Analog SFF, April 2012

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “I wanted to talk,” I said, “in person. You always said I had a penchant for drama.”

  DOESN'T SMELL LIKE YOU, Juno sent. Then he walked off, following the deck around the house, curious about the view and the smell of the sea.

  Virginia looked after Juno. “I didn't picture you as the kind to get one of those things.”

  “His name is Juno.” I considered telling her that getting Juno hadn't been my idea, that the dog had been a gift from a concerned David Ressar, who thought I needed company and another pair of ears to listen for danger, when I spent my summers at the vineyard. But I decided against it. I would not apologize for Juno, even if I used to complain that I opposed the neo-dogs trade. I added, “He's disappointed that you are indifferent to him.”

  “He thinks he's people,” she sneered.

  “He didn't ask to be what he is,” I whispered. I didn't add that I love him. I hadn't seen Virginia in years, and immediately the old pattern emerged: she put me on guard, forced me to withdraw my feelings carefully.

  “And you can't see the irony of that?”

  I shrugged.

  “So,” she said. “I'm long done with the Marrion School, with conspiracies, with all of you. I don't want to hear about any of it.”

  When I didn't answer, she sighed. She waved at two plastic deck chairs. A little table sat between them, a fat pair of binoculars resting on their lens caps. “Sit. I'll get you some wine.”

  “Can you spare a bowl of water for Juno?” I asked.

  When she came back I set the glass at my feet and pulled the briefcase onto my lap. “David Ressar was killed by a very special, very expensive assassin. It had to be corporate. I've come to tell you why they want to kill us.”

  “Us?”

  “Others are in danger.”

  Juno walked by. He went to the water bowl and slopped very noisily.

  “Charming,” Virginia said, lifting an eyebrow at the noise. Juno looked up at her with unfathomable brown eyes and stared a long while, water dripping from the hairs under his chin. She tried to feign indifference but the calm penetration of his stare made her shift uneasily. She frowned and looked away. Juno padded silently to the corner of the deck and sat, staring out at the sea.

  “You should know why they want us dead,” I said.

  “God, do you really think I don't know that, Jan? They want to kill you for the same reason anyone would if they knew the things you've done. Destroying the oil. Selectively curing diseases. Starting a political party. Infiltrating governments. How many people died because of the chaos you've caused?”

  “Hard to say. But I think in the end we made the world a better place.” I gestured at the sea below her house. “Think of how many would have died if the sea were even higher.”

  “This is why I left. You can't see how evil you all are.”

  “Virginia, I doubt that these people who killed David are sentimentalists. Or avenging past wrongs. They killed David because they want to stop what we're doing next.”

  “Good,” Virginia said spitefully. “Maybe they'll succeed.”

  I opened the briefcase. Inside, neatly packed in cut foam, lay two boxes and a data stick. “This is what they want to stop.”

  “Wait,” Virginia said. “Is this another conspiracy?”

  “That's not the best way to describe it.”

  “Will people die?”

  “Yes. Surely.”

  “Then I don't want to know.”

  “I'm going to insist, Virginia.”

  “You can't. I can go inside, lock the door, call the police, and tell them you're a trespasser.”

  “We know that you gave them David Ressar's door codes.”

  I didn't know, really. She was just the most likely source. And we'd checked: she'd called Karen, from our class at the school, two months before, and asked for the codes, claiming she intended to visit David.

  Virginia stared at me, mouth open. “How dare you! How dare you even . . .”

  That's when I knew. She always overdid her false indignation.

  “I assume you bought this house with what they paid you. Well, a good man is dead. You will hear me out, whether you like it or not. That's the price of getting rid of me.”

  She was silent a long time. Finally, I lifted the first box, a small plastic cube with electrical outlet prongs on one face. “This is a telepathy chip router. For home use. Or anywhere use. Just plug it in and leave it alone. It communicates to other such routers, and to teep chips, anywhere within range, using megabit encryption to create a totally secure peer-to-peer network. No one can break that encryption, no one can tell who is sending what messages to the router, or where the message is going, or what's in the message. We have some of these routers that run on solar power too. You can just set those anywhere they'll get sun.”

  I tapped the other box, a clear crystal box. Inside sat a tiny square of etched silicon. “This is the next generation of teep chip. The router will work with any teep chip, but these chips include sound and visual transmission abilities, lifting pictures directly from occipital cortex, sound direct from the inner ear. And these chips have a terabyte of on-board memory, to store images and thoughts and sounds for later transmission. You can share with other people what you saw or heard yesterday, or last year. And this,” I tapped the data stick, “contains a special, now open, peer-to-peer encryption protocol for the teep networks.”

  “Why should I care?” Virginia asked. We were back into our old roles, the scolding little sister, the impatient and aggressively indifferent older sister.

  “We are manufacturing these, and we aim to flood the market with them, selling at cost, giving away the plans and the manufacturing instructions. With these, teep networks can be set up, which are absolutely private. Anyone can talk to anyone, any place, in secrecy. Anonymously or not. Imagine now that a president, a general, a CEO, anyone having a meeting, cannot be sure that what is said is not being transmitted, either then or later. And if it is shared, they cannot confirm who leaked it. Imagine a dictator trying to rule, when every servant has the power to transmit his plans, and cannot be stopped, cannot be caught. Imagine sending an army out to kill people, when any soldier in that army can leak that they're coming. Imagine the criminals on Wall Street, passing secrets, when anyone in the chain might just pass on all their names and secrets to the press with no more effort than a passing thought meant to appease a transient pang of guilt. We are going to end secrecy, by giving everyone the power of secrecy. That's why they want to kill us, Virginia.”

  She laughed, bitter and without mirth. Lazily, Juno turned and looked at her. He was starting to sulk. He grew impatient with me talking to people who weren't kind to us. “You don't see the irony in this? Your grand conspiracy now claiming to end all conspiracies? It won't work.”

  I smiled sadly. “Lately I've been seeing signs in everything. Metaphors. Maybe you're seeing irony in everything.”

  Virginia stood. “Go. I don't care about this stuff. Just go.”

  I packed and closed the case and set it on the deck. “There are other assassins.”

  “Surely not,” Virginia said. “If they're corporate, like you say, they'll turn their tails if they've already risked being caught.”

  “These assassins are special. They're engineered. They don't know who they are. And that makes them . . . disposable.”

  Virginia turned to me. Her eyes grew wide, this time with genuine fear. “You're leading them here. That's why you came here! Go! Now!”

  “Too late.” I touched my glasses. “I've been recording everything I've done for the last few days. I transmitted it all this morning, and then went live. I've transmitted this conversation. It's gone to our supporters, all the people in our party, in our charities, our NGOs. And to people in the press. The Marrion conspiracy is over. No more secrets, Virginia. And that includes the secret that you betrayed David.”

  Virginia ran into the house. She came out a few minutes later, a purse in her han
d. She threw it down onto the dock. “I don't ever want to see you again,” she said. She climbed down, took two steps and the leapt deftly into her boat. When her boat pulled away, churning water as she gunned the electric engine, Juno came to my side.

  NOT NICE TO US, he sent.

  “No,” I said. “To tell you the truth, she never has been nice. And you know what? I don't think it was the way she was born. I think it's just what she decided to be.”

  He licked my hand sympathetically. Then he sent, HUNGRY.

  “I'll see what's inside, in a few minutes.” I lifted the binoculars from the table and removed their lens caps. I pushed my glasses onto my forehead and aimed the binoculars south toward Long Island Sound. That's the way a boat from Providence would need to come. The horizon there had turned dark, just in the short while I'd been talking to Virginia. It wouldn't be long till the stormfront of the expended hurricane made it here, bringing wind and heavy downpours. Before the dark clouds, a boat cut a white wake. I was impressed to see black diesel smoke rising from it. But of course: nothing was faster, on short notice, than an old diesel boat. It made for a nice metaphor, coming to get us with some of the last of the oil. Or was that an irony?

  I stood and walked to the other corner of the deck. Through two houses across the channel I could see a sliver of the Atlantic. Boats from Provincetown would have to come from there. Small gleaming triangles crowded the horizon. I raised the binoculars, looking at the sailboats, their blue photovoltaic sails bowing in the wind. All of them sped towards us. We had a lot of friends in Provincetown. Some of those boats just might be tacking on their way round the Cape. But some might be coming here, having seen my account and knowing now where I was. Some just might be sailed by friends. Those sailboats were closer, but they moved more slowly.

  It was a race now. To see which judgment arrived here first, the old world or the new one.

  I looked down at Juno. “Let's find you something to eat. A feast. And I'll get some more wine for myself. We'll look at the sea a while, huh?”

  SEA SMELLS GOOD, he sent.

  “It does. We'll just enjoy ourselves. I don't do that often enough. We'll just enjoy the moment, and see what comes of it.”

  * * * *

  (EDITOR'S NOTE: “Ecce Signum” is a sequel to “Amor Vincit Omnia" [April 2008] and “Amabit Sapiens" [September 2009].)

  Copyright (C) 2012 Craig DeLancey

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  * * *

  Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: THE CHINK IN EINSTEIN'S ARMOR

  by Jeffery D. Kooistra

  Up until September of 2011, April would have been the perfect month to write an April Fool's Day column about faster-than-light neutrinos, or faster-than-light anything for that matter. But faster-than-light particles are now serious scientific business.

  You readers know as well as I do that, despite the rampant use of FTL drives supported by plausible-sounding, double-talk science in even hard science fiction, it has been assumed to be an immutable fact of life, armored by Einstein, that nothing can go faster than light. To seriously suggest otherwise has always been greeted with hoots of derision from physicists and educated laymen, if the claim was even noted at all. Granted, a host of FTL effects are in the domain of acceptable science, things involving the subtleties of phase vs. group velocity, Cerenkov radiation, and quantum entanglement. But what I'm talking about is what every SF reader is thinking: FTL as in a bullet, or a spaceship, or a human getting from point A to point B in less time than it would take a beam of light, in vacuum, to make the trip.

  Since I'm writing this in October, and the news broke just a few weeks ago, I have no idea what the story will look like when you read this. A survey of the blogosphere finds some people saying, essentially: “Einstein said it can't be done, not without infinite energy to do it. And even then, you'd go back in time and mess up the space-time continuum and wreck causality. Everyone knows that!” Others are a bit more optimistic and nuanced in their responses, and with good reason. It was the guys at CERN who up and measured the FTL neutrinos, not some mad scientist in his basement.

  And they did it well enough to have stymied the usual heckling and derision, at least for the time being.

  The paper is called “Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam,” and it has over 150 coauthors. “OPERA” stands for “Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus.” The actual purpose of the experiment was to produce an assortment of neutrinos and watch for them to oscillate from one flavor into another (muon neutrinos into tau neutrinos). However, the nature of the experiment was such that the set-up was perfect for measuring the velocity of the neutrinos as well.

  And when they did that, as carefully as they absolutely could, they found that the neutrinos were moving faster than light.

  If you think about it, and if the result turns out to be right, the OPERA experiment is the model “archetypical science fiction serendipitous huge breakthrough.” Prior to this, the Manhattan Project was the paradigm for decades; a team of the best and brightest scientists is brought together in a crash program for the sole purpose of developing the atomic bomb. But in that case, those involved were fairly confident that what they sought could, in fact, be built. I used this trope in my own Dykstra's War when a team was assembled to reverse-engineer an alien FTL drive.

  OPERA is just a bit different. In this case, a team of scientists put together an experiment to further explore the domain of known science. They used the biggest accelerator on the planet and the highest technology available to probe the secrets of the neutrino. But along the way, one of the things they found was entirely unexpected and would, if verified, shake the very foundations of physics in a way not seen since the days of Michelson and Morley (which very much sounds like the teaser for a hard SF novel).

  I strongly urge each of you to read the original paper, which is available here: [ arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1109/1109.4897. pdf] For a particle physics paper, it is remarkably accessible even to the layman, and the typical Analog reader shouldn't have much trouble understanding it, even if a few technical terms and abbreviations remain mysterious.

  Very briefly, this is how the experiment was performed. Near-light-velocity protons from the accelerator at CERN were directed into “a 2-meter-long graphite neutrino production target.” This produced charged mesons, which “decay in flight into neutrinos in a 1,000-meter-long vacuum tunnel.” The neutrinos then flew through the Earth for about 730 kilometers to the OPERA detector and the arrival time was noted. The experimenters didn't follow individual neutrinos, of course. Rather, they noted the arrival time of a brief burst of neutrinos.

  Bear in mind that this was not some kind of drag race between photons and neutrinos, where they raced side by side and the neutrinos won. It was more like a time trial for the neutrinos. As with any such trial, be it top fuel dragsters or subnuclear particles, accurate timing relies on knowing precisely where the starting point is as well as the finish line. You also need to know very precisely when the timing started and exactly when it ended.

  For the OPERA experiment, the starting point and time were easy to determine; the starting point is the target and the time is that instant when the proton beam slammed into it. That time is known to within a fraction of a nanosecond. The position of the target is known to within a few centimeters. The team took great pains to ensure that the position of the detector is known just as precisely, as well as the arrival time of the neutrinos. Given this data, all that needed to be done was to subtract the start time from the end time and shazam—they showed the neutrinos arrived about 20 nanoseconds faster than a photon of light would have.

  Of course, even if without derision, most scientists the world over assume there is some kind of systemic error involved in the measurements. Even the scientists from CERN are skeptical that the neutrinos are really moving faster than light, even though that's what they measured, and even though they've so far failed to find wh
ere it is that the experiment might have gone wrong.

  I also am skeptical that this measurement will stand, even though I'm in the camp that actually expects FTL phenomena like this to eventually start showing up in experiments. The Global Positioning System, which is what was used for accurate positioning and timing, is a complicated and finely tuned instrument. Using it to determine both exact locations and clock synchronization requires incredible attention to the subtleties of the GPS itself. Regardless of whether or not the FTL finding survives scrutiny, reexamining it will ensure that any subtle wrinkles still remaining in the proper use of the GPS will be ironed out.

  But suppose the results do stand up to review and we're forced to conclude that the neutrinos did, in fact, arrive faster than light. Then the question becomes whether or not neutrinos are actual tachyons, or if they got some sort of FTL “boost,” or jumped through hyperspace or something like that. Classical tachyons have been written about in the pages of this magazine for over forty years, both in fact and fiction. They are particles that have imaginary mass and always travel faster than light. The hyperspace idea is simple enough—somehow during the impact the neutrinos jumped through a higher dimension and moved FTL prior to reentering our space and resuming travel at just under c. This would get them to the target early, but they wouldn't be actual tachyons.

  Since I favor an aether-consistent hypothesis, I'm partial to the boost idea. Recast in modern language, I think this idea may carry some weight among conventional physicists now that we know the “quark-gluon plasma” is actually a quark-gluon superfluid. I think that, upon impact, the spacetime superfluid itself deforms. The little bit of spacetime that the neutrinos are emerging from is expanding and moving with respect to the rest frame. It's something akin to “micro-inflation"—a short period of FTL expansion that rapidly diminishes.

  Consider a prosaic analog of this effect.

  The speed of sound in dry air (at 20 degrees Celsius) is about 343 meters per second. Suppose a firecracker is set off a mile away and you have some apparatus that starts timing at the flash and stops when the bang arrives. You can easily measure the speed of sound this way and get close to the expectation value. However, if you try this again from farther away with a nuclear explosion as the sound source, the sound will consistently arrive sooner than expected. What also is strange is that, if you are say 15 miles away from the explosion, and your associate is 20 miles away with a similar setup, and you compare notes to calculate the speed of sound over that five additional miles, you will find it was the expected value.