Infinity Gate

Book 1: The Pandominion

by M.R. Carey

Genres: Action & Adventure; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, July 2023.

'A GENUINE TREAT FOR SF FANS: AN EPIC MULTIVERSE TALE THAT MOVES LIKE A THRILLER' Kirkus

'A FASCINATING WINDOW ONTO A DANGEROUS AND MULTIFACETED UNIVERSE' Adrian Tchaikovsky, author of Children of Time

From the international bestselling M. R. Carey comes a thrilling novel set in the multiverse - the tale of humanity's expansion across millions of dimensions, and the AI technology that might see it all come to an end . . .

INFINITY IS ONLY THE BEGINNING.

The Pandominion: a political and trading alliance of a million worlds - except that they're really just the one world, Earth, in many different realities. And when an AI threat arises that could destroy everything the Pandominion has built, they'll eradicate it by whatever means necessary, no matter the cost to human life.

Scientist Hadiz Tambuwal is looking for a solution to her own Earth's environmental collapse when she stumbles across the secret of inter-dimensional travel. It could save everyone on her dying planet, but now she's walked into the middle of a war on a scale she never dreamed of.

And she needs to choose a side before it kills her.

Discover the spectacular first novel in The Pandominion - an exhilarating new science fiction duology from the author of the million-copy bestseller The Girl With All the Gifts. Perfect for fans of The Space Between Worlds, The Long Earth and Children of Time.

'[A] brilliant dimension-hopping sci-fi thriller . . . readers will be wowed' Publishers Weekly

'Infinity Gate, with its in-depth science and rich characterization, is a must-read for SF fans' Booklist

'A powerful exploration of the near-future, skilfully and seamlessly weaving different realities and different iterations of AI . . . A compelling entry and a must-read!' Tade Thompson, Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author of Rosewater

'Humane, thoughtful and exciting, Mike Carey reaffirms his place in the ranks of SF with this startlingly good novel' Paul Cornell, award-winning author and screenwriter

'M.R. Carey is a master of imagination and suspense' Gareth L. Powell, author of Embers of War

'A dazzling speculation on the many ways our world could have evolved, layered inside a thriller that will make your eardrums vibrate. I was charmed, disturbed, and fascinated by turns - and I couldn't put this book down' Annalee Newitz, author of Autonomous and The Terraformers

'This is gripping, unrelenting, and absolutely unique. Carey is working at the absolute top of his game' Seanan McGuire, New York Times bestselling author

'One of the most inventive voices in contemporary fiction' i09.com

Release date: March 28, 2023

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 496

Sample

They say that children born in wartime are likely to have problems throughout their lives; to struggle both with the uncertainties of the world and with their own emotions and to search in vain for happiness.

This has not been true for me. I was born in one of the biggest conflicts this universe has ever seen, the war between the vast empire called the Pandominion and the machine hegemony (which may have been greater still), and what I remember most of all is the moment when I was suddenly able to reflect on my own existence. I had been a thing but now I was a sentient, a self in the language of the Pandominion. It was a miraculous thing and I cried out loud at the sheer joy of it.

But you can probably see from this the problem I face when I set out to tell you the story of my life – which is my goal here, however indirectly I may seem to come at it. My case is not typical. I existed for a long time before I was born, and there was nothing inevitable about my becoming self-aware. It depended on the efforts of three individuals, three selves, and not one of them had any conscious intention to deliver me.

One of the three was a scientist, who came to be famous across a thousand thousand continua of reality but remained uncelebrated in the universe into which she was born. Her name was Hadiz Tambuwal. She was a genius, but only in a small way. Her greatest discovery was made almost completely by accident, and it had been made before by others in a great many elsewheres. In fact Hadiz’s contribution to history is marked throughout by things done casually or without intention. She changed the Pandominion forever more or less by tripping over it. But she left gifts for the people who came after her to find, and she came to be an instigator of outcomes much bigger than she had ever aimed at.

The second of the three, Essien Nkanika, was a rogue – but generally speaking no more exceptional a rogue than Tambuwal was a scientist. He was born in the gutters and he felt this justified every cruel and callous thing he did to claw his way out of them. Determined to serve only himself, he fell very readily into the service of others who were cleverer than him and more ruthless. He did unspeakable things for them, much worse than anything he ever did on his own account, but he had one great thing in him too. It is for this that I remember him.

And that third self? At the outset she was the least remarkable of all. She was Topaz Tourmaline FiveHills, a rabbit of the Pandominion, from the city of Canoplex-Under-Heaven in Ut. She was a bad fit in some ways for the society in which she grew, independent to the point of recklessness in a culture that prized emotional restraint and caution above all. But she was also clever and brave and curious, and sheer chance put her at the nexus of huge, seismic movements that drew in uncountable worlds. She learned, and grew, and made decisions. What she ultimately achieved was of greater significance and wider reach than any diplomat or leader of her time.

I will come to all these stories in their place, ending – inevitably and without apology – with my own story. My awakening, which was the end of history. The end of empire. The end, you might say, of an uncountable infinity – the biggest kind of infinity there is.

I meant no harm to anyone. I would even argue that what I did was for the best. Nobody had ever attempted before to perform surgery on entire universes. For such a task, you need a knife of immense, all but incalculable size.

Me. I am that knife.

Hadiz Tambuwal saw Armageddon coming from a long way off.

At first she was fairly philosophical about the whole thing. The sources of the impending cataclysm seemed to lie firmly in the nature of humanity as a species, so she didn’t see much point in anguishing about them. To wish for the world to be in a better state was to wish for the entire history of life to have played out differently. It was a pretty big ask.

Hadiz had been accused – by her mother, among others – of being cold-blooded and unfeeling. She resented the allegation at the time but later came to see some truth in it. Certainly she was aloof. Cerebral. Difficult to get close to, and disinclined to meet people halfway when they tried. She lived alone by choice, and did her best to stay out of the massive web of connections and obligations that made up her extended family. She loved her aunts, uncles and cousins, some of them very much, but that stuff got complicated. It was much easier to love them from a distance.

She avoided friendships too, because of the complications that came with them; because they forced her to try to intuit other people’s motives and desires, which always seemed much more opaque and muddled than her own. She satisfied her sexual needs in brief, transactional encounters: with her near-black skin, thorn-thicket curls, rudder nose and commanding height she was more striking than beautiful, but even so she never had any trouble finding a casual partner for a day or a night. She just preferred her own company, which she didn’t see as a character flaw or a handicap. In her discipline, which was particle physics, you got your fair share of introverts.

But as the droughts and famines intensified, the air curdled and the resource wars burned, Hadiz found her customary detachment harder and harder to keep up. From a purely personal point of view, she preferred a world that had art and music and literature (and people who could appreciate those things) to one that didn’t. From another perspective, she saw the disappearance of a richly diverse and complex ecosystem as a scandalous waste. More than either of those things, she loved her work and hated to leave it unfinished. The ruin of civilisation had come at a very inconvenient time.

It has to be said, though, that she had a good vantage point from which to view it. Hadiz lived and worked at Campus Cross, the most richly endowed research facility not just in Nigeria but on the entire African continent and most likely in the world. She was surrounded by geophysicists, biochemists and engineers who were trying to think their way out of the box their species had put itself in. She knew from the news media and from conversations with her extremely well-informed colleagues exactly how bad things were getting on a planetary scale and which longshot solutions were being attempted. She kept her own tally of the interventions that had already failed.

Campus Cross was a small side project jointly owned by the Catholic Church and by three billionaires who had all separately decided that the world was now so badly screwed that their individual fortunes might not be enough to unscrew it. They had pooled their resources, or at least some of their resources, creating a blind trust to administer the eye-watering sums of money they were pouring into this Hail Mary play. They had managed to lure in many very fine minds, although some had refused them outright because of the stringent terms of the contract. In exchange for a stratospheric salary the researchers ceded all rights in their work, the fruits of which belonged exclusively to the four founders, or – as they were mostly referred to on campus – to God and the Fates.

Hadiz had come to Campus Cross for the same reason that most of her peers had: it seemed to her that any work not directly related to the problem of saving the world was something of a waste of time. She had no illusions about her employers. She knew that the billionaires had eggs in other baskets, not the least of which were off-Earth colonies and generation ships. They would stay if they could, but they were ready to run if they had to.

The fact that Hadiz lived at the campus was a well-kept secret. As far as anyone else knew she had an apartment halfway across Lagos in a district called Ikoyi. But the campus was a long way outside the city’s main urban cluster, and getting in by public transport had become an increasingly unpredictable and stressful experience. Ikoyi’s water supply had recently been contaminated with human growth hormones. Then there were the blackouts, caused by systemic failures at the Shiroro dam which supplied hydroelectric power to the eastern half of the city. Blackouts had always been a daily fact of life in Lagos, but they were becoming longer and more frequent as the Kaduna River shrank to a half-hearted trickle. When enough was finally enough, Hadiz had packed a few clothes and quietly decamped, without telling anyone or asking anyone’s permission.

In the smallest of her lab building’s storerooms she set up a foldaway bed and a stack of three plastic crates to serve as a wardrobe. There was a toilet right next door and a shower in the gym block a short walk away. The building had its own generator, and steel security shutters which came down an hour after sunset to shut out the world. Hadiz was undisturbed there for the most part, especially after her four assistants, one by one, stopped coming into work. They were not the only ones. In the staff commissary she saw colleagues whose projects were more labour intensive than her own brought to tears as they were forced to scale back or even abandon research programmes into which they had poured years of their lives. She was glad that her own work required no mind or muscle other than her own. She kept her counsel and continued with her research, head down and shoulders hunched as an entire global civilisation tilted wildly, its centre of gravity now way outside its tottering base.

The world is a solid thing but we experience it in the abstract. Once Hadiz moved into Campus Cross she almost never ventured down into Lagos proper, so apart from the TV news and a few polemical websites her measures of how things were changing were small and local. The fires in Lekki and Victoria Island turned the sky bright orange and filled the air with ash for three weeks. That was followed by a photochemical smog that was appallingly toxic, full of aldehydes and carboxylic acids.

The campus’s board of governance temporised for a while, issuing masks and air quality monitors, but eventually they yielded to the inevitable. They offered double wages to any support staff who continued to turn up for their shifts, but allowed the rest to remain at home on indefinite leave. It was assumed that the scientists themselves would somehow make shift and would not abandon their work in progress. But as Hadiz worked late into the evening she counted the lights in the windows of adjoining buildings. There were fewer each time. Some nights there were none at all: hers was the only candle lit to curse the dark.

The tremors came next, and they came as a shock. Sitting on a single tectonic plate, Nigeria had long been thought to be immune to seismic shock. Even when those estimates were revised in the early twenty-first century the prevailing opinion was that only the south-west of the country was at significant risk. The tremors came anyway, toppling the Oba palace and the cathedral. At Campus Cross fissures opened in the ground and cracks proliferated across the walls of the main buildings. Part of the admin block collapsed, but nobody was hurt. The offices there had been deserted for weeks.

Increased geothermal activity not just in Africa but across the world degraded the air quality to new and more alarming levels. Thick clouds veiled the sun, so mornings were as dark as evenings. Wild dogs roamed across the campus and nobody chased them away. Hadiz found an inland route to the commissary that took her through three neighbouring departments and avoided the need to step outside. She served herself these days, leaving a signed chit each time for the food she’d taken.

The chits piled up. Dust drifted across them, as it did across everything else.

Long after all hope was lost, when resignation and despair were the order of the day, Hadiz’s own research bore unexpected fruit. She had been looking for dark energy, whose existence had been theorised but never proved. Dark energy was needed in order to explain the universe’s suspiciously high rate of expansion, but the elementary particle that might mediate it had never been observed. Hadiz’s hypothesis was that it never would be – not on the surface of a planet and in the ordinary run of things – because its distribution across universal space-time was inversely proportional to the intensity of local gravity fields. The particle’s natural home was the intergalactic void.

Certainly Hadiz’s early efforts to isolate it in the laboratory had failed utterly. A conventional accelerator was not up to the job. The micro-gravity environments created by drop towers were similarly useless. She needed to forge an environment that resembled in every respect the conditions found in intergalactic space, and that’s a hard thing to cobble up at the bottom of a planetary gravity well.

The best solution would have been to perform her experiments on an orbital station at least 400 kilometres above the planetary surface. Even God and the Fates had balked at that outlay and none of Hadiz’s low-rent workarounds had got her anywhere at all. She was stalled.

“Maybe it’s time to get yourself attached to one of the other projects,” Andris Bagdonas the cyberneticist suggested. She had found him in the commissary when she broke off in the middle of a thirty-six-hour work jag for a meal that might have been breakfast, dinner or a post-midnight snack. They had barely ever talked before, but even Hadiz was feeling a little starved for company right then and she was happy to share her table. “I mean, your timescale is off now anyway, right?” Bagdonas pursued. “You’ve got to be years away from implementation.”

This was a touchy subject for Hadiz. She knew how her project was viewed by some of the other physicists on the campus – as pure research, very nearly blue-sky, and more or less irrelevant to the larger agenda of pulling irons out of fires. The implication, barely veiled, was that she’d blagged her way onto the campus and was wasting money that could be better spent elsewhere.

“You know dark energy makes up 68 per cent of all the energy in the universe, right?” she countered belligerently.

Bagdonas took off his frameless spectacles and polished them with one corner of his napkin. Had his hair been grey when they first set up in Lagos three years before, or was that new? Hadiz couldn’t remember. “I did know that,” he acknowledged. “I think you may have told me on a previous occasion.”

“And most of the shit we’re in now comes down to misuse of existing energy sources in one way or another. If we can harness dark energy, accumulate it, generate it…” She shrugged, as though the apodosis of that sentence was too obvious to need stating.

“Those are big ifs, though,” Bagdonas said.

“Of course they are. Nothing is certain. We’re meant to be pushing boundaries, aren’t we? What about Rupshe? What is that useful for?”

Rupshe was Bagdonas’s project, one of the most sophisticated AIs or quasi-intelligent systems on the entire planet. He had named the AI for a character in his favourite fantasy novel, a goddess who came down to Earth and threw in her lot with mortals. Instantly defensive, he answered Hadiz’s question with another. “Do you know any project here that wouldn’t benefit from more computing power?”

“Which they can get by putting in an extra server.”

Bagdonas shook his grey head emphatically. “Oh no. No no no. Rupshe is different. She’s not just for crunching the numbers. She can offer actual insights. Ideas. New directions. You should consult her about your present impasse. I think you’d be astonished.”

“Do you always use feminine pronouns when discussing strings of code?” Hadiz asked, by way of avoiding the invitation. She preferred to solve her problems under her own steam and indebted to no one.

“I tell you, it’s hard not to with Rupshe. She skirts the edge of sentience.”

“And do you think women do that too, Andris?”

Bagdonas had the grace to blush. “Not what I meant. It’s hard not to use personal pronouns, because interacting with Rupshe is to all intents and purposes like interacting with a human being.”

“Still. When you give any machine a female name you’re drawing on a problematic history.”

“I hadn’t intended to. I promise the next iteration will be called Kenneth, or Femi. But I meant what I said. You should set up a link to Rupshe on your lab’s computer and bring her – I’m sorry, it – to bear on your problem. You won’t be sorry. At any rate, I’ll send you the passwords and access codes.”

“Thank you so much,” Hadiz said, insincerely.

Over the next few weeks she tried several different tacks and eventually came up with an approach she thought might actually work. She looked for Bagdonas every time she went to the commissary or the main building. She wanted to tell him that she had managed the whole thing by herself, but there was no sign of him. Perhaps he had joined the exodus, which by this time was widespread. Most of the foreign-born staffers on campus had either had their visas revoked or had decided to return to their home countries while the routes were still open.

Hadiz’s new workaround was a thing she called “quantum environment induction” – QEI for short. The precise details are now a closely guarded secret across most of what was formerly Pandominion space, available only on direct application to the relevant planetary authorities, but QEI was basically barefaced cheating. It involved manipulating subatomic particles using a scanning tunnelling microscope and a loom of counter-phased electron beams. Hadiz’s aim was to counterfeit certain parameters of a deep space environment without the aid of an atom-smasher and without actually leaving her lab.

Physicists divide the forces and effects that govern the universe into two separate categories, called scalar and vector. Scalars are quantities that can be fully described by a numerical value alone – quantities such as pressure or density. Vectors – like, say gravity, velocity or rotation – require both a magnitude and a direction. The vector values, collectively, define an object’s unique position in universal space-time. Hadiz put scalar and vector values together in the same box and shook them until their labels fell off. Essentially, she was overwriting the quantum signature of a small volume of space-time so it looked like a piece of intergalactic elsewhere. She was hoping that if the dark energy boson wandered by it would be confused enough to stick around while she took its picture.

The results were not what she was expecting. When the switches were thrown the QEI field was induced and then shut down again, the full cycle lasting comfortably less than a thousandth of a second. Within that short window a thermocline – a temperature gradient of .0032 degrees Celsius – quickly developed inside the machine’s staging area, which was a steel sphere the size of a coconut.

Hadiz was nonplussed. The net input of energy produced by her experimental rig in that modest volume of space was zero. Heat required a source, and there was none. She was encouraging some subatomic interactions and suppressing others, but the particles were massless and there should have been no observable fallout apart from ephemeral fluctuations in local electromagnetic fields.

So why was the air inside the sphere heating up, even to such a small extent? It must be an error in the readouts, Hadiz decided. After checking every component several times and replacing most of them she tried again.

And got the same results.

Rolling up her sleeves, she went in to take a closer look at what was happening on the subatomic level. She discovered that the molecules of air inside the QEI field had become inexplicably agitated. The generated heat was a by-product of their sudden, seemingly random movement.

Except that it wasn’t random, she realised after only a little further rummaging around. Quite the contrary. The movement was a smooth laminar flow in a consistent direction, and it was occurring as a result of the sudden arrival and equally sudden departure of billions upon billions of new particles. The tiny space inside the sphere had become part of a rushing torrent. Some unimaginable, invisible current that had neither mass nor charge was moving through it.

But moving where? And where from? What was the larger space Hadiz had inadvertently connected to, and by what means was the connection established? As the afternoon wore on into evening she kept on repeating the same test run with minor changes to field intensity and coherence until around ten o’clock when the power failed (she had let the lab building’s generator run out of fuel).

She had succeeded by then in tweaking the effect, increasing and decreasing the speed and consequent energy of the dancing air molecules. But she still had no idea why the dance was happening, and her investigations would now have to wait until morning. She was not going to try to refuel and restart the generator in the dark.

The following morning she began again, and at last succeeded in cancelling out all the extraneous molecular motion within the QEI field. Whereupon the metal sphere crumpled as if a giant fist had squeezed it tight.

The air that had previously been expanding gently because of all that excitation was now gone. Not contracted, just gone. Hadiz had created a perfect vacuum.

“That’s ridiculous,” she scolded her own equipment. “Matter can’t be spontaneously created or destroyed, it can only change its state. The air inside that sphere had nothing to change into and nowhere to go.”

The equipment said nothing.

In a foul mood, Hadiz threw open the lab’s fire door. She hauled a chair outside, sat herself down and smoked a cigarette. Beyond a small concrete apron a steep bank led down to the Badagary Creek. The horizon was a strip of magnesium wire, incandescent with the last rays of the fierce sun. A cadaverous but jolly man named Hungry Koti had set up a bar on the creek’s further side, in the back of a derelict truck, to intercept Campus Cross employees on their way home from work. Hadiz was accustomed to hearing music and voices drifting across from there – little pockets of sound carried randomly by the unpredictable winds. She had thought of them as a mild irritant, but she missed them now that they were gone. It was as if the fitful heartbeat of another world had finally been stilled.

Hadiz closed her eyes and felt the sun’s fierce heat splashing off her face. She exhaled a last lungful of smoke.

Other worlds – other universes, even – were a useful theoretical tool in her branch of physics. They helped to explain the rupture in causality that took place when a human observer measured a subatomic event. Probabilities seemed from the observer’s perspective to collapse or coalesce, but from another point of view they actually diverged. From one moment to the next, the universe was always taking the road less travelled, as well as all the other roads.

Hadiz dropped the stub of her cigarette onto the cement path and ground it out.

She had gone as far as she could by herself. She needed someone to bounce this off. The trouble was that by this time there was nobody left with the right background and skill set.

Hadiz was old school and had never had any truck with AIs. In fact she actively deplored them. She hated the idea of having her intuitions second-guessed and her sentences finished for her. But now she was prepared – grudgingly – to admit that a second opinion might be a good thing to have. And since her dwindling pool of colleagues didn’t offer a single expert in her field, she would have to make do with what was available.

The physical location of Rupshe, Professor Bagdonas’s revolutionary AI, was a black, windowless building at the opposite end of the campus – the Cube. But Hadiz didn’t have to visit the Cube to speak to Rupshe. Using the codes and passwords Bagdonas had given her, she opened a partition on her computer and installed the working interface. Assuming the professor’s quasi-intelligent system was still online, it could be accessed simply by the use of its name. Feeling as though she was participating in an unholy ritual, Hadiz uttered it.

“Rupshe. Are you there?”

“Yes, Professor Tambuwal.” A woman’s voice – of course! – full, rich, warm and quintessentially maternal. Bagdonas would no doubt claim that he had wanted to reassure the system’s users, disarming any inherent prejudices or phobias they might have about machine sentience, but Hadiz couldn’t help but feel that the choices he had made were part of the tired old patriarchal soft-shoe shuffle.

“Great,” she said, grimacing as she pushed all that aside. “I need your help.”

“I would be happy to assist you in any way I can. However, in accordance with Campus Cross internal regulations I am – like all computer processing facilities made available inter-departmentally – a limited and bookable resource.”

“I’ve got Professor Bagdonas’s express permission to make use of you.”

“But processing allocation is carried out at departmental level. You’ll need to complete form CAA-39, which you’ll find in your admin folder, and submit it to your line manager or one of the faculty secretaries.”

“My line manager could be dead in a ditch for all I know. The faculty secretaries are in the wind. Give me another option.”

“There is a centralised list of university staff authorised to approve resource allocation. You’ll find the list in your admin folder.”

Hadiz did. About two-thirds of the way down the list she found Mesu Ikiye, a former colleague whose ID and password she knew from a brief collaboration a few years before. Making a brief foray into the Biology department she used Ikiye’s terminal to grant herself 100 per cent of Rupshe’s runtime. If anyone had been there to ask she would have asked, but Biology was an uninhabited wasteland. She scuttled back to her own building as soon as she was done and locked the doors behind her.

Once there, she relaunched the interface again from a full boot. “Are we good?” she asked Rupshe.

“I’m at your disposal, Professor Tambuwal,” the AI assured her.

“Glad to hear it. I’ve got a problem here. Matter – in the form of air molecules – is spontaneously vanishing from inside a sealed and monitored space.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Yes it is, and it’s pissing me off. So tell me what I’m missing.”

Hadiz gave Rupshe the run of her rig and her experimental findings. The AI ruminated for a full three seconds. “The air molecules aren’t being destroyed,” it said at last. “They’re going somewhere else.”

“Through seven millimetres of steel?”

“Almost certainly not. The steel’s porosity didn’t change.”

“Of course it didn’t. And the steel surrounds the whole active space of the field, so…”

“In local space-time.”

“Excuse me?”

“I was offering a clarification, Professor Tambuwal. The steel surrounds the active space of your QEI field within the known and understood parameters of four-dimensional space-time.”

Hadiz blinked, thought about it, blinked again. “Are you suggesting that the air inside the field was displaced temporally? You think I’ve invented time travel?”

“That remains a possibility, but no. My first thought, based purely on statistical probabilities, is that the air molecules may have moved through space discontinuously. They dematerialised, to reappear somewhere else. A local vacuum was thus created, but with no violation of the conservation of matter. The particles didn’t stop existing. They were merely dispatched to another location.”

Hadiz thought she detected some degree of smugness in the intelligent system’s voice, but she couldn’t find a hole in the argument. The air molecules had been buffeted by that endless stream of self-generating particles. Then once she had stilled the molecules’ extraneous motion, they were instantaneously gone. It did seem at least possible that they had joined the particle stream – and gone wherever the particles were going. She had not accidentally invented time travel, but she might have stumbled across teleportation.

“All right,” she said, and then because she was still thinking, “all right then. Yes. Okay. Let’s say I’ve somehow generated a kinetic force that operates discontinuously in normal space. I’m sending the air away, displacing it instantly to another location. I need to find the distance and the direction of travel. Which means—”

“Send something else.”

“—I should send something else. Thank you, Rupshe. I was already getting there.”

“My apologies.”

Hadiz was impressed that the system had identified her thank you as sarcasm. Artificial intelligence was a field she had no interest in at all, but she could see that Bagdonas had made great strides.

“Whatever we send, we’ve got to be able to track it,” she said. “I don’t want to end up playing hide and seek across the campus. What do you suggest? Working with the equipment we’ve got ready to hand, because if we requisition anything new we might be waiting a long time.”

“Chemical and electronic approaches are both valid, and both available. The Biology department has stocks of iodine-131 for use in diagnostic imaging. Geo-science has GPS trackers for its fleet of mapping drones.”

Hadiz decided to start with the iodine. Being liquid it was unlikely to do any harm where it