Transmission: Ragnarok: Book Two

by John Meaney

  Da, da-dum, da-da-da-dum, da-da.

  The sickness that rose inside had little to do with her condition.

  ‘Es tut mir Leid, Gavriela.’

  Those twinkling eyes belonged to a man with human faults, but one who saw deeply into things, in more ways than she had suspected; while Payne was nodding, like a man checking off a point on a list.

  FORTY-FOUR

  EARTH, 2033 AD

  Regent’s Park, on this ninth day of September, remained green and splendid, a forest oasis in the centre of smoggy London. From the high window in his rented apartment – part of a townhouse built for a Georgian gentleman, or some such – Lucas stared at the treetops, and the parade of office workers beneath them, making the most of an end-of-summer lunchtime. Softness pressed against his back, Maria’s breasts beneath his shoulder blades.

  ‘Come to Rio with me,’ she said. ‘In the spring.’

  ‘I don’t know. Will there be sex?’

  ‘There better had be, lover.’

  Quantum resonance was one of Lucas’s specialities, and for sure his innermost cellular self resonated with Maria’s lusty energy. He laughed as she tweaked his nipple from behind. He twisted to face her, then followed as she pulled him back to the bed where she laughed as he entered her. At some point, during the rise to nova crescendo, a ting sounded from his holoterminal, but Maria Higashionna was everything, the universe he breathed in, the hot skin he melded with; and then it exploded for both of them, and they lay afterwards with only gentle adjustments and kisses, lost in each other, floating in the aftermath.

  ‘My recital’s at three,’ said Maria.

  ‘You’d better shower first.’

  ‘Mm.’

  She rolled out of bed and walked to the bathroom. Lucas watched her, wishing he had the equations to describe her nude beauty. Then she was out of sight and the shower was starting up.

  ‘Oh, well.’

  Bare-arse naked, he hauled himself to the holoterminal and tapped it into life. When he pointed, the floating-scroll icon unfurled to show a black-and-white photograph hanging in the air beside a vertical sheet of creamy writing-paper. The cursive script might have been written with a fountain-pen.

  ‘Hey, lover.’

  ‘Huh!’ He had not heard the bathroom door open. ‘You’ve left the shower running.’

  ‘Just wondering if someone would wash my … So what’s that, anyhow? An old family photograph?’

  Lucas leaned closer to the holo rather than magnify it.

  ‘I think that is my grandmother, you know. Not that I ever knew her.’

  ‘You’re kidding. Turn the letter this way, would you?’

  He gestured, and the image rotated a little. Slipping his arm around her soft, exciting waist, he made himself read.

  Dearest Lucas,

  How wonderful to have a grandson! My words will seem very strange, since we do not know each other and I speak from your past. Still, I must ask you a favour, and be assured it must be this way. Even banks can fail over time, although it is to be hoped that some familiar names survive, so I am forced to contact you in this indirect way, with the hope that you will feel curious enough to investigate as I tell you.

  He gestured at the paragraph.

  ‘Her first language wasn’t English.’

  ‘Neither is mine, meu amor. Read on.’

  ‘Yes, but … Never mind.’

  Please, my grandson, look under the parquet flooring, in the right-hand outer corner as you look out the window at the park.

  Love,

  Gavi (your grandmother!)

  X X X

  Lucas pulled out a chair and sat down. Maria leaned against him; his hand cupped her buttock.

  ‘Is this a little physics joke arranged with my friends?’

  ‘Nothing to do with me, lover,’ said Maria. ‘Is there any actual nerdy science in the note?’

  ‘A logical paradox, maybe.’

  ‘Didn’t you say maths is built on paradox-infested foundations? Russell and Gödel, right? When you got into that argument with Jim in the One Tun.’

  ‘No.’ He shut down the display. ‘I mean, that’s sort of what I said.’

  Maria looked at the space where the letter had hung.

  ‘What is parquet flooring?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘The letter said parquet flooring, in the corner.’

  He squeezed her.

  ‘That’s parquet.’ He pointed at the wooden floor. ‘Blocks arranged in patterns. And you’re going to be late for your recital.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘And you’re wasting water, more to the point.’

  ‘You’re a monster.’

  ‘Yes.’ He kissed her nipple, and ran a finger down to her mons. ‘Your monster, and I’ll be here all night.’

  ‘Bad monster.’ Maria glanced at the floor in the far corner of the room. ‘All right, I’m going to get clean by myself.’

  Lucas grinned as she returned to the bathroom. Then he pulled on a pair of discarded shorts, and went in to the kitchen alcove to make coffee.

  Silly buggers.

  He went back to the terminal and checked the message’s metadata.

  ‘Thought so.’

  These terminals were new and still scarce, each model with varying capabilities. The message had been directed to this physical device by address, not just to his cloud ID, with model-specific image optimization.

  Sorry, grandma, but you died before I was born, so this is impossible.

  He wasn’t sure of the year, although it was related to an historical event, the year that … something happened. World-shaking at the time, no doubt.

  You could not have known I’d be in this room, right now, today.

  Not to mention arranging for a message to be sent via a technology no one dreamed of then. Although, to be fair, the message content was old school: an inked letter, a black-and-white two-dimensional photograph.

  And you definitely wouldn’t have known what I was up to. Did they have sex back in your century?

  There was something weird about talking to one’s grandmother this way, even in imagination, so he closed off his thoughts. Coffee in hand, he wandered back to the window. Maria left the bathroom and opened the wardrobe, moving fast.

  ‘Who owned the building’ – she wriggled, pulling a dress down over her head – ‘before they turned it into apartments?’

  ‘I can’t remember. Someone told me.’

  ‘Some rich duke, or something, I’ll bet.’ She checked herself in the mirror, changed the tuning on her eyelid make-up – the liquid crystal layer grew pinker – then came over to kiss him. ‘Meet in the bar at six, right?’

  ‘You’ve got it.’

  ‘And you’d better get going now yourself. No time to dawdle.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right.’

  He began to hurry now, because he really did have a meeting booked, followed by a get-together with two of his PhD students. They were ten years younger than he was, and far too polite regarding his shortcomings. He remembered how his own supervisor, Vadim, had been a nightmare to pin down for meetings; that was why he wanted the next generation to have a better experience.

  Maria slammed the front door shut as she left.

  ‘All right. Shower.’

  Someone had once told him that soldiers could get showered and dressed and make their beds in under ten minutes. Military discipline was alien to his nature, but he liked this idea. Soon he was fresh-smelling and dressed, still damp-haired, collecting the things he needed for the rest of the afternoon. Then he stopped, stared at the window, and said:

  ‘Secret Intelligence Service. Well.’

  Maria had asked about the building’s earlier owners. How could he have forgotten?

  She doesn’t want me to investigate.

  More likely, she did not want him tearing up the old, expensive-to-repair floor. Some people are elegant experimentalists, hands-on as well as in design; Lucas was better wi
th the thinking aspect: his circuits tended to drift with noise instead of settling, his plug-in components rarely plugged in, while apparatus in general tended to come apart in his hands.

  ‘Plus it’s a practical joke, right?’

  But how practical?

  ‘No. Stupid.’

  There couldn’t really be something buried under the floor, could there? And if there were, it surely would not be something secreted by his decades-dead grandmother.

  Would it?

  Like spilled, dirty milk, the majority of the floor appeared slick and greyish. Lucas had forgotten about the protective membrane, now in the aftermath of some chemical catastrophe caused by his digging around. Wooden blocks, dug up, lay around him. Several kitchen utensils were bent beyond recovery; a spatula and a carving-knife had snapped clean through.

  All he had found was a square of old, folded canvas, stained but intact.

  ‘Message from the grave. Jesus.’

  He had dug a miniature grave-hole in the once-flawless floor. Maria had been right; the landlord was going to be bloody hacked off.

  ‘So which of you buggers’ – he imagined his colleagues’ faces in a row – ‘is going to be responsible for this?’

  Unfolding the canvas revealed something small, a card or letter, wrapped in flimsy paper. Inside the paper was a black-and-white photograph – no surprise now – showing two young women in hats and skirt suits, in what he supposed was the 1940s, maybe 50s.

  On the back, the ink had faded to a brownish colour splotched with black.

  Frau Doktor Gavriela Wolf & Frau Ilse Wolf, Amsterdam, 9. September 1930

  One of the women, dark-haired and with intense eyes, was the same woman as in the holoterminal message, but younger.

  ‘Hello, Grandma.’

  And there was a folded sheet of notepaper. Of course there had to be something more to the joke than an old photo. The cursive, copperplate writing was hard to make out, but the note was short.

  You will see three. You will be wrong.

  G

  P.S. Pass it on! κ∞ = 9.42 ; λ∞ = 2.703 × 1023 ; μ∞ = .02289

  Lucas stared at nothing, imagining spies in double-breasted suits working in here, the air filled with pipe-smoke, their patrician accents alien to modern ears.

  ‘The game’s afoot,’ he said. ‘So three what, precisely?’

  But none of this, really, felt like a joke.

  He slowed walking past the Royal College of Music. Heavenly sounds floated from an open window – it might have been Maria’s recital, but it could be any one of the students at practice. Opposite was the round, redbrick Victorian flying-saucer-like Royal Albert Hall where they dreamed of performing for real. Musical mastery and leading-edge science on the same street. A hundred and fifty years ago, things would have looked just like this.

  Then he was at the corner, swiping his Imperial College ID ring to gain entrance to Huxley, where he nodded to a couple of technicians he knew, then rode up to the top floor, and strode past the biophysics rooms, heading for his office in Blackett.

  You will see three.

  Three buses? Sparrows dropping dead? Moments of random kindness? Maria was going to be pissed off when she saw the floor. The landlord was the least of Lucas’s worries.

  ‘Scientists,’ his friend Arne had said over several pints of Stella, ‘just do not get hot babes like Maria as girlfriends.’

  In reply, Lucas had brought the big intellectual guns to bear, quoting Richard Feynman: ‘If experiment disagrees with theory, then the theory is wrong. All of science is contained in that sentence.’

  ‘Sod off,’ Arne had answered. ‘So whose round is it?’

  Anyway, never mind Maria or the stupid messages. He was in Imperial where he belonged. Time to decipher the nature of the universe – or have some tea and biscuits while chatting with his friends. Whichever came first.

  Arne, Jim and Fatima were waiting in the small seminar room. The chairs were battered and the walls need repainting, but the holoterminal was state of the art.

  ‘Here.’ Arne handed Lucas a cup of coffee. ‘You’ll need this to keep awake.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ Fatima was fiddling with her wristband, communicating with the holoterminal. ‘You are a bad person, Arne. My talk will be riveting.’

  A phase space blossomed.

  ‘Solar flux resonance,’ she added, ‘is fascinating anyway, and we’ve got some solid work finished.’

  ‘I’ve got hot acid reflux,’ said Arne. ‘Does that count?’

  ‘Peace.’ Jim raised his hands. ‘Fatima, why don’t you start.’

  Arne grinned. He would not interrupt again until it was time for formal questions, and then his queries were likely to be pointed and serious.

  ‘So, good afternoon, everyone,’ said Fatima. ‘Here are the latest results from the—’

  A knock sounded, and a young-looking woman peeked in.

  ‘Sorry, everyone,’ she said. ‘Er, Arne? Could you come look at something, please?’

  Jim frowned. So did Fatima.

  ‘We’ve just started here,’ said Arne. ‘Can it wait an hour?’

  ‘There’s a major anomaly on LongWatch, but Palo Alto’s showing it too. It’s just happened, like a minute ago, but the web’s already alive with—’

  ‘All right.’ Fatima tapped her wristband. ‘Arne, you want to take over?’

  ‘What? Oh, yeah.’ Arne worked his own wristband. ‘Have I got it? Right, let’s link in.’

  The holo view was of deep space, bordered with subsidiary sheaves of data. Lucas dimmed the room lights all the way down.

  ‘There.’ The young woman was pointing. ‘See?’

  ‘Holy shite,’ said Arne. ‘Hang on.’

  Jim was leaning forward, almost inside the holovolume.

  ‘You say Palo Alto’s seeing this too?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But they’re not using the LongWatch satellite array. Plus their sensor tech is totally different.’

  In the middle of the display, amid the blazing points of both stars and galaxies, three identically brilliant spots were glowing. Laid out in a perfect equilateral triangle.

  You will see three.

  Lucas checked the tabular data.

  ‘Gamma-ray bursters,’ he said. ‘But three of them.’

  In seconds they might die down – this being a real time display – but for now they were blazing with far greater energy than any supernova could muster.

  ‘What’s their origin? Where the hell are they?’

  ‘Other side of a void, looks like,’ said Arne. ‘A hundred and fifty million lightyears across, and still we get to see events like this.’

  ‘But the triangle’s an artefact.’ Jim stabbed his finger into the image. ‘Has to be. Gravitational lensing wouldn’t split the image that way. It’s the software.’

  ‘We’re seeing it, but we’re not the only ones.’ Arne shrugged. ‘If Palo Alto agree, it’s not a sensor artefact, so it’s an artefact of something out there.’

  ‘Unless,’ said Fatima, ‘there really are three gamma-ray events that were not just simultaneous from our viewpoint, but lined up in a beautiful equal-sided triangle. I mean, how likely is that?’

  Jim remained staring at the image.

  ‘A single black hole wouldn’t produce the triangle, and I’m pretty sure that two gravity sources in line wouldn’t do it either. But some other arrangement, maybe.’

  Lucas had a memory flake in his pocket, an accessory that came with his new holoterminal, useful for setup and working offline, given that holoterminals were still rare, therefore not fully supported. As a child, he remembered Dad taking backups of his work, but these days everyone relied on redundancy in the Cloud, with offline copies a rarity.

  He worked the flake, unnoticed by the others, copying several seconds’ worth of the LongWatch data. Then he thumbed it off and put it back in his pocket, alongside the old photograph.

  Why did I do that?
r />   A second later, the LongWatch image began to shiver and fall apart.

  ‘What the fuck is that?’ said Arne.

  Fatima shook her head at the language, but she was already bringing up a subsidiary image, while Jim was working on his wristpad.

  ‘Worm attack,’ he said. ‘The whole LongWatch system is going down.’

  ‘Bastard shitting—’ Arne looked at Fatima. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘Jim’s right, it’s a worm attack. I know how you feel.’

  They stared at the visual noise in the holovolume, rippling colours signifying nothing. Then the student spoke up, the young woman who had interrupted the meeting with the news and had since remained silent.

  ‘Er … I’m just talking to my friend in Palo Alto.’ She waved her wrist. ‘Their system’s been hit by the same thing, looks like.’

  Such worm attacks rarely got through these days, which was one of the reasons everyone relied on the Cloud. But hundreds of scientists at least would have seen the images before the data was corrupted to oblivion.

  ‘Maybe the triangle was the start of the attack.’ Jim had never sounded so glum. ‘Corrupt a portion of data cleverly, get everyone worked up, then take down the lot. Bastards.’

  Lucas put his hands in his pockets.

  I could tell them I’ve a copy.

  Perhaps he was not the only one in the world. What if anyone who might possess a copy was in danger?

  It’s a paranoid fantasy.

  But the photograph and note were real. From the creators of the worm? That seemed far more likely than a message from his grandmother, long deceased.

  ‘—OK there, Lucas?’

  ‘Uh, yeah. Just hacked off at all that.’ He nodded at the terminal. ‘If this was April Fool’s, you might just about understand it, you know?’

  ‘Malicious fuckers,’ said Arne. ‘Begging your pardon, Fatima.’

  ‘All right.’

  Another memory of Dad surfaced – Dad, who had never (to Lucas’s knowledge) been in a fight, telling him: ‘Trust your instincts always, as my old Mum used to say. Four billion years of evolution are responsible for gut feelings, so go with them.’