The Light of Other Days Read online

  “But gadgets do, you know! Once it was the wheel, agriculture, iron-making — inventions that took thousands of years to spread around the planet. But now it takes a generation or less. Think about the car, the television. When I was a kid computers were giant walk-in wardrobes served by a priesthood with punch cards. Now we all spend half our lives plugged into SoftScreens. And my gadget is going to top them all… Well. You’ll have to decide for yourself.” He studied Kate. “Enjoy tonight. If this young waster hasn’t invited you already, come to dinner, and we’ll show you more, as much as you want to see. I mean it. Talk to one of the drones. Now, do excuse me…” Hiram squeezed her shoulders briefly, then began to make his way through the crowd, smiling and waving and glad-handing as he went.

  Kate took a deep breath. “I feel as if a bomb just went off.”

  Bobby laughed. “He does have that effect. By the way -”

  “What?”

  “I was going to ask you anyhow before the old fool jumped in. Come have dinner. And maybe we can have a little fun, get to know each other better…”

  As his patter continued, she tuned him out and focused on what she knew about Hiram Patterson and OurWorld.

  Hiram Patterson — born Hirdamani Patel — had dragged himself out of impoverished origins in the fen country of eastern England, a land which had now disappeared beneath the encroaching North Sea. He had made his first fortune by using Japanese cloning technologies to manufacture ingredients for traditional medicines once made from the bodies of tigers — whiskers, paws, claws, even bones — and exporting them to Chinese communities around the world. That had gained him notoriety: brickbats for using advanced technology to serve such primitive needs, praise for reducing the pressure on the remaining populations of tigers in India, China, Russia, and Indonesia. (Not that there were any tigers left now anyhow.)

  After that Hiram had diversified. He had developed the world’s first successful SoftScreen, a flexible image system based on polymer pixels capable of emitting multi-coloured light. With the success of the SoftScreen Hiram began to grow seriously rich. Soon his corporation, OurWorld, had become a powerhouse in advanced technologies, broadcasting, news, sport and entertainment.

  But Britain was declining. As part of unified Europe — deprived of tools of macroeconomic policy like control of exchange and interest rates, and yet unsheltered by the imperfectly integrated greater economy — the British government was unable to arrest a sharp economic collapse. At last, in 2010, social unrest and climate collapse forced Britain out of the European Union, and the United Kingdom fell apart, Scotland going its own separate way. Through all this Hiram had struggled to maintain OurWorld’s fortunes.

  Then, in 2019, England, with Wales, ceded Northern Ireland to Eire, packed off the Royals to Australia — where they were still welcome — and had become the fifty-second state of the United States of America. With the benefit of labour mobility, interregional financial transfers and other protective features of the truly unified American economy, England thrived. But it had to thrive without Hiram. As a U.S. citizen, Hiram had quickly taken the opportunity to relocate to the outskirts of Seattle, Washington, and had delighted in establishing a new corporate headquarters here, at what used to be the Microsoft campus. Hiram liked to boast that he would become the Bill Gates of the twenty-first century. And indeed his corporate and personal power had, in the richer soil of the American economy, grown exponentially.

  Still, Kate knew, he was only one of a number of powerful players in a crowded and competitive market. She was here tonight because — so went the buzz and as he had just hinted — Hiram was to reveal something new, something that would change all that.

  Bobby Patterson, by contrast, had grown up enveloped by Hiram’s power.

  Educated at Eton, Cambridge and Harvard, he had taken various positions within his father’s companies, and enjoyed the spectacular life of an international playboy and the world’s most eligible bachelor. As far as Kate knew he had never once demonstrated any spark of initiative of his own, nor any desire to escape his father’s embrace — better yet, to supplant him.

  Kate gazed at his perfect face. This is a bird who is happy with his gilded cage, she thought. A spoilt rich kid.

  But she felt herself flush under his gaze, and despised her biology.

  She hadn’t spoken for some seconds; Bobby was still waiting for her to respond to his dinner invitation.

  “I’ll think about it, Bobby.”

  He seemed puzzled — as if he’d never received such a hesitant response before. “Is there a problem? If you want I can -”

  “Ladies and gentlemen.”

  Every head turned; Kate was relieved.

  Hiram had mounted a stage at one end of the cafeteria. Behind him, a giant SoftScreen showed a blown-up image of his head and shoulders. He was smiling over them all, like some beneficent god, and drones drifted around his head bearing jewel-like images of the multiple OurWorld channels. “May I say, first of all, thank you all for coming to witness this moment of history, and for your patience. Now the show is about to begin.”

  The dandy-like virtual in the lime green soldier suit materialized on the stage beside Hiram, his granny glasses glinting in the lights. He was joined by three others, in pink, blue and scarlet, each carrying a musical instrument — an oboe, a trumpet, a piccolo. There was scattered applause. The four took an easy bow, and stepped lightly to an area at the back of the stage where a drum kit and three electric guitars were waiting for them.

  Hiram said easily, “This imagery is being broadcast to us, here in Seattle, from a station near Brisbane, Australia — bounced off various comsats, with a time delay of a few seconds. I don’t mind telling you these boys have made a mountain of money in the last couple of years — their new song Let Me Love You was number one around the world for four weeks over Christmas, and all the profit from that went to charity.”

  “New song,” Kate murmured cynically.

  Bobby leaned closer. “You don’t like the V-Fabs?”

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “The originals broke up sixty-five years ago. Two of them died before I was born. Their guitars and drums are so clunky and old-fashioned compared to the new airware bands, where the music emerges from the performers’ dance… and anyhow all these new songs are just expert-system extrapolated garbage.”

  “All part of our — what do you call it in your polemics? — our cultural decay.” he said gently.

  “Hell, yes,” she. said, but before his easy grace she felt a little embarrassed by her sourness.

  Hiram was still talking. “…not just a stunt. I was born in 1967, during the Summer of Love. Of course some say the sixties were a cultural revolution that led nowhere. Perhaps that’s true — directly. But it, and its music of love and hope, played a great part in shaping me, and others of my generation.”

  Bobby caught Kate’s eye. He mimed vomiting with a splayed hand, and she had to cover her mouth to keep from laughing.

  “…And at the height of that summer, on 25 June 1967, a global television show was mounted to demonstrate the power of the nascent communications network.” Behind Hiram the V-Fab drummer counted out a beat, and the group started playing, a dirge-like parody of the Marseillaise that gave way to finely sung three part harmony. “This was Britain’s contribution,” Hiram called over the music. “A song about love, sung to two hundred million people around the world. That show was called Our World. Yes, that’s right. That’s where I got the name from. I know it’s a little corny. But as soon as I saw the tapes of that event, at ten years old, I knew what I wanted to do with my life.”

  Corny, yes, thought Kate, but undeniably effective; the audience was gazing spellbound at Hiram’s giant image as the music of a summer seven decades gone reverberated around the cafeteria.

  “And now,” said Hiram with a showman’s nourish, “I believe I have achieved my life’s goal. I’d suggest holding on to something — even someone else’s hand…”


  The floor turned transparent.

  •

  Suddenly suspended over empty space, Kate felt herself stagger, her eyes deceived despite the solidity of the floor beneath her feet. There was a gale of nervous laughter, a few screams, the gentle tinkle of dropped glass.

  Kate was surprised to find she had grabbed on to Bobby’s arm. She could feel a knot of muscle there. He had covered her hand with his, apparently without calculation.

  She let her hand stay where it was. For now.

  She seemed to be hovering over a starry sky, as if this cafeteria had been transported into space. But these “stars,” arrayed against a black sky, were gathered and harnessed into a cubical lattice, linked by a subtle tracery of multi-coloured light. Looking into the lattice, the images receding with distance, Kate felt as if she were staring down an infinitely long tunnel.

  With the music still playing around him — so artfully, subtly different from the original recording — Hiram said, “You aren’t looking up into the sky, into space. Instead you are looking down, into the deepest structure of matter. This is a crystal of diamond. The white points you see are carbon atoms. The links are the valence forces that join them. I want to emphasize that what you are going to see, though enhanced, is not a simulation. With modern technology-scanning tunnelling microscopes, for instance — we can build up images of matter even at this most fundamental of levels. Everything you see is real. Now — come further.”

  Holographic images rose to fill the room, as if the cafeteria and all its occupants were sinking into the lattice, and shrinking the while. Carbon atoms swelled over Kate’s head like pale grey balloons; there were tantalizing hints of structure in their interior. And all around her space sparkled. Points of light winked into existence, only to be snuffed out immediately. It was quite extraordinarily beautiful, like swimming through a firefly cloud.

  “You’re looking at space,” said Hiram. “’Empty’ space. This is the stuff that fills the universe. But now we are seeing space at a resolution far finer than the limits of the human eye, a level at which individual electrons are visible — and at this level, quantum effects become important. ‘Empty’ space is actually full, full of fluctuating energy fields. And these fields manifest themselves as particles: photons, electron-positron pairs, quarks… They flash into a brief existence, bankrolled by borrowed mass-energy, then disappear as the law of conservation of energy reasserts itself. We humans see space and energy and matter from far above, like an astronaut flying over an ocean. We are too high to see the waves, the flecks of foam they carry. But they are there.

  “And we haven’t reached the end of our journey yet. Hang on to your drinks, folks.”

  The scale exploded again. Kate found herself flying into the glassy onion-shell interior of one of the carbon atoms. There was a hard, shining lump at its very centre, a cluster of misshapen spheres. Was it the nucleus? — and were those inner spheres protons and neutrons?

  As the nucleus flew at her she heard people cry out. Still clutching Bobby’s arm, she tried not to flinch as she hurtled into one of the nucleons.

  And then…

  There was no shape here. No form, no definite light, no colour beyond a blood-red crimson. And yet there was motion, a slow, insidious, endless writhing, punctuated by bubbles which rose and burst. It was like the slow boiling of some foul, thick liquid.

  Hiram said, “We’ve reached what the physicists call the Planck level. We are twenty order of magnitudes deeper than the virtual-particle level we saw earlier. And at this level, we can’t even be sure about the structure of space itself: topology and geometry break down, and space and time become untangled.”

  At this most fundamental of levels, there was no sequence to time, no order to space. The unification of spacetime was ripped apart by the forces of quantum gravity, and space became a seething probabilistic froth, laced by wormholes.

  “Yes, wormholes,” Hiram said. “What we’re seeing here are the mouths of wormholes, spontaneously forming, threaded with electric fields. Space is what keeps everything from being in the same place. Right? But at this level space is grainy, and we can’t trust it to do its job any more. And so a wormhole mouth can connect any point, in this small region of spacetime, to any other point — anywhere: downtown Seattle, or Brisbane, Australia, or a planet of Alpha Centauri. It’s as if spacetime bridges are spontaneously popping into and out of existence.”

  His huge face smiled down at them, reassuring. “I don’t understand this any more than you do,” the image said. “Trust me.”

  “My technical people will be on hand later to give you background briefings in as much depth as you can handle.

  “What’s more important is what we intend to do with all this. Simply put, we are going to reach into this quantum foam and pluck out the wormhole we want: a wormhole connecting our laboratory, here in Seattle, with an identical facility in Brisbane, Australia. And when we have it stabilized, that wormhole will form a link down which we can send signals — beating light itself.

  “And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the basis of a new communications revolution. No more expensive satellites sandblasted by micrometeorites and orbit-decaying out of the sky; no more frustrating time delay; no more horrific charges — the world, our world, will be truly linked at last.”

  As the virtuals kept playing there was a hubbub of conversation, even heckling questions. “Impossible!”

  “Wormholes are unstable. Everyone knows that.”

  “Infalling radiation makes wormholes collapse immediately.”

  “You can’t possibly -”

  Hiram’s giant face loomed over the seething quantum foam. He snapped his fingers. The quantum foam disappeared, to be replaced by a single artefact, hanging in the darkness below their feet.

  There was a soft sigh.

  Kate saw a gathering of glowing light points — atoms? The lights made up a geodesic sphere, closed over itself, slowly turning. And within, she saw, there was another sphere, turning in the opposite sense — and within that another sphere, and another, down to the limits of vision. It was like some piece of clockwork, an ornery of atoms. But the whole structure pulsed with a pale blue light, and she sensed a gathering of great energies.

  It was, she admitted, truly beautiful.

  Hiram said, “This is called a Casimir engine. It is perhaps the most exquisitely constructed machine ever built by man, a machine over which we have laboured for years — and yet it is less than a few hundred atomic diameters wide.

  “You can see the shells are constructed of atoms — in fact carbon atoms; the structure is related to the natural stable structures called ‘buckyballs,’ carbon-60. You make the shells by zapping graphite with laser beams. We’ve loaded the engine with electric charge using cages called Penning traps — electromagnetic fields. The structure is held together by powerful magnetic fields. The various shells are maintained, at their closest, just a few electrons’ diameters apart. And in those finest of gaps, a miracle happens…”

  Kate, tiring of Hiram’s wordy boasting, quickly consulted the Search Engine. She learned that the “Casimir effect” was related to the virtual particles she had seen sparkling into and out of existence. In the narrow gap between the atomic shells, because of resonance effects, only certain types of particles would be permitted to exist. And so those gaps were emptier than “empty” space, and therefore less energetic.

  This negative-energy effect could give rise, among other things, to antigravity.

  The structure’s various levels were starting to spin more rapidly. Small clocks appeared around the engine’s image, counting patiently down. from ten to nine, eight, seven. The sense of energy gathering was palpable.

  “The concentration of energy in the Casimir gaps is increasing,” Hiram said. “We’re going to inject Casimir effect negative energy into the wormholes of the quantum foam. The antigravity effects will stabilize and enlarge the wormholes.

  “We calculate that the probability
of finding a wormhole connecting Seattle to Brisbane, to acceptable accuracy, is one in ten million. So it will take us some ten million attempts to locate the wormhole we want. But this is atomic machinery and it works bloody fast; even a hundred million attempts should take less than a second… And the beauty of it is, down at the quantum level, links to any place we want already exist: all we have to do is find them.”

  The virtuals’ music was swelling to its concluding chorus. Kate stared as the Frankenstein machine beneath her feet spun madly, glowing palpably with energy.

  And the clocks finished their count.

  There was a dazzling flash. Some people cried out.

  When Kate could see again, the atomic machine, still spinning, was no longer alone. A silvery bead, perfectly spherical, hovered alongside it. A wormhole mouth?

  And the music had changed. The V-Fabs had reached the chant-like chorus of their song. But the music was distorted by a much coarser chanting that preceded the high-quality sound by a few seconds.

  Aside from the music, the room was utterly silent.

  Hiram gasped, as if he had been holding his breath. “That’s it,” he said. “The new signal you hear is the same performance, but now piped here through the wormhole — with no significant time delay. We did it. Tonight, for the first time in history, humanity is sending a signal through a stable wormhole.”

  Bobby leaned to Kate and said wryly, “The first time, apart from all the test runs.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course. You don’t think he was going to leave this to chance, did you? My father is a showman. But you can’t begrudge the man his moment of glory.”

  The giant display showed Hiram was grinning. “Ladies and gentlemen — never forget what you’ve seen tonight. This is the start of the true communications revolution.”

  The applause started slowly, scattered, but rapidly rising to a thunderous climax.

  Kate found it impossible not to join in. I wonder where this will lead, she thought. Surely the possibilities of this new technology — based, after all, on the manipulation of space and time themselves — would not prove limited to simple data transfer. She sensed that nothing would be the same, ever again.