The Woman Who Died a Lot

9. Monday: The Madeupion

As it turned out, we were eight for dinner. Landen and myself, obviously, and Friday and Tuesday, equally obviously. My brother Joffy and his partner, Miles, also made it, as did my dad. Mum and Polly, more inseparable as the years went by, were going to listen to the live studio taping of Avoid the Question Time. The Wing Commander would always sit down to talk, but he never ate as he didn’t need to, being fictional. Jenny would have been there—for the starters at any rate—but still had the flu and so was confined to her room.

But Friday was right. My father did want to talk about matters ChronoGuard.

“Get your future in the post?” he asked, sitting down next to his grandson.

“Last week.”

“Any good?”

“It’ll be . . . challenging.”

My father had also worked in the time industry, but unlike Friday, who now no longer had the future he was going to have, my father no longer had the past to which he was entitled. ChronoGuard agents who were active during the shutdown were offered a replacement past career to replace their theoretically unsustainable ones, and most chose something in the arts, sciences or politics. My father, ever the maverick, had opted for a fifty-seven-year career in plumbing. The reason, he stated, was so his new memories would have him at home as much as possible, to better reminisce about his family. This worked well for him, but not for us—we retained only those memories of his first career as a time-traveling knight-errant. As far as we were concerned, he’d turned up the day after the time engines were shut down, full of fond memories of us that we couldn’t remember but he could— sort of like having an aged parent with a bad memory, only the other way round.

“Challenging is good,” said Dad. “I used to take your mother and her brothers on long hiking holidays in Scotland. Now, that was challenging. Do you remember that time when we got lost on Ben Nevis, Thursday, and had to be rescued by several men in beards, all of whom smelled of pipe tobacco and York Peppermint Patty?”

“No.”

“I saw a few posters up in town about the smiting,” said Landen. “The city council doesn’t seem to be taking it very seriously. Are we sure it’s still on?”

Joffy and Miles exchanged nervous glances.

“It’s on, all right,” replied Miles. “When He announced the smiting to a state-registered Meek Person in a lonely gas station in the small hours, He had the Meek write it down so he wouldn’t forget and then went and told another Meek just in case. After that He reiterated His plans in the pips of a cucumber and burned them into the side of Haytor on Dartmoor.”

“He’s kind of done with ambiguity, isn’t He?” I said.

“Pretty much,” said Joffy. “Since His Revealment He’s kind of ditched the idea of subtle signs or obscure clues. Burning His intentions into granite is a lot more direct, and it certainly makes people take notice, although the Dartmoor Parks Authority was none too pleased. But there it was: Swindon will be hit with a Grade-III Smite on Friday at midday.”

We all fell silent. It kind of sounded more ominous coming from Joffy, even if a Grade-III was not the worst. More to do with cleansing fire and none of the mass murder, lava and pillar-of-salt stuff.

“Why Swindon anyway?” asked Friday. “In the National Sinful City Stakes, Swindon sits only fifty-seventh.”

“The cleansings aren’t always just about sin,” said Joffy quietly. “Sometimes they’re about unimaginative architecture, poor restaurants or even an overly aggressive parking-fine regime. This time it’s none of those. I think He aims to hit Swindon because He knows it’s my hometown and wants to make a point.”

“What sort of point?”

“I’m not sure. It’s all very mysterious.”

Joffy was my eldest and only surviving brother, and he was supreme head of the Church of the Global Standard Deity, a sort of homogeny of faiths that hoped to bring peace and prosperity, consensus, harmony, tolerance of diversity and social inclusion to all His creations. Joffy had decided many years before that the problem with religion wasn’t religion itself but its flagrant misuse as an absolutist argument against narrow tribal agendas. Joffy argued—as had many before him—that one religion would be a much better idea. But instead of going on a murderous ideological rampage to bend others to his will, he used arguments of such clarity and reasoned debate that even the most hardened nutjobs finally came over to his way of thinking. It had taken him and his network of fearless Unifiers only thirty years to accomplish, a staggering achievement that most would agree “could only possibly exist in fiction,” if they hadn’t seen it with their own eyes.

The other big plus of Global Religious Unification was for collective-bargaining powers. Before, dialogue with the Almighty was unclear and centered on unworthiness and mumbling inside large buildings, but following unification the GSD was in a strong position to ask clear and unambiguous questions of the Almighty, such as “What, precisely, is the point of all this?”

Unfortunately, this angered His Mightiness, as theological unity was emphaticallynot part of His plan, and a series of cleansings took place around the globe—mostly as a warning to His creations that messing with the Big Guy’s Ultimate and Very Important and Unknowable Plan was not going to be tolerated.

“We’re in talks with the Almighty to bring Him to the negotiating table,” said Joffy, “but we’re not prepared to talk until He agrees to stop incinerating the unrighteous in an all-consuming column of cleansing fire.”

“Maybe He doesn’t have a plan and there is no answer,” said Landen. “Perhaps that’s why He appeared to all those different religious leaders with subtly different messages—in order to divide mankind and keep us from adopting a united front to demand an answer to the question of existence.”

“Even if there is no answer to the riddle of existence and we are all random packets of replicating cell structure in a dying universe devoid of meaning,” added Miles, “we have a right to know that. Five thousand years of prayer, conflict, self-sacrifice and being tested daily must count for something.”

“I always thought His plan for mankind was ‘Let’s just muddle through and see what happens,’ ” said Friday. “And historically speaking, it’s a sound one—it’s worked on thousands of occasions.”

“There must be more to the ultimate meaning and purpose of existence than muddling through,” said Tuesday with disdain. “If that’s all it was, there’s no reason for the eternal quest for knowledge and every reason for celebrity biographies and daytime soaps.”

“So religion could trump science after all,” said Miles with a smile. “That’ll be one for the books.”

“Mind you,” added my father, “at least you forced His hand into revealing His existence.”

“Thatwas unexpected,” admitted Joff y. “A nd very welcome— the billion or so former atheists now on board really boosted the membership and bargaining powers.”

“Didn’t Dawkins shoot himself when he found out?”

“Yes,” replied Miles sadly, “a great shame. He would have been excellent GSD bishop material. Single-minded, a good orator and eyebrows that were pretty much perfect.”

“So why destroy Swindon just to annoy you?” I asked. “It doesn’t sound like a very responsible use of resources.”

“I think it’s probably more to do with setting the tone of our first meeting. We’ve been trying to get Him to the negotiating table to thrash out our grievances, and I think He just wants to show who’s boss and to set the ambience for the meeting—like when criminal overlords have their hideouts in hollowed-out volcanoes. Highly impractical and the heating bills astronomical, but good for the overall ambience.”

“And when might this meeting take place?” asked Tuesday.

“A fortnight, perhaps,” said Miles. “Winged messengers can be pretty vague.”

“Would you put in a good word for Polly?” asked my father. “Her sciatica is acting up again.”

“I’ll be honest with you,” said Joffy. “The agenda has one point two billion items on it, and it’ll be most likely lunch before we even get around to item one: ‘What, precisely, is the point of all this?’

We all thought about this for a moment.

“Tuesday,” added Joffy in a quiet voice, “just how close are we to success with the Anti-Smite Defense Shield?”

Everyone looked at Tuesday. This, we knew, was pretty much the reason Joffy and Miles were here—to see whether she could overcome the many technological hurdles in time to avert Swindon’s partial destruction.

Tuesday pulled a face. “We’re having a few . . . teething troubles,” she said, “but it’s mostly of a mathematical nature. I simply need to find the upper and lower limits of the constant U_c.”

“Is there an easier way for you to explain it?” asked Miles. “It’s kind of important. If we can’t get the defense shield up, we’re going to have to reluctantly agree to a backup plan.”

“Okay,” said Tuesday. Like many scientists, she had become obsessed with the science itself and not its intended purpose. She took a deep breath, got up and with a felt pen drew a schematic of an anti-smite tower on the wall.

“Field research has indicated that a Wrath-Inflicted Deity Groundburst is a five-or six-second burst of high-energy particles concentrated on a circular pattern with a blast radius of about half a mile. The high-energy particles arrive so fast and with such force that there is no material we know of that can withstand the bombardment. A defense shield made of tungsten, steel, concrete—useless. Which is why we must meet energy with mass.”

“We get that bit,” said Joffy, since all this had been repeated on Toad News Network Science Channel quite a lot over the past year, “but how does your system actually work?”

Tuesday smiled. “I got the idea from a ninja movie.”

I looked at Landen. “Have you been letting Tuesday watch ninja movies?”

“One or two,” he replied sheepishly. “After she did her homework.”

“Hmph,” I replied.

“In the movie,” continued Tuesday enthusiastically, “there was a ninja who could move so fast he could run though a rainstorm without getting wet. And I got to thinking that if a ninja could do that, thenconversely he could just as easily move though the same rainstorm and get absolutely sodden—and if there were several ninjas, they might be able to stop all the raindrops from actually reaching the ground.”

“Okay,” I said slowly, “I’m getting the analogy.”

“Right. So what I have to do is to meet each charged particle with the ultradense nucleus of a lead-187 atom. The particle is halted and drained off as thermal energy to be turned to electrical energy using a steam turbine. Part of this energy is used to power the shield, and the rest is fed back into the national grid. The feed-in tariff is so good these days that we hope to be able to recoup all our production costs within about twenty-three smitings. Joffy, do you think you can convince the Almighty to schedule His cleansings to coincide with peak demands of power? Everyone pops on the kettle at halftime during the SuperHoop.”

“I’m not sure the Lord takes account of sporting events when deciding on a bit of smiting.”

“And the shield has to work first,” added Landen.

“Yes, there is that,” replied Tuesday thoughtfully. “Anyway, the problem is being able to predict the position of each charged particle in the column of all-cleansing fire and then have a lead-187 nucleus ready and waiting precisely for it underneath. To put it into practical terms, it would be like attempting to predict where in Hertfordshire an acorn would fall and have another acorn waiting underneath it.”

“I should imagine that’s almost impossible.”

She smiled. “Predicting random events is possible if you examine the effect a subatomic particle named the Madeupion has on the arrow of time near the event. For a trillionth-trillionth of a second before the event, cause and effect entangle. And if in the short period we can unentangle the effect from cause, we can see an event before it has happened—and do something about it.”

She wrote an equation on the wall and rapped her knuckles against it.

“And that’s the problem. Attempting to find an upper and a lower limit for my Madeupion Unentanglement Constant, or U_c. Too high and we’re not seeing far enough back, too low and we get to see the event after it’s happened. I’ve brought the limits down to between six point three and six point eight quintillionths of a second, but it’s still too large. To the fleeting existence of a Madeupion, the U_c is like the Jurassic—only without the dinosaurs.”

Tuesday stared at her scribbles on the wall for a while.

“It’s just that math isn’t my strong point,” she said with a sigh, “and we’re not actually sure the Madeupion exists. It just seems a good theory to explain déjà vu, intuition and the ability of ninjas to dodge bullets. Ninjas are far more important to science than anyone realizes. If we could capture one to study, I think most of science’s biggest puzzles might be resolved.”

“So where does that leave us?” asked Joffy.

“We might crack the U_c problem in ten minutes,” replied Tuesday, “or it may never be cracked.”

We all fell silent for a few moments.

“Pudding anyone?” I said brightly. “Tuesday, would you do the plates?”