Daniel walked over to Chloe and waved a hand in front of her eyes. She didn’t move. He snapped his fingers near one eye. She didn’t blink. Chloe’s mouth was slightly open, but she wasn’t breathing.
“Remarkable,” he whispered.
“She is suspended,” Mathieu said. He stepped close and caressed the side of her cheek. “Chloe flows forward. We flow empros. For her, empros hardly exists—a clock that ticks much too slowly to notice. For us it is just the opposite. Empros has expanded a billion times but forward ticks are now measured by tiny chronons. Two independent time frames. She doesn’t even know we’re here.”
Mathieu took the rubber ball from Daniel, held it in front of Chloe’s eyes and released it. Any self-respecting object with mass would have dropped to the floor, but this one hung in midair. Daniel pulled it from the air and repeated the stunt himself. The ball simply would not fall.
“This makes no sense,” Daniel said, his mind racing. “Time has no bearing on gravity.” His scientific mind grappled with the foreign concepts to fit them into the reality he knew.
Newton’s law of gravitation, F = G m1 m2 / r2. The equation had no component of time. Einstein’s formulation of gravity was no different. Space deformed by a large mass attracted a smaller mass. In both cases, time wasn’t a factor.
Yet there it was, a gravity-defying ball, as frozen as Chloe.
“The ball bothers you more than her frozen arm?” Mathieu asked. “But why should it? Both are objects in motion. The ball is still moving, still tracing a parabolic arc across the room, just as Chloe’s arm is still moving. The law of gravity has not changed. Neither has momentum. But the ticks of the forward clock are now minuscule. We simply don’t notice the motion.”
Daniel nodded, beginning to rearrange his thoughts of how physics worked to accommodate the unusual frame of reference.
Mathieu plucked the ball from the air. “You and I apply a new force within empros time, and the ball responds. Yet the force Chloe applied in forward time is still there. We can’t see the ball falling, just as Chloe cannot see us.”
He lifted Chloe’s blouse and tucked the ball under her bra, copping a feel along the way.
“Hey!” Daniel slapped Mathieu’s roving hand away from the frozen woman’s figure and frowned in deep disapproval. “Get a grip.”
Mathieu laughed. “I’m sorry, it’s a game we play. Once, I removed her blouse and brassiere entirely. Moving her arms was surprisingly easy. A scientific test to determine the pliability of the human body during time suspension.”
Daniel shook his head. “It sounded like Chloe doesn’t think much of your games.”
Mathieu shrugged. “Yes, it was extremely rude of me. I apologized to her, and she has forgiven me. Almost.” He patted her on the butt. “But it was a good test. It proved the body is not really frozen; not like a rigid mannequin. Any empros-facing force will move matter, including human bodies, just as you would expect. Watch this.”
He lifted Chloe’s forearm, bending it at the elbow, twisted her hand toward his face and pushed each finger down except the middle finger. “You see. She’s flipping me off for my past indiscretion. Serves me right.”
Daniel pushed Chloe’s arm down to her side. “Sorry,” he said to her motionless face.
He turned to Mathieu. “We’re clearly in a privileged position outside of normal time. What’s happening down at the atomic level? How are photons still moving? How can we be separated in time, but share the same space? I can think of a lot of scientific tests that don’t involve abusing your lab partner.”
Mathieu shrugged. “Chloe and I have done those tests and more. We have our fun along the way, but perhaps Americans are more sensitive.” He reached into Chloe’s blouse, removed the ball and placed it in the air as if he’d hung a jacket on a hook. “Now, shall I answer your questions?”
Their breakthrough was astonishing even if it opened the door to time-based voyeurism, among other forms of reckless behavior. A thief with this technology would be hard to catch. A terrorist, unstoppable. “Yes, let’s talk science. But leave her alone.”
Mathieu shrugged and returned to the standup stations along the wall. “When I pressed the trigger, forward time collapsed to a quantum flow and the empros direction of time expanded. But the change affected only a narrow strip of three-dimensional space along the wall that included you, me, the air that surrounded us, and that single lamp.” Daniel hadn’t noticed the light fixture attached to the wall, but it was the only source of light in the room.
“Light is still emitted by the ceiling lamps, but those photons are now bouncing around this room in slow motion. Their velocity hasn’t changed. Each photon still moves at light speed, three hundred thousand kilometers per second. But from our perspective, a single second has now stretched to almost forty years. Without the battery-operated lamp on the wall, we would be in near darkness. Yes, some photons will still reach your eyes, but while flowing empros, forward-flowing light is very dim. The same for the air. Most of the oxygen atoms you’re breathing right now are flowing forward, but they can still be absorbed by the hemoglobin in your blood, which is flowing empros. Strange, isn’t it? To think about the parts of your own body that are time-dependent.”
It was strange. But breathing atoms moving in a different direction of time also didn’t sound very healthy. Daniel nodded toward the rigid bodies of Chloe and Agent Griffith. “What do they see?”
Mathieu shrugged. “Nothing. From their perspective, less than a millionth of a second has passed since I pressed the button. Even with our finest instruments, we cannot detect the motion of objects flowing empros—that is, you and me. We occupy the same space, but we’re moving much too fast for them to see us.”
Mathieu strode purposefully across the room, grabbing the ball from its parking place in the air and pushing it into the back pocket in Griffith’s pants. “You and I will step back into the stations, and I’ll reset the flow of time, collapsing empros and expanding forward once more. And Agent Griffith will wonder how the ball managed to land in his pocket.”
“Quantum space and now quantum time.” Daniel took a deep breath and blew it out, briefly wondering how the eddy of air he’d produced would ever sort out which molecules flowed in each direction of time. “Mind-blowing stuff.”
Where would the discovery lead? And who would control access to the technology? An empros-flowing terrorist could be stopped, but only with empros-flowing security forces. The same was true for an enemy force flowing empros. Whole battles might be fought in empros time without anyone else even being aware.
Mind-blowing, yes. But dangerous too.
11 Forward
The bright yellow light flashed once more. Daniel blinked a few times and let his eyes adjust.
He looked around. The room was brighter, photons moving at full speed again. Chloe stood ten feet away, grinning at Daniel as if they had just shared an inside joke. “Bienvenue. Welcome back,” she said.
Daniel took a few steps forward. Chloe’s eyes blinked normally. The slight motion in her chest revealed each breath. Her grin widened. Griffith watched from behind her, the look of anticipation still on his face. He reached up to scratch his head. Griffith didn’t understand what had just happened. Chloe did.
Daniel approached the young woman as he’d done a few minutes before. Empros minutes? Forward minutes? This insanity would be hard to get used to.
She gently rubbed her right shoulder, and Daniel understood why. “I’m sorry, Chloe, I believe I made a beginner’s mistake by repositioning your throwing arm. I hope I didn’t hurt you.” Mathieu remained mute regarding his part of the transgression.
She shrugged, still smiling. “A spasm, uh, like the muscle…” She made a motion with her fingers as if she were squeezing something.
“Contracts?” Daniel offered.
She nodded. “Little bit, yes. Contracts. On its own.”
“Really, I’m very sorry.” He felt ashamed, and not just because h
e had touched her without permission. He had also been a witness to Mathieu’s indiscretions. She would have no way of knowing what had happened during what, from her perspective, had been a blink of the eye.
“It’s okay.” She stopped rubbing, her arm apparently unhurt. Her eyes lit up. “Did you catch the ball?” Griffith stepped closer, his brow wrinkled.
“In a way, yes,” Daniel said. “Pretty easy, almost like the ball was waiting for me.” He grinned, and Chloe grinned back. The personal connection made him feel better.
Her eyes sparkled with enthusiasm. “Fun, yes?”
“Incredible. Remarkable. How is it that you haven’t announced this technology?”
“What?” asked Griffith, dumbfounded by their conversation.
“Oh, look,” Chloe said, twisting Griffith around and pointing to the rubber ball protruding from his back pocket.
Griffith reached around and pulled it out. “How’d it get there?” He held the ball up for inspection.
Chloe scowled at Mathieu, her look of scorn changing to a grudging smile. “Another game. This one a little bit nicer.”
Griffith wasn’t processing any of it. “Huh? Did I miss something?”
Chloe took the ball, held it at the tips of her fingers and pretended to grab it with the other hand, only to flip her wrist and hide the ball. She held out an empty hand under Griffith’s nose, a practiced demonstration of a magician’s sleight of hand.
She spoke to Griffith, her English mixed with hand motions. “You and I? We saw the ball disappear. Where did it go?” She pointed to Daniel.
“I plucked it out of the air,” Daniel explained. “Probably in less time than it took the photons to reach your eye. Did you see anything?”
Griffith still looked as perplexed as a fourth-grader examining college math on the blackboard. “Well, Chloe threw the ball to you. The light flashed. That’s it.” He felt his pants pocket. “I don’t get it.”
“I put it there,” Mathieu offered. “Daniel and I were gone for about five minutes. Flowing empros.”
Griffith’s brow lowered. “No. Really?”
“Yes,” said Chloe, beaming with excitement.
“Yes,” Daniel confirmed. Griffith seemed disturbed by this idea, but he didn’t have any further questions. A good sign he was coming around.
“They are telling you the truth, Agent Griffith,” said Zin, still sitting in a chair against the wall. He returned his phone to the pocket at his waist and joined the group. “And now that Dr. Rice has returned to ordinary time, I believe we should change the conversation.” He reached out to the lab workbench and lifted Becton’s leather belt.
“Your engineer in Florida did exceptionally well. I may have inadvertently given him one or two hints, but he produced much of this himself, mistakes and all. This circuit, in particular.” His finger hovered over a rectangular array of integrated circuit boards on one side of the belt. A needlelike probe extended from the tip of his finger to touch a metal connection point. A second later, the tiny probe retracted. “These electronics almost certainly manage time compression, though the circuitry lacks any safety overrides.”
“Then it is possible?” Mathieu asked. “Time compression?” Daniel had noticed the word as well, and it wasn’t the first time someone had explained that compression was the key to understanding a quantum technology.
Zin’s head bobbed up and down like a perfectly timed machine. “Now that compression has been discovered, I can explain further.” Zin stretched the belt to its full length while Mathieu and Chloe drew close like students gathering around the master. Daniel and Griffith stood a row behind.
“Will it compress forward time?” Mathieu asked, nodding to the belt. Chloe’s eyes were wide, echoing the question.
“Based on my circuitry analysis, almost certainly,” Zin said, “but we should test it to be sure.”
“Explain, please,” Griffith asked.
“I’d be happy to, Agent Griffith,” Zin said. Griffith looked a bit startled at his first conversation with an android, but most everyone had that reaction. “You see, flowing empros is what mathematicians call the trivial case. I don’t mean to say it’s unimportant, just that it’s the simplest form of time manipulation.”
Zin handed the belt to Mathieu and walked over to a white board hanging on one wall. “May I?” Mathieu nodded.
Zin examined the available marker colors, choosing green, and began drawing. “The first thing you must understand is that time is a frequency.” He drew a series of perfect sine waves and labeled the axis Forward with what looked like practiced calligraphy. He’d make a good graphic artist.
“What we experience as the flow of time is a physical wave with crests and troughs, essentially the ticks of the clock. We say that time passes, as this wave flows past us. What’s more, the wave of time has a natural frequency, set by the universe.”
Daniel held up a hand, but Zin waved him off. “Yes, yes. A frequency of time seems nonsensical because frequency, by definition, is cycles per unit of time. But what time? We must compare time against something else.” He paused, probably for effect, because the answer was obvious. “We need a second dimension of time, and that’s exactly what the universe provides. Humans call it empros, and once flowing in that direction, we can directly observe the frequency of forward time.”
He began another drawing, this one more elaborate than the first. He drew two sine waves in two colors, one wave greatly elongated.
“This is what we see when flowing empros, as Mathieu and Dr. Rice have just experienced.” He pointed to the green drawing, labeled Forward. “The forward frequency is stretched out while empros time flows at its natural rate. Forward hasn’t stopped flowing, but the vibration of its wave is too slow to feel.”
Mathieu chimed in. “Like a plucked string on a bass. The frequency can be too low to hear.” His calm expression matched Chloe’s, making it clear that Zin had already gone through this with them.
“Yes, your musical instruments make good comparisons. When plucked, a guitar or violin string produces a higher pitch than a bass. But for dimensions of time, the difference in frequency is far more extreme. While flowing empros, forward frequency has dropped by a factor of more than one billion.” Zin looked at Griffith, who hadn’t said anything yet. “Good so far?”
Griffith shrugged.
“I can slow down, if you wish,” Zin said.
“No, no,” Griffith answered. “Keep going. I’m sure Dr. Rice is getting more of this than I am.”
Daniel had no problem keeping up. In fact, his mind raced ahead to where Zin might be heading. Time compression had certainly caught the attention of Mathieu and Chloe.
Zin’s brow ridge lifted, mimicking that human are you ready for the big reveal look. “Time is more than just a wave with a frequency. Just like space, time has a fabric. A background that gives the flow its definition. We might say that time’s fabric is the shoreline of the river, or the hose connected to the fire hydrant to use Mathieu’s example. Without this fabric, how can a flow rate have meaning?”
Daniel nodded. “I see what you mean. Flow must be relative to a fixed background.” Daniel pointed to the graphs. “In a way, you’ve already drawn it. The axis of the graph.”
“Precisely, Dr. Rice,” Zin continued. He tapped the marking pen in his hand to the green arrow. “If you agree that time must have both a flow and a fabric, then I can now share the secret of compression.” He flicked his brow up and down several times. “I do enjoy sharing, though I’m only allowed once you have made the fundamental discoveries on your own.”
“The belt?” Chloe asked.
“Yes, I’ll use the belt as my excuse, though you have been on the brink of discovering compression here in this lab. Your test results from last week?”
“Ah, yes,” Chloe answered. “The fluctuations we observed when we changed polarity!”
“Yes, your experiment tapped into the fabric of time. Allow me to show you.” He picked up
the marking pens and started drawing once more.
“In this case, we’re still flowing empros, but we see a higher frequency for forward time. That’s compression. Forward ticks of the clock are now faster than normal. But how did we get that compression?” He looked around at blank stares from the physicists. Daniel didn’t know the answer either, but he was pretty sure they were all about to find out.
“It’s simple. Lower the frequency for empros. The frequency for forward must increase. The two dimensions of time are tied to each other. It’s the same as space, a subject you’ve already mastered. You even know the mathematical relationship.”
Mathieu snapped to attention. “The Spiegel formula! It also works for time?” The mathematical formula had become famous, just as Nala had predicted a year before. It precisely related expansion and compression but so far had only been used in the science of four-dimensional space.
“It does,” Zin said. “Time is the same as space. Your Dr. Einstein was quite correct when he created the term space-time. Many of the most advanced scientists in the galaxy believe that time and space are two aspects of the same phenomenon.”
“You’re saying that with the Spiegel formula, we can compress forward time to anything we want?” Mathieu asked. “Bring the future closer to us?”
Zin looked like a proud father. He was clearly enjoying the interaction that came with his lesson. “Some call it jumping to the future, but your description is more accurate. Once compressed, the future comes to you. Instantly, I might add.”
“Like a thirty-second skip forward button on a video player?” Mathieu asked.
“Yes, exactly. Tweak empros just a little and you’ll see dramatic compressions of future time. Jump a day, a week, or many years. Whatever you want. It’s quite easy to control once you understand the mathematics. Any calculator could give you the precision to jump to almost any future date.”
There was such a calculator rigged to Becton’s belt, and it included a numeric keypad. Daniel tuned out the others as the details of this unlikely mission fell into place. Like quantum space, compression was the key—the crown jewel, as Nala had pointed out more than a year ago. Compression, as Nala had said, opened doors. If Zin was correct, time was the same, and a door leading to the future was now wide open.
The Quantum Series Box Set Page 68