The Pattern Mafia -In Your Own Time Hollywood
The Story So Far… While Molly is fending of Bleach Boy’s attempted assault on the Burning Bear with an empty swan-off shotgun and a bucket of East End bravado Charli is squaring off with Ed the Ted in his garage. They are both about to get a rude interruption …
The door to the garage bangs open and Gentleman Goon calls out from the doorway,
“Monkeys, Mr Ed.”
Skeleton Man raises his hand in reply and then gets to his feet and walks to the steel rack of old cans and random metal parts. He puts both hands on the uprights of the rack and pulls. Metal shrieks. Concrete chuffs. The rack opens halfway like a door onto an aperture no more than four feet high and three wide. Beyond the aperture lies darkness and the wet paper stink of damp and old brick.
“Hang on,” Skeleton Man says.
He reaches behind the rack to fumble with something out of sight. He lays a grey and fibrous string over the back of one of the shelves holding big rectangular gallon-sized tin cans of Castrol GTX and Imperial Oil, all rusted at their seams, and then pulls the rack open the rest of the way. In the darkness, the open mouths of two shotgun barrels appear, and behind them an old wooden chair to which the shotgun is mounted on some Rube Goldberg contraption of metal struts and pulleys.
“Burglar alarm,” Skeleton Man explains, and pulls the rack fully open. He ducks inside the dank opening and moves the chair back.
“In you go.” Skeleton Man points at the bleak dark rectangle. I stare into the churchyard darkness and shake my head.
“Listen to me carefully. No, fucking, way.”
“Your choice. It’s either Uncle George’s Hotel, or rendition monkeys. Make your mind up, cos they are on their way.”
Once past the entrance hole the space opens out into what? A vault? A cellar? A secret anarchist crypt? The ceiling is somewhere over my head lost in the dark. The space sounds big, but I can see another brick wall straight ahead of me. And there is this bed of sorts, made from thin grey metal rods and khaki canvas like a stretcher with legs. Blankets are neatly stacked on top of the canvas. Skeleton Man backs into the space and the screech of metal on concrete shuts out the light. I am on my own. In the dark. With an evil old spider bastard with a face like a hatchet. My skin prickles with anticipation and there is this whine going on in my head, high pitched and shivering.
“Hang on,” the evil old spider says.
And with a click there is light from a small table light standing on a stool beside the bed. It’s as pretty as a wart, but it has a red fringed shade that adds warmth to its light. There is an old bone-white transistor radio on the stool. Analogue; the kind with a big round dial for tuning and a single speaker behind a gold cloth grill. The light from the ugly little lamp makes a pool of warmth in a space that is big but mostly vertical, the brick wall curving up from the floor to meet far overhead, the arch of the viaduct. There is a small desk and a wooden chair beside the entrance. Piles of books lay beside the desk, some three foot high. There are manuals and engineering books, paperbacks with orange spines, a pile of magazines called Motorcycle Mechanic with a battered thermos flask standing on the top.
Skeleton Man fumbles with something and the Wart’s cousin turns him into a silhouette before the desk. He scrapes the chair with the shotgun back into position, both barrels pointing at the metal back of the rack. Very gingerly, he replaces the string on the Rube Goldberg firing mechanism, and attaches the free end to a hook on the door. He lets out his breath in a puff that turns into a cough, then turns the wooden desk chair around, sits on it, and gurns at me.
“I hate it when it goes off in here. Deaf for a week. You might want to wrap-up in a blanket, we are going to be in here for a while and it can get a bit nippy,” he said, his voice lowered to a rasp.
“You sleep here?”
“Depends on the climate. If it’s got a bit bizzy it’s nice to have a place to hole up until it all blows over.”
“How long?”
“Depends. Spade will manage the entertainment with Arret’s boys. All we have to do is wait. Could be a few hours though, and you’ll feel the chill. There’s tonnes of earth and brick overhead that never gets the light so it never gets proper warm wivout the fire on, but that’s in me office. The blankets clean.”
“Where do you live?”
“That’s not for public consumption, Hollywood.”
He looks too old to be human, like some fossilised remains animated by cigarettes and spleen. In the silence that follows I ask him the question I have wanted to ask since I met him.
“Just how old are you?”
Skeleton Man looks surprised, shrugs thin shoulders. “Mum wasn’t much for paperwork. I got birthdays of course, every kid gets birthdays, its just the date moved about a bit.”
He can’t look me in the eye for long. Looks at his hands, the floor, the pile of books by the classroom desk, a brief glimpse at me then his uneasy eyes return to their orbit. That is new and unwelcome, as if our relationship had changed in some unexplained way. I sit down on the camp bed which creaks as it takes my weight. The top blanket feels chilly under my fingers. The khaki fabric of the bed is as course as sacking. I am feeling the heat sucked out of my bones by the brick wall and concrete floor. The blanket is fibrous and heavy but it’s clean and after a couple of minutes the blanket begins to warm me up. I have it draped around my shoulders, and its big enough to cover my knees. Only my calves and shins feel the chill, and my feet. The silence stretches out into the shadows as cold as the bricks and concrete.
Then his whispering husk of a voice asks, “where did it come from, the Thing?”
“How do you mean?”
“How far away?” His face is in shadow. He is hunched forwards. I can’t see his expression. Image it’s fearful, his voice has that sort of tension.
I shrug “I am sorry, there is no way to measure it.”
“You must have some idea.”
“It’s just a machine address.”
“Explain it to me proper. Like I am one of your lot, a scientist.”
He is statue still. Expectant. And why not explain it, explain it all? It’s what started this chaos. In a sense I owe it to him. If it had not been for me he would be tinkering with his old machines and engaging in minor crime and moping after that peroxide blonde that he shares a history with. And it will pass the time. And just maybe he will understand enough to know that it wasn’t really my fault. Maybe. Ok, Parker, let’s give it a shot.
“Imagine a computer that, when you activate it, duplicates itself an infinite number of times, an array of machines that stretch out forever. They are invisible to us, but no less real. And on the one that you and I can see and touch, the one in our world, you run a program. It’s not a very big program, but it sets up a state in our machine and, as that machine is entangled with all the rest, the same state is set up in all the invisible ones, the array we can never physically touch. The program sets a variable, a variable that is an address for our computer, and on all invisible machines a variable is also set for those machines.”
“All of them?”
“As far as the entanglement holds.”
“How many?”
“Sand on the beach time, stars in the universe, at least billions of them, probably an infinity of them.”
The ‘Fuck me’ that follows is barely audible. Skeleton Man’s head is hanging between his skinny shoulders. He looks up at me, and nods.
“Go on.”
“The program calculates a random number and assigns the number to the variable as the machine’s address. Each copy of our computer in the array does the same thing. So all the computers have a random number as their address, but here’s the trick, that number is unique to each machine.”
“Why not the same number?”
“The whole point about quantum computation is that it completes all possible computations and returns the result that is right for that universe. In this case, all the possible random number computations, not the same random number repeated.”
He shakes his head, “I hate weird bollox. So why is this clever? I suppose it is clever, you are so fucking smart they had to lock you away.”
“Say you have some data you want to save to a machine in one of the other worlds. You know the machine address is different to your own, but you don’t know what it is. But what if you just create a new random number as an address and save the data to that new address?”
“It fails.”
“We have an infinite number of computers in our array. Out there, somewhere, is a machine with that random number as its address. And on that machine, the program runs, and it saves the data. On all the others it fails.”
Skeleton Man screws up his face. It’s like the face of a gargoyle crumpling. A “Gah!” escapes from his twisted lips in an involuntary curse. I wait for him to process the idea, and you can see him turning it over in his mind, the sharp edges of the idea moving the lines on his face. He looks up, glares at me for a very long minute.
“So you can store data on any one of an infinite number of machines”.
Damn but this old bastard is smart.
“Cool isn’t it. One machine, near infinite storage.”
“Near infinite? I thought it was an infinite array.”
Yup, he really is bright. He’s wasted on old motorbikes and amateur crime.
“You are limited to the number of addresses you can store on your machine, that’s not infinite. But it’s a data base billions of times bigger than your machine can hold.”
“Alright. Say I believe all this malarky works. How do you get the data back?”
“You already have the address of the distant machine; you created it on yours. You just run a routine that calls the data from that distant address, just like calling data from a machine in any other network.”
“And you have done this?”
“Yup. I stored a five letter word on the quantum network, cleared the word from my machine’s memory, then called the word back from a machine in an invisible world.”
“Bloody hell girl.” Skeleton man lets out a huge sigh running his hands through his crest. “You are breaking my head. What was the word?”
I thought I was being so smart at the time. I thought it looked good in my thesis, and for a long time it did. A little stylistic flourish to be appreciated by the initiated. It felt very right, a definitive demonstration of the claim that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from …
“Magic.”
“Magic. Yer, that sounds about right, magic. Turned out to be black magic though, didn’t its Hollywood.”
“That’s not fair.”
“So how did they contact the Thing’s builders then? And more important, how do we send it back. Is that possible? Can we shut is down, send it back, exorcise the fucking thing? Do you know how to do that?”
“No”
Skeleton Man sighs heavily, runs thin fingers through his crest, stroking it back.
“Too much to hope for I s’pose. So what did they want with it?”
“I don’t know the details of what they did so this is just a guess. It’s what I would do if I wanted to send an invitation. They used the quantum network to set up a signal, an unmistakable sign of intelligence, maybe a list of primes-and set that signal repeating over and over again. They built a beacon.”
“Who were they signalling?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they wanted to jailbreak the sim. Basically contact what they call the real. Maybe they wanted to see if anyone else had made the same breakthrough.”
“But something else answered the phone?”
“I guess so. I doubt it was what they expected. At first they thought the thing was an interface, that’s what they referred to it as, the interface.”
“And you think it’s a seed.”
“That’s just a speculation. Maybe just because it looks organic. And its growing, changing into something else.”
“It’s doing that alright.”
“Can I see it?’ I try.
“No.” Skeleton Man’s reply is blunt, harsh.
“What are you planning to do then?”
“I’m going to sell it to the highest bidder. That way I get enough money to escape.”
“ You just can’t, you just can’t do that!”
“You don’t know what it is, you don’t know what it’s for, you don’t know how to send it back, you don’t know how to stop it. Just what is your plan then Hollywood?”
“I don’t know yet, I just know you can’t let Algebra have it back.”
“It might not be Algebra. It goes to the highest bidder, Hollywood. Whoever that is.”
“What? Are you fucking insane!”
“I am not the one who brought it into the world girl. That was the insane bit. All I can do is blag enough money so I can keep moving, keep off grid. Whatever happens next is up to some other bugger, not me.”
“So just run away? Leave someone else to deal with it?”
“Someone else might be able to deal with it. I know I can’t. Look, if this is going to get serious, the real heavies are going to step in, agencies, governments. They may have the resources and the expertise to stop it. I’d be surprised if they aren’t already moving, it’s out in the open now, they must know something weird is going down.”
“You’ve never worked with government agencies have you?”
“Been my life’s work to avoid them.”
“There’s nothing there anymore. Everything got outsourced.”
“All the more reason to find a nice deep bunker then.”
“But you have to warn people, you just have to. Fine run away and hide if you must but give others a warning at least. For gods’ sake, you may have fuck all in your life, but there’s a whole world out there that does.”
The old monster stares me out again. I look down at my feet. The scar on my left shoe has been joined by a new scrape. The floor of the hide is concrete, and it’s sucking the heat out of my body through the soles of my feet.
“Nah, you can do it. You can warn them,” he said, through the coughing, each word punctured by a hack. The evil old spider bastard turns his ugly lights off. Cellar dark. Infinite black.
There is a flare of yellow light as the old monster lights up another roll-up, and coughs feebly. I look up at his mask of a face, shadows for eyes, the match flickering out to hide the mask again. Skeleton Man reaches into a pocket in his overalls and pulls out his phone. He points it at me. The phone’s camera light blinds me so that I have to cover my eyes.
“In your own time Hollywood.”