There are hints, and there is belief. There is a cult. There are residuals unable to make peace with their primaries’ death. They feel their presence in all the places where pieces of metallurgists from the ingots could have gotten. In turbine blades of aircraft engines, in micromanipulators, in biomechanical implants, in active rivets of architectural structures, in surgical instruments, in antennas of geostationary satellites.
They feel themselves to be a part of the …
Cloud.
* * *
“I don’t like truth,” Faíd told me when we met face to face for the first and last time. “It reminds me of a spoiled brat from a ‘good’ family who doesn’t have to be smart, original or pleasant, but everyone feels he should come before others. If you’re convinced something is right, should you toss it away just because the truth is different?”
We sat in the Al Emerald hotel’s café in Piraka. Faíd fit in here perfectly. He looked like another tarnished ornament with his golden rings, greased hair and round face.
“You see how honest I’m being with you? So return me the favor. Your girlfriend is a lovely woman. Charming. I understand your hopes in the realliance program. But let’s imagine how it goes: She returns into her organic body after nine months, tired and transformed by the long mission inside the ingot. Suddenly a stranger appears in the corner of her consciousness. Do you remember me? Do you love me? What do I mean to you? Are we living together? Sure, the steelworks will let you try the full realliance program so that she keeps her memories of you, after all you’re paying them to, but the success rate is three percent. Three percent!”
I kept fidgeting with my empty cup absently.
“I asked you to see me because I believe that the steelworks can offer you something more. That I can offer you something more. But only assuming that you don’t hold to the truth.”
My mouth was dry and my gaze flickered between our table to the glass entrance and back, as if Bamobah could somehow appear there miraculously and save me before I did something crazy.
“How much more?” I managed to say.
Faíd leaned back and smiled. “Nine point five percent.”
I knew that number. It haunted me in my dreams and gave me perverse hope. Nine point five percent of metallurgists were rumored not to return into their organic bodies after long shifts. The official numbers provided by the steelworks were a magnitude lower and blurred by interpretations in the media. But this was what the bad news said: nine and a half percent.
“You’re talking about the Cloud?”
Faíd didn’t speak, but his eyes said yes.
* * *
We went to Karshad by train. It was Bamobah’s idea: “We may meet in the same coupé on the way back. We may start a conversation.”
Her certainty about the failure of the full realliance gave me chills. But I just said: “That could happen.”
We passed by the monotonous desert landscape, dry, bleak, scarred by the disharmony of dusty roads and concrete houses.
“When you’re inside,” I asked Bamobah, who was clutching my hand absently, “what’s the most beautiful and impressive thing in there?”
She looked pensive for a split-second, but answered in a voice that allowed no hesitation: “Spinodal decompositions. Everyone loves the world under a spinodal curve. Every single metallurgist will tell you that nothing compares to that. And they would be right.”
She was shaking and staring out of the window.
“Tell me more about it.”
“You know, all the other changes, formation of microstructures, precipitation, coalescence – all of that starts somewhere. With lattice defects, impurities. There are tiny germs, nucleation sites, like when plants grow out of seeds. It’s different under the spinodal curve. Everything happens at the same time, and everywhere at once. Imagine two phases, like two different metals to simplify the example. They’re perfectly mixed above a certain temperature, create one crystal lattice together and you can’t tell them apart. You’re above their segregation threshold – the spinodal curve. But then something changes. You make a few endothermic operations and the system falls under the threshold. Everywhere, completely everywhere, there are suddenly two markedly different components mixed so thoroughly that it defies their nature. Where they grow apart, each creates its own tiny world. And you, before the diffusion bridges restore your integrity, grow apart too.”
Bamobah continued for a while, but I couldn’t listen anymore. I watched her mouth move, but sound went through me like through a paper screen. I wondered whether I could write a news story like that. One that would start as one person’s story but then would, without those seeds, without grains, divide into two. And I, the narrator, would be a part of both. But then, when the train shook suddenly, it occurred to me that I’m living such a story. While Bamobah was baring the innermost feelings of her self to me, the self I had never met, I was thinking about my work.
* * *
For some time ago Bamobah told me: “In-situ metallurgy is a little like writing stories. If you write a story, you have to take your self and carry it into a new world. Do what you need there, and then come back. But you leave traces of yourself in those stories, in the ink of the letters. I leave traces of myself in dislocations, vacancies, antiphase boundaries. So when a metallurgist decides to stay in the microstructure and become a part of the Cloud, it’s a matter of quantity – how much of yourself you leave inside. Quality is already a given: you’re inside. Forever. But hasn’t it ever happened that a writer had gone crazy and decided to stay inside their fictional world?”
I had no answer for that. I wrote articles, not fiction. I was just an observer; on the contrary, I was careful to leave as few traces of myself as possible in what I wrote. Yet when I found some of my older articles, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that my younger self was speaking to
