In Which the Future of the Future Is Considered
For argument’s sake,” suggested Brendan, “if we grant that the expansion of the universe is a fact—whatever the cause may be—and that the extremely fast outward expansion is actually slowing, what do you think would be the effect if that expansion began to reverse?”
“I don’t have to think about it,” replied Tony. “I already know exactly what would happen.”
They had been walking in the cool of the day, and now evening was descending over the Old Quarter as Damascus settled in for a peaceful night. The two men were stopped in the middle of a cobbled lane beneath the spreading boughs of a great cedar tree in which doves were taking roost. The doves, the gentle twilight, the soft evening air, music from the nearby tea shop—all contributed to an atmosphere of tranquillity.
But for Tony Clarke, the discussion had just taken a dark, disturbing turn and he was feeling far from tranquil. He contemplated a horror that had, for reasons he could not presently define, suddenly become a real and present danger.
Brendan was waiting for an answer. “Well then?”
“It would be the end of everything.”
“Define the end of everything,” suggested Brendan. “In layman’s terms, what do you mean?”
“The EoE, or End of Everything theory, is the systematic annihilation of all that exists,” replied Tony matter-of-factly. “In a nutshell.”
“Everything in the universe known and unknown utterly and completely destroyed,” said Brendan, nodding in agreement. “Yes, that would be my understanding.”
Tony gave a mirthless smile. “Friend, you’re just not thinking big enough.”
“Enlighten me.” They slowly resumed their stroll, working their way back to the Zetetic Society headquarters, their way lit now by the intermittent light spilling from nearby windows.
“When a scientist talks about the EoE, he is talking about something far greater than mere destruction,” Tony explained. “Destruction implies damage, demolition, wreckage—there is debris, bits and pieces of stuff left over, along with energy, light, heat, sound, that sort of thing. This allows some possibility, however small, of reconstituting or rebuilding—as following an earthquake or tornado, for example. But with annihilation there is nothing left over. All matter—each and every molecule and atom, as well as energy, light, heat, and the rest—everything that ever existed is consumed in the ultimate cataclysm.”
“Including time?” asked Brendan.
“Including time and space, for sure. Whatever future may have been is snuffed out, the present grinds to a halt, and the past unravels and disperses like mist on the wind.” He made an airy gesture with his hands. “There are various theories about how time might be affected during the cataclysm,” he continued after a moment. “Some suggest that the flow of time reverses like a river suddenly changing its course, and we all live our lives backwards to the moment of the Big Bang. Others think that time simply evaporates like a drop of water splashed onto a hot iron. Nobody really knows what form it would take, but most agree that all time—past, present, and future—would cease . . . along with everything else that came into existence at the first moment of creation.
“Think of all the galaxies and star systems spinning into an all-devouring void; light shutting down, heat dissipating into a cold beyond description; the whole spectrum of energy simply radiating away and ceasing; each and every photon suddenly winking out; all atomic particles—even those in the quantum vacuum—disappearing one by one with ever-increasing speed; the rocks and trees and oceans and the earth beneath our feet dissolving and each flying into its constituent molecules—our bodies likewise—and those molecules simply fizzling away into nothingness . . . everything returning to the primeval void from which it sprang in the instant of creation. Worse still, there would be conscious, living, breathing, thinking entities to watch it happen and suffer its unimaginable horrors.” Tony shook his head at the magnitude of the terror. “We would be alive to witness our own obliteration.”
In the silence that followed this grim pronouncement, Brendan drew a breath and let it out slowly. “Put like that,” he said, “cataclysm does not seem a large enough word to describe it.”
“Not by a long shot,” agreed Tony. “Fortunately, there is no hard evidence that the outward expansion of the universe is slowing.”
Brendan said nothing. Tony cast a sideways glance at his lanky companion whose gaze seemed remote, as if fixed on a distant yet distinctly unsettling prospect.
As if compelled, Tony insisted, “The best scientific evidence we have from close and continual observation shows that the expansion of the universe is continuing full tilt—despite rumours to the contrary.”
“And it will continue,” observed Brendan glumly, “until something disrupts that expansion and brings it to a halt.”
“This is . . . correct,” Tony confirmed hesitantly. He studied Brendan’s knitted brow and dour expression. “But if the JVLA data you mentioned was to be confirmed . . . well, that would certainly throw a wrench into the works.”
Brendan’s downcast eyes shifted to his companion. “Do not misunderstand,” he said. “I have no hard evidence. For me, it is more in the way of a premonition, a feeling of impending doom I cannot explain—and I am fairly certain it derives from the nature of our work at the society. Almost since its very inception, our members have been puzzling over one of the most frustrating riddles of ley travel.”
“Only one?” quipped Tony, trying to lighten the mood. “I’m still struggling with ley lines, multidimensional space, alternative time—the whole enchilada. What is your riddle?”
“Why is it that no one ever travels to the future?”
“Oh boy,” sighed Tony. “By future, I assume you mean the absolute future—not the relative future—because, obviously, some travellers could conceivably journey to places where times were in advance of their own. That is, they would experience a time in advance of their own, yet still somewhat removed from the absolute future of the cosmos.”
“Quite right,” Brendan confirmed. “Sir Henry Fayth, for example, came here on many occasions. For him, a man born in 1620-something, this was the future, but not for me. I was born in 1958. For me—as for you—this”—Brendan waved a hand at their surroundings—“this is the past. But why am I unable to travel to the future of my own world?”
Tony considered this for a moment, then offered, “Presumably because the future has not happened yet.”
Brendan steepled his fingers beneath his chin and gazed down at the darkness pooling around his feet. “That, or some slight variation of it, has always been our official interpretation,” he said slowly. “You cannot reach a destination by train unless the rails have been laid to take you there—that is what we have always told ourselves. Even so, that description has never satisfied, and many of our members have tried to find a better, more rewarding explanation. None have ever succeeded.”
“Your lack of success in finding a better explanation may be due to a faulty hypothesis,” observed Tony. “It is a well-known bane of science.”
“Meaning if we adjusted our assumptions about the future the facts might fit better?”
“Adjusting your assumptions not only about the future but about time itself. For example, you assume that time has a flow—moving from past through the present to the future, which is how it looks and feels to us in our normal, everyday experience. But what if time’s flow actually moves the other way? What if it moves from a very fluid future into a much less malleable present before hardening into a solid-set past?” He glanced at his companion to see if he was following and saw a broad grin on his face. “What?” He stopped. “What have I said? Why are you smiling?”
“I am just happy you suggested this alternative view yourself without prompting from me,” Brendan told him, “because it will make what I have to say that much easier.”
“Go on, then. Hit me—I’m a physicist, I can take it.”
“Suppose that time flows from the future towards the past,” replied Brendan. He turned down another street; Tony fell into step beside him. “If so, then it would follow that anything—I repeat anything—that threatens the future inevitably endangers the present as well, and the present is where life as we know it is lived.”
“True. I see that,” Tony replied. “What I do not see is what this has to do with ley lines and multiple dimensions that we were talking about earlier.”
“It is my belief that the future is even now under threat,” declared Brendan in a solemn tone. “The knock-on effect of that threat, if allowed to continue, will cause the expansion of the universe to slow and ultimately reverse . . .”
“Resulting in a chain reaction that will bring about the annihilation of life, the universe, and everything,” concluded Tony, once again sinking beneath a sense of utter calamity. “It would be as if absolutely nothing had ever existed.” He glanced at Brendan, silent beside him. “You do realise what you’re saying?”
“How long would it take to reach the end?” asked Brendan. “How much time would we have before the final cataclysm overtook us?”
Tony turned his gaze to the sky where the first stars were shining as dim pinpoints in a clean, cloudless expanse. He saw only a blot of blackness spreading like an ink stain over the heavens as he made rough calculations in his head, checked them, and then at last announced, “Depending on when the reversal actually began, such a scenario would unfold in a matter of months. Annihilation would be complete within a year—two at most.”
“That soon?” Brendan cast a hand towards the heavens where Tony’s gaze was directed. “Considering that it has taken the universe so many billions of years to expand to the present size, I would have thought that reversing it—”
“Would take a similar amount of time?” Tony finished the thought. “If only that were the case.” He shook his head. “No. You seem to have forgotten the increased mass and its effect on momentum. See, the megaverse is so very much larger now. And once all that mass begins moving backwards, so to speak, the speed of that reversal will increase exponentially—much, much faster than the initial acceleration. It would all come crashing down very, very quickly indeed. Months, not years. I’d need instrumentation to be more precise, but there it is.”
Brendan gave him a grim smile. “I knew you’d understand.”
They turned down another street. The lights of a tiny café spilled out onto the cobbled stones in a splash of liquid gold. Laughter erupted from the men gathered around the boxy radio in the corner.
Tony noticed none of this. His mind was churning with possibilities, all of them dire. “Let us accept, for the sake of argument, that this threat is real,” continued the physicist. “To what do you attribute this threat? What form does it take? Where is it? More to the point—can we test it? Can we prove it?”
“It is my belief—my hypothesis, if you like—that the Great Reversal, as I think of it, is linked in some way to the very mechanisms we’ve been discussing.”
“By that you mean consciousness and its interaction with electromagnetic forces?”
“Those very mechanisms, yes. I believe something has happened, or is happening now, to render that interaction unstable. It is this instability that poses the threat to the ongoing function of the universe.”
Tony nodded thoughtfully. “Any idea what has caused the system to become unstable?”
Brendan drew a deep breath and then blew it out. “Not really, no—nothing concrete. Only a wild speculation.”
“Often the best kind,” said Tony. “Go ahead, speculate away.”
“I suspect that it has to do with the map,” replied Brendan, directing his feet onto another darkened byway. “Perhaps a better way to say it is that once we have discovered the secret of the map, we will better understand the source and nature of the threat.”
“Whoa! Hold on. What map are we talking about?”
Brendan glanced around. “The Skin Map.”
Tony returned a blank stare. “Pardon?”
“Sorry, I thought you knew,” said Brendan, who then explained, “The Skin Map is a chart of the routes and destinations of various ley lines scattered throughout the cosmos. It belonged to a ley explorer named Arthur Flinders-Petrie. In fact, it was a man named Arthur Flinders-Petrie.”
Brendan went on to describe the map, how it was made and where, and what it was thought to contain—a treasure of unrivalled significance. He gave a curious little laugh. “To tell the truth, we’re still a bit hazy about that. We don’t really know what old Arthur found.”
“Best guess?”
“There are those among us who believe that what Flinders-Petrie found is none other than the legendary Well of Souls or, as we call it, the Spirit Well.”
“Now, that at least I have heard about,” said Tony. “It is a common Middle Eastern myth, if I remember from my school days.” He glanced at Brendan to gauge his reaction. “Are you telling me you believe the Spirit Well is an actual, physical place?”
“We have good reason to believe it exists, yes. Our genizah contains all sorts of wonders. After dinner, if you’re interested—”
“Consider me interested,” said Tony. “I’d very much like to see this Skin Map you mentioned too.”
“Ah, well,” said Brendan. “There’s the rub. We don’t have the map in our possession. At some point in the past it was divided up into four or five sections. Those pieces were hidden in places scattered far and wide through time and space. For over two hundred years it has been the work of our society to find the missing pieces and put them back together. All we have is a poorly rendered copy made by an artist who knew very little of the map’s true significance. He thought it a map of the Faery Realms.”
They had retraced their steps to the Zetetic Society headquarters. Brendan drew out his keys, and Tony glanced up at the night sky and the faint sprinkling of stars. “Thanks for the walk, Brendan,” he said. “It was . . . harrowing.”
Brendan gave a sympathetic laugh; he opened the black door and ushered in his guest. “Perhaps if you are not too very harrowed, you wouldn’t mind continuing our discussion after dinner? Talking things out helps me crystallise my thoughts.”
Tony stepped into the cosy book-lined reception room—light-years away from the doom-laden multiverse they had so recently envisioned. It took him a moment to realise that Mrs. Peelstick was there, and she was welcoming two newly arrived visitors—a young couple whose backs were to him.
“Oh, here you are!” she called as the returning men came through the door. “We were just talking about you, Dr. Clarke.”
“About me? Well, I—” He halted as the young couple turned to meet him. “Cassie!”
“Hello, Daddy,” she said, holding out her arms for a hug. “Fancy meeting you here.”