And there was a folded sheet of notepaper. Of course there had to be something more to the joke than an old photo. The cursive, copperplate writing was hard to make out, but the note was short.
You will see three. You will be wrong.
G
P.S. Pass it on! κ∞ = 9.42 ; λ∞ = 2.703 × 1023 ; μ∞ = .02289
Lucas stared at nothing, imagining spies in double-breasted suits working in here, the air filled with pipe-smoke, their patrician accents alien to modern ears.
‘The game’s afoot,’ he said. ‘So three what, precisely?’
But none of this, really, felt like a joke.
He slowed walking past the Royal College of Music. Heavenly sounds floated from an open window – it might have been Maria’s recital, but it could be any one of the students at practice. Opposite was the round, redbrick Victorian flying-saucer-like Royal Albert Hall where they dreamed of performing for real. Musical mastery and leading-edge science on the same street. A hundred and fifty years ago, things would have looked just like this.
Then he was at the corner, swiping his Imperial College ID ring to gain entrance to Huxley, where he nodded to a couple of technicians he knew, then rode up to the top floor, and strode past the biophysics rooms, heading for his office in Blackett.
You will see three.
Three buses? Sparrows dropping dead? Moments of random kindness? Maria was going to be pissed off when she saw the floor. The landlord was the least of Lucas’s worries.
‘Scientists,’ his friend Arne had said over several pints of Stella, ‘just do not get hot babes like Maria as girlfriends.’
In reply, Lucas had brought the big intellectual guns to bear, quoting Richard Feynman: ‘If experiment disagrees with theory, then the theory is wrong. All of science is contained in that sentence.’
‘Sod off,’ Arne had answered. ‘So whose round is it?’
Anyway, never mind Maria or the stupid messages. He was in Imperial where he belonged. Time to decipher the nature of the universe – or have some tea and biscuits while chatting with his friends. Whichever came first.
Arne, Jim and Fatima were waiting in the small seminar room. The chairs were battered and the walls need repainting, but the holoterminal was state of the art.
‘Here.’ Arne handed Lucas a cup of coffee. ‘You’ll need this to keep awake.’
‘Excuse me?’ Fatima was fiddling with her wristband, communicating with the holoterminal. ‘You are a bad person, Arne. My talk will be riveting.’
A phase space blossomed.
‘Solar flux resonance,’ she added, ‘is fascinating anyway, and we’ve got some solid work finished.’
‘I’ve got hot acid reflux,’ said Arne. ‘Does that count?’
‘Peace.’ Jim raised his hands. ‘Fatima, why don’t you start.’
Arne grinned. He would not interrupt again until it was time for formal questions, and then his queries were likely to be pointed and serious.
‘So, good afternoon, everyone,’ said Fatima. ‘Here are the latest results from the—’
A knock sounded, and a young-looking woman peeked in.
‘Sorry, everyone,’ she said. ‘Er, Arne? Could you come look at something, please?’
Jim frowned. So did Fatima.
‘We’ve just started here,’ said Arne. ‘Can it wait an hour?’
‘There’s a major anomaly on LongWatch, but Palo Alto’s showing it too. It’s just happened, like a minute ago, but the web’s already alive with—’
‘All right.’ Fatima tapped her wristband. ‘Arne, you want to take over?’
‘What? Oh, yeah.’ Arne worked his own wristband. ‘Have I got it? Right, let’s link in.’
The holo view was of deep space, bordered with subsidiary sheaves of data. Lucas dimmed the room lights all the way down.
‘There.’ The young woman was pointing. ‘See?’
‘Holy shite,’ said Arne. ‘Hang on.’
Jim was leaning forward, almost inside the holovolume.
‘You say Palo Alto’s seeing this too?’
‘That’s right.’
‘But they’re not using the LongWatch satellite array. Plus their sensor tech is totally different.’
In the middle of the display, amid the blazing points of both stars and galaxies, three identically brilliant spots were glowing. Laid out in a perfect equilateral triangle.
You will see three.
Lucas checked the tabular data.
‘Gamma-ray bursters,’ he said. ‘But three of them.’
In seconds they might die down – this being a real time display – but for now they were blazing with far greater energy than any supernova could muster.
‘What’s their origin? Where the hell are they?’
‘Other side of a void, looks like,’ said Arne. ‘A hundred and fifty million lightyears across, and still we get to see events like this.’
‘But the triangle’s an artefact.’ Jim stabbed his finger into the image. ‘Has to be. Gravitational lensing wouldn’t split the image that way. It’s the software.’
‘We’re seeing it, but we’re not the only ones.’ Arne shrugged. ‘If Palo Alto agree, it’s not a sensor artefact, so it’s an artefact of something out there.’
‘Unless,’ said Fatima, ‘there really are three gamma-ray events that were not just simultaneous from our viewpoint, but lined up in a beautiful equal-sided triangle. I mean, how likely is that?’
Jim remained staring at the image.
‘A single black hole wouldn’t produce the triangle, and I’m pretty sure that two gravity sources in line wouldn’t do it either. But some other arrangement, maybe.’
Lucas had a memory flake in his pocket, an accessory that came with his new holoterminal, useful for setup and working offline, given that holoterminals were still rare, therefore not fully supported. As a child, he remembered Dad taking backups of his work, but these days everyone relied on redundancy in the Cloud, with offline copies a rarity.
He worked the flake, unnoticed by the others, copying several seconds’ worth of the LongWatch data. Then he thumbed it off and put it back in his pocket, alongside the old photograph.
Why did I do that?
A second later, the LongWatch image began to shiver and fall apart.
‘What the fuck is that?’ said Arne.
Fatima shook her head at the language, but she was already bringing up a subsidiary image, while Jim was working on his wristpad.
‘Worm attack,’ he said. ‘The whole LongWatch system is going down.’
‘Bastard shitting—’ Arne looked at Fatima. ‘Sorry.’
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘Jim’s right, it’s a worm attack. I know how you feel.’
They stared at the visual noise in the holovolume, rippling colours signifying nothing. Then the student spoke up, the young woman who had interrupted the meeting with the news and had since remained silent.
‘Er … I’m just talking to my friend in Palo Alto.’ She waved her wrist. ‘Their system’s been hit by the same thing, looks like.’
Such worm attacks rarely got through these days, which was one of the reasons everyone relied on the Cloud. But hundreds of scientists at least would have seen the images before the data was corrupted to oblivion.
‘Maybe the triangle was the start of the attack.’ Jim had never sounded so glum. ‘Corrupt a portion of data cleverly, get everyone worked up, then take down the lot. Bastards.’
Lucas put his hands in his pockets.
I could tell them I’ve a copy.
Perhaps he was not the only one in the world. What if anyone who might possess a copy was in danger?
It’s a paranoid fantasy.
But the photograph and note were real. From the creators of the worm? That seemed far more likely than a message from his grandmother, long deceased.
‘—OK there, Lucas?’
‘Uh, yeah. Just hacked off at all that.’ He nodded at the terminal. ‘If this was April Fool’s, you might just about understand it, you know?’
‘Malicious fuckers,’ said Arne. ‘Begging your pardon, Fatima.’
‘All right.’