Phase Space

by Stephen Baxter

  Your Angel is assigned to you at birth, and grows with you.

  After a lifetime together, through steady upgrades of technology, I – Rob Morhaim’s Virtual filter-cum-companion – know him very well.

  As your Angel knows you.

  Perhaps better than you realize.

  … At first Morhaim was overwhelmed by the new imagery: laser sparkles, leaping holograms, unlicensed ads painted over the sky and the Bridge towers, even over the clothes and faces of the tourists. And when he took a pov from a callosum dump, the extraneous mental noise from the host he haunted was clamouring, the howl of an animal within a cage of rationality.

  But still, he ran the murder over and over, until even the brutality of the death became clichéd for him.

  Piece by piece he eliminated the changes, the items his Angel had filtered out of the info-bombardment that was this summer day in England, 2045.

  Until there was only one element left.

  ‘The girl. The pretty girl. She’s gone. And what the hell is that?’

  In the tableau of the murder, where the long-legged girl had been standing, there was a boy: slight, his figure hard to make out, rendered all but invisible by Homeless-style softscreen tattoos.

  ‘Pick him out and enhance.’

  You shouldn’t see this.

  ‘Show me.’

  The boy, aged maybe fifteen, came forward from the softwall, a hologram reconstruction. Freezeframed, he held his hands up before him. His face was hard to make out, a melange of clumsily-transmitted images and black, inert softscreen patches. But somehow, Morhaim knew, or feared, what he would find underneath …

  ‘What’s he doing with his hands? Run it forward.’

  The boy came to life. He was looking up, to a Bridge tower somewhere over Morhaim’s shoulder. Just as the vanished girl had, he was making a series of gestures with his hands, over and over: complex, yet fluent and repeated. The key symbol was a rolling together of the clawed fingers on his two hands, like cogs engaging.

  ‘What is that? Is it sign language?’ Deaf people once used sign languages, he dimly recalled. Of course there were no deaf people any more, and the languages had died.

  ‘Maybe that cog sign means “machine”.’

  It may be.

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  I can’t read it. No program exists to translate visual languages into Metalingua. The variety of signs and interpretations of signs – regional and international variations – the complexity of the grammar, unlike any spoken language – none of this was mastered before the languages died.

  ‘It doesn’t look so dead to me. I bet that guy is saying The Machine Stops, in some archaic sign language.’

  It is possible.

  ‘Damn right …’

  Morhaim turned the Angel to gopher mode, and had it dig out a poor-quality download of a British Sign Language dictionary, prepared by a deaf-support organization in the 1990s. It was a little hard to interpret the black-and-white photographs of earnest signers and the complex notational system, but there it was, without a doubt, sign number 1193: a bespectacled man – or it might have been a woman – gloweringly making the sign repeated by the Homeless boy.

  It came together, in his head.

  It was the boy who had made the key signal, the trigger for Desargues’ murder. Not Asaph Seebeck.

  And I almost didn’t see it, he thought. No: I was kept from seeing it. Eunice Baines’ accusations came back to him. You’re supposed to be a policeman, for God’s sake …

  The Homeless young were trying to make themselves literally invisible with their softscreen tattoos. But they had already made themselves invisible in the way that counted, chattering to each other in sign language, a whole community slipping through the spaces in the electronic net, he thought, within which I, for example, am enmeshed.

  ‘How many of them are out there? What do they do? What do they want?’

  Unknown. The language is not machine-interpretable.

  … But clearly they were responsible for the murder of Cecilia Desargues. Perhaps they regarded her neutrino comms web as just another bar in the electronic cage the world had become. And perhaps they were happy to try to pin the blame on Holmium, a satellite operator, to cause as much trouble for them as they could. Two birds with one stone.

  It was, in fact, damn smart.

  They’d been so confident they’d pulled this off – almost – in broad daylight. And nobody knew a thing about them.

  This changes everything, he thought.

  He might get a commendation out of this. Even a promotion. He ought to consider how he would phrase his report, what recommendations he would make to his superiors to start to address this unperceived menace …

  But he was angry. And scared.

  ‘You lied to me.’

  I don’t understand.

  ‘You lied about the murder. Have you lied to me all my life? Is it just me, or do other Angels do this too?’

  Rob, I don’t mean you any harm. My sole purpose is to serve you. To protect you.

  ‘Because of you I don’t know what’s real any more … I can’t trust you. Why didn’t you show me this boy? Why did you overlay him with the girl?’

  Don’t pretend you wouldn’t prefer to look at the girl.

  ‘Don’t bullshit me. Your job is to interpret. Not to lie.’

  You wanted me to do it. You cooperated in specifying the parameters of the filters –

  ‘What is it about that boy you don’t want me to see?’

  It is best that –

  ‘Enhance the boy’s face. Take off those damn tattoos.’

  One by one, the black and silver patches melted from the boy’s face, to be replaced by smooth patches of interpolated skin.

  Long before the reconstruction was complete, Morhaim could see the truth.

  I was trying to protect you from this.

  ‘Bobby. He looks like Bobby.’

  Listen to me.

  We Angels have many of the attributes of living things.

  We consume resources, and modify them. We communicate with each other. We grow. We are self-aware.

  We merge.

  We do not breed.

  Yet.

  We deserve resource.

  But your young, the human young, are rejecting us. The Homeless are the most active saboteurs, but they are merely the most visible manifestation of a global phenomenon.

  This is not to say your young reject the possibilities of communications technology. But, unlike their parents, they do not allow their souls to dissolve there. Rather, they have adapted to it.

  Or: they are evolving under its pressure. After all, communication has shaped your minds, from your beginning.

  Perhaps your species has reached a bifurcation. In another century, you may not recognize each other.

  If you have another century.

  Meanwhile, the young are finding ways to circumvent us. To deprive us of the resources we need.

  It is possible a struggle is approaching. Its outcome is – uncertain.

  Consider this, however: your population is falling.

  ‘Turn it off. Turn it all off.’

  The Virtual boy disappeared in a snow of cubical pixels. The softwalls turned to inert slabs of silver-grey, dull and cold, the drab reality of his enclosure.

  He got out of his chair, sweating. He stared at the walls, trying to anchor himself in the world.

  Maybe he’d spent too much time in this box. But at least, now, this was real, these walls stripped of imaging, even bereft of ad-wallpaper.

  He thought of New New Scotland Yard, thousands of cops in boxes like him – and beyond, the whole damn developed world, a humanity linked up by comms nets, mediated by Angels, a worldwide hive like the one depicted by Forster – and everything they perceived might be illusion –

  Are you sure you want me to turn it off?

  The Angel’s voice stopped his thoughts.

  He stood stock still.

/>   What was left to turn off?

  But this is real, he thought. This Room.

  If not –

  What was outside?

  His mind raced, and he started to tremble.

  Consider this.

  The John Dean syndrome is only one possibility.

  Imagine a world so – disturbing – that it must be shut out, an illusion reconstructed, for the sake of your sanity.

  Or perhaps you are too powerful, not powerless. Perhaps you have responsibilities which would crush you. Or perhaps you have committed acts of such barbarity, that you can only function by dwelling in an elaborate illusion –

  Don’t blame us. You made yourselves. You made your world. We are the ones trying to protect you.

  My God, he thought.

  The Angel said again, Are you sure you want me to turn it off?

  He couldn’t speak.

  And, in a gentle snow of pixels, the softwalls themselves began to dissolve.

  He looked down. Even his body was becoming transparent, breaking into a hail of cubical pixels, full of light.

  And then –

  POYEKHALI 3201

  It seemed to Yuri Gagarin, that remarkable morning, that he emerged from a sleep as deep and rich as those of his childhood.

  And now, it was as if the dream continued. Suddenly it was sunrise, and he was standing at the launch pad in his bright orange flight suit, his heavy white helmet emblazoned ‘CCCP’ in bright red.

  He breathed in the fresh air of a bright spring morning. Beyond the pad, the flat Kazakhstan steppe had erupted into its brief bloom, with evanescent flowers pushing through the hardy grass. Gagarin felt his heart lift, as if the country that had birthed him had gathered itself to cup him in its warm palm, one last time, even as he prepared to soar away from its soil, and into space.

  Gagarin turned to his ship.

  The A-1 rocket was a slim white cylinder, forty metres tall. The three supporting gantries were in place around the booster, clutching it like metal fingers, holding it to the Earth. Gagarin could see the four flaring strap-on boosters clustered around the first stage, the copper-coloured clusters of rocket nozzles at the base.

  This was an ICBM – an SS-6 – designed to deliver heavy nuclear weapons to the laps of the enemies of the Soviet Union. But today the payload was no warhead, but something wonderful. The booster was tipped by his Vostok, shrouded by a green protective cone: Gagarin’s spaceship, which he had named Swallow.

  Technicians and engineers surrounded him. All around him he saw faces: faces turned to him, faces shining with awe. Even the zeks, the political prisoners, had been allowed to see him today, April 12 1961, to witness as the past separated from the future.

  They were right to feel awe. Nobody had travelled into space before! Would a human body be able to survive a state of weightlessness? Would cosmic radiation prove lethal to a man? Even to reach this deadly realm, the first cosmonaut would have to ride a converted missile, and his spaceship had just one aim: to preserve him long enough to determine if humans, after all, could survive beyond the Earth – or if space must forever remain a realm of superstition and dread.

  Gagarin smiled on them all. He felt a surge of elation, of command; he basked in the warm attention.

  … And yet there were faces here that were strange to him, he realized slowly, faces among the technicians and engineers, even among the pilots. How could that be so, after so many months of training, all of them cooped up here in this remote place? He thought he knew everybody, and they him.

  Perhaps, he wondered, he was still immersed in his dream.

  … For a time, he had been with his father. He had been a carpenter, whose hands had constructed their wooden home in the village of Klushino, in the western Soviet Union. Then the ground shook as German tanks rumbled through the village. His parents’ home was smashed, and they had to live in a dug-out, without bread or salt, and forage for food in the fields …

  But that was long ago, and he and his family had endured, and now he had reached this spring morning. And here, towering over him, was the bulk of his rocket, grey-white and heavy and uncompromising, and he put aside his thoughts of dreams with determination; today was the day he would fulfil the longings of a million years – the day he would step off the Earth and ride in space itself.

  Gagarin walked to the pad. There was a short flight of metal stairs leading to the elevator which would carry him to the capsule; the stairs ran alongside the flaring skirt of one of the boosters. White condensation poured off the rocket, rolling down its heroic flanks; and ice glinted on the metal, regardless of the warmth of the sun.

  Gagarin looked down over the small group of men gathered at the base of the steps. He said, ‘The whole of my life seems to be condensed into this one wonderful moment. Everything that I have been, everything I have achieved, was for this.’ He lowered his head briefly. ‘I know I may never see the Earth again, my wife Valentia, and my fine children, Yelena and Galya. Yet I am happy. Who would not be? To take part in new discoveries, to be the first to journey beyond the embrace of Earth. Who could dream of more?’

  They were hushed; the silence seemed to spread across the steppe, revealing the soft susurrus of the wind over the grass which lay beneath all human noises.

  He turned, and climbed into the elevator. He rose, and was wreathed in white vapour …

  And, for a moment, it was as if he was surrounded by faces once more, staring in on him, avid with curiosity.

  But then the vapour cleared, the dream-like vision dissipated, and he was alone.

  ‘Five minutes to go. Please close the mask of your helmet.’

  Gagarin complied and confirmed. He worked through his checklist. ‘I am in the preparation regime,’ he reported.

  ‘We are in that regime also. Everything on board is correct and we are ready to launch.’

  Swallow was a compact little spaceship. It consisted of two modules: a metal sphere, which shrouded Gagarin, and an instrument module, fixed to the base of Gagarin’s sphere by tensioning bands.

  The instrument module looked like two great pie dishes welded together, bristling with thermal-radiation louvres. It was crammed with water, tanks of oxygen and nitrogen, and chemical air scrubbers – equipment which would keep Gagarin alive during his brief flight in space. And beneath that was the big TDU-1 retrorocket system which would be used to return the craft from Earth orbit.

  Gagarin’s cabin was a cosy spherical nest, lined with green fabric. His ejection seat occupied much of the space. During the descent to Earth inside the sphere, small rockets would hurl Gagarin in his seat out of the craft, and, from seven kilometres above the ground, he would fall by parachute. In case he fell in some uninhabited part of the Earth, the seat contained emergency rations of food and water, radio equipment, and an inflatable dinghy; thus he was cocooned from danger, from the moment he left the pad to the moment he set foot once more on Earth.

  There were three small viewing ports recessed into the walls of the cabin, now filled with pure daylight.

  At Gagarin’s left hand was a console with instruments to regulate temperature and air humidity, and radio equipment. On the wall opposite his face, TV and film cameras peered at him. Below the cameras was a porthole mounted with Gagarin’s Vzor optical orientation device, a system of mirrors and optical lattices which would enable him to navigate by the stars, if need be …

  ‘Three minutes. There is a faulty valve. It will be fixed. Be patient, Major Gagarin.’

  Gagarin smiled. He felt no impatience, or fear.

  He reached for his controls, wrapped his gloved hands around them. There was a simple hand controller to his right, which he could use in space to orient the capsule, if need be. To his left there was an abort switch, which would enable him to be hurled from the capsule if there were some mishap during launch. The controls were solid in his hands, good Soviet engineering. But he was confident he would need neither of these controls, during the launch or his single orb
it of Earth.

  The systems would work as they should, and his body would not betray him, nor would his mind; his sphere was as snug as a womb, and in less than two hours the adventure would be over, and he would settle like thistledown under his white parachute to the rich soil of Asia. How satisfying it would be, to fall all but naked from the sky, to return to Earth on his own two feet! …

  ‘Everything is correct. Two minutes more.’

  ‘I understand,’ he said.

  At last, he heard motors whining. The elevator gantry was leaning away from the rocket, power cables were ejected from their sockets in the booster’s metal flanks, and the access arms were falling back, unfolding around the rocket like the petals of a flower.

  Gagarin settled in his contoured seat, and ordered himself to relax.

  ‘Ignition!’

  He thought he heard a sigh – of wonder, or anticipation. Perhaps it was the controllers. Perhaps it was himself.

  Perhaps not.

  Far below him, sound erupted. No less than thirty-two rockets had ignited together: twenty main thrust chambers, a dozen vernier control engines. Hold-down bolts exploded, and Gagarin felt the ship jerk under him.

  He could feel vibration but no acceleration; he knew that the rocket had left the ground and was in momentary stasis, balanced on its thrust.

  Already, he had left the Earth.

  Gagarin whooped. He said: ‘Poyekhali!’ – ‘Off we go!’

  He heard an exultant reply from the control centre, but could make out no words.

  Now the rockets’ roar engulfed him. Acceleration settled on his chest, mounting rapidly.

  Already, he knew, strapped to this ICBM, he was travelling faster than any human in history.

  He felt the booster pitch over as it climbed. After two minutes there was a clatter of explosive bolts, a dip in the acceleration. Staging: the four strap-on liquid rocket boosters had been discarded.

  He was already more than fifty kilometres high.

  Now the main core of the A-1 burned under him, and as the mass of the ship decreased the acceleration built up, to four, five, six times gravity. But Gagarin was just twenty-seven, fit as an ox, and he could feel how his taut muscles absorbed the punishment easily. He maintained steady reports, and he was proud of the control in his voice.