Permafrost Read online

  “Do you feel normal?” Antti asked.

  “No. Not normal.” I steadied myself on the bench. My cane was outside, waiting for me to collect it. “Yes. Normal. But there was something. There was something. I just can’t hold onto it now.”

  “We grandfathered,” Margaret said. “That’s all it could have been. You must have asked us to demonstrate a paradox condition, and we set one up. Swapped one future for another, and then the past swapped around to keep track.” She grinned, stooping down to collect the two fallen pens. “It’s strange, isn’t it?”

  I let out a breath. “Crap!”

  “Generally the first reaction,” Antti said, with a faint approving smile, as if I’d crossed some unspoken threshold of acceptance. “Gets easier, though. Less strange. These are only small paradoxes, after all. You just buckle up and ride the turbulence. Be glad we never go near anything big.”

  I’d regained enough composure to pay attention to what she was saying. “And if we did?”

  “Oh, we can’t—luckily,” Margaret said. “The noise swamps us long before we ever get close to doing anything really stupid.”

  * * *

  So I was inducted into the work of Permafrost, a step at a time.

  But why that name, exactly, for Director Cho’s experiment?

  Throughout my time at the station he had never explained it. Appropriate enough for a place so cold, so remote, I supposed. Yet there was also a sense of stillness, changelessness, which must have been an allusion to my mother’s block-crystal model of time.

  Time as a solid, glacial structure, groaning to itself as defects propagated through its frozen matrix, yet essentially fixed, immutable, persistent, enduring. Time as a white thing, a white landscape, under white skies and ominous squared-off clouds.

  Time as a self-reinforcing structure in which all memory of humanity had been quietly erased.

  * * *

  The doctor and the orderly wheeled me to radiology.

  You think I’m going to let you stab someone with that knife?

  That’s not the idea. And even if it was, you wouldn’t be able to do much about it, so just sit back and let me handle things.

  My arm, the one that was concealing the knife, twitched in my lap. It was a moment of spasm, no more than that, but it was nothing I’d initiated.

  You saw that, didn’t you?

  Be careful.

  Or what? I’ll drop the knife, and then what’ll happen?

  What’ll happen is that we’ll both be in trouble, Tatiana. That machine ahead of us is going to kill you if you get anywhere near it. The knife is how we’re going to take the machine out of service, before it turns your brain into hot mush.

  I’m so glad that you’re concerned.

  I am. You’re the only body I get to control. I have a duty to make sure you don’t end up dead.

  So very considerate.

  Believe it or not, I also don’t want you to get hurt in any part of this. You’re an innocent party here. I appreciate that you’re angry, but you also have to understand that we’re acting for a greater good.

  Such a great good, you can’t trust me with knowing any part of it. How’s that for trust?

  Shut up and let me handle this.

  The big red doors hissed open on their own as we came near. Beyond was a brighter area, a sort of reception and waiting room with short windowless corridors branching off to the different functions of the department. The MRI section was at the end of one of these corridors, behind another set of red doors.

  The space beyond was subdivided into two equal areas, with a glass partition between them. In the first part was the control room for the scanner, with a long desk set with terminals and keyboards. In the other was the scanner itself, with that area kept scrupulously clear of any furniture or associated clutter. The control room was low-lit and spartan, with a technician seated at one of the monitors, clicking away on a computer mouse, taking the occasional sip from a plastic coffee cup.

  “Good morning,” the young doctor said.

  The technician swivelled around and touched a deferential hand to his brow. “Good morning, Dr. Turovsky. Good morning, Igor.” Then he nodded at me, and flicked an eye back to his screens. “Miss Dinova.”

  “Is it working today?” I asked.

  “We’ll be fine; it was just a stupid software problem.” The technician was a burly man in his thirties, with a black chin-beard and tattoos showing around his sleeves and neckline. “They made us install a new operating system—you know how that usually goes.”

  It’s an MRI machine, Valentina. I’ve already been through it, and it didn’t kill me. What’s changed now?

  You have.

  Enigmatic to the end. Are you all like that, where you come from? Kogalym, wasn’t it? Or some other Siberian shithole?

  I’m telling you exactly as much as I think you need, exactly as much as I think you can handle. No more. But you’re right about the MRI machine. It didn’t kill you before, but that’s because we weren’t inside you then. The postoperative scan? That’s when we dropped something into you. That little spore I mentioned, a pollen-sized speck of replicating machinery, containing one half of a quantum particle system called a Luba Pair. Delivered straight into your neocortex. Military-medical hardware, primed to grow into a living brain and establish sensorimotor dominance. Think of it as a kind of ghostly lace overlaying your own brain, mirroring a similar structure in my own head. We need the MRI machine to get it into you, like a kind of long-range syringe, but once it’s installed and growing, the link maintains itself. That’s what’s in you now, how we’re able to communicate, how I get to drive you.

  Drive me. That’s a nice way of putting it.

  Only saying it as it is. No point sparing anyone’s feelings here, is there?

  And they used to tell me I was blunt.

  Face it, Tatiana—we’re probably not so very different. You’re caught up in me, and I’m caught up in something else. Both being used. Both dealing with something big and frightening outside our usual experience. And yes, you were right about Kogalym.

  “May I see the earlier images?” the young doctor said, leaning in to the desk.

  “I pulled them up for you,” the technician said. “Before—after. You can see that cloudiness.”

  “Looks more like an imaging issue, something off with the resolution?”

  What’s he looking at?

  The control structure, before it was fully grown and integrated. Developed enough to show up on the MRI, but not enough to be seriously affected by the magnetic fields. It’ll be different now, trust me.

  Trust you?

  You’d better. We’re both in this now.

  The technician gave an equivocal shrug. “Only one way to be sure, Doctor, if you think it’s worth the expense of a second scan.”

  “I want to be sure for Miss Dinova’s sake,” said the doctor.

  “Let’s get you out of the chair,” the orderly—Igor—said.

  But I was ahead of him, pushing myself up and out of the wheelchair. What I did next was all choreographed, but it had to look natural. Just as importantly, Tatiana had to let me handle things.

  She did.

  I made an intentional step in the direction of the desk, meaning to get a closer look at the brain scans. Halfway there, I let my left knee buckle under me. I followed through with the stumble, allowing momentum to carry me forward, while reaching for the desk’s edge, misjudging it such that I knocked the coffee cup over.

  All this happened in about one and a half seconds.

  “I’m sorry,” I muttered. “I didn’t mean . . .”

  The technician pushed back his swivel chair, lifting up his arms in despair as coffee—what had not gone into the keyboard—curtained off the side of the desk in brown rivulets. Igor, who was evidently more practically minded, dashed forward and flipped the keyboard upside down, to stop the liquid getting any farther into its workings. But the essential damage had been
done. The screens flickered then froze, none of the displays updating.

  Exactly what was that about?

  I saw a moment, went for it.

  “That’s done it!” the technician said, shaking his head in annoyance and disbelief at my incredible clumsiness.

  “I’ve had brain surgery,” I said, as Igor shoved me back into the wheelchair. “Give me a break, won’t you?”

  You’re right—you’ve just had brain surgery. You shouldn’t be taking any nonsense from anyone. All right, I’m almost impressed.

  Thank you . . .

  The technician rolled his chair to the left, where he was attempting to reboot the monitors with the second keyboard, hammering repeatedly at the same keys.

  “It’s no good—she’s really screwed it up.” He began to reach for the desk telephone. “Someone’s going to have to come in and sort this out, and you know how long that usually takes.”

  The knife slid from my sleeve.

  It was a while since I’d had a chance to press the bracelet back up my forearm. The knife landed on my knee and just for an instant there was every chance it was going to remain there, before it slid off and clattered to the floor.

  That wasn’t me. I didn’t do that.

  I know.

  “A knife!” Igor called, dragging back the wheelchair, with me in it. “She had a knife on her!”

  The technician stared at me with doubt and bewilderment. Presumably I had been the model patient on my previous visits to the radiology department, and yet now I was this destructive, knife-concealing lunatic.

  “I don’t know how that knife ended up on me,” I said.

  Igor leaned over the back of the wheelchair, pushing down on my shoulders. “It was up her sleeve. I saw it come out.”

  The technician rolled his seat the limit of the desk, where it met the wall. “Damn it, I’ve had enough of this.”

  He thumped his fist against a red call button and an alarm began to sound.

  You got a plan for this, Valentina?

  I forced myself out of the chair, using all my strength to ram it back into Igor. Igor grunted and tried to wrestle me back into the seat. Now that my elbow was free I jabbed him hard in the ribs and twisted away from him. Perhaps if he’d been a law enforcement official or guard he’d have been better equipped to stop me, but Igor was just an orderly and I think my burst of strength and action was more than he was prepared for. The young doctor had the knife now, but he was holding it up and away from me, while Igor rolled the chair in front of the hallway door, as if he meant to use it as a barricade.

  The alarm continued sounding.

  “You’re confused,” the young doctor said, extending his right hand in a calming gesture. “And frightened. But there’s no need to be. You can’t be held accountable for behaviour that’s completely out of character. This is just some postoperative confusion that we should have . . .”

  With the technician at the far end of the desk, Igor at the door, and the young doctor preoccupied with the knife, I saw my opportunity. It was on the desk, between the monitors, under a flip-up plastic lid. A fat green emergency button, the kind you could hammer down with a fist.

  I sprang for it. The technician made to block me, but he wasn’t nearly fast enough.

  A grey fog hit.

  * * *

  The shock of the transition was so sudden that I nearly jerked out of the padding, a sleeper rudely awoken.

  I drew a breath, fighting for control and composure. Cho and his technicians were present, looking on with concern.

  “Why’d you bring me out?”

  “We didn’t!” Cho said defensively. “You were noise-swamped. It happened very quickly, over the course of about twenty seconds. What was happening?”

  The memory of Tatiana’s body was still with me. I could feel the bandage around her head, the soreness in her rib cage where I had banged the desk. Igor’s hands on my shoulders, the knife in the crook of my elbow.

  “Get me back in,” I said. “Fight the noise.”

  “You’re grandfathering,” Cho said, while Margaret and the other technicians fussed at their machines. “Hitting paradox limits. Be clear. What was happening? Were you anywhere near the MRI machine?”

  I wanted to be back in the room, back in Tatiana. She was more than just some anonymous host now. We’d spoken to each other, established . . . something. Not exactly trust, but a step on the way to it. And I’d bailed out of her, leaving her to deal with the mess I’d initiated.

  “I was trying to shut it down,” I said. “Going for the quench button.”

  “That was the absolute last resort,” Cho answered, with a rising strain.

  “I’d tried everything else. I thought I’d disabled the machine at the software interface, but then things went wrong. I had a knife on me, and it slipped out. They called security, and they were on their way.” I twisted my neck, addressing the nearest of the technicians. “Get me back in.”

  “We’re trying different noise filters,” Margaret said. “You’re still close to the threshold. The neural traffic was going stochastic even before you came back. Was anything off about the immersion?”

  I hesitated, on the brink of telling her everything. How Tatiana was in my head, and I was in Tatiana’s. How she’d managed to override my motor control for a moment, twitching her arm. How she’d reported a glimpse of this room, visual data feeding back the wrong way, into the past instead of up to the future. She’d seen the Vaymyr, seen the inside of an icebreaker fifty-two years upstream.

  But a glitch at this stage could be all the excuse Cho needed for pulling me off the team. The pressure was on him, this man who had already given so much. It had been controversial, moving me up after the problem with Christos. Cho’s only justification had been that I was technically competent, had a good understanding of the protocol, and already had a neural system that could be adapted to work with the Permafrost technology.

  There was some justifiable resentment. No one blamed me for Christos, but I knew there was irritation that, of all of us, I had been the one who jumped the queue, the one who ended up going back in time before the others—even though there’d been no predicting which of us would be the first.

  Still, faced with a complication, Cho might decide to abandon Tatiana. I couldn’t abandon her like that.

  “It was all right,” I said. “But I have to get back.”

  Cho rubbed at his forehead. “This is very bad. If you were committed to a course of action then you may have completed it, even in the absence of a fully functioning link. A helium quench is a very serious business.”

  Cho vanished: so did the technicians and the rest of the room.

  Just a flash came through, similar in duration to that first glimpse of Tatiana’s timeline. The room looked odd. The desk was at right angles, going up toward the ceiling. The swivel chair was sticking out sideways. The technician was slumped over on the desk, just as impossibly. A geometric surface stretched away from me, with a moundlike form not far off. Everything was slightly out of focus, tonally diffuse. I concentrated, trying to mesh my perceptions with Tatiana’s viewpoint. She was on the floor, and the moundlike form was someone else lying near me.

  Tatiana?

  No answer.

  I moved. A crawl was the best I could do. It was like fighting through thickening fluid, each action harder than the one that had preceded it. It must have taken ten or twelve seconds just to inch my way to the door, and then I had to reach high enough to tug down on the handle, using my weight to attempt to swing the door inward. It didn’t want to open against the helium pressure in the room. My vision was starting to darken. I put all my force into the door. I only had to open it a crack, and the helium would flood out and equalise the pressure on either side.

  The door gave. I crawled through the widening gap, half in and half out of the MRI room, and then I was done. I had exhausted the last reserves of energy from Tatiana’s body; she could give no more. As my vision fad
ed to tunnel darkness I had just a glimpse of figures approaching along the hallway, moving with the crouched caution of men and women not sure what they are getting themselves into.

  The last thing I sensed was some stiff, masklike thing being pressed against my face.

  * * *

  Dr. Abramik gave me a brief but thorough physical before agreeing to send me in again. There was no possibility of anything that had happened to Tatiana affecting me physically, but I’d still spent many hours in the dental chair, and with that enforced immobility came a risk of pressure sores and deep vein thrombosis. I had the kind of deep, lingering stiffness that only came after sleeping in an awkward position. After I’d walked around on the deck of the Vaymyr for a quarter of an hour, though, flapping my arms and stomping my feet, and taken in some of the cold but invigorating air, I felt I could cope with going back in again.

  I wanted to, as well. I’d made something bad happen in the MRI theatre and I felt I owed it to myself, as well as those who’d been caught up in the helium quench, to understand the consequences. That meant going back into Tatiana’s world.

  Had I done any real harm? It was hard to say.

  She’d had follow-up appointments stretching between early July and early August, and there was a note about a civil case involving criminal damage to hospital property—occurring in the same time frame—being dropped due to expert medical opinion holding that she couldn’t be held accountable for her actions.

  I squinted, slightly puzzled that I’d missed that detail the first time around. Or had I? Perhaps I had read it, but had been focussing more on the medical history.

  No; that was definitely what had happened.

  It all made sense, at least. Cho had even showed me the service record of time-probe eighteen, which was recorded on a metal plate near the base of the chassis. In June 2028, engineers from the manufacturer had carried out an otherwise routine helium recharge and recalibration, proving that no lasting harm had been done by the quench operation. Tatiana would have had her follow-up appointments sooner after discharge, but she’d had to wait for the machine to be put back into service.