Deja Vu

by Guerin Zand

  The second advantage, we hoped to achieve using the combination of the star drive and the portal drive together, was to eliminate the effects of portal lag on the crews. The first time you had reality sucked out of your ass, then shoved back in, was pretty traumatic. I wouldn’t say that it ever got any better, but you sort of got used to it. Still, depending on the person, the effects could take anywhere from seconds to several minutes to pass. This could leave a crew vulnerable to all sorts of possible hazards. Since the ladies didn’t experience these effects, the human test was critical in determining if we had succeeded in this aspect. This was actually the reason I had suggested we try this when we first decided to add the star drives to the Ryvius class of ships.

  I wasn’t too worried when we were getting prepared for the test. It was obvious from the earlier tests that the universe wasn’t going to go boom. The ship and crew seemed to come out in exactly the same form as they entered. I figured there was a pretty low probability of me ending up like a frog in a blender. The scientists, on the other hand, weren’t so sure about that, so they had me all suited up in an outfit to monitor my every bodily function. I was plugged into the ships systems to record the effects on my physical and mental being. Phoebe and Mia would pilot the ship. I was just the little guinea pig all wired up. I had a feeling they just did all of that to make me feel like an idiot. It worked.

  The transition through the portal went as expected once again. I felt none of the effects of a normal portal transition. There was a very brief moment of confusion as the view of the stars in the background universe changed ever so slightly. It seemed more like a glitch in my vision than anything else. It wasn’t much of an issue compared to the total loss of awareness that I usually experienced. They spent a week going over the data they had recorded before they declared the test a success. I knew that the moment we completed the test, but no one seemed to value my opinion. I just wanted to get on to the next phase, traveling into the future.

  Moving the exit portal into the future, as compared to the entrance portal, was where the math really started to get into new territory. According to Diane, it was simply a matter of expanding the math to include time as a variable, and then setting the delta time between the two portals spacetime coordinates. It was actually the same logic we had been testing already, but we had been using a delta time of zero for the earlier tests. In the case with a delta time of zero, the math was essentially identical to the original portal logic. Again, the first few tests would be made without the human guinea pig, that was me, onboard.

  There were a lot of arguments about how to proceed. What delta time should we test first? Should we only set it to a nanosecond, maybe less? If that worked, what would we try next? Maybe a millisecond? As far as I was concerned, we would never get done testing if we ran as many tests as they wanted. I agreed, the first test would be a nanosecond. That would prove the concept, or at least the equations worked. After that, I suggested we try an hour, then a day, and finally a week. They agreed to my test schedule as long as all of those tests were run with just the Athenians onboard. If the results were as expected, then we would try one test with me onboard, and we’d set the delta for three days.

  We spent another week testing and analyzing the data. All of the tests seemed to work as expected. The women reported back that time appeared to pass as expected within the pocket universe. The exit portals appeared at the exact time that was predicted, and there didn’t seem to be any issues. The universe was still in one piece, but I argued that if we actually screwed it up, how would we know? Most of the scientists were surprised by my lack of confidence in this phase of the testing. They thought the way I had been pushing the tests along didn’t make sense if I had concerns. From my perspective, if I was going to be turned into a bowl of creamed human soup, I’d like to not spend a lot of time thinking about it.

  In theory, and throughout all of our discussions, we couldn’t find any reason for it not to work the same for a living human as it did for the ladies. The pocket universe was essentially a clone of our home universe. All the same laws of time and space that defined our universe were exactly the same in the pocket universe. The results showed that time passed at exactly the same rate while outside of our universe as it did for those observing the tests. Crews spent months traveling within the pocket universes, and there had never been an issue transitioning back to the parent universe. This had been studied for decades, and it was considered to be totally safe for humans and every other form of life that had used the technology. It was that absolute certainty that scared the fucking shit out of me.

  I brought up the fact that the earlier tests had shown the Athenians didn’t experience the effects a human consciousness was subjected to in normal portal travel. Also, all of the data we had concerning living beings spending extended periods of time in a pocket universe was all done with the pocket universe contained within the parent universe. My main argument was I didn’t think it was a very good idea to fuck with time when you didn’t really have to. I have expressed this opinion before, and I was not about to change my mind about that. They did suggest that they could find another volunteer for the test, but I thought if someone was going to fuck up the universe, I wanted that someone to be me.

  When I took the Deviant out to perform the test, we discovered that we had made a little mistake in our testing methodology. After running the tests with the Athenians only, the scientists had verified the passage of time onboard the Deviant using the ships timekeeping systems, and those built into the Athenians. As complex as the Athenians were, they still were just machines, regardless of the ongoing debate over their status as sentient beings. Unlike humans, they didn’t get bored just sitting around and waiting for the time to elapse, so that’s exactly what they did. I on the other hand had brought a guitar and some board games to pass the time. The delay for my test was set for three days, so I made sure I had things to do, including having planned out a pretty good menu for my stay in the void. I never got to do any of those things I planned because from my perspective, the trip took no longer than the earlier test I had made without changing the time at the exit portal.

  We should have had the Athenians perform tasks during their tests and record them for playback during our analysis. If we had, we might have seen that something was not quite right. The test, from my perspective, seemed no different than the earlier test I made with no time delta between the entrance and exit portals. That was, until I disengaged the star drive. That’s when things went all hinky. In case you’re not familiar with that term, it’s a scientific way of saying you have no fucking clue what happened.

  According to the Urban Dictionary: hinky - the instant of knowledge when one becomes deeply aware that there is pure evil fuckery afoot. I say that pretty much sums up what happened after I disabled the star drive.

  When I disengaged the star drive, what happened I can only try to describe as my consciousness being thrown out of sync with time in the universe around me. It was like time was a spring that we had stretched by three days, and then let it snap back. Unfortunately, it appeared that my consciousness was the only thing attached to that spring, and no one else seemed to notice that there was anything wrong. It was almost as if my consciousness had been split into two distinct consciousnesses. This split coincidentally lasted exactly three days, the same time I was supposed to have been in the void.

  According to everyone I talked to, after my collective shit came back together, I had seemed quite normal for those three days. We discussed what had happened and had several conversations about what possibly could have gone wrong. To me, for three days I seemed to jump all around in the time covering those three days. While they saw the normal linear passage of time, I saw a every moment of those three days all at once. Over that time, I would jump from moment to moment in what appeared to be a random order. I’d be talking to someone one moment, aware of what I was saying as well as what I was going to say. It was like a perpetual loop of Déjà vu. Even
though I knew what was going to happen next, I couldn’t do a damn thing about it. It was like I was just observing myself from outside of my physical reality. As the reality of a moment started to sink in, a feeling of utter panic would overwhelm me. The next thing I knew, I was in another moment, and that just kept on repeating. Since there are an infinite number of moments in any period of time, this seemed to go on forever.

  In one of my earlier stories, I tried to explain some of this in the introduction, “Messing with Time for Dummies.” I tried to emphasize to the readers that if you fucked with time, it would most definitely fuck you back. No matter how smart you thought you were, time would beat you like the bitch you were until you realized the error of your ways. This was the universe’s way of keeping you from trying to do something stupid like traveling into the past and killing your grandfather. Time was, for the lack of a better description, and intricate feedback control loop. If you disturbed the timeline, this control system would counter the disturbance, ensuring time continued to flow undisturbed. In this case, I was the disturbance, and I kept getting fed back into this control loop until I agreed to behave. The whole beating me down like a bitch was just a by-product of that. It was obviously meant to make the disturber think twice before ever doing that again. Trust me, I got the message. To say that all of this confused me really doesn’t describe the feeling I had. I think discombobulated is probably the best term to describe my condition for those three days.

  Once again, I think the definition found in the Urban Dictionary states it nicely: discombobulated - When your mind has a million things running around in it and it makes you act like a fumbling retard.

  When my infinitely long three days of penance was finally served, I tried to explain what had actually happened to me. This of course made everyone think that I was suffering from some sort of delayed dementia. They initially ignored what I was trying to tell them. Finally, Diane and I had a chance to talk about what I had experienced.

  “You know almost everybody thinks you’ve gone a bit mad, Guerin.”

  “What was the final vote?”

  “Very funny, but you have to admit that your story does seem a bit far fetched. You seemed to be fine for the three days following the test. You talked to several of us and never mentioned any of the issues you seem to be now claiming to have occurred. Nobody noticed you having any issues getting about your daily business. It was as though nothing was wrong for the three days you say you experienced this temporal disturbance, I guess that’s what we can call it.”

  “But I think that me was fine. It was as if I was somehow out of sync with local time. The me, that was outside of time for three days, was trying to sync back up to this universe’s time domain, and the me in the normal spacetime.”

  “So, why doesn’t this happen to our crews when the operate the star drives for long durations? Wouldn’t they also have a time sync issue when they return to normal spacetime?”

  “Well, I guess that’s the question, right? Since it doesn’t happen in those cases, it is probably because there is some sort of link between the two time domains that we don’t understand. Isn’t it sort of like what we discovered when we first started to experiment with traveling at relativistic speeds, and finally when we exceeded the speed of light? We had to rethink everything we thought we knew about time.”

  “Perhaps that connection between the time domains is our consciousness? As we found in those experiments you mentioned, the human consciousness seems to be able to compensate for variations in local time. You said when you traveled through the portal in the test that it appeared to you that no time had actually passed, correct?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why not? If you were contained in the pocket universe for three days, in our local time reference, why didn’t you experience three days in the pocket universe? Why did all of the equipment onboard your ship, including the Athenians, register the passage of three days?”

  “I don’t know, Diane. You’re the hyper-dimensional theoretical physicist, not me.”

  “Don’t play stupid, Guerin. I know that you understand as much, if not more than me, about these subjects. You may not like doing the math, but you have a natural intuition about these things. What do you think happened?”

  “If I had to guess, I’d say that our physical beings are the link between our consciousness and local spacetime. When we use the star drive and travel inside the pocket universe, we can still observe our parent universe, right?” Diane nodded. “So that link between our consciousness, whatever it is, and the parent universe’s local spacetime is still there. When I traveled outside of this universe’s local spacetime inside the pocket universe, that link was severed.”

  “But if that’s true, shouldn’t you have experienced something similar in the earlier tests, when you traveled through a portal inside of a pocket universe?”

  “Remember, that when we don’t try and move the exit portals time coordinate, the time we spend outside of local spacetime is infinitesimally small, but even that small time we spend disconnected from local spacetime results in the effect we know as portal lag. When we ran the first experiment, I wasn’t affected by portal lag because we made the transition inside of a pocket universe. I also didn’t notice anything in the last test until I disengaged the star drive.”

  “Alright, but in the first test, shouldn’t you have noticed something when you exited the pocket universe after emerging from the exit portal?”

  “Perhaps there was something, but I just didn’t notice it. After the last test, I experienced what I could only describe as a severe and repeating case of Déjà vu. That has always been considered to be the result of the lag between our physical and conscious perception of an event being substantially longer than normal. If that lag was small enough, as in infinitesimally small, that would probably be imperceivable. So, what happens if we make that lag three days long?”

  “That does make sense, Guerin. If you’re right, this means we can’t use this mode of travel for living beings. Doesn’t that sort of make the case that the Athenians aren’t alive?”

  “That may be true, Diane, but it doesn’t exclude them from being a form of consciousness. Don’t you physicist talk about the existence of non-local consciousness?”

  “Damn it, Guerin. Why is it that every time I work with you, I end up with more questions than answers? Whenever we think we’re close to coming up with the Law of Everything, you and your friends throw us another curveball.”

  “Come on, Diane. You know as well as I do, when we do discover such a law, that will be when the universe has converged to become one large super-consciousness, God, for the lack of a better term. We’ll be able to form reality to our liking and create other universes. Then we’ll be searching for the Law of Nothing. No matter what we know, there will always still be the unknown. You know that, you just hate when one of your theories gets disproven.”

  “I wasn’t wrong. The portal entrance and exits are essentially inverse quantum entanglers. Any object entering a portal is pulled in, negated at the entry point, and created at the exit point instantaneously. Quantum entanglement can exist between particles over time as well as space, so the experiment worked exactly as I thought it would. It’s just that we don’t understand consciousness and its relation to local spacetime well enough. We also can’t say that quantum entanglement can exist between objkects inside and outside of our spacetime.”

  “Maybe, Diane, but if what you say is true, couldn’t we send a ship back in time using the same method we used to send one into the future?”

  Diane rolled her eyes at me. “No. If we tried that…” Diane stopped in mid-thought. “Well, maybe. Of course, we probably wouldn’t want to try that with a living being after what you say you experienced. The quantum entangled groups don’t actually create new matter, they just transform existing matter, so that wouldn’t be an issue. It would be just like that quantum storage matrix you got in trouble with when you sent messages int
o the past.”

  “They’re not still mad about that, are they?”

  “Oh yes they are, Guerin. If we were to try something like what you just suggested, I don’t think they’d be as forgiving.” Diane looked at me with a suspicious look. “You’ve done more than just glimpse at the archives on Athenia, haven’t you? I mean, that’s where you’re getting all of this from.”

  “Well, a glimpse is all it takes if you have a photographic memory.”

  “Then why did you agree to the test?”

  “They never actually tested a lot of their theories, so I didn’t know what would happen. I was a bit scared that they thought it was too dangerous.”

  “So, you were just the first one stupid enough to give it a try, right? No wonder the Collective scientists were arguing about keeping you away from the archives.”

  “What do you mean? The experiment was your idea, Diane. I just volunteered so if the universe went boom, I’d be the one to do it. I figured that would teach Julie a lesson.”

  We both laughed, and Diane said, “I think for now, we should keep what we talked about between the two of us. If they even suspect we’re discussing time travel, they’ll probably lock us both away somewhere we can’t do any more harm. They didn’t say anything to me directly, but I got the impression they were a little upset we were screwing around with portal mechanics in the first place.”

  I smiled my evil little smile. “You know they don’t like us playing together anyways, Diane.”

  Chapter 15

  A Visit to Milly’s Station

  We traveled back to Milly’s station after my latest ordeal to take a bit of a break and discuss our tests with a group of Collective scientists. The testing couldn’t really be seen as a failure. We had gained a lot of data and a lot more questions for the eggheads to ponder. Diane updated the portal system logic on the Deviant to disable shifting the exit portal in time, but she left the logic to use the portal drive and star drives simultaneously. All of our ships would have their systems updated with the new programming, including the new ships that were under construction. That was another reason we had gone to Milly’s station. The hulls for all of the new ships had been completed and we were finalizing the interior designs. When we arrived at the station, Milly was there to greet us.