Schemes of the Unknown Unknown Ch. 15

Paul had never shown much interest in the other passengers and crew of the Intrepid in all the months since he first boarded the space ship. He didn't feel comfortable in the company of soldiers, he didn't need to see the crew very often, and there were no other computer archaeologists amongst the scientists. He was more than happy in his own company and, of course, that of Beatrice. What more did he ever need?

Not a lot, Paul mostly believed, but lately Beatrice had been spending rather less time with him and there were occasions when he rather missed having someone around to talk to.

And so it was that Paul was now wandering rather aimlessly about the research laboratories and meeting rooms where most scientists spent their working days. Paul was normally rather less fully occupied. When not pursuing a line of research that more often than not ended nowhere and had very little to do with the mission to the Anomaly, he simply idled away his time. He might visit virtual space. He might spend hours playing games in cyberspace. He might even just doze. But what he didn't ever do much of was socialise with his fellow scientists.

But now he thought he'd do just that. It also occurred to him that he might even meet Beatrice who often claimed that she was visiting other scientists when Paul asked her about her whereabouts when she wasn't in the villa. Paul never thought to ask the question that inwardly troubled him the most which was why Beatrice was absent so much more often these days. Was it something he'd said or done? It wasn't that Beatrice wasn't there to share his bed at night, although quite often when Paul stirred into brief wakefulness during the night hours he'd find that Beatrice was no longer by his side.

The Research Centre wasn't the most thrilling sector of the ship to visit. The building was very similar to where he'd worked on Godwin and there was just as much there which was wholly mysterious to Paul. He found discussion about extraterrestrial life, non-baryonic matter, entangled particles, holographic projections and anti-gravity wholly incomprehensible. There was no sign of Beatrice so Paul was very soon bored.

Paul left the confines of the Research Centre after only an hour or so of wandering around. No one had much time to put aside for him and indeed seemed quite alarmed at the prospect of him disturbing their concentration with a naive question or, worse, by clumsily knocking over their equipment. The scientists' relief when Paul chose not to bother them was quite palpable. But they didn't need to worry. If there was anything that Paul understood and respected it was obsession and dedication. He knew how much he hated to be interrupted whenever he was working at a problem.

Paul sat on a bench just outside the Research Centre and surveyed the landscape on the fourth level. The curvature of the Intrepid's internal space became more apparent as each of the space ship's concentric cylinders became steadily smaller towards the core. It was easy to see the ground rise up towards the horizon where it soon curved behind the internal hub which housed the systems that kept everything functioning. Paul was still in awe of the space ship that had been his home for so long now, even though it was on a relatively small compared to the colony of Godwin. It was still difficult to comprehend that where he was sitting on what seemed like solid ground in actual fact his feet were pointing outwards into space inside a colossal vessel that was flying through space at something like a quarter of the speed of light. It was hard to believe that he was so far away from the nearest inhabited point of the Solar System that it took more than two months for light to travel there, although this lag in communication became painfully apparent whenever he trawled cyberspace. The locally held data caches were good enough for most purposes, but if Paul wanted to know about the weather on Uranus, the latest news from the wars in the Asteroid Belt or the fortunes of an interplanetary football team he'd have to wait several months till he got a response from his query and by then the news would be totally out of date.

Paul idly watched the other scientists stroll by or chat with one another beside the bubbling water of a nearby fountain. He caught the eye of a tall black man with a huge bush of curly black hair and wearing a white overcoat. The man stood up from where he'd been reading a book under a tree and approached Paul.

"Hello," he said. "You must be Beatrice's husband. Pleased to meet you."

"Likewise," said Paul who was now faced with the problem he always dreaded which was of thinking of something to say in reply. What did you say to a total stranger? The best he could think of was to refer to the subject of shared interest. "You know my wife, then?"

"Well, yes," said the scientist who took his gaze away from Paul and stared ahead of him. "She used to be a regular visitor to the Research Centre. She still sometimes visits, of course, but not as much as she used to. I guess you've come here to keep an eye on her: to find out what she's doing."

"Er, no," said Paul who'd had no such intention. The very notion of keeping an eye on someone made no sense to a Godwinian. What possible role could he have in deciding what Beatrice should do?

"Are you seriously not bothered?" asked the black scientist as if surprised.

"What should I be worried about?"

"I must say you're remarkably relaxed about it all then, Paul," said the scientist. "My name's Barry, by the way."

"Barry?"

"You can call me Dr. White, if you like, but I'm mostly called Barry. I'm a good friend of your wife."

"Well, that's good to know," said Paul with a trusting smile. "She's never mentioned you to me, but as you know my wife's got a lot of friends."

"She has, hasn't she?" said Barry with a less confident smile. "I don't know how she keeps tags on them."

"Beatrice has an excellent memory. She never forgets a thing."

"Is that so?"

"She's got a much better memory than me, that's for sure. So what do you research, Barry?"

"I'm an expert in holographic projections and other visual phenomena. I'm here to assess whether the Apparitions appearing all over the Solar System and most densely distributed around the Anomaly aren't just holographs."

"That's an interesting idea," said Paul whose fascination was genuine. "Is that something Beatrice is also interested in?"

"Your wife seems to be interested in everything," said Barry evasively.

"You can say that!" said Paul with continued enthusiasm. "I don't think there's anything she won't get involved in or find out about. I don't know how anyone can keep up with her."

"Well, I most certainly can't," said Barry ruefully.

"How does this holographic projection theory work? Do you think the Anomaly itself might not be some kind of holographic projection? Are these weird things just everyday three dimensional images?"

"I don't think they are. Holographs are visual phenomena. These apparitions have other attributes such as mass, heat and momentum."

"So is your journey here a total waste of time?" Paul asked.

Barry looked alarmed. "Don't say that too loudly."

Paul enjoyed speculation as much as anyone. "There are plenty of theories about the Anomaly. Scientists from different disciplines are investigating it from different perspectives. Not all the theories can be correct. There can only be one correct theory and it could be that it's one that's not been proposed by any of the scientists on board the Intrepid. And whatever it is, it must be the case that the majority of the scientific research that's been done here is a total waste of time. If there are no extraterrestrial life forms, for instance, then all those exobiologists might as well have stayed home. The same goes for you I guess, Barry. And I don't really know why I'm on the ship, for instance."

"If one genuinely doesn't know what the Anomaly's going to be then it's best to be equipped with as broad a range of scientific expertise as possible," said Barry loyally.

"I'd be very surprised when we arrive at the Anomaly that we find that it's the result of discoveries revealed in Twentieth or Twenty-First century computer files," said Paul. "I'm only here because I did research on classified government data from one and a half thousand years ago. It might be an interesting footnote in the history of human knowledge, but it's got no possible bearing on what the Anomaly actually is."

"You were the one who demonstrated that the Anomaly isn't just a recent phenomenon," said Barry. "A lot of theories were proved wrong because of your research..."

"But none were actually proved right," said Paul. "What's this Anomaly got to do with my expertise? Will it be encoded in ASCII or EBCDIC? Is it going to reside in a relational database? Will it be stored on magnetic disks? Since no computer in the Solar System currently resembles those primitive machines, it's extremely unlikely that the Anomaly would."

There was an embarrassed pause while Paul felt sorry for himself and wondered again just how he'd ended up being propelled at astronomical speeds across empty space towards something totally unknown. While other scientists like Barry could try out their equipment to verify or refute their theories, the most that Paul could do was watch them get on with it. His biggest dread was that the whole thing would be a huge disappointing non-event and would be remembered forevermore as the most expensive research project in all human history.

"How is Beatrice?" asked Barry. "I've not seen her for a while."

"She's doing well," said Paul, who'd seen her last just after breakfast when she announced that she wanted to go for a walk. "I don't know where she is now. I thought she might be here."

"She might be visiting a scientist in one of the villas on this level, of course," said Barry.

"She says she often engages in discussion with other scientists," said Paul. "Her curiosity is boundless. She must have got to know every scientist on the Intrepid who's got the time for her."

"I think you might be right there," said Barry sadly.

Paul's excursion to the Research Centre wasn't one he was inclined to repeat very often. Although he had access to whatever resources he might ask for, there was nothing much for him to do here. Paul mostly idled away his time at the villa that he'd come to think of as his new home.

Paul was a creature of habit and there were few days when he couldn't find some way to occupy himself while he waited for Beatrice to return from taking a walk or visiting her friends or exploring the ship or whatever else she was doing. Inevitably, much of Paul's leisure time included an excursion to virtual space, although a sense of fidelity towards his wife made him shy of returning too often to Nudeworld. It was clearly absurd to feel compromised between his love for Beatrice and his relationship with Blanche, who was just a virtual construct whose hair colour, breast size and height he could alter simply by changing her parameters. Nevertheless, cyberspace was a huge expanse and Paul could never get to know it all. There was often talk of it being infinite but Paul was too much of a mathematician to believe that. It had the potential to be infinite, but it was bound by finite time and resources.

Today he decided to indulge himself in one of the more fantastic and ludicrous virtual worlds that he occasionally visited. It wasn't his favourite—Nudeworld had that honour—but the virtual universe known as Dragonworld was good fun and had a very long history. In fact, it had now lasted longer than the Roman Empire. A version of it even existed in the very early days of computer technology that Paul researched. In its most primitive incarnation, Dragonworld had been a kind of online gaming community which was amusingly blocky and frustrating slow. It was much more sophisticated in the 38th century, but still retained some peculiar twenty-first century features. For instance, characters tended to greet one another as 'dude', which Paul imagined was a kind of honorific title whose meaning was now totally lost. There was also a curious obsession with opening hidden doors, drinking phials and escaping from irradiated mutants, but Paul tended to avoid the parts of Dragonworld like that. It was also fascinating how Dragonworld was constructed as a series of parallel universes, known aslevels,which got steadily more hazardous the further one progressed.

What Paul most liked in Dragonworld was the menagerie of strange beings that he might encounter. These also reflected the fantasies of an age that was less than half a millennium after a time when people actually did believe in dragons, witches, goblins and trolls. There were also large beings like giants, ogres and dragons who somehow managed to keep their numbers sufficiently low that they didn't destroy the world in which they lived. This left the hobbits, elves, orcs and gnomes free to wander around to address each other as 'dude' and indulge in a ritual called thehigh fivethat Paul imagined must owe its origins to the mediaeval age where these fantasies originated.

There were also humans scattered about these fantastical creatures. Many of these, of course, were people like himself who were just visiting Dragonworld. Often they stood around like statues while they waited for their real life equivalent to return to Dragonworld and resume whatever they'd previously been doing. There were many knights of both sexes dressed in heavy metal armour and carrying ludicrously cumbersome swords. There were also damsels who were either naked or attired in such fine gossamer dresses that they might as well have been. Occasionally, Paul would pass another reminder of the virtual universe's distant origins in the form of a young man wearing a baggy tee-shirt and shorts with a peaked cap on the head.

It was the damsels that held the greatest attraction for Paul, although there were no facilities in Dragonworld to make love to them as there was in Nudeworld. It was possible to slay them with a huge sword or one of the monstrous automatic weapons that were scattered randomly about. One could even touch or kiss them. But this wasn't a virtual world in which you could have sex with damsels. There were other virtual worlds populated by mythical beings where this was possible—some almost as ancient as Dragonworld—but Paul found them less attractive. They just resembled a huge never-ending orgy where fantasies of breast size, hermaphroditism and penis dimension conflicted with other fantasies related to having sex with something that wasn't quite human, like a centaur or a minotaur, but had the necessary human-like features to make sex feasible.

Unlike most virtual worlds, Dragonworld also contained an unusually large number of elderly people. Being so rare in the real world, it was curious that they existed in such great numbers in this virtual world. This was also a result of Dragonworld's very long history. In the distant past when it was designed, elderly people must have been a common sight although they tended not to call each other 'dude' or greet each other with a high five. There was a certain stereotyping, however. Elderly people tended to be either ugly crone-like witches or venerable bearded wise men. If Paul had ever paused to think about it, he might have wondered more about an age that never considered that an elderly woman might also be wise, but Paul wasn't of a reflective nature.

In a way, it was probably no great surprise that Paul should meet Virgil, the old man he'd got to know in Nudeworld. There was a sense that he almost expected to. Virgil looked quite different to the other elderly men one could meet in Dragonworld. He didn't have a long white beard down to his waist. He didn't wear a sparkly gown that dragged on the ground. He didn't wear a tall pointed hat. Instead, he continued to wear the same twenty-second century suit that nobody else in Dragonworld wore. He looked very much out of place, but nobody appeared to notice.

"Are you hunting for dragons?" Paul asked Virgil.

"No. Are you?"

"Not here," said Paul. "But I sometimes think that's what I'm doing in the real world."

"In the real world?" said the old man. "And this isn't as much a part of the real world as anywhere else?"

"Of course not. In the real world I'm just a victim to circumstances. In Dragonworld if I don't like something I can either change it or run away from it."

"I wouldn't recommend that you be quite so fatalistic. What is it that you're searching for in the real world? Does it resemble at all the sort of thing you can quest for in Dragonworld?"

"I don't think so. I don't think anyone knows what it is."

"So, you're searching for something unknown. And why are you doing that?"

"Becauseit's unknown," said Paul.

"So when something's unknown, it's necessary to find out what it is?"

"Yes."

"And if what is unknown is also unknowable, what then?"

"If it's unknowable then I guess I'll never find out what it is. But how do you know if it's unknowable unless you try to find whether it can be known?"

"And do you think that what you are seeking is merely unknown? Or is it also unknowable?"

"It depends what you're getting at," said Paul thoughtfully. "There are lots of things that are unknowable though I know something about it. For instance, I don't know what someone's thinking because I can't read their mind, but I sort of know from the way a person behaves. So, even if something is unknowable in a literal sense we know something about it in terms of the effect it has on other things."

"And what if what you find out it isn't something you want to know?"

"What do you mean?"

"What if it was something you'd rather not know what it is?"

"I don't think knowing about things works like that," said Paul. "It's not about finding out what you want to know, but more about discovering what is actual and true."

"What do you think is true? What do you know aboutanything? How well do you know what's happening around you? Are you sure what you think is true is actually how things are?"

"I wish you'd stop asking questions and give me answers," said Paul in frustration. "For instance, how is it you can be in both Nudeworld and Dragonworld? Are you a software virus that's infected cyberspace? Why do you keep appearing in strange places and asking me all these unanswerable questions?"

The nagging question of whether he could be sure of anything remained with Paul when he returned to the real world. There was so much that he believed in that might not be true. And one thing he couldn't be so sure of was Beatrice's whereabouts when she wasn't home. He now knew that she wasn't always at the Research Centre. Where else could she be?

"I've already told you," said Beatrice who countered Paul's inquiry by placing her hand on his crotch and kissing him on the lips. "I've been visiting friends."

"Would you like me to come with you when you next visit a friend?" Paul asked.

"Of course I would," Beatrice answered, "but you might get bored. It's mostly girl talk, you know."

"Girl talk?"

"What girls talk about when they are together."

"Why wouldn't I be interested in that?" wondered Paul.

But Paul didn't have to wonder for long. The following morning, he accompanied Beatrice as she visited a friend he'd never met before. Lindsey was a Neptunian military engineer whose main interests seemed to be fashion shows and skin care.

Paul sat patiently on a sofa while Beatrice and Lindsey chatted about pedicures, makeup tips and celebrity gossip. Every attempt he made to divert the conversation towards something of more interest to him, such as military engineering or life in Neptune's orbit, was treated politely but unenthusiastically. It took no time at all for Lindsey to steer the conversation towards a topic in which Paul had no vestige of interest or understanding.