Timeline (13 page)

“A publicity nightmare.”

“Maybe,” Doniger said. “But we have to prepare for the possibility.”

The jet engines whined as the Gulfstream V rolled toward them, “ITC” in big silver letters on the tail. The stairs lowered, and a uniformed flight attendant rolled out a strip of red carpet at the bottom of the stairs.

The graduate students stared.

“No kidding,” Chris Hughes said. “There really is a red carpet.”

“Let’s go,” Marek said. He threw his backpack over his shoulder and led them aboard.

Marek had refused to answer their questions, pleading ignorance. He told them the results of the carbon dating. He told them he couldn’t explain it. He told them that ITC wanted them to come to help the Professor, and that it was urgent. He didn’t say any more. And he noticed that Stern, too, was keeping silent.

Inside, the plane was all gray and silver. The flight attendant asked them what they wanted to drink. All this luxury contrasted with the tough-looking man with cropped gray hair who came forward to greet them. Although the man wore a business suit, Marek detected a military manner as he shook hands with each of them.

“My name’s Gordon,” he said. “Vice president at ITC. Welcome aboard. Flying time to New Mexico is nine hours, forty minutes. Better fasten your seat belts.”

They dropped into seats, already feeling the aircraft begin to move on the runway. Moments later, the engines roared, and Marek looked out the window to see the French countryside fall away beneath them.

:

It could be worse, Gordon thought, sitting at the back of the plane and looking at the group. True, they were academics. They were a little befuddled. And there was no coordination, no team feeling among them.

But on the other hand, they all seemed to be in decent physical condition, particularly the foreign guy, Marek. He looked strong. And the woman wasn’t bad, either. Good muscle tone in the arms, calluses on her hands. Competent manner. So she might hold up under pressure, he thought.

But the good-looking kid would be useless. Gordon sighed as Chris Hughes looked out the window, caught his own reflection in the glass, and brushed back his hair with his hand.

And Gordon couldn’t decide about the fourth kid, the nerdy one. He’d obviously spent time outdoors; his clothes were faded and his glasses scratched. But Gordon recognized him as a tech guy. Knew everything about equipment and circuits, nothing about the world. It was hard to say how he’d react if things got tough.

The big man, Marek, said, “Are you going to tell us what’s going on?”

“I think you already know, Mr. Marek,” Gordon said. “Don’t you?”

“I have a piece of six-hundred-year-old parchment with the Professor’s writing on it. In six-hundred-year-old ink.”

“Yes. You do.”

Marek shook his head. “But I have trouble believing it.”

“At this point,” Gordon said, “it’s simply a technological reality. It’s real. It can be done.” He got out of his seat and moved to sit with the group.

“You mean time travel,” Marek said.

“No,” Gordon said. “I don’t mean time travel at all. Time travel is impossible. Everyone knows that.”

:

“The very concept of time travel makes no sense, since time doesn’t flow. The fact that we think time passes is just an accident of our nervous systems — of the way things look to us. In reality, time doesn’t pass; we pass. Time itself is invariant. It just is. Therefore, past and future aren’t separate locations, the way New York and Paris are separate locations. And since the past isn’t a location, you can’t travel to it.”

They were silent. They just stared at him.

“It is important to be clear about this,” Gordon said. “The ITC technology has nothing to do with time travel, at least not directly. What we have developed is a form of space travel. To be precise, we use quantum technology to manipulate an orthogonal multiverse coordinate change.”

They looked at him blankly.

“It means,” Gordon said, “that we travel to another place in the multiverse.”

“And what’s the multiverse?” Kate said.

“The multiverse is the world defined by quantum mechanics. It means that—”

“Quantum mechanics?” Chris said. “What’s quantum mechanics?”

Gordon paused. “That’s fairly difficult. But since you’re historians,” he said, “let me try to explain it historically.”

:

“A hundred years ago,” Gordon said, “physicists understood that energy — like light or magnetism or electricity — took the form of continuously flowing waves. We still refer to ‘radio waves’ and ‘light waves.’ In fact, the recognition that all forms of energy shared this wavelike nature was one of the great achievements of nineteenth-century physics.

“But there was a small problem,” he said. It turned out that if you shined light on a metal plate, you got an electric current. The physicist Max Planck studied the relationship between the amount of light shining on the plate and the amount of electricity produced, and he concluded that energy wasn’t a continuous wave. Instead, energy seemed to be composed of individual units, which he called quanta. “The discovery that energy came in quanta was the start of quantum physics,” Gordon said.

“A few years later, Einstein showed that you could explain the photoelectric effect by assuming that light was composed of particles, which he called photons. These photons of light struck the metal plate and knocked off electrons, producing electricity. Mathematically, the equations worked. They fit the view that light consisted of particles. Okay so far?”

“Yes. . . .”

“And pretty soon, physicists began to realize that not only light, but all energy was composed of particles. In fact, all matter in the universe took the form of particles. Atoms were composed of heavy particles in the nucleus, light electrons buzzing around on the outside. So, according to the new thinking, everything is particles. Okay?”

“Okay. . . .”

“The particles are discrete units, or quanta. And the theory that describes how these particles behave is quantum theory. A major discovery of twentieth-century physics.”

They were all nodding.

“Physicists continue to study these particles, and begin to realize they’re very strange entities. You can’t be sure where they are, you can’t measure them exactly, and you can’t predict what they will do. Sometimes they behave like particles, sometimes like waves. Sometimes two particles will interact with each other even though they’re a million miles apart, with no connection between them. And so on. The theory is starting to seem extremely weird.

“Now, two things happen to quantum theory. The first is that it gets confirmed, over and over. It’s the most proven theory in the history of science. Supermarket scanners, lasers and computer chips all rely on quantum mechanics. So there is absolutely no doubt that quantum theory is the correct mathematical description of the universe.

“But the problem is, it’s only a mathematical description. It’s just a set of equations. And physicists couldn’t visualize the world that was implied by those equations — it was too weird, too contradictory. Einstein, for one, didn’t like that. He felt it meant the theory was flawed. But the theory kept getting confirmed, and the situation got worse and worse. Eventually, even scientists who won the Nobel Prize for contributions to quantum theory had to admit they didn’t understand it.

“So, this made a very odd situation. For most of the twentieth century, there’s a theory of the universe that everyone uses, and everyone agrees is correct — but nobody can tell you what it is saying about the world.”

“What does all this have to do with multiple universes?” Marek said.

“I’m getting there,” Gordon said.

:

Many physicists tried to explain the equations, Gordon said. Each explanation failed for one reason or another. Then in 1957, a physicist named Hugh Everett proposed a daring new explanation. Everett claimed that our universe — the universe we see, the universe of rocks and trees and people and galaxies out in space — was just one of an infinite number of universes, existing side by side.

Each of these universes was constantly splitting, so there was a universe where Hitler lost the war, and another where he won; a universe where Kennedy died, and another where he lived. And also a world where you brushed your teeth in the morning, and one where you didn’t. And so forth, on and on and on. An infinity of worlds.

Everett called this the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics. His explanation was consistent with the quantum equations, but physicists found it very hard to accept. They didn’t like the idea of all these worlds constantly splitting all the time. They found it unbelievable that reality could take this form.

“Most physicists still refuse to accept it,” Gordon said. “Even though no one has ever shown it is wrong.”

Everett himself had no patience with his colleagues’ objections. He insisted the theory was true, whether you liked it or not. If you disbelieved his theory, you were just being stodgy and old-fashioned, exactly like the scientists who disbelieved the Copernican theory that placed the sun at the center of the solar system — and which had also seemed unbelievable at the time. “Because Everett claimed the many worlds concept was actually true. There really were multiple universes. And they were running right alongside our own. All these multiple universes were eventually referred to as a ‘multiverse.’ “

“Wait a minute,” Chris said. “Are you telling us this is true?”

“Yes,” Gordon said. “It’s true.”

“How do you know?” Marek said.

“I’ll show you,” Gordon said. And he reached for a manila file that said “ITC/CTC Technology.”

:

He took out a blank piece of paper, and began drawing. “Very simple experiment, it’s been done for two hundred years. Set up two walls, one in front of the other. The first wall has a single vertical slit in it.”

He showed them the drawing.

“Now you shine a light at the slit. On the wall behind, you’ll see—”

“A white line,” Marek said. “From the light coming through the slit.”

“Correct. It would look something like this.” Gordon pulled out a photo on a card.

Gordon continued to sketch. “Now, instead of one slit, you have a wall with two vertical slits in it. Shine a light on it, and on the wall behind, you see—”

“Two vertical lines,” Marek said.

“No. You’ll see a series of light and dark bars.” He showed them:

“And,” Gordon continued, “if you shine your light through four slits, you get half as many bars as before. Because every other bar goes black.”

Marek frowned. “More slits mean fewer bars? Why?”

“The usual explanation is what I’ve drawn — the light passing through the slits acts like two waves that overlap. In some places they add to each other, and in other places they cancel each other out. And that makes a pattern of alternating light and dark on the wall. We say the waves interfere with each other, and that this is an interference pattern.”

Chris Hughes said, “So? What’s wrong with all that?”

“What’s wrong,” Gordon said, “is that I just gave you a nineteenth-century explanation. It was perfectly acceptable when everybody believed that light was a wave. But since Einstein, we know that light consists of particles called photons. How do you explain a bunch of photons making this pattern?”

There was silence. They were shaking their heads.

David Stern spoke for the first time. “Particles aren’t as simple as the way you have described them. Particles have some wavelike properties, depending on the situation. Particles can interfere with one another. In this case, the photons in the beam of light are interfering with one another to produce the same pattern.”

“That does seem logical,” Gordon said. “After all, a beam of light is zillions and zillions of little photons. It’s not hard to imagine that they would interact with one another in some fashion, and produce the interference pattern.”

They were all nodding. Yes, not hard to imagine.

“But is it really true?” Gordon said. “Is that what’s going on? One way to find out is to eliminate any interaction among the photons. Let’s just deal with one photon at a time. This has been done experimentally. You make a beam of light so weak that only one photon comes out at a time. And you can put very sensitive detectors behind the slits — so sensitive, they can register a single photon hitting them. Okay?”

They nodded, more slowly this time.

“Now, there can’t be any interference from other photons, because we are dealing with a single photon only. So: the photons come through, one at a time. The detectors record where the photons land. And after a few hours, we get a result, something like this.”

“What we see,” Gordon said, “is that the individual photons land only in certain places, and never others. They behave exactly the same as they do in a regular beam of light. But they are coming in one at a time. There are no other photons to interfere with them. Yet something is interfering with them, because they are making the usual interference pattern. So: What is interfering with a single photon?”

Silence.

“Mr. Stern?”

Stern shook his head. “If you calculate the probabilities—”

“Let’s not escape into mathematics. Let’s stay with reality. After all, this experiment has been performed — with real photons, striking real detectors. And something real interferes with them. The question is, What is it?”

“It has to be other photons,” Stern said.

“Yes,” Gordon said, “but where are they? We have detectors, and we don’t detect any other photons. So where are the interfering photons?”

Stern sighed. “Okay,” he said. He threw up his hands.

Chris said, “What do you mean, Okay? Okay what?”

Gordon nodded to Stern. “Tell them.”

“What he is saying is that single-photon interference proves that reality is much greater than just what we see in our universe. The interference is happening, but we can’t see any cause for it in our universe. Therefore, the interfering photons must be in other universes. And that proves that the other universes exist.”

“Correct,” Gordon said. “And they sometimes interact with our own universe.”

:

“I’m sorry,” Marek said. “Would you do that again? Why is some other universe interfering with our universe?”

“It’s the nature of the multiverse,” Gordon said. “Remember, within the multiverse, the universes are constantly splitting, which means that many other universes are very similar to ours. And it is the similar ones that interact. Each time we make a beam of light in our universe, beams of light are simultaneously made in many similar universes, and the photons from those other universes interfere with the photons in our universe and produce the pattern that we see.”

“And you are telling us this is true?”

“Absolutely true. The experiment has been done many times.”

Marek frowned. Kate stared at the table. Chris scratched his head.

Finally David Stern said, “Not all the universes are similar to ours?”

“No.”

“Are they all simultaneous to ours?”

“Not all, no.”

“Therefore some universes exist at an earlier time?”

“Yes. Actually, since they are infinite in number, the universes exist at all earlier times.”

Stern thought for a moment. “And you are telling us that ITC has the technology to travel to these other universes.”

“Yes,” Gordon said. “That’s what I’m telling you.”

“How?”

“We make wormhole connections in quantum foam.”

“You mean Wheeler foam? Subatomic fluctuations of space-time?”

“Yes.”

“But that’s impossible.”

Gordon smiled. “You’ll see for yourself, soon enough.”

“We will? What do you mean?” Marek said.

“I thought you understood,” Gordon said. “Professor Johnston is in the fourteenth century. We want you to go back there, to get him out.”

:

No one spoke. The flight attendant pushed a button and all the windows in the cabin slid closed at the same time, blocking out the sunshine. She went around the cabin, putting sheets and blankets on the couches, making them up as beds. Beside each she placed large padded headphones.

“We’re going back?” Chris Hughes said. “How?”

“It will be easier just to show you,” Gordon said. He handed them each a small cellophane packet of pills. “Right now, I want you to take these.”

“What are they?” Chris said.

“Three kinds of sedative,” he said. “Then I want you all to lie down and listen on the headphones. Sleep if you like. The flight’s only ten hours, so you won’t absorb very much, anyway. But at least you’ll get used to the language and pronunciation.”

“What language?” Chris said, taking his pills.

“Old English, and Middle French.”

Marek said, “I already know those languages.”

“I doubt you know correct pronunciation. Wear the headphones.”

“But nobody knows the correct pronunciation,” Marek said. As soon as he said it, he caught himself.

“I think you will find,” Gordon said, “that we know.”

Chris lay down on one bed. He pulled up the blanket and slipped the headphones over his ears. At least they blotted out the sound of the jet.

These pills must be strong, he thought, because he suddenly felt very relaxed. He couldn’t keep his eyes open. He listened as a tape began to play. A voice said, “Take a deep breath. Imagine you are in a beautiful warm garden. Everything is familiar and comforting to you. Directly ahead, you see a door going down to the basement. You open the door. You know the basement well, because it is your basement. You begin to walk down the stone steps, into the warm and comforting basement. With each step, you hear voices. You find them pleasant to listen to, easy to listen to.”

Then male and female voices began to alternate.

“Give my hat. Yiff may mean haht.”

“Here is your hat. Hair baye thynhatt.”

“Thank you. Grah mersy.”

“You are welcome. Ayepray thee.”

The sentences became longer. Soon Chris found it difficult to follow them.

“I am cold. I would rather have a coat. Ayeam chillingcold, ee wolld leifer half a coot.”

Chris was drifting gently, imperceptibly, to sleep, with the sensation that he was still walking down a flight of stairs, deeper and deeper into a cavernous, echoing, comforting place. He was peaceful, though the last two sentences he remembered gave a tinge of concern:

“Prepare to fight. Dicht theeselv to ficht.”

“Where is my sword? Whar beest mee swearde?”

But then he exhaled, and slept.

BLACK ROCK

“Risk everything, or gain

nothing.”

GEOFFREY DE CHARNY, 1358

The night was cold and the sky filled with stars as they stepped off the airplane onto the wet runway. To the east, Marek saw the dark outlines of mesas beneath low-hanging clouds. A Land Cruiser was waiting off to one side.

Soon they were driving down a highway, dense forest on both sides of the road. “Where exactly are we?” Marek said.

“About an hour north of Albuquerque,” Gordon said. “The nearest town is Black Rock. That’s where our research facility is.”

“Looks like the middle of nowhere,” Marek said.

“Only at night. Actually, there are fifteen high-tech research companies in Black Rock. And of course, Sandia is just down the road. Los Alamos is about an hour away. Farther away, White Sands, all that.”

They continued down the road for several more miles. They came to a prominent green-and-white highway sign that read ITC BLACK ROCK LABORATORY. The Land Cruiser turned right, heading up a twisting road into the forested hills.

:

From the back seat, Stern said, “You told us before that you can connect to other universes.”

“Yes.”

“Through quantum foam.”

“That’s right.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Stern said.

“Why? What is quantum foam?” Kate said, stifling a yawn.

“It’s a remnant of the birth of the universe,” Stern said. He explained that the universe had begun as a single, very dense pinpoint of matter. Then, eighteen billion years ago, it exploded outward from that pinpoint — in what was known as the big bang.

“After the explosion, the universe expanded as a sphere. Except it wasn’t an absolutely perfect sphere. Inside the sphere, the universe wasn’t absolutely homogeneous — which is why we now have galaxies clumped and clustered irregularly in the universe, instead of being uniformly distributed. Anyway, the point is, the expanding sphere had tiny, tiny imperfections in it. And the imperfections never got ironed out. They’re still a part of the universe.”

“They are? Where?”

“At subatomic dimensions. Quantum foam is just a way of saying that at very small dimensions, space-time has ripples and bubbles. But the foam is smaller than an individual atomic particle. There may or may not be wormholes in that foam.”

“There are,” Gordon said.

“But how could you use them for travel? You can’t put a person through a hole that small. You can’t put anything through it.”

“Correct,” Gordon said. “You also can’t put a piece of paper through a telephone line. But you can send a fax.”

Stern frowned. “That’s entirely different.”

“Why?” Gordon said. “You can transmit anything, as long as you have a way to compress and encode it. Isn’t that so?”

“In theory, yes,” Stern said. “But you’re talking about compressing and encoding the information for an entire human being.”

“That’s right.”

“That can’t be done.”

Gordon was smiling, amused now. “Why not?”

“Because the complete description of a human being — all the billions of cells, how they are interconnected, all the chemicals and molecules they contain, their biochemical state — consists of far too much information for any computer to handle.”

“It’s just information,” Gordon said, shrugging.

“Yes. Too much information.”

“We compress it by using a lossless fractal algorithm.”

“Even so, it’s still an enormous—”

“Excuse me,” Chris said. “Are you saying you compress a person?”

“No. We compress the information equivalent of a person.”

“And how is that done?” Chris said.

“With compression algorithms — methods to pack data on a computer, so they take up less space. Like JPEG and MPEG for visual material. Are you familiar with those?”

“I’ve got software that uses it, but that’s it.”

“Okay,” Gordon said. “All compression programs work the same way. They look for similarities in data. Suppose you have a picture of a rose, made up of a million pixels. Each pixel has a location and a color. That’s three million pieces of information — a lot of data. But most of those pixels are going to be red, surrounded by other red pixels. So the program scans the picture line by line, and sees whether adjacent pixels are the same color. If they are, it writes an instruction to the computer that says make this pixel red, and also the next fifty pixels in the line. Then switch to gray, and make the next ten pixels gray. And so on. It doesn’t store information for each individual point. It stores instructions for how to re-create the picture. And the data is cut to a tenth of what it was.”

“Even so,” Stern said, “you’re not talking about a two-dimensional picture, you’re talking about a three-dimensional living object, and its description requires so much data—”

“That you’d need massive parallel processing,” Gordon said, nodding. “That’s true.”

Chris frowned. “Parallel processing is what?”

“You hook several computers together and divide the job up among them, so it gets done faster. A big parallel-processing computer would have sixteen thousand processors hooked together. For a really big one, thirty-two thousand processors. We have thirty-two billion processors hooked together.”

“Billion?” Chris said.

Stern leaned forward. “That’s impossible. Even if you tried to make one . . .” He stared at the roof of the car, calculating. “Say, allow one inch between motherboards . . . that makes a stack . . . uh . . . two thousand six hundred . . . that makes a stack half a mile high. Even reconfigured into a cube, it’d be a huge building. You’d never build it. You’d never cool it. And it’d never work anyway, because the processors would end up too far apart.”

Gordon sat and smiled. He was looking at Stern, waiting.

“The only possible way to do that much processing,” Stern said, “would be to use the quantum characteristics of individual electrons. But then you’d be talking about a quantum computer. And no one’s ever made one.”

Gordon just smiled.

“Have they?” Stern said.

:

“Let me explain what David is talking about,” Gordon said to the others. “Ordinary computers make calculations using two electron states, which are designated one and zero. That’s how all computers work, by pushing around ones and zeros. But twenty years ago, Richard Feynman suggested it might be possible to make an extremely powerful computer using all thirty-two quantum states of an electron. Many laboratories are now trying to build these quantum computers. Their advantage is unimaginably great power — so great that you can indeed describe and compress a three-dimensional living object into an electron stream. Exactly like a fax. You can then transmit the electron stream through a quantum foam wormhole and reconstruct it in another universe. And that’s what we do. It’s not quantum teleportation. It’s not particle entanglement. It’s direct transmission to another universe.”