Standing Wave

by Howard V. Hendrix

  “What are you trying to pull?” he screamed, shoving the barrel of his flechette pistol into the base of her skull. “Why are you slowing down?”

  Diana heard Phelonious swivel his gun toward Brandi.

  “I thought—” Diana began.

  “Don’t think—just fly!” he shouted, smacking her hard atop the head with his palm. “Mach 6! Now!”

  The thrusters slammed on, almost knocking Dalken to the floor. He stood quickly and spoke, sending the last sequence of numbers just as they passed over Laramie. Tension began to ease out of him incrementally as they flew on, fifteen seconds, thirty seconds, forty five seconds, one minute, ninety seconds—

  Below and behind them a sun flashed on in the middle of the night. Readouts from the aft sensors a moment later showed a mottled star dying near the surface of the Earth. Simultaneously, a great roiling inky cloud rose rapidly into the black sky.

  “His will be done,” Dalken said quietly.

  “Impressive,” Phelonious said, a wry smile on his face.

  “My God,” Brandi said, stunned. “What have you done?”

  “He just nuked Laramie,” Diana said, monitoring the readouts as she risked another quick radar scan. She began to mutter, half to herself and half to Brandi. “I read three suborbital jets, closing fast from the northwest. Cross-and-Stripes fighters. Things are going to get hot for us now—though not so hot as they got for those poor people who went up in that fireball.”

  “Outrun them, outclimb them,” Dalken commanded flatly. “This starjet can do both. Follow the Missouri River corridor. The radar stations are thinnest there.”

  “Their missiles—” Brandi said.

  “Outrun them!”

  Diana looked through her interface, data flashing red like pools of blood around her head.

  “Maybe,” she said, “maybe. But we can’t outrun laser cannons. I’m shutting down our radar. We’ll have to fly with one eye closed. Only passive systems, IR and visuals.”

  “Why?” Phelonious asked, suspicious.

  “If we turn on radar to see if we’ve got a missile on our tail,” Diana said quickly, “every anti-radiation facility from here to Brownsville will have us on screen and locked in—”

  “Stay on a southeast heading,” Dalken said, his voice distant and detached. “The laser thickets are densest to the west.”

  “We have two options,” Diana continued steadily, thinking out loud. “If the jets they scrambled are far enough behind we can try to evade, keeping speed and infrared signature down. If they’re close on us, the only option is to lean on the thrusters and try to burn our way out—IR be damned.”

  “Your call,” Dalken said, wedging himself against the back of the cabin. Phelonious followed his lead.

  Scramjets cut in. As Witchcraft’s Mach numbers began to surge, Brandi felt her chest plan a vacation to the backside of her spinal column.

  “Best IR damping in the world can’t hide the heat of this hard burn,” Diana said through gritted teeth into the interface. “Nearby fighter might pick us up, but probably not a groundstation. A gamble. Give me readouts every ten clicks altitude.”

  Brandi tried to nod, but the high Gs they were pulling made it a futile effort. She watched their altimeter numbers spin digitally as their altitude rose rapidly.

  “Fifty clicks up,” she spat out. “Sixty...Sixty-five...Seventy—”

  “The fighters top out at ninety clicks up,” Dalken rasped.

  “Not their missiles,” Diana said hoarsely. “Air-to-air ceiling is higher.”

  “Eighty-five,” Brandi droned. “Ninety...ninety-five—”

  Witchcraft’s aft IR sensor gave them the next news.

  “Air to air, approaching aft,” Diana said hoarsely, watching a line of flame streaking after them. Are we high enough to elude it? Fast enough? She wondered. A second ticked by and a thousand memories flooded Diana’s mind. She thought of Orbital Park in HOME 1. Thought of her parents growing old there. Thought of her crannog and her lovers in the Wemoon’s Eden. Thought of Hattie the Webster, shouting into her interface, “Hop on your broom, flygirl!”—announcing yet another emergency gene bank flyout, another DNA hardcopy airlift from yet another ark under siege.

  A vision came to her, of clouds of passenger pigeons so thick they obscured the sun day after day, hunted and habitat-deprived down to the last one, dying alone in a cage. A vision of mullahs and ministers, priests and preachers, rabbis and roshis, innumerable holy men of every stripe standing drenched and smeared and steeped in sacrificial blood, behind them holocaust carcasses barbecuing on the fire, the whole world a burnt offering—

  The rocket fell away. It did not touch them, but Diana had been touched. Dalken applauded lightly. Phelonious smiled warily.

  “Congratulations—” Dalken began.

  A searing laser thicket leapt up around Witchcraft, putting the lie to luck. Fore and aft sensors blazed with images of several score columns of pulsed, coherent light probing the womb of Mother Night—automatic laser cannon splashing fire skyward, seeking explosive conception in the deep sky. A consummation devoutly to be avoided.

  Diana and Brandi moved automatically, thoughtlessly. In tandem through the interface they computed in an instant the cannons’ configurations. Evasively they wove their way through the pulses of hard light, Witchcraft a magic needle sewing up Evening’s tattered sleeve. In a moment they were through the laser thicket.

  “We’re out of ACSA airspace,” Diana said at last, leveling off and risking a radar scan. “No aircraft currently in pursuit. Your soldier boys must have put up that laser barrage around our last reported position, then estimated our projected course. A last ditch effort, but it almost worked.”

  Out of the corner of her eye Brandi was surprised to see Dalken wincing, as if afflicted by a severe headache. His satlink chimed with an incoming message. That seemed to distract him from his pain for a moment as he scanned the information

  “Return to your original flight plan,” he said suddenly, his pistol pointed once more at Diana. “Bring us in over Cincinnati, low and slow. You’ll receive landing instructions when we reach final approach distance.”

  A glance passed between the two women. None of this was making any sense. Hijacked out of their original flight plan, then ordered to return to it?

  Still, they said nothing. The man who had once torched his commanding officer had, just brief moments ago, incinerated a city full of unsuspecting citizens in the country he was pledged to serve. Since he still happened to be holding a gun on them, however, they suspected it might not be wise to argue with him.

  Diana and Brandi had passed into a Looking-glass world and Ray Dalken was their Mad Hatter. Even as they flew onward, though, it seemed as if the ghosts of Laramie were crying out, crying to be remembered past the flash of anguish and oblivion.

  * * * *

  “In the physics group we didn’t speculate on the psychological content of the material we encountered during our interaction with the infoburst virtuality,” Roger Cortland said to the crowd that had reconvened around the altar-fountain from their separate working groups. “We did, however, find it appropriate to consider the two alternative large-scale physical, even cosmological, scenarios presented at its very end. Whatever their origins, those scenarios seem to be descriptions or projections of possible physical processes. Through a personal connection of Ms. Magnus’s, we have been fortunate enough to be able to contact and, for the last hour, work with one of the great names in this theoretical area. I’ll now turn over the discussion to Professor Richard Stringfield.”

  Lucky indeed to have old ‘String Field’ himself in the loop, Roger thought. This crazy stuff is right up Doc Soliton’s alley. Roger was glad to be stepping down from his position as speaker for the physics working group. His instant colleagues had volunteered him for that role while he was out of the room, using the lavatory. He was also surprised at the traditional form this impromptu “conference” had fallen into. If he
had known about it beforehand, he would have done it all telepresently—not just Stringfield’s presentation. Certainly not this crush of bodies and all this quaint “coming forward” to speak. Alas, he had not been consulted.

  A large holovirtual display rose above the fountain, which was also now flowing once again. The bespectacled and gray-headed Professor Stringfield cleared his throat and spoke, the time-lag from Earth making him seem even more distracted and otherworldly than Roger actually knew him to be.

  “Er, yes,” Stringfield said. “Glad to be of help, and very glad to be in touch with you again, Ms. Magnus—um, Mei-Ling. From what I have heard described, your two cosmological scenarios are essentially endpoints. The first endpoint apparently involves the focusing of innumerable lasers onto a single point of spacetime, in order to produce a doomsday bubble. This is a physical and causal endpoint. The other involves producing a back-propagating wave, for the purpose of restructuring the fabric of the universe itself. This is an acausal endpoint.”

  The aged professor glanced aside for a moment, muttering to himself. Roger feared the man had gotten off track, until he saw scientific computer animations replace Stringfield’s image and he realized that the professor had been addressing a voice-activated display system.

  “Recall that, at the end of last century,” Stringfield said, slipping into the lecture mode he had undoubtedly used throughout his long teaching life, “scientists began to suspect the wave/particle duality was more apparent than real. Particles were in fact revealed to be clumped string fields, also known as covariant solitons. A soliton is a special subset of wave motion known as a standing wave—that is, a wave whose troughs and crests stay fixed in spatial relation to one another. Your ‘endpoints’ are two forms of the same eschaton particle. The first—the causal, explosive bubble version—is in fact known as a ‘vacuum bubble instanton.’ It was first described by P.H. Frampton.”

  A new sequence of animations looped behind him, now in the background as Stringfield continued.

  “A vacuum bubble instanton is a soliton bubble which can quantum tunnel from one ground or vacuum state of the universe to another. Its surface belongs to our universe, but its interior contains the vacuum state of another, lower energy universe. Its release into our universe would be a very destructive thing, rather like tossing a particle of dust into superheated water. Our universe would ‘boil’ in a spherical wave. That shocksphere would grow to 300,000 kilometers across in its first second of existence. The second scenario, the acausal variant of the eschaton particle—”

  The professor stopped, having apparently noticed the upraised hand of Jacinta Larkin. He responded quickly enough, despite the time lag.

  “How much of our universe would be destroyed in such a fashion?” Jacinta asked. Everyone waited expectantly past the time-lag.

  “It’s difficult to determine how much of our universe would boil off to elementary particles,” Stringfield replied. “That would depend on how long such a bubble would last. That in turn would depend on its size. Solitons eventually die back into turbulence, however. I doubt it could go on for too very long.”

  The professor waited to see if Jacinta had any further questions.

  “Could one be created that would be capable of destroying our solar system?” Jacinta asked.

  “Yes, hypothetically,” Stringfield replied after the time lag. “The solar system is a relatively tiny volume of space, at least in relation to the entirety of the universe. Though it is of course a very important volume of space, to us.”

  Stringfield again waited expectantly, which was fortunate as Lakshmi Ngubo began to speak from her chair.

  “Professor,” she said, “how big would the device for such a doomsday technology need to be? Would it fit inside a reasonable space—inside the nucleus of a medium-sized comet, say?”

  After a moment, Stringfield spoke with an awkward smile.

  “That’s rather a leading question,” he replied, “but yes, if we are speaking speculatively, I don’t see why not.”

  “What about that second path?” Roger asked, trying to detour Stringfield back onto the main line of his argument and away from this doubtless intriguing but also rather forbidding digression. “The acausal one?”

  “Yes,” Stringfield said after a moment, calling up more animations. “That’s rather more complicated. Remember, no generally satisfactory answer exists to the question of just what it is that observations can actually tell us about objects. The scientific perspective is founded upon a set of assumptions that are themselves not scientifically verifiable—assumptions of materialism, of causation, of spatiotemporality. These assumptions are, at bottom, beliefs about the universe. No observational criteria can ‘prove’ any of these beliefs over its opposite. Any inferential criteria that might be summoned for support are a product of which phenomena one gives priority. In some sense, you find what you’re already looking for.”

  Stringfield muttered another aside directed at his display systems. New imagery began to appear.

  “This is particularly important in regard to dynamical systems. Such systems are extremely common, found in fields ranging from brain physiology to evolution. Take black holes, for instance. The event horizon surrounding a singularity is a dynamical system. It separates two or more ‘worlds’ or orders of being—namely the singularity within a black hole and the rest of the universe—which are immiscible in some relevant way. The event horizon is a self-organizing system that generates its own fractal patterns of behavior, independent of causal relations between the parts of that system.

  “As a boundary condition between the worlds, it defies characterization other than through symbolic interpretation. The event horizon is a fractal, acausally-functioning. dynamical system. It echoes other such systems and may well be linked to them across scale.

  “By definition, the event horizon is that zone which forms around the collapsed star because no signal can get away from it to communicate any event to the outside world. One of the strange upshots of quantum theory, however, was that the Schwarzschild radius and the event horizon may be in some sense ‘breachable.’ If the connections between solitons, either as waves or particles, are not signals in the Einsteinian sense, then the Scwarzschild radius ceases to be a barrier, for what is a ‘horizon’ to causal events is not necessarily a horizon to acausal influences. Such influences operate in a more ethereal fashion, rather like the apparently ‘transcendental’ connection that joins the members of a particle/antiparticle pair—”

  Past the time lag, Stringfield had again noticed another hand raised in question, and stopped himself to recognize it.

  “What would these ‘acausal influences’ look like?” asked an engineer friend of Seiji’s, rather skeptically—a man whose name Roger could not remember. “Are there any empirically observable examples?”

  Stringfield nodded, calling up more images and animations.

  “Mode locking and entrainment,” said Stringfield, “such as that seen in clock pendulums, satellites and some species of flashing fireflies. There are many other examples. Mode locking is essentially an acausal connecting principle. It’s the fundamental way in which conditions influence dynamical systems, and by which dynamical systems exchange information: by influencing each other’s activity. Mode locking superimposes patterns.”

  Roger was struck by a thought from one of his own earlier ideas.

  “Does that relate to the quantum theoretical idea,” he asked, “that time and the universe exist as superposed states until observed?”

  “In some ways, yes,” Stringfield agreed. “All possible states are actual states until observation/interaction makes one or another of them real. Dynamical systems mode-locked to one another function essentially as one system, the way the particle/antiparticle pair does, or the way the interactor/state does, for that matter. They incorporate a universally basic pattern—that of the attractor—into their behavior. A universally basic pattern implies a universal dynamical system
.”

  In a flurry of murmuring, Stringfield called up a series of new animations. Then, abruptly, he seemed so struck by a particular thought that he switched off his background displays and spoke to them without the benefit of any visual aids.

  “If all these systems mode-lock onto one another to form a universal dynamical system,” he said, obviously still working it out in his own mind, “then that universal system would be an intersection or interface, eternal and infinite, which imprints itself upon every pattern in the universe and is in turn impressed upon by every pattern in the universe. We would thus reside in a holographic plenum of information—information in the form of influences. All information would be everywhere, at all times, because information, as mode-lockable influence, would stand outside of merely historical or temporal existence.”

  Stringfield paused, absently bringing one hand up to his chin.

  “Viewed in this light,” he continued, “we are not essentially biological, or even only physical, beings. We are entelechies that cast a shadow into matter. That shadow we identify as our physical being. Even our whole universe would then be more than just physical. The universe itself would be entelechial, moving toward unity in the sense that it is moving toward the unification of all its dynamical systems into one system. Mode-locking all the universe’s dynamical systems would essentially create a system that unifies all of the dynamical phenomena of the universe.”

  Stringfield paused again, but it wasn’t due to transmission time lag or question—just a moment to think.

  “If the universe is evolving beyond the causal and toward the dynamical,” he continued, “then many strange things become probable. You could see the opposite of the instanton bubble we discussed earlier—a droplet, instead, of different internal space, in which black holes would turn into spiraling strings and spiraling strings would turn into black holes. Instead of the eschaton particle manifesting itself as a wave that boils our universe, it could undergo another type of phase transition, a concrescence, like vapor condensing to water, or cells organizing themselves in development—”