by Josh Karnes
Chapter 14
Isla Roca, Puerto Rico
When Larry Duncan arrived back in the lab, he found that Kyle had moved on without him, taking charge of the team to work out what they should do next.
“Hey Larry,” Kyle said as Larry joined the group huddled in the control room. “We’ve been hashing out our available options, and I think we have made some progress. And I think we have identified another flawed assumption that we’ve all been working under, and if we get past it, we may have more options.”
“What’s the flawed assumption?”
“Space-time. We have been trying to fold space-time in order to make a shortcut through space, without having to also follow the same distance in time. Sound about right?”
“Yeah. That’s a gross oversimplification, but it’ll do.”
“No, it won’t. That’s the problem. It’s a gross oversimplification, just like you say, because we have to grossly oversimplify it in order to get a handle on it. The assumption we made is about the relationship of space and time in so-called ‘space-time’. We are just so stuck in thinking of time as this one-dimensional path, like an axis on a graph that goes on in only one direction forever, that we assumed that when we bend something, what we are bending is space. I think it’s natural for us to assume that, since we can bend ordinary things in space all the time and we use that analogy so often, we just make it too literal in our own minds.”
“I don’t follow,” Larry admitted.
“We assumed we can skip across space, using a shorter path of time. Like somehow we were able to not only separate space and time from one another, but we could manipulate the shape of space, bending it, while keeping the shape of time as a straight line. You know, we put a cube into the portal, and in just a fraction of a second in time, we expect it to move through space to some location we determine, along a straight line of time, linearly, where one second follows the one before it predictably. That’s ridiculous in its arrogance, in addition to being a totally flawed assumption.”
“Wait a minute. Arrogance? This is well-accepted theory, originating from the mind of the man Albert Einstein himself. Every single thing Einstein ever theorized has been proven correct, even in spite of enormous effort to prove it wrong in many cases. Remember the CERN thing with the neutrinos—” Duncan’s speech was interrupted.
“Einstein never said that time will remain linear and space alone can be curved by gravity, did he?” Laurie Carter, the computer scientist, interjected.
Right then, Larry Duncan knew Kyle was right. And he also was beginning to realize that he was putting blind faith in Einstein’s theories, which he and many others may have misinterpreted or not fully understood. And this was little different from religion.
Duncan left Laurie’s question on the table and redirected, “Kyle, what are you getting at?”
“What if it’s the other way around? We always imagine that a time loop is like this, where something arrives at a point in space, then reverts to another position in time while maintaining its position in space. That’s the whole Back to the Future story that’s been ingrained into our cultural psyche. You drive the DeLorean to eighty-eight miles per hour, and then it pops out in exactly the same place, only thirty years earlier. But that’s a complete fabrication with no basis in science.”
“Well of course it is. It’s a science fiction movie.”
“Yes, but we are assuming the same thing about Daedalus whether we intended to or not. That’s why we were confused by the cube in the log. What the cube in the log tells us is that when we send something back in time, we also send it back to where it was, in space. So imagine I could put my watch into the portal and Daedalus was tuned to a one-hour time loop. The watch would not appear in the portal when it went back in time. That would be to add its matter to the universe, which we can’t do. What will happen is my watch would just become an hour fast while it sat on my wrist. When I send it ‘back in time’, what I am actually doing is sending it’s new spatial orientation, that is the charge in the battery, the position of the movement, the hands, et cetera.”
“So that’s why we can’t find the cubes, if we have actually created a time loop,” Laurie said. “Something we are not compensating in the control loop is causing us to fold space too far, and we wind up with an uncontrolled time loop. When we put anything in the portal, we have to look for it wherever it was at the time we are sending it to. Since we don’t know what time is, we don’t know where to look. And the cubes are a really poor choice for this experiment since there was a time, not so long ago, when they were just carbon atoms locked up in a log.” It took the only non-physicist in the team to boil down the problem in terms they all could grasp. “So we need to be testing with something that has been around exactly as it is now, for a long time, and we know exactly where it has been for a long time, so we know where to look.”
“Yeah, sort of. But that won’t work because we can’t go back in time ourselves to look for it,” Kyle said.
Duncan responded, “We need to mark it, change it in some way, like your watch analogy.”
“What do you mean?” Laurie asked.
“We need to test with an object that we can change in some noticeable way, but a way that will stay that way. Like, take a book off the shelf, fold a page, and then put it in the portal. Then we’ll look on the shelf and see if the page is folded. That will tell us whether we have a time loop.”
“That won’t work. Whatever page we folded will already be folded before we put it in the portal. We won’t have any way to tell ourselves, in the past, that we folded that page and that it is important. Plus, for all of the time between now and whatever past time we would send the book, the book remains out of our control. Who’s to say someone didn’t remove it and unfold our page?”
Laurie offered, “Not only that, if I understand what you guys are saying correctly, then once we put the book in the portal, it will never again be on the shelf for us to check. Unless something changes the timeline, we will always take the book off the shelf and put it in the portal today. Isn’t that what you said about the cubes before, Kyle?”
“You are right. So we need to test with something that we can also use to communicate to us not to do the experiment. I mean, if this works, then the result of the experiment is going to appear immediately after we put the thing in the portal, and we need access to the thing, whatever it is, after. That means we have to avoid putting it in the portal the second time around, so to speak.”
“How about a hard drive?” Laurie said.
“What?” Duncan said.
“A hard drive. All that changes on a hard drive when you write data to it is the alignment of magnetic fields on the platter. That should stay the same when we send it back in the portal. And we can put a tremendous amount of data on it if we need to. All we have to do is find a hard drive that’s been in use for a long enough time to get caught in our time loop.”
“Yeah, but how will we know to go look at the data on some old hard drive?” Kyle said.
“We pick one that we have to use every day, so it stares us in the face,” Laurie said as she glanced over at their rack-mount server that runs their main control system. “That server, for example, has been up and running doing this daily for, what, six years? If we pull the hard drive, we could reformat it and set it up to just boot and display a message, like ‘Your time loop worked! Don’t put the hard drive in the portal next time!’ or something. The hard drive will end up right back in the server where it is now, but with this new data on it.”
“I don’t think that will be enough information to get us to not do the test. Remember whenever we discover it, and we don’t know when that will be, but in the past sometime, we will not have any context. We won’t know that we have ever run into this problem or even what kind of experiment we were going to do,” Kyle pointed out.
Duncan broke in, “Guys. Are we really talking about being able to send a hard disk drive, with a terabyte or
more of storage capacity, back in time? Do you realize just what kind of opportunity that is? We should zip up all of our notes, a complete chronicle of what we have done, what we have learned, what worked and didn’t work, photos of the cube in the log, the whole thing, all of our research, and put it on that hard drive. Then we will never encounter this problem to begin with! This is a way to actually communicate with our past selves. We can shave years off of the project schedule.”
“Larry, I’m not sure—” Kyle said,
“The notes, the pictures, all that won’t exist for us to put on the hard drive if we don’t follow the same path we did to get here, will it?” Laurie said, brainstorming the new paradoxes that seemed to be materializing.
“All that has to exist is the shape of the particles on the hard disk platter,” said Duncan.
They all stood in silence, thinking, for several seconds before Kyle spoke, “Well, it’s worth a try. Worst case, it doesn’t work. We have a backup of that server, right?”
“Yes,” said Laurie.
“Then let’s do it,” said Duncan.