by Gregory Mone
The big advantage of Ori’s machine, from the getting-all-those-techie-toys-to-Santa perspective, is that it could allow travel to the distant past. With most time machines, that’s not possible. They come with a very important caveat: You can’t go back any further in time than the creation of the first machine.
Think of time travel like an airplane trip. You can’t just build the departure runway. You need an arrival airport, too. You need somewhere to go, or else you’ll just end up flying around for a while and then landing right back where you started.
What this means is that until someone on Earth figures out how to build a time machine, or how to bend and twist space-time enough to allow for one, we’re probably not going to get any visits from citizens of the twenty-third century. We don’t have anywhere for them to land.
Ori’s design reveals a potential detour around this theoretical obstacle, but it’s not exactly practical. He has said that if it’s possible to warp space-time enough to create one of these time-traveling paths, then it’s also conceivable that the universe has done this on its own. In other words, the cosmos may have already built a landing strip for us. If this were the case, then it would be possible to fly back to some distant time and place. Our twenty-third-century travelers could jump into their time-travel ship, fly through a warped region of space-time, and eventually pop out far in the past.
The trick, though, is that they wouldn’t be able to control where and when they’d be going. Ori’s scenario suggests that time travel to some era before the invention of the first time machine is possible, but there wouldn’t be much flexibility. The idea that Santa’s friends from the future would be able to even land on Earth, therefore, is seriously suspect.
All of which leads us to the only logical conclusion: Santa’s technology is of alien origin.
3
The Aliens Who Love Christmas
THE SEARCH FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE, EXTRASOLAR PLANET HUNTING, AND A SUSPICIOUSLY SANTA-SHAPED GALACTIC CLOUD
The great thing about aliens is that we know almost nothing about them. We don’t know if they have eyes and ears, whether they’re bipeds, or if they have anything like ice cream, avocados, or even kielbasa where they live. Yet scientists are working hard to close this information gap.
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, has been training radio telescopes on the heavens for years, listening for faint signals from distant worlds. Billionaire investor and Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen has made several major contributions to the group, including a reported $25 million gift supporting the design and construction of an advanced new telescope array that bears his name. (Given that his current investment firm, Vulcan, is named after an alien race, one could assume that his involvement isn’t entirely selfless; he may be trying to find his home planet.) And scientists aren’t just listening. They’re actively looking, too. In the last decade, astronomers have begun identifying hundreds of planets located outside our solar system. In the coming years, using increasingly advanced and more sensitive observatories, they will be studying those distant worlds more closely, checking to see whether they have the characteristics necessary to support life, including water, a favorable atmosphere, sufficient protection from radiation, etc. Unfortunately it’s not as simple as checking to see if anyone’s waving back at us.
Scientists have not yet had contact with intelligent, Christmas-focused alien life, but there have been some encouraging signs. In 2007, astronomers using the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton observatory, a space-based telescope that picks up light in the X-ray frequency, identified a cloud of high-temperature gas in the Orion galaxy and pointed out that it vaguely resembled Santa Claus. Cynics might interpret this as an effort to attract media attention to their finding, which turned out to be less concerned with the peculiar shape of the gas cloud than its presence near an active star-formation region. But perhaps it really was a signal of some sort. A message from a benevolent, Christmas-loving species saying, “Hey, we’re over here!”
Regardless of where they live or what they eat, we do know that the aliens who provided Santa with all of his technology are an incredibly advanced civilization. From an engineering standpoint they are far, far ahead of us.
But why did they get involved? What motivated them to single out a white-bearded, big-bellied man and outfit him with technology that granted him superhuman abilities? It may be that they are members of a supremely charitable society founded on the spirit of giving, and that they concluded, after discovering and observing our planet, that a person or figure whose sole purpose in life was to give to others, with no gain for himself, would have a significant effect on the way regular people lived. They may have reasoned that by giving someone the tools to deliver gifts across the world, they would accelerate the moral evolution of humanity. The spirit of Santa would spread, and mankind would become an enlightened species. Wars would end; tips would increase; drivers aiming for the same parking spot would stop and wave each other ahead, saying, “No, take it, it’s yours.”
Yet we also know that these aliens are highly intelligent, so this line of thinking can’t be right. Sadly, the real answer is elusive. Scientists are only now learning about the big-picture characteristics of the planets these aliens may or may not inhabit. They certainly haven’t begun delving into their psychological or cultural motivations for interfering with life on Earth.
Still, we do know something about the man these aliens chose, the man who would become Santa Claus. There is strong evidence that he was a shipbuilder named Jebediah Meserole, and that before moving to the North Pole, he lived in Greenpoint in Brooklyn, New York.
4
From Shipbuilder to Toy Maker
LEGEND, REALITY, AND A WARP-DRIVE EXHAUST COVER-UP
Perhaps you’re wondering how it is that Santa is from Brooklyn—specifically the neighborhood of Greenpoint. Indeed, this goes against the received wisdom. But that jumble of tales we know of as the Santa Claus story is heavily tainted with misinformation.
Until the mid-nineteenth century, Santa was a myth. A total fabrication. Sure, children had been receiving gifts all that time, but these items were actually provided by their parents. Santa was no more real than the tooth fairy or the Easter bunny. Of course, he was alive and well in stories and songs, paintings and pictures. He already had a detailed mythological history; he had appeared in various forms, in different cultures, for hundreds of years. Variations of him have turned up in Africa, Italy, Russia. Many people trace him back to Saint Nicholas, an immensely charitable man who lived in present-day Turkey in the third and forth centuries. He was a good friend to children, and earned the nickname Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker. His legend spread across the Western world, and, in fact, the name “Santa Claus” comes from the Dutch for St. Nicholas: Sinterklaas.
Eventually, the legend of Santa Claus became popular in America, too. Washington Irving wrote about Santa in his book Knicker-bocker’s History of New York, and Clement Clarke Moore crafted one of the more influential descriptions of Santa’s routine in his seminal poem “A Visit from Saint Nicholas.” By the early to mid-nineteenth century, all the stories, poems, and illustrations had begun to spawn imitators. Inspired by the legend, people across the world would try to carry out Santa’s mission in their own towns, neighborhoods, and cities. Men would dress up in festive costumes, throw bags of presents over their shoulders, and break into their friends’ and neighbors’ homes to drop off toys. Granted, not all of them had charitable intentions. There were also a number of Santa-themed robberies at the time and a few isolated cases of adultery. (The famous lyric “I saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus” isn’t actually about the big guy; the man that little kid saw was a neighbor disguised as Santa. Although she’s aware of this misconception, Mrs. Claus still doesn’t allow this song to be played at the North Pole.) Thankfully, though, these imposters and philanderers did not taint the growing legend, and there were far more warmhearted men at work than scurrilous ones.
Jebediah Meserole was one of these benevolent imitators. A resident of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, he worked by day as a shipbuilder. As a result, he had the woodworking skills required to craft nineteenth-century toys. He and his wife, who was so radiant that locals said she could make roses bloom just by looking at them, had no children of their own, but Meserole spent most of his nonworking hours building toys for local kids. And on Christmas Eve, staying true to the legend of St. Nick, he’d trudge through the snow from house to house, delivering these gifts. While this is all very interesting and warm and fuzzy, none of it constitutes hard evidence. In fact, the only serious proof that this man became the real Santa may have been destroyed.
In the mid-1970s, beneath a building on the corner of Nassau Avenue and Russell Street (the present-day location of Greenpoint’s renowned Palace Café), a scientist from the Hercules chemical company found trace evidence of elements that had never before been seen on Earth. He concluded that the material had probably been deposited or discharged at some point in the mid-nineteenth century. Contemporary scientists were doubtful that this man had really discovered alien elements in Brooklyn, so they demanded evidence. The scientist was scheduled to bring samples to New York University, but the night before his appointment, a dozen pointy-eared, three-foot-tall men broke into his lab, stole all the material, and cleaned out the original site, too.
Needless to say, the report of that scientist was never published; his name remains a mystery, too. The key point here, though, is that the location of his dig was once the site of Jebediah Meserole’s home. Furthermore, based on his conclusions, those strange elements were deposited in that soil when Meserole lived there. More precise details have proven difficult to obtain, as Santa appears intent on keeping his original identity unclear, perhaps to prevent his descendants from asking for extra presents, but we can only assume that he dispatched those elves to erase the evidence.
Again, we don’t know the aliens’ real motivations, but it is perfectly logical to assume that once they arrived here on Earth, they studied the work of a few of the amateur Santas and chose one they deemed worthy of a much grander task. They must have picked Meserole, and informed him of their intention to give him the tools to spread Christmas cheer not just in his neighborhood, but across the world. Presumably, they told him that they could transform him into a real Santa Claus, a man with even more phenomenal capabilities than the figure of legend.
So, why was that evidence left behind? In all likelihood, Meserole asked for a demonstration of one or a few of these technological toys, and the aliens probably complied. Those trace elements discovered under Palace Café were probably exhaust from a warp drive.
This is all highly speculative, though, and for that I apologize. From here, however, the story is easy to piece together. After accepting the challenge, Meserole dropped his old name, moved to the North Pole with his wife, and became the real, the one and only, Santa Claus. With the help of those aliens, he transformed that centuries-old myth into reality.
And while Meserole was the Original Claus, or OC, it must not have been long before he realized that he would need help. Even with all his wonderful gadgets, Santa would never be able to drop off all the necessary presents himself.
5
Why Santa Needs Lieutenants
RELATIVITY, WORMHOLES, AND THE LOGISTICAL DRAWBACKS OF TIME TRAVEL
To get a sense of the challenges posed by Santa’s itinerary and, in turn, understand the absolutely inescapable need for assistants, let’s look at the numbers. It’s hard to estimate exactly how many presents Santa delivers on a given Christmas Eve, since the figure is constantly on the rise, but a conservative guess would be three hundred million. Many homes contain more than one gift-receiving child, which rounds the number of actual drop-ins down to two hundred million.
Now let’s say that he gives himself thirty seconds inside each house. This means it would take him one hundred million minutes to deliver each and every gift. That works out to roughly 190 years without factoring in travel or the time it takes to get from one living room to the next. (In fact, he doesn’t need to worry about this, since his operation relies on the theoretical shortcuts through space-time known as wormholes, which drastically reduce the house-to-house commute. A wormhole that’s merely a few meters long can connect two points that are millions of miles away from each other.) Given these figures, and without counting transit time, Santa would need almost two centuries to finish a single night’s worth of deliveries.
Granted, he could time-travel via methods discussed in chapter 20. The aliens did give him the requisite technology, and since he wouldn’t be headed for the distant past, he wouldn’t encounter the same obstacles as our hypothetical friends from the future. But this technique would only save him seconds and hours relative to all those sleeping boys and girls. Think of it this way: If he visits a house at midnight, spends his thirty seconds dropping off gifts, and then jumps into one of his time machines, goes back thirty seconds while moving from one spot to the next, and arrives at his destination at midnight again, he hasn’t lost a millisecond. That is, the night hasn’t advanced, and he’s no closer to his four thirty A.M. deadline, at which point all of the toys in a given time zone must be in place.
Yet for Santa himself, the thirty seconds he spent in that first house are real. His body’s clock has already advanced and can’t be wound backward. Sure, time machines would allow him to deliver all those presents in the necessary nine hours. Technically he could even finish the job in a second’s worth of our time, if he chose to. But he would never get back the half-minute spent in each home. Those intervals would still add up, and Santa would be about 190 years older after a single night of deliveries, even if only a second had passed on Earth. If Santa’s system really did work this way, he’d be tens of thousands of years old today. And immensely bored, no doubt.
Ah, but what if he were to use the time machine each year to go back to a few minutes before he started, pop into the Pole, and tell his younger self, “Hey, don’t worry about it, your deliveries are all done”? His younger self could then skip the night’s work and wake up on Christmas morning just a few hours older than when he went to sleep, instead of having 190 extra years tacked on to his chronometer.
Unfortunately, this wouldn’t really work, either, for a number of reasons. The theoretical implications of this problem are addressed in chapter 21, but think of it this way: If his younger self were to go to sleep, he’d never deliver those presents or get in the time machine afterward to tell himself to take the night off. Besides creating a cosmic conundrum that might lead to the destruction of the universe, or at the very least the onset of a migraine for anyone who bothers thinking too much about this sort of thing, his actions would result in millions of kids hustling excitedly into their living rooms the next morning to find themselves a few presents short.
So. No matter how much technical trickery is applied, the notion of a single Santa Claus just doesn’t compute. An operation of this scale needs employees, stand-ins, mindless wage slaves. And Santa has them. Between two and three hundred, in fact. The number varies, as these lieutenants only work on short-term contracts and occasionally become the unlucky victims of malfunctions in his wormhole-based time machines, which have a relatively rare but very unfortunate tendency to leave their pi lots adrift in alternate universes. (In all likelihood, these are fatal accidents, but because it’s impossible to extract information from alternate universes, Santa comforts himself, and his subordinates, by assuming that they’ve been adopted by a margarita-loving alien race that lives on a planet with a UV-blocking atmosphere that allows them to sunbathe all day without ever contracting skin cancer.)
Who are these men? Are they clones of Santa himself? That would make sense on some level. They would fit into his clothes and shoes, so he could loan them old or worn-out uniforms. And if he were to play cards with them, Santa would probably know their poker faces, since they’d also be his face. Santa eve
n has the necessary cloning technology. Ultimately, though, Santa decided against creating knock-offs of himself because he didn’t want one of his doubles romancing Mrs. Claus. If you saw her, you’d understand. She could melt a polar ice cap quicker than global warming. And their relationship has not always been so solid. Back in Brooklyn, the former Jebediah Meserole came home from the shipyard more than once to find a local farmer leaving his humble home with a relaxed smile on his face. Initially, he used the old “ho, ho, ho” refrain despondently; it was something he muttered sadly under his breath. Only later, after Meserole’s transformation into Santa Claus strengthened their marriage, did it become a cheerful rallying cry.
So, instead of cloning himself and potentially endangering his marriage, Santa recruits normal folk to be his lieutenants. Each of these Santas, with the use of a wormhole-based time machine and numerous other alien technologies, spends approximately six months delivering presents every Christmas Eve. Again: That’s six months in their time; for the rest of us, the time-machine-free citizens of the here and now, just a few hours elapse. Following those deliveries, they live a time-travel-free year at the Pole, with two ten-day vacations, one to Vegas for a critical, Christmas-related convention, and another, just prior to the big night, to the Four Seasons Hualalai, on the big island of Hawaii. The logical conclusion here would be that in a given year, they actually age eighteen months, but Santa’s hibernation program—a sleep-pod-based system, reviewed in chapter 10, that halts aging in patients—actually cancels out a large portion of that time, from a getting-older perspective.