Chapter 7

When she emerged from the Manipulator, Olivia was surprised to find the Institute bathed in the sun’s first weak rays, her watch having apparently lost time during the night.

On returning home, she wrote a hubmail to Professor Cruickshank describing the night’s events, though made no mention of her use of the Manipulator’s Babbage engines.

She was awakened later by the ping of an incoming hubmail. But rather than Professor Cruickshank, it was from Mrs. Etherington, the secretary to the Head of the Institute, summoning her to see Professor Gounelle in the Newton Building.

The door to Mrs. Etherington’s office was open when Olivia arrived, and she stepped apprehensively through to the larger room beyond. Ethan was already there, standing a little apart from Professors Taraskin and Gounelle. Professor Cruickshank was sitting on a nearby sofa, scrutinising a sheet of paper, the folds of his belly escaping from between the buttons of his shirt.

Professor Gounelle sat down behind her desk and eyed them sternly. ‘Angus, Evgeny and I went to have a look at your discovery this morning,’ she said. ‘The first thing we did was confirm the area was free of radiation and chemical spills. Did it not occur to either of you last night that a hazard suit might have been a sensible precaution?

‘Now Angus,’ she continued, before Olivia could reply, ‘you wanted to mention something?’

Professor Cruickshank held up the sheet of paper he had been studying. On it was a graph of instrument readings from the Manipulator, curving upwards before plummeting to zero at around the time the lights had failed.

‘These field energies are too high,’ he said. ‘The Manipulator doesn’t draw enough power for such numbers to be possible. If it was just one instrument, I’d assume it was faulty, but every single readout is telling the same story.’

‘The Thomson and Stokes buildings both reported power cuts overnight,’ said Professor Gounelle. ‘Could it be related?’

‘I don’t see how, Antoinette,’ he replied. ‘Though I suspect we will only understand these readings when we work out what exactly was created last night.’

‘Then how do you suggest we proceed?’

‘The damage to the Manipulator is minimal. But we are in winter shutdown now. If we want to rerun Mr Brice’s experiment we will need to wait until the spring. Until then, I propose that my student, Rob Hamilton, and I should arrange to move the thing into a lab so we can give it a good poke with our instruments. In the meantime you theorists can try and work out what happened.’

‘It is as though the energy was sucked out of the vacuum but not returned,’ Taraskin said, as if to accept the challenge. ‘This isn’t an alien concept within discretised aetherics.’

Professor Gounelle retorted without hesitation. ‘Come Evgeny, such energy fluctuations occur only on the smallest of scales.’

Olivia did not understand the exchange that followed. Neither, she suspected, did Ethan, though that did not stop him from nodding along to every statement either of the professors made.

Eventually they were interrupted by Professor Cruickshank loudly clearing his throat. ‘I shall leave you to your theorising,’ he said. ‘Antoinette, I will keep you updated.’

As he pulled the door open, Professor Gounelle called out, ‘Angus!’

He paused, his frame filling the doorway.

‘Please keep this within your group, for now. She looked sternly across the room. ‘This applies to all of you.’

***

With the Manipulator now dormant, Olivia was assigned to write data analysis algorithms for Dr Haynes, a researcher in the fluid dynamics laboratories in the Stokes Building. It was refreshing to be working more regular hours, even if the work itself was mundane. But a few days after the events in the Manipulator, she found herself invited, more politely this time, to another meeting in Professor Gounelle’s office.

It was the first of many such meetings, during which Professors Gounelle and Taraskin argued about the sphere, sketching out on the blackboard tenuous threads of calculation in a fruitless attempt to understand its origins.

Various names were mooted for the sphere. After all, they couldn’t continue to call it ‘the object’, or ‘the thing’. Eventually Professor Gounelle, hypothesising that it might be some sort of macroscopic particle, proposed calling it the spheron, and the name stuck.

With little to contribute to the discussions, Olivia began to wonder why she had even been invited. But her interest was piqued one day, when Professor Taraskin shared some news.

‘I received a hubmail from a former colleague of mine, Sergei Medvedev, last night,’ he announced. ‘He works at the SuSGAD facility in the East Siberian. He claims they made a detection the night the spheron was created. He hasn’t told me precisely when, but if the precise time matches, then it can surely be no coincidence.’

Before she could ask what this meant, Ethan leaned over and whispered, ‘I’ll explain later.’ She looked away hotly. His ingratiating manner towards the professors was bad enough, but this level of condescension was unbearable.

The discussion was interrupted by the ping of an incoming hubmail from the Babbage machine on Professor Gounelle’s desk.

‘It seems Angus has some news for us,’ Gounelle said, and swivelled the screen round to show them.

Antoinette,

With considerable difficulty, we have finally managed to move the spheron. But rather than its weight, it was its smoothness that caused us the most trouble. When we tried dragging it, our steel cable simply slipped round it.

Eventually Rob Hamilton fashioned a net out of several cables. With the spheron encased in this manner, two of us could drag it along the tunnel quite easily, without even needing a buggy. For something heavy enough to make a dent in the floor, this was somewhat surprising.

But that’s not all. When we moved the spheron, the grille it had been sat on returned to its original form. The dent, meanwhile, moved along with the spheron, even when we dragged it onto a concrete floor. There is some sort of optical effect around it, like the kind you see when you look through the bottom of a wine glass (something you’ll be familiar with, Antoinette).

The spheron is of such perfect clarity and is so slick, that as we dragged it down the Equatorial Ring Road, we could not tell whether it was rolling or sliding. Either way, we got it as far as the concourse, but there it must remain. For in spite of how easy it is to drag, the utility lifts are not strong enough to raise it, so we will be unable to relocate it to my laboratory in the Thomson Building. Instead, we plan to move some of our equipment to the concourse.

There is nothing more to say for now because the spheron ignores everything we do. It simply sits there impassively, as if to mock us. As far as we can tell though, it is completely safe and cannot be damaged, so you are free to have a look yourselves.

I look forward to updating you in person soon,

Angus

***

The lift doors slid open and Ethan and Olivia were greeted by their distorted reflections leering back at them from the surface of the spheron, which now sat on a low podium between the two branches of the ring road. There was a small indentation in the podium beneath the spheron, presumably, due to the optical effect Professor Cruickshank had reported. Scattered around the floor nearby were various partially assembled instruments.

With her work finished for the day, she had agreed to accompany Ethan here straight from the meeting, though his manner with the professors had almost been enough to put her off.

Once she had stared at her deformed reflection and run her hands over the spheron’s textureless surface, she stood awkwardly beside him, unsure what to do next.

When the silence became intolerable, she said reluctantly, ‘So, what did Professor Taraskin mean about SuSGAD?’

‘It stands for the Sub-Siberian Geometrical Anomaly Detector,’ Ethan said, this time with a touch of contrition in his voice. ‘It’s buried beneath the Arctic Ocean north of Russia. My father regularly –’

‘I mean, why did Taraskin mention it? SuSGAD is the realm of astronomers is it not?’

Ethan nodded. ‘It’s designed to detect spacetime waves generated by astronomical events, like the merger of gravitational sinks or neutralon stars. It shouldn’t be sensitive enough to detect geometrical effects from anything we do here though. But if they detected something when we created the spheron …’

He sat down on a nearby chair and rolled a coin nervously around his fingers.

‘It’s difficult to believe sometimes,’ he said. ‘This huge machine probing things we will never see. And SuSGAD: some light beams and mirrors, detecting movements smaller than a positon. It all seems so ... unlikely.’

‘I wouldn’t let Taraskin hear you say that!’

Ethan smiled wryly. ‘I’m not saying it’s wrong. Our theories are true on some level, or at least, they are a good approximation to reality. It’s just …’ He stared at the coin his hand. ‘Do you never feel held back by the limitations of your mind?’

Ethan immediately looked appalled at what he had just said and quickly added, ‘I don’t mean you personally. I mean, what if we’re reaching the limits of what the human mind is capable of? What if we will never really be able to understand the world?’

‘As a matter of fact, I do feel limited,’ Olivia said. ‘I have nothing useful to say at Professor Gounelle’s meetings and was probably only invited to keep me happy, so I don’t tell anyone. I feel like an imposter.’

Ethan inhaled as if on the cusp of speaking … then stilled the coin in his hand and looked away. Conversation grew stilted thereafter and they wordlessly took the interminably slow lift to the surface.

It was not until Olivia returned home that she realised how late it was, her watch having lost time again.

***

During the next meeting in the Newton Building, Professor Gounelle set a deadline of the end of term, after which, she declared, they would release their calculations, together with Professor Cruickshank’s experimental data, to the wider scientific community. Professor Taraskin objected, demanding more time to make a breakthrough themselves, but Professor Gounelle was resolute.

With little to contribute to the meeting, Olivia’s attention began to wander. A host of sparrows had taken up residence in the grounds of the Institute and as they darted busily past Professor Gounelle’s window Olivia’s gaze followed them.

Framed in the window, the darting silhouettes looked almost like the inhabitants of one of her simulations. And so, as the professors concocted yet another outlandish theory about the spheron’s origins, Olivia’s thoughts returned to her project with Professor Kettle.

 She no longer dared run her algorithm on the Manipulator’s engines. But as she pondered the work she had done the night the spheron was created, she realised that, if her hurriedly written implementation of Ethan’s reformulation was refined, it might be possible to run it on her own machine.

***

‘Wonderful!’ Professor Kettle exclaimed, when Olivia returned to his office several days later. ‘There must be millions of individuals in your simulation.’

Olivia was sitting in what she had come to think of as ‘her’ armchair, her machine on her lap and a cup of tea on an occasional table beside her.

‘I have decided to call the algorithm Host,’ she told him. She pressed a key and an arrow appeared in one corner of the screen. As the swarm of points within the simulation folded in on itself, the arrow twitched and swivelled like a lost compass needle.

‘The emergent quantities!’ cried Professor Kettle.

They watched, mesmerised, as the arrow stretched and shrank, occasionally vanishing completely. But its behaviour bore no apparent relation to the billowing cloud of points filling the screen.

‘Professor, we’ve never properly discussed what the quantities mean,’ Olivia said.

He looked at her enigmatically. ‘Would you like to posit an idea?’

Olivia stopped the simulation and hinged her Babbage machine shut. ‘In order to get Host running on my machine, I used various data compression methods.’ she said, ‘I had to learn about the storage and transmission of information. I noticed a similarity between the equations governing information flow and the equations for the emergent quantities.’

‘You mean to say that somebody has done this before?’ he said.

‘No,’ she replied, ‘or at least, the equations have never been used in this context before. But it means we could interpret the emergent quantities as a measure of information movement. The arrow points in the direction of information flow, and its length represents the strength of the flow. There’s something else too.’

Casting around for some paper, she saw a notepad beneath a stack of books on the table beside her. There was an eclectic mix of titles in the pile: Larmor’s classic The Elasticity of Time and Space: a modern treatment; Barrowman’s Biochemistry of the Human Lifecycle; Aldridge’s Philosophy of Time; and at the bottom, a battered-looking Jules Verne volume.

Pulling out the pad, she outlined the refinements she had made to the algorithm and described how only the animals on the edge were needed in order to compute the emergent quantities. The significance of Ethan’s reformulation was not lost on the professor.

‘Tell me, my dear,’ he said. ‘Rather than generating animals in your machine, if we were to point visio cameras at a flock of birds, could your algorithm compute the emergent quantities?’

***

Between Olivia’s work for Professor Haynes in the Stokes building, and an increased frequency of meetings about spheron, spare time in which to develop Host was in short supply. In spite of this, once she had obtained several small visio cameras and configured them to send images to her Babbage machine, it took only a few evenings to make the required changes.

At the next opportunity, she and Professor Kettle took a bus out of the city to a nearby area of wetland, where they hoped to find a large enough flock of birds to test Host.

Olivia balanced a visio camera on a rock, pointed it above the reeds in the frozen shallows of the lake they had walked to, and flicked the switch on the housing. She continued round the shore, repeating the procedure with several more cameras. Her hands were numb by the time she had circled the lake to rejoin Professor Kettle on the shingle beach from which they planned to watch the evening’s proceedings. He produced a flask from within his fur overcoat and she gratefully accepted a cup of sweetened tea.

They stood in companionable silence as the trees beyond the lake slowly coalesced into a single bristly silhouette. Olivia noticed the professor’s mittened hands toying with his dull, black marble, before secreting it into the depths of his overcoat.

He must have seen her staring because after a pause, he said, ‘A keepsake to remind me of my dear grand-mama, who raised me when I was young.’

‘Your parents … ?’

‘My mother succumbed to typhoid fever soon after I was born. In those days there was no vaccination. My father was prone to bouts of what was then called melancholia, and took his life soon after.’

The professor spoke in such a matter-of-fact manner that Olivia was unsure how to respond. In the end she said nothing and they lapsed into silence once more.

For a brief moment the setting sun was precisely blocked by the Manipulator’s dome, whose hulking mass dominated the horizon. The edges of the Manipulator glowed like a solar eclipse. Then, as the fiery corona dimmed, the reed beds before them grew noisy with the chattering of starlings. A great murmuration rose from the shadows and surged erratically across the darkening sky.

Olivia stood hypnotised as the starlings billowed from one shore to the other before sweeping back across the semi-frozen surface. Professor Kettle’s gleeful exclamation jolted her attention down to her machine.

A cloud of points was undulating across the screen, imitating the movement of the starlings. In one corner, an arrow turned and swelled, now pointing in the same direction as the flight of the starlings, now in the direction of subtle ripples moving back through the murmuration.

When the birds finally swooped into the reeds to roost, Olivia made her way back round the perimeter of the lake to recover the cameras. When she arrived back at the beach, Professor Kettle was pacing back and forth across the shingle.

‘I would like to propose that we involve a dear friend of mine, Debbie Austin,’ he said. ‘She is a geologist by trade, but is excellent with negatonics. Perhaps she can construct a device to save us running around with multiple visio cameras.’

Buoyed by their project’s new momentum, Olivia readily agreed.

‘Unfortunately for us, Debbie is currently on an expedition in Iceland,’ said Professor Kettle, as they made their way slowly back along the gravel path towards the bus stop. ‘She discovered a new mineral in a lava tube last year and is attempting to take a sample of it. I shall eagerly await her return.’

He added more sombrely, ‘It would be lovely to get as far as we can with this work before I finally have to leave the Institute.’