24
Grayson, Harper, and Sabrina turn away from the frosted glass panels to focus on Yul and me in the center of the room.
I step closer to Yul. “You said you’d give us answers after Titan Hall. What happened here, Yul?”
“I only know about some parts.”
“Which parts?”
“Q-net.”
“What about it?” I ask.
“I created it.”
Interesting. “I thought the Titans did.”
“I’ve been working on it for years. I think the Titans only invested in it, provided the money to make it accessible to everyone.”
“What is it?”
“A quantum network, a new Internet. It’s a way to move data around the globe instantaneously, using quantum entanglement. It will revolutionize computing. It was all experimental until a week ago, when the first Q-net nodes went active. For months I’ve had this problem with data corruption. Every time I sent a burst of data, it came out wrong on the other end. There was a pattern to the corruption, so I wrote an algorithm to filter it out. When I looked at the data the filter had extracted, I realized it was organized.”
“Meaning?”
“It was a message.”
“From?”
“The future.”
Yul’s words hang in the glass room for a second.
“The sender claimed to be from the year 2147,” he presses on. “I thought the stress had finally gotten to me. I took a day off, went to the doctor, got a full workup. I was fine. The next messages proved beyond a doubt that they were from the future.”
“How?”
“They predicted events that would happen the next day. The exact vote tallies for parliamentary elections in Tunisia, for example—right down to the votes cast for every candidate for every office. The arrival times, down to the minute, for every flight that landed that day all around the globe, including every delayed and canceled flight. A few days went by, me demanding proof again and again, them answering correctly every time.”
“How’s that possible—messages from the future?”
“They were altering entangled particles that existed in their time, organizing them to make a readable message in our time.”
Oh, now that makes sense.
Yul reads the expressions around the room and spreads his hands like a high school science teacher giving the complex lecture that’s over his students’ heads, the one he dreads every year. “Imagine we’re back on the beach we just saw, but we’re in the year 2147. Imagine we can put on a special glove, and when we reach down to touch the grains of sand on our beach in 2147, it makes a copy of that beach, in every instant in which it’s ever existed. There’s a string that reaches across space-time, connecting the grains of sand on our beach to those same grains on that beach in every other moment. We can adjust its length, choosing which beach our string connects to. So now the grains of sand on our beach in 2147 are connected to the same grains on the same beach in 2014. We bend down and draw a message in the sand, and it appears in 2014. I saw that message—on my beach in the past. That shared beach is Q-net, and the data on my hard drive, the digital bits, they’re the grains of sand. Because this was the first moment that Q-net existed in our time, it was their first opportunity to send a message back—this was the first instant when the quantum particles that form the network became entangled. Those particles are the grains of sand in the analogy.”
The four of us just stare at Yul, no one quite sure what to say. Grains of sand on a quantum beach? I’m so far out of my league here. I ask the question that seems most relevant: “What did the sender want?”
“To help us. They told me that a global catastrophe was imminent, an event that would cause the near extinction of the human race, an event they had barely lived through and were trying to prevent. They asked me to contact Sabrina, whom I didn’t know. I was asked to pass a series of instructions to her. They didn’t make any sense to me.”
“Nor to me, at first,” Sabrina says. “Then I realized what it was: a breakthrough in my research—a new treatment.”
“For?”
“Progeria syndrome.”
Now that surprises me. Since we reached London, I’ve nursed a theory about how humanity might have vanished from the face of the earth: a pandemic. To me, it’s the most viable theory as to how the human race could have fallen so far, so fast. My suspicion was that Sabrina, more than Yul, was connected to it. But this doesn’t add up. “Progeria syndrome . . . ,” I whisper, trying to reconcile the information with my working theory.
“It’s an extremely rare genetic condition that causes premature aging. Affected individuals die of old age in their teens.”
“I assumed you worked in infectious diseases,” I say to Sabrina, unable to hide my suspicion.
“I don’t. Never have.” Sabrina pauses, searching for the right words. “That was, however, a logical assumption, given what we’ve seen. The messages asked me to take several actions, what I believed were preventive measures against some biological event: an outbreak or mass mutation, perhaps. I believed I was distributing a vaccine that might propagate, saving the human population in 2014. It seems, however, that I was only inoculating some of the passengers on the plane.”
It takes me a few seconds to process that. Everyone’s studying the dark floor, trying to wrap their heads around it. Finally Yul breaks the silence.
“I also received instructions. Schematics. I used them to build a device they said would allow enhanced communications. Both of us”—he motions to Sabrina—“were told to come to London, where we’d receive further instructions.”
“That’s why you wanted to come to London, even after the crash?”
“Yes,” Yul says. “Those were our last instructions. They were all we had to go on.”
“The device you built—you think it crashed the plane, or played a role in bringing us here?”
“I’ve . . . entertained the idea. The plane broke apart roughly where my carry-on was. The device, however, survived the crash unharmed.”
“You’ve been working on that device since the crash?” I ask.
“No. I’ve been trying to connect to the Q-net, to make contact with them.”
“And?”
“The Q-net is different now. The protocols have changed. It’s like dial-up in the nineties: every time I connect, I get booted off instantly. My hardware is okay. It’s like I don’t have the right software. The data packets I’m sending aren’t formatted correctly, and I have no guide to how they should be formatted.”
I consider that for a moment. “Or they are formatted correctly, but someone’s trying to keep you off. Maybe connecting would reveal your location, endanger you.”
“True,” Yul says.
“How long have you known we were in the future?” I ask. It’s not strictly relevant, but it’s a hot button for me. I feel we could have saved some time, and maybe even lives, if Yul had at least told some of us, enlisted help earlier.
“The first night,” Yul says. “The stars. At first I thought the crash event could have caused a widespread blackout, eliminating all the light pollution. The first clue was that the international space station was gone. Where it should have been I saw a large, lighted ring in orbit. That’s how I knew we were in a different time completely.”
“And you told no one?”
Yul shrugged. “Who would have believed me? You?”
I can see where this is going. We need to focus. I wonder if we should move. We’ve been here too long . . . but the panels might reveal details we still need. I motion to the cracked, spray-painted panels.
“You think the Titans sent the messages?”
“I don’t know,” Yul says. “They were involved in Q-net, and seemingly in the catastrophe that occurred. In 2014 the senders identified themselves only as the Friends of Humanity. For all I know, it could have been the Titans’ enemies; they seem to be at war.”
“The question, to me,” Sabrina says, “is why it took the . . . rescue teams four days to reach the crash site.”
“Yes. Very curious. When I returned from Stonehenge, two factions were at war. What were the tents? Some kind of medical experiment?”
“Perhaps. I’m only certain of one thing: they were treating the passengers for wounds.” Sabrina glances at Harper. “And doing an excellent job.”
Through the doorway, I hear footsteps. The intro restarting?
I open my mouth to ask another question, but stop. Figures. In the doorway. Suited. The beings from the crash site. They stop ten feet from us. No one moves. I glance behind me, desperately hoping someone activated another simulation from the menu.
The closest figure raises his arm, pointing it toward us.
No, it’s not a simulation.