Alice in the Palace
ALICE put on the magic glasses again and settled back in the recliner. “I think this ‘telepresence’ business is all just a ruse to allow you to lie around on a soft couch all day while you’re pretending to work.” she said.
“You’re not the first person to suggest that,” said George’s voice in her earphones.
She was getting the hang of adjusting the glasses. George had explained that she would have an independent ‘body’ in the interface, but that her position would be servoed to his so they would move together.
As her eyes adapted to the lower light level, she saw that she was standing at the corner of a magnificent building, a Greek temple that appeared to be filled with amazing statues. She was reminded of the Loggia della Signoria on the Piazza Veccio in Florence, but this building was huge. It stretched away as far as the eye could see. Curiously, over the entry stairway were carved and gilded architectural letters that read “LEM Data Analysis System, Virtual Desktop - Version 2.1A,” followed by a modified quotation from Dante.
George’s voice spoke next to her. “Alice, can you hear me OK?”
“Sure,” she said and turned to see that a wireframe figure with George’s face stood next to her. “Where are we? What is this place?”
“Oh,” George said, laughing. “I should have explained. This is our ‘desktop’, our locational interface. Pietro, one of our programmers, had a dual college major in computer science and classical art history. One morning I connected to the system, and here it was in all its glory. He took statues from a giant classical sculpture database and used random combinations of statue elements filtered by an ‘aesthetics’ expert system developed by the Harvard Department of Fine Arts.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“As it turns out,” George continued, “associating computer files and operations with physical locations in the Palace does seem to make a good computer-human interface. The operations and locations feel very natural and stick in the memory. Pietro claims the interface is based on a classical scheme for memory improvement developed by the Greeks.”
“Are there more of these locational interfaces?” asked Alice, wishing for her notepad. “I’ve never heard of them before.”
“As far as I know,” said George, “it’s unique to the SSC. But it’s become rather a local fad to see who can come up with the most bizarre locational interface. The SDC programmers designed one based on the works of Lewis Carroll, and I’m told there’s a new one at the E-4 experiment that’s supposed to be derived from the H. P. Lovecraft mythos.”
The view of the Palace began to change. They were moving through the vast building. The statues were passing faster, now. So fast that she could not comprehend one before the next appeared. They passed gardens, open areas, belvederes, glittering fountains, and elaborate staircases leading up or down. Finally, the view stopped before a goat-headed man. Alice noticed that the words “Snark => Talk to Jake!” were carved in neat architectural letters into the white marble pedestal of the statue.
“Here we are,” said George. “This is the icon for the event I need to measure.”
Alice saw George’s phantom hand, a representation of curving connected yellow polygons and lines, reach out and touch the pedestal. The words “Talk to Jake” vanished from the inscription. Then the hand moved to touch the foot of the statue ...
... there was a “pop” sound and she floated in a black night illuminated by a spiked flower pattern constructed of many-colored curving lines.
“This is the Snark event,” George said. “Its collision products passing through the LEM detector made this pattern.”
“It’s like a neon-tube sculpture I saw once,” she said. As she watched, the phantom hands dimmed each colored line of the pattern until only one remained. It was a straight line that glowed with a violet color, and at random intervals along its length were blossoming bunches of shorter red lines.
“Here,” said George, “is our Snark. It has a large electric charge and a very large mass. It came out of the vertex, but it took no energy or momentum from the collision.” The phantom hand touched one of the bunches of red along the violet line. “See these? They’re called jets, bunches of energetic particles that are made when a quark or a gluon is ejected by a collision.”
“I’ve read about them,” said Alice.
“They always come from the point of collision. Never are they found at random spots along a trajectory like this.”
“What? Never?” Alice quoted.
“Well, hardly ever,” George responded.
She imagined that he must be grinning.
“Roger Coulton suggested that they’re from a process he called ‘color ionization’. Somehow the Snark is losing energy by separating quarks and antiquarks along its path and making them into forward jets, just as a normal charged particle loses energy by separating electrons from atoms.”
A frame of yellow lines, which Alice took to be an outline of the LEM Detector, now surrounded them, and they swam in the space it enclosed. “What I’m trying to do,” George said, “is estimate where in the detector the Snark stopped. Ah!” A region at the edge of the detector suddenly contained a sprinkling of colored line segments. The viewpoint shifted until Alice could see that one of the segments, a fat red line, was a direct extension of the violet line that still glowed near the center of the device. A dashed yellow line winked on, connecting the violet line to the red.
“That,” said George, “means the Snark went through the inner slab of the depleted uranium absorber, made a big flash of light in this lead glass scintillator, but never made it to the outer muon detector. It stopped somewhere in here. A column of green numbers appeared momentarily above the place where the red track ended.”
The field of view expanded and grew more detailed. Alice could see structures within structures within structures.
The hand gestured again, and a bar with a hexagonal cross section lit with a violet glow. “Jackpot!” said George. “The Snark hit this lead-glass scintillator unit, and the thing is still scintillating, half a day later. I think our Snark must be embedded in it.” The hands made a another gesture ...
... and Alice found herself before the statue of the goat-headed man.
“OK, I have the Snark’s coordinates,” George said. “Now we know where it’s hiding. So we need to figure out how to get to it.”
They moved off through the forest of statues at a dizzying speed.