Engineering Infinity (25 page)

The vagaries of chance: That’s
what I was thinking about when I turned away from the infinity window.

Apex Road was empty of buses and
most other traffic, adding to the general dilapidation of downtown. I could
have checked the transit logs, wringing the data for a good estimate of my
departure time. But I wasn’t in any special hurry. There was no place I needed
to be. A joyful life full of minimal expectations - that’s how I paint myself
when I need to crow about my blessings.

It was a warm day but not a
furnace. Not like the last three weeks, at least. A previous mayor used our
greenhouse abatement funds to buy ginkgo trees - an enhanced strain. They were
planted up and down Apex, pieces of sidewalk removed so the roots could be
shoved into rectangular patches of hard clay soil. The trees thrived a few
years before starting to die. Only the corner gingko was still alive, and there
was a bench in its shade where a man could sit and wait for the next piece of
his life to begin.

There wasn’t any wind. The world
was like a picture, fixed and forever. I scratched an itch and sat down, and
then I looked up.

Perched on the lowest branch was
a marvel. How I even noticed her is a minor mystery. Whatever the reason, I saw
her perched on the ginkgo branch, and with no expectations of success, I stood
up and reached high, fingers nervous until the light dry feet shifted onto my
right hand.

Her size and what I remembered
about mantis biology told me she was a fully mature female. All of my life I’d
held a fondness for these creatures. They looked deeply unlikely, cobbled
together out of several less beautiful insects, but those marvellous, murderous
arms belong to them alone. She weighed almost nothing, but she was still better
than four inches long. I brought her down to eye level, staring at her
pivoting, self-aware face. If I was a worry, she didn’t show it. She held
herself in a confident, queenly poise. I dropped her gently onto the back of
the bench, and she accepted her new perch without complaint. I put my hands on
my hips and laughed. Then I decided that an audience was necessary, which was
why I looked back at the infinity window.

People were still riding those
elliptical beasts. The woman in front of me was tall and elegant, not young but
pretty in ways that no living, farting human being could ever manage to be. I
didn’t own any clothes as attractive as her tights and top. She looked like
someone I should recognize: an aging actress, perhaps. In his own way, her
man-friend was equally unlikely, all muscle and shiny flesh, thick veins
bulging when he worked his arms and those long strong legs that shook the
machine as he powered his way through the illusionary forward.

I waved at them and pointed at my
mantis. But neither person would look at me now. The man was staring off into
the distance, talking with feeling about some important matter, and then he
stopped talking and the woman began to speak, causing her companion to frown
and speed up even more, eyes narrowed as he contemplated whatever unwelcome
news he was hearing.

Once again, I looked up the
street.

My bus was still missing, but
walking down the sidewalk was a rather pretty girl. And by “girl,” I mean she
was a female who looked maybe fifteen years younger than me, which meant she
wasn’t a girl at all. I watched her. She glanced at me long enough to decide
that maybe she should look elsewhere. I’m accustomed to that response. I’ve
never been a beast who dresses up in camouflage. But this was a different day,
and the beast had a fresh trick at the ready.

“Look here,” I said. “Look at
this.”

The girl threw a hopeful glance
over her shoulder. But no, she was the only real person in sight.

“I found her up in the tree,” I
said.

My audience considered some good
fast walking.

“And she walked right into my
hand,” I concluded, backing away from the bench, palms opened to the sky like a
magician finishing his signature trick.

It was a wonderful moment. As if
playing along, the mantis did a sudden little dance, flexing her raptorial legs
while that bright watchful face did everything but wink.

The girl blinked.

Then she said, “Delightful,” and
came closer.

I just stood there, grinning
happily.

With measured caution, she held
out her hand and then slowly extended one finger, and the mantis took a swing
at her fingertip.

She laughed loudly, buoyantly. “Oh,
it is real,” she said.

“I love these insects,” I told
her.

And she gave me another look. Not
that I was anything she would ever want, but there was something about my face
or my eyes that told her that at least she didn’t need to run away.

The two of us could stand on that
street corner, talking politely.

“Is it really a female?” she
asked.

I said that I thought so, yes.

“They’re the bugs that chew off
their lover’s heads, aren’t they? While they’re actually doing it?”

“It’s their nature,” I said.

And once again, with relish, she
said, “Delightful.”

“I’m sorry,” the woman said.

This was an apology, but it took
me a few moments to appreciate what was happening. I slowed and looked over at
Berry, and she smiled as if embarrassed, admitting, “It’s a rough game,
thinking you might not be real.”

“But I am real.”

She nodded politely.

“I am,” I repeated. But my denial
was just words, reflexive and simple, and this topic made me uncomfortable.

Berry looked at her machine’s
screen, at the wise doctors and their beautiful, doomed patient. I assumed that
our conversation was finished, that we might never speak again. Desperate for a
distraction, I looked at the window. A young woman had just wandered into view.
She could have been pretty, but she was too thin - that half-starved look that
people acquire when they eat nothing but algae. Her legs and forearms were like
sticks. She and that strange man chatted amiably. Then she approached the
bench, her hand palm-up and slow. I studied her scrawny chicken back with the
spine trying to push up through the skin and the shirt. I couldn’t see what her
hand was doing, but I was curious, particularly when she started to laugh. A
loud giggle was audible over the sounds of machines and ventilation, and that’s
when she turned around, showing the world what she was holding.

“Look at that,” I said.

Berry lifted her gaze. “Is that what
I think it is?”

“No, it’s probably something
else,” I said.

The old woman laughed. “You’re
right. But it could be a praying mantis. They get that big, don’t they?”

“Honestly, I don’t know bugs.”

“We could look it up,” she said.

“Or we could just watch the show,”
I said.

“The show” was two strangers and
that emerald-green mantis perched in the girl’s skeletal hand. The man said a
few words, and the girl nodded and offered her other hand to the rider. More
amiable than most pets, the insect walked to its new perch and flexed its arms.
I could just make out its head pivoting and the sunshine in the tree branches
and how those odd, almost alien looking leaves caught the light, turning it
into something cooler and more special.

For a second time, I was sad and
bothered.

Maybe Berry noticed, but probably
not. More likely she was just dwelling on matters that meant something to her.

“I’ve watched a lot of these
shows,” she told me.

“Strangers and bugs?”

She laughed hard enough to break
stride. Then she pointed at her screen, saying, “When I was little, my mother
and I watched this television series, and I felt special. She allowed me to
stay up late on a school night. Just to see these long-dead actors reading
scripts written by people I wouldn’t know from anybody. Oh, and the stories
they told. Contrived and melodramatic, and we loved them. This was a great
bonding experience for my mother and me. And I can’t stop loving them. I mean,
just this scene here...this poor gorgeous actress who lived fifty more years,
but in this episode she’s dying of leukaemia, and doesn’t she look wonderful?”

I glanced at the screen. “She
looks fine.”

“An innocent, rich, meat-fed
wonderful.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“This is the world I was born
into,” Berry said, her tone amazed, even a little disbelieving. “Whatever
happened to that world?”

“The future happened,” I said.

She laughed about that.

“But we’re doing better every
day,” I added with conviction.

The strangers were sitting on the
bench. They weren’t sitting together, but they were close enough that the third
party in this newborn relationship could stand on one open hand, and then,
following some bug logic, calmly and purposefully walk across to the other
offered hand.

I couldn’t say why, but I was fascinated.

My pace slowed, and the machine
gave me a quiet warning beep.

Then as I sped up, Berry turned
back to me. And with a wary eye, she asked, “Do you want to know how to know?
If you’re real or not, I mean.”

“There’s a test?”

“One that I invented, yes.”

“All right,” I said. “Give it to
me.”

We sat and we talked, and I wasn’t
entirely sure what we had been talking about. It was that fun, that unexpected
- one long, wonderful blur of words, busy and intense but never focused on
anything important. Nothing secret or even borderline personal was shared. It
was just that the ordinary details of ordinary life seemed spectacularly
fascinating. We discussed weather and traffic and favourite foods, and she
mentioned how much she liked Chinese food. And that was my opportunity to
mention that ginkgo trees were from China and this mantis was probably the
same. An Asian species was brought into the country in the last century,
drafted a biological warrior in the losing war against insect pests.

“So she is a weed,” the girl said
with amusement. “One of the monsters crumbling our precious ecosystem.”

“Maybe you should smash her,” I
suggested.

And the girl gave me a funny
look, trying to discern if I meant it. I didn’t. Then she lifted the mantis to
her face, its arms in range of her nose.

The mantis’ head twisted and
turned.

And the girl easily mimicked
every motion.

She wasn’t beautiful, no. But
there was youth and humour in her soul, and she wore the purposeful leanness of
someone who didn’t want to ride hard on our poor suffering world.

Lowering our friend, she looked
at me, and with a suddenly serious, very important tone, she asked, “Is that
your bus?”

It was. But as I explained
before, there was no place that I needed to be, at least not in the immediate
future.

“I’m going to sit here for now,”
I said.

“Well then. I guess I will too.”

Such a day, and who would have
guessed it possible?

“I’ve made a study of
storytelling,” Berry began. “Nothing scholarly or elaborate. But I’m lucky
enough to have been around for a very long time, and what do humans do with
their lives? We absorb stories. Day and night, commercial tales or twists of
gossip, we swim in an ocean of story.”

“You just think you’re human,” I
said.

She laughed. “Point taken.”

A new bus was arriving. The shiny
door swung open, but nobody disembarked. Instead of an automated pilot, there
was a fat human male perched on a hard high seat. The drab uniform threatened
to split with the pressure of the swollen body, fat hands clinging to the
old-fashioned steering wheel. All the colour was washed out of the man, but
that wasn’t the oddest detail. It was his face. I recognized him. To save my
life, I couldn’t identify the driver, but I was absolutely certain that I had
seen him pictured somewhere. Maybe he was the obese man from one of my son’s
school lessons - a cautionary emblem of wasted, impoverishing wealth that stole
too much from the world.

“A good story begins in an
intriguing place,” Berry said.

The couple remained seated on
their bench, playing with the bug. The driver closed his door with a mechanical
lever, and the ancient diesel engine roared as the bus rolled away, dragging a
swirling black cloud of soot in its wake.

“But the tale can’t be too
interesting either,” she said. “The author doesn’t dare surrender too much,
because the next scenes or the coming chapters are going to drag, if only by
comparison.”

“I suppose not,” I said.

“A great story is like a
wonderful song. There are those delightful beginning notes and a fetching flow,
and it builds and grows, entertaining its audience for the whole journey.”

“And what does this have to do
with us?” I asked.

“Stories do grow,” she said. “It’s
inevitable and I’m sure there is some robust scientific reason why narratives
become more complicated and intricate with time. Maybe it’s because fresh
characters are being introduced. Or maybe it’s the thirst for surprise plots
and new twists. Whatever the reason, I’ve seen this a thousand times. Take my
little doctor drama here, for instance. The television series ran for years and
years, getting bigger and wilder every season. Ordinary diseases weren’t good
enough anymore. Plagues and spectacular tropical diseases kept raising the
stakes. Happily married characters suddenly fell into torrid affairs, and the
best doctors started killing patients, and every woman gave birth whenever it
would help the ratings most. Preferably in the middle of an anthrax attack.”

If she proved nothing else to me,
I realized Berry was a very peculiar old gal. “So what’s your test?” I asked.

“This is how you can tell if you’re
living inside a made-up story,” she said. “If your world is contrived from
thought and shaped light and a few arbitrary, algorithmic principles, then odds
are you are living an interesting, unlikely life. A spellbinding life. Just
think of the stories that capture your imagination. Aren’t they full of
important coincidences, and passion, and tragic pain, and obvious heroism? No
character with a name has to wait long for something new and fascinating to
happen to him.”