Big-scale changes or not, sooner or later the cumulative differences would become so acute that the quantum link couldn't be sustained. The portal closes on that world, leaving its occupants to carry on with their lives without being in contact with ours. Eventually we'd establish a lock with another Cardiff and begin the whole thing again. And always it was me, Joe Liversedge, who I spoke to the first time.
It does things to you, that. It's why Rachel left me, in the end. She said she couldn't deal with living with a man who had such a warped take on reality, let alone my own mortality.
'Do you talk about me behind my back?' she'd asked. 'The two of you, comparing notes?'
'You're not the other Rachel,' I'd said. 'She's just . . . some woman Joe's married to. You're the only one that matters to me.'
'The only one,' she'd answered tersely. 'When most men say that, they're talking about other women. You're talking about other copies of me, like I'm some kind of mass-produced Barbie doll. I can't deal with this, Joe.'
'You could have a go.'
'Life's too short,' Rachel said.
When she left, I did what I always did in times of crisis: threw myself into the work. Cardiff had been the first to develop cold-calling technology, but that didn't mean other universities and corporations weren't snapping at our heels, trying to get ahead of us. We'd been the first to establish a video interface between parallel worlds, enabling one version of me to chat to the other, as if we were just sitting in different offices. We'd been the first to use presencing technology - pinched from the tourist agencies, developed for the masses who couldn't afford to fly any more - and later we'd moved from clunky robots to actual human bodies, equipped with implants so that you could take them over, as if you were physically present in the other world. All that was well and good, but none of it had come free. To stay ahead we'd had to bite into a big juicy poisoned apple called direct government funding, money that arrived independently of the usual academic research pools. On the surface, the new money was intended to ensure that the UK maintained its prestigious lead in this cutting-edge field. It was all about science for science's sake, the money supposedly untainted by any baser concerns beyond the sheer intellectual thrill of the enterprise.
That was bollocks, though, and everyone knew it.
In a time when the government could lock up just about anybody they liked for simply looking a bit odd, the technology had powerful security implications. Once a lock was established, two different versions of a suspect could be arrested and interrogated in parallel, with the relevant agencies cooperating with themselves to extract the maximum intelligence. Feed one story to the suspect in one timeline and see what he says. Feed another in the other timeline and see what you get from that. Have your cake and eat it, and sod the human rights.
Of course, they never admitted to doing that kind of thing. But it wasn't blue-sky science that had paid for the new machines or their elaborate, bombproof installation in the basement. It was national security. What else?
Did I mention that the apple was poisoned? As a condition on all that glorious funding, the government had their own 'hotline', their own super-secure communications channel running into our lab. Their mandarins could talk to each other through the machines without me or anyone else in the department having a fucking clue what was going on. They didn't get in our way and we didn't get in theirs.
But sometimes, there were consequences.
Like today, for instance.
It's three months since the bomb went off. Our window into that version of Cardiff closed only four days after the event itself, so none of us has any idea how they're getting on. They hadn't come close to final casualty figures when the link collapsed, and no one was yet daring to talk about plans for the reconstruction. We'll never make contact with that version again, even if we kept on cold-calling for the rest of eternity. It's deviated so far from our own that the quantum lock just can't be established.
In my version of Cardiff, it's not a bad day at all. The sun's out, the pavement cafes are doing good business and everyone looks remarkably happy and content. Nothing much has changed here in three months. Of course, everyone who bothers to keep up with world events knows that a version of Cardiff got wiped off the map, and they've seen the pictures and video clips to prove it. Some of them, like me, have even presenced over to that other reality. We've strolled - or in my case rolled - over the smoking ruins of what was once a city.
For most people, though, the bombed Cardiff is receding into the past, like the memory of a bad summer blockbuster with overblown special effects. Lots of things have happened around the world since then, and we've cold-called hundreds of other realities, some of which have brought their own scandals and nine-day wonders.
But some people - some very select people - have longer memories than that.
Over my morning coffee, I flick through the paper. Buried somewhere on page three is a little item about the recent arrest and detention of a man living in Cardiff.
His name doesn't matter. He's British, all right? Welsh, if you want to be pedantic about it, although he's not called Jones or Evans or anything acceptably Welsh like that.
He's never done anything wrong. His only mistake is that he happened to blow up Cardiff in an alternate universe. Actually, that's an exaggeration. He wasn't directly involved in the planting of the bomb. All he did was inadvertently give house room to those who were. Maybe he knew something was going on, but it's equally likely that the perpetrators managed to keep their big secret from him.
No one can ask them now, though, because - inconveniently - they're all dead. Their counterparts in the other Cardiff died when the bomb went off. In this version they committed suicide when, because of a tiny imperfection in a soldered joint, their copy of the bomb failed to detonate properly, maiming two of them. All intelligence leads to a wider network of specialists and financiers have dried up. We can cold-call into other versions of Cardiff, but each of those now shares the same history as ours, so the terrorists are dead there as well. Which means that the only man the government can get their hands on - and who might know
something
- is the man who gave them somewhere to live.
His denials - according to what I can glean from the newspaper - have the taint of plausibility. He was related to one of the bombers, but only distantly, and nothing in his past suggested any involvement in extremist organisations. I'm left wondering this: in our timeline, the bomb failed, maiming two terrorists and eventually leading all of them to commit suicide. Civilian losses: nil. Radiation exposure: negligible. Damage to property: not worth mentioning.
If we didn't know what had happened to the other Cardiff, we'd say: case closed. The detained man has no case to answer. Justice has already been delivered.
Problem is, we
do
know. We do know and we like it when there's someone we can punish.
According to the paper, the detained man is reported to have died of complications following a heart attack, suffered during incarceration. The government line is that he had a precondition that could have flared up at any time.
Me, I'm wondering what they did to the poor, innocent bastard.
I fold the paper, finish my coffee and ride the tram to the university. Coincidentally, it's another Sunday. When I get there the department is empty, except for a few hoovering robots. Anyone with an ounce of sense is somewhere else, enjoying the weather, enjoying their city.
I tap the keycode and descend into the basement. The cold-calling machines loom around me, huge, humming horizontal cylinders, cold to the touch. There's always been something faintly sinister about them, although I'd never admit it aloud. I think of the government hotline running into this basement, into the machines, enabling signals to span the gap between realities. Without that connection, they'd never have come down as hard on that man as they did.
I think, for a moment, about sealing myself in here and turning off the air circulator. Go out the way the other Joe did, with a suicide note to myself and twenty pounds clutched in my cold, dead hand. A pint and a bag of crisps. It wouldn't really be killing myself, would it? Even if I die here and now, countless other versions of Joe Liversedge carry on living. We won't all make the same decision.
But then I think about what Rachel said, before she packed her bags. We're not Barbie dolls. If I've started slipping into a state of mind that allows me to believe that we
are
- that death is just the pruning of one local branch from an infinite, ever-growing tree - then maybe she had a point. Maybe I have been doing this a bit too long. Killing myself - no matter how noble the intention - would only reinforce her sense that I've let myself get sucked too far in.
It's not that I want Rachel to like me again. Too late for that. But I can still make a stand, without dying like the other Joe did.
Alarms will trip as soon as I start damaging the machines. Sooner or later they'll come and find me - they'll be able to break into the basement with or without the keycode. Then I'll be arrested - and, well, who knows? But no matter what happens to me, sooner or later they'll find a way to put the machines back together. But still: I'm Joe Liversedge. I'm a creative bastard. And I reckon I can do some serious damage if I put my mind to it.
There's a big axe on the wall, next to the fire extinguisher.
Let's get cracking.
This very short story - little more than a vignette - was written for the Welsh edition of
The Big Issue
, the magazine sold in the UK by the homeless and vulnerable. Commissioned by the Cardiff-based crime writer John Williams for a special series of summer stories by Welsh writers, the idea was that the story should have a specific Welsh connection. This proved suitably problematic until I remembered that I'd already established a Welsh-themed near-future background for the novella 'Signal to Noise'. The Yorkshireman Joe Liversedge had been a background character in that story, but in this much shorter piece I put him (or copies of him, to be strictly accurate) in the foreground, a few years after the events of the earlier story. Once the elements were in place, the story wrote itself very quickly (good thing too, as the deadline was tight) and proved a refreshing exercise after some of the much longer pieces I had been working on recently. The title is a steal from the Manic Street Preachers, of course (as is, very nearly, 'Everlasting', also in this collection). Yes, I'm a fan . . .
HIDEAWAY
PART ONE
There was
, Merlin thought,
a very fine line between beauty and terror
. Most certainly where the Way was concerned. Tempting as it was to think that the thing they saw through the cutter's windows was only a mirage, there would always come a point when the mysterious artefact known as the syrinx started purring, vibrating in its metal harness. Somehow it was sensing the Way's proximity, anxious to perform the function for which it had been designed.
It seemed to bother all of them except Sayaca.
'Krasnikov,' she mouthed, shaping the unfamiliar word like an oath.
She was the youngest and brightest of the four disciples who had agreed to accompany Merlin on this field trip. At first the others had welcomed her into Merlin's little entourage, keen to hear her insights on matters relating to the Way and the enigmatic Waymakers. But in the cutter's cramped surroundings Sayaca's charms had worn off with impressive speed.
'Krasnikov?' Merlin said. 'Sorry, doesn't mean anything to me either.' He watched as the others pulled faces. 'You're going to have to enlighten us, Sayaca.'
'Krasnikov was . . .' she paused. 'Well, a human, I suppose - tens of kiloyears ago, long before the Waymakers, even before the Flourishing. He had an idea for moving faster than light, one that didn't involve wormholes or tachyons.'
'It can't work, Sayaca,' said a gangly, greasy-scalped adolescent called Weaver. 'You can't move faster than light without manipulating matter with negative energy density.'
'So what, Weaver? Do you think that would have bothered the Waymakers? '
Merlin smiled, thinking that the trouble with Sayaca was that when she made a point it was almost always a valid one.
'But the Way doesn't actually allow faster-than-light travel,' said one of the others. 'That much we do know.'
'Of course. All I'm saying is that the Waynet might have been an attempt to make a network of Krasnikov tubes, which didn't quite work out the way the builders intended.'
'Mm,' Merlin said. 'And what exactly is a Krasnikov tube?'
'A tube-shaped volume of altered space-time, light-years from end to end. Just like one branch of the Waynet. The point was to allow roundtrip journeys to other star systems in arbitrarily short objective time.'
'Like a wormhole?' Weaver asked.
'No; the mathematical formulation's utterly different.' She sighed, looking to Merlin for moral support. He nodded for her to continue, knowing that she had already alienated the others beyond any reasonable point of return. 'But there must have been a catch. It's clear that two neighbouring Krasnikov tubes running in opposite directions violate causality. Perhaps when that happened--'