 meters: 2.35 gravities

  3.5 meters: 3.00 gravities . . .

  By the time the mechanism whirred to a halt, its business end was two and a half meters from the pulsating vortex and straining under six times its normal weight!

  Then a whine, the abrupt click of a release mechanism, and a fleeting glimpse of something arcing into the radiance: a metallic cylinder, a twin to the one Grishin had been waving around at his show-and-tell. Except this one was shrieking at the edge of human hearing and beyond as it warped and twisted in the grip of Vurdalak’s gravity.

  It was falling far too fast to follow now, but the display on the crane posted the numbers in quick succession: forty gravities, a hundred fifty gravities, six hundred, more zeroes than the display could hold.

  A final burst of light and the probe was gone, gone off in a direction the eye could not follow, leaving the chamber reverberating with the thunderclap of its passage.

  42 | A Stitch in Time

  MARIANNA BARELY NOTICED when the synthetic voice announced, “Insertion complete at three minutes seven seconds. Reestablishing event horizon,” and the Portal began to close, blocking off the Singularity’s luminescence.

  She sat there in the sudden dark, trembling, tears streaming down her face and no way to wipe them away with her fettered hands. She’d seen—she’d seen her Mom and Dad, alive again. And so young. Young as when the world was new, a full moon rising out of the Aegean as they wandered up into the hills.

  She choked back a sob and looked around in the gloom. Grishin and company had risen from their gallery seats and were standing at the far end of the aisle congratulating one another. Even Yuri was down there getting instructions of some sort. That left only Sasha and Jon.

  “Sasha?” she whispered. It probably came under the heading of consorting with the enemy, but she had to know. “What was it I saw when the Portal opened? Was it, was it just a dream?”

  Sasha shook himself, summoned back from some transport of his own. “Each person sees something different in the timefield,” he said slowly. “Still, it is not a dream. The search through the maze is guided by each individual mind and heart, but all of the worldlines are real.”

  “Worldlines? The automated announcement said something about worldlines, too. What is a worldline?”

  “A worldline is—Humpf! How to explain?” Sasha frowned, and ran his fingers through his frizz of hair.

  Finally, he said, “Think of the path of an object through time and space, as if you could see it from outside. Everything and everyone traces out such a path, including you and me. From hyperspace, every moment in your life appears all merged together into a continuous ‘tube.’ It splits off from your mother at the moment of birth, and terminates, or perhaps not, at the hour of your death. Slice through this four-dimensional tube anywhere along its length, and the resulting three-dimensional cross-section is you, at the corresponding point in time.”

  “Like a motion picture, maybe?” Jon spoke for the first time. “If every instant of my life, every ‘now,’ were a single frame in the film, then the worldline would be the whole reel, considered as a single thing?”

  “Yes, Dzhon, excellent analogy.”

  “And these worldlines, they still exist?” Marianna asked. “Even the ones from the past? They don’t just . . . go away?”

  “They still exist, Marianna, as you saw.” Sasha paused a moment, then added quietly, “The worldlines are real. Some believe it is the flow of time itself that is the illusion.”

  “Sasha?” Galina’s voice emerged from a loudspeaker positioned overhead.

  “Excuse me, please,” Sasha said, rising. “I must go to confer with Galya on the final shot.”

  Marianna barely noticed him leaving. Her tears had begun to flow again. She let them.

  Alive! They were still alive. Still in love, somehow, somewhere in time.

  Perhaps they always would be.

  “Marianna? You okay?” Knox slid into the seat Sasha had just vacated and held her to him. It was an awkward embrace with her hands still stickywebbed to the arm of her chair, but it seemed to help. Her trembling went away bit by bit. He felt her take a deep breath, then release it slowly, relaxing in his arms.

  “Better now,” she sighed against his chest. “Better with you here.” She leaned back just far enough to lift her face for a kiss.

  A kiss she broke off after only a few moments, as if suddenly remembering where they were, and why. She pressed herself tightly against him again. “Jon, what are we going to do?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “Maybe . . . maybe we should just let it go. Maybe it is all just an internal Russian affair, like Grishin said.”

  He pulled back and looked at her. Was this the woman warrior he�
�d spent the past week with? Where was the edge, the attitude? She was the last person he’d have thought would go all warm and fuzzy on him. What had the Singularity showed her?

  “Dammit, Marianna, that’s wrong and you know it! The world may not be perfect the way it is, but it’s a damn sight better than it’d be if the KGB had been left in charge of the only other superpower for the last twenty years.”

  “You’re right. Of course, you’re right.” She was looking down, biting her lip. When she met his gaze again, she had her game face back on. “Sorry. I let myself get a little . . .” She took one shuddering breath. “I’m okay now.”

  He said nothing, just reached out and gently wiped a last tear from her cheek.

  “So,” she said, “what are we going to do about it?”

  He looked around. No one within earshot.

  “I’m going to try turning Sasha.”

  Knox only wished he felt as confident as he sounded. Still, turning Sasha was their best shot. If anyone was in a position to pull the plug, it was GEI’s second-in-command. Galina would listen to Sasha. And, from what Knox had seen, Galina was the one running the show.

  So, the why worked; the question was, how? A lot hinged on just how committed to Grishin and his revanchist fever-dreams Sasha really was. GEI was his meal-ticket, sure, but that didn’t necessarily buy a man’s soul. And it sounded like Sasha’d been through hell at the hands of the old KGB. Had he caved at the end, succumbed to hostage syndrome like Marianna’d said? Or was the old Sasha still buried deep down inside, waiting on the right word to draw him out?

  And, if so, what was the right word, le mot juste? Knox tried to focus, but nothing came.

  Marianna whispered, “Here he comes.”

  Knox released her and turned to watch Sasha feeling his way down the aisle through half-light and variable gravity.

  Reaching their row, Sasha leaned over and slapped Knox on the back. “You see, Dzhon, no need to worry. Galina reports all parameters well within safety tolerances. In thirty seconds more, power generation will be back at self-sustaining levels.”

  Sasha settled into the aisle seat. Good: the glow from the lighted handrail made it easier to read his face.

  Oh, well, got to start somewhere. “So, Sasha, you said that last probe was being sent back only thirty-something hours? That’s way too early—too late?—to have been the same one Marianna saw arrive in the lab five days ago.”

  “You mean the probe with the go-code for capture? No, that was not it.”

  “What was on this one, then?”

  “You disappoint me, Dzhon. I was certain you would have figured it out before now.”

  “Well, if I had to guess, it’d be something to do with how you managed to pick up our trail again.”

  “Bravo! Yes, the message giving the name and location of Weathertop. And one thing more, two words I personally added: ‘Return Them.’ ”

  “Didn’t trust your boss to bring us back alive, huh?”

  “Not that I didn’t trust. But Arkasha is more inclined to do the right thing when the timeprobes tell him to.” Sasha almost smiled, then became utterly serious. “I did not want you and Marianna killed, Dzhon.

  Alas, I could not do as much for your friend, Dr. Finley Laurence. I am sorry.”

  Knox let that last remark slide; he wasn’t ready to go there just yet. Instead he said, “So, what comes next here?”

  “Next comes what we have called the ‘omega sequence.’ First we rebuild our power reserves to maximum levels; for omega, we must go into the far past—two decades back. So far, in fact, that we cannot trust the computer to manage the energy expenditure—too delicate, too much variability. Instead, Galya must control the process manually.”

  Sasha glanced back smiling in the direction of the operator’s station. “She is a true magician at the weaving of fields.”

  “I’m sure she is. You must be really proud of yourself for having dragged her into this nightmare.”

  That got a reaction! Sasha turned beet-red and began mouthing protestations of innocence.

  “Skip it.” Too much, too soon. Just keep him talking for now. “What’s this about an omega sequence?”

  “Yes, well . . .” Sasha seemed relieved to return to a less sensitive topic. “The point is to sift through the worldlines and lock onto the time and place where Andropov was killed: 7:35 A.M. February 9, 1984, Moscow, Special Polyclinic #17, Suite 12. All under computer control, of course.”

  “Hold on. I thought it took a conscious observer to isolate any particular strand in the timefield.”

  “This is so. However, the computer qualifies as an observer for purposes of this interaction. We have a DSP-7 parallel processor running a neural net over there.” Sasha pointed toward a matte-black cube about a meter on a side; it was cabled into the crane installation.

  “You’ve got a computer capable of simulating consciousness crammed into a box that size?”

  “Not consciousness, Dzhon—vision. Much simpler. Fortunately, as regards observation, the universe appears not to distinguish between a simulation and the real thing. Once Galina finds the desired worldline, the DSP can match input from her visual cortex well enough to lock on.”

  “So that’s what the helmet is for. There’s a SQUID in there reading her brain’s bioelectric field.”

  “An MRI,” Sasha corrected, “to read the chemical state of the striate cortex. Room-temperature superconductivity makes possible very precise magnetic resonance imaging in a very small package.”

  Small indeed! Most MRIs were big enough to swallow you whole. This one could’ve come straight out of a millinery catalog. Just another everyday miracle from GEI’s Materials Sciences Division.

  “Once the pseudo-visual lock-on-target is confirmed,” Sasha was saying, “the computer aligns the launcher accordingly. The entire apparatus enters a discrete quantum state entangled with the target spacetime. Much more reliable than human guidance: the neural net is not prone to distractions; it remains focused on the target until probe launch and beyond, until a human operator intervenes to reset or adjust it. Simple.”

  “Uh, simple’s not the word I would have chosen, Sasha. How about ‘unbelievably complicated’ ?” Knox wouldn’t have believed it could work at all if he hadn’t seen it in action a moment ago. “And you’ve only had the past day or so to experiment. How’d you know it would . . . oh!”

  “Yes, Dzhon: time travel again. Probes twelve and thirteen: the first to explain the basic principle twenty four months ago; the second to confirm our final design seven months later.”

  “Whatever.” Knox gave up. Thinking about this business of magicking up information via messages from the future was making his head hurt. There just had to be a paradox in there somewhere.

  Side issue. Knox didn’t need to buy into Sasha’s bizarre reasoning. All he needed to do was find, somewhere amid the technobabble, the hook that would land his fish.

  Till then, keep the conversation going. “So, okay—you stake out the crime scene. Andropov’s assassin shows up on schedule, somehow evading an entire platoon of Ninth Directorate guards in the process. What then?”

  “Then comes the omega sequence itself: two separate insertions, one after another. First, the extensor arm launches one single bullet along a trajectory that intersects with the assassin’s worldline all those years ago. Intersects, more precisely, with the back of his head. In result, the threat to Andropov is eliminated. With luck, even the marvelous self-destruct device may be recovered intact.”

  “If that’s phase one, then the second phase must be your Ourobouros patch, right? Where the snake eats its own tail?”

  “Ah, you have deciphered our GEI corporate crest, Dzhon. Very good! But, yes, you are right: having shifted the timeline by this little bit, we must ensure that the new course taken by history also includes a research program leading to our present timewarping capability.”

  Sasha sobered suddenly, his voice dropping almost to a whisper
. “Without that, our intervention to save Andropov could create a true temporal paradox: an effect without a cause.”

  “And what would happen then?”

  “Nobody knows.” Sasha’s eyes held a haunted look. “Worst case, a rip in space-time continuum leading to collapse of the so-called false vacuum, and the end of all existence. Or an infinite temporal cycle, like a forever loop in a computer program. Nothing good, this much is certain.”

  He took a breath before going on. “But this will not happen, because in the second, final phase we launch one more probe back to the same point in space and time. Investigating the successful assassination attempt in the revised timeline, Arkasha will still find the same cylinder with its message about Tunguska and cosmology . . . only this time on the floor beside Andropov’s bed, not sticking through his chest as in our own history. This should ensure essentially the same subsequent progression of events as brought us to here. Novikov’s Conservation of Reality principle will work to preclude any causality violation.”

  “One question, Sasha: you don’t really believe all of this is going to work, do you?”

  “It has been working up to now,” Sasha reminded him.

  “But up to now you’ve just been recapitulating events you know have already taken place. Sending your ‘timeprobes’ back to when and where you first received them, that sort of thing. You have no idea what’ll happen when you actually try to change something, do you?” This was it, the hook he’d been looking for. “Well, do you?”

  Sasha glanced around before replying. When his answer came it was pitched so low that even sitting next to him, Knox had to strain to make it out.

  “No result in science is ever assured until the experiment has been conducted, Dzhon. Our best mathematical models imply support for the Novikov principle. Still, it is impossible to altogether exclude the possibility of a less desirable result.”