In the Courts of the Sun (27 page)

Glossolepis incisus
I’d named Generoso, and how starting one morning it grew all spiky and belligerent and killed the other male rainbowfish and then the females and then died itself, about things that not only hadn’t I thought about in years, but that I maybe hadn’t thought about between the time they happened and today. Oddly, they all seemed to play out backward, and out of sequence with each other, and then later on they’d happen forward again, as though they were first being defragmented and then rewound and assigned to new positions on my hard drive, and then replayed, and a few times I was so out of it that I almost thought I might be the one, that is, the one of me who would find himself back there, stuck in the late seventeenth century, and here I was hoping and even praying to deities that were both evil and nonexistent that it wouldn’t be me, let it not be me who goes, let me be the one who stays here, because if I were the other one, I wouldn’t be coming back.

[20]

M
aybe I should clarify that just a little.
You know how when, say, Kirk or Bones or whoever goes through the teleporter, he’s copied and disintegrated here and then the information beam goes to wherever and he’s reintegrated over there out of available local atoms, and you tend to think, wait, why disintegrate your captain when you don’t have to? Why not just skip that step and integrate him over there anyway? Then there’d be two Kirks and one of them could stay on the bridge. In fact, who cares about teleportation when you’ve got duplication? Why not make a whole bunch of Kirks so every ship in the Starfleet Command could have one? Well, in a way you could say that the Kerr Space Project system made use of that very principle. That is, when I was lying on that cot with the thing on my head, it didn’t disintegrate me, or zap me out of my head, or even put me to sleep, any more than taking a picture of me would have. Despite all the stims and whatever psychotropics I had in my system, I was awake and conscious and even thinking relatively clearly. I didn’t feel a thing.
Or maybe it would be better to say that the “I” that happened to stay, the one who was still here after the picture was taken—that “I” didn’t feel a thing. But the picture itself—a much less lucky version of Jed DeLanda—would be like the hypothetical second Kirk, the one who ended up down on the planet’s surface and had to deal with the Romulans or whoever. The less lucky Jed would be trapped in the body of a withering, pustuled crone. Shit. Supposedly, dying of smallpox is pretty painful. Maybe they’d give her some opium. No, probably not. That other Jed is
so
screwed, I thought. Sorry, Other Jed. But we have to do this.
Of course, in the interim stage, that other Jed would just be a pattern, without any way to be aware of itself. It was just a code written with a special protocol, the P of CTP, which had originally been developed by the Human Cognome Project and which was in some ways similar to a high-level assembler. In fact, since the code was transmitted digitally, you could say that it was a number, a number with more than a trillion digits, but still just an integer like any other.
Over the course of six hours the EEG/MEG scanner would take a 3-D movie of the behavior of my brain in action, trillions of electrical and chemical events more or less triggered by the Q&A. Neurons generate voltage spikes at distinctive rates, and chemical reactions release measurable bursts of heat and infrared. Every one of these microevents would go through source-analysis software and get triangulated to a specific location. Then it would get tagged and sorted by location, strength, and time and—out in one of the boxes in the hall—it would be integrated into a mathematical space that would overlay the electrophysiologic signalling onto a matrix of biochemical and metabolic information. Finally, this-all would be coded into a data stream. The code, presumably, would represent everything that I thought of as myself, the Alps-size grab bag of memories and attitudes and habits of calculation and rationalizing and multiple and contradictory self-images and everything else that creates the illusion of selfhood—which is, take it from me, definitely no more than an illusion, and not always a convincing one. Then all those roughly two hundred trillion bits of information that made up my consciousness—or my id and ego, or let’s just call it my SOS, my Sense of Self—all of that flowed through a pair of heavily shielded 2.4-gigahertz signal boosters—the things that looked like speakers—and over parallel fiber-optic cables through the hallway, up a little back stair, and out into a small transmission dish on the rectory roof. The dish bounced my SOS off a Spartacus Intercellular Communications satellite—retasked through unimaginable Pentagon connections—to a relay station near Mexico City. From there it went via ordinary data transmission satellites to the Very High Speed Superconducting Supercollider, a new accelerator ring with a 14.065-kilometer circumference, which, according to the briefing, was near CERN, on the French/Swiss border. The data went into a bank of hard drives in the collider compound, which together could store about six hundred trillion bits.
This was a lot less, though, than the total of roughly four hundred quadrillion bits that would come out of my head over six hours. So we’d run into the problem of storage. In fact, there wasn’t yet enough computer memory on the planet to hold all the data. You’d need over twenty billion five-hundred-gig hard drives. Part of the problem was simply that it was digital and not analog. The only device with enough room was another human brain. And the brain we were interested in had shriveled into crumbs a long time ago. So we’d have to catch it when it was still working.
Now, as I’m sure you know, over the last century, and especially over the last decade or so, there’s been an awful lot of loose talk about time travel. Maybe it’s because people are getting used to certain long-percolating sci-fi forecasts finally coming true. With all the brilliant and personable computers, with all the space tourism, nanobot surgeons, with all the world’s books, music, and video right in your pocket, with all the wet artificial life, invisibility panels, cryonics, teledildonics, and glow-in-the-dark Labradoodles, people assume that someone must also be close to cracking the time thing. It’s no wonder there have been so many scientific frauds about it. It’s like alchemy in the Middle Ages. Back then it was like, “Sure, give me a thousand copper Soldos and I’ll turn them into 0.99 gold by Saint Whitlough’s Day.” Now it’s “Give us another billion and we’ll have Cleopatra in your office in time for your IPO.”
Unfortunately, time’s actually a bit of a tougher nut. Or rather, the past is. It’s easy to go into the future, even with current cryonics. But going the other way you run up against two big problems.
The first one, of course, is the grandfather paradox. For a while, the main way people tried to get around it was by positing parallel universes. You could go into your past and do anything you wanted—even including killing your grandfather—and your future there would be different from the future you’d come from, and everybody’d be happy. But there are problems with this. For instance, if you have all those universes to choose from, why not just go to a parallel universe where everything is great—where, say, you bought Google in ’04, milk chocolate has one calorie per ounce, and Bill O’Reilly never existed? But the biggest problem is it’s not the case. That is, according to the best current theory and the best experimental evidence, there is not an infinite number of universes out there. And even if there were, you couldn’t get to any of them. Energy from now that radiates out of black holes in the past comes out in our past, not in an infinite number of pasts. And even if this isn’t the only universe, the number of actual universes is still probably rather small. Which still doesn’t mean this one is special, of course. When we were going over this in one of the briefings, Marena said, “It’s like how there was only one episode of
Chic Chesbro,
but it still wasn’t any good.” Although none of us, including me, got the reference. Taro put it a little better. He said that the line around physics departments was “Multiple universes: cheap on theory, expensive on universes.” That is, when you can’t get some equation to zero out, you can always just say, “Oh, the remainder must have just gone into some other universe.” Not only is this a cop out, but eventually, somebody always solves those equations without it. So the polycosmic dream is fading.
The other big problem with time travel is that anything you send back runs about a 100-percent risk of spaghettification. More specifically, it’s not too much of a problem finding or even making a black hole. And in a black hole, energy goes back in time all the time. Or more specifically, time’s passage inside it isn’t clearly related to how it passes for the rest of the universe, and in fact it tends to go backward, which is why black holes eventually evaporate. Right now there’s energy from the distant future spewing out of singularities not all that far from earth. Not that it does us any good. But the point is that even though it’s not prohibitively difficult to drop something into a black hole and have it automatically spew out at some point in our past, it will emerge hopelessly crushed at the atomic level, and often converted into pure energy. This means that ordinarily, you can’t send information. You could drop in an encyclopedia, but all you’d get, back in the past, would be a lot of heat and light, signifying nothing.
However—however, however—you can send something that’s nothing, that is, that doesn’t have mass. You can send energy.
At the Superconducting Supercollider, the raw data stream of my SOS got processed into an information-rich wave map. This also compressed the signal, collapsing the distance between the waves, so that the information that was taking hours to download today would take less than forty seconds to blast out on the other end. A gamma gun shot a stream of energy based on the wave pattern into the Kerr space path, an imaginary perfect circle at the center of the collider’s torus. The stream traveled around the ring about six hundred thousand times, accelerating to the point where its centrifugal force made it spin off from the ring and into the tangential tunnel, where there was a new electromagnetic installation specially designed to create and suspend miniature Krasnikovian wormholes.
It had already been four years since the gang at the Large Hadron Collider announced that they’d created a microscopic black hole. Creating a wormhole is a similar process, but in some ways it’s easier. Black holes have event horizons, which are nothing but trouble. Wormholes don’t. Wormholes have two mouths—and you need both of them—but black holes only have one. And to keep a black hole around for any decent amount of time, especially anywhere near the surface of earth, you’d need several sun’s worths of energy.
The care and feeding of a wormhole is much easier. But even for an ordinary wormhole—if one can call it that—you still need advanced engineering and a lot of power. Your basic hole, say the Schwarzschild type, in a space-time
R
²
×
S
²
, looks something like
ds
²
= - (1 -
r
_s
/
r
)
dt
²
+ (1 -
r
_s
/
r
) - 1
dr
²
+
r
²
d
Ω
²
, that is, when Ω is your density parameter and where
r
_s
= 2
G M
/
c
²
, and
d
Ω
²
=
d
θ
²
+ sin
²
d
ϕ
²
. And of course
M
is the molecular mass,
G
is the gravitational constant,
ϕ
is the angle,
r
is the radius, and
d
is the distance. So anyway, if you tweak at it for a little while, you can see that its throat has huge tidal forces on it, and without a lot of opposing energy, it’s going to collapse. Really it’s just part of a black hole/white hole system. But the Krasnikov variety has a Kerr metric of
ds
²
= Ω
²
(ξ)[-
d
τ
²
+
d
ξ
²
+
K
²
(ξ)(
d
θ
²
+ sin
²
θ
d
ϕ
²
)], where Ω and
K
are smooth positive even functions and
K
=
K
0cosξ/
L
at ξ
∈
(-
L
,
L
),
K
₀
≡
K
(0), and
K
is constant at large ξ. So it’s very, very stable. It’s static, it satisfies the weak energy condition, it doesn’t need exotic matter, and it’s spherically symmetric. In fact, at first it doesn’t even look like a wormhole, but if you transform the coordinates as
r
≡
B
^-1
Ω
₀
exp
B
ξ, with
t
≡
B
τ
r
, then you can make it as flat as you want by just increasing the size of
r
. And you can fold that into a usable wormhole with a length of Ω
₀
L
and a throat radius of min(Ω
K
). Of course, to make it wide enough for, say, a space pod to get through, you’d still have to throw a few planets in the fusion stove. But a very tiny version doesn’t take a huge amount of energy to make, or to hold onto—that is, to keep it from sinking into the core of earth. The narrowest point of our baby was only a bit wider than a hydrogen atom. But as long as it was a bit wider than a single photon, information could still get through. The pulsed gamma beams—although actually they were made of a lot of different wavelengths, some of them more in the spectrum of hard x-rays than gamma rays, but let’s stick with calling them gamma beams because it sounds so retro-Cold War-space-operatic—would focus down into the wormhole’s mouth, converge at its throat, and then spread out at an angle that would bathe Sor Soledad’s little room in a movie of my mind.
But even with all that, just because of quantum fluctuations, it would take more energy than the SSC could muster to keep a hole that size open for longer than a few microseconds. So the lab’s biggest insight was that you didn’t have to do that. You could just create a new wormhole in the same “place,” so to speak. Or, more specifically, along the same predictable curve on the Cauchy hypersurface. And then you’d make another and another. The gamma beams that would encode my consciousness would be phased to enter each of the series of holes, and when they came out the other end, they’d be lined up at the right point behind us on the space-time curve, that is, in the past.
Actually, the trickier part was the next stage, that is, working out the angles. A
₂
, who despite working for Taro had a degree in experimental physics from Pohang University of Science and Technology, said that it had taken more man-hours to get working than all the other elements of the Kerr space system put together.
If you just sit still, at the end of a minute you’ll have moved about 85,000 miles from the point in the universe you started from. So if the beam encoding my SOS emerged in the past at the same place it started, it would come out in the middle of nowhere, somewhere roughly midway between the sun and Alpha Draconis. So a little tweaking was a must. Of course, our GPS sent our exact position to the Swiss team, so where we were now wasn’t a problem. But they also had to extrapolate our location into the past, to identify the point in space-time where most or at least many of the atoms in this room would have been exactly 170,551,508 minutes ago.
This requires fine-tuning to about 1 part in 10
³²
. And of course the data on where earth was doesn’t go back that far. Even using old eclipse records and whatever other astronomical archives they could find, the cone of accuracy for AD 664 was way, way too large. And of course the sun also moves. Just like the earth, it shrinks and inflates. It jiggles around its plasmic core. It gets buffeted by meteors and cosmic winds. So for beyond-astronomical precision they’d had to zero in the transmission largely by trial and error. They’d started by blasting energy into the center of a big block of freshly cut wood sitting on a lab table in a basement room. They’d angle the beam so that it would emerge five minutes ago—which is already in outer space, in fact a few thousand miles behind where it is now—and the gamma beams would shake up the carbon isotopes in the center of the block so that they’d decay just a little more quickly than the ones on the surface. When they’d gotten that right they started aiming for further back in the past and directing the beam at sections of well-dated historical buildings in old mining towns and abandoned pueblos around Bryce Canyon, blasting the conjectured position with enough radiation to turn the uranium 238 in the foundations halfway to lead, drilling out samples, testing them, usually coming up empty, and trying it again a few feet away on the building’s foundation and a few million miles forward or back, in the path of earth through space. The calculations were fraught with tricksome variables. Even earth’s internal motion, which you’d think wouldn’t be a lot, had turned out to be a bitch. As you probably know, it’s gooey down there, and that causes wobbles in the rotation that can be very close to random. And even if you had that licked you had to take into account things like continental drift, erosion, changes in absolute land level versus the core of earth, orbital slips caused by passing comets, and a hundred other things. And there were similar problems with the spin of the sun and the Milky Way galaxy. Still, over the last two years they’d drawn a tight picture of where our planet was in the past, extending an imaginary helical track from the surface of earth out into space, out of the solar system, out of the Milky Way galaxy, and far back toward the center of our expanding universe.
Luckily, the other end of our wormhole didn’t have to travel that far. They didn’t need to load it on a spaceship and truck it out to Vega or wherever. It could stay here, right on earth with us, and from here it could be angled so that the energy they put into it emerged in different positions in space, the same way it could come out at different positions in time. In fact, the whole project had originally gotten started, way back in 1988, as part of a NASA space-travel program. Since the nineties Warren had been continuing the research, working more on the time angle. As of today, the program—which was still housed at one of the big Ames Research Center servers in Mountain View, California—could tell you how to hit any given spot on earth’s surface at an exact second centuries ago. It was like shooting an arrow into the air and hitting the eye of a Tralfamadorian wasp on the far side of Titan. But assuming it all worked, the stream of data would emerge at the right point in space at the right time in the past, in this case, in Sor Soledad’s cell, three days before her death. Taro’s assistant A
₂
had done a whiteboard sketch of the concept for the last presentation to Boyle that made it all look pretty straightforward: