Kettles, selling my home, and refrigerators
As I was writing, it became clear I would need to name the time machines in Time Frame something other than time machines. I needed to refer to them too often, and if I was forced to call them time machines on every occasion, this would quickly become clumsy and tedious. I chose to use the term kettle, to honor Isaac Asimov, my childhood idol, and his brilliant time travel novel, The End of Eternity, which I had loved as ten-year-old (and in which time machines were called kettles).
Time Frame was tricky to write because there was so much going on in my life while I was working on it. After living in the same home for twenty years, my wife and I had become empty nesters, and decided to downsize. We wanted a home that had a master bedroom on the first floor and was smaller and less expensive than the one in which we were living.
Naturally, we ended up with just the opposite. We live in San Diego, where space is at a premium, and we also wanted a view, and not to have neighbors within six inches of us. Smaller and less expensive wasn’t working, especially since I work out of the house, and being crammed too close together 24/7 is probably not great for any marriage.
So after months of looking at homes all around San Diego County (since, as a writer, I can work anywhere—on the Moon if it had an Internet connection), we finally decided on a lot in a new development, one that didn’t have so much as a slab of concrete upon it.
Wow. New construction. I won’t be doing that again. Not only was my writing time interrupted for several months as we toured endless homes for sale, once we decided on new construction, I had to go with my wife to pick out flooring, and window coverings, and lighting, and tiles, and arghhhhh—please make it stop! (To be fair, my wife did almost all of the choosing, and I did almost all of the wanting to kill myself.)
Then there were visits to the construction site every week. “Is that sliding glass door supposed to be broken like that?”
Seeing a home being built is like seeing sausage being made, except the sausage isn’t the most expensive thing you’ve ever bought, and you don’t have to live the rest of your life inside a Bratwurst.
But let me back up to the real point of this section: refrigerators. The large built-in model we had owned for twenty years finally decided to call it quits in the midst of all of this. No problem. We were working hard to put our home on the market, but we had two weeks until the caravan of realtors was scheduled to descend on our home like locusts.
Two weeks is plenty of time to get a replacement refrigerator. We shopped and found one, nice enough to be in line with those found in homes priced similarly to ours, but not so nice that we had to win the lottery to buy it. It had to be shipped to the San Diego store we bought it from, and it was back-ordered, but we were assured it would arrive in plenty of time.
Finally, the arrival date was set—not only set but guaranteed—a day before the caravan of realtors would be descending on our home. Mind you, this is a demanding group of individuals who haughtily insist that a working refrigerator is a must-have in any modern house (wow, people have become so spoiled). Our realtor even had the audacity to suggest that not only do buyers expect this appliance to be present in a home, they also expect electricity, plumbing, and running water.
So I called the appliance store four times the week before the refrigerator was due to arrive, explaining that I had to have it when it was promised because I needed to install it that very day. Explaining that I couldn’t show my home to this many realtors with a massive refrigerator-sized gap in my wall of cabinetry, and asking them to confirm it would arrive as scheduled. They assured me each time that it would.
The morning it was due to arrive, I called again. To my delight, it had made it! Outstanding! “Yes,” I was told, “your refrigerator has made it to Chino, right on schedule.”
“Chino?” I said worriedly. “Where the heck is Chino?”
Turns out this is in Los Angeles, where their national distribution center is located. You learn something new every day. It wouldn’t arrive in San Diego for another few days.
Now you tell me.
I had made it very clear—multiple times—that I needed it installed in my San Diego home the day it arrived, and was assured this would happen. No one had once told me the date they were quoting was the arrival time to LA, which might have been useful information for me to have. I wasn’t asking when it would make it LA—or to Dubai, South Africa, or even France. I wanted to know when it would arrive in San Diego.
So I asked for the manager, and after explaining the situation, he agreed to let me take one of his floor models that was the right size to fill the giant hole in my kitchen. Problem solved.
Except that when I called the installer to confirm, I learned that he had called the store a few hours earlier and had been told the unit wouldn’t be in San Diego for two more days. So he had sent his guys to the opposite side of town to do jobs there. There was no way he could install it now.
I could go on, detailing how I called a half-dozen installers in San Diego, offering them extra money if they could squeeze me into their schedule, and so on. Suffice it to say that the next day, an hour before the caravan arrived, the installers I had bribed were racing to complete the job, which they did with just minutes to spare.
It was right around this time that I was thinking about a good way to disguise a time machine for Time Frame. I was racking my brain. What could I use? What might possibly work?
And then, like a lightning bolt out of the blue, it came to me. I could disguise a kettle as a large Sub-Zero refrigerator.
Genius! Sometimes I amaze myself. Where do I get this stuff?
I guess creative people never really know where their inspirations come from.
Who knows, had I been shopping for a dresser or a casket at the time, this novel could have been quite a bit different. :)
(After the caravan arrived, the interest in our home was tremendous. Which meant my wife and I were kicked out of it for three to five hours a day for weeks—effectively shutting me down, since I’m not the kind of guy who can write a novel on a laptop at Starbucks. I need a full-sized keyboard and isolation. But this has nothing to do with refrigerator time machines, so I’ll stop here.)
Tabby’s Star
Everything written in Time Frame about Tabby’s Star is accurate, except for the part about its peculiarities being explained by a light-years spanning time-travel suppressor—at least I think this isn’t responsible :). If you google “Tabby’s Star” you’ll find any number of articles about these inexplicable observations that have captured the imaginations of so many, both inside and outside of the astronomy and cosmology communities. Many of the articles you will find try to come up with possible natural explanations, but each of them have at least one fatal flaw (at least from my reading).
One possibility scientists have taken seriously is that the dimming of Tabby’s Star is the result of an alien megastructure, such as a Dyson Sphere, which would consist of an incomprehensibly large array of solar collectors ringing the star. This would allow an alien civilization to harness a significant fraction of the star’s energy. (I tried to confirm this by reading literature from a San Diego solar company. Inexplicably, it didn’t mention anything about the efficiency of their solar panels increasing if they were placed near the surface of the sun. Still, I’m willing to take these scientists’ word for it.)
Here is an excerpt from an article published on May 20th, 2017, in the Verge entitled, “Why astronomers are scrambling to observe the weirdest star in the galaxy this weekend.”
EXCERPT: It was early Thursday morning when astronomer Matt Muterspaugh noticed something strange with the star he had been observing for the last year and a half. Telescope data taken from the night before showed that the brightness of the star had dipped significantly. He contacted other astronomers who had also been observing the same star, to let them know what he had seen and to keep an eye on it for any more changes. Then by the following mornin
g, the star had dimmed even more.
That’s when he and the others knew it was time to signal the alarm: the weirdest star in our galaxy was acting weird again. And it was time for everyone to look at this distant celestial body—to figure out what the hell is going on. “As far as I can tell, every telescope that can look at it right now is looking at it right now,” Muterspaugh, a professor at Tennessee State University, tells The Verge.
The star Muterspaugh has been looking at is KIC 8462852, though it’s also known as Tabby’s Star. That’s because Tabetha Boyajian, an astronomer at Louisiana State University, first noticed this strange star a couple years ago after looking through archive data from Kepler. The data showed that KIC 8462852 experienced some extreme fluctuations in brightness, way more than what a passing planet would cause. At one point, the star’s light dimmed by up to 20 percent. It was a huge dip, like nothing that had ever been seen before, indicating something big and irregular may be orbiting around the star.
Then in late 2015, astronomer Jason Wright from Penn State suggested a tantalizing scenario for the dips. Perhaps large megastructures created by an alien civilization were orbiting around the star, explaining the weird changes. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider,” Wright told The Atlantic at the time, “but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.” That’s when Tabby’s Star became popularly known as the “alien megastructure” star.
The problem, though, is that Tabby’s star is unpredictable. The fluctuations aren’t exactly repetitive and don’t seem to follow any known pattern—making it hard to know when the strange star will be strange again. “Things that change the brightness of a star happen in a very regular pattern,” says Muterspaugh. “And from what we can tell so far, [this star] is not periodic. We cannot predict when it happens, and that makes it very weird.”
That’s why astronomers have been observing the star basically around the clock since they first learned of its dimming behavior. To do this, Boyajian started a Kickstarter campaign called “Where’s the Flux?” to secure funding for enough telescope time to continuously monitor the star. The campaign successfully raised more than $100,000, which helped Boyajian and others set up a year-long observation program.
. . . So all the theories are still on the table—including the alien megastructures. “That theory is still a valid one,” says Muterspaugh. “We would really hate to go to that, because that’s a pretty major thing. It’d be awesome of course, but as scientists we’re hoping there’s a natural explanation.”
As of this writing (November 2017) I’ve searched for the latest news about Tabby’s Star to see if scientists have been able to solve this mystery. They haven’t. The latest theory I read is that these strange fluctuations are due to an uneven dust cloud moving around the star. But while this theory can account for many observations, it doesn’t address a number of dimming events, especially the huge twenty-percent dip in brightness that Kepler has previously observed.
Finally, during this section, I was tempted to repurpose a joke I had once heard on the Simpsons that had made me laugh out loud. I can’t remember it exactly, but somehow the death of Lou Gehrig came up. Homer asked what Lou Gehrig had died from. The answer was Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
Homer’s eyes widened in amazement, and without missing a beat, he said, “Wow, what are the odds of that?”
The obvious corollary for Time Frame, which I decided not to use, would go like this:
“Who discovered Tabby’s Star?”
“A woman named Tabby Boyajian.”
“Wow, what are the odds of that?”
Smart contact lenses
I found the addition of a smart contact lens in the novel good fun. Sometimes I come up with ideas I think are futuristic and creative, only to later learn that others are already working on them. But in this case, I read about the technology first, and then decided it would be fun to use. I would have never gone so far as to suggest a contact lens could have a night-vision feature—until I read that this capability was actually being worked on at the University of Michigan.
Here are a few excerpts from articles I found interesting. The first is from an article on Trustedreviews.com (news) in April 2016, entitled, “Samsung’s smart contact lenses turn your eye into a computer,” by Sean Keach.
EXCERPT: The human eye is an incredible feat of natural engineering, but it’s not smart enough for Samsung. Samsung has been granted a patent for smart contact lenses that would revolutionize the way we see.
The filing details a smart lens that would imbue a user’s eye with computing capability.
The lens would come equipped with an antenna, presumably to connect to a peripheral device like a smartphone, which would likely provide the brunt of the computing heft.
Samsung says users will be able to control the lenses through gestures like blinking, which will be registered by tiny, embedded sensors that detect eye movement.
The second excerpt is from an article by Mark Elgan that appeared in the May 2016 edition of Computerworld, entitled, “Why a Smart Contact Lens is the Ultimate Wearable.”
EXCERPT: Smart contact lenses sound like science fiction. But there’s already a race to develop technology for the contact lenses of the future—ones that will give you super-human vision and will offer heads-up displays, video cameras, medical sensors and much more. In fact, these products are already being developed.
Sounds unreal, right? But it turns out that eyeballs are the perfect place to put technology.
Smart contact lenses are like implants but they don’t require surgery and can usually be removed or inserted by the user. They're neither on nor under the skin full time. They’re exposed to both air and the body’s internal chemistry.
Contact lenses sit on the eye, and so can enhance vision. They’re exposed to both light and the mechanical movement of blinking, so they can harvest energy.
What you need to know is that smart contact lenses are inevitable for all these reasons.
University of Michigan scientists are building a contact lens that can give soldiers and others the ability to see in the dark using thermal imaging. The technology uses graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms, to pick up the full spectrum of light, including ultraviolet light.
Sony applied for a patent for a smart contact lens that can record video. You control it by blinking your eyes. According to Sony’s patent, sensors in the lens can tell the difference between voluntary and involuntary blinks. When it detects a deliberate blink, it records a video. Sony’s contact lens would be powered by piezoelectric sensors that convert eye movement into electrical power. It would involve extremely small versions of all the parts of a modern digital camera—an auto-focusing lens, a CPU, an antenna and even on-lens storage.
The decision to drop the bomb
I feel it’s important that my characters recognize the collateral damage that their decisions bring about, and wrestle with the ethics of this. Often in fiction, it’s easy to get caught up in grand explosions without really focusing on the human cost. How many movies have we seen in which the hero fights the villain, but at the cost of thousands of innocent lives?
To be honest, I had never learned anything in school about the deliberations preceding Truman’s decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surely the most difficult ethical decision in human history. When I began researching this topic, I found much more than I thought I would. I was especially surprised to learn that even some on the Japanese side were suggesting it may have been the right call.
If you Google, “The decision to drop the bomb on Japan,” you will find any number of articles, some condemning the decision and some in support. As always, I urge you to find your own sources and draw your own conclusions. One article I found useful, which can be found on historyonthenet.com, is entitled, “Arguments Supporting The Bomb,” by Michael Barnes.
Another article I read, written in 2015 by Tom Nichols in The National
Interest Magazine, was entitled, “No Other Choice: Why Truman Dropped the Bomb on Japan.” This was much shorter, but made an interesting point I chose not to include in the novel, but which I will excerpt below.
EXCERPT: Still, let’s assume, as some historians have done, that Harry Truman was either duped or made an honest mistake, and that the invasion casualty estimates were way off. (One historian has suggested that these estimates were ten times too high.) What should Truman have done? If the figure of 500,000 casualties was wrong, perhaps Truman would have been risking only—only—50,000 lives. But would even one more Allied death have been worth not dropping the bomb, in the minds of the president and his advisors, after six years of the worst fighting in the history of the human race?
Imagine if Truman had decided to hold back. The war ends, with yet more massive bloodshed, probably at some point in 1946. Truman at some point reveals the existence of the bomb, and the President of the United States explains to thousands of grieving parents and wounded veterans that he did not use it because he thought it was too horrible to drop on the enemy, even after a sneak attack, a global war, hundreds of thousands of Americans killed and wounded in two theaters, and years of ghastly firebombing. Seventy years later, we would likely be writing retrospectives on “the impeachment of Harry S. Truman.”
Germany desperately wanted the bomb for itself, of course, and my research suggests they might have won this race had Hitler not insisted on the extermination of a group of people who could have helped him the most. For a rundown of the many Jewish scientists, including those who fled the Nazis, who contributed to the bomb, I can refer you to two articles, “Scientist Refugees and the Manhattan Project” (from Atomic Heritage Foundation) and “Jewish Scientists Helped Build the Atom Bomb,” (from American Thinker), which you can find by typing these titles into a Google search bar.
Time Frame (Split Second Book 2) Page 40