Loss of information, Jan says. Limited disk space. She's still smiling at me, insight shines from her eyes with a giddy radiance.
But I can see her vision now, and I don't know what she's smiling about. I see two spheres expanding, one within the other, and the inner one is gaining. The more I learn the more I lose, my own core erodes away from inside. All the basics, dissolving; how do I know that the earth orbits the sun?
Most of my life is an act of faith.
***
I'm half a block from safety when he drops down on me from a second-story window. I get lucky; he makes a telltale noise on the way down. I almost get out of his way. We graze each other and he lands hard on the pavement, twisting his ankle.
Technically, handguns are still illegal. I pull mine out and shoot him in the stomach before he can recover.
A flicker of motion. Suddenly on my left, a woman as big as me, face set and sullen, standing where there was only pavement a moment ago. Her hands are buried deep in the pockets of a torn overcoat. One of them seems to be holding something.
Weapon or bluff? Particle or wave? Door number one or door number two?
I point the gun at her. I try very hard to look like someone who hasn't just used his last bullet. For one crazy moment I think that maybe it doesn't even matter what happens here, whether I live or die, because maybe there is a parallel universe, some impossible angle away, where everything works out fine.
No. Nothing happens unless observed. Maybe if I just look the other way...
She's gone, swallowed by the same alley that disgorged her. I step over the gurgling thing twitching on the sidewalk.
"You can't stay here," I tell Janet when I reach her refuge. "I don't care how many volts they pump through the fence, this place isn't safe."
"Sure it is," she says. She's got the TV tuned to Channel 6, God's own mouthpiece coming through strong and clear; the Reborns have a satellite up in geosynch and that fucker never seems to go offline.
She's not watching it, though. She just sits on her sofa, knees drawn up under her chin, staring out the window.
"The security's better on campus," I say. "We can make room for you. And you won't have to commute."
Janet doesn't answer. Inside the TV, a talking head delivers a lecture on the Poisoned Fruits Of Secular Science.
"Jan—"
"I'm okay, Keith. Nobody's gotten in yet."
"They will. All they've got to do is throw a rubber mat over the fence and they're past the first line of defense. Sooner or later they'll crack the codes for the front gate, or—"
"No, Keith. That would take too much planning."
"Janet, I'm telling you—"
"Nothing's organized any more, Keith. Haven't you noticed?"
Several faint explosions echo from somewhere outside.
"I've noticed," I tell her.
"For the past four years," she says, as though I haven't spoken, "all the patterns have just... fallen apart. Things are getting so hard to predict, lately, you know? And even when you seem them coming, you can't do anything about them."
She glances at the television, where the head is explaining that evolution contradicts the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
"It's sort of funny, actually," Janet says.
"What is?"
"Everything. Second Law." She gestures at the screen.
"Entropy increasing, order to disorder. Heat death of the universe. All that shit."
"Funny?"
"I mean, life's a pretty pathetic affair in the face of physics. It is sort of a miracle it ever got started in the first place."
"Hey." I try for a disarming smile. "You're starting to sound like a creationist."
"Yeah, well in a way they're right. Life and entropy just don't get along. Not in the long run, anyway. Evolution's just a—a holding action, you know?"
"I know, Jan."
"It's like this, this torrent screaming through time and space, tearing everything apart. And sometimes these little pockets of information form in the eddies, in these tiny protected backwaters, and sometimes they get complicated enough to wake up and brag about beating the odds. Never lasts, though. Takes too much energy to fight the current."
I shrug. "That's not exactly news, Jan."
She manages a brief, tired smile. "Yeah, I guess not. Undergrad existentialism, huh? It's just that everything's so... hungry now, you know?"
"Hungry?"
"People. Biological life in general. The Net. That's the whole problem with complex systems, you know; the more intricate they get, the harder entropy tries to rip them apart. We need more and more energy just to keep in one piece."
She glances out the window.
"Maybe a bit more," she says, "than we have available these days."
Janet leans forward, aims a remote control at the television.
"You're right, though. It's all old news."
The smile fades. I'm not sure what replaces it.
"It just never sunk in before, you know?"
Exhaustion, maybe.
She presses the remote. The head fades to black, cut off in mid-rant. A white dot flickers defiantly on center stage for a moment.
"There he goes." Her voice hangs somewhere between irony and resignation. "Washed downstream."
***
The doorknob rotates easily in my grasp, clockwise, counterclockwise. It's not locked. A television laughs on the far side of a wall somewhere.
I push the door open.
Orange light skews up from the floor at the far end of the hall, where the living room lamp has fallen. Her blood is everywhere, congealing on the floor, crowding the wall with sticky rivulets, thin dark pseudopods that clot solid while crawling for the baseboards—
No.
I push the door open.
It swings in a few centimeters, then jams. Something on the other side yields a bit, sags back when I stop pushing. Her hand is visible through the gap in the doorway, palm up on the floor, fingers slightly clenched like the limbs of some dead insect. I push at the door again; the fingers jiggle lifelessly against the hardwood.
No. Not that either.
I push the door open.
They're still in there with her. Four of them. One sits on her couch, watching television. One pins her to the floor. One rapes her. One stands smiling in the hallway, waves me in with a hand wrapped in duct tape, a jagged blob studded with nails and broken glass.
Her eyes are open. She doesn't make a sound—
No. No. No.
These are mere possibilities. I haven't actually seen any of them. They haven't happened yet. The door is still closed.
I push it open.
The probability wave collapses.
And the winner is...
None of the above. It's not even her apartment. It's our office.
I'm inside the campus perimeter, safe behind carbon-laminate concrete, guarded by armed patrols and semi-intelligent security systems that work well over half the time. I will not call her, even if the phones are working today. I refuse to indulge these sordid little backflips into worlds that don't even exist.
I am not losing it.
***
Her desk has been abandoned for two weeks now. The adjacent concrete wall, windowless, unpainted, is littered with nostalgic graphs and printouts; population cycles, fractal intrusions into Ricker curves, a handwritten reminder that All tautologies are tautologies.
I don't know what's happening. We're changing. She's changing. Of course, you idiot, she was raped, how could she not change? But it's as though her attacker was only a catalyst, somehow, a trigger for some transformation still ongoing, cryptic and opaque. She's shrouded in a chrysalis; something's happening in there, I see occasional blurred movement, but all the details are hidden.