Quantum Space: Book One in the Quantum Series

by Douglas Phillips

  “We’ll let Bradley make that call,” Daniel said. “But we’ll be ready to go.”

  There was a pause. “Daniel?”

  “Yeah, what?”

  “Can you patch me in somehow? I really have to see this.”

  Daniel looked at Nala and she nodded. “We’ll figure it out on our end. You’re in a communications center—do they have video conferencing somewhere?”

  “Duh. That’s why I moved over here.”

  “Marie, you have my word. If we launch anything, we’ll make sure you’re on board.”

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  Nala kept her head down, eyes focused on the computer screen as Daniel refilled her cup with fresh coffee. He saw the lines of software code scrolling by, but his understanding was limited to what she had told him. Adjustments in the neutrino oscillation amplitude. A larger amplitude would increase quantum expansion, and greatly increase the corresponding compression of normal space.

  A version of the graph she had sketched in the bar was taped on the wall, more carefully drawn. Expansion versus compression. Expanding quantum space to a thousand kilometers would give a ratio of compression equal to 0.0002. The tau ratio, they called it. Ordinary space would compress by 99.98 percent. In practical terms, it meant that orienting the beam in the right direction could compress real space enough to put a camera next to Mars. Point in a different direction, slightly tweak the expansion, and the camera would suddenly be at Jupiter. The capability was startling.

  Daniel set his laptop on the desk. “We’ll need a target for a test run, right?” He pulled up an app that displayed a view of the night sky from Earth.

  She looked up from her work. “It doesn’t matter that much. Anything a few million kilometers away will do. But pick a place that’s roughly overhead, with nothing else in between. A planet would be nice.”

  He looked at the constellations marked on the screen. “Canis Major is just rising now.” He zoomed in to see the dimmer stars. As expected, a reddish star appeared with a label VY CMa. “Cool, I found the origin star.”

  Nala swiveled her head and did a good impersonation of a scowling mother. “Something nearby, Daniel. Baby steps.”

  “Okay, just checking.” He clicked on an icon to label the current planetary positions and rotated the view to point straight up into the night sky. One planet stood out.

  “Perfect, the rings should be beautiful this time of year.”

  “We’re going to Saturn?”

  “It’s nearly overhead right now. Mars and Jupiter are below the horizon, and the moon is nowhere near. Unless an asteroid happens to be in the way, it’s a clear shot from Earth to Saturn.”

  “What kind of position data can you give me?”

  “Right ascension and declination, plus current distance. Will that work?”

  Nala nodded her head. “That works. I’ll need one more software change. And a few hardware adjustments to survive deep space. Give me twenty minutes.”

  Daniel clicked on the label and zoomed in. His night sky app displayed a photograph of Saturn, likely taken by NASA’s Cassini mission. Robotic reconnaissance missions are now ancient history, he thought. To deliver a package of scientific instruments to Saturn in 2004 had taken thousands of people, many years and hundreds of millions of dollars. Using Diastasi technology, NASA could do the same thing within minutes at a tiny fraction of the cost. Rockets were now obsolete. Space flight itself was obsolete. All future planetary science would be conducted simply by positioning instruments in a kata location, taking measurements, photographs, maybe even rock or air samples, and then returning the package to Kata Zero.

  No, he thought, we definitely won’t be shutting this program down. Even if three astronauts had to give their lives to make it possible.

  But, of course, there was much more to think about. Our solar system seemed small in comparison to the vast collection of stars, many with their own planetary systems, each waiting to be explored from the comfort of a laboratory on Earth. The likelihood of at least one other civilization beyond Earth made the quest even more important.

  Regardless of the knowledge that might be gained from this marvelous technology, Daniel’s original objective remained front and center. He had been tasked with finding three men and supporting their rescue, if feasible. That rescue, or perhaps the recovery of bodies, was somehow interwoven with the alien message, the yin-yang devices and a map to a location far from Earth. Was it also tied to the countdown? They had less than four hours before the device in South Dakota hit zero.

  Daniel looked over at Nala, her head immersed in her work. She was single-handedly harnessing the most significant technology ever created, and like any advanced technology, it could also be dangerous. She had pointed out its dangers several times. She said it herself. You have to know what you’re doing. Did she?

  Nala motioned in the air as if talking to someone not there and then typed furiously on the keyboard. Smart, diligent, with attention to detail. She had each of those qualities. But she was also impulsive. Pick a planet, she had said. Not exactly a rigorous scientific analysis. But then, what was the downside? They might lose a camera by slamming it into an asteroid?

  The yin stays here, he decided. If it had some additional purpose out in the depths of quantum space, there would be time to learn its secrets. But there was no reason to risk sending it off to Saturn… or VY Canis Majoris. Only expendable electronics would make the trip.

  Nala finished her computer work and turned her attention to the equipment. She wrapped the radio and its battery pack in a large thermal blanket. “Our engineer thought of this,” she said. “It adds some radiation shielding and should help to keep the battery from freezing.” She taped the ends of the blanket and then taped two webcams to the top. She plugged their USB cords into the back of the radio.

  It made a compact package. Certainly nothing NASA would send into space, but it had a chance of being functional. Daniel recalled an article he’d read about an ordinary Nokia phone that had been strapped to the outside of a satellite, and was still able to take photos even in the vacuum of space.

  But there were more questions in the back of his mind. “We’re not really sending any of this into space—I mean real space—right?”

  “Correct. We’re going into kata space, 4-D space, quantum space. We’re essentially creating a bubble of new space that never existed. There won’t be anything in it, not even at the molecular level. But from the bubble, we’ll be looking into real space that has been highly compressed. Some of that light and radiation that exists in real space will leak into quantum space. Just like neutrinos, photons are quantum particles. So, yes, if we got close enough to a star, this equipment could get fried.”

  The geometry of this new form of space was hard to grasp. He knew that a fourth dimension was easier to comprehend by using the imaginary Flatland world. He pictured a 3-D bubble, like a soap bubble, attached to a flat piece of paper, and then imagined folding the paper like an accordion to compress it in one direction. Nothing about the soap bubble would change, but a camera inside would suddenly be very near what used to be the far edge of the paper. He made a mental note to remember the metaphor for future use. Something told him he might be explaining all of this to higher-ups.

  Nala finished her work and turned a beaming face toward Daniel. “Software is adjusted and unit tested. Hardware is as protected as we can make it. I think we’re ready to fly, cowboy.”

  42 Intuition

  Pixie drove past a long row of helicopters, each tied down by thick orange straps. The car shuddered with each gust of wind as they drove across the darkened tarmac. Marie wondered how anything stayed in place, tied down or not. The car’s headlights illuminated the hangar and they stopped near its entrance. She grabbed a canvas bag from the seat and pushed the car door open.

  The cold wind whipped open her light jacket. “Jesus.” She pulled it tight. Does it ever stop blowing? Pixie ran ahead and pulled a key ring from his pocket.
She hurried through the open doorway, glad to be out of the storm. “Thanks, Pixie, I really appreciate your help.”

  “No problem, ma’am.” He pointed into the dimly lit hangar. “You sure you want to go back in there?”

  No doubt, he was nervous about Soyuz. Everyone at the base was. “We’ve still got time before it hits zero, and I won’t be long. Just have to get this camera in place.” She held up the canvas bag.

  Pixie looked pale. “I can stay if you want me to.”

  “That’s not what the colonel said. Limited exposure—that’s what I heard.”

  He didn’t argue. “Yeah. You have my number. Call me when you’re ready and I’ll pick you up. If I don’t hear from you in twenty minutes, I’m coming anyway.”

  She nodded and he wished her well. The door clanged shut with an echo across the empty hangar floor. She stood alone in the near darkness. A sole spot light illuminated Soyuz.

  She walked purposefully to the capsule and climbed the metal stairs to the top of the scaffolding. Someone had left an extension cord with a lamp attached to the end, and luckily it worked. She dropped it through the hatch and lowered herself down.

  The lamp provided enough light to see, but the long shadows it created on every surface made the capsule feel… haunted. It was not a word she would have used in front of anyone else, but it matched her internal emotions perfectly. She sat in the left seat once more, Sergei’s seat, feeling the curves in its cushion imprinted by his body. She didn’t move for several minutes and absorbed the surreal experience; the empty seats, a spent oxygen bottle wedged into a corner, the blank control panel with the yang still attached firmly on top.

  As she watched, the bottommost character on the yang changed. It was a quick flick of black and gray, a change hardly noticeable unless you were looking directly at it. Two and a half minutes closer to zero.

  She pulled out her phone and compared the characters that Daniel had sent to the yang. 104, base eight. About two and a half hours to go and still on track to hit zero at 3:20 a.m. local time.

  She took a picture of the yang and then started a video for good measure. She panned around the cramped cabin and narrated. “It’s nearly one in the morning. The yang is still doing its thing, I don’t see any changes. I don’t know why I should expect anything different. People are scared of it now, like it’s packed with explosives or something. Blowing up the capsule seems farfetched to me, but this thing must have a purpose. I’m going to hook up a camera so we can watch remotely when it gets to zero.”

  The yang ticked again. 103.

  She pulled a camera from the canvas bag and wedged it firmly between the seat backs, pointing at the yang. McGinn had also provided a “field pack,” as he had called it, a portable network router that could send a secure signal to a base unit. She plugged in a cable from the camera and powered up. A green light lit on the camera and she leaned into its view, smiled and waved. “Camera secured and tested.”

  The yang ticked. 102.

  Her primary task complete, she dropped back into the seat. She closed her eyes and thought of Sergei and Jeremy. Mostly Sergei. The chances of seeing him alive again seemed remote. All conventional means of returning safely to Earth had come and gone. She imagined him stored away in some alien test tube filled with clear gel, a line of cables plugged into his vertebrae. But, of course, that was a fear implanted into her brain by writers of fiction. Push it out of your head.

  Remember the man. Kind, funny and playful. Forever dedicated to his mission. She would sorely miss Sergei. Yet somehow, she felt him. It was more than sitting in the contours of his seat. More than a lingering scent of a missing man. She felt him directly.

  The yang ticked to 101. There was no sound, but she opened her eyes on cue, her brain in complete synchronization with the two-and-a-half-minute count. The yang seemed to stare at her. Taunting her. Her anger built.

  “Stupid thing,” she growled. “What the hell are you doing?” She lifted a leg and kicked it, which did nothing except to hurt her ankle. She screamed at it. “This is torture. You take away my friends and act like nothing happened. You sit there and just count down. To what? What the fuck is your problem?”

  She took several deep breaths and tried to calm down. She remembered the camera was rolling and felt embarrassed by her outburst. Lashing out wouldn’t help. The challenge she faced was something that could not be solved with fists or yelling or weapons of any kind.

  The yang ticked. 100.

  It made a clicking sound, and from the left hole, a green laser projected straight ahead, hitting the middle seat just a few inches from her right shoulder.

  She jumped, banging her knee on the control panel. “Oh, shit!”

  The laser light flicked to the empty right seat.

  “Oh no, get me out of here!” She managed to get one leg on the seat, squirming to shift her weight in the confined space. “Oh, please…”

  The laser flicked to the left seat and its beam hit her squarely in the chest. The yang’s silver panel slid open and a slender tube extended into the air. She got a second leg onto the seat and frantically pushed up. The tube extended further, its tip sharpening to a point. Her hands slapped the edges of the hatch tunnel, searching for a grip. “Nooo!” Her hand finally grabbed onto a bar and she pulled as hard as she could. She launched upward and out the hatch.

  Her heart pounded, her breath stuttered with a voice that would not come out, and she collapsed onto the metal scaffold.

  43 Saturn

  The photon was like any other of the googolplex photons in the universe—a simple string vibrating in ten dimensions in just such a way that it existed as a boson capable of transmitting electromagnetic force. Light, as it was called.

  If a photon could be happy, this one would be. It sailed unrestricted through routine three-dimensional space on its way from the star called Sol toward the planet called Saturn. But like all photons, it didn’t spend all of its time in the wide-open space of three-dimensions. Occasionally, its vibration carried it into one of the very narrow quantum dimensions—the back alleys of space, just wide enough for particles of its size to pass.

  Moving at very high speed, the photon approached the giant planet. Its surface was covered in swirls of yellow and blue in long horizontal bands. At its somewhat flattened pole, a hexagon shape stood in contrast to the vigorous churn elsewhere in the atmosphere. Enormous rings of shimmering white stretched around it, raked into perfectly parallel lines like a Japanese rock garden.

  The photon approached one of the many moons orbiting the planet. At its current speed, it would blow past in a fraction of a second. But it didn’t.

  At the precise instant that the photon happened to be vibrating in a fourth dimension, space radically deformed. The quantum thickness suddenly burst into a colossal bubble, and the photon’s direction of travel collapsed to a tiny fraction of its former size. New space had come into existence—a deformity that was attached, yet separate from the routine set of dimensions where the photon existed only a moment before.

  At the center of this new void, wisps of frozen fog drifted into surrounding emptiness. The fog cleared, revealing an array of electronic equipment floating in place—a radio receiver and two webcams.

  From inside the bubble, the view of the planet was very different. The enormous breadth of its rings was compressed into an elliptical shape pressed onto a flat wall that stretched to infinity up, down, left and right. The massive planet within the center of the rings had also collapsed to an ellipse and was embedded in the same infinite wall. The planet’s colors had not changed, its atmosphere swirls were still there, but its bulk was gone like a deflated balloon.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  “Holy crap.” Nala stared at her computer screen. Two windows, one for each webcam, and both were filled with a gloriously complex but bewildering view. The gentle curve of the planet’s edge filled the view from top to bottom. Striated rings of white stretched out of view to the left. She touc
hed a joystick and panned one of the cameras further left. The rings seemed to end prematurely, misshapen as though their circular shape had been compressed. She panned back to the planet. The camera revealed an enormous oval with bands of yellow and white waves across its surface. It was beautiful, and odd at the same time.

  Daniel sat next to her, his face close to the screen. “It looks like Saturn, but squished.”

  “Spheres compressed to discs. Predicted by theory, but still amazing to witness.” She had known their program would get to this stage, but she’d never thought it would be this soon. Lost astronauts turned out to be pretty useful. It was a selfish thought and she banished it from her mind lest she say it out loud.

  The background was entirely black, but otherwise the view was brightly lit. She switched to the second camera. In the foreground, she could see the first webcam attached to the thermal blanket, a visual confirmation that the scene was very real. She turned the camera until its view settled onto a second ellipse, this one smaller and colored yellow. Its edges were somewhat fuzzy and it had a distinct reddish glow in its center.

  Daniel pointed. “There, that’s got to be Titan. The yellow color is right, and it has an atmosphere.”

  “With a red center.”

  Daniel peered closely. “Yeah, that answers a hotly debated question. Planetary geologists thought Titan’s center might be slushy water, but it looks like it’s molten.”

  Nala laughed. “Pretty handy to see inside things, huh? How much did NASA spend on that Saturn mission? And look what we found out in just a few minutes.”

  Daniel shook his head. “Planetary research will never be the same.”

  Behind them, the lab door swung open and Jae-ho Park walked through. He was followed by two others. The bald man looked friendly enough, even familiar, but the woman exuded authority—never a good sign as far as Nala was concerned.

  She reached out to Park. “I wasn’t expecting to see you tonight.”