Page 84 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

‘No, God no, they wouldn’t risk it. I don’t know where he is, but they have him somewhere. I’ll show you. How did you find this place? Did Akira ask you to come?’

Akira – Matsumoto, of course. ‘He reported you missing. Tokyo’s gone mad, there’s electricity everywhere, everything’s on fire – everyone thought it was something to do with the volcano, so I came up to see if it was erupting, and then I found all the ghosts and a monk who said there were scientists up here— what did you say about Mori?’

‘This is all here because of him. It—’ She glanced up, because someone had opened another door at the top of the stairs and footsteps were coming down. ‘Come up, I’ll show you,’ she said, falsely bright again. Another man passed them and nodded. ‘Dr Shirakawa.’

‘Mrs Matsumoto,’ he muttered.

She made a brittle effort at wry. ‘I think the university only sent me and not the head of department because they knew it was shifty,’ she explained.

‘Morons.’

She laughed. ‘Entirely,’ she said, and clipped up the stairs. After the bizarre testing room, the little stairway was ordinary. It had a grey carpet, and the edges of the steps were lined with fresh strips of linoleum.

At the top was a gallery office whose window overlooked the chalk-dusted testing floor. A few people were there, but no one paid them any attention; they were watching the testing floor, making notes, beside bulky things wrapped up in rubber and mounted on tripods. Cameras. The room was full of other devices too, but Thaniel couldn’t have got close to naming most of them. Something that might have been a telescope was pointing out the window, but it was made mostly of cardboard, and wires flooded around one side. There was something complicated going on with paperclips and scavenged bits of clock. On a desk in the corner was a weird mutant of a microscope with a lightbulb burning underneath it. It might have been going for a while, because there was a smell of hot metal coming from that direction.

‘Damn,’ Grace muttered, and slung a tea-towel over the lightbulb. ‘People keep using it and leaving it on.’

‘What is it?’

‘I’m trying to see if it’s possible to see ether particles – it would help a lot – but normal microscopes don’t have anything like the magnification. I’m focusing down electron streams instead of visible light … no, it’s boring, you don’t care,’ she finished, and then scuffed her hand through the back of her hair and scanned the ground as if her thoughts had just rolled off in different directions. ‘Sorry. I’m going to bits; nobody up here believes in sleep. I was going to show you …’

She went to a filing cabinet and took out a heavy folder. The hum of the great generator was low and nagging in the background.

‘Every day all through January,’ she said, very low, ‘we sent information requests to a research facility whose location we don’t know, via the Home Ministry. Every day, we received answers to the requests of two days before. These are the records.’

Thaniel looked down the page she had opened. It was a zebra-striping of telegram transcripts pasted on black paper. She cleared aside odd bits of mechanisms and cardboard stencils to make room for them to lay out some of the pages.

Q: Please place the Subject in total darkness. Set out in front of him three coloured sheets of paper. Allow nobody, including yourself, to tell him which colours they are. Ask him to identify the colours. Is he able to do so?

A: No.

Q: How does the Subject respond to the THREAT of corporal punishment if it is a) fully intended and b) unintended.

A: a) Subject reacted as though I had removed his first two fingers, although I hadn’t yet picked up the chisel. Subject assured me in no uncertain terms that he would make me kill myself before too long.

b) Subject didn’t register that he was being spoken to.

Q: Please place the Subject in a vacuum, with breathing apparatus, in total darkness. Is he able to predict how many times you mean to tap his hand?

A: Yes. We’re not doing this one again. He got a match into the room and set the oxygen tank on fire. I no longer have the use of my eyebrows.

There were pages and pages, double-sided. Thaniel turned them over, not breathing. The final page was from the end of January. The transcript only reached halfway down the page.

‘They stopped,’ Grace said quietly. ‘We’ve had nothing since. I tried to ask why, but the Home Ministry only told us to make do with what we have.’

He lifted his eyes slowly, because they felt heavy. ‘What’s it all for?’

‘This place was built,’ she whispered, ‘to discover what Mori does, and to reproduce it. I’m not even meant to know his name. He’s just Subject A in all the official communications.’ She flicked a glance towards the big window, but the men there still weren’t paying them any attention. ‘But it must be him. When did you last see him?’

Thaniel shook his head slightly and turned back to the beginning of the folder. The first date was the second of January. He clenched his hand when his eye caught on ‘chisel’ again. ‘Christmas. Grace – why the ghosts?’

‘Mori remembers the future. He can tell you what it looks like, what it sounds like.’ She coughed. It sounded bad. She must have been breathing chalk for weeks. ‘So we knew there must be visual information to be had. We knew that any perception of future events must be happening at faster than light speed, and – God, you don’t care,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘What we found very quickly is that if you electrify the atmosphere and introduce a fine medium – chalk, sugar, flour, smoke – it will outline imprints. You know what the luminiferous ether is. Immensely fine, subtle substance that permeates everything, and through which light moves.’

‘Like sound moves through air.’

‘Well—’ She looked pained, then seemed to let it go. ‘Yes, fine. It turns out light makes prints on it. The ghosts are light fossils. The marks made by visible light on the ether. Which is like the bedrock of the universe. Unmoving, but like real bedrock, possible to imprint.’

‘But how is that anything to do with …’