Permafrost Page 5

  By means of something we put into your head. You were having an MRI scan, and . . . that’s how we do it. That’s how we reach the past, from 2080. We inject something into your head, a thing about the size of a grain of pollen, and it grows through your brain and lets me take you over, just for a short while.

  Why?

  So we can get something done. Something important.

  And what gives you this right?

  Nothing. No right at all. But it still has to be done. We’re in a mess here, Tatiana, a really bad one, but we can fix things a little by altering the past. Just a tiny amount—not enough to change your life or anyone else’s. And after we’re done, after you’ve helped us, you’ll never hear from us again. The thing in your brain, the control structure, will self-dismantle. It’ll flush itself out of you harmlessly, and you just get on with being you, as if nothing had ever happened.

  She echoed back my words with a cold mockery.

  As if nothing had ever happened. Do you really think it’ll be that simple?

  I do.

  Then at least you’ve settled one question for me. I know which one of us is insane.

  * * *

  After that, she let me get on with eating in peace and quiet.

  Perhaps she’d decided to see if I went away if she stopped interrogating me. That said, it was very definitely me in charge of her as I worked my way through the hospital meal. But exactly how strange would that have felt, anyway? I thought of the times I’d spooned my way through government rations, my mind on the homework I was supposed to be marking, barely conscious of my hand as it went from plate to mouth. There were days when all of us might as well be under the control of disembodied spirits from the future, for all the difference it makes.

  Yet this was a screwup, and no mistake. She wasn’t supposed to be able to talk to me or hear me in return. It was nothing Cho had ever mentioned as a normal aspect of the control structure functionality. But then again, all of this was experimental. No one had ever linked together two control structures through time, via Luba Pairs.

  The meal wasn’t bad. I could already smell and taste quite well by then, and it was surprising how full-up I felt by the time I’d emptied the plate. The food wasn’t going into my stomach, but the signals from Tatiana’s digestive system were still finding their way to my brain, producing the effect of a steadily diminishing appetite.

  “We’re not bad people,” I’d mouthed to myself.

  Then what are you?

  She was back again.

  Please . . . for my sake . . . for your sake . . . just pretend none of this is happening.

  I wish I could. Trouble is, I keep getting these flashes of double vision. I’m here, and then I’m somewhere else. Not this room. Somewhere without any windows, all metal. I’m in a chair, leaning back, and there are people crowding around. Lots of machines and lights. What is it, some secret government laboratory? Are you testing some way of turning ordinary people into zombies? Putting things in our heads, while we’re in hospital? Is that it?

  Yes. That’s exactly it. Mind-control drones. The government’s in on it. So’s the hospital. And they’re reading your mind right now. You’re about the tenth subject we’ve burned through so far. I’d really like to protect you, too, but if you keep talking aloud in your own head, keep asking questions, they’re going to pick up on it, and . . .

  And nothing. You just want me to shut up, is all it is. Still, I think you told me the truth about Kogalym. I had an aunt there once. And you’re right, it really is a shit-hole. No one would ever have made that part up.

  * * *

  The one good thing was that sooner or later even Tatiana Dinova had to sleep.

  I’d worked out a system with the knife by then, one we’d rehearsed upstream as best we could. If I pushed the admissions bracelet as far up my arm as it would go, I could wedge the handle of the knife under it, with the sharp end digging into the crook of my elbow. It wasn’t comfortable, and it relied on my keeping an angle in my arm, but it kept the knife from showing when I let down my sleeve.

  The hospital wasn’t a restful place at night. There were fewer admissions, the televisions were turned down, and the staff kept their conversations low, but it made very little difference. Electronic monitors still went off at all hours, beeping tones cutting through walls and floors, patients coughed and complained, telephones rang and elevators whined and clattered. Then there were shift changes and people being paged, and fire and security alarms going off in distant wings.

  By five the blinds were doing a bad job of masking the arrival of daylight. The doctors were starting their morning rounds. Curtains were being swished back along curving rails. Voices were going up again, the coughs and complaints more full-throated. I reached under the pillow and extracted the knife, then slid it back up my sleeve.

  A few minutes before six, the young doctor came into the room, along with an orderly and a vacant wheelchair.

  “Good morning, Tatiana. How are we today?”

  Oh, I’m fine. I can’t control my body, and there’s another voice in my skull, but other than that . . .

  “I’m all right, thank you,” I said, speaking aloud for the first time since becoming time-embedded, and forcing out the words as if both our lives depended on it. “Much better than yesterday.”

  He looked at me for a few seconds. I wondered what was going through his head, the details that were nagging at him. Was my accent and diction consistent with Tatiana Dinova? Was she the sort to say “thank you” at all?

  But he smiled and nodded.

  “You sound much better. And that confusion you mentioned yesterday—that’s all cleared up?”

  “No—I’m all right. Whatever that was, it passed.”

  I wish you would pass. I was hoping you were a bad dream from last night. But you’re sticking around, aren’t you?

  The knife was tight against my armpit.

  Just for a little while—yes. I said we’ve got work to do. But I’m sure we’ll get used to each other in time.

  * * *

  On the morning of my first full day at Permafrost, Margaret, Antti and I put on clean-room outfits and then went through a positive-pressure airlock into the Vaymyr’s laboratory.

  The room was about the size of a large double garage and surgically clean. Positioned on a central bench, surrounded by ancillary equipment and computers, was an upright silver cylinder, about the size of an oil drum. It was festooned with cables and monitors, with telescopelike devices peering into it at various angles.

  Margaret went to the device and brought one of the computers to life. Fans whirred. Data and graphs appeared on an array of monitor screens.

  “This is how we first created and manipulated a Luba Pair,” she said, sounding like a proud parent. “In essence, it’s really just a cavity surrounded by a very powerful superconducting magnet. You recall your mother’s work on quantum memory states in superconducting systems?”

  I nodded in my mask and clean-room hood. “That was when she was beginning to get bounced by the respectable journals.”

  “That must have been hard for her,” Antti said, just her eyes meeting mine over her mask.

  We had shared a house since Father died, and my mother had come to depend on me as a sounding board for her wilder ideas, almost as if I were an extension of herself, only a more skeptical, questioning one. That had been flattering to me, when I was in my middle and late teens. To have this celebrated intellect, this world-famous mathematician, treating me as an equal, someone capable of seeing her ideas through fresh eyes, made me feel very special.

  But by the time I was approaching my twenties, I knew I had to strike out on my own. I wasn’t going to run off and do anything crazy like join a radical arts collective. I still wanted to be a mathematician, but in my own fresh corner of it, a long way away from my mother’s crazy work on time-loops and grey paradox.

  She took it as a betrayal. Not to my face, not to begin with, but it was
always there, simmering. That resentment grew and grew over one long, hot summer, until we had a major bust-up.

  Things had never been the same after that.

  “Hard on both of us,” I said, answering Antti. “All a long time ago, in any case. You’re too young to remember what the world was like back then, but it all feels like a different life. I remember the work, though. That’s as fresh in my mind as it ever was. All very speculative, even by Mother’s standards. But according to her theory, if you were going to attempt to build a time machine, this is where you’d start: with a superconducting system.”

  “Is the experiment running?” Antti asked.

  “Yes, we’re in the operating regime,” Margaret said. “Luba Pairs are being bred inside the assembly. We’re sending electrons back from the future, exactly a minute upstream. They’re travelling back sixty seconds, appearing in the magnet, holding coherence for a short while, then becoming noise-limited, which means we can’t track the correlation anymore.”

  It was warm enough in the laboratory, but still I shivered. “This is really happening?”

  Antti beckoned me to one of the screens, where a wriggling yellow line was describing a kind of seismic trace. “This is the correlation, summed across multiple Luba Pairs, so that we keep one step ahead of the decoherence effect. It’s a signal from the future, so to speak. Our future, one minute ahead of now. It’s very noisy in the raw state. We run it through a battery of signal optimisation algorithms drawn from your mother’s work, but we’re hitting real limits in our understanding of those algorithms, how to make them fit together. The Brothers . . .” She paused, glancing at Margaret. “It’s believed we can do much better, with your guidance.”

  The yellow line jagged upward suddenly, then collapsed back down to its normal noise level. As the spike inched its way to the left, a pair of brackets dropped down on either side of it, accompanied by a set of statistical parameters.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “Could be anything,” Antti said, with only vague interest. “A noise spike in the upstream electronics, a shift in the ice under the Vaymyr, someone dropping a crate on the upper deck. We’ll find out in about forty-five seconds, if it’s anything at all.”

  I grinned at their insouciance.

  “You’re both taking this way too casually.”

  “We’ve had lot of time to get used to what we’re doing,” Margaret said with an apologetic smile, as if they were being bad hosts by not making more of their experiment. “Even time travel becomes normal when it’s your day job.”

  “You constructed this apparatus?” I asked, nodding at the upright cylinder.

  “Put it together from parts, more accurately,” Margaret said. “But it certainly didn’t exist in any significant form until we assembled it here. You’re wondering how far back we could have sent those electrons?”

  “I’m thinking that a minute doesn’t really buy you anything. Time to cheat the stock markets, if there were still stock markets. But not to solve Director Cho’s food crisis.”

  “If we eliminated every source of noise, we could go back fourteen months, the day we first put the apparatus together. Fourteen months would help us in small ways—we could transmit knowledge that would help speed up the development of the experiment, warning us from blind alleys and dead ends. In practise, though, we’re nowhere near that. Twelve hours is our effective limit with this setup.”

  “And on the Admiral Nerva?”

  “A little further back,” Antti said.

  I approached the experiment, wanting to get a closer look at the instrumentation. Along the way my clean-room garment brushed against a pen and clipboard lying on one of adjoining benches. The pen clanged to the floor.

  I stared down at it, shaking my head slowly.

  “That didn’t just happen.”

  “There’s your noise spike,” Antti said, stooping down and picking up the pen, then setting it back on the bench as if this was a completely mundane happening. “Congratulations, Valentina. You just made a small alteration to the past.”

  I looked at Margaret’s apparatus, thinking hard, and trying to show that I wasn’t totally disorientated by what had just transpired.

  “What if another noise spike showed in that trace, and we switched off the experiment immediately?”

  “Then you’d be grandfathering,” Margaret said. “Sending a causal change upstream, which in turn affects the downstream reality. A true paradox, albeit a relatively mild one. But I can easily demonstrate a low-level paradox without turning off the experiment.” Her eyes flicked to a wall clock, a digital counter in a black surround. “In sixty seconds I’ll drop this pen again.”

  I returned my gaze to the noise trace. Immediately a similar spike appeared, and after a few seconds the brackets and statistical parameters appeared.

  “All right . . .” I said, eyeing Margaret carefully.

  Margaret walked softly to another bench and picked up a second pen. Now she held them both, one in each hand. “You see one spike at the moment, agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  “That’s because our downstream reality reflects an upstream case in which I dropped only one pen, as I promised. That’s a closed loop, paradox-free. But I’m going to violate it, by dropping two pens.”

  The single spike was drifting to the left, now about thirty seconds downstream of our present position. I thought about what would happen when we caught up with the future moment in which Margaret had dropped only one pen. Now there would be two acoustic events, and the Luba Pairs would respond accordingly. The digital trace would have to show two noise spikes, instead of the one that was still visible.

  But it hadn’t.

  Something will happen, I thought, to preserve the present condition. Margaret would drop one pen and it would hit the floor just like the one I’d dropped. But the second would hit her shoe, muffling its impact, so that there was still only one acoustic event. Even that would be weird. But there’d be no paradox, no grandfathering.

  The digital clock showed sixty seconds since Margaret picked up the first pen. She dropped it, waited a second, then dropped the second. Both pens had hit the floor, as loudly as the first time.

  “We’ve modified the upstream condition,” Margaret said. “The past will now adjust itself to reflect this. But it doesn’t happen instantly. We call it causal-lag, a sort of inertia or stickiness.”

  “It’s an outgrowth of your mother’s work,” Antti put in.

  “We’re now in a superposition of histories,” Margaret continued. “There’s the fading state, in which there was just one noise event, and the rising state, in which there are two events. Gradually the rising state will supplant the fading one. Our minds are easily capable of perceiving both histories, until the new condition becomes dominant.”

  My attention returned to the noise readout. The original spike was still there, but a fresh prominence was rising out of the noise to its right, like a second peak thrusting up from a mountain range. This new spike quickly became as significant as the first, bracketed and annotated. These were noise events that had already been recorded on the system ninety seconds ago.

  I blinked.

  There was a fuzziness to my thoughts, like the first pleasant stages of drunkenness.

  I remembered that there had been one spike. I also remembered that there had always been two. My brain was holding two histories within itself, and it was no different, no stranger, no more paradoxical, than crossing my eyes and seeing two slightly offset versions of the same scene.

  Antti and Margaret regarded me with a quiet, knowing watchfulness. They’d been through this already, numerous times. It wasn’t unusual to them at all.

  I thought of the causal-lag Margaret had mentioned.

  I remembered my mother at her whiteboard, a summer or two before that bust-up, rubbing out and rehashing one idea after the next. Trying to break through to a new model of time, a fresh way of thinking about the relationships be
tween past and future events, the illusion of the ever-moving now. Time wasn’t a river, she said, and it wasn’t a circuit-diagram. Nor was it a tree with multiple branches. It was a block structure, more like a crystal lattice than any of those old dead-end paradigms. It was a lattice that spanned the entire existence of the universe, from beginning to end. There were no alternate histories, no branches where the Roman empire never fell or the dinosaurs were never wiped out. Just that single lattice, a single fixed structure. We were in it, embedded in its matrix.

  But the lattice wasn’t static. There were flaws in it—imperfections, impurities and stress points. What the lattice was trying to do was to settle down into a minimum-energy configuration. But in doing so, those stresses could give way suddenly or propagate a long way from their initial positions. That was the lattice adjusting itself, history settling into a new, temporary configuration. The alterations happened naturally, time murmuring to itself like an old house, but they could also be generated by artificial interventions, such as Margaret’s paradox with the two pens. Then, a pattern of changes would ripple through the lattice, the future changing the past, the past changing the future, the future returning the favour, like a series of dying echoes, until a new configuration held sway. But that adjustment process wasn’t instantaneous from the point of view of an embedded observer. It was more like the thunderclap arriving after a lighting flash, a delayed portent of the same event. Causal-lag.

  But what paradox, exactly?

  There’d always been two spikes. Margaret had said she would drop two pens, and the system had detected her future intention, and she had followed through one minute later.

  No. I almost had to frown to hold onto it. There’d been that other condition. One spike, not two. One pen drop. It was slipping away, though—hard to recollect, hard to think about. Like a dream fragment that shrivelled to nothing in the light of day.

  Gape-mouthed, I stared at my new colleagues.

  “What just happened?”

  “What do you remember?” Margaret asked.

  “Almost nothing. Just that . . .” But I could only shake my own head. “It’s gone. Whatever it was, it’s gone.”