‘What are the chances?’
‘Well – we don’t know, obviously. I’d say it would be very, very unlikely. Very unlikely indeed. It hasn’t happened before, as far as anyone knows. But then, if Banacharski has found a way of making a machine that affects probability – which would be odd because probability doesn’t itself exist, necessarily; at least not in the sense that most people might understand it…’
‘Then you’re supposing,’ said Red Queen, ‘he made a machine with his brain. And this machine made it possible for his brain to make the machine. Isn’t that a bit circular?’
‘I’m speculating,’ protested Hands. ‘That’s all I’m in a position to do.’ He looked a little hurt. ‘I’m a professor of mathematics, anyway: not of yet-to-be-discovered physics.’
Red Queen stood up, walked round the desk, returned to the chair, performed a lazy roll of the neck.
‘So it won’t look like a machine, necessarily?’
‘I don’t suppose so, no.’
‘No knobs, buttons, flashing lights, wires?’
‘I doubt very much it runs on a battery.’
Red Queen’s watch said it was a quarter to midnight.
They were interrupted by a rap at the door of the room, followed before either had the chance to respond by a man of medium height, with a splash of grey in his hair, wearing a dark suit. His manner was brisk.
‘Porlock,’ said Red Queen.
The man bowed his head slightly. ‘Word from Our Friends. They think they’ve found the suitcase the boy dropped at the airport. They’re bringing it in.’ Our Friends was Directorate slang for what might have been called the executive branch. Friends got things done. Theoretically, they were partner agencies. But Red Queen regarded their involvement in this – in anything – as at best a necessary evil.
‘What was it? Where was it?’
‘He didn’t leave it. He passed it, as you thought, to someone in arrivals.’
Hands sat on the sofa mutely watching the exchange.
‘Who?’
‘Courier.’
‘For who?’
‘An agency. His name was misspelled on the manifest. That’s why the initial sweep didn’t pick it up. The client was MIC.’
Red Queen tensed, looked at Hands, then went out into the corridor with Porlock. Porlock pushed the door to behind him so that Hands could no longer hear their conversation.
‘What was it?’
‘An encrypted hard drive.’
‘How did you get it?’
‘The courier had an accident. Not the boy, the pickup guy. Non-fatal. Best Our Friends could do. We thought you’d want it.’
‘I do. Put everyone on this. People with big brains and eyeglasses. Tell me when you’ve cracked the drive.’
‘Could this be it?’
Red Queen shrugged. ‘Seems unlikely if the analysts are saying the thing’s on the move. Something’s making the weather out there.’
‘Weather?’ said Porlock.
‘Figure of speech. I mean something’s stirring things up. And whatever it is, this hard drive is the best clue we have to what it is and where it’s going.’
Porlock turned on his heel and clicked off up the corridor. Red Queen went back into the room, where Hands was shifting in his chair, looking faintly grumpy.
‘Professor Hands. I’m sorry again to keep you so late. Now, this is important. You said earlier you thought we had a problem. What did you mean by that?’
Hands sat back in the sofa and rubbed the bridge of his nose hard with his thumb and forefinger.
‘Nicolas Banacharski was one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the twentieth century. No question. He had a very powerful mind. But he was – is, if he’s still alive – cracked. That is often part of the way things go with mathematicians who work at a very high level. If this thing he’s made is a leakage of that mind into the world, and if it’s working like a feedback loop… it will get more powerful and more unpredictable the more it operates.’
‘And it won’t have an off switch.’
‘I have no idea. I’m not imagining this thing as something that has an off switch. I’m imagining it as something that will tend to produce effects that have to do with human minds. The very fact that you say it’s affecting probability is the troublesome bit.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Probability isn’t something you can affect like – I don’t know – like a magnet affects iron filings. When you load dice you’re not affecting probability – you’re affecting physics. You’re making one side heavier. Probability isn’t a force. It doesn’t do anything. The earth hasn’t got a probability field in the way it has a magnetic field or a gravitational field. Luck -’ He blew out through his lips. ‘Luck is something that exists simply in the brain of the lucky or unlucky person. It’s an idea, not an actual thing.’
‘We have Gypsies,’ said Red Queen. ‘Down on the fourth level. We have cats on their tenth lives. We have lucky clover. Rabbits’ feet. The Pentagon stockpiled rabbits’ feet during the first Gulf War. They requisitioned rabbits’ feet. They were issued.’
Hands shook his head. ‘No luck. Just things, so to speak, taking place. Your brain is programmed to notice things that seem strange, to invent correlations and to make theories about them. Winning streaks.’
‘If I won the lottery, I’d be lucky,’ said Red Queen. ‘I’d be amazed.’ Red Queen was not lying about this. Red Queen didn’t play the lottery.
‘Yes, you’d think so. But are you amazed every week when someone wins the lottery?’ Hands answered his own question: ‘No. Because someone always wins the lottery. The thing is: that’s not surprising at all. That’s just something happening. One person in a million, or however many players you have, will always win. You’re only surprised when it’s you. From the point of view of the universe this is not at all unusual. A coincidence isn’t something strange that happens; it’s something that happens that you think is strange.’
Red Queen looked blank, frowned.
‘Let me try to explain again,’ said Hands, his slightly frayed but pleasurably superior sense of himself reasserting itself; his seminar tone sneaking back in. ‘So if this machine is, as you say, affecting probability, it is affecting something that doesn’t exist in the first place. It’s affecting an idea in someone’s head. An idea about expectation, or even desire. And then that idea is affecting things – substantial physical things – in the world. Its operation is as paradoxical, so to speak, as its very existence.’
‘I don’t really have the leisure to think about this philosophically, Professor, interesting though that may be,’ said Red Queen. ‘I need to know how to find it, and how to get it under control.’
‘There,’ said Hands, ‘I don’t know if I can help you. If it has to do with ideas – and if it is tending to behave in such a way as to be so to speak “improbable” – what it does will get more and more improbable. It will begin to feed back into itself.’
‘It will get weirder?’
‘In all likelihood, yes. I was talking earlier about cascade effects. You know, like when a truck starts to fishtail on the freeway, and then… it just goes and it spins out altogether. Something predictable, after a certain point, becomes very, very unpredictable. At the ends of these series, very close to zero or very close to infinity, the line doesn’t just curve slightly – it goes…’ Hands’s right arm wearily described a rocket taking off across some sort of imaginary graph. ‘What I mean is that something that we know to exist but that is highly, highly improbable – something at the point where the rules really seem to break down altogether – is called a singularity.’