Chapter 6

"The possibilities were almost limitless. Apart from fundamentally changing our understanding of the physical universe, repealing the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and guaranteeing himself the Nobel Prize, this discovery had huge practical applications."

I nodded, seeing it. "Sure. Record an apple. Eat the apple. Then press a button and, zing, there's another apple. My God, talk about ending world hunger! You could..."

She was shaking her head. "No. I -- well, he, I actually mean -- thought of that. But it turns out that what he was doing was erasing the fact that the cigarette was ever burned in the first place. No ash or nicotine from the cigarette would have stayed in your lungs after the cigarette was restored. Or to use your example, the first guy to eat the apple wouldn't have any apple parts in his stomach after the 'zing' created the apple back in the Op-sphere. You see?"

I rubbed my forehead. "I think so. It didn't really create a new apple — or a new cigarette. It just changed what happened to the cigarette."

"Right," she agreed. "Now, as it turned out, there was a way to do what you were thinking of. There were two kinds of basic changes that could be made. The first kind, the one we just discussed, imposed a new equation on the fabric, the... stuff... that Yehuda had discovered. The other..."

"Yehuda?"

"Sorry. Yehuda, Dr. Yehuda ben Ami, the senior scientist, the one that discovered all this."

"And Victor?"

"What?"

I looked at her a second, thinking. "And Victor?" I asked again. "Victor Romero? Who was he?"

"Oh. Right. He apparently worked for Yehuda. His part... comes later."

"Sorry," I said. "I just want to keep all the players straight." I paused. "You were saying there were two kinds of changes..."

"Yes. The first kind was forcing a change of reality, basically. You overwrote the equation for something with the equation for something else. It was a one-time thing. The second kind of change was different. He discovered you could force an additional equation on to the fabric. It wasn't originally part of the fabric. But that could do what you were talking about: make a second cigarette appear next to the first. This was a change that was part of reality, not a change of reality."

I must have looked baffled.

"Look," she said impatiently, "in the first case, the change rewrites history. The cigarette never burned in the first place. In the second case, the fact that a second cigarette appeared happened. It's a part of history. There's a new cigarette in the world. And if you somehow totaled up all the cigarettes ever manufactured, there would now be that number plus one more. It's a part of reality that this change happened."

"OK," I nodded. "So what happened to you and Lauren was the first type of change. Your equations, or the equations representing you, were re-written, reality was changed."

"Exactly. But listen: there are differences between the two. The first type of change doesn't require any on-going work. You power up, write the change to the medium, the fabric, the..."

"The matrix?" I suggested innocently.

She looked at me sourly. "Ha. Ha. Not quite. In the Matrix movies, the idea was an inner virtual reality and an outer actual reality that were both active, and different. This is, I grant, something like learning that there's an inner virtual reality, but there's no other reality going on. This substance, this fabric, is completely passive unless we cause it to respond."

"OK, OK. Keanu Reeves won't be playing me in the movie. Got it."

"Anyway," she continued after a pause, "the main limitation on those second types of changes was the computer systems. You could make the first type of changes all day; they were discrete transactions, over and done with. The second type required a continual... push, a continual force, to keep them active. The moment you stopped imposing them, they stopped existing. And we're not talking about 2 + 5 = 7 here. I don't understand the details, but even a simple cigarette equation required massive computer memory to hold in place. And the more changes you wanted, and the more complex you wanted them to be, the more computer power it took to keep them happening.

"You can see now why we can't feed the world. All the food we create would vanish the moment we turned off the computer."

Something about that conclusion nagged at me. I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Often, hearing a witness testify, I'd get that feeling and have to make a note to go back and see what I was missing. Here, I just nodded and let her continue.

"Somehow, Victor outsmarted Yehuda and took control of the device away from him, and ended up here in New York. He found a place upstate that gave him privacy. He set up the device in a place that let him connect directly to the power grid and gave him almost unlimited electrical power, and he decided to use the machine to fulfill some fantasies. I figure that he used the machine to make women... us, I mean... think that we were in love with him. He couldn't make that change a "forever" change because it would mean the new reality would be that we were always in love with him, and our friends and family would know we were in love with him. So he used that change to get us out and away, and then used the 'forever' change to erase us. And then he..." she paused. "Well, then you know what he did. He got to fuck a teen singing sensation and a leading actress and a TV personality all at once. And he would have probably kept going for a while, except..."

"The power failure!" I exclaimed.

"Exactly," she agreed. "The one thing Victor didn't count on was losing all his electrical power. He was attached directly to the grid, after all. But for some bizarre reason I still haven't completely figured out, the entire northeastern United States and parts of Canada as well lost all their electrical power on August 14th. It might be related to what he was doing; he drew a huge amount of power. Or it might just be a really unlucky coincidence. But with no power to the computer or the Op-sphere grid, the rig shut down. When it shut down... all of the temporary changes that it was imposing on reality vanished.

"I don't really remember the transition. We all woke up at some point after the power went off and beat the shit — pardon my language — out of Victor. I think Lauren's told you that part. Then we figured out we were trapped and we made Victor tell us everything. We used persuasion on him that included some nail clippers and his own cigarette lighter." She waited a beat and then said, "And he deserved it," in a curiously flat tone.

I had been making notes as she talked — lawyer's habit — and now I looked up from my pad.

"What happened to the third girl? Lisa Antoine?"

"I'm not sure. I think the same thing happened to her as happened to Lauren. While we were trying to figure out what to try, the power came back on. And the computer was set up for voice recognition and simple commands, so we tried to make it undo everything. Nothing that we tried worked as far as we could tell. Then Lauren triggered something by saying something like 'Send me home, ' because the computer asked if we wanted to terminate the running program and execute the send object program. We said yes, and it asked her what the destination was, and she said 'My house, ' or something like that. And then... she was gone."

I looked at Lauren, who seemed a little puzzled by something. Finally I nudged her and she said, "Yes. The next thing I knew, I was standing inside my house. I was there for maybe thirty seconds, and then I was in this wooded area next to Tyson's Corner. I have no idea why that happened."

I looked a question at Courtney, who shrugged.

"We tried the same formula with Lisa, and she vanished as well. Then I did it for myself. I ended up in a condo on the Upper East side that was where I live, but it was definitely not mine. The furniture was different and the wallpaper was different and I was lucky not to come face to face with whoever lived there."

The trilling of my cell phone interrupted our conversation, and when I saw who was calling, I excused myself and slipped outside the café to take the call privately. It was Dr. Lou, returning my call of yesterday. Amazing, I thought, how much had changed in the past day. I explained to him that it had been a false alarm, that I had a client that I thought might need a referral, but it turned out to be premature and I wouldn't need him after all. We exchanged pleasantries for a moment and then hung up. I turned to watch Courtney and Lauren at a distance, and a few thoughts that had been dancing around in my head solidified somewhat.