I can tell when we’re getting close, without even searching the skyline; there are lights on in all of the houses, and families standing in their front yards. Many people wave and cheer as we pass, a sight that always depresses me. When a group of teenagers, standing on a street corner drinking beer, scream abuse and gesture obscenely, I can’t help feeling perversely encouraged.
‘Dickheads,’ mutters the cop I don’t know. I keep my mouth shut.
We take a corner, and I spot a trio of helicopters, high on my right, ascending with a huge projection screen in tow. Suddenly, a corner of the screen is obscured, and my eye extends the curve of the eclipsing object from this one tiny arc to giddy completion.
From the outside, by day, The Intake makes an impressive sight: a giant black dome, completely non-reflective, blotting out a great bite of the sky. It’s impossible not to believe that you’re confronting a massive, solid object. By night, though, it’s different. The shape is still unmistakable, cut in a velvet black that makes the darkest night seem grey, but there’s no illusion of solidity; just an awareness of a different kind of void.
The Intake has been appearing for almost ten years now. It’s always a perfect sphere, a little more than a kilometre in radius, and usually centred close to ground level. On rare occasions, it’s been known to appear out at sea, and slightly more often, on uninhabited land, but the vast majority of its incarnations take place in populated regions.
The currently favoured hypothesis is that a future civilisation tried to construct a wormhole that would let them sample the distant past, bringing specimens of ancient life into their own time to be studied. They screwed up. Both ends of the wormhole came unstuck. The thing has shrunk and deformed, from —
presumably — some kind of grand temporal highway, bridging geological epochs, to a gateway that now spans less time than it would take to cross an atomic nucleus at the speed of light. One end — The Intake — is a kilometre in radius; the other is about a fifth as big, spatially concentric with the first, but displaced an almost immeasurably small time into the future. We call the inner sphere — the wormhole’s destination, which seems to be inside it, but isn’t — The Core.
Why this shrivelled-up piece of failed temporal engineering has ended up in the present era is anyone’s guess; maybe we just happened to be halfway between the original endpoints, and the thing collapsed symmetrically. Pure bad luck. The trouble is, it hasn’t quite come to rest. It materialises somewhere on the planet, remains fixed for several minutes, then loses its grip and vanishes, only to appear at a new location a fraction of a second later. Ten years of analysing the data has yielded no method for predicting successive locations, but there must be some remnant of a navigation system in action; why else would the wormhole cling to the Earth’s surface (with a marked preference for inhabited, dry land) instead of wandering off on a random course into interplanetary space? It’s as if some faithful, demented computer keeps valiantly trying to anchor The Intake to a region which might be of interest to its scholarly masters; no Palaeozoic life can be found, but twenty-first-century cities will do, since there’s nothing much else around. And every time it fails to make a permanent connection and slips off into hyperspace, with infinite dedication, and unbounded stupidity, it tries again.
Being of interest is bad news. Inside the wormhole, time is mixed with one spatial dimension, and —
whether by design or physical necessity — any movement which equates to travelling from the future into the past is forbidden. Translated into the wormhole’s present geometry, this means that when The Intake materialises around you, motion away from the centre is impossible. You have an unknown time —
maybe eighteen minutes, maybe more, maybe less — to navigate your way to the safety of The Core, under these bizarre conditions. What’s more, light is subject to the same effect; it only propagates inwards. Everything closer to the centre than you lies in the invisible future. You’re running into darkness.
I have heard people scoff at the notion that any of this could be difficult. I’m not quite enough of a sadist to hope that they learn the truth, first-hand.
Actually, outwards motion isn’t quite literally impossible. If it were, everyone caught in The Intake would die at once. The heart has to circulate blood, the lungs have to inhale and exhale, nerve impulses have to travel in all directions. Every single living cell relies on shuffling chemicals back and forth, and I can’t even guess what the effect would be on the molecular level, if electron clouds could fluctuate in one direction but not the reverse.
There is some leeway. Because the wormhole’s entire eight hundred metres spans such a minute time interval, the distance scale of the human body corresponds to an even shorter period — short enough for quantum effects to come into play. Quantum uncertainty in the space-time metric permits small, localised violations of the classical law’s absolute restriction.
So, instead of everyone dying on the spot, blood pressure goes up, the heart is stressed, breathing becomes laborious, and the brain may function erratically. Enzymes, hormones, and other biological molecules are all slightly deformed, causing them to bind less efficiently to their targets, interfering to some degree with every biochemical process; haemoglobin, for example, loses its grip on oxygen more easily. Water diffuses out of the body — because random thermal motion is suddenly not so random — leading to gradual dehydration.
People already in very poor health can die from these effects. Others are just made nauseous, weak and confused — on top of the inevitable shock and panic. They make bad decisions. They get trapped.
One way or another, a few hundred lives are lost, every time The Intake materialises. Intake Runners may save ten or twenty people, which I’ll admit is not much of a success rate, but until some genius works out how to rid us of the wormhole for good, it’s better than nothing.
The screen is in place high above us, when we reach the ‘South Operations Centre’ — a couple of vans, stuffed with electronics, parked on someone’s front lawn. The now familiar section of street map appears, the image rock steady and in perfect focus, in spite of the fact that it’s being projected from a fourth helicopter, and all four are jittering in the powerful inwards wind. People inside can see out, of course; this map — and the others, at the other compass points — will save dozens of lives. In theory, once outdoors, it should be simple enough to head straight for The Core; after all, there’s no easier direction to find, no easier path to follow. The trouble is, a straight line inwards is likely to lead you into obstacles, and when you can’t retrace your steps, the most mundane of these can kill you.
So, the map is covered with arrows, marking the optimal routes to The Core, given the constraint of staying safely on the roads. Two more helicopters, hovering above The Intake, are doing one better: with high-velocity paint guns under computer control, and laser-ring inertial guidance systems constantly telling the shuddering computers their precise location and orientation, they’re drawing the same arrows in fluorescent/reflective paint on the invisible streets below. You can’t see the arrows ahead of you, but you can look back at the ones you’ve passed. It helps.
There’s a small crowd of coordinators, and one or two Runners, around the vans. This scene always looks forlorn to me, like some small-time rained-out amateur athletics event, air traffic notwithstanding. Angelo calls out, ‘Break a leg!’ as I run from the car. I raise a hand and wave without turning. Loudspeakers are blasting the standard advice inwards, cycling through a dozen languages. In the corner of my eye I can see a TV crew arriving. I glance at my watch. Nine minutes. I can’t help thinking,
seventy-one per cent,
although The Intake is, clearly, one hundred per cent still there. Someone taps me on the shoulder. Elaine. She smiles and says, ‘John, see you in The Core,’ then sprints into the wall of darkness before I can reply.
Dolores is handing out assignments on RAM. She wrote most of the software used by Intake Runners around the world, but then, she makes her living writing computer games. She’s even written a game which models The Intake itself, but sales have been less than spectacular; the reviewers decided it was in bad taste. ‘What’s next? Let’s play Airline Disaster?’ Maybe they think flight simulators should be programmed for endless calm weather. Meanwhile, televangelists sell prayers to keep the wormhole away; you just slip that credit card into the home-shopping slot for instant protection.
‘What have you got for me?’
‘Three infants.’
‘Is that
all?’
‘You come late, you get the crumbs.’
I plug the cartridge into my backpack. A sector of the street map appears on the display panel, marked with three bright red dots. I strap on the pack, and then adjust the display on its movable arm so I can catch it with a sideways glance, if I have to. Electronics can be made to function reliably inside the wormhole, but everything has to be specially designed.
It’s not ten minutes, not quite. I grab a cup of water from a table beside one of the vans. A solution of mixed carbohydrates, supposedly optimised for our metabolic needs, is also on offer, but the one time I tried it I was sorry; my gut isn’t interested in absorbing anything at this stage, optimised or not. There’s coffee too, but the very last thing I need right now is a stimulant. Gulping down the water, I hear my name, and I can’t help tuning in to the TV reporter’s spiel.
‘. . . John Nately, high-school science teacher and unlikely hero, embarking on this, his
eleventh
call as a volunteer Intake Runner. If he survives tonight, he’ll have set a new national record — but of course, the odds of making it through grow slimmer with every call, and by now . . .’
The moron is spouting crap — the odds
do not
grow slimmer, a veteran faces no extra risk — but this isn’t the time to set him straight. I swing my arms for a few seconds in a half-hearted warm-up, but there’s not much point; every muscle in my body is tense, and will be for the next eight hundred metres, whatever I do. I try to blank my mind and just concentrate on the run-up — the faster you hit The Intake, the less of a shock it is — and before I can ask myself, for the first time tonight, what the fuck I’m really doing here, I’ve left the isotropic universe behind, and the question is academic.
The darkness doesn’t swallow you. Perhaps that’s the strangest part of all. You’ve seen it swallow other Runners; why doesn’t it swallow
you?
Instead, it recedes from your every step. The borderline isn’t absolute; quantum fuzziness produces a gradual fade-out, stretching visibility about as far as each extended foot. By day, this is completely surreal, and people have been known to suffer fits and psychotic episodes at the sight of the void’s apparent retreat. By night, it seems merely implausible, like chasing an intelligent fog.
At the start, it’s almost too easy; memories of pain and fatigue seem ludicrous. Thanks to frequent rehearsals in a compression harness, the pattern of resistance as I breathe is almost familiar. Runners once took drugs to lower their blood pressure, but with sufficient training, the body’s own vasoregulatory system can be made flexible enough to cope with the stress, unaided. The odd tugging sensation on each leg as I bring it forward would probably drive me mad, if I didn’t (crudely) understand the reason for it: inwards motion is resisted, when pulling, rather than pushing, is involved, because
information
travels outwards. If I trailed a ten-metre rope behind me, I wouldn’t be able to take a single step; pulling on the rope would pass information about my motion from where I am to a point further out. That’s forbidden, and it’s only the quantum leeway that lets me drag each foot forwards at all.
The street curves gently to the right, gradually losing its radial orientation, but there’s no convenient turn-off yet. I stay in the middle of the road, straddling the double white line, as the border between past and future swings to the left. The road surface seems always to slope towards the darkness, but that’s just another wormhole effect; the bias in thermal molecular motion — cause of the inwards wind, and slow dehydration — produces a force, or pseudo-force, on solid objects, too, tilting the apparent vertical.
‘—me!
Please!’
A man’s voice, desperate and bewildered — and almost indignant, as if he can’t help believing that I must have heard him all along, that I must have been feigning deafness out of malice or indifference. I turn, without slowing; I’ve learnt to do it in a way that makes me only slightly dizzy. Everything appears almost normal, looking outwards — apart from the fact that the streetlights are out, and so most illumination is from helicopter floodlights and the giant street map in the sky. The cry came from a bus shelter, all vandal-proof plastic and reinforced glass, at least five metres behind me, now; it might as well be on Mars. Wire mesh covers the glass; I can just make out the figure behind it, a faint silhouette.
‘Help me!’
Mercifully — for me — I’ve vanished into this man’s darkness; I don’t have to think of a gesture to make, an expression to put on my face, appropriate to the situation. I turn away, and pick up speed. I’m not inured to the death of strangers, but I am inured to my helplessness.
After ten years of The Intake, there are international standards for painted markings on the ground around every potential hazard in public open space. Like all the other measures, it helps, slightly. There are standards, too, for eventually eliminating the hazards — designing out the corners where people can be trapped — but that’s going to cost billions, and take decades, and won’t even touch the real problem: interiors. I’ve seen demonstration trap-free houses and office blocks, with doors, or curtained doorways, in
every
corner of
every
room, but the style hasn’t exactly caught on. My own house is far from ideal; after getting quotes for alterations, I decided that the cheapest solution was to keep a sledgehammer beside every wall.