Maxwell's Demon. Steven Hall
particles – the less can actually happen, and the more slowly the arrow of time can move forward. To begin to get an idea of this, think about stirring a pile of sand with a stick. No matter how much you stir, it doesn’t make the pile of sand any more disordered, because there’s no order to the sand grains anyway – it doesn’t matter where the individual grains go, it’s still just a pile of sand. Because things can’t get any messier within the pile of sand, entropy cannot increase and so there cannot be a discernible before or after, nothing can happen, nothing can change or, to put it another way, time does not pass.
‘Avoid the world,’ Kerouac said, ‘it’s just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.’ Well, the diagnosis might’ve been premature, but you can’t fault the science. When entropy reaches a universal maximum, nothing can be anything, or do anything, or mean anything. Our universe will not see out its days by barrelling towards some big, climactic, Revelations-style ending, but by slouching through an increasingly meaningless jumble of dispersing elements, then limping on towards the most bland, uniform, entirely generic middle you can possibly imaginable, and dying there.
This is all a little bleak, I realise, but it’s important to get the facts down on paper. It’s also important, and maybe even a little heartening, to say that there’s a speck of scientific fairy dust to be found amongst all this gloom and collapse. You see, entropy and the arrow of time are not driven by a hard constant – like, say, the speed of light – but by probability, and probability alone. What I mean is, there is no rule specifically saying that everything in the kitchen can’t fall, bounce or somehow shift from a messy state to a neat state by sheer chance. It’s just that the odds against such things are so astonishingly, incredibly, mind-bogglingly, unimaginably huge, compared to the usual ‘neat to messy’ movement, that for practical purposes we say it doesn’t ever happen.
But it could.
You’d have to watch countless billions of kitchens for countless billions of years to glimpse even the beginnings of something like that, but – it could happen, in theory.
How would it feel to experience something like that?
The overwhelming sensation would probably be that something magical and impossible had happened – a visit from the fairies. But also, wouldn’t there be a sense that you had somehow travelled back in time?
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7
The Letter
Cleaning the kitchen in a kind of trance, entirely absorbed in the act of ordering and restoring, I took a deep satisfaction in matching up the plates, cups and pans, and in vanishing each set behind cupboard doors and drawer fronts. I’d just finished mopping the floor and was pouring grey water into the toilet bowl when there was a knock on the front door.
Danni Grayson from the flat upstairs stood in the doorway, her arms full of post, all of it for me and for Imogen, and all of it delivered to her flat by mistake at various times over the last three weeks. Her expression said they have one job and for God’s sake, and mine said sorry and tell me about it. The problem had been going on for so long that we didn’t need to discuss it.
I took the pile through to the kitchen and began to sort it. Junk mail, red bill, junk mail, junk mail, red bill, red bill, junk mail, bank statement, red bill, red bill, red bill. And then—
‘Oh.’
The word came involuntarily, as my chest squeezed itself tight in surprise.
I stood dead still, the red bill in my hand still hovering above its pile on the counter.
A small, simple, handwritten envelope had emerged from the mass-produced, plastic-windowed heap. My name and address appeared in small, neat black capitals, and the whole thing was finished off with a perfectly aligned first-class stamp.
I knew the letter was from Andrew Black the moment I saw it.
‘Oh,’ I said, for a second time.
I thought I’d never see that neat black writing again.
The story was a fairly famous one. I knew it as well as anyone, probably better than most:
Six years ago, Andrew Black abandoned his writing career, Cupid’s Engine, and everything else. He released one massive bestseller, and then he vanished. Even the few people who knew him, who had worked with him on his novel, never heard from him again. If you’d pushed me for a reason as to why he’d do such a thing, I might’ve told you that certain circumstances led to this decision, prompting him to sever whatever ties he had with the world, and his literary ties especially, but none of those things were down to me. I’d have said we were acquaintances – friends would be too much of a stretch – for a while after my father died, but even so, I assumed – I assumed that I’d hear something from him when things finally settled down. Or, at least, I assumed that somebody would hear something. But, as far as I knew, no one ever had.
Not until that moment.
I turned the envelope over in my hands.
The postmark told me that the letter had been sent weeks earlier. I ripped it open, feeling a stab of anxiety. Small talk, pleasantries, just saying hello – that wasn’t Andrew Black. This meant that something was happening, or had happened, and I was only hearing about it now.
Inside, I found a single Polaroid picture and a small folded note.
The photograph showed a black sphere, resting on what I took to be Andrew’s desk. He’d placed a ruler next to the object, and though the Polaroid was a little fuzzy, it seemed to indicate a diameter of around ten centimetres. I struggled to make out much more, partly because it was slightly blurred, but also because the sphere was so utterly black. The most diffuse crescent moon of light touching the thing’s left side, and an equally faint shadow on the bench to its right, were all that gave it away as three-dimensional.
The object – whatever it was – looked as black as a hole.
And it bothered me.
I don’t write that lightly. I’ve thought long and hard about whether to include my reaction here at all, but the facts are the facts. I didn’t like the picture when I first saw it. As to whether we should set any store by this, whether it means anything – that’s another matter altogether.
I put down the Polaroid and unfolded Andrew’s note.
Only nine words, each one written in that same precise hand:
Thomas,
What do you think this is?
Andrew Black
8
The Mary Magdalene Treatment
‘No,’ said Sophie Almonds.
I’d barely had a chance to lay Black’s letter and the picture of the black sphere out on the table between