Chapter One

 

He works alone, at who knows what, in a grey, relentless room, a dismal, lifeless, airless place beneath a grey and toneless sky.

 

I will tell you, now, it is in miracles he works; made-in-miniature machines; some components smaller than a molecule of flax, some parts in flux, so you could never know exactly what they are or what they do. It is no longer possible for its consequence to harm us, so I will say: it is an impossible machine, running on nothing but its own momentum. The smallest cogs and coils, too small to be seen, he coaxes into life with mesons and induction, part skill, part unbridled optimism. It is a secret far too dangerous to be revealed. The world needs energy. It is the crux of power. How dangerous it would be to make it free for all eternity. But now, the secret is safe, and so is he.

 

He learned long ago that science is fiction. He tried to separate its so-called laws from what he does in the hope that, without them, he may succeed. His faith in quackery is just as likely to uncover the solution. His knowledge of molecular bonds is formidable, and he has invented a new, elastic material that forms new bonds when stretched and restores its shape with more force than was used to stretch it. Its particles can skip a beat and weave along the threads of time, entropy backpedalling cycle, gaining energy, making it work. After countless re-inventions, his device works; drives itself and even, for a moment, emits energy. And then it stops. Every time, as soon as it begins, it stops.

 

So much work for nothing. Again it stops. This time, he flies into frustrated rage! Deliberated papers fly; delicate flasks roll and crash; intricate creations cascade out of his reach like tiny beads; micro-clouds of unknown powders grow milky in the riotous air and fuse, their hostile energies buzzing, crackling in the glow of dark light; atoms fly apart and reform, stabilise. And he, too, settles, holds his head in folded arms, in helplessness and fury.

 

A single speck, no more than a quark, a single string, loops, twirls, battered by electrons, and falls between those volatile parts, falls deep within the machine where it blends with restless waves and transforms the laws of time.

 

The change to him is so abrupt it seems unreal. Here he is, the same man, in the same mind, doing again the very things he’d done just moments past. He watches as though out of body: sees himself make one last effort to start the machine, perhaps this time never to be stopped. Parts made of barely anything at all are regulated, aligned, poised, all ready to begin their unremitting pulse, with tiny yields of energy the impossible, predictable, result. He watches as it fails, his deadly, careless rage sends him reeling back in time, a little, this to happen over and again. The starting up, the silence, the malfunction; then the rage, the flicker back in time, living through it all again.

 

His mistake would be easy to correct if he were able to do something differently but, however long he has, however many times it is re-lived, he cannot change a thing. An old clock clings wretchedly to the wall, well-worn with all the years, hours, and decades it has seen; the decay of long-gone-days worn in figures pitted round its smoke-dark, day-worn glass. The hands never move whilst watched but have, on staring for a minute, rotated six degrees. Later, with more time on his hands, he learns the angle those hands turn for each and every time he turns back in time. Three-point-four degrees. Thirty-four seconds. A single word is stamped above the centre and below the twelve: Infinity.