by Jack Dann
Lula listened with mounting excitement. It was something she’d been waiting for all her life, without knowing quite what it would be. Hitcher was her kind of man. Materialising. Spontaneously combustible. Here one minute, gone the next.
‘And we’re like, an aerospace company. Was he some kind of spy from, I don’t know, some of the big guys, like, Lockheed? Boeing?’ Lucille sat down.
Gaynor stood up. ‘Except, you know, Lula, we’re not really yet into aerospace. It’s just we want to be, when it happens. We’re really just truckers, but we want to truck to space.’
‘I know,’ said Lula, ‘Most forward thinking of you.’
‘Should I tell the boss? What can I tell the boss? Hitcher got through security somehow. He got through the usual checks, and then he said I’ve come to warn you. And he looked so sad, just before he left.’ Lucille stood up.
Gaynor sat down. ‘It’s not like we’re big time, like NASA. It’s the boss’s baby, this rocket. He wants to send it to the moon. It’s a new kind of propulsion he’s into, but it’s not like it’s going to run Boeing out of business. Or Lockheed. It’s just a prototype, a model just two metres long. I don’t know anything more about it. It’s the guys in R&D who do that stuff.’
‘He came to warn us, Lula,’ said Lucille, ‘as if something is about to happen. We’ve got some consultancy money left over, enough for a day. Take it. Spend the rest of the day looking round. See what you can find.’
‘Do something, Lula, we need your help. So we can go to the boss and not look so stupid,’ Lucille pleaded.
Lula took the job, not knowing what it was, and feeling way in over her head in either industrial espionage, or fraud, whatever. All she knew, she wanted to find out as much as she could, and fast. She wanted to meet Hitcher. If it wasn’t already too late.
‘We do have a photo. There’s a camera in the corridor, and we got Charlie from Security to print one off for us.’
Hitcher was dark, serious, unsmiling, as if the weight of the universe lay on his hazy shoulders.
Lula took the photo and asked around. She soon found everyone knew Hitcher. To Ross in the law department, he was Mitch, the consultant sent to sort out intellectual property issues. To Bill in trucking, he was Pitcher, an IT whiz with the rosters. To Fletcher in finance, he was Pushka, the tax expert invited to tidy the year’s returns. At the factory site, he was Hutch, the spot welder.
Ross, when pressed for more information, got a bit huffy. ‘What do you want to know about Mitch for? That stuff’s commercial-in-confidence. I’ll tell you one thing though. Loved his suit. Armani three-button pinstripe flat-front… to die for.’
It was with the engineers that Lula found her first lead. George said, ‘I want to use the rules and get the right answer. I want this rocket to stay in the air, go where I want it, and come back.’
‘It’s this guy, you know him?’
‘Hutchkin? He was great. He’s this physicist sent from head office. Hutchkin said, when I showed him what the problem was, “It won’t work, that way, not like that it won’t.” All that torsion field stuff was like way above my head.’
‘Torsion field?’ Lula made a note.
‘Yup. Never heard of it till then, but now I do. It wasn’t rocket science, it was quantum physics. The wave function of the universe? Never heard of it. But the way he explained things, it made sense. He gave me rules to follow.’
‘What rules?’
‘The law of conservation of energy, for starters. I mean, I know all that, but the way Hutchkin put it, it’s the law of conservation of dark energy that you’ve got to take into account, and when I did that, and I tell you, we’re the only rocket company in the world working on dark energy as rocket propellant, then a few things clicked into place, and the next rocket we launched was a right zippy little sparkler.’
‘Did you happen to notice what he was wearing?’
‘Blundstones. Plaid shirt. Jeans.’
‘Like you?’
‘Just like me. He’s an engineer.’
At the end of the day, Lula reported back to Lucille and Gaynor. ‘Multi-skilled. He’s been all over. Hitch, he turns up when and where he’s needed, as if he knows he’s needed. Then he leaves, but people aren’t too puzzled, because he was only a temp, or a consultant.’
‘He knows all about the business?’ Lucille asked. ‘We’ve got to tell the boss. Big Charlie won’t like it.’
Hitcher, Pushka, Mitch, whatever, came when he was needed and fixed things up. He went where he wanted, no passes, no keys, no passwords. He appeared. He disappeared. Lula felt a prickle on the back of her hands, the thrill of the chase. Hitcher was her kind of man. If indeed he was a man. Could be, he was more like a collection of molecules brought together by the torsion field, so that now you see him, now you don’t, as he dissolved and vanished into the ethereal wind.
I’ve come to warn you, said Hitcher — and then he was gone. What he meant to say, in the moments following the moment he wasn’t there any more, was this: I’ve come to warn you, it’s not a good idea doing what you’re doing in R&D, creating a bubble universe in a jet propulsion stream while that fax machine in Lucille’s office is sparking with sleptrons and neutralinos because of this trapped O-type Q-ball I’m trying my best to free. Only minutes from now the gravity lens will be in full refractory mode, and all hell will break loose. Furthermore, Lucille, as a friend, I have to say with that fax machine of yours, the reason why half the faxes you send never arrive is because in its inner workings six laws of your universe (though not of mine) are being violated with every pulse of the ink jet feed.
And if he’d managed to say all that, Lucille would never have taken it all in, except for the bit about the fax machine, which, intuitively, she would recognise as true.
Hitcher’s story: What Lucille can’t yet know, is, I’m inside the fax machine, looking out. It’s what I came here to fix — this Q-ball that’s been the problem with the fax machine. Q-balls — they’ve been roving round the universe since the Big Bang, and mostly, they’re no problem. They just zip though materials like these machines and out the other side, and straight through the centre of the Earth, and off to the edge of the universe, much the same now as when they were first created. This Q-ball though, it’s been warped a bit, got its O-field in a Mobius knot and it’s stuck here. Playing up.
When I say I’m looking out from the edge of the Q-ball, it’s only in a manner of speaking. I’m more tweaking the space-time continuum, twisting the geodesic warp drive, and throwing a gravity wave round a corner and behind. All to keep this Q-ball stable. For as long as I can.
Time to send a fax.
Fax: For Lula
From: Hitcher
I have come to warn you …
The fax machine burst into flames. A piece of paper, singed at the corners, flew out of the machine and clear across the room, scattering sparks as it went.
Lucille tugged the electricity cord from the socket.
Gaynor poured coffee on the flames.
Lucille picked up the fax by an unburned edge. ‘Hey, it’s from Hitcher! For you, Lula.’
‘How’s he know about me?’ asked Lula.
‘I’ve come to warn you,’ said Lucille. ‘It’s what he said to me.’
‘That fax machine’s a write-off,’ said Gaynor.
‘Forever,’ said Lucille.
As the instant coffee with its dose of artificial sweetener hit the flames, the dark energy from the rogue Q-ball made a break for it. The entity known as Hitcher was ready. Taking advantage of the instability in the space-time sub-axis, Hitcher thinned his consciousness one slepton thick and spread it round the inside surface of the Q-ball. He went with the flow, then sucked himself back, one squark at a time. Then Gaynor picked up the fire extinguisher and threw foam on the caffeine-slepton mix. That was it. That did it. The bulge redoubled its efforts, the dark matter inside the Q-ball not quite meeting the matter outside. The O-field tightened the Mobius knot and c
aught a ride on the gravity wave.
The Q-ball sphere expanded to embrace first the coffee, then the foam, and then Lula, Lucille, and Gaynor.
‘Aarrkkk,’ said Gaynor, as the room fell away and expanded outwards in a sphere of light. ‘Uh Uh Uh.’
‘That fax machine, it always was big trouble,’ said Lucille, as she slipped into a new state of being.
‘So this is what it’s for, dark energy and such.’ Lula opened her mind to the bright new world.
The sphere expanded rapidly. Squarks co-exist with quarks, sleptons with leptons, each occupying their own space in the universe of spaces; dark matter occupying, as it does, the interstices within un-dark matter. Q-balls are the stuff of dark matter. It’s not like matter and anti-matter, where the two meet, but in explosion, Boom! A new black hole. More, matter and dark matter actually co-exist within the framework of the universal laws of nature, violating only those laws that were meant to be broken. Faster than light travel becomes possible, though technically not so. Conversion of matter to dark energy, and (possibly) back again may happen, depending on the proportionate implosion of cosmic anarchy.
Hitcher did his best to stop the inside getting to the outside and the outside getting to the inside. On the outer surface of the Q-ball the conscious entities that were Gaynor, Lucille and Lula found instantaneous transformation. They are the creatures of quarks and leptons. Hitcher is the stuff of squarks and sleptons. Matter encounters dark matter, and the universe is forever changed.
— Welcome. We are Hitcher-Mitch-Pitcher-Pushka-Hutch-Hutchkin. Hitcher.
— We are Lula-Lucille-Gaynor.
— Gurgle. Glug. Waark.
— Not Gaynor. Not talking yet. What’s happened? What have you done?
— It wasn’t me. This O-type Q-ball, it’s bad news. I’m trying to get rid of it.
— Hitcher, Lucille here. You weren’t truthful. You said you were a temp.
— I never said I was.
— You let me think you were.
But you would never have believed me, if I told the truth.
The entity that was Hitcher strained at the seams, doing its best to keep a tight grip on the edges.
Lula looked out on the office where she has just a few minutes before been standing, upright, possessed of her usual two arms, two legs, body and head, then a normal regular human woman, now, what was she? Now it was as if she was looking at the world from the perspective of a consciousness smeared atoms thin over the surface of a rapidly growing sphere. She couldn’t see her arms or legs, or Lucille or Gaynor, though she sensed them close to her, and Hitcher, if that was really Hitcher, the voice coming from within her head — her brain, no her mind, whatever it was. Hitcher appeared as an extra sense, something that gave her access to a consciousness above and beyond her own, incorporating those close by, Lucille and Gaynor, in the one expanded entity. She sensed the office ceiling looming closer, its spacecraft models swaying in the ethereal wind, until she whooshed up through them, through the roof and into the sky. The building of Creighton Trucking and Aerospace was left behind, and — It’s true, thought Lula, the future truly is a river bearing us away. But this is just not possible.
— In your world, yes, but certainly not in mine. It’s happening.
— Where are we? What are we? Why are we, where we are, what we are? Lula sensed herself leaving the world behind. She saw mountains, rivers and oceans in rapid retreat below.
Oblivious to the panorama, Hitcher continued. — There’s this point now, and from this point, a whole heap of things are possible, might happen, but only some do — only some seem to happen. But what if they all happen, but we don’t know, because we’re caught on this time line here, and not that one over there?
— Like the future is a quiver full of arrows?
— We’re at this point from which the possibilities diverge, but we’ll know only one future that will come of it. But there are others.
Lula watched the Earth shrink in size to a sphere as seen from space.
— I did try my best to fix things before they got to this stage, said Hitcher. — But if you will use dark matter as rocket propulsion at the same time you’ve got a O-type Q-ball stuck in the fax machine, while Ross is trying to patent the intellectual property on stuff he can’t begin to understand, forcing George from R&D to confine the bubble universe in the jet propulsion stream; and as for the income tax complications, you are aware that making mistakes there can make the space-time axis throw a wobbly and — there’s more. Later. Let’s fix this mess first.
— How could we know?
— About Creighton? That it’s a centre for the flux of synergistic energies, on the cusp between the universes of matter and dark matter? You know now.
— Uh Uh Uh.
— It is? But what’s this? Hitcher, is that our Earth down there? And the moon, so tiny ?
— You’ve got it.
— Why are we here? Where are we going?
— Got to go. Can’t stay. The Sun will go neutronic.
— Is that the solar system, Mercury, Venus, Mars?
— Got to get going. We’re heading for a small hole, over near the edge, the containment facility for rogue and errant Q-balls. We’ve got a choice, see? The future here’s like a forked path. The choice is — do nothing, and the Earth explodes. Do something, we get to save it. Some choice. Don’t want the Sun to be a neutron star, no way. Slurps up the sleptons like you wouldn’t believe. No, we’re taking this O-type Q-ball to the cosmic dustbin.
— There’s something you’re forgetting. Us. We didn’t ask for this. It’s like you asked us to step into a cab, and when we do, the driver is wearing a blindfold, and can’t see a thing, and it’s out of control and nobody knows where we’re going. The next thing we do is we all crash together.
Then Lula realised that it’s like she’s always been told: the moment of transition, of transformation, no one ever sees it coming. Change is sudden, sharp and discontinuous. The old gives way to the new. Everything seems clear until the moment when nothing is clear, when the people that once were people, the entity that once was Hitcher, the fax machine that was once a fax machine, become entangled in a mutually transformative experience.
Hitcher says, and he’s the boss of this world, this conjunction of worlds, he knows more about it than they, the collective consciousness of Lula, Lucille and — well not Gaynor, she’s lost her voice in the Ughs and the Erks and the experience has been a bit outside her comfort zone and she’s not coping as well as …
— Yuk yerk yikes.
Leave her out of it, then, the merging. Lula-Lucille has come to feel it’s perfectly natural somehow to be riding a transparent Q-ball at faster-than-light-speed, on the way to save the planet from destruction.
As a futurist, Lula always followed Dator’s dictum — any useful idea about the future can often appear ridiculous, at least when it is first suggested, before it takes flight. Doors that open all by themselves? Crazy. Rockets that fly to the moon? Impossible. Lula, Lucille and Gaynor riding a Q-ball, on a mission to save the universe from destruction? Totally ridiculous.
Except it was happening.
— I’m a futurist, said Lula of Lula-Lucille, introducing herself properly to Hitcher. — I don’t believe we met, not as the old me, the old you.
— Lula, it’s Lucille here, tell Hitcher we want to go home. Gaynor’s not feeling so good.
The Q-ball grows as it bounces through the universe. Inside the ball two universes co-exist. One is the creation of dark matter. The other, both within and without, is the everyday world of un-dark matter, where on the edge Lula-Lucille and Gaynor exist in a higher state of excitation. Plop, plop, plop, the bubbles of dark matter rise up from under.
— Lula again. Hitcher, we seem to have picked up one of the rings of Saturn.
— Whoops. Give it a wriggle and a shake. Can’t go taking one of the rings of Saturn with us, not where we’re going.
— There it goes. Now
about this future, this straight line stuff, past-present-future, even past-present-multiple futures, isn’t that a bit too simple? Aren’t things more intertwined, more like the future already exists in the present, bubbling up from underneath like mud baths in Rotorua or Yellowstone, plop, plop, plop. Ripples spread out and they bump into each other and become all interconnectedy.
— Hitcher here. Interconnectedy? There’s this time here, and the lines go off and diverge and there’s no going back. But what if you can go sideways? Get interconnectedy that way? That’s the Oort cloud down there, by the way.
— We’re starting to get a tail, like a comet.
— Lovely, isn’t it? They’re proto-comets. They can tag along.
— I’d be enjoying this a lot more if I knew where it was going to end.
— Simple enough. Here we have divergent futures and we are jumping between them. Just because it sounds impossible doesn’t mean it is.
— True, said Lula, that’s Dator’s Dictum, to which I adhere, as a principle of my profession.
— It’s not impossible. It is in agreement with the law of the conservation of mutually inconsistent futures.
— Of course, said Lula. I was forgetting what Mikey told me.
— That’s why Mikey thought of you, Lula, because you’d understand.
— It is my kind of thing, said Lula.
In the state of cosmic anarchy, exotic matter rules. The solid stuff of hands, faces, legs, arms, eyes, ears is left behind, mere appearances cloaking a deeper quantum reality. Inside the Q-Ball, the O-type energy surges, seething with plopping goo, on a mission to draw the non-Q universe into itself.
— Where are we going? What’s this hole?
— Just a small one.
Inside the Q-ball, Hitcher mobilises his squarks and sleptons. Outside the starry skies whiz past, blurred like in spherical time lapse. Lula-Lucille gets her act together. — This hole, it’ll be the end of the journey?
— As always. But I always think the journey matters more than the end.
— Hitcher, we don’t want to just end. Pfutt. Pfoot. Phut. We didn’t want to come on this trip. You dragged us along. Once you get sucked into a cosmic containment facility, that’s it? End of journey? End of life? We want to go home.
