Flashforward
“So,” said Lloyd, “we basically created conditions here on Earth that hadn’t existed since a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, and simultaneously we were hit by a whack of neutrinos spewing out of a rebounding brown hole.”
“That’s about the size of it,” said Wendy’s voice. “As you can imagine, the chances of that ever happening are incredibly remote—which is probably just as well.”
“Will Sanduleak rebound again?” asked Lloyd. “Can we expect another neutrino burst?”
“Probably,” said Wendy. “In theory, it will rebound several more times, sort of oscillating between being a brown hole and a neutron star until stability is reached and it settles down as a permanent, but non-rotating, neutron star.”
“When will the next rebound occur?”
“I have no idea.”
“But if we wait for the next burst,” said Lloyd, “and then do our experiment again at precisely that moment, maybe we could replicate the time-displacement effect.”
“It’ll never happen,” said Wendy’s voice.
“Why not?” asked Theo.
“Think about it, boys. You needed weeks to prepare for this attempt at replicating the experiment; everyone had to be safe before it began, after all. But neutrinos are almost mass-less. They travel through space at virtually the speed of light. There’s no way to know in advance that they’re going to arrive, and since the first rebound burst lasted no more than three minutes—it was over by the time my detector started recording again—you’d never have any advance warning that a burst was going to occur, and once the burst started, you’d have only three minutes or less to crank up your accelerator.”
“Damn,” said Theo. “God damn.”
“Sorry I don’t have better news,” said Wendy. “Look, I’ve got a meeting in five minutes—I should get going.”
“Okay,” said Theo. “Bye.”
“Bye.”
Theo clicked off the speaker phone and looked at Lloyd. “Irreproducible,” he said. “The world’s not going to like that.” He moved over to a chair and sat down.
“Damn,” said Lloyd.
“You’re telling me,” said Theo. “You know, now that we know the future isn’t fixed, I’m not that worried, I guess, about the murder, but, still, I would have liked to have seen something, you know. Anything. I feel—Christ, I feel left out, you know? Like everyone else on the planet saw the mothership, and I was off taking a whiz.”
27
THE LHC WAS NOW DOING DAILY 1150-TEV lead-nuclei collisions. Some were long-planned experiments, now back on track; others were parts of the ongoing attempts to find a proper theoretical basis for the temporal displacement. Theo took a break from going over computer logs from ALICE and CMS to check his email. “Additional Nobel winners announced,” said the subject line of the first message.
Of course, Nobels aren’t just given in physics. Five other prizes are awarded each year, with the announcements staggered over a period of several days: chemistry, physiology or medicine, economics, literature, and the promotion of world peace. The only one Theo really cared about was the physics prize—although he had a mild curiosity about the chemistry award, too. He clicked on the message header to see what it said.
It wasn’t the chemistry Nobel—rather, it was the literature one. He was about to click the message into oblivion when the laureate’s name caught his eye.
Anatoly Korolov. A Russian novelist.
Of course, after that man Cheung in Toronto had recounted his vision to Theo, mentioning someone called Korolov, Theo had researched the name. It had turned out to be frustratingly common, and remarkably undistinguished. No one by that name seemed to be particularly famous or significant.
But now someone named Korolov had won a Nobel. Theo immediately logged onto Britannica Online; CERN had an unlimited-use account with them. The entry on Anatoly Korolov was brief:
Korolov, Anatoly Sergeyevich. Russian novelist and polemicist, born 11 July 1965, in Moscow, then part of the USSR—
Theo frowned. Bloody guy was a year younger than Lloyd, for God’s sakes. Of course no one had to replicate the experimental results outlined in a novel. Theo continued reading:
Korolov’s first novel Pered voskhodom solntsa (“Before Sunrise”), published in 1992, told of the early days after the collapse of the Soviet Union; his protagonist, young Sergei Dolonov, a disillusioned Communist Party supporter, goes through a series of serio-comic coming-of-age rituals, fighting to make sense of the changes in his country, ultimately becoming a successful businessperson in Moscow. Korolov’s other novels include Na kulichkakh (“At the World’s End”), 1995; Obyknovennaya istoriya (“A Common Story”), 1999; and Moskvityanin (“The Muscovite”), 2006. Of these, only Na kulichkakh has been published in English.
He’d doubtless get a bigger write-up in the next edition, thought Theo. He wondered if Dim had read this fellow during his studies of European literature.
Could this be the Korolov Cheung’s vision had referred to? If so, what possible connection did he have to Theo? Or to Cheung, for that matter, whose interests seemed commercial rather than literary?
Michiko and Lloyd were walking down the streets of St. Genis, holding hands, enjoying the warm evening breeze. After a few hundred meters passed with nothing but silence between them, Michiko stopped walking. “I think I know what went wrong.”
Lloyd looked at her, his face a question.
“Think about what happened,” she said. “You designed an experiment that should have produced the Higgs boson. The first time you ran it, though, it didn’t. And why not?”
“The neutrino influx from Sanduleak,” said Lloyd.
“Oh? That might indeed have been part of what caused the time displacement—but how could it have possibly upset the boson production?”
Lloyd shrugged. “Well, it—it…hmm, that is a good question.”
Michiko shook her head. They began walking again. “It couldn’t have an effect. I don’t doubt that there was an influx of neutrinos at the time the experiment was originally conducted, but it shouldn’t have disrupted the production of the Higgs bosons. The bosons should have been produced.”
“But they weren’t.”
“Exactly,” said Michiko. “But there was no one to observe them. For almost three whole minutes there wasn’t a single conscious mind on Earth—no one, anywhere, to actually observe the creation of the Higgs boson. Not only that, there was no one available to observe anything. That’s why all the videotapes seem to be blank. They look blank—like they’ve got nothing but electronic snow on them. But suppose that’s not snow—suppose instead that the cameras accurately recorded what they saw: an unresolved world. The whole enchilada, the entire planet Earth, unresolved. Without qualified observers—with everyone’s consciousness elsewhere—there was no way to resolve the quantum mechanics of what was going on. No way to choose between all the possible realities. Those tapes show uncollapsed wave fronts, a kind of staticky limbo—the superposition of all possible states.”
“I doubt that wave front superposition would look like snow.”
“Well, maybe it’s not an actual picture; but, regardless of whether it is or isn’t, it’s clear that all information about that three-minute span was censored, somehow; the physics of what was happening prevented any recording of data during that period. Without any conscious beings anywhere, reality breaks down.”
Lloyd frowned. Could he have been that wrong? Cramer’s transactional interpretation accounted for everything in quantum mechanics without recourse to qualified observers…but maybe such observers did have a role to play. “Perhaps,” he said. “But—no, no, that can’t be right. If everything was unresolved, then how did the accidents occur? A plane crashing—that is a resolution, one possibility made concrete.”
“Of course,” said Michiko. “It’s not that three minutes passed during which planes and trains and cars and assembly lines operated without human intervention. Rather, three minutes
passed during which nothing was resolved—all the possibilities existed, stacked into shimmering whiteness. But at the end of those three minutes, consciousness returned, and the world collapsed again into a single state. And, unfortunately but inevitably, it took the single state that made the most sense, given that there had been three minutes of no consciousness: it resolved itself into the world in which planes and cars had crashed. But the crashes didn’t occur during those three minutes; they never occurred at all. We simply went in one jump from the way things were before to the way they were after.”
“That’s…that’s crazy,” said Lloyd. “It’s wishful thinking.”
They were passing a pub. Loud music, with French lyrics, spilled through the heavy closed door. “No, it’s not. It’s quantum physics. And the result is the same: those people are just as dead, or just as maimed, as if the accidents had actually taken place. I’m not suggesting there’s any way around that—as much as I wish there were.”
Lloyd squeezed Michiko’s hand, and they continued walking, up the road, into the future.
BOOK III
TWENTY-ONE YEARS LATER
AUTUMN 2030
Lost time is never found again.
—John H. Aughey
28
TIME PASSES; THINGS CHANGE.
In 2017, a team of physicists and brain researchers mostly based at Stanford devised a full theoretical model for the time displacement. The quantum-mechanical model of the human mind, proposed by Roger Penrose thirty years earlier, had turned out to be generally true even if Penrose had gotten many of the details wrong; it was perhaps not surprising, then, that sufficiently powerful quantum physics experiments could have an effect on perception.
Still, the neutrinos were a key part of it, too. It had been known since the 1960s that Earth’s sun was, for some reason, disgorging only half as many neutrinos as it should—the famous “solar-neutrino problem.”
The sun is heated by hydrogen fusion: four hydrogen nuclei—each a single proton—come together to form a helium nucleus, consisting of two protons and two neutrons. In the process of converting two of the original hydrogen-provided protons into neutrons, two electron neutrinos should be ejected…but, somehow one out of every two electron neutrinos that should reach Earth disappears before it does so, almost as if they were somehow being censored, almost as if the universe knew that the quantum-mechanical processes underlying consciousness were unstable if too many neutrinos were present.
The discovery in 1998 that neutrinos had a trifling mass had made credible a long-standing possible solution to the solar-neutrino problem: if neutrinos have mass, theory suggested that they could perhaps change types as they traveled, making it only appear, to primitive detectors, that they had disappeared. But the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, which was capable of detecting all types of neutrinos, still showed a marked shortfall between what should be produced and what was reaching Earth.
The strong anthropic principle said the universe needed to give rise to life, and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics said it requires qualified observers; given what was now known about the interaction of neutrinos and consciousness, the solar-neutrino problem seemed to be evidence that the universe was indeed taking pains to foster the existence of such observers.
Of course, occasional extrasolar neutrino bursts happened, but under normal circumstances they could be tolerated. But when the circumstances were not normal—when a neutrino onslaught was combined with conditions that hadn’t existed since just after the big bang—time displacement occurred.
In 2018, the European Space Agency launched the Cassandra probe toward Sanduleak −69°202. Of course, it would take millions of years to reach Sanduleak, but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that now, in 2030, Cassandra was 2.5 trillion kilometers from Earth—and 2.5 trillion kilometers closer to the remnant of Supernova 1987A—a distance that light, and neutrinos, would take three months to travel.
Aboard Cassandra were two instruments. One was a light detector, aimed directly at Sanduleak; the other was a recent invention—a tachyon emitter—aimed back at Earth. Cassandra couldn’t detect neutrinos directly, but if Sanduleak oscillated out of brown-hole status, it would give off light as well as neutrinos, and the light would be easy to see.
In July 2030, light from Sanduleak was detected by Cassandra. The probe immediately launched an ultra-low-energy (and therefore ultra-high-speed) tachyon burst toward Earth. Forty-three hours later, the tachyons arrived there, setting off alarms.
Suddenly, twenty-one years after the first time-displacement event, the people of Earth were given three months’ notice that if they wanted to try for another glimpse of the future, they could indeed do so with a reasonable chance of success. Of course, the next attempt would have to be made at the exact moment the Sanduleak neutrinos would start passing through Earth—and it couldn’t be a coincidence that that would be 19h21 Greenwich Mean Time on Wednesday, October 23, 2030—the precise beginning of the two-minute span the last set of visions had portrayed.
The UN debated the matter with surprising speed. Some had thought that because the present had turned out to be different from what the first set of visions portrayed, people might decide that new visions would be irrelevant. But, in reality, the general response was quite the opposite—almost everybody wanted another peek at tomorrow. The Ebenezer Effect still was powerful. And, of course, there was now a whole generation of young people who had been born after 2009. They felt left out, and were demanding a chance to have what their parents had already experienced: a glimpse of their prospective futures.
As before, CERN was the key to unlocking tomorrow. But Lloyd Simcoe, now sixty-six, would not be part of the replication attempt. He had retired two years ago, and had declined to come back to CERN. Still, Lloyd and Theo had indeed shared a Nobel prize. It had been awarded in 2024, not, as it turned out, in honor of anything related to the time-displacement effect, or the Higg’s boson, but rather due to their joint invention of the Tachyon-Tardyon Collider, the tabletop device that had put giant particle accelerators at places ranging from TRIUMF to Fermilab to CERN out of business. Most of CERN was abandoned now, although the original Tachyon-Tardyon Collider was housed on the CERN campus.
Maybe it was because Lloyd’s marriage to Michiko had crumbled after ten years that Lloyd didn’t want to be involved with this attempt to replicate the original experiment. Yes, Lloyd and Michiko had had a daughter together, but always, down deep, not even acknowledged by her at first, there was a feeling on Michiko’s part that Lloyd had somehow been responsible for her first daughter’s death. She’d surprised herself, no doubt, the first time that charge had come out during an argument between her and Lloyd. But there it was.
That Lloyd and Michiko loved each other there was no doubt, but they ultimately decided that they simply couldn’t go on living together, not with that hanging, however diffusely, over everything. At least it hadn’t been a painful divorce, like that of Lloyd’s parents. Michiko moved back to Nippon, taking their daughter Joan with her; Lloyd got to visit with her only once a year, at Christmas.
Lloyd wasn’t crucial to the replication of the original experiment, although his help would have been a real asset. But he was now happily remarried—and, yes, it was to Doreen, the woman he’d seen in his vision, and, yes, they did now own a cottage in Vermont.
Still, Jake Horowitz, who had long since left CERN to work at TRIUMF with his wife Carly Tompkins, did agree to come back for three months. Carly came as well, and she and Jake endured the gentle kidding of people asking them which labs at CERN they were going to baptize. They had been married for eighteen years now, and had three wonderful kids.
Theodosios Procopides and about three hundred other people still worked at CERN, running the TTC there. Theo, Jake, Carly, and a skeleton crew raced against time to get the Large Hadron Collider ready to run again, after five years of disuse, before the Sanduleak neutrinos hit.
29
&nbs
p; THEO, NOW FORTY-EIGHT, WAS PERSONALLY delighted that the reality of 2030 had turned out to be different from what had been portrayed in the visions of 2009. For his own part, he’d grown a fine, full beard, covering his jutting jaw (and saving him from looking like he needed another shave by mid-afternoon). Young Helmut Drescher had said he could see Theo’s chin in his vision; the beard was one of Theo’s little ways of asserting his free will.
Still, as the replication date approached, Theo found himself growing more and more apprehensive. He tried to convince himself that it was nervousness about letting the whole world down again if something went wrong, but the LHC seemed to be operating perfectly, and so he had to admit that that wasn’t really it.
No, what he was nervous about was the fact that the day on which the 2009 visions said he was going to die was rapidly approaching.
Theo found that he couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. If he had ever determined who it was who had originally wanted him dead, that would have perhaps made it easier—all he would have to do is avoid that person. But he had no idea who had/would/might pull the trigger.
Finally, inevitably, it was Monday, October 21, 2030: the date that, in at least one version of reality, was laser-carved into Theo’s tombstone. Theo woke that morning in a cold sweat.
There was still oodles of work to be done at CERN—it was only two days until the Sanduleak neutrinos would hit. He tried to put it all out of his mind, but even after he got to the office, he found himself unable to concentrate.
And, by a little after 10h00, he couldn’t take it anymore. Theo left the LHC control center, putting on a forward-swept beige cap and mirrored sunglasses as he did so. It wasn’t all that bright out; the temperature was cool, and about half the sky was covered by clouds. But no one went outside without head and eye protection anymore. Although the depleting of the ozone layer had finally been halted, nothing effective had been done yet about building it back up.