Rhianna’s going to make me pay for that.
His pain was everywhere, but he would not let it matter.
Here goes.
Scarlet light blazed, and massive, thunderous vibrations drove through him – battlefield simulation – and Rhianna came for him at incredible speed.
Fuck.
He spun away growling and the fight was on.
Again.
FIFTY-FOUR
THE WORLD, 5568 AD
For two thousand nights and more, he Sought. Across the Sere Wastes and the Shattered Range, he followed Ideas, sharing those he captured with the villagers he came across, always receiving hospitality, always bidden farewell with relief: his difference was both useful and unsettling.
Once, he skirted a settlement where a flux storm combined with a buried crystal lode had induced foam-mouthed insanity. They were raving and armed, too dangerous to approach. He wondered, sometimes, how long they had lasted before death took them. But most of the adults he met were normal, with names and remembered childhoods, so unlike him; for he was Seeker, and that was all he could be.
Sometimes he walked past dawn, the rising sun shining red upon his burnished skin; but only if he was sure of shelter before the conditions grew deadly. There was some kind of enjoyment in not having the constraints that ruled villagers’ lives; but the true joy was finding Ideas like the one captured yesterday, swirling in his mind:
**Vacuum is a phase of spacetime as ice is a phase of water. The properties of a vacuum are emergent, just as the properties of solids – the existence and hardness of surfaces – arise independently of the quantum attributes of constituent molecules.**
Tonight, as he walked beneath the light of Magnus and Minissimus, both of them full-orbed, he wondered if this region harboured a Theme. Yesternight’s Idea resonated with one he had captured two nights earlier, and with another he had received in trade from a fellow Seeker on one of those rare occasions when two paths of Seeking crossed.
This was the Idea that the other Seeker had given him:
**Emergence is more obvious the wider one travels. It is rare to find two worlds whose organisms use the same molecule or group of molecules (the latter tending to feature one or more autocatalytic reactions) as the basis for replication. No planet besides Earth has ever shown evidence of DNA. Yet evolution occurs similarly in every biosphere, producing predator-prey relationships alongside symbiosis.**
It was an old Idea, long-held in some crystal lode; but the one he had snagged himself two nights before featured even more archaic references, linkages to other deep Ideas that might or might not be lost to time, broken apart into random flux perhaps generations before Seeker’s birth.
**Poor mad, suicidal Boltzmann correctly derived the behaviour of gases by considering their molecules to be small, hard, miniature billiard balls flying about at random. His ideal gas law is a decent fit to observed behaviour; while adding the concept of electrical charge gives the ‘real’ gas law, an even better match. This remains true even though molecules are clouds of probabilistic vibration, not billiard balls at all.**
So much in common, with such tantalizing gaps, suggesting missing Ideas whose absence cried out for discovery. He was thinking these things as something bright arced meteor-like across the night and landed, or appeared to land, somewhere among the rippling ridges that lay ahead.
The next day, he sheltered – having pushed himself too long into the hours of heat – close to a lode bearing an energetic Idea, but not close enough for him to catch it. Hunkered down, he ached with the need to take it, unable to sleep as it called to him. Finally, daring to move before dusk, he pulled the complex, twisting flux inside himself.
**‘Phase transition’ and ‘symmetry breaking’ are synonymous terms, though it may not be obvious. In the very early universe, the electroweak force was singular. When it shivered apart, spacetime itself entered a new phase.**
Unusually, the flux had tangled with a tenuous strand, leading him to a linked Idea embedded in the same lode. After a moment, Seeker realized it had been a single Idea broken in two, and a sense of rightness filled him as he pulled the second half inside himself.
**Faster-than-light travel was long thought to destroy causality, allowing travel outside the light-cone. However, relativistic lightspeed performs two functions: the speed on which all observers agree, and the universal speed limit for motion. Finite FTL breaks this symmetry – different observers will not agree on an FTL flight’s duration – and causality is indeed distorted from the Newtonian paradigm, but not to randomness, no more than distance and duration are destroyed by Lorentz-Fitzgerald transformations.**
If this region did in fact contain a lost Theme, he should notify as many people as he could, in the hope that more Seekers would learn of it. But he was drawn by something else: the sight of that meteor, which lay a night’s journey ahead of him, or so he thought.
In fact it was two nights later when he peered over a ridge and saw the strange, massive, shining craft on the sands below, with its soft-fleshed but human-shaped crew and their metallic, dragon-like companion, and the silver-skinned prisoner, bound and kneeling.
It was the other Seeker, whom he had met so recently.
There was a niche to hide in, though buried seams contained tangled flux – powerful but random, therefore dangerous – but he had to do it, to secrete himself and think, to work out what to do. He was terrified, that was the thing: too scared to imagine courses of action, never mind carry them out. They had overwhelmed the other Seeker; they could do the same to him.
Vibrating in his hiding-place, he managed to form two questions: where had the awful-looking things come from? And why had they landed where they did?
It was a craft, the huge device below; and as he thought of it – without having the courage to risk another look – the outside had been damaged, blackened and torn, much as the other Seeker’s skin would turn in daylight if they kept him out there. While from below the sand he had caught a sense of something archaic and huge, buried very deep, in place for a long time – many generations, maybe even fifty or more.
A howl of agonized flux spun this away.
They were torturing their prisoner.
FIFTY-FIVE
EARTH, 2033 AD
Portrait of a scared physicist, one Lucas Woods, hiding out in a damp-smelling budget hotel room for which he had paid cash (no questions asked, this being the dodgy end of Bayswater), working on a fake-ID qPad likewise bought for cash (this time with raised eyebrows but acceptance, in a small Tottenham Court Road establishment), dividing his time between reading and thinking and puking up with fear in the en suite, before reading once more:
It was nine years since a young, British-born researcher called Gus Calzonni – her legal name being Augusta – made her controversial discovery in Caltech. A laser beam that appeared broken, non-existent along part of its length, was significant in itself; but Calzonni’s claim was that the beam in fact remained continuous, with a segment inside another spacetime continuum that she named mu-space. What gave the claim some credibility was that she had calculated the transition requirements in advance, based on the fractal geometry of a hypothetical ur-continuum, and designed the experiment afterwards. However, it remained an open question: just because the beam behaved as if it had entered mu-space did not guarantee it actually had.
The webAnts and webAgents that Lucas set loose returned an interesting picture, more high-tech entrepeneur (or entrepeneuse as several journal sites had it) than researcher. There was a small tradition of Oxford, where she had taken her first degree and DPhil both, producing academics who grew rich from spin-off companies; but Calzonni appeared to have a greater, un-English (or un-English-academic) drive for wealth. A mathematical prodigy, she had also studied a near-forgotten non-academic system called neurolinguistic programming, which she claimed produced useful psychological techniques and skills for business people, even as she denounced the system’s community as New Age schizoid delusional, with minimal knowledge of neurology, linguistics or software engineering, unable to see past their dogmatic constraints or test themselves with scientific rigour. Lucas removed the latter set of findings from his workspace – they seemed strident about an irrelevance – so he could concentrate on the physics.