“Wait wait wait. What are all these theys and thems?”
“The angels, of course. Though Harx says you shouldn’t call them that; they’re machines, and machines have souls but no spirits. They can’t be of God, see?”
“Wait wait wait wait. If the angels are machines…”
“Not if.”
“Okay.” No contention: everyone head-knew that what they called angels were, for the most part, leftover manforming machinery, but the conceit persisted because for the most part they lived in heaven—they formed a visible ring around the world—and they carried out unguessable missions on the part of unseen powers for the betterment of humans. “And they’ve no spirits, so what do you and this Harx boy actually see with your sight?”
He sighed the sigh guys sigh when their thoughts are too much for wee females. Sport, sex, steam or steel, it never failed to kindle the devil in Sweetness.
“It’s theoretical.”
“Go on.”
“How much vinculum theory have you got?”
“The universe is a big brown package all tied up with string.”
“It’s a lot more complicated than that.”
“I know that. That’s the bollocks you get off the School of the Air. All matter, energy, space and time are different harmonics in eleven dimensional strings, most of which are rolled up smaller than Planck space so all we get are the four we live in rather than lots we wouldn’t know what to do with.” She had always found visualising seven extra dimensions, each containing the ones beneath it, mind-wringing. Then one of her wiser Stabile Tutors, who held seminars in reality, had let her into the secret that everyone else did as well. Good thing. The order of the universe should be mind-wringing. She added, “I’m named after it.”
“What?”
“Octave. Harmonics. String music, all that.”
“What do you know about filament computing?”
Sweetness let go Serpio’s jacket and hunted for other hookholds underneath the bag rack. She made sure he appreciated that she was leaning back, away from him.
“Suppose you just give me the lecture, then?”
After a few miffed moments he said, “All the ROTECH machines use vinculum processing architecture.”
“Spell it,” Sweetness challenged. He did, and continued, “Calculations get done not in two states, like the old quantum machines we got on the trains, but in eleven uncollapsed states. You know…”
“Two impossible things at the same time. Or in this case, eleven.”
“Yeah. But what it really is, deep down, is using the structure of the universe as a computer. So in a sense…”
“The whole universe is a computer.” Or God, she thought of adding, but she was unsure of the small print of Serpio’s theology. If it involved blind hejiras into the Big Red, the devil in the details could be sharp.
“No.”
“Okay.”
“The whole universe has the potential to be in any number of uncollapsed states.”
“This is the ‘Many-worlds’ theory, isn’t it?”
“It is, but this is how it actually works day to day. Most of the time the calculations are very small and neat and they stay down there in the string-level of the universe.”
“Like those little knots in thread you sometimes get if you’re sewing, that don’t stop the needle going through the cloth.”
“Sort of, I suppose. But sometimes if you have to make a lot of calculations, like something really complicated like making a model of an ocean, or an ecosystem, you get what they call coherence. That’s when a whole lot of string potentials are entangled together and all collapse into the same state. Then you can get whole chunks of the big universe switching from one world to another. Like magic.”
“Like knots so big they pull the shape of the cloth into something else.”
“Like sewing a big sheet of fabric into a jacket or a shirt or a wedding waistcoat. That orph…”
The precise perimeter of the circular crazy-zone was sharp in Sweetness’s memory. Like stepping from one world into another, she had thought. Right and wrong. It was another way of being this world. And what of that other place Uncle Neon took her? Was she taken to other-world, or was other-world erected around her, and the set struck when she left?
“Its little string-machines all agreed to go mad and decided that reality was something else.”
“They switched on an alternative reality.”
A new image now, of the cloud-sized heaven machine decreeing its doom on the defective earth-builder and restoring the world to normality. But who decreed what was normal? Who minted the consensus? Normal ordained that girls don’t drive trains. Consensus said, the only daughters of illustrious Engineer Domieties marry Stuards with stainless steel kitchens and good prospects.
“We’ve got a consensus reality now, so any breaches have to get cleared up right quick, but in the earliest days of the manforming they used the technique all the time to speed things up. They’d run a model of an alternative world where, say the atmosphere was working better, or there were bacteria, or soil, or even plants, and when the model got complex enough, the model would become reality. Otherwise it would’ve taken thousand of years and we’d be up to our asses in ice, if we could even breathe at all.”
Sweetness’s mind was wringing with that same painful twist she recalled from Pastor Jhingh and his eleven-dimensional visualisations. If the machines could think like that, could see all those dimensions unfolding out of each other, then maybe it was right to call them angels.
“So, what is it you actually see?”
“Most people don’t know this, but humans can see on the quantum level no problem at all. We could do it out here. It’s good and clear at night. I’d drive about twenty kays away and light a match, and you could see it. That would be like one single photon reaching your eye, and one photon is seeing quantum.”
Please don’t feel you have to demonstrate, Sweetness thought.
“You know a lot about this.”
“It’s good to study the things that make us different.”
“So,” Sweetness said. “You see things not on the quantum level, but on the vinculum scale?”
“That’s the way I was born. That’s why I can see what you people call the angels, because I can see them thinking. All those tiny tiny little vinculum calculations. I can see their minds glowing.”
“And this Harx boy.”
“To be able to see on the vinculum level involves vinculum processes. He can see me, seeing them. But he can see better. He can see anywhere in the universe, because it’s all entangled.”
“Okay,” Sweetness said carefully. “I can get this. I think. But tell me, how come you see Little Pretty One? I’m telling you, she is not a machine. She is my sister, and she lives in mirrors, and she gives me good advice, most of the time, when she can be bothered talking.”
“And she’s sitting right behind you looking over your shoulder and smiling at me.”
“You know something,” Sweetness said, truly savouring the sudden rush of emotion. “I really hate it when you talk about her like that.”
“Sorry.”
“She talks to me. All you do is see her.”