by B. C. CHASE
“So in secrecy we had these special gondolas built that look exactly like the ones that went down to the actual portal. But when these gondolas go into the lake on the track, instead of going down the portal, they are diverted to this facility inside the mountain. Using virtual reality technology that harnesses the brain’s power of REM sleep, they link everyone into a shared dream. One of the participants is a lucid dreamer: he controls the dream. The others are riders on his roller coaster, so-to-speak. Some of the elements may be unrealistic, but like any dream, you do not question the reality of your experience while you are dreaming. To you the terror is just as intense, the thrills just as vivid. And when you wake up, because you do not know you were dreaming, you believe the experience you had to be absolutely real. And of course it is the job of the lucid to make it as consistent as possible.”
Henry asked, “So the person controlling the dream, the lucid dreamer, brings the whole world to life in everyone else’s minds?”
“Yes.”
“But how is that possible?”
“The dreaming mind you see, is vastly more powerful than the conscious mind. In dreams, people have reported speaking languages fluently that they have only heard, calculating mathematics that only supercomputers can calculate, inventing startling new inventions, solving problems thought to be unsolvable, composing music that otherwise would never be written, probing the mysteries of physics and the physical universe, prophesying the unseen future, and, of course, creating worlds and characters they have never experienced or seen. Many of mankind’s greatest triumphs are the product of dreams. Albert Einstein, Kekulé von Stradonitz, Elias Howe, Carl Jung, Charles Dickens, Mary Shelby, Niels Bohr, Giordano Bruno, Otto Loewi, the list goes on and on. All the greatest minds have been inspired by dreams.
“Of course the fact that these experiences were actually dreams meant that anything you obtained in your dream could not be brought back with you. That is why we established the ‘anti-contamination’ policy. ‘Nothing can be brought back from Paradeisia due to concerns about contamination,’ is what the signs say. Any foreign substance will be destroyed upon reentry. That isn’t true. It is a cover-up for the fact that you are really going nowhere except in your head and therefore cannot bring anything back.”
“But what about Andrews? When Jinkins took us down the first time and Andrews appeared? He came back.”
“When he saw him, Jinkins assumed that he had lost control and a memory he did not intend had crept into the dream—this is something that had never happened before. But when the dream ended and he woke up in the gondola back at the transportation center, Andrews was there. How was this possible? We knew we had a very serious problem on our hands.”
Henry asked, “Could it be that Andrews never really died?”
“Oh no, he certainly died.”
“Well then how do you explain his physical appearance?”
“I have no feasible explanation.”
“Then he didn’t die,” Henry stated with assurance.
Kaufmann shrugged his shoulders.
Lady Shrewsbury inquired, “How did you keep this a secret? What about all those who had gone down the portal? And the tremendous engineering assets it must have taken to construct this lucid dreaming facility?”
“I can’t tell you the full truth, but suffice to say everyone signed nondisclosure agreements tied to profit-based compensation. The cost of exposure is very high. They came from all over the world, spoke different languages, and were told nothing about the holistic purpose of the work. All they knew was their small piece of the puzzle. There is no single story that would be corroborated.”
“And if Paradeisia failed to make a profit?”
“That is why we could not allow it to fail.”
Babel, impatient, exclaimed, “I don’t give a care about the failure of the business. All I need to know is how to get your gondolas to take me to Paradeisia. Is that something you can tell us, Kaufmann?”
“It is dangerous. It will ruin you and anyone you bring with you.”
“I know the risks. Do you also understand that we will stop at nothing to reach it?”
Doctor Kaufmann looked down at his feet. Then, his face hardening, he said, “Okay. I will give you what you want. But let me assure you it isn’t a dream at all. This is a nightmare, and you will destroy the world. This is power that only gods should possess.”
FlyRail Hub
They had slept under armed guard in a single room at the Command Center. The next day had been spent preparing gondolas to enter Paradeisia. It was now night again. Henry and the Vice President were standing on the concrete helipad platform on the cliff edge overlooking the crater lake. “You have what you want. Go down and leave us,” Henry said.
“Oh no,” Babel laughed. “Make no mistake. You’re my traveler’s insurance. Everyone knows you bring your policy with you. I have to make sure you’re not taking me on a virtual reality dream. I need to go to the real place. And besides, you might be useful once I’m down there. Now, are we ready for departure? Did Doctor Kaufmann prepare the FlyRail or whatever you call that thing?”
“Yes, they loaded twelve gondolas. Just waiting for your order to depart.”
Tony Bridges approached from the direction of the FlyRail Hub building, saying, “Mr. Vice President, I realized there might be a problem.”
“You’re right, there’s a problem. I sent you here to infiltrate this place and instead you fell for the ruse. And not only that, I’ve heard you had your own plans for Paradeisia. You thought you were communicating to Aztec gods.” Babel laughed, shaking his head. “Aztec gods! I’m afraid your greed has made you a liability, Mr. Bridges.”
“But, sir, one of the people—”
“It’s too late, Tony. You’re off this detail.”
“No, please, Mr. Vice President.”
“Sorry, Tony. This has been a tough environment since it started. We can’t afford failures, we can’t afford anything less than total secrecy, and we certainly can’t afford greedy sons-of-guns who have their own agendas. One hundred percent loyalty, Mr. Bridges. That’s what we need.”
Two soldiers took Bridges by the arms.
Bridges pleaded, “Please! I can give you more intel! I can show you—”
“Get rid of him!” Babel ordered. The soldiers dragged Bridges toward the edge. He screamed, “Please! Bob! You know me!!! I have a wife and daughters!” They shoved him to his knees on the concrete.
“We’re saving the human race. It’s an ethical job. You’re just not ethical enough.”
Bridges was sobbing when they shot him point blank in the head. His body collapsed forward and one of the soldiers kicked it off the precipice.
A large Sikorsky Seahawk helicopter appeared from behind the nearest mountain peak, thundering toward the helipad. When it landed, a uniformed team unloaded a gurney. The figure on the gurney was diminutive and contorted under the sheet. Only his face and forearms were exposed. There was a small hole in his forehead and some open flesh where he had a horrible knotted scar that spread across his eye to his cheek. His arms had strange, boney protrusions and his fingers were long and gnarly. Tubes ran up his nose. He was accompanied by a wheel chair.
“Finally, he’s here. We can move out.”
“Who?” Henry asked.
Babel said impatiently, “The person they talk to. The one they’ve chosen, for whatever reason. Only Paradeisia can save him now. Go tell Kaufmann we’re ready to leave.”
Aubrey found herself sitting in a gondola, pulling a harness down over her shoulders once again, next to Adriaan.
“At least this time we’re well-rested going down,” Adriaan said cheerfully, “Though I think our chances of making it out alive are slim to none.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Because, Aubrey,” Henry interrupted. “Once they get down there and everything is as it should be, we will be of no use to them.”
Soldiers were boarding, along
with Vice President Babel. They pushed a wheelchair in. A pale man with a bandaged forehead was sitting in the chair. He had misshapen knobby hands and repulsive projections on his face. His eyes were barely open. They situated the wheelchair in the front, facing the passengers, and fastened it in place.
Henry entered and walked down the aisle. He paused momentarily, looked at her. Their eyes met and she felt a flurry of butterflies. She didn’t understand why. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but, saying nothing, walked on and took a seat. She watched him with amusement as he meticulously fastened his harness and tested its security several times, then grabbed the handlebars with white-knuckled grip.
Nimitz, seated across from Henry and next to Doctor Kaufmann, said, “I wonder what’s in those cases they loaded.”
Henry said, “They’re unfertilized ova. Billions of them.”
“What are they doing with them?”
“They are planning to seed Paradeisia with a new human race.”
“Why?” Adriaan asked.
“Because,” Henry said, “The world is about to end.”
“Say again.”
“A giant anomaly of some kind is heading for our solar system. There is nothing that can be done to stop it. We will all die.”
The gondola started to move with a lurch.
“We slept through a lot, then, did we?”
Nimitz asked, “So if we were sleeping and what we saw was just a dream, where is the real Paradeisia? Where are we going?”
Doctor Kaufmann replied, “That depends on the nature of the universe.”
“Huh?”
“If time is in fact a quantifiable property of the universe then we believe that the portal is a closed timelike line to the past generated by a circulating cylinder of high-powered light.”
“And what does that mean, exactly?”
“Imagine a cup of coffee with a bean floating in it. Now imagine that you take a spoon and stir this coffee. The spoon is the light, the coffee is space-time, and we are the bean. When you stir fast enough, you get an opening through which the coffee bean will fall. Fall back in space-time.”
Henry asked, “Where in space-time?”
“We have no idea. But the other possibility is even more obscure.”
“What is that?”
“That the universe as we see it does not exist. That time and three dimensions are illusions.”
“How could that be?”
“Blame quantum fields.”
“Quantum fields, eh?” Adriaan said. “Now you’ve really got our attention.”
“Subatomic particles, bosons and fermions, are, at their basest level, essentially ‘ons’ or ‘offs’ known as quantum state vectors in Hilbert spaces. Well, more complicated than just ‘on’ or ‘off’ but we don’t have time to get into all of that. Now fermions are what makes up all matter: the stuff we are familiar with, the stuff we can touch. They adhere to the Pauli Exclusion Principle which says that the same fermion cannot occupy the same quantum state as its twin. Bosons, on the other hand, comprise the things we cannot see, like electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, which holds protons and neutrons—fermions—together to form matter, and, we think, gravity. Quantum fields explain why light travels at a constant speed in a vacuum and this speed is the fastest possible speed in the universe. The light is passing between spaces within the quantum field. The quantum state of each Hilbert space is changing as the light passes from one to the next to the next, without resistance. This is why nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. You cannot skip spaces within a field, but you can face resistance in one field and the next. Thus we can conclude that time does not exist: the perception of time is in fact one of two possibilities: on, or off.”
“I don’t think any of us has the foggiest idea what you are trying to say,” Henry irritably said, still gripping his harness. The gondola was vibrating as it sped up in a trajectory along the cliff face toward the crater lake.
“Okay, think of a screen comprised of pixels, and each pixel can be either on or off. The screen is a field and the ons or off are subatomic particles. Time is an illusion, just like everything else we perceive about the world. Nothing you see truly exists in the way you experience it. It is all your mind’s interpretation of the fields that are around you, the series of ons or offs, the quantum states, stored in your memory in the form of new quantum states. So in that sense, reality is what you make of your surroundings. To a heat-sensing snake, reality is far different than it is to us. The universe looks far different through a telescope that interprets infrared, ultraviolet than it does through a telescope that interprets visible light. A savant who sees numbers as landscapes of colors views mathematics as a different reality than most of us do. Reality is entirely subjective. An attractive figure is attractive to a human but not to a bird. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
“You see, reality is in the hands of the creator, not the interpreter. You largely interpret reality the way you were designed to see it. Reality may be projected or manipulated, and as such cannot be trusted implicitly. Tens of thousands of neutrinos pass through us every second, and yet are incredibly difficult to detect because they have next to no mass and they travel at the speed of light. Do we know about the neutrinos or even care? No. All we are is pixels, trillions of ons or offs on a giant screen that we call the universe. And this screen doesn’t have to be three dimensional. It doesn’t have to take any form at all. It is merely data. Numbers. Numbers with no chronology. Just 1’s and 0’s.”
“Well that makes us all feel really special,” Adriaan said, his voice vibrating as the gondola splashed under the water of the lake.
In exasperation, Henry demanded, “So what implication does that have for the portal? I mean if time doesn’t exist so we cannot go back in time, then where does the portal take us?”
“Well, within the world of quantum fields, and assuming time is an illusion, we are going to a different place within the universe or perhaps even within a different universe.”
“Where, specifically in our universe might we be going?”
“Unknown.”
“Unknown?”
“Yes.”
“You mean we have no idea where we’re bloomin’ going?” Adriaan said.
“Yes.”
There was a moment of silence. Then Lady Shrewsbury said, “Do explain why it seemed a good idea to take tourists to this unidentified place through a portal that might or might not go back in time?”
Doctor Kaufmann was silent.
She scoffed to Henry, “How fortunate for you that you took ownership of this place for yourself. My only question is, how are you planning to spend all the money you’ll make?”
Henry rolled his eyes.
The water surrounding the gondola was quickly blackening as they surged to the depths of the lake. But ahead, there was light. Light which appeared to flash. When they came closer, it became apparent that the light was not flashing, but that there were streams of light rotating in a brilliant, hypnotic display.
Doctor Kaufmann said, “We’re about to enter Paradeisia.”
Diyu
“Jia Ling!” he shouted. She had vanished without a trace, and the time it had taken him to get back to the surface was more than ample time for a sarcosuchus to pull her beneath it.
Something bumped into him from behind, “Here! Take my hand!” a voice said in English. He spun around to see a rubber boat with Gary leaning over the edge for him. He quickly obliged and was pulled up onto the craft, where he immediately saw Jia Ling sitting, along with Gary’s wife and son and a number of soldiers and technicians.
The pilot at the back steered the boat toward another straggler in the water, which they quickly brought onboard before making a beeline for the sandy shore.
The water that lapped up on the beach was tinged pink with blood. A severed arm was rolling on the sand with the waves. One soldier on his knees held the torn cadaver of another, mourning.
; Zhang shouted, “Gather the equipment as fast as you can. We don’t have time for distractions! The mission must proceed!”
Doctor Ming-Zhen’s blood boiled. He marched up to Zhang and demanded, “What could possibly be so urgent? You call these distractions?” he pointed to the mourning soldier. “Too many have died! Whatever this mission you have is over. We must return to Lake Vostok.”
Calmly, but firmly Zhang said, “And how do you propose we do that? Of the twenty-eight boats that had left the submarines, only twelve have made it ashore. We have lost most of our gear, including most of our weapons and ammunition. Our contingent began with 334. We now have 198. All six submarines have been destroyed. We have no idea who destroyed them, or why, but we can guarantee that whoever it is will not consider the job done until each of us is dead. We have no possibility to communicate with Vostok Station, and even if we did, they would not be able to organize a rescue until another submarine could be built, an undertaking which would cost billions of yen and last nine months. So, yes, I am very much aware of the desperation of our situation, Zhou. And you do not need to lecture me about how to react.
“No, there is only one choice for us now, and that is to proceed with our mission as quickly as possible before things deteriorate beyond all possibility for victory.”
“Victory? Victory for what?”
“We are at war, Zhou. When you came to Lake Vostok looking for life, you actually found mankind’s salvation. We believe that you were brought here by powerful beings who knew of earth’s future.”
“What future?”
“For many years now we have known that a star-sized deep space object was on its way to our solar system. Earth will be absolutely destroyed. This new world is the only chance to save humanity. Do you think the other superpowers of the world will roll over while we claim it as our own? We cannot allow that to happen.”
