‘That’s a more immediate concern.’ Max closed down the holo. ‘If you were a Zajinet in authority, to whatever extent they have such a thing, how would you interpret Gunnarsson’s actions?’

Only one answer came to Rhianna’s mind.

‘I’d call it an act of war.’

As if the Anomaly and Schenck’s renegades were not trouble enough.

EIGHT

EARTH, 2033 AD

Lucas was not sure about the cyberphysics gathering in Denver. Was it the smallest important scientific conference he had ever attended? Or the minor conference with the highest opinion of itself? But Gus had wanted him to be here, and she was his new boss as well as friend.

Back at Imperial, his former colleague Fatima once said that Lucas clearly possessed an innate sense of entitlement. What she meant was, he would walk up to anyone he admired to tell them so – people that others would be scared to approach. Over the years, that had included two Nobel laureates and the Irish prime minister. Lucas disagreed: it was not entitlement, it was other people who were desperate for a celebrity’s approval, even though fame was nonsense.

Whatever the reason, he found it easy to be friends with Augusta ‘Gus’ Calzonni, the rich and often feared scientist-turned-entrepreneuse (as the smarter zines had it) who had discovered mu-space. For some it remained a metaphor – a visualisation to aid understanding of the equations – while others believed she had uncovered something real: the actual ur-continuum, the ultimate context.

‘Consider the universe as a net curtain, if you’ve ever seen such a thing,’ Lucas said in the hotel’s lounge to a handful of attendees, ‘which is what you get if spacetime is quantised at the Planck length and time. Now drape it across a pointy landscape, so miniature mountain peaks insert through some of the holes, giving the curtain the possibility of shape. That’s what context means, in this, er . . . context.’

One of the group – her fluorescing name-badge read Jacqui Khan – stared at him with the deepest, most intelligent gaze he had ever experienced. She was a little overweight and not pretty, but as they abandoned the mu-space discussion, standing up in response to the next talk being announced, as everyone’s qPads chimed in time, Lucas could not take his eyes off her.

Not pretty, but beautiful.

The next speaker was a computer scientist, a grey-haired fellow Brit with a background in cyber-forensics who might have been in his fifties, though he looked so fit it was hard to tell. His name was Gavin Case, and he surprised Lucas by referencing C.P. Snow, whose once-famous 1954 lecture Lucas knew of by chance and expected no one else to have heard of, not these days.

Snow had talked about two cultures, how people educated in the humanities were proud of their ignorance of, say, the second law of thermodynamics, which was the same as a scientist not knowing about Shakespeare. ‘Although he later amended that,’ said Case, ‘to the equivalent of not being able to read.’

There were chuckles from his no-doubt biased audience, as he continued to criticise Britain’s Ministry of Computation for its short-sighted views on commercial quantum crypto – and criminal cryptanalysis – before stepping everybody through mathematical formulations of the latest advances, together with a demo of working software.

Someone asked, when the time for questions came, why Case and his team had not used open source technology; his reply mentioned client requirements, which seemed to satisfy. Lucas wondered if he was the only one to realise what that really meant: this was defence-funded work, with mathematical models – but not the working code – publicised here as part of a deliberate effort to spread anti-criminal techniques to the wider technical world.

The talk finished with another scathing anti-anti-science remark, about the famous quantum scenario that was the Schrödinger’s cat paradox – because a real cat is alive or dead, no middle ground, which is exactly the point – and how few people grasped the significance.

‘Present company excepted, of course,’ Case concluded. ‘You understand that subatomic particles are weird, but the real mystery is how they behave in a non-quantum way in large numbers.’ He held up his qPad. ‘Except in these.’

For decades, researchers had been entangling larger and larger collections of particles, which meant that qPads and qPins were an advance that people should have seen coming, although investors had spectacularly failed to do so. It was a steady advance, unlike graphene, say, whose discovery – as far as Lucas knew – came from nowhere, luckily for him.

Or I couldn’t have sent a message six centuries ahead.

Unless he and Gus had deluded themselves, and consigned a memory flake to simple destruction. That would be a shame, since it had contained perhaps the last uncorrupted copy of observational data from the gamma-ray burster event. All other copies around the globe had been subject to cyberattack – hence, presumably, Gus’s newfound interest in crypto and leading-edge countermeasures.

But Lucas had just found his own reason for being here.

Jacqui Khan’s applause, as the lecture ended, seemed half-hearted. Lucas wondered if commenting on this was the best way to begin a conversation; then he stopped second-guessing himself and allowed the words to flow.

‘You don’t look entirely happy with the talk.’

‘There’s a difference between assuming specialist knowledge and, well, not talking down to people. He didn’t get it right for me, but then I’m no physicist. More computers-by-way-of-psychology.’ She held out her hand. ‘I’m Jacqui, by the way.’

‘Lucas.’

When they shook, it was like completing a high-voltage circuit.

‘I could tell you my opinions,’ he finally went on, ‘over coffee.’

He no longer cared about the conference, and was willing to bet that she didn’t either.

‘An excellent idea,’ she said.

Because the real conversation was occurring far below the verbal level, and some important conclusions had already been reached. They were both smiling as they left the conference centre and came out onto the pavement – sidewalk – in downtown Denver.

‘Have you been there yet?’ She pointed to the Rockies, visible through a gap between buildings. ‘Or are you local?’

Most conference attendees had flown in for the event.

‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘And I’m definitely not local. You?’

‘LA.’

‘I live in Pasadena.’ He was tempted to add something stupid about quantum entanglement and destiny, but instead gestured across the street. ‘Coffee shops and civilisation are pretty much synonymous, I’ve always thought.’

Vehicles moved quietly past, flywheels humming. As Lucas and Jacqui headed for a crosswalk, she said: ‘If you think it’s hard to breathe here, try Pike’s Peak.’

Lucas had noticed a shortness of breath during the past hour and particularly the last few minutes; he doubted the altitude had much to do with it.

‘Up in places like Fairplay,’ Jacqui added, ‘they call Denver folk “flatlanders”.’

‘And what would they call people like me?’

‘Oh’ – smiling – ‘a weird foreigner, I should think.’

Waiting at the crosswalk, he said, ‘Where I come from, jay-walking is not a concept. Everyone has the freedom to cross where they like.’

‘The freedom to get squished?’

‘Our life in our hands. Germany’s like this, though.’ He pointed at the temporarily empty street, while fellow pedestrians waited on the other side. ‘The concept is very, well, Teutonic.’

‘Is that what you Brits call “taking the piss”?’

Lucas could not help his laughter.

‘You’re obviously a world traveller.’

A transcript of their conversation might contain apparent insults; but anyone observing their body language or hearing their tone of voice would conclude that something else entirely was going on: more dance than dialogue.