Chapter 11

Olivia strode across the grounds of the Institute towards the Anderson Building. High above her, a flight of pigeons circled the Manipulator before wheeling towards its sloping sides. She glanced up and pondered what Host might have shown were its cameras pointed at them.

Twice more she and Professor Kettle had travelled to the Fens to test incremental improvements to Host, returning each time with more data to analyse. After work each day, Olivia would spend the evening poring over the visios, trying in vain to ascribe meaning to the arrow of emergent quantities. The prospect of Professor Kettle’s imminent retirement had lent an urgency to their work. If they only had something meaningful to report, then perhaps the Institute’s administrators could be persuaded to reverse their decision. She had even taken to pulling wildlife visios from the hub to see what Host could make of them.

She sometimes found herself wondering if any progress had been made in understanding the spheron. Nonetheless, working on Host felt like a better use of her time than sitting silently in Professor Gounelle’s meetings. Besides, she would find out more in the seminar Professor Gounelle had arranged for the following week.

As she raised her fist to knock on Professor Kettle’s door she heard murmuring from within. She knocked lightly and entered, stealing herself for an argument with whichever administrator was harrying the professor today.

Sitting in Olivia’s usual armchair was a woman with cropped hair and a weathered face. She was dressed too casually to be an administrator and the conversation seemed too amiable.

‘… and he has arranged to have it shipped over,’ the woman said. ‘It will be arriving at the Hudleston Building …  Hello! You must be Olivia. I’m Debbie Austin. But call me Debbie.’

Once Olivia was seated in another chair with a cup of tea in hand, Professor Kettle began to describe their investigations to Debbie. His explanation was rambling and haphazard and Olivia soon found herself interjecting to flesh out the details. In the end, he seemed content to let her take over completely.

‘Professor Kettle thought you might be able to help us,’ she said, once she had described their experiments with starling murmurations.

Debbie nodded. ‘Since I spend a lot of time in the field, I’ve learnt to construct some of my own instruments: anemometers, ruggedised Babbage machines and so on. I might be able to miniaturise your equipment so you don’t need to drag around multiple visio cameras. If you can get away with a small number of very close cameras, it might even be possible to fit it all into one single device.’

Olivia spent the rest of the evening explaining Host to Debbie in greater detail, while Professor Kettle plied them with tea. Eventually, Debbie declared that she understood it well enough to construct a stand-alone device on which to run the algorithm.

‘I’m afraid there’ll be a delay before I can start, though.’ she said, as she stood up to leave. ‘My neckerite sample arrives from Iceland tomorrow, and it is going to take some time to chisel it out of its rocky tomb and analyse it. In the meantime, promise me you’ll drop by the Hudleston Building sometime to have a look at it.’

Once Debbie had left, Olivia and Professor Kettle sat staring into their empty teacups. Debbie’s response had not been unexpected, though that did little to soften the disappointment. Professor Kettle would likely have lost his access to the Institute by the time she was able to start.

‘Is there anything else for us to discuss then,’ Professor Kettle said, ‘or should I start packing up my office?’

‘Well, there was something,’ Olivia began, hesitantly. ‘I found some visios of groups of animals on the hub: flocks of birds, herds of bison, shoals of fish, and so on, and tried feeding them into Host.’

She opened her Babbage machine and showed the professor a visio of a cloud of bats emerging at dusk from a jungle cave. A flickering arrow appeared beneath the visio, as Host computed the corresponding emergent quantities.

‘Look how the arrow is always pointing out of the cave,’ she said.

The professor nodded. ‘I expect a similar visio at dawn would show the emergent quantities pointing inwards.’

Having anticipated the question, Olivia brought up another visio showing the bats returning to roost. The arrow was shorter now and jumped around erratically, but never pointed inwards.

‘It’s as if the bats overall act as an information source,’ she said.

She swiped a finger across the screen and the bats were replaced with a mass of bees, writhing across a beehive frame. They appeared to be moving haphazardly, but again the arrow oscillated about one dominant direction.

‘I’ve looked at a lot of other visios,’ she said. ‘Ants, bees or wasps, fish, bison. There is typically a dominant direction for the arrow irrespective of the direction of motion of the individuals.’

Professor Kettle said nothing and Olivia began to wonder if he had understood what she had shown him.

‘You don’t look surprised about any of this,’ she said, finally. ‘But I still don’t see how it helps us.’

Professor Kettle drummed his fingers together for a time, before answering. ‘It is my contention that what you have found is an artefact of considering isolated populations of animals. We should instead consider the flocks, swarms and nests together as a whole, transferring information between each other via the emergent quantities’

‘Why would they do that?’ Olivia asked.

‘Because that is what the cells in our brains do.’

Olivia shifted awkwardly in her seat. ‘Are you implying there’s some sentience out there. Is that what this is really about? Trying to explain consciousness?’

The professor gave an unconvincing laugh. ‘No. And neither do I know that we will ever be able to understand the miracle of consciousness.’ He sat back into the depths of his armchair and lowered his eyelids. Just as Olivia was wondering if she should prod him awake, he opened his eyes and addressed her.

‘If I were to try to communicate with a single one of your brain cells, you would justly consider me ridiculous,’ he said. ‘The individual cells of your brain do not understand English, or algorithmics. Yet somehow the entirety of your brain does.’ He leaned forward. ‘What if the same analogy applied to groups of animals? What if we should be thinking of the individual animals as the cells and the groups as the whole, with the emergent quantities governing the flow of information?’

‘It’s unfalsifiable,’ Olivia replied hotly. ‘There is nothing we can test. Nothing we can publish.’

‘And is science about no more than merely testing predictions?’ he said. ‘Is it not also about explaining? About understanding?’

‘I thought you said we’d never understand consciousness?’ Olivia retorted, uncomfortable with the direction he seemed intent on following.

Professor Kettle’s eyes shone, one brighter than the other, in the light of his desk lamp. ‘I have witnessed many of the great leaps in physics over the last century,’ he said, more quietly now. ‘But on this subject we are still floundering. We are nowhere near to explaining how our minds work, why we have a sense of self, why I feel like me and you feel like you. But you and I, Olivia, are on the cusp of a deeper truth.’

He extended his arm and clasped her hands in his. ‘We must grasp it, together.’

‘And how do you propose we do that?’ she said. ‘You’re about to be forced out.’

‘That I do not yet know.’

It was not until Olivia returned home that night that she noticed the hubmail from Ethan, asking her to meet him at the spheron. She might have joined him had it not been so late; by now he would long since have given up waiting.

***

The discussion with Professor Kettle was never far from Olivia’s thoughts as she worked, heavy-eyed, in the Stokes Building the following day. Whatever he thought was behind their results, she would not be drawn into the realm of pseudoscience. Yet there was clearly something here they had discovered, even if it was not clear what.

Longing to talk to somebody more dispassionate than the professor, she replied to Ethan’s message, suggesting they meet, though it felt galling to do so given his apparent disinterest in her work.

A little later, her screen flashed to signify the arrival of a new hubmail, but it was not from Ethan.

Olivia,

Try this with Host. Then we will know one way or the other.

Yours as always,

Clarence

Below the message was a reference leading to a page on the Medical Institute’s internal hub. It contained numerous brain scans which had been made freely available to researchers. The professor’s idea needed no further explanation.

Abandoning her work for Dr Haynes, she pulled from the hub a data packet corresponding to a few seconds of brain activity from an anonymous individual. The data was vast: the cerebral scanner the doctors had used appeared to measure the brain one tiny cube at a time, recording, with great resolution, the cerebral pulses sent between adjacent cubes of brain matter.

It did not take long to manipulate the data into a format that Host could read. Where previously the algorithm had computed the emergent quantities based on the movements of animals, now it would use the flow of cerebral pulses. The computation was too much for her own machine so she pushed the algorithm across to the Institute’s simultaneous engine facilities, which she had also been using for Dr Haynes’ work.

Later that day, when the computation was finally complete, she pulled the output onto her machine.

A visio appeared on the screen, showing an arrow moving apparently at random, lengthening, swivelling and shrinking with no discernible pattern. She repeated the experiment several more times over the next few days, choosing a different data set each time. Dr Haynes’s work provided solace during the interminable wait for results, and she was grateful for once to be kept busy by his mundane computational requests. But when she looked at the visios at the end of each day, the results were just as meaningless.

She sat in her room that evening and emptied her frustrations into her keyboard, bemoaning, in a hubmail to Professor Kettle, how the endeavour had been a waste of time. Of course, Ethan would probably have persuaded her not to bother in the first place had she spoken with him, but he had never replied to her previous message. In fact, other than an announcement about the special seminar tomorrow, even the usual stream of spheron-related hubmails from Professors Gounelle, Taraskin and Cruickshank had stopped.

She managed to calm down sufficiently to discard the hubmail before sending it, and switched her attention back to Host, algorithms being easier to deal with than people. Besides, it would be sensible to check her results one last time before her collaboration with Professor Kettle came to an end.

Since she could not access the simultaneous engine facilities from home, this time she selected data focusing on a small region of the brain. A little while later the results flashed up.

Olivia caught her breath. The visio showed a long arrow, twitching about a single, dominant direction, as if moored in a stream. She tapped the screen as if to make the arrow wobble, but it remained steadfast.

Unable to believe what she was seeing, she repeated the process, her impatience growing as she waited for the computation to finish. Once again, the emergent quantities manifested as a long arrow, sometimes meandering from side to side, occasionally flipping direction completely, but never showing the random behaviour she had seen previously. The conclusion was inescapable: information was being transferred from one region of the brain to another via the emergent quantities.

She lay back on her bed, pondering the implications of her findings. Was this the ‘deeper truth’ to which Professor Kettle had referred? No, extraordinary claims needed equally strong evidence – somebody needed to independently check her work before she would admit he was right.

She resolved to seek Ethan out at tomorrow’s seminar and show him her results.

***

The Maxwell Lecture Theatre was full long before the seminar was due to begin, with even the stepped aisles leading down to the stage occupied. Olivia squeezed through the throng at the back and found a space where, if she stood on tip toes, she could just see the stage between the shoulders of those in front. She saw Ethan in the front row, sitting between Professors Taraskin and Cruickshank.

The expectant chatter ceased when Professor Gounelle strode out of the wing, before a ripple of laughter spread through the auditorium as the audience realised she was not yet ready to begin. Professor Gounelle glanced up nonchalantly then retrieved a Babbage screen from her bag, unrolled it and swiped a finger across it.

There was a collective gasp, followed by animated chatter as an image appeared on the screen behind the stage, showing the spheron in its original location, partway round the Equatorial Ring Road. Two technicians, who Olivia did not recognise, were stood in front of it, staring at their reflections.

‘The image behind me was taken in the Freeman Manipulator several weeks ago.’ Professor Gounelle began. ‘We call this object the spheron.’

Irritated hushes spread through the audience as people strained to hear her over the excited murmur.

When the auditorium had quietened once more, Professor Gounelle continued. Her voice was thin and her figure tiny, yet she had complete command of the room as she gave an outline of Ethan’s discovery of the bifurcation equation and the subsequent Manipulator experiment. Olivia was surprised to see him slouching down in his seat, cheeks flushed as if with shame. Surely he should be revelling in this level of attention. Yet he only seemed to relax when Professor Gounelle moved on.

‘I would now like to pass you over to Professor Cruickshank,’ she said. She stepped away from the lectern, leaving her Babbage screen behind, and looked warmly at Professor Cruickshank as he approached the stage. Even from one step below he towered over her.

Professor Cruickshank described the tests his team had conducted. Various photographs accompanied his talk, showing either him or Rob Hamilton holding an assortment of probes up to the spheron, their stances mirrored in its perfect surface.

‘I’ll pass you back to Antoinette now to bring you up do date on … recent developments.’ He looked at Professor Gounelle, and the corner of his mouth twitched as if he was sharing a private joke. ‘Let me just leave you with one last photograph, though.’ He swiped his finger across the Babbage screen on the lectern then returned to his seat.

The audience erupted.

The photograph showed Professor Cruickshank and Rob Hamilton standing beside the spheron, staring sullenly at the camera with their arms crossed. But in the reflection in the spheron Professor Cruickshank stood next to Professor Gounelle.

It was some time before the noise had abated sufficiently for Professor Gounelle to address the room once more.

‘Last week, our reflections in the spheron started to … misbehave. It began with small effects, such as discrepancies in the toss of a coin.’ Professor Gounelle glanced at Ethan, who  slunk further into his chair. ‘The divergences rapidly increased until our erroneous reflections were moving completely independently of us. No sound is transmitted by the spheron, but we have been able to communicate with our doppelgängers by displaying messages to each other. This in turn has accelerated the separation between us.’

As Professor Gounelle spoke, several more images of the spheron appeared behind her. In one, Ethan held up the three of hearts from a deck of cards, while in the spheron the ace of spades was shown. In another, Professor Cruickshank displayed a sheet of paper on which was written π=3.14159265 …. Within the spheron, Rob Hamilton, held up a sheet showing a completely different number:

‘Our doubles claim to live in a world identical to ours,’ said Professor Gounelle. ‘To them, it is we who appear as images on the surface of a spheron.’

She paused and stared hard at the audience. ‘Let me be explicit,’ she said slowly. ‘Within the spheron, in another version of the Maxwell Lecture Theatre, another Antoinette Gounelle is addressing another version of you. She and I are probably saying similar things. But as our two worlds drift further apart, the discrepancies will grow. Already, the other Antoinette is no longer quite the same person as me.’

There was complete silence.

‘For several weeks, a group of us have tried without success to devise a theory to explain the spheron. We had hoped to present it to you today. However, we have failed, and, in the light of the last week’s developments, it is time to open up our work. The best I can do today is to present our partial explanation, such as it is.

‘We believe the spheron is formed from a geometric anomaly in the curvature of spacetime resulting in a boundary that can only be traversed by electromagnetic radiation. This hypothesis is consistent with the spheron’s curious properties: its smoothness, its clarity, its inability to transmit sound. Its creation in the Manipulator also resulted in the emission of a spacetime wave, which was detected by the SuSGAD team in the Arctic. As for our mirror image world, we don’t understand this fully. The bifurcation equation undoubtedly plays a crucial role here, but we have been unable to incorporate it into our theory.’

Professor Gounelle spread her arms out in front of her. ‘I would now like to invite questions, although I fear I will be unable to answer many of them satisfactorily.’

A forest of arms rose. She nodded to somebody near the front, hidden from Olivia’s view.

‘What caused the divergence? Initially you were seeing perfect reflections, were you not?’

‘At the instant of spheron’s creation, two versions of this world somehow manifested on either side of its boundary,’ Professor Gounelle replied. ‘Random fluctuations near the Noether scale caused the two versions to drift apart in a manner too small for us to notice. It took weeks for these discrepancies to accumulate until they were large enough for us to see. Now, the divergence continues exponentially.’

Somebody near the back of the theatre shouted out, ‘What do you mean by two worlds? Have we created a new version of us, or accidentally connected two existing versions?’

‘Please, I would ask that you raise your hand before asking questions,’ said Professor Gounelle. ‘Indeed, our current theories of discrete aetherics do not preclude the existence of multiple instances of our world. Could we have somehow linked two of them? We do not know.’

She pointed to somebody else near the front.

‘What about the magnetic properties?’ came the question. ‘The existence of a monopole is still of huge importance is it not?’

‘We do at least have an explanation for that,’ said Professor Gounelle, ‘though I am afraid it might disappoint you. When Professor Cruickshank held a bar magnet to the spheron, the force he felt was due to the magnet held up by the Professor Cruickshank within the spheron. The spheron itself is not magnetic, but it does transmit magnetic fields.’

‘That’s wrong!’ the voice near the back cried out again. ‘If Cruickshank and his double both held up the same poles of their magnets, there should have been a repulsion not an attraction.’

Olivia could just make out Professor Cruickshank turning round angrily at the interruption, but Professor Gounelle remained calm.

‘Again, please raise your hand before shouting out. Nonetheless, your question brings us to a crucial point. Why, if we are seeing another version of our world, does it appear in the spheron as a mirror image?’ She surveyed the room expectantly. ‘The answer is that the very definitions of left and right are reversed within the spheron.

‘In conversations with our doubles, we have established that the world within the spheron mirrors ours in every way. We discussed, for example, the classic experiments of the last century: the twin apertures experiment, the deviation of light round the sun, and, crucially, Fisher’s parity violation test.

‘For those who are unaware, Fisher’s test demonstrates an inherent asymmetry between left and right: on subatomic scales, the laws of physics are not symmetric. Now, remember that our doubles are mirror images of us. Our left is their right. We should therefore expect to disagree on the result of Fisher’s parity violation test. However, their experimental results appear identical to ours.

‘We therefore conclude that the spheron contains not just a reflected version of our world, but a reflected version of our physics, down to the level of the most fundamental discrete aetheric laws. And one consequence of this is that our magnetic north poles are attracted to their magnetic north poles.’

She took a sip from a glass of water beneath the lectern before taking the next question.

‘Forgive me if this is too simplistic,’ the questioner began, in a tone that suggested they knew it wasn’t. ‘But where precisely is this duplicate world? There isn’t much room inside the spheron for a whole other universe. Or are both worlds part of some higher dimensional space?’

‘I cannot discount that we reside in a higher dimensional space,’ said Professor Gounelle, ‘but let us not forget that our duplicates are probably asking themselves the same question right now’

She stepped across the stage to a blackboard and began to scrawl some diagrams and equations on it, reaching high with the chalk in an effort to make her work legible to those at the back.

‘A transformation known as a spherical inversion allows us to relate the geometry within the spheron to the geometry that we experience,’ she said.

A low hubbub began to filter round the auditorium, as people struggled to follow the technical minutiae of the answer, but Professor Gounelle continued unabashed.

‘We can map our universe, all the way out to infinity, onto the inside of the spheron via a reflection in its surface. Similarly, we can map the inside of the spheron back to the outside by applying the same inversion. Which of the two versions of our universe lie inside or outside the spheron then becomes merely a matter of perspective, with the mapping translating between the two options.’

Olivia strained to get a better look at the board but Professor Gounelle had already moved on to the next question.

‘What would happen if you reran the experiment?’

‘The damage caused by the creation of the spheron is easy to fix, but the Freeman Manipulator will be inactive until the spring. We do net yet know whether we will repeat the experiment, nor what would happen if we did.’

‘Why can only massless particles pass through the spheron?’ came the next question. ‘Is there any hope that we could ever traverse through and meet out other selves?’

An excited murmur rose at such a possibility.

‘We don’t know,’ came the professor’s reply. She fell silent for a few moments before continuing. ‘It is my belief that we will never be able to traverse through the spheron as you suggest, and only ever be able to exchange information via massless rayons. I believe the reflection in the physical laws we discussed earlier represents an absolute barrier between the two worlds for massive particles.’

‘If the physical laws are reflected, then the world within the spheron could be made of antimatter,’ somebody shouted.

‘In which case entering the spheron would be most unwise,’ Gounelle said, to a smattering of laughter.

Several more questions were asked of an increasingly technical nature, for which Professor Gounelle had no answer. The chattering among the audience steadily increased. 

‘I think we have reached the stage where I will be unable to answer further questions without speculating more than I am comfortable with,’ she said. ‘The final question I shall address is this: what happens next?

‘All of our experimental data will be pushed to the hub, where anybody is free to analyse it. However, the spheron itself will remain in the Manipulator and will not be accessible. I hope you understand our stance on this matter. In the meantime, I wish to warmly welcome you to a new era of scientific endeavour.’

The audience broke out into sustained applause. When it eventually died down and people began to file out, Olivia noticed Professor Kettle sitting immobile at the end of an aisle. He was gazing blankly into the distance, pale and haggard, oblivious to the rest of the row trying to get past. Only when he received a sharp tap on the shoulder did he come to his senses and join the flow of bodies up the aisle. He was gone before she could catch his eye.

Olivia weaved her way to the front of the lecture theatre. As she neared the stage, she saw Professor Cruickshank step over to Professor Gounelle and give her shoulder a lingering squeeze. Professor Gounelle looked wearily up at him.

Professor Cruickshank dropped his arm when Olivia approached, and he and Professor Gounelle gave her a friendly, if stilted, salutation. Professor Taraskin arrived soon after but did not bother with such pleasantries.

When Ethan had joined them in front of the stage, Professor Gounelle began to address them, her voice echoing in the now empty auditorium.

‘I think that went –’

There was a bang behind them and Olivia turned to see a flustered Mrs. Etherington burst through the doors at the back of the lecture theatre and rush down the steps towards them.

‘Sylvia, is everything alright?’ asked Professor Gounelle.

‘There is a young lady outside your office who is refusing to leave until she has spoken to you,’ said Mrs. Etherington, between breaths. ‘She says she needs your help.’

‘Can she not wait?’

‘She said it’s too important, and she asked me to tell you something. She told me the exact words to use and made me repeat them back to her.’ Mrs. Etherington screwed her face up in concentration. ‘She told me to say, “What they created in the Manipulator is not the only one”.’