Flashes

My heart pounded as I surveyed the scene. It was a horrific, but oddly appropriate, image: a bright light pulsing on and off. The light was the setting sun, visible through the window, and the pulsing was caused by the rhythmic swaying of the corpse, dangling from a makeshift noose, as it passed in front of the blood-red disk.

“Another one, eh, Detective?” said Chiu, the campus security guard, from behind me. His tone was soft.

I looked around the office. The computer monitor was showing a virtual desktop with a panoramic view of a spiral galaxy as the wallpaper; no files were open. Nor was there any sheet of e-paper prominently displayed on the real desktop. The poor bastards didn’t even bother to leave suicide notes anymore. There was no point; it had all already been said.

“Yeah,” I said quietly, responding to Chiu. “Another one.”

The dead man was maybe sixty, scrawny, mostly bald. He was wearing black denim jeans and a black turtleneck sweater, the standard professorial look these days. His noose was fashioned out of fiber-optic cabling, giving it a pearlescent sheen in the sunlight. His eyes had bugged out, and his mouth was hanging open.

“I knew him a bit,” said Chiu. “Ethan McCharles. Nice guy—he always remembered my name. So many of the profs, they think they’re too important to say hi to a security guard. But not him.”

I nodded. It was as good a eulogy as one could hope for—honest, spontaneous, heartfelt.

Chiu went on. “He was married,” he said, pointing to the gold band on the corpse’s left hand. “I think his wife works here, too.”

I felt my stomach tightening, and I let out a sigh. My favorite thing: informing the spouse.

Cytosine Methylation: All lifeforms are based on self-replicating nucleic acids, commonly triphosphoparacarbolicnucleic acid or, less often, deoxyribonucleic acid; in either case, a secondary stream of hereditary information is encoded based on the methylation state of cytosine, allowing acquired characteristics to be passed on to the next generation …

The departmental secretary confirmed what Chiu had said: Professor Ethan McCharles’s wife did indeed also work at the University of Toronto; she was a tenured prof, too, but in a different faculty.

Walking down a corridor, I remembered my own days as a student here. Class of 1998—“9T8,” as they styled it on the school jackets. It’d been— what?—seventeen years since I’d graduated, but I still woke up from time to time in a cold sweat, after having one of those recurring student nightmares: the exam I hadn’t studied for, the class I’d forgotten I’d enrolled in. Crazy dreams, left over from an age when little bits of human knowledge mattered; when facts and figures we’d discovered made a difference.

I continued along the corridor. One thing had changed since my day. Back then, the hallways had been packed between classes. Now, you could actually negotiate your way easily; enrollment was way down. This corridor was long, with fluorescent lights overhead, and was lined with wooden doors that had frosted floor-to-ceiling glass panels next to them.

I shook my head. The halls of academe.

The halls of death.

I finally found Marilyn Maslankowski’s classroom; the arcane room-numbering system had come back to me. She’d just finished a lecture, apparently, and was standing next to the lectern, speaking with a redheaded male student; no one else was in the room. I entered.

Marilyn was perhaps ten years younger than her husband had been, and had light brown hair and a round, moonlike face. The student wanted more time to finish an essay on the novels of Robert Charles Wilson; Marilyn capitulated after a few wheedling arguments.

The kid left, and Marilyn turned to me, her smile thanking me for waiting. “The humanities,” she said. “Aptly named, no? At least English literature is something that we’re the foremost authorities on. It’s nice that there are a couple of areas left like that.”

“I suppose,” I said. I was always after my own son to do his homework on time; didn’t teachers know that if they weren’t firm in their deadlines they were just making a parent’s job more difficult? Ah, well. At least this kid had gone to university; I doubted my boy ever would.

“Are you Professor Marilyn Maslankowski?” I asked.

She nodded. “What can I do for you?”

I didn’t extend my hand; we weren’t allowed to make any sort of overture to physical contact anymore. “Professor Maslankowski, my name is Andrew Walker. I’m a detective with the Toronto Police.” I showed her my badge.

Her brown eyes narrowed. “Yes? What is it?”

I looked behind me to make sure we were still alone. “It’s about your husband.”

Her voice quavered slightly. “Ethan? My God, has something happened?”

There was never any easy way to do this. I took a deep breath, then: “Professor Maslankowski, your husband is dead.”

Her eyes went wide and she staggered back a half-step, bumping up against the smartboard that covered the wall behind her.

“I’m terribly sorry,” I said.

“What—what happened?” Marilyn asked at last, her voice reduced to a whisper.

I lifted my shoulders slightly. “He killed himself.”

“Killed himself?” repeated Marilyn, as if the words were ones she’d never heard before.

I nodded. “We’ll need you to positively identify the body, as next of kin, but the security guard says it’s him.”

“My God,” said Marilyn again. Her eyes were still wide. “My God …”

“I understand your husband was a physicist,” I said.

Marilyn didn’t seem to hear. “My poor Ethan …” she said softly. She looked like she might collapse. If I thought she was actually in danger of hurting herself with a fall, I could surge in and grab her; otherwise, regulations said I had to keep my distance. “My poor, poor Ethan …”

“Had your husband been showing signs of depression?” I asked.

Suddenly Marilyn’s tone was sharp. “Of course he had! Damn it, wouldn’t you?”

I didn’t say anything. I was used to this by now.

“Those aliens,” Marilyn said, closing her eyes. “Those goddamned aliens.”

Demand-Rebound Equilibrium: Although countless economic systems have been tried by various cultures, all but one prove inadequate in the face of the essentially limitless material resources made possible through low-cost reconfiguration of subatomic particles. The only successful system, commonly known as Demand-Rebound Equilibrium, although also occasionally called [Untranslatable proper name]’s Forge, after its principal chronicler, works because it responds to market forces that operate independently from individual psychology, thus …

By the time we returned to Ethans office, he’d been cut down and laid out on the floor, a sheet the coroner had brought covering his face and body. Marilyn had cried continuously as we’d made our way across the campus. It was early January, but global warming meant that the snowfalls I’d known as a boy didn’t occur much in Toronto anymore. Most of the ozone was gone, too, letting ultraviolet pound down. We weren’t even shielded against our own sun; how could we expect to be protected from stuff coming from the stars ?

I knelt down and pulled back the sheet. Now that the noose was gone, we could see the severe bruising where Ethan’s neck had snapped. Marilyn made a sharp intake of breath, brought her hand to her mouth, closed her eyes tightly, and looked away.

“Is that your husband?” I asked, feeling like an ass for even having to pose the question.

She managed a small, almost imperceptible nod.

It was now well into the evening. I could come back tomorrow to ask Ethan McCharles’s colleagues the questions I needed answered for my report, but, well, Marilyn was right here, and, even though her field was literature rather than physics, she must have some sense of what her husband had been working on. I repositioned the sheet over his dead face and stood up. “Can you tell me what Ethan’s specialty was ?”

Marilyn was clearly struggling to keep her composure. Her lower lip was trembling, and I could see by the rising and falling of her blouse—so sharply contrasting with the absolutely still sheet—that she was breathing rapidly. “His—he … Oh, my poor, poor Ethan …”

“Professor Maslankowski,” I said gently. “Your husband’s specialty …?”

She nodded, acknowledging that she’d heard me, but still unable to focus on answering the question. I let her take her time, and, at last, as if they were curse words, she spat out, “Loop quantum gravity.”

“Which is?”

“Which is a model of how subatomic particles are composed.” She shook her head. “Ethan spent his whole career trying to prove LQG was correct, and …”

“And?” I said gently.

“And yesterday they revealed the true nature of the fundamental structure of matter.”

“And this—what was it?—this ‘loop quantum gravity’ wasn’t right?”

Marilyn let out a heavy sigh. “Not even close. Not even in the ballpark.” She looked down at the covered form of her dead husband, then turned her gaze back to me. “Do you know what it’s like, being an academic?”

I actually did have some notion, but that wasn’t what she wanted to hear. I shook my head and let her talk.

Marilyn spread her arms. “You stake out your turf early on, and you spend your whole life defending it, trying to prove that your theory, or someone else’s theory you’re championing, is right. You take on all comers—in journals, at symposia, in the classroom—and if you’re lucky, in the end you’re vindicated. But if you’re unlucky …”

Her voice choked off, and tears welled in her eyes again as she looked down at the cold corpse lying on the floor.

[Untranslatable proper name] Award: Award given every [roughly 18 Earth years] for the finest musical compositions produced within the Allied Worlds. Although most species begin making music even prior to developing written language, [The same untranslatable proper name] argued that no truly sophisticated composition had ever been produced by a being with a lifespan of less than [roughly 1,100 Earth years], and since such lifespans only become possible with technological maturity, nothing predating a race’s overcoming of natural death is of any artistic consequence. Certainly, the winning compositions bear out her position: the work of composers who lived for [roughly 140 Earth years] or less seem little more than atonal noise when compared to …

It had begun just two years ago. Michael—that’s my son; he was thirteen then—and I got a call from a neighbor telling us we just had to put on the TV. We did so, and we sat side by side on the couch, watching the news conference taking place in Pasadena, and then the speeches by the U.S. President and the Canadian Prime Minister.

When it was over, I looked at Michael, and he looked at me. He was a good kid, and I loved him very much—and I wanted him to understand how special this all was. “Take note of where you are, Michael,” I said. “Take note of what you’re wearing, what I’m wearing, what the weather’s like outside. For the rest of your life, people will ask you what you were doing when you heard.”

He nodded, and I went on. “This is the kind of event that comes along only once in a great while. Each year, the anniversary of it will be marked; it’ll be in all the history books. It might even become a holiday. This is a date like …”

I looked round the living room, helplessly, trying to think of a date that this one was similar to. But I couldn’t, at least not from my lifetime, although my dad had talked about July 20, 1969, in much the same way.

“Well,” I said at last, “remember when you came home that day when you were little, saying Johnny Stevens had mentioned something called 9/11 to you, and you wanted to know what it was, and I told you, and you cried. This is like that, in that it’s significant … but … but 9/11 was such a bad memory, such an awful thing. And what’s happened today—it’s … it’s joyous, that’s what it is. Today, humanity has crossed a threshold. Everybody will be talking about nothing but this in the days and weeks ahead, because, as of right now”—my voice had actually cracked as I said the words—“we are not alone.”

Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation: a highly isotropic radiation with an almost perfect blackbody spectrum permeating the entire universe, at a temperature of approximately [2.7 degrees Kelvin], Although some primitive cultures mistakenly cite this radiation as proof of a commonly found creation myth—specifically, a notion that the universe began as a singularity that burst forth violently—sophisticated races understand that the cosmic microwave background is actually the result of …

It didn’t help that the same thing was happening elsewhere. It didn’t help one damned bit. I’d been called in to U of T seven times over the past two years, and each time someone had killed himself. It wasn’t always a prof; time before McCharles, it had been a Ph.D. candidate who’d been just about to defend his thesis on some abstruse aspect of evolutionary theory. Oh, evolution happens, all right—but it turns out the mechanisms are way more complex than the ones the Darwinians have been defending for a century and a half. I tried not to get cynical about all this, but I wondered if, as he slit his wrists before reproducing, that student had thought about the irony of what he was doing.

The source of all his troubles—of so many people’s troubles—was a planet orbiting a star called 54 Piscium, some thirty-six light-years away. For two years now, it had been constantly signaling Earth with flashes of intense laser light.

Well, not quite constantly: it signaled for eighteen hours then paused for twenty, and it fell silent once every hundred and twelve days for a period just shy of two weeks. From this, astronomers had worked out what they thought were the lengths of the day and the year of the planet that was signaling us, and the diameter of that planet’s sun. But they weren’t sure; nobody was sure of anything anymore.

At first, all we knew was that the signals were artificial. The early patterns of flashes were various mathematical chains: successively larger primes, then Fibonacci sequences in base eight, then a series that no one has quite worked out the significance of but that was sent repeatedly.

But then real information started flowing in, in amazing detail. Our telecommunications engineers were astonished that they’d missed a technique as simple as fractal nesting for packing huge amounts of information into a very narrow bandwidth. But that realization was just the first of countless blows to our egos.

There was a clip they kept showing on TV for ages after we’d figured out what we were receiving: an astronomer from the last century with a supercilious manner going on about how contact with aliens might plug us into the Encyclopedia Galactica, a repository of the knowledge of beings millions of years ahead of us in science and technology, in philosophy and mathematics. What wonders it would hold! What secrets it would reveal! What mysteries it would solve!

No one was arrogant like that astronomer anymore. No one could be.

Of course, various governments had tried to put the genie back into the bottle, but no nation has a monopoly on signals from the stars. Indeed, anyone with a few hundred dollars worth of equipment could detect the laser flashes. And deciphering the information wasn’t hard; the damned encyclopedia was designed to be read by anyone, after all.

And so the entries were made public—placed on the web by individuals, corporations, and those governments that still thought doing so was a public service. Of course, people tried to verify what the entries said; for some, we simply didn’t have the technology. For others, though, we could run tests, or make observations—and the entries always turned out to be correct, no matter how outlandish their claims seemed on the surface.

I thought about Ethan McCharles, swinging from his fiber-optic noose. The poor bastard.

It was rumored that one group had sent a reply to the senders, begging them to stop the transmission of the encyclopedia. Maybe that was even true—but it was no quick fix. After all, any signal sent from Earth would take thirty-six years to reach them, and even if they replied—or stopped— immediately upon receipt of our message, it would take another thirty-six years for that to have an impact here.

Until then at least, data would rain down on us, poison from the sky.

Life After Death: A belief, frequently encountered in unenlightened races, that some self-aware aspect of a given individual survives the death of the body. Although such a belief doubtless gives superstitious primitives a measure of comfort, it is easily proven that no such thing exists. The standard proofs are drawn from (1) moral philosophy, (2) quantum information theory, (3) non-[Untranslatable proper name] hyperparallactic phase-shift phenomenology, and (4) comprehensive symbolic philosologic. We shall explore each of these proofs in turn …

“Ethan was a good man,” said Marilyn Maslankowski. We had left her husbands office—and his corpse—behind. It was getting late, and the campus was mostly empty. Of course, as I’d seen, it was mostly empty earlier, too—who the hell wanted to waste years getting taught things that would soon be proven wrong, or would be rendered hopelessly obsolete?

We’d found a lounge to sit in, filled with vinyl-covered chairs. I bought Marilyn a coffee from a machine; at least I could do that much for her.

“I’m sure he was,” I said. They were always good men—or good women. They’d just backed the wrong horse, and—

No. No, that wasn’t right. They’d backed a horse when there were other, much faster, totally invisible things racing as well. We knew nothing.

“His work was his life,” Marilyn continued. “He was so dedicated. Not just about his research, either, but as a teacher. His students loved him.”

“I’m sure they did,” I said. However few of them there were. “Um, how did you get to work today?”

“TTC,” she replied. Public transit.

“Where abouts do you live?”

“We have a condo near the lake, in Etobicoke.”

We. She’d probably say “we” for months to come.

She’d finished her coffee, and I drained mine in a final gulp. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll give you a lift home.”

We headed down some stairs and out to the street. It was dark, and the sky seemed a uniform black: the glare of street lamps banished the stars. If only it were so easy …

We got into my car, and I started driving. Earlier, she’d called her two adult children. One, her daughter, was rushing back to the city from a skiing trip—artificial snow, of course. The other, her son, was in Los Angeles, but was taking the red-eye, and would be here by morning.

“Why are they doing this?” she asked, as we drove along. “Why are the aliens doing this?”

I moved into the left lane and flicked on my turn signal. Blink, blink, blink.

Off in the distance we could see the tapered needle of the CN Tower, Toronto’s—and, when I was younger—the world’s tallest building, stretching over half a kilometer into the air. Lots of radio and television stations broadcast from it, and so I pointed at it. “Presumably they became aware of us through our radio and TV programs—stuff we leaked out into space.” I tried to make my tone light. “Right now, they’d be getting our shows from the 1970s—have you ever seen any of that stuff? I suppose they think they’re uplifting us. Bringing us out of the dark ages.”

Marilyn looked out the passenger window. “There’s nothing wrong with darkness,” she said. “It’s comforting.” She didn’t say anything further as we continued along. The city was gray and unpleasant. Christmas had come and gone, and—

Funny thing; I hadn’t thought about it until just now. Used to be at Christmas, you’d see stars everywhere: on the top of trees, on lampposts, all over the place. After all, a star had supposedly heralded Jesus’ birth. But I couldn’t recall seeing a single one this past Christmas. Signals from the heavens just didn’t have the same appeal anymore …

Marilyn’s condo tower was about twenty stories tall, and some of the windows had tinfoil covering them instead of curtains. It looked like it used to be an upscale building, but so many people had lost their jobs in the past two years. I pulled into the circular driveway. She looked at me, and her eyes were moist. I knew it was going to be very difficult for her to go into her apartment. Doubtless, there’d be countless things of her husband’s left in a state that suggested he was going to return. My heart went out to her, but there was nothing I could do, damn it all. They should let us touch them. They should let us hold them. Human contact: it’s the only kind that doesn’t hurt.

After letting her off, I drove to my house, exhausted emotionally and physically; for most of the trip, the CN Tower was visible in my rearview mirror, as though the city was giving me the finger.

My son Michael was fifteen now, but he wasn’t home, apparently. His mother and I had split up more than five years ago, so the house was empty. I sat on the living-room couch and turned on the wall monitor. As always, I wondered how I was going to manage to hold onto this place in my old age. The police pension fund was bankrupt; half the stocks it had invested in were now worthless. Who wanted to own shares in oil companies when an entry might be received showing how to make cold fusion work? Who wanted to own biotechnology stocks when an entry explaining some do-it-yourself gene-resequencing technique might be the very next one to arrive?

The news was on, and, of course, there was the usual report about the encyclopedia entries whose translations had been released today. The entries came in a bizarre order, perhaps reflecting the alphabetical sequence of their names in some alien tongue; we never knew what would be next. There’d be an entry on some aspect of biology, then one on astronomy, then some arcane bit of history of some alien world, then something from a new science that we don’t even have a name for. I listened halfheartedly; like most people, I did everything halfheartedly these days.

“One of the latest Encyclopedia Galactica entries,” said the female reporter, “reveals that our universe is finite in size, measuring some forty-four billion light-years across. Another new entry contains information about a form of combustion based on neon, which our scientist had considered an inert gas. Also, a lengthy article provides a comprehensive explanation of dark matter, the long suspected but never identified source of most of the mass in the universe. It turns out that no such dark matter exists, but rather there’s an interrelationship between gravity and tachyons that …”

Doubtless some people somewhere were happy or intrigued by these revelations. But others were surely devastated, lifetimes of work invalidated. Ah, well. As long as none of them were here in Toronto. Let somebody else, somewhere else, deal with the grieving widows, the orphaned children, the inconsolable boyfriends. I’d had enough. I’d had plenty.

I got up and went to make some coffee. I shouldn’t be having caffeine at this hour, but I didn’t sleep well these days even when I avoided it. As I stirred whitener into my cup, I could hear the front door opening. “Michael?” I shouted out, as I headed back to the couch.

“Yeah,” he called back. A moment later he entered the living room. My son had one side of his head shaved bald, the current street-smart style. Leather jackets, which had been de rigueur for tough kids when I’d been Michael’s age—not that any tough kid ever said de rigueur—were frowned upon now; a synthetic fabric that shone like quicksilver and was as supple as silk was all young people wore these days; of course, the formula to make it had come from an encyclopedia entry.

“It’s a school night,” I said. “You shouldn’t be out so late.”

“School.” He spat the word. “As if anyone cares. As if any of it matters.”

We’d had this argument before; we were just going through the motions. I said what I said because that’s what a parent is supposed to say. He said what he said because …

Because it was the truth.

I nodded, and shut off the TV. Michael headed on down to the basement, and I sat in the dark, staring up at the ceiling.

Chronics: Branch of science that deals with the temporal properties of physical entities. Although most entities in the universe progress through time in an orthrochronic, or forward, fashion, certain objects instead regress in a retrochronic, or backward, fashion. The most common example …

Yesterday, it turned out, was easy. Yesterday, I only had to deal with one dead body.

The explosion happened at 9:42 a.m. I’d been driving down to division headquarters, listening to loud music on the radio with my windows up, and I still heard it. Hell, they probably heard it clear across Lake Ontario, in upstate New York.

I’d been speeding along the Don Valley Parkway when it happened, and had a good view through my windshield toward downtown. Of course, the skyline was dominated by the CN Tower, which—

My God!

—which was now leaning over, maybe twenty degrees off vertical. The radio station I’d been listening to went dead; it had been transmitting from the CN Tower, I supposed. Maybe it was a terrorist attack. Or maybe it was just some bored school kid who’d read the entry on how to produce antimatter that had been released last week.

There was a seven-story complex of observation decks and restaurants two-thirds of the way up the tower, providing extra weight. It was hard to—

Damn!

My car’s brakes had slammed on, under automatic control; I pitched forward, the shoulder belt giving a bit. The car in front of mine had come to a complete stop—as, I could now see, had the car in front of it, and the one in front of that car, too. Nobody wanted to continue driving toward the tower. I undid my seat belt and got out of my car; other motorists were doing the same thing.

The tower was leaning over further now: maybe thirty-five degrees. I assumed the explosion had been somewhere near its base; if it had been antimatter, from what I understood, only a minuscule amount would have been needed.

“There it goes!” shouted someone behind me. I watched, my stomach knotting, as the tower leaned over farther and farther. It would hit other, lesser skyscrapers; there was no way that could be avoided. I was brutally conscious of the fact that hundreds, maybe thousands, of people were about to die.

The tower continued to lean, and then it broke in two, the top half plummeting sideways to the ground. A plume of dust went up into the air, and—

It was like watching a distant electrical storm: the visuals hit you first, well before the sound. And the sound was indeed like thunder, a reverberating, cracking roar.

Screams were going up around me. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” I felt like I was going to vomit, and I had to hold onto my car’s fender for support.

Somebody behind me was shouting, “Damn you, damn you, damn you!” I turned, and saw a man shaking his fist at the sky. I wanted to join him, but there was no point.

This was just the beginning, I knew. People all over the world had read that entry, along with all the others. Antimatter explosions; designer diseases based on new insights into how biology worked; God only knew what else. We needed a firewall for the whole damn planet, and there was no way to erect one.

I abandoned my car and wandered along the highway until I found an off-ramp. I walked for hours, passing people who were crying, people who were screaming, people who, like me, were too shocked, too dazed, to do either of those things.

I wondered if there was an entry in the Encyclopedia Galactica about Earth, and, if so, what it said. I thought of Ethan McCharles, swinging back and forth, a flesh pendulum, and I remembered that spontaneous little eulogy Chiu, the security guard, had uttered. Would there be a eulogy for Earth? A few kind words, closing out the entry on us in the next edition of the encyclopedia? I knew what I wanted it to say.

I wanted it to say that we mattered, that what we did had worth, that we treated each other well most of the time. But that was wishful thinking, I suppose. All that would probably be in the entry was the date on which our first broadcasts were detected, and the date, only a heartbeat later in cosmic terms, on which they had ceased.

It would take me most of the day to walk home. My son Michael would make his way back there, too, I’m sure, when he heard the news.

And at least we’d be together, as we waited for whatever would come next.