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And the Admiral’s voice left me.
I re-emerged from the wrecked spire, into the sunlight.
Macawley and Aretha were still waiting, still watching. They saw me from a distance, and waved. There was blood dripping from my shattered mouth, and from my groin, and I made a note to fit myself with replacement genitalia as soon as possible. I had, I recalled, quite a range to choose from.
I waved back.
Aretha was smiling, I noticed. And that observation made me feel – good. I had an urge to walk over to her, and hold her in my arms, and perhaps even kiss her. I wondered if she would like that. And forty-two possible scenarios unfurled in my head, forty-one of which involved humiliating and abject rejection of me by her, of one kind or another. But, on balance, I decided it was worth the risk.
And yet, for a few moments, having resolved to kiss the girl no matter what dire consequences might, potentially, ensue, I did nothing. I just stood there, lost in thought.
And then I blinked, with surprise. For the sky above me was filled with vast flocks of fluttering butterfly-like creatures.
I marvelled at them. They were beautiful, and alien, and fast: like no insect I had ever seen before. And as I watched them, these brightly coloured winged creatures gracefully swooped and swarmed and danced.
Then they landed on me, and my body became a swarming delightful kaleidoscope of colour. My hands were coated with butterflies, they writhed in my hair, they created a coat of many colours out of my body, but it didn’t feel threatening or oppressive. It felt as if they were – kissing me.
And then the butterflies swarmed again, and left my body. And they whirled and twirled in mid-air. Then they coalesced into the outline of a Space-Dragon.
“Ah,” I thought, and now I understood.
Then the butterflies dispersed again, and swooped again, and swirled again, more wildly. And then they formed another shape; a jellyfish creature-type shape.
And they swirled again, and became a feline monster.
And then formed the shape of a human being, with four arms.
And finally, a two-armed human.
And then they swarmed wildly, chaotically, and wonderfully. Their wings were brightly coloured and flickered constantly, creating rich patterns of light in the air. And the hum of their wings was like a song, a lilting ballad as adorable as a mother kissing her baby’s cheek, a song as tender as a lover’s caress.
I watched, enraptured, as these strange and beautiful alien creatures danced and sang in the breeze.
And then they were gone.
APPENDIX 1
THE PRINCIPLES OF
QUANTUM TELEPORTATION
Abstract (first published in Quantum Stuff,
Vol. 3,344, 121, 23/2/3403)
by
Mark Ruppe (deceased)
John Bompasso (laterally inverted)
Jean Everett (deceased)
Contents
I. HOW TO QUANTUM TELEPORT
1 The theoretical basis
2 The experimental record
II. THE PHYSICS OF THE QUANTUM BEACON
3.1 The folly of reductio ad absurdum: Einstein’s Bridge
3.2 Entangled particles
3.3 Data loss
III. THE PHYSICS OF QUANTUM TELEPORTATION
4.1 The impossibility of quantum teleportation
4.2 Why it works anyway
4.3 The perils of the fifty-fifty
PART 1: HOW TO QUANTUM TELEPORT
1 The theoretical basis
The fundamental principles underlying quantum teleportation were derived by Albert Einstein in 1927, partly as a result of a series of thought-experiments conducted at the fifth Solvey Conference with his rival Niels Bohr.
Einstein was implacably opposed to the new discipline of quantum mechanics, which he believed to be a partial and deranged line of thinking. Famously, he said that “God cannot play dice with the universe.” He was wrong; God probably does play dice with the universe, if there is a God, which there probably is, and there also probably isn’t.1
Einstein also said, in reference to quantum physics in general, and the Copenhagen Interpretation in particular: “this theory reminds me a little of the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoiac, concocted of incoherent elements of thought.” He further commented, “The more successes the quantum enjoys, the sillier it looks.”
These are the Einsteinian comments which are fit to print; in the book The Lost Letters of Einstein (ed. T. Silverman) we can see2 the great scientist really let rip with a series of choice invectives and startling profanities. We shall, however, not go there.3
In order to ameliorate some of Einstein’s problems with quantum physics – namely, that it is insane, stupid, counterintuitive, and impossible – these authors devised their Quantum Theory of Everything,4 which attempts to offer a profound explanatory rather than merely descriptive5 account of the nature of quantum physics. It shows that the principles of emergence and evolution working in tandem “explain” or rather offer a conceptual model for the process whereby “unreal” quantum states become the reliable, corporeal universe we term “reality.”
By comparison with QTOE, our attempt to create a theoretical model that will allow for instantaneous travel from one part of the universe to another was child’s play. However, it should be noted that two of the three of us are now dead, and the third member of this team, Dr Bompasso, has spent more than six months in a penal institution in America, where he is constantly mocked by other inmates because of his profound lateral inversion.6
1.1 The Einstein-Rosen Bridge
Quantum teleportation relies upon the simultaneous use of two theories, both partly derived by Einstein. The first is the principle of non-local action at a difference between entangled particles, which is the basis for the Quantum Beacon.7 The second is the concept of the wormhole, which is derived from the principles of Schwarzchildian geometry, starting from the equation
Schwarzchild’s solution to the equations of Albert Einstein describes a wormhole connecting two regions of flat space-time, thus:
Einstein-Rosen Bridge
For more details, please refer to any reputable High School Physics textbook.
1.2 The Quantum Beacon
Einstein did not approve of quantum physics, with its bizarre assumption that reality can be created by measurement; in other words, that consciousness causes the world to be.8 In a series of thought-experiments with Bohr, he attempted to disprove quantum physics through the rhetorical device of reductio ad absurdum. Most cuttingly, he demonstrated that if the equations of quantum physics are correct, then this allows the possibility of an impossibility i.e. non-local action at a distance.
According to the EPR Paradox, then, entangled particles in one part of the universe can exchange information with other entangled particles elsewhere in the universe. This, Einstein, believed, was absurd; and so quantum physics must be wrong!
However, sadly for the old gent, it now appears that, however absurd it might be, non-local action at a distance can occur. And it does.
As most eleven-year-olds will know, we start from the basis that Person X (male or female or hermaphrodite) has a qubit that he or she or he/she wants to teleport to Person Y (whether Y be male or female or hermaphrodite). This can be rendered as
Hence:
This leads us, via a series of mathematical steps with which readers of this paper will be only too familiar, to:
And by this means, teleportation can be achieved.
2 The experimental record
When we began our work, therefore, we felt confident that this project would be, in the words of my esteemed colleague Dr Ruppe, “a piece of piss.” In Part 2 of this paper (published in a separate volume, or available online here) I will outline the theoretical underpinnings of our approach, which requires some explanatory descriptions of our new system of mathematics called Tensor Slitherings, which allows us to achieve practical applications of QTOE. In Part 1, however, I inte
nd to chiefly devote my time to grumbling at the way we were constantly starved of resources, funds, and kudos proportionate to our accomplishments, and not even given a proper office by our supposed sponsors, NASA and the ESA.
Meanwhile, all the resources were being poured into the abortive Hyperspace Project. Trillions of dollars! Thousands of staff! Assistants! Offices! Coffee machines! (I’ve been to their offices in Houston, I’ve seen the Gaggia machines.)
These authors have written extensively about this situation in blogs9 and scientific papers.10 The directors of the Hyperspace Project, in their naivety, just kept throwing money at their problems. They built the most expensive spaceship in the history of mankind (the Einstein I) and sent it through a wormhole in the expectation it would travel through a white hole and end up in another part of our own universe. And it never came back! No messages were sent from the spaceship’s computer brain. The Doppelganger Robots on board failed to transmit visual or sensory data.
And so they sent another spaceship – the Einstein II – which also vanished without trace.
Then the Einstein III. The Einstein IV. The Einstein V. The Einsein VI. The Rosen I (you see – they start numbering again from I to avoid drawing attention to how much money they were squandering!). The Rosen II. The Rosen III. The Bohr I. And so it went on!
Meanwhile, we’d already figured out what to do, but no one was listening.
Our primary postulates are these:
Nothing can survive a journey through a black hole and a white hole. These mothers will really chew you up.
The only way to achieve instantaneous space travel is via a Quantum Beacon. It works! It’s simple! It’s tried and tested technology. But no, these guys at the Hyperspace Project wanted to travel through hyperspace. They loved the idea of wormholes. And in fact, to this day, even learned scientists talk about the fifty-fifty as “hyperspace travel.” It’s not hyperspace travel! It’s just not! Their gang use hyperspace travel, we use quantum-entangled qubits. I mean, is it so very hard to tell the difference between those two things?11
The Quantum Beacon, as my colleague Dr Everett so pithily put it, before the unsuccessful qubit transfer which reduced her body to slush and turned her, briefly but rather shamefully, into a sentient pond, is based on the principle of two tin cans connected by a string. Once you have qubits at one end of the string which are entangled with qubits at the other end of the string, then instantaneous transmission of data is possible. And once you can distinguish between a 0 and a 1, then any data, however complex, can be compressed and transmitted.
But you need the other tin can! It’s easy enough to replicate the data of a human body and consciousness – that’s the underlying principle of cyborg mind replication, which is already established, tried-and-tested technology.12 It’s a small step to therefore replicate quantum-entangled particles and send them from one bit of the lab to the other. And Duce, Featherstone and Stafford-Clark13 have already pioneered and mastered those techniques.
But how do you get the other tin can in place? That was the fundamental problem facing us. And our radical, lateral, in our view brilliant approach was simply this; to break into Mission Control at the Hyperspace Project, and use their equipment to send our spaceship through hyperspace.
There was nothing illegal about this. Underhand, yes, duplicitous yes, but not illegal. We didn’t actually “break in,” you see. We merely scheduled a meeting with General Pevsner, the head of the Hyperspace Project, and his lickspittle scientists Watts and Malarkey. And, while Ruppe and Everett engaged them in high-octane scientific critque, I went out “to the loo,” made my way to their launch pad, and slipped a tennis ball into their hyperspace launcher.
Then I turned the hyperspace drive on and ran back to join the others.14
Naturally, our experiment was successful. The tennis ball travelled through a wormhole, via the black and white holes, and appeared in orbit somewhere in the Cepheid galaxy, and immediately began exchanging data with the quantum-entangled particles in our lab.
The tennis ball itself, of course, had disintegrated long before, so all that was left was the content of the ball – namely, a mini-black hole, containing within its structure, in microcosm, all the elements necessary for the functioning of a quantum beacon entanglement device.
You see, what those dunderheads at the Hyperspace Project did not understand is that nothing at all can survive a journey through a black and a white hole; except a black hole. Our “space vessel” was a lab-created black hole the size of a pimple!
We then quantum-teleported a Doppelganger Robot to the Cepheid galaxy, and took it in turns to remotely “ride” the beast, as it flew among the stars.
Before long we had quantum-teleported almost a dozen Doppelganger Robots into space. Some of them malfunctioned, but we thought nothing of that. It’s a long journey after all. But at this point, before publishing our findings, we decided on one mad gamble.
We wanted to travel into far-distant space, and experience it all for ourselves!
And that’s when we “borrowed” the spaceship from the Hyperspace Project. We would have returned it, I can assure you of that, if it hadn’t turned into molten lava within seconds of our arriving back on Earth. But our intentions were honourable. For we felt, with a deep passion, that it wasn’t enough to be the first scientists to unify relativity and quantum physics with emergence and evolution theories, nor was it enough to be the first scientists to create the first-ever instantaneous macro-teleportation machine.
We felt, in short, that we needed to be the first scientists to ever make a group of soldiers, jocks and politicians eat shit. We had been mocked for years, you see! Starved of funds. We used to have to walk down the street to get take-outs from the coffee shop, because no one felt we deserved a Gaggia machine!
So we stole the spaceship and teleported it to a portion of space. We spacewalked; we saw distant stars; we were there! The mission was a total triumph. But on the way back, unfortunately, we discovered the principle of the fifty-fifty, as it applies to human travellers.
Ruppe survived, hale and hearty and intact. But Everett died horribly – after a mercifully brief existence as a sentient pond – and I was very much half-and-half. I have survived; my body is intact; I am sane; but I am laterally inverted and my eyes are inside my head. (And yet I can still see! How weird the quantum universe really is!)
Professor Ruppe, of course, subsequently and sadly died while resisting arrest.
For my part, I am content to know that I have revolutionised science and society; and do not apologise for the fact that I stole a spaceship, or that, in a fit of madness, I fired the launch jets even though General Pevsner was banging on the spaceship door telling us to “fucking get out of there.”
Thus, on my return, I was obliged to stand trial both for theft and for murder. I did a plea-bargain and took a manslaughter rap; after all, as my attorney argued, the General, because of his senior rank, was possessed of an emergency oxygen capsule in his brain, and so wasn’t actually true-dead. Indeed, he is even now doing a tour of duty on Occupied Enceladus.
And I treasure my memories of the day when – accompanied by two armed prison officers – I received my Nobel Prize, for what I am sure will be considered as the greatest invention of all time; the quantum teleportation device. Yes, it has a flaw, in that travellers only survive intact fifty per cent of the time, give or take a percentage point. However, I am confident a way will, eventually, be found to ameliorate this effect.
I will now outline the mathematics that underlie this revolutionary invention.
(See volume 2, or click here.)
APPENDIX 2
Song Lyric to “The Ballad of Parliament Square”
as sung by Blind Jake Maro and Pete Mullery in various
clubs in the city of Bompasso, Belladonna
Based on an ancient text of unknown origin;
allegedly dictated to a prominent SF writer by evil aliens
from an
other dimension where the only humans survive
as slaves, catamites and scribes
For lyrics only, read on.
For full recorded version, click here.
“The Ballad of Parliament Square”
(aka “The End of Days”)
Singer 1 (baritone)
Hear my song.
Hear my song, of woe, and joy;
The end of hope.
of the death of Heroes;
A tale of warriors brave.
and of bastards cowardly.
Listen well.
It all began
Oh great and ghastly day!
with Smith and Blake
Those foolish knaves!
who told the world
And braggarts too!
they could achieve
With their magic powers
the ultimate of ultimates –
callèd Science
to build a miniature Hadron Collider,
and Quantum Physics
that could easily spew forth the Bosons
that were so bizarre
of Higgs, and thus recreate
and complicated
the chaotic state of matter
and “mathematical.”
at the Universe’s Birth.
They worshipped Wizards
Their mini-cyclotron
like Newton, Einstein, Bohr,
could atoms mightily smash.
and others of that tribe
And thus, within their dark laboratory
of cowardly mages
in the soulless city of Milton Keynes,
who never fought
they replicated, between 2 and 4,
a battle, nor ever slew