David Williams - The Machinery of Light

“Not even parallel,” says Sarmax faintly. His voice drifts among them, sounds almost hollow. “More like intertwined . Interfering with each other constantly. The whole idea of ‘universe’ is an absurdity, because they’re all—”

“Connected,” says the Operative. “And if you roll them back to the Big Bang that kicked them all off, all you find is that we’re on just one branch of something much larger. Something that—”

“So what’s outside these walls right now?” asks Linehan.

“Nothing,” says Sarmax.

“Or everything,” the Operative shrugs. “Same difference in the end. The walls of the Room constitute a barrier on space-time—an envelope sustained by the aetheric fluid of those culled in the slaughter that’s going on outside—and then harnessed by the generator-membranes and channeled through the primary node itself—”

“Haskell,” mutters Sarmax.

“Wait a second,” says Lynx, “you’re saying this really comes down to human sacrifice? To the burning up of souls— ”

“That’s a loaded word,” says Sarmax.

“So strip it of its baggage,” says the Operative. “Sanskrit calls it prana . The Taoists know it as chi. It’s the aura that Kirlian photography captures. The life force within each of us. Absurd that science for so long thought it absurd—”

“A totally surface understanding,” says Sinclair. “We’re harnessing the consciousness of all that cattle. The assimilation of their quantum viewpoint to augment our own, allowing us to manipulate the cosmos—handing us the reins of aggregated decoherence to shape reality the way no individual observer-effect ever could. The conveying of mere psychic energy to the Room’s engines is just one source for the turbines cranking up around us—”

“In another age they’d have called you a magician,” says Sarmax.

“A black one,” says Linehan. “He wields the dark arts—”

Sinclair laughs. “You just don’t get it, do you? Science and magic are merely different sides of the same coin. Newton worked on his Principia by day, his alchemy by night—struggling against more than a thousand years of superstition while he did so. Never underestimate the impact that religion had on science—how much it deadened it, made it crave orthodoxy, gave it such a narrow view of all that’s possible even among those who thought they’d escaped faith’s baggage. The greatest tragedy in history was the triumph of monotheism—of ideologies that claimed a monopoly on magics while they engaged in mass hypnosis to prop up texts written in the fucking Bronze Age . Someone had to restore sanity before—”

“But God exists,” says Linehan. “He’s real.”

“Have you spoken with Him?”

“I’ve felt Him—”

“Real trick’s getting an answer,” says Haskell.

Her voice is coming from all around—from every screen that’s hung about the inner Room. The face of Claire Haskell sits on all of them. Each one’s saying the same thing.

“Nice to see you again, Matthew.”

Linehan’s already clocked it—Haskell’s body’s still contained within that pod. Sinclair isn’t even bothering to look. Presumably he’s already taken it all in. He’s just gazing at one of those Haskells on one of those screens—smiling as he does so—

“So glad you could join us, Claire.”

“But you weren’t counting on it, were you?”

“Such assumptions don’t—”

“Your future-sensing ended when you got to the Room.”

Sinclair says nothing. And suddenly Haskell’s voice sounds in Carson’s head—

get ready to move fast

The Operative shakes his head violently as though to clear it—can’t seem to establish any kind of return communication. He has no idea what the hell she’s planning—no idea if it’s even her anymore. Maybe Sinclair doesn’t either. Because Haskell’s voice has taken on what might almost be a certain wary confidence—

“I’m right, aren’t I? You knew exactly what would happen up until the point you stepped within. But you can’t postulate the condition of a structure cut off from all space. Nor could you anticipate what course your creation would take when cut off from all time, a bubble universe adrift amidst the sea of—”

“But there you go again,” says Sinclair. “With your assumptions. A luxury the trapped can’t afford.”

Some of the Haskells laugh. “You think I’m trapped?”

“I have your flesh, don’t I?”

“You of all people should know that meat means nothing—”

“We’ll see if that’s true when I burn it.”

The Operative notices something. Sinclair’s eyes are tracking on some of the screens, ignoring others. He wonders if any of the others have noticed this. But everybody else seems just too intent on trying to keep up—

“Do that and you won’t find your way home,” says Haskell.

“Home?” Sinclair laughs. “Why would I want to go home?”

“How else are you going to rule humanity—”

“And go back in time to change it,” says Lynx.

“I’m not,” says Sinclair.

“What?” asks Lynx.

“You can’t go back,” says Sinclair. “Travel to the past is travel to a parallel past by definition. Thus do the laws of quantum gravity sidestep paradox. And as to going back to the future of the world we left, Claire: a better question is, why would I want to?”

That last one seems to catch her off guard. “You—don’t—?”

“I don’t know if you noticed, but Earth really went to the dogs these last few days.”

“Thanks to you—”

“Can’t make an omelette without … well, what can I say? There are only so many ways to hammer a hole into the next dimension. Mass killing was always one of the more direct routes—”

“That was just one part of it,” she says coldly.

“Sure. First we had to get a bridgehead established.”

“Me,” she says.

“Us,” says Sarmax.

All of them, and he’s been left to live with it all: his role as the original prototype, his part in the creation of the ultimate hit-team, his days training those who would take his place, his nights with the woman whose body sprawls in front of him—

“Exactly,” says Sinclair. “The Rain. And only Leo here had any idea what he was getting into.”

“I was young enough to be into masochism.”

“A vice that failed to fade with time.”

“Fuck you, Matthew.”

“Do you want to see Indigo again or don’t you?”

“I see her in my mind right now, you bastard.”

“That might be all you ever do.”

“Didn’t you once tell me that memory is real?”

“Everything in the mind is real,” says Sinclair. “Though it got a lot more complicated once I’d remixed your head with all the histories of your other selves—”

“I thought Control was lying when he said—”

“He wasn’t. How else do you think I got a duplicate Marlowe into the mix? Took a shell and charged it with emissions seeping in from—”

“Fuck,” says Sarmax. He feels like he’s been punched in the gut. He notices Carson and Lynx seem to have the same reaction—

“This is bullshit,” says Lynx.

“I’m sure you wish it was.”

“But—they—the memories of those years—they were all consistent,” says Sarmax.