by Josh Karnes
Chapter 2
Isla Roca, Puerto Rico
Larry Duncan told his most trusted engineer, “Maybe I’m just not that smart, Kyle. You are going to have to spell it out for me.”
“Larry. This is really not very simple. We can’t just observe this problem. Nobody has ever seen this before. We don’t have any example to point to. There’s no precedent.”
“But the cubes can’t be literally just disappearing. They have to be going somewhere.”
“Of course. But we just don’t know where. Look. The problem really is that Daedalus literally distorts space-time. It’s easier to think about it distorting both space, and time, at the same time but in different ways. Maybe. We don’t exactly know. But that’s the crux of the problem. How do you observe something that is itself a distortion of space? How can you possibly trust your observation? And that’s even without getting into the issue of time distortion. We may be looking in the right place, but at the wrong time. Hell, we may need to be looking in the past, and that’s just not possible. Maybe we need to be looking in the past and in a different dimension. Maybe the cube jumped from the positive space-time to negative, and now it is actually in the opposite place where it should be. We just don’t know enough yet, and we don’t know how to know more.”
In this new uncharted science, the Daedalus team had been operating in relative isolation for over a decade. With no broad group of peers to share ideas with, they made much of this up as they were going along.
Daedalus was made possible by the discovery of material that has negative mass. To bend space-time for the purposes of shortcutting requires a tremendously strong gravitational force. So strong, if we were to create such a force here on earth, it would suck all of earth into it, crushing and collapsing everything, kind of like a black hole. This would, of course, make use of such a technology unreasonable. While the Daedalus scientists knew how to create micro black holes with Daedalus’ particle accelerator, they were not able to shape or project these micro black holes and of course if they were to create them, there was great risk that they would destroy the very device that created them by collapsing it, and maybe the earth along with it. However, using negative mass particles to create micro black holes gave the option of canceling out these huge gravitational fields. So Daedalus project scientists had figured a way to make even large micro black holes possible on earth without destroying the very planet.
With gravium, negative gravitational energy can be applied locally and used to shape gravitational fields. One early discovery the team made was how to project a narrow beam-like gravitational field, similar to how a lens focuses light, by applying localized gravium micro black holes to shape the positive-mass gravity. Such a narrow, long field is the pathway that a teleported object would follow, in theory, if Daedalus were working correctly. Unfortunately, it was not working correctly.
“So let me get this straight, Kyle. You are telling me that not only do you not know what is going wrong with Daedalus, but it may be logically impossible for you to know, and you do not even know how to tell the difference. Is that about it?” After two months of failed trials, Larry was losing his patience.
“Yeah, Larry,” replied Kyle. “That sounds about right. Or it could be worse. A lot worse.”
“What do you mean, worse?”
“Look man. We are dealing with forces that intentionally bend space and time. We don’t have any way to observe the dimension of time. Now, we are trying to control something that we can’t even observe. That’s a big problem right there. But the thing is, if we can manipulate space and time, but we are so limited that we can’t even observe it, then—”
“No!” Larry cut in. “Don’t give me more of that religious crap—”
“It’s not religious crap! It’s just one possibility we—”
“No it’s not. We are not considering the possibility that some magic supernatural beings are unbending what we are bending, or are fixing what we are breaking. If I can’t measure it, if I can’t see it, it doesn’t—”
“That’s my point! You can’t see time or space, you can’t see how we are manipulating them, and that’s why we can’t find the cubes! But you know it exists! What else that you can’t see might exist?”
“Okay… Okay—”
“You can’t see the cubes anymore, are you sure they exist?”
“Okay! Enough! You made your point. But it doesn’t matter because we can’t do anything about that. If there is some force or phenomenon we are not accounting for because we don’t know it exists, how are we supposed to solve our current problem?”
“We’re not,” Kyle replied flatly. “Seriously, Larry. We are relying on mathematical models based on as-yet unproven theory. We know it does something but we are really not sure what is actually happening. We believe we are bending space-time by pinpoint application of high gravitational forces but what if we bent it too far? What if we looped it back? We have to consider that maybe the cubes are not disappearing. Maybe they are just moving into a different time. Or maybe they never existed.”
“Say again?”
“Well if we are manipulating time, it’s possible that the cubes have disappeared now because they are skipping through a time loop. Maybe they were sent back in time and no longer exist in our time. Who knows? We can’t know.”
“No way. Now you’re starting to sound like Emmett Brown. Are my siblings going to start disappearing from the picture in my wallet next?”
Larry was referring to the so-called “Grandfather paradox”, which suggests that if a man travels back in time and kills his own grandfather, then would he cease to exist? This is a classic science-fiction paradox that was used to great effect in Back to the Future, where Marty goes back in time thirty years and inadvertently puts his parents meeting at risk, thus causing his own existence to begin to be at risk. It makes for a fun movie, but a far simpler and less entertaining limitation applies if a person were to try and go back in time to some time before their birth, or very far back in time. This is a problem of matter. Accepted theory suggests that there is a fixed quantity of energy and matter in the universe, and you cannot add to it or destroy it. So if an object of any kind is sent back in time, then it cannot add its matter into the universe, existing alongside a younger copy of itself.
So if Daedalus’ cubes were being sent back in time, then one theory suggests they would just become their previous selves, inasmuch as it is possible. So if one cube were taken from a box of a hundred cubes and put into the portal, and it went back in time to yesterday then it would just be found in the box again, of course, yesterday. There would still be only a hundred cubes in the universe. So what would have happened to the cube that went into the portal? Since it's in a time loop, it would be in the box, up until it got moved and put into the portal, today, and then it is sent back in time, to yesterday, whereupon it is back in the box. But today, it would have still disappeared from the portal. To find it, you would have to look in the box, yesterday. The cube would effectively cease to exist in the present, from that day on. It would have stopped progressing through time once it was put into the portal, which looped it back to a previous time. So while nearly everything else in the universe would continue to just move along time, the cube would have started to go into a loop so it wouldn't progress. From the perspective of one who had no choice but to progress, the cube wouldn't seem to exist.
Kyle responded, “I’m not kidding about this, Larry. Until we can gather some evidence of what is going on, we have to leave all options on the table. One option has to be that we overdid it and folded at least some small part of space-time back on itself and created a localized time loop. If it was deep enough to get them back in the container, then we’d never know and they’d stay in the loop forever. Or never. Or whatever.”
“Quit it Kyle, you’re making my head hurt. What did Laurie come up with?”
“I don’t know. Come with me. She is still working on it.”
The p
etite, blonde, tough as nails Laurie Carter is the team’s chief computer scientist and architect of the software that controls the gravium servos, stabilizes the black holes and directs the gravitational beam that makes Daedalus work. It’s really the brain of Daedalus; the supercollider and gravium servos are the brawn.
Kyle led Larry to the control room at the other end of the lab. Laurie had been working in there nearly non-stop for two months trying to find any code errors or logical flaws that might explain their negative results. So far, no good.
“Alright Laurie, what’s the word?” Larry asked.
“I think I know why we are not able to debug this.”
“What? Not able to debug it?”
“Here’s the thing. All of our control devices, servos, computing devices, even communication links, wiring, you name it, all depends on an ordered sequence of events for it to work right. Imagine a simple if… then conditional. What if you get to the ‘then’ before you do the ‘if’? Or what if there are more than one if… thens in a row, and you skip to the wrong ‘then’ that doesn’t match the ‘if’?”
Kyle took the bait, “Well, that’s a logic error. You just fix it. The compiler should catch it.”
“No, Kyle. It’s not that the code is wrong. It’s our assumption that is wrong. Look, we are making these really focused gravitational fields and we are controlling them with the gravium servos that are very near to the micro black holes—”
“Oh, I get it,” said Larry. “We didn’t account for the time distortion localized at the servos.”
“Exactly. So the controller tells the servo to spin at a certain rate, but you know the rate is just a function of time and the servo doesn’t spin at the rate we expected, since time for the servo is passing far slower.”
“Okay. So we can fix that…?”
“Not easily. The whole purpose of the servo is to create a negative gravitational field, which might have an opposite effect on time for the servo and those things near the servo. So as we add negative gravity, then time could actually be speeding up for the servo. The problem is the control circuitry. We have to use oscillators to time the binary data bus. Since the time is changing constantly, then the rate of the oscillators is also changing constantly and possibly in different directions. I’m not sure we have the computational capacity to predict it or compensate. It’s kind of like trying to control weather. There are just too many variables that all interact with each other,” Laurie explained.
“Alright. Got it. The elegant method of doing this, design it to work right, might be, umm, let’s say, challenging. How about brute force. Think of it like I have a rifle with a bent barrel. Every time I shoot at the target a hundred yards away, I miss twenty feet left. Once I know where I am hitting, I just aim twenty feet to the right and then I can hit the target. Is there something like that we can do here?”
Kyle replied, “We would have to figure out where the cubes are going to do that. Or when. If it’s a ‘where’, then we might be able to just aim wrong and get it right. If it’s a ‘when’, well we may never be able to find it.”
“Wait a minute. We are sure we are bending space-time, right?”
“Right.”
“Then we can look for time distortion anomalies and maybe find the cubes, whether they are ‘where’ or ‘when’, right?”
Kyle said, “That’s right, but how do we look for time distortions?”
“Clocks.”
“I don’t follow.”
Laurie zeroed in, “Oh, I get it. We can use devices with accurate clocks, look for errors that are too big.”
“You mean, like atomic clocks?” Kyle asked.
“No,” Larry said. “We can find it with GPS. Fortunately that may also tell us pretty much exactly where to look.”
GPS, or “Global Positioning System”, is a system that uses an array of satellites to aid in precise navigation. The technology is based on precise time, and as a result GPS receivers synchronize to the very precise time that is being transmitted from the satellites based on accurate atomic clocks in the satellites. Once every second, the GPS satellites send a message that informs receivers of the exact time. Receivers can use these time messages to triangulate their position, and also to synchronize their time. Many industries that require precise time synchronization use GPS to set the time for sensitive equipment.
Larry continued, “Since the GPS satellites are very far from the micro black holes used by Daedalus, they would be immune to the effects of the increased gravity. However, any GPS receivers on the ground near to the Daedalus’ gravity beam would experience a very large time drift due to their own internal clocks running much slower than the GPS satellite clock.”
Laurie picked up Larry's logic. “Once the next second comes around for it to synchronize, any GPS receiver that was affected would have to make a big correction. If we monitor the GPS receivers for large corrections, then we can find the anomaly.”
“And if we can find the anomaly, maybe we can find the cubes and adjust Daedalus to 'aim wrong' in order to compensate. Brute force method,” Larry said.
“OK, Larry. So I guess we can set up some kind of grid of GPS receivers and monitor their offsets, then put a cube in the portal and see if there’s a spike on any of the GPS receivers in the grid. Of course this will only work if the cubes are being sent to some place above ground and outdoors. If they are going into the middle of a mountain or 500 feet underground, we can never find them.”
“Do it. Whatever you need, you will get. I want some results by the end of the week.”
With that, Kyle set off to get some GPS receivers and figure out how to monitor them. At least they had a plan.
Monday