Alastair Reynolds - Signal to Noise

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SIGNAL TO NOISE
Alastair Reynolds
Alastair Reynolds is a frequent contributor to
Interzone
, and has also sold to
Asimov’s
Revelation Space
, was widely hailed as one of the major SF books of the year; it was quickly followed by
Chasm City, Redemption Ark, Absolution Gap
, and
Century Rain
, all big
sprawling space operas that were big sellers as well, establishing Reynolds as one of the
best and most popular new SF writers to enter the field in many years. His other books
include a novella collection,
Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days
. His most recent
Galactic North
and
Zima
Blue and Other Stories
. Coming up is a new novel,
The Prefect
. A professional
scientist with a Ph.D. in astronomy, Reynolds comes from Wales, but lives in the
Netherlands, where he works for the European Space Agency.
Reynolds’s work is known for its grand scope, sweep, and scale (in one story,
“Galactic North,” a spaceship sets out on in pursuit of another in a stern chase that takes
thousands of years of time and hundreds of thousands of light-years to complete; in another,
“Thousandth Night,” ultrarich immortals embark on a plan that will call for the physical
rearrangement of all the stars in the galaxy. In the intimate and compassionate story that
follows, he sticks a lot closer to home, in one sense—while in another sense taking us to
another universe altogether, one further away than the most distant galaxies, but close as
the touch of a hand.
* * * *
FRIDAY
MICK Leighton was in the basement with the machines when the police came for him. He’d
been trying to reach Joe Liversedge all morning to cancel a prearranged squash match. It
was the busiest week before exams, and Mick had gloomily concluded that he had too much
tutorial work to grade to justify sparing even an hour for the game. The trouble was that Joe
had either turned off his phone or left it in his office, where it wouldn’t interfere with the
machines. Mick had sent an email, but when that had gone unanswered he decided there
was nothing for it but to stroll over to Joe’s half of the building and inform him in person. By
now Mick was a sufficiently well-known face in Joe’s department that he was able to come
Science Fiction, Spectrum SF
, and elsewhere. His first novel,
books are a novel,
Pushing Ice
, and two new collections,
 and go more or less as he pleased.
“Hello, matey,” Joe said, glancing over his shoulder with a half-eaten sandwich in one
hand. There was a bandage on the back of his neck, just below the hairline. He was
hunched over a desk covered in laptops, cables, and reams of hardcopy. “Ready for a
thrashing, are you?”
“That’s why I’m here,” Mick said. “Got to cancel, sorry. Too much on my plate today.”
“Naughty.”
“Ted Evans can fill in for me. He’s got his kit. You know Ted, don’t you?”
“Vaguely.” Joe set down his sandwich to put the lid back on a felt-tipped pen. He was
an amiable Yorkshireman who’d come down to Cardiff for his postgraduate work and
decided to stay. He was married to an archaeologist named Rachel who spent a lot of her
time poking around in the Roman ruins under the walls of Cardiff Castle. “Sure I can’t twist
your arm? It’ll do you good, you know, bit of a workout.”
“I know. But there just isn’t time.”
“Your call. How are things, anyway?”
Mick shrugged philosophically. “Been better.”
“Did you phone Andrea like you said you were going to?”
“No.”
“You should, you know.”
“I’m not very good on the phone. Anyway, I thought she probably needed a bit of
space.”
“It’s been three weeks, mate.”
“I know.”
“Do you want the wife to call her? It might help.”
“No, but thanks for suggesting it anyway.”
“Call her. Let her know you’re missing her.”
 “I’ll think about it.”
“Yeah, sure. You should stick around, you know. It’s all go here this morning. We got a
lock just after seven this morning.” Joe tapped one of the laptop screens, which was
scrolling rows of black-on-white numbers. “It’s a good one, too.”
“Really?”
“Come and have a look at the machine.”
“I can’t. I need to get back to my office.”
“You’ll regret it later. Just like you’ll regret canceling our match, or not calling Andrea. I
know you, Mick. You’re one of life’s born regretters.”
“Five minutes, then.”
In truth, Mick always enjoyed having a nose around Joe’s basement. As solid as
Mick’s own early-universe work was, Joe had really struck gold. There were hundreds of
researchers around the world who would have killed for a guided tour of the Liversedge
laboratory.
In the basement were ten hulking machines, each as large as a steam turbine. You
couldn’t go near them if you were wearing a pacemaker or any other kind of implant, but
Mick knew that, and he’d been careful to remove all metallic items before he came down the
stairs and through the security doors. Each machine contained a ten-ton bar of
ultra-high-purity iron, encased in vacuum and suspended in a magnetic cradle. Joe liked to
wax lyrical about the hardness of the vacuum, about the dynamic stability of the magnetic
field generators. Cardiff could be hit by a Richter six earthquake, and the bars wouldn’t feel
the slightest tremor.
Joe called it the call center.
The machines were called correlators. At any one time eight were online, while two
were down for repairs and upgrades. What the eight functional machines were doing was
cold-calling: dialing random numbers across the gap between quantum realities, waiting for
someone to answer on the other end.
In each machine, a laser repeatedly pumped the iron into an excited quantum state.
By monitoring vibrational harmonics in the excited iron—what Joe called the
back-chirp—the same laser could determine if the bar had achieved a lock onto another
strand of quantum reality—another worldline. In effect, the bar would be resonating with its
counterpart in another version of the same basement, in another version of Cardiff.
 Once that lock was established—once the cold-calling machine had achieved a
hit—then those two previously indistinguishable worldlines were linked together by an
information conduit. If the laser tapped the bar with low-energy pulses, enough to influence it
but not upset the lock, then the counterpart in the other lab would also register those taps. It
meant that it was possible to send signals from one lab to the other, in both directions.
“This is the boy,” Joe said, patting one of the active machines.
“Looks like a solid lock, too. Should be good for a full ten or twelve days. I think this
might be the one that does it for us.”
Mick glanced again at the bandage on the back of Joe’s neck. “You’ve had a
nervelink inserted, haven’t you.”
“Straight to the medical center as soon as I got the alert on the lock. I was
nervous—first time, and all that. But it turned out to be dead easy. No pain at all. I was up
and out within half an hour. They even gave me a Rich Tea Biscuit.”
“Ooh. A Rich Tea Biscuit. It doesn’t get any better than that, does it. You’ll be going
through today, I take it?”
Joe reached up and tore off the bandage, revealing only a small spot of blood, like a
shaving nick. “Tomorrow, probably. Maybe Sunday. The nervelink isn’t active yet, and that’ll
take some getting used to. We’ve got bags of time, though; even if we don’t switch on the
nervelink until Sunday, I’ll still have five or six days of bandwidth before we become
noise-limited.”
“You must be excited.”
“Right now I just don’t want to cock up anything. The Helsinki boys are nipping at our
heels as it is. I reckon they’re within a few months of beating us.”
Mick knew how important this latest project was for Joe. Sending information
between different realities was one thing, and impressive enough in its own right. But now
technology had escaped from the labs out into the real world. There were hundreds of
correlators in other labs and institutes around the world. In five years it had gone from being
a spooky, barely believable phenomenon, to an accepted part of the modern world.
But Joe—whose team had always been at the forefront of the technology—hadn’t
stood still. They’d been the first to work out how to send voice and video comms across the
gap with another reality, and within the last year they’d been able to operate a
camera-equipped robot, the same battery-driven kind that all the tourists had been using
before nervelinking became the new thing. Joe had even let Mick have a go on it. With his
hands operating the robot’s manipulators via force-feedback gloves, and his eyes seeing
 the world via the stereoscopic projectors in a virtual-reality helmet, Mick had been able to
feel himself almost physically present in the other lab. He’d been able to move around and
pick things up just as if he were actually walking in that alternate reality. Oddest of all had
been meeting the other version of Joe Liversedge, the one who worked in the counterpart
lab. Both Joes seemed cheerily indifferent to the weirdness of the setup, as if collaborating
with a duplicate of yourself was the most normal thing in the world.
Mick had been impressed by the robot. But for Joe it was a stepping stone to
something even better.
“Think about it,” he’d said. “A few years ago, tourists started switching over to
nervelinks instead of robots. Who wants to drive a clunky machine around some smelly
foreign city, when you can drive a warm human body instead? Robots can see stuff, they can
move around and pick stuff up, but they can’t give you the smells, the taste of food, the heat,
the contact with other people.”
“Mm,” Mick had said noncommittally. He didn’t really approve of nervelinking, even
though it essentially paid Andrea’s wages.
“So we’re going to do the same. We’ve got the kit. Getting it installed is a piece of
piss. All we need now is a solid link.”
Nature
cover article in his friend’s eyes. Perhaps he was even thinking about taking
that long train ride to Stockholm.
And now Joe had what he’d been waiting for. Mick could practically see the
“I hope it works out for you,” Mick said.
Joe patted the correlator again. “I’ve got a good feeling about this
one.”
That was when one of Joe’s undergraduates came up to them. To
Mick’s surprise, it wasn’t Joe she wanted to speak to.
“Doctor Leighton?”
“That’s me.”
“There’s somebody to see you, sir. I think it’s quite important.”
“Someone to see me?”
“They said you left a note in your office.”
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