Lab Rats

Part three — week three — began with an apple.

The same kind as in the first week: ordinary, green, slightly bruised — Olga bought them at the market in Krasnogorsk, because “supermarket apples smell like cardboard, and cardboard, in case you hadn’t noticed, is an engineering achievement, but not food.”

— Look, — said Wei Lin. — The way you looked then. But now — further.

— How much further?

— All the way to the author.

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I already knew how to read an apple. Biography: the tree, thirty years old, Krasnodar Krai (a faint taste of the sea in the flavour; I checked — it was there; Wei Lin nodded: “yes, it drifts in from the coast sometimes”). Sun, rain, a graft onto a wild stock. Forty generations of selective breeding. Human intervention is visible: the apple has been tuned — for sugar, for size, for skin of a certain density, to the teeth of this particular species; you can’t bring yourself to call such an apple simply grown — rather finished, the way a part on a conveyor is finished to a saleable condition.

I’d already seen this. In the first week.

— This isn’t further, — I said. — This is the same thing.

— Look more. Beneath the breeding.

I looked. Beneath the breeding — the wild stock, a wild apple tree: thousands of years of slow mutations, no author, just evolution in its pure form — environmental pressure, selection and statistics.

— That’s chaos, — I said. — There’s no author there.

— There are parameters there. The gravity in which the apple falls. The temperature at which the tree blossoms. The atmosphere in which pollen is carried by an insect calculated for the length of the stamen. Deeper.

I closed my eyes. Went deeper.

And saw.

What I saw didn’t lend itself to ordinary description, but a physicist is a person who describes everything he has found a way to measure. I saw settings. As in a program: field, value, units. g = 9.81. T = 288 K. Atmospheric composition — such-and-such. Day length — twenty-four hours plus or minus a few hundredths. Each with a tolerance. Each for something. Not arbitrary. Calculated.

And behind the settings — intention.

An intention bigger than both the human and the gardener — someone else’s, belonging to whoever entered the values.

The author.

I opened my eyes. The apple on the table. Ordinary. Green. I looked at Wei Lin.

He was drinking tea. Waiting.

— Who? — I asked.

— For now — what. Who — later. — He put down his cup. And, as if in passing, removed the apple from the table. In its place he put a globe. A small school one, on a stand, the kind that sits in a geography classroom. I didn’t notice where it came from.

— Now — this.

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I looked at the globe for thirty seconds. Then a minute. Then I stopped counting.

Because once you’ve learned to see an apple’s settings, a planet is the same operation, only at a different scale.

Gravity. Tuned. Axial tilt. Tuned. Distance to the star. Tuned. Magnetic field. Tuned. The ratio of water to land. Tuned. Twenty-one parameters, each in a narrow window outside of which life as I knew it doesn’t work. And each one compatible with every other. No contradictions. No randomness in the distribution. As if someone had spent a long time fitting the values until they came out.

The physicist in me tried to object. The anthropic principle. We see a universe like this because in others we wouldn’t exist. Observer selection. We’re a tautology.

The physicist in me fell silent. Because behind the settings, visibly, stood intention. The same as behind the apple. Only bigger. Considerably bigger.

My throat tightened.

— It’s a project, — I said. The voice wasn’t mine. Half a tone lower.

— Yes, — said Wei Lin.

One word. Seven hundred years. Twenty-six years of his waiting for someone to see it for himself.