Outland (World-Lines Book 1)

by Taylor, Dennis

  “Who’s got the what now?”

  “Your tee-shirt smells of sulfur dioxide. Have you been seeing another volcanologist behind my back?” She poked him playfully with her index finger.

  “Oh, uh, that’s from an experiment that we did last night.”

  “You mean your bro-ject? A physics experiment about randomness is making you smell like a volcano?”

  “Uh…” Matt realized with a start that he had just stepped into dangerous territory. Richard had been pretty clear about confidentiality, and Richard didn’t seem to have a sense of humor where that was concerned. Or anywhere else, come to think of it.

  Matt made a valiant attempt to derail the inquiry, but all he did was to make Erin more suspicious. In the end, she extracted the truth by the simple— and effective— expedient of threatening to walk out and leave him to entertain himself.

  “So your project ejected a plume of gas? And that’s what I smell?”

  Matt shrugged an acknowledgment, looking down at his feet. “This is all supposed to be confidential. Spilling the beans to my girlfriend is going to get my bro license revoked.” He gave her a weak smile. “Not to mention that Bill will point out some movie where this happens and someone ends up getting killed.”

  “Well, I’m coming to your next meeting. I need to talk to them about this,” Erin stated with finality. “I’m not sure you guys have thought this through.”

  Matt sighed. Not good.

  Enter Erin

  Erin entered Dempsey’s Pub as Matt held the door for her. She waited while he did a quick once-over to find his group. The pub was less than half full, and the buzz of background conversation was muted. It was around dinnertime, so the aroma of caramelized onions, cooked beef, and vinegar dominated the room. Matt’s stomach rumbled, and Erin smiled. Wouldn’t mind a burger myself.

  He touched her elbow lightly, and she followed him in the indicated direction. Three men were sitting at the table. She recognized Bill, and had little problem guessing which of the other two was Richard and which was Kevin.

  As they approached the table, they were met with glares ranging from surprised to murderous. Matt said, “I suppose you’re all wondering why I’ve gathered you here.”

  That got a chuckle from Bill, but Richard looked even angrier. He transferred his glare to Erin.

  She glared back at him, daring him to give her any lip.

  After several seconds of standoff, Richard looked at Matt and said between clenched teeth, “There’d better be a damned good explanation for this. I thought I was pretty clear before.”

  “Look Richard, Erin smelled the fumes from the event the other day on my clothing, and I think she may have a better viewpoint on this than we do.” He spread his hands. “She’s a geology major, for crying out loud. She identified the chemical in the gas plume just from the odor, and it scares me a little bit that she thought I’d been hanging around a volcano.”

  Matt held a chair for Erin as she sat down, and did quick introductions. He took a seat beside Erin, then continued. “I know you wanted this project kept quiet, but I’m pretty sure we’re out of our depth at the moment. What if the next time we open the gate, the results are even worse?”

  All eyes were on Richard as he stared at Matt. After a few seconds, he sighed and nodded. “Okay, point taken.”

  Richard took out his phone, poked at it, then handed it to Erin. “Here’s the video record from the event.”

  She pressed PLAY and watched the scene unfold. Richard, Bill, and Kevin provided running commentary.

  “Holy crap!” she exclaimed, when it got to the exciting part.

  When the video had finished, she sat in thought for a few seconds, then handed the phone back to Richard. “I’m guessing that wasn’t what you expected. Matt told me that on the previous try, you were working with coin flips.”

  Richard looked down at his hands, and Erin could see that he was trying not to break into a grin. So he has a sense of humor. Why does he act like he’s determined to be a jerk?

  Richard looked up, deadpan. “Yeah, we figure it was your boyfriend’s software mods that did it. He added a feedback process with learning capability. Apparently it found something more interesting than our flipper to zero in on.”

  Erin looked at Matt, who smiled and gave her a ‘Who? Me?’ shrug.

  She swept her gaze around the group. “Look, the heat and that particular gas point to a small number of possibilities. Either you’ve connected with a volcano or something like it, or you’ve connected with Venus or something like it.”

  Erin gestured at Kevin in momentary confusion. “Um, Kevin right? Kevin was correct that it probably isn’t Venus—at least not at ground level—or you’d all be a whole lot of dead. Thousand-degree temps would have done more than just blister the wall. But you’ve connected to something that isn’t from around here, and once you accept that, the sky is the limit. Almost literally!”

  Richard leaned forward on his elbows. “So what would you suggest?”

  “Matt told me that you’re going to try again soon, this time with the gate enclosed in something airtight. That seems like a good plan. Will you have some kind of dead-man switch rigged to the container in case it doesn’t hold?”

  “Uh, I will now,” Richard replied, looking surprised.

  Erin saw Bill grin for a moment, just outside Richard’s field of view, and had to struggle to avoid doing the same. She made a pretense of rubbing her lips to hide it while nodding slowly. “Okay. I’d like to be there for it. You’ll have all kinds of cameras going, right?”

  “Yes,” Richard gave a dismissive snort. “None of us wants to be too close after last time.”

  “Seems reasonable.” Erin smiled. “Can you fill me in on what this is about? I know that it has something to do with Schroeder’s cat and random events, but that’s about it.”

  Kevin jumped in. “First, it’s Schrödinger’s cat, not Schroeder. Schrödinger was a scientist; Schroeder plays piano.” Kevin smiled at his own witticism.

  Erin raised one eyebrow and waited for him to continue.

  “Er, right. Anyway,” Kevin continued. “According to my models, the old idea that you get a new universe for each chance event is incorrect. When you flip a coin or something, the models say that only those things affected by the coin flip get duplicated, and the duplicate realities share the single universe at large.”

  “I asked once before if this was like the TV show Sliders,” Bill said. “Kevin’s head almost exploded.”

  “Yeah, first, that’s where we get our science these days—from TV. Second, that show assumed you get a new world for every little decision. In reality, it takes a significant event to create a different world-line that will persist.”

  Erin shrugged, willing to take his word for it. She looked around the table, a little amused at this group of men who had possibly just made history and were treating it like a technical problem.

  Under Glass

  Bill, Matt, and Erin arrived well before Richard’s announced starting time. In the center of the lab, the gate sat inside something that looked like an extra-large diving helmet, the kind with an air hose running up to the surface. It had a larger window on the front, and one of the cameras pointed through the window at the gate. The whole assembly including the camera sat on a large turntable.

  Matt pointed at the setup. “Now, that is some mighty fine Rube Goldberg.”

  Richard waved a hand at the equipment. “That’s the pressure vessel that Bill supplied. No idea what it was supposed to be for originally. We’ll rotate the whole assembly on the turntable and try to get a 360-degree view of things.”

  “You think that’ll work?” Matt asked.

  “It should. This isn’t like a TV; it’s like a periscope. Stuff came through last time. I think we can rotate our viewpoint. We’re going to try anyway.”

  This time the control station and monitor were set up in the observation room behind the safety glass. The group settled do
wn, and Richard went through his startup sequence.

  “I got the parameters from the logs the other day, so I know where we need to go to lock in. I won’t even bother with anything local,” he explained.

  “Shouldn’t someone make a speech or something?” Bill asked. “Boldly go, yadda yadda.”

  “Chrissake,” Richard muttered. Without ceremony, he activated the connection. In the monitor, the area within the gate blurred, then settled into a murky view of what appeared to be a landscape with tall objects in the distance. The vessel made a slight groaning sound as the pressure equalized. A glance over at the setup made it clear that air in the vessel was mixing with atmospheric gasses from the other side. Readouts on the container indicated a little over two atmospheres and 90 degrees Celsius.

  Once the mixture stabilized, the view through the gate cleared up a bit. Kevin pointed the remote at the video camera and operated the zoom. The view on the monitor expanded, and they found themselves looking at… the campus. Or a very ruined version of it. In the stagnant mist, they could see corroded and partly collapsed buildings.

  “That’s the Engineering Center,” Kevin said in a soft voice.

  “And Othmer Hall, or what’s left of it.” Erin added.

  They were silent for several seconds before Kevin said, “They’d be in that direction from this angle too.”

  They stared at the scene of devastation. There was no movement other than an occasional slight shift in the mist.

  “Okay, I’m going to rotate,” Richard said. He operated a control, and the turntable started to turn. As it did so, the view on the monitor slid sideways. When the assembly had rotated just about ninety degrees, they got an out-of-focus image of something too close to the camera. Kevin backed off the zoom, and they realized they were looking at part of a wall. Another ninety degrees and they found themselves looking at the room they were all standing in, or a heavily damaged version of it.

  “Well, not Venus,” Bill said in a small voice.

  “Nope,” Erin replied. “Earth. Runaway greenhouse effect. Not as bad as Venus, but bad enough. This is an alternate Earth, and they lost the coin toss.”

  ***

  They walked to Dempsey’s after shutting down the experiment. By tacit agreement they didn’t talk about it until they had sat down, looked at menus, and ordered food and drinks. Once the waitress had left, Erin turned to Kevin and asked, “So is there one alternate Earth or an infinite number?”

  “It’s, uh, probably more than one and might be infinite. See the way it works—at least according to my math—is that time is two-dimensional. There’s the normal forward and back, and that’s what we experience as past and future. Then there’s, uh, left and right, I guess. That’s where the various world-lines run in parallel for a while, then merge when the differences average out. Except if something happens that’s big enough so they can never merge, where there’s no sequence of events where they can ever become similar enough. This all sounds stupid in English, because it’s all bad analogies. The math makes a lot more sense.”

  “I guess having the Earth go into a meltdown and kill everyone and everything qualifies as big enough,” Matt mused. “So is there another Earth beyond that? Maybe it’ll be better. Or does it just get worse?”

  “Yes, maybe, no,” Kevin replied. “If there are more beyond Greenhouse Earth, they could be better or worse. It’s a random walk, not a trend. Although I think there might be a general tendency for each Earth to be a little stranger compared to us—not counting things like being a burnt cinder, I mean.”

  “Not following,” Erin said.

  Kevin opened his mouth to reply, but at that moment the waitress came back with the drinks.

  Bill raised his and said, “To whatever the hell we’ve got.”

  The others raised their glasses and said, “Whatever the hell we’ve got.”

  Kevin picked up where he’d left off. “So, a world-line splits off from us at some point in the past. Let’s call it Earth Two. Then later, Earth Two splits again, and one of the new lines becomes Greenhouse Earth. Is Greenhouse Earth the one closer to us, or the one farther from us? The answer is, it can be either one. The world-lines don’t sort themselves. There could be an Earth five world-lines over that’s almost identical to us.”

  “Can we connect to those world-lines?” Bill asked.

  “We can only get to the one beyond Greenhouse Earth from Greenhouse Earth. We can’t go around it. Time is two-dimensional, not three.” Kevin explained.

  “Okay, how about the other direction? Left instead of right, or whatever.”

  “Possible in principle, but I don’t think it occurred to anyone to build a direction setting into the equipment.” Kevin looked at Richard.

  “Um, crap, give me a second.” Richard stared into space.

  “What about reversing the polarity of the bogotronic particle stream?” Bill interjected. “Always works on TNG!”

  Richard frowned at Bill but otherwise didn’t respond to the gibe. “Yeah, if we shift the matching phase by 180 degrees, it might have the effect we want. Yes, Bill,” he added as Bill opened his mouth to speak. “It sounds a lot like reversing the bogotrons. Get off it.”

  Bill sat back, smiling.

  “And the Earth in that direction could be anything at all?” Matt asked.

  “Or nothing at all…” Erin added.

  “So, I’ll get going on modifying the control system to allow reversing the bogotronic particle polarity, shall I?” Matt said with a grin in Bill’s direction. “Trial run day after tomorrow?”

  Relaxing

  Erin picked up her glass of wine and snuggled in against Matt’s side. Matt was holding an open but untouched beer. The TV was on, and in theory they were watching it, but at least as far as Matt was concerned, it might as well have been a test pattern.

  Be careful what you wish for… Holy crap. What am I into here?

  “Um, Erin?”

  “Hmmm?” Erin looked up at him.

  “I’m not crazy, right? This is bizarre, right?”

  Erin smiled. “Yes, it is. I’m pretty sure there aren’t more than three or four other parallel-universe-generating projects in the whole state.”

  He laughed and attempted to tickle her ribs, which almost resulted in a wine-related accident.

  “What do you think we should do about it? Or with it?” he asked.

  “Not our decision, to be honest. And when it comes down to it, you don’t even know what you have yet. Let’s see what happens with the next experiment. Then you can start to answer that question.”

  “Yeah. I just have a funny feeling that this is going to get complicated.”

  “Oh, depend on it.” She put her wine glass down on the coffee table, turned, and began to nuzzle Matt’s neck. Thoughts of multiverses faded…

  What's Happening?

  “Hey, Ted,” Suzie called out.

  Ted turned at the hail and stopped to wait for her to catch up.

  “I hear you had an interesting time at Yellowstone,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Ted replied. “I think we had five people injured in the quake. The girls in my group got pretty panicked. I had to keep reassuring them that we were safe.”

  “So, were you? Safe, I mean.”

  Ted shrugged. He grabbed the door and held it open for her. “As safe as anyone who goes to Yellowstone. I mean, if the thing erupted, there’s no guarantee there’d be any warning anyway.”

  “There have been a lot of news stories about it lately,” Suzie said.

  “I know, but this isn’t the first time or the last time that’s going to happen. Some people got killed in the late fifties when a big earthquake took down the side of a mountain. Stuff happens, you know? It’s an active volcano. It’s going to act up a couple of times a century.”

  Suzie said, “Mm hmm,” then changed the subject. “So your course is done now, right?”

  Ted gave her a large smile and a thumbs-up. “Yep. Field trip, thesi
s, and conclusions, all done, for full course credit. Can’t beat that! I’m taking off tomorrow, going home for a couple of weeks of actual home cooking before I have to start getting ready for the next round of hell.”

  Suzie laughed and waved goodbye as she headed off for her class.

  Let's Try the Other Way

  “I wrote a speech…” Bill said, deadpan.

  Kevin snickered. Richard closed his eyes for a moment but otherwise ignored Bill.

  “Seriously, we’re making history here. Maybe. Or maybe we’re about to create a big hole in the campus. Either, or. Don’t you think a speech is in order?”

  Matt shook his head. “I bet it starts out: Space, the final frontier…”

  Bill laughed and dropped the subject. Richard looked just about ready to start, anyway.

  Richard had set up the equipment in the same manner as the previous occasion, sealed in a pressure vessel and sitting on a turntable. The camera was poised at the viewport on the vessel, and Richard had stopped poking at the tablet.

  He turned and looked at the group for a moment. “Okay. I’ve got it set up in what I hope will send us leftwards.” He hit OK.

  Bill noticed a certain amount of cringing in the audience. Pressure vessel or no, they had no actual idea what they might get.

  The reality was anticlimactic. The gate opened with none of the drama of previous attempts. The monitor showed a scene straight out of Wild Kingdom, a large meadow with sparse forest to one side, blue sky, and the occasional fluffy cloud. A herd of what appeared to be deer grazed in the meadow.

  “Now that’s more like it!” Matt said. “This is like the exact opposite of worst-case.”

  “Let’s rotate it and see what we get,” Richard activated the turntable.

  As the scene shifted, Erin commented, “Looks almost like the Lincoln area, doesn’t it? Maybe a little hillier. Why would it be hillier?“