Noumenon Infinity Read online

  “What’s the trouble?” Jamal asked Dr. Nakamura.

  “We’re not sure—could be on your end, could be on ours,” she said. “But we’re close to something—or maybe we’re way off base. Hard to tell. But when the printer making your Alpha-2.09 model was eighty-five percent done, something happened inside the machine and things went uncapped.”

  Jamal’s skin tingled. “So, we were right? The devices contain some sort of energy-to-matter—”

  Three cut him off. “No.” He’d wandered, phantom-like, through the clean room wall, keeping a reasonable distance from the spewing hose. “That can’t be right, I told you,” he called. “If all you’re doing is absorbing a star’s typical output, why would you want to waste energy converting it to matter for storage? I don’t think mini fusion reactors are the key.”

  “Uh, Doctor Kaeden?” Nakamura prompted.

  “I’m sorry. You were saying there’s been some kind of uncalculated reaction in the printer?”

  “We think so.”

  “Can you bring up a display of the portion the machine was printing at the time?”

  “Of course.” She hurried to a hologram array and brought up a rotating model. She pointed to the area involved in the malfunction.

  Jamal looked to Three and Five, but didn’t say anything.

  “This would suggest the secret lies directly in the innate properties of the materials,” said Five eventually. “That it doesn’t have anything to do with a signal or a code.”

  The area Nakamura indicated was a small compartment surrounded by a complex arrangement of wires and nodes, all made of different alloys and all connected differently. Jamal’s team liked to call it the “infinity gap,” because they didn’t have a damn clue what happened inside. They were sure energy went in, but beyond that, they knew nothing.

  “Looking at this model doesn’t tell us crap,” said Three. “You need to see the damage.”

  Jamal glanced over his shoulder to the smoking machine. The flames were gone, and no one seemed to be in panic mode any more. “May we?” he asked Nakamura, gesturing.

  She took stiff strides over to the clean rooms, showing great restraint in her movements, though Jamal could tell she internally vibrated with frustration. Whether it was because she was tired of the setbacks, or because he’d used “we” instead of “I,” Jamal couldn’t say.

  Before entering, Jamal and Nakamura were sprayed with antistatic formula—which smelled like wet dog—before being shrink-wrapped into hyperefficient temporary bunny suits. The suits were made of a thin flexible film that clung to every pore and fiber, following any twists and bends the wearer made. After six hours they could be washed away with soap and water. Membrane masks—to protect them from any toxins hanging in the air—topped off their ensembles.

  The printer in question was a mangled cube. It had originally shared the dimensions of an industrial trash compactor, but now it looked as though it had gone through a trash compactor. During the accident, parts of it had imploded while others had disintegrated.

  The semifabricated portion of the Web node was in a much better state. If Jamal hadn’t submitted the schematics himself he wouldn’t have recognized the object as something his team had designed.

  Three and Five scrutinized the mangled mess from all sides, hemming and hawing.

  “Can you get her to lift up this end?” Three asked, pointing to the pinched right side of the printed piece.

  Jamal passed on the request. I.C.C. directed a robotic arm to do the job.

  “There’s something familiar about the way this collapsed,” Five said, trying to probe the damage with his finger. His flesh wouldn’t interact with the metal, as usual.

  That must be frustrating—not being able to touch things, Jamal thought, an instant before he was taken out of the moment by another idea. Will I be like that some day? An ethereal being piggybacking off some other clone’s brain power? Could I become some electromagnetic pattern that needs to resonate with a shared physicality in order to find self-awareness?

  Would that truly be me, or just the memory of me?

  “Hey, chief.” Three snapped his fingers at Jamal. “You’re supposed to zone out around other people, not us.”

  “This damage,” Five repeated. “I know I’ve seen it before.”

  Jamal bent closer, his nose nearly touching the still-steaming fragments. “Where?” he asked out of the corner of his mouth while eyeing Nakamura.

  Five shrugged.

  “Loads of help there,” said Three. A moment later he straightened himself, then cracked his back. “Yeah, I’ve got nothing.”

  Clueless himself, Jamal kept searching anyway. He took as many mental notes as he could, and asked I.C.C. for all of the details it had gathered about the failure.

  “Thank you,” he said to Nakamura, shaking her hand after the inspection. “And I’m really sorry about the printer.”

  “Accidents happen,” she said. Her words were topped with a sigh that made it sound like incompetence happens. Jamal knew the sentiment wasn’t pointed at him, but at the world in general.

  On his way out of the manufacturing sector, he paused in an empty hallway to confer with his visitors. “You had something there for a moment, Five. Are you sure you can’t remember?”

  “No. But perhaps I can’t remember because you don’t know.”

  “I thought we agreed to stop that,” said Three. “And you,” he said to Jamal. “You had some funky space-out moment there.”

  Jamal leaned against the wall and shoved his hands deep into his uniform pockets. “I just wondered if I might be you one day.”

  The other two stood close, conspiratorially, as though they might be overheard.

  “Interesting thought,” said Three. “But how do you know this isn’t a fluke? That we’re never gonna come back again. We are the only two—whatever we are—in your life, right? I mean, shouldn’t there be loads more if this were a pattern and not an anomaly?”

  Jamal shrugged. “Maybe I only see you because I only need you.”

  “That’s a nice sentiment,” said Five.

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” sneered Three. “I think it’s shitty. So, what, we’re all trapped in the ether—or the Higgs field or whatever your generation likes to think nothingness is made of these days—and because you want something special, only a few of us get to wriggle into your reality? That’s crap, man.”

  “I’d have thought you’d appreciate having fate turn in your favor, even if it means everyone else gets screwed,” said Five.

  “Stop it. Arguing like this is not helpful,” Jamal said pointedly.

  “Well that flushes your theory then, doesn’t it?” snapped Three.

  “Jamal?”

  Jamal pushed himself off the wall and straightened his collar. That last voice belonged to Anatoly Straifer, the man who would take over Jamal’s technical position after he retired. “Uh, yes?”

  Anatoly was a boxy man—angular all around, from pointed chin to jutting shoulders to sharp knees. “Were you . . . were you just talking to yourself?”

  “I.C.C.,” he lied.

  “Oh, funny. It sounded like you were arguing with yourself.” He clearly didn’t think it was funny at all.

  There were rumors, Jamal knew. Other members of his team had overheard him talking to Three and Five early on, before he’d decided to take personal days whenever they appeared.

  His colleagues sometimes made snide comments when they thought he couldn’t hear. They knew he took regular trips to Hippocrates for “neurological reasons,” and Toya had told him that at least a half-dozen people had expressed concern for his health.

  You promised her you’d stop in public, he reminded himself. “Are you headed to lunch, or . . . ?” he asked Anatoly, changing the subject none-too-deftly.

  “Yes.”

  “Great, me, too. Let’s go,” he said.

  “You should listen to your sister,” said Five. “Leave her out of this.
Us. Leave everyone out. We know how it looks. We get it, and whatever we’re here for, I’m sure it’s not to make you look crazy.”

  They both stood behind him, hovering, as he ate his midshift meal with Anatoly.

  “Yeah, just pretend we’re not here,” said Three.

  You’re hanging over my shoulders like a devil-angel pairing, he thought. How am I supposed to ignore that?

  “So, the computer engineers think they found an alien hard drive today,” Anatoly said.

  Jamal picked at his protein. It had been reconstituted to resemble fried grasshoppers. Anatoly wolfed them down, but Jamal had long ago made a personal vow never to eat something that he could look in the eye before biting into—even if it didn’t technically have an eye to begin with. “They did? How?”

  “That flexible strip thing we gave them—which looked like a soap bubble?—they did something with it and I.C.C. They jury-rigged a port for the bubble, or something—didn’t catch how it all went together. But I.C.C. could read the bubble. Couldn’t make heads or tails of it, but the AI recognized the information as some kind of binary. Not ones and zeroes necessarily, but you get the idea.”

  “That’s bizarre,” said Three. “I would have expected something more complex. Something so far removed from I.C.C.’s history that it couldn’t interact with it at all.”

  Isn’t that the primary argument about alien and human biology? Jamal wanted to say. They should be so different that reactions can’t occur between them. Our diseases should do nothing to them, and vice versa? But then there’s the opposing argument that life is a fundamental quality of only a limited number of compounds and chemical reactions—so that anything living should be based on structures that are similar. Maybe in the long run, computers are somehow the same?

  He opened his mouth to say something to that effect, something that would let Three in on the idea, but he couldn’t figure out how to phrase such a segue for Anatoly’s benefit.

  See, if you guys really were all in my head I wouldn’t have to say anything at all.

  “How’s the team coming with that new bonding technology?” he asked instead.

  “Good, good. Still have a long way to go. The bonds are taking, but they’re not standing up through the stress tests.” Anatoly scratched the back of his neck. “The bonds weren’t the cause of that problem in manufacturing, were they?”

  “They’re still looking into it.” He waved aside Anatoly’s concern.

  “I bet they won’t find much,” said Three. “When you’re messing with alien shit it could be anything.”

  “They’ll figure it out. Have a little faith,” said Five.

  “Like faith in the system ever got me much.”

  Ignore them. Pretend it’s a conversation at the next table that doesn’t involve you, Jamal told himself.

  That was easier said than done, though. “Why are you even here?” Five asked Three, leaping up to sit on the table. Jamal inconspicuously moved his tray away from the imperceptible man.

  “I have no clue,” spat Three. He hopped up on the other side of Jamal, then mounted the table and began pacing back and forth between the trays. “Did my damndest to get off this boat the first time around. Maybe this is my punishment. Go through some half-assed reincarnation only to get stuck with no one to talk to but a yes-man and a nutter. Guess you guys represent what my future would have been like had I rolled over for the man.”

  “Oh, stop with the self-righteous bull already, will you?”

  “I’m self-righteous? Mr. I-stood-up-to-the-Master-Warden-and-redeemed-your-heinous-crimes?”

  Jamal cleared his throat, throwing in a particularly phlegmy cough. Maybe that would get their attention.

  Five caught the hint. “Drop it. Our host, the nutter—as you so diplomatically dubbed him—is trying to look sane.”

  Three plopped himself down, cross-legged, narrowly missing someone’s mashed yucca.

  “I’ve been out most of the day,” Jamal said to Anatoly, now that he could concentrate. “Give me the rundown. Any news on any of our projects? Any firm progress?”

  “I haven’t had a chance to check it out myself yet, but the materials engineers have arrived at the correct alloy, they think.”

  Five asked dully, “Can the printers be programmed to make it?”

  “Can the printers be programmed to make it?” Jamal repeated.

  Anatoly shrugged and shoveled a bite of mash into his mouth. “Have to ask Dr. Nakamura.”

  “This guy is your cycle partner?” Three asked, squinting at Anatoly. “He’s going to take your place some day? He doesn’t seem to know much about anything, does he?”

  Jamal shot him a warning look. None of us look like we know much about anything. We might as well be hunter-gatherers who’ve stumbled upon a Roman aqueduct and presume to build one ourselves. There was such a large technological and informational gap between the humans and the alien builders that it was best not to think about it, lest their endeavors to complete the Web seem impossibly silly.

  Oh, great, Jamal realized, interrupting his own train of thought. I’ve gone from looking like I’m talking to myself to actually talking to myself. Why did I listen to Toya? I should have just stayed home.

  Jamal stood abruptly. “See you back in the labs,” he said to Anatoly. Then he made a mad dash for his quarters.

  Jamal hadn’t seen Three and Five for weeks now. That in itself wasn’t unusual, they’d never had a firm schedule. He’d gone six months on the outside without seeing them before. It was the way they’d left last time that made him wonder if something had changed.

  Three’s blathering at the table with Anatoly had struck a harsh cord in Jamal. Not so much that this apparition, or reverberation, or whatever thought of him as “nutters,” but that he thought his own state of existence was a punishment.

  “Until you two came along, I always believed in one man, one life,” Jamal said gruffly, almost the instant they reappeared.

  Three now leaned up against the wall in Jamal’s quarters, while Five sat at the table. “I was damn positive that when I retired I was finished. I didn’t believe in a heaven or a hell or a limbo where souls hang out indefinitely. You die, you die. You cease to actively change anything relevant to the living.”

  Neither of them were looking at him, which was fine. Jamal was speaking more for his own sake than theirs. “I thought everyone, everything, had a clear-cut ending. Individuals die. Cultures die.” His hand took a quick jab in the direction of the window, through which the Web could be seen rotating into view, its many concentrically placed nodes and lathes forming a dark latticework through which the star’s brilliance tried to escape. “Civilizations and races die. Which means that everything a man does is only relevant to himself, unless he can build something that resonates with the future.”

  Jamal crossed to the bed, reached over, and slapped his palm to the windowpane. “Something like that. It’s not a Web or a Dyson Sphere. It is a legacy. It’s a sum of voices crying out to forever. That is where I thought a soul went when it died: into the objects it built, the individuals it inspired, and the ideas it cultivated.” He removed his hand from the window and placed it over his eyes. “You’ve changed what I believe. Because here you are.

  “So, now I fear that I won’t simply die. That I won’t forge myself a forever in life so that I may rest in death. Instead, I might go on. I might find myself in a blind limbo, waiting to cling to facsimiles of my former body. That is wonderful—and frightening—and how dare you call it a punishment.”

  “No, you were right before,” Five said softly.

  Jamal turned toward him. “What do you mean?”

  The two of them made eye contact for the first time since entering the apartment. “I helped reinstate SD travel. Three—” He glanced in Three’s direction, but the other man’s gaze was fixed firmly to the floor. “I.C.C. credits Three with much of its early maturation. Regardless of how things went toward the end, he put a lot of hims
elf into the AI. Maybe that’s how we got here. Something of our essence went into our work—I’m sure it’s less mystical than it sounds. But maybe that’s why we’ve appeared and others haven’t.”

  “But you can’t have been the only two in the convoy. Why isn’t anyone else seeing apparitions from the past?”

  “Maybe that part has to do with you,” Five said, glancing at the clock. “Something about how conscious you are of legacy and resonance. Hey—” He snapped his fingers in Three’s direction. “I’m getting . . .”

  “Yeah, I feel it, too.” Three pushed himself off the wall and gave Jamal a halfhearted wave.

  Three and Five knew when they were about to pop out of reality. To Jamal, it always looked like someone switched off a remarkably vibrant hologram. One instant they were there, the next they were gone. No fade outs, no wobbly waves, no signal interruptions.

  It was disturbing. He didn’t need any more reminders that they were insubstantial, so he always asked them to “leave” as soon as they got the inkling.

  He opened the door for them, and Five hurried out. Three slumped after, but before he’d made it all the way into the hall he said, “If we’re imprints on the convoy and not aneurysms in your brain, why isn’t I.C.C. hallucinating us instead of you?”

  “We’re blood,” Jamal said frankly.

  Three nodded his acceptance. “The next time you decide to get all preachy on the virtues of afterlife, think about this—How would you feel if only one person in the convoy could see you, and that was a prerequisite for your existence?”

  “You mentioned that already.”

  “Right. Now think about how you’d feel if you knew that guy would only be able to see you for another five years. If dying young once is a tragedy, tell me that dying young twice isn’t hell.”

  Jamal blinked and they were gone.

  Now, weeks later, he wondered if he’d ever see them again. He’d never known Three to sink so resolutely into a funk. They aren’t a coin like I thought, he realized. Rather, we are a triangle. We’re all connected equally. It wasn’t the two of them versus him.