Standing Wave Read online

  Rolling up her design plans, she headed toward Stringfield’s cottage to show them to him. She was certain he’d approve. Had he seen the plans, he would probably have remarked that her “digital wave maze” was an intriguing macroscopic elaboration on the double-slit experiment, so famous in quantum studies and so much a part of wave/particle debates about matter ever since Thomas Young’s initial work in 1804. Stringfield might also have remarked that the standing wave, moving in solitary fashion through a single entrance, would behave essentially as a particle, like a ball rolling down the maze—just as light behaved particulately when it passed through a single slit in Young’s original experiment.

  The old man might have predicted the wave interference patterns that would develop in the maze when the soliton entered through both entrances—the same sort of wavelike patterns a beam of light generated when given the opportunity to pass through both apertures in the double slit experiment. He might even have speculated that Mei-Ling’s digital wave maze interestingly “opened out” the traditional experiment to chaotic factors inherent in the entire system of ocean, earth, sun, moon—and beyond.

  Stringfield had none of these reactions, however, for the old man was no longer there. Mei-Ling found only this note, pinned to the door of Stringfield’s cottage:

  Dear Ms. Magnus:

  Recently you may have experienced, as I have, a peculiar phenomenon, a certain “flash in the brainpan” that can best be described as the Light. This Light disturbs me, for it behaved not as a standing wave but as a brief particle on the flux. I have always believed, with Heraclitus, that latent structure is master of blatant structure. I have proceeded under the assumption that the latent structure of the universe is all waves, all the oneness-of-things, not the blatant and illusory thingness-of-ones, of particles. I’m a holist. “From out of all the many particulars comes oneness, and out of oneness come all the many particulars”—Heraclitus again. Difference is immanent, but similarity is transcendent—a higher synthesis in a higher dimension.

  This sense of the connectedness of everything has always been more than a mere theory to me. I have taken it as an article of faith. I am now going to return to my work, motivated, if you wish, by a crisis of faith that I must resolve. I have greatly enjoyed our conversations, and I hope to see you again once I have made my way out of these theoretical thickets.

  Yours,

  R. E. Stringfield

  Mei-Ling was disappointed to learn that Stringfield had left, especially since she had hoped the old Professor might be able to help her put her wave maze together. She did recognize the decorative border that framed his letter, however: a Greek key pattern in computer clip-art, completely surrounding the note.

  She sighed, immediately missing Stringfield’s involvement. Nonetheless, she decided to go ahead with her plans. With the help of a Fionnphort fisherman (who thought she was working on some sort of “art piece” and, fortunately, also possessed considerable carpentry skills), she assembled her wave maze from wood and began testing it. Day after day Mei-Ling brought the door-flapped maze out to the spit below Stringfield’s cottage and mounted it in the sand. There she waited for the tide to come in, then watched as the standing waves interacted with it.

  Although she had not been able to benefit from the things Stringfield might have said, Mei-Ling soon was able to intuit most of them from working with her wave maze. The idea of particles as waves that had been “digitized,” or the non-linear and non-deterministic factors arising from interaction with the larger tidal system—such concepts would not have surprised her, after she’d watched her maze in operation for a few days.

  As the weeks passed, Mei-Ling became more and more the connoisseur of chaos as a subtler form of order. The waves in the maze behaved in a manner that was neither quite random nor quite predictable, and it was exactly there that beauty lay. Like the round of her days here, there was something quite soothing about the waves as, tide after tide, seated on the sand, she watched the wave maze and logged in the endless variations the waves created in their interaction with it. The tidal bore was never boring.

  She might have been inclined to spend the rest of her days this way, breaking her maze down into its component pieces, carrying the pieces around in a big canvas bag, putting the maze back together and watching the waves interact with it, then breaking the maze down again, day after day. One afternoon, however, a Naval hydrofoil cutter came surging into her little bay. When it cut its power and settled into the small cove, its wake became wave, rolling steadily toward the sand bar, cresting and thoroughly swamping Mei-Ling’s wave maze. Aboard, two men waved to her, their presence calling her back to a life and a world she thought she’d left behind.

  * * * *

  Ah, Cincinnati! Aleck McAleister thought. As he pedaled recumbently through the deserted 2 A.M. downtown streets, slouched down behind his bicycle’s aerodynamic cowling, he found the quiet of the night conducive to contemplation. The Queen City. City of Seven, or at least Many, Hills. Like Rome, only without quite so much history. Or San Francisco, only without the ocean.

  Aleck had a love/hate relationship with the city of his birth. He stacked the pros and cons up against each other as he pedaled.

  He loved the lightness of the city’s Springs and Autumns. Hated its Summers and Winters—weather oppressive like a weight carried on brow and shoulders, an unsheddable atmospheric tumpline backpack.

  Loved the city’s history, especially the tales of German families who had settled this river valley because the region reminded them of the Rhineland back home. Hated the Teutonic repressiveness of the political and social culture.

  Loved the Zoo and Museums and Theatres and Libraries. Hated the beer-besotted boosterism.

  Loved the small-town safety and charm of a brick-buildinged city that still took time to sleep (he couldn’t ride his bicycle through the center of most cities in the middle of the night, after all). Hated its self-satisfied, smug parochialism, its almost fascist law-and-order mentality.

  Loved the economic stability of the place. Hated the rigidity and conformity imposed on the city by the big corporations that ran it.

  Only appropriate, he thought as he pedaled down Vine Street, that a self-proclaimed intellectual rebel like himself should end up working for Retcorp & Lambeg, the most mind-deadeningly conformist globocorp in town.

  At least he was in Twin Tower Complex B. There was a certain old-fashioned charm to the aged buildings, lovingly referred to as the “Dolly Parton Towers”, after a notably pneumatic songstress of the past century. Things could have been worse: he could have been working in the big, blind, chopped-top Pyramid by the river, R & L’s global headquarters. He could have been riding the escalators to cubicles with thousands of others, all with hair and clothes of the appropriate contempo-conservative cut “favored”—meaning “more than mandated”—by R & L corporate culture.

  Even the riverside pyramid was thoroughly throwback—not least of all the idea of a “global headquarters” itself. The vast majority of transnationals were virtual enterprises anyway. Their home addresses were any number of condominiums on the back forty googolbytes of the infosphere. Aleck had never quite figured out why R & L hadn’t gone the same way.

  Reconnoitering the corporate canyons, he thought how lucky he was to be in the company’s scientific underground. That allowed him a few degrees of freedom, at least. Not enough freedom so that he could wear his “2 POR 2 LIV, 2 DUM 2 DYE” retro-tiedye sweatshirt to work without hiding it beneath a nice dull sweater—but some real freedom, where it really counted: No supervisors crawling all over him all the time, and only a modicum of project reports and self-monitoring.

  Coasting off the street and down the ramp leading to the understoreys beneath the Dolly Parton, it occurred to Aleck that maybe he had more freedom than most R & L employees because he had less power—and made even less money.

  He shrugged. Tough life, working graveyard shift. He was in his first year of graduate studies i
n medical computing at University of Cincinnati and he didn’t want a job that would make for scheduling conflicts with his academic work anyway. He had never been that big on sleep either, so vampire hours didn’t much bother him.

  The freight elevator doors were open and he was able to ride his bike right in. He commanded the doors shut and asked for the bottommost floor, where the lab was, down among the city’s viscera of electric and fiber optic and ancient co-ax, water and sewer and old steel and concrete. Piped energy, piped water, piped information. He liked it there, down among the city’s infrastructural intestines. Felt more real—naked, less like the stage-show façade of any city aboveground.

  Yeah, he didn’t make much money, he thought as the elevator headed down. Then again, he didn’t do much work, either. During his undergrad years he had been an evening-shift bacteriology lab tech and a phlebotomist, a blood-drawer doing “sticks” on the labyrinthine levels of Good Samaritan Hospital. Despite ultrahypos and all that tech, he’d still heard every damned Dracula joke in the world during his stint at Good Sam. Genomics and bioinformatics notwithstanding, he’d also plated out enough samples of stool, sputum and urine to last a lifetime—like any eighteenth century medico.

  This R & L job was a lot more pleasant. He liked graveyard. The types of folks who worked this shift, the vampires, were good people overall. Didn’t take things all that seriously.

  The elevator doors opened and he rode his bicycle down the blue-lit corridor to his lab. He hopped free of his bike and the lab lit up automatically as he came in. He glanced at the big tank as he parked and folded up the bike, then voice-logged in. Denene Jackman, the sharp-eyed young black woman who worked the eight-to-two shift, had left him a message.

  “Hey, Smart Aleck,” she said on video, “keep a close watch on the Great Tanked One tonight. The report on its ‘episode’ a few weeks back finally reached the higher-ups. It makes them nervous. GTO is still doing everything the company wants but seems to be looking around the infosphere way too much on its own. Monitor the dataflow and put something in your report to appease them.”

  Aleck got the message. A heightened state of involvement with their Subject, then. He stared at the large shape floating placidly in the spot-lit tank that took up one wall of the lab. He checked vitals. No problem there. Brain wave readouts, heart, lungs, all major organ systems were well within parameters.

  “What’re you up to, Hugh?” he asked the thing in the tank. Denene called their Subject “GTO” because when she was a kid her grandfather had owned a vintage Pontiac the same metallic-flake gray-green color as their Subject’s livesuited form. Aleck thought his own name for their Subject—“Hugh Manatee”—was far more appropriate, however.

  The livesuit completely wrapped their Subject like a mummy sleeping bag. “Hugh” floated head upward, like a large sea mammal lazily surfacing for air, which in some ways was exactly what was going on. At the head end was where Hugh was hooked up to all his umbilicals, including air, nutrients, and electronics. Through the clear plastic of the umbilicals housing, just the hint of a round fattish human face could be seen over the bloated, paddle-fluked body—thus “Hugh Manatee,” a name which persisted, despite the fact that the last wild Florida manatee had actually died in an encounter with a speed boat some weeks back.

  Staring at his Subject, Aleck wondered again who Hugh had been and what his real purpose was, now. Of course, the work protocols didn’t even refer to him with a male pronoun—officially the Subject was an “it”. Hugh’s blood chemistry was pretty heavily monitored, however—enough to place the Subject’s testosterone levels well within the male range.

  The official Word was even less reliable as to why he was down here under the Partons of the Queen City. Supposedly Hugh was part of a “marketing research experiment in sensory deprivation and virtual interaction.” Yeah, right. Aleck had sampled Mister Manatee’s dataflow a few times. If he was only what the Word said he was, then why was he overviewing all of R & L’s corporate data, even the highest level stuff? Assuming his mummybag livesuit was really nanotech-enhanced, and that it had a legal permit, why had the company gone to so much trouble? Ever since the War Mite Plague and the Nanogeddon, machines measurable in the low angstroms had been banished beyond the edge of Earth’s ecosphere. It was notoriously difficult to get a permit for their use down here, even for a company with R & L’s clout.

  Aleck had long since developed a penchant for paranoid suspicions which he was not paid nearly enough to have. Ever since the first troubles with the big AIs and the quirky “consciousness” of the ’Net, a number of the larger transnationals had been seeking out alternatives to both. Teraflop parallel-process machines oversaw the biz of those corprits too complex to be bureaucratically managed, but now some of the humans still in the loop had begun to question their long-term reliability.

  Years back, one of the chemical megacorps had come up with its “mind is a terrible thing to waste/waste is a terrible thing to mind” solution. A young woman from an “economically stressed” family had been head-shot into coma by youths holding up the Kwikstore where she’d been working. The Kwikstore chain was a wholly-owned subsidiary of the chemcorp, and soon enough the damaged woman had been volunteered by her family to serve as “minder,” an overseer of all the chemical conglom’s toxic waste monitoring facilities.

  In exchange for Big Chem paying all her hospital bills, the comatose young woman had been interfaced to Big Chem machines so that she completely oversaw their toxic waste reprocessing concerns. Good for Big Chem’s bottom-line, good for the family’s budget, even if it did smack vaguely of slavery.

  Aleck often wondered if Hugh was a step—or several steps—further along the evolution of that process. Certainly R & L was no longer the happy little bunch of soap-floaters it had once been, a century and a half ago. The company had gotten into all aspects of home life, becoming in the process the world’s largest user of advertising.

  Like a lot of transnationals, R & L was far too vast and complex in its activities for any ordinary mortal to fully grasp its operations. Was Hugh perhaps a “found mind” slaved to R & L’s corporate data, his mind/machine interwit insuring the company’s competitive edge? R & L had corporate interlocks with big machine intelligence firms like ParaLogics and Crystal Memory Dynamics. Was Hugh Manatee also Hugh MacHinery?

  Naah, Aleck thought, shaking his head and smiling ruefully. Coma corpses in the computer room. That was too paranoid, even for him, even at two-thirty in the A.M. Like those old stories claiming that, just after the Second World War, R & L had made a killing on soap base materials traceable back to manufactories with names like Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau. Good stories for raising that frisson of paranoia from the Cincinnati-German connection, but there had never been any proof.

  Actually, it was embarrassing even to think of Hugh as really human. In all his communications with Denene, and even when talking to his roommate Sam about him, Aleck referred to the Subject as Hugh Manatee. In all likelihood, however, Hugh might once have had a name of his own, an identity independent from Aleck’s creation. How would he feel about being renamed so flippantly?

  Much easier to distance himself from any separate and human existence Hugh might have once had, and instead think of him only as “the Subject,” the way the work protocols always described this particular piece of protoplasm.

  Hard to do, though.

  Better to bury himself in the work of tracing Hugh’s unauthorized jaunts around the infosphere, for now. Aleck had a pretty good idea when they probably began. Hugh’s “episode.” The night of what some people were calling the Light. Aleck had been on duty when it happened. Calling up and looking at the records now, Hugh’s EEG from that time looked like a cross between a seizure and a dream. But how did it fit in with the infosphere treks?

  Work, Aleck thought. Lots of work. Arbeit macht frei.

  * * * *

  “Déjà-vu, all over again,” Paul Larkin said. He and Roger Cortland shou
ldered their gear and deplaned, walking into and through the crowded Caracas air terminal. They had been a long time on the wing, first aboard a night-bright clipper falling from the orbital habitat to Edwards-LAX, then a connecting flight to the stacked-up sky over Caracas.

  Now they would be facing more seat time: first aboard a regional tiltrotor puddle-jumper taking them to Amianac, then a helicopter to the site where one of the tepuis or “floating worlds,” the one called Caracamuni, had literally lifted off from Earth years ago. The same one which, quite recently, was rumored to have returned—a mountain of light descending from space.

  Dropping his gear beside him, Cortland took a seat in one of the uncomfortable air-terminal chairs as Larkin spoke Spanish with the woman behind the ticket counter. At last the balding, gnomish older man walked over toward where Cortland sat, toting his carry-ons and looking annoyed.

  “Problems?” Cortland asked as Larkin sat down beside him.

  “Just more déjà-vu,” the older man said with a shrug and a tug at his beard. “No problem connecting to Amianac. Looks like we’ll have to get to the Caracamuni area the old-fashioned way, though—by boat and backpack. The woman at the counter said all helicopter flights into the back country around there have been banned. Joint military exercises in the area.”

  Cortland raised his eyebrows significantly, but said nothing. A public-address voice announced a flight in Spanish, then in what Larking called “Brazilian-accented Portuguese.” Roger tried not to listen. He had to concentrate to keep his post-Light “talent” in check. Difficult to do here, though. He always found airports distracting and disorienting. His talent only made it worse by constantly trying to flash him with the history of everyone and everything that had ever passed through the space around him.