The Light of Other Days

…and for Bobby, still warm with the afterglow of orgasm, it was as if the woman in his arms had suddenly turned three-dimensional, solid and whole, had come to life. Everything he could see, feel, smell — the warm ash scent of her hair, the exquisite line of her cheek where the low light caught it, the seamless smoothness of her belly — it was all just as it had been before. But it was as if he had reached through that surface texture into the warmth of Kate herself. He saw her eyes, watchful, full of concern — concern for him, he realized with a fresh jolt. He wasn’t alone any more. And, before now, he hadn’t even known he had been.

He wanted to immerse himself in her oceanic warmth. She touched his cheek. He could see that her fingers came away wet.

And now he could feel the great shuddering sobs that racked his body, an uncontrollable storm of weeping. Love and pain coursed through him, exquisite, hot, unbearable.

Chapter 12 Spacetime

The inner chaos didn’t subside.

He tried to distract himself. He resumed activities he had relished before. But even the most extravagant virtual adventure seemed shallow, obviously artificial, predictable, unengaging.

He seemed to need people, even though he shied away from those close to him, he was a moth fearing the candle flame, he thought, unable to bear the brightness of the emotions involved. So he accepted invitations he wouldn’t otherwise have considered, talked to people he had never needed before.

Work helped, with its constant and routine demands for his attention, its relentless logic of meetings and schedules and resource allocation.

And it was a busy time. The new Mind’sEye VR headbands were moving out of the testing labs and approaching production status. His teams of technicians had, suddenly, resolved a last technical glitch: a tendency for the headbands to cause synaesthesia in their users, a muddling of the sensory inputs caused by cross talk between the brain’s centres. It was a cause for long celebration. They knew that IBM’s renowned Watson research lab had been working on exactly the same problem; whoever cracked the synaesthesia issue first would be the first to reach the market, and would have a clear competitive edge for a long time to come. It now looked as if OurWorld had won that particular race.

So work was absorbing. But he couldn’t work twenty-four hours a day, and he couldn’t sleep the rest of the time away. And when he was awake, his mind, unleashed for the first time, was rampaging out of control.

As his cars SmartDrove him to the Wormworks, he cowered in fear from the high-speed traffic. An unremarkable tabloid news item — about vicious killings and rapes in the burgeoning Aral Sea water war — moved him to harsh tears. A Puget Sound sunset, glimpsed through a broken layer of fluffy black clouds, filled him with awe simply at being alive.

When he met his father, fear, loathing, love, admiration tore at him — all overlying a deeper, unbreakable bond.

But he could face Hiram. Kate was different. The surging need he felt — to cherish her, possess her, somehow consume her — was completely overwhelming. In her company he became inarticulate, as out of control of his mind as much as his body.

Somehow she knew how he was feeling; and, quietly, she left him alone. He knew she would be there for him when he was ready to face her, and resume their relationship.

But at least with Hiram and Kate he could figure out why he felt the way he did, trace a causal relationship, put tentative labels to the violent emotions that rocked him. The worst of all were the mood swings he seemed to suffer without discernible cause.

He would wake up crying without reason. Or, in the middle of a mundane day, he would find himself filled with an indescribable joy, as if everything suddenly made sense.

His life before seemed remote, textureless, like a flat, colourless pencil sketch. Now he was immersed in a new world of colour and texture and light and feeling, where the simplest things — the curl of an early spring leaf, the glimmer of sunlight on water, the smooth curve of Kate’s cheek — could be suffused by a beauty he had never known existed.

And Bobby — the fragile ego that rode on the surface of this dark inner ocean — would have to learn to live with the new, complex, baffling person he had suddenly become.

That was why he had come to seek out his brother. He took great comfort from David’s stolid, patient presence: this bear-like figure with his bushy blond hair, hunched over his SoftScreens, immersed in his work, satisfied with its logic and internal consistency, scribbling notes with a surprising delicacy. David’s personality was as massive and solid as his body; beside him Bobby felt evanescent, a wisp, yet subtly calmed.

•

One unseasonably cold afternoon they sat cradling coffees, waiting for the results of another routine trial run: a new wormhole plucked out of the quantum foam, extending further than any had before.

“I can understand a theorist wanting to study the limits of the wormhole technology,” Bobby said. “Pushing the envelope as far as you can. But we made the big breakthrough already. Surely what’s important now is the application.”

“Of course,” David said mildly. “In fact the application is everything. Hiram has a goal of turning wormhole generation from a high-energy physics stunt, affordable only by governments and large corporations, into something much smaller, easily manufactured, miniaturized.”

“Like computers,” Bobby said.

“Exactly. It wasn’t until miniaturization and the development of the PC that computers were able to saturate the world: finding new applications, creating new markets — transforming our lives, in fact.

“Hiram knows we won’t keep our monopoly forever. Sooner or later somebody else is going to come up with an independent WormCam design. Maybe a better one. And miniaturization and cost reduction are sure to follow.”

“And the future for OurWorld,” said Bobby, “is surely to be the market leader, all those little wormhole generators.”

“That’s Hiram’s strategy,” David said. “He has a vision of the WormCam replacing every other data-gathering instrument: cameras, microphones, science sensors, even medical probes. Although I can’t say I’m looking forward to a wormhole endoscopy…

“But I told you I studied a little business myself, Bobby. Mass-produced WormCams will be a commodity, and we will be able to compete only on price. But I believe that with our technical lead Hiram can open up much greater opportunities for himself with differentiation: by coming up with applications which nobody else in the market can offer. And that’s what I’m interested in exploring.” He grinned. “At least, that’s what I tell Hiram his money is being spent on down here.”

Bobby studied him, trying to focus on his brother, on Hiram, the WormCam, trying to understand. “You just want to know, don’t you? That’s the bottom line for you.”

David nodded. “I suppose so. Most science is just grunt work. Repetitive slog; endless testing and checking. And because false hypotheses have to be pruned away, much of the work is actually more destructive than constructive. But, occasionally — only a few times, probably, in the luckiest life — there is a moment of transcendence.”

“Transcendence?”

“Not everybody will put it like that. But it’s how it feels to me.”

“And it doesn’t matter that there might be nobody to read your papers in five hundred years’ time?”

“I’d rather that wasn’t true. Perhaps it won’t be. But the revelation itself is the thing, Bobby. It always was.”

On the ’Screen behind him there was a starburst of pixels, and a low bell-like tone sounded.

David sighed. “But not today, it seems.”

Bobby peered over his brother’s shoulder at the ’Screen, across which numbers were scrolling. “Another instability? It’s like the early days of the wormholes.”

David tapped at a keyboard, setting up another trial. “Well, we are being a little more ambitious. Our WormCams can already reach every part of the Earth, crossing distances of a few thousand kilometres. What I’m attempting now is to extract and stabilize wormholes which span significant intervals in Minkowski spacetime, in fact, tens of light-minutes.”

Bobby held up his hands. “You already lost me. A light-minute is the distance light travels in a minute… right?”

“Yes. For example, the planet Saturn is around a billion and a half kilometres away. And that is about eighty light-minutes.”

“And we want to see Saturn.”

“Of course we do. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a WormCam that could explore deep space? No more ailing probes, no more missions lasting years… But the difficulty is that wormholes spanning such large intervals are extremely rare in the quantum foam’s probabilistic froth. And stabilizing them presents challenges an order of magnitude more difficult than before. But it’s not impossible.”

“Why ‘intervals,’ not distances?”

“Physicist jargon. Sorry. An interval is like a distance, but in spacetime. Which is space plus time. It’s really just Pythagoras’ theorem.” He took a yellow legal notepad and began to scribble. “Suppose you go downtown and walk a few blocks east, a few blocks north. Then you can figure the distance you travelled like this.” He held up the pad:

(distance)² = (east)² + (north)²

“You walked around a right-angled triangle. The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of -”

“I know that much.”

“But we physicists think about space and time as a single entity, with time as a fourth coordinate, in addition to the three of space.” He wrote on his pad once more:

(interval)² = (time separation)² — (space separation)²

“This is called the metric for a Minkowski spacetime. And -”

“How can you talk about a separation in time in the same breath as a separation in space?. You measure time in minutes, but space in kilometres.”

David nodded approvingly. “Good question. You have to use units in which time and space are made equivalent.” He studied Bobby, evidently searching for understanding. “Let’s just say that if you measure time in minutes, and space in light-minutes, it works out fine.”

“But there’s something else fishy here. Why is this a minus sign rather than a plus?”

David rubbed his fleshy nose. “A map of spacetime doesn’t work quite like a map of downtown Seattle. The metric is designed so that the path of a photon — a particle travelling at the speed of light — is a null interval. The interval is zero, because the space and time terms cancel out.”

“This is relativity. Something to do with time dilation, and rulers contracting, and -”

“Yes.” David patted Bobby’s shoulder. “Exactly that. This metric is invariant under the Lorentz transformation… Never mind. The point is, Bobby, this is the kind of equation I have to use when I work in a relativistic universe, and certainly if I’m trying to build a wormhole that reaches out to Saturn and beyond.”

Bobby mused over the simple, handwritten equation.

With his own emotional whirlwind still churning around him, he felt a cold logic coursing through him, numbers and equations and images evolving, as if he was suffering from some kind of