This Shared Dream (23 page)

She and Sam had endlessly questioned the rightness of the self-reproducing Device, but had never found an exit from the problem—or the promise—its mere existence posed. Unlike its cousin, nuclear energy, it worked directly on the functioning of the mind, of collective consciousness as reflected by the constant feedback of news, education, and communication in all forms. The stuff that informed cultural-racial constructs, the roots of power, the biological evolution of the human brain, and its inherent plasticity were all laid bare by the Device, like rock strata revealed by a receding river.

What would true, radical democracy, put in place virtually overnight, look like? For instance, if girls in certain countries attended these Q-Schools, who would defend them? Armies of other children, perhaps? Child Soldiers for Education? Mothers and Fathers for Education? Would their former oppressors change, overnight? Who knew what might happen?

Bette was indeed in a world that was different, and, in myriad ways, better, than many spun from the timestream in which JFK been shot, despite its problems. Without the Cold War, with which politicians and manufacturers could justify staggering expenses, the wealth of this world was more equally distributed. The marvelous rail system was just one tiny facet of the differences. But one of the roots of war—extreme religious persuasion, which by definition bypassed reason and conferred great power on some—still existed here.

Bette let her imagination run wild. These Q-Schools could, conceivably, lure fundamentalists of all kinds—those who used religion to control others—strip them down to childhood, and give them the gift of neuroplasticity. Help them—Bette grinned and closed her eyes, hearing herself and Sam, arguing again through long summer evenings down by the creek—understand that true religion was a matter of personal choice and conscience, an experience of natural transcendence, rather than a tool, like totalitarianism, just more subtle, with which to hijack the unwary.

Perhaps just as important, these environments might provide a cure from strokes, a reorganization of the brain, neurogenesis. People might even take month-long neuroplasticity vacations to rediscover the joy of learning and pursue new, enriching paths of study.

It didn’t really matter. It was out of her hands, and, probably, had never been in her hands. It was out of Hadntz’s hands too. The Device had been born, survived infancy, and was entering another of its own developmental stages. It was human, and was taking humanity with it.

*   *   *

Jill stood on the porch and waved as Brian and his family left, then dropped into the rocking chair and crossed her arms. She probably couldn’t keep this up much longer. Brian had the notebooks, which probably had something about what their parents had been up to. Maybe all the information about the Game Board was there—if, as she suspected, the Game Board was actually the Device that that caller had demanded. She was curious, herself. What
did
Megan and Brian think? What
had
happened to them, to their memories. What had lately given them this bug? They’d gone for years—decades—without mentioning that anything strange had happened.

She recalled the menace in the caller’s voice the other night. Maybe she
should
tell them. Maybe together they could figure something out, do something.

Like what?

Whens ran in through the screen door, which slammed behind him. “I’m hungry. What are you frowning about?”

She grabbed him and put him on her lap. “I’m thinking that I have work to do. But I’m hungry. Do you want to walk over to Bazanno’s and have a pizza?”

“Yeah! They have Slingers there.”

“But not for you. Ready?”

*   *   *

Later that night, when Jill opened her school-planning folder, she noticed that some of her tabs—half-inch, flexible, translucent squares that one pressed to the Q-screen to transfer information—were missing. She’d planned to properly integrate the Q-School plan into the Future Possibilities section tonight.

That was the problem with tabs—they were too small; easy to lose. Manfred could have licked them up. Surely someone without dogs, children, or a portable office had designed them. She searched the carpet, went through all her papers, folders, the top of the desk—and after a few hours, finally fell into bed, too tired to look any longer.

*   *   *

In her garret, her fortress, Bette went over the plans for the school seed many, many times, wondering what it might truly do.

She Q’d it to Hadntz, not expecting a response—or, if any, just feedback. Advice. She had no idea where the woman was. Then she returned it to Jill’s rather haphazard notebook.

To her surprise, she got a very quick reply:

Good work. Manufacture in Kyoto set up.

Estimated time of manufacture: ten days.

Immediate worldwide release and distribution scheduled.

For the life of her, though, Bette couldn’t raise another damned word from Hadntz.

*   *   *

The minute Jill got up the next morning—well, after some very strong coffee—she resumed her search for the tabs. When she opened her notebook, they were there in their little slots.

“I could have sworn,” Jill said, then shrugged.

Relieved, she quickly transferred the information to her International Schools presentation.

Brian

THE PLANS

May 18

B
RIAN LUGGED HIS FATHER’S
boxes into their cramped apartment.

Every room was stacked with boxes. Most were still taped shut, but some were open, the contents rummaged through. He sighed as he set Sam’s boxes next to the coffee table.

“Problem?” asked Cindy, from the kitchen area, ten feet away.

“These are Dad’s papers, but I have no idea when I’ll get a chance to read them.”

“Is two hours from now soon enough?”

Brian gave her an enthusiastic hug and kiss. “Easy to please,” she said. “I like that in a guy.”

She put Bitsy to bed right after dinner, claiming that she was exhausted, ergo, Bitsy must be too. Zoe lingered, opening the saxophone case. “Grandpa’s?” she asked. Brian nodded.

She fell asleep on the couch, holding the saxophone on her lap, smiling. Brian gently removed it and carried Zoe to bed. He was alone.

It was a miracle.

Brian began to unload the dusty contents of the boxes onto the cleared-off coffee table.

He found a sizable collection of notebooks. Twenty? They were all neatly labeled by date in his father’s hand. The first one was in December 1941. The last was dated 1967. He glanced inside each of them, briefly, as he stacked them on the table. Each was full of his father’s fine engineering print.

Beneath these, Brian found a brown cardboard folder. He untied it and went through memorabilia. Tickets to a show in London. A folded poster that, when unfolded, fell apart at the creases. The Perham Downs, his father’s band, would be appearing in the village of Ludgershall on the night of April 12, 1944; a photo of the band was at the top of the poster. He set it aside, to be framed, and put the folder aside too. He’d explore it in detail later. Next: a bundle of papers held between two sheets of corrugated cardboard by rubber bands, which disintegrated when he pulled on them.

He lifted off the top piece of cardboard, and fell into the world of someone very different from his father—a typed treatise. By someone named Dr. Eliani Hadntz. Footnotes referenced scientific papers published in the 1930s, 1920s, and earlier.

He plunged into it.

The process was disorienting. A lot of the speculation in the paper, which proposed a huge project to change humanity from warlike to peace-loving, was based on information he had always assumed was discovered later in the century. But then, he didn’t know a whole lot about the history of science; not much more than any reasonably well-educated person.

The paper referenced Schrödinger. Perhaps, he speculated as he read, the author even knew Schrödinger. He realized, as he turned the pages, she definitely knew Lise Meitner, the physicist who had resolved the issue of the possibility of nuclear fission.

And yet, the ideas the author had were more …
organic
than Brian thought of physics as being, even though he was familiar with Schrödinger’s thin volume
What Is Life?,
which was in the Halcyon library.

Schrödinger had been a physicist. Physics, for Brian, was abstract, a model of forces and their interaction on one another, not alive, as biological processes were. However, it made sense that one’s bodily interior, one’s brain, one’s genes, were also subject to the laws of physics.

How had Hadntz found so much information about neurology? He looked back to the title page. Yes, this
Doktor Doktor
Hadntz was a medical doctor, and also had a doctorate in physics. That might explain her focus, and her linking of such disparate subjects.

He became lost in the strange, inspiring manuscript, which was interrupted, from time to time, with diagrams and equations.

The night waxed. Existence narrowed to this tiny opening into another universe of thought and perception. Yet, when he stepped through the passageway of the paper, the view widened in a dizzying fashion, encompassing time and space and consciousness, entwining them in a way he’d never thought possible. Exhilaration burned in him, paired with a mysterious, nagging undertone of fear.

He came to a set of folded mechanical drawings. He unfolded them, one by one, carefully, on the floor. As he handled them, pieces of paper flaked away. Several had been folded and unfolded so many times that he had to piece together sections that had separated. He opened one of four small canisters and shook out a roll of microfilm, a hallmark of the spy thrillers he’d loved when he was a kid. A thrill ran through him. This was his father’s. Or maybe … his mother’s? That was Megan’s theory.

Of Jill’s theories, if she had any, he knew absolutely nothing. She had remarkable powers of withdrawal and stonewalling.

He examined the drawings, which were numbered. They were views of a “Device,” powered by a top-secret invention, the cavity magnetron. He had to smile. A cavity magnetron powered his microwave. It was interesting that yesterday’s top-secret war-winning development, which made possible shortwave radar, was now used in such a ubiquitous and mundane fashion.

Later papers were more speculative. A theory of postulated neural plasticity, accompanied by equations. He worked through a theory of the kinds of forces, and pharmacological interactions—separate, as if they were two different avenues to the same end—that might create a situation of relatively extreme neuroplasticity.

The documents explicated ideas about the nature of time heavily linked to theories of quantum reality and to a theory of consciousness.

The night wore on. His eyes burned. He wished for a quaff of this postulated neuroplasticity so that he could continue. He rummaged through high-up bottles in a cabinet over the top of the refrigerator and poured himself some quite marvelous Scotch. Neuroplasticity, straight up.

At about five in the morning, it struck him: He was looking at the plans for the … Infinite Game Board. He remembered it now; it hove into memory like those vaunted memories of childhood abuse he’d heard about: something buried, inaccessible until it sprang into mind with all its ferocious original energy.

The Infinite Game Board was metal, or metal-seeming, cool and hard, with upturned edges, like a cafeteria tray. Beneath it was a platform about two inches high, which held small drawers, like storage drawers beneath a bed, and short metal legs unfolded from each side so an invalid could use it in bed. The drawers held gamelike tools: dice, round, colored chips, decks of cards with faces that varied from numbers to shapes to colors to questions. He and his sisters called it “Infinite” because it seemed that the number of games one could play were never-ending.

Whenever they got it out, it manifested a different game—unless they called for an old favorite, or a particularly compelling game. Avid game players, they eagerly began each game the board suggested, never wondering at its odd capabilities. It was the golden age of board games, and this game was many in one, not advertised on TV because it was another mysterious thing from the attic, so old that no one else knew about it anymore. It might show them a race, a game of chance, a game of getting the most chips, or a game of strategy. The rules seemed evident from the face of the board, or the pieces they found in the drawers, but if they fell to arguing about the rules, a pleasant teacher’s voice emanated from the board, or a printed rulebook might be found in one of the drawers. It was a child’s delight. They didn’t question it and naturally they didn’t reveal it to their parents, perhaps sensing that it might be dangerous and would be taken away. As they grew older, the games grew more serious, and less fun. The board had a mind of its own. The Nuclear Winter game scared the pants off them, for instance, because it was imminent. Brian began to fear playing with it.

Now, he marked that as a true tipping point, the first time he became aware that the game corresponded to realities in the grown-ups’ newspapers or the magazines his parents read.

And yet, he had forgotten all that, as if it had been a dream. The possibility of a nuclear winter was, after all, extremely remote. In 1964, Khrushchev and Kennedy had disarmed their entire nuclear arsenals, and all information about the development of nuclear arms had been sealed. Off the table, completely. Too terrible to contemplate.

What if, these papers asked, the idea of any war became obsolete? How? Through neuroplasticity combined with education, cultural and historical literacy, even shots of live horror from victims of war, making the consequences direct, impressing upon people the necessity for change.

“Game Board,” was just one whimsical form that the … Device … took, according to this paper. Its essence could be embedded in any physical form. It predicted and passed the development of weak and strong nanotech.

But what did it
do
?