Resonance (37 page)

Graham could hardly breathe, the anticipation was stifling. What was the message? Who was it from?

Annalise exploded into life. "It's Annalise One," she said. "Something's happened. Something amazing."

Annalise Six scrambled through her bag for her phone.

"Gary, it's me," she said. "This is urgent. Tune to 001 574 121 357 immediately. Express it. Do whatever it is you've got to do to it. But read it. Kevin says it's incredible. He thinks it's the breakthrough we've all been waiting for."

Graham held his breath and tried to hear Gary's reply.

"He didn't say," Annalise continued. "Annalise One says he's barely coherent at the moment."

She repeated the numbers and folded the phone away.

"Come on, Graham. We're off to Putney."

Graham was little wiser by the time they arrived at the ParaDim office. Annalise One had conveyed Kevin's message as soon as he'd stumbled on the download from 001 574 121 357. What the download contained she didn't know. Repeated attempts to get back to Annalise One had been met with a rushed "Not now, later."

They found everyone clustered around the far terminal in Room G—the black sphere room. Howard had the chair while Gary and Shikha hovered over his left and right shoulders respectively. Only Shikha glanced towards the opening door. She smiled and beckoned them over.

"It's starting to come through," she said.

"What kind of world is it?" asked Gary, his hand drifting towards the keyboard.

Howard batted it away. "I've got to enable it first," he said curtly. Graham smiled; they looked like two children fighting over a new toy.

"It's one of the white noise worlds," said Howard.

"That's impossible," said Gary. He turned to Annalise. "Are you sure Kevin said they were receiving a message?"

"That's what Annalise One told me."

They rechecked the coordinates. All twelve digits were correct.

"Is anything coming out?" asked Annalise, peering over Shikha's shoulder.

"Too early to say," said Gary. "There's a delay before anything comes through on the terminal."

No one spoke for thirty seconds. Ten eyes fixed on the screen. A cursor blinked.

Then the screen filled. Words and numbers scrolled past too fast to be read. Howard hit a button. The screen froze and everyone at the back leaned forward.

"What language is that?" asked Shikha.

Graham wasn't sure it was a language. Numbers and words were intermingled with symbols and foreign-looking letters—Greek, Russian, something like that. But there was an order to it. It wasn't random. And some of the words were repeated further down the screen.

"It's stopped," said Gary, glancing at the small window at the top right of the screen. "That's all there was. A few seconds' data and now it's moved on to the next world."

"I've seen this language before," said Howard, his eyes fixed on the text in front of him. "One of the advanced worlds. Maybe not the same, but similar. We might be able to run a translation."

"What's that there?" said Gary, pointing at the bottom right of the screen. "Those symbols. I've seen that combination recently. It's part of an equation. It's . . ." He fought to remember. "It's something to do with Schenck. Can you scroll to the next page?"

Howard flipped to the next page.

Embedded in the text were two words that everyone understood. Two words that appeared again and again.

Graham Smith. 
 

Everything moved into overdrive after that. Howard and Gary moved from terminal to terminal, pulling down lists, conducting searches, running programs. They had to find a match for the language. Was there more than one language? What other files had been downloaded from that world? Were the symbols mathematical inserts, format characters or part of the language's alphabet?

And why had they suddenly been able to extract data from a world that a week ago had presented nothing but white noise?

The two men barely talked and when they did the content flew over Graham's head. He stood back, out of the way, and watched alongside Annalise and Shikha.

"This is outside my area of expertise," Shikha told them. She leaned closer to the screen on the left for a few seconds before shaking her head. "I keep thinking I see gene sequences but they're not."

Annalise asked her about Graham's tests. "Did they show anything?"

"Unfortunately not," she said, still watching the screen as Gary flipped from sample to sample. "There were no measurable changes compared to the previous tests." She paused and looked at Annalise. "I would like to run some tests on you though. If that would be acceptable? Maybe next week?"

"Why me?" asked Annalise.

"The telepathy experiment. I'd love to see a map of your brain activity during a telepathic episode. If that's all right with you, of course."

"Sure."

"Got it!" shouted Howard. "Not an exact match but close."

Everyone crowded around his terminal. The screen was divided into two halves of similar-looking text.

"The one on the left's today's sample, the one on the right is Etxamendi."

"Is there a translator?" asked Gary.

Howard grimaced. "Of sorts," he said. "Etxamendi's a difficult language to translate." He pulled down another screen and flipped through a series of pages before finding the one he wanted.

"This'll take awhile," he said. "Many of the words are untranslatable and others are approximations. It might not make much sense."

A translation progress bar appeared at the top left of the screen.

Graham felt the anticipation as everyone waited? What was it going to say? Was it going to be the breakthrough that Kevin had said it was? And why hadn't Annalise One been back in contact?

The progress bar barely moved. It had been stuck on six percent for nearly a minute.

Howard filled in the silence. "It must be one of the very advanced worlds. Etxamendi's only found in civilizations that survived the post-glacial flood. The nearest we have to it is Euskara—the Basque language."

The progress bar ticked to seven percent. Howard checked his watch.

"Anyone want a coffee?" asked Shikha. "I think we're going to be here some time."

They weren't. When Shikha returned with the drinks, the process had finished.

Howard pulled up the translated file and displayed the first page.

It was a strange mix of English, untranslated Etxamendi and embedded mathematical formulae. Even the passages in English were hard to understand. The sentences were long and technical and the verbs were in unexpected places. It read like a scientific treatise by an author with no gift for communication.

But there was one passage that everyone understood.

The title.

The Conjunction of the Worlds. 
 

Gary and Howard picked their way through it, guessing the meanings of the untranslated passages, shouting them out to each other in their excitement, refining those guesses as they understood more. It was astounding. And unexpected.

According to the file, there had been a conjunction of the worlds. For a few hours in one tiny corner of North London, all the dimensions had touched.

"See this section here?" said Gary, pointing to the screen. "This is a modified proof of Schenck's Law. If you use this in conjunction—no pun intended—with the text above, it starts to make sense."

Not for Graham, it didn't. He was still waiting to hear what happened to the tiny corner of North London.

"I don't see it," said Howard.

"Here," said Gary, pulling out an envelope and writing on it. "If you replace that expression with this one, change all the alphas to that wiggly character there and let the dimensional constants cancel each other out."

"My God!" said Howard.

"Anyone care to translate for the stupid kids at the back?" asked Annalise.

"Not yet," said Gary. "This needs more work. The mathematics and the text are bound together inextricably. Anything I say now could be disproved totally five minutes later."

"How long will it take to find an answer?" asked Annalise.

Gary and Howard exchanged looks. "Ten? Twenty minutes?" suggested Gary.

"Any more than fifteen and I start screaming," said Annalise.

"Okay," said Gary, fifteen minutes later. "We have most of it but some of the proofs don't make sense."

"Yet," added Howard.

Graham didn't care if none of the proofs made sense. He wanted to know what the file said.

"Imagine that all the parallel worlds," said Gary, "for some reason as yet undefined, begin to move closer together. According to this paper, that happened in 1966."

"The year Graham was born," said Annalise.

"Exactly," said Gary. "As the worlds moved closer they began to exert an increased influence over each other—not widespread, but localized, very localized, touching down in North London."

"Like a tornado," added Howard. "But without the destruction."

"And much more focused," said Gary. "It's difficult to make out from the text but it appears to say that as the worlds moved closer, an attraction developed and a bridge was formed."

"What kind of a bridge?" asked Annalise.

"We're not sure. The word could mean 'bridge' or 'field' or just about anything else implying a connection of some sort. But what we do know," Gary paused as he turned to look at Graham, "was that Graham's father was touched by that bridge."

Everyone turned to look at Graham. Which made him annoyed as well as impatient. What did they expect to see—a look of recognition? Oh, that bridge! I remember my dad telling me about it?

Gary continued. "We're not sure if it was the person closest to the phenomenon or the person most susceptible, or maybe when the first two worlds touched, Graham's father was standing in the exact same spot as his counterpart on that other world."

"The text is unclear on that point," said Howard. "It may be that the presence of two or more counterparts at the exact same location drew the phenomenon to that point rather than, say, two or three miles further away."

"Exactly," said Gary. "And once the link was made it spread out into the other worlds, finding all his other selves. Where it couldn't find his other self, it followed his genetic path to a brother, a sister, a father, a mother. Spreading out until all the worlds were joined and, suddenly, for a few hours, all the worlds were one."

"Why would it choose a genetic path?" asked Shikha.

Gary shrugged. "There appears to be a proof associated with the text but . . ."

"It's not one we've encountered before," finished Howard. "The genetic link makes sense because of what happens later. Perhaps it was characteristic of the type of connection?"

"Anyway," said Gary. "At this point of connection, it was as though all the worlds were overlaid, one on top of another." He used his hands to illustrate the point, bringing them together slowly. "And a massive resonance developed for Graham's father. An idea on one world would bleed through to the next. It would have been overpowering. He would have felt driven as his head filled with ideas, desires and feelings. All the thoughts of his other selves, all the people he was linked to across billions of Earths would percolate through his mind. Some would be drowned out while others would resonate and build until they became imperatives."

"And they all ended up having sex?" said Annalise, raising her eyebrows.

"It's a strong emotion," said Gary. "Perhaps the strongest."

"And one of the commonest," added Howard.

"Exactly," said Gary. "And what happened on one world, happened on all. A child was conceived—Graham—a child that belonged not to one world but to all worlds, genetically fused with the DNA of all his parents across all the worlds. A hybrid with over five hundred fathers and almost five thousand mothers."

"Why ten times as many mothers?" asked Annalise.

"That's why we think the link followed the father's line," said Howard. "His fathers averaged ten different wives. If it had followed the mother's line, most likely we'd never have noticed. Graham would have had different surnames. It's sheer fluke the link formed around a male and not a female."

"Then the worlds separated," said Gary. "But the resonance lingered, there was a link—the unborn Graham—between the worlds. Hence his name. I expect many names were put forward over those next nine months, but gradually one name became dominant, and the more dominant it became the greater the resonance until no other name could have been chosen.

"Each couple would think they'd come upon the name by accident. A name that suddenly entered their head and wouldn't go away."

"And look where Graham was born," said Howard. "Always in North London. Even when his parents lived elsewhere, they appear to have been drawn to Harrow and Stanmore and Pinner. It's a resonance of place and genetics. Maybe, as we think, they were drawn there because that's where the bridge first developed or, maybe, the resonance created by all those unborn Grahams was too powerful for them to resist."

"And that resonance is still strong today," said Gary, pointing at Graham. "Not for Graham's family, but for himself. Notice how he chooses the same career path and he still lives in North London."

Graham felt uncomfortable—being pointed at, being talked about, having his conception talked about. It made his parents sound like rutting animals.

"Does any of this tell us how to stop the resonance wave?" asked Annalise.

Howard and Gary looked at each other.

"We're closer than we were before," said Gary, a little too noncommittal for Graham's liking.

"And there's so much else in that file," said Howard. "There are equations that, once we understand them, are certain to revolutionize our resonance wave models."

Gary nodded. "We've barely scratched the surface. And I can't believe a world would go to the trouble of giving us a file we can download, if it doesn't contain the answer we're looking for."

Gary and Shikha phoned the other Resonance project members and brought them up to speed. They needed to bring in a linguist, they all agreed on that. Tamisha said she'd arrange it. ParaDim had several linguists who'd worked on Etxamendi.