A Pause in Space-Time

by Laurence Dahners

  The watch was reading 3:17 p.m. and its date was nine days ago. Gunnar wasn’t sure exactly what time they started the stasis field, but it’d been midafternoon and right now it was morning. Kaem’s damned field really did stop time, he thought.

  Gunnar sent a text message to Kaem and Arya, attaching the picture he’d just taken. Then he started examining the components in the chamber, especially the radar emitters that protruded into the chamber. As best he could tell they were all fine. Kaem had taken all the external electronic components back with him when he’d left so there was no way for Gunnar to check whether the emitters were working, even if he’d understood Kaem’s setup. The electronics held the real secret of how he’d induced stasis, so Gunnar could see why Kaem didn’t want anybody else fooling around with them.

  Because of their classes, it was a couple of hours before Kaem and Arya Uber’d over to look at the chamber and retrieve Kaem’s watch. As Gunnar’d told them when they called, there wasn’t much to see. The chamber’s door was still broken. The rest of the chamber was absolutely fine. “So, it worked,” Gunnar said. “What’s your next step? Fix the door and try to send a mouse into the future?”

  Kaem looked contemplative. He said, “I think we need to build a chamber that doesn’t have any bumps on its interior walls. I’ve got some ideas on how we could use the inner mirrored surface as the radar emitting antenna. That way we’ll be able to build a smooth chamber. After all, we need to be able to take the stazed segment of space-time out of the chamber. Then we’d be able to staze other things while we’re waiting for stasis to break on the first object.”

  Arya said, “So we could staze a mouse, and a clock—”

  “And a burning candle,” Kaem interrupted, waving dismissively, as if those things weren’t important. “More interesting, we could just staze some air and run tests on the properties of the stazed segment of space-time.”

  Arya frowned, “What kind of tests?”

  Gunnar said eagerly, “I hope we’d be testing it to see if its surface’s really frictionless.”

  Kaem nodded. “And, how hard is it? Wha—”

  Gunnar interrupted, “It’s harder than diamond. I bought a diamond scribe and it couldn’t scratch it.”

  Kaem nodded again, then continued, “What’re its other mechanical properties?” He got a distant look in his eyes, “Now that I’ve worked with the math, taking consideration of our first result, my theory suggests that the mechanical properties of a segment of stazed space-time may be pretty surprising.”

  Arya gave him a suspicious look, “What kind of surprising?”

  “Essentially we should have an unchanging piece of space-time. If we can’t change it, then it’ll appear to have zero friction. Hardness far beyond diamond. Strength much higher than steel.” Kaem shrugged, “The kind of numbers the theory predicts are… just impossible to believe. But, still, even if they aren’t what my math predicts, they should still be pretty far out there.”

  Arya gave the broken chamber a worried look. “I don’t know. Repairing the chamber we’ve got sounds doable. Building an entirely new one…” She looked at Kaem, “You don’t have any money, right?”

  He shook his head, “I save everything I can from my living allowance, but I send it all to my family. They’ve been having a really tough time.”

  Arya bit her lip, “I’ve spent almost all of what I’ve saved already. I think we’ve got to fix the chamber we’ve got and do whatever experiments we can with it. That’s all I can afford. If we can work out a viable product, we could sell it and use the income from the sales to finance more experiments.” She shook her head and snorted a little laugh. “I didn’t think this would work so I never even considered the next step. I must’ve been crazy to invest almost everything I’ve got in something I didn’t think had a chance.” She turned to Gunnar with a resigned look on her face. “How much to just repair the door?”

  Gunnar said, “Kaem’s right. That’d be a waste. The money’s going to be in stazed objects that you can take out of the chamber—”

  Arya started to interrupt, “We don’t have the money for—”

  “I’ll finance it,” Gunnar said, “for one percent of your profits.”

  Arya gave him a wide-eyed look. “You… can afford…?”

  Gunnar snorted. “Yeah. I look poor because I save my money. I can afford to finance a lot of experiments.”

  ***

  Kaem had just finished opening the boxes when his roommate got back. “What the hell’s all this?” Ron asked.

  Remembering his dad’s advice, Kaem smiled at Ron, hoping to diffuse Ron’s tendency to belligerence. He waved at the stack of electronic gear he’d ordered on Gunnar’s credit, then said, “Just some electronics for an experiment we’re doing.” Kaem didn’t specify who “we” was, hoping Ron would think it was a physics class project. “As soon as I make sure I’ve got the right stuff I’ll take all those boxes down to be recycled.”

  “Yeah, do that,” Ron said in a clipped fashion.

  Kaem cleared Ron’s side of the room, throwing the boxes on his bed. Then he went over his list of equipment, comparing it to the stuff he’d just unpacked. Not only making sure that he’d got what he ordered, but also looking at the modules to make sure they had the inputs and outputs he’d expected from studying them online.

  The new equipment was much better than the setup he’d kludged together for their first trial. For that, he’d bought a few cheap items. He’d checked out some things he couldn’t afford from the physics equipment room, but he’d had to return those the next day. Also, the ones available from the equipment room tended to be old and not of the best quality to begin with.

  It took him the entire evening, but he finally got set up and, with his new oscilloscope, was able to show the equipment producing all the frequencies he wanted with much greater precision than his previous gear.

  As a bonus, the new set up was much smaller. It’d be a lot easier to haul around.

  Kaem took the boxes down to recycling. He checked the time. Deciding Gunnar wouldn’t be in bed yet, he spoke to his AI, “Odin, call Gunnar Schmidt.”

  “What do you want?”

  Not sure whether this was Gunnar’s usual grumpiness or something worse, Kaem said, “Um, I was wondering how you’re coming on the new chambers?”

  “Why? Did you finally get the electronic gear?”

  “Uh-huh. It looks really good. I’m dying to try it out.”

  “The chambers’ll be ready tomorrow afternoon. Come by any time after two.”

  “Okay, I’ll check with Arya. I think we can be there by 2:30.” Kaem waited a moment for a response but none came. “Odin, is Mr. Schmidt still on the line?”

  “No,” Odin replied, “he disconnected immediately after his last words.”

  Typical, Kaem thought. Or maybe he was asleep.

  He called Arya.

  ***

  As they rode in the Uber to Schmidt’s house, Kaem described how grumpy Gunnar had sounded when they talked on the phone the night before.

  Arya said, “I’ll bet you woke him up.” She paused for a moment and then said, “Though, maybe he’s pissed because I didn’t offer him a bigger share of the profits. He is putting up a pretty big stake for all your experiments.”

  Kaem snorted, “I think he expects to be very satisfied with one percent.”

  “Really? You think stasis is going to be worth enough that he’d be happy with a piece that small?”

  Kaem shrugged, “You’re the businessperson. But I think it’s going to disrupt almost every industry. Things that do that are usually worth a lot of money”

  It was her turn to snort, “There you go being Mr. Optimist again.” She shook her head, “I can imagine that, if living organisms aren’t damaged by being in stasis, we might have a business model where some people might go into stasis for ten years hoping a cure’ll be developed for their untreatable cancer.” She made a face, “I guess that’d probably be tho
usands of people, but I think a lot of people would be worried about popping out of stasis and finding out all their friends and relatives are old or dead. Worse, what if one of your relatives spent all your money while you were gone and there’s not a cure yet? You could find yourself friendless, lonely, broke and still dying of cancer.”

  They were arriving. As Kaem got out of the car, he said, “Trust me, there’ll be a lot more uses than just jumping ahead a few years. But even if that were the only thing it was good for, I’ll bet there are a bunch of crazy people who’d put themselves in stasis for a thousand years just to see what the future’s like.”

  “What other uses?”

  Kaem knocked on the door of Schmidt’s shop. He glanced at Arya, “Wait and see, business guru, wait and see.”

  Arya was saying, “How can I project our business cases if you won’t tell me…?” Schmidt pulled the door open and wordlessly waved them in. She gave Kaem a mini glare and said, “Later.”

  As they walked into Gunnar’s workplace the old man eyed the rack of electronics Kaem was carrying. “Well, that’s a lot less of a mess than the pile of crap you brought last time. Is it going to work as well?”

  “A lot better,” Kaem said. “Thanks for financing the upgrade.”

  “No need to thank me. You’re going to pay for it with my piece of the action, remember?”

  Kaem said, “Arya thinks you’re grumpy because she didn’t offer you a bigger piece.”

  Gunnar glanced at Arya and snorted. “Oh, I’m happy. She’s clueless.” He winked at her, “It’s just that this is as sunny as I ever get.”

  They spent about half an hour hooking Kaem’s new electronics up to the new 15 cm cubical chamber Gunnar’d built.

  While they did so, Arya set up her phone on its little mount and positioned it so it’d be able to take a video of the chamber.

  “We’re ready,” Kaem said.

  “Okay,” Arya said, getting out one of the birthday candles and a box of matches. She lit the candle, then held it horizontally in the 15 cm chamber until a bit of wax dripped on the bottom. She stuck the candle into the wax.

  “Geez,” Gunnar complained, “I had it all clean!”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Arya said backing away and checking the alignment on her phone. She started it recording, then said, “Go ahead.”

  Gunnar closed and latched the door. “How long are you hoping your stasis is going to last this time?” he asked Kaem.

  “A hundred seconds,” Kaem said. “One and two-thirds minutes.” There was a whine from a charging capacitor, then a snap as it discharged.

  “Okay to open the door?” Gunnar asked.

  “Sure.”

  Three sets of eager eyes watched the door open. The candle flickered in the puff of air that resulted. “Crap,” Kaem said.

  Arya’s heart sunk and her thoughts ran. What if that first stasis field we set up was through some kind of strange serendipity? What if we never get it to happen again?! Why did I spend so much money on this project?!

  The two men didn’t seem to consider that possibility. They just started troubleshooting. Making sure the laser was coming on when power was supplied. Measuring the RF field in the chamber when the antenna was activated. Kaem started checking all the settings on his electronic gear. Suddenly he said, “Oh. Okay, let’s try it again.”

  “What was it?” Arya asked.

  “I’d rather not say,” he replied, though Arya thought he looked chagrined, as if he’d made some kind of dumb mistake. “Have you restarted your camera?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Okay, restarting now.” When it was going she got out another candle.

  This time when they opened the door of the chamber they were greeted by the kind of silvery mirrored surface they’d seen the first time. Arya felt her jittery nerves relax and imagined she heard sighs of relief from the two men as well. But it stayed silvery and stayed silvery. “What’s happened?” she asked worriedly.

  “We’re just coming up on the hundred seconds… Now!” Kaem said.

  A beat later, the silvery surface disappeared and the candle reappeared, still burning and looking pretty much unchanged. When Arya went back through the video, she could tell a minuscule amount of candle’d been consumed, but she thought it seemed to be about the right amount for the length of time it’d taken to close the door on the chamber and turn on the stasis.

  They tried it again with Kaem’s watch. It fell behind by exactly the hundred and one seconds that passed between the audible snap of the capacitor when Kaem turned on stasis and the disappearance of the mirrored field on the video. Kaem punched the air excitedly at the confirmation of his new set-up’s accuracy.

  They didn’t have a mouse but Kaem had brought some crickets one of the girls in his dorm fed her chameleon. They put a cricket in stasis for 100 seconds. When the field collapsed the little guy was immediately walking—as if he’d popped out of stasis in midstride and just kept on trucking.

  He seemed fine. Arya had the eerie feeling that the cricket didn’t even know anything had happened.

  Crickets live 8 to 10 weeks after they reach their adult form, so they put a smaller, presumably younger, cricket in the chamber and set stasis for five megaseconds (58 days). Hopefully, when the stasis collapsed, they’d still have a young cricket. One who’d live for another eight weeks or so—thus proving that stasis hadn’t caused it significant harm.

  Now came the moment Kaem and Gunnar’d been waiting for. Gunnar tipped the chamber up so the stasis field containing the cricket would fall out of the cavity. They were looking forward to finally seeing a stazed fragment of space-time from all sides.

  It didn’t fall out.

  Gunnar took a deep breath, threw his head back and let out a curse. “I swear there’s nothing in there for it to hang up on! The walls are perfectly smooth.”

  Kaem said, “Relax. It’s just such a perfect fit air can’t get in around it. It’s being held in by a vacuum effect. Suction you’d call it.”

  Gunnar blinked, glanced at the chamber, then said, “Of course it is. I knew that all along. I was just waiting to see if an egghead like you could figure it out.”

  Arya snorted, but made no comment.

  It took some doing, but once they had a thin blade pushed in so it bowed the mirrored glass wall of the chamber slightly away from the stazed cube, allowing a little air to get in there and break the suction, the frictionless cube practically squirted out of the glass-walled compartment.

  It fell very slowly, twisting as it dropped. Something like a feather.

  It landed on the concrete floor with a faint muted click. It barely bounced, then slid as frictionlessly across the floor as one might’ve expected from their findings on that first day. It bounced off the leg of Gunnar’s band saw, but the bounce was as weak as the bounce off the floor. It looked like it’d just keep sliding forever, but then Kaem bent down and scooped it up, holding it strangely in cupped hands like you might cradle a frightened animal you expected to try to escape.

  Arya asked, “Why’d it fall so funny?”

  “It’s 6 inches, by 6 inches, by 6 inches,” Gunnar said, “but weighs as much as a cricket.”

  “Wait. It has a bunch of air in it.”

  “Air that has exactly the same density as the air around it, so it’s perfectly buoyant.”

  “But a balloon only has air in it…” she trailed off.

  “Yeah, air under pressure from the elasticity of the balloon, so it’s a little heavier than the surrounding air, plus it has the weight of the balloon—which weighs more than our friend the cricket.”

  “It didn’t bounce like a balloon,” Arya said musingly.

  “Nope. It bounces like something really light, yet impossibly hard. It doesn’t hit very hard and has absolutely no spring-back. The only springiness to produce that bounce came from the concrete it landed on.”

  They’d gathered around to stare at the silver cube. It felt like it was hard to see because the only th
ings they saw were reflections from somewhere else. Perfect reflections. Arya reached out and gently felt a corner. “It’s rounded,” she observed.

  “I think that’s because the field can’t form features under a certain size,” Kaem said. “Which is good since then it might’ve extended little slivers out into any cracks at the joins between the mirrors. That could have made it impossible to get the stade out of the chamber. I was worried it might and that they’d be ultra-sharp, making this thing dangerous to handle.”

  Gunnar said, “I was worried about that so I was really careful about the joins on this one. It’s good to know I don’t have to spend so much time in the future.”

  “Stade?” Arya asked.

  Kaem shrugged, “Yeah. We need new words. We’ve been saying ‘stazed when we’re talking about how we’ve put something in stasis. It felt to me like we needed a word for a stazed object so we didn’t have to say ‘stazed object’ all the time.”

  Arya shrugged, “Okay.” She looked thoughtful, “Are you thinking… I’m getting the impression that you think a stazed object, sorry, a stade, may have value in its own right, without even considering the fact that things inside it are skipping forward in time?”

  “Oh, hell yes,” Gunnar said. “If that stuff’s strong enough, frictionless bearings would be worth their weight in gold!”

  Kaem shrugged again, “Among other things…”

  “For instance…” Gunnar turned to Kaem, “Can we make another stade?”

  “Sure,” Kaem said, turning to his equipment rack.

  Gunnar turned to the chamber. He picked up a small hose from where it lay on the bench and put it in the chamber, closing the door as far as it’d go on the hose. With a reach, he turned the knob on a bottle sitting on the bench. Arya heard the hissing of gas blowing into the chamber. Gunnar turned to Kaem, “Ready?”