The Flicker Men (13 page)

“Look early enough in gestation, and we've got gills, a tail, the roots of the whole animal kingdom. It's all there, like a little time machine, starting with a tadpole and working your way up. You climb the phylogenetic tree as the fetus develops, and the newer characteristics, the things that make us human, get tacked on last.”

“How will that impact the test?”

“What Robbins is testing for is only found in humans, so my gut tells me he's wrong, and wave collapse comes late. Real late.”

“You think it works that way?”

“Eric, I have no fucking idea how it works.”

*   *   *

The day of the experiment arrived, and we went to work like it was nothing. We waited for the press release—something on the TV or radio. Some announcement.

The first hint that something went wrong came in the form of silence.

Silence from the Robbins group. Silence in the media. No press conferences. No TV interviews.

Just silence.

The announcement wouldn't come out till later.

Satvik rejoined us at the lab, but when we interrogated him, he had no answers to share. He'd helped them with the equipment but hadn't been present for the testing.

“How could you not know?” Point Machine asked.

“They didn't let me watch the testing,” Satvik said. “They kept me away.”

One day turned into two. Two into three.

Finally, a terse statement was issued by the group, which called their results inconclusive. Robbins came out a few days later, saying bluntly that there had been a failure in the mechanism of the test.

Satvik scoffed. “Failure? What failure?”

We sat in his office and watched the news link on his desktop, forwarded from Jeremy.
You probably want to see this
, the e-mail heading had read.

“The box was perfect,” Satvik muttered. “If there had been failure, they would have asked for my help.”

I clicked the
PLAY
button. In the video, Robbins stood at a lectern of some kind, microphones in array. The link was a press conference. “The test itself is flawed,” Robbins said. He wore a neat suit. Camera flashes lit up the blue screen behind him. His expression was confident, his tone measured. “The procedures required to perform the testing on pregnant women made accurate evaluation impossible. We weren't able to get meaningful results.”

He opened the floor up to questioning. Reporters asked questions, but the answers were all the same.

“The test was flawed.”

“The mechanism failed.”

“Meaningless.”

I clicked the link closed.

“There was no flaw,” Satvik said. “He didn't get the answer he wanted.”

“Yeah,” Point Machine said. “I think you're right. He's lying.”

But the truth was something stranger, of course.

And of course, that came out later, too.

 

18

In the following weeks, Satvik buried himself in work. I'd find the lights on in his lab, the electronic debris field of his tabletop skewed in new configurations. His slot in the mail room filled, then emptied, then filled again.

I woke at 7:00 a.m. Shaking hands, cold porcelain. A bad morning. The worst in a while, after a night of bad dreams: A dark unfurling. A vision from childhood.

I drove to the lab at 8:00.

I found Satvik already in his office. He'd let his hair grow in the previous weeks. The roots were salt and pepper, the ends mostly dark. It gave him a disheveled appearance that he hadn't had when I'd first met him. The old Satvik was gone, replaced by this thin man with haunted eyes.

He was packing up a box, folding the cardboard flaps across the top.

“Going somewhere?”

His head jerked up. I'd startled him. “I'm packing equipment. I'm going to be on the road.”

“For what?”

“A project.”

I stepped farther into the room, remembering when I'd first said those words to him. Words that had started it all. “What project?”

“Something I must check,” he said, finishing up the box. He picked up a roll of duct tape from the table. “I will tell you about it when I get back.”

“Why not now?”

“Because I'm probably wrong, and nothing will come of it.”

“Does Jeremy know you're going?”

“I sent him an e-mail. He'll know when he reads it.”

“You're working too hard. Do you remember when you told me that?”

“I remember,” he said.

“People forget they're going to die someday.”

He smiled. The first smile I'd seen since before the Robbins experiment. For a moment, I saw the Satvik I'd met that first week at the lab. “This is different,” he said.

“How?”

“This is something I must do.”

I nodded, accepting his answer, though I didn't like it. For some reason, the story of the princes rose up in my head.

At the bird.

I was struck again by how much he'd changed. The experiment had done that. I'd done that. I glanced around the room, and I could see that some of his electronics were missing. It was hard to guess what he'd packed up.

“You need any help with that?”

He shook his head. “No, it's fine.” He yanked a strip of duct tape from the roll and plastered it across the top of the box. “I'll be back in a week.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Because Robbins was lying,” he said. “The test didn't fail.”

“That has nothing to do with you. You can just let it go.”

“I cannot,” he said.

I stared at him. Satvik was that fourth prince and always had been.
At the bird's eye.
He was never going to just let it go.

He picked up his box and headed for the door.

“Be careful out there.” I watched him go.

“You as well, my friend.”

*   *   *

The truth, when it came out, came in waves. It hit the news the next day, like a slow tide Robbins couldn't stop. It was only later that I'd realize that Satvik must have known. Must have seen some hint on the Net.

The truth was that some of the fetuses
did
pass the test. Just as Robbins had hoped. The video surfaced on YouTube. Uploaded anonymously. A leak from Robbins's inner circle. The mothers smiled, while the doctors hovered—the little diode trailing away from the distended abdomen. Robbins himself was in the shot for certain frames, waiting for the results.

Some fetuses
did
cause the green indicator light to go on. Some did trigger wavefunction collapse.

But others didn't. And those videos surfaced, too.

The same doctors. Different patients.

Heated voices.

“Try again.”

“Again.”

The mother's worried face. And a light that would not change, would not turn green, no matter what.

“What does that mean?” the mother asked, voice rising to a panic. “Is my baby okay? What does
this mean
?”

Video after video. A dozen abdomens of various degrees of distension. Two very different results. Most fetuses did collapse the wavefunction. But some didn't.

And gestational age had nothing to do with it.

*   *   *

Satvik wasn't back in a few days. Or a week.

Ten days later, I received the call in the middle of the night, waking me from a nightmare.

“I found one in New York.” It was Satvik.

“What?” I rubbed my eyes, trying to wake up. Trying to make sense of the words coming through the cell phone.

“A boy. Nine years old. I tested him with the box, and he didn't collapse the wavefunction.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He looked in the box, but he didn't collapse the wave.”

I blinked in the darkness. Satvik had seen it first, before any of us. What was true of the fetuses would be true of others.

At the bird's eye.

“What's wrong with him?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Satvik said. “He's normal. Normal vision, normal intelligence. I tested him five times, but the interference pattern didn't budge.”

“What happened when you told him?”

“I didn't tell him. He stood there staring at me.”

“Staring?”

“It was like he already knew. Like he knew the whole time it wouldn't work.”

*   *   *

Days turned to weeks. The testing continued. Satvik found more of them. A lot more.

He traveled the country, searching for that elusive, perfect cross section and a sample size large enough to prove significance. He collected data points, faxed copies back to the lab for safekeeping.

I imagined Satvik on the other end of the line, sitting in some dark hotel room, fighting a growing insomnia, fighting the terrible loneliness of what he was doing.

Point Machine sought comfort in elaborately constructed phylogenies, retreated into his cladograms. But there was no comfort for him there. “There's no frequency distribution curve,” he told me. “No disequilibrium between ethnographic populations, nothing I can get traction on.” He pored over Satvik's data, looking for the pattern that would make sense of it all.

“Distribution is random,” he said. “It doesn't act like a trait.”

“Then maybe it's not,” I said.

He shook his head. “Then who are they, some kind of empty set? Nonplayer characters in the indeterminate system?”

Satvik had his own ideas, of course.

“Why none of the scientists?” I asked him one night, phone to my ear. “If it's random, why none of us?”

“It's self-selecting,” Satvik said. “If they're part of the indeterminate system, why become scientists?”

“What do you mean?”

“Lots of species are capable of ordered behavior,” he said. “It doesn't mean they have consciousness.”

“We're talking about humans,” I said. “This can't be right.” Even as I said it, I wanted to pull it back—reel it back onto my tongue, the thing said over and over in quantum mechanics.
It can't be right. It can't work that way.

“Data is data,” Satvik said. “Your eyes are two slits.”

“Do they even know what you're testing them for, when they look at your little light? Do they know they're different?”

“One of them,” he said. He was silent for a moment. “One of them knew.”

*   *   *

And then days later, the final late-night call. From Denver. The last time he'd call me.

“I don't think we're supposed to do this,” he said, voice strangely harsh.

I rubbed my eyes, sitting up in bed. “Do what?”

“I don't think we're supposed to build this kind of thing,” he said. “The fault in reality that you talked about … I don't think we were expected to take advantage of it this way. To make a test.”

“What are you talking about?” Light from the parking lot slanted beneath the curtains, drawing a pale line across the floor. Around me, the room had grown cold in the night.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I saw the boy again.”

“Who?”

“The boy from New York,” he said. “I saw him today. He came to see me.”

My mind wasn't working yet. I tried to process what he was telling me. “The boy,” I said. I was still half-asleep. I needed coffee. “What did he want?”

“I think he came here to warn me.”

And then Satvik hung up.

 

19

I called him several times over the next few days, but he never answered. It was as if Satvik had fallen off the face of the Earth, along with his special little box. The calls went straight to voice mail. I spent the nights in the lab, sleeping on my cot. I was at the lab when I got the call from his wife.

“No,” I said. “Not since Monday.”

She was crying into the phone. “He calls home every night. He never misses.”

“I'm sure he's fine,” I lied.

When I hung up, I grabbed my coat and keys and headed for the door. The rental glowed under the parking lot lights.

Do they know they're different?
I'd asked him.

One of them
, he'd said.
One of them knew
.

I punched the gas as I hit the main road, accelerating through a yellow light.

The more complex the system, the more ways it can go wrong. Point Machine had said that.

And things go wrong. That spotlight. Little engines of wavefunction collapse. Can a spotlight sense the darkness, when it sees only light?

I hit the highway two minutes later.

*   *   *

A knock on the door.

Her face filled the narrow gap.

“Joy,” I said.

She let the door swing open as she turned and walked deeper inside. There were no words. Not until later.

On her bed, she rested her warm cheek against my shoulder. I told her about Satvik. The call from his wife.

She lay silently and did not speak. In the darkness, she was a shape. The curve of a hip.

“The nightmares come every night now,” I said.

“They will pass.”

“What do you know about dreams?”

She heard it in my voice, the real question. “Sound and touch,” she said. “But I remember dreaming in sight. It was so long ago that I'm not sure if I remember seeing or only the dream of seeing. Or maybe they are the same.”

“Maybe they are,” I said.

“There was another threat today,” she said. “A letter at the lab. I overheard Jeremy in the hall.”

The shadows moved. I couldn't see her, but I felt her arm across my chest.

“So what do you dream?” she asked.

“I never remember.”

“Keep your secrets,” she said. “I don't blame you.”

“Do you think he's okay?”

She didn't answer for a long while. “He'll be back. I think he's just lost his way.”