Fractals Read online

  Fractals

  Peter Watts

  First published in On Spec 7(1), 1995: 31-41.

  Fractals

  or: Reagan Assured Gorbachev of Help Against Space Aliens

  by Peter Watts

  Trespassing? Trespassing? You arrogant slant-eyed alien motherfucker, I used to live here!

  * * *

  How long have I wanted to do that? How many years have I hated them, dreamt that my fists were smashing those faces into shapes even less human? I can’t remember. The anger is chronic. The anger has always been chronic. And impotent, until now. The pain in my knuckles throbs like a distant badge of honour.

  It’s cold.

  The rage is gone, absorbed somehow by the mud and the unlit piles of lumber and masonry scattered around me. I can barely focus on my surroundings. The shapes keep changing, hulking angular monstrosities shifting on all sides. Only the sign at the front of the lot, the sign he kept pointing at, refuses to move.

  I can barely see him in the dark. He’s just a few meters away, but the shadows are so black and he doesn’t move at all. What if I killed him? What if I—

  There. He moved a bit. It’s okay, I didn’t kill him, he’s not dead—

  Yet. What if he dies here in the mud?

  (So what if he does? Lots more where he came from.) No. I don’t mean that. I can’t believe I ever did, I mean, what if I, what if he dies here, what if—

  What if he lives, and identifies me?

  A couple of steps forward. A couple more. Okay, he was about here when he saw me, and then he moved over there and started shouting—

  He couldn’t have seen my face. Even when he came closer, it’s so dark he’d only have seen a silhouette, and then he was right in front of me and—

  I can get away. I can get away. Oh Jesus God I can’t believe I did this—

  Okay. This is a construction site, after all; my car will only leave one set of tracks in a muddle of hundreds. And the nearest house is over a block away, this whole end of the road is unlit. Lucky me: no witnesses.

  The car starts smoothly, without a moment’s hesitation. I descend toward the city.

  It was as though I had planned it all, somehow. In a way I feel as though I’ve been rehearsing this forever. I have been purged. It’s such a relief not to burn, to unclench my teeth, to feel the hard knot of tension in my stomach easing away. Somehow, I’m free. Not happy, perhaps. But I have acted, at last, from the heart, and in some strange way I’m finally at peace.

  (What if he dies up there?)

  I’ll stop at the next phone booth. Ambulances respond to anonymous tips, don’t they? In the meantime, I’ve got to be careful to keep my shoes on the mudmat. Just in case. Joanne might still be awake when I get home. I’ll stop off at a gas station and rinse everything clean on the way.

  * * *

  It’s a nice window; nice scenery. I’ve always liked forests, though I’ve never seen so many squirrels and deer and birds crammed into such a small area before. But hey, who am I to complain about realism, I’m twenty floors over Robson Street looking out at a rainforest so why worry about details? Besides, it’s not a rainforest any more. It’s an alpine meadow. She touches a button on the windowsill and the whole world changes.

  I walk across the room; rocks and heather come into view, cross the window, fall into eclipse at the other side. I move closer and the field of view expands. Nose against glass I can see one hundred and eighty, three-dimensional degrees along all axes. Just outside, an explosion of flowers stirs in a sudden breeze.

  But now she fingers a switch and the world stops, there’s no window at all any more, just a flat grey screen and a fake window sill.

  “That’s incredible,” I say, distantly amazed.

  She can’t quite keep the pride out of her voice. “It’s a breakthrough all right. There are other flat monitors around, but you can see the difference.”

  “How do you do it? Is this some sort of 3-d videotape or something?”

  Her smile widens. “Not even close. We use fractals.”

  “Fractals.”

  “You know, those psychedelic patterns you see on calendars and computer posters.”

  Right. Something to do with chaos theory. “But what exactly are—”

  She laughs. “Actually, I just demonstrate the stuff. We got a guy at the university to hack the software for us, he’d be able to tell you the details. If you think your readers would be interested.”

  “I’m interested. If I can’t get them interested too I’m not much of a journalist, am I?”

  “Well then, let me give you his name,” she says. “I’ll tell him to expect you. He should be able to set something up within the next week or so.”

  She jots a name on the back of her card and hands it to me.

  Roy Cheung, it says. I feel a sudden brief constriction in my throat.

  “One last question,” I say to her. “Who’s going to be able to afford something like this?”

  “Bottom-line models will retail at around thirty thousand,” she tells me. “A lot of businesses want to hang one in their lobbies and so forth. And we also hope to sell to upper income individuals.”

  “If you can find any nowadays.”

  “You’d be surprised, actually. Since the Hong Kong influx started there’s been a real surge in the number of people who can afford this sort of product.”

  You poor dear. You haven’t done your market research, have you? Or you’d know exactly what your wealthy clientele think of nature. It’s abstract art to them. There probably isn’t a blade of grass left in all of Hong Kong. Most of those people wouldn’t know what a tree was if one grew through their penthouse windows and spat oxygen all over the walls.

  No matter. In another few years, neither will we.

  * * *

  “Emergency Admissions.”

  “Uh, yes. I was wondering if you’ve had—if there was an assault victim admitted over the past day or so.”

  “I’m sorry sir, you’ll have to be more specific. Assault victim?”

  “Yes, um, has someone been admitted suffering head injuries, an oriental—”

  “Why?” The voice acquires a sudden sharp edge. “Do you know something about an unreported assault?”

  “Uh—” Hang up, you idiot! This isn’t getting you anywhere!

  “Actually, it must have been reported, they were loading him into an ambulance. He looked pretty bad, I was just wondering how he was doing.”

  Yeah. Right. Very credible.

  “I see. And where did this happen?”

  “North Van. Up around, um, Cumberland I think.”

  “And I don’t suppose you know the name of the victim?”

  “Uh no, like I said I just saw them taking him away, I was just wondering—”

  “That’s very...kind of you, sir,” she says. “But we’re not allowed to disclose such information except to family—”

  Jesus Christ, woman, I just want to find out how he’s doing I’m not interested in stealing national secrets for Chrissake! “I understand that, but—”

  “And in any event, nobody answering your description has been admitted to this hospital. Cumberland, you said?”

  Maybe they’re tracing the call. It would make sense, maybe they’ve got a standing trace on emergency hospital lines, I bet a lot of people do what I’m doing, I bet—

  “Sir? You said Cumberland?”

  I disconnect.

  * * *

  Joanne stirs as I slip into the darkened bedroom. “Anything interesting on the news?”

  “Not really.” No reports of unknown assailants on the north shore, anyway. That’s probably just as well. Wouldn’t a dead body at least warrant mention?

  I feel my way to the bed and climb in. “Oh,
The Musqueam Indians are planning this massive demonstration over land claims. Roadblocks and everything.” I mould myself against Joanne’s back.

  “They must hate our guts,” I say into her nape.

  She turns around to face me. “Who? The Musqueam?”

  “They must. I would.”

  She makes a wry sound. “No offense, lover, but I’d be very worried if too many other people thought the way you did.”

  I’ve learned to take such remarks as compliments, although that’s almost never the way she means them. “Well, if getting home and culture stolen out from under you isn’t grounds for hatred, I don’t know what is.” I hold back a moment, decide to risk it. “I wonder if that makes them racists.”

  “Ooh. Shame on you.” She wags a finger that I can barely make out in the darkness. “Victims of racism can’t possibly be guilty of racism. Why, you’d have to be a racist to even suggest such a thing. Excuse me while I call the Human Rights Commission.” Instead, she kisses me. “Actually, I’m too tired. I’ll let you off with a warning. G’night.” She settles down with her back to me.

  But I don’t want to sleep, not yet. There are things I have to say aloud, things I can’t even think about without invoking some subtle, chronic dread. I don’t like keeping things from Joanne.

  Three days now and the silence spreads through me like gangrene.

  But I can’t tell her. It could ruin everything. How much am I supposed to gamble on the hope she’d grant absolution?

  “I saw some graffitti today on Denman,” I try aloud. “It said White man out of Vancouver. Canada now for Asian Peoples.”

  Her back moves in a gentle respiratory rhythm. She mumbles something into her pillow.

  I ask: “What did you say?”

  “I said, there’s assholes on all sides. Go to sleep.”

  “Maybe it’s true.”

  She groans, defeated: if she wants any sleep tonight she’ll have to hear me out. “What’s true?” she sighs.

  “Maybe there isn’t room for all of us. I was on the bus today, it was full of all these Chinese and I couldn’t understand what any of them were saying—”

  “Don’t sweat it. They probably weren’t talking to you.”

  No, I want to say, they don’t have to. We don’t matter to them. Our quaint values and esthetics can be bought as easily as the North Shore. Don’t I have a right to be afraid of that? Can’t we fear for our own way of life without being racist? Aren’t we even allowed to—

  — beat the fuckers to death with our bare hands—

  There’s something else here.

  It’s lying in the dark between us and it’s invisible, Joanne could roll over right now and she wouldn’t see it any more than I can, but somehow I know it’s looking right at me and grinning...

  Joanne sits up without a word. It’s as though my own inadvertent thoughts have triggered her. She turns to look at me, she leans right through the thing between us without even pausing, her face breaks through that invisible grin and replaces it with one of her own.

  “If you wasn’t livin’ with a black woman,” she says in her best Aunt Jemima drawl, “I’d say you was sho’ ’nuff a racist honky sumbitch.” She nips me on the nose. “As it is, I think you just need a good night’s sleep.” She settles back down with one arm draped over my chest.

  We’re alone again. In the next room, Sean coughs softly in her sleep.

  My knuckles sting with faint remembrance.

  I wonder if he had a family.

  Whoever you were. I’m—

  —sorry—

  * * *

  It’s almost time to meet Roy Cheung. For two hours now I’ve been wandering downtown streets, watching morning traffic congeal in thin slushy snow. I’ve been counting invaders. They hurry past the rest of us, mixed but not mixing, heads down against the chill of this alien climate. Sometimes they speak to 8

  Nimbus

  each other. Sometimes they even use our language. More often they say nothing at all.

  They never look at me.

  I didn’t always feel this way. I’m almost sure of it. There was a time when we were all just people, and I knew exactly what racism looked like: it drove a Ford pickup with a gun rack in the rear window. It threw beer bottles out the window at stop signs, and it didn’t think; it gibbered.

  But now statistics and xenophobia are in bed together. Every day the planes touch down and the balance shifts a little more. Asian wealth rises around us, flashing invisibly bank-to-bank, ricocheting down from comsats high over the Pacific rim.

  Burying us. Who wouldn’t be afraid? My whole world is listing to the east.

  But nobody taught me to hate like this. It just happened.

  Is this what it’s like to discover you’re a werewolf?

  * * *

  There’s a poster commemorating the 1995 International Computer Graphics Conference hanging on one wall of Roy Cheung’s office. Below it, a transistor radio emits country and western; it’s partially eclipsed by a huge, luxuriant Boston fern in a hanging pot. I wonder how he does it. Every time I buy one of those bloody plants it’s dead within a week.

  His desk is barely visible under a mass of printouts and the biggest colour monitor I’ve ever seen. There is a spiral galaxy rotating on the screen. It seems to be made of iridescent soap bubbles, each arranged with unimaginable precision.

  “That,” says Cheung, “is a fractal. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  He speaks without a trace of accent. He sounds just like I do.

  Cheung sits down at the keyboard. “Watch closely. I’m increasing the magnification so we’re only looking at one of these nodes. One star in the galaxy, if you will.”

  The image blurs, then refocusses. There is a spiral galaxy rotating on the screen.

  “That’s the same image,” I say.

  “Not quite. There are a number of differences, but overall it’s pretty similar. Except, like I said, we’re only looking at one star in the galaxy.”

  “But that’s a whole—”

  “Now let’s zoom in on a single star in this galaxy.”

  There is a spiral galaxy rotating on the screen.

  Something clicks. “Isn’t this what you call infinite regression?”

  He nods. “Actually, the term is scale- invariance. You can look at this thing with a microscope or a telescope, it doesn’t matter; at every scale, the pattern is essentially the same.”

  “So at what scale do we get the nature scenes?” There isn’t the slightest hint of tension in my voice. I even smile.

  “All of them. This fractal comes from a very simple equation; the trick is it keeps repeating itself. Uses the output from one iteration as the input for the next. You don’t have to store a complete image at all. You just store a few equations and let the computer draw the picture step-by-step. You get incredibly detailed output with hardly any memory cost.”

  “You’re saying you can duplicate nature on a screen with a bunch of simple equations?”

  “No. I’m saying nature is a bunch of simple equations.”

  “Prove it,” I tell him, still smiling. For an instant I see him shrouded in darkness, arms thrown up in a vain attempt to ward off judgment, face bleeding and pulpy.

  I shake my head to dislodge the image. It sticks.

  “—shape of a tree,” he’s saying. “The trunk splits into branches. Then the branches split into smaller branches. Then those divide into twigs. And at each scale, the pattern is the same.”

  I imagine a tree. It doesn’t seem very mathematical.

  “Or your own lungs,” Cheung continues. “Windpipe to bronchi to bronchioles to alveoli. Or your circulatory system. Or the growth of a crystal. Incrementally simple, the same thing happening at a dozen different scales simultaneously.”

  “So you’re saying trees are fractal? Crystals are fractal?”

  He shakes his head, grinning from ear to ear. “Nature is fractal. Life is fractal. You’re fractal.” He wears the lo
ok of a religious convert. “And the image compression stuff is nothing. There are implications for meteorology, or—wait a second, let me show you what I’m working on for the medical centre.”

  I wait while Cheung fiddles with his machine. Voices from his radio fill the lull. A phone-in show; some woman is complaining to the host about a three-car pile-up in her front yard. Her neighbour up the hill used a garden hose to wash the snow off his driveway this morning; the water slid downhill and froze the road into a skating rink, tilted twenty degrees.

  “They come in from Hong Kong, they think the climate is just the same the world over,” the caller complains.

  The host doesn’t say anything. How can he? How can he sympathise without being branded a racist? Maybe he will anyway. Maybe he’ll call a spade a spade, maybe the editors and the censors haven’t quite crushed him yet. Go for it, asshole, it’s what we’re all thinking, why don’t you just say it—

  “What an idiot,” Roy Cheung remarks.

  I blink. “What?”

  “That’s actually pretty minor,” he tells me. “That’s just some moron who never saw ice outside of a scotch on the rocks. We’ve got these neighbours, a whole bloody family came over from Hong Kong a couple of years back and we’ve had nothing but trouble. Last summer they cut down our hedge.”

  “What?” It’s very strange, hearing Cheung betray his own kind like this.

  “My wife’s into horticulture, she’d spent ages growing this hedge on our property. It was gorgeous, about fifteen feet high, perfectly sculpted. Came home one day and these guys had paid someone to come over and chainsaw the whole thing. Said the hedge was a home for evil spirits.”

  “Didn’t you sue them or something?”

  Cheung shrugs. “I wanted too. Lana wouldn’t let me. She didn’t want any more trouble. You ask me, I’d gladly ship the whole lot of ’em back overseas.”

  I collect my thoughts. “But didn’t you, um, come from—”

  “Born here. Fifth generation,” he says.

  I’m only third.

  And suddenly I recognise the kinship behind those strange eyes, the shared resentment. How must it feel to go through life wearing that skin, that hair, these artifacts of a heritage left behind decades ago? Roy Cheung, guilty by association, probably hates them more than I do. He’s almost an ally.