Meanwhile, Anna Kearney was staring around as if she couldn’t believe any of it. Every so often her eyes went across Tate with the calm contempt of one neurotic for another, and she shook her head. “What’s that?” she said suddenly. The white cat had emerged cautiously from under the desk. It looked up at Michael Kearney and ran off a little way. Then it stretched itself with a kind of careful self-regard and walked up and down purring, its tail stuck in the air. It seemed to be enjoying the heat. Anna knelt down and offered her hand. “Hello, baby,” she said. “Hello, little baby.” The cat ignored her, leapt lightly up onto the hardware, and from there onto Tate’s shoulder. It looked thinner than ever, its head more than ever like the blade of an axe, ears transparent, fur a corona of light.

“I’m living in just the one room,” Tate said.

“What’s happened, Brian?” Kearney said gently. “I thought you said it was a glitch.”

Tate held his hands out from his sides.

“I was wrong.”

Rooting about in the tangle of USB cable, stacked peripherals and old coffee cups that covered the desk, he came up with a 100Gb pocket drive in a polished titanium shell. This he offered to Kearney, who weighed it cautiously in his hand.

“What’s this?”

“The results of the last run. It was decoherence-free for a whole minute. We had q-bits that survived a whole fucking minute before interference set in. That’s like a million years down there. That’s like the indeterminacy principle is suspended.” He gave a strained laugh. “Is a million years long enough for us, do you think? Will that do? But then . . . I don’t know what happened then. The fractals . . .”

Kearney felt this wasn’t going anywhere. He thought results like these were probably wrong, and that anyway they couldn’t explain what he had seen in the laboratory.

“Why did you smash the monitors up, Brian?”

“Because it wasn’t physics anymore. Physics was off. The fractals started to—” he couldn’t think of a word, nothing had prepared him for whatever he was seeing in his head “—leak. Then the cat went inside after them. She just walked through the screen and into the data.” He laughed, looking from Kearney to Anna. “I don’t expect you to believe that,” he said.

Underneath it all—underneath the inexplicable fear, the weirdness, the simple guilt of selling the project out first to Meadows then to Sony—Tate was just a teenager good at physics. He hadn’t developed past a hip haircut and the idea that his talent gave him some sort of edge in the world, if only he would always be forgiven by adults. Now his wife had disabused him of that. Worse, perhaps, physics itself had come looking for him in some unfathomable way he couldn’t live with. Kearney felt sorry for him, but he only said carefully:

“The cat’s here, Brian. She’s on your shoulder now.”