The Ring
WHEN George had received Alice’s message, he, Roger and Iris had rushed to the LEM Data Analysis Room so that he could connect to an SDC remote and they could watch.
Now Roger tore off the glasses and stared at the others in horror. “They’ve killed Alice!” he said.
“Yes, she’s dead,” said George. “There was nothing I could do.” He put his hands over his face.
Roger straightened slowly, struggling to calm himself after the grisly spectacle he had just witnessed. He walked across and placed his hand on George’s shoulder. “We understand, George,” he said. “We were watching. There was nothing more you could do.”
Iris walked over and put her hand against George’s cheek. Roger wondered if she was doing something to calm him. “It’s a tragic loss, George,” she said, “but only the first of many millions. We Makers were naive to assume that we had a year to prepare before the Hive arrived. They modified their tactics, probably in response to our previous successes. On your planet we have failed to stop the Hive incursion. The Hive will now assimilate your world.”
“We need to warn people,” said George, taking out his cellphone.
“That would be futile,” said Iris. “All of the human race will be dead by tomorrow. Warning your people would have no effect.”
“But surely there must be a way to stop it,” said George. “Suppose a hydrogen bomb were detonated at the SDC site ...?”
“It would have little effect,” said Iris. “A Bridge is a topological defect in space itself, and it represents a Planck-scale concentration of energy.. It cannot be removed by some minor energy discharge at the nuclear scale. Moreover, by now the Hive Mind has surely dispersed itself far enough to withstand any local act of destruction.” She paused, her head cocked to one side as if listening, then spoke slowly and deliberately. “There is one further thing we can attempt which might stop the Hive. We had expected to have more time. We’ve made no preparations for it, and it is at best a desperate measure. It will require a very large electrical power source.”
“How large?” asked George through gritted teeth. He was crying. Roger fished a handkerchief from his backpack and handed it to George, frustrated that this was all he could do.
“In your units of energy flow, perhaps two hundred megawatts at a bare minimum,” said Iris. “We have studied the design of the SSC and have determined that there is such a power source associated with it.”
“Yes,” George said in a choked voice, “That’s about the size of the magnet power supply for the injector synchrotron.” . He wiped his eyes with Roger’s handkerchief, blew his nose, and sniffed.
“Then we must go to it immediately,” said Iris. “The Hive tends to ignore mechanical infrastructure in its initial attack, but we must get there while the power supply is still operating.
“The problem is,” said George, straightening, “we’re here on the East Campus of the ring and the injector is in a tunnel at the West Campus. We’ll have to drive across.”
Roger shouldered his backpack and led the way as they walked quickly to the lobby of the LEM building. His car was just outside in the parking lot. But before the wall of glass in the building lobby he halted abruptly. Looking south toward the SDC building, he saw that the air around it was a dirty gray. In the distance large dark shapes were moving. Outside the glass they could see small metallic-looking flying insects landing on the concrete and shrubbery.
“Pandora’s box has been opened,” said Iris. “The Troubles are abroad in your world. Those creatures are Hive flyers. The assimilation of your world is beginning. Their touch brings instant death.”
“Could we make it to the West Campus in my car through that?” asked Roger. He doubted it
“No,” said George, suddenly alert. “I have a better idea. Come on.” He led them to the building’s deep elevator. Inside the car, he pushed the button that would take them down to the LEM detector itself, two hundred meters below the surface. “We can reach the West Campus through the ring,” he explained.
“But,” Roger objected, “that would take all day. The circumference of the ring is 86 kilometers. Half way around is 43 kilometers, a good day’s hike.”
“Yes,” said George, “and because it’s so far they have a fast little monorail system to take the engineers and technicians and hardware around the ring when the beam is off. We can use that.”
The doors opened to reveal the LEM detector. George’s access card got them through three security doors and into the SSC tunnel itself. Not far away a yellow vehicle, like a wheel-less pickup truck, hung from a siding rail mounted on the ceiling. They climbed in, and George engaged the drive mechanism and swerved out onto the main railing. The vehicle began to move backwards, truckbed first and passenger area behind. It accelerated until it was backing up at about 70 kilometers per hour.
“We‘re going by the north side of the ring, in the direction that avoids the SDC detector area,” George said.
Roger nodded.
“OK, Iris,” George said, “we have about half an hour before we get to the other side, assuming the power stays on. You’d better explain your plan to us. What is it you want to do?”
The beautiful child smiled. “We will try to deliberately create a time vortex, what your quantum field theorists call a timelike loop or a Cauchy horizon,” she said. “The vortex will destroy your present universe, unravel it to a point in the past and produce a new history in which the Hive does not create a Bridge and your world is safe.”
“Do you mean you want to build a time machine and change the past, to rewrite history?” said Roger. “I thought that was ...”
“... impossible?” Iris finished. “In a way, it is. Creating a time vortex produces a catastrophic condition that is usually considered unacceptable. It destroys the part of the universe in which the loop is created.”
“How can that be?” asked Roger.
“You are a field theorist, Roger,” said Iris. “You surely know about path integrals.”
Roger nodded. “Only too well,” he said.
“What happens when the space-time interval along the path goes to zero?” Iris asked.
“Oh, you mean the self-energy term,” said Roger. “That’s certainly a problem. It makes a singularity. The energy goes to infinity. We’ve learned to re-normalize the theory by subtracting those infinities away. I should add that we always feel uncomfortable about doing that, but it works.”
“You subtract the singularity for a particle acting on itself, with zero interval between the particle and itself,” said Iris. “But suppose there was also another path that had a zero interval, a net zero space-time distance. What would you do then?”
“Another? There can’t be, because ...” he stopped. “Oh, I see. With a wormhole back through time you can make the negative timelike part cancel the positive spacelike part, so the net interval goes to zero. That would produce a very nasty singularity that probably couldn’t be disposed of by subtraction.” He smiled with the pleasure of a new idea, then frowned. “You’re suggesting that the resulting singularity destroys the universe?”
Iris nodded. “It does indeed. We Makers have done it. Fluctuations in the vacuum are amplified and build up until all paths within the timelike loop acquire arbitrarily large energies. The part of the universe that is threaded by the loop is destroyed. History is nullified and must form again from the earliest point of the loop. That is what a time vortex is.”
“Hold it,” said George. “How can you destroy only part of a universe?”
“I suppose ‘destroys’ gives the wrong impression,” said Iris. “Perhaps ‘unraveled’ provides a better metaphor. Or consider it as the ‘rewind and restart’ of a recording. All events related to the existence of the time vortex are nullified, as if they never happened, and are replaced by new causal sequences that do not contain the loop.”
“You mean that we can go back to a time when Alice is still alive?” George asked. He looked a bit wild-eyed, Roger thought.
“Yes,” Iris replied, “of course.”
“Wait a moment,” said Roger. “Are you talking about moving back to some alternate branch Everett-Wheeler universe?”
Iris laughed. “Since we established contact with your culture many Individuals of our world, particularly our science meta-historian specialists, have derived great amusement from your quantum mythology, that area which you call the ‘interpretation of quantum mechanics’. They were particularly amused by your Copenhagen interpretation, with its state vectors that are altered by the thoughts of intelligent observers, and by your Everett-Wheeler interpretation, with its splitting and re-splitting into multiple universes. In this regard, your culture is unique among those that we have encountered . No other has provided such a remarkable demonstration of fertile creative desperation in seeking to understand physical behavior at the quantum level. We find these myths of yours quaint and charming.”
“In other words, ‘wrong’?” asked Roger.
Iris looked troubled. “No more wrong, say, than your Greek or Norse myths. Your excursions of scientific fantasy are an interesting manifestation of your culture, but they are not an accurate portrayal of the behavior of the universe. Human observers, for example, are not demigods with the ability to collapse a wave function with an act of measurement or of insight. It is better that they are not, believe me.”
“I’m not sure where this is leading,” said George, “or what it has to do with our present predicament. I gather that you were in the process of saying that there is a way of, how did you put it, nullifying the Hive’s discovery of our universe.”
“Pardon me, George,” said Iris. “Yes, that’s what I was saying. This universe, all Bubbles individually and all of them together, move forward in time at the quantum level by a chain of handshakes between past and future. The psi-star time-reversed wave functions of your formulation of quantum mechanics, though you have never realized it, represent the future reaching back to make an accommodation with the past that allows a quantum event to happen, to become reality. Each quantum event emerges into reality as the result of a feedback loop between past and future. These are allowed timelike loops which bring the universe into being.
“If we create an artificial timelike loop back to some point of spacetime within the negative light cone of the present, we create a condition that nullifies all of those handshakes, those transactions between future and past. The events within the loop are in effect erased or unraveled and the universe starts over from the first instant where the forbidden loop would have begun to exist. The universe is wounded and heals itself with a new set of handshakes that do not bring a timelike loop into being. Nature, as your ancient Greek natural philosophers might have said, abhors a time machine.
“We will attempt to create a time-hole back to an era from which you can prevent the SSC from being built. If we can achieve that, then your world, your Bubble, will be safe from the Hive.”
“Why do we need to stop the SSC project?” George asked. “If the universe really reforms without the timelike loop, why do we need to do anything more. Won’t the universe heal itself to take care of the Hive problem?”
“Not necessarily,” said Iris. “There are many paths that could lead to the absence of a timelike loop. For example, your SSC is built and the Hive discovers your world but we do not.”
“Does this time vortex thing really work?” asked Roger. “You’ve actually done it before?”
“We have been making contact with other Bubbles for a dozen gross of orbits, over seventeen of your centuries. For about the last half of that period we have had to deal with the Hive civilization. In our last eight contacts, we were able to provide isolation from the Hive in five cases, and we had to create timelike loops in two cases. The other case was lost to the Hive altogether.”
“I don’t understand,” said George. “How could you know that you created the loop if it erases its own existence? Wouldn’t it erase its traces in your world too?”
“Excellent question,” said Iris. “As a part of the process of creating the loop, we transmit a complete record to our past. In this way we know what has happened and also preserve all the new information we gained from the contact.”
They had come to a maintenance station, and their way was blocked by another vehicle on the rail. George brought their truck to a stop, and they got out.
“Well, if it ain’t George and Roger,” said a voice. “Howdy!”
George turned.
It was Whitey, dressed in blue SSC coveralls and carrying a toolbox. “You folks have any idea what in God’s Creation is goin’ on round here?” he asked. “The diagnostics say that all hell is breakin’ loose on the East side of the ring, and nobody will answer my phone calls.”
“Hell is indeed breaking loose,” said George. “Poisonous insect things have invaded the ring and the above-ground area too. The people that don’t answer your calls are probably dead. Alice is dead, too. We’re trying to get to the West Campus to try to do something about it.”
“Alice is dead?” Whitey exclaimed. “What? ... How? ...” His face turned the color of his pale-blonde hair, and he seemed to shrink.
“Here, let me,” said Iris. She stepped forward and placed her right hand on Whitey’s cheek. His dazed expression slowly vanished, to be replaced by a look of calm determination.
“The Hive has invaded your world,” said Iris.
“Yes’m,” said Whitey.
“We are trying to stop this.”
“Yes’m.”
“We would like you to help us, if you’re willing.”
“I surely am, Ma’am,” said Whitey. “Just tell me what to do.”
“We need to get to the injector synchrotron power supply complex,” said George. “We need to get there fast.”
“Then follow me,” said Whitey. He led them to his monorail vehicle, which was pointed west. The truckbed was loaded with supplies, including cans of solvent and steel industrial gas cylinders in a variety of colors.
As they were climbing into the service vehicle, Roger glanced up the vertical shaft leading to the surface. “Look!” he said and pointed. At the top of the shaft, illuminated by floodlights, was a gray haze. A cloud of Hive flyers was just entering the upper part of the shaft.
Whitey moved the controls, and the vehicle moved rapidly down the tunnel.
“Those flyer creatures are spreading fast,” said Roger, looking back. “How many more maintenance stations do we pass before we reach the West Campus?”
Whitey consulted a diagram on the dashboard. “Two more to go,” he said. “No, hold on,” he said, “there’s a branch beamline tunnel leading up to the injector. We can stop there and walk up the tunnel. That means we only have to pass one more maintenance station.”