Pushing up the digits

by Pascal Inard

  Maybe he’d had a full check-up in the last twelve months and he was on medications. He went upstairs and checked the medicine cabinet, but it was empty.

  He sat on his bed to take stock of his situation. His memory had a big hole, but it was intact before and after. He could still remember Bob’s speech at the QPT inauguration word for word.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, good evening and welcome. It is an immense honour for me to open the Quantum Particle Transformer. This facility holds the key to a brighter and more prosperous future for our nation. The winds of change are blowing, and rather than resisting them, we have embraced them. We have hoisted the sails by building this installation, and it will carry Australia to a victory, the likes of which we have not seen since the America’s cup in 1983. And in case you were wondering, we do have the equivalent of the revolutionary keel that helped us win us that race.” Bob paused to let his words sink in. “And that’s why there are some things that we can show you tonight and others that will remain secret. All the world needs to know is that we’re on the road to finding a new source of energy, one that is unlimited and non-polluting. It will set us free and it will set the rest of the world free. Once they have bought it from us, that is.” Bob waited for the cheering and applause to stop. “Yes, mark my words, thanks to this Quantum Particle Transformer and the team of researchers led by the brilliant doctor Stephen Collingsworth, Australia will lead the way to an energy revolution.”

  Stephen would have preferred that Bob dispense with the premature triumphalism, but Bob was counting on this event to turn the tide of his abysmal approval rating. It was Stephen’s fault; he had used the argument that the generation of dark energy was a sure thing to convince Bob to commit the funds. When Bob was running for a second term, desperately looking for a new policy that would lead him to victory, Stephen had given him the answer. If there wasn’t a market for the fuels that laid under its soil anymore, Australia was going to develop the technology to generate a new sort of energy. Stephen remembered his winning argument. “Consider this,” he’d said. “68.3 per cent of the total mass-energy of the universe consists of dark energy, the primordial energy of the big bang, responsible for the expansion of the universe. It’s incredibly powerful: it battles against gravity to expand the universe at a rate of 74.3 kilometres per second per megaparsec. If you give me the funds, I can build a facility that will find a way to transform ordinary quantum particles into accelerons, the mediators of dark energy.”

  More importantly for Stephen, it was going to prove his ‘Theory of Everything’, the single all-encompassing theoretical framework that was going to fully explain and link together all physical aspects of the universe.

  The holy grail of physics, no less.

  A simulation had followed the speech in which protons and neutrons had travelled at the speed of light. Stephen explained that particle colliders produced particles through the collision of other particles at high energy, but the QPT was different because it stopped the decay of the particles created and transformed them into other elementary particles. Andrew had developed an animation which showed the bosons being created; it looked pretty and wasn’t fully accurate, but the media loved it.

  A question and answer session had followed.

  “Prime Minister, is this the right time to spend twenty billion dollars when we are in the middle of a recession, and Australia’s credit rating is on the brink of being downgraded by three notches?”

  “The return on investment is predicted to be phenomenal, and beyond the billions of dollars of revenue this will generate is the boost to Australia’s status in the global energy market and scientific community. We will be seen as innovators and leaders. Australia has lived for far too long on the back of finite resources buried in its soil. Now it’s over: after the Chinese closed all their coal power stations, we thought we would fall back on our feet by selling our uranium to fuel their nuclear power plants, and then vast deposits were discovered in the desert of Gobi. It’s no coincidence that the Chinese Empire annexed Mongolia, apparently without any resistance from the Mongolians. The desert of Gobi also contains iron ore, so we’re not going to have anything to sell to The Chinese Empire, nor to our other customers. They’ll get their metals from the Chinese Empire at a much cheaper price. That’s why I’m saying we are entering into a new era, an era of prosperity and renewed confidence on our ability to find creative solutions to our problems. We can do it and we will! After all, this is the country that gave the world the ultrasound, the bionic ear, the electronic pacemaker, the black box flight recorder, the refrigerator and, most importantly, vegemite.”

  The audience laughed.

  “What do you say to your critics who say it’s too little too late? If the Chinese are successful in developing teleportation, a lot of the energy problems we are facing will no longer exist.”

  “It’s a very good question. Teleportation is a good concept, but the Chinese are years or even decades away from making it work on a large scale. The first test to transport a plastic pen one hundred metres required as much energy as a truck laden with thirty tonnes of goods to travel ten kilometres.”

  “Yes, but this facility requires its own nuclear power plant.”

  “It may seem ironic that you need energy to find how to generate a new type of energy, but it’s a one-off investment. Don’t forget that we are talking here about a new source of energy which will never run out.”

  “How safe is this research work?” another reported asked. “Do the scientists know what they’re doing? What happens if they create a black hole that swallows this area and the city of Ballarat?”

  Stephen had responded that safety was the utmost priority, and had given assurances about the technical safeguards that had been implemented. But he knew that the flat-earth believers, as he liked to call them, would continue to spread their doomsday messages. The riot police had been busy dealing with protesters during the construction of the Transformer, and Bob’s office regularly received petitions asking for its closure.

  Stephen had been relieved when the ceremony had finished, but he hadn’t expected waking up a year later with his memories and his family gone.

  The house was an empty shell now that his wife and children had moved out with all their belongings. Stephen was not a materialist. His most treasured possession was his memory. He had never had to do anything to develop it. It was a gift bestowed to him by nature, the prize he had won in the lottery of life.

  He remembered everything he saw, heard, smelt, tasted or touched. Most hyperthymesiacs (not that there were many of them) were overwhelmed by the uncontrollable stream of memories and found their condition a burden, but Stephen had learnt to control it. He only retrieved memories that were useful or pleasurable, like the taste of a Tarte Tatin Cécile had made two weeks ago (he wished she would make it more often). When his parents had realised that Stephen was gifted, they used his talent to find their car in the parking lot and participate in the Pi memorisation competition where Stephen had set a new record.

  He had been fascinated with the workings of the brain, and the components of this marvellous machine that were involved in memory. His answer to the ‘what will you be when you grow up’ question customarily asked to children his age had been without hesitation ‘neurologist’. But when his curious mind turned to the question of what the universe was made of, he saw that it still kept many secrets. The standard model of particle physics developed in the 1970s fell short of explaining everything: it didn’t contain any viable dark matter particles, incorporate the full theory of gravitation nor did it account for the accelerating expansion of the universe.

  Where others had failed in defining a ‘Theory of Everything’, Stephen was going to succeed. He was sure of that, failure was not an option, and he would stop anyone from stealing his work. He didn’t want to end up like his father, self-destructing slowly and painfully in front of his family after his work had been diverted to a futile use when he’d had hig
h hopes for what it could do.

  How close to proving his theory was he now? The answer was somewhere in his brain, but it was useless if he couldn’t retrieve it. Retrieval was as important as storage, everyone knew that.

  The only time his memory had been deficient was in his university days when he had his first taste of alcohol at a party; he came home, staggering, at five AM and the next day had been hell. He had been unable to recall anything he had said, done, seen or heard after his third glass of whisky. That was the last time he had drunk any alcohol, until the inauguration of the Transformer, which in his mind was still yesterday.

  He didn’t mind being called a party pooper; he wasn’t concerned about his public image like Bob was. It wasn’t as bad as visiting Cécile’s relatives in Normandy where refusing to drink the aperitif, the white wine and the home-made Calvados that accompanied every meal was taken as an offence. To make up for it, he forced himself to finish the dishes that were invariably drowned in cream and butter. He used his Personal Health Assistant to confirm on the spot that these infringements to his diet hadn’t affected his cholesterol level.

  That night, Stephen’s sleep was hijacked by the fear that he was going to wake up in 2047, and the more he tossed and turned in bed, the more he thought about the fact that sleep improved the consolidation of information and that the functioning of memory, even one like his, depended on getting sufficient sleep.

  END of Chapter One of The Memory Snatcher