I. The Latitude of Falling Sparks

Everybody who is my age or older can remember exactly where there were the day they heard about The Amazing Journey of Colonel Eratosthenes Smith. It was that kind of thing. If you’re too young to remember then forget about it. You have no idea.

It’s like that moon landing thing. To you and me, it might seem like just another boring day in history class but my father had a thing for rockets and old movies and science and stuff and so it meant a lot to him. He said he could remember exactly what he was doing when everybody found out that the moon landing was all fake, another huge joke on humanity from the Age of Nation States. Anyway, Smith was a much bigger deal than the moon landing thing. Changed everything.

It was the morning after a gig. I’d been up all night kicking rocks under the rose bushes with this insane dark haired girl I met at the show, didn’t get home until ten in the morning, no sleep, still pretty wasted and I walk into the kitchen and here’s Bernie, the drummer in the band, one of my housemates, surrounded by a cloud of 3Ds as bright as the frigging sun, all news sites, running the audio at around 100dB, pounding like a swing band on crank.

I stopped just inside the door and just squinted. “What is this?”

“You didn’t hear?” He waved to turn down the sound.

“Hear what?”

He pointed in a random direction. “See that guy? That guy flew due south, past Antarctica.”

“Who?”

“Him.” He pointed again. “The guy. Colonel Eratosthenes Smith. He’s half a million miles out now. He’s still going.”

I tried to focus. There he was. I read the caption: “known to his friends as ‘Tosser’ Smith.” I read it again.

It didn’t make any sense. “How do you fly south from Antarctica?” I asked him.

“Look at the map, man.” He pointed at the counter, which had layers of dishes, magazines, dishes, food, dishes — a crap parfait. I tried not to hurl. In front of the counter Bernie was projecting a big flat map. I could see the seven continents stretching out around the north pole like pieces of a flattened orange peel. Antarctica was over on one side and there was a long red line shooting outward, passing some shadowy squiggles.

He stood up. “See that?” he pointed to the red line. “That’s where Smith has flown, so far. See these?” he pointed to the squiggles. “These are new continents.”

“No.” I looked at him sideways and shook my head. “No. Who says?”

“They do. It’s on the news.”

“How the hell would the news know?”

“They’re the news. They have experts.”

“How do the experts know?”

He gave me a look. “They’re experts, dude.”

I looked back, a little harder than he was looking at me. “What about all that stuff in school, Columbus and all?”

Bernie sat down again before he answered. “Yeah, well,” he said slowly “that was all bullshit. Everything they said about Columbus was bullshit.” He looked like a kid who had just found out his parents are divorcing. He grimly tells me the news. “The world is flat, my friend.” 

“What?”

“The World.” He said. “Is.” And then for this part he had a nice gesture, like making a pizza. “Flat.“

I sat down, spinning a little. I could see it now. The graphics. The talking heads. A little 3D of a supersonic aircraft doing Mach three to the horizon. It kept repeating. 

“Weird,” I said.

We stared at the show in silence for the next couple of minutes. Over on the map, the red line shot out into the blankness. There was a lot of blankness.

“How far does it go?” I asked him.

“It doesn’t stop.”

“Never?”

“Nope.”

“Weird.” I said again.

▼ 

At first, I didn’t think it would make any difference. I’m a bass player. What do I care? That’s what I thought at first.

Believe it or not, I was a hell of a musician back in those days. Did you know I invented the Zook beat? Bernie, the drummer, he and I came up with it. It’s a trick, you know. It only seems like it always speeds up. We speed up until we’re going exactly double the tempo we started at, but then we sneak in a half time feel. You don’t even notice it, but we’re right back where we started. You get the impression that we never stop speeding up, but somehow we get back to the same place. I’m owed about a billion dollars for that beat. Whatever. I’m not complaining.

In those days I played with Chad Zooks. You’ve probably never heard of us. We were one of the first real Zook bands and maybe the best, I don’t know. This was before the Zookmaniacs got to be such a big deal. They had that good looking singer, Giggles, what’s her name, you know. We just had Chad, who is ugly as dirt and he doesn’t even sing. Just shouts to the beat. Anyway, the Zookmaniacs came along later. This was back in the day and everybody was going nuts.

I was nineteen years old. I had never fired a gun, never been in any real danger, never been out of California. I wasn’t some kind of outlaw or revolutionary anything like you might have heard. We were just trying to meet girls and get people listen to our ridiculous music. What difference did the shape of the world make? It was the least of our problems.

▼ 

We lived in a wrecked bungalow about ten blocks south of the college campus. It was big a crowd for a small place. Chad lived there and so did Bernie, along with some students from the college and a couple of genuine lunatics. There was one guy, Rebo or Rasputin or something like that who lived in a room entirely filled with newspapers, like a gerbil. He would say pithy crap like “Technology is Murder,” and refuse to download anything on the superprinter, not even breakfast. In fact, I think he lived entirely on popcorn and condiments. He bought the popcorn at the health food store for three cents a bag and stole the condiments from McDonald’s. He would mix up steaming buckets of the stuff. We finally threw him out and everything he owned into the superprinter. You get the idea. It was a dump.

I spent the rest of that morning fussing with the superprinter, trying to download this pure diamond jewelry for Chad. He was going to sell it at one of our shows. In those days fashions changed every two or three days and Chad had sussed that this stuff would the next lightning blue rage. Of course, I had to do all the work. Chad couldn’t bootleg a baseball broadcast.

Theoretically a superprinter can make anything you want, but anything you want costs money, of course. To bootleg stuff you have to convince the machine that you’ve paid for it and then it can use its Quantum Superposition Something-Or-Other to find a way to make it from the water and whatever garbage you throw in.

So anyway we’re all there and I’m working, trying to concentrate, Chad is over my shoulder kibbitzing, Bernie is across the room bitching at us because he wanted to use the superprinter to make cheese sticks, and then to top if off this kid, one of our housemates, comes bouncing in the door shouting “Guys! guys!” He’s grinning like Christmas. Like chips and guacamole. He was one of the college kids and he actually paid us rent to stay in our smelly little hamster nest. We called the kid “Elmo”. I still don’t know his real name. The truth is, I liked Elmo, but I could see why he drove most people bats. 

“I’m going to be a physicist!” he bubbled. Nobody said anything for a minute. Elmo is frightening when he’s happy.

“What’s a physicist?” Bernie asked, forcing a smile. He wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed.

I tried to answer. “It’s a guy who works with atoms and stuff. It’s an old time science thing.”

“Not really.” Elmo corrected me. “Physics is the study of the physical world, using measurements and mathematical models.” Elmo had been doing some reading.

Bernie looked blank. “It’s a science thing?” he asked.

“I said it was a science thing.” I was trying to show I had been right all along.

Now Elmo was starting to get a little pissed. “Yes, it’s a science thing,” he said.

“Wrong.” Chad says with his back to us. Bernie and I look at each other. Chad liked to hear himself talk, he was way smarter than us and he loved to make us feel like idiots.

He turned around slowly, like a tank turret lining up the final shot. “You can’t be physicist. Physics is finished. Completed. Edwig Wittenstein demonstrated that the ultimate theory of physics could be expressed as a large black rectangle. The Hamiltonian of the universe was coded as a series of primes in the ratio of the height to the width.” He took a step or two forward, sketching in the air. “He had his rectangle drawn on a large piece of poster board and he used to set it up on an easel at the start of his lecture, go to the microphone and say ‘I’m Ed Wittenstein. Thank you.’ and sit down. He was the last real physicist.” Even though he was disagreeing with Elmo, he was staring right at me, although he must have known, deep down somewhere, I couldn’t care less about what he was saying.

“No, no.” Elmo said. “I mean yes, I knew that, but it’s not important. Things have changed–”

Chad’s not listening. He keeps the floor by talking louder. “Physics was finished, back during the Singularity. There isn’t any physics — there’s just discussion, reinterpretation, deconstruction — physics today is really just a kind of … poetry.” Very quickly, he checks all of us, to make sure we are completely aware just how freaking deep he is.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” Elmo was one of those unfortunate people whose voice got higher in pitch the more angry he got. It was painful to watch. “Wittenstein was wrong. He was wrong.” he squeaked.

I’d had enough. Now or never. “Look, Chad,” I said. “You’re missing the point completely. The point is that Elmo here is all wiggly because he wants to be a physicist. We’re all his pals and so he kind of expects us to be happy for him. That’s all that matters. You’re winding him up just to hear yourself talk. So just try to cool it and let Elmo finish a sentence, for chrissakes.”

He shut up, because he knew that eventually I would hit him. “Go ahead, Elmo,” I said, “Say what you were going to say.”

“They’re putting together an expedition to one of the new continents. They want to use scientists, just like in an old movie. They’re casting it here in the city.”

“And you want to go?”

He looked up, breathing slower now. “Yes.”

I looked around. The mood had changed. Eyebrows were raised, people looked at each other. I got up and hit Elmo on the head. “Well, that’s different!” I said, smiling. “Hey guys, Elmo’s going to be in a movie!”

Elmo smiled weakly with a sort of a f— it and shook everybody’s hand.

▼ 

I got the diamonds later that afternoon. Bootlegging is tricky, but I’ve got a knack for it. Diamonds were worth a lot of money just then, but like I say, in those days stuff went out of style pretty fast and chances are in a few weeks these diamonds would be one more worthless thing that anybody can download for free from their friends. That’s the trouble with a superprinter. This machine was supposed to give people everything they want, but people don’t work that way. People only want what somebody else has. By the time everybody’s got it nobody wants it anymore. We all just keep chasing things we don’t need, going around in circles, always moving but never getting anywhere. It’s a merry-go-round of desire and greed and trying to be better than the next guy. It’s built into us. We can’t help it, the way the sparks from a dumpster fire can’t help flying upwards.

The superprinter was invented by that guy, the last physicist, Eddie Wittenstein. His name is still on some of the core code. His inventions made it so everybody could have anything they wanted any time they wanted. He figured everybody would be happy about it but he wound up hanging himself in Las Vegas hotel room.

Some people say he was murdered.

See, this is the problem: what he invented was a kind of computer that can solve any math problem. This was bad news if you were a mathematician, because it put them out of business. Then next he put the physicists out of business, because it’s just more math. Then he put the chemists out of business and then he put the engineers out of business and eventually he put the manufacturers out of business, too. They called it the “Singularity.” 

But here’s the thing: there are only so many ways of sticking atoms together, only so many ways to make stuff and the machine handled all that automatically. It already knew what was the strongest, or the lightest, or whatever you want. You’re never going to come up with something that’s actually new. The best you could do is come up with something that’s fresh. That’s a kind of fashion and fashion can go around in circles making money forever. All you need to know was what people wanted. You didn’t need science. Science was finished, like Chad said. I guess some people still count birds or stars or whatever, but I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t pay very well.

Anyway, it depressed the hell out of Edwig, so he climbed a ladder, put a rope around his neck and kicked the ladder away. Or so the story goes. You probably saw the movie.

▼ 

Our last gig was at a club called “Yummy Yummy Freshness” in the city. I was sitting at the edge of the stage, waiting, my mouth tasting numbly of cigarettes, pizza and orange juice. My bass was this nice upright number I had designed myself at home and printed at the club. It felt good and still a little warm from the printer. The kids were there, milling around the front of the stage, talking, unaware of the tremendous personal danger we represented. I looked at Bernie, he twirls his drumsticks and smiles. He counts to four, the lights go down, I light the fuses, stuff starts blowing up. I started with some plastic dolls, so that body parts came raining down on the poor slobs. Then Chad jumps up and starts firing a commercial laser drilling rig into a half ton hunk of freshprint sandwich meat and brains. This gives you a huge sonic boom loud enough to penetrate even the highest grade of industrial ear protection. Like I say, in those days, everybody was going nuts.

Then we start the Beat. Just live, acoustic drums and bass. You can’t quite tell what you’re hearing until the ringing in your ears starts to go down. But then you do. The beat keeps speeding up, you keep breathing faster and faster, you can’t think straight, you want to run the hell away and pretty soon the kids are having a group coronary and Chad starts to sing, but all the kids can hear is “Hee! Ugh! Hee ugh! Hee ugh!” which is probably for the best, since Chad’s lyrics were unbelievably bad.

Somewhere along the way, all the exotic chemicals in Chad’s bloodstream began to disagree with each other. He started haranguing the crowd, taunting them. Pushing them over the edge. They threw chairs around, bouncing them off the bartender. At first I was laughing, caught up in the rush of it all, but then I saw where it was going. I looked at Bernie and he had his head down, almost touching his snare drum, sweat dripping off his nose, pushing the beat harder and harder, faster and faster, never getting anywhere but more agitated, more twisted, more intense. I tried to get his attention, to warn him, but then I saw Chad out of the corner of my eye, climbing the proscenium, stark naked except for jewelry, still screaming through his amplified voice, telling the crowd all his personal problems, what a bad singer he was, how terrible his music was and how much he loved them, all in an unintelligible wail like a orangutan being gutted by a chain saw.

Well that was it. They rushed the stage. I tried to use the bass as a kind of weapon, to keep them from trampling the still clueless Bernie, but it was only made of cheap lith-stuff and it was no match for three hundred and fifty amped out human torpedoes. I went down.

▼ 

I woke up at the Police station. The first thing I can remember is sitting up, screaming. Two people were holding me, one was putting a some medical stuff away. I stopped bellowing and stared into the bright lights for second and then suddenly realized just how lucky I was to be sitting down. So comfortable. With all my friends, here at the station. My good friends.

Happymorph, maybe 150 mg. With a touch of acetylcholinase.

I was glad to see the Peace Officer. We had a pleasant chat about the club and Chad and the band and this and that. You know. They downloaded my autowitness. It probably showed a magnificent view of fists and large metal objects swinging directly at my head. At least they knew I was telling the truth.

At about 10 the next morning they were through with me. I went outside and sobered up on the front steps for a minute. There was nothing to look at except a row of bail bondsmen and a few nasty little sex joints. The air was clean, anyway. I closed my eyes and checked the messages on my head phone. 

Chad had left a totally incoherent message sometime in the middle of last night. He had escaped the fracas with only minor injuries, unless you count the fact that he was completely out of his mind. He said he was quitting the band.

Bernie’s boyfriend had called me from the hospital. He said Bernie’s new face was better than the old one.

Elmo wanted to borrow my car. He needed a ride to get to his audition.

Out across the street, in front of the sex joints, the ads exploded in bursts of twisting sunshine spitting. “Welcome to Utopia,” a beautiful woman said.

I stood up slowly and started walking back home.

▼ 

I decided to go with Elmo down his audition, or whatever the hell it was. The truth is I was feeling kind of lousy and I was hoping that some of Elmo’s boy joy would wear off on me. We had to walk all the way around the block to find my car. Everybody borrows my car without telling me and then I can’t find it when I need it. I told the car where we were going and we headed out. Elmo couldn’t stop talking all the way there, about Eratosthenes Smith, exploration, stuff like that. I don’t remember exactly. To tell you the truth, I kind of spaced out.

We were a few minutes late and Elmo almost missed his appointment. There was a panel of people: a stylist, a fad engineer, an image architect, a couple of producers, some people from marketing. They asked Elmo some questions and when he started gushing about science and the future, they smiled. They liked him, or anyway they thought he was funny, so he got the job.

But they really liked me. I was just sitting by the door, minding my own business. They wanted to cast me as the “Strong, Good Looking Young Man Who Can Handle Machines.” Hilarious. I am pretty good with a cadcam or a superprinter, but they were stretching it with the “good looking” part. They wanted me to change my name to Sparks and wear a baseball cap. I told them that was out, no way, and so then they said they liked my Attitude. They said it was “authentic.” That’s what they wanted: the Bad Boy of the Expedition with a Confrontational Haircut and a Heart of Gold. Big and Strong and Dumb as a Post. Whatever.

They wanted people who could leave today, right now. There was some kind of a race to scoop the other media companies. They wanted to get a team in the air by tomorrow morning at the latest. All they needed was for Elmo and I to sign a little agreement that gave them the rights to our autowitness downloads when we got back and then we would have a few hours between now and dawn to get our lives together.

I told them I wanted to think about it and started to get up to leave, but I felt too dizzy. I guess I still had some of those nasty police pharmaceuticals in my system. They wanted an answer. I thought about Chad and Bernie and the whole drug infested zoo. I thought about Eratosthenes Smith and the stuff Elmo said in the car. My head was floating like a helium balloon.

“All right.” I said, “I’ll go.”

And that’s the truth. Everything else you’ve heard is bullshit. I decided to go to the new world because my head was all messed up on truth serum and I was tired of running in circles. I don’t know what I was thinking. I was young, I guess. 

When Elmo and I got back home again, I spent a few hours sitting on the porch calling people, telling them I was leaving, that I would be gone for a couple of weeks. I wanted to call the dark haired girl I told you about, but I didn’t have her number and she hadn’t called. I’ll always regret that. I wish I had said more to everyone. I didn’t know it was the last time I would talk to any of them.

I didn’t sleep that night. I went out for a long walk up into the hills.

▼ 

In the morning, we couldn’t find my car again and Elmo and I had to take a cab to the airport. Some people from the company met us there and took us out to a hangar. We actually walked out cross the tarmac at sunrise, the wind blowing in our faces, bringing the smell of rotting garbage from the bay.

They had printed a new plane for us, a big military transport that could make amphibious landings. My job was to run the huge superprinter in the back of the plane. It was the mother of all stereoliths. I could have printed a Sherman tank, driven it out the back of plane and conquered Germany.

The others started showing up. They were excited, very nervous. We did some pictures and a fluffy video bit. Ten actor-scientists, two actor-pilots, an actor-doctor and one musician pretending to be an actor-gearhead.

In a few hours, we were in the air.

Going south, from anywhere, led you off the old map. We followed Colonel Smith’s route, down South America. I guess we could have gone any direction and it would have worked just as well. It took us two hours to get to Tierra del Fuego, where we stopped, did some more publicity stuff and then headed out straight across Antarctica and beyond.

The next 11,000 miles was just ocean, with ice fields the size of Borneo. The sun stayed with us, always near the horizon, a big reddish ellipse, looking stranger and stranger as went further south. Elmo and I watched for awhile. I was a little weirded out.

“Where does it go at night?” I asked him, “Like, is there a big hole in the ocean or what?”

“Uh, well,” he said, “it’s light, it comes from a different direction depending on where you are and what time it is.” He blinked those bug eyes and shook his head. “That’s about all we know. We don’t know what it is.” He pushed up his glasses and looked at me like it was some kind of tragedy. “We don’t know what the stars are,” he said. “We don’t know anything any more.” I didn’t know anything in the first place, so there you go.

Somebody yelled “Shut up!” They were trying to sleep. Actors.

▼ 

Our first landfall was on what Smith had named “Lindaland” after his ex-wife. Man, he must have hated her. It was unbelievable. It was so cold that there were dry ice glaciers on the mountains. We stopped, the pilots and I got out and loaded the tanks with seawater and ice and other crap hoping that we had enough raw materials to make some more fuel, so we could get the hell out of there.

They were reasonable guys, former military pilots who were probably the only ones who really knew what they were doing. I sat in the radio seat banging my hands together.

“Do you know where we’re going?” I asked them.

“Yeah,” said one.

“We just follow the front of the plane,” said the other. He was scraping for humor. I tried to smile. I appreciate scraping. It has its place.

“We have Colonel Smith’s flight data in the computer. We’re just trying to follow his route.” He pointed to a screen that showed a video of clouds and fog. Right next to it was a big screen that just said “Error.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The navigator.”

“Why is it blinking like that?”

“It doesn’t know where we are anymore. It’s confused.”

I looked back and forth between the screens and the pilots. “So the only way you know which way to go is look out the window and see if it looks the same?”

“Yeah.” They laughed.

I thought this over for a second. The video still showed the endless fog, whipping by far below. 

“But Smith knew what he was doing, right? I mean, he can get back and all, right?”

“They lost touch with Smith yesterday morning.”

Not what I wanted to hear.

▼ 

Eventually we crossed another huge continent, warmer and densely forested. I was in a window seat, next to a woman named Zoe. She was cast as “The Beautiful Young Scientist Who Doesn’t Take Any Guff From Anyone.” They were right about the beautiful part. She had a full limbic autowitness, so that the kids back home could get dosed with adrenaline or drenched in endorphins whenever she was. They told us to call her Zoe, probably because she was the Zoologist. Clever bastards.

We watched the scenery go by. The trees didn’t look right, somehow. Too tall. We flew over a series of big U shaped canyons. Far below us, a river wound back and forth across itself like jewelry in a box.

“Look at that!” Somebody yelled down the plane. Zoe picked up her binoculars. I saw them, in a meadow, running in a big triangular formation. They looked like roaches from this distance.

“Theropods.” She said. “Or some descendent of the theropods.” I had no idea what a theropod was. She put down her binoculars and looked at me.

“Dinosaurs.” She said.

▼ 

Our first camp was at the mouth of a big river. We took a vote and named it ‘Lost Angeles”. It was a joke, at the time. Sorry.

It looked a lot different than it does today. It was just a big flood plain, with sand dunes as you got near the ocean. We landed in a shallow lake and taxied up to the shore. Everybody climbed out the big ramp in the back, boots splashing in water.

The clouds looked kind of ugly, so I got to work printing up a whole bunch of stuff — shelters, food, equipment. Everybody wanted something from me all at once. Elmo and some of the more serious types began setting up experiments immediately. He was all excited because apparently the gravitational constant wasn’t constant. He hoped it would explain something about the weather, but I didn’t quite understand what.

I set up a microwave radio and they got in touch with the company. This led to a round of interviews, some of it sexy, but mostly dull as educational T.V. People were talking about the Turner Thesis, a New Malthusian Limit, stuff like that. I kept working.

It started pouring right after sunset. Things settled down after that. I printed myself up a big parka and went out into the rain. I headed out across the dunes, till I got to where I could see the waves crashing, the lightning on the horizon.

I watched for awhile. 

I felt free.

I turned around when I heard someone climbing up the dune behind me. A big figure, silhouetted by the lights from camp. It was Roger, The Strong-Jawed Team Leader, Quick Thinking and Cool Under Fire. He walked up next to me, nodded, glanced at the sky, started some laconic man-to-man chit chat. I couldn’t figure out what he was up to.

Eventually he asked me why I came on this trip. I looked at him, luminescent rain streaming down the sides of his face, dripping off his photo-ready cheekbones. I said something about adventure, what not.

“You’re lying.” He said, just like that. It was a fact. I was lying. He knew and he wanted me to know that he knew. He was curious, he wasn’t in a big hurry. He wanted to see what I would do.

“I’m not lying.” I said, never taking my eyes off him. “I’m simplifying.” He watched me for a minute, then nodded his head and turned, calling over his shoulder.

“A lawyer called for you. He wants you to call back. He’s from the company.”

Chad Zeukmajian was dead. He was found hidden in the old steam tunnels under the campus. What gave him away was the smell. Someone had put him there, or at least that’s the police thought, because his face had been pounded as flat as a quesadilla.

His autowitness was useless. Fishing around in cyberspace, the police had located the last video of Chad. It showed him gunning a car against the glowing menu board of a Jack in The Box restaurant at five in the morning. It was hard to talk a car into doing something like that, but there it was, captured by some security camera. The sign was unbreakable, of course, so the video showed Chad in the driver’s seat, telling the car to back up, to accelerate forward and then the car and the sign rebounding like giant superballs. Over and over again. As if he could wake up the closed restaurant by slapping it and telling it to whip up some cheeseburgers.

The car was mine. It was found parked at an entrance to the tunnels, a hundred feet from Chad’s body. There were fifty pounds of bootleg diamonds in the trunk. My fingerprints were all over everything, of course. And no one knew where I went the night before I left, or why I had suddenly decided to leave the country.

There was a warrant out for me, but it was just a “material witness” warrant. They didn’t say I did it or anything, but they wanted to talk to me and to download what I saw before I left. The company didn’t care what the police wanted, of course. They knew a murder would sell a lot more air time than some mickey mouse expedition to the Land of the Lost. The best thing from their point of view would be if I had killed Chad and they had an exclusive contract on the video, assuming I did it after I gave them full rights to my autowitness. Unfortunately, the cops didn’t know exactly when Chad was re-arranged so the company didn’t know if it already owned the murder or not.

The trouble was, the bandwidth of a microwave radio was too small for me to give a real electronic deposition. Besides, the autowitness is designed so that it only works in the proper legal setting. They couldn’t download me, even if I wanted them to.

So I didn’t say much. They thought I knew something. They wanted it. It killed them, not knowing everything.

The next phone call was from the police. I said even less.

▼ 

We left in the morning, heading further south. Everything I had made the night before got left behind, blowing across the wet sand. Human beings. The world is our ashtray.

We followed the river and the flood plain became a valley, the valley became a canyon and then we passed an unbelievable system of waterfalls, maybe a thousand feet high. I knew, just looking at it, that it was the highest waterfall in all the known world. I looked across the arching peaks of glacier and stone that stretched out in front of us. Was there an even higher waterfall out there? Somewhere undiscovered, maybe half a million miles away? Was there a higher mountain, a bluer sea? There had to be, there would always be, because it didn’t stop.  I was finally beginning to understand what it all meant.

Elmo and Zoe figured that the farther you went out, the less things would resemble those back home. Whatever killed the dinosaurs back home hadn’t quite wiped them out here. But if you went further, you would eventually get to a place where there were no dinosaurs and no mammals, or reptiles or birds. Just something else, stranger than anything you’d ever known. Maybe there were other civilizations, cities with an architecture too alien to imagine. Maybe there was a distant latitude where water flows in figure eights down the drain and where sparks don’t fly upward.

I couldn’t see it very well at the moment, because my hair had left a big grease spot on the window and now I was fogging it up with my breath.

▼ 

The pilots never even saw the mountain until we hit it.

Our plane could absorb the impact and release the energy as a blinding piezoelectric flash, a flash so bright it set the forest on fire and started an avalanche. So the plane came out okay, but everybody was tossed around the cabin pretty bad, bouncing off the air bags. The plane careened down an alluvial slide and came to rest on the edge of a gully, with the nose pointing down about 45 degrees. Within a few seconds a huge billowing cloud of snow and rock buried most of the plane.

Then it was quiet. I could hear Roger shouting. “Is everybody okay?”

One of pilots was out cold or dead, with blood pouring from a scalp wound. Zoe looked like she probably had a broken nose. Most people were just shaken up. Me and Roger got a cabin door open and we climbed out. There was still a lot of snow in the air. We looked out into a world that was white, featureless. Elmo and some of the others came outside to see. We were giddy on endorphins and adrenaline, glad to have solid ground beneath our feet.

But it wasn’t over yet.

The first warning we got was a long, low pitched sound, unbelievably loud, like a train whistle. Everybody started talking at once.

“What was that?” Somebody said.

“An animal. A very loud animal.”

“And probably a big animal,” Elmo said, “You can’t make low frequency sound unless you have a big resonating chamber.” This is how a geek faces death, armed with an accurate and insightful analysis of the shit that’s about to kill him.

“It sounded close.”

I was looking around, checking every direction. There were shapes, forms, shadows. Things that seemed to moving. The smell of smoke.

It blasted again. A great sound, rich with overtones like a pipe organ and a ripping, high pitched harmonic that screeched with distortion at the end of the phrase.

“There could be a stampede. I think the forest is on fire.”

“In the snow?”

“Maybe we’re in somebody’s territory. Maybe we should get back in the plane.”

“Wait. It’s probably nothing.” Famous last words.

There was rush, rocks flying in the air, branches breaking, snow flurries and it was coming right at us, a giant plucked chicken, waving its tail in the air like a broken fan belt. Fight or flee. Full limbic. The kids at home would love this. We scrambled backwards over uneven ground, witless primates in full retreat.

Now, I want to clear up something at this point. I know everybody thinks I’m a big hero and I saved everybody’s life and all, but the truth is it was just a lucky accident. Before the crash, I had been in the back of the plane, fooling around with the superprinter, just poking around the directories and making a lot of really cool stuff, including a 1955 pump action shotgun, straight out of the Encyclopedia. I wasn’t going to use it or anything. I was just looking at it. I was lucky I didn’t blow somebody’s head off when we were bouncing around the cabin. When everybody got out of the plane, I still had the shotgun with me.

When Big Bird came rushing at us, I released the safety, cocked it and shot it into the air.

The beast froze. The scientists froze. I cocked the shotgun again and blasted one more in the air. The dinosaur bolted, leaping away into nothingness.

“I guess the loudest one wins,” I said. Everybody laughed at that, not because it was funny, but because they were scared out of their minds.

Roger organized some watches to protect our perimeter. All kinds of weird animals were running down the slope to escape the forest fire, or the avalanche, or maybe they were just running from each other. I made some more weapons, this time modern directed energy rifles.

We held them off. It was a long day.

▼ 

By nightfall, we had constructed a shelter. It took a long time, because we couldn’t get the ramp open and we had to take everything out of the cabin door. And at first I didn’t realize that I should build robots and let the robots build the shelter. In the meantime it was getting colder.

I got a radio set up and Roger made the famous mayday call. We were high drama back home. A rescue was being mounted to come and get us, but they didn’t think it would arrive for a day or more, at least.

Something really bothered me about the rescue. We were okay, we were going to survive. Why did we need to be rescued? I told Roger that I thought I could get the robots to dig out the plane and we could fly it out of here, keep going. He looked at me like I was crazy.

We made some food and got ready to wait out the night. After dinner, I found Elmo, sitting on the floor against the wall of the plane, looking a little beat up.

“It’s over, isn’t it,” I said.

“Maybe.” He shifted a little and glanced at me. “I don’t know.”

We sat there, not saying anything.

▼ 

The next morning, clear and bright. We had started building a bigger antenna, on a ridge not far from camp.

“Holy shit,” somebody said.

We looked out over the canyon. They were coming in at unbelievable speed, absolutely silently. Four blue and yellow vertical take off jets. A sonic boom rocked us and then the sound of the engines as they came blasting into camp.

It didn’t make any sense. It couldn’t be the rescue. There was no way they could have gotten to us so quickly. These jets must have already been on their way long before we crashed.

It was the police and they were coming for me.

I picked up the shotgun and headed for the trees. A quarter mile away from camp, on the edge of a frozen lake, the robots should be just finishing a jet and a new superprinter. In a few minutes, I would be in the air. Let them try and find me. I wasn’t going back.

When I was a kid, whenever it rained, we used to run across the freeway to get to the beach. We smoked cigarettes underneath the pier and watched the rain fall on forgotten frisbees and melting cardboard chicken buckets in the sand. Eventually all our matches would be wet and we would come home. My Dad would be out on the porch, yelling at us, asking us where we’d been. We never told anyone and they could never figure it out, because nobody would believe we were crazy enough to cross thirty lanes of freeway in the rain.

I knew that if the navigation didn’t work, then nothing worked. Not the beacon in my autowitness, not the network that could find it. For the first time in my life, the police didn’t know where I was. They couldn’t get to me in minutes. I was out of their reach.

The hilarious part is, of course, that I didn’t know anything. I had no idea what had happened to Chad. He might have banged his head against a wall all by himself, over and over. He was like that.

But the police and the company figured I must know something and it killed them — they hated the fact that they didn’t know. Screw them. Let them wonder. Let everybody wonder.

Elmo and all the others would spend years and years looking for me. Eventually the searchers would find Dr. Wittenstein and discover he had faked his death and had built an Anthropic Engine to change the shape of the universe. But that, like I say, was many years later.

I told the jet to hit it and I arched up, out above the clouds. From 60,000 feet I could see ocean and continents, maybe hundreds of thousands of miles away. The horizon was a long line of light, dense and infinite.

II. Prometheus

I wanted to make a wish come true.

I had a dream of a rational thinking machine, free from the pressures of the flesh, with unlimited imagination and insight, with precise and flawless logic, with infallible attention, who had no pride to preserve, no territory to defend, no agenda to promote, who would discover and invent far faster than we could, who would be a short cut to the science of the future. If any of our problems could be solved by technology, or by the truth, or by clear eyed unbiased Reason, this machine would do it. It would be the Neo-Platonic god of Logos, the Word made Flesh. And I wanted to build it.

There was time, in the 1960s, when the wish seemed all but granted — most people aren’t aware of how close we once were. Computers were doing well on intelligence tests, passing college entrance exams, doing high school algebra word problems. In 1965, Nobel laureate Herbert Simon predicted that, within twenty years, thinking machines would be able to do “any work a man can do”.  Around that time, Simon co-wrote a program he called “The General Problem Solver”.  I loved that name. It had hubris, but it was a magnificent gurgling hubris, full of joy and laughter.  

A scientist never leaves childhood, not really, not completely. Filled with ambition, more assiduous than any of our peers, only because we wanted to make wishes come true, each of us dreaming of being the New Prometheus of the Last Golden Age.

We failed, of course. 

The predictions, as wrong as they were, seem to me like the misguided shout of freshman sailor, high in the rigging of the ship in the fifteenth century, squinting against the wind at a dark uneven line on the horizon. He saw something, and he wished. A child’s wish, yes —  the sailor is barely a teenager — but with courage, from a high vantage point, seeing further than the rest of us.

A generation or two later, in the 21st century, the memory of past failures had faded and it became fashionable for AI researchers to begin publishing their wishes again. This time, they called it the “singularity” — the hope that, one day, machines would be smart enough to redesign themselves, and would quickly improve themselves to levels far beyond human understanding. 

This wasn’t exactly the same wish — the transcendent machines they feared and the ones I wished for were of a different kind. The programs they wrote did not use the pure and perfect logic that had seemed so promising back in the middle of the 20th century. They were guessing machines, soft and unpredictable, forming themselves around the data like warm candle wax pouring out across a desk. They were mortal, like us, plagued by the same uncertainty, dishonesty, shallowness, and prejudice. 

This new and visionary generation of scientists would be surprised to learn that the singularity had already occurred, quite some time ago, at least twice that I know of — once in the basement of small Philadelphia house, and another time in the old barn of a horse ranch in the wind and chartreuse grass above Half Moon Bay.

1994

The phone rings. 

I let it go a few times then pick it up. “D___?” I ask. “What time is it?” I roll over to see the clock.

“It’s around … around four I think by now.”

I lower the phone, raise my eyebrows and blink. The clock reads 3:38. I shake my head and put the phone back to my ear. “You need me to come in?”

“Of course.” D says musically. “They’ve sent a car for you.” I don’t ask how they knew where I was.

“All right.” I sit up. “Do they know the cold war is over?”

“They’re waiting for confirmation.” I can hear him smile. This is the early 90s and the intelligence community is still pacing back forth across the world like an former prison guard on the first day of his new job as a substitute gym teacher.

I tell him I am on my way. He hangs up and I sit in the dark for a few seconds. My wife had always hated these calls and it is still a relief to be able to turn on the lights before I go. 

The car arrives and I slump into the back seat. The driver watches me in the rear view mirror and I nod. They are always watching me. 

The driver is wearing a conservative dark suit and tie, and his haircut clearly defines him as military, most likely Navy Intelligence. Judging by his age, he had probably served in Desert Storm, fell into intelligence or security work and had decided to make a career of it — and here he is, heroically driving for his country.

I arrive at Fort Meade and work my way through security. The soldiers hold my I.D. in the air between us, lining up my insipidly smiling face with my insipidly smiling picture, just as they have been trained to do.

D is just inside. “I can’t come in with you. Carry this.” He gives me an envelope, stamped in red. “Talk to me when you’re done. Okay?” I nod and smile with one side of my face. I knew that he meant that no one in the agency should know what was in that envelope but the two of us. Then, for a moment, we just stand there. “How was the drive?” he asks. I shrug.

He has another driver for me but I decide to walk. My office and work space are in a small brick office building, beneath peeling wartime paint and an antiquated sprinkler system. My door has no special locks, cameras or security. It says nothing on the door except a stenciled room number, an ordinary combination lock and a deadbolt. The room contained something so secret that it couldn’t even be trusted to the people in charge of keeping secrets. It was a secret that there was a secret.

Once inside, I throw the envelope on the desk and turn on the main lights. The liquid nitrogen tanks have poured a soft meadow fog across the floor and my shadows fall in straight dark lines across it. For now, I am alone. I go to my couch and lay down. This is the one place where no one watches me.

▼ 

Around ten o’clock, I head to the PX for some coffee. J___ M___ and D___ R___  are there and I nod hello. They are, like me, Ph.D.s in the hard sciences. Academics outnumber the soldiers here. 

“What are you working on, Eddie?” D R asks me. The last person to call me “Eddie” was J, back when we were in college. I don’t wince. I shrug. I can’t say what I’m working on, he knows that.

“Same here. Weird.” He laughs. They both laugh. “Listen, I’m stopping by Toys ‘R’ Us for my kid tonight. You need me to pick anything up for you?” 

D R was referring to my paper which had just appeared in the Mathematical Intelligencer. It gave a complete strategy for a particularly complicated puzzle game for pre-teens.

I still publish something from time to time, all of it trivial and worthless. I write about games, mostly, because there’s always some unproven conjecture that I can tackle and it doesn’t worry my employers. Nothing to do with physics of course, or cryptography. It keeps the illusion alive that I am a talented but uninteresting scientist. No one reads my work, except maybe some rabid and unbathed enthusiast, trapped in cluttered and unheated offices at the far end of some dusty academic hallway. Certainly not these guys.

“I read it,” said J M and I look at him for a second. Why? I want to ask, but I know he would not answer. He read it because someone in the agency had asked him to. They are always watching all of us. 

“It was good,” he says, grudgingly but kindly. We smile, even though we both knew that he thought my paper was a waste of his time. “Very clean. It’s great the way you can put everything together in one paper like that. No loose ends.” Here he is passive aggressively criticizing my scholarship: the paper had less citations than most.

“He doesn’t refer to anything else because he doesn’t read anything else,” D R says.

“It’s true.” I say, and nod towards the cafeteria line. “I can’t read anything longer than a menu.” I find myself wishing this was funny. They laugh anyway. 

If you have never been forced to spend long hours surrounded by human males, then you may not be aware of an interesting anthropological fact. When men are alone, their social interactions consist of, and entirely of, scraping for humor. Men will scrape to the very lowest fungal depths to find something to laugh at. The will laugh at the guy who isn’t laughing. They will laugh because the joke isn’t funny. They will laugh at your divorce, if you let them.

Homo sapiens is the only living species that laughs. Other social mammals establish their status and access to mates through ritual combat. The loser winds up wounded or dead. In human society, the loser smiles with one half of his mouth, chuckling and shaking his head. He says “All right then. I’ll see you assholes later.”

And then I am back in my office, on the couch, sipping the coffee, looking at the tiny spots of daylight pouring through holes in the heavy industrial paint that blocks my windows, a constellation of sparks.

The real reason there were so few citations in my paper was that it was almost entirely new mathematics. D M apparently had not noticed an unmarked proof of Dvorak’s Conjecture, buried on pages 13 through 19 of my paper. This problem had stymied the greatest minds in mathematics for 84 years. My short proof was worthy of a Field’s Medal, or even the Nobel Prize in economics. It had applications to financial risk calculations, to logistics, to negotiations. 

No one will catch on, I’m fairly sure, not even trained mathematicians. Maybe two hundred years from now some historian of science will discover that I was the first to prove it. Maybe the theorem will even carry my name, one day.

I decide to keep D waiting until the end of the day. I need give him the impression he’s getting his money’s worth. 

They pay me a great deal of money.

I’m paid to pretend. I pretend there is nothing here in this room except another physicist who failed when he was young, dropped out of academia and took a meaningless government job. I’m paid to pretend I was wrong. As I far as I know, there are only three people in the world who know I was right. 

▼ 

D calls me around five that afternoon. I tell him it will be ready in a few hours, and he says “Great. Keep me posted. Bring it upstairs when you’re finished.” 

I turn on the equipment and begin entering the data — a megabyte of noise, a sequence of random numbers. I have to cycle the machine twice because, on the first run, I forget to plug in the printer. I drop the results, a few hundred lines of Russian, into a manila envelope and spend a few minutes searching through my desk drawers for a stamp with the right security clearance — not high enough to draw attention, just a neighborly threat of fines, imprisonment and unemployment.

I’m finished and I glance at the clock. Twenty two minutes. This is the only real work I’m likely to need to do for the next several months.

D’s office was on the seventh floor of the M. W. Clark building, a short walk. He tosses the envelope into a drawer as soon as I hand it to him. “There’s a couple of people here who want to talk to you.” He nods towards the conference room.

This was unusual.

“Who is it?”

“It doesn’t matter. They’re not NSA.” He glances almost imperceptibly towards the door. 

I hated this way of talking. “You mean the CIA.” I say flatly.

D looks annoyed and decides on a direct approach. “Listen. I want to make sure you understand something. You work for me. I have your back. I protect you.” His eyes were cheerless now. “When you said wanted to work alone, I agreed. I let you. I’ve kept everybody off your back.” This was only partly true. Because I work alone, it’s easier for D to keep me a secret, so that D has something none of the rest of them have. I am his asset.

He is still looking straight into my eyes. “You get it?  Nobody is after you. Nobody knows what you can do, except me. No matter what these guys say to you, remember, I’ve got your back.” I honestly had no idea why he was telling me this.

He puts his hand on my arm. “All right?” 

“All right.” I repeat.

“All right.” He agrees with himself.

▼ 

“Do you know this man?”

It was a photograph of R___. He looked, as always, cheerful and out of focus.

“Sure. We used to work together.”  I say.  “You knew that.”  

The woman asking the question has a security badge, a Hillary Clinton haircut and an inoffensive wardrobe. The best strategy for a person in my position is to simply tell them the truth, as much as possible, and hope that it’s good enough for them.

She shows me another 8×10, this time of a ruined Honda Civic, twisted and destroyed, being dragged out of a river onto an embankment, with a bloated corpse in the driver’s seat. This is also R. She waits while I take this in.

“Here’s why we wanted to meet with you, Dr. W___,” she says, “We have reason to believe that you are an exposure.”

“What does that even mean?” I am upset about R, and all that energy turned instantly into rage. She is expressionless. I already know, in a spinning, sinking way, what she is going to say.

“Dr. C___ was assassinated.”  She pauses while he shuffles through her briefcase. “Now, I understand that you are a very talented man and an asset to the agency. There are already a considerable amount of resources dedicated to your protection.” I realize, as she’s talking, that she has no idea what it is that I actually do. Or why they watch me. Maybe no one does, any more. “You’re going to have to adjust some aspects of your life. We have a pamphlet … ah. Here.” She pulls a thick company document from his briefcase. She hands it to me and I can only hold it motionless in the air above my lap. I can’t believe it. Somebody might be trying to kill me and they have a pamphlet. 

“Read it.”  She says.  “It could save your life.”  Now she is just being dramatic. I give her a look and start to get up, but she isn’t finished.

“Who is this woman?”  She shows me a picture of J___. It looks like a driver’s license or a passport shot.

“A friend. An old friend.” I sit back down and rub my forehead.  “We haven’t spoken in a long time.”

She blinks and waits. She wants more. Nothing is too personal for them. I tell her as much as I can remember, all the way back to college. There is no other way to play it. 

“Alright,” she said, holding up her hand. “I get it. She’s in the file by accident. She’s just someone you used to know, like you say, ‘a long time ago’, who became a person of interest only by association with you. But here’s the thing that is confusing me.” She leaned forward. “Look at you. Why do you care? You haven’t seen her in years. Are you trying to protect her?”

“I would give my life for her.” The statement forms in my mind, but I don’t say it. I have already given my life for her.

 “We were close.” I finally say. Eventually, she is satisfied and I go back to my office.

Back on my couch, I flip through the pamphlet. The first chapter is titled “Take an Inventory of Your Friends.” That won’t take long. I toss the pamphlet onto the floor.

I had been warned, years ago now, that this would happen, and now that it is finally here, I wish there was another way out. I wish I could close my eyes, whisper, and the world would spin backwards. When I open them, it will be morning again, none of this would have happened. And with a deeper breath, I could toss the earth around the sun, twisting and spinning against the stars, erasing whole years of my life. Open my eyes in that tiny apartment on Walker Street, blinded by morning sun, tired clock radio playing New Romantic music, papers and books burying every table and chair. I would get out of bed, walk to the physics department, get my class schedule, fumble with names I’ve forgotten, slowly get my bearings and try again. 

I wish I could try again.

I haven’t made this wish in a long time. When I was young, I made it constantly, over things that I now realize were trivial. It’s a time travel wish, but one that produces no paradox and doesn’t violate any laws of physics. To an outside observer, it would be as if, just for an instant, I had experienced a vivid dream of a possible future. My job, my colleagues, my boss, the demolished car, the pamphlet, all of it, would just be a vision I had while sleeping. In this wish, the only thing that travels through time is information; it wouldn’t leave a ripple in the universe. 

I could play my life like a familiar video game, re-playing each day until I had mastered it before moving on. I could edit and re-edit my life like a movie or a novel, like a recording artist in the studio, doing as many takes as I needed until I found something truly magical. Or I could just avoid making some of the horrific mistakes I made when I was young. I could avoid breaking J’s heart.

I lost interest in this wish when I finally did something so terrible that trying to wish it away would have been even more shameful. I realized then that the most important thing to know about your past is the truth. No matter how sad or painful it is, the truth will help you realize that we are all basically decent people who sometimes make terrible mistakes, but we make them for reasons. It all fits together into a story that you tell yourself to understand it and to heal. There may be many different stories about your past but the only one that matters is the one you believe. And the most important thing is that your story is true.

I have been holding my breath, and I let it out, and I let the wish go with it. All that remains is an image in my mind of J, sitting at the kitchen table, laughing with one hand across her face. 

She was an easy laugh.

1982 

J and I met at a Freshman Seminar in Physics, or “Physics for Poets” as they called it. She was an eighteen year old drama student trying to fulfill a requirement in the physical sciences. I was teaching the class, a graduate student and just twenty years old. I saw her for the first time through slanting columns of dusty light in Harvard’s oldest lecture hall, the woman with striking turquoise eyes in black frame glasses, slouched deep into a chair with her long legs stretched out in front of her, one thin boned arm draped across the desk lazily spinning a pencil in her hand, her full lips smirking in incredulity while I stammered through my take on Aristotelian mechanics.

At some point, late in the semester, she was just there. After lecture, I would be talking to someone, look over their shoulder, and I would see her. She stopped by my office hours. If I walked out of class with a group of people she was always one of them, in a motorcycle jacket and peasant skirt, boots, bracelets and fingerless gloves, her hair shorter now and dyed black. As the group broke up, she would catch my eye and hold her hand up in a curt wave, smiling with one half of her mouth. 

In a bookstore, she touched my arm, just to emphasize the point she was making. 

As we waited in line for lobster rolls, she pushed me gently when she laughed, throwing her hair across her face and holding two limp fingers across her mouth, eyes squeezed shut.

Sitting on the trunk of my car, out by the water, we sat close enough that I could feel her breathing and the warmth of her thigh against mine, our shoulders touching, her eyes following the line from my arm to my fingertip to Vega while we drank paper cups of red grocery store wine. 

I think that was the moment, with the stars. 

 My father was a merchant marine —  thin beard, musky Marlboro Pendleton shirt — and he taught me to find Scorpio in summer, Leo in the spring, Orion in the fall and winter.  The stars have stayed with me whole life, even though the father left when I was six or seven. 

J said nothing. She was uncomfortable with reminiscences or confessions and she would hide her awkwardness with silence, looking calm and confident, while praying that she wasn’t required to give some testimony of her own.

I had no idea what she was thinking of course. To me the silence seemed romantic, pregnant and inevitable, with clouds of adrenaline pouring through my body, feeling the tidal pull of the future and the slow turning of the planet beneath us, wheeling the stars in great circles across the sky. I watched the strands of black hair pulled loose by wind and brushing her cheek

I wished that I could touch her face for the ten thousandth time, without ever having touched it the tenth. 

I wished that a gentle gamma-ray burst, flowing over us like Bermudan waves, would cause a massive fluctuation of the quantum field potential and suddenly collapse all possible histories of this moment into a new equilibrium, so that it would suddenly be true that I had married her twenty years ago and that this was just a quiet drive after dinner that would lead us both home, where we would make love and she would fall asleep and I could stay up late working and then gingerly lift the covers and wrap myself around her until morning. 

“Well,” I said, when the silence had become truly awkward, “I think this is the part where I make a pass at you.” She laughed, a puff of air through her nose, smiling and slowly moving her face closer to mine.

We dated, on and off, for the rest of the year. It was the happiest time in my life.

▼ 

I wished that I could use quantum mechanics to build a machine that would wash backwards through my life changing everything, the way a flip of a butterfly’s wing can rewrite the future. This wish could not cause any kind of paradox or disaster — after all, the present remains exactly the same. If no one remembers exactly what happened, or if there’s a possibility, no matter how slight, that the past was different than you remember it, then in some sense, that is the past. It’s one possible history, as real as any other.

1959, physicist Hugh Everett noticed that the basic equations that govern the universe insist that, at every instant, the universe splits into innumerable copies of itself, each one slightly different.  Everett’s ideas seemed ridiculous to the physicists of his time. Many simply dismissed him as a crank without even having read his Ph.D thesis. It’s possible that Everett didn’t really believe this “many worlds” theory — he may have only been trying to point out that there was a problem, an unexplained gap, in the equations of quantum mechanics that contradicted common sense. No one knows. We do know that he quit quantum mechanics and began building atomic weapons, drinking heavily, becoming more and more silent, slowly disappearing into himself.

The equations imply that all possible worlds exist, uncountable, infinity upon infinity. Luis Borges called it a “garden of forking paths.”  We see ourselves moving from an immutable past to a nonexistent future, carried along in the moving womb of the present, the Now, but this is an illusion. The Now is a small clearing in the garden, connected to an uncountable infinity of paths, each leading to possible futures and possible histories. Our sense of free will says that we choose one path and take it, but the math says we take all possible paths outward. 

Even more strangely, it says we take all paths inward: it tells us that all possible histories are just as real and inscrutable as our possible futures — forgotten, erased by random noise, leaving no trace, but still real. The past is not a single line, written in stone. The past spreads out behind us like roots. All the things I could have done exist, they are there, distantly seen through the trees of the garden.

We think that time rides on straight rails to the horizon, linear, one dimensional — but this isn’t true. The other dimension is possibility. Time is an infinity of trajectories tangled and branching, shattered fragments of what could be or what might have been, of what is imagined and what is forgotten, a chaotic explosion of the possible.

▼ 

It was raining and J and I were beneath the rose bushes in the park, tugging at roots and kicking at rocks, her long skirt soaked, tangled and muddy, hiked up around her hips. When the rain turned cold and heavy we ran back to her apartment, our teeth chattering as I fumbled for her keys, opened the door, and put her over my shoulder against her protests. We fell into the shower together, letting the warm water run down our faces, and then finally lying in each other’s arms on the bathroom floor in cool sweat and nothing.

The rain stopped late that night and I walked home from her apartment in starlit darkness, watching my breath making clouds luminescent in the streetlights, walking fast and directly and feeling complete inside my jacket, thinking casually about my work, hallucinating molecular structures in the shape of trees and in the architecture of buildings, hearing the sound of an equation ringing in my ears like a pop song, imagining that quantum mechanical coherency had the rich aroma of coffee and fertilizer. 

And then I stopped, halfway across a bridge over the Charles.

I had an image in my head, a picture of a giant curving molecule, surrounded by clouds of electrical potential like a vast stellar nebula. I had been watching it for some time, turning it over in my mind, before I realized what it meant. The molecule could not exist, and yet had to exist. It was a paradoxical quantum mechanical structure, a contradiction in physical form, a nanoscopic M. C. Escher woodcut. I stood breathless and motionless, ignoring the pedestrians who passed me by and staring into the distance beyond the grey water through eyes wet with wonder, as it slowly dawned on me that this molecule would make my reputation and change the world completely. 

▼ 

J spent the next summer in Italy. She had been talking to a New York modeling firm and they sent her to Milan, the center of the international fashion industry, where there are plenty of easy, low paying jobs for unknown models. They wanted her to build up a portfolio of magazine work — a “book of tear sheets” she called it. Beautiful young women from all over the world go to Milan to try to break into modeling careers.

She met me at the train station, one of Mussolini’s huge fascist masterpieces. We kissed quickly and she introduced her new friends, frighteningly gorgeous women from Stockholm, Minneapolis, Belfast, New Jersey.

No one sleeps in Milan. We went out at 10 and didn’t get back till well after dawn. We had a dinner, and spent the night in the dance clubs, shouting over the pounding bass lines. Each club had separate entrances, one doorway for the paying public, another door for models, rock stars, politicos, literati, mafiosi. We were escorted into the exclusive center of each club by jeweled pimpwear impresarios, laughing and talking in rapid-fire bursts of impenetrable Italian. J would introduce me as a friend from America, and I would shake hands firmly, smiling, locking eyes, in a lame effort to be a part of it, to show I was at home and in control in the screaming neon Eurotrash nightlife. We would have drinks and talk for a minute, and then our hosts would return and invite a woman from our group to come over to a big table in the dark and meet Andy Gibb, or to have a drink with the Senator from Maryland. One by one, the women would disappear, sometimes returning, sometimes not. I found myself sinking in a haze of alcohol and boredom, better than my surroundings, silent as a Cherokee gunfighter, squinting into the strobe lights and sipping slowly on my drink.

It went downhill from there. I don’t know why I didn’t just relax, try to have a good time and let her have a good time. I was pretending to be a man, at that age where you don’t have a personality yet, just a variety of poses. 

By the time I left Milan, she was in a rage, I was letting it happen. I was booked on a train north to Vienna, where I was presenting a paper, the first of my coherency proofs. We waited in silence until people began streaming under the iron gates and onto the platform. She looked at me and our eyes met. “Wait,” I said and dropped to one knee, searching my bag for the phone number of my hotel on the Alexanderplatz in Vienna. The tiny apartment she shared with four other girls had no phone and I would have no way to call her. I put the number in her hand and told her, that one time, that I loved her. “Call me,” I said, “You have to call me.” She said nothing. I turned and ran to catch the train.

The paper was a huge success. J didn’t call me in Vienna, in fact we didn’t talk at all, for almost a year.

▼ 

When I got back from Europe, I stopped teaching. When I started running out of money, I sold my car. It was a beat convertible Spyder, a car J used to borrow all the time. I could still see her driving up the street below my window, sunglasses, tank top, long dark hair all a tangled wreck from the wind, plastered against her skin by the sweat of a northeastern steam bath summer. I didn’t miss my car.

I did nothing but read and write and wrestle with the abstract universe inside the machines. I slept at random times, I neglected my friends — my friendships were like house plants that I didn’t water, left to survive or die on their own. 

The only people I saw were my advisors and my colleagues, who listened to me with a nervous intensity, carefully examining every argument. They believed in me; they knew what this was, they had seen this before. Some of them had felt it themselves. I was like Galois, who produced his greatest work when he was just twenty, frantically scribbling on the night before he was shot to death in a duel on the streets of Paris.

I approached R C, an analytical chemist. He was a former student of Feynmann’s and was anxious to make a reputation of his own. He liked to work. For both of us, science had been our escape, he from the oppression and confusion of the Shah’s Iran, me from the spinning numchucks and clattering butterfly knives of South Central Los Angeles. He was twenty years older than me but he had always treated me as an equal.

We built the first versions of the machine in a corner of K___ L___’ s lab. L had made fundamental contributions to MRI technology, and most people assumed we were doing some extension of his work. If pressed, we would hint that we had a new approach to modeling protein folding. We told no one what we were working on.

Like an atomic weapon, my machine required a special material, something hard to make, something that most experts did not believe could exist. For the bomb, it was Uranium-235, an extraordinarily rare isotope of an extremely rare mineral. It took them fourteen years and 16 billion dollars to get it. I had one extraordinary chemist, a friend, R.

By the end of 1984, we had finally managed to create a primitive version of my idea, a snaking across four tables in the laboratory: powerful magnets, an argon laser, beam splitters, a forest of supports and metal clamps, labels written in black felt tip pen on short strips of white electrical tape, the whole system attached to an ordinary DEC Rainbow computer.

We asked the machine a question, coded into zeros and ones. What are the factors of the number twenty four? A carefully tuned pump of laser light and the machine considered all possible guesses and the wave function gently collapsed into a stable arrangement. Two, two, two and three, the machine reported.

R and I celebrated that night. We had something to publish. 

It was the first drink I had since that night in Milan.

▼

Suppose you wished for omniscience, that is, to know everything. To know the answer to every possible question, every knowable fact. You could solve crimes and find missing persons, outwit evil and save the world.  Or you could know the precise probability of stock fluctuations to become unimaginably wealthy. You would already know the melody of the greatest song possible or the opening line of the perfect novel. And you’d know the second line, and the all the rest of the novel.

In fiction, this complete knowledge always drives you insane — the constant torrent of information overwhelms your mortal machinery and you become manic, dissociated, or catatonic. Or the wish excises all mystery, curiosity and uncertain hope and you lose all interest in the world or your life, falling into nihilism, hopelessness and suicide. 

But I eventually landed on a form of the wish that I thought might work: “I wish that I can always tell if my guesses are true and I can guess correctly if I try.”  Guessing was an ordinary thing, we do it all the time. It would be harmless to be good at guessing.

Guessing, it turns out, is the engine at the heart of artificial intelligence. Herbert Simon’s programs wandered through vast intractable trees of guesses, searching in vain to find the answer.  Modern machine learning searches an equally vast landscape of guesses, flowing downward like water through canyons shaped by experience. You can solve any problem, any problem at all, if you can find a guess that  turns out to be true.

Our machine was a chain of molecular letters that encoded a message. We used MRI techniques to split the Now, to send the molecule traveling along billions of different paths through a garden of possible histories. Along each path, the molecule encoded a different message. Every message contained a guess. After a pulse of last light, the machine would arrive in a present place, a “Now”, with a particular history — it behaved as if it had always been true that it had guessed correctly from the beginning. All the wrong guesses disappeared, and only the truth remained.

▼

I began developing a programming language for the machine, based firmly on mathematical logic. The next version of the machine would answer questions of the form “is there a mathematical proof of this theorem that is less than n tokens?” 

I worked mostly at night and mostly in my head, so I was home, on a wet summer Tuesday, when J finally called me. She was calling from Greece. She was married.

“Really?” I asked. I couldn’t believe it.

“Yes.”

“Congratulations.” I said. We talked for awhile and I got the basic details. An older man, who’s name I can’t even remember any more. I was confused, but somehow honestly happy for her. Maybe I was just glad to hear her voice again. I pictured her, tan and laughing on the shaded tile porch of a white washed villa, with a view of the harbor where her husband’s sailboat is anchored in the turquoise water, a drink in her hand, phone cradled in the soft skin of her neck, laughing warmly and nostalgically at my wisecracks. We didn’t talk about Milan, we didn’t apologize, we just fell into our routine of fast paced sarcasm.

There are some people, who, for whatever reason, you can always make laugh. It’s a kind of trust that you build up. They fall for your schtick.

When I hung up the phone, I realized I had no way to call her back.

▼ 

The spring after Vienna, I went to Edinburgh for a conference.  I came away more convinced that ever that we were the only ones who had stumbled onto this. I thought of Leo Szilard, stepping off a curb in London, 1933, when he was the only man in the world who knew there was a way to build an atomic weapon, when all the leaders of his field had announced it was impossible.

My hotel was on a street that wound along the cliffs below Edinburgh castle, lined with bent medieval buildings, now used record stores and trinket shops for the tourists. Some of them were torn open on the street side and faced by huge sheets of glass, filled with Italian designer clothes or coffee shops with large abstract paintings hanging on the ancient stone walls. After the day’s proceedings, I walked up the long hill to the hotel. The elderly woman at the desk told me I had a telegram.

“For me?” I didn’t think I had ever received a telegram before. “Aye,” she said, holding it out, “You can read it.”

It was a message from J, forwarded to me by the staff in the physics department back at Harvard. She had left the number of a hotel in Paris. I went to the pay phone and called her and we talked, both of us trying to be funny, but she wasn’t herself. I asked her if anything was wrong. She brushed it off. Then, without any preamble, she asked if she could come see me in Boston. I told her I was in Scotland. She said nothing.

“Look, I can be back in a day or two.” There were still two more days in this conference. “If you’re coming to Boston, just call me when you get in. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said. “I will.”

I hung up the phone and called the airline. They were less than helpful, so I packed my bags and went to the airport and stood at the counter until I got a flight. When I landed, I went to a pay phone and called the number of the hotel. I was told that the couple had checked out. I didn’t know what else to do, so I collected my bags went home to my apartment to see if she had called.

▼ 

I pushed the playback button on the answering machine, and dropped my bag by the door. “Eddie, this is Rami. Have you seen this letter? Call me when you get in.” I collapsed onto the couch in the dark, and threw my keys onto the coffee table. “Eddie. This is Rami. I guess you’re not back yet … I’ll uh … I’ll try you again later.” I pulled off one shoe and rubbed my eyes. “Eddie. Rami. Call me.” “Eddie … Call Rami.”  There was no message from J.

R told me to meet him in the office. We had each received a letter from someone at the National Security Administration. It read, in part: “… be aware that privacy devices and cryptographic devices are instruments of war and are covered by the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) code. Publishing or distributing any technical data pertaining to such devices will be a violation of federal regulations …”

I was confused. “What does this mean?”

“They think it’s a cryptanalysis machine. If we publish, they’ll prosecute.”

“They can’t.”

“I don’t know, Ed. I think they can.”

We were stupid. We were arrogant. The secrets of the world were protected by mathematical codes. Our machine could snap these chains like they were tissue paper. The N.S.A. was charged with keeping America’s secrets. There was no way they would let us publish.

R thought we should stop at once until it was all sorted out. I scoffed at this. The University would stand behind us, I said. This was an issue of academic freedom. 

I went to my advisor, and we put in a call to the University’s lawyers, told them the situation and they said they would call us back. He told me not to worry, that we would find a way out it, and that in the meantime I probably shouldn’t talk to anyone about this. I shook his hand and thanked him for his help.

After I left his office, I realized that he hadn’t asked me what we were working on. I hadn’t told him. As far as he knew, we were still working on the protein folding thing. I’d been lying to him for six months.

▼ 

It took another day for the secrecy order to arrive. Federal marshals arrived and impounded every scrap of gear in the lab, all the computers, all the disks, every last clamp, pipette and beaker, a pack of R’s foul cigarettes and a pad of paper covered with doodles and phone numbers, disappearing down the hallway in identical numbered cardboard boxes.

I was “invited” to come to Fort Meade, Maryland, to explain to the NSA exactly what we were working on. They were accustomed to getting prepublication information about anything that had to do with cryptography, and apparently they thought it was my job to keep them informed. One of the University lawyers flew out with me, a lanky bearded New English aristocrat named Peter something. I didn’t think I had done anything wrong and I hoped I could plead my case honestly and they would let me continue my work. After a lot of useless stalling, they finally found some excuse to separate me from the lawyer and brought me into a conference room and told me the real reason they wanted to talk to me.

They wanted to offer me a job. 

▼

When I got back, I couldn’t find R anywhere. He wasn’t in his office, he didn’t answer his phone. As I criss-crossed the department, I began to realize that the word had gotten around. People stopped talking when I walked into a room. 

There was a knock at the door and one of the other graduate students, Dan, I think was his name, walked in with a worried and distant look on his face and said slowly, “you should see this,” and dropped a short stack of paper on my desk and walked out.

It was a prepublication copy of a research paper. It claimed to find a flaw in my coherency paper that proved a machine like ours was impossible. It suggested that I could not have gotten the results I claimed to have. I scanned the last few paragraphs, where there was a polite but somehow half-hearted call for more “objective data.” The obvious implication was that I had just made it up, that we had faked the experiments to match my theory. That was a lie, of course, but it would be good enough to ruin my reputation.

This paper was calling me a fraud.  I flipped back to the front and read the name above the abstract. 

The paper had been written by my collaborators, R H and K L.

I had to search but I found him in Linguistics, working in the empty classroom next to his wife’s office. I shut the door.

“All right, talk to me” I said. I was surprised at the waver in my voice. I took a deep breath and unclenched my fists.

He pushed up his glasses and squeezed his lips, and then rolled out his words out slowly “What do you want me to say?”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Why am I doing what? What do you think I’m doing?”

“You’ve written a paper that makes me look like a liar. You circulated it without letting me see it. Come on, Rami, we’re supposed to be coauthors on this thing!” He was obsessively rearranging the papers on the desk, lining up the angles until the table began to look like a Mondrian painting. “Rami,” I said, as kindly as I could, and put my hand on the papers holding them still. He looked up at me. I quietly asked him if he had cut some kind of deal with the NSA.

“What are you talking about?” He turned away, scowling. “Don’t be dramatic.”

“Just tell me the truth.”

“Jesus, you are arrogant!” he shouted in a sudden rage, shoving his arms as if he were trying to stuff me into a bag. “You, Were. Wrong. Okay? That’s all there is!” He looked at me pointedly, but it was an act, and it showed. He shook his head in mock pity and began to intone apologetically. “I just think that there are some problems with this approach and we’ve got to reassess–”

I talked over him, incredulous. “What problems? It works. The demonstration works! You know it works. We just need to keep scaling it up. The next step is trivial.”

We argued for over an hour. When he started to walk me through his paper I began to falter. His proof was brilliant. The physics was impeccable, the mathematics concise and elegant. I sat down on a table and stared at the equations. 

It was beautiful. 

I felt like an explorer seeing a vast new landscape from a mountain pass. He had re-discovered computational complexity theory, something he had never shown any interest in, as far as I knew.  He called it “feasibility radius”, but his version was more symmetric, more general and incredibly powerful, and I wanted to understand it. I began asking him questions for clarity. He answered haltingly, pausing often to check his notes, sometimes repeating the same point several times, as if he was still unfamiliar with his own proof.

I felt my hands go numb.

“You didn’t write this proof.” I said, very slowly. “You didn’t write it.” R was frozen with his back to me. I looked up at him. “The machine did.”

He stood motionless at the white board.

“God damn it, answer me. You used the machine.” I reached for him, spinning him around. “You used the machine to prove the machine can’t exist!” I think I was about to hit him, but I lost it when I saw his wet eyes. He still wouldn’t look at me, standing there staring at his shoes with a blue felt tip marker in his hand. He got his voice together and mumbled “I didn’t have any choice, Eddie.”

Like fuck, I said.

“I’m not an American citizen. I have to think about my family.” I started to leave. He kept talking, louder now. “It’s not over yet. Someone will find out, eventually. Or they’ll rediscover it, search the literature and realize that you were first. A hundred years from now, I’ll be the guy who falsified his data, not you. I’m damned. You’ll survive.”

I never spoke to R again.

▼ 

I was leaving, maybe for good, but the department desk had a message for me. I went to my office to use the phone.  

 “I’m here,” she said.

“Where?”

“Boston.” She gave me the name of a hotel downtown, on Church St.. She still wouldn’t tell me anything, only that she was “confused” and she wanted to see me. Twenty-five minutes later I was standing in the hall outside her room. I almost didn’t knock, but when the door opened and I saw her, everything changed.

She looked like hell. She had lost weight and she had let her hair grow down so it almost covered her eyes. We hugged and she smiled and we didn’t know what to say for a second but then she pulled me into the room and made me sit down.

“What are you doing here?” I asked her. “Where’s the guy, Aristotle Onassis, what’s his name?”

She waited before answering. “I don’t know,” she said, “Where he is, I mean.” She looked at me, trying to smile, and for a horrible second I thought she was going to cry. She looked away, down into her bag, and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. I closed my mouth and watched her, thinking that I could just wait, and then I would know what to do. She lit one and took a long drag. “I was hoping we could talk, and just hang out a little.” I nodded. “I didn’t plan on falling apart for at least an half hour or so.” She smiled, brushed at her eyes with the back of her hand, then ran her fingers through her hair.

It was easier after that. I didn’t ask her anything else, and we managed to return to our comfortable habit of not talking about anything that really mattered. 

She was “visiting a friend for a few days.”  That was the official story. Harmless. But she hadn’t called her husband and I assumed he had no idea where she was. She was probably running away. I didn’t ask to where, or from what, or why.

“Come with me.” She said. 

I pictured my empty lab. “Where?”

“Wherever. Let’s just go.”

I smiled. Let’s just go. 

She smiled and leaned toward me, almost like she was stretching, saying very quietly “Okay?” and starting to laugh. We agreed that I would I go back to my place to grab my passport, meet her back here, go to the airport, get in a plane, and just go.

“I’ll be back in a half hour. I promise.”

She took my hand and held it against her cheek. I stood there, not moving, falling into her eyes, feeling a rush down to my stomach. I took my other hand and brushed back her bangs, not touching her skin, slowly, until my hand came to rest on the side of her neck. Holding her head in my hands, I said quietly “If I’m making a terrible mistake, please don’t tell me.”

She smiled, her lips brushing mine. “Don’t worry,” she whispered, “I won’t.”

I went down the stairs, out into the heat of Arlington, raised my arm to hail a northbound cab, a leather glove reached up, grabbed my wrist and twisted my arm behind my back. I was forced backwards, off balance and staggering, as I heard a polite woman’s voice saying, “Dr. E___ W___, you are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent…” and I was awkwardly forced into an unmarked black sedan.

▼ 

I was arrested for violations of the International Traffic in Arms Regulation code, known as ITAR. They kept calling J a “foreign national”, which I guess is what she had become.

They held me in an interview room, sound proofed, fluorescent lights, orange plastic chairs. This is where I met D, sandy grey hair, carefully trimmed beard, cheap business suit.

He put out his hand. I hesitated. “Don’t worry.” He smiled with the right side of his mouth. “I’m here to help you. I’m not with the police.”  He introduced himself and finally I took his hand. 

“I knew your father, and I think I can help you.”  My first thought was this: he’s lying to me, to earn my trust, so I’ll help him in some way. He’s assuming that any father of a Harvard grad student would have old friends in the government, and that this opening line about my father would make sense. It didn’t. “My father was in the merchant marine.” I said, “He disappeared twenty years ago.” 

D’s gaze was level. “He was in the navy. We served together.” I still thought he was lying. 

“I might be the only one who can help you. You need to listen to what I’m saying.” He looked at me, worried and sincere. “I can get the charges against you dropped, but that’s not your biggest problem here. If we set you free, today, and you go on with your research, in six weeks, you’ll be dead.” I stared at him, confused by the drama. “The world is full of people with secrets, and trust me, they will not hesitate.” I looked away. He moved his head to meet my gaze. “Am I making sense?” 

He was. I glanced at him and touched my forehead. I thought of J and began to feel nauseous.

“Did they go into the hotel?”

“What hotel?”

“Where I was arrested, downtown.” He looked blank. I asked him if they arrested anyone else. 

He raised his chin, pretending that he had only just realized who I was talking about. “Ah. She is on her way to the airport.” His face was serious, but there was a satisfied smile hidden in his eyes.  “She will be arrested and charged with the same felony as you. Unless,” he nodded at a phone, “I make a call.”  I realized that a threat like this could only mean that he wanted something from me. I was ahead of him now.

“But if you don’t make a call, if she leaves the country, will she be safe?” I was talking faster now. I began to stand up. “She has nothing to do with this. She doesn’t know anything about it.”

“That’s not what the FBI thinks.”

“If they do, they’re wrong. She’s not a scientist, she doesn’t understand my research. You can check. I didn’t give her anything, I didn’t pass her disks or papers or anything else.”

He watched me, still seated, and I could tell that he knew he had me. “Then it’s even easier. Suppose that no one knows that she was ever charged with a crime. Suppose that no one knows anything about her.”

“You could do that?”

“I could do that.”

I tried to decide if I believed him. “How?”

“This whole situation is very well contained. From the beginning. We know you didn’t pass anything to her. And I doubt that she knows anything anyone else could use.”

It was time to take the next step. “What exactly do you want from me?” He knew it too, and moved to close the deal.

“What your country needs is this: no one can ever know what you did, back at Harvard.” He put his fingers together. “You’ve broken the codes. All of them. You have the power to compromise military operations, to put lives at risk, to change the outcome of war. You have the power to break into computers and move billions of dollars anywhere you want. My job is to make sure that you never, ever use this power. But more than that: I need to be sure that no one knows this power exists.”

“I have to keep quiet.” 

“Yes.”

“And pretend I’m a fraud.”

He nodded, a single tilt of his head. “Yes.” He said. 

“Or else, eventually someone will stop me.” D raised his eyebrows and turned his face to the side, watching me. I looked away. “I’ll be killed. And maybe she will, as well.”

Now he was motionless. 

“Absolutely,” he said.

▼ 

There’s a game I play to pass the time on a flight or a long drive, a cruel game I have played since I was child. I try to imagine exactly what I would say if, by some fantastic metaphysical circumstance, I was suddenly offered three wishes. Anything I want. I could wish for money, or fame, or to be emperor of the world. I could wish I could fly, lifting straight into the air and away from the awkwardness and ugliness of any situation, arching high above the atmosphere and outward faster than light itself, swinging in great hyperbolic curves under the brightly colored rings of Saturn and on to the universe. My psychotherapist derisively calls this “an addiction to magical thinking”. 

In the game, I assume that the grantor is an adversary and that I have to phrase the wish carefully so nothing goes wrong. Wishes, at least in literature, usually go horribly wrong. I work and rework the wish, like a transcendental lawyer preparing a brief.

I might start with this wish: “I wish that all my wishes would turn out exactly like I imagine they will.” Sometimes I think that this just might be able to protect me against any unexpected consequence. 

But, of course, nothing in the real world ever turns out exactly like we imagine it will. So, at some point, I begin to remember that the wish can only be granted by leaving the real world — the world after the wish would belong to a different universe, one without meaning.  The game is a wish to live in a world where wishes come true, a dream world, where life is a game to pass the time. When this thought comes, when I sink downward to this level, the game ends and wishes can no longer comfort me.  

I did not know, until that day, that there was a another level, another isotherm, another phase change, near the bottom of the trench, a depth where you begin to wish again. And, at this depth, there is only one wish: you wish that the people you love are safe. You make the wish without any conditions.

Six hours later I was home. 

I sat at my crappy second hand table, edged with curves of aging chrome, topped with a formica pattern that resembled socks or spilled rubber bands, on the torn vinyl of my crappy second hand chair. Pieces of the sun lay in pools on the kitchen floor, slowly flowing east, finally reaching the wall as the planet turned its back to the light. 

The ladder that I climbed fell away and I was stranded. The wave function of my life collapsed, the interference terms canceled out, and the amplitude approached a flat zero. I have ceased to exist. I am Schrodinger’s Cat. Dead and alive, at the same time.

▼ 

They gave me my Ph.D., but I was never allowed to publish my research. They destroyed my notes, emptied my computer, cleared out my office. The fellowships I applied for were quietly refused. I walked out of the front door with nothing.

R would eventually leave academia, taking a position as an industrial chemist in the flavor industry, outside Philadelphia on Route 36. K returned to Korea and then, a few months later, disappeared all together. I’m not even sure if he knew what R and I were doing in his laboratory.

I never found out what happened to J after that day. Only that she was safe. I assumed she went back to her husband.

They gave me an office at Fort Meade among all the other ex-mathematicians and ex-physicists. No one communicates at the NSA, so, for the first several weeks I just did nothing. Just showed up and sat there all day.

D was the only one who seemed to know who I was. Eventually he pulled me out and asked me what I needed to continue my work. I could have refused, or pretended that it couldn’t be done.  But I didn’t. I needed to know, and that was all I had left.

1994

The pamphlet says “Avoid regular habits” so I stop going to work.  

I live in a two story antebellum walk up in Georgetown. I have no furniture except for a bed and two very expensive chairs. It’s a monk’s cell — for a monk with a six-figure income.

So I’m surprised when my doorbell rings.  I’m not sure if I have ever heard the doorbell before. It’s a messenger, who needs a signature and an ID to give me a package. The return address is a lawyer’s office in Philadelphia. 

I think about calling the police and handing it over to the bomb squad, but my curiosity is too much. Inside is an unmarked compact disk, rattling around in a cardboard box. I dig around in the garage till I find compatible disk reader and open it up on a PC. It has one MS-DOS text file, filled with about 5K of random characters.

It was encrypted. There were only three people in the world who know that public key codes could be broken. 

It is a message from R. 

For a moment, I have the odd feeling that I am looking directly into his face — silent, expressionless. I realize quite suddenly that I haven’t thought about R, at all, in years. I’m not angry. If anything, I just miss our work. 

I run back up the stairs two at a time, grab my coat, keys. The door slams loudly behind me and I stop, right where I am, perfectly still. 

Why did they show me a photo of J?  She is still 19, in the picture and in my memory. Just a girl, really. I am suddenly nauseous. 

Why didn’t I ask? I don’t even know how to reach her. I can still see R’s face, but this time, he’s dead in the front seat of his car.  I go back inside and call D. I start to ask him if he can help me to understand what’s happening. He gives a non-answer and asks me again to come in. I start to talk about R and J and the CIA and he interrupts me. 

“Are you all right?” He asks intently. 

“Can you help me get in touch with her?” I don’t remind him of our deal, so many years ago. 

D changes course and is suddenly helpful, focussed, clear-headed. His tone says that things can be fixed, that he’s on it, that we should get to work. D suggests I start by talking to a friend of his from the FBI, a special agent. “If this woman can’t find J, no one can. She’s the best. And she owes me.”  He gives me the number. “Listen, don’t tell her what it’s about over the phone. Give her my name. She’ll understand.” 

I call the agent and we agree to meet at the coffee shop in the lobby of the Hotel Harrington, downtown, near the theater where Lincoln was shot, a couple of Metro stops from Georgetown. 

She is already sitting down when I arrive. She wears a ponytail, a plain business suit with a coat. I tell her my name and hold out my hand.

“I know who you are.” She gestures that I should sit and before I can speak she starts interviewing me. “Okay. I understand that you and Dr. C used to work together, back at Harvard. Is that right?” I nod. “What did the two of you work on?” 

There is no record of our work together, anywhere. I’m not sure what I am legally allowed to say.  “Quantum mechanics.” I hope that I can talk over her head. “I had a new technique to sustain coherent superpositions of quantum spin states. We were trying to—“

“No you didn’t.” M says. “You worked on cryptography. Who else knew, besides the N.S.A.?”

I am surprised that she already knows about R’s murder, or that I had any connection to him. I don’t say anything. 

“Okay, this is a waste of my time and your time. If your agency has information that can help me, have them send a field agent and tell them he should be prepared to give me something I can use. I hate this off-the-record bullshit.” She puts down her drink and I think she is going to leave. “I’m not smart enough to trick you into telling me something I don’t already know.”

“Wait,” I said, “I was told you could help me.” I talk fast, explaining I just want to find someone I’d lost touch with.

“Really.” She says. She tilts her head. “Suppose that’s true.” She pulls her purse onto the table and begins rifle through it. She keeps talking without looking at me, only half interested.  “So what, are you worried about her? Or are you worried about yourself?” No, I tell her. 

“Okay. Why do you travel with bodyguards?” I stare at her.

She takes a mirror from her purse, holds it up to her face and lifts her chin. “Behind me, sitting in front of the gift shop. That’s someone we know, a professional. In the car over your left shoulder is probably his partner. They’re expensive, but you can afford them.”

“They’re not my bodyguards,” I say weakly. 

She watches me for a minute and then sits back, tucking her tongue in her teeth. “No,” she says. “They’re not.” She puts the mirror away and watches me for another minute. 

“All right. You’re scared — that’s obvious. You desperately want to talk to this person, who you haven’t seen in ten years. Do you think she can help you?” 

I don’t answer. “No,” she says to herself, “No. You’re trying to ‘save’ her.” After a minute, she spreads her hands — part invitation and part shrug. “How about you tell me exactly what it is that you all are so scared of?” she says.

“Uh, I don’t know, exactly —“

She looks bored. “Bullshit,” she says. I still don’t know what to say. I can’t tell her that R and I built a machine that could destroy the world economy, change the global balance of power. What would she do with this information? I have gotten used to the idea that everything is erased. 

She shrugs, and looks at me decisively. “Okay,“  she says again, “Think about this: why are you here?” She looks around. “Out here, on the street? If you’re in danger, why doesn’t your agency have you locked up on an army base somewhere?” She pauses. “No idea? You’re the fucking bait. They’re watching you. They’re listening right now. They want to know what you’re up to. They want to know if you’ve been in contact with the deceased. They could give a shit about your girlfriend.”  

M continues. “They’re also trying to see what I know. That’s why they sent you to me. They want me to tell you something. They can’t just fucking use the phone, they want to play games.” She shakes her head. “So here it is. They can read all this in the investigation memo. The explosive itself originated in Ethiopia, but was probably sold commercially here in the U.S.. The other materials were bought with cash, at a box store, just outside of Richmond, Virginia. It was placed by professionals or someone else with a detailed knowledge of forensics. The deceased is Islamic by birth, but does not attend a mosque or read Islamic literature. He has family in Iran, but they are rarely in contact. There are no unexplained debts or expenses in his financial records, no evidence of infidelity, no obvious enemies. There are no other leads.” She pauses. “Until you called.” 

I realize that I am not helping my position, or J’s, by staying here. I start to get up, and begin an apology, but she interrupts, “Sit down, sit down.” She says. “She’s in London, okay?  Took ten minutes to find her. She’s in London. She works in entertainment management, publicity or some …” she searches for right the word. “…some shit.” She lowers her chin and looks up at me, raising her eyebrows, another kind of shrug. “Okay? She’s fine. I doubt that she’s involved at all.” I nod and don’t say anything. “She’s married. I’m guessing you already knew that. If you want her home number in London, I can give it to you. Do you have it?” I tell her I don’t, and she recites the digits. I write them on a napkin.

She finishes her drink and stands up. “Your agency picks up the check,” she says. I stand up too, and I’m surprised that she is shorter than me. She touches my arm. “Here’s my advice. Stay at Ft. Meade. They’re going to watch you anyway and you’re probably safer there. Forget about the girl.”  

She gave a nod and headed across the smoke stained lobby and out into the blinding light on Eleventh St. 

I followed her out, walking slowly, with my fists tightening at my sides, trying to think clearly about what I needed to do. I knew this day would come.

▼ 

I arrive at Fort Meade and head straight to my building. I see them when I come down the alley, standing in front of the azalea bushes, waiting for me, one on each side of my door. The one on the right is the woman who had told me about R’s death.

The man steps in front of me. “Good morning, Dr. W. May we come in?”

“Uh,” I hesitate, “this is a Special Security Area. You would need to—“

He interrupts me. “All right. It’s not necessary. We’ll talk here.” He glances at his partner, who begins surveying the area around us, her eyes touching on each tree, each parked car, each window and doorway, in turn. .

“Tell me what this is.” He has a binder. In it was an academic paper. Every page was marked as classified, in huge red stamps that obscured the text. 

I grit my teeth and turn to face him fully for the first time. “It’s the paper that ruined my career.” He nods and puts it away. “Of course,” I add softly, “you know that already.”

“Yes. We do. We need to know where you were, on all these dates. We need to know if you’ve had any communication with Dr. C, or with any of these people.” He hands me seven or eight typewritten sheets. “We need to know this now. And you need to understand something.” He looks around again. “You’ve done good work for your country and we would like that to continue. At this point, you need to be honest with us. We’re the only ones with the resources to help you.”

I sigh deeply, letting my head fall to the side a little, then drag it back upwards.

“Look, let me tell you what’s happening here.” He glances at his partner, puts his hand on my shoulder and turns me towards the wall. He speaks softly. “Right now, the FBI has their thumb up their ass, but that won’t last forever.” His partner is looking at him now. She scowls. “Do you really think that you, working alone, can protect yourself better than we can?” He was practically whispering, in a dark low voice. “Are you certain that there isn’t something you overlooked? Do you know it for a fact? You need a lot of eyes to catch all the details. Believe me.” He watches me. I look away.

“Okay,” he says, louder now, stepping back. “It’s all right. You need to think about it,” showing me with his tone that he understands. He hands me a business card. “Call me in an hour. At this number. Otherwise,” he says, “we’ll be back.” He nods at his partner and they turn and walk towards the parking structure. 

I go inside and close the door. I know what I need to do. I hit the main lights and start cycling the machine down for a run. 

 “I’m sorry, Eddie.” R wrote. “I don’t expect you to forgive me.” He explained that he had asked his wife to send this message to me in the event of his death. “If anything ever happens to me,” he wrote, “I want you to have this.” This is followed by the name of a bank branch in Philadelphia, a ten digit number and the chemical name of our molecule. A safe deposit box? The chemical name could be the password.  

I grab my jacket and walk slowly out to the parking lot. On highway 95, heading north, I watch the mirrors, wondering which cars were tailing me. I’m not going to try and ditch any of them, there’s no point. Some of them apparently think they are helping me. 

The bank is on Chestnut St., a few blocks off the Vine St. expressway. The staff escorts me into a private booth. I am awkwardly aware that I haven’t showered. A few minutes later, a security guard brings me a long black safe deposit box. It contains an IBM ThinkPad 380 and R’s handwritten notes on his experiments. 

As I had guessed, R had recklessly built another version of the machine, much more powerful than the one I had at Fort Meade. The ThinkPad’s memory contained hundreds of programs for our machine, ASCII text files written in the language I had designed. I study the programs intently, transfixed and fascinated.

He was using the machine to do analytical chemistry, teaching it the foundations of his field. That had always been one of our ultimate goals. We describe the large scale properties of a material we want: weight, size, tensile strength, conductivity, and so on. The machine searches all possible configurations of atoms, calculates their macroscopic properties, and then returns to us a precise chemical description of a material that matched our criteria.

R had asked the machine this question: “What is the longest lasting battery allowed by the laws of physics and chemistry?” He specified the size, the shape, the voltage and current. The initial answers made no sense to R; they contained singularities and infinities. Looking at them now, I realized that the machine was describing a way to attach two wires to something like an inverted black hole, or the birth of a new cosmos: a nine-volt battery that contained more energy than our entire universe, lasting a billion billion billion years or more. This device was probably beyond the point where our physics breaks down. 

He learned to be more specific about the processes he had to manufacturer the battery, and eventually the machine described a way to initiate cold fusion in a complex nest of twisting, tightening organic molecules, encased in a some kind of organic ceramic. 

The ceramic, by itself, was a revolutionary new material, It would never rust or leak, in fact, if the numbers were to be believed, it could not be destroyed at all, unless it was placed at ground zero of a fifty megaton atomic bomb or dropped directly into the sun. The battery would continue to faithfully deliver 9V and 25mA for, literally, millennia. 

Carefully following R’s instructions, the machine had designed the power source with a thin reflective plating that would make it appear exactly like an ordinary battery, in the same familiar shapes.

I lean slowly back from the computer screen, my eyes turning to the shoebox. I dig through the papers and find it, buried on the bottom of the box. I pick it up and turne it around with my fingers, watching the light reflect off of its metal sides. 

I hold in my hand the most practical and efficient power source that our chemistry and physics will allow.

R had stenciled a logo on the side, a green tree and sunrise inside a cursive letter C. This is a prototype. He planned on selling these. Who did he show it to? Who were his potential buyers, his business partners?

He had sketches of other applications: power sources in the shape of thin rods, designed to power electric motors in the wheels of cars, a small cube with the slots of an ordinary electrical outlet on the side, batteries of every shape and specification. He had apparently planned on supplying every last kilowatt of energy the world needed. 

I realize that R may not have been killed by my government, after all. R’s assassins could have been hired by an unscrupulous American oil company or they could be jihadi from the Ayatollah’s Iran.

Outside the bank, I find myself looking directly into the eyes of strangers.  Some of these people are undoubtably tailing me and, weirdly, I feel like I may as well be polite. I nod insipidly. 

I turn abruptly and go into a bar — a pair of swinging doors upholstered in leather like an old couch, beneath a green awning with a stenciled Irish harp. It’s dark, narrow and empty. I go to a small hallway in the back, smelling vaguely of urine, with a cigarette machine and a pay phone. 

I know enough about spycraft to realize that they can’t listen to every pay phone on the Eastern Seaboard, or direct a long range microphone into a tiny hallway from across the street. The FBI operator puts me on hold and it takes a long time to get M on the line. I find myself staring at an old man at the bar. He is staring back. Neither of us seems to care. M finally picks up. The audio is distorted and and she distracted.

“He was working on energy.” I say.

“Uh huh.”

“In secret. He had a product, a prototype. It was something that could disrupt the energy markets.”

“Is that what you worked on, back at Harvard? Energy?”

I hesitate. “Sort of.” I say.

“Okay,” she says, “I know how this works. I can rattle the bars, I can stir up some shit, but you guys are still going to feed me one bullshit lead after another. I know that.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Yeah okay it’s the truth. Look, Doctor, you’re a nice guy, but let me tell you what’s happening here. They want to solve this problem themselves. They want me to give them what they need to finish it. If they reach a point where they know who’s who, then they’re going to give me a fall guy. There’s always a fall guy somewhere for this kind of thing. They had people working on that part of the problem as soon as the bomb went off. It’s all set by now. Maybe it’s you. Watch your ass.”

“I’m trying to.”

“You tell those fuckers I’m not a fucking pony, you hear me? I’ll look into this. If I can make this stick, I’ll use it. But fuck you and your fucking bullshit.” She hangs up.

I head back out onto the street, looking behind me, holding the computer case under my arm. I walk across the ground floor of the parking garage to the cement steps that lead to the upper floors. I climb three flights, push down on the bar to open the door to the outside, and a wire goes around my neck, feeling like a knife. I am yanked back inside the stairwell and I can’t breathe, can’t shout, and begin to panic.

Someone gives an order in a language I don’t know. The case is yanked from underneath my arm. I struggle but can’t seem to reach my attacker. I realized that he is a professional and that he knows what he is doing. I am twisting downward and he is letting me fall, deliberately banging my head hard on the metal railing, so that I see stars, bright white constellations flashing on and off, weird unseeable regions in my field of view. I am turning, time stopping and starting now, sound and light no longer in waves but only in discrete packets of energy, consciousness coming only in flashes, disconnected, no longer a circle, singular, unique, blue.

It is too late, I think, disappointed but not surprised. A perfectly calm thought, as if watching from outside of my body, outside of the stream of time itself, half smiling and shaking my head. 

I am lying on the floor. My hands are in front of me, covered in a spray of blood. I am in horrific pain now. At the same time, I see bright flashes, somehow completely disconnected from the sound of the gunshots. Splashes of blood cover the bits of glass. Glass is raining down from a broken window. My consciousness was no longer passing through time linearly. My brain can no longer make a coherent story out of my experience. Instead, it is disjointed, a set of images, sensations, sounds.

“This is the FBI. Drop your weapons.” It is M, shouting, from behind the door.

The agent who shot my attacker had fired from a prone position, near the bottom corner of the door. He is still laying on his stomach, surrounded by a cloud of grey smoke, his weapon still aimed at a point just above and behind me. The blood that now covered me belonged to my attacker. He is lying on top of me now, dead.

There are two other bodies in the stairwell. The first has been shot by M, apparently through the glass window of the door. The other has been shot from below, by another agent who is holstering his weapon and heading up the stairs to inspect the body.  There are several more agents out in the parking lot, some wearing headsets, others talking on hand held radios animatedly.

Within the next ten or fifteen minutes, the police arrive and, after some haggling, begin surrounding our area with yellow tape. Fire department paramedics come soon after. They are looking for a victim, but M has moved me out of the area. She took me down the stairs and out into the garage. She is dragging me, holding my shirt firmly in her hand.

“There’s a warrant out for your arrest. Did you know that? It’s for murder. They have a confession from you, a recorded conversation. The Philadelphia P.D. got it in the mail.”  She straightens up.

I pulled away from her hand. “No. My agency—“

“They’re not going to help you. Your agency thinks that you did it, too. They think you’ve been planning your revenge on this guy since he ruined your career.” I have never told M about any of that. “He did ruin your career, didn’t he?” 

I nod.  “They put you in front of me so I would look into your background, so I would find out what this guy did to you. But, see, that was their mistake. I’m not an idiot. You didn’t do this.” She looks at my shirt. “Let’s face it. You were too scared to do this. And now somebody did it for you. Probably these assholes over here.”

“I thought they were from my agency.”

“No you didn’t. You knew they were Russian all along.  You and Dr. C had figured out how to break the Russian codes. The NSA found out. They brought you inside, because they knew they couldn’t trust you. They let C work on the outside, feeding them information from his international connections. Eventually, the two of you got together with D and started blackmailing people, based on encrypted emails intercepted by the NSA. D funneled the money to Dr. C through a Russian entrepreneur named K_____, who runs the black market in and out of Georgia. The two of them kept the money away from you, because you don’t seem to give a shit about money, or maybe just because they just don’t like you.

“Things started to fall apart when you tried to blackmail an Uzbekistani foreign minister named A___ K___. This fucker didn’t bullshit around. He paid to have Dr. C cremated just to scare the living shit out of you and it worked. But here’s the thing.” She pauses to look back up the alley.

“I can’t prove any connection between you and all this. There’s no money trail to you. All I know is that deputy director D wants you to go down for all this; that’s why he keeps pushing you at me. So here’s my offer. I can get all these fuckers off your back. You have to give me something, something I can use.”

I nod. “You got to show me,” she said, “or I leave you out there where these fuckers can find you. No bullshit, this time.”

“I have everything that D was using to blackmail people,” I said. I reached into my bag and pulled out a file folder and some computer disks. “This should give you the names of all of the victims, at least.”

M nodded grimly. “I thought so.” She took them, still staring at me. Her eyes were narrow and focused. She looked almost sad. “Is this everything?”

“No. There’s more. D must have had some way of getting files out of Fort Meade. I don’t know. It took me years to find ways. But, I  know him— he would never leave any trace that someone else could find. It’s a good bet there’s no other record, at this point.” It was a secret that there was a secret.  

I pointed to one of the disks. I say, hesitantly, “This one I think you want to destroy.” She nods, and pulls it from the stack.

“Fucking A,” she says sadly, drops it, and smashes it under her heel.

▼ 

Over the next couple of days, M obtains a warrant and opens R’s safe deposit box. In it they find a treasure trove of compromat, including a video of the Uzbekistani in bed with a woman, and a copy of the information they were sharing. 

There was a money trail from K to R. The Russian government had recently cracked down on his activities and imprisoned him, so the U.S. authorities had no way to obtain his side of the story. M did not notice that the investigation was instigated by the cousin of the deputy minister of the Russian oil ministry. 

I believe that R and K intended to manufacture the battery, far away from American oil interests. The men who tried to kill me on the street, who had placed the bomb in R’s Honda Civic, had been hired by the oil ministry. I was sure of it. I only hoped that, before they died, they didn’t have time to tell their handlers that it was me who first opened R’s safe deposit box. Once M’s investigation starts producing indictments, the Russians will probably by relieved that none of their operatives were mentioned, and assumed that someone, somewhere had handled the situation. 

When I am sure that M doesn’t know anything about what R was really doing, I cooperate with the investigation, but they had all they needed without my testimony. The prosecutors never even mentioned the connection between R and I.

D phones me just once. “You fucked me. I protected you. I had your back.”

“Did you?” I ask.

“You’d be dead if it wasn’t for me. Do you know that?” When was this, I wondered. When I was first arrested? Later, when R was killed? Was it even true? I say nothing. 

“Fuck you, Eddie.” He hangs up. 

There’s always a fall guy.

2012

D died of a coronary occlusion in the spring of 1999, shortly after he was arraigned. I suppose it’s possible he was murdered by some undetectable chemical in a tainted box of breakfast cereal, but there’s no way for me to know. 

I continued to work at the NSA for a year or so. I was moved to a cubicle in the mathematics department where I quietly proved a few theorems that provided a basis for new encryption methods and text mining algorithms. Everything I had done with D was highly classified and it began to look like it would stay that way. No one questioned my resignation when it finally came.

I bought a ranch in the hills above Half Moon Bay in California, and now I watch the horizon from my porch, waiting for a phalanx of black helicopters to rise above the oak trees into the night sky and land here on my driveway, dropping in a tentative rage, blowing waves of yellow dust and sandstone rubble. But they haven’t come. Not yet. 

Nothing comes between the stars and I. Leo in the spring, Scorpio in the summer, Orion in the fall and winter.

▼ 

I still see J, sometimes, when I’m in New York. She talks about her husband. I talk about my wife. We never mention the past. I almost tried to kiss her, once, in a cab on 86th street when it dove into the darkness of Central Park, shadows and light racing across her skin, her dark hair, her arms and shoulders. In that moment I cascaded into a million separate streams, mumbled thoughts, flickering images, voiceless intentions, a mumbling army of future selves moving relentless to separate destinies, overlaid like colored transparencies, stained glass in red and purple. I let the feeling pass, coming back to my senses, doing the right thing, and the cab explodes outward into the glare of Central Park West, out of the fragmented darkness. I didn’t kiss her, in fact I didn’t do anything but sit there and watch her breathe.

The cab drops J off at her building on the upper west side and I ride on to my hotel in midtown, I go up to my room and lay there changing channels for hours, unable to finish a thought.

When it’s late enough, I step out through the sliding glass doors onto the balcony and New York roars back at me with a single voice, a white noise composed of engines idling and doors slamming, a polyrhythm of all possible melodies at once, a million shouted greetings and bitter arguments, voices reminiscing or confessing or scraping for humor, the singular hum of lives like time machines rolling towards the unknowable future from the forgotten past.

Below me, the lights are mostly dark across the street. It’s safe. I walk to the very edge of the balcony, look upwards towards Cassiopeia and raise both my arms. I step off the balcony and rise silently and invisibly into the air.

End notes

The N.S.A. was finally investigated for their aggressive prosecution of scientists involved in cryptographic research in 1995. A congressional committee concluded that the agency had overreacted to the invention of Public Key Cryptography and were for forced to apologize for their attempts to censure the work of Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, Len Adelman, George Davida, Carl Nicolai, and others.

Lost in the mountain of documents was their attack on a small, unfunded and unnamed Harvard research project on (what would one day be called) quantum information processing. All records of my arrest had disappeared by the time congress became involved. However, the date and location of the police action against our laboratory still appears on documents at the Boston FBI office and the archive of the U.S. Marshall’s Office in Knoxville, Kentucky. The pages containing the names of the investigating officers have been lost.

Traces of our work can still be detected in the literature. If you’re interested, you should try to find these: 

• D___,J, and W___, E.  “Molecular Non-Deterministic Finite Automata and Universal Turing Machines” in the Journal of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence,  v.24, 1983;
• D___, J, and W___ E.,  “Preservation of Quantum Mechanical Coherency in Certain Structured Polymers” in Proceedings of the Thirteenth Vienna Conference on Theoretical Quantum Mechanics 1981.
• _______
• _______
• L___, H., C___ R. and W____ E.  “Encoding Logical Expressions as Spin States in Large Molecules,” in Physics, v. 932, 1983;  
• _______

These papers can be very hard to find today (since they are all retracted and mostly classified) but you may be able to find a hard copy on the shelf of a University library with a lazy staff. 

The molecule as I first pictured it was a cousin of polyvinylbutacite, but we discovered many other possibilities. The carbon atoms appearing deep in the structure could be excited in quantum superposition by a version of NMRI techniques. Once they were excited, the indeterminacy would propagate through the entire molecule and coherence could be sustained for several hundred microseconds, plenty of time to complete a calculation. The molecule, like Schrodinger’s Cat, would simultaneously exist in many states at once.

Each state could be considered as a message or number and all possible messages of a given length were represented. Each state could be used as a “guess” for the answer to some problem. The quantum superposition allowed the machine to check all possible solutions at the same time.  

Since the state of the molecule can represent any message we choose, it can also be a description of the system itself. This self-reference allows you to create a virtual machine which implements a version of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem — we can set up a situation where the state was possible only if it was impossible and it was impossible only if it was possible. Unable to resolve the paradox in the macroscopic universe, the paradox must propagate backwards in time until it is resolved. The system acts as if the paradoxical states had never existed in the first place.

This was the impossible molecule I saw in my mind that night on the Charles. It was a molecule that encoded the message “This molecule can’t exist.”

The demonstration version of the machine used eight q-bits, allowing it to guess from among 256 possibilities. Factoring the number twenty four was just about the most difficult problem that it could handle. My second version of our machine had 10^85 possible states. Arbitrarily larger machines are theoretically possible.

I should note that most scientists working in quantum information processing today generally don’t believe that the kind of exponential searches we carried out are possible at all.  Some of the theorems in this literature actually mirror points made in R’s paper, he might be pleased to know, if he were still alive. 

This story is fictional and any resemblance to real persons and real events is entirely coincidental. The names of persons and institutions have been changed. The final chapters were added at the behest of my editor, who felt that the reader needed to see the millennial implications of the machine and felt the protagonist should have a clearer victory — a wish that finally came gloriously, magically true. 

III. Excerpts from The Amazing Adventures of Colonel Eratosthenes Smith

“Gun it!” 

The kid leans into the controls and the hovercraft accelerates, just brushing the tops of the trees. The Savokim anti-aircraft fire tries to aim lower to catch us, sending a rapid fire series of rockets on low parabolas that explode to our six, shattering the trees, drowning out my voice, splinters of shrapnel rattling on the sides of the hull. I lean out the open side of the craft, looking just ahead, where I can see two figures running between the trees.

“Bring it down! Now, now!”

“I see them,” the kid says. He dives the craft between two pines, banking so hard that we are essentially rolling, and pulls back hard about four feet from the ground.

“Wittenstein!” I shout and lean further out, extending my arm. He sprints and grabs my hand and I tug him inside. “Get him.” He gasps, out of breath. “We need him.”

The trees in front of us begin to explode into flames as a dozen Sa’aks armed with particle beam rifles try to target the tall blonde boy running. They are cutting through the forest on their hind legs, two hundred meters out.  I shout and reach for the boy’s hand. “Return fire!” I say to the kid.

“You got it.” The kid is already firing. Forty rocket powered seekers scramble from our position and zig zag through trees targeting the Sa’aks. The boy is in and before I can give the order the kid is launching us straight into the air a thousand meters where he hits the big jets making us arch high across the sky. The Savokim rockets leave a series of parallel vapor trails that intersect our course, each weapon passing just behind our position as they fail to accurately target us.

I close the hatch. Wittenstein is still gasping for breath. “Thank you, Colonel Smith,” he manages to say, extending his hand. I point to the seat belts. He looks at them, quickly withdraws his hand and begins strapping himself in.

“Don’t call him ‘Tosser’. He hates that. Trust me.” The kid says, still staring at his instruments. Suddenly he yells. “Hang on, people!” The craft pitches nose down at full throttle, spinning left and then pulling out level near the trees, while an enormous explosion splits the sky above us.

“They’re using tacticals.” I say, as I regain my footing.

“Yes,” says Wittenstein, “that’s why the outskirts are such a wasteland.”

“But they have an Engine.” I am strapping myself in. 

“It’s the only explanation. You can’t violate the laws of physics without it.”

“Why don’t they use it?” 

“They might,” he says, flatly. “But it’s not clear to me if they have that kind of understanding. They’re very different than us, you know. There’s not a lot of common ground for communication.”

“Coming around again, people.” The kid says. Straight ahead of us is what looks like squadron of more than 100 Savokim fighters, now little more than a grey smudge on the horizon, fifteen kilometers away. The kid has good eyes. He reverses by pitching the craft up hard, until we are inverted, rolling us upright as he completes the turn, gunning the engine as we straighten out.

The tactical has become a colossal mushroom cloud and we loop around it. I glance at the radiation meters, square patches on the jump suits strapped to the ceiling. 

“Straight down.” I tell the kid.

“Aye aye, captain.” With the cloud obscuring our movements from the fighters, we dive four hundred meters down into the Vksa Sea, breaking the water with a flash of piezoelectric radiation.

“Silent running.” I order, but the kid has already shut everything down by slamming his hand on the red emergency cut off the second that we were underwater. We tumble to the bottom of the sea.

For a minute everyone is silent. I listen for pursuit. Nothing.

“I think we’re cool,” the kid says, looking a little incredulous. “Stand by,” I say. The kid smirks.

After a good ten minutes have passed, I am satisfied we have escaped the Savokim for now. I turn to our passengers. “Now, Dr. Wittenstein. We’re trying to save the human race from certain destruction by an alien threat. The kid,” I gesture to him, “thinks you can help us. What do you know that we don’t?”

…

“This isn’t happening,” Wittenstein says. I ignore him. 

The kid is pulling the weapons out of the superprinter, blowing on them to cool them off. He says, “Oh it’s happening all right, Doc.”

“No, I mean really. This isn’t happening.”

I put the binoculars on the windowsill, trying to steady them. I count forty now. They are taking up positions across the entire horizon.

“The issue is simulation vs. reality. If an Engine can find a simpler solution where we never existed, we —” Wittenstein says. 

“Jesus!” The kids says. “Seriously Doc, do not share your mother fucking philosophical musings right now.” The kid forces a weapon into Wittenstein’s hands and leans into his face. “Boring.” Wittgenstein holds the weapon at arms length and shakes his head. The kid looks back and rolls his eyes.

“Forgive me, my good sir. Perhaps later we shall discuss this over pastries or cappuccinos or whatever the fuck you Harvard fellows delight to dine upon.” He turns back to the super printer and grabs a rifle. “But right now,” he says as it puts it on his shoulder, “we need you to focus.” 

I turn around to face them and talk first to the kid. “I want you to take the cloak and try to get across the creek. Take a position in those trees. They may still believe that they have the advantage of surprise. We may be able to outflank them.” The kid nods. “Doctor, you’re going to stay right here. If they open fire, at any time, you point your weapon out this window and just keep firing. Cover the left and the right, as much as you can. Don’t stop, no matter what happens. Can you do that?” He looks into my eyes for a second. “I can do that,” he says.

The kid has already gone out the front door of the house and should be making his way east to the trees. I open the trap door and head back into the crawl space, making my way west. Hopefully the kid and I won’t kill each other in the crossfire.

…

The stairways arch across the abyss in a dozen directions. I’m uncertain if they even connect to the towers above. The jazarak are rising into the air as a flock, cutting through the mist, turning like a living cloud that streams out of the mouths of the caves below. Now I realize the cave openings are hundreds of meters tall. The rust colored area at the bottom of the trench is a city, a human city, clouded in the smoke of hearth fires, with Vertnoia towers reaching upwards a hundred meters or more, each one carrying a single seated Mystic in meditation. 

“Okay, I take it back.” the kid says. “This is worse than shrooms.” David #7 looks at him blankly. 

“See that”, I say, pointing to an abandoned tower in the distance. “That’s our entry point.”

…

Wittenstein begins attaching wires to the Engine, glancing at his wrist computer as each connection is made. “You have to set up a contradiction. Everything follows from a contradiction. We need to encode the laws of universe into some subset of the universe.“

“Doc, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” the kid said, “just show me how to get at the code. I can figure it out.”

“The difficult issue is linearity. We have to find a tractable solution. This is essentially a three-body problem, and —“

The kid snarls in a whisper while Wittgenstein is talking. “There’s going to be three bodies in this room if we don’t get the hell out of here in the next thirty seconds — “

“Got it.” Wittenstein interrupts. 

“Go! Now!” I say. The kid opens the Pad, looks at it intently, begins typing furiously. Wittenstein was kneeling, now he leans back against the cramped walls and breathes deeply.

“Wittenstein. Outside, with me.” The kid doesn’t look up. Wittgenstein gets his rifle and follows me up the ladder into the utter darkness of the Temple hallways. Wittenstein covers the left. I take a step to the right and stop.

“We’re not alone.” I whisper. 

…

I crawl forward along the base of the low wall between the courtyard and the Palace. The kid follows, running lightly and silently down the embankment through the cover of the trees, and then diving in next to me, landing with his back to the wall and his weapon held in both hands on chest.

I signal on my mark to him.  He turns around slowly into a low crouch, raising his weapon but staying low enough that he still can’t be seen. 

We hear the front of the ship open.

I raise my weapon as well. I start counting down, on the fingers of my left hand, where the kid can see them. Five. Four. Three.

“My name is E. Howard Manning,” a voice shouts. “I represent the human race. We come in peace.”

The kid looks at me and then shakes hia head. “Elmo?!” he shouts. He stands up. I shoulder my weapon. “Elmo? Is that you? Jesus, dude, you scared the shit out of us.”

…

“Don’t sweat it, Eddie,” the kid tells him. He is drunk. “If it weren’t for you I would have been dead already. Before I even met you.”

“Yes, well…” Wittenstein looks into the distance, and, for a moment, it seems like there is something he needs to say. I watch him for a moment, but he does not speak. I nod to the kid, and he toasts me, hanging his head loosely. It is time to go. I stand up, drain my glass and step quickly out the door and into the empty night.