So these time-travelling scientists are sitting in the bleachers on Friday nights, probably wearing some sort of fitted cap appropriate to the time period, the collars turned up on their jackets so as not to attract undue attention. They don't talk to anyone and they bring their own food -- who knows what sort of long lost bacteria is hiding in the dregs of those popcorn bags? They record their data surreptitiously, pulling something that looks like paper out of their pockets and appearing to scribble on it. On occasion they stand up and yell something off-kilter, like Cut-block! Crack-back! They note members of the audience turning toward them for a moment, and satisfy themselves with recording the white noise of the crowd's roar and its subtle impact on the play about to be run. By the end of the night, their voices are hoarse from shouting, something they have done a hundred times more than the most ardent fan, though the crowd only remembers one or two exclamations.
Now, say you go to a high-school game and find a likely candidate -- somebody sitting alone, glancing around intently and making furtive recordings. How would you bribe one of the time-travelers into lending their device to you? This is the real question about these time-travelling scientists: how do their employers maintain job satisfaction, when they have the ability to alter reality to their tastes. They could be rich sheiks with vast harems or monarchs who rule for millions of years, probably taking breaks here and there to skip over the boring periods. The world is their sandbox - what possible authority could hold them?
Maybe they are family men, and they must be very careful to limit the timeline contamination or their sons and daughters will never exist and the loves of their lives will marry someone else. In that case, they're not likely to hand over power to some joker in the stands.
What if they are limited to a specific time and place, and each time-dilator is keyed to a specific and narrow window? You won't fix your life by moving forward from this moment; if you'd wanted to do that you would have worked harder in the first plan. Alternately, the device might only work for the traveler, who has no incentive at all to run back to the past and swap out your timeline for another where they themselves might be worse off.
Another option is that this is one of infinite parallel universes, a universe where that scientist has made the bafflingly poor decision of wasting his life tracking statistics on high school football games when he has access to any life he wants to lead. Maybe every single decision -- every zig of a particle when it could zag -- spawns a new universe to reflect both paths. It's a false interpretation to suggest that this results in all possible universes; laws still apply, just like an infinite geometric series headed toward a finite asymptote. And this universe has a fundamental principle stating that no one keeps going to a shitty job when they can have whatever they wish for, making it a bit less likely that this person is the time-savvy visitor you took them for.
Then there is always the possibility that this scientist has followed the course of their existence along a thousand different paths and yet always come back to this life, drawn to it by discontent or temporal inertia: not a perfect life, but a fitting one. If that's the case, you probably won't do any better, and this person can't help you at all. The whole reason for their existence has lost meaning for you; there's really no need for the person to be a time-traveler at all.
The sudden transition from the imagined potential of perfection to hanging out next to a creepy guy at a high school football game is more than likely enough to give you some appreciation of your current life.
###
The slight black slope of the distant walls reduced the stars to a flush plate of speckled glass. Flat on his back, Chandrasekhar couldn’t see anything else but their unadulterated and unilluminating glow. A shadow rose and passed between him and the sky, before swiftly disappearing – from the sound transmitted to his helmet, he could only imagine it was the Boots of Steel blanketed by the invisible mechanism that was tearing it apart.
The fall from the ship had been unexpectedly short – a couple of feet at the most. His legs had buckled from the sudden impact and caused him to lose his balance. He was sure he was unhurt, less sure of his suit.
Siri? he questioned over the suit’s comm. Here – I think. The noise of the Boots’ destruction had passed away and he could distinctly make out Siri’s sharp breathing.
Willing his muscles to work, Chandrasekhar pushed himself to his feet. He waited a moment for his eyes to adjust to the lighting. The darkness remained. With a click from a hard switch on the suit, the light from his helmet spilled out weakly onto a featureless floor. The effect of a single spotlight on a quiet stage was disturbed by the sound of another click as Siri’s suit light joined his. He spun in an arc, finding nothing to fix on – no walls or structures, only the encroaching penumbra beyond the range of the light. If this is a dock, then where are the lights? What’s happened to the ship? He said it aloud for Siri’s benefit and heard only her breaths in return. He left his questions about the other ship they had seen unspoken.
Chandrasekhar looked himself over as well as he could while checking the environment display. The suit appeared to be holding up, maintaining a safe and stable environment. Likewise, the outside atmosphere had every indication of being safe: temperate and breathable at a normal pressure. Oxygen levels were unusually high; they had better keep their helmets on just to be safe. Check my back, said Siri. They mutually assured each other of the wholeness of the other person’s suit; each was nearly identical to the other, though Siri’s lacked a command gauntlet. An image of the spire flashed in his mind. Your arms, too, he said. She dropped her arms to her sides and looked at him expectantly through her helm. Nothing in her hands, he thought.
He looked down at his gauntlet and ran his fingers over it. Color traced along its length as he called up data. I’m trying to reconnect to the Boots of Steel. The ship’s computer is still online but it’s not responding to commands. It’s moving – he pointed – that way. The signal’s still strong. He paused and spoke simply. No other signals. No other people, he meant, or at least none that wanted to talk – to them or anyone else.
So what is your plan, exactly? Chandrasekhar parsed her question for emotion – distaste, disappointment – and found none. Instead of answering, he punched another set of commands and the gauntlet reacted. A bright display projected itself onto the floor, subtly adjusting itself to maintain perfect observer perspective to his two eyes as his arm moved and his head bobbed.
From Siri’s position the illusion was an imperfect clash of edges, but still recognizable. A blueprint? she said with some surprise. The wrong blueprint, said Chandrasekhar, shaking his head. The image stayed stable. Plans for Star City aren’t exactly laying around in city hall. This is the underside of New Atlantis; I’m hoping for some commonality. So far, there had been little enough of that. We need to get topside. Whatever answers this city held would be above.
The gauntlet has calculated our distance from the central spire and transposed our position as a ring on the plans, he told her. That puts us somewhere below the Fourth Ring, she said, the lines coming into focus as she moved closer to him. She stretched out her gloved fingers. There – there’s a series of roundabouts on the edge of the Third Ring we can use. Roundabouts were curved platforms descending through the floor that transitioned from one gravity vector to another, easing travellers from the “upside-down” perspective of the underside to the topside. They were used sparingly in New Atlantis; most docking areas and parking garages had traditional gravity and large landing platforms. The traditional design was inefficient, but more comfortable for the majority of people who found the roiling Atlantic swimming above their heads to be nauseating.
What if they aren’t there? There’s no guarantee they’ll be on Star City because they are on New Atlantis, he said.
She laughed at him, spreading her arms, palms out. This is your plan, remember?
His plan was nothing more than a vision, an expected inevitability. They would go topside, to th
e middle of the city, because that is where they would find the replicator. That's where the people would be, he hoped, becoming wary of what might be there instead. He found comfort in explaining the reasoning to her, even if it was a false rationalization.
He walked a few paces from Siri, and held his arm gauntlet above his head. Several intense beams of multiple wavelengths danced out in many directions, barely appearing at all but for the moisture in the air and the distances involved. Dots of light shined more brightly to his right; it was possible they were reflecting off a wall, a suspicion his gauntlet confirmed with masers and radar. For now, his plan involved getting to a wall and following it in the direction of the city center. Time to move. He strode off toward the light, unworried that she would fail to follow him. The light from her helmet bobbed over his legs as he set a fast.
Chapter 12
Quiet Interlude | Silenced Machine Gun | A Roundabout Silence
Baby 14-B has finally nodded off, and in the quiet Wald thinks of his niece. She was reading now; his brother Hank had given him an update over the phone last week. He can't quite remember if she was about to turn 4 or 5. She was in some sort of school, he knew that, but they start kids so young these days. He thought he would spend more time visiting her now that she was developing a personality -- she had been a sweet baby but Hank and Tina, his sister-in-law, had been overwhelming in their parenting. He heard about everything: the time she almost walked for a few seconds; how her hair kept coming and going; how she felt about duckies. Tina would never admit it, but Stephen could tell that she was slightly disappointed now that her daughter had grown out of being a baby and into being a little person.
Wald glimpses the girl in 16-D through a slit between the headrests in front, admiring the sheer comfort she lounged in while he is cramped to distraction.
He thought about having a daughter himself. He and 16-D had had a lovely ceremony; they had gotten their ends away for years and now they were ready to settle down and have a family. Was he ready? Would something suddenly change when he saw that first sonogram or felt it kick? While his niece was still in his sister-in-law's womb, he had marveled at the blurry sonogram pictures; he had struggled to find the human form in what looked like a cave lit by a lantern. That's no cave, he'd said. No one laughed. They were anxious over possible complications, the kind the technicians can see coming on down the line with ultrasonography, essentially the same technology as used in doppler radar with a bit of wave substitution.
Something new coming down the line -- that was a child. A reason to shape-up, an opportunity to succeed and a chance to fail, not changing at all.
Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon is a peripheral extension of his gritty and prolific -- though less recognized -- Continental Op stories, glitzed up and made slick. There is an easy romance to the character of Sam Spade wholly dissimilar to the workmanlike anonymity displayed by the anti-hero of Red Harvest and The Glass Key, and the text propels Sam from a simple private eye to a man on a mission to avenge his partner and find the fabled falcon that is as much adventure story as it is noir detective fiction.
But the most significant difference between the works is that very much unlike Continental Op stories, The Maltese Falcon has a point. The reader knows this, because Hammett flatly halts the novel's continuous action to explain it with a parable about a man named Flitcraft that could almost have been written by another author entirely, the prose sharing little of Hammett's typical matter-of-fact delivery.
Flitcraft, explains Sam, was a family man of considerable means from Seattle, who failed to show up to work one day. He disappeared without money and without notifying his family. One day his wife sees a man that looks like him, and comes to Sam's detective agency to find out if it's him. Sam investigates and discovers the man is Flitcraft, going by another name and living a new life with a new family. There's no kidnapping scandal to uncover or murderous deceit to unmask; the man had simply walked to work one day and nearly been killed by a beam falling from a construction scaffold, a circumstance that had shocked him out of the rut of his life. He left with the money he had in his pocket, leaving his family financially provided for, and set off in search of another life.
That he settled back into a life in Spokane, Washington, with a wife not unlike his first holds no irony. Sam sums up the tale by saying: But that's the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling. At the end of the novel, Sam finds himself back in his spare office: unbelievable escapade over; beautiful seductress gone; prepared to be saddled with requests for divorce work. Sam, like Flitcraft, accustomed his life to adventure, then beams stopped falling and he adjusted himself to real life.
Stephen wonders whether the same thing happens when your baby is born. Some fathers say they became changed men the minute their baby is born. Of course, that might just be the oxytocin, a hormone that strengthens connections between strangers which gets released when men toss their babies into the air and make them giggle. Instant baby-bonding -- a chemical that instructs you to fix the world for the future. We have the same conceit with raising children that we do with technology: that each generation, we are improving, making a better life that builds on our past mistakes and fixes them. Building on sand, thinks Wald, looking down at the bulge caused by the half-broken lump of metal in his pocket.
16-D rings for an attendant and asks for something in a voice too muffled by the blocky stewardess to hear. The attendant shakes her head and replies something in the negative. Wald tilts his head to overhear, but the attendant has already left 16-D looking puzzled and displeased. She calls again and the attendant returns after some time, obviously grudgingly. She is speaking to the attendant sharply but quietly, and Stephen can't make out what she says. The attendant leans over, tense, her body language brooking no argument. She whispers something fierce then speaks loudly as she leaves, so the rest of the cabin hears. Excuse me, I have the safety of the airplane to attend to now, Miss.
Titters of attention come from the bobbing heads of passengers in the seats near 16-D. Even a few clicks are heard as people in forward rows slip out of the seat belts to turn around. Stephen cancels his fake marriage, an annulment on the grounds the union was never consummated and the fact that his wife is the type to argue with flight attendants.
After a few moments, the tumult dies down and thoughts of children and marriage pass from Wald's mind as his imagination moves on to other dreams.
###
Maxwell "Maxim" Rampall, wealthy and retired from business, dreamed of a perpetual motion machine of peace, built on simple networking principals and a core drive to propagate. When he publicly announced the concept to a world of skeptical guffaws and enthusiastic cheerleading in 2053, the core investing foundation of philanthropists behind the project had already committed several billion dollars, produced several prototypes and stopped arguing amongst themselves long enough to settle on a name: the SourceFlow. Here is the dream he announced:
A single mass replication device - a self-expanding box of approximately 20x60x20 meters in dimension - is shipped to a community lacking basic necessities like clean water and a power plant. The box can manage both easily: power comes from induced gravity and water is condensed directly from the air, an uneconomical method made practical by a near limitless source of energy. Raw material can be supplied in bulk to produce mid-grade repped products. The repper is not state-of-the-art, by design, for cheap manufacture. It can produce edible material but not food; simple molecules but not complex polymers; its material banks accept only easily broken-down compounds. The repper is designed to produce 3 things: water, power, and itself.
A classical Von Neumman machine can replicate itself completely; the SourceFlow could produce itself in whole, barring the gravplate necessary to power it. Gravplates only came from VIG's manufacturing center, and in 2053 they were still cheap and relatively plentiful. A single gravplate inserted into the
box would bring a second-generation SourceFlow online, allowing it to be easily moved to a location four to eight miles away.
The distance was important. The SourceFlows were interconnected, each one a node, and their operation depended on propagation. The first thing that each machine produced was two descendant SourceFlows which had to be online and sited within a set distance before the original would produce water and extraneous power. Two descendants could spread the machine exponentially in a short period of time; forced expansion would see to that. This was the mechanism Rampall had designed to emulate the biological imperative to reproduce.
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