Here & There (27 page)

It was one of our bimonthly Trailblazer Idea Harvest Sessions, a required “creative” experience that felt more like its acronym: a backward SHIT. It’s not that I had forgotten about the meeting, it’s that it wasn’t even on my radar. There I was, sitting at my workstation, doing yet another Google search on the works of Eve Tassat, when I looked up and realized Lorelei was standing next to me, waiting for an answer to some question I didn’t hear.

“You all right there, Tri-Me?”

That was her specific variation on my office nickname, the Trinity of Me. I was always a tad sheepish around her. It’s not that I was intimidated or anything like that, it’s just that most of the time, she found me amusing. Which normally would be a plus, right? Except with her, I was never trying to amuse. No matter how many stops I pulled out, she just sifted through my bag of tricks and inspected them all with a quaint detachment, like you might while looking at tchotchkes in an antique toy store.

None of this would be a problem really if it weren’t for the fact that she was the kind of a girl who made a skirt suit look better than lingerie. She knew it too. The bizarre thing was, it wasn’t in any stuck up sort of way, just an understanding that
yes, this is the way things are, yeah she knows how she affects men
(and women), and then she’d shrug with a sort of can-we-please-get-on-with-this-now manner. And for whatever
reason, she’s taken a shine to me. Like at one point she just decided I’m ok, I’m going to be her buddy, and then just told me,
come on buddy, we’re going for a drink
. I have no idea why. My only clue is that when we’re drinking and she’s complaining about this investment banker boyfriend who took her paintballing or that trust fund baby who flew her to New Orleans for crawdaddies, she always rolls her eyes and smacks my arm with the back of her hand and says something like,
You’d’ve gotten a real kick out of it, Tri-Me, grinding away at his organ not even realizing he’s the dancing monkey.

The arm smack cues me to nod and laugh, and say something about how they just don’t realize that artifice and architecture are the same things. All the while, I’m just wondering how she got her hair to be as shiny and lustrous as they make it look in commercials. It always smelled really good too, even in a dive bar. Like some jasmine-gardenia hybrid.

“You look like shit, partner,” she said, still standing over me at my desk.

“I just haven’t been sleeping much.”

“For good reasons or bad?”

I gave her something back like you know me, or hard to tell the difference. I wanted to tell her all about my mother, her disappearance, the report. I wanted to take her to the carriage house and show her and then go to some bar and talk it out over a couple dozen pints. She’d nod. She’d rest a sympathetic hand on my shoulder. A connection would start to buzz, like when you throw up the ancient light switch in a big industrial space. She’d tell me something like she knows just what I need. And she’d take me back to her place, lay me down on her couch, and rest my head on her lap. She’d run her fingers through my hair, and we’d just talk until I drifted off.

And I’d stop feeling alone, sensing the warmth of her thighs beneath my head.

In real life, she guided me down the hall into our glass-walled conference room, whispering something to me about how frustrated the top dogs were getting with redundant innovations. I think I made a joke about them being out-ovations. I don’t know, it’s all a blur.

The only thing that really stuck out was her sitting next to me. I swear I could feel her body heat radiating outward.

The bosses were railing against us becoming stagnant. Something about sharks and how if they don’t keep moving they die. Ideas were tossed out and quickly crushed like cheap beer cans.

I was off obsessing about Reidier and Eve and the bookend
Thinkers
. She found bookends, I found a book. A tome, really. A consciousness trapped in the words. It’s the last thing I have of Mom.

A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.

A woman, too. Hilary’s essence is similarly locked up in her words,
pinging out an image of the Reidiers. She’s in there in the echoes of the Psynar
^®
. The problem is, I’m losing myself trying to find her.

Lorelei’s voice pinged me out of my own darkness. She was taking a swing at knocking Anomaly out of its doldrums. The top dogs tore it up with a lot of howling about thinking in and out of the box and all we were doing was getting boxed in.

“Why don’t we just throw out the fucking box?” I blurted out.

The room went still.

I don’t know what had spurred me into motion. Probably some chivalrous impulse to step between Lorelei and the rocks she was getting tossed against. Or just frustration against the unimpeded flow of uninspiring bullshit. Or maybe I was sleep deprived.

It got their attention though.

They asked me to expand on my idea. I didn’t really have one, so that’s when I dropped the Einstein quote about reality and math, math and reality. I was buying time, but it caused an honest-to-God hullabaloo.

I had them. Just didn’t know what I had them in.

Before I knew it, I was off and running about dedicating our powers and skills to conjure up a reality about nothing. A non-product. An illusion of a mirage. We’ll call it
Chameleon
. And, well, you pretty much know the rest.

I’m getting good at asking “what if?”

The class laughs again.

“So, teleportation, the moving of matter from one place to another. A long-imagined dream of humanity. How do we travel without traveling? There are essentially three fairly straightforward methodologies.”

“Method one is the most popular version, i.e. the
Star Trek
version. It entails transforming all of the matter that is you into energy, transmitting that energy to a specific, distant location, and then reconstituting that energy into the matter that is you.

“The second is more Harry Potter–esque. It would require tearing a hole through several dimensions of space at your location all the way to your desired location and then simply pushing you through it.

“Makes going through security at the airport a lot more appealing, eh?”

More laughter.

“The third method involves a process more akin to replication. It involves scanning your person, destroying the original you, transmitting that information, and reconstructing ‘you’ at a distant location.

“So of these three, the first one is utter hogwash. While matter and energy are indeed two sides of the same coin, as dictated by E = mc
²
, once matter is transformed into energy, it can no longer maintain the various properties of matter, i.e. ordered structure and patterns. It is structure and patterns that make you you, rather than just a lump of carbon and hydrogen. While one might conceivably be able to transform your energy back into matter, it would not be pretty.

“The dimensional-hole option is also a dead end since all we’ve been able to do is theorize about the existence of other dimensions. Furthermore, traveling through the multiverse would expose our three-dimensional, this-universe selves to a myriad of respective physical laws within each parallel universe that would most certainly annihilate us, or at least distort us in uncomfortable ways.”

An unintelligible question from a student.

“Maybe it’s a universe without the weak nuclear force, requiring the modification of several constants that we’ve grown accustomed to. Or one where quarks have different masses, so that neutrons became heavier than protons, resulting in the negation of any carbon-or oxygen-based life form, i.e. us. Or perhaps the quark mass adjustment would result in the proton being heavier than the neutron, negating the possibility of the basic hydrogen atom. Anyhow, you see the complications with that mode of travel.
*

*
Not even remotely, but I’m taking this guy’s word for it. This was a class for nonmajors?!

“Which leaves us with option number three, the most promising means of teleportation, or as I like to call it, Tele-fax-ation.”

The class let out a fairly large laugh this time. Most likely this had less to do with the humor and more to do with releasing some of
the communal stress that had been built up, considering the contortionistic logistics of traveling through the multiverse.

“So, how do we do it?”

Reidier opened his hands outward to his audience, inviting suggestions. None came.

“As with all of our seeming sci-fi conundrums the solution is pretty straightforward—at least in theory.”

Reidier raised his eyebrows conspiratorially. He pulled a remote out of his tweed pocket and started the slide show presentation. Slide 1 read
5 Steps from Here to There
.

Next slide,
Step 1: Communication
.

“The first thing we need is a reliable means of communicating. There are several important factors wrapped up into this . . .”

Next slide,
Bandwidth, Speed, & Security
.

“The holy trinity of web surfing.”

Reidier paused for the laughter. Next, an image of da Vinci’s
Vitruvian Man
.

“Why bandwidth? As I’m sure you know, an image of a person, like, say, a digital photograph, takes up a lot of memory. A video of them even more. Imagine how much information is in the whole shebang. Anyone care to venture a guess as to how many atoms make up the average one-hundred-and-fifty-four-pound human body?”

Sporadic numbers leapt out of the darkness, a hundred million, a billion, ten billion, a billion billion.

“The average human body, which is 99 percent hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon is made up of over seven thousand trillion atoms.”

Next slide, a model of an atom, nucleus and orbiting electrons.

“Inside we also have electrons, protons, neutrons which yield twenty-six thousand trillion trillion total interacting particles inside each of us. Not to mention electrical patterns in our musculature and brain waves. Clearly we’ll need a lot of bandwidth.”

A slide of the cartoon image of the Road Runner.

“Next up, speed. We all want our internet connections faster and faster, it only makes sense we’d want our teleportation quick as well. With this technology, however, it’s not only preferable but crucial. Obviously with teleportation we want to ‘beam’ you from point A over at least a somewhat significant distance to point B. The longer it takes, the more information is lost.

“Right now we can transmit at the speed of light. So if we were to teleport someone from here to say Cape Town, it would take just under half a second.”

The class laughs.

“Doesn’t seem like that big a delay, does it? But let’s say we wanted to go from here to the top of Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain on Mars, assuming we are in the closest orbit.”

A slide of a photograph of what looks like an irritated red wart, until the photo zooms in a little to transform the wart into a huge mountain jutting out of the massive rust-colored landscape of Mars.

“That trip would take over four minutes. And while that might not seem like a long trip, timewise, consider the mode of transport. Depending on how we actually build our scanning system, the you that is teleported is actually missing four minutes of existence or is four minutes out of sync with your time frame. After a couple tele-ports, the effects would add up. Is that travel time now acceptable?”

Reidier casts an inquisitive glance out to the class. Only sounds of bodies shifting in seats echo back to him.

“Agreed. So, for our teleportation machine, we will require a mode of instantaneous communication. And that brings us to our last necessity of our communication technology: security.”

On the screen, familiar green numbers trickle down as seen in
The Matrix
.

“If our communication isn’t perfectly secure, someone could either hack our transmission and redirect our transported essence, duplicate our transported essence, or, even worse, alter our transported
essence with a literal and virtual virus. Identity theft would take on a whole new, more literal meaning.

“Contemporary security systems all rely on classical physics which allows, at least in principle, any physical properties to be measured without disturbing them. But if we were to encode our transmission in measurable physical properties of some signal, then we open ourselves up to undetectable tampering. In order to avoid this, we’ll need to utilize something called quantum cryptography. As much as I’d love to get into that with you, I think I’d be forced to forfeit the status of gut course from my curriculum classification.”

A few snickers.

A slide pops up that reads,
Step 2: Scanning
. “Obviously we’re all familiar with scanners and the basics of how they work, or at least what they do. Take an image, divvy it up into pixel-size quantities, digitize the information, and voilà. So all we would need is a three-dimensional version of this.”

Up comes a slide of a cartoon of a man being sandwiched into a flatbed scanner.

“Furthermore, it would need to be capable of measuring and organizing a good chunk more than just the twenty-six thousand trillion trillion total interacting particles inside each of us, but also whatever information we need to describe them: momentum, location, spin, et cetera.”

A student pipes up, “So this alterative is like just as unrealistic as the other two.”

“Well, there are some tricks available to us. For instance, hydrogen atoms are fairly fungible. One hydrogen atom is just as good as the next, it doesn’t really matter where exactly the electron is inside of it at any given moment. As long as we get all the intermolecular dynamics lined up right, we could compress that number significantly. We could even possibly go more macro and use anatomy models for organs and such to fill in the blanks as problems arise
with anomalies. Either way, at least the body is manageable. The brain might require us to stay a little more detail oriented.