We See a Different Frontier: A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology (8 page)

Patel didn’t like the patronizing tone, but he already had his orders from above. He had no choice.

So they went for the Grand Tour of the Little Lab.

“In the beginning,” Patel said, “we were simply researching a more high-resolution and cost-effective immersion environment to be used in arcology elevators. Something to pass the time, and to act as a pressure valve for borderline claustrophobic individuals.

“Then something went wrong. During one of the experiments with the prototype, we lost the signal from the car.”

He paused, more for dramatic effect than for anything else, and glanced at Raitek. The suit was still listening attentively, hands behind his back. Patel went on.

“Five minutes later, the signal was reestablished. When the car was opened and the three team members aboard it were debriefed, they all said the same thing: that the doors had opened on another place and another time. That they were apparently still in Accra, but, according to the elevator display, in 2011.”

Then Raitek raised a hand.

“Can you trust them completely?”

“Mr Da Silva,” Patel said. “I was there. I am one of them.”

Raitek nodded.

“So I am to assume the lab cameras registered everything? And the car never left the lab?”

“As I have told your men countless times. They have the records.”

“They are not my men. So: you all must have traveled, if such a time travel really occurred, in some sort of ‘bubble’ inside the car?”

“As I’m sure you already know, that is the current theory, yes.”

Raitek stopped, straightened himself and looked around. “Do you have a private room, Hiram? May I call you Hiram? And, please, call me Raitek. I really insist.”

Patel had to control himself not to huff audibly. “This way. And my name is Hira
n
, ending with an ‘n’, not an ‘m’, if you please… Raitek.

Raitek grimaced.

“Ok. As long as you don’t forget to pronounce my name with a guttural ‘R’. It’s not a weak ‘R’. It’s more like a roar, if you please, Hiram.”

Both went silent the rest of the way. When they entered Patel’s office and he closed the door, Raitek turned to him and suddenly changed his tone. He went from that easygoing mode to utter seriousness and delivered the following speech, almost as if in a robotic mode:

“Do you want to know what I do, Hiran? Do you really want to know what I’m here for? I’m going to tell you.

“I compress stories.

“These are times of raw information. Information is not knowledge—at least not until it gets mixed with reference and experience. Then it becomes something else: it gets transmuted, translated into a legible, understandable message.

“Information is pure data being fed to you from every possible source at the same time. People like me act like human filters. In the past, some tried to call us names: Googlists, information curators, Gibsonians. I don’t call myself anything. I am what I am. In fact, I don’t do anything you don’t already do. When you open a book, do you read all its pages at once? No. You read them one by one. Whether on a linear basis or not, it doesn’t matter. When you watch a bustling, crowded street at rush hour, are you able to take in every single face in the sea of people who threatens to engulf you from all around? Of course not.

“I just happen to be able to do it a little bit better.

“I take the ancient concept of the memory palace and shrink it down to the size of a 1:72 scale model. A die-cast aircraft toy of a memory palace in my head. All I do then is move the goods in.

“The process is like unloading a removal van. But, instead of big, tidy boxes crammed with info, I picture amorphous masses, not hard stuff, but spongiform ones instead, bouncy buckyballs with tiny spikes all over their surfaces, like weird alternate-Earth Mongol-Raygun-Gothic antennas. I stuff the place with them, and their antennas start telescoping and touching each other. Kinky alien robot sex. I always thought it a bit too cyberpunk-chic-démodé, but it’s deeply imprinted in my culture. I’m comfortable with the imagery.

“The balls interconnect and form a rhizome. The information sexes up and creates a wave of mutilation. All the data is cut, cropped, pasted. Measured, compared, verified. After all this processing, I expand the memory palace… and the knowledge is there. Not so simple, but you don’t need to know every single step, do you?

“To keep it short: I’m the one you’re looking for. I am the one you need to collate all the data you've amassed, to make some sense of all your fucked-up experiences. I came here to salvage your invention, and to save your ass in the process. Is that clear or not, Hiran?”

Patel was impressed with the apparent intelligence of the man, but not with the vulgar display of power. He knew it came with the suit, even if the Brazilian bureaucrat decided to change clothes later.

“It is clear, Raitek.”

The easy smile came back to the Brazilian man’s face as quickly as it had vanished.

“Good. Good, man. We’ll work this out. You will see.”

Patel nodded. But he was not amused.

The next day began on a lighter note. As promised, Raitek wasn’t wearing a suit: to match the hot weather of Ghana, he wore a light blue polo shirt, khaki pants, and flip-flops. Patel noticed the man’s feet were well-manicured.

“
Salve, moçada! Tudo beleza?
” he said to everyone in a loud, happy voice. “Let’s get to work, shall we?”

As if we haven’t already been working our asses off for months, thought a disgruntled Patel, still combing his hair. He missed his flat. He missed his freedom. He was becoming more and more uncomfortable with the increasingly military vibe of this whole lockin. He didn’t respond well to authority. That was why he always preferred working for civilian companies. This time, however, he thought he might have made the wrong choice. Maybe there was no right choice at all in this line of work. It was a depressing thought.

“Good morning, Hiran,” Raitek said, closing on him like a shark upon its prey. “Shall we begin the mission briefing?”

“What mission?”

“Why, the retrieval mission, of course.” Raitek showed his big-toothed smile.

In five minutes the entire team was in the meeting room.

“The funny thing,” Raitek started the briefing, “is that we never see the elevator disappear at any given moment in time, from our side.”

“Yes,” a young black man cut in. “This happens because only the environment travels in time.”

Raitek stared for just the smallest amount of time at the young man.

“You are Jonathan, right? Jonathan Kufuor? One of the techs who was originally in the carriage when it traveled back?”

The young man smiled.

“Yes, sir. That’s me.”

“Call me Raitek, please. Same goes to everyone here. No red tape, no ass-kissing. We must do what we must do. The sooner we get this solved, the sooner we get home.”

Yes, but we are staying here and you are going to a hotel every night
, Patel thought grimly.
Nice try, though
.

“Do we know why that happened, Jonathan?” Raitek asked.

“Not exactly,” he answered.

“But we suspect,” Patel said.

Raitek nodded. “Pray tell.”

“The Faraday cage principle.”

Raitek shook his head. “I wouldn’t put it that way, but I agree with you that the analogy seems solid enough.”

“Why is that?”

“We are not talking about electricity here, but tachyon flow.”

“We haven’t established this with absolute certainty yet.”

“You probably won’t,” Raitek said. “We don’t have the tech for it, nor the necessary measurement tools. Unless we use the Gambiarra Method.”

“The
what
?”

“It’s just a thing we learn to do in Brazil,” Raitek explained. “How to do things with whatever you have at hand.”

“Oh, you mean a kludge,” Jonathan said.

“No, not a kludge,” Raitek corrected him. “Kludges are for electromechanical things. A gambiarra goes for
anything
. Even abstract stuff.”

“And how do you propose we use this gambiarra of yours…?” asked Patel, already feeling very uncomfortable. The Brazilian guy was insane.

“First, assuming that everything you experienced was absolutely real, and not an illusion provoked by extreme immersion, what probably happened was that a bubble formed inside the carriage. Not a spherical, topologically perfect bubble, but an extradimensional structure, or better yet, an n-dimensional structure according to the parameters of the Calabi-Yau Manifold.

“Theoretically, a Calabi-Yau space can project itself beyond the borders of our, let’s say for lack of a better term, ‘traditional’ space. Kähler manifolds could also apply, but the calculus involved seems to make it a poorer choice. Right now, it doesn’t matter: we should be able to repeat the experiment with no problem at all and no harm to the test subjects.”

“Test subjects? What do you mean, test subjects?” said Patel.

“May I go again?” asked Jonathan.

Damn
, thought Patel.
This is getting out of control
.

As Raitek explained to them, the Calabi-Yau Manifold (if that was what really formed inside the elevator) opened not a window, but a kind of excrescence, something like a vesicle, a ballooning organ with only one end stretching towards our so-called normal reality. So, one could enter and exit the CYM via this stretch the same way one could use a door—probably, in this case, the elevator doors. Maybe they would not even need to do alignment procedures.

“We’ll probably have to do lots of calibrations for years and decades before going for something bigger,” Raitek said. “That is, if the mechanism isn’t already locked in 2011.”

“What makes you think so?” asked Patel.

“Nothing special,” said Raitek. “Science fiction stories. And wormhole theories.”

“I thought you were pretty sure about the manifold.”

“Well,
quem tem dois, tem um. Quem tem um, não tem nenhum
.”

“Come again?”

“It’s an old Brazilian saying. If you have two, actually you have only one. If you have one, you have none. Bottom line: you better be prepared and have a spare—a spare tire, a spare sonic screwdriver, a spare condom, a spare of anything you can possibly think of, because you will most probably need it.”

“A spare theory as well?”

“Yep. That too.”

In the second controlled experiment, the elevator fell four decades in three seconds.

Naturally, it wasn’t the elevator that was really falling, as it was mounted on a spring-based shock absorber structure. But the principle seemed to remain, as Jonathan reported being taken to a different decade each time. They weren’t able to calibrate the instruments well enough to account for years.

Another precaution they took this time was securing Jonathan to the carriage by rappelling equipment, harness, static rope attached to the guardrail. It wasn’t necessary in the end, but they did it all the same. All that Jonathan did was to get out whenever he happened to be, take a couple of steps, recording every sight and sound for no more than five minutes, then get back to the interior of the carriage, close the doors and pray to return to this own era. Which he did both times.

The only occasion nothing happened was when they decided to turn the immersion environment off.

“Okay, one thing we can be quite sure of,” Raitek concluded after the second experiment, “is that the immersion machinery is somehow the key. Now, another question: can we use it
outside
the elevator with the same result? Or can we use another elevator
and
different immersion machinery to the same effect?”

“This last question I can easily answer,” Patel said. “No, we cannot. We had two elevators and half a dozen immersion machineries running in parallel. Only this one presented this result.”

“Then we could normally say that something is wrong with this particular setting,” Raitek said. “Therefore, it’s an anomaly.”

“We already knew that.” This time Patel smiled.

Raitek turned back to him and said, “Hiran, I already know something else: you are a top-notch robotic expert who does not like to have your time wasted and is deeply pissed off by my very presence at what you consider to be
your
lab, even though you’ve worked for this company for much less time than I have. So I will propose a deal: don’t be smug with me and I will tell you what you don’t already know. How about that?”

Patel remained unamused. But this time he replied.

“As long as we can reciprocate.”

Raitek just nodded. And extended his hand.

What didn’t they know? First off, they couldn’t ascertain if the bubble inside the car was the byproduct of the Calabi-Yau Manifold or a portal to a wormhole, but the former theory held more water than the latter—issues of mass and gravity pertaining to wormholes made it almost impossible to think of them as a viable option.

The second thing: they never could reproduce the experiment outside the elevator. And the car had to be in motion, if only at a small rate of acceleration.

Acceleration. Raitek wondered if it played a major role in the events after all.

At the end of the day, he took the elevator in the central shaft and pushed the button for the top floor.

Raitek stepped out of the elevator and into the penthouse of the 400th floor. It was a sparsely furnished space, all-white, with very few interior walls. He liked the lofty aspect of the place, its half-spartan, half-samurai cleanliness. It reminded him a bit of his summer refuge in Rio; the concrete-and-woodplank house in the middle of Tijuca National Park was very different structurally, but the silence was almost the same. It gave him freedom to think.

He took a long, hot shower and lay on the queen-size futon in the bedroom. He closed his eyes and initiated the memory palace walkthrough.

The meditation technique took less time and was less cyberpunkish than he'd described it to Patel. Instead of spiky buckyballs, all he could see this time were cubes: cubes fitting inside each other, like an ancient 3D version of Tetris he’d played at his grandpa’s house as a kid—only in his vision they penetrated each other, almost as if they were having sex.