I drank the last of my tea and brought the mug over to the sink, where I washed it and set it on the drying rack. A holiday candle burning on the counter gave a sharp wintergreen smell to the air. “Keep talking.”
“Have you kept up with the literature?” Brian asked, but we were interrupted by a wailing cry before I could answer. Sean, my son, catapulted into the room and crashed into me. At five years old, his only speed setting was full acceleration, and his only means of stopping was collision.
“Slow down,” I said. “What’s wrong?”
“Alessandra won’t let me play,” he said, still crying.
“She’s practicing. Why don’t you find your bugle?”
“It’s broke. And she hit me!”
“Alessandra hit you?”
“In the head! With her trumpet!”
I looked at the spot and, sure enough, a small half-moon cut was swelling, clearly visible through his blond, short-cropped hair. I sighed. Another chapter in the ongoing drama of the Kelley children.
Alessandra flew around the corner a moment later. She was dark-haired, like her mother, but without Elena’s easy-going patience. “It wasn’t my fault,” she said.
“Not your fault?” I said. “Look at that cut! You’re fourteen, Alessandra, not seven. You have to find a better way of dealing with him than violence.”
“I was just playing. He ran into it.”
“You’re seriously going to tell me he got that cut just running into you? That you were practicing, minding your own business, and he just crashed into your trumpet hard enough to leave that mark?”
She crossed her arms and gave me one of her ferocious, sullen glares.
“Don’t look at me that way,” I said. “You have to learn to keep that temper of yours under control.”
“You mean like you did with that guy at the gym who insulted Mom?” Alessandra asked.
I felt my blood rising. “Don’t push me, young lady. Fix your attitude right now and apologize to your brother.”
Elena put a hand on my arm again. “We have a guest,” she said. “You stay and talk; I’ll bring the kids upstairs and deal with this.” She rummaged in the freezer and pulled out a teddy bear icepack, which she pressed to Sean’s head. “Upstairs for your pajamas,” she said. She rotated Sean by his shoulders and pointed him in the right direction.
“Give me a moment to get the kids to bed, and then I’ll be back,” Elena said to Brian. “Help yourself to coffee; there should be another cup’s worth in the pot.”
I caught Brian staring at Sean’s short arm, though he didn’t say anything about it. It’s what most adults did: they stole glances, with varying degrees of subtlety, but didn’t ask. Sean had been born that way, his left arm half the normal length, with a tiny hand at the end of it that couldn’t grasp anything very well.
I heard Alessandra still protesting her innocence as they climbed the stairs. Brian snickered. “Always the domestic, weren’t you?” he said. “Diapers and runny noses.” We’d been out of diapers for several years, but I didn’t bother to point this out. I couldn’t believe that even when he showed up at my house shaking in fear and asking for help, he could still manage to look down his nose at my family.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s hear it.”
Brian held my gaze for a beat. “You remember the nature-as-computer argument?”
“Sure. The idea that the whole universe is just one big quantum computer.”
“All the information in the universe can be represented by a vast but finite number of bits, just a few for each particle: its type, its spin, its momentum, like that,” Brian said.
“It always sounded like doublespeak to me,” I said. “The universe is the universe. Calling it a computer doesn’t provide any scientific insight.”
Brian looked a little offended. “Yes, it does. You can simulate any real set of particle interactions with a quantum computer made up of the same number of particles, no matter how many particles and how complex the interaction.”
So far, this didn’t sound like anything to make anyone run out into the snow in flip-flops. It just sounded like wonky metaphysics. “Yeah? And I can simulate an apple with an apple. So what?”
“So, if you can simulate the universe with a quantum computer the same size as the universe, that means that the universe is indistinguishable from a quantum computer. For all practical purposes, it is a quantum computer.”
“Which means…” I was starting to get it.
“Which means it’s a computational device with a complexity factor far in excess of Pronsky’s Threshold.”
“Sufficient to generate consciousness,” I said, letting my incredulity show in my voice.
“Right.”
I couldn’t help it. I laughed. “You’re telling me, what? The universe is sentient?”
“Pieces of it.”
“You’re serious?”
Brian sat rigid in his chair, darting glances at the windows. He didn’t have to answer. I knew he was serious. I just didn’t know if he was crazy or not.
Just then, Claire came in and helped herself to Oreo cookies and a glass of milk. At sixteen, Claire generally chose her own bedtime. She sat down at the table, unscrewed a cookie, and dunked half of it.
I welcomed the distraction. “Claire, you remember Mr. Vanderhall?” I said.
“Sure, a little,” she said. “Glad to meet you.”
Brian’s eyes focused, and he shook her hand. “My pleasure.” He studied her face. “You’ve really grown up since I saw you last.”
He was right—in the last few years, Claire’s freckles had faded, and she’d traded girlish cuteness for a real beauty. Given Brian’s reputation with women, though, I didn’t like him noticing it. Besides, it wasn’t just Claire’s beauty that made her an impressive young woman.
“Claire’s at the top of her class,” I said. “National Merit semifinalist, too.”
Claire rolled her eyes. “Dad.”
Elena came back into the room. “Head upstairs, please,” she said to Claire.
“I haven’t finished my cookies.”
“Take them upstairs with you. We need to speak with Mr. Vanderhall privately.”
“Can I watch the stream before bed?”
“Fine. Just go upstairs.”
She gave me a kiss, murmured a “G’night, Daddy,” and went up.
Elena settled into the chair next to me with her mug of coffee, probably cold by now. “So, what’s this all about?”
I rolled my eyes. “Brian was telling me how there are invisible fairies in the spaces between the atoms,” I said.
He leaned forward. “They’re real, Jacob.”
“What are? The fairies?”
“Consciousnesses. Beings. Artificial intelligences, like in a computer, only the computer in this case is the whole universe.”
“And you’ve seen them?”
“A lot more than that. They’ve talked to me. Taught me things.” His expression was cryptic, a smile laced with uneasy fear. “It’s probably easier if I show you.” He leaned over and picked a gyroscope up off the floor. Sean must have left it there—he was forever leaving his toys about. The gyroscope had been a gift from me, like the microscope and chemistry set and electricity kit—all attempts to interest Sean in science. He had paid little attention to my explanations of angular momentum, but he did like to watch the gyroscope spin at odd angles, balanced on a wire or a pencil point. For the first day, at least. Ultimately it was no more to him than a glorified top. He had lost the string and moved on to other toys.
Brian held the gyroscope up like a magician displaying a coin that was about to disappear. I felt a strange internal tugging sensation and wondered what it meant. Nervousness? Did I really care that much about what this was all about?
He held the gyroscope upright on the tabletop. Without the string, there was no way to set the gyroscope spinning. When Brian let go of the wheel, however, it started spinning on its own. He removed his hand, and it kept going, precessing with a slight wobble, but otherwise stable. My practical mind looked immediately for the power source, thinking that he might have switched the gyroscope for one with an ingeniously hidden battery and motor, but as far as I could tell, it was the same steel and plastic model, simple and cheaply made. There was no room for a power source. Despite this, the gyroscope kept spinning.