Other Worlds Than These

bandage on the back of his neck, just below the hairline. He was hunched over a desk covered in laptops, cables, and reams of hardcopy. “Ready for a thrashing, are you?”

“That’s why I’m here,” Mick said. “Got to cancel, sorry. Too much on my plate today.”

“Naughty.”

“Ted Evans can fill in for me. He’s got his kit. You know Ted, don’t you?”

“Vaguely.” Joe set down his sandwich to put the lid back on a felt-tipped pen. He was an amiable Yorkshireman who’d come down to Cardiff for his postgraduate work and decided to stay. He was married to an archaeologist named Rachel who spent a lot of her time poking around in the Roman ruins under the walls of Cardiff Castle. “Sure I can’t twist your arm? It’ll do you good, you know, bit of a workout.”

“I know. But there just isn’t time.”

“Your call. How are things, anyway?”

Mick shrugged philosophically. “Been better.”

“Did you phone Andrea like you said you were going to?”

“No.”

“You should, you know.”

“I’m not very good on the phone. Anyway, I thought she probably needed a bit of space.”

“It’s been three weeks, mate.”

“I know.”

“Do you want the wife to call her? It might help.”

“No, but thanks for suggesting it anyway.”

“Call her. Let her know you’re missing her.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Yeah, sure. You should stick around, you know. It’s all go here this morning. We got a lock just after seven this morning.” Joe tapped one of the laptop screens, which was scrolling rows of black- on-white numbers. “It’s a good one, too.”

“Really?”

“Come and have a look at the machine.”

“I can’t. I need to get back to my office.”

“You’ll regret it later. Just like you’ll regret canceling our match, or not calling Andrea. I know you, Mick. You’re one of life’s born regretters.”

“Five minutes, then.”

In truth, Mick always enjoyed having a nose around Joe’s basement. As solid as Mick’s own early-universe work was, Joe had really struck gold. There were hundreds of researchers around the world who would have killed for a guided tour of the Liversedge laboratory.

In the basement were ten hulking machines, each as large as a steam turbine. You couldn’t go near them if you were wearing a pacemaker or any other kind of implant, but Mick knew that, and he’d been careful to remove all metallic items before he came down the stairs and through the security doors. Each machine contained a ten tonne bar of ultra-high-purity iron, encased in vacuum and suspended in a magnetic cradle. Joe liked to wax lyrical about the hardness of the vacuum, about the dynamic stability of the magnetic field generators. Cardiff could be hit by a Richter six earthquake, and the bars wouldn’t feel the slightest tremor.

Joe called it the call center.

The machines were called correlators. At any one time eight were online, while two were down for repairs and upgrades. What the eight functional machines were doing was cold-calling: dialing random numbers across the gap between quantum realities, waiting for someone to answer on the other end.

In each machine, a laser repeatedly pumped the iron into an excited quantum state. By monitoring vibrational harmonics in the excited iron—what Joe called the back-chirp—the same laser could determine if the bar had achieved a lock onto another strand of quantum reality—another worldline. In effect, the bar would be resonating with its counterpart in another version of the same basement, in another version of Cardiff.

Once that lock was established—once the cold-calling machine had achieved a hit—then those two previously indistinguishable worldlines were linked together by an information conduit. If the laser tapped the bar with low-energy pulses, enough to influence it but not upset the lock, then the counterpart in the other lab would also register those taps. It meant that it was possible to send signals from one lab to the other, in both directions.

“This is the boy,” Joe said, patting one of the active machines. “Looks like a solid lock, too. Should be good for a full ten or twelve days. I think this might be the one that does it for us.”

Mick glanced again at the bandage on the back of Joe’s neck. “You’ve had a nervelink inserted, haven’t you.”

“Straight to the medical center as soon as I got the alert on the lock. I was nervous—first time, and all that. But it turned out to be dead easy. No pain at all. I was up and out within half an hour. They even gave me a Rich Tea Biscuit.”

“Ooh. A Rich Tea Biscuit. It doesn’t get any better than that, does it. You’ll be going through today, I take it?”

Joe reached up and tore off the bandage, revealing only a small spot of blood, like a shaving nick. “Tomorrow, probably. Maybe Sunday. The nervelink isn’t active yet, and that’ll take some getting used to. We’ve got bags of time, though; even if we don’t switch on the nervelink until Sunday, I’ll still have five or six days of bandwidth before we become noise-limited.”

“You must be excited.”

“Right now I just don’t want to cock up anything. The Helsinki boys are nipping at our heels as it is. I reckon they’re within a few months of beating us.”

Mick knew how important this latest project was for Joe. Sending information between different realities was one thing, and impressive enough in its own right. But now that technology had escaped from the labs out into the real world. There were hundreds of correlators in other labs and institutes around the world. In five years it had gone from being a spooky, barely believable phenomenon, to an accepted part of the modern world.

But Joe—whose team had always been at the forefront of the technology—hadn’t stood still. They’d been the first to work out how to send voice and video comms across the gap with another reality, and within the last year they’d been able to operate a camera-equipped robot, the same battery-driven kind that all the tourists had been using before nervelinking became the new thing. Joe had even let Mick have a go on it. With his hands operating the robot’s manipulators via force-feedback gloves, and his eyes seeing the world via the stereoscopic projectors in a virtual-reality helmet, Mick had been able to feel himself almost physically present in the other lab. He’d been able to move around and pick things up just as if he were actually walking in that alternate reality. Oddest of all had been meeting the other version of Joe Liversedge, the one who worked in the counterpart lab. Both Joes seemed cheerily indifferent to the weirdness of the setup, as if collaborating with a duplicate of yourself was the most normal thing in the world.

Mick had been impressed by the robot. But for Joe it was a stepping stone to something even better.

“Think about it,” he’d said. “A few years ago, tourists started switching over to nervelinks instead of robots. Who wants to drive a clunky machine around some smelly foreign city, when you can drive a warm human body instead? Robots can see stuff, they can move around and pick stuff up, but they can’t give you the smells, the taste of food, the heat, the contact with other people.”

“Mm,” Mick had said noncommittally. He didn’t really approve of nervelinking, even though it essentially paid Andrea’s wages.

“So we’re going to do the same. We’ve got the kit. Getting it installed is a piece of piss. All we need now is a solid link.”

And now Joe had what he’d been waiting for. Mick could practically see the Nature cover-article in his friend’s eyes. Perhaps he was even thinking about taking that long train ride to Stockholm.

“I hope it works out for you,” Mick said.

Joe patted the correlator again. “I’ve got a good feeling about this one.”

That was when one of Joe’s undergraduates came up to them. To Mick’s surprise, it wasn’t Joe she wanted to speak to.

“Doctor Leighton?”