Transmission: Ragnarok: Book Two

by John Meaney

  For about a mile, Lucas continued in the absence of a path or track. In England one walks on the pavement; in the States pavement is for driving on. He could imagine the British couples making snotty remarks. Finally he was back on a real pavement – sidewalk – passing a row of single-storey businesses.

  One of the things about Ramanujan – Lucas resumed his meditation – was his vegetarianism. Him and Gandhi both, Lucas recalled. The thing was, Edwardian cooking had no notion of balanced meatless diets: between the lack of nourishment, the damp cold, and his customary lack of exercise, Ramanujan’s health plummeted; and back in India he suffered a grim and painful death at the edge of thirty-two.

  Now Lucas was in a residential area, the streets laid out in a geometric grid with empty sidewalks. It was mid-morning and the place looked empty. Again, there was the contrast to every other country he had been in: the rectilinear layout, streets labelled by numbers rather than names: practical yet subtly oppressive. Perhaps that was due to his sense of enemies watching from everywhere, because arrival in the States usually perked him up, straightening his spine as he resonated with a sense of confidence and self-determination so lacking in his usual life.

  His colleague Arne did have confidence: strapping and muscular, strictly vegetarian, fond of the occasional lager but a fanatic about physical conditioning. He had a second dan black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and had previously competed in powerlifting, while these days his strength training consisted mostly of exercises from India, traditionally used by wrestlers: yoga-like, strenuous callisthenics called dands and bethaks. Once, he had demonstrated the movements in the Imperial bar, to the joy of his colleagues, Lucas included.

  Bethaks, it turned out, were deep knee-bends, while dands were cat-lick push-ups that looked like the motion of a tireless male porn star – ‘He’s forgotten to put a woman underneath him,’ Jim had said – after which they had given Arne a new name: Captain Carpet Shagger.

  In Edwardian Cambridge, where Town and Gown remained disparate, the well-off took a four-hour walk every afternoon, while impoverished working men spent the same amount of time walking to and from their jobs – and their wives would make the same journey in the middle of the day, fetching lunch to their husbands. It was a contrast to the self-taught mathematical genius who remained shut up in his rooms to work amid gloomy days and dark unlit nights, with Cambridge blacked out in case of Zeppelin attack.

  Arne followed a Hindu-inspired lifestyle that gave him enormous vitality; poor Ramanujan had dwindled to skin and bones for the same reason.

  When he reached the next shopping area, Lucas went into a diner and ordered steak and eggs, OJ and coffee. Ongoing free refills of juice and coffee: another difference from home. He took alternating sips from glass and cup as he powered up his qPad and checked the route to Caltech. The jet lag was catching up with him, but if he could stay awake for a full Californian day, he would avoid the danger of checking into a hotel where they might ask for ID. Or was that paranoid thinking?

  They deleted data from Palo Alto and LongWatch.

  Secure systems both. From the Chinese astrophysics community, there had been no mention of a triple gamma-ray burster event, no joining in with international discussion. Perhaps that absence meant their systems, too, had fallen victim to worms.

  When the steak and eggs came, Lucas slathered ketchup over everything, and ate. It was a taste explosion, just wonderful.

  While eating, he revisited his material on Gus Calzonni. In interviews, her tone was occasionally sarcastic, with comments that Lucas found funny. Since Ramanujan died back in 1920 or whenever, he read, mathematicians and scientists have been raiding his work for good stuff. He had this intuition, you see, like nobody else. Without partition theory and modular forms, I would never have discovered mu-space. Of course, that meant disproving string theory, also inspired by Ramanujan’s theorems, but them’s the breaks, string-kiddies.

  Perhaps this was why so much dispute remained about the nature of mu-space: physically real continuum or mathematical device.

  ‘It better be sodding real.’ He realized a waitress was looking at him. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Hey, no problem.’

  A few seconds later, the waitress was behind the counter with her colleague, stage-whispering: ‘Oh, I just love his accent.’

  Lucas rubbed his face and shut down his qPad.

  Night-time in Pasadena was orange, with palm-trees. A profusion of sodium-vapour streetlamps, warm un-English air, a sense of un-European space between buildings that would have been austere without the advertising. It was not the darkness that Lucas had envisioned creeping through like a ninja; but he could see that no one was lying in wait, no black-garbed snatch team ready to truss him up and remove him from the everyday world.

  Once on campus, he solved the security problem in the usual way: walking in behind someone else, in this case a dark-skinned young woman with ferociously intelligent eyes who held the door open for him.

  ‘That’s very kind of you,’ he said. ‘Thank you very much.’

  ‘Oh, you’re British.’ She giggled. ‘You’re welcome.’

  When she turned left at the first corridor, Lucas turned right. From behind, he heard her give a small, disappointed sigh.

  For God’s sake.

  But he was in, and that was all that counted. Following the route he had planned from online diagrams, he tried to project a sense of belonging here, in case some security guard was watching internal surveillance views. Twice, he nodded to a white-coated person walking the opposite way. Scientists do not always work nine-to-five.

  The door lock on the lab was the real barrier, with a redfang sensor expecting a digital code. But this was the technology that Lucas had expected to come up against – zooming in on students’ Facebook photos – and before leaving London, he had returned to Tottenham Court Road for one last piece of shopping.

  All sorts of covert surveillance devices were on sale in several of the electronics shops, not always the dingy ones. It had surprised Lucas the first time he went there as an undergraduate, and so he had checked online: it was the use, not ownership, of pen cameras and the like that was illegal. In the event, he bought the app from the man who had sold him the qPad; it came on a memory flake in a small cardboard box labelled For entertainment purposes only. Lucas’s hand shook when he took it, but the shopkeeper looked calm. Buying it here seemed safer than downloading from online, not knowing which agency might have the download site under surveillance.

  He cranked it up now. The qPad showed no visible output, but it must have finally redfanged the correct pass-code because the lock clicked; and when Lucas pushed, the door swung in.

  Holy crap, I’m doing it.

  As he went inside, the door swung shut behind him. His surroundings were gloomy at first, then lights began to flicker on – motion sensors, hopefully not linked to a security system – and shadows became benches and equipment, over there a vertical torus, and to the other side—

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  A woman was standing there.

  ‘Too bleeding right,’ she said.

  Agony exploded in Lucas’s thigh, and he was down on one knee as if genuflecting, with his arm wrenched up behind him, leverage and pain somehow combining to immobilize his whole body. Even his neck could only turn through a degree or two.

  ‘You’re English,’ the woman added.

  From her, there was no giggling.

  ‘Yeah, you– Christ!’ The hold had tightened. ‘You too. I’m not a criminal.’

  ‘Actually you are.’

  ‘Shit. Yes. But I wasn’t until thirty seconds ago. I’m Lucas Woods from Imperial College.’

  ‘What, come to steal results? You won’t find any in here. Nothing unpublished.’

  ‘Yeah, I know …’

  There was no way to explain his breaking in.

  ‘Or was it the apparatus you were planning to steal?’

  ‘No, I … I was going to borrow it.’
Something wrenched, and the pain level rocketed. ‘No, not borrow! I mean I was going to use it.’

  The hold relaxed, by some tiny quantum of torture.

  ‘Use what apparatus for what purpose, specifically?’

  ‘I need to …’ He tried to clear saliva from his throat. ‘I need to send something through to mu-space.’

  ‘You need to what? Member of some kind of cult, are you?’

  ‘No, I’m a fucking physicist.’ Despite the pain, he turned his head enough to look up at her. ‘Much like yourself, Dr Calzonni.’

  With repeated backtracking and filling-in of skipped details, he told her everything. From his pocket, he took out the black-and-white photograph of his grandmother, and the note he had found with it.

  You will see three. You will be wrong.

  G

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

  And they talked about the gamma-ray burster event. Throughout the conversation, Calzonni had been watchful, ready to strike him down again – this time she would break something, she had promised, then beat him unconscious – but when he ran through the events of that day, she relaxed a little. When he said he had a copy of some LongWatch data, she looked excited.

  Lucas wondered why she had been sitting alone in the dark, brooding over her most notable scientific achievement, but dismissed the idea of asking her, on the grounds that she might beat the shit out of him.

  ‘The full outer component is compromised,’ he said. ‘There are private members in inner objects, even initialization blocks, designed to bootstrap worms. Luckily I dissected the thing instead of trying to load it whole.’

  Calzonni gave the first hint of a smile.

  ‘You’re not the only one who took a data copy,’ she said. ‘But you’re the first one to still have it, as far as I know. Well done.’

  ‘Er, thank you.’

  He showed her the snapshots of the astronomical event. Three dots shining to the east of β Aurigae, the triangle perfectly equilateral, its centre corresponding to the galactic anti-centre.

  ‘Draw a line from that through Earth,’ said Calzonni, ‘and you’d reach the galactic core. It can’t be natural.’

  ‘I got that note from my grandmother’ – Lucas pointed – ‘several hours before the burster event. Don’t talk to me about natural.’

  ‘I don’t believe in ghosts, gods or magic.’

  Lucas said: ‘Me neither. You know Hardy once had a list of New Year resolutions that included, find an argument for the non-existence of God which shall convince the general public?’

  ‘Hardy who?’

  ‘The one who mentored Ramanujan. As in modal forms, infinities, and just possibly travel into mu-space, Dr Calzonni.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Mind you,’ said Lucas, grinning, ‘other items on the list included assassinating Mussolini and becoming Communist president of Britain and Germany.’

  Calzonni stared at him.

  ‘Tell me again what you wanted to do here.’

  ‘It’s the note.’ Again he pointed, this time specifically at the postscript. ‘She told me to pass it on. I think’ – gesturing at the burster event data – ‘that’s what I’m supposed to pass on. And I think the parameter values tell me where to pass it to.’

  ‘Totally insane,’ she said.

  ‘Like thinking it took some conspiracy to wipe out all that data with a worm attack. That’s parallel worm attacks on separate systems you’d expect to be secure, with massive redundancy in the Cloud.’

  ‘Yeah.’ She tapped her finger on the note. ‘There are nine insertion parameters. But for all my early experiments, I fixed six of the values, varying only these three.’

  ‘Which is how I made the connection, scanning papers for those variable names.’

  ‘You mean you didn’t know my work by heart?’ Again, the partial smile. ‘So if we’re going to send this data, how are we going to do it? Not the qPad, surely.’

  Lucas processed the we in her sentence.

  ‘You’re going to help?’

  ‘If it’s a delusion, what’s the harm? And if it isn’t … Too bad we’ll never know how it turns out.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  He fished inside his pocket and pulled out the payload: a white-and-red memory flake.

  ‘Graphene,’ said Calzonni. ‘Fair enough.’

  She went over to the torus, and started the equipment up.

  SIXTY-ONE

  MOLSIN 2603 AD

  As always, before Rhianna and Roger began training, they checked the surveillance nets they had tapped into. The local equivalents of netAgents were set up as realtime observers, ready to report the instant they saw something; but the point was this: the patterns might have been subverted, the registration links of view-source (normally an area of quickglass wall in some convenient location) to watcher (a conglomerate of software agents active elsewhere in the architecture) destroyed or redirected. They had countermeasures in place, but Helsen and Ranulph might be smart enough to avoid them. The setup-check was necessary.

  ‘Intact,’ said Rhianna. ‘I almost wish it wasn’t.’

  Because at least something would have happened. Roger understood. The negative result could mean anything, even that Helsen and Ranulph had escaped offworld, though the mu-space quarantine should have prevented that.

  ‘So what’s the agenda today?’ asked Roger.

  It was the fifth day of training, and he had passed through exhaustion to a kind of flow state, everything happening automatically because he was too fatigued for self-critical thought, too tired to get in his own way. Ancient samurai called this state mu-shin, the derivation identical to that of mu-space; and they strove to reach it always.

  ‘Metacognition,’ said Rhianna in local Spanalian, then repeated it in Aeternum.

  Roger blinked at the semantic resonance of the Aeternal term.

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’

  ‘In what way?’ asked Rhianna.

  ‘We can’t do it in realspace.’

  ‘Really? Trust me.’ She smiled. ‘I’ve done this before.’

  All around, the quickglass chamber reconfigured into shapes that would have looked bizarrely angular to a normal observer, here spiky with fractal complexity, there distorted into visual paradoxes of impossible polygons, of straight edges that appeared to spiral, of static lattices that seemed to twist into and around themselves.

  To a Pilot, it meant more: the shadow of a reflection, the hint of different geometry.

  A soupçon of mu-space.

  ‘Now relax deeply.’ Her voice appeared to pulse and wash in tidal waves. ‘And deeper still …’

  His awareness fell deep inside himself, though his eyes remained open, assisting the illusion that he was plunging into a different universe, the continuum where he and all his kind came wonderfully alive. But now it was more than that.

  Roger split apart.

  The mind that had been Roger Blackstone became a scale-free forest of neural cliques and groups, miniature gestalten with their own brand of self-awareness: a community, a population of cognitive daemons aware of and communicating with each other. Those groups, freed of the old patterns, began to explore new ways of joining together, of running in parallel, trying new architecture as suggested by the decoded linguistic input – he/they/all of him were aware of the processing in his language centres, the auditory computation, the words originating from the other being whose designation was Rhianna Chiang, signposting this process of change but not controlling it, because that task was his/theirs/all components’ responsibility – and some self-aware cliques combined to form a fleeting thought: Was this how the Anomaly experienced itself?

  Change continued.

  By the timeflow of realspace thermodynamics in the location that his body occupied, some three standard hours passed while this process of metacomputational reorganization continued in Roger’s central nervous system. But no one, not even a Pilot,
could remain in this state for ever. Not in this universe. So he began, under Rhianna’s measured direction, to come out of it.

  Rebuilding his mind, piece by piece, as he did so.

  Talk about multi-tasking.

  He understood, as he reintegrated, how different things would be in future – and how wildly marvellous they would be in mu-space, back where he belonged. Summoning a Labyrinthine fastpath no longer seemed impossible, rather a trivial application of inductive projection, of the neural and quasi-neural flows that all Pilots were capable of, no matter where they had been raised.

  How incredible the world is.

  Every pore of Rhianna’s facial skin, every tiny feature of the quickglass surroundings, glowed with an inner light it had always possessed. Every sound – all the vibration that washed over and through his skin during every second he was alive – became rich and crisp and wonderfully complex. Rhianna’s pride in his change was obvious from the airborne molecules that every human being could atavistically sense, but not bring into conscious awareness the way he could now.

  Metaconsciousness was his.

  Who could have believed it might be like this?

  He was a multitude of shifting personalities – as he had always been, as everyone was – with a new qualitative awareness, and the ability to be many people at once: the observer scanning the surroundings constantly for danger; the mathematician and the artist appreciating the world and the ideal forms beyond; the caring, empathising lover of all people, who understood everyone and forgave them their weaknesses; and the binding personality, the one who emerged and might in emergency control the others: the new core Roger, if there was such a thing.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Rhianna.

  She sensed it, and he knew that: the feedback between them was a pulsing bidirectional blizzard of non-verbal signals, from pheromones to micromuscle twitches.

  ‘I’m not,’ he said.

  Because there was only one word that suited his coordinating self, a single name that matched perfectly: an old word that resonated down the centuries from its roots among the followers of Thórr and Óthinn.