The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  Amanda came to visit us on the first Saturday in September, the last weekend before school started again – although it wasn’t yet clear if the schools would open, because of the continuing rat problem – and brought back the baby she had borrowed for testing in a cat box; it was now fully grown. Rutherford, Appleton and their unnamed babies, now separated by sex, watched impassively.

  Amanda professed admiration for our map.

  “Look,” Penny said. “We used a different colour code for each week since I found the first two at RAL. See how it spreads out? And there’s more of them all the time. I counted it up with Dad. There were four nests sighted that first night when the babies were born. Three weeks later there were twenty-six. Three weeks after that 128 . . .”

  “Show her your graph,” I told her.

  Penny brought up a graph of the number of reports of independent nests versus time, plotted on logarithmic scales. There was a scatter of points around a neat straight-line trend. “Dad showed me how to do this. See that? It’s a power-law line. That’s what Dad says. Every three weeks the nests seem to multiply by about five. That kind of multiplication grows quickly. This is week twenty and we’re up to over 1,300, spread across a circle with a diameter about sixteen kilometres.”

  Amanda nodded. “You should show this to Mr Beauregard. He keeps saying you’re underachieving at maths.”

  She pulled a face. “This isn’t maths. This is real.”

  Amanda raised her eyebrows at me. “Which tells you all you need to know about Bob Beauregard’s teaching methods. That fivefold increase maybe makes sense. You get typically ten or a dozen babies per litter. Maybe five breeding pairs each generation? But the generations are coming too close together, though, even for these rats . . . I’ll have to think about that. Do some mathematical modelling.”

  I went to put the kettle on. “So how’s the youngster? Survived its tests at RAL?”

  “Oh, yes.” She leaned down to look at the rat in its cat box. “Although my friends in there couldn’t agree on an interpretation of their scan results.”

  Penny said, “Tell us what you think.”

  Amanda said slowly, “Well – I think this rat has got a wormhole in its stomach. A flaw in spacetime. And I think it was born that way, born with the wormhole.” She smiled at us. “Isn’t that a wonderful idea?”

  Penny clapped her hands.

  I poured out mugs of tea for me and Amanda, handed Penny a soda, and we sat at the table. “‘A flaw in spacetime.’ I’m not sure what that means.”

  “The classical description of a wormhole is the Einstein-Rosen bridge, which – ”

  “Einstein didn’t keep rats, as far as I know. This, this flaw in its stomach, is how the rat can travel back in time. Is that what you mean?”

  She nodded. “But not voluntarily, I don’t think. It must be connected to the rat’s nervous system somehow – like a muscular reflex. When it’s cornered, it flexes this spacetime spring, and flips back.”

  “Just a few seconds,” Penny said.

  “Yes. That would be enough to escape most entrapment situations. But I’m speculating that a deeper reflex can work when the rats are very young. What if some babies in a litter can hop back weeks? It would be a random jump into the unknown, but they would be safe from any predators who might be attracted to the nest.”

  “Or the vermin controllers.”

  “Well, yes. And we know this strain of rat is able to survive precociously young – especially if it finds some kind human like Penny to look after it.”

  Penny frowned. “They’d be separated from their mother. For ever.”

  “But rats don’t have the same kind of parental bond as we do, Penny. We, with our ape lineage, only have a few children whom we cherish. The rats have lots of babies, expecting to lose most of them to predators. Being able to throw at least some of your babies back to the safety of the past is a valid survival option.”

  I said, “And this is what the RAL people wouldn’t believe.”

  “Well, would you? Although you’d think by now others would have noticed something odd. The police and the rest keep saying they’re just an extreme strain of ordinary rat.”

  “So how did spacetime wormholes get into the bellies of rats?”

  “It started – or will start – in the place we found the first pair.”

  “The Pevatron?”

  “You’ll recall those anti-science protesters outside the facility. They may have a point. The Pevatron will work at unprecedented high energies, and even some of the RAL people are expecting it to create extremely exotic objects . . .”

  Objects such as wormholes and black holes. The energies released by the Pevatron’s colliding electrons and positrons could be enough to rip the fabric of spacetime and leave it stitched back together again wrong, with points that should be separated in space or in time unnaturally connected together.

  “Miniature time machines,” Penny said.

  “Yes. The RAL people are actually figuring out ways to detect such things. If a particle got trapped in such a wormhole it might bounce back and forth so you’d see multiple copies of it. Or, you might see a flash as all the light that fell in the wormhole in the future, as long as it existed, was sent back to the instant of its creation and emerged all at once.”

  I nodded, half-understanding, not quite believing. “And if such a wormhole did form, at high energy –”

  Amanda spread her hands on the table. “I’m speculating. You’d get not one but a whole population of the things. The wormholes would interact and self-select – I think we might see a kind of evolution, a physical evolution, as the wormholes spiralled into stable, low-energy modes that could persist even outside the Pevatron, in our low-energy environment.”

  “Until one got swallowed by a rat,” I said sceptically.

  “Well, something like that. After that we’re talking about biological evolution. It’s obvious what a competitive advantage an ability to time-travel would confer. And, remember, if these creatures are somehow looping back in time, a lot of generations could be compressed into a short interval. Evolution could work very quickly, the time-travel gene spreading fast.”

  “OK. But even if I buy all that, the Pevatron doesn’t work yet. It isn’t due to come online for two whole years! So how did those first time-travelling rats end up back in April?”

  “That’s obvious, Dad,” Penny said, admonishing. “They just got thrown further back in time than usual. Their origin is in the future. They are infesting the past.” She smiled at the idea. “Cool.”

  Amanda and I shared a glance.

  That didn’t seem so cool to me. Mankind has waged war against rats since we became farmers. Even before the Pevatron rats came along, there were thought to be more rats than all the other mammals put together; and rats and the diseases they brought were thought to have killed more humans in the second millennium than all our wars. If this new strain really did have the ability to time-travel – even to plant their young in the deep past – how could humanity stop them?

  We weren’t about to alarm Penny, who clearly hadn’t thought it through that far. I raised the pot. “More tea?”

  A population increasing fivefold expands fast. By the end of September there were over six thousand nests, being spied as far out as Wantage. That was when we were evacuated out of the expanding infestation zone. It broke Penny’s heart when Rutherford and Appleton were taken away.

  Amanda sent us a video clip. It had been caught by chance, by a webcam in a bird’s nesting box: it was the arrival of a baby rat, apparently sent from the future into its past, our present. At first you saw a sort of outline, flattened like roadkill, that gradually filled up to a living, breathing, three-dimensional rat. Amanda said it was as if the rats were using their wormhole muscles to fold up into a higher spacetime dimension, and then back down into ours. She had hacked this footage out of data being gathered by government science units at the heart of the infected zone. The scientists
didn’t know what to make of it – or if they did, they weren’t admitting it.

  By week twenty-nine, mid-November, the rats were being seen in Wallingford, around thirteen kilometres from Harwell. In our government-issue caravan we kept up our map, and the centre of it was covered with dots; the rats weren’t just spreading outward but were filling in the spaces they had already colonized. The authorities estimated there were over 150,000 nests in the area. Penny extrapolated her graph and made lurid predictions of how quickly the rats would reach Birmingham, London, the Channel Tunnel. “It’s the end of the world, Dad, for humans anyhow,” she said, thrilling herself by half-believing it.

  By the end of November, the authorities were making provisional plans to evacuate Oxford. That was when Amanda called me and asked me for help. “We need to sort this out before it’s too late.”

  I met her at the edge of the control zone, near Wallingford. She had requisitioned an NHS ambulance, rat-hardened with cages over its tyres and netting over its doors. She was already wearing her spacesuit, as she called it, a coverall of tough Kevlar fabric with thick gloves and a hood like a nuclear engineer’s. She had one for me; I had to put it on as she drove us briskly into the zone. I was impressed by the resources she’d assembled, leaning on her contacts within Harwell itself. She was always far smarter, more resourceful than she appeared, and was rising to this challenge. She was having a good war. That’s one reason why I’ll miss her.

  Inside the infected zone the towns and villages were deserted of people. The rats were everywhere, swarming out of doorways and windows and over the streets in a black tide. Even out in the country I could hear their heavy bodies thumping against the body of the ambulance as we drove.

  “They’ve eaten everything there is to eat,” Amanda said. “The supermarkets, larders, granaries, fields, all stripped. The population must be near its peak. Soon they’ll turn on each other, if they haven’t already . . .”

  As we neared Harwell we passed the hub of the emergency control, a heavily fenced-off group of trailers, vehicles and comms masts – Gold Command, as it was called, under the control of the local chief constable, and patrolled by squaddies armed with rifles and flame-throwers. Rats scurried across the ground even inside the soldiers’ perimeter. That was the nature of them.

  At Harwell itself we left the ambulance at RAL’s security gate, were passed through the unmanned security barriers by Amanda’s retinal scans, and walked across a campus deserted save for the shadowy black forms of rats. Amanda wore a canvas pack on her back that looked suspicious even to me, but none of the campus’s security measures impeded us.

  We passed through the rough ring of the Pevatron accelerator, and came to a group of more finished buildings at its centre. The area was heavily fenced off and the ground dosed with poison; this billion-pound facility had not yet been abandoned to the rats.

  “In fact,” Amanda said, “you could say the Pevatron’s development is continuing, even now, as that works its way through its own, slow, superhuman calculations.”

  That was the quantum computer. Contained within one of the largest of the central buildings and held behind a glass wall, it was a translucent ball maybe three metres across that hovered in the air, suspended by magnetic fields and contained in a perfect vacuum. Walking back and forth in its hall I thought I saw hints of deeper structure, glimmering. Even aside from its engineering quality, that computer was one of the most beautiful pieces of sculpture I have ever seen.

  “Nobody knows how it works,” Amanda said. “Not in detail anyhow. It bootstrapped itself. It finished its own physical design, and now is working out its own programming for the task of running the Pevatron.”

  “That is one smart machine.”

  “But vulnerable.” And she took off her pack, and pulled out pretty much what I expected: a lump of pale plastic, an explosive. I didn’t ask her where she had got this from. She slapped the plastic against the glass window, where it stuck easily, and attached a detonator charge. This would be controlled by a radio switch. She showed me what to do, just in case: it was a gadget like a TV remote, with a big red button to push. “We need some distance,” she said, and led me out of the building to the open air.

  “The quantum computer is the heart of the Pevatron – and where most of the money has been spent. If we destroy it there’s a good chance the project will be derailed enough to be cancelled altogether, especially given it’s in the middle of a disaster zone. Of course others might build equivalent facilities somewhere else, but at least we’d buy time to prove the reality of the time loops, and to protect against the danger.”

  We stood near the edge of the ring, looking back at the unprepossessing control buildings. “Do we really have to do this? To smash such a beautiful machine – ”

  “I know,” she said, smiling at me. “I feel it too. But, yes, we have to do this. Look . . .” She pulled a handheld out of her pack, and showed me how she had modelled the spread of the super-vermin. “These rats are fertile at four weeks old, and have a gestation time of about three weeks. When a litter is born, a percentage of it is thrown back in time four weeks. So they are mature just at the point they were born – if you see what I mean. That’s why we see this jump in the spread with each three-week generation.

  “But I’m speculating that under conditions of extreme stress – such as the overcrowding we’re already seeing here – some individuals, or their offspring, can be thrown back further still. Just as Penny suggested.”

  “To escape the population crash.”

  “That’s it. Because if you dive deep enough into the past, you always find virgin territory: you are the first of your kind, and your offspring can fill their boots. Think about it. The first boom will start when the Pevatron comes on line. Forty weeks later, crash . . .” The authorities were predicting a crash for us around week forty, when the rats would have overrun Oxford, and there would be tens of millions of nests – hundreds of millions of rats, swarming over an area thirty or forty kilometres across. Amanda went on, “A few extreme individuals escape back, say, a hundred weeks into the past, into the virgin time before the Pevatron was even turned on. Forty weeks later, their ancestors are still ahead of the first origin. But there’s another crash –”

  “And another leap into the past, even deeper.”

  “Yes. And back they go, crash and leap, crash and leap, working their way ever deeper into history. Every time it will start as it did for us, with just a handful of cute-looking babies in a virgin world. Every time it will end with a crash. You know, maybe this is the only way a species as smart as us could be eradicated. We fought back against predators and plagues; we’d probably survive everything short of the planet being destroyed altogether. But not this.” Those seawater eyes were grave behind her scuffed faceplate. “There’s nothing ahead of us, Joe. Nothing but rats swarming and fighting and dying; whatever human future existed has been eaten.” She waved a hand. “And soon none of this will exist either. We won’t just be dead; we will never even have existed. Our history, our very existence, consumed by the rats.”

  I touched the hand that held the bomb control. “And you think this will put it right.”

  “This must be where it started. I can’t think of anything else to do.” I would never have believed that the timid teacher I had got to know only months before would ever have been capable of setting up an operation like this, which shows how much I know about people. But she was trembling inside her suit. “I’m scared, Joe.”

  I squeezed her gloved hand. “Don’t be. To have figured this out, to have got this far – I could kiss you.”

  She looked away, shy even in that extreme moment. There were rats running around our feet. “We shouldn’t risk it.”

  “I guess not,” I said. I will regret that choice forever.

  She held up her control, the button under her gloved thumb. “I hope this works. Three, two, one – ” A flash of light.

  It took me a long time to recover fr
om the injuries I suffered in the next few seconds, and even longer to figure it all out.

  Amanda and I had talked about what the rise of the rats would mean for humanity – that is, our extinction. What we didn’t talk about was what it would mean for the rats themselves.

  Rats breed fast, and compete hard. In a world empty of mankind there would be a quick radiation of forms; I imagined slavering wolf-like rats preying on big grazing antelope-like beasts. And I imagined intelligence advancing. Why not? Rats are already smart and highly social, and the stuff we left behind would give a start to any tool-users. Whatever society they built would surely be quite unlike ours, however. Rats, with their different breeding strategy, show little loyalty to their many offspring; there will be no rodent Genghis Khan. And natural time travellers would wage wars of a qualitatively different kind from ours. All this in a rat future.

  But that future was always contingent. Suppose Amanda was right – suppose her one action in aborting the Pevatron was enough to stop the rise of the rats. Maybe a smart enough super-rat of the future would know that. And maybe he or she would come back in time to avert the extinction of its kind before it existed – or to confirm the defeat of mankind. But for the rat, it was a leap across time too far.

  This is all speculation. But it would explain what I saw.

  “Three, two, one – ”

  I saw Amanda’s thumb press down on that red button.

  And in the same instant I saw a vertical line appear in space before us, and fold out, like a cardboard cut-out rotating.