The Deplosion Saga

by Paul Anlee

  Darak had to agree. It had been a waste of life and exceptional engineering.

  “Tell me honestly,” he asked, “is saving Your grand vision worth so many lives?”

  “Infinitely more will rise in their stead in Heaven,” Alum replied, side stepping the question.

  “But the lives in this universe are here, now,” Darak pressed. “You would sacrifice it all, the endless variety, the many galaxies, and whatever forms of life they harbor, all of that to ensure Your Heaven is never threatened? I’ve only explored a tiny fraction of reality and, even at that, I can’t believe You would destroy it all.”

  “I would. Perfection is worth that and so much more.”

  Darak had heard enough. It was time to leave. If Alum wouldn’t let him go, he’d have to fight his way out.

  “You should come and visit,” Alum said, his voice suddenly light and cheery.

  “What?”

  “All this talk about Heaven, and comparing universes. You should come see for yourself the beauty that you oppose.”

  “No matter how beautiful or how perfect You make it, You know I’ll never accept what it represents.”

  “And what is that?”

  “An end to uncharted possibility.”

  “You value uncertainty so much?” Alum said. “Why not cast your fortunes to the Chaos, then? Remove yourself and let a different version of reality take hold. Your way is the old way. My Divine Plan is the future. Let the universe decide.”

  “Because Your way takes away the ability of the universe to decide,” Darak answered. “Permanently. Nature is everywhere and always the arbiter of truth. It always has been, and it always will be. You would tear away variability, probability, quantum uncertainty, and replace it with Your Divine Plan. You would remove Nature’s ability to find its own truth.”

  “Because it is all so random!” Alum cried. “So pointless! It has no purpose!”

  “Yet, it is infinite in potential,” Darak replied, his eyes burning with fervor. “I will protect that potential to the end of my existence.”

  Alum bowed His head.

  “So be it. We have nothing more to discuss. Do what you think you must. You cannot stop Me. You cannot defeat Me.”

  “Nor can I permit You to succeed,” Darak finished.

  “We shall see,” said Alum. He turned away and the water tunnel collapsed behind Him.

  Darak shifted.

  Reality Assertion-Part2

  Deplosion Chronologic: Book 7

  Paul Anlee

  Darian Publishing House

  Chatham, Ontario, Canada

  1

  “God offered you a place in Heaven?”

  “And I turned it down.”

  “But He offered you a place in Heaven rather than trying to kill you. And when you didn’t accept, He let you leave?”

  Darak noted the distrust in Darya’s voice.

  “Yes, He offered. His version of Heaven doesn’t interest me. I prefer a less predictable universe.”

  “Knowing you were determined to oppose Him, why did He let you leave so easily?”

  Darak shrugged. “For old time’s sake. Or because He thinks I’m powerless to stop Him. Maybe He knows I wouldn’t be easy to harm or to hold. Who knows?”

  Darak allowed part of his attention to drift away from the War Council meeting. His eyes wandered to the hummingbirds jockeying for the best flowers in the local shrubs. He followed their darting motions a while, enjoying the apparent playfulness of their deadly serious fight over food and territory.

  When he’d calmed and refreshed his mind, he turned back to the meeting. The Council members sat on worn stone benches in the middle of a garden inspired by the columns and trellises of an ancient Greece that had died off and long since been forgotten. Except where it lived again in this specially-constructed inworld he’d asked Crissea to host.

  Convergent evolution of form and function—he observed.

  A fountain splashed cheerfully to his right. Hummingbirds flitted back and forth between the dancing water and the flowers behind. Darya, Mary, and Timothy, or rather, their human-shaped virtual avatars, sat together on a curved bench opposite him. Next to him, the virtual Brother Stralasi and Crissea chatted quietly while Darian paced back and forth between the bench and the arched exit.

  In the real universe, the seven of them were travelling in a battle-hardened spacecraft light years away from Eso-La. Until he could be absolutely certain Alum hadn’t planted any tracker particles on him, he didn’t dare go to the home of the Esu.

  They’d jumped the ship to an agreed location and only then did he shift to join them. He immediately threw a decoherence field around the vessel. If Alum had planted a tracker particle on him, the field would prevent the Living God from jumping directly to their location.

  Darak didn’t think the Alum was desperate enough to try blind navigation. Space was immense and, without the millions of years of practice Darak had accumulated, a novice to that kind of shifting was likely to wander lost for ages. The danger of falling outside the universe was high for those with little experience and no teacher, especially if they tried to jump across intergalactic distances or through a decoherence field. Had he known how risky traveling without beacons could be, he might never have attempted it all those many millions of years ago.

  He rubbed his tired brow and shook his head at his own distraction.

  Focus.

  He reviewed the last few seconds of discussion. Darya had moved on to other questions, but her last one still bothered him.

  Why did Alum let me leave so easily? What’s He up to?

  He was considering the possibilities when he realized Darya had spoken.

  “Sorry. Could you repeat that?”

  “Do you think we’re a match for Alum, now?”

  Darak didn’t need to run the analysis; the answer was always the same.

  “Familiarize yourselves a little more with your new capabilities, and I’m sure we could defend ourselves from Alum in a regular attack.”

  “But could we defeat Him?”

  “That’s harder to say,” he answered, honestly.

  He counted off the obvious points on his fingers.

  “First, He’s been a God for a long time. He has ages of experience with exploring His capabilities. Much like me, but unlike both of you.

  “Second, He’s experienced in battle. The Aelu were close to His level, as were the five Gods that He recently deposed.

  “Third, He’s got at least one established universe—His so-called Heaven—where He could escape to and regroup. Without knowing the characteristics of that reality we have no chance of tracking Him.”

  “Plus, He’s widely distributed,” Crissea pointed out.

  “Exactly,” Darak agreed. “He must have thousands, maybe millions, of sizeable CPPUs all over the Realm. If there is some central nexus whose destruction could cripple Him, we aren’t aware of it.”

  Darian stopped pacing. “It’s all relative,” he stated, vaguely.

  “What?” Darak had no idea what his former mentor was getting at. Yes, everything’s relative—he thought. So what?

  “At the speed of light, the universe seems enormous to us,” Darian began. “And by that measuring stick, Alum’s consciousness would appear to be spread over a vast volume. But if we were to measure using the speed of quantum propagation, that is, the speed of transmission of entangled properties, then both the universe and Alum’s part of it are no more than tiny specks in a tightly-shared locale.”

  “That’s how the deplosion field must work,” Darya added, “by disrupting the propagation of the laws of nature, what we think of as reality.”

  “I hate to ask a silly question, but just how fast does reality spread?” Stralasi asked. “I mean, how fast is the universe expanding into the Chaos? And how big is it now?”

  Darak waggled his head, thinking of how best to answer his friend without saying directly that he was asking the wrong questions. “Well
, if you’ll humor me, let’s look at those questions another way.

  “For starters, there’s no way to measure the velocity of expansion relative to what’s outside the universe. The Chaos is at the same time infinite and nothing more than a thin shell of unreality that surrounds our universe.

  “And there’s no meaningful measure of distance inside the Chaos. Distance is only a meaningful expression between bits of matter that belongs to some interacting set, such as a universe of consistent natural laws. But the Chaos is the antithesis of consistent, natural laws. The expansion of the universe makes new space, but only within itself. So we could say that the universe is getting bigger, but it’s not displacing the Chaos, not really.”

  Stralasi raised one eyebrow and shifted his hopeful gaze to Darian.

  Darian tried to clarify. “In some ways, our universe is infinite. To us, here inside it, this is all there is. In terms of the quantum fields that span it, and in terms of things whose quantum properties are entangled, it’s infinitesimal, tiny. One doesn’t so much travel outside of it when imagining other universes into existence. One merely creates another reality that shares neither space nor time with this one. A new universe pulled from the Chaos has no spatio-temporal direction or distance from this one, only a conceptual distance.”

  “Thank you. I’d forgotten how much this makes my head hurt,” Stralasi said.

  Timothy looked at the Good Brother with sympathy. “I’ve given up trying to follow,” he said. “It boggles the imagination.”

  “Reality is weirder than most people think,” Darian said. “A relativistic, quantum universe is deeply counterintuitive. Our human and Cybrid experiences can’t perceive the mechanisms that lie beneath what is readily apparent.”

  “At the risk of an even greater headache, what do you mean?” Stralasi asked.

  “Even before I was born,” Darian began, “a scientist named Einstein developed a theory he called Special Relativity. It was the beginning of our understanding of how strange the universe truly is.”

  “Well, you did say, it’s all relative,” Stralasi replied. “I mean, I get how, when I describe your spatial position, it’s relative to the landmarks around me. I describe where you are in relation to things I can relate to, such as to the entrance, or to Darya, and so on. What else do you mean?”

  “Even time is relative. We don’t all experience it in the same way,” Darian answered. “One of Einstein’s original thought experiments illustrates this.”

  “Thought experiment?”

  “Yes, not an actual experiment with data and so on. Not at first, anyway. Later, it was confirmed with solid evidence but initially Einstein just imagined a certain situation and thought his way through it.”

  Stralasi nodded for him to continue.

  “The original thought experiment only made one assumption, that the speed of light would appear as a constant to all observers. Nothing goes faster than the speed of light, so it always has the same speed.”

  “But doesn’t shifting allow for instantaneous movement, even across light years?” Timothy asked.

  “We’ll come to that in a moment,” Darian replied. “Let’s start out with this, first. Einstein imagined a train travelling past a stationary platform, let’s say, a train station. Then, he pictured one person on the platform and another person inside the train.

  “Now, imagine the person standing inside the moving train throwing a ball a meter into the air and catching it when it falls. To the person standing inside the train, the ball would go up and fall back down. But to the person standing outside the train on the stationary platform, the path of the ball looks more like a parabola, a steep arc. That’s because the path seen by the person on the platform includes the up and down motion of the ball plus the forward motion of the train.”

  He looked around to make sure everyone was following.

  “Okay, so now, let’s change the scene a little. I want you to picture a big mirror on the ceiling of the train coach. And instead of throwing a ball, the person inside the train is holding a flashlight. He points it straight up at the ceiling, and he turns it on and off, once, very fast, so that it emits just a quick flash or pulse of light. You’ve got that image nice and clear? So, what do you think the path of that light pulse would look like to our person standing inside the train? What shape would it take?”

  “Easy,” Stralasi said. “The light would go straight up, bounce off the mirror, and come straight back down: a single, straight line.”

  “Right,” Darian said. “If we call the distance between the flashlight and the mirror ‘L’, then one cycle of motion, once straight up and once back down, would be two times L, or 2L, in distance.”

  “Sure.”

  “Now, if the train were moving quickly, what would the person standing outside on the stationary platform see? What path would the pulse of light trace out for him?”

  Stralasi thought about that a little longer. “Well, if we add the speed of the train to the movement of the light pulse, like we did before, the path would go up and forward, then, down and forward. Its motion in both directions would be at a constant speed, I mean, the speed of light going up and down, and the horizontal speed of the train travelling from left to right.”

  He traced a pattern with his fingers in the air. “So to the guy on the platform, the path would look like…a…triangle.”

  “A sawtooth waveform, yes,” said Darian. “The person on the platform would see two sides of a triangle traced out. If we dropped a straight line down from the top-center of that triangle to the floor, we’d have two back-to-back right-angle triangles.”

  Stralasi pictured that in his mind.

  “Here’s where it gets a little tricky,” Darian said. “Remember, the speed of light is constant for all observers so both of the observers, the one inside the train and the one outside the train, both see the light go up and down at the same speed. And remember that we called the distance between the flashlight and the ceiling, L. So the path the light traces in one up-down cycle is 2L for the person in the train. But, it’s going to look longer for the person outside.”

  “Why is that?” Stralasi asked.

  “Remember your basic trigonometry? The hypotenuse, the side, of a triangle is always longer than its height. If L is the height, then the hypotenuse is going to be longer than L. The path of the light is longer to the outside observer than it is to the inside one. But the speed of light is always the same to both of them.”

  “Oh, I think I see where you’re going,” Timothy said, surprising everyone.

  Encouraged, Darian continued, slipping easily into the mathematical explanation.

  “We know that velocity is distance divided by time, v=d/t. Say, the distance the outside observer sees is 3L instead of 2L. The v inside is v=2L/tin, the apparent time that passes inside the train, but the v outside is v=3L/tout.

  “Not to cut you short—I can see you’re really into this—but how exactly is this relevant to our present situation?” Mary asked.

  Darian blinked a couple of times before answering, as if coming out of a trance, and laughed sheepishly.

  “Uh, yeah, sorry about that. I guess I do get excited by these things. Bear with me a sec, and I’ll get there.

  “Now, where was I? Oh, yeah. Remember v, the velocity of light, is the same for both observers, so we can set 2L/tin=3L/tout. We can do some simple math to show tin must be less than tout, in this example tin would be 2/3 tout. So, if the outside observer sees the light travel between the flashlight and the ceiling mirror in say, three nanoseconds, the inside observer would see the same movement take two nanoseconds. The two nanoseconds inside is equal to three nanoseconds outside; each internal nanosecond must be longer than an external nanosecond.

  “And so, there you have it. Time passes slower for the person in the moving train.”

  “Wow!” was all Stralasi could say.

  Darian laughed. “Yeah, that pretty much sums up the reaction of the scientists a
t the time. ‘Wow. Time moves at different rates for all observers.’ That certainly wasn’t what anyone expected.”

  Stralasi’s eyebrows furrowed in concentration. “Okay, I think I follow but, then, what about when we shift using entangled particles? That isn’t limited to light speed.”

  “That’s because Einstein didn’t get it quite right,” Darian replied.

  Darak and Darya nodded in agreement.

  “The full answer is a little more complicated. The truth is that the observer outside the train can’t possibly know anything about the pulse of light bouncing off the mirror. None of the photons from that pulse reaches the platform. When it was a ball going up and down, the light bouncing off the ball told the outside observer what was happening. But how could they receive information about the light pulse? If photons carry information and all the photons are in the pulse, the outside observer sees nothing.”

  “I don’t get it,” Stralasi said. “Is relativity correct or not?”

  “Oh, it’s correct,” Darian said. “It’s one of the most verified theories ever created. But the reason it’s correct is because there is hidden information being carried in a different way, an entangled way. And it’s right there in the thought experiment.”

  Stralasi concentrated, but he was beginning to despair of ever understanding. It was bad enough when he had only Darak throwing this stuff at him. Now he had Darak, Darian, and presumably Darya to bury him in complicated thought.

  Darian forged ahead, confident that the monk would figure it out.

  “The only way the outside observer could know anything about the path of the light pulse is if its location information was immediately transmitted from the travelling photons. That information would travel instantaneously along the entangled quantum fields that join the moving photons to the rest of the matter in the universe. This instantaneous transmission of information by the quantum fields is inherent in what makes relativity work.

  “When we shift, we disconnect from the matter of the universe through normal particle-particle interaction and connect directly to the entangled quantum fields. We can ride those waves of propagating reality at their speed, which is effectively infinite, across the universe.”