Isla walks up between two rows of beanpoles towards the cabin. She thinks: nobody is here.
A cane chair, empty, sits outside the cabin. The windows are shuttered. There is an outer door, with a gauze screen in it, that looks like it once had some paint on the wood. It’s very slightly ajar, and she pulls it open. She waits a minute, listening to nothing, then knocks on the inside door. She waits, turns on her heels and looks around her. There’s no reply, still, from inside, so she walks round the side of the cabin. There’s a sloping roof coming off the wall a bit below shoulder height – mossy slates, sheltering a pair of tall red gas canisters and a neat stack of chopped wood.
The back of the cabin is windowless, and faces an escarpment – there’d be room to wriggle past, but not comfortably. As she peers round she sees a cat vanish into the crawl space under the cabin. It smells of sawdust and wet earth. He’s in the woods somewhere, presumably. She wonders about leaving a note, decides against.
She puts her face up against one of the windows, cups her hands around her eyes so she can see in. The room looks bare – there’s a dark rug of some sort on the floor, some sort of pallet up one end, drifts of yellow paper stacked on and around a table on the blank wall. On the table is an old-fashioned hurricane lamp.
The yellow paper… This is it. The letters all came on long sheets of ruled yellow paper from legal pads. The writing disciplined, intense, very small. She is remembering the first letter she had: two years ago, out of the blue, apparently in response to something she had written about him.
‘Dear Miss Holderness,’ it had begun. ‘The order of things is changing.’ The letter was written in English, albeit some of it curiously constructed.
It had been addressed in scrawled block capitals with her first name gone over several times in ink, care of ‘EtUdes/RecOltes’, University of Nice. On the back was a poste restante address in Carcassonne.
He had read, he said, the short introductory commentary she had written – there’d been some sort of dodgy French translation – on the value of his work to number theory for this small mathematical journal with its tiresome capitalisation.
She hadn’t believed it at first. Clearly Mike was winding her up. But would even Mike write forty pages just for the sake of a joke? And Mike didn’t know the maths well enough, she realised as she went on, to have written some of the material in the letter. Then she thought that it meant something momentous: if it was Banacharski, and he was still reading journals, it meant he might still be doing maths.
A subsequent page suggested otherwise. He had bought some artichokes at the market, and they had been wrapped in a photocopy of her article. This, Banacharski said, was of tremendous importance.
‘I ate these artichokes. There were four of them. And I counted each one the number of their petals, and counted each one the number of the fibres around their hearts. This took me several days. I have started to see what you are talking about. Your article shows a deep grasp of theory. Not in the meanings of your words, which are banal, but in the patterns of your words. You know this. I am now starting to learn. The problem is in disorder.’
Isla had been taken aback by this. She’d thought her article sensible enough.
There had followed – taking up most of the letter – a long, long string of numbers – a series with no apparent pattern to it. Then there were operations on these numbers. Some of these, as far as she could make out from the marginal notes, were derived from the number of letters in the successive words of her article; some had to do with the frequency with which given letters had recurred in the article; some had to do, in a complex way, with artichokes.
Banacharski was trying to sieve some sort of order out of the randomness. Nobody could do this. He was constructing equations, finding relationships, whittling the number string down… he was – as far as she could tell – trying to wrestle the data into abstract algebra. He was trying to use it to describe a shape in space time, or a manifold of that shape. He digressed, occasionally, into some impenetrable speculation about the symmetries of the artichoke.
His letter closed: ‘Write to me. There is not enough data. The work I am doing is important.’ Important was underlined three times.
Isla had tried to follow what was going on. He was mad, that was clear enough. It was a scarily powerful mind, she thought, in deep distress. She had been halfway through writing back when the second letter had arrived. It had been shorter, with moments of lucidity. ‘I am fighting with devils,’ it said. ‘Forgive me.’
She had written back, finally, with her home address in Cambridge – he never used it, continuing to write care of the magazine, whose name he sardonically recapitalised, she noticed, in every letter. She said nothing about artichokes. She was chatty, factual, friendly – and did everything she could to flatter him. She told him about work that had been done on his work. Two major conjectures, she said, had been proved. He hadn’t been active for seven years.
His letters had gone in and out of lucidity. None was shorter than twenty pages. The longest was eighty-six pages. They appeared at intervals of anything between two and ten days. One or two of the letters contained fragments that made straightforward mathematical sense. In most, the equations seemed to be somehow… bent.
Isla discussed them with a few colleagues, including – though she came slightly to regret it – Mike, but was shy of showing them to anyone. She felt somehow protective. She had a sense that Banacharski trusted her.
Frustration started to infect them, though, as time went on. For the last six months, things seemed to be gathering pace. He underlined heavily, used confusing ellipsis, the ascenders and descenders on his letters becoming longer and angrier. Some of his choices of word seemed odd, stilted – and he started to capitalise words at random within the text of his letters. He went on and on about something he called ‘the churn’, or the ‘in-between space’. It was as if she was supposed to understand something he was trying to communicate and was failing to.
His last letter – all of them, previously, had been signed, simply, ‘NB’ – was signed off ‘Affectionately, and in despair, Nicolas’.
All this has led her here. And she is looking, now, through the window of what must be his shack as a cloud passes over the sun and brings, in this high place, a slight chill.
She takes her face from the window and turns round and there he is. He is standing at the end of the wooden wall of his cabin, smiling at her. The first thing she takes in is the skin of his face. It is blotchy – a pattern of brown freckles alternating with a cross pink colour like sunburn. His eyes are deep-set. His lips are fat, old-man lips. His beard is dark grey, with a badger-stripe of white down one side, and spreads wide to his chest, across a striped and grubby shirt, open three buttons down.
Around his waist, higher than his trousers, is a length of what looks like baling twine, snarled in a scraggy version of a bow knot. He salutes her, then casts his eyes down and away, then looks up at her again. He beckons, flapping one hand while looking at his feet.
His feet are in flip-flops. His toenails are filthy.
‘Alors, oui, entrez donc,’ he says, shuffling round the corner and opening the screen door then the other one.
‘I’m Isla,’ she says.
‘Of course,’ he says, as he opens the door and ushers her in. There’s a strange look in his eye, she thinks.
‘Honestly?’ said Hands. ‘I think you have a problem.’
The interview had gone on late into the evening, though you would not know in the unchanging light of the room that it had done so. Functionaries had been and gone. Hands had spent several hours looking through sheaves of photocopies: selections from Banacharski’s letters, classified reports from Directorate sources in MIC, what scraps of intelligence were available.
The coffee in the cup marked Starbucks had been replaced by more coffee in another cup marked Starbucks and Hands had been given a very large cookie containing very large raisins, which he had eaten hungrily. The atmosphere was near enough genial.
‘The way you might want to think about it is this,’ said Hands, cupping his left elbow with his right hand and rubbing it thoughtfully. ‘If what you’ve described to me is correct, and I must stress if, then this device, or engine if you will, is going to be highly unpredictable in its behaviour. Highly unpredictable.’
Red Queen let him run.
‘There’s a point at which mathematics and advanced physics shades over, in a way it’s hard for laypersons to understand, into philosophy. It’s not the fact that it’s hard for the outsider to understand, no. It’s more the way. Laypeople, you see – laypeople very often get the wrong end of the stick. Headline writers, arts graduates, pompous novelists. They get very attracted to metaphors, you see. You know how it is: they thought Einstein had proved that “everything was relative” whereas actually he proved something much more interesting than that. Then there was quantum mechanics and the stick they got hold of the wrong end of was the wrong stick altogether.’ Hands allowed himself a professorial little chuckle at his own joke. ‘Then chaos theory. Dear me. What I mean to say is: it’s not that all this mathematics is a metaphor. It’s the other way round. It’s that – sorry, I’m not explaining it very well. What we do doesn’t reflect the universe. It describes it. See? There isn’t a realm of ideas and then the world… it’s more like… ideas are part of the world. And if this machine does what you seem to think it does, it’s possible that what has happened is that something that ordinarily belongs for all intents and purposes to the realm of ideas is, effectively, acting in the world.’
‘Are you going to tell me what this machine might be doing, Professor?’ said Red Queen.
‘I’m getting round to it. You’ll have to forgive my thinking aloud.’
Hands was leaning forward and the elbow-rubbing was slowing and increasing in time with his diction. He paused.
‘Mind control?’ said Red Queen.
‘No. I don’t imagine so. Probably rather the absence of it. One of the big mysteries is consciousness. What is creating what I’m thinking, and what – assuming, that is, that we’re not all brains in a jar, or the hallucination of some being in another universe altogether – is creating what you’re thinking and what does it mean to think? Consciousness, ideas, imagination, selfhood – all the things that make you you and me me. These obviously arise from electrical impulses in the physical brain. And the best accounts of consciousness we have – which is to say, no real accounts at all – speculate that the ghost in the machine, so to speak, may be a function of these impulses interacting at a quantum level.’
‘OK.’
‘So the brain – consciousness itself – isn’t separate from the system of matter and energy in the rest of the universe. It’s part of it. Maybe a very tiny part of it, but that doesn’t matter. Chaos theory says that something very, very tiny in the data of a system that feeds back through itself can create very, very dramatic results. So it’s not theoretically impossible that something that started life as an idea might have an effect in the world.’
‘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.’
‘Like a black hole?’
‘Yes, a black hole is a singularity, in physics. When it comes to the laws of physics, all bets are off, so to speak. But singularity means something slightly different across different disciplines… Are you paying attention to me?’
Red Queen was not – was, rather, thinking about the patterns they’d been plotting in gambling odds in the big centres. Porlock’s clever idea. They’d let the numbers Doppler off against each other – Atlantic City and Vegas and bootlegged data for Tijuana; all-night poker hands flowing through the big Internet servers; roulette on reservations; anything that might pick up a sort of after-echo of the effect, like background radiation. Porlock had looked as smug as all hell when he’d brought the results, plotted through the day. It had suggested, however approximately, a vector: a field of disturbance heading due west from Atlanta, emitting a steady, Geiger-counter-like crackle of the unpredictable.
In Red Queen’s head, a map of America. Porlock thought these gambling centres might be a way of plotting a course. But a line between Atlanta – the place where the boy had stopped and handed this package to his employers – and San Francisco – the place where the boy was apparently heading before he decided to go off-map… it went more or less through the Nevada Desert.
‘Vegas. What would happen?’
‘Sorry?’
‘I’m thinking aloud. Let’s say, sake of argument, this is a terrorist action…’ Red Queen got up from the desk again, paced down one side of the room, now ignoring Hands altogether. ‘You have a coincidence machine. You want to cause maximum damage. Where do you go?’
‘I don’t follow you.’
‘You go to Vegas. You go to – what would happen if… if… everything came up black all at once?’
‘Well, I’m no expert on this, but generally casinos lay off odds. On average the people who bet red will cancel out the people who bet black. Rather as I was saying -’ Hands was keen to get back to his lecture – ‘the behaviour of a roulette wheel or a deck of cards – a straight one, so to speak – is perfectly predictable over a long period. That’s why the casino always wins. The most freakish results all cancel each other out, and -’
‘But say, Hands -’ this was the first time Red Queen had not called him ‘Professor’, and there was a definite edge of impatience in it – ‘say everyone happened to have bet on black. Or nobody bet on black. Then it came black. Or say -’ an image suddenly presented itself in Red Queen’s mind – rows and rows of women sitting like tortoises in velour leisure suits, in front of the slots in the waxy yellow light – ‘say every slot machine in Vegas paid out its top jackpot at once. What would happen?’
‘Theoretically -’
‘Theoretically hell. This would be – would be an act of war. It would wipe out companies, pension plans, stocks. It would cause chaos. This would be like dropping a coincidence bomb on America.’
‘I suppose, in -’
‘Professor, I need to make some phone calls, now. I would appreciate it if you were able to give us a little more of your time.’
‘Actually, as I was going to say,’ Hands returned, ‘I see that gambling or stock markets would present a problem, economically speaking. But I’m – when I said you had a problem I meant something rather more serious than that. A run of numbers in a gambling parlour is one thing, but a singularity is a problem of a quite different order of magnitude.’
‘I don’t see.’
‘There is something that baffles physicists about the beginning of the universe. We know a little about what gravity was like, in the very first moments of time. And the chances of the initial state of the universe having arisen by accident are one in ten to the power ten.’ Hands’s eyes rolled up and right and his tongue appeared in the corner of his mouth. He remembered: ‘To the power 123.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘That is fantastically improbable.’
‘I thought you just said that there was no such thing as probability.’
‘Not as a force, no. But let’s talk as if probability exists as you understand it. For the sake of argument. The state of gravity at the beginning of the universe was so improbable that the odds-to-one against it are so great that if you wrote a 0 on every single atom in the universe, you still wouldn’t be able to write it down. I’m saying this machine could do something much more damaging than bankrupting a couple of casinos or crashing the United States’s economy.’
‘There is nothing more damaging than crashing the United States’s economy,’ said Red Queen. ‘Trust me.’
‘No. I don’t think you understand me. This machine could, if it – strange to put it this way – took a shine to the notion, pull our universe inside out through its own asshole.’ Far from being dismayed by the prospect – in the way Red Queen was dismayed, deeply dismayed, by the prospect of explaining a threat to the economy to the boss – Hands seemed positively to perspire with excitement.
‘Is that professor-speak?’ said Red Queen.
‘Yes.’
‘Singularity,’ said Red Queen thoughtfully.
‘Yes.’
‘Universe pulled inside out?’
‘Yup.’
‘Asshole.’
‘Yes.’
‘I wasn’t asking. Professor Hands, we would appreciate it if you stayed in overnight. I’ll have someone bring you a toothbrush. The universe being pulled inside out through its own asshole,’ Red Queen repeated wonderingly. ‘Nice. Well. That’s a bridge we’ll cross when we come to it. Keeping this thing from getting anywhere near Binion’s Lucky Horseshoe Casino is the problem I propose to tackle first off.’
Red Queen got up and walked out of the room.
As Alex drove west, whistling on his way, little strangenesses proliferated in the world around him.
In one town in Nevada, the cashpoints malfunctioned. Hundreds and hundreds of dollars poured onto the pavements and were blown down the street by the wind. Children chased them. Adults chased the children. Some adults attempted to return the money to the banks. The banks blamed a lightning strike.
In Baton Rouge, a man in a tall hat removed it and a hummingbird flew out. He stopped in astonishment, not noticing the hummingbird, seeing nothing remarkable in the white sunlight on the sidewalk, overwhelmed only by a sense of déjàvu so powerful he forgot for an instant who he was.
Every narcoleptic in Mississippi went out at once. All of them were crossing roads at the time. People thought there was a plague. Cars backed up, honking, at pedestrian crossings as the pedestrians slept. And here, there and everywhere sleepers shared the same broken dream: of an old man in a shack in the mountains, a rainbow in the dark sky, a terrible wind. None of them remembered the dream.