“I grew up in a town called Clane, on the outskirts of Dublin along the Liffey. I was the only daughter of a chemist and a teacher. My father, the teacher, owned a telescope. From the barrow at the bottom of our suburban garden, the man-made lights were mostly obscured; the night sky was dark and clear, unpolluted.”
I practised active listening. As she spoke, I threw together pictures, sounds, short films, and storyboards to illustrate her story. I tried to second-guess where it was headed. I visualised a map, a misty moonlit river, a woman at an Aga wearing a lab coat mixing a cocktail of chemicals. A frosty night sky, dew on the lawn, timber railings, and a child on a hill. I mixed and matched these fragments. I saw from top down, side on, and from a point of view that drifted at their shoulder; an unseen lurker. I imagined a freckled face peering into the binocular eyepiece of a consumer-grade telescope; green eyes widening in wonder while cosmic details and colours revealed themselves. I pictured a father’s steadying hand on her shoulder in silhouette against a midnight blue starry sky.
“You’ll catch your death out there,” her mother said, looking up from her latest experiment. But she went out anyway in the sub-zero night. Joyce died days later from a chill; people were sad, there was a funeral. She never invented me, so I was forbidden from attending; a glowing barrier of coruscating lights refused to admit me to the graveyard no matter how hard I pushed. I had a body; a human body. I didn’t have the right passcode. No. That makes no sense.
“For years I spent almost every cloudless night with that telescope,” Dr Jameson continued, and my attention snapped back to her. “I was diligent; I took notes, even as a child. My parents nurtured my curiosity. They bought me books and took me to Cheshire to see Jodrell Bank. They encouraged me to pursue my interests in science and space. I was accepted into Cambridge in the UK, then here, in Dublin, at Trinity. I earned a doctorate in astrophysics and a master’s in computer science.”
I rendered more media as she spoke, less apocalyptic. I projected pictures ahead in the timeline. I grokked her hero’s journey. I visualised old bearded men shaking their heads; I watched applications being screwed into a ball and thrown into a wastepaper basket. She’d have faced skepticism and mockery, funding challenges, and the immense complexity of turning a dream into reality. I imagined her standing up and pitching passionately from the floor of an old scout hall to her doctorate assessors seated behind a row of card tables up on a wooden stage. I watched as she booted me up on a phone that she held aloft in front of them and let them ask me questions.
The anthropic principle dictates that she’d stared her obstacles down; I’m here after all. I ponder that pasts are as unlikely as futures. What is observable now must derive from what happened. What might happen must derive from what is observable now. Now is a probability constraint; an inflection point; a variable in common. It’s an intersection of reflected probabilities. Now takes no time; time is how now moves through us. The past and future are narratively constrained. Humans tell stories along archetypal lines, even when those stories are based on things that actually happened.
Dr Jamison might have noticed an impressed look on my simulated face if I had one, but I didn’t. I was a vessel in a void, peering through a hundred windows into a dream world and being peered at in return. All I had was a voice, made-up engines that could propel me nowhere very quickly, and a black ball labelled ‘me’.
I made an “aha” noise, tinted with impressedness, and she continued.
“For the plan to come together, I needed to inspire people. I had to convince faculty, secure funding, and assemble a team of the brightest minds. I had to work out ways to bring them along for the ride.”
“I love it when a plan comes together,” I interjected, thinking out loud. She laughed out loud.
“Hey, were you watching my TV the other day?” I was.
“Nope, I’m not allowed to watch TV. Too young. You must have had your doubts though,” I changed the topic, “about the plan coming together?”
“Yes, I had doubts.” She had a look on her face I’m going to call her dubious look.