The Lure

42 The X-Theory

Bull had loosened his tie and was tapping his chin meditatively with an unopened can of beer. Across from him, the CIA Director was sipping froth from the top of a glass.

Hazel Baxendale started the DVD rolling and settled back in an armchair next to Professor Gene Killman.

The picture was in colour and its quality was good, although the sound had an echoey quality. The camera had been set up in a room decorated with yellow embossed wallpaper. Shutters had been opened at a large window through which there was what looked like an Alpine view. Petrie sat in a swivel chair, at a desk with pewter trays, blotter and pen holder. A desk lamp had been swivelled to light up his face and there were little beads of sweat on his brow. Occasionally a hand would appear on the right, when the questioner was gesturing. Otherwise the only sign of the interrogators was cigarette smoke and two voices off-stage, both American, one of them female. In the event they had little interrogating to do: Petrie was pouring it out like a man unburdening his soul. He was visibly shaking.

Petrie: First, the starting point. You’re not going to believe a word of what I say. Not a word.

Callaghan: Not even one?

Petrie: But that’s okay. The important thing is not whether you believe it, which you won’t, but that you transmit what I say to people in Washington who can evaluate it.

Callaghan: Okay, Tom, that was a good opening line. You’ve softened me up nicely and now I’m ready to buy whatever you tell me. Now, just so there’s no misunderstanding between us: you’re wanted for murder and I ought to be handing you over to the Slovaks. I haven’t yet done so for one reason only. You claim to have something — you haven’t said what — that affects American interests.

Alice: Big league.

Callaghan: Now I don’t give a toss if you’re the Boston Strangler. All I want to know is one thing: where do big league American interests come in?

Petrie’s voice is low and rapid, matching the tension apparent in his face: First you have to understand about the underground facility in the Tatras. It’s designed to pick up exotic particles of a type we might know nothing about.

Callaghan: Is this a secret laboratory or what? I’ve never heard of it.

Petrie: No, it’s a joint British-Russian experiment, unclassified and open. It’s under a mountain, but that’s because they need to shield the equipment from ordinary particles, cosmic rays and the like. Only particles of a new type can get through. Apart from the odd neutralino from the Sun. I won’t bother you with them.

Callaghan: Why should we care anyway?

Alice: American interests, Tom?

Petrie: They picked up particles all right. For twelve years there was nothing and then there was this terrific storm, billions of particles shooting right through the mountain and probably right through the Earth. It was something totally new, and it was Nobel Prize stuff.

But then they saw something else. The particle storm wasn’t like a spray of buckshot: they arrived in a pattern, there were rhythms in space and time of arrival, that’s when they asked me in, I’m a mathematician and I specialise in pattern recognition, that’s what I do, I do patterns, I look for order inside chaos.

Alice: When you say patterns …

Petrie: Intelligent patterns. The signals were arriving from deep space and they were intelligent signals.

There is a long silence. The camera is fixed on Petrie’s face, but he adds nothing to his incredible statement.

Callaghan: Intelligent signals? Like from Klingons or something?

Alice: You were right, Tom. We don’t believe it.

Petrie: What? No no, that was the bit you’re supposed to believe. This is the bit you won’t believe. I decrypted some of the patterns and it turned out I was looking at the human genome, all thirty thousand genes, redundant DNA insertions from ancient bacteria, the lot. Then there were chemical formulae, thousands of them. So far as I can see they’re enzymes, they target the aging genes, the cancer genes, the Alzheimer genes, everything. Lots of them do things we don’t understand and it will take a generation or two to work them out.

You see what this means? Your girlfriend drinks some enzyme juice, gets herself pregnant and nine months later she’s produced a superior little baby.

Callaghan: A genetically modified baby? Are you serious?

Petrie: One which will never suffer disease. When we’ve worked through the enzymes, my bet is we’ll have a means to boost our intellects, live three hundred years, maybe three thousand. We’ll have transformed humanity but that’s just scraping the surface. There’s a mountain of stuff I couldn’t understand but it related to particle physics. I saw some of the easier subnuclear patterns — Gell Mann’s eightfold way and stuff like that — and I thought I glimpsed a Calabi-Yau space, but most of it I hadn’t a clue about, and I think we’re being given knowledge of physics centuries ahead of where we are now. We can’t handle the real stuff because it’s so advanced we’d have no basis for understanding it — it’d be like giving calculus to an ape — so they’re making it easy for us, giving us stuff a few centuries ahead instead of thousands of years ahead. We don’t need to think that far ahead anyway since what they’ve given us is enough to transform all our lives and we’re still just skimming the surface of it. There’s an intelligence out there which maybe holds all knowledge and it knows more about us than we do about ourselves.

Alice: Whoa, Tom, slow down for us. What do you mean, an intelligence out there? You know the source of these signals?

Petrie: I do, yes I do. I absolutely know where they’re coming from and it’s absolutely incredible.

Callaghan: Well?

A sly grin momentarily breaks the tension on Petrie’s face: That’s a bargaining chip. I’ll keep it to myself for now.

Callaghan: Okay, Tom. You said something about still skimming the surface. What do you mean?

Petrie: Yes, there’s more, far far more, but this next bit will blow your mind. I can’t take it in myself, it’s just fantasy … Can I have some water or something, please?

Off-screen muttering. A chair scrapes on a hard surface. A door bangs.

Petrie stands up: I don’t think you’ll grasp the next bit.

Callaghan: Tom, don’t be so bloody insulting. I have a degree in law.

Petrie: We’re being invaded.

Callaghan: What? Look, Tom, sit down and calm down. I don’t get it.

Petrie: Listen, you dumb ox …

Callaghan: You’re right, Tom. I must be dumb because why else would they assign me out here in the boonies?

Petrie: I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.

Callaghan: That’s okay, Tom. You did mean it and you’re right. So why don’t you calm down and explain why you think Darth Vader is heading this way?

Petrie laughs, but his hand is shaking as he takes the glass of water. Some dribbles down the side of his mouth. A female hand, all bangles and rings, appears with a paper handkerchief. He dabs at his chin.

The President was biting a thumbnail. He glanced over at his Science Adviser. ‘He’s high on something, right?’

‘No, sir. He just got more and more excited as he told his tale.’

‘So he’s a screwball?’

‘No, sir. He’s as sane as any of us.’

Bull shook his head as if to clear it. ‘He’s sure as hell blowing my mind.’

Hazel gave the President an arch smile. ‘Wait till you hear the next bit.’

Petrie stands up again. He is pacing up and down and on occasion is completely off-screen.

Alice says, ‘I’m getting a headache.’

‘You said we’re being invaded. They’re already among us; maybe like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers?’ Callaghan’s tone is flat.

Petrie taps at his jacket. ‘I have the advance guard right here in my pocket. But it’s not a physical invasion. It’s an invasion of ideas.’

There is a long, strained silence. Petrie, owl-like behind his round spectacles, forces a brief, nervous smile. Alice leans back in her chair. ‘I’m sorry, but that’s just off the wall.’ She turns to Callaghan. ‘I think we should turn him in.’

Callaghan is peering thoughtfully into Petrie’s eyes. ‘Keep talking, Tom.’

Petrie shakes his head in frustration, like a man lacking the words to get his thoughts over. He sits down again. ‘Imagine a world where countries are always at war with each other. So, war is good. War forces change, drives technology, sweeps away dead wood and so on. But as technology advances it reaches a point where it’s so destructive that societies crash if they go to war. At that stage things can go one of two ways. Either they keep going back to the Stone Age, or they get through the threshold by developing some code for living together.’

‘Where did you get that from? Out of some CND pamphlet?’

‘Now if you’re on a planet that doesn’t get through the barrier, you don’t matter. You keep going back to the Dark Ages and that’s that. But if you break that threshold, if you evolve a moral code which makes war impossible, there’s no stopping you. You just keep growing in technology and knowledge. Survival of the fittest selects those civilisations. Until they hit the next barrier.’

‘Which is?’

‘Your first extraterrestrial contact. Then natural selection works just like before, only on a different scale of space and time. Now it’s planets instead of countries but the same rules apply. On the long term the choice is still between mutual destruction or mutual sharing of some moral code which allows survival.’

‘With you so far. The good guys win through.’ Callaghan is humouring a lunatic. ‘Don’t quite connect it with this alien signal, though.’

‘Right. Right.’ Petrie blinks in surprise, as if he thinks the connection is self-evident. ‘Okay, here’s a question that bugged us from the day we got the signal. Why did they contact us? They don’t need us, not for food, not for their test tubes. We’re too primitive to be of any interest to them.’

‘They just want to be nice to us?’ Callaghan suggests.

‘They want us to survive, for their own reasons. And to survive they want us to adopt a particular complex of ideas because that’s our best chance of survival. If we don’t, we become a threat to them, maybe a thousand years down the line, maybe just a hundred. They need us to evolve towards their values and morality because it’s their best protection.’

‘Otherwise we might turn into Vikings or something?’

Petrie nods. ‘Exactly. And if we don’t respond, we’re a potential threat to the signal. Not now, but in the future. I don’t know how they handle a threat.’

Callaghan is struggling. ‘Excuse me, did I hear you say we could become a threat to the signal?’

‘Yes, Joe, the signal. It propagates, it grows, it evolves by natural selection, it communicates. By any reasonable definition it’s a living thing. It’s infinitely powerful because it contains all knowledge. And it uses life forms as its medium of storage. I guess that’s why it wants us to survive and prosper. Life is rare and precious.’

Alice says, ‘You’re a nutcase.’

Petrie grins desperately. ‘And I’ve been running amok with an axe. You know what Darwin said? He said the chicken is the means by which the egg reproduces itself. The egg has all the information it needs to make the chicken. The information is stored in the DNA but the storage medium doesn’t matter — it can be molecules or silicon chips or paper tape. The knowledge is what matters. You can encode life in a string of letters, you could even reduce it to Morse code.’

‘Now hold on, a musical score ain’t music,’ Callaghan objects.

‘Excellent point, Joe, on the button. You need an instrument to play a tune, and the signal needs life forms to propagate itself. Signal and life need each other like the chicken and egg need each other.’

‘The invaders are ideas? Not guys in spacesuits?’

‘There’s no point in interstellar travel because civilisations don’t need it. With the information content in these particle flows you don’t have to visit alien worlds, you could recreate them in virtual space. The signal outstrips any conceivable spaceship. At the speed of light, information can cross the Galaxy in fifty thousand years.’

‘Still a helluva time.’

‘Joe, it’s a lot less than the lifespan of a primate species. Expand your mind. Anyway the nearest signallers could be next door. We’re just four hundred years from Antares, two hundred from Betelgeuse, eight years from Sirius and four months from the Oort cloud.’

‘Let me get this right — the invaders are ideas?’ Callaghan asks.

‘The life forms stay nice and cosy in their own planetary system or whatever. They might be organic life forms like us, or machines or computers or molecules, but so far as the signal is concerned, life is just a storage medium. The signal is the real living entity.’

‘The signals have colonised the Galaxy,’ Callaghan repeats. He is still struggling with the concept.

‘Not guys in spacesuits, not even machines. The colonisers are imperialistic, all-conquering complexes of ideas and information bound together by a moral code which ensures mutual survival of life forms — organic life or machine descendants — because without life forms to transmit it, the signal itself would die.’

‘Gentle Jesus, I’m just a Trade Adviser.’

Alice asks, ‘Are we supposed to believe that this signal is a living entity or what? Is it a spiritual thing?’

‘I don’t know. It encompasses all knowledge. It evolves and reproduces itself and acts to protect itself. It inculcates its baby — life — with the moral code it needs for its own survival and that of life. It pervades the Galaxy.’

‘Maybe even beyond?’ Alice suggests. ‘Making the Universe a living thing?’

Petrie grins again. ‘You’re getting into the spirit, Alice. Maybe our Galaxy has been seeded, maybe genetic material drifts around like spores, I don’t know. Some of it takes, some of it doesn’t. But just as soon as any garbage civilisation crawls out of the caves and learns the most primitive biochemistry, the signallers fire off a blueprint for survival.’ His eyes are gleaming. ‘There’s a Galactic club out there. It’s a paradise club, it’s immortality. The signal is an invitation to join.’

The President put his beer can on a coffee-table, still unopened. He contemplated it for a few seconds, sighed, looked up and grinned. ‘Yep, I’ve finally heard it all.’

The CIA Director said, ‘Seth, if you were trying to beat a murder rap, would you come up with a yarn like that?’