“You are fifteen seconds late,” Nestor says, an acid smile on his face. “This is not acceptable. I would ask you to bear this in mind.”
I try to justify myself, “I have a good reason – I was attempting to make sense of your Brochure. Not very successfully, to be honest.”
“Well,” Nestor scoffs, “that means you’ll have to value my friendship even more!”
Today, he is wearing glasses, which make him look older. For some reason, that seems rather amusing.
“It is not acceptable to be late!” my counselor repeats and then adds, looking down, “However, Theo, you have never excelled when it comes to discipline.”
“It’s probably in my file,” I nod sagely.
“Exactly,” he stresses. “Just bear in mind there’s no escaping your file. Although that’s hardly going to upset you.”
“Interesting,” I narrow my eyes, “and where did my file come from? Did you follow me back there? Do you have agents, observers, spies?”
Nestor snorts sarcastically, “What a conspiracy theorist you are! Someone back there may well have been following you – perhaps some of the women you cheated on or the creditors you deceived – but it has nothing to do with what goes on here. None whatsoever – you’ll be told about this in more detail soon – and the file was compiled during your birth here using special methods that would take too long to explain. There are, you know, algorithms that link together disparate fragments of memories, whirling about in the subconscious from the very first moment of life. We know how to deal with the subconscious and the fragments of it too, but, fragments or no fragments, it’s the whole, the entire thing that is most interesting to us – everything that has been accumulated in your earthly brain. It is inaccessible to us and, for the time being, to you too. The memory restores itself gradually – in fact, this is the main reason you are here. You will need to work on it – fortunately, you know how to work hard, Theo. And you have an assistant – in me. And your roommate. And your dreams.”
He raises his finger significantly, intending to add something, but I interrupt him, “Just a minute! Please, Nestor, could you check my file again and read to me all the fragments, as you put it, about Tina, a girl who looks a bit like a teenager. She is twenty-three, she has a slight squint and a red tress of hair. I promise I will work hard – but I need a prompt, at least a hint!”
Nestor shrugs his shoulders, “I’ve already told you, everything must be done according to the schedule.” Then he glances up at me and unexpectedly agrees, “Well, all right. As an exception, just this once. In your file…” He looks down, leafs through something and declares, “There is nothing in your file about a girl called Tina with a red tress in her hair. At least not in the part that I have access to: not a thing!”
“Do you mean to say, there are other parts?” I ask, leaning forward. “They need to be found, a request sent – how is that done here?”
“It can’t be done at all,” says Nestor in a bored voice. “I have already told you everything I can. You need to work on your memory – and, right now, please get yourself comfortable; you have a lot to take in. You look better today; it’s time to systematize your picture of the world. To orient you, so to speak, in time and space. As they say here, to define a place – a place for everything. And so, you were born…”
I make an angry gesture but understand there is no point in arguing with him.
“You were born on a three-dimensional brane,[3] when it was in the middle of its cycle,” Nestor’s voice is impassive, level. “In your time, it was generally referred to as the ‘Universe,’ and this represented outer space in all its entirety. Or at least, this was the commonly held view – you, Theo, and certain others tested it out for yourselves. Fortunately, your critics proved to be deeply wrong…”
Nestor pauses and says, “Yes. We are discussing cosmological issues but, at the same time, considering you personally. To a surprising degree, the milestones of your career correspond to the chronology of your brane. But first – a little about the world as a whole, as we understand it here!”
“Here is…” I butt in.
Nestor stops me by raising the palm of his hand, “Just listen, listen,” and continues in his monotone voice, “in actual fact, there can be an infinite number of branes, but it is unlikely we will be able to verify this. Our knowledge is limited to two: the first, on which you were born, and the second on which you and I are now situated. The space itself, in which localized branes are floating, has apparently always existed – or at least for a very long time. Branes are born and die independently of each other, passing through cycles – let’s tentatively call them expansions and compressions. During each cycle there is a period of time known as the ‘window for life’: on your brane it was composed of – or to this day continues to be composed of – several billion of your planetary years. We know of only one place where intelligent life has developed to a significant level – your planet on which your mind, Theo, and the minds of many of those with whom you will meet in the new world were formed.”
“And what about yours?” I raise my eyebrows inquiringly.
“We’re not going to talk about me today,” Nestor replies dryly. “Now listen and don’t interrupt!
“A couple of words about space itself – it, by the way, has been given different names,” he continues. “Just basic ‘space,’ or ‘metaspace,’ as you used to sometimes call it, or even ‘metabrane’ – meaning that it’s possibly embedded into some more global structure. The latter seems an unjustified complication to me, but the term has caught on, and we may as well use it too. At least two fundamental fields – gravity and the field of the conscions – are globaclass="underline" their particles can travel from one individual brane to another. It is the existence of these forces, gravitational primarily, that is responsible for the unexplained cosmological phenomena noted in your time. And I stress: there are grounds to surmise that it is specifically the metabrane, and the metabrane alone, that emits the conscions predicted by you. This is important – very, very important!
“Very important,” Nestor repeats, moving his lips strangely. “But let us go further: unfortunately, we don’t have any control over the global fields. We can’t send information to other branes; we cannot create messages to our former lives – or our next ones if they exist. We don’t know whether your descendants are trying to contact us or not. It appears to be fundamentally prohibited: the metaspace is a strict censor of the trajectories along which the interbrane particles can move. There is only a limited set of possible directions of movement and there is global time – you cannot argue with it, and you can’t turn it back. It’s impossible to estimate the size of the whole of space, and we have only fragmentary ideas about its geometry – although we have managed to achieve something there. The main thing we do know is its variability: at any scale, the curvature of the global space changes constantly and with considerable amplitude. This, naturally, is reflected somehow onto the local universes, on their structure and properties – and onto their intelligent life: if it exists, of course. We can say that all of us, indirectly or directly, depend on the geometric quirks of the metabrane, but we will discuss the details of this dependence later. For now, we need only note that it borders directly on any of the points of all the local worlds. From the inside, your universe seemed like a large sphere or perhaps something torus shaped, but, from a global point of view, it is more like a long thread packed into a tangled ball or another complex but compact structure. Local branes seem to float in space, like balls of yarn in an ocean: throw a ball into the water, and every facet of it will become wet. They themselves might appear very distant from each other, looking from the inside, but still might be extremely close – imagine a tangled ball made up of a multitude of different-colored threads. You can move along one of the threads for a billion years not knowing there are others nearby – although, to be fair, there is no way to jump from one to another nonetheless… All in all, you need to remember: in the models of the world, different forms and structures are possible, but the metabrane is always nearby, and this, as you will later understand, is our greatest blessing!”
3
Multidimensional physical object located in a higher-dimensional space. Branes are analogous to the strings of string theory.