“Welcome back, Si," Sarah said as Simon approached the group.
“Hey. So how are we getting this thing up there?” Simon got straight to the point, as usual.
He knew the practical solutions for putting the craft into orbit, they had a launch pad ready to be actualised by the SARA, the question was intended to receive an answer more administrative in nature.
“Well, I have friends in NASA that should be able to help grease the wheels with AFSPC in Colorado, they keep an eye on what’s going up there and make sure it doesn’t cross paths with anything in airspace before it leaves the atmosphere," Zack said. “Companies have private satellites sent into space now and then, so it shouldn’t raise too much interest. Launches are usually handled by established spaceports, but we’re going to be using our own for secrecy, it’s much smaller and a thousand times more efficient.”
“Great, how long till we have it up there?” Simon asked.
“I’d give it a week or so. It would probably take months, but I think my friends at NASA should be able to get it pushed through quickly.” Zack said.
“You could push it through instantly, go back to when you first installed your portal in Houston and request it then, but…”
“Shit. This takes some getting used to. I’ll do that right now, why waste time.” Zack said while tapping at his keys to boot up the portal, he walked to the hoop while he continued uninterrupted. “We’ll have authorisation in no time, and we’ll be able to launch without any further delay. See you guys in a bit.”
He walked through the portal, which disappeared a second later.
“…but it will only change things for the new timeline, not ours.” Simon continued
“Simon!” Victor said. “Why didn’t you tell him that before he left?”
“He wouldn’t let me get a word in, and I didn’t expect him to close the portal. Did he learn nothing this morning?”
“Oh," Victor said. “He closed the portal. That’s not good.”
∆ ∆ ∆
Zack used his home laptop to send an email to his NASA colleagues, then returned to the portal, pressed his thumb to the plate and stepped through the pool back to HQ.
“I sent the request,” he said. “They should have authorised it by now, I’ll check my emails.”
Checking emails was not in the cards for him as someone was already seated at his terminal. Initially confused as to why his own countenance was staring back at him in confusion; Zack soon ascertained his mistake.
“Oh, damn. I should have left the portal open.”
“You should have left the portal open.” Simon agreed, a brand new Simon in a brand new timeline that he’d created thanks to his trip to the past.
The rest of the PRE-Innovations team looked bewildered. New Zack was first to speak.
“So you’re the reason I got that authorisation email yesterday?”
“Yes, that would be me," Zack said, feeling like a dog caught in a room full of pillow feathers.
“Well, we have our explanation now.” Victor said, “How are we going to get this Zack home?”
Everyone looked to Simon. He placed his elbow on the desk in front of him and his head in his hands. He sighed.
“I’d say that we should keep him here until we finish our work,” Zack’s eyes widened. “But, his timeline is going to need him.” Zack relaxed.
“It looks like finding a method of contacting superseded timelines has been bumped up on the pipeline.” New Zack said, feeling just as responsible as original Zack. “Sorry guys.”
“It’s okay,” Simon said, “this might not be as complicated as we’re expecting, as long as you remember the exact time that you initiated the portal.”
“I do.” Zack gave the time and mentally crossing his fingers.
“Which portal did you use?”
“That one.” Zack pointed to the portal on the left.
“Okay, I’ll search for a shadow on the data from that portal.” After a few moments, he continued. “Okay, I found one. I’ll configure the photon in that portal, so it creates a digital message, once my counterpart realises your mistake in the future, he will try everything to get you back. When he figures out how to solve the problem, which he will, he will look for shadow messages, then reply in the same way. Maybe he already thought of sending a message this way; I didn’t think to check. No matter, I see that he’s rerouted the shadow data stream to his portal, so once you step through ours, yours will handle the reintegration.”
The portal hoop booted and the pool appeared. Zack had managed to follow Simon’s verbalised train of thought and knew this would be a satisfactory solution.
“Well, bye all, sorry for the mix-up, I hope you all enjoy the speedier launch schedule.” He stepped through the portal to avoid any further embarrassment.
The team watched Old Zack leave to his superseded reality, then turned to each other, seeing the same look in each other's eyes.
“What the F, guys," Beth said. “This is getting nuts, we need a set of rules in place, so this kind of thing doesn’t happen. We dodged a bullet this time, but what if one of us gets lost for good? No wonder movies always simplify time travel; the reality is insane, it makes my head hurt.”
“Yeah, we need to be more mindful in future," Sarah agreed. “This tool could be dangerous as well as powerful.”
“I’m so sorry guys, I need to learn to look before I leap, it just that this is all so exciting to me," Zack said, apologising for his parallel self.
“Don’t beat yourself up, we’re the first ones to do this, no one could have known how this would turn out. There’s a learning curve.” Simon said.
“A learning curve that fucks with reality. No worries, though, Alternate Zack brought us forward a few weeks.” Victor said.
“Any suggestions for a safety protocol, so this doesn’t happen again?” Sarah said.
“What if we just make it the default that the quantum computer searches a shadow?” Beth asked.
It didn’t take long for Simon to adapt to her way of thinking. “Yes, if the quantum computer is already searching for a shadow from the moment the transfer initiates, it’s synchronous, and it will be found instantly. We could add a return button for use when the portals have been disengaged.”
“Yes, that," Beth confirmed.
“That’s brilliant, Beth," James said. “I think that should work.”
“Absolutely," Simon said. “I’ll get on it.”
“Now we know that there are no deletions, how do you think it will affect our work?” James asked.
“What do you mean?” Zack asked.
“Well, we now know that changing the past doesn’t help us, we don’t get deleted, we go on as usual. We don’t get anything out of helping the past, only the alternate version does.”
“I think we should carry on as we were. We’ve created so many realities at varying stages of technological advancement, in some of them the fall was unavoidable, but in newer timelines, we have solved that problem. Every new reality we create improves the universe for the human race. I think we have still achieved our objective, even if some of the realities didn’t fare as well. Now we have a way of contacting superseded realities; we can limit how many offshoots are happening.”
“What you’re saying is that older timelines are expendable," Spencer said.
“Maybe so. Mankind survived, even if it’s only in some realities, that was the goal.” Simon replied, unaffected by Spencer's glare. “But I have a theory that it could still be possible to delete the more unfortunate timelines.”
“That goes against what we now know," Victor said. “Explain.”
“Well, it’s still a theory right now, but I think it has potential. It may be possible to merge all timelines back into one, making it so that the offshoots along the way never happened. For example, what if I was able to send a message back to the timeline where Zack made his stupid blunder?”
Zack cleared his throat and hid behind his ha
nd. Simon continued.
“We now have the ability to contact that reality, what if we sent a message to Zack before he left to split the timelines? If we warned him beforehand, he wouldn’t go back, which means the offshoot he created — this timeline — would no longer happen, neither would theirs. It would be paradoxical for it to continue in existence, even with multiple realities, it would have to be deleted. If we were to send a message back in time from this new reality, we might end up with branches from branches, but if we send it to the shadow reality, it’s a part of the same track. If we’re altering the original stream of data, the reality that it created can’t continue to exist. If we look hard enough for shadow signals, we could erase a lot of the realities we’ve created up to now, not from the time period that Stan destroyed though, of course.”
“That theory may hold some water.” Sarah said, “But how would we test it?”
“We need to set up some new realities as test environments. We create new realities, find their shadow signals, delete the new timeline and recheck. If we don’t find a signal, we know the reality no longer exists. Here’s how it would go, we make a change in our reality, then keep in touch with the timeline that splits off from ours using shared photon boxes from the portal. We negate the change that created their offshoot and, if we lose contact, we know it’s gone.” The others mulled it over and nodded, knowing that Simon was simplifying the process, but it was a decent plan. “We can wait until we’re set up on our new planet before we try it out though.”
“Agreed," Victor said. “One thing at a time.”
“There’s one more thing I want to add to the table. We need to address the elephant in the room.” Spencer said. “How are both of you feeling about these alternate realities?” She was looking at Victor and Sarah.
“Us? Why?” Victor said.
“Well, all four of you I suppose” she motioned to the rest of his family. “Now we know this…”
“Yes?”
“Well, your kids weren’t deleted at all. There’s still a version of them stuck in that horrible future that Stan left.”
Victor pondered this for a moment. “Oh shit," he muttered. Jules and James looked pensive.
“We’ve figured everything else out Vic, we can figure this out," Simon said. “We can find their photon shadows, send them the data for building portals and bring them here.”
“But then there’ll be two of them," Victor said. He looked at his children. “What would you guys think of that?”
“It would be weird. But not weird enough to maroon another version of us in hell on earth.” James said.
“Yeah, I don’t think I’d like that on my conscience," Jules said.
“I’d put that aside for now too," Simon said. “No matter how long we wait, we can still rescue them right after Stan leaves, they won’t be stranded for more than a few seconds.”
“That’s true.” Victor said “While we’re on the subject of things we haven’t discussed,” he turned to Spencer. “We haven’t talked about the fact you stopped a school shooting either. How does that feel?”
“It wasn’t me.”
“You have no knowledge of it, but it was you. You saved lives, Spencer and that’s awesome. Do you know how many?”
“My alternate said that they didn’t have an exact number on the report she watched, but it was approaching fifty, I think.”
“Fifty people are alive in this timeline because of you, you’re a real hero," Sarah said.
“Oh stop. Making these changes is why we’re doing this, making a better world for them all. Now there are almost fifty extra lives that can enjoy it. I just hope that our new planet is a place that’s free of the stress that causes people to do something like that.”
“Soon enough we’ll be over the population problem too, so the extra surviving inhabitants won’t matter," Simon said.
“Thank you, Mr Spock, for that cold logic.” Victor rebuked.
“Well, it won’t be long until we can split the world's population by half, or thirds if we keep looking and divide among the planets. Two to three billion is optimum for the planet so three planets including earth would be great.”
“Do we even know how it’s going to work?” Jules said.
“In what way?” Victor asked.
“Do we know who we’re going to let join us on another planet?”
“Anyone willing to live differently would be welcome," Simon said.
“I think there’ll be a split down the middle once they’re given the option," Victor said. “There’ll be a lot of people who aren’t willing to leave home. Then there are the big businesses that will try and hang on to their profits like their life depended on it, they won’t be happy to see their customers leave. They’ll try their hardest to make people believe that it’s best for them to stay and keep giving them their money and there’ll be people gullible or fearful enough to do it, even with the SARA given away for free.”
“You know,” Sarah said, “I think that might be the biggest challenge we’ll have to face.”
The rest of the team began to feel anxious while they considered the resistance they might encounter from the very people that they were trying to save.
Chapter 55
Thanks to the SARA and a fleet of android assistants, the spacecraft was ready to launch two days later. The pilot android had been fitted with an orange and white casing in homage to Mark Watney’s EVA suit in The Martian. The colours also appeared on the chassis of Star Wars droid BB-8, so Victor designed a dome-shaped head for the robot, even covering its eye sockets with additional domes to echo BB-8’s photoreceptor, and adding some boops and bleeps to its audio responses.
The launch site was situated on a remote piece of land that they had acquired in Houston. The Texas location was ideal, saving travel time when using Zack’s portal, and offering more open space than they would find anywhere in England, allowing them to work discreetly.
Now that they had memories of the future, they were fully aware of how their technology was to affect it. They knew that the SARA would delay the fall by creating resources, but it would not solve the problem entirely, even if it were to happen hundreds of years later and less severely, overcrowding would still become an issue in time. Finding a new planet to allow breathing room remained a high priority. Despite the SARA being a force for good, there were still ways it could be perverted by the selfish nature of mankind. SARA technology could take carbon dioxide and convert it into oxygen, eliminating the need for plant life, deforestation could be ramped up with no real effect on the atmosphere that humans need to breathe. Wood from the trees wouldn’t necessarily still be required, due to the SARA, but the growing population would continue to exponentially increase the demand for housing. The earth’s ecosystem could be converted to a purely human habitat, and mankind would survive as long as they had the SARA. It was a risk that PRE-Innovations weren’t prepared to take, so finding other planets was essential to show society that there were better options.
Despite what the more distant future might hold, in the relatively short-term future that the group had experienced, the SARA had the exact effect that they had predicted. World hunger and poverty were no more, the sheer volume of SARA they were able to manufacture — with each subsequent unit being brought into the fold for producing more — made it extremely difficult for the wealthy to put up a fight. As they had anticipated, energy providers did their best to make the most of the situation, but underused solar roadway technology became much more convenient to produce — and at zero cost — thanks to the SARA. In the world of our present, developers offer free open-source software to rival their overpriced alternatives; in the future, this same mindset also helped sidestep possible tyrannical intentions from energy suppliers by making solar roadways happen on a vast scale. Governments did their best to block the use of the solar panels in their highway construction, impotently trying to protect the financial interests of their contractors and investors, but civil unrest
combined with highly unstable administration put the decision back in the hands of the people. Desert solar farms also appeared quickly and, in conjunction with the roadways, were able to provide free electricity to the world. Androids were abundantly available and programmed with abilities that equalled any service provider, such as plumbers, electricians or builders. The solar roadways and farms were efficiently maintained by the androids, a limitless workforce available twenty-four hours a day, never moving from their designated work area.
Food production was revolutionised, any meal ever prepared could be recreated at will. Once currency acquisition was no longer the driving force in human existence, the best chefs in the world would compete for the fame and glory of their legendary cuisine rather than for cash. The world’s most reproduced and highly rated dishes were recorded and charted like trends on social media. Once a chef thought they had a winning plate on their hands, they would scan it with the SARA before even tasting it. The dish could then be reproduced for them to sample and, if they found it up to their required standard, they would release the recipe to the internet for the world to recreate. This was mostly a blessing, as nutritionally balanced diets were much more straightforward to calculate, procure and maintain. Some still chose to overindulge since they had access to an unlimited buffet of the world’s most delicious foods, but they were rare cases. The world happiness index was higher than ever, leaving little room for comfort eating.
Every adverse medical condition could be solved with nanobots or a simple trip through a teleporter. Nanobots could remove cancerous cells, eradicate any trace of disease and speed up the healing rate of broken bones. If a person felt like they were at the peak of their physical condition, a teleporter could save a copy of their body to hard drive when making a trip, allowing them to recreate that body every time they used the portal in future. Even death could be avoided if a copy of a person’s physical form had previously been digitised and stored. Most citizens gave up their jobs to live out their dreams, the world was now their oyster, but there were some who still enjoyed their occupation. Caring professions weren’t suitable for an android, but a plethora of people are at their happiest while caring for others. The technological advances eliminated the need for care, but there were some who chose not to use it. A sizable portion of the population had elected to continue to grow old as nature designed, and the elderly still needed care, as did the wildlife and domestic animals born on the streets. The technology gave people a choice to remain young and immortal, which could have been a disaster for the population, so a system was put in place to allow the option of immortality or procreation. Those who chose immortality would be fitted with nanobots that would inhibit their ability to reproduce, if the nanobots weren’t present in a body, the teleportation hoops would refuse to reverse the ageing process.
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