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The Filigree
by
Alvaro Zinos-Amaro
On the drive out to Makuzo’s Falls she thought she saw more filigrees, but it might have been inertial blur. Her stomach stung with acid nausea. She recalled three of them earlier in her midmorning shopping. One had been a tall oppressive man who had glanced in her direction several times before guiltily donning a well-rehearsed smile and engaging in the fake perusal of last-minute gifts. People said that knowing you had one day left to live spiked your libido. It only made Sarah want to puke.
Navizian was waiting for her, of course, standing erect against the gleaming silver chrome of his vehicle, and when they shook hands he didn’t remark on the tremulous filaments of light hovering above her head.
“This place doesn’t seem to grow old,” he said, and led them on a muddy path that serpentined up the western side of the main rock face. By implication she felt that they had both aged. And that, until his own filigree arrived, he would be fortunate enough to continue aging.
His romantic observation was rebutted by the torrid jets of yellowish bilge that tainted the edges of the streaming sheets of water, and Sarah tried hard to pretend that the waterfalls were as pristine as they had been years ago, that industry had not reached this place.
They stared at the falls, and she leaned dangerously into the decayed wooden railing. Splinters flew off towards the rabid cascades, lost in the concussion of water and stone. Navizian stood motionless. She edged on, assuming that he would reach out and grab her, then realized the absurdity of her expectation. Final day causality. She chuckled, a desultory laugh, and moved back. She studied Navizian. “Thanks for agreeing to see me,” she said. “I know this can’t be easy for you.”
He smiled gently.
He pointed up to the scalloped sun, swimming down now towards the murkiness of night. “How do you think they know?” he asked.
The discs were invisible from their current altitude and orientation, but everyone had been force-fed the pictures a billion times over by the frenzied media, and those same discs orbited above them right now, tucked away behind layers of atmosphere and miles of vacuum.
“I have no idea. To be honest, I don’t care. I do wonder who the hell they think they are,” she said. “Did we ask them to know? Who needs to know they have one day left, anyway? I sure don’t.”
He held out his hand. Sarah grazed it as she dropped her arms towards her side, then hugged herself through her woolen jersey.
“I need your help,” she said. “But some things should remain as they are.”
She saw a reddish tinge suffuse his cheeks.
“Loevler Unified,” she went on. “I’ve done research. I remember when they hired you three years ago, it was a run-of-the-mill operation, just another highbrow research group suffering from impractical methods and lack of funding. But Loevler is turning out to be a regular Feynman. I’ve followed some of his work, whatever’s been leaked into the mainstream. If what I think is true, you could help save me.”
“Save you?” His voice distilled irony from incredulity.
“Let’s cut the BS,” she said. “He’s working on a way to escape the twenty-four-hour period causality trap, isn’t he?”
“That doesn’t sound very sane,” he said.
“Is he or not?”
“My job,” he said. “I can’t.”
“Why did you come?”
“I wanted to see you.”
“Look at me, Navi,” she said. “Look at me. I won’t be here much longer, so take a good look while you can.”
He turned around. His voice was a hush.
“He thinks he’s found a way around it, Sarah.”
“Is there any proof? Empirical evidence?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Proof,” she repeated.
“Yeah.”
Sarah moved only inches from him, set her jaw, gripped his shoulders. “Then use whatever technology you have. Use it on me. I volunteer. I’ve got nothing to lose. I know you don’t trust me. How could you? But I’m out of options. I know this hurts. It’s wrong. But I can’t do anything about that. I’m too scared. I’m scared of dying. I’m fucking terrified. I didn’t think I would be. I never did. But I am. Help me, Navi.” Her words were impetuous thrusts, desperate implorations that knifed through his armor of resentment and doubt.
For the first time, Navizian seemed off balance. He faced her again, squinted, scratched the stubble on his jaw. His eyes roamed over her.
He nodded, like a leaf bowing in an autumn breeze.
Sarah removed her hands from his shoulders.
She said, “So tell me, how do you escape the final day causality?”
He launched into his response, and his relief at discussing something intellectual, not emotional, was as tangible as the rails Sarah gripped. “Well, this is what standard theory says. The filigree appears. You know you have twenty-four hours left. ‘They’ send it to us, in their infinite compassion, so we have one last day to put our affairs in order, because unexpected death is such a messy business.” It was difficult for her to decide how much was sarcasm and how much reverence. “Now, this is where it gets tricky. The appearance of the filigree itself can’t be the cause of your death, since that would create a closed loop, and your death would be a-causal. If something appears to let you know you’re going to die, and that in itself is the cause, you wouldn’t have died if it hadn’t appeared, reductio ad absurdum.”
She sighed.
“All right,” he said, speaking faster. “So. Anything that you do differently as a result of the filigree alerting you to your death cannot contribute to your death. You see it appear, you pull the trigger. Nothing happens. You jump off a building, you get up and walk away. You step into a nuclear reactor, you emerge unscratched. Quantum probabilities become jangled and they work to preserve you. Society tumbles into chaos. But, at the end of the twenty-four hours, you still die. Something gets you. Where’s the flaw in all this?”
Sarah bit her lower lip. As the evening shadows settled around them, she could see the faint glimmer of silver light-threads above her.
“I have no idea,” she said. “Until Loevler, I was sure they’d tried everything. That’s why it’s called a causality trap.”
“Not quite everything,” Navizian said. “What if you knew about your death, outside of the twenty-four-hour period? How far back do you suppose the trap extends, in time?”
She mulled it over. “Maybe it cuts off exactly at the one day mark, maybe it recedes infinitely into the past. The point is, the filigree appears at that precise moment, so how does that help us?”
“The filigree appears at that time because that’s when they choose to project it to us. But Loevler’s found a way to retroproject it. And everything indicates there’s no causality trap beyond that twenty-four period. You can break the chain.”
“I’ve known you for twelve years,” she said.
In the old days he would have been able to finish the thought for her, in his mind if not his words. But witnessing her flailing about for life had rendered him mute, unable to gauge her thoughts.
“I want you to know that during all that time, you’ve never let me down. Not back then. And not now.”
She turned and began back towards where they had parked their drivers. Dusk created new ripples in the falls and heightened the sound of the crashing water.
Her pace was brisk. One time she trotted too far ahead, and she heard him mutter after stumbling on some pebbles. She realized that the faint luminosity of her death-symbol was all the illumination Navizian had on this descent. She tempered herself to keep her legs from bolting. She had revealed enough desperation already.
On the way down she said, “Makuzo was such an ass. He really got me, that one time.”
Navizian’s voice answered from behind. “I think he scared himself, after they pulled you guys up.”
On that excursion Makuzo had taunted and prodded until she had tripped on an outcrop and was left dangling from a sheer drop, her hands coiled around his left leg. Later he would complain that she’d gripped him so tightly that her nails had dug blood from his skin, right through his jeans. It was Makuzo’s Falls from that day, although Navizian could have claimed the namesake for himself, with his own brand of far more pleasurable taunting and prodding.
“I wonder what Makuzo’s up to these days,” she said.
A pause. Then, “He’s gone.”
She turned, then continued walking.
“Cancer last spring,” he said. “I saw the filigree. It wasn’t —-”
“Don’t tell me it wasn’t like mine,” she snapped. “I know that they’re all different.”
“I was going to say that it wasn’t painful for him. Two months, and he knew it was coming. I think he’d known for a long time, maybe even his whole life. Sometimes you just know.”
She sensed a dark undercurrent to his words, as though he might be speaking of himself rather than Makuzo.
She reached the foot of the mountain some moments before him, and as soon as he had caught up with her, a little out of breath, he said, “Let’s go in my driver. We’ll meet Loevler at the research center.”
She looked in the direction of her own driver, hands in her pockets. “My life is in your hands.”
“Don’t be melodramatic. And don’t misstate the nature of things: you’re pretty much indestructible for the next nine hours.”
She noticed that he averted his gaze from the glow of her filigree, almost as though the silver and gold strands of light, like a Medusa’s nest of writhing snakes, might petrify him if he stared too long. What had started as politeness now verged on bathos.
Inside his vehicle, he commented on some of the brand-new features that her own model lacked. En route he activated a signal that let Loevler know they were on their way, minute-estimate of arrival included. Some moments later, Navizian asked, “Didn’t you program your driver to go back home?”
“If this works, I can remote activate it to pick me up in the morning. If not, it’ll be a donation.”
Minutes passed and she became impatient. “Can’t you make this thing go faster? Disengage the safeties.”
They picked up speed.
#
Sarah felt unnatural drafts of cold air as they marched down the facility’s narrow corridors, Loevler in the lead. He was a rotund fellow who scampered on like a rodent, just as she had seen in the threegrams. She and Navizian exchanged a conspiracy of smiles as they followed the bobbing, balding head.
They arrived at a room with several computers on a table alongside the back end and a rotary projector that extended from the ceiling.
“If this is the central lab, I have to say I’m not exactly overwhelmed.” Sarah injected her words with a flippancy she did not feel.
“This isn’t the central lab,” Navizian said, glancing uneasily at Loevler, who was entering commands into one of the workstations, too busy to respond.
When he was done, Loevler pointed at some chairs, and they took his cue. Images from the projector formed in the air, and Loevler’s running commentary provided the soundtrack. They were mostly pictures of a young boy with a hovering filigree. From Navizian’s fidgetiness, she could tell something was amiss.
“I’m not here to discuss the theoretical underpinnings of my work, fascinating as they are,” the man said. His voice sounded gravelly, constrained by some unseen malaise. “This young man you see here is Michael, my son.”
The boy was a pre-teen who appeared to be unaware he was being photographed in many of the snapshots. The word ‘man’ made the gallery display seem like a parody, one with unsettling overtones.
“Michael is a very bright young man, as you can tell from these pictures.” The embarrassingly candid pictures revealed only a shy youngster clearly saddened by his filigree. “He deserves the chance to explore his potential. He deserves a future. This is what Loevler Unified is about. Michael will be back with us. Soon.”
Navizian said, “Loev, what’s going on here? What’re you talking about?”
Sarah gathered that there were some things which had been kept even from him.
“Why do you think I’ve dedicated six years of my life to studying the causality trap, son?” Loevler asked, demonstrating no qualms about his choice of words.
“To escape it.”
“And why should I care to do that? I’m quite alive, myself.”
“Because the consequences would be far-reaching. It would mean --”
“If we can break causality, anything is possible. We can reshape the past. We can create our own futures. Michael and I can be together again.”
Images of Michael continued to display in the air. When they had finished, Loevler seemed to relish the moment, beaming with pride.
“We still have a lot of work ahead of us tonight. Let me start by sharing some of our evidence with you, Miss Grennel. Follow me.”
#
Once in the main lab the evidence was wheeled in by two nondescript assistants.
“I could have shown you with the projector, of course,” Loevler said, “but I didn’t want you to feel that I was being deceitful. No threegrams here, just live flesh.”
Sarah leaned over the bed and her finger poked at the man’s immobile torso. No reaction. She wondered just how alive this flesh was.
She studied the man’s eyes, which remained fixed on infinity, and drew her head several millimeters from his chest and his nostrils, struggling to detect any movement associated with breathing. There was none.
“This man’s dead,” she said.
“Almost, Sarah, but no,” Navizian corrected.
He passed his hand through the filigree that hovered above the subject’s head. It rippled and reformed, like the filigrees always did, and everything seemed to be exactly as before, but Sarah didn’t miss the subtle facial contraction that had accompanied the disturbance.
Loevler projected the man’s vital signs, and Sarah saw at once that they were not flat. He explained each one to her, and to prove to herself she had understood, she said, “So he’s in a coma.”
“That’s as good a description as any,” Navizian agreed. “But it’s an unusual coma, in the sense that we could rouse him out of it.”
“Why don’t you?” She was curious but her voice carried the weight of a challenge.
“If we did, he would have only a few moments to live,” Loevler said.
“Ok. So we have a man in a coma, with a filigree.”
“Look carefully at the vitals,” Navizian said. “Check how far back the data goes.”
She did, then blinked. “Two days.”
“That’s right,” he said. “Two days.”
“And?”
“Two days ago is when the filigree first appeared.”
They played back a threegram recording for her which showed the last two days at compressed speed, and matched the vital signs data.
“He’s the first successful subject to be alive beyond the twenty-four hour filigree mark. When the filigree appeared, we were able to manipulate it, to retroproject it one point three days in time before that moment. That gave the subject enough time to change his course of action, and to agree to this coma. Causality was successfully interrupted, and he lives. We could keep him like this forever, but we’re confident that after tonight’s experiment that won’t be necessary. If we’re able to break causality farther back in time, he’ll have a lot more options. We’ll all have more options, including yourself.”
When Loevler spoke, it was hard for Sarah not to imagine that he was describing the detailed ingredients of a fashionable cocktail, or recollecting the high points of a sporting event, and she had to force herself to concentrate on the seriousness of his words. Remembering the images of Michael helped. So did Navizian’s hand on her back.
She said, “So you stretched the filigree back in time. He knew about his death a day and a third before he would have otherwise. But to do that, he must have agreed to the experiment after the filigree originally appeared. In essence, you rewrote his past.”
“Yes,” Loevler said. “And his future.”
“What were the risks? I’m assuming he wasn’t the first.”
“He wasn’t. He suffered partial brain damage. In fact, if we revived him now, he probably wouldn’t be able to follow a game of checkers. Or to spell his own name, for that matter. His body would shut down.”
“It looks like I’m in for a world of fun,” Sarah said. “But then again, I guess I should be grateful. Not much of a speller, and never did like checkers.”
Navizian said, “We’ve improved the technique, Sarah. The risks should be minimal to you. We can retroproject your filigree a lot farther back in time, and you can choose to live as you wish.”
“Will I remember any of this?”
“Yes,” Navizian said. “It will be confusing for you, at first. But then you’ll learn to think of everything that’s happening as a kind of dream, or the memory of another life perhaps.”
“And the filigree? Wouldn’t it be pointless, then?”
“Not necessarily. You could choose to act normally, in which case you would still die at the predetermined time, or you could alter your behavior, and the number would be meaningless.”
“The choice seems pretty obvious to me.”
“You’d be surprised,” Loevler said. “Many of the earlier trial runs failed because once the subject had the option to live or die, they decided to die. Nothing in our predictive curve indicated that kind of leap. Something about not messing with God’s intended purpose, I suppose. There’s no accounting for taste.”
“I guess some simply feel it makes sense to follow God’s will, since we can’t all play at being God,” Sarah said.
Loevler was unfazed. “A few of us can, and very successfully. Navizian assures me you are trustworthy, and his word is enough for me. The only reason I’ve humored you this long is because Nav seemed to think you’d be a good girl.” He intoned the word ‘girl’ the same way he had said ‘man’ when referring to Michael.
Nevertheless, something about the comatose man compelled Sarah. He was handsome, in a sort of rugged way, and more peaceful than anyone she had ever seen. His lips were slightly drawn, not so much in a smile but in a kind of eternal sigh. She knew it was all fake, of course, the illusion of serenity conjured by nanoregulators busily at work inside the man’s body. But that didn’t matter.
She examined the data again.
A jolt of optimism overcame her.
“Ready when you are,” she said.
If the procedure was successful, she might even have the chance to forget she’d ever met Loevler.
#
Navizian saw to it that the assistants handled her with at least a modicum of dignity. They dumped nanos into her bloodstream, irradiated her with particles whose name she found unpronounceable, and subjected her to equally tongue-tripping fields. With a tinge of regret, Sarah realized that by dropping physics in high school she’d passed up the chance to learn a lot of abstruse words, though her chosen field of stochastic art had offered its own share of rewarding nomenclature.
By turns she felt queasy, light-headed, feverish, and finally depleted. If there were any more procedures, she thought morbidly, their means of escaping causality might simply be to exhaust her to death.
Loevler now made a brief reappearance. Her head still spun from the treatments, and the sight of him added a new type of throbbing to her temples.
“You may experience some disorientation and discomfort as we begin the actual procedure,” he said. “For the last two hours technicians have been calibrating your responses to different immersions. Now that they understand your tolerance levels, we can begin in earnest.”
“Your sense of humor is as endearing as your needles.”
“He’s not joking,” Navizian said. “We needed to keep you motivated. We want this to be a success, after all, as much as you do.”
“Maybe more,” she said.
“You don’t mean that.”
“My migraine means that.”
Navizian had them dispense medication to ease the pain.
“Would you like to be awake during the process?” Loevler asked. “It could prove to be quite an experience.”
“I’m sure that’s how you described your visits to the dentist when you were a kid. To hell with it. Knock me out.”
The world became soft and fluid, and she fell into a caramel dream.
#
Sarah’s eyelids fluttered frantically, trying to adjust to the torrential white light before her. But there was no adjusting, so she shut them as hard as she could, until pain shot down her forehead and formed a grimace.
And then she was stepping out of the light, into a vast, padded chamber. Rows upon rows of listless humans sat on dull ochre chairs, some slouching, some erect. They were all filigreed.
She stumbled upon a mechanical orderly, which attempted to feed her a gooey mush, no doubt laced with tranquilizers.
One of the women near her seemed to be more conscious than the rest, and Sarah shook her shoulders.
“Why are you here?” she demanded. “What is this place?”
The woman had probably not spoken in years, for her lips quivered in an effort to produce cracked syllables. “We’re here … because there’s nowhere else to go. Time is running out.”
Sarah focused on the woman’s filigree. Tendrils of light shaped scintillating numbers in the air. Five years, four months, eighteen days, six hours, twenty-five minutes, ten seconds. Nine seconds. Eight. Seven.
She looked up at her own filigree.
It was an unwavering zero.
The light returned.
#
She woke up on a soft bed with dim lights overhead.
“Navi?” She struggled to call out the name clearly, but rasped a forced whisper.
Tried again. “Navizian?” Silence.
She sat up. She was alone in a lab.
She remembered something. An experiment.
Maybe she was it. Well, if it had been a success, she would have expected someone to greet her.
If it had been a failure, she might be dead, and this could be the afterlife. But her lab robe was moist with sweat, and she could still smell some of the chemicals they had applied to her skin, which made it seem unlikely she’d traveled into the next world.
She padded around the lab and discovered automated systems still running and terminals left abandoned in the middle of analyses.
The dim lights must be emergency power.
The soft hum of the air circulators made her want to scream.
As she walked around she noticed her head still bothered her, though not as much as before. She glimpsed the reflection of her filigree on several screens. Time … is running out. Instantly she recalled her dream, and at once found coruscating numbers.
Twenty years, eight months, nine days, seven hours, forty three minutes and twenty eight seconds. Her mind was still somewhat numb by events, but intuitively she seemed to understand that those numbers were probably devoid of significance. If not, the oppressiveness of that knowledge was unthinkable.
She tried to recall what time it had been before going under, but it was no use.
Foggy images drifted through her mind. The sun going down, water falling.
Something must have happened to draw everyone away from here. Navizian must be involved, and he would have the answers. He always did.
She wandered down several corridors and then had the brilliant idea of engaging the facility’s intercom system.
She heard her voice resound across halls, around corners.
A few minutes later a man in uniform approached her. He seemed to be a security guard. He shuffled the bulk of his body. Maybe he was just starting to become acquainted with his own filigree, the numbers of which she paid little attention to.
“Are you looking for someone?”
His tone was gruff, his eyes embedded in furrowed skin. Suspicion rippled through him but his hands remained at his sides. Her appearance could have been so bewildering that he was hesitant to detain her. She might be alive, but from the little she’d seen of herself in the lab she would probably look dandier in a casket.
“Have you seen Navizian?”
He shook his head.
A name arrived on her tongue, and she allowed it life. “Loevler?”
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