Peter Watts - Beyond the Rift

“Well—” Russell wavers. The caricature seems to cause him physical pain. “I suppose so,” he finishes, reluctantly. “In thirty words or less, as you say.”

“Wow.” Suddenly Fitzgerald’s ravings sound downright pedestrian. “But if he’s right—”

“The consensus is he’s not,” Russell interjects hastily.

“But if . If the model’s an exact reproduction, how could you tell the difference between real life and afterlife? I mean, what would be the point ?”

“Well, the point is avoiding ultimate extinction, supposedly. As to how you’d tell the difference…” Russell shakes his head. “Actually, I never finished the book. As I said, theology doesn’t interest me all that much."

Thomas shakes his head. “I can’t believe it.”

“Not many could,” Russell says. Then, almost apologetically, he adds: “Tipler’s theoretical proofs were quite extensive, though, as I recall.”

“I bet. Whatever happened to him?”

Russell shrugs. “What happens to anyone who’s stupid enough to come up with a new way of looking at the world? They tore into him like sharks at a feeding frenzy. I don’t know where he ended up.”

What’s wrong with this picture?

Nothing. Everything. Suddenly awake, Myles Thomas stares around a darkened studio and tries to convince himself that nothing has changed.

Nothing has changed. The faint sounds of late-night traffic sound the same as ever. Gray parallelograms stretch across wall and ceiling, a faint luminous shadow of his bedroom window cast by some distant streetlight. Natalie’s still gone from the left side of his bed, her departure so far removed by now that he doesn’t even have to remind himself of it.

He checks the LEDs on his bedside alarm: 2:35a.

Something’s different.

Nothing’s changed.

Well, maybe one thing. Tipler’s heresy sits on the night stand, its plastic dustcover reflecting slashes of red light from the alarm clock. The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead. It’s too dark to read the lettering but you don’t forget a title like that. Myles Thomas signed it out of the library this afternoon, opened it at random:

…Lemma 1, and the fact that, we have

which is just ( E .3), and ( E .3) can hold only if…

—and threw it into his briefcase, confused and disgusted. He doesn’t even know why he went to the effort of getting the fucking thing. Jasmine Fitzgerald is delusional. It’s that simple. For reasons that it is not Myles Thomas’s job to understand, she vivisected her husband on the kitchen floor. Now she’s inventing all sorts of ways to excuse herself, to undo the undoable, and the fact that she cloaks her delusions in cosmological gobbledegook does not make them any more credible. What does he expect to do, turn into a quantum mechanic overnight? Is he going to learn even a fraction of what he’d need to find the holes in her carefully constructed fantasy? Why did he even bother?

But he did. And now Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead looms dimly in front of him at two thirty in the fucking morning, and something’s changed, he’s almost sure of it, but try as he might he can’t get a handle on what it is. He just feels different, somehow. He just feels…

Awake. That’s what you feel. You couldn’t get back to sleep now if your life depended on it.

Myles Thomas sighs and turns on the reading lamp. Squinting as his pupils shrink against the light, he reaches out and grabs the offending book.

Parts of it, astonishingly, almost make sense.

“She’s not here,” the orderly tells him. “Last night we had to move her next door.”

Next door: the hospital. “Why? What’s wrong?”

“Not a clue. Convulsions, cyanosis—we thought she was toast, actually. But by the time the doctor got to her she couldn’t find anything wrong.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Tell me about it. Nothing about that crazy b—nothing about her makes sense.” The orderly wanders off down the hall, frowning.

Jasmine Fitzgerald lies between sheets tucked tight as a straitjacket, stares unblinking at the ceiling. A nurse sits to one side, boredom and curiosity mixing in equal measures on his face.

“How is she?” Thomas asks.

“Don’t really know,” the nurse says. “She seems okay now.”

“She doesn’t look okay to me. She looks almost catatonic.”

“She isn’t. Are you, Jaz?”

“We’re sorry,” Fitzgerald says cheerfully. “The person you are trying to reach is temporarily unavailable. Please leave a message and we’ll get back to you.” Then: “Hi, Myles. Good to see you.” Her eyes never waver from the acoustic tiles overhead.

“You better blink one of these days,” Thomas remarks. “Your eyeballs are going to dry up.”

“Nothing a little judicious editing won’t fix,” she tells him.

Thomas glances at the nurse. “Would you excuse us for a few minutes?”

“Sure. I’ll be in the caf if you need me.”

Thomas waits until the door swings shut. “So, Jaz. What’s the mass of the Higgs boson?”

She blinks.

She smiles.

She turns to look at him.

“Two hundred twenty-eight GeV,” she says. “All right . Someone actually read my thesis proposal.”

“Not just your proposal. That’s one of Tipler’s testable predictions, isn’t it?”

Her smile widens. “The critical one, actually. The others are pretty self-evident.”

“And you tested it.”

“Yup. Over at CERN. So how’d you find his book?”

“I only read parts of it,” Thomas admits. “It was pretty tough slogging.”

“Sorry. My fault,” Fitzgerald says.

“How so?”

“I thought you could use some help, so I souped you up a bit. Increased your processing speed. Not enough, I guess.”

Something shivers down his back. He ignores it.

“I’m not—” Thomas rubs his chin; he forgot to shave this morning “—exactly sure what you mean by that.”

“Sure you do. You just don’t believe it.” Fitzgerald squirms up from between the sheets, props her back against a pillow. “It’s just a semantic difference, Myles. You’d call it a delusion . Us physics geeks would call it a hypothesis .”

Thomas nods, uncertainly.

“Oh, just say it, Myles. I know you’re dying to.”

“Go on,” he blurts, strangely unable to stop himself.

Fitzgerald laughs. “If you insist, Doctor. I figured out what I was doing wrong. I thought I had to do everything myself, and I just can’t. Too many variables, you see, even if you access them individually there’s no way you can keep track of ’em all at once. When I tried, I got mixed up and everything—”

A sudden darkness in her face now. A memory, perhaps, pushing up through all those careful layers of contrivance.

“Everything went wrong,” she finishes softly.

Thomas nods, keeps his voice low and gentle. “What are you remembering right now, Jaz?”

“You know damn well what I’m remembering,” she whispers. “I—I cut him open—”

“Yes.”

“He was dying. He was dying . I tried to fix him, I tried to fix the code but something went wrong, and…”

He waits. The silence stretches.

“…and I didn’t know what. I couldn’t fix it if I couldn’t see what I’d done wrong. So I—I cut him open…” Her brow furrows suddenly. Thomas can’t tell with what: remembrance, remorse?