Doppelganger

by John Schettler

  He remembered Orlov clearly enough, and all the other missing men as well. Yet the Admiral and other senior officers seemed foggy when he first asserted Tasarov was missing. Indeed, he realized that he had also been oblivious of Tasarov until Nikolin came to him and insisted his friend had gone missing. Once the looking glass of his memory was dusted off, however, he could suddenly recall everything. And he had been able to jog the memory of Admiral Volsky and the other senior officers on the bridge at that critical moment. Now they were among the knowing few on the ship, but as he made his rounds, he soon discovered that most other crewmen knew nothing of Orlov, while others remembered him clearly enough.

  Sergeant Troyak was a perfect example. He clearly recalled Orlov being assigned to his Marine detail after he was busted, and the details of his mission to Ilanskiy on the Narva were also clear in his mind. In fact, most of the Marines remembered him with no problem, but other crewmen, even those who might have had daily interaction with the Chief, seemed oblivious.

  His first thought was that this was an effect that resulted from their sudden shift. Every other time displacement they had made, left the ship and crew remarkably intact, but not this one. The more he thought about this, the more he came to believe his worst fears were now slowly being realized.

  Paradox… It wasn’t just a seeming contradiction, or a thorny puzzle to challenge the logic of one’s thinking. No. It was a real force, and one capable of reordering the physical reality of the universe, changing and altering everything. It was the force of annihilation, the cruel imperative in any equation that demanded a zero sum—and it was killing them. The missing men, the missing data, were all evidence of the deadly hand of Paradox.

  Now that the ship had phased, shifted again in time, he still had no real idea what their position was on the continuum. Was it still May of 1941, or had they moved to some other time? Did they shift forward, or slip deeper into the past? If the disappearance of these men was the result of Paradox, then he was inclined to think the ship might have moved forward again, to a point in time where they were now suffering the consequences of their many interventions. They had changed the course of events to a point where the life lines of Tasarov and the others were fatally compromised. This was all he could deduce at that moment.

  The only thing he was relatively certain of was that Paradox was somehow involved. As the ship had sailed closer and closer to a moment in time where it already existed, these effects became more pronounced. The hand of fate was on them now, and he could see no way they could avoid it. His fear now was that the process was still underway, and other things could change—go missing, just like Kamenski and the others.

  Yet just a moment, he thought. The ship doesn’t simply exist in time. It also occupies space, and the combination of its spatial position and its temporal position would define it as an event in spacetime… Then something struck him with thunderclap surprise. Two discrete objects could easily exist at the same time, but they could not exist in the same space. Therefore they could also not exist together in the same spacetime, which was a unified expression of both space and time.

  Physicists and theoreticians were always trying to nail things down on a chart, just as he plotted the position of the ship for navigation. He was often asked to set an intercept course that depended on many variables, and this was always a chancy prediction. He could know an enemy ship’s last reported position, course, and speed, and then compare that with similar information on his own ship. This enabled him to set a course and speed that would potentially bring the two ships together in the same future moment of spacetime. And when this was happening with two opposing warships, battle would result, with one ship ruling the moment and prevailing, and the other either driven off or destroyed.

  Just like two chess pieces trying to occupy the same space on a board, one or the other had to prevail. But we are not on an intercept course in spacetime, only in time. Our last reported position was just a few hundred nautical miles west of Lisbon, but that other ship, the one we arrived on, will appear in the Norwegian Sea. Two discrete objects can easily co-exist in the same time, but not the same spacetime. If this were so, then it suddenly occurred to him that it was not simply a collision in time that he should fear, but a collision in spacetime.

  Was this the source of my confusion? I believed we were on an intercept course with that other ship, with our own selves as we appeared on July 28th of 1941. They are approaching that event in spacetime from the future, while we are approaching it from the past. I have been obsessed with the timing of the event, and I was ignoring the spatial element. We’ll reach July 28th, 1941 if we continue to move forward here, but that will be a separate event, from that defined by the other ship. We won’t be in the same spatial location, and therefore we won’t be in the same spacetime as the ship arriving from the future!

  Now he remembered that terrifying moment when Kirov was in the Pacific. The ship had begun to pulse, its position in spacetime wavering and undefined. They had used Rod-25 to try and remove themselves from danger, then there came that strange event, where the cruiser Tone had appeared and seemed to plow right through the ship. He could still see it in his mind’s eye, and feel the terror of that experience. It was as if a ship of ghosts had sailed right through them on a collision course, spectral phantoms from another reality.

  At that moment we were fortunately not in the same spacetime as the Tone. Otherwise the two ships would have had a fatal collision. He had been thinking about this all wrong, believing he had to be in a different temporal location when Kirov was slated to arrive from the future. Yet could they avoid the Paradox he feared by simply being at a different spatial location? That could be easily arranged. Was the solution to this dilemma that simple?

  Then one troubling note sounded an objection in his mind—Alan Turing’s watch. Why did it vanish, only to be found later in that file box that must surely have also come from a future time? Why did time find it necessary to move that watch? What complication was it trying to avoid? Was something else happening with that watch, something unrelated to the possibility of Paradox?

  Two ships… one arriving from the future, another arriving from the past, and both wanting domain over a single moment in time, but not in the same location in space…

  Now he found his thinking falling through to yet another level. Were there really two ships? Wasn’t this the ship that arrived from the future? It’s already here… and if we haven’t moved elsewhere, it will still be here come July 28, 1941. It isn’t arriving at that moment from the future this time. Now it is arriving from the past.

  All these thoughts swirled through his mind, like a great spiraling whirlpool of possibility, and he felt like a swimmer adrift in that maelstrom, and desperately struggling to keep his head above water. Quite literally, only time would tell which of these conflicting theories would hold true. There were only three possible outcomes. The first was that the ship he was now standing on would vanish, as it seemingly had, and its place in 1941 would be claimed by the ship arriving from the future. This was the chilling reality he feared they were now facing. They had vanished, and pieces of the puzzle that had once been Kirov in 1941 were now obviously missing.

  The second possibility was that the other ship would be prevented from arriving from the future, and for a number of reasons. The most obvious was that the long chain of causality could never replicate itself to produce the circumstances that sent Kirov back through time.

  Now his thinking about that stack of plates and teacups returned. All the events from 1941 to 2021 extended out like a stack of fragile china, eighty years high. Wouldn’t these changes they were making to the history cause catastrophic changes in the future? This was what the butterfly effect argued. It held that something as simple and insignificant as the flapping of a butterfly’s wings could cause just enough of a perturbation in the air to prevent the formation of a hurricane in the future. Small things now have big effects much later, and the changes they ha
d caused in the history were not small things—they were huge.

  In their first displacement they had altered the entry date of the US in the war, and by so doing, changed the entire course of the war in the Pacific. There was no way he could see the design and building of Kirov after what they had done, let alone the assignment of all the exact same crew members, and the same exact decisions and events being taken to eventually result in the ship being displaced in time as it happened. How could that future moment repeat? How could it arise now from this terribly convoluted past?

  That was logic enough, he thought, and there is one more reason the future Kirov cannot arrive here—because the ship was already here. If this were so, there was no real threat, even though they were now suffering all these ill effects. Something else could have caused the oddities that were occurring—our instability in time—the pulsing I have observed many times before. Perhaps Orlov and the others were still here with them, but strangely out of phase? Yet if that were so, why did so many seem oblivious to the fact they ever existed? Why was there no physical evidence they were ever here, their possessions, ship’s records?

  So in these first two options, the chess game example holds true—only one piece can occupy a given square, and it would be left up to fate and time to decide which would prevail.

  Then there was yet one more possible outcome—both ships could arrive on July 28, 1941, one from the future and also the one he was on now, arriving from an earlier moment in time, arriving from the past. He had first thought this co-location would be impossible, and become the root of the Paradox, but if his thinking about spacetime was correct, then this was now a real possibility. They could both be in the same time, as long as they did not occupy the same space, and he knew that could never happen.

  For this to be so, it would mean that the ships were different, not the same at all—that they had originated in different worlds. Is this the way it worked? He knew the ship slated to arrive from the future could not be coming as a result of the history extending forward from this moment. It had to be coming from some other time line—some other meridian in the continuum. In fact, it had to be coming from the same exact world they left when they first raised anchor at Severomorsk. No other time line, assuming multiple lines were possible, could result in the unique set of circumstances that sent the ship back through time. And here is the riveting truth—I’m standing on that ship. This is the Kirov that came from that meridian in time. So if another ship does arrive here from the future, then it must be coming from some other meridian, not the world we left at Severomorsk.

  That thought shook him, for it depended on there being many alternate universes, which was something he could never prove or know for certain. Could such an alternate world produce the same exact event that first sent the ship back in time—the live fire exercises, the accident aboard Orel, Rod-25, all of it? The odds on that seemed impossibly small, but assuming it did so, would the ship come here, to this alternate time line? Why? Is there really a world for every possible circumstance and replaying of these events?

  He shook his head. Trapped in the loop of his own thinking. Yet he realized that one of those three outcomes must happen. Kirov will either be prevented from arriving here because of the changes we have made to the history, or, if it does arrive here, then it comes from some other world, and not the world in which we now sail. Assuming that, it will either replace us and rule unchallenged in these waters, or else both ships will survive.

  Kamenski had tried to tell him something else about this… Kirov was not a thing, not an object, but a process, an activity, a verb. “Yes, my friend, everything in the universe is like that. Everything is a verb. There are no nouns, if you really think about it. That is just a pleasant and useful convention. Everything is a process.”

  We are just an activity—we are just something the universe is doing, thought Fedorov, and now he remembered Kamenski’s incredible discourse on that topic.

  “Time is not what you think it is… There are no ‘moments,’ only a constant expression of motion…. Old Zeno tried to prove motion was an illusion, that life was like a series of frames in a movie—or a series of positions in a chess game, but he actually had it backwards. This notion of fixed moments in time—that is the illusion, a mere convention of thought… 1941? 2021? These are not places, Fedorov, they are activities, movement in a dance. To go to one or the other you simply have to change your behavior—step lively, and learn the dance of infinity. You see, anything can be expressed in that dance…”

  Anything… If Kamenski is correct, then I am just a maelstrom of particles, in this very peculiar shape called Fedorov. I’m just something the universe is doing, just as a whirlpool is something the river is doing, an activity, a temporary arrangement of particles that seem to persist, though we know it is impermanent. And none of those particles can ever be said to be in any particular place. This was what quantum theory asserted, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. The particles were always in motion, never in any one “place” and always retaining the possibility of being somewhere else. It was just as Kamenski had argued… “To put it simply, things don’t stay put… there is only constant change and motion—constant uncertainty. And if they are never here, then they are never anywhere else either.”

  If another ship does arrive, it will be another arrangement of particles, will it not? The two ships will not be the same. In fact, it would be impossible for them to ever be the same, to have every unique particle of their being doing the exact same thing on both ships, acting out the exact same steps in the dance Kamenski had talked about.

  Damn… this ship had combat damage, missiles expended from our magazines, men missing, and all the souls here forever changed by what we have experienced, what we have endured. But that ship would be fresh from the docks at Severomorsk, its magazine full, undamaged in any way, and with a full crew of innocent souls who had no idea of what they were about to face.

  They aren’t the same…. It may appear so, but on a quantum level the two ships would be distinctly different, two whirlpools in the stream, two expressions the world might simply call Kirov, but they would be completely different, like identical twins—doppelgangers. And considering they would not even be occupying the same spacetime event, being in two completely different locations… Was it possible that both could exist at the same time? And if this is true…

  There is no Paradox!

  That thought struck like the bell of hope ringing in his weary mind, yet one question still remained unanswered. If this were true, then what was happening to us now? Something told him his hope might be standing on shaky ground, and in this instance, his deep unconscious objection to his tortured logic was quite correct. For all of his assumptions and suppositions were simply wrong…

  Chapter 5

  The time for speculation and pondering the physics was over. The grey fog that still surrounded the ship persisted like a funeral shroud, and Fedorov knew they had to do something.

  “I have never seen sea conditions like this,” said Volsky. “The ocean is still and calm, and this sea fog is impenetrable.”

  “For the cloud deck to extend up so high is most unusual,” Fedorov agreed. “Every compass on the ship is spinning like a top, which is probably an effect from that uncontrolled shift. But the weather?”

  “How long before it will break?”

  “Hard to say, Admiral. Advection fog like this usually forms when a warmer air mass migrates above the colder sea surface air. Yet for this to extend up so high that the KA-40 could not find clear air is unheard of. It’s usually confined to the boundary layer of the warmer air mass, and just manifests as surface fog.”

  “And we have no wind,” said Volsky. “So here we sit, stuck in the doldrums.”

  “True sir, but I am beginning to suspect that this is not advection fog. It seems… almost unnatural.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well it’s clear we shifted, as we’ve lost all contact wit
h the British and Gromyko. So something happened to disturb the ship’s position in time. Who knows why? The ship was beginning to exhibit signs of instability, just like that time in the Pacific after the last air strike we faced. Remember? We turned north, well ahead of the cruiser Tone, but then it just appeared because I think we were pulsing, phasing, moving in and out of the time we were in. That allowed Tone to close the distance, because it was moving in space when we phased.”

  “Then no time passed for us when that happened?”

  “The evidence seems to support that. Tone should not have been able to catch up with us that quickly, so when we phased, we must have been in a kind of suspended time. And yet, I never lost the sensation that we were in the sea the whole time. We don’t know where we go when this happens, but we are clearly somewhere, because the ship remains stable and afloat on the sea, just as it is now.”

  “You mean you believe we are in one of these phasing states now?”

  “I can think of no other explanation for this heavy fog. It simply cannot manifest all of a sudden like it did, nor could it expend up beyond the ceiling of the KA-40. You are correct Admiral, these sea conditions are nigh on to impossible. It is unnatural.”

  That gave Volsky a chill as he looked about them, the grey fog so close on the ship that the bow was barely visible through the forward view screens.

  “So we are somewhere,” he said. “Elsewhere, a kind of purgatory where we sit in judgment at time’s court. Is that what has happened?”

  “That is a colorful way of thinking about it sir, but you may be correct. Then again, all these effects we’ve been experiencing may simply be the result of our approach to Paradox. To be equally colorful, it looms like a vast hidden ice berg out there in that fog somewhere, and there we were, sailing blindly along as the days ticked off and we came ever closer. Something was bound to happen sooner or later, and it did.”