“So,” Hiram said. “Lorentzian wormholes?” David leaned back in the sofa and scratched his head. “To tell the truth, we’re nearing a dead end. Casimir technology seems to have inherent limitations. The balance of the capacitor’s two superconducting plates, a balance between the Casimir forces and electrical repulsion, is unstable and easily lost. And the electric charges we have to carry are so large there are frequent violent discharges to the surroundings. Three people have been killed in WormCam operations already, Hiram. As you know from the insurance suits. The next generation of WormCam is going to require something more robust. And if we had that we could build much smaller, cheaper WormCam facilities, and propagate the technology a lot further.”
“And is there a way?”
“Well, perhaps. Casimir injectors are a rather clunky, nineteenth-century way of making negative energy. But it turns out that such regions can occur naturally. If space is sufficiently strongly distorted, quantum vacuum and other fluctuations can be amplified until… Well. This is a subtle quantum effect. It’s called a squeezed vacuum. The trouble is, the best theory we have says you need a quantum black note to give you a strong enough gravity field. And so…”
“And so, you’re looking for a better theory.” Hiram riffled through the papers, stared at David’s handwritten notes, the equations linked by looping arrows. He glared around the room. “And not a SoftScreen in sight. Do you get out much? Ever? Or do you SmartDrive to and from work, your head in some dusty paper or other? From the moment you got here you had your FrancoAmerican head stuck up your broad and welcoming backside, and that’s where it has remained.”
David bristled. “Is that a problem for you, Hiram?”
“You know how much I rely on your work. But I can’t help feel that you’re missing the point here.”
“The point? The point about what?”
“The WormCam. What’s really significant about the ’Cam is what it’s doing out there.” He gestured at the window.
“Seattle?”
Hiram laughed. “Everywhere. And this is before the past-viewing stuff really starts to make an impact.” He seemed to come to a decision. He put his glass down. “Listen. Come take a trip with me tomorrow.”
“Where?”
“The Boeing plant.” He gave David a card; it bore a SmartDrive bar code. “Ten o’clock?”
“All right. But.”
Hiram stood up. “I regard myself as responsible for completing your education, son. I’ll show you what a difference the WormCam is making.”
Bobby brought Mary, his half-sister, to Kate’s abandoned cubicle in the Wormworks.
Mary walked around the desk, touching the blank SoftScreen lying there, the surrounding acoustic partitions. It was all clinically neat, spotless, blank. “This is it?”
“Her personal stuff has been cleared away. The cops took some items, work stuff. The rest we parcelled up for her family. And since then the forensics people have been crawling all over.”
“It’s like a skull the scavengers have licked clean.”
He grimaced. “Nice image.”
“I’m right, aren’t I?”
“Yes. But…”
But, he thought, there was still some ineffable Kateness about this anonymous desk, this chair, as if in the months she had spent here she had somehow impressed herself on this dull piece of spacetime. He wondered how long this feeling would take to fade away.
Mary was staring at him. “This is upsetting you, isn’t it?”
“You’re perceptive. And frank to a fault.”
She grinned, showing diamonds — presumably fake — studding her front teeth. “I’m fifteen years old. That’s my job. Is it true WormCams can look into the past?”
“Where did you hear that?”
“Well, is it?”
“…Yes.”
“Show her to me.”
“Who?”
“Kate Manzoni. I never met her. Show her to me. You have WormCams here, don’t you?”
“Of course. This is the Wormworks.”
“Everyone knows you can see the past with a WormCam. And you do know how to work them. Or are you scared? Like you were scared of coming here.”
“Up, if I may say so, yours. Come on.”
Irritated now, he led her to the cage elevator which would take them to David’s workstation a couple of levels below.
David wasn’t here today. The supervising tech welcomed Bobby and offered him help. Bobby made sure the rig was online, and declined further assistance. He sat at the swivel chair before David’s desk and began to set up the run, his fingers fumbling with the unfamiliar manual keys glowing in the SoftScreen.
Mary had pulled up a stool beside him. “That interface is disgusting. This David must be some kind of retro freak.”
“You ought to be more respectful. He’s my half brother.”
She snorted. “Why should I be respectful, just because old man Hiram couldn’t keep from emptying his sack? Anyhow, what does David do all day?”
“David is working on a new generation of WormCams. It’s something called squeezed-vacuum technology. Here.” He picked out a couple of references from David’s desk and showed them to her; she flicked through the close-printed pages of equations. “The dream is that soon we’ll be able to open up wormholes without needing a factory full of superconducting magnets. Much cheaper and smaller.”
“But they will still be in the hands of the government and the big corporations. Right?”
The big SoftScreen fixed to the partition in front of them lit up with a fizz of pixels. He could hear the whine of the generators powering the big, clumsy Casimir injectors in the pit below, smell the sharp ozone tang of powerful electric fields; as the machinery gathered its huge energies, he felt, as always, a surge of excitement, anticipation.
And Mary was, to Bobby’s relief, silenced, at least temporarily.
The static snowstorm cleared, and an image — a little blocky, but immediately recognizable — filled up the SoftScreen.
They were looking down over Kate’s cubicle, a couple of floors above them here at the Wormworks. But what they saw now was no cleaned-out husk. Now, the cubicle was lived-in. A SoftScreen was slewed at an angle across the desk, and data scrolled across it, unremarked, while a frame in one corner bore what looked like a news broadcast, a talking head with miniature graphics. There were more signs of work in progress: a cut-off soda can adapted as a pencil holder, pens and pencils scattered over the desk with big yellow legal pads, a couple of hard-copy newspapers folded over and propped up.
But what was more revealing — and heartbreaking — was the kipple, the personal stuff and litter that defined this as Kate’s space and no other: the steaming coffee in a therm-aware cup, scrunched up food wrappers, a prop-up calendar, an ugly, angular 1990s-style digital clock, a souvenir portrait — Bobby and Kate against the exotic background of RevelationLand — tacked ironically to one partition.
The chair was pushed back from the desk, and was still rotating, slowly. We missed her by seconds, he thought.
Mary was staring intently at the image, mouth open, fascinated by this window into the past — as everybody was, the first time. “We were just there. It’s so different. It’s incredible.”
…And now Kate walked from offstage into the image, as Bobby had known she would. She was wearing a simple, practical smock, and a lick of hair was draped over her forehead, catching her eyes. She was frowning, concentrating, her fingers on the keyboard even before she had sat down. He found it hard to speak. “I know.”