Metaplanetary (A Novel of Interplanetary Civil War)

by Tony Daniel

  Things get weirder yet. The other crucial experiment of the twentieth century was first performed by the scientist Alain Aspect and his colleagues, all Earthlings, of course. In the Aspect experiment, two photons are created in the same quantum process. Several of the properties that each photon possesses must be a mirror image of the other. One of these properties is the polarization of the light. You can think of it as being something like a compass direction. If one photon has 90 degrees of polarization, the other must have 270. The photons are said to be “entangled” on a quantum level. So both of these “entangled” photons go shooting off in different directions, and they both have an equal chance of having any particular polarization. In fact, if you measured either photon separately, you would find that its polarization was entirely random. But if you measure one photon first and determine its polarization, then the polarization of the other photon is instantly determined. How do we know? Because photon B, the one you didn’t measure, will pass through a filter and pile up in adifferent pattern than it would have had you not measured its counterpart. Furthermore, it wouldn’t matter if the photons were separated by many millions of miles when you took the measurement. Changing photon A instantly changes photon B. Not at the speed of light. Not faster than the speed of light.

  Instantly. The photons “know” before they leave their light source whether or not you are going to measure one of them and when and where, and they set out on a different path accordingly.

  Again, these facts were well-known to scientists of the late twentieth century. Einstein thought of them as “spooky action at a distance” that was seemingly faster than light, but they were not mysterious at all to the quantum theorists. They were predicted by the equations of quantum physics. In fact, the experiments were done to confirm what theory had already called for.

  But it took Raphael Merced to reconcile the absolute violation of common sense (and General Relativity), which Einstein had sensed, with the obvious facts of the matter.

  “It turns out,” says Merced, “that atoms—all of elementary particles, that is—are little time machines. After you accept that madness, it’s fairly simple to explain the rest, including the relationship of the strong force and electromagnetism to gravity.”

  Gravity, said Merced, is the same thing as the other two forces when considered as a wave function notin time, butof time. The graviton is time’s “messenger particle,” and, as such, it doesn’t ever exist in the present. The only trace it leaves in the now is a record in space-time of its passing. Its “purpose”—if it can be said to have such a thing—is to mediate between basic particles separated in space. Or, conversely, to mediatespace to conform to the properties of each and every particle in it. The residual effects of this mediation are what holds the galaxies together and sets the planets in their orbits. The present is a “symptom” of the past and the future.

  With his theory, Merced also solved therenormalization problem of quantum theory. The infinities of particle self-interaction turned out to be precise and finite solutions of Merced time functions.

  Merced went on to suggest a kind of macro graviton detector using a modified Josephson junction that functioned as a time machine—albeit for nanoseconds—on the everyday level of things. Within a year of the publication of his doctoral thesis, gravitons had been detected both in the past (zero spin) and in the future (with a spin of 2). Today, every schoolchild has learned the statement of his fundamental equation:

  FT = (pq – qp) + mc2

  Where “FT” is the future multiplied by time as a continuous function, where “pq” and “qp” are quantum matrices, and “mc2” is matter times the speed of light squared.

  “What it all comes down to,” Merced wrote, “is that you either accept space as being nonlocal or you accept time as being a series of unrelated points, essentially disjoint. For me, it is a lot easier to view time as self-forming, with the future being intimately acquainted with the past. But it doesn’t matter how you look at it. The math is the same.”

  Merced’s time equations had the added bonus of giving a precise explanation for the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Time, it turns out, has chirality, or handedness.

  “The space-time continuum,” says Merced, “has a left-handed spin to it of exactly one second per second.”

  And this is the reason that we live our lives from the past into the future, and the reason that hot things get cooler instead of warming up, and why a scattering of stones doesn’t spontaneously form itself into a house.

  Twelve

  “Shall we check the markets?” said Danis. “Maybe things have settled down.”

  “I seriously doubt it,” Kelly replied, but Danis engaged the merci, and they had a look together at the current conditions.

  Things were worse than even he had imagined they could become in so short a time. It was a crash that was rapidly headed toward a full-scale depression.

  Danis checked the automatic sell-points on all of the shorted stocks that Kelly had arranged. Everything had been converted into cash and pure energy certificates of deposit hours ago. She gave Kelly a summary of their current holdings, and he laughed aloud.

  They were now multimillionaires. Teleman Milt was also weathering the storm and acting as a kind of ad hoc inner-system bank, making limited, heavily secured loans to keep the other trading houses afloat. The old man at TM would soon be the most powerful financier in the solar system, if he wasn’t already. And that, Kelly estimated, should last a few e-days at most—and then would come a government takeover of the financial community. Such was in the cards, and Kelly was amazed that he was one of the few who saw the obviousness of it. Kelly would not be surprised if the Old Man were personally incorporated into Director Amés’s array of personas. Amés had made no secret that he was “recruiting” some of the bigger LAPs to do productive government work. The Old Man might go from being king of the world to a slave in a matter of moments.

  There was no way Amés was going to pass up this opportunity to consolidate his rule. The banks would soon be an extension of the Department of Immunity.

  And what would happen then? Amés would either have to start minting money or he would step up production. Not even Amés was arrogant enough to think that he could escape runaway inflation if he fired up the greenleaf mints. That meant stepping up production of goods. And how did you do that with an economy that was already operating at full capacity?

  You started a war.

  Thirteen

  from

  Old Left-handed Time

  Raphael Merced and the Genesis of the Merced Effect a short history

  by Andre Sud, D. Div.

  Triton

  After Raphael Merced published his dissertation, Chen Wocek secured a junior professorship for him at Bradbury. Merced turned down several far more lucrative offers in order to take it and remain near his mentor. At Bradbury, Merced began further investigations into his idea that theory was a kind of by-product of phenomena and that the laws of nature were only a limited way to understand experience. When he was twenty-seven, Merced devoted himself entirely to experimental physics, and it was at this time that he and Beat Myers began their famous “Fifty Worlds to Sunday” correspondence that is a seminal text in the modern study of aesthetics and its relationship to the scientific method.

  Merced built larger and larger Josephson-Feynman time machines and extended the duration in which he could study the graviton up to several seconds. It was in the course of these experiments that he began to notice a peculiar aspect of the particle. Gravitons seemed to possess a property that was singular and asymmetric. It was a property that only expressed itself under conditions of extremely complex paradox resolution.

  “It was as if the little buggers were making informed decisions after thinking about something for a while,” wrote Merced. “That’s why I called this behavior judgment. It was as if, within the locality of my apparatus, nature becameteleological —that is, it acted as if it had will and purpose
. There were singular instances of paradox resolution that didn’t obey any statistical laws I had ever heard of, and they certainly weren’t predictable by any standard mathematical means. They were, by definition, little miracles. And that’s why, in the equations I developed to express this behavior, there is always a point where I wrote ‘and a miracle happens here.’ ”

  Merced called this method evolutionary calculus. Four years after publishing the Grand Unified Field Theory that linked all the known forces of nature, Merced’s contemporaries openly pilloried him and he was kicked out of the two major associations of scientists of the day. Wocek fought a rearguard action at Bradbury and managed to save Merced’s position there. Merced was too engrossed in his research to take much notice of the brouhaha.

  “I cannot tell you if the universe as a whole has any meaning,” said Merced. “This may be fundamentally unknowable. But what I was seeing in my experiments was that the universe wasacting as if it had meaning locally. After a while, I was forced to the conclusion that this wasn’t just appearance. Individual gravitons were exercising judgment just as a person does. The universe is teleological locally. Bylocally I mean any distance that is contained between quantum-entangled particles that are pressed into complex time-related paradoxes. I would force these paradoxes on the gravitons, and it was as if they had a little town meeting and came to a decision about how to handle each paradox. These decisions were never precisely the same, but all had the generaltendency of preserving reality as we know it. From there it was only a short step to reasoning that one aspect of the ‘judgment’ property was that it brought about instant information transfer at a distance. After continued work, I discovered that I could influence what this information would be, and I could cause the gravitons to carry messages that I wanted. I discovered a number that acted as a sort of code key of time. This is what I called the Teleological Constant. If you know the Teleological Constant, you could send and receive information instantaneously over great distances—as far, in fact, as you chose to separate two entities that you originally observed to be entangled on a quantum level.”

  This instantaneous transfer of information is what we call the Merced Effect.

  Merced was thirty-five years old by this time. His experiences with the scientific establishment had left him extremely leery. He chose to publish the results of his experiments in his friend Beat Myers’s poetry journal,Flare . The November 2646 issue ofFlare was almost wholly devoted to Merced’s paper, which was interspersed with poetry by Myers and others in theFlare generation. During his life, Merced always insisted that reprints of his paper, “The Teleological Constant and its Relation to Instantaneous Information Transfer at a Distance,” be printed with the poems included.

  The NovemberFlare did not make much of an impact at first. Merced continued his work, and by that time had several graduate assistants under him. One of them was a brilliant young nanotechnological engineer who had been raised in an orphanage in the asteroid belt. His name was Feur Otto Bring. Bring was an incurable victim of Tourette’s syndrome, and conversations between Merced and Bring would often consist of Merced patiently explaining a problem to Bring, followed by Bring swearing uncontrollably at Merced. Then, usually within days, Bring would have the engineering solution or the apparatus that Merced had envisioned.

  One day in 2648, Merced casually suggested to Bring that it ought to be possible to invent a nanotech time machine that incorporated his Josephson-Feynman setup and that, if such nano were properly disseminated, there could be instant information shared over whatever distance the nano covered. Bring is reported to have stormed from the room shouting, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck you, cocksucker!”

  Within a week, he and Merced had designed and created such a thing. With little modification, that design is still with us, permeating all our lives. It was the design of what we now know as grist.

  Fourteen

  Danis looked over the numbers and felt a bit of disappointment of her own. When Kelly had first come up with the crazy idea of shorting all their assets, along with Teleman Milt’s, Danis had worried about the chance—small, but present—that he might be wrong.

  “So,” she said, “my little pi-minus option was a wild-goose chase.”

  Kelly was extremely quiet for a moment, and then he said, almost in a whisper, “What?”

  “I took an option out on pi meson production, the kind that are made of a down and anti-up quark pair.”

  “I know what a pi-minus particle is,” said Kelly in a preternaturally calm voice. As if he is trying to hold his breath, Danis thought. As if he is deathly afraid of what he is going to hear next.

  “I figured, just in case you were wrong . . . I mean, in case there was a general slide, but then a sudden correction. Pions are so hard to make independently, and they’re impossible to store, you know. They are essential in isotope instantiation. There would have to be a major shortage for a few minutes, even allowing for relativistic effects. I timed it all out to four minutes and took out the option. But all that’s moot. You were right, of course.”

  “You took out a time option?”

  “Yes, Kelly. There’s no reason to be angry with me. I lost my money, but—”

  “I’m not angry.”

  “I just thought I had . . . an intuition about it. A gut feeling.”

  “Danis,” Kelly said, still in his frighteningly calm voice, “check to see if the option has a Section C rider.”

  She performed the necessary check perfunctorily, but it was a standard contract, and she knew what she would find before she looked.

  “Of course it has a Section C.”

  “A dearth clause.”

  “That’s what a section Cis, Kelly.”

  “C stands for ‘convert,’ Danis.”

  “Yes, I—”

  “Read the wording.”

  She read it again. And again. And then she understood what her husband was driving at.

  In the event that the issuing entities shall be unable to carry out the actuarial functions for the completion of this contract, the purchaser shall provide said functions or shall cause said functions to be performed by a proxy agent as specified by Unified Banking Code IV-A subsection 84. Absent a proxy, purchaser is responsible for final tally and related items under paragraph five, above.

  “But Teleman Milt is my proxy agency, and I bought the damn things from the Ferro Group—”

  “Which is now a member of Teleman Milt, Danis. The first thing the old man will have done is bought up the competition.”

  “So my issuer and proxy tabulator are the same entity.”

  “That’s not allowed by law. You have to abandon your proxy account holder in that circumstance, and do all the final accounting yourself. Some party with your interests in mind has to independently verify the contract’s completion. If the entity that you bought it from is the same one that loaned you the money—”

  “That leaves only me.”

  “If it were a regular person, with an aspect and convert portion, he would have to loan out his virtual side until the accounting was done.”

  “But that kind of number crunching normally requires a convert like the Abacus. It would takeme days.”

  “And youcan’t loan out your convert. Youare a convert, and nothing else.”

  “It will take me days,” Danis said again.

  “They can legally hold you in the Met until the terms of the contract are completed.”

  “Kelly . . . you don’t think . . .”

  “I think that the first thing the Department of Immunity is going to do is round up all the free converts by any means necessary. It’s probably already happening.”

  “It will take me days,” said Danis. “I’m not made for that kind of arithmetic.”

  “We have a big problem, Danis.”

  They can hold me in the Met, Danis thought. They can separate me from my children.

  “Why?” Kelly said. His voice was almost a sob. “Why did you do that, Danis?
”

  “I didn’t believe,” she replied. Something like a buzz was developing in her thoughts. Like a nest of bees that has been disturbed. Like an electric short in a closet full of fuses. “I didn’t believe it could possibly get as bad as you said it would, and I wanted a little protection, just in case you were wrong. It’s what we do at work, after all. Arbitrage. We always hedge our bets.”

  “Except when extreme measures are called for,” said Kelly. “Then there aren’t any rules you can count on.”

  “I . . . acted like a computer program,” Danis said. “Garbage in, garbage out.”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” Kelly replied. “We have to figure out what to do next.”

  They are going to take me from my children, Danis thought. It was all she could think, over and over again. They are going to take me from my Aubry and Sint.

  She looked at the two of them. Aubry was playing the old game of paper, rock, and scissors to keep Sint amused, now that he had no enigma box.

  I’m a pair of scissors, thought Danis, and my opponent is a rock.

  Ready to crush the scissors.

  They’re going to take me away from my children.

  Fifteen

  from

  Old Left-handed Time

  Raphael Merced and the Genesis of the Merced Effect

  a short history

  by Andre Sud, D. Div.

  Triton

  Raphael Merced’s later years marked the steady acceptance of his ideas. Bring and others worked out the manufacturing sequences for grist. On Merced’s fiftieth birthday, the then Martian government approved the dissemination of grist over all human-made surfaces on the planet. The similarities between this interconnected grist and virtual reality of computing entities had long been seen. But there was a visceral, physical quality to the “grist web.” It came to be viewed as the fusion of actuality and virtuality. Today it interconnects all human spaces in the solar system, and is known, collectively, as themerci . The name is derived, of course, from Merced.