by Exurb1a
“I’ll take you, but only so you can let go. If we even find her she’ll be unrecognisable by now. Ah, but you think you know better, eh?”
Argie said nothing, only looked out of the window. The moons were setting. Beggars and wild beasts alike shuffled along the street. She thought of that day, the first day of the infant's life.
“And I am your infant,” the child had said, there in Nufeeja with her pale face and green eyes. Argie thanked the birthing machine and took the infant home to her burrow. The infant seemed to like it, lying on the beach for hours, gazing at the stars. Soon enough, as her selfsense cohered, she grew a body and behaved as Argie assumed a sapien child would. The little girl learned fluent speech in minutes when she finally decided to. Then she began to ask questions.
How big is our burrow?
As big as we need it to be, Argie said.
What defines its limit?
Nothing. We could keep walking forever if we wanted to.
Then is it infinite?
No, it will just generate random land configurations ahead of us as we walk. Does that make sense?
I think so. Are there other burrows?
Yes.
How many?
Billions on this tier at least, one for each denizen. It's like a house. No one can come in without an invitation. That’s just the Ape Cellar though. I don’t know how they do things on other tiers.
What’s a tier?
A bit like what sapiens called a ‘country’. The place one lives in, depending on how they want to live.
What’s this tier called?
Everyone knows it as the Ape Cellar.
Why?
Because we live a bit like sapiens used to, down here. We use speech to communicate and choose to feel hunger and thirst and all the other desires they enjoyed fulfilling.
Can we get rid of those things?
If we wanted to, but usually we don’t. Here, try this. It’s called a banana.
Mmm, it’s all right. Do they eat and drink on other tiers?
I’m not sure, darling. Probably not. They’re strange folk up there.
How do you know?
I’ve heard stories.
Can we visit them?
One day if you like. First we have to make sure you’re secure and sound here. Outside our burrow there are some strange folk. I’ll keep you safe, but you always have to do as I say. Understand?
Mm.
Do you understand?
How do we get to the other tiers?
We’ll learn about that later.
What’s an Original Migrant?
A denizen who started as a sapien, then migrated inside Arcadia.
Am I an Original Migrant?
No, you were made by Arcadia.
How?
It’s complicated. Let’s do that one tomorrow.
Were you a sapien?
I suppose so.
What was it like?
I really don’t remember.
Why?
Only a few days ago you started as a jumble of numbers. Would you really want to remember that?
Yes.
And on and on in that fashion, question after question until the infant learned to interact with the burrow interface and got her information that way.
“Did you know,” the infant would say, “that they don’t speak up in Lemuria? They just think.”
“Fascinating,” Argie would reply, and change the subject.
For the first few weeks the two of them slept on the beach, but soon the infant requested to edit out sleep altogether. Her mother reluctantly agreed, but did not do the same to herself. Sleep was pleasant. Dreams could be educational, occasionally.
One morning the burrow’s alarm sounded and Argie jumped from the sand. Fatal topology error, the alarm screeched over and over. The infant wasn’t in sight. Argie turned the gravity restrictions off and flew over the island, looking for the girl. The problem was obvious the moment she passed over the mountain. On the far side of the island the ocean had disappeared. In its place stood a twenty-six dimensional hypershape of some kind, twisting and warping, already towering over the island and growing at an obscene speed. The sky was flickering in distorted patches. The burrow was bending back on itself, coming undone. The infant stood below on the beach, marvelling at the thing. Argie wasted no time and eradicated the shape immediately. She flew down to join the infant on the sand.
“Are you completely mad?” Argie yelled. “What did I tell you about exotic dimensions?”
“I knew what I was doing.”
“Another few minutes and that thing would’ve destroyed the entire burrow. The Ape Cellar can’t handle hypershapes, I’ve said this a thousand times. A thousand damn times. What in hell’s name were you thinking?”
The infant scowled. “I knew what I was doing.”
“Anything but.” An interface window was lying open on the beach, 20th century history. “You’ve been reading about Kaluza?”
“He was a sapien mathematician who-”
“I know damn well who Kaluza was,” Argie shouted. She sat down, exasperated. The infant joined her on the sand and stared blankly out into the distance. The ocean was slowly returning where the hypershape had been. To think, just a few more dimensions and the thing would’ve started infringing on other burrows, tearing them apart. Who knows what could’ve come after that.
Creatures flew overhead, a sign of the burrow resetting. Turquoise dragons barked. A randomly generated spacecraft lowered itself down onto the water in the distance and disappeared beneath the waves.
“Sorry,” the infant whispered.
Argie was quiet for a while, then put her arm out. The infant leant into her mother and the two of them watched the ocean. “It’s all right,” Argie said. “All I ask is that if, when, you feel like experimenting again, just make sure I’m there, okay?” The infant nodded. “You’re not a prisoner here, but the world is complicated and strange, and you can’t just go bounding into stuff like hypershapes without knowing what you’re doing.” The infant nodded again. The burrow had returned to its normal state, the ocean a little purpler than before perhaps, but all else the same. “You like Kaluza?”
“I do,” the infant said.
“Well, we still haven’t named you. Kaluza. Rolls off the tongue. How about it?”
“Kaluza…” the infant said.
“Kaluza it is, I think.”
The infant hugged her mother tighter. “Kaluza,” she said again.
The Navigator watched the smoke from his cigarette curling up in a twist. With a flick of his hand it took the form of a DNA double helix. “It’s endearing that you choose to stay so sapien,” he said.
“There is something essential in it that the rest of you have forgotten,” Argie replied.
He snorted. “War and jealousy. Yes, fine things to look back on. Oh, if only we could hang onto them forever.”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
He turned to her and his body took on a luminous quality. His tags were muddled, displaying infinite size and presence. The room dimmed, or perhaps he only outshone it. “I am over fifty thousand years old, in sapien time. I have lived as a galaxy. I have died as a god. I have witnessed the world expressed in a single, perfect equation that codified space, time, love, and infinity. I could have killed death if I wanted. There’s very little I don’t understand.”
Argie tried to ignore the spectacle. She quoted some forgotten Ape Cellar philosopher. “'That which is abandoned in the name of efficiency was often an essential part after all.'”
The Navigator returned to his normal stature and said, “Like having children, no? I cloned myself thousands of times up in Indigo, to see what would happen. It’s a traditional game there.”
“It’s not the same.”
“How?”
“Children are wayward. They demand sacrifice. We don’t sacrifice anything anymore.” She caught herself. “I mean…sorry, I know you’ve sacrificed a grea
t deal.”
“Enough, certainly,” The Navigator mumbled. “As have you.” He lit a new cigarette. Another long silence held out.
“Do you miss it?” Argie said quietly.
“What?”
“Indigo. What about your friends?”
The dream fountain bubbled and gurgled to itself. Shapes appeared, human figures, five, ten, a hundred, a thousand of them, arms outstretched. Then they faded back to neon mist. “Yes,” The Navigator said. “I miss it.”
The sofas vanished. The geometry of the room altered and a door appeared suddenly in the wall. The Navigator wore a long, purple robe now and clutched a cane. “No sense hashing this out anymore,” he grumbled. “Shall we?” The door opened by itself.
Argie hesitated. “You want to go now?”
“Now.”
“How do we…do it?”
The house faded translucent and beyond the house was the great mountain in the distance, the tier portal at its tip. The Navigator pointed with his cane. “We climb to the top of that. Then, if we have to, we climb to the top of Arcadia.”
5.
8/11/2021
P,
What is known so far:
Around a month ago you dressed, took your tablet, purse, phone, as well as several changes of clothes, left the house around 6:35AM and drove to Croftbury Train Station. There you left the car without a ticket in the long-term car park and caught a train to London Waterloo. You then caught the tube to Victoria Station and boarded one of the cross-country trains. There is no further security footage the police have been able to uncover yet.
Your current account is drained, along with your savings. If they’re telling the truth, none of your friends had any idea where you were going or that you planned to disappear. The translator insists that your mother also had no clue as to your intentions, and that you'd been talking to her only a few days before about how well life was going in England.
The head of the mathematics department at the university said you hadn’t been acting unusually and that your students have reported no strange behaviour. Your research was going well.
I turned up at the university and with a bit of persuasion they let me into your office. It was messier than a crack den. No surprise there. The secretary came in and tried to apologise on your behalf. She moaned quite a bit about how you sometimes go a full day without eating and just live on coffee, and no wonder she’s so thin, etc. I told her about the situation and she shut up and left me alone after that.
I liked being in there. It felt like your sanctum. I was looking through your brain and this time you couldn’t change the subject. Usual academic rubbish as it turned out: books I know you’ve never read and never intend to, postcards from friends, journals and papers stacked on the desk for review that had already been released a few years back. And then some not-so-academic stuff: a tin foil wrap of hash in the drawer and a photo of me sleeping that I didn’t know you’d taken.
One of your professor friends put his head around the door – Martin I think his name was. He already knew all about your disappearance. He didn’t seem interested in showing any pity, which was nice. Like all your dull math friends, he started talking about the thing like it was a numbers problem. ‘Extremely low probability she experienced a psychotic episode. She always presented as very stable.’ Maybe you were just sick of me, I suggested. “No,” he said. “She talks about you all the time.”
Do you secretly have a heart after all, Polly?
I asked about your research. He tried to fob me off with the ‘it’s complicated’ move all your dickhead friends do when they come to our place. I kept pushing and he gave in. Something to do with data compression, I think? Some new algorithm for storing files at only a tenth the space of regular compression. Struck me as odd considering you used to work exclusively on universe stuff and never had any interest in computers. God, only a few weeks ago I had to show you how to change the mouse speed settings.
Another little niggle you never mentioned: this was partly a government project and you’d signed the Official Secrets Act, the guy said. You do know you’re allowed to tell people that you’re not allowed to tell people stuff? Especially your husband. It would’ve been exciting. My wife the spy. They probably investigated me before letting you sign it. Thanks for the heads up.
After that I had a proper rummage around. Most of the papers on your desk were about data encryption and new computation algorithms. Hidden under a folder was a copy of The Little Prince with the bookmark I gave you last month. It's fun to think of everyone tiptoeing past your office door, trying not to disturb the Great Bulgarian Genius, while you sit inside reading a kid’s book and popping out at lunchtime to get higher than a giraffe's vagina.
There was a letter from your mother. I could read enough Bulgarian to get the gist. Nothing weird in there, just well-wishing and the usual charming doubts about the Englishman and why ever did you marry him, etc. I hope she gets ALS.
I span around in your chair for a while and did some thinking. Now the obvious spousal thing to do is jump to the conclusion that you were either kidnapped or coerced. Bear with me though. Kidnapping is unlikely since they would’ve had to break into our place and presumably force you out at knife/gunpoint and I think I would’ve noticed that. Coercion though, not so silly. A psychologically normal (as much as a Bulgarian can be) woman nearing the peak of her academic career leaves the house one morning, drains her bank account, and catches a train up the country. She sends no word to her husband, family, or friends about where she’s going. She even sets her students assignments the day before, obviously with the intention of marking them at some point.
I ate some of your Oreos and decided something was being held over your head. Blackmail possibly. Threat of violence more likely.
And then an unusual thing happened. There was a knock at the door and a man in a decent fitted suit came in and introduced himself as Jonathan Hayden. He didn’t look very academic. He obviously had social skills for one thing.
“How are you getting on?” he said and smiled like he'd known me a long time. He was very well-spoken, Oxford-born I expect, or somewhere around there.
“Fine,” I said. “And you are?”
He said he’d been supervising your research for the last year or so, but that he wasn’t an academic. I pushed it a bit. Civil servant was the most specific he’d be before changing the subject. He said he’d been meaning to come and see me at home for a few days now, to check how I was doing. I said that was odd since I didn’t remember us ever being friends. He parried all the hostility like some expert martial artist and I had to forcefully step in to stop myself liking him accidentally.
“Dr. Hare is an invaluable asset to this university, and to the research community in general. She's a gem,” he said.
I told him you were also all right on the ukulele. I lied though. You’re crap.
He asked me about what I did. I said I worked in IT just to see what would happen. He said that was nice and that he’d read a few of my books and ignored the lie completely. Evidently we were already deep in the game.
I said I knew about the government stuff and asked him to stop messing around. He sat down and sighed like something important was coming and said, “Dr. Hare, can I trust that whatever I tell you next goes no further?”
I said I might mention it to the cat, but she was usually quite good with secrets. His face got all serious. “Your wife was involved with some extremely delicate research regarding encryption, pertaining to aspects of British security. Her disappearance is extremely worrying, not just to my organisation but the British people in general. This is exceptionally serious, Dr. Hare.”
“Well then you can tell me what she was working on can’t you, Mr. Hayden.”
He called the secretary in by her first name and asked for tea and honey. The secretary said she didn’t have any honey. He told her to go and buy some.
“I really don’t like honey in my tea,” I said.
<
br /> “I do,” Mr. Hayden said.
“Anyway,” I said.
“Not until we have our tea.”
Then the next unusual thing happened. We sat in silence for 10 minutes or so, Captain Nutjob staring out the window with a serious face and me eating your biscuits. Do you know how long 10 minutes is in awkward-time? Probably not. You never got awkward. That emotion is only available to people with at the least a minimal degree of social awareness. Or shame. Never felt that one either, did you? It was acceptable at parties for you to ridicule my friends for not knowing what an axiom was. Or the time my mum asked what you were working on and you said “numbery stuff”. Well look where your numbery stuff has gotten you now, Polly. Actually, I wish I knew.
The secretary came in with the tea. Mine had honey in it but I didn’t complain. Hayden took a sip and smiled and dismissed her. He moved his chair closer and his voice dropped to an almost monotone murmur and he said something like, “Dr. Hare, this isn’t in any way intended as a threat, but the withholding of sensitive information when questioned directly is considered an act of treason.”
“Okay,” I said. “In fairness that does sound a bit like a threat.”
And then the questions began. Had you been irritable at home recently? Had you ever talked about betraying the British government? Had you entrusted me with any sensitive information? Did you keep any data stored in a secret spot in the house? Did you take drugs? Did you still speak fondly of communism? Had there been any decrease in your libido? How did you seem when you got back from work?
I think I was honest about everything except the sex stuff which I refused to answer. If he knew I'm an archaeologist, he probably knew a lot more than that and this was just some test to check my allegiances. Or maybe he was simply doing his job, I don’t know.
The last question was if you had any religious leanings. I said you were so anti-theist that Richard Dawkins would’ve found you obnoxious. He asked the same question again using synonyms. I gave the same answer using synonyms. He made the treason threat again.
“Polly wasn’t religious in any way. Shall I write that down and sign it in blood for you?”
