The Heisenberg Corollary Read online

  THE HEISENBERG COROLLARY

  C. H. Duryea

  THE HEISENBERG COROLLARY

  by C. H. Duryea

  Copyright © 2019 by C. H. Duryea

  All rights reserved. This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, events or locales is purely coincidental. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  Cover by Warren Design

  For Jim, Richard and the two Freds.

  They know why.

  “Things inconsistent with the laws of physics will never happen... everything else will.”

  —Max Tegmark

  One

  Dr. Hezekiah Travers studied the curvature of the Earth from the observation port behind his desk. The window’s thick, convex transparency refracted the horizon into a series of concentric arcs like ripples on the surface of a pond. He straightened his tie, sunk his hands into the pockets of his trousers, and told the pressurized walls around him for the thousandth time that he was not nervous.

  But with his life’s work on the line, how could he not be?

  A curved, light-peppered slab descended and occluded his view of the Earth. Below him—in a relative sense at least—the segmented interior of the XARPA Research and Proving Platform rotated soundlessly. The platform was actually an impressionistic patchwork of smaller platforms that formed a cylinder rotating around a central spine clustered with labs, communications, fabrication facilities, and a command and orbital navigation control center poking like a doorknob off the end. An array of lights flashed in sequence directing some incoming traffic to one of the landing docks.

  He turned from the window and fixed his attention on the slowly rotating hologram floating over his desk, placing his hands on the edge of the desk and leaning in as if trying to get inside it. It was a tangle of logarithmic curvilinearity of sufficiently high mathematics to give him a headache—and he was the one who had cooked it up. The model was the product of countless all-night caffeine jags, drunken tirades, and a not insignificant number of mescaline highs. To his acutely abstracted mind, the model looked to him like a spider climbing a ladder.

  With a quick swipe of his arm, the holo winked out. He reached down and absently thumbed through the yellowed, wrinkled pages of the old notebook holding his original theories and calculations. His primary, unfiltered thinking—conceived on a beach in Maui—felt purer, more fundamental than the construct of distorted physics waiting out on the proving platform. The tactile reality of the old pages was comforting in the face of what he and his team had done—and had yet to do.

  The entry bell chimed, knocking him from his reverie. He closed the notebook, but he held onto it as if its cracked leather binding was all that kept in the here, the now.

  “Come in!” he called.

  The door hissed open and Dr. Agosto Diaz sauntered in, his huge frame dressed to the nines, fedora slanted on his head and the flaps of his trench coat fluttering behind him as he walked.

  “Zeke,” Dr. Diaz said, sweepings arms wide, “are you ready for our big day?”

  “Depends what you mean by ready, Augie. When did zoot suits become standard issue in the lab?”

  “They’re not,” Augie said, whipping off the hat and spinning it like a top around his upheld finger. “I just wanted to look like a hep cat for the investors.”

  “Hep cat? Doctor, there ain’t that much hep about you.”

  “Look who’s talking. I’ve whipped the VCs into a frenzy, so I’ve done my part. Now it’s your turn, partner. You get to talk to the brass.”

  “Without even knowing,” Zeke said, “if Carter and Burroughs have already beaten us to the punch.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Augie said, half a smile crossing his broad face. “Word out on the concourse is that Bowers is running out of patience with them.”

  “How do you hear this stuff when I don’t? I know, I know, don’t answer that. I gotta get out of the lab more often.”

  “Not out of the lab,” Augie said, gesticulating expansively at the space around them. “Out of your head. The rest of us live out here.”

  Zeke looked down at his hands gripping the notebook. His knuckles were white from clutching it so tightly.

  “Look at me,” he said. “I live for no other reason than to hunt down the fundamental truths of reality—and here I am, clinging to this like it’s some magical talisman.”

  “No such thing as magic, my friend,” Augie replied. “Only that which hasn’t been explained yet.”

  “Tell that to Chuck.”

  “Indeed. He was still spell-flinging with his RPG gang when I checked on him this morning.”

  “Another all-nighter?”

  “Not to worry. He’s jockeying the console as we speak. Narissa just finished at the dojo and is on her way down to the platform for final calibrations.”

  "Taekwondo practice, even on an important day like today?”

  “The workout helps her with her calculations,” Augie said.

  “This is really going to happen, Augie.” Zeke allowed himself a slight crack of a smile.

  Augie shrugged. “If they like what they see—or in this case, what they don’t.”

  Zeke opened his valise and packed up the schematics and memory cubes on his desk. For good measure, he tossed his old notebook on top of the stack before snapping the case shut.

  "What are we waiting for then?” he asked. “Let’s go dance for our dinner.”

  Zeke and Augie walked down a long white concourse that bustled with activity. Personnel in lab coats, flight suits, security armor, and military uniforms moved in a swift and purposeful river. As they walked, Zeke’s eye wandered out again to the rotating platforms beyond the viewports. Plugged into one of those floating squares, a squat, nondescript cargo shuttle looked to be prepping for flight.

  Augie noticed Zeke looking at the ship. “That’s the new NeuralNav project getting ready to test,” he said.

  The lettering on the shuttle’s gray flank read Friendly Card.

  “It’s not much of a boat for such a high profile test,” Zeke commented. “That gizmo’s been getting all the press lately.”

  “Oh, not all of it,” Augie said. “A few of the savvier media outlets have been paying attention to us. I should know—one of them cornered me for an interview before I came back. Someone’s paying attention.” Augie’s eyes grew wide. “Hey, I almost forgot—guess who’s running the interface for that test.”

  “Out there?” Zeke jerked his thumb at the Friendly Card. “Got me.”

  Augie grinned. “Doctor Hell Storm.”

  Zeke groaned inwardly. “Oh, brother.”

  “She’s at dock nine if you want to wish her luck.”

  “I’m not sure she would appreciate that,” Zeke grumbled. “The last time I saw her she threw a two-liter borosilicate boiling flask at me.”

  “Hey, you’ve had worse second dates.”

  “Don’t remind me. How do you and Narissa do it?”

  “That’s a rather personal question.”

  “You know what I mean. Twenty years together?”

  “Simplicity itself,” Augie answered. “Separate disciplines, same projects. She thinks, I build. And when she tells me to build what she thinks, I build double time. We’ve been working together since Freshman Quantum Computing and it’s worked for us every day since.”

  “Bottle it,” Zeke said. “You’re lucky.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Augie admitted as they kept walking.

 
When Zeke and Augie stepped off the lift onto the proving platform, General Bowers and his entourage were already there. Dr. Narissa Brand had gathered them around the insertion module, and they towered over her as she gave them a tutorial on the machine’s workings. She had apparently just cracked a joke because they were all laughing. Above the proving floor, behind a wide expanse of glass, Dr. Charles Harbinger sat before a dizzying array of monitors and controls, making last-minute adjustments to the equipment.

  Bowers turned as Zeke and Augie approached.

  “Travers and Diaz!” the general barked. “The men of the hour. Doctor Brand here was just giving us a tour.”

  Narissa Brand stood with one hand on the wheel lock of a sealed door on the module.

  “I was just about to show them the Frogger,” she said.

  “The Frogger?” Bowers asked.

  “It’s still the Travers Drive on paper,” Zeke explained. “Repeating the name all the time made me feel a bit narcissistic.”

  “Call it what you want,” the general said, “as long as it works. Let’s see it.”

  Narissa released the magnetic lock and spun the wheel. She pulled the hatch open and a plume of cold fog spilled out onto the group’s feet. As the fog cleared, the interior of the module became visible.

  “There it is,” Narissa said.

  On a track that ran the breadth of the module sat an apparatus about the size of a small suitcase. It was crusted with sensors and gauges and was clamped to a set of mag runners that floated over the track.

  “We’re still prototyping an artificial gravity actuator,” Zeke explained. “But for now, we’re using velocity to engage the mechanism.”

  Bowers smirked. “It doesn’t use a DeLorean, does it?”

  Zeke blinked. “I don’t follow.”

  Augie nudged Zeke with an elbow. “Funny, General. But no. The track feeds into an accelerator that loops around the station cylinder. It gets us close enough to relativistic speed to jump its clutch. And the closed loop assures its return.”

  “How so?”

  “At higher power levels,” Narissa explained, “the drive forces an odd twist in the Uncertainty principle. We can precisely target the insertion point in time or in space—but not both. A very low power level inside the accelerator allows us to compensate and get this prototype back within an acceptable time frame.”

  The general turned to Zeke.

  “I assume this ‘twist’ will be resolved before deployment?”

  “It’s one of the reasons for this prototype. We hope to find a way to minimize the effects of the corollary.”

  “And how do you actually know this machine has gone anywhere?”

  “That’s what all the instrumentation is for,” Narissa explained. “Gravimeters, chronometers, gamma and X-ray spectrometers, optical cams—we’ve got almost every sensor and recorder we could pack onto it along for the ride.”

  “If it goes where we think it will,” Dr. Harbinger added over the loudspeaker, “the data should be very, very interesting.”

  “Interesting, my eye,” Bowers said. “It seems too damned fantastic to be true.”

  “It’s like the man said,” Augie answered. “Any sufficiently advanced technology—”

  The words hung in the air, and the group all looked at one another for an expectant moment.

  “All right,” the general said. “Show me.”

  Zeke led the group to a sealed observation platform above the proving floor and toggled a pneumatic lock while Augie and Narissa stepped into their hazmat suits. Once their suits were sealed, they set the controls on the insertion module and sealed the hatch. As Narissa threw down the handle, Augie spun the wheel lock, and a low hissing sounded from inside the surrounding networks of piping and ducts.

  General Bowers turned to Zeke.

  “Why do you call it the Frogger, anyway?”

  Zeke smirked. “That’s a long story.”

  “I look forward to hearing it, Doctor.”

  “Commencing pre-acceleration protocols,” Dr. Harbinger’s voice rang out from the speakers as Augie and Narissa backed away from the machinery until they stood well on the other side of a broad red stripe on the floor that arced around the insertion module as its radius. Zeke reached into his breast pocket and took out a pair of wire-rimmed sunglasses.

  “Will we need those?” the general asked.

  “No,” Zeke said, shaking the glasses open with a flick of his wrist and sliding the dark round lenses over his eyes. “But they look cool.”

  Bowers nodded, smirked, and took out his aviator shades.

  Dr. Harbinger began a countdown, which was more for the benefit of the observers since Zeke and his team already knew what was coming. When Harbinger reached zero a loud klaxon blared, followed by a deep, shuddering thrum that Zeke could feel in his bones. It thrilled him as much now as it did the first time he heard it.

  “Reading gravitational fluctuations,” Harbinger commented over the loudspeakers.

  The thrum was followed by a low, steady whine that gradually increased in intensity. As the whine grew, the air around the insertion module seemed to shudder. Had they still been on the floor, the gravitational distortions below would have thrown them all into the walls with enough force to make a wrecking ball feel ticklish.

  “Point one c,” Harbinger said over the speakers. “Point two.” He counted up the intervals towards relativistic velocity, and at point nine, a loud crack sounded.

  “Confirming departure,” Harbinger said, with cool professionalism. “Departure confirmed.”

  The chamber grew very quiet.

  “What now?” the general asked. “How long before—”

  Another crack rang out like a clap of thunder.

  “We have re-entry,” Harbinger announced.

  “Not long,” Zeke answered.

  Beyond the glass, the shimmering of the gravitational distortions dissipated. Augie and Narissa were already over the red warning line and heading back to the insertion module. The steam flowing from the surface of the apparatus was now rising—and clearly hot. Two mounted hoses sprayed the hatch door with vapor coolant and strong antimicrobials. Augie spun the lock back, and Narissa pulled the lever; they both carefully opened the machine and stepped back.

  The clouds of steam from the heat and the coolant were still dispersing, blowing from inside the hatch and past the two scientists. Within a few seconds, a pair of articulated arms emerged from the mist, bearing the Frogger like an extended gift. The device glittered and blinked with instrument and sensor lights but appeared completely undamaged. A fiery energetic residue danced in the air in a wavering circle around the opening in the insertion module.

  “Executing bio-scan,” Harbinger said from the control room. The light in the chamber redshifted slightly. “You can unzip, guys. It’s clean.”

  Augie and Narissa removed their headgear as Zeke opened the seal on the observation deck door. As he led the group back across the proving floor, Augie plugged several cables into the device, and Narissa toggled a screen on the panel of the module and began scanning a rising tide of number strings.

  “What’s the glow?” Bowers asked, pointing at the insertion module.

  “Just a little ionic bleed-off from the trip,” Zeke answered. “The membrane’s a little thin at the insertion point for a few minutes. Nothing dangerous.”

  “Yeah,” Narissa said, “as long as you keep your hands and feet away from its mouth.”

  Dr. Harbinger’s voice quietly cataloged the information crossing his screens. “Chassis reading massive graviton anomalies. Plus-value tachyon signature. Calibrating chronometer. Holy cow!”

  Zeke looked up at Harbinger. “What?”

  “Onboard chronometer shows a substantial time differential.”

  “How substantial?”

  “In the ten seconds or so it was gone, the Frogger logged over four and half centuries.”

  “That’s pretty substantial,” Zeke assented.
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br />   “Four hundred and fifty years?” the general asked, whipping off his shades. “Let me see those figures.”

  “Be my guest,” Narissa said and gestured him towards the scroll of numbers on the panel screen. He stepped forward and studied it, his eyes narrowed, his face stern.

  “If these figures are accurate,” Bowers said, his voice tense with excitement.

  “They are,” Harbinger said from overhead.

  “Then that means—”

  “That’s right, General Bowers,” Narissa Brand said. “This device has traveled to another universe.”

  Two

  General Bowers had just finished conferring with several of his aides. The group turned to face the scientists.

  “This is incredible,” one of the aides said. “How did you do it?”

  “It’s your standard run-of-the-mill quantum theory,” Narissa answered, “with a few proprietary twists.”

  “How can there be more than one universe?” another asked. “I mean, isn’t the universe by definition everything there is?”

  “That’s a false premise,” Dr. Harbinger said, coming off the metal staircase from the control room. His thick plastic-framed glasses gave him the unmistakable air of an early-computing-era nerd. The fingers of his right hand moved in a quick rippling motion, rotating a pair of percentile dice like a couple of protons around an electron. “If you had never been outside this room, you would naturally assume the walls around you to be the edges of the universe.”

  “Hand me one of those,” Zeke requested. Harbinger tossed him one of the dice. Zeke held it up before him. “You’re assuming if I roll this die a single number is going to come up and that will be that.” He reached out and let the die fall on the top of a duct running from the flank of the module. It came up an eight. “I roll an eight and the world goes on. But what if each roll resulted in not just one—but every outcome simultaneously? In a nutshell, quantum theory maintains that every action doesn’t have just one outcome. It has all possible outcomes, each one creating a unique causative timeline—and its own universe. Now imagine every possible outcome for every single action all the way down to the subatomic level—at every moment?”