The Flicker Men (29 page)

“Not according to the paper.”

*   *   *

Twenty yards ahead, we came to the final building. A large warehouse of cinder block and steel. I saw her car parked against the wall. A gray sedan like a million other gray sedans. A vehicle that would get lost in the crowd.

She turned her face into the sun, her visage so hard and sharp that it looked chipped from stone. “Come,” she said and motioned me through a gap in the wall. If the old structure had ever had a door, that was long ago.

She led me down a narrow corridor. It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the dark interior, but I followed her down a dim hall.

She glanced at me as we walked, and her face was impossible to read in the shadows. “The eberaxi, too, has gone by different names,” she said. “Eberrin. Eberex. Axierra.” She turned away as she continued walking. “And another name. Errant axis. A thing named for its own result.” She approached a doorway. “Come.”

Her words sparked a memory. “Brighton talked about the world's axis.”

“What did he say?” she asked.

“That the world had more than you can see.”

We stepped into an open room, and it took me a moment to make sense of it. “Yes,” she said. “He's right. And here we trace one of them.” Against the wall were tables and a workstation. Reams of paper and charts. If this place had once been a warehouse, it was now something else.

Sudden movement caught my eye. Quick-gray, near the floor.

My eyes tracked motion in the shadows—a change of direction, too regular to be an animal. More like a machine. And then I understood. Suspended in the center of the room, a huge weight swung from the end of a long wire.

“Welcome to the pendulum room,” she said.

 

37

The weight swung from the end of its tether thirty feet long. A ball of iron dangling from a single thin wire.

“It's big,” I said. The first words that came to mind. So big that the arc of movement seemed to skim along the ground in a straight line before rising.

“The wire needs to be thirty feet for it to work well,” Vickers said. “Though it can be shorter if you correct for air flow. There's no correction for air flow here, though, so we went big. The weight is almost ten pounds.”

“I take it that it's not just a pendulum.”

“That's the beauty. It is. And any pendulum on Earth could do what this one does.”

“Which is what, exactly?”

“Describe an arc through three-dimensional space.” She walked farther into the room. “And while it swings, it maps out the procession of the Earth. These pins here mark out the movement.”

She pointed at the neatly swept concrete floor, and I could see the simple nails standing on their heads, forming the outline of a large circle. Like the teeth of some tremendous bear-trap mechanism hidden in the floor. Stonehenge if Stonehenge was nails. I stepped closer and saw that a dozen of the nails had been knocked down, presumably by movement of the pendulum. Six on one side of the circle, and six on the other.

“So it shifts over time.”

She shook her head. “You're looking at it wrong. The pendulum stays true, like a navigator's compass. It's not the pendulum moving around the room; it's the other way around, the whole Earth moving beneath the pendulum—describing an arc within the spiral arm of the Milky Way; just as the spiral arm is moving, too, in relation to … what, exactly? Call it the larger interstellar background. Or maybe the fabric of space-time if you believe such a thing exists. Have you ever wondered if there are hidden ley lines in the universe? Some location against which you can measure all other points?”

“No such location exists.”

She gestured toward the iron bolus as it swung past, a gray blur. A
whoosh
, and a rush of air. “You think a deterministic universe is a paradox, try to explain a universe where this pendulum somehow knows how the universe is aligned. Einstein bemoaned spooky action, yet here it is, right in front of us.” She gestured to the pendulum. “The truth is, nobody has the slightest idea why this happens.”

“Brighton spoke of waves,” I said. “This implies some directionality.”

She nodded and walked to the workstation. A table and charts. “Waves, yes, but of what medium? It's easy to talk of waves, but when we look at matter, what are we looking for exactly? There is a reason that when physicists talk in unguarded moments, they eventually speak of the universe as a kind of information.”

From atop a stack of paper charts, she picked up a book. Heavy and large. She tossed it to me.

I caught it. Saw the bookmark and opened the book to the marked page.

It wasn't what I expected. “Renaissance art?”

On the page was an image of the angel Gabriel, blowing his trumpet, all the angels of heaven lined up behind him, forming a ring that seemed to disappear into oblivion. There was something fractal and beautiful in the circle of wings—like a cryptic mandala hidden in the pattern.

“Gabriel's horn,” she said. “To be blown on judgment day, when all will answer for their sins.” She turned to look through the books again. “I've always liked that image. The horn and the angels. But there is another.”

She picked a second book up from the table. A dog-eared volume. This one on mathematics. She lay the book on the table before me and leafed through the pages.

“This, too, is Gabriel's horn,” she said. “A paradox.”

I moved closer and looked over her shoulder. I studied the image on the page. The graph of
f
:
x
as a function of 1/
x
.

“The reciprocal of
x
, spun around its axis,” Vickers said. “An object that is bigger on the inside than the outside.”

“A mathematical monster,” I said. I knew the figure well. “The graph has no end. Gabriel's bottomless horn. It's also called Torricelli's trumpet,” I said. “Finite volume but infinite surface area.”

“It's a metaphor for the universe. A thing Evangelista Torricelli could never have guessed when he described this figure in the 1600s.”

“A metaphor how?”

“The universe isn't a sphere; it's a funnel. Though even that isn't quite right, is it? A metaphor for a metaphor that doesn't quite track.”

I stared at her. It was like listening to string theory. Not even wrong, just somebody's idea of what could be. “Just words,” I said, more sharply than I meant to. It reminded me of my mother's stories—things that had no intersection with reality.

“Words,” she agreed. “And data. Here's a different metaphor if you'd prefer. Have you ever heard of a Matryoshka universe?”

“The Russian dolls, you mean.” It was a cosmological theory kicked around for the past few decades by some of the more speculative thinkers. “The idea that universes can be stacked inside each other.”

She gave a nod. “The same principle as Torricelli's trumpet. Finite volume but infinite surface area—Gabriel's horn writ large. With our universe just one in a cascade of universes nested inside each other. And consider humanity's unique perspective.”

“Meaning what?”

“What is humanity's niche in all this? Why are humans different? It is our ability to observe and to reflect what we observe. It is our ability to recapitulate the world around us. First in paintings and books, and now using technologies, the reproductions growing ever more sophisticated.”

I thought of the cave paintings that Brighton mentioned.

“It is an impulse in our nature,” she continued. “First we see, and then we reflect. Imagine a painting of a bicycle; then imagine the bicycle cast as a sculpture. Finally imagine a sculpture so perfect in every detail that it is indistinguishable from what it reflects. Imagine that you might ride upon this perfect sculpture. Is it not, in fact, just another bicycle? As civilization advances, and we improve our ability to transcribe the universe, at what point does the effigy
become
what it is representing? And what if inside this vastly complex counterpart, a civilization arose which itself spawned its
own
counterpart?”

“Counterpart?” I said. “You're talking about constructed realities.”

“All realities are constructed in one way or the other, are they not? Either through the work of some will or rising as an emergent property from a system's own underlying laws. There's an Oxford scholar, Nick Bostrom, who calculated the odds that we're in such a nested system.”

She pulled the bookmark from the book and unfolded it—a ragged sheet of paper on which a series of numbers and letters had been scrawled. She spread the paper flat on the table. “His formula,” she said, pointing to the last line:

“There could be an infinite number of universes in such a cascade. Existence is not cyclical but seriesmatic.”

I shook my head. I'd seen the formula before. A fascinating exercise in deduction, but like so many theoretical cosmologies, untestable. “There's no evidence,” I said. “This is all just speculative.”

“On its surface perhaps, but there is a certain mathematical inexorability to the idea, is there not? If secondary or tertiary realities are possible, then why would those living
inside
those analogues not unleash analogues as well? And then the ones inside
those
analogues. There is no upper bound to the number of iterations, so what are the odds we're living in the prime universe? How many worlds might live upstream from us in worlds stacked upon worlds?”

I shook my head.
Finite volume but infinite surface area.

She approached from the other side of the table. “The math is fairly clear: there could be a nearly infinite cascade of universes in such a system, but only one prime world. So either subsequent realities are impossible, or, by the law of averages, we're likely already in one of them.”

I stared at her.

“And if we are in the cascade,” she continued, “then we know which universe we must be.”

“How?”

“One very special universe,” she said. “Because we're not yet advanced enough to unfurl our own realities.”

I was about to speak but stopped. I saw it then. Saw where she was leading me.

She seemed to study my face. “In all of the limitless universes that could exist in such a cascade, ours could be only—”

“The terminus,” I said cutting her off. “The last universe.” The only one that hadn't yet spawned successors.

She nodded. “The edge of the spear.”

I thought of the microscope, falling down into the image.
There is no bottom to see.

I turned and watched the pendulum, considering her words. “So you're saying this is all some kind of artificial construction?”

“No, not all. You're not even asking the right question. Isn't it obvious now?”

“Nothing is obvious,” I said.

“Even after everything, you're still blind to it.” She shook her head. “The universe is an object—a collection of waves, just as all matter is a collection of waves. You know this already from your understanding of physics.”

“So?”

“So where does that take you?”

“I…” My jaw clenched. I didn't see what she was getting at.

“The universe is just the medium through which the waves propagate. We're not in some kind of simulator.” She shook her head. “We
are
the simulator.”

I stared at her, trying to comprehend.

“We are creators.” She studied my face. “Consciousness,” she said. “That is the magic.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

“This seething nest of waves is just pattern. The ability to collapse that pattern is what consciousness is. The soul. Whatever you want to call it. Each wave an action potential, which we translate into physical existence by force of experience.”

“You're saying that the universe is an object—a wave medium.”