Emergence, Page 3

  ‘An hour? I’ll believe it when I see it.’

  ‘Mike’s coming for dinner.’ Louise smiled, turned back to her computer, and started bashing away.

  Karen walked away. ‘Laters!’

  For about thirty minutes, Louise mooched around the internet. She actually had very little to do, mostly she was getting out of the house to allow Jeff his creative cooking space. Something exotic had been promised for the three of them.

  A stage whisper interrupted her thought pattern. ‘Louise!’

  Louise turned to see Harry Jones leaning out of his office and beckoning to her. Louise nodded an acknowledgement and walked towards his office, trying to ignore the looks of sympathy that followed her.

  As usual, Louise had a good look around the walls of Harry’s office. They were adorned with framed newspaper clippings from the previous forty years. Harry had won the Daily Record, and himself, a number of prestigious national awards.

  Once Louise had stopped looking round, Harry caught her eye and held it for a few seconds. ‘Don’t worry, your time will come, the slip-up wasn’t fatal.’ Harry made a show of looking around the walls himself. ‘The reason I sit you just outside my office isn’t to keep an eye on my reckless apprentice, it’s to copy over the shoulder of my star reporter.’

  Louise smiled and, forcing her shoulders to relax, sat on the sofa. ‘So what’s up?’

  ‘I wanted you to hear it from me, but you are not allowed to act on this information. However…’ Harry left a long pause. ‘Jack Bullage…‌Jack the bastard…‌Jack the business man.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘I have a new title for him…‌Jack the M40 motorway miracle man!’

  Louise was speechless for a few seconds, then less so. ‘Fuck a duck!’ For the next few moments Louise unloaded her full repertoire of expletives, getting more and more gratuitous and graphic as she went.

  Harry held up his hand and Louise listened while he gave her the basics on the M40 crash.

  ‘Give me the story, please!’

  ‘No chance. This is just news cycle filler. Get on with one of your investigative pieces. Anyway, Jack is totally off your menu. Forever. You are not to investigate, it was part of the settlement agreement. I brought you in here to remind you of the considerable expense of the court case.’

  Louise nodded demurely, made the right sounds and went back to her desk. She immediately started searching the internet for references to Jack Bullage and the M40 crash. She didn’t stop surfing until late afternoon when Karen mouthed ‘one hour’ at her. Louise jumped up. ‘Jeff!’

  At 6pm, while Jeff stood by the cooker quietly stirring the contents of various saucepans, there was a loud bang. Louise crashed at full steam into the house. She marched into the kitchen, opened the fridge, took out the red wine and sloshed down a large glass before turning to Jeff. ‘One word. Well, two words. Jack Bullage. Okay, more words. You’ll never guess what. You will never flipping guess what.’

  Jeff waited, and then, after what seemed like an appropriate pause. ‘You’re marrying him?’

  ‘Jack Bullage is the M40 miracle survivor.’ She gave Jeff a quick kiss, then turned and rushed up the stairs.

  Unperturbed, Jeff internalised the information. Another day living on the knife-edge.

  Upstairs, Louise took her laptop out and jumped on to the bed. By the time she had stopped bouncing she was typing furiously, with her shoes, socks and jumper strewn on the floor. At some stage she heard Jeff shout up the stairs. ‘Louise, are you ready?’

  ‘Nearly!’ Louise called out, although she had not moved from her laptop for the past 45 minutes. She continued to scoot around various chat boards frequented by the internet’s more conspiracy-imprintable participants. Her mind raced through a number of angles. Maybe Jack Bullage has fixed this crash to get a sympathy vote?

  After a further 30 minutes of looking, she faced a lack of even tenuous circumstantial evidence. Even though the crash was almost 48 hours old, there was not even a sniff of Jack Bullage being a criminal mastermind. Louise rubbed her temples and wondered if, perhaps, she was getting carried away. She couldn’t really believe the whole thing would have been staged or faked, considering the destruction involved. Anyway, the court cases had been completed and Jack had been found innocent of everything. Louise dragged herself away from the screen, concluding this weasel had simply been lucky and survived a genuine crash. She called up some of the pictures of the carnage. But how did he escape with just a few scratches?

  Louise jumped at a sudden noise directly behind her.

  ‘You haven’t moved for the last two hours.’ Jeff had clearly sneaked up the stairs to observe the veracity of Louise’s ready statement and found it wanting, by a significant margin. ‘And, with my poor cooking, I am facing the real possibility of poisoning you and my best friend.’

  ‘I thought I was your best friend.’

  ‘Of course you are.’ Jeff paused and blew Louise a kiss. ‘Except for Mike, obviously.’

  Louise stuck out her tongue, smiled, got up, and put on her socks and jumper. ‘Okay, let’s go and host Mike for a Jeff mega curry.’

  As Louise followed Jeff down the stairs he turned back. ‘And…‌no chat tonight indicating you’d have preferred it if Jack had fried. Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Karma. I get it.’

  Louise settled herself at the kitchen table and flicked through a magazine. Jeff continued to potter around by the oven, stirring, tasting, seasoning.

  Jeff looked at his watch. ‘Mike’s late.’

  Not long after, the doorbell rang. Louise stayed seated while Jeff went down the hallway and greeted Mike at the door. She watched Mike come in, his eyes flicking to the usual corridor mess, which she knew he secretly yearned to tidy. Mike was a tidier, not a cleaner, but a tidier.

  She half listened to his explanation, to Jeff, of his tardiness. ‘…‌cut myself shaving, came out like a Harkonnen Heart Plug…‌took ages…‌considered A&E.’

  Moments later Mike came through to the kitchen wearing his usual faded jeans and corduroy jacket with leather elbow patches. As usual, he looked like the archetypal absent-minded professor with messy hair, glasses and a shirt which seemed to have been cleaned by hoping that simply not wearing it for a few days made a difference. Mike hugged Louise amiably, and sat down at the kitchen table.

  Jeff took a beer bottle for himself and passed one to Mike.

  Mike got up, collected a glass from the cupboard, and filled it before taking a sip. ‘So, what’s going on in the Harding household?’

  Louise couldn’t see where he’d cut himself shaving. Drama queen.

  Jeff replied. ‘We’re having a dinner party for some of the neighbourhood’s greatest minds to ponder the vastness of space and the wonders of the universe.’

  Mike’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘Yes?’

  ‘So, you’d better finish your drink and leave before they get here!’

  Mike gave a little salute of acknowledgement. ‘We all know you’re one of the world’s great intellectuals, Jeff, and I’m pretty sure you are academically correct almost 90 per cent of the time.’

  Louise took the bait. ‘And?’

  Mike removed his glasses and cleaned them. He took his time. Then he wagged a finger at Louise. ‘Not and, it’s but…‌and the but is…‌for the ten per cent of the time Jeff happens to be incorrect, that’s exactly when he’s at his most convinced he’s actually one hundred per cent correct.’

  Jeff threw a mock punch at Mike. ‘Boom boom!’

  Mike put his glasses back on. ‘So how’re things going for you at NLUST? Is the place still standing?’

  ‘The department’s ticking along; Sophie’s keeping it running nicely.’

  ‘And she’s treating you okay? Not too much of a blow to your masculinity deferring to a woman?’

  ‘Are you still kidding? She’s joined a long queue of women I defer to.’ Jeff took another bee
r from the fridge.

  Mike turned towards Louise. ‘How’s things with you?’

  ‘I’ve got news.’ Louise gave Mike a quick summary of the Jack Bullage situation.

  ‘Miracle survivor. Nice job. Particularly nice if you’re in a situation where you need it…’ Mike drew breath to expound on the subject, but was interrupted.

  ‘Okay, food’s ready.’ Jeff served the curry and they started to eat. A few moments later, Jeff looked up with a grin. ‘I saw something in the news related to Bullage. All those wrecks with no chance of functioning again…‌but enough about the old peoples’ home, let’s talk about the crash.’

  Louise snorted. ‘He escaped all the legal charges and now he escapes a massive car crash.’

  Jeff waved his beer bottle around. ‘He also escaped a death missile.’

  Louise gave Jeff a long, flat stare.

  Jeff continued. ‘But where’s the story? An evil man walked away from a crash, so what? Good things happen to bad people all the time. Did Jack do something actively miraculous?’

  ‘He’s quoted as saying he was dozing in the rear passenger seat when the crash happened. He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and just got catapulted out.’

  Mike leant forward. ‘Any other witnesses?’

  Louise shrugged. ‘Plenty of people remember seeing him on the side of the motorway. No-one saw how he got there. A few said he was trying to get back into the burning wreckage to help the other passengers. Fat chance!’

  Wagging a finger, Jeff reminded Louise of her promise. ‘Karma down.’

  Louise wagged a different finger back, with only the most transitory hint of a smile to soften the image. ‘Don’t worry, I’m under orders from Harry, I can’t investigate.’

  In an apparent attempt to break the mounting tension, Mike caught Louise’s eye and theatrically spooned more curry onto his plate. ‘Korma down?’

  Without waiting for Mike to finish his second helping of curry, Louise helped herself to ice cream. ‘Okay. So, Mike, what are you up to at the moment?’

  ‘Enjoying semi-retirement. A tiny bit of advisory work for the university; just corporate sponsorship stuff. The Dean likes to wheel me out as a stereotypical academic.’ Mike paused and turned to give Jeff a meaningful look. ‘Waiting for research papers to review…’

  Jeff didn’t meet Mike’s eye. ‘I thought we’d agreed you reading my work may be detrimental to our friendship? Anyway, I don’t need your review. The paper is coming along just fine.’

  There was a brief silence and then Jeff spoke again. ‘I’m still waiting for you to invite me to that tennis match.’

  Louise whispered under her breath. ‘Handbags!’ But neither Mike nor Jeff gave any sign they had heard.

  ‘Well, I’m also spending time reading, walking, writing and looking for love.’

  Louise reached out and patted Mike’s arm. ‘Any sign of a meaningful relationship?’

  ‘No, I am particularly singular at the moment. I could do with a bit of Bullage’s luck.’

  ‘Sorry to hear it, Mike…’ Louise paused for a moment, her attention focused on her spoon. ‘I suppose it was just luck for Bullage.’

  Mike clicked his fingers. ‘We were talking about me!’

  Shaking her head clear, Louise continued. ‘There’s no great alternative, I mean he could have staged the crash to appear he’d been in it.’

  Jeff groaned. ‘He’d hardly murder twelve people just to get a little sympathy. Anyway the court case is over.’

  ‘There’ll be more, mark my words.’

  ‘Okay, okay, if you’re both obsessed with not talking about my love life.’ Mike theatrically waved his hands in the air. ‘It could be Jack has super-powers, or he did stage the crash for sympathy. But what’s most likely is Thursday was just a good day for him. There were probably 10,000 serious crashes around the world that day; he was one of the lucky survivors.’

  Louise’s attention drifted again, then she looked at them both in turn. ‘There’s the word luck again. Could Jack Bullage be somehow, genuinely, intrinsically lucky? It would explain how he escaped the court case.’

  Pointing through the open door at the bookcase in the corner of the living room, Jeff replied. ‘There are a few sci-fi novels based on luck being intrinsic and wired into our DNA. But they’re novels, just fiction.’

  Mike concurred. ‘Scientific theory doesn’t allow for any sort of intrinsic luck.’

  Jeff leant forward. ‘Yeah, the whole point of luck is it is chaotic. If a favourable outcome were repeatable through skill then it wouldn’t be chance.’

  ‘Semantics, Jeff! The word you want is random, not chaotic. If it were chaotic then it, logically, would be predictable, and so repeated favourable outcomes could be obtained through exceptional skill or highly detailed planning.’

  Louise stepped in. ‘Guys…‌get to the point.’

  Mike shrugged. ‘The point hasn’t changed. If something is random, like the lottery then, semantically, you’re lucky to win it once. You’ve got a favourable outcome to a random event…‌But no single person wins it week after week…‌no one is sustainably lucky.’

  Jeff looked at Mike momentarily and then back to Louise. ‘So we’re pretty sure it is impossible to get lots of repeated lucky outcomes across lots of random events.’

  Mike looked sharply at Jeff. ‘Pretty sure? No…‌Semantically, we’re absolutely certain. There cannot be any such thing as predictable repeated favourable outcomes to purely random events, because semantically if something is random then it’s really random. So since luck is just the way of describing the favourable outcome of a single random event, then…’

  ‘Mike! No going postal!’ Louise was waving her spoon at him. ‘Semantics aside and simple sentences, please; if we can’t understand you, you may as well keep quiet.’

  Mike smiled and spread his hands wide. ‘Sorry, I’ve no idea what could specifically cause Jack to survive the crash, other than random dumb luck.’ Mike paused. ‘But we must also accept the possible existence of a situation which, to us, looks random because we have insufficient data to show other factors in action…‌hidden variables…‌either because we have no concept of them, or, alternatively, we simply haven’t considered them.’

  Louise walked back over to the kitchen table. ‘So it could be that certain people are more likely to survive a crash or trauma than others.’

  ‘Of course, some people are more likely to survive a crash than others. If we had all the data on car crashes across the whole world, we would definitely see survival correlation factors: age, fitness, seatbelts…‌lots of things.’ Mike paused. ‘And, without wanting to complicate matters unduly, let’s not forget there are also some people who are young, fit and wearing seatbelts but die from very small and innocuous crashes. The other side of the coin.’

  Louise puffed up her cheeks and blew out. ‘Unlucky people?’ Mike grimaced and Louise continued. ‘Okay, forgetting the L word, could it be that Jack is special in some way that makes him a survivor?’

  ‘Sure, there could be something particular about him, to make him more likely to survive car accidents, or perhaps thrown bricks.’ Mike studied his glass for a while, thinking carefully. ‘But it would probably be a completely different something from the one that would make him more likely to receive a favourable ruling in a court case.’

  Conversation moved on to office politics at the university; Jeff was still worried about budgets though, as Louise noted, not so worried as to make daily attendance an absolute priority.

  Just after midnight the party broke up and Mike left the house.

  As Jeff lay gently snoring, Louise reviewed the evening’s conversation. Her mind kept returning to lucky survivors. Mike had said no-one was sustainably lucky. Was he sure? Could there be individual survivors of multiple accidents? It couldn’t hurt to have a little look. Or at least some correlation between survivors of single events.

  Chapter
5

  Back in the crew room of the Gadium ship, the Professor Harkin summary on the Trogian Event remained projected on to one of the grey walls, filling 10 square metres of wall space with text and data.

  Aytch paced around the room with his communications tablet in one hand, studying his notes, and making more. ‘Trogia was stuck in a Partial Emergence. Beta to Alpha transitions had stopped. The Gadium mission commanders tried to artificially boost the transition rates.’ He shook his head, bewildered. ‘Why?’

  Justio looked up. ‘Desperation. Bravery. Ignorance. Take your pick. They obviously genuinely thought they could succeed. But there’s no historical precedent. Trogia was stable.’

  ‘Stable? Wouldn’t stalled be more appropriate?’

  ‘No, they were stable: 1% Alphas, 99% Betas, and no more transitions.’ Justio sighed. ‘Well maybe stable is not the word. Once the Trogians learned…’ Justio trailed off and left a silence.

  Aytch looked for a few moments at Justio, wondering if he was going to pick up again, but Justio remained silent. ‘I imagine that day-to-day there were no real differences.’

  Justio struggled for a few moments with his walking stick and stood up. ‘None at all. No one had a clue whether they were an Alpha or a Beta.’

  As Justio walked passed Aytch he stumbled. Reflexively, Aytch reached out to steady him. Small and crippled. Tough start. But Justio steadied himself quickly and brushed away Aytch’s help with a grumbled, ‘I’m fine.’

  Slightly put out by the rejection, Aytch looked back at the screens. He felt his anger growing; those Gadium commanders had been a disgrace to their positions. ‘Until we interfered, and the Gadium commanders tried to kick-start the transitions.’

  ‘But their plans were so intrusive they needed the tacit agreement of a few of the Trogian governments. The selected governments were promised longevity, physical resilience and enhanced reactions for their own populations. It’s not surprising they were tempted.’ Justio walked around the crew room, working flexibility into his damaged leg. ‘But we…‌they…‌couldn’t deliver on the promises, it didn’t work. The processes were tweaked, making them more and more dangerous until fatalities became an issue.’