by Exurb1a
“Very kind of you,” Argie said. “And what's that black mass?”
“We're not sure.”
The sphere was growing, little by little. Argie thought of a dying lung. “This is another test.”
“No more tests.”
They continued to watch in silence, stupefied. The mass had obviously absorbed areas of Lemuria already, and was now spreading through the more populous zones. “It manifested several cycles ago,” Lambert said flatly. “It appears to be originating from Indigo.”
“It's an attack,” Argie said.
The Navigator shook his head. “Indigos aren't violent, and even if they were, this isn't how they'd do it.”
“What then?”
“We have no idea,” Lambert said. “Its speed is increasing though, exponentially. It took a whole cycle just to cover a few private burrows. Now it's absorbing ten times that much each half cycle. We don't expect the process to slow down.”
“Wait, private burrows?” Argie said.
“That's right, and the denizens inside along with them. It's absorbing all matter without hesitation. We've tried blockades, barriers, negotiation – nothing works.”
“Does it communicate?”
“No, dead silence.”
“How did it gain the privileges to be doing this?”
“Exactly what I wondered. Again, we don't know. By our estimates it's swallowed about a quarter of Indigo already, and a tenth of Lemuria. It'll protrude into the Ape Cellar next.”
“Jesus Christ,” Argie whispered.
Why didn't we know about this? Argie said directly to The Navigator's selfsense.
Time passes much faster up here, remember. Ten times the speed at least in Lemuria, I think, he replied.
They watched the mass a while in awe. It absorbed all matter indiscriminately. Lambert expanded the map. Denizens could clearly be observed running from the object, then being lost in its seamless marble embrace. “This is a simplified representation, of course,” Lambert said. “Denizens here are far too advanced to present as sapiens, and the tier itself is a hypershape, but this should make it easier for your small mind to grasp.”
“What's inside?” Argie said.
“No idea. We've tried sending probes in, but they don't respond once they cross the threshold. We've also tried erecting walls, though this has proven pointless also.”
Argie felt the thrill of catastrophe suddenly, though it was not a pleasant sensation. To be chased or hunted or threatened; these were not good conditions but they were still preferable to the flat unemotion of the last few hundred cycles. With her gaze on the black mass in the distance she was able, for the briefest moment, to push her daughter's disappearance from her mind. And then, like a drunk crawling automatically home and to bed, the knowledge of it returned.
Cycles ago Argie woke on the beach in her burrow to a violet sun. The sky was odd too, turned a shade of green. She rose, intending to chastise her daughter for altering the world so drastically. Kaluza was standing near the water opposite a figure Argie recognised at once. She approached slowly. They weren't talking; Kaluza was just staring and staring at the newcomer.
Without turning Kaluza said, “Isn't he strange?” Argie could not disagree. He was unusual looking, but perhaps it was his clothes: sapien, 21st century, 'smart-casual' – as they called it back then. “I found him in the archives. His story is funny.”
“His story is anything but funny…” Argie murmured. “What are you doing with him anyway?”
“I just wanted to look. I like looking.”
“Mmm….”
“You like him too.”
“What?”
“I saw you reading his letters. That's why I looked him up.”
It would be pointless to lie, the infant was obviously observant. But since that damn Indigo's visit, the child had grown even more wayward, thinking herself remarkable. She was remarkable of course, but any child who actually believed this of themselves would end up becoming a terror.
“Why were you reading his letters?” Kaluza said.
Argie let her gaze settle on the projection of Benjamin Hare. His face wore the beginnings of a satisfied smile. He was not short, not tall – not ugly, not handsome, but his eyes were kind. When had this picture been taken, she wondered. In his good years or his bad years?
It was something of a tradition in the Ape Cellar to read his letters, or it had been for the last few thousand cycles. Every now and then they held a parade for him in the city centres, lamenting his brilliance. Argie had avoided this kind of rubbish for a long while, but someone or other recommended she give his letters a read and she was taken in at once. She did not simply absorb them into her selfsense as was the tradition, even in the Ape Cellar, but constructed a comfortable chair and reading lamp and sat for many hours trawling through his private life. She knew how his story ended. Everyone in the Cellar did. At many points during her reading she wanted to scream at him to stop, to tell him to back off, resume living a quiet life, however irrational that might be. But Hare was conveyed by fate's gravity. He was already dead. He had been already dead, in fact, for over ten thousand years going by his species' time. The world he knew was surely gone, reduced to rubble, or less than rubble. His wife too, less than ashes.
Had he known that his letters would not only be read across such a gap of history, but regarded with this level of admiration, Argie wondered if he would have written differently – or even written at all. She felt she knew Hare quite well from his writings, knew him well enough at least to be sure he would consider this a disastrous invasion of his privacy. Still though, he was not here to complain.
How many aspects people had, sapiens and denizens. Here was Hare, standing on her beach, a noncon facsimile, an arrangement of nodes. So too had the real Hare been; a collection of quarks, of strings, of blood and skin and sperm. She could spend a lifetime researching him, every email, every footprint he left on the global computation network of his age, and still never really know what it was to be Benjamin Hare.
“If we learn about them,” Argie said finally, “then we'll learn more about ourselves.”
Kaluza scoffed. “They were silly.”
“Yes, extremely. But the fact that they survived at all is a wonder.”
“You admire him as a lover would.”
Argie went to scold the child. God, the little girl had no respect for anything. But in this case she was not so far from the truth. There was a gentleness to Hare. She had convinced herself she had devoured his writing on account of its honesty, but rather it was because of the writer himself. She fantasised often about meeting him, this sad and dead sapien. She fantasised about smelling his skin, about biting his neck, taking his clothes off as they did back then, frenetically making love. She could easily have recreated him in her burrow, a noncon version at least, and satisfied her curiosity to one degree or another. But the idea was tasteless, even by Ape Cellar standards, and so she had abandoned the notion quickly.
Hare still stared straight ahead, neither sad nor happy. “He was stupid,” Kaluza said idly, more to herself. “All that running about for nothing.”
Sure, Argie thought, and what's all our running about for, exactly? The dance is more elaborate for us, but still just a pointless when viewed in the disastrous light of the sun.
They spent the day working on small hypershapes, the girl leaning on her mother's shoulder and it was a fine time and the sky was still. The light dimmed as Argie had instructed it to do in the evenings, and she grew tired and slept. In the morning she woke and Kaluza was not in sight. She knew, without needing to check, that the child was gone.
13.
19/12/2021
P,
For someone so clever you do occasionally make silly IT decisions; leaving what was obviously a password on your office noticeboard being one of them. What it was a password to, however, was something of a mystery. After trying your email accounts, bank account, and anything else I could think
of, it finally occurred to me you back up work on the cloud. Again, tried a few approaches, nothing worked, until I used it on your university email account. That did the trick. There was nothing in the folder except for an email exchange copied into a word processor document. And I knew right away I'd stumbled on what in the journalistic community they call “some proper shit”.
[email protected]
“We kindly request:
Five en-suite bathrooms with double beds for three nights of stay.
An ample supply of bottled water, still and sparkling.
Trouser press facilities.
A personal guide at our disposal, day and night.
A dedicated coffee machine.”
To which you replied from your personal email address:
“Sounds good. See you at 5.”
Since when did you press your trousers? Safe to say I was curious.
There were more bizarre exchanges, the same kind of admin requests. The organisation in question was a mystery, granted, but I was more curious why people were running all of this past you. Evidently you're higher up in maths circles than I give you credit. Still, my curiosity wasn't quite done yet. I phoned your university and asked for an M. Lambert, as per the name on the email. None existed; no Lamberts at all. I found several online, but only two in the UK, and only one down south. Marie Penelope Lambert, Professor of Physics at Evegreen University. Since the university wasn't Bulgarian, they put me through to her with only minimal shouting. The conversation went like this:
“Hello, is that Dr. Lambert?”
“Yes,” said the voice of someone simultaneously inhaling their lunch.
“I'm phoning regarding my wife, Polly Hare. She-”
“Thanks then, goodbye.”
Click.
I phoned the switchboard again. When they put me through the phone rang and rang. I hung up and phoned again. Lambert picked up this time.
“Now look,” she said.
“Wait,” I said and tried not to sound rude. “It's important. It's really important.”
“Terrible line,” she said and made some shhhhh noises and put the phone down again. I had nothing to do that day, because I do nothing every day, so I got in the car and drove the four hours to Evegreen University. The Applied Physics section was quite easy to find as there was a huge sign saying “Applied Physics.” Dr. Lambert was quite easy to find as there was a huge sign on a door saying, “Dr. Lambert”.
“Dr. Lambert?” I said, knocking politely.
“Yes?”
“It's about my wife, Polly.”
“Oh what the hell.”
I barged in. Lambert looked pretty dishevelled, long and wild blonde hair, in her fifties or thereabouts. The room was crammed with papers and books and obscure equipment. She stared at me with a mix of disdain and defeat.
“Hi,” I said.
“How did you even find me?”
“Well you see there was a huge sign on the door that said-”
“I really must ask them to take that down, nothing but trouble.”
“Look, I can't help notice you were a bit reluctant to talk with me.”
“I'm very busy.” She surveyed me from behind thick red spectacles.
“I've gotten quite good at pestering people recently,” I said. “Down to a fine art. I'll keep pestering you until we talk properly. Nothing personal, you understand, but I'm in something of a bind.”
Her eyes were tired but quick and they flashed across my face. She lowered her voice. “Are you alone?”
“Far as I know.”
She nodded to the door, got up. I followed. We walked silently down empty corridors, through an atrium, then out into the university grounds. Students were laying about on the grass, accruing debt and trying to fuck each other. Lambert glanced around. “I have exactly six and a half minutes until I need to leave for a seminar. Tell me what you want to know and I'll see what I can do.”
“Why were you asking my wife for a trouser press?”
“I like to keep my clothes neat,” she said. I glanced at her trousers. In fairness they did look quite nice. “And I wasn't asking your wife for a trouser press.”
“Then who?”
“That is something I won't be answering.”
“Why?”
“Because it will lead to a cut in my research funding. I'll gladly tell you anything in the public record, however, to save you the arduous task of ten seconds on Google.”
“All right.” Wind blew pamphlets about in the courtyard. We crossed it and turned into a narrow passage. “Can you tell me what you're working on?”
I caught the slightest hint of excitement on her face. “Computing,” she said.
“What kind?”
She shot me a sardonic glance. “Fast computing.”
“Is that why Polly contacted you?”
“I was a colleague of your wife's just after she arrived in England. We worked on a few mathematical challenges together, folding graphene, quantum algorithms, that sort of thing.”
“What kind of computing do you work on now?” I said, having learned that the same question can be asked multiple times with different answers.
“Topological.”
“Like, different shapes?”
“No.”
“Dr. Lambert-” I started angrily.
“Mr. Hare-”
“Dr. Hare, actually.”
We met eyes. “Oh? I do apologise.” What spineless twunts all these pointy-heads are, changing their tune the moment they hear you've stepped foot inside a university before. “Field?”
“Archaeology.”
“Speciality?”
“Thrace.”
She made a mmhmm noise and seemed to be thinking something over. We came to a stream and paused on its bank. In the distance a housing estate was being built on what once must have been a gorgeous meadow. Lambert spoke again, slowly this time and with no discernible trace of contempt. “Dr. Hare, you must be no stranger to the idea of radical shifts in human history.”
“I'd be a crap archaeologist if I was.”
She took off her spectacles and rubbed her eyes. “I talk often with one of the university's own archaeologists, Dr. Phillips. There is a widely held sentiment at present that our era will be remembered for a sudden explosion in computing and communication. Let me assure you that this is misguided. Electricity is one transformative technology, to be sure. Another is on its way, quite apart from anything we've dealt with before. When it arrives it will shepherd in an age of such rapid change that I do not think there will be a single academic field unaffected by it.”
“That's lovely to hear, but some specifics would be really appreciated.”
“You won't be getting them.”
We stood in silence a while and watched the stream and the tractors beyond it lugging dirt about, laying foundations, obliterating the field. “Was Polly involved in whatever this is?”
“Yes.”
“Did it have something to do with her theories of logic?”
She looked startled a moment. I guess I wasn't supposed to know about that. Then: “Yes.”
“Is she in danger right now?”
Very, very quietly: “Yes.”
“If you tell me where she is, I swear I'll try my hardest not to get you in any trouble.”
“I'm afraid that's information Polly wouldn't trust anyone with except Polly.”
“You don't have any idea at all?”
She checked her watch. I didn't need to see my own to know she was already ludicrously late for her seminar. “Dr. Hare, as a final favour I will give you some advice. You can take it or leave it. I strongly suggest that you take it. Accept that your wife is gone and do not go looking for her. Even in the event that she is still alive, you will not like what you find. I can promise you that with absolute and total assurance.”
“Are you married, Dr. Lambert?”
“I am.”
“And if your husband wen
t missing, wouldn't you go after him, regardless of all advice to the contrary?”
“I would.”
“Then how can you expect me to do as you say?”
“I can't and I don't. But since I'm the one in the know here and you're not, I can only make suggestions based on what is the case.”
“None of which you're willing to tell me.”
“Correct.”
The stream gurgled. The tractors ambled. Lambert adjusted her perfectly ironed trousers and we walked in silence back to her office. “I really can't do this without you,” I said, trying for a pull on her heartstrings.
“Goodbye Dr. Hare.”
I read one of your papers a few days ago on quantum superposition; a particle existing in multiple states until it's collapsed by observation. Standing at the threshold of that office, I was overcome with the sense that several thousand possibilities existed in front of me now. I could scream and shout. I could make severe threats. Perhaps in one of these scenarios she would tell me more, or at least enough to locate you. It was unthinkable that there existed no combination of events in which something useful was not obtainable. And yet I left.
I made down the empty corridors again and across the courtyard and the students were still accruing debt and trying to fuck each other. God, what a strange time that all was, as an undergrad. All the confusion, the recklessness, thinking life would be like that forever, then being spat out the other side in the world suddenly, and the harsh light of reality dissolving all your plans to nothing. No, not nothing. Just a state less achievable and more problematic. But everyone still accruing debt and still trying to fuck. Some things are constant.
