“Do you want to come in?” he said vaguely.
“Brian—” Kearney began.
“Don’t go in,” Anna said suddenly. She was still standing in the flower bed under the window.
“You don’t have to come with me,” Kearney told her.
She stared at him angrily. “Oh yes I do.”
Inside, the house was thick with heat and humidity. Tate led them into a small room at the back.
“Could you shut the door after you?” he said. “Keep the warmth in.”
Kearney looked around.
“Brian, what the fuck are you doing?”
Tate had made the room into a Faraday cage by tacking copper chicken wire to the walls and ceiling. As an extra precaution he had covered the windows with Bacofoil. Nothing electromagnetic could get into him from outside that room; nothing could get out. No one could know what he was doing, if he was doing anything. Boxes of tacks, rolls of chicken wire and Bacofoil cartons lay everywhere. The central heating was turned up full. Two standalone heaters running off bottled gas roared away in the middle of the room next to a Formica kitchen table and chair. On the table Tate had racked six G4 servers connected in parallel, a keyboard, a hooded monitor, some peripherals. He also had an electric kettle, instant coffee, plastic cups. Takeaway food cartons littered the floor. The room stank. It was immeasurably bleak and obsessive in there.
“Beth left,” Tate explained. He shivered and put his hands out to one of the heaters. His face was hard to see inside the hood of the parka. “She went back to Davis. She took the kids.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Kearney said.
“I bet you are,” Tate said. “I bet you are.” He raised his voice suddenly. “Look,” he said, “what do you want? I keep the phone in another room, you know? I’ve got work to do here.”
Meanwhile, Anna Kearney was staring around as if she couldn’t believe any of it. Every so often her eyes went across Tate with the calm contempt of one neurotic for another, and she shook her head. “What’s that?” she said suddenly. The white cat had emerged cautiously from under the desk. It looked up at Michael Kearney and ran off a little way. Then it stretched itself with a kind of careful self-regard and walked up and down purring, its tail stuck in the air. It seemed to be enjoying the heat. Anna knelt down and offered her hand. “Hello, baby,” she said. “Hello, little baby.” The cat ignored her, leapt lightly up onto the hardware, and from there onto Tate’s shoulder. It looked thinner than ever, its head more than ever like the blade of an axe, ears transparent, fur a corona of light.
“I’m living in just the one room,” Tate said.
“What’s happened, Brian?” Kearney said gently. “I thought you said it was a glitch.”
Tate held his hands out from his sides.
“I was wrong.”
Rooting about in the tangle of USB cable, stacked peripherals and old coffee cups that covered the desk, he came up with a 100Gb pocket drive in a polished titanium shell. This he offered to Kearney, who weighed it cautiously in his hand.
“What’s this?”
“The results of the last run. It was decoherence-free for a whole minute. We had q-bits that survived a whole fucking minute before interference set in. That’s like a million years down there. That’s like the indeterminacy principle is suspended.” He gave a strained laugh. “Is a million years long enough for us, do you think? Will that do? But then . . . I don’t know what happened then. The fractals . . .”
Kearney felt this wasn’t going anywhere. He thought results like these were probably wrong, and that anyway they couldn’t explain what he had seen in the laboratory.
“Why did you smash the monitors up, Brian?”
“Because it wasn’t physics anymore. Physics was off. The fractals started to—” he couldn’t think of a word, nothing had prepared him for whatever he was seeing in his head “—leak. Then the cat went inside after them. She just walked through the screen and into the data.” He laughed, looking from Kearney to Anna. “I don’t expect you to believe that,” he said.
Underneath it all—underneath the inexplicable fear, the weirdness, the simple guilt of selling the project out first to Meadows then to Sony—Tate was just a teenager good at physics. He hadn’t developed past a hip haircut and the idea that his talent gave him some sort of edge in the world, if only he would always be forgiven by adults. Now his wife had disabused him of that. Worse, perhaps, physics itself had come looking for him in some unfathomable way he couldn’t live with. Kearney felt sorry for him, but he only said carefully:
“The cat’s here, Brian. She’s on your shoulder now.”
Tate glanced at Kearney, then at his own shoulder. He didn’t seem to see the white cat perched there, purring and kneading the material of his coat. He shook his head.
“No,” he said abjectly. “She’s gone now.”
Anna stared at Tate, then the cat, then Tate again.
“I’m leaving,” she said. “I’ll call a taxi, if no one minds.”
“You can’t call from in here,” Tate told her, as if he was talking to a child. “It’s a cage.” Then he whispered, “I had no idea Beth felt so badly about things.”
Kearney touched his arm.
“Why do you need the cage, Brian? What really happened?”
Tate began to cry. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Why do you need the cage?” Kearney persisted. He made Tate face him. “Are you afraid something will get in?”
Tate wiped at his eyes. “No, I’m frightened it will get out,” he said. He shivered and made a curious half-turn away from Kearney, raising his hand to zip the neck of the parka; this brought him face to face with Anna. He jerked in a startled way, as if he had forgotten she was there. “I’m cold,” he whispered. He felt around behind him with one hand, pulled the chair out from behind the table and sat down heavily. All the time the white cat rode on his shoulder, shifting its balance fluently, purring. Tate looked up at Kearney from the chair and said:
“I’m always cold.”
He was silent for a moment, then he said: “I’m not really here. None of us are.”
Tears rolled down the dark grooves around his mouth.
“Michael, we’re none of us here at all.”
Kearney stepped forward quickly and, before Tate could react, pulled back the hood of the parka. Fluorescent light fell mercilessly across Tate’s face, stubbled, exhausted, old-looking, and with an abraded appearance about the eyes, as if he had been working without spectacles, or crying all night. Probably, Kearney thought, he had been doing both. The eyes themselves were watery, a little bloodshot, with pale blue irises. Nothing was odd about them in the end except the tears pouring in a silvery stream from their inner corners. There were too many of them for Tate’s grief. Every tear was made up of exactly similar tears, and those tears too were made from tears. In every tear there was a tiny image. However far back you went, Kearney knew, it would always be there. At first he supposed it was his own reflection. When he saw what it really was he grabbed Anna by the upper arm and started dragging her out of the room. She struggled and fought all the way, hitting out at him with her luggage, staring back in horror at what was happening to Brian Tate.