“Aj is out there,” Thomas Lull said.
At the hydrofoil dock the rain was falling heavily, tinged with smoke, but the city was venturing out, a peek from a door, a furtive dash past burned-out Marutis and looted Muslim shops, a scurrying phatphat run. There were livelihoods to be made. The city, as if having held its breath, at last allowed itself a slow, trembling exhalation. A steady throng pushed through the narrow streets to the river. With handcarts and cycle drays, with overloaded cycle rickshaws and phatphats, with hooting Marutis and taxis and pickups, the Muslims were leaving. Thomas Lull and Lisa climbed around the hopelessly jammed traffic. Many had abandoned vehicles and were off-loading their salvaged possessions: computers, sewing machines, lathes, great swollen bundles of bedding and clothing wrapped up in blue plastic twine.
“I went to see Chandra at the university,” Thomas Lull said as they pushed through a snarl of abandoned cycle-rickshaws onto the ghat where the separate streams of refuges fused into one Vedic horde at the water’s edge. “Anjali and Jean-Yves were working in human-aeai interfaces; specifically, grafting protein-chip matrices onto neural structures. Direct brain-computer connection.” Lisa Durnau fought to keep Thomas Lull in sight. His gaudy blue surf-shirt was a beacon among the bodies and bundles. One trip on these stone steps and you were dead. “The lawyer gave Aj a photograph. Her, after some kind of operation, with Jean-Yves and Anjali. I recognised the location, it was Patna, on the new ghat at the Bund. Then I remembered something. It was back in Thekkady when I was working the beach clubs. I used to know a lot of the emotics runners, most of it came from Bangalore and Chennai but there was one guy imported it from the north, from the Free Trade Zone at Patna. They had everything you could get from Bangalore for a quarter the price. He used to go on monthly runs, and I remember him telling me about this grey medic, did radical surgery for men and women who didn’t want to be men or women any more, if you get what I mean.”
“Nutes,” Lisa Durnau yelled over the sea of heads. The hydrofoil staff had sealed and barred the gate to the jetty and were lifting money from the hands thrust through the bars to permit refugees to slip aboard. She guessed they were halfway to the gate but she was tiring.
“Nutes,” Thomas Lull shouted back. “It’s a long shot, but if I’m right, it’s the missing piece.”
To what? Lisa Durnau wanted to ask but the crowd surged. The hydrofoil was filling by the second. Refugees were waist deep in the Ganga, holding babies, children up to the boat crew who pushed them ungently back with landing poles. Thomas Lull pulled Lisa Durnau close to him. They fought to the head of the line. The steel gate opened, the steel gate clanged shut. Bodies jammed against the grating.
“Got any green?”
A search of her bag threw up three hundred in traveller’s cheques. Thomas Lull waved them in the air.
“US dollars! US dollars!”
The steward beckoned him forward. His crew shoved back the clingers-on.
“How many how many?” Thomas Lull held up two fingers. “In in.”
They squeezed through the barely open gate, up the gangplank and onto the hydrofoil. Ten minutes later, grossly overloaded, it pulled away from the still-growing crowd on the ghats. To Lisa Durnau, peering through the streaky window, it looked like a blood clot.
In the overcrowded lounge she pushes the Tablet towards Thomas Lull. He thumbs through the pages of data from the Tabernacle.
“So what is it like in space, then?”
“Smelly. Tiring. You spend most of your time out of your head and you never actually get to see anything.”
“Bit like a rock festival. First thing strikes me about this, you assume it’s an artefact of an extraterrestrial civilization.”
“If the Tabernacle is seven billion years old, then why don’t we see the aliens who built it everywhere we look?”
“A variant on the Fermi Paradox—if aliens exist, then where are they? Let’s work through this: if we posit the Tabernacle builders an expansion rate of even one-tenth percent of the speed of light, in seven billion years they would have colonised all the way to the Sculptor Galaxy group.”
“There’d be nothing but them.”
“But all we find is one shitty little asteroid? I don’t think so. Subsidiary point, if it is almost twice as old as our solar system.”
“How did they know we’d be here to find it?”
“That this swirl of Stardust would one day turn into you, me, and Aj. I think we can dismiss that theory. Conjecture two: it’s a message from God.”
“Oh come on, Lull.”
“I’d lay better than evens it’s been whispered at the White House prayer breakfast. The end of the world is at hand.”
“Then that’s the end of the rational worldview. It’s back to the Age of Miracles.”
“Exactly. I like to think my life as a scientist has not been a complete waste. So I’ll stick to theories that have some nugget of rationality in them. Conjecture three, another universe.”
“That thought occurred to me,” says Lisa Durnau.
“If anyone knows what’s out there in the polyverse, it should be you. The Big Bang inflates into a set of separate universes all with slightly differing physical laws. The probability is virtually one hundred percent that there’s at least one other universe with an Aj, a Lull, and a Durnau in it.”
“Seven billion years old?”
“Different physical laws. Times runs faster.”
“Conjecture four.”
“Conjecture four: it’s all a game. Rather, it’s all a simulation. Deep down, physical reality is rules and the application of rules, those simple programmes that give rise to incalculable complexity. Computer virtual reality looks exactly the same. I’ve only been saying this all my life, L. Durnau. But here’s the rub. We’re both fakes. We’re reruns on the final computer at the Omega Point at the end of space-time. The probabilities are always going to be in favour of our reality being a rerun rather than the original.”
“And bugs are appearing in the system. Our mystery seven-billion-year-old asteroid.”
“Implying some imminent plot development for The Sims.”
“You’re not supposed to see the Great and Powerful Oz,” says Lisa Durnau. “We’re definitely not in Kansas any more.”
The chai-wallah passes, swinging his stainless steel urn, chanting his mantra: chat, kafi. Thomas Lull takes a fresh cup.
“I don’t know how you drink that stuff,” Lisa says.
“Conjecture five. For a mysterious alien artefact, it’s a bit clunky. I’ve seen more convincing SFX on Town and Country.”
“I get what you’re saying here. It looks like we built it—if we wanted to send some kind of message to ourselves.”
“One you can’t ignore—an Earth-crossing asteroid, and then make it move out of the way.” Lisa Durnau hesitates. This is beyond blue-sky. “From our future.” “There’s nothing here I don’t see us achieving in a couple of hundred years.”
“It’s a warning?”
“Why else send something back, unless you need to change history pretty damn bad? Our umpteen-great-grand-Lulls and Durnaus have run into something they can’t deal with. But if they gave themselves a couple of hundred years’ head start.”
“I can’t imagine what they’re up against if they can send objects through time and they’re still on the ropes.”
“I can,” says Thomas Lull. “It’s the final war between humans and aeais. We’d be up against Generation Tens by then—one hundred million times the capability of a Gen Three.”
“That means they would operate on the same level as the Wolfram/Friedkin codes that underly our physical reality,” Lisa Durnau says. “In which case.”