Best European Fiction 2010

by Aleksandar Hemon

  —Besides, added the professor, what do you mean “nobody else ever noticed”? How do you think the proverb you were testing out got coined in the first place?

  Then the professor gave Karataev a short lecture.

  —The effect that you have discovered, Chinghis Platonovich, he said, can only be explained by analogy with gravity. First of all, one has to keep in mind the fact that money in its essence is a social mediator: it does not exist in and of itself, separately from the people whose behavior it affects. In this particular case, it was probably not your money that attracted more money. It’s more likely that the huge social magnet represented by the sum you were carrying influenced your consciousness in such a way that you started perceiving the world slightly differently from how others see it. It was you, not the bag on your shoulder, who discovered the wallets and the plastic bag under the bench—just you! You out of the hundreds of people passing by!

  Karataev had to admit that this made sense. What Potashinsky said next, however, stunned him:

  —We’ve observed, said the professor, that sums of money behave like gravitational masses. The only difference being that the source of the financial gravity is not money in and of itself, but the consciousness of its owner. The behavior of large gravitational masses has already been studied by contemporary physics in great detail. It is not difficult, therefore, to deduce the financial corollaries to these discoveries. Have you heard about black holes?

  Karataev said that he understood the general idea—they are, they say, stars that have collapsed under their own weight into tiny invisible points; science doesn’t really know much about them.

  —Precisely, said the professor. In the vicinity of a black hole, all the properties of space and time as they’re known to us become distorted. But there are certain things we do know about them. If you, Chinghis Platonovich, were falling into a black hole, everything would end rather quickly as far as you were concerned—your body would cross the event horizon, beyond which even light can’t escape; then, torn into particles, it would be sucked into a singularity. But for an external observer, it would look like you’d approached the boundary of the black hole and then frozen there forever. From the point of view of an external observer, you would never cross that boundary—time, for you, would have stopped. It’s impossible to fully comprehend this paradox: it can only be accepted.

  Later, the professor would remember that Karataev was simultaneously inspired and frightened by what he had heard.

  —Well, he said. Well, let’s continue the experiments then.

  First they decided to see how Chinghis Karataev’s subjective time would be altered when the sum he was carrying was increased to a million dollars. The cash was divided into two identical red Puma bags. Their straps crisscrossed over the entrepreneur’s chest like bandoliers (he was outfitted in this fashion not only for convenience, but also to the even distribution of financial gravity). Professor Potashinsky also hung an electronic chronometer, borrowed from his old lab, on Karataev’s chest. An identical chronometer was synchronized with the first and kept in Karataev’s office. The goal of the experiment was to compare the readings of the chronometers after a three-hour walk around the city. Potashinsky was supposed to walk ten meters ahead of Karataev in order to find out whether he would be able to spot—before Karataev himself—whatever valuable things would be attracted by his employer’s financial gravity.

  Unforeseen circumstances, however, interfered with the experiment. When Potashinsky and Karataev left the office, a bomb went off in a nearby trash can. It killed Karataev on the spot and threw Potashinsky aside, damaging the professor’s spine. Potashinsky saw a masked man come running up to Karataev’s body, grab both bags, throw them into the trunk of a parked car, and drive away.

  A few years later it turned out that the attack had been carried out by a professional hit man from the Vyborg criminal syndicate named Sasha “Der Soldat”: the gangsters had found out that a significant sum of money was about to pass through Karataev’s office. But in the first days following the tragedy, suspicion fell on Potashinsky.

  While the Department of the Interior was investigating, Potashinsky had a hard time of it: sleepy Moscow cops failed to comprehend any of what he told them about the planned experiment, and even began to suspect that the professor was feigning insanity. Later, however, in view of the enormity of the sum that had been stolen, the Federal Security Service joined the investigation, and there, the professor found a very attentive audience indeed. The legendary General Slipa, who at that time headed FSS department #6, dedicated to paranormal and neo-scientific affairs, got personally involved. After his discharge from the hospital, Potashinsky was taken on staff as a consultant for a project that Slipa poetically dubbed “The Green Corridor.”

  In the late nineties and at the beginning of the new millennium, work on the project was moving very slowly, and was basically limited to repeating the experiments already conducted by the late Karataev: there was a shortage of money in the country, and it was only whatever cash happened to be seized as material evidence in criminal cases that allowed the research to continue. The experiments were conducted on young volunteers from among the FSS officers, who with Slipa’s blessing became known as “lucrenauts.”

  It was finally determined that “the Karataev effect” did indeed exist, and that large sums of money had the ability to transform reality. Two additional points were clarified as well, at this time. First, said transformation took place only in cases where the money in question had actually become a lucrenaut’s own property, however briefly (a convoluted plan was developed to provide temporary cash flow through their accounts—but we need not concern ourselves with its intricacies). Second, the effects of the money were entirely internal to a given lucrenaut, and couldn’t be registered by any scientific device. For instance, in the experiment that had led to Karataev’s death, the chronometers would not have shown any difference, no matter how long he had walked the streets. But Potashinsky refused to believe that the entrepreneur’s death had been in vain.

  —His glorious sacrifice was like those of the heroes of our childhood, he said in a video-recorded memorial speech, the characters in Andromeda Nebula, The Magellanic Cloud, and The Country of Crimson Clouds. Romantics like him are the ones who once made our country great…

  As their scant financing didn’t allow them to conduct any serious experiments, Potashinsky devoted himself passionately to theoretical issues during those years—and made several important discoveries, as they say, on the tip of his pen. Some physicists still consider his calculations to be pure fraud, though even they agree that the mathematical approaches he brought into play were witty and unconventional. His attempts to connect the theory of relativity as well as quantum mechanics to such fields as the neural mechanisms of perception are still considered highly dubious: “like an iron and beef sandwich,” as one imaginative specialist put it. Nevertheless, the conclusions the professor reached are astounding.

  But let’s turn the floor over to Potashinsky himself (here the professor is trying to speak in simple terms, so that even you and I can understand him):

  A simple parallel with black hole theory allows one to see that there must be a certain sum of money, the personal possession of which would lead to something resembling a gravitational collapse within the boundaries of one’s consciousness. By analogy with the Schwarzschild radius, which is the radius a given mass must be compressed to in order to generate a black hole, let’s call this particular sum of money the “Schwarzenegger threshold.” Its amount can be calculated on the basis of the nonsteady solution to Einstein’s field equations, as put forward in 1922 by A. A. Friedmann. In memory of the great mathematician, let’s call the mysterious dimension entered by a person whose holdings exceed the Schwarzenegger threshold, the “Friedmann space.”

  The nonsteadiness of the solution means in this case that the sum total of the threshold has to be recalculated every year due to a multitude of economic
indicators. Its exact value is classified at the moment. I can only say that many Russian businessmen have managed to cross the Schwarzenegger threshold.

  Our calculations indicate that, after crossing this threshold, it is impossible to acquire any factual information about the inner life of a superrich subject, though an external observer will still think that the subject is capable of initiating contact and, indeed, discussing a broad range of subjects, from soccer to business. It may be hard to grasp this from an everyday perspective, but it is nonetheless true that, in such cases, the external observer will be dealing with a relativity illusion, similar to the seeming cessation of time at the boundary of a black hole; except that in this case, everything will be reversed: time will stop in the lucrenaut’s consciousness (American physicists call this effect “the end of history”), but not the observer’s. Moreover, beyond the Schwarzenegger threshold, all lucrenauts perceive one and the same singularity—Friedmann space is the same for everyone! But what exactly a lucrenaut sees while there, we, most likely, will never find out. And here’s why.

  A superrich person can, of course, lose all his money and once again become just like you and me. But here another paradox awaits us: when his consciousness returns to the normal human dimension, he, no matter how he tries, will be entirely unable to tell us about his experiences in Friedmann space, because he won’t remember a thing. A lucrenaut crossing the Schwarzenegger threshold in the opposite direction, returning to earth, as it were, will retain only the so-called “false memory” that corresponds to the illusory trajectory of his life as recorded by the external observer. The symmetry of the space-time continuums—financial and physical—remains intact, in this respect, and all the fundamental Einstein-Friedmann equations are still valid. In practice, this means an absolutely amazing, not to say terrifying, thing. That is, only a lucrenaut personally present in Friedmann space can see what happens there—and he’ll only be aware of it as long as he remains there. He can never bring this information back and share it with the rest of us…

  A few years later, the first opportunity to check Potashinsky’s theoretical propositions arose. Two undercover researchers were placed into the cell of a former oligarch serving his sentence in a prison camp (out of compassion, we won’t mention his name). Their goal was to find out what, if anything, the prisoner remembered about his past. The researchers insinuated themselves into the former oligarch’s confidence and soon determined that he retained no memories of Friedmann space—just as the theory had predicted. Potashinsky’s assumption regarding the existence of a “false memory” turned out to be valid as well: the oligarch’s recollections coincided with the external pattern of his biography, as an observer would have recorded it, in every detail. Thus, one of the cornerstones of Potashinsky’s hypothesis was confirmed. After this, the highest state authorities took an interest in the scientist’s experiments.

  At that time, even the most audacious dreamer couldn’t have imagined that scientists would soon have the ability to see into Friedmann space. It happened, of course, thanks to rising oil prices. And yet, the primary factor in this achievement was the technological progress of humanity.

  By 2003, a group of Japanese scientists succeeded in developing a set of microprobes that, implanted directly into the brain, allowed them to objectify human perception, if imperfectly. The Japanese equipment couldn’t determine what its subject was feeling or thinking, but it could generate a multicolor (though blurry) image of what the subject was seeing at a given moment—not only while awake, but also in the active phase of sleep. This was possible because the signal was received directly from the areas of the brain responsible for unmediated representation, rather than from the optic nerve. This equipment was immediately purchased by Potashinsky’s team.

  The probes could transmit wirelessly, which allowed a lucrenaut to carry on with his daily life unhampered by his participation in the experiment. The only requirement was to keep relatively near a signal receiver, which transmitted all information to the laboratory computer in real time.

  Potashinsky’s experimental procedures could be summarized as follows: First, a set of test electrodes was implanted into the brain of a lucrenaut-researcher (for this role, as usual, volunteers were selected from among the young officers of the FSS). After this came the launch, fueled by a tractive network of offshore accounts all working according to the recoilless financial principles invented by Potashinsky: the volunteer’s private property was augmented until it reached the sum guaranteeing that he would pass beyond the Schwarzenegger threshold.

  Many of the large transfers of capital that have been noted by international currency regulation committees over the last few years—all of whom were at a loss to account for them in any coherent way—were associated precisely with these experiments. Similar to how ballistic missile launches can be detected from all over the world, the lucrenaut launches conducted by FSS with the aim of studying Friedmann space were registered by all sensitive economic sensors, of course. But the majority of observers peering into the financial universe mistook these tremors for the redistribution of wealth after the privatization of Soviet property. This isn’t surprising, however—the launches were conducted in absolute secrecy, and there was no way for anyone not directly involved with the project to tell which members of the pleiad of new superrich might be one of the FSS research vessels.

  Now it has been revealed who they were, of course—not all of them, but the first pair. The first ever controlled leap beyond the Schwarzenegger threshold was made by Russian lucrenaut Yuly Kropotkin. A month later he was followed by Sergey Timashuk. The payload sent with the second launch was more or less the same as the first—approximately six hundred million dollars (of course, in the “real world,” these new financial stars rose into the stratosphere under cunning pseudonyms).

  The lucrenauts led the lives of rich sybarites—flitting from continent to continent in Boeings refurbished as flying palaces, drinking rare and expensive wines, yachting, playing cards, transferring their genetic material to gentle creatures who sold themselves so expensively that the transaction already resembled love—in a word, they denied themselves nothing. And all this time, the signal relays registered the transmissions coming from the probes implanted in their brains, sending these to the FSS computer center in Moscow, where they were gone over as thoroughly as possible.

  When this first expedition into Friedmann space came to an end, the lucrenauts’ accounts were closed, and the process of returning them to the human race was initiated. Yuly Kropotkin successfully touched down at Domodedovo Airport. But Sergey Timashuk was not so lucky.

  When making his approach to terminal 2 at Sheremetevo Airport, he entered a semi-comatose state onboard his Global Express XRS, which was making its final flight at his expense. The welcoming party decided that he’d simply had too much to drink, but the lucrenaut’s condition did not improve the following day. He was practically incapable of communicating with anyone around him, and was heard to be muttering the same mysterious phrase over and over again: “The moon is the sun for the poor!” (Scientists suggested that this might have had something to do with the unknown visual phenomena that he might have observed during his passage through the Schwarzenegger threshold—similar to the apparent distortion of heavenly bodies in close proximity to a black hole.) It proved impossible, in the end, to return Sergey Timashuk to normal life. But his sacrifice—made in order to acquire this unique scientific data—was not in vain.

  For the first time in history, Friedmann space had been photographed by means of two probes, absolutely independent from one another, completely eliminating the possibility of error. As a result of this unprecedented breakthrough, the project scientists acquired the second experimental confirmation of Potashinky’s theory.

  If you recall, the professor’s calculations had established that, having crossed the Schwarzenegger threshold, all lucrenauts would start perceiving one and the same reality. The very first telemetric data showed
that this was true: the video signals from Kropotkin’s and Timashuk’s brains coincided completely. Moreover, Potashinky’s theory had predicted that time in the Friedmann space must come to a stop. This too was confirmed: the image from both video probes was static and hadn’t changed during the entire experiment. Thus, Professor Potashinsky’s hypothesis was vindicated. Theoretical science hadn’t enjoyed a similar success, perhaps, since evidence of black holes—which had also been discovered on the tip of someone’s pen—were actually found in space.

  Not everything went so smoothly, however. The very first photographs of Friedmann space astonished and amazed the researchers: the flickering screen of their monitor displayed a blurry, washed-out image of…a corridor.

  No single image from the surface of Mars, no radio telescope image of the galaxy ever underwent such intensive analysis as these images. Unfortunately, the low resolution supplied by the first-wave neuro-optical implants precluded study through magnification. But as far as they could tell, using every possible reference point, it was a typical institutional corridor—with linoleum tiles and walls in chrome green up to two meters (above two meters they were white). A few meters ahead, the corridor turned right, into some sort of unlit area; it was difficult to tell what might be over there.

  Viewing the image using infrared or ultraviolet didn’t add much to their initial impressions; all they could establish was that there was something very hot around that corner.

  So-called scientific journalists immediately started printing guesses as to what kind of a corridor it was and where it led, but the serious scientists strongly disapproved of this approach.

  “None of this actually indicates that there is any such corridor or source of heat,” writes one of the researchers. “All we know for certain is that the received video image of Friedmann space looks similar to a corridor. If you thought you saw a human face made up by geological features on the surface of Mars, this would not imply that it had been carved by Martians. It would just be your own interpretation of a natural geological formation.”