Against Gravity

"If you're referring to Sieracki's experiment, then, granted, we shared something. But it was all in our own heads. There was nothing objectively real about it."

"No, what we saw was real. The Bright are real."

"The Bright were from Robert's deranged-"

"For Christ's sake!" Buddy dropped the plate onto the grass and threw up his hands in the air. "Will you listen to yourself? What is it about all this that you can't accept? You were the one who told me the most about the Bright, before Robert died and-"

"Don't say it," Kendrick interrupted quickly.

"Look, I'm sorry. But it's just-"

"Here's a question back at you. When did your augmentations turn rogue?"

Buddy looked impressed. "What makes you think they have?"

"I found some medical records with all our names on them. They told me everything I needed to know. So tell me when."

"Round about the same time as you, probably. Anyone who got out of Ward Seventeen who hadn't yet developed rogue augments went on to develop them between nine and twelve months ago. We're all in the same fix. That's just one more reason why we all have to work together."

Buddy stood up to stretch his legs. "Okay, I brought some stuff I wanted to show you. It's all back in the tent, so care to join me?"

He turned away, ducking down to crawl into the tent's interior. Kendrick hesitated a moment, then followed.

Although it was based around an ancient design, the tepee had been made from modern heat-absorbing artificial fibres. There was enough room inside for both men to stand, and the supporting struts were fashioned from super-light alloy. Rather than living by basic means, Buddy had been able to spend his time here at the retreat in relative comfort while still maintaining the near-complete isolation he'd once craved.

Noise and activity covered the interior walls, eepsheets and printouts having been hastily taped onto any available surface. Kendrick noticed that the London Times was tacked up near his head, its real-time default set to its technology pages.

Kendrick saw mostly pictures and videos of the Archimedes orbital. One image looped endlessly, a computer animation very similar to the one he had found in Caroline's working files.

He studied some of the printouts, most of which were related to the LA Nuke, the Wilber Trials – anything that tied in to the history of the Labrats. If he hadn't known better, or hadn't seen some of the things he'd seen over the past several days, he would have thought that this was the work of an obsessive or a madman.

"I said I wanted to show you something. Look at this." Buddy carefully detached one eepsheet from the tent's i

"This is a multi-author feed that collates information relating to the space industry," Buddy explained. "A lot, but not all of it, consists of technical and safety issues."

Kendrick took the eepsheet and flicked through its summary page. "What am I supposed to be looking for here?"

"There's something happening near the Archimedes. A spatial anomaly that's got half the physicists in the world spi

"Meaning what?"

"Look – for Draeger, building the Archimedes was an important step on the road to proving the reality of the Omega Point. You're an expert on Draeger, so you know the theory."

The idea was more than a century old. It suggested that since intelligent life always sought to preserve itself, then, faced with the ultimate extinction – the final collapse of the universe and the end of time – that intelligence would seek to preserve itself indefinitely, using some unimaginable super-science of the most distant possible future. The result would be a subjective virtual environment, which, the theory argued, would be effectively indistinguishable from Heaven.

Kendrick saw the gleam in Buddy's eye and shook his head violently. "Oh, come on. The Omega Point theory just doesn't wash. You'd have to make a lot of prior assumptions for it to even begin to hold water."

Buddy made a dismissive gesture. "Look, what I'm saying is, if Draeger built the Archimedes primarily so that the nanite computer networks up there could try and find God for him – well, I'm saying they achieved it. Or they found something, that's for sure."

Kendrick couldn't keep the look of scepticism off his face. "Where's the proof?"

"You saw the evidence." Buddy tapped the side of his head. "The visions. The Archimedes."

"Or maybe there's something hard-wired into our augs. Something triggering a collective hallucination."

"C'mon, Kendrick, that's grasping at straws."

"Look, maybe there is something in this shared-experience thing. Maybe it's something like what happened to the four of us in the Maze, but if that's the case I'm only getting the thirty-second preview. Whatever the rest of you have been seeing, Erik made it clear that it was a lot more than I'd seen."

"Which would explain why you haven't been in touch. If you had, you'd-"

"I'd know. Sure. Erik said the same thing." Kendrick rubbed at his face. "Fine, so you're going to the Archimedes. How? And what are you going to do when you get there?"

"The Bright is the collective term by which the AI nanite communities On board the Archimedes refer to themselves, right? The Bright found the Omega… and they also found us."

"Buddy, this is utterly crazy."

"Listen to me. If you didn't see what the rest of us saw, then I'll tell you what we were shown. The Bright have learned a lot from the Omega. The anomaly I mentioned is a wormhole that they've constructed, a gateway to the end of time."

Kendrick began to snigger. "Yeah? So what would they do with that?"

"The Bright were designed to be curious. Every answer they could possibly desire is there at the end of time, in the Omega. So why not go straight to the source?"

"This is too much, Buddy. I don't know how to take it in. Do you know how ludicrous this sounds? A worm-hole? What kind of wormhole?"

"There's strong evidence that the Bright have figured out a way to access zero-point energy. You know what that is, right?"

"Sure, it's getting something out of nothing, energy out of empty space." Physicists had long theorized that even within cold, empty vacuum vast unbounded energy resources existed on the quantum scale, powering the constant generation of short-lived virtual particles in a seething, invisible maelstrom of creation. Finding a way to tap directly into those resources was an objective that physicists had been hunting for decades.

"Well, you'd need nearly infinite energy to keep a wormhole indefinitely open, in order to cause the kind of fluctuations that have been observed up there. It's hardly surprising that Los Muertos are so concerned about preventing us getting to the Archimedes. If they could get their hands on energy resources like that they could hold the whole world to ransom – if they wanted. They don't want any of us in the way."

A radiant smile spread across Buddy's features, and Kendrick was reminded of a supplicant throwing down his crutches at the feet of a healing saint. "But Los Muertos we can deal with. What matters is that the Bright have invited us to go along with them. To them, we're all the same: you, me and anyone else who survived Ward Seventeen."

Kendrick returned to Edinburgh and tried again to contact Caroline, without success. In the end he let himself into her flat a second time – and found it wrecked.

Either someone had searched it messily or there'd been a struggle there. He sat in Caroline's living room, with the moonlight streaming through her window-screen, painting pale stripes across broken furniture and a dent in one wall where it looked as though a body had impacted hard. He tried to remember that Caroline was the kind of woman who knew how to look after herself. For an hour or so Kendrick sat on her couch and stared numbly at the wreckage.