Ra Page 11

  "But in fact, what's more likely is that the machine proves unduplicable. Its location on neutral territory in, for example, the Hague, the Netherlands, becomes the nucleus of a community of ill and dying pilgrims desperately queueing for one-time exposure to a machine which cannot physically process one in a hundred of the patients who need its treatment. A second city is founded on the streets of the first. First crime consumes both cities, then disease, then violence. In the final series of riots, the facility is stormed and the machine captured by a dozen different groups in a single week. Eventually the Dutch military end the conflict by permanently disabling the machine.

  "But even that's an outside chance because, in the first place, you're never likely to get it out of the DRC unchallenged. Eight African nations including the Democratic Republic of the Congo itself become aware of the machine's existence and initiate a decades-long, interminable land war to claim it. Western nations become involved and the war in turn claims millions of lives and ends with the tactical atomic bombing by the United States of the installation where the machine is being held. Even though the machine was believed to have been rendered unrecoverably inoperable years earlier, the bombing is regarded as the greatest humanitarian catastrophe of all time.

  "Except that that might not happen either. Let's say the U.S. wins the war. They capture the machine and take to the bunker underneath the White House, where only the President, his family and his cabinet are permitted access to it. Medical technology is deliberately stalled and never reaches the pinnacle it should.

  "And yet, for anybody to leave the machine unexploited is implausible. We spin more numbers and simulations and we see the machine being reverse-engineered, and the principles it applies being adapted for purposes other than the immediate, perfect restoration of living and dead humans. Mr Grey, you've seen how easy it is to heal. Can you imagine how easy it'll become to kill?

  "The truth will inevitably be somewhere in the middle of all of these possibilities, but I'm sure you understand the common theme. Death surrounds this machine, like a curse. Death and leverage. The mother of all MacGuffins."

  Grey imagines how easy it would become to kill. You wouldn't need a gun anymore. You could create a bullet and give it motion. You could simply "correct" a living human body to a living body with a hole in it.

  "And you see," the youth concludes, "that you have to let us take it and put it somewhere safer."

  "Take it back, you mean," Grey says.

  "...Indeed."

  "It must have been in a hell of an accident to wind up inside a mountain," Grey says. "How did you lose it?"

  The young man shrugs.

  "But how did you know we'd found it? I chose my crew for loyalty. Until yesterday, I didn't utter a hint to them about what I thought the thing actually was. And I know none of them satphoned home."

  "Magic."

  "Then who are you?"

  "I can't tell you."

  "But you're going to kill me."

  In response, the youth nods towards the shaft mouth. "It's still a risk. You understand."

  Grey does.

  The youth continues, "All I can say is that we're the ones who ran the numbers. Of course, nobody can accurately predict the future, but after ten thousand high-fidelity simulations of the same events, some outcomes turn out to be more probable than others, and then when we go through our courses of action, this is the firmest recommendation."

  Grey's eyes widen. He puts his hands out, mind racing, heart racing. "Wait. No, wait!"

  The youth pulls his right hand out of his pocket and says "One more, please," seemingly to nobody before pointing at Grey with his first two fingers.

  "How good are your simulations? What kind of fidelity? Was I a component? Could you be?" Grey delivers all four questions in about three seconds.

  There's a pause. The boy doesn't lower his hand, but Grey's got his attention.

  "How would the simulation begin?" Grey continues. "If you were simulating this course of action, how would it begin? It would begin with the decision being made, right?"

  A longer pause.

  Grey says, "It would begin exactly like this. No matter the option, no matter the outcome. The course of action to be tested is X. So they create a simulation in which the course of action selected was X. In the simulation, you are given the order. In the simulation, a simulation of you carries X out. And as it plays out, the simulators observe the results. They collect the results from X and Y and Z and stack them all together. And then pick the best one and they go out into reality and do it once, for real.

  "Think about it. You, you, know all of the possible outcomes if nobody does anything, if nobody interferes," Grey says. "Because those runs were run. But you don't know what the other options of interference are. You don't know about the other hypotheses. About Y and Z and the rest. That's the only way that you could prove that this isn't a hypothetical, because that information is the only information that's guaranteed not to be available inside a hypothetical. And you don't have it. And this can't be the right solution because it doesn't make sense. Killing to prevent more killing? Killing to prevent a medical revolution that could save literally every life? This has to be one of the faulty hypotheses. And that means that you and I don't exist. This isn't happening. So it doesn't matter if you don't kill me."

  "Then it doesn't matter if I do—"

  "But the point is that X doesn't have to happen here. Make this the one where you gained unexpected self-awareness and disobeyed orders. Put your... absence of gun away. Maybe that's what they really want to see happen. They order you to do X but they want me to overrule you with Y so they can see how Y plays out. They want to see what happens if... you let me try to save everyone." Grey locks eye contact with the youth. Grey tries to make himself believe that he sees a flicker of doubt in there.

  There is the longest pause.

  "No," says the boy. "This is real."

  He shoots Grey. No gun. No bullet. He just opens a hole in Grey's heart.

  Space Magic

  Rachel Ferno's burning mana so fast to stay in the air that it feels like it's doing physical and mental damage to her, as if she were consuming body parts and organs and memories as reaction mass, as if whatever it is that's finally going to match velocities with the plummeting orbiter won't even be a human being anymore but a spent propellant tank. Autokinetic effects must, on pain of burst retinas and crushing death, be applied uniformly across the whole body. She pulls what would be lethal gees to keep up with the machine's chaotic tumble, desperately fighting to stay out of its smoke trail where she can still eyeball her interception trajectory.

  Virtual instruments spread out in front of her like playing cards show her relative position and velocity, her airspeed and orientation, her oxygen levels, mana levels, and her degree of concentration, but the more closely she monitors the flashing values, the closer she edges towards completely losing it, breaking the spell and then bodily breaking apart under aerodynamic stress. So she dismisses them and the shielding holds, flexing actively to stay stable at supersonic speed. Rachel rolls and deliberately loses the horizon, throwing on another twenty percent thrust. She fixes the orbiter in the centre of her field of view and pushes towards it, burning blue-hot and singing and in control. She hears music, bass waves so loud that it feels like she's riding them. She burns her life story for fuel. She burns her fingers and toes and her attachments to the ground until there's nothing left of her but purified, abstract acceleration.

  Relatively speaking she hits the Atlantis nosecone as softly as a feather, wrapping her fields across the windshields and locking herself into the vehicle's motion. She feels the impact numbly, as if insulated from it by thick wool. There are seven people inside and they all look identical in the flight suits and the helmets and she can't spare the mental bandwidth to remember any of their names, but she singles out the figure in the seat in the middle row on the left. It's her daughter, having the dream again. It's the same drea
m. This is just a different angle.

  Some messages are all medium. They have no payload. "I'm on the orbiter's exterior," Rachel tells them. "I'm going to try to save you all using magic." It's not words or sign language. She tells them this just by being there.

  *

  "What happens next?" Nick asks Laura.

  "I wake up."

  "No, the other thing."

  Nick's cooking dinner. Laura's flat on her back on his floor in the next room, pouring it out like a psychiatric patient and intermittently guessing what he's doing from the smells and cookware clunks. "What happened next was the most well-observed event in history," she replies. "The thing went up like an atom bomb. Spark, fuel, liquid oxygen. It was caught on thirty-five distinct film sequences and it shows up as the terminating point on almost all of the telemetry. In fact— what happened next is the only known fact. And it's also the only part I don't get to see in the dream."

  "Because you get blown up."

  Laura says nothing.

  "Oh, wait," says Nick. "They recovered all seven bodies? So you don't get blown up, but the explosion knocks you out. Out of the dream."

  "But my point is— my point is that everything up to that point is... conjecture. It's fantasy, I must have pieced it together from my research. There isn't footage that shows any of what I'm imagining. There aren't voice recordings. The fact that Mum turns up at the end of it is... I don't know if she got there. I don't know if she even tried to get there. It's fan fiction!"

  "You have to speak up," says Nick. "I can't hear you over the hood."

  "I don't know why I keep having this dream. When I'm dreaming it, I care—"

  "Do you know you're dreaming?"

  "What?"

  "When you start off strapped into the chair, do you recognise it? Do you remember that it's a dream you've had before? Is it lucid?"

  Laura stares at the ceiling and splays her fingers out against the carpet. She doesn't know.

  There's a long lull in the conversation before she pipes up again. "I smell thyme."

  "Very good!"

  It was an educated guess. She watched Nick buy some earlier that day. "When I'm dreaming it, it matters. Whether I know I'm dreaming or not, I treat it as real. I try to stop it. And then afterwards, after I wake up, I realise that I don't care. I have no reason to care. Because it already happened. It's in the past. I have no reason to dream this dream."

  "Maybe your subconscious cares more about your mother than you do."

  Laura considers this unlikely. "Maybe. All I consciously care about is duplicating what she did."

  "'Six impossible things'."

  "Six-ish. And I'm getting there. Her O2 supply wasn't much more than a fan-shaped force field rotating at high speed. That kind of fine-grained force field projection is definitely going to become possible soon. And I've almost got the Montauk storage theory cracked. That much energy stored and released in that amount of time? It's almost definitely— well, I mean it's definitely possible, because I've seen it happen. But I've almost got it duplicated. And I'm going to guess... turkey?"

  "Yesss."

  "Gestural casting and non-vocal casting might be the same thing," continues Laura. "But I don't understand them. Or autokinetics. Those have been very difficult. I don't know where to look. I don't even know where to stand when I'm looking. I feel like there are empty bookshelves waiting there, you know? Whole new Dewey Decimal categories. But I'm only trying to figure out what got her to that point, or at least what could have theoretically got her to that point. Like a bug on the windshield. I don't care about what was next. Maybe the dream cuts out at the point where I stop caring."

  "Okay, it's done," says Nick. He comes through with the plates. Turkey is involved, as are thyme, green salad, sautéed potatoes and a thin brown sauce. He puts plates on the table and goes back for cutlery. Laura sits up, gets up from the floor, then sits down at the table.

  "What was next?" Nick calls through from the kitchen.

  "What?"

  "What was the plan?"

  "The plan was that I tell you about my day while you're cooking, and then you tell me about your day while we're eating, so that you don't eat all of your food incredibly quickly and start stealing mine."

  "No," says Nick, coming back in with knives and forks. He hands one of each to Laura and sits opposite her. "What was your mum's plan?"

  "I don't know." And this revelation explodes in Laura's mind, like an airbag. Suddenly it occupies all the available space. I don't know?

  Nick puts some food in his mouth and carries on talking: "You've said yourself that new magic takes like a day of prep, plus. That's why you need to build a toolkit. You can't improvise. So she must have had something worked out." He chews and swallows. "Or maybe she didn't have a plan, what do I know? Or a clue or a prayer. Any of them."

  Laura holds her knife and fork and stares at a point on the wall directly behind Nick's head. "Wait a second."

  "So potentially there's a seventh impossible thing here. When you count what her actual plan was, if she had one, there's an extra thing that you didn't even know that you didn't even know."

  "But she doesn't demonstrate it. She fails. Failed. Just give me a second to think."

  "Sure," says Nick. "So you're driving yourself mad. It's a jigsaw with a piece you didn't realise was missing."

  Laura's elsewhere entirely.

  "What was she going to do? Why can't you see that in the dream?" Nick presses.

  "There's... nothing that she could have done," says Laura.

  "Is there?"

  Laura stares back at Nick but she's not looking at him. She's trying to remember what her mother's face looked like. She's trying to read her intentions, across a gap of years.

  *

  Douglas Ferno's forty-something, but looks older. Not fat, but expanding; not bald, but thinning. He doesn't care, but the degree to which he doesn't care is diminishing. A city council treasurer, he finds the routine and the rationality of his workplace soothing. He has settled into a kind of career Main Sequence, even with retirement still a sizeable distance off. In his spare time, he pursues falconry.

  Raptors aren't dogs. Having found himself with the time and stability, Doug Ferno threw himself into something requiring a sustained effort across years plural to get a positive result. Raptors are stunningly well-adapted for their evolutionary niche, all talons and laser eyesight and two-hundred-mile-per-hour dives, but none of that makes them smart or friendly or obedient. Hela, his Harris Hawk, is a wild, paranoid animal. She accepts humans into her life only to the extent that they appear to be part of her successful hunting strategy. Even having been essentially raised by Doug Ferno, Hela treats him like the terrifyingly smart and dangerous apex predator he is, the same way that a man would treat a tiger who mysteriously began cooking meals for him. The instructions Hela understands extend as far as "fly into that tree over there", "fly back here to my hand" and "LOOK LOOK A RABBIT GET IT!".

  Today Hela perches on a thick leather glove on his left hand, with thin leather jesses tied around her legs and the other ends held tightly in his fist. Hela is a uniform dark brown, with yellow hooked beak and a one-metre wingspan. Her feathers are delicate and brittle, like glass. She weighs about a kilogram, almost little enough to forget about.

  Doug and Laura are working their way up a forest track to the largish field where Doug usually brings birds for training. Laura's carrying a mobile perch, basically an oversized metal croquet hoop, heavy enough that a bird can't fly away with it.

  "I got a job interview," Laura says.

  "I thought you were going to stay on for a master's," Doug Ferno replies.

  "So did I," Laura says. "It's at Hatt. I think it's 'Hatt Group' in full but they just call it 'Hatt'. They're an aerospace group. They're using a lot of magic in their work. And if they're using a small amount of magic in their work that'll be ten times the amount of magic that any other aerospace outfit uses, because the industry moves li
ke a petrified snail."

  "You sent an application?"

  "No."

  "They phoned you out of the blue?"

  "Emailed me out of the blue. Come on, Dad. They want me to come up and see the factory."

  "Have they mentioned money?"

  "They've mentioned hardware."

  "Toys," Doug Ferno translates.

  Laura grins a kid-in-a-toy-shop grin.

  "How many people know what you're trying to accomplish?" her father asks. What Laura's trying to accomplish, in ten words or fewer: An entirely magical human-rated orbital launch system.

  "Everybody knows. Everybody who'll sit still and nod and smile for long enough. As to how many people spread that word or think I'm seriously going to get anywhere, your guess is as good as mine. I guess at least one person gives me the credit. This wasn't a form email, Dad. It wasn't an artificial mail merged mailshot thing sent to four thousand people or even to four people. It was personal. Somebody sat down and decided to write to me."

  "How flattering. Will you go?"

  They get to the top of the track and they're out of forest onto the hillside. It's a dazzling day, the world all blue, green, orange and yellow. Laura and her father take the view in. Weather this good is a precious resource at any time of year. Hela looks around indifferently. Like all birds, her eyes can't swivel in their sockets. She has to turn her entire head to look at things. It would be impossible to tell what she's thinking, or even, with mere human eyesight, what she's looking at.

  "Yeah," says Laura.

  "And give up on postgrad work? Give up on a Ph.D.? Is that what you want to do?"

  "If they'll let me, I'll give up on the degree."

  "What? This close to the end? Honey, that's madness."

  "What I want to do is go into space. You know how I'm making decisions right now, Dad? I'm making decisions based on what's going to get me into space fastest. You ask me where I see myself in five years? I see myself in space. I don't think academia's it. I think academia's going to keep me on Earth. If Hatt are going to give me the materials and the equipment, the toys, then I'll annihilate what's left of the theory in... in—"