Love Story: In The Web of Life (5 page)

I walked back to my office still a little bit
stunned.

Zaza greeted me with, "Patty told me the news.
You're unemployed!"

That made me despair.

"I am going to the desert for a couple of days.
You can call me anytime out there," I said. "You forgot your
briefcase," said Zaza as I walked to the entrance.

When I walked into my apartment, I checked my
phone for voicemail. I pressed the play code and heard Tina's
voice:

"Thanks for the flowers. I called to thank you
on your cell phone with no answer, and then I tried at your office.
Your secretary said you had just left, and she didn't know when you
would be back. I asked whether you were on a business trip. All she
said is 'No.' She sounded very abrupt. Is everything
OK?"

'That's Zaza,' I thought. I must have missed
the cell call while I was in the parking garage. I knew that Tina
was in class today, so I called her home phone and left a message,
explaining that I had finished a case, was taking a few days off,
and everything was fine.

On the way to the desert, I felt very alone and
uncertain. I wished Tina had come with me. Zaza was right, 'I am
unemployed.' Fortunately, I still draw a salary. Settling a case is
like landing on a dry lake, stopping short.

It was just beginning to get dark when I got to
CrystalAire. I parked the car and got my bag from the trunk.
Glancing at the sky, I said to myself, 'Good evening, Hesperus!'
Most people referred to the evening star as Venus. I like the Greek
male version, Hesperus, because he is the leader of the stars as
they march into the evening sky, obviously a great leader with that
many followers, He has great organizational powers and gets
everyone in place in the clear desert sky. I wondered if he was on
Facebook.

It was already chilly. I hurried into the
mobile home, put my bag in the bedroom, and went to the closet to
get a down jacket, choosing the lighter one of two. I kept the
warmer down jacket in a plastic wardrobe bag, bathed in the aroma
of cedar chips and sage in the bottom of the bag, placed there to
hide the scent of whoever had worn the jacket last, lately
Tina.

I poured myself a brandy, went out onto the
patio with the view of the desert, sat down in one of the white
plastic chairs, put my feet up on a table, rocked back and looked
at the zillions of stars in the clear desert sky. Despair was my
only companion.

"Space-time," I said to myself, "there is a lot
of it out there. Spaces are measured in millions of light-years.
Time is measured in billions of years." I remembered that
Einstein's theory of relativity and space-time had first been
supported by measuring the bending of light from a distant star as
it passed the sun during an eclipse. 'I don't see how there is a
patent law case in the subject,' I said to myself.

I felt lonely.

I called Tina on my cell phone. She answered,
and I said, "Hi, Tina, I am calling you from the desert. How are
you doing?"

"Oh, thank you for the flowers. They are
beautiful, my favorite kind; they were there when I got home from
school."

I wondered what Zaza had sent.

Tina continued, "How is the weather out there?
I got your message about taking a few days off. Is settling the
case bad? You sound sort of down."

"It is beautiful, cold, and clear." I replied.
"Settling a case is good–at least for the client–but I won't get to
go to trial. That's where I really have my fun. Now, I get to start
all over with a new client."

"More heavy scientific stuff?" Tina asked and
then answered she, "Of course, that's what you do."

I sensed the cold tone in her voice. I asked,
"Any chance you might like to visit the desert again?"

"I really can't right now; my
end–of–school–year testing and grading, and my night school
courses, will keep me buried until the end of the term," she
replied stiffly. "There is someone at the door; I have to go now.
Say hello to the kangaroo rats for me. Goodbye."

I felt deflated. I would have to start over in
that department also.

"Too bad," I thought, 'Tina was fun to be with,
unless she was talking nonsense about metaphysical things. No
long-term future there.’

I sat quietly for a few minutes, just Hesperus
and me, and watched his followers deploy. 'Hesperus, does your life
ever come apart,' I wondered.

Then, I heard, "Good
evening
(as you believe time to exist), we are
happy to be able to communicate with you again."

I thought, 'Oh, no. I don't need this
now.'

It was Uriel, I looked around and saw a
sandstone boulder that the landscapers had placed near the patio.
It had a bright spark of light on the side of it. "Congratulations
on the settlement of your patent case," said Uriel.

"How do you know about that?" I asked, somewhat
intimidated.

"For now, we shall only say that we could see
it coming when we last communicated. It was a probable
future."

"I believed wining the case was a certainty. I
have to believe that when I am working on a case," I
rebutted.

"That's the way it works," Uriel's sound
continued, "
Belief causes a probable
future to manifest.
We will get to that
later."

I was surprised. I was starting to feel that
talking to a speck of light and an extra-dimensional intelligence
was a natural thing to do. This time it couldn't be a
dream.

"I have been sitting here looking at the stars
and thinking about space-time," I interrupted, "That subject is
about black holes, the Big Bang, galaxies, mathematics that few
understand, not anything I am trained or interested in. It is too
abstract for my thinking."

"You have correctly identified the problem,"
said Uriel. "Space and time in the sense of the cosmos are
incomprehensible to all but a few of your species. Let's talk about
space and time in terms of what you call a movie film.

"There is a story recorded on the frames of the
film. Suppose that story starts with a man looking at the stars in
a desert, then moves to a woman talking to him on the telephone, in
Los Angeles, then moves back to the man in the desert, then to a
restaurant, where he has dinner. The next day he travels back to
his office, the story ends with the man returning to the same
desert where he talks to a speck of light. When the movie film in
on the reel, stored in the movie company's vault, there is no time
or space in the movie. On the film, frames in the desert looking at
the stars come first and the frames of the woman in LA are next,
and the frames of the restaurant are next etc. There is no physical
time, there is only a sequence of film frames: there is only
timing; some things happen before others."

"I can understand that," I replied. "When
someone projects the film, there is the illusion of
time."

"Correct!" Said Uriel. "The illusion of time is
only in the story. The director might have shot the film out of
sequence, shooting the office scene first then shooting all the
desert scenes, shooting in the restaurant, and then shooting the
woman on the telephone. The timing of scenes was made in the
editing room."

"OK," I said, "time is an illusion in movies.
What has that to do with reality?"

"Let's switch the metaphor," continued Uriel,
"On your planet, there is something that we are amazed by, it is
called YouTube. People make videos of something of interest to
them, then add keywords, and upload it to 'the cloud' of all
YouTube videos. 'The cloud' is not in a single physical space. As
in the movie I described before; the video may have had only the
illusion of time. Anyone can search for the videos by keywords or
by the address and watch them. YouTube is a space-time system where
you can watch a video taken at a give place, such as a corner near
the World Trade Center, which is the spatial dimension, and at a
particular time, nine o'clock on September 11, 2001, the time
dimension."

"I understand about YouTube," I said, "and I
guess it is a space-time system."

"That is the way reality works!" Uriel said.
"Think of what you call reality as something like YouTube. Lets
call it R-Tube. Everything that someone thought was important is in
the, let us say, R-cloud."

I said to myself, 'I must be logical and
scientific about this. I had a patent case involving the Internet
one time.

The videos on YouTube exist physically. They
are data bits on servers distributed around the world in data
centers.'

"Uriel." I said, "Where is the R-cloud in
physical reality?"

"This is where the metaphor breaks down.
Time does not really exist: it is only a
coordinate in space-time.
The physical things
happening are not stored, they are all happening as what you would
call 'at once.' For example, at the space coordinates you know on
your planet as 40° 42' 45" N / 74° 0' 54" W, you are at the New
York location of the World Trade Center. At the earth time
coordinate, nine o'clock on September 11, 2001, the building is
being destroyed. Change the earth time coordinate to August 12,
1964, and the World Trade Center is under construction. At those
coordinates, everything is going on according to what you
understand as your four-dimensional scientific laws of physics–what
you are taught in your universities.

"
Reality as you know
it exists is an eight-dimensional space-time.
The
first four coordinates pertain to the four-dimensional scientific
laws of physics. 'Information' exists in eight-dimensions. Those
eight-dimensions include the four of physics.

"Using the YouTube metaphor, one might say that
the physical stuff in the video, as it is taken, obeys the laws of
physics. If the video is of a cat doing something cute, everything
in the scene obeys the laws of physics, for instance gravity,
according to four-dimensional space-time. The video that is
uploaded to the YouTube cloud is
information
. You can turn the picture
upside–down and have the cat fall upward in that video. The video
cat doesn't have to obey the laws of physics.

"We realize this is all very new to you. You
need to find out about eight-dimensional physics, known on your
planet as '
complex eight–dimensional
Minkowski space.
'" Uriel's voice trailed off. The
spark of light on the boulder disappeared.

"Wait!" I said. It was too late. 'Why is he
telling me all this?' I wondered.

I was confused, bewildered. I went back into
the kitchen and poured myself another brandy. Back out to the
patio, Hesperus had everyone organized in space-time. I
wasn't.

The first light of dawn was just breaking when
I awoke, still musing about my contact with Uriel, wondering why I
was involved in this, pondering the scientific logic of the whole
contact. I made a cup of coffee, put on my parka, and started a
walk out into the desert to clear my head.

It had been cold during the night, and all the
cacti and sagebrush were covered by a fine coat of silvery frost,
glittering in the first rays of the dawn sunlight. I scared up a
long–eared rabbit that dashed away in jagged hops. The sun came up
suddenly, and I felt the heat on my face. Frost evaporated. The new
day was here. My head cleared as I viewed the hundred miles of
desert to the North. Sunlight on the dark buttes and distant
mountains spread down from the peaks to the valleys.

California City is eighty miles to the North,
at the southern foot of the Sierras. In land area it is the third
largest city in California, a dream of a developer in the 1960s,
and boom years for Southern California. During that time,
developers were buying worthless tracks of desert land, subdividing
them, grading grids of roads, advertising, and selling lots on the
promised it was the site of the next land boon. California City was
laid out with streets, cul-de-sacs, a lake, and 52,000 lots in its
master plan. It didn't boom. Some bought lots and then sold them to
other suckers. Many lots are now in estates of the departed, with
the beneficiaries having no idea what to do with them. Today fewer
than 15,000 people live there, mostly employed by the declining
Edwards Air Force Base, or at the nearby privately–operated prison,
which is having trouble making ends meet. California City should be
considered a tourist spot, a modern wonder, a ruin of gigantic
proportions, not of crumbling buildings, but a ruin of lost dreams,
gullibility, and greed.

These lost–dream developments are sometimes a
glider pilot's salvation as a landing spot in an otherwise
vegetation–covered landscape. One time, I landed in a one-mile long
street, bulldozed out of the raw desert, fifty yards wide. A 747
could land there, but none ever have.

I had no dream for the day. Soaring wouldn't be
any good today; my recent love interest sounded as if she was
dumping me because of my 'superior logic,' my legal career was on
hold. I felt like a California City lot.

Back from my walk, I had breakfast, read the
New York Times, the Washington Post, and the LA Times on my iPad.
The news didn't lift my spirits. I thought I would walk over to the
office at the airport, find someone to talk to, and do some 'hangar
flying,' reminiscing about past flights.