Superluminal Read online

  It seems that each of our individual personalities consists of personas and systems that are forced to work together for the common good. When those constraints are removed, as was the case with the time towers, people generally go insane.

  This was the basic paradox of modern existence before the war. Although we could exist everywhere there was grist, and we could do so instantaneously, we could not really do so and remain conscious individuals. To remain individuals, we had to exist in time. There were limits to our mental “spread.” But we would never have been able to spread out as much as we had were it not for the invention of the Bennett-Brassard quantum encryption system—the unbreakable means we use to hold our individuality absolutely secure.

  Then came the war, and a new principle was discovered.

  Ten

  Li moved into a new phase of her professional life at Sui Sui University. There was, she discovered, a physics department within the physics department at Sui Sui University. It consisted of scientists handpicked by Techstock, working on…well, there was no other word for it.

  Weapons.

  Military weapons. Weapons of mass destruction. There were several directions of research, but one aim: to end the insurrection in the outer system as quickly and completely as possible, no matter what the cost.

  It was a secret operation, and as such, Li was fitted out with an addition to her grist pellicle that was a combination security clearance and defensive shield. The new protocols within her skin were so strict that she had to think of a specific password in order to go to the bathroom. There was, of course, grist that could take care of that problem entirely, allowing one to retain and dissipate bodily waste gradually, but Li didn’t rate that high a level yet, and she couldn’t afford the grist.

  Li reported for work not in the venerable Ekilstein Facility, but in the newly constructed Lab Complex B—located outside of Bach proper. The complex was an opaque spheroid that was carved deep beneath the surface of Mercury, with curving transportation shafts leading down from the surface. If seen in profile, the complex would look like an enormous Earth jellyfish turned upside down, tentacles stretched to the planetary exterior. Li’s office was an oval-shaped cubicle set against the outer rock wall. Although they were many feet below ground, over the course of a two-e-month period, Li could feel the wall grow cold and hot as Mercury faced, then turned from, the sun. Sometimes, owing to the eccentric shape of the planet’s orbit, the sun would seemingly stop in the midflight, move backwards, then turn again and cross the sky normally, all the while varying greatly in apparent diameter and actual brightness. This change in heat was passed through Li’s wall. At Mercurian perihelion, Li would have to adjust her pellicle for e-days, providing her skin with a bit of air-conditioning.

  She settled into a new routine consisting of long hours of work and total estrangement from her former colleagues. There were further sexless trysts with Techstock—but meetings where the Glory flowed. By necessity, she even had to become distant with her family. Li had always kept up close contact with them before—and particularly with her father, whose pride in her was unwavering. But she could not speak of her current work with anyone not approved by the Department of Immunity, and Hugo Singh was adamantly not approved. He was, in fact, a bit of a suspicious character, as far as the DI went. He was, after all, a longtime supporter of free-convert rights. He’d even made contributions to several charities, outlawed after the war started, that had opposed the iteration laws and limits set down for sentient algorithms within the Met. Li supposed her father’s political leanings might pose a problem for her someday, but there was nothing to be done about it. When he really believed in a cause, her father could be pretty obnoxious about letting everyone within earshot know his opinion.

  So Li stopped her weekly visits to the family in the virtuality and cut back on all of her other communications with them. Not wanting to lie to her parents—particularly to her father—she didn’t offer an explanation, and such talks as she did have were tense and tinged with feelings of hurt and bewilderment on their part.

  At first the Glory made up for it all.

  Techstock had stopped talking when he came to visit her now, and that came as a great relief for Li. She could still look at him—at whatever aspect he chose to show up in that day, that is—and still make herself believe that it was him inside and not…

  Not what?

  Something more frightening to consider. It was as if Techstock were a coating of skin and hair over one of the very physical principles he studied. And that principle was chromodynamics. They no longer chatted about Techstock’s latest research; but Techstock had, in a way, become his research. His bodily aspects—his older man, his young man, his mannish young woman—began to show up wearing bright clothes of clashing colors. Some had even used their pellicle grist to change the color of parts of their skin—a blue arm, a face half green and half red, or blue fingers. Techstock’s main aspect, the twenty-eight-year-old man, had, by that point, made himself into a walking motley caricature of his former self.

  Techstock’s work revolved around the “color” property of quarks. Quarks are the subatomic particles that make up the protons and neutrons, which, in turn, make up atomic nuclei. Color could be thought of as roughly analogous to electrical charge in atoms, but instead of positive, negative, and neutral, quarks might be blue, red, or green.

  Techstock would arrive. The two of them would sit, either at a table in the kitchen or on a couch in the living room, and there they would be. Li might get up to make tea or bring a snack. Techstock would drink and eat. He would respond to basic requests or questions—usually with one-sentence replies. Then silence would descend again upon the apartment. Finally, after what seemed an allotted time had passed, it was time to share the Glory.

  A new light would come into Techstock’s eyes. He would motion Li closer, and the two of them would join hands. His hands were always warm and supple—even when it was the old-man aspect who’d showed up. She remembered that before, his palms had sometimes been rather cool and raspy. She’d liked that. His skin always felt feverish to her now, no matter what color it had assumed for the moment.

  But all thoughts of the past—or of the present or future beyond the Glory—soon left her. Utter satisfaction suffused her. Happiness at a job well done. But what job? Her research was progressing steadily, but she’d made no spectacular strides.

  Amés must know what she was feeling satisfied about. He must approve of her or she wouldn’t feel this way. Right? She fit in , no matter her doubts. Everything was all right. It was. Wasn’t it?

  After Techstock left, she wondered if she was becoming more like him. Absorbed. Absorbed by some unnameable something, a persona in a larger mind that was not her own.

  Then her hard work in Complex B began to pay dividends.

  At first it was a minor but portentous breakthrough on a complicated problem she’d set for herself. It involved the “judgment” property of gravitons, as discovered by Raphael Merced over five hundred years before. Merced, the greatest scientist since Einstein, had largely defined the study of physics for half a millennium. Among many other advances, he both described and discovered the first graviton—a particle that had eluded physicists for centuries.

  As Merced had famously said, “It turns out that atoms—all elementary particles, that is—are little time machines.”

  Gravitons never exist in the present, and that’s why nobody had ever been able to find one. In much the same way that the photon is light’s “messenger particle,” the graviton carries a quantum of time’s “energy.” This energy is indistinguishable from information, and what gravitons do is fly backwards and forwards in time, telling the other particles how to behave—and generally mediating any paradoxes that might arise. Gravity itself is the interference pattern created by this passage—the wake of a boat slapping the shore, not the boat itself.

  “I can’t tell you if the universe as a whole has any meaning,” Merced wrote.
“But locally, it behaves as if it does.”

  Gravitons “decide” how to get quantum-entangled particles out of complex, time-related paradoxes.

  “I would force these paradoxes on gravitons, and it was as if the little buggers had a town meeting and came to a decision about how to handle each paradox. The decisions were never precisely the same, but they had the tendency to preserve reality as we know it.”

  Merced learned how to control the amount of input information gravitons had to reach their “decisions.” With the aid of his friend and colleague nanotech engineer Feur Otto Bring, Merced harnessed and used this communicating energy to force the gravitons to communicate the information he wanted them to transfer. That property became one of the fundamental functions of the grist. All grist everywhere communicated instantaneously. Not faster than light. Instantly.

  Every schoolchild for the past five hundred years had learned Merced’s famous equation:

  FT = (pq - qp) + mc2

  Where FT is the future multiplied by time as a continuous function, pq and qp are quantum matrices, and mc2 is the speed of light squared.

  Li had, of course, memorized the equation as a young girl along with everyone else. But late in his life—just before he and a ship full of friends plunged into the sun, actually—Merced had made a cryptic comment. It was found in the last communications from that ship, a document known as The Exiles’ Journey.

  “I have been thinking,” said Merced, “that I was a bit mistaken about time. Don’t have the opportunity to go into the details right now, but I might suggest that somebody one of these days have a look at that big F in my equation. It might be possible to arrange things in the past more to our liking.”

  Many had tried to follow Merced’s lead over the years. There were scads of theories, but all had failed to figure out what the great scientist might have meant.

  In Merced’s famous equation, F stood for future. All of the future multiplied by all of time—past, present, and future—yielded a single graviton. Actually, it yielded two gravitons—one that existed in the past, with a spin of 0, and one that existed in the future, with a spin of +2.

  Li’s specialty was “spin 0” gravitons—that is, particles that traveled from the present to the past (or vice versa) and delivered packets of energy—a sort of temporal mail carrier. They were observed in the present by devices that forced extreme paradoxes on the space-time continuum. In fact, all grist contained within it just such tiny time machines. Every bit of grist was a graviton detector.

  What the grist generally detected was simultaneous events in the present. It seldom detected the past, except under extraordinary circumstances. Spin 0 gravitons communicated information only on a “need to know” basis—that is, what a quantum-entangled particle needed to know to resolve a paradox on a submicroscopic level, and not what a historian needed to know who was, say, trying to witness firsthand the Sputnik launch from the old Soviet Union, or who was writing his or her dissertation on Julius Caesar’s victories in Gaul.

  There were a few intriguing exceptions to this general rule, however. One of them was the very strange effect known as “convert déjà vu.” Occasionally, with no apparent effort, bits would rearrange themselves into a “story” and a convert—the digital portion of a human (or, in the case of free converts, the digital being in its entirety)—would have memories of an event in the past that it could never have experienced.

  An occurrence of this nature was always triggered by a convert’s finding itself in exactly the same logic state as some other computer program had been in its past. It was, for all intents and purposes, a kind of “past life” for a convert. As silly as it seemed, there was irrefutable proof that a convert could sometimes remember performing certain calculations in entirely different circumstances—circumstances that could be verified as having occurred in the past.

  It was the damnedest thing. The memories were seemingly as real—that is, as logically valid—as any other information the convert had stored away in memory files.

  The only problem was that the moments were nearly always trivial. And they were completely random. In fact, “convert déjà vu” was sometimes used as a random-number generator to create security codes within the Met for secret communication. They had been proved to be mathematically “more” random even than such events as radioactive decay.

  Li was working on a variation of just such a proof and simultaneously wondering how she would put off her family’s latest request that she visit all of them over the coming holidays when suddenly it occurred to her that no one had ever attempted to prove that gravitons from the future—spin 2 gravitons—might create “convert precognition” in a like manner.

  “It has to happen all the time,” she said to herself, “but the information communicated hasn’t happened yet and nobody notices…by the time it does happen…but we should remember. A convert should know it’s seen the event before!”

  Yet nobody, neither computer program nor human software, could foresee the future. So it didn’t happen. It must not. But…

  Li began to scribble down the implications. Then she sat back and looked at her notes. Could that be?

  Not random at all. Each déjà vu precisely canceled out glimpses into the future. It substituted trivial information from the past for the nontrivial information that came from the future.

  “Nontrivial,” Li said to herself. “That means important. All information from the future is nontrivial.”

  If you took into account spin 2 gravitons, you could even predict when déjà vu would occur.

  Convert déjà vu was the universe’s way of preventing actual useful knowledge from passing from the future into the present. It was the manifestation of a natural regulating mechanism.

  You could write out a little algorithm…

  You could disprove a century’s worth of misguided assumptions, and maybe bring down a whole industry by accident.

  A sense of accomplishment flooded through Li as intense as the Glory. Was the feeling her own, or was it sent from on high, from the Director himself? It didn’t matter; it was good. Satisfying. The intense feeling that something like this had never happened to her before.

  Li wrote out the algorithm.

  And then she realized that her discovery implied something even more amazing.

  You knew when the “cancellation” events were coming. They weren’t random.

  They weren’t random; they were predictable.

  You could avoid them.

  You could arrange to experience nontrivial knowledge of the past or of the future. Theoretically, at least.

  Arrange to experience .

  My, my, thought Li. Have I discovered time travel?

  Then she thought about the implications once again.

  “Not only that,” she said. “I’ve think I just invented superluminal flight.”

  Eleven

  From

  The Pelican-Puckerup Retinal Pop-up

  Metaplanapedia

  50,203rd Edition

  PELOTA, ITS HISTORY AND RULES

  Pelota was invented nearly seven hundred years ago on the Aldiss radial from Earth to Earth’s moon. It was by first played by construction workers in the Hochelaga Barrel, half of whom were of Hispanic ancestry and the other half Native North American.

  Players float weightlessly and can only use their feet, chests, or heads to score with the ball. The “ball” in pelota is made up of interlocking hexagons instead of being round, and forms a dodecahedron. It is made of leather or synthetic fabric stretched over a flexible frame and is very lively when kicked. Players have compressed-air jets on their arms and legs for maneuvering. The reaction force of the exhaust flow is limited by the rules, and most movement comes from push-offs and in-flight momentum exchanges between players.

  Vector, momentum, and velocity are the three ruling principles of the game when it is played well.

  The playing arena is a transparent cylinder, one hundred meters long and
seventy-five meters in diameter. The arena is constantly turning, lengthwise, around an axis. On each end of the cylinder is a goal. The goals are five meters in length. They are wider on the ends than in the middle, like a propeller. Each goal is notched into a pearl-string of ten “gaps”—hexagonal indentures that are bigger toward the end. The gap in the middle, the “hub gap,” fits the ball perfectly. When a shot goes into one of these gaps, the attacking team scores from one to five points, depending on how close the gap is to the center of the goal. A ball slotted into the dead center gap gets five points, a ball that enters a gap on the outside edge of the goal gets one point, etc.

  The goals slowly rotate, like two exhaust fan blades, one at each end of the playing cylinder. They rotate in the opposite direction from the cylindrical arena, but at the same rate.

  The original players quickly adapted traditional soccer formations to a third dimension, and, with a few variations, these lineups have generally been used for hundreds of years. There is a goalkeeper, what is called a “spray” of backs, another spray of midfielders, and two attacking strikers. Starting at the defending goal, the normal ten-player formation is either a 4-4-2 or a 4-5-1.

  The goalkeeper is a special position. In addition to being able to use his or her hands, the goalkeeper can, and usually does, attach himself or herself to an elastic tether. The other end of the tether is anchored to the center of the goal, to a rivet located just beside the center gap. The keeper bungees about, like a ball on a rubber band, attempting to guard the goal. Timing these bounces correctly with a rotating goal and an oppositely rotating play arena has become a specialized and highly prized art over the years.