“A Patch of Blue” is free on this website for this week only. It was originally published in “2113,” an anthology of stories edited by Kevin J. Anderson, based on the music of Rush—which is one of my favorites…both the story and the band. My story is based on the song “Natural Science,” which is a very cool, very SFnal behemoth of a piece. It was both a total blast and a young man’s dream to be able to contribute it. If you’d like a copy of the story for your own, you can get it from online retailers or get a copy directly from me right here. I hope you enjoy it!
What does it mean, to be able to create universes upon universes?
A Patch of Blue
On the whole, Galen considered himself to be happy.
He went to his office each day, stopping at the shop on 5th and Broadway for pancakes and coffee. He spent his good days with his multidimensional models (or his bad days in meetings), then he returned to his apartment to make dinner and to connect into his favorite shows.
Galen was good with this. It wasn’t the life he thought he would be living, but he was comfortable. He could live this way forever.
Ishi leaned against the hood of the car and watched as Alex stood in the shallows. The wind was sharp, and the day was getting dark. The sky was that wicked slate color that only happens when the west coast overcast meets the ocean. Waves beat against the shoreline with a crescendo that made him feel like he was listening to electrojazz.
On the beach, Alex wore a dark sweatshirt with the words Gem Machine stenciled across her chest. Her platinum hair blew flat against her head. A pair of worn cargo pants were rolled to her knees, the bunched-up wads dark with sea brine despite the precaution. Her feet and legs were bare. A wave crashed over her exposed calves. She looked cold but happy as she stared into the tide pool left behind.
“Come on,” Ishi yelled, waving at her. “Time to go.”
Without looking up, she waved back. Then she bent and took a shell from the pool. With a quick glance at the ocean, she straightened and picked her way up the beach, stepping around cracked shells and shards of driftwood that littered the sand. Rain began as she climbed the concrete stairway to the parking lot, a light rain, more a cold mist than a drizzle. It brought out the heat in her smile as she came near.
Ishi gave her a hug and they got into the car.
“Still sure you want to do this, babe?” he said.
She gave a crooked smile, her teeth perfectly straight. Then she sat back in the seat and stared over the breaking waves. A lace net of mist glistened in her hair. “More than ever,” she said. “I need to do something important again.”
Ishi ran his hand over her knee. “Then let’s go.”
That’s when he knew this was really going to happen.
When Galen was at a party or any other social gathering he was unable to avoid, people who learned what he did for a living would sometimes ask how he felt about it.
“Do you think you’re playing God?” they would say.
He always hesitated before answering. “No,” he would say. “It feels more like being a parent.”
“I can see that,” they would reply.
Galen liked this answer because it made him sound wise. He also liked the fact that the answer was generally good enough to make people move on. He enjoyed what he did for a living. He was good at it. Talking about it made him uncomfortable, though, because it was his opinion that very few people actually understood themselves, better yet other people. On the other hand, this answer also gave him some anxiety because he knew even less about being a parent than he did about being God, and occasionally, of course, an inquisitive person would follow up with “That’s interesting,” or “Tell me more,” and he would find himself embroiled in a conversation that made him even more uncomfortable.
“It’s interesting to watch civilizations grow up,” he would say in those cases, hoping this would be enough but knowing that once such an inquisitive person got this far, they inevitably went further. “It’s interesting to see how societies start small and innocent, then grow more sophisticated,” he would add when they responded with another “Oh, really?”
“It’s like watching a hatch of tadpoles swimming around in their little ponds of muck, not particularly caring much how they got there. Or, if they ever do get around to asking those ‘where do I come from’ kinds of questions, it’s interesting to see how they always manage to make up the stories they need to get by. They’re like kids playing in their fenced-in backyards, oblivious to the idea of something bigger outside.”
“So they’re just like us?” the inquisitive person would respond with a knowing chuckle as they sipped their martini.
“Yes,” Galen would reply. “But they seem happy.”
The conversation could go a few different directions at this point, but there always came a moment when the inquisitive person, who was invariably also a bit of an intellectual, would stop and say: “You know they’re not real, right? You know they’re just models?”
“Oh, I know that,” Galen would reply.
He had discovered that this moment was sometimes a good point of dismount.
His eyes would glance left or right, looking for an acquaintance in the distance, or maybe indicating an appointment suddenly remembered. If, however, such a distraction were not available, he would proceed to compare his feelings toward his creations to the phantom sensations that war veterans often reported about missing limbs. “These people say they can still feel their hands or legs,” Galen would explain. “Even though they know the hand or leg isn’t really there. They say they can feel heat or cold in them, or the pain of a pinprick.”
At this point, the inquisitive person would agree with him, but would then find their own acquaintance, or their own vital appointment that needed running off to.
Real or not, no one seemed to enjoy discussing pain.
Three hours later Ishi sat behind the drum kit as the band went on.
As always, they opened with “Willa Girl Wanna.” Sarena did her guitar thing on the intro, and the crowd went dizzy. Crash laid a line of organ synth like a safety net underneath her riff, and the people roared.
Ishi ran the backbeat under the standard issue JazzMech unit.
For the first time in forever, the simple existence of the JMU didn’t piss him off. He had hated the thing since the very beginning. Its receiver boxes were placed around the kit in their precise layouts, feeling like the footpads of some invisible spider of joy-sucking death that hovered over him as they played. Tonight, though, Ishi sat back and took in the plasticine feel of the entire place. He wallowed in the artificial sheen of money that covered everything in sight. “Live” performance made him ill now — it was music’s equivalent to play-acting against a movie that was showing on the screen behind you. But tonight he sat back and waved his drumsticks in an overwrought caricature, and he grinned his ass off as the JMU ensured the band’s trademark sound would nail the pleasure centers of every one of the eighteen thousand kids here who had paid their parents’ cash money for the right to scream their lungs out at anything that happened.
And who could argue with success?
That’s what Alphonse Cato, their manager, had argued a long time ago when one of the Machine’s sponsors demanded the whole prepackaged thing to make the deal stick. Predictably, no one in the band had professed to like the odor of selling out that wafted from the contract, but Alphonse was sure it made sense.
“Think about the fans,” he said. “Give them what they want!”
In the end, most of the band had come to see his view.
Ishi understood why.
Gem Machine had been so poor early on — the kind of poor most people can’t actually describe, the kind that blankets a person’s life and smothers their dreams if they aren’t already too busy living them. So the idea of that kind of money just hanging there was like being given a guided tour of the Promised Land by Santa Claus. Alex was the last holdout, agreeing to the deal only when Sarena said she couldn’t handle the grind anymore, and that if they didn’t take the deal, she would ditch the band.
Not surprising, Sarena and Crash found they liked the whole mainstream thing just fine.
And the cash flow was great.
For a while, anyway.
But if Ishi would have known then what he knew now, if he could have felt the difference in the music . . . well . . .
Lights flashed. Smoke rolled on cue. The backing vocals slid in like gravy.
Ishi could picture J-Jezzie wired up in the booth pushing buttons and sliding settings like he was a conductor. The man was more than half machine, his brainwaves connected straight to the lighting system and his fingers able to call up sound with a simple twitch or a flex. When Jezzie was jacked-in, his eyes would glaze over and his face would get rigid. His hands moved and robots scurried over the board like mechanical cockroaches.
Ishi gripped his sticks properly, and threw a triplet into the break in Sarena’s lead, even though he knew it would be lost in the rest of the show. The fans, bless their hearts, they screamed and yelled no matter what he did. But he played those runs to the best of his ability tonight, because that way at least he knew the music was still there, and because it had suddenly become important to him to do it right this one last time.
“The company is way behind on the Rift Gate project,” Jada Hansho said to Galen. “We need all hands on deck, or we won’t hit our commitments.”
She was standing at the control station of Galen’s containment well., wearing a royal blue blouse, black slacks, and stylish shoes of some well-known make. Galen wore his powder-blue lab coat.
The row contained three other containment wells, machines that can perhaps best be viewed as big tubs that hold a warped slice of space time wherein almost anything was possible. But it was lunchtime so the others were empty. Around them, the windowless modeling center, with its thirty-five foot ceilings, its hanging light fixtures, and the distant hum of an air handling system, felt like a secret cave. Galen had been deep in contemplation when she arrived (the changes he had made to the standard epigenome libraries hadn’t worked as he had expected they would), so he had to replay the conversation back to himself to understand that Jada Hansho was reassigning him to the team responsible for modeling multi-dimensional gates.
He frowned. “Can I finish work on this project, first?” he said. “It won’t take long, and I really hate to lose what we’ve accomplished so far.”
“No can do,” Hansho said. “I need you thinking about the Rift Gate every hour of every day. I want you dreaming about drop engines, time shifts, and transfer functions. This is important, Galen. MultiD says they can open a tri-gate. We don’t believe it, of course. But if it’s actually true, we’re way behind.”
Galen had been around long enough to know better than to put a rising star like Jada Hansho off her rails, but he didn’t want to work on a project that everyone knew was a sham, regardless of the money it was bringing in. The Rift Gate project was a blight, it was their company sucking on the teat of a jointly funded government spending bill with hooks spread out over so many states and provinces that no politician anywhere could possibly manage to repeal it.
In theory, success in modeling a multidimensional rift could result in opening interstellar space travel. That’s where the money was. Companies and governments wanted resources, or energy, or some other such thing. They wanted faster-than-light travel, wormholes, extradimensional passages that would fuel trade and maybe even discover partners beyond the ability to imagine.
The only problem was that none of the most respectable scientists in the field thought it would ever work. Not even Marcelle Ki, the French mathematician who made the final adjustments to the eigenvectors that resulted in the design and creation of the Containment Wells themselves. “The dimensions are doorways to other realms,” Ki said, “not highways to our own future.”
Of course, even if the theory was sound, Galen did not want to work on the Rift Gate project.
Galen liked his science smaller.
He wanted to understand how people worked. Why they did what they did. At one point he had actually wanted to help make a perfect society, but he knew that was a pipe dream. Still, he was happy to leave it to others to expand human’s understanding of the stars. He was more interested in understanding people. He liked the intimate feeling that came with making his models. He built unitary worlds, sometimes even just single planets, twisting the materials within them, changing small pieces of how life started, and watching the way these worlds grew.
He spent a year working with direct DNA modifications, creating worlds of life forms that were beyond the imaginations of most people — realms where eleven-armed birds controlled the planet, or where networked societies of gargantuan dolphins used their segmented legs to reign over land and sea. Mostly, though, direct DNA modifications still resulted in worlds run by human beings, or something like humans. Then he moved to the epigenome — adjusting the proteins and histones, and the rest of the chemical seas that make up the environment in which the DNA strand exists, and that would, theoretically, alter the way the base DNA would express itself — a study of nature vs. nurture, as it were.
His latest project, a universe that was now spinning away in the Containment Well, had been an experiment in adjusting a histone composite in hopes of increasing human kindness.
Though humans had managed to evolve in this run (something that was not always the case), his changes hadn’t seemed to do anything to civilization in the grand scheme. But Galen wasn’t finished with the progressions, yet, either. The world in his Containment Well hadn’t finished its cycle. Data needed to be regressed. There was still more to learn.
Galen chewed the inside of his cheek and looked at Jada Hansho. He could see no way out of her reassigning him.
For all his eccentricities, he was a top performer. In the early days, when social scientists and bioengineers were freighting eighty percent of the bill, he would never have been pulled to work on Jada Hansho’s project.
But a lab, it seems, can become quite sanctimonious about withholding judgment as long as a research grant hangs in the balance.
Hansho was not taking “no” for an answer.
“All right. I’ll shut it down,” he said.
“That’s great,” Hansho replied.
Galen waited until she left the area before turning his attention back to the universe that still spun away in the middle of his Containment Well.
Alex was perfect, as always.
Perfect as she ran into the spotlight wearing her sequined pants, and her black and white top torn in just the right places to expose just the right amount of shoulder. Her lips were streaked with gloss. Her eyes were lidded in a hue of blue that Aul Larkin, the hottest fashion designer on the planet, had so precisely calculated would sell to women between eighteen and twenty-four years of age.
The crowd greeted her like she was Cleopatra. They rose to their feet as she strutted in the purple and silver beams Jezzie showered over her. They roared as she wiggled her shoulder and ran her sparkling, painted nails through hair that tonight carried a shocking streak of magenta.
They were the G-Machine. The fucking G-Machine. Hear them roar.
Ishi could feel the gravitational pull of cash registers spinning as Alex opened her mouth to sing, and he could hear the producers and the Rez-Mark account reps clamp up in silent orgasm as the crowd went crazy.
Alex killed, of course. Totally killed.
Not many could tell the difference. The enhancement chips took her voice and ran it though compressors and digital shapers that ensured she had perfect pitch, and the timing algos made sure she matched the beat, just like they always did. There would be no imperfections. No raw edges. But Ishi felt the difference. He saw it in the way Alex held herself. He sensed it in her breathing pattern and the way she took her power pose on the edge of the stage as she waded into “Willa Girl Wanna.” Raw desire flowed off her like it hadn’t flowed since they were playing little clubs with misspelled marquees made up of plastic letters clipped together the afternoon before they came into town. That was what they wanted to do, both of them. That was how they wanted to play.
And it’s what they would have done, too, if their contract had let them.
Instead, because they had been stupid, because they signed something they didn’t fully understand, they were locked in. Forced into this direction. Forced to choose between a terrifyingly uncertain future of brilliance and a lifetime of wallowing in pseudo-art.
Ishi saw that Alex wanted to launch herself into the crowd.
It was there in the way her muscles clenched along her legs. There in the way her back arched as she looked over the fleshy sea of humanity that churned a proper arm’s length away.
It didn’t fit the script, but she wanted it. She needed it.
And she would have it. Soon. Yes, soon. But not now. Not yet.
Instead Alex pulled herself back from the edge, singing and clapping and dancing in her spandex and lace just as she had for a thousand shows before.
Ishi caught her eye as she passed.
A wry smile was her only acknowledgement that she saw him. Yes, she wanted to be free as much as Ishi did. Knowing that made the sticks feel real in his hands. He pounded the bass and felt vibrations like rain. Tears welled up. His chest grew tight.
They were so close.
“Willa Girl Wanna” finished, and while the group paused to give the crowd a chance to fill the recording with “natural” noise, Ishi reached under the seat, ripped off the tape, and pulled out the two vials that held the stuff of dreams. They had come from a renegade scientist overseas, and cost more money than he knew existed.
Alex turned to him.
He threw one of the vials to her.
She grabbed it, ripped open the top to expose the hypodermic needle, then raised it up to let it shine in the silver beam of the spotlight.
The crowd went crazy.
Together, Ishi and Alex plunged the hypos directly into their hearts.
Software broke down. Enzymes decayed into acids that ate into proteins and ripped into cellular structures. Time stretched. Space boiled. The entities that had once been Ishi Castigan and Alex Sumpter sizzled in null space. There was pain but not pain. Joy but not joy. Images crossed their being, flashes of vision and smell and the taste of intense longing. Their bodies burst. Their minds melded. Behind them, eighteen thousand fans screamed and a business manager was left to calculate the return on a series of computerized vids and “best of” releases. Ahead of them stretched a future that raged in grand currents, endless loops, and patterns so complex.
Their hearts beat pulses across a universe made of universes.
Galen turned back to his Containment Well.
The problem, of course, was that the inquisitive intellectuals that sometimes surrounded Galen were wrong when they said the worlds he created were not real. Yes, they were models. Replicas. Scale duplicates. Clones, perhaps more than anything else. Half code and half material — strange systems made of subatomic mash and designed using the concept of multidimensional space warping endlessly within itself to create infinite physicalities that could be run forward rapidly in local time to study the effects of various new ideas. But they were not fake. Perhaps it was semantic, but these replicas were no more fake than he was. All these universes, all these worlds Galen created, and therefore all their life forms, the bacteria, and the mold, and the trees and the protoplankton. The reptiles, amphibians, lungfish. The strange mutants, the bird-like things, and, yes, the people.
They were not models.
To Galen, all these worlds were real.
And this world he had in his Containment Well wasn’t finished. The lives held within it hadn’t completed their story. If he couldn’t keep working on it now, maybe he could save it off somehow? Find a way to put it into a stasis that would let him come back to it.
This is what he was thinking when every readout in his Containment Well went alpha-ballistic.
He frowned and brought his eyebrows together.
The energy levels were off the chart. Internal temps were rising a degree every few seconds. The plasma core images dropped balance. The particle readers seesawed back and forth. The entire system’s cosmic pressure spiked. Crap. He pressed a reset, but nothing good happened. He glanced into the well, and saw his universe glowing blue and green. A gloppy bubble blistered from the side of the universe, a willowy, gauzy thing like the mass of a solar flare expanding outward like a Mandelbrotian jellyfish.
Numbers flowed across his control screen.
Holy crap.
Lost, Galen pressed the Containment Well’s automatic shutdown.
The control panel went dark, the 3D holo display died away, and the hum of electronics faded into the background as the entire system ground to a halt.
Screens stared blankly at him.
Galen put both hands on the control table and scanned the area around him.
No one had noticed. He took a very deep breath.
Christ, that was close.
Then he cursed. Now he was going to have to spend weeks justifying himself and resetting the machine. Even if he could find out what happened, there was no way the Containment Well could be used until he duplicated the problem and made sure they had it under control.
He rubbed his eyes and gritted his teeth as he looked into the Containment Well’s pit.
Galen expected to see a charred-out husk of a universe. Instead, he saw colors churning, reds and greens and yellows, rotating, swirling like warped galaxies. Metallic flares shifted through the space inside a dark core. A beat pulsed. He swore he heard music. And he felt something more. As he watched this kaleidoscope of color and taste and otherworldly sensation churn before him, Galen Martin felt the presence of pure elation. He felt discovery. Beauty. Wisdom. Glory. Pain. He felt integrity.
He pulled his hands back off the table like they had been burned.
He sat down so hard on his seat that it rolled backward, and as he sat still he felt an elegance within him that consisted of a constant, gnawing yearning that ran deeper than anything he had ever felt.
Where is this from? Who put this here?
It was his Containment Well. He had created the world within, and yet he knew it was this world within that had hit him upside the metaphysical head with a multidimensional baseball bat that had him seeing emotions in colors and in a backbeat that still throbbed in his mind.
“Are you okay, buddy?”
It was Paulina Meridith, the woman who operated the Containment Well beside his. She was returning from lunch.
He glanced up at her, unable to shake the sensation. “Yes,” he muttered. “I’m fine.”
But he most definitely was not fine.
Galen stared at his Containment Well. The memory of that flare still burned. That flare was a birth of its own. That flare was . . .
He didn’t know what it was. But it felt like the most important thing in the world to him.
He found he couldn’t breathe. The music came back to him, and he felt like flying. He wanted to throw himself out over the world and let it carry him on its shoulders. In that instant, Galen felt them. Two creatures. Two people, flying with bodies outstretched, branding themselves into his mind.
Ishi sailed into dimensions and through the infinity of universes. He and Alex became became one. They became many. Music flowed in white noise. Colors grew. Ishi tasted rose petals and something like sharp cheese. There was a sense that was neither taste nor sound, a touch that was not touch. He saw things that before he could not have seen.
And Alex.
Alex rode on her mosh pit. She soared in the waves of an ocean that flowed around her, waves that rolled up beaches and then pulled back to leave pieces of her in the sand that could be picked up again by later waves and then again by still others.
She reached out to touch entire worlds, exploring each, then dropping pieces of herself in their flow as she left life on these worlds to go on to the beat of its own pulse, but soaring as she left.
Soaring.
Always soaring.
Galen stood at the gateway to Hansho’s cube, knowing exactly what he was going to do. He waited for her to pull herself away from the holomeeting. Her gaze caught him, and she grimaced. Excusing herself without hiding her exasperation, she disconnected and turned to him.
“What is it?”
“I’m done,” he said.
Then he turned and walked through the sterile white hallway with its dark blue carpet, and its holoprint artwork, walked into the entry foyer, past the reception counter, and through the glass doors that led out into the open air.
He breathed in the scent of the hills around him and looked over the city.
The research center had been built on the crest of the slopes to the north of the city proper, and the building’s porch gave a panoramic view of the skyline, complete with its massive brown and white pyramidal skyscrapers and the rows upon rows of other concrete and metal constructions that people had made. Traffic clogged the streets. People, and machines. The outskirts of the city were equally strange, a plasteel network of bubbled buildings and tubular vista jets that ran people from place to place.
How had he become so numb?
How had he let himself settle for so little?
Life was too short to waste on a Rift Gate project that was never going to pan out. Too short to stay in one place like he had been.
Tomorrow, he would take his learning to France. Perhaps see what Marcelle Ki thought of it. And, if that didn’t pan out, there were other scientists in small places where research was done despite dire sums of money, or despite a lack of publicity. Other scientists who worked to make a difference rather than fill a grant quota. It might be a grind. Maybe it would take years to make a difference. Maybe he would never make a difference.
But he thought he would. There is progress, and there is progress.
And others saw the value of what he wanted to do.
The horizon stretched into the distance before him. The sky’s overcast made the gleam of the solar farm to the west feel metallic. He looked up. How long had it been since he even paid attention to the clouds? He didn’t know. But he looked up now. Really looked. The bottom of the overcast was smooth and solid, but curves of mist whirled in the weave of the clouds. Feathered wisps of vapor flowed in random currents of the wind.
Tilting his head just a notch further, Galen saw one patch of blue, open to the endless sky above.
“A Patch of Blue” is free on this website for this week only. It was originally published in “2113,” an anthology of stories edited by Kevin J. Anderson, based on the music of Rush—which is one of my favorites…both the story and the band. My story is based on the sone “Natural Science,” which is a very cool, very SFnal behemoth of a piece. It was both a total blast and a young man’s dream to be able to contribute it. If you’d like a copy of the story for your own, you can get it from online retailers or get a copy directly from me right here. I hope you enjoy it!