“A hope.”
“A wish.”
“A plan.”
“And it hasn’t occurred to you that in all the angles of the world, there might not be such a Japan?”
“It isn’t like the huge library in that story, where it is believed that among all the books containing all the combinations of all the letters that could fit in all those pages, there is bound to be a book that tells the true history of all the world. There are many angles, yes, but our ability to differentiate them is not infinite, and in many of them life never evolved and so the air is not breathable. It is an experiment not lightly undertaken.”
“Oh, of course. To find a world so nearly like our own that a nation called Japan—or, I suppose, Nippon—exists at all, where a language like Japanese is even spoken—you do speak Japanese yourself, don’t you?”
“My parents spoke nothing else at home until I was five and had to enter school.”
“Yes, well, to find such a world would be a miracle.”
“And to search for it would be a fool’s errand.”
“And yet it has been searched for.”
Hakira waited. Moshe did not go on.
“Has it been found?”
“What would it be worth to you, if it had?”
2024—Angle Θ
“You’re a scientist,” said Leonard. “This is beneath you.”
“I have continuous video,” said Bêto. “With a mechanical clock in it, so you can see the flow of time. The chair moves.”
“There is nothing you can do that hasn’t been faked by somebody, sometime.”
“But why would I fake it? To publish this is the end of my career.”
“Exactly my point, Bêto. You are a geologist, of all things. Geologists don’t have poltergeists.”
“Stay with me, Leonard. Watch this.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes it’s immediate. Sometimes it takes days.”
“I don’t have days.”
“Play cards with me. As we used to in Faculdade. Look at the chair first, though. Nothing attached to it. A normal chair in every way.”
“You sound like a magician on the stage.”
“But it is normal.”
“So it seems.”
“Seems? All right, don’t trust me. You move it. Put it where you want.”
“All right. Upside down?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“On top of the door?”
“I don’t care.”
“And we play cards?”
“You deal.”
2090
It is the problem of memory. We have mapped the entire brain. We can track the activity of every neuron, of every synapse. We have analyzed the chemical contents of the cells. We can find, in the living brain, without surgery, exactly where each muscle is controlled, where perceptions are rooted. We can even stimulate the brain to track and recall memory. But that is all. We cannot account for how memory is stored, and we cannot find where.
I know that in your textbooks in secondary school and perhaps in your early undergraduate classes you have read that memory was the first problem solved, but that was a misunderstanding. We discovered that after mapping a particular memory, if that exact portion of the brain was destroyed—and this was in the early days, with clumsy equipment that killed thousands of cells at a time, an incredibly wasteful procedure and potentially devastating to the subject—if that exact spot was destroyed, the memory was not lost. It could resurface somewhere else.
So for many years we believed that memory was stored holographically, small portions in many places, so that losing a bit of a memory here or there did not cause the entire sequence to be lost. This, however, was chimerical, for as our research became more and more precise, we discovered that the brain is not infinite, and such a wasteful system of memory storage would use up the entire brain before a child reached the age of three. Because, you see no memory is lost. Some memories are hard to recover, and people often lose track of their memories, but it is not a problem of storage, it is a problem of retrieval.
Portions of the network break down, so tracks cannot be followed. Or the routing is such that you cannot link from memory A to memory X without passing through memories of such power that you are distracted from the attempt to retrieve. But, given time—or hyper-stimulation of related memory tracks—all memories can be retrieved. All. Every moment of your life.
We cannot recover more than your perceptions and the sense you made of them at the time, but that does not change the fact that we can recover every moment of your childhood, every moment of this class. And we can recover every conscious thought, though not the un-conscious streaming thought behind it. It is all stored...somewhere. The brain is merely the retrieval mechanism.
This has led some observers to conclude that there is, in fact, a mind, or even a soul—a nonphysical portion of the human being, existing outside of measurable space. But if that is so, it is beyond the reach of science. I, however, am a scientist, and with my colleagues—some of whom once sat in the very chairs where you are sitting—I have labored long and hard to find an explanation that is, in fact, physical. Some have criticized this effort because it shows that my faith in the nonexistence of the immaterial is so blind that I refuse to believe even the material evidence of immateriality. Don’t laugh, it is a valid question. But my answer is that we cannot validly prove the immateriality of the mind by the sheer fact of our inability to detect the material of which it is made.
I am happy to tell you that we have received word that the journal Mind—and we would not have settled for anything less than the premiere journal in the field—has accepted our article dealing with our findings. By no means does this constitute an answer. But it moves the field of inquiry and reopens the possibility, at least, of a material answer to the question of memory. For we have found that when neurons are accessed for memory, there are many kinds of activity in the cell. The biochemical, of course, has been very hard to decode, but other researchers have accounted for all the chemical reactions within the cell, and we have found nothing new in that area. Nor is memory electrochemical, for that is merely how raw commands of the coarsest sort are passed from neuron to neuron—rather like the difference between using a spray can as opposed to painting with a monofilament brush.
Our research, of course, began in the submolecular realm, trying to find out if in some way the brain cells were able to make changes in the atom, in the arrangement of protons and neutrons, or some information somehow encoded in the behavior of electrons. This proved, alas, to be a dead end as well.
But the invention of the muonoscope has changed everything for us. Because at last we had a nondestructive means of scanning the exact state of muons through infinitesimal passages of time, we were able to find some astonishing correlations between memory and the barely detectable muon states of slant and yaw. Yaw, as you know, is the constant—the yaw of a muon cannot change during the existence of the muon. Slant also seemed to be a constant, and in the materials which had previously been examined by physicists, that was indeed the case.
However, in our studies of brain activity during forced memory retrieval, we have found a consistent pattern of slant alteration within the nuclei of atoms in individual brain cells. Because the head must be held utterly still for the muonoscope to function, we could only work with terminally ill patients who volunteered for the study and were willing to die in the laboratory instead of with their families, spending the last moments of their lives with their heads opened up and their brains partially disassembled. It was painless but nevertheless emotionally disturbing to contemplate, and so I must salute the courage and sacrifice of our subjects, whose names are all listed in our article as co-authors of the study. And I believe that our study has now taken us as far as biology can go, given the present equipment. The next move is in the hands of physicists.
Ah, yes. What we found. You see? I became side-tracked by my tho
ught of our brave collaborators, because I remembered their memories which meant remembering who they were and what it cost them to...and I am being distracted again. What we found was: During the moment of memory retrieval, when the neuron was stimulated and went into the standard memory-retrieval state, there is a moment—a moment so brief that until fifteen years ago we had no computer that could have detected it, let alone measured its duration—when all the muons in all the protons of all the atoms in all the memory-specific RNA molecules in the nucleus of the one neuron—and no others!—change their slant.
More specifically, they seem, according to the muonoscope, to wink out of existence for that brief moment, and then return to existence with a new pattern of slants—yes, varying slants, impossible as we have been told that was—which exist for a period of time perhaps a thousand times longer than the temporary indetectability, though this is still a span of time briefer than a millionth of a picosecond, and during the brief existence of this anomalous slant-state, which we call the “angle,” the neuron goes through the spasm of activity that causes the entire brain to respond in all the ways that we have long recognized as the recovery of memory.
In short, it seems that the pertinent muons change their slant to a new angle, and in that angle they are encoded with a snapshot of the brain-state that will cause the subject to remember. They return to detectability in the process of rebounding to their original slant, but for the brief period before they have completed that rebound, the pattern of memory is reported, via biochemical and then electrochemical changes, to the brain as a whole.
There are those who will resent this discovery because it seems to turn the mind or soul into a mere physical phenomenon, but this is not so. In fact, if anything our discovery enhances our knowledge of the utterly unique majesty of life. For as far as we know, it is only in the living brain of organisms that the very slant of the muons within atoms can be changed. The brain thus opens tiny doorways into other universes, stores memories there, and retrieves them at will.
Yes, I mean other universes. The first thing that the muonoscope showed us was the utter emptiness of muons. There are even theorists who believe that there are no particles, only attributes of regions of space, and theoretically there is no reason why the same point in space cannot be occupied by an infinite number of muons, as long as they have different slants and, perhaps, yaws. For theoretical reasons that I do not have the mathematics to understand, I am told that while coterminous muons of the same yaw but different slants could impinge upon and influence each other, coterminous muons of different yaw could never have any causal relationship. And there could also be an infinite series of infinite series of universes whose muons are not coterminous with the muons of our universe, and they, too, are permanently undetectable and incapable of influencing our universe.
But if the theory is correct—and I believe our research proves that it is—it is possible to pass information from one slant of this physical universe to another. And since, by this same theory, all material reality is, in fact, merely information, it is even possible that we might be able to pass objects from one such universe to another. But now we are in the realm of fantasy, and I have spent as much time on this happy announcement as I dare. You are, after all, students, and my job is to pass certain information from my brain to yours, which does not, I’m afraid, involve mere millionths of a picosecond.
2024—Angle Φ
“I can’t stand it, I can’t. I won’t live here another day, another hour.”
“But it never harms us, and we can’t afford to move.”
“The chair is on top of the door, it could fall, it could hurt one of the children. Why is it doing this to us? What have we done to offend it?”
“We haven’t done anything, it’s just malicious, it’s just enjoying itself!”
“No, don’t make it angry!”
“I’m fed up! Stop this! Go away! Leave us alone!”
“What good is it to break the chair and smash the room!”
“No good. Nothing does any good. Go, get the children, take them out into the garden. I’ll call a taxi. We’ll go to your sister’s house.”
“They don’t have room.”
“For tonight they have room. Not another night in this evil place.”
3000
Hakira examined the contract, and it seemed simple enough. Passage for the entire membership of Kotoshi, if they assembled at their own expense. Free return for up to ten days, but only at the end of the ten days, as a single group. There would be no refund for those who returned. But all that seemed fair enough, especially since the price was not exorbitant.
“Of course this contract isn’t binding anyway,” said Hakira. “How could it be enforced? This whole passage is illegal.”
“Not in the target world, it isn’t,” said Moshe. “And that’s where it would have to be enforced, nu?”
“It’s not as if I can find a lawyer from that world to represent my interests now.”
“It makes no sense for me to have dissatisfied customers.”
“How do I know you won’t just strand us there?” said Hakira. “It might not even be a world with a breathable atmosphere—a lot of angles are still mostly hydrocarbon gas, with no free oxygen at all.”
“Didn’t I tell you? I go with you. In fact, I have to—I’m the one who brings you through.”
“Brings us? Don’t you just put us in a bender and—”
“Bender!” Moshe laughed. “Those primitive machines? No wonder the near worlds are never found—benders can’t make the fine distinctions that we make. No, I take you through. We go together.”
“What, we all join hands and...you’re serious. Why are you wasting my time with mumbo jumbo like this!”
“If it’s mumbo jumbo, then we’ll all hold hands and nothing will happen, and you’ll get your money back. Right?” Moshe spread his hands. “What do you have to lose!”
“It feels like a scam.”
“Then leave. You came to me, remember?”
“Because you got that group of Zionists through.”
“Exactly my point,” said Moshe. “I took them through. I came back, they didn’t—because they were absolutely satisfied. They’re in a world where Israel was never conquered by the surrounding Arab states so Jews still have their own Hebrew-speaking state. The same world, I might add, where Japan is still populated by self-governing Japanese.”
“What’s the catch?”
“No catch. Except that we use a different mechanism that is not approved by the government and so we have to do it under the table.”
“But why does the other world allow it?” asked Hakira. “Why do they let you bring people in?”
“This is a rescue,” said Moshe. “They bring you in as refugees from an unbearable reality. They bring you home. The government of Israel in that reality, as a matter of policy, declares that Jews have a right to return—even Jews from a different angle. And the government of Japan recently decided to offer the same privilege to you.”
“It’s still so hard to believe that anyone found a populated world that has Japanese at all.”
“Well, isn’t it obvious?” said Moshe. “Nobody found that world.”
“What do you mean?”
“That world found us.”
Hakira thought about it for a moment. “That’s why they don’t use benders, they have their own technology for reslanting from angle to angle.”
“Exactly right, except for your use of the word ‘they.’”
And now Hakira understood. “Not they. You. You’re not from this world. You’re one of them.”
“When we discovered your tragic world, I was sent to bring Jews home to Israel. And when we realized that the Japanese suffered a similar tragic loss, the decision was made to extend the offer to you. Hakira, bring your people home.”
2024—Angle Θ
“I told them I didn’t want to see you.”
“I know.”
“I
was sitting there playing cards and suddenly I’m almost killed!”
“It never happened that way before. The chair usually just...slid. Or sometimes floated.”
“It was smashed to bits! I had a concussion, it’s taken ten stitches, I’ll have this scar on my face for the rest of my life!”
“But I didn’t do it, I didn’t know it would happen that way. How could I? There were no wires, you know that. You saw.”
“Nossa. Yes. I saw. But it’s not a ghost.”
“I never said it was. I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“What, then?”
“I don’t know. Everything else I think of sounds like fantasy. But then, telephones and satellite tv and movies and submarines once sounded like fantasy to anyone who thought of such ideas. And in this case, there’ve been stories of ghosts and hauntings and poltergeists since...since the beginning of time, I imagine. Only they’re rare. So rare that they don’t often happen to scientists.”
“In the history of the world, real scientists are rarer than poltergeists.”
“And if such things did happen to a scientist, how many of them might have done as you urged me to do—ignore it. Pretend it was a hallucination. Move to another place where such things don’t happen. And the scientists who refuse to blind their eyes to the evidence before them—what happens to them? I’ll tell you what happens, because I’ve found seven of them in the past two hundred years—which isn’t a lot, but these are the ones who published what happened to them. And in every case, they were immediately discredited as scientists. No one listened to them any more. Their careers were over. The ones who taught lost tenure at their universities. Three of them were committed to mental institutions. And not once did anyone else seriously investigate their claims. Except, of course, the people who are already considered to be completely bobo, the paranormalists, the regular batch of fakers and hucksters.”
“And the same thing will happen to you.”
“No. Because I have you as a witness.”
“What kind of witness am I? I was hit in the head. Do you understand? I was in the hospital, delirious, concussive, and I have the scar on my face to prove it. No one will believe me either. Some will even wonder if you didn’t beat me into agreeing to testify for you!”
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