Einstein’s Last Words

by | Dec 19, 2006 | Story

Author : J. S. Kachelries

I walked into the offices of Temporal Travel Inc. A bored agent three rows back motioned me toward him with his free hand, as he peered around his upturned coffee cup. “Good morning, Sir.” he said as he placed the empty coffee cup squarely on a coaster. “Where and when may we send you?”

I sat down in the large chair at the side of his desk. “Yes, hello,” I said. “My name is Dr. Marc Strohm, Dean of the Physics Department at MIT. I’m interested in going to Princeton, New Jersey, April 15, 1955, at about 1:00 AM. Specifically, the Princeton Hospital. I need to stay about 20 minutes.”

The salesman motioned to his AI assistant to begin the temporal calculations as he scanned the iridium credit transponder implanted in my forearm. He said, “I don’t believe anybody ever asked to go there and then before. Sounds boring. You sure I can’t talk you into Mars, say 3.5 billion years ago? Tropical climate, twenty foot waves slowly crashing onto orange beaches? Very beautiful, and we’re having a special this week.”

“No, it has to be the hospital room of Albert Einstein on the day he died. You see, just before his death at 1:15 AM, he uttered his last words to the attending nurse. Unfortunately, he spoke them in German, and she only understood English. Nobody knows what he said. I’m hoping that during the heightened brain activity at the end, he may have solved the unification problem. Einstein had spent the last half of his life trying to develop a single equation to unite the four fundamental forces in the universe. As far as we know, he never did it. Two hundred years later, we still haven’t solved it. I’ve been studding German for three years for the opportunity to understand his last words.”

The salesman looked disappointed. His commission was based on years traveled, not scientific merit. “Listen, professor,” he said, “what if Einstein said, ‘Nurse, you’re standing on my oxygen hose.’ You would have wasted a trip for nothing. How about the end of the Cretaceous? You can watch The Great Asteroid impact the Yucatan peninsula.”

“Sir, I’m a Theoretical Physicist, not an Astrophysicist, or a Paleontologist. Look, if you’d prefer, I can go to Time Excursions.”

The eyes of the AI began blinking green. The salesman quickly changed tactics. “No, no, no. You’re the boss. OK, I think we’re ready now. Please step into the Phase Transporter, and we’ll send you on your way. You’ll be able to see and hear everything, but you’ll be in ‘phased-time,’ so you’ll be invisible to them. Have a good trip. And, good luck.”

When he shut the door to the Transporter, everything went pitch black. Then there was a flash of intense light. When sight returned to my eyes, I was indeed in Einstein’s hospital room. He lay propped up in his bed. He looked so old and feeble. But even at this hour, as weak as he was, he was feverishly writing in his note pad. I drifted behind him to study his notes. Fantastic, he was working on the unified field equation. I started to get chills up my back. He appeared to be on the verge of something, when his eyes closed, his hand went limp, and his chest stopped moving. The pen fell out of his hand, rolled off the bed, and dropped onto the floor. The attending nurse ran to his side and shook him gently. “Mr. Einstein, are you all right? Can you here me?”

His eyes suddenly fluttered open. He motioned for her to come closer, and whispered, “Gott zeigte mir die Lösung. Sie war… schön.” Then he smiled, closed his eyes, and died.

It was a bitter sweet moment for me. Although I was disappointed, I was happy for Einstein. His last words were: “God showed me the solution. It was…beautiful.”

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Eternal Life

by | Dec 12, 2006 | Story | 0 comments

Author : Patrick Supple

At the peak of the technological firestorm of the mid-21st century, few would have forecast a second Dark Age. The advance of dogma started with the unification of the world’s major religions into an evangelical philosophy in the 2050s. Many had welcomed the amalgamation, believing it would consign wars of faith to history. Yet within two decades the New Faith had dramatically expanded its following through its proselytizing against the dehumanizing and non-spiritual nature of modern technology. The New Faith’s power grew until it was no longer a vehement critic of secular states – it became the state itself. Sharia laws which blended the moral traditions of the former religions were enacted and art and learning slowly atrophied. Inquisition agents searched for scientists who continued to study outlawed subjects and brought them before religious courts.

Harvey Johnson now stood before one such court. He had refused to end his studies in nanotechnology when university science departments were dissolved. He knew he was close to creating repair engines that could prolong human life indefinitely. For years he had worked in secret laboratories funded by wealthy individuals who dreamed of eternity. Harvey’s breakthrough arrived just weeks before he was found by the Inquisition and dragged away in chains.

The Bishop-Judge seated above Harvey began sentencing. “Your crimes are the most heinous that have been brought before this court. Despite the New Faith’s ruling on the sanctity and immutability of the God-like human form, you have continued to study your changeling art. For this crime, even death and the inevitability of your soul’s damnation are inadequate. Through you, this Court wants to send a message writ in stone to others who seek to alter God’s world. I thereby sentence you to become your creation and experience an eternal life of the dammed.”

While still trying to understand the sentence, Harvey was led to a side-room where he was administered an injection of his repair engines and handed back to the inquisition.

Less than a week later, Harvey was pushed into the obsidian void of space from an Inquisition shuttle. He was naked. The vacuum sucked the oxygen from his lungs, his veins exploded as his blood broiled and his skin blackened and cracked as it froze. Harvey felt an unendurable pain and despaired as he now understood his sentence. The repair engines began to reconstitute his body. His blood was recreated, ruptured veins closed, and his body reformed. With the nano-bots able to draw energy and matter from the dust and radiation of space, Harvey knew that his body could be repaired for an eternity. He also knew that the engines had been programmed to simply recreate and not develop adaptations to the rigor of vacuum. When Harvey’s body was whole once more, the stress of the void again tore it apart, only for the nano-bots to rebuild again. Harvey’s only hope would be for madness to come quickly and mask this pulse of destruction and creation, this drawn out moment of death.

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Wet

by | Nov 18, 2006 | Story

Author : Michelle Pitman

A holo-spa is not really that much fun.

For one thing you can’t actually feel holographic water. If they ever figure out how to make holo-water feel like its real, someone out there is going to become 1: Real famous, real quick! And 2: Make a fricking whole lot of money!

Sonic Particle Wave showers and baths have pretty much replaced water for the job of getting clean. A holo-spa is basically warm air and SPW’s. The warm air makes it bearable, just.

I remember being in real water.

I was a little kid back then. There was this neighbour of ours who owned a water tank in his back yard. It was illegal of course and he used to go to great lengths to hide the damn thing. Had this elaborate shed constructed over it in expensive stealth tiles so that when the Police Probes flew over it, it didn’t register as being a tank etc. Rather clever really.

A holo-spa isn’t a patch on that old water tank, although the water in that tank was pretty much filthy and fetid most of the time. We never queried what manner of foul and pestilent matter lurked in the bottom, all we cared about was the sheer wonder of the sensation of being in water! Bloody marvelous that feeling! Still gives me goose-bumps even now, remembering it.

So anyway! They’ve done all the usual hocus-pocus science stuff to create water. We’ve got hydrogen fuel cells pumping out hot water as fast as they can, it’s just not enough. The oceanic desalinators are all but exhausted now – the sea has become too salty even for them to cope. Nearly all the water manufacturing plants from water re-claiming to water synthesis have been so heavily regulated in output by the Foundation that many of them have just gone bust, shut their doors and given up bothering to try. But that’s typical of frickin’ governments isn’t it? What we need the most of they ensure is always in the shortest supply!

It’s pretty tough having to live in this weird dry world. It’s getting so bad now that there’s talk of an evacuation to the off-world planets. I don’t see how that’s going to make a difference really, seeing as hardly any other planet around here has enough of anything, let alone water, to support a couple of million life-forms. It seems the whole galaxy, has pretty much dried up!

Water: the stuff of life! Yeah! But that was all well and good when there was plenty of it about. So now its holo-spa’s and synthesized liquid proteins to satiate our need for the wet stuff.

I guess if people had been a little more careful back …oh well! Can’t go whining now that the water horse has bolted eh?

But geez! I miss that water tank!

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Hubris

by | Oct 21, 2006 | Story | 0 comments

Author : Michael “Freeman” Herbaugh

We wanted to save the planet. The greenhouse effect was getting out of hand and someone came up with a solution. It seemed a bit outrageous at first but the alternatives were not acceptable. Something drastic was needed and we found it. We decided to crystallize the mesosphere.

And it worked. We had encased the entire planet in a shell of crystal. It acted as the perfect filter and allowed enough heat out that it negated the entire greenhouse effect. Scientists predicted that our planet would never see another ice age again. When we combined that with banning the use of coal on a global scale, the troposphere began to repair itself. Sure we lost the space program and astronomy became a dead science, but our planet and, more importantly to us, our race would survive.

Then it shattered. We heard nothing but all saw it and it was beautiful. Imagine a googleplex of tiny snowflakes filling the sky. It was like a lightshow, until it made earthfall. Each and every crystal was razor sharp and anyone outside without complete coverage was almost vaporized. The worst incidents were people with partial coverage and people who stuck their hands out windows to feel the crystal fall. The worst of it? Anyone caught in the crystal fall wearing a helmet, those poor bastards suffered the most.

Flora and fauna were devastated as well but recovered much more quickly. Most animals weren’t fooled by the beauty of crystal fall and sought shelter if it could be found. Plant life while shredded acted as fertilizer for the next crop of plantlife. Water supplies were contaminated as well until the crystals settled and could be screened. Fortunately, the bottled water supply wasn’t overly tapped at least until natural water could be used again.

In all two-fifths of the world’s population was caught outside and died in crystal fall. Another fifth died as a part of the aftermath due to injury or starvation. Our infrastructure took minimal damage but with a sudden decrease in population was difficult to maintain. Most of us left are farmers and gardeners now. The cities stand empty having all but been abandoned.

We regained the night sky and a sun that was no longer diffused into a bright patch of crystal. The stars, we had forgotten about the stars and for the first year our nights were filled with wonder.

We wanted to save the planet. And in the end, I guess we did.

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Say Again?

by | Oct 12, 2006 | Story

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

The waitress took their order reflexively, their speaking the words were just a formality after so many visits, their orders never deviating.

‘All day over easy, bacon, white toast. And coffee. Please.’

‘Same.’

Emma would just nod and smile, and return in short order with two heaping plates of breakfast.

It was this plate that Bradley was focused on now, liberally salting and peppering the eggs, and slathering steak sauce on the home fries.

Stan busied himself pouring packets of sugar and the contents of creamers into his coffee, before stirring madly and leaning over his plate, and in a voice just loud enough to reach his friends ear, he spoke nervously.

‘I think I’m onto something really, really big.’

Bradley barely looked up from his plate and grinned before breaking the first of three perfect eggs, watching the yolk meander into the mountain of home-fries.

‘What?’ he said, making Stan wince at the loudness of his voice.

‘Shh!’ Stan looked around furtively. ‘Shh! I think I can travel through time’

Bradley stopped eating, put down his fork and paused only to wipe his mouth on a paper napkin before he began to berate his fidgeting colleague.

‘Say Again? Time travel? Is this like your foray into ESP? Or your biofeedback machines, or your faster than light propulsion? Seriously, at least those had some basis in real science, but time travel? Stan – if you don’t come up with something your backer can actually use, your capital is going to evaporate and you’ll be on the street.  Even the university won’t have you back now.’

Stan sat back shaking his head. He was used to this, he’d stopped submitting to the journals, stopped attending the university functions, and lost contact with most of his friends. He absently folded the frayed cuffs of his oxford several times before shoving them up to his elbows. Brad knew him, and though he always talked like this, Stan knew he was just worried about him.

‘This is the culmination of all of that. Everyone’s been trying to figure how to accelerate a mass past the speed of light – right?  Tachyons looked promising for a while, but they’re already moving faster than light, so they’re really no good. We need to accelerate a stationary mass beyond the speed of light in a controlled way, and then slow it back down without destroying it.  Generating energy is hard enough, and the amount of energy we need to push anything meaningful into the past is, well – huge – so to get enough energy means a huge reaction of some sort, not very practical. But what if we don’t need to generate energy, what if we just use the objects’ own energy, not create or release it, just reform it for a time, then let it return to it’s natural state?’

Stan paused for a moment to push his glasses up the bridge of his nose, and Bradley, still intent on clearing his plate, just grunted around a mouthful of bacon, eyeing Stan warily but letting him continue.

‘The ESP study, and the biofeedback machines, we had kids that could actually manipulate the energy in tangible things, solely because they really believed they could. They just, I don’t know, had the faith in their ability to control things. We could show them the effect they were having, we helped them to push harder, focus more intently. We validated their belief in themselves, and the gains were incredible.  I think we’d have made a huge breakthrough then if the parents hadn’t got scared and had us shut down.’ Stan paused, and pushed his bangs away from his eyes. ‘Anyways, I’ve been working with those same machines, working at manipulating my own energy field, changing my own frequencies and I’m making my own solid gains.’ He lowered his voice, but his excitement remained palpable. ‘You’ve got to try it, it’s amazing, when you’re tuned in, you can feel the change in your mind, your body – everything just starts to hum, and the buzz – jesus, the buzz is incredible. I can feel I’m right on the edge, every-time, it builds, and builds, and builds and my focus intensifies, and the feeling – Christ Brad, you’ve got no idea what it feels like… it builds until it’s like…’ His voice trailed off.

‘What?’ Bradley broke the silence, making Stan wince at the loudness of his voice.

‘Shh!’ Stan looked around furtively ‘Shh! I think I can travel through time’

Bradley barely looked up from his plate and grinned before breaking the first of three perfect eggs, watching the yolk meander into the mountain of home-fries.

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