Wormhole Theater
A Short Story By Ed Thrush
Copyright © 2012 Ed Thrush
Cover:
Orion Nebula, Mirror Distortion by Author
Published:
Type:
Science Fiction Short Story
Abstract:
A first hand report of real time viewing of past events. Photons can be rebroadcast from anytime, but there is a catch…
ISBN:
9781476421858
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Table of Contents
Enyo’s Journal
Gaia’s Journal
About the Author
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Enyo’s Journal
“I got a ticket to the Wormhole Theater! Tonight!! I’m going without my girlfriend Gaia. Hey! I could only get one ticket, she understands. My name is Enyo. I’m just getting off work at the DYI Home Center. I almost forget to get the drill bit my sister needed. I work in the computer center, if you can call it that. It’s a bunch of servers in a walled off area behind the fiberglass insulation and roofing materials. It is so hard to get these tickets! You never know exactly what you are going to see. I better slow down and explain what this is all about. Not knowing when or who gets this journal, I should say that I am recording this using the minder. Everybody uses them, but who knows in what time you’ll be reading this. The minder is an integrator system, I communicate through an ear insert. I access all of the com streams, I can monitor the systems at my workplace and I can record a journal with voice, GPS video tracking, and activity logs. You have to wear contacts to see the heads up display – which is really cool because you can see a movie being acted out in the middle of a busy street. It all grew out of cell phone technology. We call it ‘Z’, stands for the 3rd dimension axis or something like that. Cell phones are still valuable though, as collectables. Don’t buy those old smart phones at a yard sale, they don’t bring much. I watch the antiques show on TV and a celebrity phone with data on it is what’s hot.”
“About 10 years ago the first artificial wormhole was created in the laboratory. I don’t understand all the science – you probably guessed that by now, Gaia knows more about that stuff. But it took the largest particle accelerator on Earth, 31.4 miles in diameter. There are huge magnets 500 feet high. It also needed the biggest bank of high powered lasers available. This thing even has several of its own power plants. Of what I can remember, these scientists were colliding quantum black holes together and containing the resulting particles generated. At any rate, when they tried to slow down the collisions with some kind of magnetic glass, they created a very small but working wormhole. What they discovered is that we can’t jump into and travel to the other side of the universe. We can’t send anything into it. The forces creating the wormhole would disintegrate any matter. The containment actually kept the internal particles ordered, meaning that the photons reflected off surfaces from the other world kept their arrangement when they entered ours. The scientists did discover that the photons are from different times and places as they emanate from the wormhole. The photons are collected and most of the time they form an image that makes sense.”
“The majority of the wormhole images were of deep empty space (a complete black void) or looking up close at a star (solid white image) most likely our sun. After about a year formulas were discovered to control the energy of the wormhole to place the focus on Earth. There was never enough energy to go out of the solar system.”
“That was the best that could be done. Focus somewhere on Earth. They cannot control where or what time. But they can change the “camera” position quickly if the picture is bad, like the inside of a wall or under a rock. Just staying on the surface of the earth is difficult enough. A high speed computer figures out if 90 percent of the pictures are not going to be any good. A human editor decides on the other 10 percent. A theater chain created a new theater that has the large high definition huge screen but the projectors are all networked back to the wormhole lab. Wormhole Theater helps offset the cost of all this research. The image can be very small or take up the whole screen. Even with the filtering of the boring stuff, you never know what you are going to get. Nothing is lost though, all video images are recorded and still images are recorded every minute down to the photon itself and sent to a massive data warehouse. So there are data through services available of this everywhere, with general themes (like ships, factories, street life, house, forest, ocean, etc…) given to a collection for an hour or so. But the greatest thrill is seeing it live. You never know what part of history you will see. Gaia thinks we could see the future too, but the current thinking is that it would require a different type of wormhole than the one we got now.”
“This is true viewing of reality, even if it is an image of an average middle income person from 1937 working in the garage and we only see part of the arm and some wrenches (that would be a huge success, compared to the inside of basement closets or the ever present wires and plumbing). There have been a few truly shocking items and never knowing just when you might see one draws the crowds. I can’t wait!”
“Well the time has come and we are taking our seats in the big theater. One can’t help but cast a look of envy over at the lucky season ticket holders. The odds are in the billions of getting those. For some strange reasons these people seem to dress the absolute worst.”
“While we are waiting for the show to start, you are probably already thinking about bedroom shots. Well sad to say there are few of these and the ones that do show up have the wormhole camera looking at the worst angle. Like out the window, in a drawer, the baseboard, the bolts on a bed frame, an armpit that moves around a lot, you get the idea. Besides the random nature of the focus, you have the problem that statistically the earth is mostly covered by water, and then you have land, trees, highways, buildings, farms and so on. Even given the huge number of houses, the bedroom is usually 1/3 or less of the house. When a house shot does show up we are more likely to be looking at a floor (including the amazing detail of dirt on the floor), ceiling or wall since that comprises the majority of a house. While this may not be exciting for most people, restorationists have the opportunity of a lifetime in getting detailed carved woodwork, fireplace mantels, tin tiles, plasterwork, stonework techniques and designs that have been lost over the years. The images are so detailed that wood can be easily identified by the grain. They are making out much better than the historians since most house shots will more likely be of the ceiling than any people, particularly famous people. Think of it, even if we do get to look inside Davinci’s home, what are the odds of: his being in the house at that moment, his being in that room, his being in that particular spot we are looking at? We would be lucky to get a picture of Davinci’s dog, cat, or old shoes. Time stamping the pictures is very difficult. There is no clock readout panel like in the H.G. Wells “Time Machine”. The researchers are ecstatic when they see a calendar or newspaper. Otherwise it is clothing, and decorating styles of the periods. It is important to note that there are no sounds. It is only light that we can see, nothing else gets through.”
“Oh, there go the house lights, all right!! Here we go. Looks like some kind of car bumper, only from the inside of the bumper, where we can see the back of the nuts holding the bolts to the license plate, at least one corner of it. Not too bad an image, not one though that gets you on the edge of your seat. But this is what is left after they filter out the “boring stuff.” Hey at least it’s not the inside of a rock. Okay, now this is better, appears to be a really big asphalt road, I see a bird in the distance. There is something at the top of the screen, coming down fast, wheels, it’s a B52 bomber (I like the old aircraft), the underside gets more and more into view as the wheels hit and s
end out plumbs of smoke (we can only imagine the “ERTTTTCHCH” sound as they hit). Wow it is really coming at you, like the 3D action films (all images are 3D now with added pseudo touch via pressure fields) then it really does go right through you or at least the wormhole “camera” point of view. That made quite a few people duck, including me. The only parts of the plane we saw were the underside, the wing fronts and part of the nose, enough to identify the plane, especially for an aeronautic history buff like me.”
“Everybody is settled back down now. Now we are waiting for the next image. It is hard to live up to that last one though, very rare to get that, like in a lifetime rare. Hmm, looks like a theater of some type, we are watching from slightly above the seats. I can see someone’s head. They have hair like mine, and a SHIRT LIKE MINE! Hey…, that is me. I look behind and just above me but there is nothing there. That was a bit scary. I return to see my head returning to forward position. This is really weird now. Not only am I looking at myself watch Wormhole Theater, it appears to be in real time! Now I am getting vertigo, the image on the huge screen is an endless mirror. Unlike a movie, the image here is flawless to the eye, no distortion, with endless clarity. This is me watching the screen, watching me watch the screen on and on forever. With the level of detail here I can easily see thousands of myself and other patrons who are equally spooked. I can hear talk about it being a trick to pump up interest and some nervous laughter, but this is dying down pretty quick.”
“There is some kind of roar behind us. Wait a minute. It is also in front of us. Like a hug tidal wave approaching. It’s getting pretty loud. This sound is drilling into me and I feel like my body is vibrating really hard, there is a rush inside me moving faster and faster and …”
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Gaia’s Journal
“I miss Enyo. I lost Enyo that terrible day when all the wormhole theaters disappeared. Taking the theaters and everybody in them somewhere, nobody knows. It’s all so horrible, and yet ridiculous. How do you deal with something like this? The wormhole project is gone too. It left a hole the size of Grand Canyon. Yes it even took all of the dirt. What I read is that the remaining wormhole project scientists, who were not at a theater or the project at the time, think there was a feedback loop. When the wormhole appeared in the present time, it focused on the output of itself, this information created an expanding resonance. Like a vibrating guitar string facing an inch away from a huge amplifier with the volume turned way up. Unless you pull the guitar away, the sound will get louder and louder and eventually blow the speaker if the amplifier is powerful enough (or at least blow out everybody’s eardrums). Well the wormhole amplifier was plenty powerful enough. Several huge reactors powered the wormhole itself. The output of the wormhole was amplified and sent all over the world to 100,000 theaters. Many cities look like they were hit with asteroids. The exception being that nothing else around the craters was touched. In every case there is a block long empty space where the theater was, with laser like cuts.”
“All I can hope for is that Enyo is either in another time, another planet, or another dimension, still in one piece, watching the wormhole theater. So I am waving to him holding a sign with I love you on it.”
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About the Author
Ed Thrush was born on August 16, 1954. He now lives in Woodlawn, Maryland. Growing up with the original “Outer Limits” television series he was highly influenced by science fiction and followed the space program closely as a child. Recently he obtained all 42 episodes of the Outer Limits and watched them all. An early science fiction reader (among other genres) and lover of sci-fi films, Ed has decided to publish some of his own short stories. Travel with me to the science future…
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