Aurora Wolf

Trees Falling in the Subatomic Forest

by Don Norum

     Elizabeth Waterstone pressed the key for the intercom by her right knee. “There’s a man named Harvey Wallace here to see you about the ansible, Mr. Harrison. He says that he’s a physicist.”

     “How did he get in here?”

     “He was a member of one of the touring groups of prospective applicants. Shall I send him on down – hold up a minute.” Mrs. Waterstone tapped the side of the headset to send it mute and listened to the visitor.

#

     In his office, John Harrison kept one finger over the red button on the underside of his desk. ‘Send him on down’ was a coded question of whether or not to stall him for security, but it didn’t sound to him like the man was dangerous – their application process usually weeded out those types before they ever saw the facilities.

     “He says to tell you that ‘you can’t hide from time’.” She sounded puzzled. “Excuse me. ‘You can’t hide time.’” Pause. “Shall I send him down?” she asked slightly more insistently.

     Harrison opened his mouth to tell her that yes, he’d be ready in a moment while he tapped the second button, blue, to have Mr. Wallace quietly escorted back to the group and quickly out of the building, but his eye alighted on the draft copy of the latest technical report he’d written out on the ansible on his blotter.

     Scrawled in the margins were private, his-eyes-only corrections to several of the equations that he had carried over from his original Nobel paper and failed to update.

     His finger rose up, like a man signaling for the check. He blinked, and felt like he’d stepped out onto an ice-covered driveway and lost his footing, sliding down towards the bottom without any shred of control.

     “Go ahead and send him on up, Mrs. Waterstone, send him on up.”

*

     Harvey Wallace was a small man wearing a respectable if worn-in suit jacket and trousers, a standard interview uniform for a mid-level academic. In one hand he held a sheaf of papers stapled together, a pre-print draft of a paper judging by the columnar formatting and Greek letters sprinkled in blocks through the text.

     John Harrison, president and founder of Uhasu Industries, waved him to a tubular steel chair across the glass desk. All of the papers had been swept from its surface into a locking tray flush underneath. He regarded the academic with cool eyes for a long moment before raising an eyebrow.

     “Mr. Harrison, I’m so glad to make your acquaintance, your early papers were –”

     “You said that you had something to say to me about the ansible?”

     “Oh! Right, I suppose you’re a busy man. Here –” he slid the paper across the desk, managing not to mar the glass with the snipped ends of the staple, and sat back like a cat dropping a dead bird on its master’s pillow.

     “Your ansible’s a fraud. It’s fake.”

     Harrison stared at him long enough to ascertain (helped along by a nod of the head to the paper on the desk) that anymore questions he had would have to wait until he read the paper in front of him.

     He didn’t read the paper in front of him. He didn’t kick Wallace out of his office and off the plant grounds, though. Instead, he turned around and tapped a few keys on a credenza underneath the plate-glass windows and turned back to watch a panel swing back into the wall to reveal a plasma display screen to his right.

     A flicker as it warmed up, and then the screen filled with text and thumbnails of images streaming into the Deep Space Array from the NASA/ESA Mars Footstep Mission. He turned to Wallace, still ignoring the paper, and spoke.

     “These are images coming to us live – no delay – from the surface of Mars, currently twenty three point six five light-minutes away from us. If you doubt the efficacy of the ansible, you have only to take a drink and wait for the radio back-channel to get here.”

     “I never said that it didn’t do anything; never said that it didn’t work. It just doesn’t work anywhere near how you say it works. It can’t.”

     “The exact operating mechanisms, the implementation principles, of the Uhasu ansible are the most closely guarded trade secrets in the world.”

     Wallace smiled. “I’m not surprised, but we both know that isn’t what I’m talking about. How’s the Science paper, by the way? No mistakes?”

     There was an unwelcome gleam of academic triumph in the man’s eyes – not predatory, Harrison had been in business long enough to recognize the difference between victory and self-satisfaction – but there was a sense that the professor knew enough to know what they both knew, but wouldn’t yet say.

     He picked up the paper and began to read through it.

     Professor of Theoretical Physics Harvey H. Wallace (of Emory University, he saw) began by reiterating the basis of the EPR paradox and introducing several recent tests of the Bell inequalities.

     Essentially, two entangled particles have opposite spins. If particle A is removed to a distance and then measured, at that instant one will know the exact spin of particle B. Since the information about the spin of particle A couldn’t travel to particle B faster than the speed of light – obviously – some bit of information had to be ‘hidden’ with each particle.

     The paradox is that either this hidden variable exists, with troubling implications for the theory of quantum mechanics, or somehow information travels faster than light, contradicting the original assumptions.

     The first half of the paper was a rather elegant unification of the different kinds of these hidden variables, a compendium of all of the various methods by which the ansible could operate. These were all prohibited (or at least six-sigma-strongly suggested against) by the results of certain polarization experiments.

     Harrison had put forward a new solution to the paradox, a third option involving a second time dimension that allowed the hidden variables to evolve in such a way as to allow non-causative simultaneity. The information could travel faster than light, he showed, but not so fast as to cause any of the problems that plagued Einstein.

     It was, in short, the proof that the laws of the universe allowed such a phenomenon as the ansible effect to exist.

     The second half of the paper showed that the proof had a hole in it, fitted the hole with a stick of dynamite, and sent the dust flying.

     Wallace proved (and this proof, Harrison saw, was in every way stronger than his original proof of the ansible effect (not surprising, he thought, since he had made that proof up knowing that it was flawed, but betting (and, up until now, quite successfully) that no-one would be able to find the flaw, let alone prove it)) that the hidden variables would in fact be susceptible to causality violations in sub-luminal reference frames. Namely, that it was possible to obtain contradictory values for these variables under physically achievable conditions.

     If you got an observer going fast enough – three-fifths the speed of light would do it – and operated an ansible just so, you could throw a ball into the air and then tell your past self to drop it instead. Hell, you could even – with some contrivance – hire a hitman to kill your grandfather. If, of course, the ansible worked as advertised.

     Thus, the hidden variables didn’t – couldn’t – exist, and the ansible couldn’t work.

     Except it did.

*

     Harrison looked up and nodded, sliding the pre-print back across the desk. It was a personal file, he saw with a quick, thankful prayer and not a print-off from arXiv or another of the online repositories. Wallace looked at him, smiling.

     “Well? Yes, it all looks correct.”

     The professor looked stunned. He’d been expecting something more.

     “Is that it?”

     “Yes, your theory looks sound, and the math seems solid. I haven’t taken too long to look it over, but –”

     “Then what about the ansible!?” The man had half-risen from his chair. “You just admitted that it can’t work, so how can it? How does it?”

     Harrison sat for a moment, then asked, slow and thoughtful, “I suppose you’re going to publish this soon. You may have already submitted it, in fact.”

     “Damn right.” They both knew that he hadn’t, though – to rush this into print before meeting the man behind the future cohesion of interstellar society would be like passing up a chance to have a beer with Einstein and Jesus at the pub. Harrison had no doubt that the paper would be online before nightfall, if the man weren’t mollified.

     “In that case, will you allow me a small indulgence if I promise to show you the real proof?”

     Wallace sat down and nodded. Harrison stood and walked to the wall. Holding his hand against the wood paneling, he began drumming out a quick tattoo with his fingers. The RFID chips implanted under his skin beat out a sixteen digit code, and the wall safe hissed open on hydraulic cylinders.

     From inside, amid stacks of forms and notebooks, he pulled two small boxes, each consisting of circuit boards stacked on top of one another via ceramic spacers. Nestled inside the bottom half of each one was a tennis-ball sized sphere containing an integrated-chip magneto-optical trap.

     He flicked a switch on each, and blinking green LEDs began to peek out from within the polycarbonate shelves. Two specially designed tubes stuck out from the sides of the spheres, with an intricate pattern of prongs and holes on their faces, and he stuck these two together.

     Wallace watched with a half-open lower lip. These were the first two ansible transmitters ever constructed, the apparatus that Harrison had done his Nobel work on.

     The two tubes separated with a slight hiss as their seals re-engaged, and Harrison turned the two around to show the screens and numeric keypads to Wallace. On one, a blinking cursor stood at the upper left hand of the screen, while on the other one the screen glowed a quiet backlit green.

     “You’re familiar with the basic operation of the ansible?”

     “The operation isn’t –”

     Harrison waved the objection down. “I mean how it works according to the literature.”

     “Each chamber holds a certain number of entangled ions. The transmitter interacts with the spin of a small section of the trapped ions with every clock cycle, while the receiver measures a portion of its trapped ions and extracts the information. Like a modem for a quantum computer.”

     “Right. This is a small model, so it can only transmit a handful of bits at a time, and only once for each synchronization. Here,” he pushed the transmitter across, “type out a few digits.”

     Wallace did so. Harrison pressed a button on the receiver, and the same digits reappeared on its display.

     “And it would do the same thing, at the same speed, if the two were separated by a light year of empty space or lead brick,” Harrison concluded.

     “Okay, now how does it really work? Look,” Wallace said, impatient, “I’m not going to blackmail you or try to ruin your company, but I want to know how – and why – this is all… this…”

     “You want to know how I managed to achieve the most remarkable breakthrough in physics in the past hundred years and why I’ve lied about it for the past decade?”

     “Well, yes.”

     “Perhaps…” Harrison paused, “just this once, I can show you.” He scrawled a glyph on the touch-reactive section of his desktop. The plasma screen switched from the Martian feed to a view of the office from behind his desk.

Wallace looked a little bit startled at this, glancing this way and that for the camera lens whenever he thought Harrison wasn’t looking, but suddenly stopped, perhaps he realized that his furtive search itself was being recorded for embarrassing posterity.

     “Now, once I reconnect the units to entangle the populations again,” he did so, “I’ll give you the transmitter – don’t touch anything yet – and turn the receiver to face like this.” Harrison rotated the other unit so that the display was in clear view on the monitor, yet hidden to Wallace. Another quick gesture across the glass and the screen went blank.

     He made one last adjustment in the receiver and leaned back after double checking the screen.

     “All right, professor. Go ahead and type in a few numbers.”

     After Wallace had done so, he brought the display back up and turned the receiver around to show the same six numbers on its LCD screen. The professor was unimpressed.

     “That’s just the same as before.”

     “Let’s go to the video.”

     Harrison ran his finger across the desk and the video feed rewound to just after he had separated the two units. They both watched as the inventor of the ansible turned the receiver unit around to face away from the professor and make a small adjustment inside.

     “Hold on a minute – what’s that?” The same six numbers had just shown up on the display screen in the video, but the plasma-screen Wallace had yet to bring his hand up from his lap to start typing.

     “That,” said Harrison, “is how the ansible works.”

     Wallace had no response as he saw himself punch in the same six numbers on the transmitter that were already on the screen of the receiver. He slumped in his chair. Harrison waited another second then killed the replay. The screen went back into the wall. He waved a hand towards the second page of the paper.

     “If you redo this same line of calculation in a slightly different direction, you’ll find – although this took me five years or so – that the Novikov self-consistency principle is valid over entangled quantum waveforms. That is, that not only are closed time-like curves everywhere, they’re an inherent part of quantum phenomena. You can go back in time, so to speak, but you can’t kill your grandfather. In fact, you can’t do _anything_ that would change anything that will already have happened.”

     Harrison paused, gauging the other man’s response. He saw the slow breath in, the slight rise and fall of the chin.

     He went on.

     “The ansible just makes the future visible. It doesn’t transmit anything; it stores the entire conversation ahead of time and plays it back to create the illusion of superluminal communication.”

     Wallace sat quietly staring at him. Then,

     “Show me. No video trickery.”

     “All right.”

     Harrison synchronized the units again, and then placed the receiver at one end of the desk, the transmitter at the other. He got up and walked around to stand next to Wallace. From his desk, he pulled a single ten-sided die.

     “Six rolls and I’ll punch in the numbers from each roll.”

     “Agreed.”

     He pushed the button, and the receiver printed out six numbers – five, six, zero, nine, two, five. He rolled the die, clattering across the desk. Five. He punched it into the transmitter.

     The next time, six.

     Then, zero.

     And the next three numbers the same as well. Wallace would have called it a one in a million chance.

     If he thought it was chance.

     Ashen, he slumped back into his chair. Harrison blanked the machines and connected them to each other again before leaning back against the corner of the desk.

     “What do you suppose would have happened if I had tried to punch in the wrong number, or stop you?” Wallace asked.

     “I expect that I would have prevented or overpowered you. Or, maybe, the thermal electronic noise would have punched the buttons before either of us could have reached it.”

     “Can I try it? Punch the buttons myself, see if –”

     Harrison didn’t let him finish. “No. It was enough letting you see this.”

     “Why are you being so… so god-damned obstinate!?” Wallace stared at him, befuddled. “This is the biggest discovery ever, bigger than your phony ansible, even. Why couldn’t you have chosen to…” he trailed off.

     Both men stood still, staring at the twin machines on the table. Harrison broke the silence by handing the sheaf of papers back to the visiting professor. Wallace took them and wordlessly began to fold them over, worrying the sheets until a crease formed, tearing along it, and then repeating the process.

     When he could go no further, he looked up. Harrison looked to the wall and nodded his head in the direction of a discreet incinerator chute. In the torn scraps of paper went. As Wallace stood at the door to leave, he paused, hand on the knob, and turned to Harrison one last time.

     “You knew I wouldn’t tell anyone, didn’t you.”

     “You’re a reasonable man, Mr. Wallace.”

     “No,” he said as his hand left the knob and he turned square to face Harrison. “You _knew_ I wouldn’t tell anyone. You _know_ that I won’t. Can’t.”

     Harrison sank lower into his chair, leaning back and dropping his gaze to the far edge of his desk.

     “What would you do if you knew how it all ended? For you, for your children, for anything – everything – that you hold dear?” He let a soft sigh out through his nose. “What would the world do? To learn that there’s nothing that they _can_ do, nothing that they _will_ do, to change any of what they see, _know_ will happen to them?”

     “What did you do?”

     “If you close your eyes, the future goes away. Or at least, you don’t see what’s coming, which is just as good.”

     “And if you don’t?” Wallace asked. “Or if you’re too late?”

     “You try to forget.”

     “Did that work?”

     Harrison turned to stare out the windows, desk empty and visitor ignored. Wallace waited, nodded once to the chair back, and let himself out.

     In the empty room,

     “No.”