How To Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart (VI): Back to Work
FWD:fwd:fwd:null:c://IF_JASON TAVARES::THEN_SEEKING YOUR IMMEDIATE FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE!re::GRAVITATIONAL∞COLLAPSE --
Previously on…
Jason Tavares is finance bro looking for love … but his obsession with chemtrails and 9/11 conspiracy theories keep getting in the way. When those obsessions threaten a major investment deal at his company, he agrees to attend an addiction support group for conspiracy theorists. It’s there he meets a paranoid mom named Monica Lund who believes she’s a Targeted Individual for PsyOps; and Adam Oh, a wannabe rockstar whose thinks his creative streak has been stolen away by some mysterious aliens; along with Felix Buckley, a racist cop who believes in Lizard People. Jason storms out of the meeting in a huff — but he’s followed by the final member of the group, Kyle Contee, who corners him in a bar to talk about the Berenstein Bears and Mandela Effect. Jason finds a surprising sense of comfort in their strange conversation (though it certainly doesn’t hurt that she’s kind of cute, either). But now it’s time for everyone to go back to work and pretend like things are normal…
Chapter 7
Jason returned to work the next week, trying to act like everything was normal. Like he was totally normal, and wasn't skating thin ice because of what he'd said to the woman from Weyland Albemuth Strategic Technology Enterprise. Like he hadn't actually gone to a meeting for an addiction support group for conspiracy theorists.
He had ordered his iLexus unit to wake him at quarter-of seven, like he always did every. He showered; commanded the apartment to clean up his clothes; threw on his best slacks and shirt; and walked to work with enough time to spare so he could steel up his confidence, meditating in motion to convince himself that he was a normal fucking person again. So that maybe he could make himself belong somewhere for once.
He wound his way through the gridded Elm City streets, he could see the scaffold printers rising high above the city, zipping back and forth and spitting out their composite materials like mechanical spiders building a beautiful web to trap their prey. Printed pre-fab buildings like the W.A.S.T.E. project on Prospect Hill went up quickly these days, but organic communities still took time to percolate. Social shifts moved in nearly-imperceptible increments, slipping by in the slightest variations on a theme until a month or so had passed and those who cared would look back just in time to see their local life had left behind nothing but an echo of The Way Things Used To Be.
Perhaps it was just a cultural shift that Jason hadn't noticed as he went about his daily life, consumed by cryptocoin, calculations, and conspiracies.
He entered the Kadath Capital lobby -- with that stupid tantalum-gold slogan of "Where dreams become reality!" emblazoned on the marble walls -- like all the other automatons, going through the monotonous motions of a life based on white-collar labor, pushing numbers that held no inherent meaning or value beyond what people like him projected upon them. He waved at the security robot at the front desk as if cared, then ran his hand through his hair to show his cool. But he had used too much pomade, and his hand just kind of stayed there, fingers trapped like waves of amber against the hard-gelled follicles of dead cells that grew out of his empty head.
Jason forced a smile, knowing the robots were recording his every move. That there would be an archive of that moment that someone else could dig up some day in the future -- for entertainment, or to use as proof that Jason was unstable, unfit for this life. He pushed the thought away as he walked towards the elevator, where he smiled and laughed and nodded along with all his casual work acquaintances as they grumbled on anon about the coffee and the weather and Sam From Stewardship's Daughter and That Moron From The Bane Account. The mere act of keeping up with all their nothingness held a strange adrenal thrill; it made it easier for Jason to keep his anxieties in check, just because he was so hyperfocused on his body's small responses, keeping up with the appearances of unremarkability. He was so concerned with making sure he blended in that his brain didn't have enough energy to worry about what would happen if he slipped and said something stupid again.
There was something strangely comforting about that.
Jason stayed at the office until 10pm that Monday, only packing it in when the overhead fluorescent lights shut off and left him in the dark. He went home, washed his clothes, and returned to work at eight o'clock Tuesday morning in a crisp new artificial skinsuit with the same mask of monotony.
By the time Wednesday rolled around, he was so locked back into his routine of veiled normalcy that he even found himself killing time around the water cooler in the company kitchen, where Christon held court with his fan-theories on some brand new TV show with vampirebots and cowboys. It seemed that everyone but Jason had not only watched the show, but also spent their hours combing over the multiple timelines and subtle costume clues to uncover the secrets that would lead them to the Next Great Content Twist. Jason played along with their enthusiastic chin strokes and small, thoughtful sounds, acknowledging that yes, he understood that reference, and oh, of course, that moment was great, and sure, he knew precisely every detail of that scene that Christon just alluded to and was now about to describe at length even though we've all already seen it, as evidenced by our aforementioned chin-stroke nods and thoughtful sounds. No spoilers, please.
But Jason's interest began to wane from this charade as it dawned on him: their obsessions with these stories weren't so different from his own obsession with the attacks on the World Trade Center. Except one was a fiction for advertising revenue, and the other was a struggle for power with conspiratorial capillaries that stretched all the way back to the darkest corners and tallest towers of the New World Order, and actually had an impact on their lives. Why were they so concerned about the connections between all of these meaningless details in some mind-numbing commercial entertainment, but still so willing to ignore the same shocking truths that littered the financial arrangements they'd made with Weyland Albemuth Strategic Technology Enterprise? Why had Jason been the one who was punished and reprimanded for seeking the symbology that actually affected their lives and their livelihoods? Why had --
-- why had Jason not realized that everyone in the kitchen was staring at him, waiting for his answer to a question or a reference that he hadn't heard, and wouldn't have understood even if he did. Fuck.
"Sorry," Jason said, stumbling to recover as he slid his feet towards the kitchen doorway. "I just remembered...that scene from the content reminded me...something in the project Mr. Atal gave me and...I should go double-check the..."
All things considered, he thought it was a pretty good deflection -- although it's not like Jason could have seen their response to his sad escape plan anyway.
Jason wasn't really lying to the group in the kitchen, at least not technically. He returned to his sleek black Swede-ish desk, in his cubicle office at the back corner of the building with its floor-to-ceiling view of the scorched brick base of the building next door. If he spun his chair at the right angle, he could almost get a glimpse of the waste bins that filled the alleyway below. The trash reserves were piled abnormally high that day, topped with a handmeme'd sign that said "W🍆ll s👻k 4 f🍑🍑d."
No sooner had Jason sit down in that oppressive high-backed faux chair than the flatscreen monitor on the wall flashed on. It ran through a hundred lines of green-tinged code, then flashed through several spreadsheets before settling on a digitized version of Mr. Atal's emotionless face.
"Tavares," he said, nodding slightly. He wore a suit that looked like it was made from silver seersucker, if such a thing were even possible.
Jason adjusted a mask of his own face and forced a smile. "Happy Hump Day, your honor."
Mr. Atal blinked. The screen blinked with him. "Are you -- " Either Mr. Atal or the screen blinked again, though Jason couldn't quite tell which it was. "Are you fucking with me, Tavares?"
"Absolutely not, sir," Jason said with a nod.
"Well...good." Mr. Atal glanced down -- at something, or himself, or maybe at Jason -- it wasn't really clear. Jason just hoped that one of them would blink away again, for good. "I've got a stack of start-up incubators apps for you to comb through. Can you clear away whatever other bullshit you were working on and do that for me?"
Jason blinked; he wasn't sure if Mr. Atal could see his reaction, what with his own digital blinking away. "Start-up incubators, sir?" he said, unable to hide the incredulous sneer in his voice. "Like, tech write-offs? Don't we have interns to handle that?"
"Sure. But you do want a job, don't you?"
"Of course."
"Well then I've got to give you something to do, and I can't really trust you with any of our valuable clients right now, can I?"
Jason swallowed. "No, sir. I suppose you can't."
"Don't be such a fucking welp, Tavares. It's just a demotion. Think of it like a favor. My nephew's in the spreadsheet somewhere, with some dumb plan to crowdsource Wi-Fi frequencies for content creators with some ad revenue as a data grab."
"So like radio? Like when we were kids?"
Once again, Mr. Atal blinked, or blinked away. "He's disrupting the broadcast industry, you twat," he said between blips of static. "I'm sure you can do some fancy number shit to help him out, right?"
"Fussing with doomed-to-fail startup apps so we can show our altruistic side to other investors." Jason couldn't help the cynicism in his voice, which burned at his throat as the words escaped. "Of course, sir."
Mr. Atal laughed. "What, you thought I was going to let you hang around with your thumb up your ass while you weaned your way off your bullshit conspiracies? I'm not paying you to have fun, Tavares. Just be glad I haven't submitted a formal demotion for you yet. There's plenty of bullshit menial administrative work for you to do in the meantime to maintain this illusion. Think of this as your penance.
"And remember: stay the fuck away from the Weyland account."
Mr. Atal's pixelated visage cackled as it faded away, leaving Jason with nothing but another boring number-crunching project specifically designed to numb his mind. There were no stakes in the project; no real exciting innovation, the way that Weyland Albemuth Strategic Technology Enterprises had presented to them. Just some disruption of some generic industry that Jason didn't care to understand -- some boring C-round tech startup that needed office space for its marketing team to deal with their off-shore manufacturing agents, before ultimately selling out to Alphabet, or Amazon, or Apple, as they'd planned. It was an easy investment, and of course they'd do fine. Jason wondered briefly if there was something holy in Mr. Atal's order, and the theory alone reminded him of all the ass-kissing phony camaraderie and fleeting first-level friendships he'd accrued at Kadath Capital -- the things he's always hated, but once was able to ignore.
And that made his mind wander back to what Mr. Atal had told him: that theories can change the realities they describe.
Jason's reality had changed, all right. But maybe that wasn't such a good thing after all. Because he still didn't have a theory to describe -- well, anything that had happened in the last week.
So he dove deep into the datasets to occupy his mind and distract himself, just like he always did. His eyes scrolled down and down the rows of numbers, names, and datapoints, as he tried to shift his mind into the focus of a sieve.
And just as he settled into the rhythms of the numbers, he was interrupted from his algorithmic analysis by a sudden white noise rhythm from the office VoAI.
"Incoming message," the VoAI announced without urgency.
"Okay?" Jason rubbed his eyes, trying to refocus himself. He wasn't really in the mood, but he played along anyway. "Identify caller?"
The VoAI released a ear-piercing feedback squeal of sudden network calculations and dials, pinging bleating signals to the server for connection. Jason had never heard it make such an awful sound. He covered his ears as he glanced up at the plasma screen where the caller ID was displayed, hoping to reset the system.
But there was no name. There was only a message: "FWD:fwd:fwd:null:c://IF_JASON TAVARES::THEN_SEEKING YOUR IMMEDIATE FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE!re::GRAVITATIONAL∞COLLAPSE -- "
Jason stumbled backwards, away from where the office's erratic digital assistant was housed above his cubicle. He cowered as he tried to shield his ears from the sudden sonic assault of unexplainable frequencies. The caller kept ringing, and the VoAI continued screeching out its feedback squall -- a sound, he noticed, that no one in the nearby cubicles seemed to react to.
The noise become a nail, hammering harder into the splitting wood of Jason's skull. So he did the only thing that he could think to do:
He answered the call.
Chapter 8
You finish your Wednesday morning coffee and dry-shower while the water runs to drown out all the recording devices. You squeeze into your heather blouse, then head down twelve flights of stairs and out the doors to the lab.
Sometimes you wonder if you should just take the elevator. It's not as if they're not monitoring the stairwell, too. But at least your morning exercise routine reduces the chance of a random encounter with one of their proxies, all scripted to incite some predetermined response from you. So maybe you can't stay ahead of them every single time; abject avoidance is always an option.
On the walk to work you see that Desi man again, this time wearing a White Sox hat, waiting at that same bus stop at the corner of Whitney and Church. You smile and wave -- why did you do that, Monica? -- and then you remind yourself that maybe he's just waiting for the bus, just waiting for work, just going through the same bland motions of a meaningless existence that no one cares to notice.
A Schrödinger's life. And maybe you smile and wave and that makes you the observer in the grand experiment of his life.
That's an empowering thought. Until you remember that the act of observation means the difference between life-and-death and life, or death. That your little spurt of friendliness may have just condemned him to the fiery depths, and it's all your fault.
And if it's all your fault -- if you just killed a man and sent him to Hell through something as passive as a neighborly greeting -- does that mean you're condemned as well?
You utter that commandment "Thou shalt not kill" as you walk through the office doors and wave at the indifferent security man at the desk. Sometimes you wish you had gotten to know him better -- or if not him, then any of the men who make their measly wage keeping watch at the entrance. There are three of them who rotate shifts, plus a few substitutes when the occasion arises. But mostly it's been the same few men shifting in-and-out for the last few years. And you're still too scared to befriend them. What if one of them -- or all three of them -- work for them? you think. Or worry. Maybe it's not thinking, technically, because it's actively worrying, it's a constant state of paranoia, and it's rational, not crazy, you know that, there are valid reasons for you to have such suspicions about such people and --
NO.
Stop it, Monica.
You take a breath. You smile at Taig behind the security desk and he gives you that rote friendly nod of co-workers who kind of know each other but also don't really care -- which is strange, because his job as a front desk security guard is to literally care, and be attentive about every individual that walks through that door and it's fine though, you totally understand how the ennui can get to you day after day after day after day and it's fine, you tell yourself, it's fine. It's fine.
"Hey," you say, fingers fluttering in a wave from your waist. Why did you do that, Monica?
Taig winks, with a slight salute from the brow. It almost feels ... flirtatious? You can't remember the last time anyone flirted with you, including your own estranged spouse. So even if it was meant to mean something, you're still not sure what that would look like. And that just makes you even more suspicious.
The Sleeping Giant physics lab is the only place you can turn off the panic, even if the work isn't all that you'd dreamed it would be. You had taken a job at one of those privatized university offshoots with visions of on-hands lab work and wild experimental procedures that would tear through the structures of spacetime, earning you accolades and global renown and all the other glory that a good scientist deserves.
Then you took time off to raise a child with his own cryptic language. Now the best work you can get is skimming spreadsheets on a part-time basis, swiping through an air-tablet of automated data compiled by intelligent laboratory systems that are already light years beyond your own ancient education. All you do is sort through and through the numbers, three days a week, with a stained white lab coat draped on your shoulders to make you feel special, like a part of the team, as you compare electron voltage rates and isotopic resonance and the scalar fields of Bosonic particulates in search of red flags and stand-outs that never appear.
But at least you know that at the end of the day, you get to go home to your Shan. That he'll be there waiting for you at the daycare you can barely afford without the state's support. That at least he's in your life, and away from your lying drunkard soon-to-be-ex.
You take another breath and let the numbers blur on the screen. As your eyes re-adjust and the digits take shape once again, you notice some recurrent similarity in the shapes that form, in a much higher frequency than what you're used to working with. You pull a stack of stickypaper tabs from your purse and slap one over the screen's on-board camera and microphone, suddenly nervous about what you've discovered.
Instinctively, your eyes flicker upward towards the source of the data on the file label, and you realize: these are the most recent remote sensor readings from the particle accelerator on Prospect Hill.
The lead engineers on the Prospect Project have been using the tunnels from the old supercollider to balance the pull of an artificially energized black hole, harvesting the dark matter into some kind of solid gravitational foundation that would counteract the electron charges and spin the particles out in perpetual motion.
Or something like that; you never can keep all the details straight. They only ever trained you to search for certain signs and anomalies, outlaid metrical indications of a breakthrough that someone else gets credit for. And maybe, just maybe you'll find it one day. Then maybe they'll promote you, give you a voice in the lab and the chance to shape the physical world and maybe, just maybe, today is that day, where the truth has finally revealed itself in the tiny cells of particulate surveillance when --
You take a deep breath and put aside three minutes to meditate. Sometimes you wonder if the antimatter ambience is getting to you. And if this truly is the key to your scientific success, well, you want to make sure that you're getting it right.
When your three minutes are up, you scroll back to the top of the air tablet screen and start through the numbers again, hoping to isolate the source of the strange geometric symbols you observed, just to be sure. You think back to the Desi man at the bus stop with his Schrödinger's life, and the power that was granted you by passive observation. You want to respect the weight of what you're doing here, so you stand up on your feet to get your brain moving better. You can hear yourself muttering the words beneath your breath as you try to parse the information, try to extrapolate the datum the way that you were taught to all those years ago in school, recalling the clash of the Lorentz invariant under Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, remembering how the kinetic energy of a zero-point field should be, and how it could potentially affect the half-integer spin of a five-dimensional brane in a superconformal field, which could mean -- oh.
Oh.
This is bad.
Or it could be bad, anyway, if you're actually reading the numbers right.
Which you are. Right, Monica? You're not just crazy. Right?
Whatever flaws you might suffer, you still understand your physics, and your faith, and this...this is everything a God particle could ever promise.
Your concentration dissipates like gaseous energy when Kincaid, the laboratory director, enters the cavernous room, speaking way too loudly with a businesswoman in tow.
For a brief moment, you wish you hadn't gouged the RFID chip out of your hand. It would have made it easier for you to steal away an archive of the datasheet you'd been working on.
"As you've seen, the extant facilities offer a remarkable variety of structural opportunities," Kincaid explains in his best sales pitch-booming voice -- which, as far as you're concerned, has never been very convincing.
"I was never interested in the building, Mr. Kincaid," the businesswoman replies with a scoff. You try not to let your eyes wander, but the woman's tight black dress seems to bend the laws of optics. "Only what was beneath it. Which is why I have to ask that you discontinue all ambient environmental observation on what is now my lawfully private property."
Kincaid hesitates, then forces a laugh. He shoots a swift look towards you and the other analysts, as if to encourage you all to turn your attention back to your air tablets and continue acting nonchalant, as if this isn't happening.
"The research that we do here, Ms Albemuth, it's for the benefit of all mankind." Kincaid's twine-like fingers knot nervously around themselves. "While I understand that we have agreed to relinquish the physical property to your organization, Prospect Hill is still a part of our planet, even our city, and as long as those facts remains true, we believe it is our duty to observe all potentially supersymmetrical elements that -- "
The woman waves her gloved right hand sharply through the air, as if slicing through the sound waves that had once been Kincaid's words. "I'm not interested in your altruistic aspirations, Mr. Kincaid." She sneers. "Nor am I concerned with whatever knowledge you believe is left out in the world to uncover. My only concern is the future of the property on Prospect Hill that I have rightfully purchased -- "
"Ah, but the processing is not complete. And even when it is, we will still be concerned with planetary physics. As long as it is of this Earth, our satellite sensors will continue to observe and record from that particular lot."
You can see the writing on the wall: this woman -- Ms Albemuth -- she's there to rescind your access to that very information. And given her sharp, dismissive attitude, she does not intend to leave until that datum is destroyed, bit bleached and zeroed-out multiple times until there's no hope of restoring it again. You don't know why the woman wants such a thing, although you know it makes her nervous. And you know that there's a pattern there, some important algorithm waiting to emerge and reveal its own great truth about the natural world, or at least what's left of it.
But you still need time to find it. You need to isolate the variables. And this woman -- Ms Albemuth -- is not about to let that happen.
Except now the convenience of your very-real concerns about government surveillance and the large-scale psychological operation in which you have become an unwilling player has suddenly screwed you even more. Because you no longer have that handy RFID implant that would allow you to download any information that you wanted and carry the data with you in the literal palm of your hand.
While Kincaid and Ms Albemuth continue to argue, you turn to the workstation next to you. You've never taken much stock in your colleagues before, and you only recognize Jasz by the nameplate above their air tablet. They’re probably twenty years your junior, and you feel a moment of embarrassment that you're both still working the same entry-level job. Would Jasz judge your choices, what you did for your son? Will they assume you're old and out of touch? What if they works for them as well -- maybe for the same reasons that they works at the lab, just some general data entry work to pay the bills while they party with her friends?
Your hands are shaking. Your stomach scrunches up in fear. But at least now you know what to do.
"I'm getting a little screen fatigue right now," You whisper to Jasz beside you. You place your hands gently on your midsection. "These old eyes, you understand."
"Not really but sure," Jasz replies without looking away from their monitor.
You lean in closer, keeping your voice down. "If I lock this spreadsheet, do you think you can print it out for me, so I can take a look at it offline?"
Jasz turns to you, their frowning face dripping with disgust. "Like, on paper?"
You shrugs and smiles the biggest, sugary-sweetest smile that you can.
"I mean, that's kind of wasteful but...wait, why can't you do it?"
You force a bubble of air up into her throat and feign like you're about to throw sick on the screen. "I was having some issues patching into the network -- I think I was still using my password from last week, so the system locked me out -- and plus, like I said, the screen, I can't..."
Jasz nods hesitantly. It's a look that you've seen too many times before, one that settles somewhere in between pity and repugnance. That dripping disdain is almost enough to make you feel like you're actually sick.
But Jasz answers in the affirmative. They still rolls her eyes at you, of course, then swipe across the screen, probably wondering why they haven't replaced this work with bots yet anyway. "Should be coming out on the fourth floor any moment now," they grumble. "You're welcome."
You give them a side-hug -- just to rub it in -- and run off to the stairwell right as Ms Albemuth instructs Kincaid to erase all the data.
You grab the papers from the printer and stash them in your floral pink backpack, then hide out in the bathroom for a while to let your faux-sickness subside. By the time you return to your desk after lunch, Jasz is either out themself or else finished with their shift. You pick a separate empty workstation, just in case, and set yourself up at another spreadsheet splayed upon an air tablet screen. This one has to do with the energy outputs in different parts of the city.
As you sift through the numbers, you think back to college, when every single one of them would have been remarkable. But now they've let it reach a point where energy is everything and hyperstorms are commonplace, and all the data that you would have flagged back then is now the static of the status quo that crackles through the air.
Every.
Single.
Cell.
On the spreadsheet, or the planet, you don't know anymore. They all read out-of-control, and now that's totally normal.
It's hard to find the outliers when everything is an extremity.