Chapter 5

Ethan gazed up at the concrete face of the Freeman Field Manipulator, curving gently towards the sky, and wondered if this might be his final trip here. After all, if tonight yielded no meaningful results, Taraskin would surely end their collaboration.

The double doors swung open, and he stepped into the lobby, passing the bust of the great Professor Freeman himself. In the middle of the lobby stood a scale model of the facility, showing how the dome extended deep underground to form a vast, partially buried, spherical shell of criss-crossing pipes and tunnels. Normally this area would be bustling with technicians and algorithmists, but with the winter shutdown beginning tomorrow, it was deserted.

He held up his pass and, from behind the reception desk, a bored-looking security guard waved him past, oblivious to the importance of tonight’s experiment to Ethan.

At the far side of the foyer, Ethan stroked his hand across a screen beside the lift and the doors slid open.

There were no floors to count down as the metal cage descended, only a featureless, concrete-lined borehole rising past him. He rolled a coin between restless fingers and wondered what Taraskin really thought about the experiment. Certainly he had seemed interested earlier, but perhaps he had merely sensed an opportunity to prevent the wasted slot from impacting his own reputation.

Ethan was still unsure why he had neglected to mention MG’s note; it had not been a conscious decision. Perhaps a part of him still doubted that MG, whoever he was, could really have pre-empted a century and a half of scientific developments. The calculation surely had nothing to do with discrete aetherics after all. Nonetheless, as he had lain on his bed earlier, with no undergraduate teaching commitments or seminars to attend that day, he had all but resolved to return to Taraskin’s office and share the note. But a night without sleep had soon caught up with him, and by the time he had awoken, Taraskin would long since have left his office for the day.

The lift deposited him at the end of a long concourse, on either side of which two tunnels faced each other. Blast doors hung like guillotines above their entrances and on the walls behind were signs, Equatorial Ring Road West and Equatorial Ring Road East, beyond which the tunnels curved almost imperceptibly into the distance.

Ethan headed instead for a third tunnel at the far end of the concourse, leading to the control room. Olivia would already be there, he realised. He quickened his pace, footsteps echoing through the empty hall.

At the far end of the tunnel, another swipe screen released the door into the control room.

He paused in the doorway. Ordinarily the bank of displays dominating the wall opposite would be full of instrument readings and schematics, showing the current status of the Manipulator. Instead, a visio of what appeared to be a vast shoal of tiny fish filled each screen.

‘Argh, it’s you!’

Ethan turned from the displays to see Olivia scurrying across the room. She stabbed at a keyboard and the displays flickered back to their usual state.

Olivia brought up a table of numbers on one of the screens then looked at him sheepishly. ‘Your settings are already loaded into the system,’ she said. ‘But as you’re here, you may as well check them before I set everything off.’

Ethan perused the numbers and nodded. Olivia typed some commands at the keyboard then made a twisting gesture with her hand over a nearby sensor plate. A rotating three-dimensional view of the plant appeared on one of the displays. A symbol at its centre began to glow and the temperature readings next to it climbed, indicating that the subatomic generator at the centre of the sphere was powering up. The experiment had begun.

Ethan settled himself into a chair beside Olivia.

‘You know you don’t actually need to be here?’ she said. ‘The results will come through automatically in the morning.’

The room suddenly felt as hot as the Manipulator’s subatomic generator. Ethan mumbled something about not realising he wasn’t needed, then made for the door. But with one hand on the handle, he hesitated.

‘I won’t tell anyone,’ he said.

Olivia stiffened.

‘I don’t care what you were doing before I arrived,’ Ethan said, then quickly added. ‘I mean, I’m not going to get you into trouble.’

He wiped the sweat from his upper lip as she regarded him. Finally, she turned to her console and said, ‘I suppose I owe you an explanation.’

She pressed a few keys and the displays flickered back to the visio Ethan had seen when he first entered the room, waves of compression and rarefaction rippling through the swarm as it moved across the screens.

Olivia’s demeanour changed into barely-concealed eagerness as she described her meeting with Professor Kettle and outlined the algorithm governing her simulation. Given its complexity, it was little wonder she needed to use the Manipulator’s Babbage engines.

‘But does the simulation tell you anything useful?’ Ethan asked.

Having apparently anticipated the question, Olivia produced a sheet of paper, displaying some familiar-looking equations written in an uneven hand.

‘Professor Kettle derived them,’ she told him. ‘They are emergent quantities. I have been trying to get my algorithm to compute them.’

‘Thermodynamics!’ Ethan said. ‘I knew I recognised them. And I presume Kettle has an outlandish theory about what the emergent quantities mean.’

‘Perhaps,’ she replied curtly, ‘but I have some ideas myself.’ She gestured to the display, which now showed a mass of dots wandering steadily across the screen. ‘This simulation is supposed to represent a herd of bison. The emergent quantities stay fairly constant as the herd moves. But if I change the behaviour of the individuals….’

She typed a few commands at the console and the cloud of shapes began to move more haphazardly.

‘Sometimes the emergent quantities increase, as if the population is acting as a source for them. And sometimes they decrease, as if the population is acting like a sink. But this doesn’t necessarily correspond to anything visible that is happening to the animals. The emergent quantities are telling us something different.’

‘And you’ve been doing this during your night shifts here?’

Olivia shook her head. ‘Only today, while the simultaneous processing engines weren’t busy. It’s too much for my own machine to handle.’ Her eyes fixed on him intently. ‘You realise how much trouble I could get in for this?’

Ethan assured her he had no intention of telling anyone.

‘Well I won’t be using the engines here for much longer anyway,’ said Olivia. ‘When I ran into you yesterday, an administrator had just told Professor Kettle he was being forced into full retirement. He’s been here since 1954.’ She turned back to the display. ‘We wanted to find a way to compute the emergent qualities in the real world, rather than in my simulations, but we’ll never get the chance now.’

Ethan inspected the equations once more. It was one matter computing the emergent quantities in a simulation, in which the algorithm had access to the coordinates of each individual, but in real life, when only the edge of the group was visible, it seemed impossible. Unless ….

He glanced up to find Olivia looking curiously at him, and whatever idea had begun to coalesce in his mind dissipated before he could grasp it.

He might have made his excuses then, had Olivia not said, ‘I suppose you ought to explain what your experiment is about.’

As he paused to choose his words, the bizarreness of day’s events hit him. Experiments at the Manipulator were usually months or years in the planning, yet this morning, his own experiment had lain in tatters. ‘I was supposed to be investigating hexons,’ he replied eventually, ‘but when I saw you this morning I had finally realised my approach would not work. Then I … stumbled upon another idea, which we are testing now.’

Olivia looked at him incredulously. ‘You devised a new Manipulator experiment in a day?’

‘I did most of the calculation last night,’ he admitted, ‘and Taraskin helped compute the Manipulator settings.’ He felt his cheeks redden as he recalled MG’s note. But most of the work had been his really. Was there really any need to mention it?

‘Do you know anything about the Noether limit?’ he said finally.

‘Only that it’s the smallest length scale possible,’ said Olivia, ‘orders of magnitude smaller even than a negaton. And that none of our scientific theories work on such scales.’

Ethan nodded. ‘Even discrete aetherics, which describes the behaviour of subatomic particles, fails at the Noether limit. That’s one of the reasons the Manipulator was built. It’s designed to probe the smallest length scales, not directly, but by manipulating space to magnify such tiny effects closer to macroscopic levels –’

‘I do work here, you realise.’

‘Sorry,’ said Ethan, though Olivia looked more amused than annoyed. ‘Then you’ll be aware that recently Professor Cruickshank used the Manipulator to uncover something strange. You know about the four fundamental aethers: the gravitational and electromagnetic fields, and the subatomic forces? Well near the Noether scale, Cruickshank discovered a fifth aether. We call it the coupling field.’

Olivia said nothing.

‘It’s a giant leap forward after years of stagnation in elemental physics,’ Ethan pressed, when it became apparent she did not share his excitement.

‘I realise that,’ Olivia said, flatly. ‘It’s just … I was helping with a course for gifted school children last week. I showed them round the Manipulator and taught them about the algorithms we use in its engines. They were excited to talk to somebody who actually works here. Yet nobody had bothered to tell me about the discovery until it was made public. Probably because I’m only an algorithmist. So you’ll forgive my lack of enthusiasm.’

‘It’s not just because of that!’ said Ethan, immediately regretting his use of ‘just’. ‘It was a closely guarded secret while the analysis was checked. I only knew because Taraskin was involved, though he’d probably rather I didn’t know.’

‘You don’t get on then.’

Ethan chuckled ruefully. ‘I think he blames me for holding him back from making his own career-defining discovery.’

‘So where does this coupling field come from anyway?’ Olivia asked resignedly.

‘Nobody knows,’ said Ethan. ‘Probably from something too small to explain using discrete aetherics. Professor Gounelle thinks it might even originate from an additional dimension. Whatever the explanation, yesterday I … well, Taraskin and I … derived an equation connecting the coupling field and the Noether length. We call it the bifurcation equation, but we don’t know how to interpret it. When you approach the Noether length, the equation splits into two solutions. It’s as if there are two possible outcomes and the equation doesn’t rule out either.’

He held up the coin he had been toying with then flipped it. Heads. ‘We managed to compute the Manipulator settings which would allow us to investigate whether the bifurcation is just a mathematical artefact or …’ He shrugged.

They sat in uneasy silence and watched the rising instrument readings on the display. Ethan made several more stuttering attempts at conversation, but each one soon faltered.

Eager to preempt any further suggestion that his presence was not required, he got up to leave. He glanced once more at the sheet of equations on the desk beside Olivia, then paused.

The idea that had eluded him earlier had finally cohered in his mind.

‘Perhaps Kettle’s idea isn’t as crazy as it seems,’ he murmured. Flipping the sheet over, he began to scribble on the back. It seemed that one of the techniques he had read about last week could be used to reformulate the equations. When he glanced up, Olivia was staring at him inscrutably.

‘I think I know of a way of estimating the emerging quantities,’ he said. ‘It should save you a lot of numerical computation.’

He stepped over to a blackboard on one side of the displays and sketched out his idea in more detail, as much to convince himself of its validity as to persuade Olivia. She looked unconvinced when he finished.

‘I don’t see how it helps,’ she said. ‘Down here, I have as much computational power as I need.’

‘But in this reformulation of the problem, the behaviour of the animals at the edge of the domain is sufficient to determine the emergent quantities,’ Ethan explained.

Olivia replied tentatively. ‘So all you need to do to compute them is to observe the animals on the edge of the group?’

He nodded. The implication was not lost on Olivia.

‘Measuring the emergent quantities in the real world might be possible after all,’ she said.

***

Ethan all but forgot his experiment as he watched Olivia bring up her algorithm on the nearest screen and adapt it to use his reformulated equations. All sense of the passing of time was lost to the lines of algorithmic instructions flickering up the display, Olivia’s fingers flitting across the keyboard, and the creases on her brow as she puzzled over particular lines of the algorithm. She seemed to derive the same satisfaction from algorithmics as he did from algebra.

Finally, she turned towards him eagerly and said, ‘It’s ready.’ She typed some commands into the console to set the algorithm running.

For a while nothing happened. Then there was an explosion of light, as if the air itself was aglow. As the flash receded, the displays went blank and the lamps in the ceiling failed.

Ethan waved his palm in front of his face, but the darkness was absolute.

‘How are we going to get out of here?’ he said, forcing his voice to remain steady.

‘I don’t care,’ came Olivia’s whimper beside him. ‘I’ve broken the Manipulator!’

‘And ruined my experiment.’

‘Right now that’s the least of my –’

The lights in the console room flickered back on.

Ethan and Olivia watched in panicked silence as a series of status messages flashed across the displays: Babbage engine restart … System checks in progress … Initializing interface. An instrument feed appeared, the readings slowly falling as the subatomic engine at the centre of the Manipulator cooled. Finally, the schematic of the facility returned. But at the edge of the diagram was a flashing red circle that Ethan was sure had not been there previously.

Olivia waved her hand above the sensor plate to bring up the three dimensional representation of the facility. The flashing circle lay at the same depth as the console room, on the equator of the buried sphere, but partway round its circumference.

‘Probably a ruptured pipe,’ she said. ‘If it’s a coolant duct, there should be a valve nearby which we can manually shut. If that’s the only damage then we might get away with this. We just have to hope the vacuum tube is intact.’

Ethan opened his mouth to question Olivia’s use of ‘we’, but she was already halfway to the door.

‘Hurry up if you’re coming!’ she called.

By the time Ethan reached the concourse, Olivia’s steps were little more than a faint echo. Clutching the stitch in his side, he leaned heavily against the wall. Opposite him was the recess leading to the emergency exit stairwell. The prospect of hauling his weight up a mountain’s worth of stairs if the lift was disabled was unappealing, but he did not have time to worry about that now. Then he noticed the electric buggy tucked behind a rack of hazard suits and gave an inward smile.

A short while later, he steered the buggy onto the gentle arc of the Equatorial Ring Road, the rumbling of its wheels on the concrete floor reverberating down the tunnel ahead.

The walls were soon lost behind bundles of cables, and pipes. Lamps appeared at regular intervals in the ceiling, punctuating the journey with pools of harsh light. Every so often the buggy rattled over a grille in the floor, with another visible overhead, marking the points where longitudinal shafts intersected the subterranean road.

It did not take long to catch Olivia. She glared at him then squeezed wordlessly onto the seat beside him, her body pressing distractingly against his side.

He heard the hiss of the ruptured pipe long before they reached it. Then, as they rounded the bend, a thick fog filled the passage ahead.

Before Ethan could even bring the buggy to a standstill, Olivia had leapt down and turned a nearby valve. The noise diminished to a low sigh and the mist slowly cleared. But in its stead, something else was blocking the tunnel.

It was a sphere, a little taller than Ethan, resting on a deformed floor grille that appeared to have melted and softened, leaving the sphere sitting in a shallow depression. Ethan’s distorted reflection followed him as he walked round its circumference.

‘What is it?’ said Olivia.

‘I don’t know.’

He reached out tentatively. Such was the clarity of the sphere’s surface, that he half expected to feel flesh when his hand met that of his reflection. Instead he felt nothing. His hand simply slid to one side, as if deflected by an unseen field.

He watched Olivia perform the same experiment then stare at her hand perplexedly. His eyes met those of her reflection and he smiled uneasily. It was easier, somehow, to talk to the reflection, than to Olivia herself.

The sphere was unresponsive to any of their attempts to interact with it. Its surface had no texture, no sound could be elicited from it, and not even their breath condensed on it. But for a slight shimmering of the light around its edges, it was completely inert. Their efforts to move it proved equally fruitless, as they were unable to gain any purchase on its frictionless surface.

When they were both devoid of further ideas, Olivia eased the buggy past and continued down the tunnel in case there were any further such anomalies.

Ethan, meanwhile, sat on the floor beside his reflection, absent-mindedly flipping a coin. That the Manipulator should create something so many orders of magnitude larger than the sub-negaton scales it had been designed to probe, was inexplicable. He knew of no modern scientific theories to explain this, whatever this was. But MG’s question, “What is Cedric’s orb?” now seemed more important than ever.

Soon, he heard the tired whir of the returning buggy.

‘Sorry I’ve been so long,’ Olivia said, ‘the cells are dying. We’ll have to walk back.’ She slid down next to him. ‘I didn’t find anything else. It looks like there’s no damage other than the ruptured pipe and that floor grille. But I’m going to be in trouble when they find it was my algorithm that caused this.’

‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ said Ethan, ‘and I don’t think your algorithm was responsible. It was just bad timing.’ He stared contemplatively at his reflection. ‘This has something to do with the settings Taraskin and I derived.’

They agreed that Olivia would return to the control room to remove her algorithm from the Babbage engines, before informing Professor Cruickshank, director of the Manipulator, about the night’s events. She set off at a brisk pace and the echoes of her footsteps soon receded down the tunnel.

Ethan loitered beside the sphere for a time, intoxicated by their discovery, a secret that, for a few more hours at least, he shared with Olivia only. Then, with a final glance at his reflection, he made his way back toward the surface.