Noumenon Infinity Page 24

  And he worried that drawing such a conclusion, no matter how eye-opening it seemed, might actually cause a block. What if his new bout of empathy for them meant they could not manifest? Perhaps now they would resonate more closely with his being, and therefore lose their individualism.

  “I.C.C.?” he began, thinking that if there was anyone he could confide in who would not judge him, it would be the computer. What if he related some of the conversations he had with Five and Three, just to see if their theories about their own existence held any clout? Maybe the Inter Convoy Computer would be able to look into it for him, see if their first appearance or disappearances correlated with anything.

  They made him wonder about the metaphysical, yes, but he was an engineer first and foremost, a man of physics. And what was the metaphysical except physics not yet pinned down?

  “Yes, Jamal?” I.C.C. intoned.

  “I—”

  But, he’d promised Toya. He was on his way to see her now, to help her with wedding preparations.

  Sure, I.C.C. wasn’t a person, per se. But he respected his sister too much to go back so quickly on his word, even if there was a logical loophole. Was understanding the origins of his “ghosts” more important than his fellow crew members’ ease? Their peace of mind?

  “Never mind,” he said. “Sorry to bother you.”

  “It’s never a bother,” I.C.C. assured him.

  After Jamal arrived at his sister’s quarters and rang the buzzer, Toya quickly ushered him inside. The room smelled like bright nectar. Live flowers, on loan from the tropical quarter of Eden, filled her dining table.

  “Kasun will be here soon,” she said. “But we’re alone now, aren’t we?”

  “Yes,” he said with an impatient sigh.

  “If your visitors make an appearance—”

  “I won’t say anything in front of Kasun, don’t worry.” Why didn’t she trust her future husband with her brother’s idiosyncrasies? Jamal knew Kasun to be a kind man, and thought Toya was being unfair to him by keeping her family’s dirty laundry bundled up in the basement.

  “Thank you.”

  From her closet she pulled out several boxes labeled Scraps. It was traditional for the couple to tie the wrist of each guest from one side to the wrist of a guest from the other side to symbolize unity. Leftover bits from tailored jumpsuits were used—typically in the work colors of the couple.

  “Help me sort these, would you?” she asked solemnly, setting them on the table. “Don’t want any frayed ones.”

  Despite the happy occasion, something was clearly weighing on Toya. Something not Jamal-and-his-imaginary-ancestors-related. Her movements were stiff, almost angry. She squeezed each scrap as though it might try to escape.

  As they worked—mostly in silence—Jamal searched for the right question, or the right words of encouragement. But everything that popped into his head was banal or trite:

  Buck up.

  It’ll be all right.

  It’s just the stress of the wedding.

  Nothing felt right.

  He looked down at a red swatch in his hand, then up again. Three and Five stood behind Toya, looking over her shoulder with the utmost interest.

  “Ask her what she’s afraid of,” said Three, as though he’d read Jamal’s mind.

  “Stay out of it,” Five said.

  “No, trust me,” said Three, brushing his counterpart aside.

  “Is there something you’re . . . scared of?” Jamal asked gently.

  Toya nervously tucked a curl behind her ear. It had an unexpected shimmer to it, making the strands glitter like onyx and silver. After a moment, Jamal realized the shine came from an errant tear. “It’s nothing,” she said. He didn’t press. “Well, all right,” she said after a moment. “I’m worried I’m making a big mistake. But I’m too afraid of what happens if I don’t make the mistake to examine the situation close enough to figure out if it really is a mistake.” She laughed cathartically. “That’s confusing—sorry. I just mean I sometimes worry that Kasun and I aren’t right for each other. That we’re forcing it.”

  “But you want to force it,” Jamal said with a nod.

  “Yes, because I’m too afraid to start all over again. And I can’t . . .” she trailed off.

  “What?” Jamal asked.

  “She feels like she’s all alone in the world, you big dummy,” said Three.

  Five punched him squarely in the shoulder. “Could you be any more insensitive?”

  Three rubbed his arm. “Hey, he’s the one who can’t figure out that his sister feels like her brother abandoned her to talk to the sprites inside his head.”

  Jamal skipped a beat and nearly knocked one of the scrap boxes to the floor. “Is it me?” he asked, catching himself. “Do you feel like I’ve been ignoring you?”

  “Not on purpose. And it’s not just you. I’ve never been good at making friends, and when I did they were always older, which means—” she took a deep breath so that she could spit the rest of the sentence out all at once “—which means they’ve all been retired recently. And when David died and left me single, all I had was you. My brother. Someone I could always depend on. Or, at least I thought so, until this thing started happening. Then I was alone. And it’s hard to be alone, Jamal. Truly alone, I don’t just mean in the romantic sense. I didn’t have anyone to turn to until Kasun. And if I admit he’s not right for me, then I’ve got no one again.” Toya put her hand over her mouth, as though she’d said too much.

  “I didn’t mean to . . .” Jamal said. “That’s partly why I wanted to share it with you—the visits. I wanted it to bring us closer together, not push us apart.”

  “But it can’t, don’t you get it?” Her fear finally boiled over the hurt. She slammed the lid down on one of the boxes. “I can’t share the voices in your head. I know your visitors seem real, but they aren’t.”

  “What if I could prove they are?”

  “Don’t go there, Jamal,” warned Five.

  “You can’t,” she insisted.

  He gently took her hand. “They’re here, right now. If you’ll just hear me out. Listen to what they say, try to feel their presence—”

  Toya jerked her fingers free. The hint of a tear in her eye was burgeoning. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but it scares me. Please get help, Jamal.” She marched to the door and opened it. “Go. Now. Please, I love you. Get help.” With her hand pointing into the hall, she stood as still as a statue, waiting for him to honor her request. As soon as he complied, she shut the door again, leaving him alone and flabbergasted.

  His two ancestors set comforting hands on his shoulders. Of course, he could not feel the weight of their palms or the squeeze of their muscles through the starched fabric of his shirt.

  And for some reason, suddenly he was afraid, too.

  He didn’t get help. He considered it, calling on I.C.C. several times in stutter-start attempts to schedule psych evaluations. But, in the end, he couldn’t see how making the two invisible clones disappear would actually help anything.

  “It might repair your relationship with Toya,” Five pointed out.

  “I don’t think so,” said Jamal with a sigh. “Even if I believed you were gone and had been in my mind all along, I don’t think she’d ever trust that I was telling the truth. She’d always suspect you were still hanging around. There aren’t enough years left for me to erase her fears.”

  Toya’s wedding came and went as scheduled. Jamal hadn’t seen nor spoken to her since Kasun moved in with her.

  Maybe things would have been different if Toya had had children. Maybe she wouldn’t have felt so adrift. She’d always been the second wife, even in her first marriage. Her husband, David, had already had two children, nearly grown, and they’d never applied for another.

  Perhaps then she wouldn’t have felt so alone when Jamal’s “friends” appeared. Maybe then she wouldn’t have jumped at the first relationship offered to her—perhaps she would have
slowed down, considered things differently.

  It might not have made the difference in Jamal’s relationship with her, but maybe she’d be happier.

  And ultimately, he just wanted her to be happy.

  Jamal tried not to let the new estrangement from his sister bother him. It was her choice, and he had to respect that. Throwing himself into his work seemed the best option. That way he wouldn’t have time to think about his mental health or personal relationships.

  But months went by without much engineering progress, and he began to wonder if a legacy project, that tangible thing that would somehow help him live on after retirement, was out of his reach.

  “Any more additive manufacturing problems?” Three asked one day. He seemed to be more comfortable with his insubstantialness, as he’d taken to sitting in inappropriate places. Now he’d hooked himself onto the bookshelf in Jamal’s Slicer office, elbows and heels on the shelves, body bent outward in a position that would have been impossible for any person of physical substance. “You haven’t said much about that accident.”

  “Nakamura never came to a firm conclusion. It might have been an unstable chemical mixture or something, we’re not sure. The more recent schematics I sent to them had a few material changes, for safety’s sake. No more implosions . . . yet.” Jamal sat at his desk, going through some ‘flex-sheet work, running his fingers thoughtfully over the edges of the supple plastic. An unactivated puppet sat hunched in the corner of the room, its featureless face bent sightlessly toward the floor. Jamal never used the automations from Earth, even though he had the proper implants. He didn’t like them, and felt he didn’t need them, but since there was no longer any place to store them—Hvmnd, their original home, having been allocated to Convoy Seven-Point-Five—one was stationed in each office, a literal silent partner.

  Five had been doing sit-ups on the polished cement floor. He suddenly sprang to his feet. “I remember!”

  “Remember what?” Three asked.

  “I know where I saw that kind of damage before.”

  Jamal looked up from his data entry. “Where?”

  “Bottomless. After The Battle of Eden, I threw myself into figuring out what went wrong. It’s what Kexin wanted, and I thought I should . . . anyway. I studied the SD drive during the process of submersion, mostly. Not so much the actual wreckage, but I did look at all of the snapshots taken right after the accident. They looked just like the mangled printer. Have you ever accessed Bottomless’s archived files?”

  “No. I’ve had access, but I’ve never seen the remains. You’re saying the implosion patterns are the same? That the damage in manufacturing looked identical to the damage on Bottomless?” He rubbed at the rough stubble of his chin. “I.C.C.? Will you please bring up all files related to the decommissioning of Bottomless?”

  “Certainly,” I.C.C. said, a hair slow. “May I ask for what purpose?”

  Jamal knew the AI had been listening in on his seemingly one-sided conversation. It was understandably curious. “Side-by-side comparison,” he said. “I’ll need the data from the manufacturing accident on the seventeeth of August as well. Could you bring the files up on my wall screen, please?”

  Bright flashes flickered across the monitor as all of the files popped up for access. Jamal stood and sifted through the information until he came to the photographs. Five was right, the damage patterns were almost identical.

  “How did you know?” asked I.C.C.

  “I didn’t,” he admitted. “Five—uh, Diego, I mean, Jamal the Fifth did.”

  “What—”

  Ignoring I.C.C., Jamal pressed on. “This has to mean we’re dealing with SDs.”

  Five stood next to him, pointing at the screen. “But Bottomless’s mis-dive was due to ineffectual radiation shielding for the DNA-encoded commands, and an incorrect compensation in the governing program’s software. There aren’t any organics—and no software—involved in the printing accident.”

  That tickled something else in the back of Jamal’s mind. The way he’d said organics . . . Once again he wanted to confide in I.C.C., rattle off every thought he’d ever had as to the origin of Three and Five—but that was a matter for another time. If ever.

  Still, it got his thoughts churning, and with a little skip in his step, he started scrolling through items on the touch screen with a dancer’s flare. “No organics . . . From which we can conclude that there’s something innate in the combination of materials that creates a subdimensional pull. Our materials are forced into an SD-compatible state by a computer when we dive. What if it’s the opposite for the Web? What if its materials have to be forced into the greater dimensions—what we call ‘normal’ space-time—by a computer? That their state of rest lies in the subdimensions?”

  “If the ‘infinity gaps’ in the units are for energy storage, that makes perfect sense,” said Three, still poised precariously on the shelves. “Forcing a pocket of subdimensional space-time would take constant monitoring—you’d have to expend extra energy to hold on to the energy. A magnificent waste. Once the Web started gathering energy from the star, it would have to remain on—constantly running, draining. This way it could be switched off, conserving energy.”

  Clapping his hands, Jamal turned to pat Five on the back, only to pull up short in order to avoid an uncomfortable situation. “We were getting closer with the instability, not further away,” he said. “Destroying the printer wasn’t a setback, it was progress.” Then he stopped, his eyes widening. “Like the computer.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Five.

  “I.C.C., you discovered that the Web’s computer system is based on a type of binary, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you, Three, you were surprised. Because of how basic that is. Because you thought an advanced civilization might find more use for more complex systems. Base three, five, even base ten?”

  “Yes.”

  “But it’s base two. Just like our computers, before Earth went into bio-computing. It’s the most simplistic form of computing. Fundamental. One could say, the most likely to exist.”

  “What are you getting at?” asked I.C.C.

  “It took SD technology to get us here in the first place—and now we think SD tech is part of the Web’s devices. What if that’s why the Web is where it is in the galaxy? Much closer to Earth and it would be too easy for us to get to, so we wouldn’t have arrived with SD drives. Much farther, and the variations in orbit and luminosity probably would have been too minute for us to take notice. The original builders were looking for new builders with the right technology at the right time. Their Web is advanced for us, yes, but also understandable. What are the odds of that?”

  I.C.C. broke in. “You’re saying that the Web’s position in relation to Earth is not a coincidence? That the aliens knew humans existed? But the timeline projections put the Web’s inception at millions of years before—”

  “Maybe not humans, just life,” said Jamal. “They knew life was close enough, and that if it evolved into sentience and intelligence than it could make it here and continue the project.”

  “But there were others,” said Five. “Other civilizations. Those who came in the Nest, the Nataré. That means they were close enough, too. But as far as we know, Noumenon Ultra still hasn’t made contact with them. If intelligence is that common this close to Earth—”

  “It may be common in physical proximity, but not in chronological proximity,” Jamal said.

  “What may be?” asked I.C.C. It was clearly having a hard time following the snippets of conversation.

  “Intelligent life.”

  “But what about the instructions?” said Three. “Or lack thereof. There’s no writing, no pictographs. If the buggers wanted to make it simple enough for anyone to build, wouldn’t there be directions? A user’s manual?”

  Jamal shrugged. “Maybe there are instructions and we just haven’t discovered them yet.” He looked back at the comparison pictures. “I.C.C., I don
’t suppose you took any measurements of mass before and after the printer accident?”

  “I did not.”

  “Damn. That might have sealed it. I’d be willing to bet the printer had significantly less mass after the implosion than before. Some of it disappeared into a subdimension.”

  “Do you think the pictures are enough to go on?” asked Five. “For everyone else to make the SD connection?”

  “Only one way to find out. I.C.C., please transfer these images to a ‘flex-sheet. I need to show them to Nakamura.”

  “Brilliant,” Anatoly commended him. Three weeks prior, Jamal had presented the theories to the division leaders. The concept of subdimensional storage was quickly championed by all.

  Now Jamal was in the Slicer’s giant bay, before his team, gesturing at one of the harvested, ship-sized nodes. In one hand he carried a smooth plastic model of the device that had imploded in the printer. “Thank you,” he said softly to Anatoly, the blush evident in his voice if not his face. He was trying to explain his current understanding of how the nodes might siphon their gathered power into the “infinity gap,” where it would sink into a stable SD pocket.

  “How did you make the connection? Between the two accidents?” Anatoly persisted.

  “Oh—” Jamal waved a hand haphazardly through the air. “I guess it just came to me.”

  With a small knot of guilt in his throat he looked up. On top of the node sat Three and Five, their legs swinging off the side. He wanted to give them credit, but they both just gave him the thumbs-up.

  This was proof, wasn’t it? That the two of them couldn’t be pure hallucinations?

  But trying to make that point now felt like it would detract from the technical revelation.

  When he was finished with his presentation, he returned to his office alone—his ancestors continued to climb the node like it was their personal jungle gym—and found a message from Nakamura waiting for him. “We’d like to discuss going public with your SD storage theory. Please contact either myself or Captain Nwosu at your earliest convenience.”