Okay, she said. Lets go through the message one last time.
I said okay. For the hundredth time we went over what to write down, what to write it on, and where to leave it.
Good, she said. Okay. Tell me about the Desert Dog.
What? I thought.
Whoa. Howd she know about that? Id never told anybody about it. Maybe Id mumbled it in my sleep during one of those long EEG tests at the Stake. Theyd probably dosed me with sodium ammitol or something. Bastards.
Jed?
Sorry, I said, I havent, uh, thats not, uh
I know, she said, its a surprise question; please answer it anyway.
There was a pause. Fine, I thought. I started to tell her how my stepbrothers had caught the dog, how he had no front paws, just scrappy stumps with strings of cartilage trailing out, how his eyes were bulgy with fear, and how when Id been out there by his cage for a little while the fear had lessened, and how Id tried to solve the combination padlock and couldnt do it, and then to jimmy it and couldnt do that, and then Id tried to bend the thin bars back. Somehow I was going to get them together again so that my stepbrothers wouldnt know it had been me. But I was only eight and didnt know how to do anything mechanically serious, and the crate was some sort of heavy-duty industrial thing made for pigs or whatever. Desert Dog had known what I was doing, and he seemed to trust that Id get him out. It wasnt easy at first, telling Marena about it, especially since I despise sentiment, and my voice was getting hoarse and monotonal, but maybe something in the pharmacocktail theyd given me loosened the tongue, because I kept going. I told her how Id brought a can of Mountain Dew, and how I poured it into a little pool on the zinc and how he practically dove for it and lapped it up, resting on his elbows, and then looked at me with this grateful expression in those kind eyes dogs have, with almost even a dampness of hope in them, how I gave him a snack-sized bag of Rold Gold pretzels that Id rubbed the salt off of, and how hed loved those, and how he wagged his threadbare tail and shook his gold earflaps, and how Id given him the rest of the Mountain Dew, and how happy he was getting it, looking at me with that doggy feeling of trust, how I could tell he thought that for sure Id do the right thing, that I was powerful and would let him out when I wanted to, that hed come along and be my lookout, that he was saying he could still get around fine even without his paws, that hed come along with me and be a good friend, how soft his snout was when he licked my hand, with that compact sort of coziness in his doggy head, how his spongy nose was dry and hot but not so dry as it had been, how his tongue flicked over my bruised fingers as I tried this and tried that, I tried bending the ground plate with a piece of metal and couldnt do it, and how finally I just lay back crying, looking at my bloody hands and seeing Id scratched my fingertips and knuckles in several places, and knowing that if I didnt get back to the house and get to work with my wound plasters I could bleed too much, and how I scratched Desert Dog under his soft flaps with my fingers and told him that I had to leave but Id be back, you wait, you good dog, and how I walked back home across the vacant lots in the white highway lamplight, frustrated beyond the strength of the word frustrated, like I was biting on the rock of the universe. It was one of those moments when you see with just a sliver of clarity, just one little finger-melted dot on your frosted goggles, just how terrible existence is, how its all just the disappointment of innocents, transmuting their hope into shit at a headlong rate, and how much the torturing just has to somehow stop. When I got home I could still hear Desert Dog crying across the highway, not so much in a canine whimper but more just sobbing, like a two-year-old human with an earache. And another
Uh, okay. Good, Marena said. Probably Lisuarte had told her over the headset that theyd finally gotten enough activity out of my limbic cortex. At last, Jed Mixoc de Spock shows some real feeling. Now were going to start some stims. She meant neuronal stimulations.
I said fine and closed my eyes. There were ten seconds of normalcy and then a flash of green light.
I see green, I said.
Good, she said. There were another few seconds of downtime and then the sound of raindrops.
I hear rain, I said. I was also noticing that someone had lit a stick of sandalwood incense. Then I realized it was probably just one of the stims.
Incense, I said.
Right, Marena said.
Sounds, smells, and images flashed up and faded. I heard violins in G minor, a bar of Prokofievs Piano Concerto no. 2. I smelled cinnamon and burning rubbersomebodys messing with my temporal lobes, I thoughtand then, all at once, a sweet woodsy smell like wet old books. I saw Silvanas face. I felt itches on my chest and a jab in my ribs. I saw the faces of people I didnt remember but must have known. I saw my mothers face. She smiled. I saw a scary pattern of wood grain on the door of our room in the Řdegârds house that Id thought looked like a devilish goat in a bow tie. I remembered an orange Tonka backhoe Id dug out of a landfill and played with for hours and days, thought about one of the first fish I had, a Glossolepis incisus Id named Generoso, and how starting one morning it grew all spiky and belligerent and killed the other male rainbowfish and then the females and then died itself, about things that not only hadnt I thought about in years, but that I maybe hadnt thought about between the time they happened and today. Oddly, they all seemed to play out backward, and out of sequence with each other, and then later on theyd happen forward again, as though they were first being defragmented and then rewound and assigned to new positions on my hard drive, and then replayed, and a few times I was so out of it that I almost thought I might be the one, that is, the one of me who would find himself back there, stuck in the late seventeenth century, and here I was hoping and even praying to deities that were both evil and nonexistent that it wouldnt be me, let it not be me who goes, let me be the one who stays here, because if I were the other one, I wouldnt be coming back.
[20]
Maybe I should clarify that just a little.
You know how when, say, Kirk or Bones or whoever goes through the teleporter, hes copied and disintegrated here and then the information beam goes to wherever and hes reintegrated over there out of available local atoms, and you tend to think, wait, why disintegrate your captain when you dont have to? Why not just skip that step and integrate him over there anyway? Then thered be two Kirks and one of them could stay on the bridge. In fact, who cares about teleportation when youve got duplication? Why not make a whole bunch of Kirks so every ship in the Starfleet Command could have one? Well, in a way you could say that the Kerr Space Project system made use of that very principle. That is, when I was lying on that cot with the thing on my head, it didnt disintegrate me, or zap me out of my head, or even put me to sleep, any more than taking a picture of me would have. Despite all the stims and whatever psychotropics I had in my system, I was awake and conscious and even thinking relatively clearly. I didnt feel a thing.
Or maybe it would be better to say that the I that happened to stay, the one who was still here after the picture was takenthat I didnt feel a thing. But the picture itselfa much less lucky version of Jed DeLandawould be like the hypothetical second Kirk, the one who ended up down on the planets surface and had to deal with the Romulans or whoever. The less lucky Jed would be trapped in the body of a withering, pustuled crone. Shit. Supposedly, dying of smallpox is pretty painful. Maybe theyd give her some opium. No, probably not. That other Jed is so screwed, I thought. Sorry, Other Jed. But we have to do this.
Of course, in the interim stage, that other Jed would just be a pattern, without any way to be aware of itself. It was just a code written with a special protocol, the P of CTP, which had originally been developed by the Human Cognome Project and which was in some ways similar to a high-level assembler. In fact, since the code was transmitted digitally, you could say that it was a number, a number
with more than a trillion digits, but still just an integer like any other.
Over the course of six hours the EEG/MEG scanner would take a 3-D movie of the behavior of my brain in action, trillions of electrical and chemical events more or less triggered by the Q&A. Neurons generate voltage spikes at distinctive rates, and chemical reactions release measurable bursts of heat and infrared. Every one of these microevents would go through source-analysis software and get triangulated to a specific location. Then it would get tagged and sorted by location, strength, and time andout in one of the boxes in the hallit would be integrated into a mathematical space that would overlay the electrophysiologic signalling onto a matrix of biochemical and metabolic information. Finally, this-all would be coded into a data stream. The code, presumably, would represent everything that I thought of as myself, the Alps-size grab bag of memories and attitudes and habits of calculation and rationalizing and multiple and contradictory self-images and everything else that creates the illusion of selfhoodwhich is, take it from me, definitely no more than an illusion, and not always a convincing one. Then all those roughly two hundred trillion bits of information that made up my consciousnessor my id and ego, or lets just call it my SOS, my Sense of Selfall of that flowed through a pair of heavily shielded 2.4-gigahertz signal boostersthe things that looked like speakersand over parallel fiber-optic cables through the hallway, up a little back stair, and out into a small transmission dish on the rectory roof. The dish bounced my SOS off a Spartacus Intercellular Communications satelliteretasked through unimaginable Pentagon connectionsto a relay station near Mexico City. From there it went via ordinary data transmission satellites to the Very High Speed Superconducting Supercollider, a new accelerator ring with a 14.065-kilometer circumference, which, according to the briefing, was near CERN, on the French/Swiss border. The data went into a bank of hard drives in the collider compound, which together could store about six hundred trillion bits.
This was a lot less, though, than the total of roughly four hundred quadrillion bits that would come out of my head over six hours. So wed run into the problem of storage. In fact, there wasnt yet enough computer memory on the planet to hold all the data. Youd need over twenty billion five-hundred-gig hard drives. Part of the problem was simply that it was digital and not analog. The only device with enough room was another human brain. And the brain we were interested in had shriveled into crumbs a long time ago. So wed have to catch it when it was still working.
Now, as Im sure you know, over the last century, and especially over the last decade or so, theres been an awful lot of loose talk about time travel. Maybe its because people are getting used to certain long-percolating sci-fi forecasts finally coming true. With all the brilliant and personable computers, with all the space tourism, nanobot surgeons, with all the worlds books, music, and video right in your pocket, with all the wet artificial life, invisibility panels, cryonics, teledildonics, and glow-in-the-dark Labradoodles, people assume that someone must also be close to cracking the time thing. Its no wonder there have been so many scientific frauds about it. Its like alchemy in the Middle Ages. Back then it was like, Sure, give me a thousand copper Soldos and Ill turn them into 0.99 gold by Saint Whitloughs Day. Now its Give us another billion and well have Cleopatra in your office in time for your IPO.
Unfortunately, times actually a bit of a tougher nut. Or rather, the past is. Its easy to go into the future, even with current cryonics. But going the other way you run up against two big problems.
The first one, of course, is the grandfather paradox. For a while, the main way people tried to get around it was by positing parallel universes. You could go into your past and do anything you wantedeven including killing your grandfatherand your future there would be different from the future youd come from, and everybodyd be happy. But there are problems with this. For instance, if you have all those universes to choose from, why not just go to a parallel universe where everything is greatwhere, say, you bought Google in 04, milk chocolate has one calorie per ounce, and Bill OReilly never existed? But the biggest problem is its not the case. That is, according to the best current theory and the best experimental evidence, there is not an infinite number of universes out there. And even if there were, you couldnt get to any of them. Energy from now that radiates out of black holes in the past comes out in our past, not in an infinite number of pasts. And even if this isnt the only universe, the number of actual universes is still probably rather small. Which still doesnt mean this one is special, of course. When we were going over this in one of the briefings, Marena said, Its like how there was only one episode of Chic Chesbro, but it still wasnt any good. Although none of us, including me, got the reference. Taro put it a little better. He said that the line around physics departments was Multiple universes: cheap on theory, expensive on universes. That is, when you cant get some equation to zero out, you can always just say, Oh, the remainder must have just gone into some other universe. Not only is this a cop out, but eventually, somebody always solves those equations without it. So the polycosmic dream is fading.
The other big problem with time travel is that anything you send back runs about a 100-percent risk of spaghettification. More specifically, its not too much of a problem finding or even making a black hole. And in a black hole, energy goes back in time all the time. Or more specifically, times passage inside it isnt clearly related to how it passes for the rest of the universe, and in fact it tends to go backward, which is why black holes eventually evaporate. Right now theres energy from the distant future spewing out of singularities not all that far from earth. Not that it does us any good. But the point is that even though its not prohibitively difficult to drop something into a black hole and have it automatically spew out at some point in our past, it will emerge hopelessly crushed at the atomic level, and often converted into pure energy. This means that ordinarily, you cant send information. You could drop in an encyclopedia, but all youd get, back in the past, would be a lot of heat and light, signifying nothing.
Howeverhowever, howeveryou can send something thats nothing, that is, that doesnt have mass. You can send energy.
At the Superconducting Supercollider, the raw data stream of my SOS got processed into an information-rich wave map. This also compressed the signal, collapsing the distance between the waves, so that the information that was taking hours to download today would take less than forty seconds to blast out on the other end. A gamma gun shot a stream of energy based on the wave pattern into the Kerr space path, an imaginary perfect circle at the center of the colliders torus. The stream traveled around the ring about six hundred thousand times, accelerating to the point where its centrifugal force made it spin off from the ring and into the tangential tunnel, where there was a new electromagnetic installation specially designed to create and suspend miniature Krasnikovian wormholes.
It had already been four years since the gang at the Large Hadron Collider announced that theyd created a microscopic black hole. Creating a wormhole is a similar process, but in some ways its easier. Black holes have event horizons, which are nothing but trouble. Wormholes dont. Wormholes have two mouthsand you need both of thembut black holes only have one. And to keep a black hole around for any decent amount of time, especially anywhere near the surface of earth, youd need several suns worths of energy.
The care and feeding of a wormhole is much easier. But even for an ordinary wormholeif one can call it thatyou still need advanced engineering and a lot of power. Your basic hole, say the Schwarzschild type, in a space-time R2 × S2, looks something like ds2 = - (1 - rs / r) dt 2 + (1 - rs / r) - 1 dr2 + r2dΩ2, that is, when Ω is your density parameter and where rs = 2G M / c2, and dΩ2 = dθ2 + sin2dϕ2. And of course M is the molecular mass, G is the gravitational constant, ϕ is the angle, r is the radius, and d is the distance. So anyway, if you tweak at it for a little while, you can see that its
throat has huge tidal forces on it, and without a lot of opposing energy, its going to collapse. Really its just part of a black hole/white hole system. But the Krasnikov variety has a Kerr metric of ds2 = Ω2(ξ)[-dτ2 + dξ2 + K2(ξ)(dθ2 + sin2θdϕ2)], where Ω and K are smooth positive even functions and K = K0cosξ/L at ξ∈(-L, L), K0 ≡ K(0), and K is constant at large ξ. So its very, very stable. Its static, it satisfies the weak energy condition, it doesnt need exotic matter, and its spherically symmetric. In fact, at first it doesnt even look like a wormhole, but if you transform the coordinates as r ≡ B-1Ω0 exp Bξ, with t ≡ Bτr, then you can make it as flat as you want by just increasing the size of r. And you can fold that into a usable wormhole with a length of Ω0L and a throat radius of min(ΩK). Of course, to make it wide enough for, say, a space pod to get through, youd still have to throw a few planets in the fusion stove. But a very tiny version doesnt take a huge amount of energy to make, or to hold ontothat is, to keep it from sinking into the core of earth. The narrowest point of our baby was only a bit wider than a hydrogen atom. But as long as it was a bit wider than a single photon, information could still get through. The pulsed gamma beamsalthough actually they were made of a lot of different wavelengths, some of them more in the spectrum of hard x-rays than gamma rays, but lets stick with calling them gamma beams because it sounds so retro-Cold War-space-operaticwould focus down into the wormholes mouth, converge at its throat, and then spread out at an angle that would bathe Sor Soledads little room in a movie of my mind.
Brian D'Amato Page 28