19_____________
At this time, bona fide time machines still did not exist as such, not for anything as macroscopic and complex as a primate anyway, though given the paradigmatic dynamite of QT, not to mention the nostalgia for the old days it brought in tow, Earth Government was dispensing temporal dislocation research grants like they were water purification tablets, and a majority of the scientific community was predicting practical applications any minute now.
Then they’d started making babies and entered into a whole new stage in their lives together.
“This sucks,” Dylan said, making his final play. “I should just tell her to go screw herself.”
“You know what?” Erin said.
“What?”
“You should go. I can get along without you for a couple of days.”
“But you know how I feel about that planet.”
“Dylan, we can hardly afford for you to jeopardize your career right now. Think of the children.”
“You’re not serious?”
“I am, actually. It’ll be good for you to see Earth again. Maybe you’ll find that it’s changed…or that you have.”
He sighed and ran his fingers though his hair. “You really want me to go?”
She nodded. “I do.”
“All right,” he said. “Fine. I’ll do it. I’m not happy about it, mind you, but I’ll do it.”
If he felt a touch sorry for her, he consoled himself that she no doubt had her own secrets hidden away in her bosom behind the milk ducts. And anyway as far as he could tell she’d basically gotten what she wanted out of life, while he’d lost it all. Okay, he’d gotten her, but now she was the self-actualized, essentially happy human being while he was…something else. Could anyone blame him for trying to change his destiny before it grew too late?
“Thank you, honey,” she said, and she kissed him on the cheek and went back to giving suck.
• • •
Quantum Travel was actually quite simple, one more variation on the copy-and-transmit teleportation schemes so abundant in twentieth-century science fiction.20
20_____________
Few understood the particulars, but even Dylan, not a scientist by any means, could wrap a few neurons around the theory. Essentially, Quantum Travel capitalized on the property of “entanglement”—what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”—to encode and relay information literally instantaneously. In short, when two particles are entangled, their relationship is such that, no matter how far the one is from the other, as soon as you observe one of its properties—spin, for example—you instantaneously know something about the properties of the entangled other, even if it’s billions of light years away. For a while there, quantum mechanics were gun-shy about the prospect of using entanglement to transfer classical bits of information because the essence of that initial observation was randomness and Heisenbergian uncertainty, and if you fiddled with one of the entangled particles too much, the particles quickly decohered, or became disentangled. Such was the prevailing view anyway until 1984, when Jun Watanabe, a thirteen-year-old wunderkind conducting research at Kyoto University, made a suite of revolutionary discoveries, viz. 1) all subatomic particles are always-already entangled with infinite other particles throughout the universe; 2) one can predict with remarkable accuracy the locations of these entangled particles by reading the “signatures” of the proximal particle and plugging just seven measurements into an algorithm adapted from the fractal-geometry work of mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot; 3) decoherence as such doesn’t exist, i.e. perturbed particles simply switch allegiances, and 4) there exists on Earth a (now patented, government-classified, much-speculated-about-but-almost-certainly-fish-based) catalyst that can collapse probability waves into predetermined measurements one hundred percent of the time. Watanabe had figured out, in other words, how to steer the quantum universe, making him about as close to godlike as any human, let alone adolescent, had ever been (though, as he made painfully clear in his 2009 memoir, Action at a Distance, mastering the microscopic world didn’t help him get laid in the macroscopic one until he was well into his twenties). He’d also established, in short, that the uncertainty principle was every bit the cop-out quantum physicists had always insisted it wasn’t. To this day, no one really understood the theoretical-metaphysical underpinnings of quantum entanglement—most suspected the existence of hidden dimensions or wormholes—but Terrans had gotten the manipulation of it down to an exact science, and so far it was an achievement they hadn’t found matched by any alien civilization. Galactic neighbors had built some very impressive starships, to be sure, bona fide marvels of engineering, but none could reach superliminal speeds, whereas humans were now traveling regularly at millions of times the speed of light, which, a little arrogantly, they’d once called “the cosmic speed limit.”
Of course, QT wasn’t really travel at all. Your body was scanned at the source as information, transmitted instantaneously, and then reconstituted via a RiboMate ribosome-matrix printer at the destination in under twenty seconds (directions for the self-assembly of the RiboMate itself having been transmitted in advance, but this was where Dylan’s pop-sci resources gave out altogether—per Arthur C. Clarke’s third law, it all seemed like so much magic to him). Unlike earlier 3-D printers and molecular assemblers, which had relied to some degree on sampling and compression technology, the RiboMate was lossless. According to every study yet conducted, when you “arrived” at your destination, you really were one hundred percent you, with no margin for error, no noise. Still, QT remained controversial among a certain segment of the Terran population. The fly in the philosophical ointment, old hat for any Star Trek fan, was that for at least a dozen seconds, unavoidably, there existed in the universe two identical copies of “you,” one at the origin, the other at the destination. As soon as the all-clear signal was received via entanglement, the RiboMate instantaneously—and painlessly, at least in theory—dematerialized you and recycled your molecules for subsequent matter compilations. Some Terrans worried that QT, a.k.a. destructive copying, was in fact a form of suicide, that the “you” who emerged at the destination was not the same you who departed. If you asked the arrived passengers themselves, however, they would tell you, to a person, that they were indeed the very same people who had departed. Even if the two weren’t numerically identical, they had the very same DNA, the same memories and scars, the same haircut and wardrobe, even the same microbes, and their recent experience diverged for a few minutes at most (new laws, and port-security AIs, forbade the simultaneous existence of two or more incarnations of the same hominid for any longer than three Earth minutes). Those who opposed QT outright were generally of a religious persuasion. These were people who believed quite literally in the idea of an immaterial soul, the special sauce of personhood, which they took to be non-transferable. For them, the copy was at best a kind of zombie, all the material of the original but without its God-given essence, a flute without breath. Dylan had been religious enough as a kid to understand that objection, but his life as an adult had suggested to him over and over again that man makes God at least as much as God makes man, and having QT’d once himself, he could attest that his inner life, his spiritual life if you like, was every bit as deep and rich and sensitive to wonder as it had ever been. (But then it was undeniably a copy attesting this, so you’ll have to make up your own mind on the matter.)
The little hiccup in consciousness necessitated by QT was no more troubling to Dylan than any power nap. For all practical purposes at least, there was no need to dwell on the philosophical conundrums. Much more urgent than whether or not you were being murdered elsewhere at that very moment were questions like “What time is it?” “Where can I catch a cab?” and “Who among you is human?”
Dylan disembarked at Baltimore’s BWI Thurgood Marshall Intragalactic Teleport and immediately set to exchanging some New
Taiwanese zarkaks for Terran quid;21 he could hardly afford to leave any record of his transactions via omni, being as he was officially at a K-12 conference in Minneapolis. He’d even made sure to catch up, via omni, on the latest K-12 pedagogy trends while waiting in line back in New Taipei, just in case there turned out to be a quiz when he got home.
21_____________
The recently adopted pan-Terran currency. One of the more interesting sociological effects of the discovery of life on other worlds was the degree to which human-human relations had been reconfigured in the collective human psyche as non-zero-sum. Wars ceased, dictators abdicated, wealth really did trickle down, and the Terran quid was born. Zero-sum sentiments were reserved for those warlike planetary civilizations the explorers were bound to discover any day now. To be sure, Earth was still no utopia, but it was a good deal closer than it had been during Dylan’s time there.
He loved Erin. He really did. This had nothing to do with her. He realized this was just the sort of thing men had been saying for eons. He also realized they’d been saying it because it was true.
He hopped on a bus to Baltimore. Like most of the rest of the vehicles on the roads here since fossil fuels were outlawed in 2004, it was powered by natural gas, but it was still wheel-based. How odd to think a civilization that could perfect QT had made so little progress when it came to the daily commute. Going back ten centuries, personal transport vehicles on New Taiwan had harnessed the planet’s natural magnetic field to hover several inches above the ground. The primary “fuel” was inertia, and good old Lem took care of the rest. Liquid methane was abundant on New Taiwan, and they hardly even used it. Even the rolling road in New Taipei—a multi-lane (i.e. multi-speed), sixty-kilometer pedestrian conveyor belt complete with on-road cafes and rest areas—was wholly magnet-powered. All this tire-to-road friction here on Earth seemed like such a waste, not to mention the source of some highly avoidable nausea. To think you could hardly read on a Terran bus without losing your lunch!
He got off at the Inner Harbor. Ashley had told him to meet her at Ye Olde Telephone Booth, which she informed him was the last phone booth on the eastern seaboard and listed on all the crossroads signs around the harbor. Along the way, Dylan marveled at the queerness of being surrounded, seemingly entirely, by members of the same species again. It came as something of a relief, in fact, when he spotted the double-jointed knees of a New Taiwanese teenager grinding a handrail on his skateboard. “Zalbuña!” Dylan said in what he took to be the boy’s native tongue, and in reply he received a wholly unaccented and slightly surly, “Dude, I was born here, okay?” Man, Dylan had been gone a long time. And as if to corroborate this, no one had recognized him as a famous actor yet; he had to remind himself that this was what he supposedly wanted.
True to its name, give or take, Ye Olde Telephone Booth was just an ordinary phone booth of the sort Dylan remembered so well from childhood, grayish and with a baby blue border around the top and white letters spelling out “TELEPHONE.” It was cordoned off so that you couldn’t get too close, but hordes of Earthlings were gathered around, taking pictures. Parents waxed nostalgic while their children, who clearly didn’t get what this upright coffin thing was supposed to be (an old RiboMate?), tugged at their pants and pled, “Come on, let’s go.”
These kids, like his students and his own offspring, thought of all manner of the old communication devices the way he had thought of gas lamps, chamber pots, and horse-drawn carriages as a kid—charming maybe, but backwards.22
22_____________
Practically every sentient being in the known galaxy was plugged into an omni now, and even those few Luddites who weren’t—the Amish, for instance, and the purplish-green civilization on 2Pac—were accounted for by it. Dylan remembered that for a time there on Earth, the number of screens-per-home had proliferated like a cancer. People had their TVs, computers, phones, e-readers, cameras, video cameras, biometric devices, telescopes, translators, etc. It was only a matter of time before a sort of technological gravity, and common sense, made them converge into a singularity. Dylan, like many members of his generation, still preferred the omni VII (smart contact lens and wireless earbud rig), but most of his students these days had the more immersive cortical implants, which were a double-edged sword in the classroom; in theory, he could—and did—limit student access to the Omniverse, but they always found workarounds. Some of their parents conducted their marriages between planets or moons for years at a time via omni, which relayed bits of communication via entanglement just as the teleporters relayed bits of biochemistry (information is information is information). For a monthly fee, the omni would even project full-blown holograms, and theoretically, though it was at present outlawed by the Mons Olympus Accord on the Reproductive and Reduplicative Rights of Human Persons (2005), you could even impregnate someone via omni if you had the right matter printer on the other end. Those given to slippery-slope arguments believed the next logical step would be for hominids to forego external reality altogether and live permanently in the sorts of virtual reality game worlds that had become so popular in the past decade. Naturally some were doing this already, spending the entirety of their lives in the shadows of the Omniverse, shooting virtual junk into their virtual arms and zipping around on lightcycles or wrecking on the halfpipe without any real pain. You still had to surface to eat non-virtual food, however, and the daily reminder that you were spending the majority of your life inside Plato’s cave was enough to undermine the pleasure for most people. Dylan himself had experimented with VR as a form of holiday escapism. He’d tried the drugs and slept with the succubae, and they had brought him great audio-visual stimulation, to be sure, but consciousness is a layered thing, and throughout all his virtual amusements there was always some nagging awareness one hierarchical level up that none of it was “real,” and the reward centers of the brain responsible for secreting the dopamine and whatnot really did seem to care whether you had earned their rewards in the real world or not. Some of the more affluent junkies, with the assistance of months-long IV drips and waste-disintegrating diapers, had taken to having their avatars don virtual VR rigs, and then to have those avatars don virtual VR rigs, etc. in an effort to confuse the cortex into believing that some level or other of this intracranial utopia was real. For Dylan at least, VR amounted to mere rehearsal for life. It was like reading literature that way, but not half as artful. Whenever he surfaced from a session of VR, he felt vaguely sick and needed a nap to undo the psychic pollution, whereas a good book, especially one printed on a felled tree, made him feel nourished and awake and alive.
“Dylan Greenyears?”
Dylan looked up. Brown hair. Pale, freckled skin. Single-jointed knees too. Human. Very. “Ashley Eisenberg?”
“I can’t believe I’m finally meeting you,” she said. Her teeth gleamed preternaturally white.
“The pleasure’s all mine,” he said. She was pretty, if not at all what he’d expected. Eisenberg sounded so Jewish, but this girl looked as Irish as any Molly or, as it were, Erin. Her eyes, like his, were as emerald as any sea.
“You’ve hardly changed,” she said.
“That shows what you know.”
Halter top. Muscular arms. Breasts like overripe fruit.
“You hungry?” she asked.
“A bit, yes.”
“Crab cakes sound okay?”
“Miraculous. I haven’t had one of those in twenty years. We don’t have crabs where I’m living now. There are various types of shellfish, but the meat is different, more sausagey.”
“Eww.”
“It’s not too bad actually. Just different.”
“Speaking of which, where are you living now? Omni doesn’t list an address for you.”
Obviously. He was a celebrity after all, even if no one had done a double take yet today, let alone stopped to ask for his autograph. It was normal for celebrities to
opt out of Omni’s registry. Their existence would be noted, but not their address. As it happened, Dylan’s address actually was listed, but it was under his newer, abridged name. He had told very few people of his whereabouts after his flight from Earth, and though he considered coming clean with Ashley now, he deemed it too much of a risk. He didn’t know her yet really, and the line between avid fan and stalker, he’d heard, could be quite thin. Granted, it was he who’d contacted her this time and not the other way around.
“Ask me again later, would you?”
She shrugged.
He let her lead the way in her black leather pants. Beveled thighs. Butt like a heart-mark. Fuck-me shoes. Not that he was thinking about that.
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