Empty Space (37 page)

Gaines’ response was to shrug. One way or another, he supposed, they would get some science out of it. This bland assumption turned into an argument in which Case’s team joined.
They all talked at once. ‘Science?’ Case shouted at one point. He held both his sticks in one hand so he could make a contemptuous gesture with the other. ‘Science is off.
It’s been off ever since you and Emil walked into this fucking place!’

Laughter all round.

‘I don’t like these people,’ the assistant said loudly.

Everyone stopped talking.

Gaines took her by the arm. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘It’s OK, really.’ They stood looking at one another, while Case and his team stared at them. Rig gave her one of his
wryest smiles and while he was still smiling at her said to someone nearby:

‘We could probably get some coffee here?’

The guy said sure. He could fetch that if they liked. They could get regular with milk or they could get regular without.

‘You don’t need to stay with us,’ Gaines told the assistant when the coffee arrived. ‘Have a look around. Have a look at everything.’ After that she was left
alone with herself to an unfamiliar degree.

The room was as big as a travel terminal, dark but with islands of activity. Vehicles drove about, some quite heavy. Over near the middle of the space they had something isolated under
powerful lights. It was moving in a sporadic way, like something natural, but she couldn’t see what it was. She found a place to sit, sprawled her legs wide and smiled at some of
Case’s people until they looked away. She thought of names for herself: Bruna, Kyshtym, Korelev R-7 and ‘The Angel of the Parking Orbit’. She looked down at her forearm: it was
registering No Data. Meanwhile, Case’s people brought up new equipment, which they organised inside the circle of light. Whatever it was, it meant nothing to the assistant.

Outside the lighted area they had some basic chopshop fitments – a brand new proteome tank enamelled the colour of white goods in 1953, a cutting table and some surgical instruments. She
was comfortable with all that. When she had finished her coffee, Gaines led her over there and said, ‘While we’re waiting, why don’t we have a look at this seizure activity of
yours? Hop up on the table.’ She hopped up on the table and let him get a couple of probes into her at neurotypical sites. One of them slipped into her chest cavity, high up. She felt it
rest momentarily against the collarbone as it pressed past. A sensation difficult to interpret: not painful so much as certain and invasive. Soon she experienced pleasantly warm and lethargic
feelings, with everything retreating to a distance as if it had nothing to do with her. ‘That’s great,’ Gaines told her, ‘just relax. Fuck,’ he said, to someone
else. ‘These guys, whoever they were! Look at this. And this.’ He touched something and colours flew about in her head like small birds. She heard herself laugh. ‘Oops,’
Gaines said. ‘Wrong switch. Did you like that?’ She tasted metal, then two or three workshop spaces seemed to open inside her. Gaines began working in one of them. Later Case arrived
to have a look.

‘I don’t want him here,’ she said.

‘It’s fine,’ Gaines said. ‘It’ll be fine.’

‘I want you to wake me up now,’ the assistant said.

Gaines bent over her and she saw him smile.

‘You’ll be fine,’ he said.

‘Are you going to strangle me?’

‘You’ll be fine.’

After that she never seemed to be properly conscious again. She could tell what was happening, but it didn’t involve her. ‘Did you know you’ve got a 27 to 40 gHz radar
option?’ Gaines said. His voice came from inside her now, with a clear echo, as if they were back in the tunnels. ‘Short range local surveillance medium. Not bad. Would you like it
switched on?’ He switched it on and she saw everything in the control room filmy grey. Case’s people rolled the table over into the middle of the space, under the brightest light,
where they left it. She lay in a comfortable haze, lighted internally by the 27 to 40 gHz radar, which Gaines had left switched on. She could detect people coming and going but not move her head.
Eventually they swung the inspection table on its axis and did something to the probes so that her unforced sensory systems came back on. The assistant saw what was under the lights and why she
had been brought here.

Two or three days earlier, after a minor convulsion ripped up the containment area, the object known to Case’s team as ‘Pearl’ or ‘the Pearl’
had begun to fall again. This process – less motion than an attempt to express motion in a static medium – seemed as wilful as it was stylised. Her body language, Gaines thought, was
that of a sustained struggle against circumstances no one else could be allowed to understand. Case had a different view.

‘Fuck that,’ he said. It would be wise to remember that the falling woman was neither falling nor a woman. It was a monster, heavily misrepresented from the data. It was the
nearest guess the instruments could make about what was actually going on. ‘Much like the universe itself, it’s a useless analogy for an unrepresentable state,’ he said, and
laughed. This led to an argument between the two men about the original nature of the Aleph. Case believed they had been wrong about that, too.

‘It never contained a fragment of the Tract,’ he said.

‘Then what?’

‘It contained the whole of it. It still does.’

Once they had the policewoman disabled and in position, the Aleph team brought up their final item of equipment. Shiny one moment, indistinct the next, it was still assembling itself from a
nervous slurry of materials – carbon nanofibres, non-Abelian superconductors held at ambient temperatures, fast-evolving AI swarms running on picotech. Next an operator was introduced. It
took the form of a young girl, thin and tan, perhaps eight years old, dressed in the dark blue shorts and short-sleeved Aertex shirt of an endless summer holiday in St Steven’s Withy or
Burnam Agnate, who reminded Gaines of his daughter at that age. The operator was quick to sense this.

‘Oh, Rig!’ it said, taking his hands and laughing up at him. Its feet were bare. ‘What have you got for us this time!’

It winked. Raw white light poured out its eyes, mouth and nose. Then it seemed to break up into a shower of sparks and enter the machine. Musical sounds emerged. A single awed voice said:
‘Strange forces are at work here.’

‘For fuck’s sake, Case,’ Gaines said. ‘Let’s just get on with it.’

Case’s people pressed the tit.

For a moment nothing happened. Then the policewoman jumped off the table, swaggered three paces away from it and attempted to switch on her tailoring. Whatever Gaines had done to her switched
it off again.

She shouted angrily and tried again, and was switched off again. Visual records showed two or three iterations of this behaviour occurring in a single five-second period, as the
assistant’s housekeeping systems laid new neural pathways around the blocks put in by Gaines. Learning rates were impressive but capped out quickly: within two minutes she was able to
remain overdriven for periods up to twelve seconds, but her repertoire – and her range – of movements became fixed. Anxiety pushed the repertoire through several iterations, during
which the subject was observed to:

Jump off the cutting table (once); crouch on the floor and move her head rapidly side to side, emitting active sonar between 200 and 1000 kHz (three times); perform other target-seeking
behaviours (twice); become aware of the Pearl in front of her (twice); vomit a white liquid (once); throw up her hands and shout something indistinct (four times); turn left and run three paces
(four times); turn left and run four paces (three times); decelerate abruptly (every time); and scream (every time).

Somebody laughed.

‘Stop that,’ said Case.

Overdriven movement registered as the usual mucoid blur. Waste heat systems undervented, raising the subject’s body temperature slightly above operating norms at 110 degrees fahrenheit;
cortisol, androstenedione and estradiol levels rose sharply. After the fourth iteration, a suite of unplanned arm-movements began to be present. No one was able to explain this.

Throughout, the Pearl remained stable. Viewed as a false-colour display, the folds of its metallic gown fluttered in undetectable drafts. A faint zone of refraction surrounded it, causing the
image – now perhaps twice life size – to ripple as if underwater. Its face looked human, then more like a cat’s face. After some minutes there came a shift in the index of
refraction, like a little step-change in energy states. At the same time the main research tool came to life: elements of the labyrinth began to realign themselves; a grinding vibration could be
felt in the floor. Hologram schematics flickered. Seismic arrays were picking up action at the scale of plate tectonics. ‘VF14/2b is warming up,’ someone announced, and began to reel
off phase-space data. Case’s operator said in a calm voice, ‘There’s something massive in the tunnels.’ The overhead lights dimmed and shifted towards the red. ‘You
may have to extract me,’ the operator said.

Then it shouted, ‘Look, look! In the maze! Deep time!’ Nothing was heard from it after that.

Meanwhile the Pearl opened and closed its mouth, waving its arms above its head in a kind of boneless, astonished panic. It seemed to be falling faster. Thousands of small objects tumbled
along with it, as if the air itself were unloading them, glowing embers or stained-glass fragments, bouncing and rattling as energetically as Entreflex dice where they fell. Waves of perfume
– cheap, old fashioned and bizarrely sexual, something you might smell on Pierpoint Street at four in the morning – billowed through The Old Control Room. As if disheartened by this
display, the policewoman tired visibly. She made a last effort to break Gaines’ behavioural constraints, then raised her left fist to her mouth and bit at the knuckles. She stared over her
shoulder at him.

‘Help!’ she called (once).

Then she jumped into the Pearl and vanished. After that, the Pearl vanished too, and everything went dark.

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Gaines into the silence.

He was working out how to distance himself from the project and move on when he saw the tall white flower of light slowly beginning to bloom, and heard the voices and sounds which, to him at
least, sounded like the voices and sounds of something, as he put it to himself,
arriving
, and began to run like everyone else for the back door of the facility and the debatable safety of
the labyrinth beyond, trampling as they did so the ageing Case, who had lost both his sticks.

TWENTY SEVEN

The Medium is Not the Message

When Anna Waterman fell through the summerhouse floor and into the Aleph, it was just before dawn on a damp September morning in London. What time it was for the Aleph would
be less easy to record.

The space she fell through was a confusing colour, like darkness on a windy night. It was too wide to be a tunnel, too confined to be anything else. Its boundary conditions allowed her to
topple; they didn’t allow her to touch the sides. The sky quickly contracted to an almost invisible point above her. For a time, the cat was some company. It fell with a comical expression
on its face, then seemed to drift in towards her, kneading the air with its front paws and purring loudly, after which they lost sight of one another. ‘James, you nuisance,’ Anna
said.

Up above, something settled, as if the summerhouse, properly on fire this time, had begun to collapse. Rattling down towards her came a shower of objects coloured deep wine and amber or fanned
by their speed to the fierce yellow of Barbie hair. These hot dolls, burning coals and melted pill-bottles seemed to be falling much faster than Anna; as they passed they matched her velocity for
a moment, so that she felt she could have reached out and touched them; then they accelerated away and were quickly lost to sight.

In life, she knew, you might: Fall ill. Fall pregnant. Fall from grace.

God knows she had done all three of those. ‘Mine was a prolonged fall,’ she imagined herself explaining, ‘accompanied by much of the detritus I thought I’d left
behind.’ She addressed the cat: ‘Name your
jouissance
.’

As she fell, she was aware of her arms waving slowly and bonelessly. Her legs pedalled. The sensation of falling was, she thought, much the same as that of treading water: the more you
struggled the less control you maintained. Your heart rate increased, all the effort went to waste. You felt closer to drowning. It was a mistake to allow that idea in. The most important
distinction of childhood is the one between falling asleep and falling as death. Long before she had fallen into anorexia, or read Milton on the fall from dawn to dewy eve, or fallen victim to
Michael Kearney, Anna had been afraid to fall asleep. As soon as she recognised that, she began to struggle. There followed predictable moments of panic, flickering and buzzing on all sides,
anguished flashes of light, after which she found herself in an echoing space, the nature of which she would have been hard put to describe.