Permafrost(15)

A few minutes before six, the young doctor came into the room, along with an orderly and a vacant wheelchair.

“Good morning, Tatiana. How are we today?”

Oh, I’m fine. I can’t control my body, and there’s another voice in my skull, but other than that . . .

“I’m all right, thank you,” I said, speaking aloud for the first time since becoming time-embedded, and forcing out the words as if both our lives depended on it. “Much better than yesterday.”

He looked at me for a few seconds. I wondered what was going through his head, the details that were nagging at him. Was my accent and diction consistent with Tatiana Dinova? Was she the sort to say “thank you” at all?

But he smiled and nodded.

“You sound much better. And that confusion you mentioned yesterday—that’s all cleared up?”

“No—I’m all right. Whatever that was, it passed.”

I wish you would pass. I was hoping you were a bad dream from last night. But you’re sticking around, aren’t you?

The knife was tight against my armpit.

Just for a little while—yes. I said we’ve got work to do. But I’m sure we’ll get used to each other in time.

*

On the morning of my first full day at Permafrost, Margaret, Antti and I put on clean-room outfits and then went through a positive-pressure airlock into the Vaymyr’s laboratory.

The room was about the size of a large double garage and surgically clean. Positioned on a central bench, surrounded by ancillary equipment and computers, was an upright silver cylinder, about the size of an oil drum. It was festooned with cables and monitors, with telescopelike devices peering into it at various angles.

Margaret went to the device and brought one of the computers to life. Fans whirred. Data and graphs appeared on an array of monitor screens.

“This is how we first created and manipulated a Luba Pair,” she said, sounding like a proud parent. “In essence, it’s really just a cavity surrounded by a very powerful superconducting magnet. You recall your mother’s work on quantum memory states in superconducting systems?”

I nodded in my mask and clean-room hood. “That was when she was beginning to get bounced by the respectable journals.”

“That must have been hard for her,” Antti said, just her eyes meeting mine over her mask.

We had shared a house since Father died, and my mother had come to depend on me as a sounding board for her wilder ideas, almost as if I were an extension of herself, only a more skeptical, questioning one. That had been flattering to me, when I was in my middle and late teens. To have this celebrated intellect, this world-famous mathematician, treating me as an equal, someone capable of seeing her ideas through fresh eyes, made me feel very special.

But by the time I was approaching my twenties, I knew I had to strike out on my own. I wasn’t going to run off and do anything crazy like join a radical arts collective. I still wanted to be a mathematician, but in my own fresh corner of it, a long way away from my mother’s crazy work on time-loops and grey paradox.

She took it as a betrayal. Not to my face, not to begin with, but it was always there, simmering. That resentment grew and grew over one long, hot summer, until we had a major bust-up.

Things had never been the same after that.

“Hard on both of us,” I said, answering Antti. “All a long time ago, in any case. You’re too young to remember what the world was like back then, but it all feels like a different life. I remember the work, though. That’s as fresh in my mind as it ever was. All very speculative, even by Mother’s standards. But according to her theory, if you were going to attempt to build a time machine, this is where you’d start: with a superconducting system.”

“Is the experiment running?” Antti asked.

“Yes, we’re in the operating regime,” Margaret said. “Luba Pairs are being bred inside the assembly. We’re sending electrons back from the future, exactly a minute upstream. They’re travelling back sixty seconds, appearing in the magnet, holding coherence for a short while, then becoming noise-limited, which means we can’t track the correlation anymore.”

It was warm enough in the laboratory, but still I shivered. “This is really happening?”

Antti beckoned me to one of the screens, where a wriggling yellow line was describing a kind of seismic trace. “This is the correlation, summed across multiple Luba Pairs, so that we keep one step ahead of the decoherence effect. It’s a signal from the future, so to speak. Our future, one minute ahead of now. It’s very noisy in the raw state. We run it through a battery of signal optimisation algorithms drawn from your mother’s work, but we’re hitting real limits in our understanding of those algorithms, how to make them fit together. The Brothers . . .” She paused, glancing at Margaret. “It’s believed we can do much better, with your guidance.”

The yellow line jagged upward suddenly, then collapsed back down to its normal noise level. As the spike inched its way to the left, a pair of brackets dropped down on either side of it, accompanied by a set of statistical parameters.

“What was that?” I asked.

“Could be anything,” Antti said, with only vague interest. “A noise spike in the upstream electronics, a shift in the ice under the Vaymyr, someone dropping a crate on the upper deck. We’ll find out in about forty-five seconds, if it’s anything at all.”