“I suppose you’re now going
to lock yourself away in that study all day long!” said Abigail, her whiny
neurotic voice now barely more intrusive than the noise of a passing car. “At
least have a shower and get dressed,” she continued. “The plasterers will be
here later. You can’t go answering the door in your dressing gown!”
“Huh? - Yeah, okay,” he said without looking up from the screen.
“And remember, you’re picking the kids up from school this afternoon. I won’t
be home until after nine. Just heat up what’s left of that spaghetti.”
“Hmm-hmm!” he murmured, scribbling some equations on a pad beside the keyboard.
“So, you won’t forget!”
“Forget what?”
“Did you hear any of what I just said?” she yelled in frustration.
“Of course!” he said, starting to type on the keyboard. “I’m to pick the kids
up from school and give them left-over spaghetti from last night.”
She fell silent and he finally stopped to look at her. Her face was flushed
with anger and exasperation.
“What?” he asked innocently.
She turned and stomped downstairs. A moment later the door slammed and peace
was restored.
There was something wrong with quantum physics!
The Dream-Zone experiences, while both entrancing
and exquisitely beautiful, had left Peter with a nagging sense of frustration –
a feeling that some important truth had been revealed to him, only to slip
through his grasp like so many grains of sand. He had gone back to the video
many times since Sunday evening, convinced on each occasion that the missing
knowledge would present itself. He had learned to control his passage through
the thought-scape, eliciting answers to almost any question, but while it all
appeared to make sense for the duration of his time in the Zone, key fragments
of understanding would disintegrate as soon as he came back out. Instead, he
would be left with incomplete pieces, all alluding to something of their former
elegance, but nevertheless falling short in some critical way.
For a while, on returning from the Zone,
everything around him would take on a profound, almost spiritual significance.
Only the previous day, Sam had found him staring intently at a ladybird on the
wall. When asked what he was doing, Peter had replied with some embarrassing
drivel about the creature’s unique place in the universe and how all living things
were connected to one another. Sam had looked worriedly at his father for a few
moments, as though fearing for his sanity, before scampering off to watch TV.
Although famously counter-intuitive, the
scientific laws governing the quantum world had stood the test of time, and
most physicists – a group of which Peter once more considered himself a member
– had grudgingly accepted the associated weirdness. But after repeated trips to
the Dream-Zone, he was once again beginning to question some of the bizarre
implications of this world – a world riddled with inherent uncertainty, where
matter could simultaneously manifest at multiple locations – a world where two
particles could become entangled in such a way as to defy changes to one
without simultaneously affecting the other – even when separated by great
distance. Depending on the problem you were trying to solve, a solution could
generally be derived using equations that treated sub-atomic matter as either
waves or particles, and so this apparent duality was embraced as a useful,
albeit inconvenient truth. And yet, Peter now found this compromise deeply
unsatisfying, as though both viewpoints were, in fact, merely approximations to
a greater underlying reality. It was somewhat reminiscent of Plato’s allegory
of the cave.
As he was grappling with these ideas, the doorbell
sounded. Still dressed in pyjamas and gown, Peter went downstairs to find a
scrawny little man in paint-splattered jeans and T-shirt, standing fidgeting on
the doorstep.
“I’m the plasterer!” said the man.
Peter nodded and led him to the upstairs landing. The man stood frowning, hands
on hips, studying the two jagged holes in the ceiling, tutting and making
various other noises presumably intended to prepare Peter for the unfavourable
verdict to follow.
“Just do what you have to do, but don’t overcharge me,” said Peter, deciding on
the pre-emptive approach. “I know exactly what’s involved in repairing this
ceiling. I just have neither the time nor the skill to do it myself.”
The man looked at him for a moment as if trying to determine whether Peter had
just questioned his integrity in some way. “Well I’d best get started then,” he
said finally, clearly still unsure.
“Help yourself to tea and coffee in the kitchen,” said Peter, “I’m going to take
a shower and then get on with my work.”
As the steaming high pressure jets stimulated the
nerve endings of his scalp and shoulders, Peter closed his eyes and tried to
empty his mind. A recurring, yet frustratingly transient image had been
presenting itself ever since the first full Dream-Zone experience on Sunday
evening. It was a complex, yet symmetrical, multifaceted geometric shape, whose
iridescent surface shimmered every colour of the rainbow, like some impossibly
convoluted cubist interpretation of a sunlit soap bubble in the breeze. It was
a thing of indescribable beauty which, during its fleeting apparitions, hinted
of deeper significance. On a number of occasions, he had tried to draw it, but
the resulting two-dimensional representations had utterly failed to capture its
essence, now once again so vividly revealed as Peter showered.
Coming out of the bathroom, he heard voices from
above and looked up to see not one, but two identical scrawny heads peering
through the dual holes in the ceiling.
“This is my brother John,” said one of the heads. “Sorry if we startled you -
we’re twins you see!”
“Nice to meet you!” said the other.
Peter stood staring at them for a moment, as the whole ceiling became overlaid
with the same shimmering shapes of his erstwhile visions. Although the heads
clearly belonged to two separate bodies, the initial impression of the same
object appearing at two distinct points in space, had triggered a thought
process, which pointed to an answer he had been seeking all his life. “That’s
it!” he shouted, rushing into the study.
For several hours he scribbled frantically in his
notebook, filling the pages with equations, comments and sketches. Periodically,
he would return to the Zone, snatching confirmatory insights into the hypothesis
that was gradually unfolding before him. The imagined shape was both
multi-dimensional and fractal, and the revelation upon which Peter was now
fixated, was that this strangely beautiful form was in fact the underlying
shape of space-time itself. Unlike the existing models of string theory though,
this configuration was not infinitely repeated in discrete sub-Planck-length
nodules, but interconnected throughout the entire universe. The specific
fractal nature of the shape meant that its mathematical description was likely
to be simpler than most of the Calabi-Yau forms previously put forward.
From the equations now flowing furiously from his
ballpoint, it looked as though every point in the cosmos could be connected to
every other through at least ten spacial dimensions. Through a startling
property of reciprocal equivalence, which appeared to derive from the fractal
nature of the shape itself, the cosmically large scales of the universe were
inextricably linked to the sub-atomically small, and if Peter was correct in
his assumptions, the resulting physics would be consistent throughout. Everything
appeared to be slotting into place: the quantum entanglement of two particles,
was in fact just the same particle appearing at two points within
three-dimensional space, the multi-location of a single photon as it passes
through parallel slits giving rise to the familiar wave-like interference
pattern, was also an artefact of the photon’s true multi-dimensional nature –
the apparent weirdness arising only from the mistaken belief that the object
was just a point in Cartesian space.
There was a knock at the study door, and one of
the heads peered hesitantly through the opening. “It’s all finished, if you
want to take a look,” said the head.
Peter stared blankly at the man for few seconds, while his brain’s current
train of thought pulled into the station of consciousness, allowing its
cognitive passengers to disembark onto the page beneath his pen. Peter surveyed
the smooth dark patches of fresh plaster where the two holes had once been.
“Your wife said you’d be painting it over yourself, is that right?”
Peter nodded, went back into his study and wrote out a cheque.
“I haven’t told you how much it is yet,” said the man watching him from the
doorway.
“Okay, tell me,” said Peter, folding the cheque in half and tucking it into his
shirt pocket.
The plasterer pulled a calculator from his tool bag and hit some buttons, all
the while mumbling something about materials, labour and tax. “A hundred and
eighty-five quid!” he said proudly after a few minutes.
Peter handed him the cheque and started walking downstairs.
“How the hell did you do that?” came a startled exclamation from behind.
Peter opened the door and winked, as the two men shuffled out, exchanging
baffled glances. He looked at his watch. Damn! He was thirty minutes late for
the kids’ pick-up from school.
As he was getting into the car, the mobile rang.
“Peter, I’ve just had a call from Sam,” came Abigail’s angry voice, “He says
he’s been waiting…”
“I’m on my way. Tell him I’ll be there in five minutes.” He hung up, too
excited to listen to another of his wife’s beratings. Although he still had a
lot of maths to get through, he was already starting to allow himself to
believe that he might have discovered the ultimate theory of everything.
Sam and Kate were tired, hungry and restless, but
Peter scarcely noticed. His mind was filled with the equations and permutations
of existence itself. Nothing else mattered. His bodily automaton set about
reheating the leftover spaghetti in the microwave, while his conscious mind
entertained the possible scenarios of his imminent universal acclaim as a
visionary theoretical physicist. People would soon be comparing him to
Einstein, he thought grandly. How did you come up with this radical new theory
all by yourself, Dr. Sawyer? they would ask. But how had he come up with it?
Had Dream-Zone inspired him to find the answer from within his own memory and
experience? How could his mind have suddenly conjured up the underlying shape
of space-time? Even Crick and Watson’s discovery of DNA’s double helix
structure had been based on some pretty strong clues, although a good deal of
insight had certainly been involved. But what had been the clues for this?
Could Dream-Zone have allowed him to tap into some external reserve of
knowledge? This is what it felt like, but how could that possibly be? And
earlier, how had he been able to guess the plasterer’s bill? If indeed it was a
guess. The separate Dream-Zone audio and graphics files had only served to
enhance access to existing memories, but the effect of the combination video
seemed to do more. The hitherto undiscovered shape of space-time could not have
come from memory – neither his nor anyone else’s. The only conceivable
explanation was that clues had existed somewhere in the depths of Peter’s mind,
and that these had somehow combined in a sudden flash of insight to produce the
final gestalt. But perhaps he was getting ahead of himself; the mathematical
proof for his discovery was still some way off. Unless he could show, in an
independently verifiable way, how the elementary particle masses and forces
implied by a universe organised in this way were in fact those observed, it
would remain no more than idle speculation. He watched, without appetite, as
the children twirled the strings of pasta around their forks, cramming the
resulting tangles into their mouths.
Having dropped Doug off at
the university, Nadia drove back to her apartment feeling both exhausted and
frustrated. They had spent most of the afternoon being questioned by a couple
of well-meaning, but none-too-bright detectives at a North London Police
station. She and Doug had agreed to come clean about Dream-Zone, but downplay
her involvement to that of friend and mutual acquaintance of the deceased. They
had tried to explain the potential danger of the video file reaching the
Chinese, but it was clear the officers had neither the slightest understanding
of what they were saying, nor any intention to follow up. Someone had beaten
the young Russian to death, and judging mainly by the lack of blood spatter on
Doug and Nadia’s clothes it seemed, the police had appeared satisfied that this
someone was neither one of them. All the subsequent talk of computer files
though had only served to confuse the poor dears. She and Doug had both aired
their suspicions that Markov was the assailant, but what, if anything, their
interrogators had made of this was hard to read.
She activated the garage door and drove slowly
down the ramp. A large white minivan was parked in the spot next to hers,
forcing her to shunt back and forth several times before slotting the Porsche
into the allotted space. Grabbing her bag from the passenger seat, she stepped
out of the car. At that moment, the driver’s door of the van swung out in front
of her, blocking her exit, while the side door slid open. “Get in!” said Sergei
Markov, sitting smugly in the back. There was a click and something cold and
hard pressed against her temple.
“Better do as he says,” came a low voice from behind.
“And give me bag before you get crazy ideas,” added Markov.
She climbed in and tossed the handbag over to his feet, where it landed on the
white metal floor with a clank. He turned it upside down, emptying the contents
into a pile, and picked up the training weight. “Aha!” he said, tossing it from
hand to hand and smiling with approval. “One could do damage with this.” He
started to put the weight back on the floor and then jabbed it at her with
lightning speed. The steel caught her on the chin, sending her flying back
against the driver’s seat.
“Unless you want to look like our friend Dmitri, you do exactly as I say and no
more games!” he continued coldly. “Now put hands behind back.”
Nadia felt a plastic cable-tie tighten around her wrists until it bit painfully
into her flesh. Markov produced a role of tape, tore off a six-inch strip and
stuck it across her mouth. He nodded to the man behind her and a cloth sack was
pulled over her head and secured around the neck. The sack smelled of
fertiliser. The image of Dmitri’s mashed face flashed before her eyes, and a
cold harsh terror began to consume her. The doors of the van slammed shut, and
the vehicle pulled away with a jolt. The tyres squealed on the smooth concrete
of the garage floor and then they were out on the street. For a while, she
tried to follow the bends and turns in the road, but soon lost track.