The Machinery of Light

Some of the Haskells laugh. “You think I’m trapped?”

“I have your flesh, don’t I?”

“You of all people should know that meat means nothing—”

“We’ll see if that’s true when I burn it.”

The Operative notices something. Sinclair’s eyes are tracking on some of the screens, ignoring others. He wonders if any of the others have noticed this. But everybody else seems just too intent on trying to keep up—

“Do that and you won’t find your way home,” says Haskell.

“Home?” Sinclair laughs. “Why would I want to go home?”

“How else are you going to rule humanity—”

“And go back in time to change it,” says Lynx.

“I’m not,” says Sinclair.

“What?” asks Lynx.

“You can’t go back,” says Sinclair. “Travel to the past is travel to a parallel past by definition. Thus do the laws of quantum gravity sidestep paradox. And as to going back to the future of the world we left, Claire: a better question is, why would I want to?”

That last one seems to catch her off guard. “You—don’t—?”

“I don’t know if you noticed, but Earth really went to the dogs these last few days.”

“Thanks to you—”

“Can’t make an omelette without … well, what can I say? There are only so many ways to hammer a hole into the next dimension. Mass killing was always one of the more direct routes—”

“That was just one part of it,” she says coldly.

“Sure. First we had to get a bridgehead established.”

“Me,” she says.

“Us,” says Sarmax.

All of them, and he’s been left to live with it all: his role as the original prototype, his part in the creation of the ultimate hit-team, his days training those who would take his place, his nights with the woman whose body sprawls in front of him—

“Exactly,” says Sinclair. “The Rain. And only Leo here had any idea what he was getting into.”

“I was young enough to be into masochism.”

“A vice that failed to fade with time.”

“Fuck you, Matthew.”

“Do you want to see Indigo again or don’t you?”

“I see her in my mind right now, you bastard.”

“That might be all you ever do.”

“Didn’t you once tell me that memory is real?”

“Everything in the mind is real,” says Sinclair. “Though it got a lot more complicated once I’d remixed your head with all the histories of your other selves—”

“I thought Control was lying when he said—”

“He wasn’t. How else do you think I got a duplicate Marlowe into the mix? Took a shell and charged it with emissions seeping in from—”

“Fuck,” says Sarmax. He feels like he’s been punched in the gut. He notices Carson and Lynx seem to have the same reaction—

“This is bullshit,” says Lynx.

“I’m sure you wish it was.”

“But—they—the memories of those years—they were all consistent,” says Sarmax.

“Consistent at any given instant. Not necessarily across instants, though—”

“Jesus,” says Lynx, “that’s why it’s been such a head trip.”

Lynx’s mind’s spinning, but it’s finally all starting to make sense. Sinclair reprogrammed them with the real memories of others, left so much latent—and tapped so much else to enable telepathy among his agents, breaking down the walls that are—

“Everywhere,” says Lynx.

Sinclair nods. “Space-time riddled with bubbles; quantum foam that pervades us, each bubble a momentary wormhole, and all of it entangled. And once you postulate that Einstein’s hidden variable is actually consciousness, then the mind’s real significance in driving nonlocality becomes apparent. Unless, of course, your civilization is so dysfunctional it’s based on blinding itself to the obvious. Of course minds can link. Animals do it all the time. Just watch flocks of birds changing direction. Or the hive minds of bees and ants. But the human animal shackled itself in chains of language—language that opened up new possibilities even as it foreclosed others—”

“I thought you said you blamed religion,” says Linehan.

“‘In the beginning was the Word’: what the fuck do you think language is? How else do we label the universe?—and so much of that labeling is the papering-over of things we don’t understand. Why do humans have to be so fucking certain about everything even when they know nothing?”

No one says anything.

“I’ll tell you why. They don’t have the strength to gaze into abyss.”

“Unlike you,” says Haskell.

His eyes snap toward her, and she’s wondering if he’s realized what’s up with the screens. Or if he’s way ahead of her …

“I’m going to find you,” he says.

“You can try,” she says.

“But she’s right there,” says Linehan.

“I’m talking about her awareness,” says Sinclair. “On what sunless seas is she traveling? What stars gleam in the spaces through which she’s soaring? Is she even now beachcombing the shores of inflating universes?”

“She is,” she whispers—he’s right. They stretch all about her, whole hierarchies of dimensions, endless grids of no-grids, vast innation fields, pure information begetting endless chains of existence ripping past her, each one described by a wave-function that in itself describes a whole multiverse within it, infinite possibilities of some larger megaverse, the myriad paths stretching out on all sides and she can only see just a fucking fraction of it all. She takes in the plight and promise of infinite humanities, sees too—

“Tell me we’re not the only ones,” says Sinclair.

“We’re not,” she replies—sees in his eyes that he gets it, knows he can’t wait to see it—the limitless forms of life that populate existences—so many of those worlds just life and nothing more and some of them rising up toward intelligence, and some of that intelligence becoming starfaring—

“But what about in here?” says Sinclair.

“I see nothing,” she says.

“Nothing’s managed to slip between the cracks of time?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” asks Carson.

“I’m talking about the competition,” says Sinclair.

“You mean aliens?” asks Linehan.

“They wouldn’t even have to be that,” says Sarmax. “Could be any other humanity that’s managed to crack the code—”

“We have to assume others have done it,” says Sinclair. “Have to assume that they’re out there, maybe maneuvering against us even now—”