“So what’s this all about?” Mike finally asks. “Kelly seemed pretty upset. So upset that she drove here with you instead of going to work.”
“Where do I begin?” Steve asks.
“Maybe with the beginning.”
“The beginning. Okay. I sustained a head injury in Zurich several weeks ago. A brain surgeon there saved my life. Afterwards I began suffering hallucinations, or at least that’s what I thought they were until I saw your interview on CNN.”
“What does my interview have to do with your hallucinations?”
“Before that I didn’t know anything about particle physics. I still don’t, obviously, but what little I did learn shed light on my experiences.”
“Okay.”
“Look,” Steve says. “You’re going to want to dismiss me immediately. I understand this. All I ask is that you listen to everything I have to say with an open mind, just like any other phenomenon you might observe in a laboratory, all right?”
“Okay,” Mike says again.
“I don’t
see
any of this. I think my mind wants to translate the sensations into visual images because that’s the only way I can relate to them.”
“You don’t see what?”
“The Higgs field. Electromagnetic radiation. Particles of matter.”
“Excuse me?”
“Before I ever heard of Higgs, before your interview, I began to sense what I thought of as a field, what seemed like an all-encompassing universe of points, waves, something—I couldn’t really determine its nature exactly, but I understood it in a fundamental way. How the relationships between the constituent particles of this field and the matter within it determined something important. Like weight or mass or something. It’s hard to describe. As if the density of the field varied according to the different types of matter particles.”
“That’s certainly a workable description of the Higgs field,” Mike admits. “But . . . I mean, are you sure you’d never read or heard that before? Our search has been in the news quite a bit since the super collider came online.”
“Just show him,” Kelly blurts. “Just do the same thing with him that you did with me.”
“Do what?” Mike asks.
“Just a minute,” Steve says. “I want him to understand everything first. I want to tell him how I came to be here, the bigger picture of it all.”
“You’re burying the lead,” Kelly groans.
“What?”
“That means you won’t get to the point,” Mike says. “News speak. I learned that one the hard way.”
“Okay,” Steve says. “Let me spell it out, at least the way I see it. This doctor in Zurich, I believe he did something to my brain. Intentionally. To enable me to sense the constituent elements of matter and energy. And I think he may be working with others, because someone has been tracking me since I got back to the States.”
Mike frowns and subtly pulls Kelly closer to him. “Have you talked to anyone else about this?”
“I have. I explained all this to my psychiatrist.”
“And?”
“And later I decided she couldn’t help me.”
“If you’d just
do
it,” Kelly pleads.
“I visited a prostitute in Zurich. I fell out a window. When I came to I thought I could float off my goddamn bed. It seemed like if I could just influence this field somehow, then I could levitate, and my legs—which hurt like hell—if I could levitate then I wouldn’t have to put any weight on them, you know? And why would I think I could do that when I had never heard of Higgs before?”
“Well, for one thing it doesn’t necessarily work like you think,” Mike points out. “Just because the influence of Higgs assigns mass to particles of matter, that doesn’t mean you can simply—”
“He read my mind!” Kelly says.
“What?”
“After I got out of the hospital,” Steve says, “I went back to Cabaret, the place where the prostitute worked. Her name was Svetlana. When I got there the place was closed. And Svetlana was dead.”
“Dead?” Mike asks.
“The police say she fell to her death, fell just like I did. And they couldn’t find the owner for questioning. They couldn’t find the man I struggled with before I went out the window.”
“And you think the coincidental nature of this woman’s death means there is some sort of conspiracy. To eliminate witnesses. Only why would they care who saw you at the Cabaret? Your being there doesn’t implicate anyone who chose to perform experimental surgery on you.”
“No,” Steve says. “It doesn’t. Her death could be entirely unrelated, as you say. But I left a very expensive piece of jewelry in my clothes there. A diamond engagement ring. When I awoke from my coma, the nurse explained how the prostitute had returned the ring to me a few days after my arrival in the hospital. But the Zurich police later told me that Svetlana died the morning I was admitted. So there isn’t any way she could have brought it later.”
“Maybe one of the other women brought it,” Mike offers. “Did you ever think of that?”
“Svetlana was Russian. The nurse said it was a Russian woman.”
“Was she the only Russian working there?”
“Well,” Steve says. “I don’t know. I never thought of that. But . . . I’m not sure a woman who didn’t know me would return a twenty-thousand-dollar piece of jewelry.”
“I’ll grant you that,” Mike says. “But it’s at least possible, isn’t it? And what is more believable? That an honest prostitute returned your ring, or that you are at the center of an international conspiracy, the purpose of which is to grant you mystical powers, return you to your normal life, and then see what happens?”
“This is ridiculous!” Kelly cries and pulls away from Mike. “It sounds preposterous, what he’s saying, I know. Who knows if there is a conspiracy or not? But he
told
me things, Mike. He stood outside my door and knew every time I moved on the staircase, he knew about my senior prom, he knew things no one else could have known.”
“Your senior prom?”
“Just do it,” Kelly says. “Come on, Steve. Just do it. Do it. Read his mind. Show him what you showed me so we can stop talking about
if
it’s possible and start figuring out
how
it’s possible.”
“I’m trying,” Steve says. “I’ve been trying. But I can’t . . . it doesn’t always happen when I want it to. It’s not something I have access to on demand.”
“You did with me.”
“It was quiet. Maybe it’s easier at night. I don’t know.”
“It’s after seven now,” Kelly says. “Do it, Steve. Just do it.”
“I can’t!”
Mike steps closer to Kelly again, who pretends to push him away, but he pulls her toward his body anyway. Something is not right with this man in his kitchen. He is almost certainly mentally ill. Yes, Mike promised to be open to any possibility, but obviously there is no way he can—
“He’s turning red,” Kelly says.
“Mr. Keeley?” Mike says. “Steve? Are you all right?”
“My head. God, my head hurts.”
“Look, Mike. I swear to you, he did what I said. He could not have known . . . I mean, there’s no way he could have known about the prom, about
GMA,
there’s—”
“My head. Oh, God.”
Mike’s thoughts are in disarray, wondering what the hell is going on here, how Kelly got herself (and now him) into this mess, when the glass in his hand begins to . . . to. . . . Something isn’t right. It’s vibrating. Or humming. Or
squirming
in his hand somehow. It feels as if a trillion tiny insects are crawling over the surface of the glass—
“. . . holy fucking shit this hurts . . .”
—and he is about to put the glass down so he can attend to Steve—who has collapsed to his knees, clutching his head—when the glass shatters in his hand, shatters and nearly liquefies, leaving him with a clear paste of glass shards and dripping tea and what looks, unbelievably, like sand.
5
Donovan sits in his car, watching from a small parking lot as the Concorde touches down, twin clouds of smoke curling around the rear tires. It’s a funny-looking plane, coming down at a weird angle with its nose pointing down. It reminds him somehow of a goose. The neck and the beak. Something.
A few minutes later two men approach his car with a military police escort. One short, with bushy black hair, and the other taller, bigger, and silver-haired.
“Mr. Donovan,” the taller fellow says. He offers his hand, and Donovan shakes with him. “I am Karsten Allgäuer. Very nice to meet you in person. This is my colleague, Markus Dobbelfeld.”
“Hello, Markus,” Donovan says. Then to Allgäuer, who looks much older than he sounded on the phone: “Will you tell me what’s going on?”
“We are very late. It is after seven o’clock. You are ramping up the beam for tonight’s run, yes?”
“Soon, but—”
“We should get into the car,” Allgäuer says. “I will explain on the way to Olney.”
For some reason Allgäuer doesn’t feel comfortable speaking freely until they are off the base and speeding down the highway. Donovan is pissed that they both chose to sit in the backseat. This isn’t a limousine. He’s not their fucking driver.
“This is a very exciting time, Landon. A project many years in the making is finally about to pay rich dividends.”
“What sort of project?”
“Do you remember when I spoke to you about the rapid advancement in technology? How we would eventually claim the ability to control time and space?”
“How could I forget?”
“The journey to this final result will no doubt be an interesting one, paved with startling successes and disappointing failures. There will be many milestones, and tonight you may witness one of them.”
“Really.”
“The human brain has long been, by a wide margin, the most capable computer in man’s known universe. Our lightning-fast, binary microchips have proven no match for its complex associative ability. And while scientists believe our pattern recognition capability emerges from the interaction of billions of neurons, there is also strong evidence that the rule sets used by the brain are not particularly complex. Simple rules, billions of connections, a tremendous amount of storage, and eventually you have intelligence—and ultimately consciousness.”
Allgäuer pauses, as if he’s waiting for Donovan to say something. But Donovan just keeps driving.
“Obviously,” Allgäuer continues, “the brain cannot compete with modern computers when it comes to processing speed. Transistors fire many, many times faster than neurons. But with the brain’s massive parallelism, the overall number of calculations still outnumbers most computers. Your Texas Grid, however, considering its enormous number of processors and high network speed—with the right instructions, it might be possible to simulate the operation of the human mind within its architecture.”
“If you say so,” Donovan says. “But isn’t the structure and software of the brain, the connections and the rule sets, aren’t those the hardest to replicate? Doesn’t the brain grow new connections in response to things it learns? That’s why studying and practice improve your ability.”
“You are correct. What we need is a way to scan or monitor the brain to understand how it works on a fundamental level, and how it changes with regard to new stimuli. We would never try to replicate this exactly in a transistor-based computer—you must design something unique to make the most of the hardware architecture and its strengths—but using the lessons learned by nature is a good place to start, don’t you think?”
“Let me get this straight. You think you can turn our Grid—much of which already operates as a neural network, anyway—you think you can turn it into a learning computer as powerful as the human brain?”
“Landon,” Allgäuer says. “That is only the beginning.”
6
Steve awakens in an unfamiliar bed. Kelly is sitting beside him, and Mike stands a few feet away. Steve’s head throbs as if it’s full of boiling water.
“How long was I out?”
“Not long,” Kelly tells him. “It’s only been a few minutes since we carried you in here from the kitchen.”
“And the glass?”
“I don’t know how to describe it exactly,” Mike says. “Some sort of disintegration. Some kind of chemical or molecular change.”
Steve closes his eyes, pleased.
“You did that?”
“I arranged it. I manipulated the energy around the glass, in the glass, I don’t know. It’s not like it came from me. I just organized and focused energy that was already there. There is a lot of it, all around us, everywhere. The best way I can describe it is as a little chain reaction. Push one domino and others fall.”
Mike grunts. “Have you ever done anything like this before?”
“No. Until now I could only sense fields. I couldn’t influence them. And however I managed it this time, it hurt me. Badly.”
“If I hadn’t seen with my own eyes,” Mike says, “I wouldn’t believe it.”
“Me, either,” Steve agrees.
Mike sits down next to Kelly and puts his hand on hers. “So can you explain it better?” he asks Steve.
“I’ll try, but it’s so intangible. When I first became aware of myself in the Zurich hospital, while I was still in the coma, I thought of the pain as a field, a wide, defined area of discomfort, with clusters that were localized and excruciating. And then there was this feeling of emptiness, of whiteness, that came over me, which was also a field of some kind, but much, much greater in scope. I think I was convulsing. I think I was dying. I got the distinct impression that the white field was death, that if I hadn’t lived I would have been absorbed into it somehow.”
“Are you religious at all?”
“No.”
“Well, I’ve read about near-death experiences similar to what you describe. Sometimes there is a tunnel—”
“Yes! Later there was a tunnel through which I could see the field of white, I think, and within it I felt this great, unseen presence, infinitely vast, infinite energy, infinity, period. And if I passed through the tunnel I would be able to see everything and know everything.”
Kelly looks at Mike, her eyes open wide.
“Hold on,” Mike says. He stands up, walks over to the window. Looks out on the orange dusk of the backyard. “It could’ve just been a hallucination. Like I said, there are thousands of documented cases of near-death experiences, and several theories have been suggested to explain the phenomenon. Most revolve around the idea that the brain, in an effort to diminish the emotional pain of impending death, soothes itself with anesthesia. Sort of how painkilling endorphins flood the bloodstream when you break your leg.