She rolled her eyes and waved her hands in the air. “I don't know. That's why I said get here ASAP. Duh.”
“So, there's not one void streak, there are two identical ones, but only now.”
“They are not actually identical. Look again.”
He did. “They look the same to me.”
“No. The 5:00 void streak is … it's void. The 11:00 one is a channel in the stars. See, they're mostly pushed aside.”
“Oh. Right.” He looked back to the monitor. “It is interesting that the new disturbance is diametrically opposed to the longstanding void streak, isn't it?”
“I'll agree it'd be hard to invoke its presence by chance alone.”
“But this part at eleven is new and this one at five is ancient. So that argues against a causal relationship.”
“Only to the weak minded.”
“I think I'll have to beg to differ with you, on that one, Shaky.”
“The empty center of M 31 has no scientific explanation. The void streak has none, either. The new disturbance will, I'm certain, defy analysis. What that means is we're all missing something.”
“Of course we are. What we observe is real therefore it is really happening, or rather it did two and a half million years ago. That's how long the light took to get here. But trust me there's no physics that can account for what we see.”
She turned away. “Of course there is. We're just not allowing ourselves to apply the science.”
“Well, unless you can conduct a seance with Einstein, Hawking, and Joshi in the near future, there's no one who'll be able to pull that off.”
“We're missing something.”
“Yes,” he stood, “and I know what it is. Sleep. There's a reason you work the machines while I work my fluffy pillow, each and every night.”
“Good night.”
“Yes, it will be. And I'm looking forward to your bleary-eyed update second thing tomorrow morning.”
She squinted. “What's the first thing your looking forward to?”
Tank turned back to her. “Honey, you're still single. I doubt you'd understand. But when a man has a rendezvous with a pretty young thing late at night, he is obliged to demonstrate to his wife of nearly a quarter century that it wasn't for that reason.”
“TMI, Tank. Gross TMI.”
“If you hurl, you're fired.”
“Okay.” she waved him away. Hopefully he'd be out the door before the full impact of the image polluting her brain hit home.
FOUR
Tank held his cup in his mouth and turned the knob clumsily. Then he kicked her office door open with a thud, just catching the cup that slipped from his teeth. He spied Sachiko sitting behind the desk. Her hand had a death grip on half her hair, while the other scratched rapidly over a sheet of paper. The desk and the floor around it were littered six inches deep with wadded up, used, printer papers. Tank couldn't visualize the trash can under the mountain of calculations.
“Hey, kiddo, when I said bleary-eyed, I didn't mean for you to take that as an order.” He set an extra-large cup of tea in front of Sachiko.
She continued to write equations at a maniacal speed. They were barely legible. She ignored Tank, and the tea, completely.
“I had a feeling you'd pull an all-nighter, so I had them use two tea bags.” He gestured to her paper Starbucks cup.
She was still oblivious, but he noticed Sachiko was mumbling something softly. “Sachiko, good morning. Your supervisor is speaking to you. No pressure.”
A little louder, she said, “There's no time. No time.”
Tank smiled, like the goofball he was at heart. “There's always time. And there's always room for Jello.”
“There's no more time. It's gone. No, it never was. It was never there to be gone.”
“Shaky, seriously,” he shook her shoulder gently. “You're starting to scare me, just a tad.”
She shot him a startled look, like a cornered animal. “Oh, what? Tank.”
“That would be me. Who the heck are you?”
“What? Tank, there's no time. When it left it never was. Don't you see?” She tapped her fingernails on the paper she'd been scribbling on.
“I see a young woman badly in need of a nap.” He stood and came around to her side of the desk. “Why do you think all the offices in the Physics Department come with filthy, old couches, hmm? Generations of occupants needed some rack time and none of them needed it as badly as you do, right now.” He started to lift her arm to guide her. “I'll be back around 3:00 pm to—”
She shook his hand off. “No, Tank. There - is - no - time. That's what we weren't allowing ourselves to see. It's all so simple, if you reset the boundary conditions with that assumption.” Sachiko thrust him the most recent set of equations she'd been laboring over.
Tank inspected them as he felt his way over to a chair. “Hmm. I don't think you … okay, you picked it up here.” He pulled at his ear vacantly. “No reason to use this reference frame. Oh, I see, you did want spherical coordinates. Makes sense, then.” His lips moved as he silently continued. “I see where you're heading, but based on what initial conditions?”
She rifled the papers on her desk. Not finding what she wanted, Sachiko abruptly dropped to her knees and dug into the wads nearest her feet. She opened one, sighed, and sat back down. She handed Tank the crumpled sheet. Immediately, she returned to her crazed scribbling.
“I see. Sure. Hey, this is a nice assumption. I like where—” He shook his head and blinked his eyes hard several times. “This is … wow. This is one bold assertion, kiddo. Unless you can show—”
She shoved the original sheet back to him from where he'd set it on the desk.
“One, okay. Back to the mean, integrated over the domain.” His finger slammed on the paper repeatedly. “Your Hamiltonians are eloquent, as always.” Then he flicked the sheet with his finger. “You proved it here. I see it. Lord in Heaven, Sachiko, this is Nobel quality work.” He reread both sheets.
“There's no time,” she said blankly.
“There is no time. Your model is, well it's perfect. If one assumes there was a normal space time, and then time itself is removed from the equation, you get exactly what we see in M 31. Man,oh, man, how I wish I'd realized this two decades ago. This is brilliant.”
She seized his arm. “Tank, stop. Listen. There is no time. There was and then there wasn't. Shit bricks, Tank. Where the hell did time go?”
He got very serious. “It never was. It didn't go anywhere. If the baby bird leaves the nest empty, sure, it went somewhere. But, kiddo, you just demonstrated how quantum time never was, even if it had been. There never was a tree, or a nest, or a mama bird. There was nothing to go away from.” He giggled quietly.
“Tank,” she flattened her palms and set them next to either eye. “Focus. I just spent the last thirteen hours proving that time was and then it wasn't. If time is not a mandatory, an indispensable factor, do you know what that means?”
“Yeah. I better go tuxedo shopping and you better buy some warm clothes. We're going to Sweden.”
“I'm serious. Think of what this means. There was a time when the Andromeda galaxy was normal, just like the Milky Way. Then something made time disappear and go boom. As a result, you get a galaxy with a donut hole and a void strip.”
“What about the disturbance, the one you found yesterday?”
“I actually think I know what it is.”
“Do not leave me hanging.”
“If a huge amount of mass becomes timeless, what would it do?”
He puzzled a minute. “There'd be no mass if there was no time attached to it.”
“Sure there would be. Time suddenly vanished, but space didn't. Mass didn't go puff.”
“I'll have to think about that. But you got the ball. Keep running with it.”
“Space-time. It's a thing. We know this. Mass exists in space-time. It has a position, a place, right?”
“Sure. Everyone's gotta be somewher
e.”
“Yes,” she pointed at him. “So,” she circled her arms, “there's this huge mass sitting in the center of a galaxy minding its own business. Couldn't be a happier mass. Then something makes the time of space-time not exist. What does the mass do? Nothing, it's just a bunch of mass. But it now is stationary in time.”
“Time marches on,” he said with bravado.
“Whatever,” Sachiko said with a little disapproval. “Having no time coordinate, the mass seems to move though space-time because space-time is not stuck in a no-time frame.”
Tank shook his head. “That one I'll take on faith. I'll need to work on that probably for the next ten years.”
“So, check this out. M 31 is sitting there being a normal galaxy. Then something makes it's supermassive black hole not have time. It would never have had time. The mass seems to move off, relative to normal space-time.”
“It's a rock in the middle of the mighty river.”
“It's a bowling ball slamming into whatever's at the eleven o'clock direction relative to the black hole's original location.”
“What we saw last night.”
“What we saw last night.”
“But, Sachiko, that's new, I mean it was new two and a half million years ago. It wasn't there. The black hole has never been there. How can the no-time mass just now be crashing into the undisturbed galaxy? That makes no sense.”
“It does if the black hole's time disappeared shortly before the impact began. The dead-in-time mass is just now hitting the stars, just now making a tunnel in them.”
“But it can't be shortly after forever. We know the galaxy's looked the way it has for centuries. And what does that make the void streak?”
“The one at eleven o'clock is the remaining mass of the black hole moving off in that direction.”
“That doesn't cut it. The five o'clock streak has always looked the way it does.”
“It has always looked the way we perceive it. Don't you see? Whenever a region of space becomes timeless, we see it as never changing. If it grows twice as long, we can only think it's been that length all along.”
“But it never was different.”
“Tank, Tank. That's because the void streak has no time. The new channel is made by something with no time. No time means it is like it always was as we observe it. But the black hole's time vanished only recently. The impacting mass is only now wreaking havoc with its neighbors.”
He shook his head like it was a wet dog. “That's going to be basically impossible to prove. You know that right?”
She held up the thumb drive he'd given her yesterday. “Not if you have a recording of it.” She smiled triumphantly.
“This is big, kiddo. Look, you catch a few Zs and I'll call a couple of theoretical people I know, who I trust. We'll get together at my place tonight. How's seven sound?”
“Seven it is. But, Tank, seriously, academics you can trust to keep a new discovery secret? Really, you're such a babe in the woods.”
“No. I got shit on them, too. If they even talk into their mirrors, I'll make'em wish they hadn't.”
“Do you have dirt on me, yet?” she grinned.
“I'm working on it. You, kiddo, are a tough one. You're too nice.”
“There's always the future.”
“Let's hope so.” He looked down. “I know it's early days, but what do you think caused this no-time?”
She looked past him. “I don't know. I hope we never encounter it.”
“Amen to that.”
FIVE
“Vector maker, bring the half-fleet to course binary-fixed ten.”
“In agreement, Body Maker-lop. Along the galactic plane?”
“In agreement,” it responded. “Maximal forward movement. Alert me if net-time assumption varies over five percent.”
“In agreement.”
“Compel the other half-fleet to follow primary no-time pulse until galactic exit. After that time they must vector to our forward movement.”
“In agreement.”
The body maker made motion toward its designated rest and assimilation space. It had commanded the fleet for tens of centuries. They had been good centuries. Enormous quantities of time had been consumed, collected, and collated. Much time never was. No-time was good, this it knew as a fact. It allowed the body maker's clan to swell. A bigger clan meant more ships in its fleet. A larger fleet permitted more no-time to be created.
Blessed was the no-time, it thought as it moved. And blessed were the deaths of the no-time regions. They contained no clan members, so no-timing them didn't offend the collective. The body maker raged suddenly against the walls of the corridor, pounding, biting, and clawing. Metal and polymer were ripped free and thrown wildly. Curse the no-time dwellers, especially. They cried and they protested like the locusts they were. Non-clans fought back like insects, ineffectively and with pitiful futility. The body maker hated the weak. All time dwellers he made no-time dwellers were weak. He kicked against the scarred walls, again.
Blessed be the clan. The clan would always be. It had amassed more than enough time-energy to ensure that truth. It was proven by the thought makers and the faith makers that the clan could never not be. Body Maker-lop had only to lead the fleet to more and more assumption, to never-ending assumption. By the End of All Time much of the time that ever was would belong to the clan. It would be blessed.
“Course maker,” it thought to another, “what galaxies lie before us in our assimilation?”
“That would depend, body maker, on your desires. There are several small galaxies in the region. Many are in the range of only e1 to e5. Some have no central singularities.”
“Too small to no-time until we near the End of All Time.”
“In agreement. The closest major galaxy is two and one half million light years distant. It has an acceptable singularity at its center. Range e70.”
“Time to arrival potential?” The body maker was in its personal area by then. It gazed upon its body in the vertical reflection pool. It cooed and soothed itself, twisting its body with the passing time it could taste but dare not consume.
“At present forward movement, six months.”
“Can better movement be made? Do we have sufficient time-energy to spare?” It began to cackle a dry, harsh, and unyielding cackle. The body maker knew it had time-energy enough to vent it wastefully into space and make small nonlinear times if it desired.
“In agreement.”
“Utilize up to ten yorks to make the journey less time. I hunger to consume more. My clan lusts for more time-energy. Lust and hunger, hunger and lust must not be delayed.”
“In agreement. Estimated arrival five point seven months.”
The body maker danced for five point six months, there alone in its area, as the fleet passed around the barrier of space-time. For the last tenth of a month, it stopped dancing. It was time to set its mind to destruction.
SIX
“Okay,” said Tank, “you've all read my summary and you've had time to study Sachiko's equations. While some of us are still young, can we begin the discussion?”
Besides Sachiko there were three others in attendance. Graham Norse, a theoretical physicist, Naomi Stoltzfus, a physics post doc, and Aron Rabinovich, a cosmology professor emeritus. Aron was the most trustworthy, since he was nearly eighty five and hadn't published in a decade. But his mind was still like a steel trap, as was his wit. Noami was the obvious weak link in terms of Tank's confidence. She was bright and ambitious and had her career ahead of her. But she was also Amish. He figured that brought with it a heritage of guilt and restraint he could count on. And Graham was his best friend. That didn't make him safe with Nobel-level material, but Graham had at least yet to stab a colleague in the back. That Tank knew of, that is.
Graham began first. “This is an awful lot to swallow whole like this, Tank. You realize that?”
“Yeah, but we have no alternative. If I presented this at a conference the room'd
be empty halfway though. Everyone'd try and beat me to a major journal. And a letters-article would be suicidal. Whoever read it would burn their copy and 'discover it' themselves.”
“So you settle for the antiquated, the powerless, and the loyal to bounce this monumental concept off?” Aron chuckled dryly.
“That is why I almost didn't invite you, you old Russian bear. But, I know, and trust, each one of you. That is why you're all here.”
“And I'll likely be dead before I could get this peer-reviewed,” added Aron, grinning while he waved his set of papers in the air.
“If you were going behind my back, I could only hope so,” shot back Tank with a pleasant grin.
“So, Ms. Jones,” said Aron turning his attention to her, “this is quite a tour de force, if true.”
“Please, call me Sachiko,” she invited.
Without missing a beat, he continued. “However, Ms. Jones, there is much I read here that I question. For example, your proposition hinges on the very disappearance of time itself from the physical universe.” He tapped the sheets with the back of his knuckles. “While you've shown me an interesting mathematical exercise on paper, what could possibly account for such a counterintuitive event?”
Sachiko shrugged. “I don't know.”
“It's like dark energy, Aron,” defended Tank. “We believe it is out there, but still haven't a clue as to what it is or how it acts.”
Aron tossed his head to one side and frowned. “Not the same, really. Dark energy is a force, like gravity. It acts somehow to perform a simple repulsive task.” He shook the equations, again, in the air. “This would not be a force but a process. That's a very big difference, as I see it.”
“I agree there is a mechanistic leap of faith,” said Naomi. “That should not concern us, too much, at this early juncture. My impression is that your reasoning supports your proposition, Sachiko. That is all we're really here to judge, isn't it?”
“Yes, that's what I'd like,” she replied.
“I say go for it. Publish it and let the chips fall where they may. No one believed Einstein for quite some time. You'd be in good company, if you were pelted by doubters,” voiced Graham.
Ryan Time Page 3
