Cryptic Spaces

by Deen Ferrell

  “Technology?” Willoughby frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  H.S.’s bushy eyebrows lifted. “Of course you don’t.” He paused a moment, then let his face break into a wide grin. He held up what looked like an old fountain pen. “What do you know, Willoughby, about the circumpolar stars?” He slid a finger over the pen and a holographic image bloomed out. It seemed to be a star field.

  Willoughby blinked. “Circumpolar stars?”

  “Centuries ago,” H.S. continued, “Egyptians embraced the idea that time and space could be warped by arranging mass into shapes with exacting mathematical properties. They believed that the pyramid, with its perfect right triangles, could bridge our fragile mortality with the eternity of the Gods. A secret pyramid tunnel, designed to anchor this bridge, pointed to a place of fixed darkness in the night sky, a hub around which all stars seemed to rotate. We know this hub today as the center of our universe. The two bright stars rotating closest to the hub are called the circumpolar stars. ”

  Two stars in the hologram glowed blue. Willoughby sat back, stealing a nibble on his chocolate tipped crescent moon. H.S. brushed his finger back over the pen. The hologram disappeared.

  “The Egyptians weren’t far off. There is indeed power in the heavens and exacting mathematics can tame it. When properly harnessed, gateways can be created that intersect various cracks in time’s plodding corridors—rips in the unraveling ribbon that connects present and past. But how do we harness a power so vast that it can penetrate the walls of time? Fast forward to the time of the ancient Greeks…They discovered a ratio that is repeated in nature over and over and over.”

  H.S. touched the pen and holograms of various images populated the air; a nautilus, a leaf, a human face, a sunflower…

  “The golden mean,” Willoughby noted.

  “Yes.” H.S. started toward the back of the cavern, motioning Willoughby to follow. He walked directly at a section of smooth wall. When he was within two feet, a flash of light engulfed him and he was gone. Willoughby hesitated before walking cautiously toward the section of unmarred wall. Light flashed, and he found himself standing beside H.S. in a brightly lit corridor. He glanced back. Unmarred wall was only about two feet away, this time, behind him. H.S. only smiled.

  “I trust you’re familiar with M theory?” he said, conversationally. Willoughby looked up, his jaw hanging open. “Oh, come now,” H.S. continued; “What self-respecting Ninja couldn’t walk through walls.” With a wry grin, he set off again at a brisk pace. Willoughby had to almost run to catch up with him.

  “Einstein theorized that time was the fourth dimension,” he lectured as Willoughby caught up. “M theory concludes that dimensions form as membranes or ‘branes,’ and that there are an infinite number of them.”

  Willoughby had to fight the urge to pant as he matched the big man’s stride. He offered what little he knew of the topic. “M Theory is a spin-off of string theory, isn’t it? While string theory allows the concept of gravity to work within the framework of quantum mechanics, M theory pushes it out over the dimensional branes.”

  H.S. ducked into a dim archway to his left. As Willoughby followed, he found himself in a circular room with a high, domed ceiling. He paused a moment, letting his eyes adjust. H.S. had already taken his pen out again and was pointing it toward a low console. The light dimmed further, allowing the ceiling to become alive with millions of stars. They seemed to have stepped into a planetarium of sorts.

  H.S. gazed up. “Actually, the two theories are connected. Time, you see, is not a single dimension, but an infinity of dimensions. Individual branes flow over us like a vast tide flowing over an isolated coral reef.” He pointed his pen at the star-bedazzled dome. The dome darkened, throwing the room into a deep, penetrating blackness. Only H.S.’s voice filled the void. He spoke in a heightened, excited tone, as if he were a child showing off a prized possession.

  “In the visual spectrum, when the various colors of light combine, they form a pure, blindingly white light. Try to imagine, Willoughby, an intersection of all mass, and space, and time. We will call this point of intersection infinity. It is a point that has no beginning and no end—a perpetual dynamo of ceaseless potentialities, manifest by ceaseless, seething motion.” Swirls appeared across the dome, slowly caressing the darkness.

  “The speed of motion is called velocity. What is the velocity of infinity? Einstein speculated that a velocity at or above the speed of light would be the point at which time stands still—the point of breakthrough between the finite, governed by time, and the infinite, where time ceases to exist, or ‘stands still.’ Now, let’s turn the equation around. What could make a velocity at or above the speed of light slow down? Imagine in this infinity of ceaseless potentialities two diametrically opposed velocities colliding… ”

  A massive explosion shattered the dome with blinding light, forcing Willoughby to look away. As he finally turned back, gas and matter began to appear near the center of the explosion, spreading out in a sort of inky soup.

  “The Big Bang,” Willoughby murmured.

  “Yes,” H.S. agreed. “The speed of motion is slowed below the threshold of infinity and a hemorrhage ensues. The hemorrhage spreads, and time is born. I don’t expect you to fully grasp the concept, but you may get a sense of it. What your science describes as a single, colossal event is actually the result of an ongoing event, an infinite event occurring outside of time.

  Willoughby raised his eyebrows, but H.S. didn’t seem to notice, caught up in his explanation.

  “We may not see the active rift, but we are aware of the ripples or pulses emanating from it. The measure of these pulses is the basis of finite time. Now, back to M Theory; imagine each pulse from this hemorrhage as a brane or a dimension of time. Remember our discussion on velocity, and consider how many of these branes are created each moment—rippling outward like waves on a pond. They are the heartbeat of our finite universe. Everything we know, everything we can surmise of our physical universe is shaped by how we move within the field of these pulses. The push of this flow is outward toward an expanding horizon we call the future.”

  The star scene above disappeared as a series of white-lined sketches populated the blackness, intersecting the stars to portray familiar angles and point out ratios. “Which brings us,” H.S. continued, “back to the golden mean. As velocity slows, movement becomes more organized. Patterns of movement develop that are able to anchor themselves within the flow of time/space. The golden ratio is one of nature’s most effective patterns. It helps stabilize us in place, allowing time to flow through us.”

  Willoughby spoke into the darkness. “You’re saying the golden mean, as a pattern, holds matter steady in a point of space—and that allows it to resist the push of time?”

  H.S. patted his shoulder and gave a quick nod. “You’re getting it. This pattern is built into us at the atomic level where the line between motion and matter blurs to extinction. Our world is not as solid as we suppose. We are beings created entirely from patterned velocity, from organized motion. A train moving at a high enough speed will seem to be solid, despite the fact that there are wide gaps between cars. A movie seems to be fluid, though it is made from hundreds of still images.

  “M Theory, as you rightly observed, was developed to account for the weakness of gravity—the weakest of the four known forces we study in standard physics. It suggests that this weakness exists because gravity acts across multiple branes simultaneously. Physicists have long stated that there’s no such thing as empty space. Even in the remotest corners of our universe, what appears to be nothingness is, in fact, teeming with particles and antiparticles appearing and disappearing in subatomic foam. M theory attempts to explain how these particles wink in and out of existence. It gives us our first clue into the enormous role gravity plays in creating our finite world.”

  “You’re losing me. What does this have to do with
time travel?” Willoughby felt his mind spinning. He had expected H.S. to show him some sort of fancy machine or point him to some simple, mathematical equation that could act as a framework for him to build on. Maybe H.S. was purposely trying to confuse him so that, if he didn’t agree to be part of the organization, he would have no clue how the technology worked.

  “Think about it, Willoughby,” H.S. said patiently. “You are losing particles and antiparticles from finite space—you have a tire that is losing air. You believe the tire has a slow leak, so what do you do?” H.S. waited a moment, and then answered his own question. “You find the hole.”

  The man drew in a sharp breath. “That’s what we’ve done. We’ve followed the map of nature and found the hole. The golden mean is, as the Greeks asserted, God’s own ratio. It’s the ‘X’ that marks the spot, so to speak. You see, shape is critical to penetrating individual branes, allowing one to tunnel backward through the pulses of on-coming dimensions—to travel backward in physical time.”

  “Only backward?”

  H.S. gave him an approving nod. “That’s a perceptive question. To go forward in time, one must have a target point to anchor the travel. We cannot anchor travel to a future we do not know, though we can travel back to the present from the past.”

  Willoughby tilted his head. This seemed to make sense. H.S. continued on.

  “Geometric shapes adhering to the golden ratio, you see, forever repeat within themselves. They collapse and expand in perfect golden spirals. This is critical to understanding time travel.”

  H.S. clicked the pen instrument again, creating another hologram that illustrated the collapsing of matter to move through a sub-atomic hole, then the matter reforming on the other side.

  “These golden spirals allow pulses of infinity to pass through us so that we’re not washed away. The process includes a collapsing, a reverse of polarity, and then an expanding again until the pulse passes and polarity once again shifts. The process happens hundreds or possibly thousands of times a second, so we fail to notice. What seems to us solid matter is, in point of fact, a continually collapsing and expanding pattern of motion. But we can’t stop here. We started with a discussion of gravity. We would propose that gravity is a by-product of this specific pattern of motion—a sort of cosmic inertia created by the motion.” The dome of the room burst into a panoramic view of a wind farm. “To better understand, imagine a wind farm, Willoughby. How is the energy of the wind harnessed?”

  “The wind turns propellers, which operate a generator.”

  “How is the wind able to turn the propellers? The wind interacts with the shape of the propeller blade. This shape allows the energy of the wind to create motion, to cause the propeller blade to turn. This motion, then, allows for the harvest of the energy. Certain shapes in matter facilitate the harvest of energy. While propellers are used to harvest energy from the wind, shapes formed to approximate the golden ratio harvest energy from the pulsing of time. The by-product of this process is a force capable of anchoring an expanding and collapsing element of motion to a definable point, creating finite space. This by-product acts as a counterforce to the pulsing hemorrhage of infinity. It is the force we call gravity.”

  H.S. clicked the steel pointer. Star charts appeared, broken into vectors and spirals.

  “Here is the key we found to drilling backwards in time. What would happen, Willoughby, if a monster wind hit a certain wind farm, cranking out so much electrical energy that it overwhelmed the grids and containers designed to store and control it?”

  “I don’t know. It would probably blow up a generator or something.”

  “Yes. And the same thing can happen with gravity across multiple branes; it can arch out, like some great lightning bolt, yanking matter from its resident anchor point in time and jerking it backwards.”

  “Only to the past?” Willoughby asked.

  “Yes, only to the past, counter to the direction of the outward ripples. Gravity gains its energy from working against these ripples. It must be understood, though, that matter jerked away from its resident anchor point maintains a mathematical connection to its resident time—a corridor, so to speak, that will eventually draw the matter back. Every point in time, you see, has a signature. A thing out of its signature time is like a bit of sand in a clam shell. Forces naturally build around the thing, isolating it, smoothing its edges so that, eventually, it is more easily carried back to where it should be. So you see, everything we do with our technology is designed to accelerate a natural process. Look.”

  Words and images began to appear across the dome. A small picture of an old, army-type airplane appeared over the words: Flight 441, Navy transport, 42 passengers, disappeared less than 100 miles off the coast of Bermuda, 1954.

  “We’ve found that some points, some areas, seem more prone to gravity strikes than others. We’ve found some holes that are, more or less, constant.” He clicked his control again and a different configuration of stars appeared. He traced the spiral to its point. New words and a new video enactment appeared: Entire British battalion disappears into a storm cloud, never found, Suvla Bay, Turkey, 1915. H.S. turned to Willoughby.

  “In a swiftly flowing river, Willoughby, there are places where eddies and whirlpools form. The fabric of time/space is peppered with such anomalies. They are areas where massive gravity storms have struck, weakening resistance against the constant onslaught of new pulses, new waves, new ripples of time. We call them natural holes. We have located several across the breadth of our globe and have built structures designed to attract and enhance whatever gravity storms exist at any given moment across our world. In essence, we’ve built a lightning rod to help us call and then tame the storm.”

  Willoughby listened, fascinated. “But how can you control where a pulse sends you? How can you return?”

  H.S. had started walking toward a segment of dark wall and motioned for Willoughby to follow. A light flashed and they were suddenly on the other side of the wall, walking on a metal catwalk that overlooked a hive of industrial activity. The sound was deafening. Willoughby stared with disbelief at the dimensions of the cavern below him. Carved into the solid rock, the room was five times the size of the observation room. The catwalk extended across the top of the cavern for about 30 yards, then disappeared into billows of black smoke. An intense arc of light zipped and snapped from the center of the smoke, masking the tip of a huge, revolving structure of heavy, well-greased metal. Wrapped in a skin of dark metallic sheeting and pitted with silver piping and bundles of copper wire, the enormous structure was in the shape of a revolving pyramid. The bundles of wire glowed red with heat and the dark metal skin emitted a bluish haze. Electrical arcs crackled and buzzed up the sides of the pyramid toward the crimson gasses at the tip.

  Willoughby stared, amazed. The room was functioning like a giant organism. Automated arms swung and reached, heavily-shielded computer screens scrolled lines of telemetry, industrial turbines whined, like some ancient beast’s foul breath. Heavy iron braces, similar to the ones Willoughby had seen at the top of the Certus Grove building only immensely larger, clung to the cavern walls like giant ribs. It was like nothing Willoughby had ever seen. “An electromagnetic pyramid?” He yelled.

  “A very powerful one,” H.S. nodded. He pointed to the brilliant arc. “Here, an un-tethered hole exists, raw and unbridled by the safeguards of the door through which we travel. By feeding the energy of this hole into a structured corridor, we can create an arc, so to speak, between the two lightning rod points.”

  “You have similar devices on both sides of the natural hole?” Willoughby asked. “I didn’t see anything of this scope at the top of the Certus Grove building.”

  “Quite right,” H.S. shouted. “The Certus Grove is merely a conduction point. The real tip of the corridor in your resident time is hidden thousands of fathoms below the sea off the coast of Bermuda. Remember, time has an order i
n which everything fits nicely. When something is pulled out of its natural time, its phase is shifted. It creates repulsion to the artificial time it has landed in, and carries attraction to where it should be. Over hundreds, sometimes thousands of years, all things that were pulled out of their natural time are returned. Of course we can’t wait that long, so we use the power of the natural hole to quicken the process.”

  “By how much?” Willoughby yelled back.

  “The return trip takes less than two minutes,” H.S. smiled. His voice was growing hoarse.

  Willoughby blinked. It all seemed like a dream to him. “Okay. Let’s say I believe you, you’ve found a way to hitch a ride through natural holes in time. What keeps you from affecting the past? What if you destroy things?”

  “Contrary to popular myth, Willoughby,” H.S. began, pausing to cough and then leaning in close, “it isn’t possible to travel in time and change things. The past is set; it has a weave, a design, a substance. Though certain elasticity allows for minor deviations, any attempt to alter essential events causes a bulge in time’s fabric. Forces you cannot imagine act upon the anomaly until it is forced back into alignment with the natural weave. It would take a great deal more power than we have discovered to make a change that could imprint back through hundreds of millions of unique pulses of time. So time ignores us. We are here, but we are not here. We are solid and real while we stand here, but we are not allowed to stay outside our time for extended periods. When we leave, we become to this time only ghosts—slight blips, buried and forgotten in a weave that heals back into its known form.”