She clenches her fists, shakes her head, sighs in frustration as the volume in the lecture hall reaches a mild roar. Vishram takes the microphone.
“Ladies and gentlemen, if I could have your attention please? I know it’s been a long day for many of you and it’s been nothing if not eventful, but if you’d come with me through into the lab where the breakthrough was first made.”
The staff herds the guests into the zero-point lab.
“No plan ever survives contact with the enemy,” he whispers to Sonia Yadav. A hovercam darts past his head, close and irritating as an insect, relaying the events to the remote shareholders. He imagines the virtual ghosts of the agent aeais hovering over the slow-moving line of guests. Centre Director Surjeet had objected robustly to Vishram opening the zero-point theory lab with its labyrinth of wall-writings and hieroglyphics. Surjeet feared it would make the project look amateurish—see, this is how they do things at Ray Power! With crayons and spray cans, on walls, like badmashes making graffiti. Vishram wants it for just that reason: it is human, messy, creative. It has the desired effect, the people relax, look up in wonder at the hieroglyphics. Will it be a new Lascaux, a Sistine chapel? Vishram wonders. The symbols that birthed an age. He should start making inquiries about having the room preserved.
Vishram Ray, with intimations of immortality. He notes with small, sharp pleasure that his dinner date with Sonia Yadav still shines in red felt-marker on the corner of the desk. In the less formal environment, her passion easily keeps an audience. Vishram watches her arm movements delimit swathes of ceiling to a rapt group of greysuits. He overhears her telling them “. at a fundamental level where quantum theory, M-Star theory, and computing all interact. We’re discovering that the quantum computers we’re using to maintain the containment fields—and its the containment fields that affect the winding geometries of the ’branes—can actually manipulate the Wolfram/Friedkin grain structure of the new universe. At a fundamental level, the universe is computational.”
Their little mouths are wide open.
Vishram shimmies in beside Marianna Fusco.
“When this is done,” he says, getting as close as professional propriety allows to a legal advisor, “How about. We go. Off somewhere. Where there is sun and sea and sand and really good bars and no people and we can run around in nothing but factor thirty for a month?”
And she slides her head as close to his as she dares and through a frozen public smile says, “I can’t. I have to go.”
“Oh,” says Vishram. And, “Fuck.”
“It’s a family thing,” Marianna Fusco says. “Big anniversary in my constellation family. People coming from all over. Relations I didn’t have last time we did this. No, I’ll be back, funny man. Just tell me where to turn up, sans luggage.”
Then the lights flicker and the room quivers. Glass rattles in the windows and door. There is a murmur of consternation. Director Surjeet’s hands are raised in placation.
“Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, please, there is no need for alarm. What we have just felt is a quite normal side effect of us ramping up the collider. We have closed one aperture and used the energy to warp the ’brane into another. Ladies and gentlemen, we have broken through into a new universe!”
There is polite, baffled applause. Vishram takes the opportunity to showboat.
“And what that means, my friends, is a twelve percent return on our energy investment. We put a hundred percent into maintaining the aperture, we get all that, plus an extra twelve back again! It’s this way to the zero-point future!”
Inder starts off a tattoo of enthusiastic corporate applause.
“You should have been a lawyer,” Marianna Fusco says. “You have the gift of talking endless shit on subjects you know nothing about.”
“Didn’t I tell you that’s what my Dad wanted for me?” Vishram says, positioning himself so that he can see down Marianna Fusco’s top. He imagines slowly, luxuriously oiling those hand-filling nipples.
“I remember you saying something about the law and comedy both being professions that make their living in the arena,” she says.
“I did? It must have been after sex.”
He does remember that conversation. It seems like another geological era, another incarnation. The room shakes again, harder, more sustained. Pens fall from desk; concentric ripples clash inside the water-cooler.
“Another universe, another point on the share-price,” Vishram quips but Sonia Yadav looks concerned. Vishram catches her eye. She abandons her tour. They move through the groups of shareholders back to the empty lecture hall.
“Problem?” he whispers. Sonia points at the display boards. Output, one hundred and thirty-five percent.
“We shouldn’t be anywhere close to that kind of figure.”
“It’s doing better than expected.”
“Mr. Ray, this is physics. We know exactly the characteristics of the universes we create, no surprises, no guesswork, no ‘better than expected, good boy, top of class.’”
Vishram messages Director Surjeet. When he enters, Vishram closes the door to hovercams and eavesdroppers.
“Sonia tells me we have a problem with the zero-point.”
Surjeet does this tooth sucking thing that grates Vishram’s nipples, especially when it reveals the saag he had for lunch.
“We’re getting anomalous readings.”
“That tells me exactly as much as ‘Vishram, we have a problem.’”
“Very well, Mr. Ray. It’s a universe, but it’s not the one we ordered.”
Vishram feels his balls contract. Surjeet has his palmer open, mathematical renderings and wire-frame graphics spins across it. Sonia, too, is reading the digits.
“Eight three zero.”
“It should be.”
“Two two four.”
“Wait wait wail wait wait; enough of the lottery results.”
Sonia Yadav says carefully, “All the universes have what we call winding numbers, the higher the number, the more energy we need to access it and the more we can get out of it.”
“We’re six hundred universes too high.”
“Yes,” says Sonia Yadav.
“Recommendations?”
“Mr. Ray, we must close the zero-point down immediately.”
Vishram cuts him off. “That is absolutely the last resort. How do you think that’s going to look in front of our entire board and the press? Another Bharati humiliation. If we can get the thing up to full power safely.” To Sonia Yadav, he says, “Does this pose any danger?”
“Mr. Ray, the energies released if membranes cross.”
Sonia cuts in.
“No.”
“You’re sure.”
“Dr. Surjeet is correct about the energy levels if membranes cross, it would be like a nano-Big Bang, but that involves energies thousands of times more powerful than we can generate here.”
“Yes, but the Atiyah’s Ladder effect.”
The guy who let off the second Big Bang, Vishram thinks. Creation Two. That’s the biggest laugh any comedian will ever get. He says, “Here’s what we do. We continue with the demonstration as planned. If it goes over one hundred and seventy, we close the whole thing down, show’s over, please exit via the gift shop. Whatever happens, nothing said in this room goes any further. Keep me appraised.”