The Light of Other Days

part 1: THE GOLDFISH BOWL Chapter 12 - SPACETIME
The inner chaos didn't subside.

He tried to distract himself. He resumed activities he had relished before. But even the most extravagant virtual adventure seemed shallow, obviously artificial, predictable, unengaging.

He seemed to need people, even though he shied away from those close to him, he was a moth fearing the candle flame, he thought, unable to bear the brightness of the emotions involved. So he accepted invitations he wouldn't otherwise have considered, talked to people he had never needed before.

Work helped, with its constant and routine demands for his attention, its relentless logic of meetings and schedules and resource allocation.

And it was a busy time. The new Mind'sEye VR headbands were moving out of the testing labs and approaching production status. His teams of technicians had, suddenly, resolved a last technical glitch: a tendency for the headbands to cause synaesthesia in their users, a muddling of the sensory inputs caused by cross talk between the brain's centers. It was a cause for long celebration. They knew that IBM's renowned Watson research lab had been working on exactly the same problem; whoever cracked the synaesthesia issue first would be the first to reach the market, and would have a clear competitive edge for a long time to come. It now looked as if OurWorld had won that particular race.

So work was absorbing. But he couldn't work twenty-four hours a day, and he couldn't sleep the rest of the time away. And when he was awake, his mind, unleashed for the first time, was rampaging out of control.

As his car's SmartDrive him to the Wormworks, he cowered in fear from the high-speed traffic. An unremarkable tabloid news item - about vicious killings and rapes in the burgeoning Aral Sea water war - moved him to harsh tears. A Puget Sound sunset, glimpsed through a broken layer of fluffy black clouds, filled him with awe simply at being alive.

When he met his father, fear, loathing, love, admiration tore at him - all overlying a deeper, unbreakable bond.

But he could face Hiram. Kate was different. The surging need he felt - to cherish her, possess her, somehow consume her - was completely overwhelming. In her company he became inarticulate, as out of control of his mind as much as his body.

Somehow she knew how he was feeling; and, quietly, she left him alone. He knew she would be there for him when he was ready to face her, and resume their relationship.

But at least with Hiram and Kate he could figure out why he felt the way he did, trace a causal relationship, put tentative labels to the violent emotions that rocked him. The worst of all were the mood swings he seemed to suffer without discernible cause.

He would wake up crying without reason. Or, in the middle of a mundane day, he would find himself filled with an indescribable joy, as if everything suddenly made sense.

His life before seemed remote, textureless, like a flat, colorless pencil sketch. Now he was immersed in a new world of color and texture and light and feeling, where the simplest things - the curl of an early spring leaf, the glimmer of sunlight on water, the smooth curve of Kate's cheek - could be suffused by a beauty he had never known existed.

And Bobby - the fragile ego that rode on the surface of this dark inner ocean - would have to learn to live with the new, complex, baffling person he had suddenly become.

That was why he had come to seek out his brother. He took great comfort from David's stolid, patient presence: this bearlike figure with his bushy blond hair, hunched over his SoftScreens, immersed in his work, satisfied with its logic and internal consistency, scribbling notes with a surprising delicacy. David's personality was as massive and solid as his body; beside him Bobby felt evanescent, a wisp, yet subtly calmed.

One unseasonably cold afternoon they sat cradling coffees, waiting for the results of another routine trial run: a new wormhole plucked out of the quantum foam, extending further than any had before.

"I can understand a theorist wanting to study the limits of the wormhole technology," Bobby said. "Pushing the envelope as far as you can. But we made the big breakthrough already. Surely what's important now is the application."

"Of course," David said mildly. "In fact the application is everything. Hiram has a goal of turning wormhole generation from a high-energy physics stunt, affordable only by governments and large corporations, into something much smaller, easily manufactured, miniaturized."

"Like computers," Bobby said.

"Exactly. It wasn't until miniaturization and the development of the PC that computers were able to saturate the world: finding new applications, creating new markets-transforming our lives, in fact.

"Hiram knows we won't keep our monopoly forever. Sooner or later somebody else is going to come up with an independent WormCam design. Maybe a better one. And miniaturization and cost reduction are sure to follow."

"And the future for OurWorld," said Bobby, "is surely to be the market leader, all those little wormhole generators."

"That's Hiram's strategy," David said. "He has a vision of the WormCam replacing every other datagathering instrument: cameras, microphones, science sensors, even medical probes. Although I can't say I'm looking forward to a wormhole endoscopy...

"But I told you I studied a little business myself, Bobby. Mass-produced WormCams will be a commodity, and we will be able to compete only on price. But I believe that with our technical lead Hiram can open up much greater opportunities for himself with differentiation: by coming up with applications which nobody else in the market can offer. And that's what I'm interested in exploring." He grinned. "At least, that's what I tell Hiram his money is being spent on down here."

Bobby studied him, trying to focus on his brother, on Hiram, the WormCam, trying to understand. "You just want to know, don't you? That's the bottom line for you."

David nodded. "I suppose so. Most science is just grunt work. Repetitive slog; endless testing and checking. And because false hypotheses have to be pruned away, much of the work is actually more destructive than constructive. But, occasionally-only a few times, probably, in the luckiest life-there is a moment of transcendence."

"Transcendence ?"

"Not everybody will put it like that. But it's how it feels to me."

"And it doesn't matter that there might be nobody to read your papers in five hundred years" time?"

"I'd rather that wasn't true. Perhaps it won't be. But the revelation itself is the thing, Bobby. It always was."

On the "Screen behind him there was a starburst of pixels, and a low bell-like tone sounded.

David sighed. "But not today, it seems."

Bobby peered over his brother's shoulder at the "Screen, across which numbers were scrolling. "Another instability? It's like the early days of the wormholes."

David tapped at a keyboard, setting up another trial. "Well, we are being a little more ambitious. Our WormCams can already reach every part of the Earth, crossing distances of a few thousand kilometers. What I'm attempting now is to extract and stabilize wormholes which span significant intervals in Minkowski spacetime, in fact, tens of light-minutes."

Bobby held up his hands. "You already lost me. A light-minute is the distance light travels in a minute... right?"

"Yes. For example, the planet Saturn is around a billion and a half kilometers away. And that is about eighty light-minutes."

"And we want to see Saturn."

"Of course we do. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a WormCam that could explore deep space? No more ailing probes, no more missions lasting years... But the difficulty is that wormholes spanning such large intervals are extremely rare in the quantum foam's probabilistic froth. And stabilizing them presents challenges an order of magnitude more difficult than before. But it's not impossible."

"Why "intervals," not distances?"

"Physicist jargon. Sorry. An interval is like a distance, but in spacetime. Which is space plus time. It's really just Pythagoras" theorem." He took a yellow legal notepad and began to scribble. "Suppose you go downtown and walk a few blocks east, a few blocks north. Then you can figure the distance you traveled like this." He held up the pad:

(distance)2 = (east)2 + (north)2

"You walked around a right-angled triangle. The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of - "

"I know that much."

"But we physicists think about space and time as a single entity, with time as a fourth coordinate, in addition to the three of space." He wrote on his pad once more:

(interval)2 = (time separation)2 - (space separation)2

"This is called the metric for a Minkowski spacetime. And - "

"How can you talk about a separation in time in the same breath as a separation in spaced. You measure time in minutes, but space in kilometers."

David nodded approvingly. "Good question. You have to use units in which time and space are made equivalent." He studied Bobby, evidently searching for understanding. "Let's just say that if you measure time in minutes, and space in light-minutes, it works out fine."

"But there's something else fishy here. Why is this a minus sign rather than a plus?"

David rubbed his fleshy nose. "A map of spacetime doesn't work quite like a map of downtown Seattle. The metric is designed so that the path of a photon-a particle traveling at the speed of light-is a null interval. The interval is zero, because the space and time terms cancel out."

"This is relativity. Something to do with time dilation, and rulers contracting, and."

"Yes." David patted Bobby's shoulder. "Exactly that. This metric is invariant under the Lorentz transformation... Never mind. The point is, Bobby, this is the kind of equation I have to use when I work in a relativistic universe, and certainly if I'm trying to build a wormhole that reaches out to Saturn and beyond."

Bobby mused over the simple, handwritten equation.

With his own emotional whirlwind still churning around him, he felt a cold logic coursing through him, numbers and equations and images evolving, as if he was suffering from some kind of intellectual synaesthesia. He said slowly, "David, you're telling me that distances in space and time are somehow equivalent. Right? Your wormholes span intervals of spacetime rather than simply distances. And that means that if you do succeed in stabilizing a wormhole big enough to reach Saturn, across eighty light-minutes - "

"Yes?"

"Then it could reach across eighty minutes. I mean, across time." He stared at David. "Am I being really dumb?"

David sat in silence for long seconds.

"Good God," he said slowly. "I didn't even consider the possibility, I've been configuring the wormhole to span a spacelike interval, without even thinking about it." Feverishly, he began to tap at his SoftScreen. "I can reconfigure it from right here. If I restrict the spacelike interval to a couple of meters, then the rest of the wormhole span is forced to become timelike..."

"What would that mean? David?"

A buzzer rang, painfully loudly, and the Search Engine spoke. "Hiram would like to see you, Bobby."

Bobby glanced at David, flooded with sudden, absurd fear.

David nodded curtly, already absorbed in the new direction of his work. "I'll call you later, Bobby. This could be significant. Very significant."

There was no reason to stay. Bobby walked away into the darkness of the Wormworks.

Hiram paced around his downtown office, visibly angry, fists clenched. Kate was sitting at Hiram's big conference table, looking small, cowed.

Bobby hesitated at the door, for a few breaths physically unable to force himself into the room, so strong were the emotions churning here. But Kate was looking at him-forcing a smile, in fact.

He walked into the room. He reached the security of a seat, on the opposite side of the table from Kate. Bobby quailed, unable to speak. Hiram glared at him. "You let me down, you little shit."

Kate snapped, "For Christ's sake, Hiram."

"You keep out of this." Hiram thumped the tabletop, and a SoftScreen in the plastic surface lit up before Bobby. It started to run fragments of a news story: images of Bobby, a younger Hiram, a girl-pretty, timid-looking, dressed in colorless, drab, outdated fashions and a picture of the same woman two decades later, intelligent, tired, handsome. The Earth News Online logo was imprinted on each image.

"They found her, Bobby," Hiram said. "Thanks to you. Because you couldn't keep your bloody mouth shut, could you?"

"Found who?"

"Your mother."

Kate was working the SoftScreen before her, scrolling j quickly through the information, "Heather Mays. Is that her name? She married again. She has a daughter, you have a half-sister, Bobby."

Hiram's voice was a snarl. "Keep out of this, you, manipulative bitch. Without you none of this would have happened."

Bobby, striving for control, said, "None of what?"

"Your implant would have stayed doing what it was doing. Keeping you steady and happy. Christ, I wish somebody had put a thing like that in my head when I was your age. Would have saved me a hell of a lot of trouble. And you wouldn't have shot off your mouth in front of Dan Schirra."

"Schirra? From ENO?"

"Except he didn't call himself that, when he met you last week. What did he do, get you drunk and maudlin, blubbing about your evil father, your long-lost mother?"

"I remember," Bobby said. "He calls himself Mervyn. Mervyn Costa. I've known him a long time."

"Of course you have. He's been cultivating you, on behalf of ENO, to get to me. You didn't know who he was, but you kept your reserve-before, when you had the implant to help you keep a clear head. And now this. It's open season on Hiram Patterson. And it's all your bloody fault, Manzoni."

Kate was still scrolling through the news piece and its hyperlinks. "I didn't screw and dump this woman two decades ago." She tapped at her SoftScreen, and an area of the table before Hiram lit up. "Schirra has corroborative evidence. Look."

Bobby looked over his father's shoulder. The Screen showed Hiram sitting at a table-this table, Bobby realized with a jolt, this room- nd he was working his way through a mound of papers, amending and signing. The image was grainy, unsteady, but clear enough. Hiram came to a particular document, shook his head as if in disgust, and hastily signed it, turning it facedown on a pile to his right.

After that the image reran in slo-mo, and the viewpoint zoomed in on the document. After some focusing and image enhancement, it was possible to read some of the text.

"You see?" Kate said. "Hiram, they caught you signing an update of the payoff agreement you made with Heather more than twenty years ago."

Hiram looked at Bobby, almost pleading. "It was over long ago. We came to a settlement. I helped her develop her career. She makes documentary features. She's been successful."

"She was a brood mare, Bobby," Kate said coldly. "He's kept up his payments to keep her quiet. And to make sure she never tried to get near to you."

Hiram prowled around the room, hammering at the walls, glaring at the ceiling. "I have this suite swept three times a day. How did they get those images? Those incompetent arseholes in Building Security have screwed up again."

"Come on, Hiram," Kate said evenly, evidently enjoying herself. "Think about it. There's no way ENO could bug your headquarters. Any more than you could bug theirs."

"But I wouldn't need to bug them," Hiram said slowly. "I have the WormCam... Oh."

"Well done." Kate grinned. "You figured it out. ENO must have a WormCam as well. It's the only way they could have achieved this scoop. You lost your monopoly, Hiram. And the first thing they did with their WormCam was turn it on you." She threw back her head and laughed out loud.

"My God." Bobby said. "What a disaster."

"Oh, garbage," she snapped. "Come on, Bobby. Pretty soon the whole world will know the WormCam exists; it won't be possible to keep a lid on it any longer. It has to be a good thing if the WormCam is prized out of the hands of this sick duopoly, the federal government and Hiram Patterson, for God's sake."

Hiram said coldly, "If Earth News have WormCam technology, it's obvious who gave it to them."

Kate looked puzzled. "Are you implying that..."

"Who else?"

"I'm a journalist," Kate flared. "I'm no spy. The hell with you, Hiram. It's obvious what happened. ENO just figured out that you must have found a way to adapt your wormholes as remote viewers. With that basic insight they duplicated your researches. It wouldn't be hard; most of the information is in the public domain. Hiram, your hold on the WormCam was always fragile. It only took one person to figure it out independently."

But Hiram didn't seem to be hearing her. "I forgave you, took you in. You took my money. You betrayed my trust. You damaged my son's mind and poisoned him against me."

Kate stood and faced Hiram. "If you really believe that, you're more twisted than I thought you were."

The Search Engine called softly, "Excuse me, Hiram. Michael Mavens is here, asking to see you. Special Agent Mavens of ."

"Tell him to wait."

"I'm afraid that isn't an option, Hiram. And I have a call from David. He says it's urgent."

Bobby looked from one face to the other, frightened, bewildered, as his life came to pieces around him.

Mavens took a seat and opened a briefcase.

Hiram snapped, "What do you want, Mavens? I didn't expect to see you again. I thought the deal we signed was comprehensive."

"I thought so too, Mr. Patterson." Mavens looked genuinely disappointed. "But the problem is, you didn't stick to it. OurWorld as a corporation. One employee specifically. And that's why I'm here. When I heard this case had turned up, I asked if I could become involved. I suppose I have a special interest."

Hiram said heavily, "What case?"

Mavens picked up what looked like a charge sheet from his briefcase. "The bottom line is that a charge of trade-secret misappropriation, under the 1996 Economic Espionage Act, has been brought against OurWorld: by IBM, specifically by the director of their Thomas J. Watson research laboratory. Mr. Patterson, we believe the WormCam has been used to gain illegal access to IBM proprietary research results. Something called a synaesthesia-suppression software suite, associated with virtual-reality technology." He looked up. "Does that make sense?"

Hiram looked at Bobby.

Bobby sat transfixed, overwhelmed by conflicting emotions, with no real idea how he should react, what he should say.

Kate said, "You have a suspect, don't you. Special Agent?"

The FBI man eyed her steadily, sadly. "I think you already know the answer to that question, Ms. Manzoni."

Kate appeared confused.

Bobby snapped, "You mean Kate? That's ridiculous."

Hiram thumped a fist into a palm. "I knew it. I knew she was trouble. But I didn't think she'd go this far."

Mavens sighed. "I'm afraid there's a very clear evidentiary trail leading to you, Ms. Manzoni."

Kate flared. "If it's there, it was planted."

Mavens said, "You'll be placed under arrest. I hope there won't be any trouble. If you'll sit quietly, the Search Engine will read you your rights."

Kate looked startled as a voice - inaudible to the rest of them-  began to sound in her ears.

Hiram was at Bobby's side. "Take it easy, son. We'll get through his shit together. What were you trying to do, Manzoni? Find another way to get to Bobby? Is that what it was all about?" Hiram's face was a grim mask, empty of emotion: there was no trace of anger, pity, relief-or triumph.

And the door was flung open. David stood there, grinning, his bearlike bulk filling the frame; he held a rolled-up SoftScreen in one hand. "I did it," he said. "By God, I did it... What's happening here?"

Mavens said, "Doctor Curzon, it may be better if - "

"It doesn't matter. Whatever you're doing, it doesn't matter. Not compared to this." He spread his SoftScreen on the tabletop. "As soon as I got it I came straight here. Look at this."

The SoftScreen showed what looked superficially like a rainbow, reduced to black and white and gray, uneven bands of light that arced, distorted, across a black background.

"Of course it's somewhat grainy," David said. "But still, this picture is equivalent to the quality of images returned by NASA's first flyby probes back in the 1970s."

"That's Saturn," Mavens said, wondering. "The planet Saturn."

"Yes. We're looking at the rings." David grinned. "I established a WormCam viewpoint all of a billion and a half kilometers away. Quite a thing, isn't it? If you look closely you can even see a couple of the moons, here in the plane of the rings."

Hiram laughed out loud and hugged David's bulk. "My God, that's bloody terrific."

"Yes. Yes, it is. But that's not important. Not anymore."

"Not important? Are you kidding?"

Feverishly David began to tap at his SoftScreen; the image of Saturn's rings dissolved. "I can reconfigure it from here. It's as easy as that. It was Bobby who gave me the clue. I Just hadn't thought out of the box as he did. If I restrict the spacelike interval to a couple of meters, then the rest of the wormhole span becomes timelike..."

Bobby leaned forward to see. The "Screen now showed an equally grainy image of a much more mundane scene. Bobby recognized it immediately: it was David's work cubicle in the Wormworks. David was sitting mere, his back to the viewpoint, and Bobby was standing at his side, looking over his shoulder.

"As easily as that," David said again, his voice small, awed. "Of course we'll have to run repeatable trials, properly timed."

Hiram said, "That's just the Wormworks. So what?"

"You don't understand. This new wormhole has the same, umm, length as the other."

"The one that reached to Saturn."

"Yes. But instead of spanning eighty light-minutes - "

Mavens finished it for him. "I get it. This wormhole spans eighty minutes."

"Yes," David said. "Eighty minutes into the past. Look, Father. You're seeing me and Bobby, just before you summoned him away."

Hiram's mouth had dropped open.

Bobby felt as if the world was swimming around him, changing, configuring into some strange, unknowable pattern, as if another chip in his head had been switched off. He looked at Kate, who seemed diminished, terrified, lost in shock.

But Hiram, his troubles dismissed, grasped the implications immediately. He glared into the air. "I wonder how many of them are watching us right now?"

Mavens said, "Who?"

"In the future. Don't you see? If he's right this is a turning point in history, this moment, right here and right now, the invention of this, this past viewer. Probably the air around us is fizzing with WormCam viewpoints, sent back by future historians. Biographers. Hagiographers." He lifted up his head and bared his teeth. "Are you watching me? Are you? Do you remember my name? I'm Hiram Patterson! Hah! See what I did, you arseholes'"

And in the corridors of the future, innumerable watchers met his challenging gaze.