Cecelia

Cecelia’s down here with Ratio in the cafeteria, shooting the shit, almost as though it’s just any other floorday. It’s hour 45 of this particular floorday but Cecelia got accustomed to sleep-dep back in college and never quite got un-accustomed. So she feels on home turf. The burnt-toast smell is beginning to pervade her nostrils, which she’d usually thought of as an hour-60-and-past phenomenon, but it seems to be starting early this time.

The cafeteria has always provided a nice neutral space, a wide-open place—too hard to find down here in the Sphere, and prized after a youth spent in midwestern prairie—and a place where her bond to Ratio seems natural. They are friends, co-workers: they banter over meals. Who doesn’t? They often stay in here long after anyone else leaves for one meal, and are here before anyone else arrives, which gets some stares. But it’s a conspicuous display of social activity, and that makes Cecelia feel good: a bulwark against the ever-feared prospect of people imagining that she’s some sort of misanthropic hermit, spiteful and spite-worthy in equal measure.

That worry, she tells herself, is not completely irrational. After all, her default expression is something like a peevish grimace—she sees it every day in the mirror, and disapproves of it, which paradoxically justifies it—and her appearance at work parties, to say nothing of scientific meetings, is sporadic. They all think I’m judging them, she thinks—and are they wrong? But she’s not some sort of fucking elitist. She doesn’t think people are beneath her. She just has a highly limited and circumscribed capacity for dealing with them.

So anyway she’s been on a cafeteria marathon with Ratio, waiting out the day. They’ve both got laptops out. Cecelia’s been idly twiddling with some frivolous branch-loop simulations, a victor dancing a jaunty little jig now that her enemy has been routed and composure is no longer necessary. Ratio has put theory aside for the moment and is currently engaged in a heated intranet debate about the Starchild Universe, a sprawling, persistent sci-fi world he and a few other geeks down on the Sphere have devised and depicted in numerous works of (let’s be serious: pretty dismal) fiction and a complexly inter-related array of (surprisingly well-done) computer games.

The Starchild Universe includes time travel, which complicates things immensely. Ratio was against the idea in the first place. But it stuck by majority vote—3 against 4 (the Starchild Universe appeals to a select elite)—and now the consequences have wreaked havoc on the Universe’s lovingly plotted history. Ratio types furiously, trying to broker some kind of compromise between the ever-disputing MeowEllipse and DogShatter (real names known but rarely used), all the while pointing out that if he had had his way none of this nonsense would have started in the first place.

Occasionally, they talk. Mostly, they just laptop. It’s a good place to be.

And then all at once this steady state, which has continued for a number of hours Cecelia can’t estimate to within error bars narrower than 6 on either side, is broken by the arrival of a spectral figure, moving with a slightly inhuman energy, seemingly not quite sure it likes its physical form and wondering if it can go back to the shop and exchange it for another one.

The specter sits at their table, facing them. It’s Maria.

Having realized this, Cecelia re-calibrates her original impressions and realizes that Maria doesn’t look quite as weird as she’d originally thought, upon her approach. Though she still looks weird. Odd gait, circles under the eyes (of course), eyes themselves open a little too wide for Cecelia’s comfort. Hair looks unwashed, which everyone’s does at this point, but there’s even some visible electrode paste there, which is odd because surely that can’t be chalked up to the floorday being so long. No doubt she would have washed it out this morning, 45 hours ago . . . ?

Anyway, they’re all cracked out at this point. Cecelia happens to like being cracked out but she realizes this isn’t everyone’s preference. Lord knows she wouldn’t want everyone to be just like her: after all, a world of Cecelias would be so damn particular about who they associated with that . . . well, best not to go there.

“Hello,” Maria says.

“Hey,” says Cecelia. “Don’t see you that often.” Ratio had glanced up from his laptop, but has since returned; the latest salvo won’t write itself.

“I know. I’ve been . . . busy,” Maria says limply. Cecelia knows the truth: Maria can’t stand her or Ratio. Which is understandable: they are, at the very least, acquired tastes. So what exactly is she doing at this table?

“Look,” Maria begins. “I know you guys understand how pneuma works. Really works. You can . . . build things.”

“I suppose we can,” Cecelia offers.

“I need you to build an engine.”

“What?” says Cecelia.

A pause.

“What kind of engine?” says Ratio.

And Maria’s eyes open even further, and Ratio’s face is fully visible above the laptop, and there’s a kind of charge to the table now: now we’re getting serious.

“I’ve . . .” Maria seems to be wrestling with how to phrase something with appropriate delicacy. “I’ve been talking to a man. A man who knows a lot of things. He knows about your theories, and how they’ll make the loops crystalize because the ascendance ratio is just right.”

It is now Cecelia’s turn to open her eyes wide, because this is something Maria could not possibly know. She is describing a feature of the latest R&C theory, one they hadn’t even released in the pre-print, because it was too tentative—not sufficiently well-supported by reinteg_plume.mat—and they felt they could be plenty convincing if they stuck only to what was inarguable.

She turns to Ratio. He shrugs. So Maria knows: more grist for the shop-talk mill. In Ratio’s world this is an unalloyed good. Cecelia smiles.

“I know you can make an engine that will generate power the way the heteropneums do it. Giant fields. I need you to do that.”

“Why?” Cecelia asks.

“Because,” and Maria lowers her voice and leans in, a bit over-dramatically, like a child whispering secrets on the playground or an actor over-emphasizing a stage whisper, “there are still heteropneums left. They came with us in the plume. And they are worse than anything we’ve seen before. Either you build that engine, soon, or we’re dead. Dead at best.”

Even Ratio is taken aback by this. But he quickly regains composure and initiates a flurry of shop talk:

“She’s talking about how the loops will crystalize because lambda_5 is fine-tuned—”

“—so under ideal conditions we don’t even need a special pre-prepared state or a startup energy source as long as we can get spontaneous crystallization—”

“—the reaction just fuels itself the moment we get it—”

“—and so we’re talking what here? Like an ordinary eigensoul decomposition’s not going to do the trick because of the negative weightings—”

“—but just do a Salim-Frobenius decomposition and—”

“—bam.”

“We could do that with a few pneumases! Not even weapons-grade! Just a research kit would be sufficient, more than sufficient—”

Cecelia realizes something about this oh-so-ingenious plan. She turns to Maria, who hunches, ghostly and expectant, at the other end of the table.

“Maria, this kind of . . . engine you’re talking about. We could build it. It wouldn’t even be hard. But it—well . . .”

Ratio fills in for her. “It would involve splitting and recombining a human pneuma. We’d need a volunteer. No guarantee it’s safe. Wouldn’t be ethical.”

“I’ll do it,” Maria says.

She is intense, self-possessed despite her unkempt appearance. There’s almost something compelling about her, the tempting confidence of mania. Despite herself, some part of Cecelia wants to buy whatever she’s selling.

“We can’t guarantee your safety. I think we should all sleep on it.” She laughs, but no one else does.

“We can’t guarantee anyone’s safety. We are going to be eaten alive. The clock is ticking.” Maria’s unwashed hair splays in a halo around her. She makes a very transfixing prophet of doom.

Cecelia looks at Ratio, and in his eyes she sees what she knew she was going to see there, and knows: we’re going to do it.

In the Sphere all bets are off, and all one can do is keep running, on and on, bounding from one mad idea to the next, and counting on one’s personal brand of madness to stay alive. And so they are going to go on, further, ever further, into ever stranger uncharted waters.