The Flicker Men (21 page)

“Are you looking for the lens?” Stuart asked.

“Where is it?”

“There is no lens. Just the sensor.” He pointed to a white dish in the ceiling.

“I don't understand.”

“It's created a 3D model of the entire room. Like a video game. And you're in it. We can adjust the angle of the image to see the scene from any direction. The perspective is controlled over here.”

He worked his hand on a small roller control, and the scene in the sphere changed, shifting to a new perspective.

“This is amazing.”

“This is nothing. Watch this.” He bent to his keyboard and hit a series of commands. There was a sound like static, and for a moment the scene in the sphere twitched. And then it started to play backward. I saw my own hand retract slowly from the sphere. I saw my own face turn back toward Stuart, as if I'd heard something. And then the image went gray.

“It moves.”

“Hell yes, it moves, and that's not even the amazing part.”

“So you recorded this?”

“No, it's not like that. Here, let me show you.” He walked to the center of the room. He reached up to the electrical cord hanging from the ceiling. “This is the sensor's power source.” He yanked the cord, and it came out from the wall. “The sensor is off, unplugged. Nothing is being recorded by anything. Now put your hand back on the sphere.”

I did as he asked. This time I spread my fingers as wide as they'd go. The quartz was warmer now. Body temperature. The few seconds it had run had heated it a dozen degrees.

“You ready?”

“Yeah.”

He plugged the cord back into the wall. “Now the sensor is powered. Remember, your hand was already on the sphere when I plugged it in.” He touched the controls, and the light pulsed again. A sound I felt in my bones. That same touch of pain. That same fuzziness in my vision. It faded quickly.

In the sphere, an image flashed into existence. Me standing at the sphere, hand on the quartz, like a perfect mirror.

“Keep your hand there,” he said.

“Okay.”

“Now watch.”

He hit the dial, and the image shifted. I saw my sprawled fingers slide, saw my hand retract as I backed away and turned my head. The image stopped.

He played it again. Again I watched, searching for the error. But there was none. It was me, played in reverse. Three seconds—the image of me reaching my hand out to touch the sphere. He played it again and again.

“But the sensor was unplugged when I did that,” I said. “How can it have recorded me moving?”

“There are a lot of limitations,” he said. “Don't get me wrong. The length is different every time, but usually less than five seconds. And the range of the image is highly constrained. It'll only record within a certain circumference.” He turned the knob on the control, and the image panned out a dozen feet before fading to gray. He spun the knob, and it zoomed back again. “With minute adjustments of the sensor, I've been able to increase the radius of the read. It started out just a few feet—an area not much bigger than the sphere itself, but now it's expanded to fill most of the room.”

“But I still don't see how the sensor recorded something before it was turned on?”

“The sensor didn't record the state of the photons,” He said. “It recorded the bounce.”

I looked at him. And then I understood. I understood what he'd done. The enormity of it. “Holy shit,” I said again. He hadn't recorded a moving sequence at all. He'd taken a snapshot; the rest had been assembled from the messenger particle bounce data.

“You're able to play images that happened before you started recording.”

“That's why I sent them all home,” he said. “All the people who helped to build it and designed the algorithms to analyze the data. And that's why I wrote to you. This is only a prototype, but this tech is a game changer. It's a camera that can look at anything. Anything.”

“Even back in time.”

He nodded.

“If the world found out, there are people who might not be happy about this kind of tech.”

“Anybody with a secret to keep.”

“Criminals,” I said. “Governments.”

“Things worse than that, Eric.” He walked to the cord and pulled it from the wall again.

“You said it records five seconds.”

“Usually,” he said.

“But not always?”

He smiled. “If you study magic hard enough, does it become science?”

Something about the way he said that gave me pause. “What did you see?”

“It went back eight seconds one time. And one time farther than that.”

“How much farther?”

“Far enough. I think…” Here he seemed on the edge of stopping himself but instead continued. “I think sometimes it can get confused.”

“Confused about what?”

“About what it sees. Which past it's looking at.”

He walked back to the controls. He picked up the shotgun from where it leaned against the console. “Sometimes I see things that didn't really happen,” he said.

I waited for him to explain.

Stuart put his shotgun on his shoulder and crossed the room to the sphere. He stood next to me. “I see it in the sphere but never in real life.”

“What?”

“I'm not sure. It's always at the edges.”

I looked around the room. The chaos. The sheer weight of what he'd been dealing with. His company shutting down. It was easy to imagine that a man could break under such pressure.

“Maybe you're seeing reflections,” I said.

Stuart nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “That's what I thought the first time.” His expression was tired. “That's probably what I'd still think, but I have it recorded. Would you like to see?”

Stuart walked back to the control panel and manipulated the toggle.

The sphere lit up. I moved closer, and in it I could see the room. I saw Stuart, shotgun in his hand.

“This image was taken a few months ago,” he said. “There was something at the very edge of the render where I couldn't get a good look.”

I squinted and looked close. There was nothing unexpected in the image. Just Stuart. An image of Stuart, standing near the sphere.

Stuart continued, “If you run the scene twice, in quick succession, you can bridge it longer. You can zoom in to see yourself watching, looking into the sphere. And then you zoom in on the sphere inside the image. That's how I saw it the first time, by accident. Later, I went looking.”

I wondered at the side effects Stuart talked about. I wondered about the pain in my head when he'd started the machine. What would that do if you used it over and over? What would it do if you used it a dozen times a day? Would you see things that weren't there?

“There it is,” Stuart said.

I looked. My mouth dropped. In the sphere, I saw a shape—a subtle irregularity. A shadow at the edge of perception. It could have been anything or nothing, until it moved. When it moved, my understanding shifted.

“Now here's where I can bridge the scene,” Stuart said.

Suddenly, the image zoomed out and began to play, and I wasn't seeing the shadow anymore, but the entire scene, until I saw the image of Stuart as he approached the sphere, carrying his gun. The scene zoomed in closer, and the sphere itself became clear and bright, itself an image. Like a TV that showed the image of a TV.

I glanced toward the real Stuart, who stood at the controls. I turned back to the recording.

I watched the image-Stuart peer into the sphere. I saw him see what we saw, the strange shadow in the room inside the sphere—a shadow in the shape of him. Another version of him, standing where he hadn't stood. And then the image-Stuart pulled the shotgun from off his shoulder. He took three steps back. He raised his gun and fired.

The quartz exploded, and the sphere went dark.

*   *   *

Stuart left the controls and stood next to me. “I thought I could fix it,” he said. “I thought starting over might correct the irregularity, but it didn't. Replacing the quartz took two months, and when I ran it again, I saw the shape at the edges. Like a parallel version of myself. I know it's there. Somewhere.” He gestured around the room. “Or maybe it's in here.”

I glanced down at the floor, and I suddenly understood the glass all around, not glass at all—a perfect ballistic pattern across the dark gray cement, radiating outward from the central dais. I turned to look at that spot in the room where the shadow had stood.

A perfect ballistic pattern across the dark gray cement, that is, except for two spots. Two distinct foot-size gaps in the quartz, where it looked as if someone had been standing.

 

28

“What was Satvik hoping to get from coming here?”

We stood on a courtyard that wrapped around the second floor of the building. The first two floors were slightly wider than the floors above, producing a terrace that circled the building in a ring. There were a series of picnic tables and small trees. As a neat and ordered little park, it stood in stark contrast to the chaos of the interior. The wind periodically made Stuart's hair dance around his head, while his wrinkled shirt flapped open, and I wondered how many days he'd been wearing the same clothes.

Stuart carried his shotgun over his forearm. He looked like a lost hunter.

“He wanted to see the other work you'd done.”

“Why?”

“At first, I wasn't sure. Then I realized it had to do with the test. The two-slit.”

“Do you know where he is now?”

Stuart shook his head. His dark eyes looked out over the terrace as the light faded. “He seemed scared, though. Something had him scared.”

“Why do you carry the gun?”

“Because I think he was right to be scared.” We watched the sun go down for several minutes. Night came on. “Let me see that paper again,” Stuart said.

I handed it to him. He scanned the paper. “Look at the type of research that's on here. What does it all have in common?”

“It's all over the place.”

“That's because you're not looking. The winners are red herrings. If you only look at who actually won the prize, that research has just been skirting at the edges.”

“The edges of what?”

“The real questions. You don't see it? It's the
other
research they're really looking into. The research that didn't win.” He frowned. “I think I knew some of these researchers. Or at least I knew guys working in the same areas.”

“Who are they?”

“Warnings,” he said. He handed the paper back. “Two of them are dead.”

“Recently?”

“In the last few years. A car accident. Another one jumped from a building. It's dangerous having research on the Discovery Prize short list.”

He turned away from me and leaned against the railing. “It gets quiet up here at night. So peaceful.” He looked in the distance. “We didn't build that gem in the sphere; we discovered it. That's how it feels, like it was always there. An artifact buried in the ground. The tech is just the shovel that digs it out.”

“When was the last time you were home?”

“Weeks,” he said. “I have everything I could want here. There's food stockpiled. Electricity, water, and plumbing.” He glanced down at his weapon. “My shotgun.”

“Spoken like a man under siege.”

He turned toward me, eyes suddenly focused. “I was impressed by your paper. The experiment was elegant and simple. And then what happened afterward. That doctor.”

“Robbins,” I said.

“Bad business, that.” Stuart shook his head and chuckled. “And there's the rub, isn't it? Just your luck. You find the soul, and then you stumble across the soulless.”

“There's no proof it means that.”

“Proof? Do you think people need proof?” He pointed. “Look over there. You see that church parking lot?”

I could see where he was pointing. A building in the distance, two blocks down, barely visible from where we stood. I would have taken it for a sports complex or some kind of small arena.

“I can see that church parking lot on Sundays, and these last few weeks it's been fuller than I've ever seen it. All this talk of souls and strange scientific tests. Your man Robbins and those videos that came out. People might not be sure what that test of yours found, exactly, but they know it found something.” He looked up at the sky. “But it's all just six quarks and six leptons, right? All the matter in the universe. The twelve particles that make up everything. Six quarks and six leptons.” He leaned out over the railing. “Do you think it's quarks and leptons in that quartz?”

“It's an image,” I said.

He waved his arm again. “It's all an image. All of it. It's not even a question anymore, is it? The math's been going that way for years. When you drill down into it, it's mostly just empty space, and nothing really touches—just the illusion of touching, the experience of touching. Call it quarks and leptons if you want. The only true argument left is what it all means.”

“And what do you think it means?”

“Damned if I know.” He laughed. “That pattern in the quartz is telling us something, burned like an afterimage. The first time I used the sphere, those imperfections were left behind, and yet when I used it again, there was no image distortion. I've thought long and hard about what that has to mean.”

“Come to any conclusions?”

“There's only one thing it can be,” he said. “I think that pattern in the quartz is a negative of sorts.”

“A photographic negative? Of the room?”

“Of reality.” He shrugged. “Three-dimensional space-time. Somehow it's all coded inside that single shape, right down to the Planck length. Didn't you used to talk about trying to unify quantum mechanics with relativity?”