by Anthology
“Who’s it from?” he asked uneasily. “A gentleman,” Reggie said coolly, “by the name of Abraham Lincoln.” He rocked slightly on his heels and hooked both thumbs complacently in his vest holes. “Mr. Lincoln thought a lot of we Vliets. Yes indeed! Thought a powerful lot of us.”
“Let me see it,” Colonel Vanderveer said hoarsely. “There must be—be some mistake.”
Reggie handed him the letter, and put his arm about Sandra’s waist. She leaned against him, murmured.
“My but you’re wonderful, Reggie.” Reggie nodded.
He was thinking of the old goat’s face when he exploded the next bombshell in front of him. When he told him of the treachery and perfidy of the French Vanderveer who sold out to Wellington. That ought to be worth watching. The old goat would probably blow his top off proper then. Reggie smiled gloatingly, a delightful anticipation mounting in his veins. With both of the long-renowned Vanderveers consigned to ignominious oblivion, old Colonel Vanderveer would be a sadder but wiser human being.
Colonel Vanderveer stood up then, pale and shaken.
“It appears to be genuine,” he said weakly. “It would seem that the man we have venerated these long years as Major Vanderveer is actually a relative of yours, a Vliet.”
Reggie nodded complacently. When he had received the communication from the dispatch rider back in the Civil war, he’d realized that it wouldn’t do to make a chump out of his own relative. That was why it had been necessary to race after Sheridan and undo the damage he had done.
“Positively staggering,” old Vanderveer said heavily.
“And that isn’t all,” Reggie said, with poisonous calm. “I have more information for you, Colonel Vanderveer. It seems—”
Colonel Vanderveer waved a hand. “It must wait,” he said, with some of his old fire. “I have something to say to you. Something that you, ahem, might consider in the way of restitution for the use of your name all these years.
“I receive a pension fund in the amount of five thousand pounds each year from the English government. It is given to me from the estate of Colonel Horatio Vanderveer, one of the outstanding English heroes, as you probably know.”
Reggie smiled gloatingly. His time had just about arrived. Let the old bore ramble on and then he’d spring the fact that Colonel Horatio Vanderveer was actually a French traitor and deserter.
“This money,” Colonel Vanderveer said pontifically, “I will bequeath to you and Sandra as a wedding present along with my blessings and best wishes for your happiness.”
“Oh Daddy!” Sandra cried, hugging him.
Reggie felt as if he would collapse. The old man’s capitulation was one amazing thing, but secondly there was the realization that the treachery of Colonel Horatio Vanderveer must continue to remain a dark secret. For Reggie knew that if the old man suspected his great-grandfather’s treachery, he would never accept the lush pension from the English government. If he refused it, as he undoubtedly would, where would one Reginald Vliet get off? Probably out in the cold as far as a substantial lump of the stuff was concerned.
Reggie fought a brief battle with his conscience and his conscience lost by a wide margin. Reggie squared his shoulders, and decided to forget forever certain circumstances concerning Colonel Horatio Vanderveer.
“This is wonderful of you, Colo—I mean, Dad,” he cried enthusiastically. He took Sandra by the arm. “Come darling,” he said masterfully, “I have things to speak to you about. Important things.”
They left the room, arm in arm, and Colonel Vanderveer winced as he heard Reggie’s clear young tenor voice floating back, singing:
“Oh we cut down the fam-lee treeeee
“And we hauled it away to the mill.”
THE MAN WHO ENDED HISTORY: A DOCUMENTARY
Ken Liu
Akemi Kirino, Chief Scientist, Feynman Laboratories:
[Dr. Kirino is in her early forties. She has the kind of beauty that doesn’t require much makeup. If you look closely, you can see bits of white in her otherwise black hair.]
Every night, when you stand outside and gaze upon the stars, you are bathing in time as well as light.
For example, when you look at this star in the constellation Libra called Gliese 581, you are really seeing it as it was just over two decades ago because it’s about twenty light years from us. And conversely, if someone around Gliese 581 had a powerful enough telescope pointed to around here right now, they’d be able to see Evan and me walking around Harvard Yard, back when we were graduate students.
[She points to Massachusetts on the globe on her desk, as the camera pans to zoom in on it. She pauses, thinking over her words. The camera pulls back, moving us further and further away from the globe, as though we were flying away from it.]
The best telescopes we have today can see as far back as about thirteen billion years ago. If you strap one of those to a rocket moving away from the Earth at a speed that’s faster than light—a detail that I’ll get to in a minute— and point the telescope back at the Earth, you’ll see the history of humanity unfold before you in reverse. The view of everything that has happened on Earth leaves here in an ever-expanding sphere of light. And you only have to control how far away you travel in space to determine how far back you’ll go in time.
[The camera keeps on pulling back, through the door of her office, down the hall, as the globe and Dr. Kirino become smaller and smaller in our view. The long hallway we are backing down is dark, and in that sea of darkness, the open door of the office becomes a rectangle of bright light framing the globe and the woman.]
Somewhere about here you’ll witness Prince Charles’s sad face as Hong Kong is finally returned to China. Somewhere about here you’ll see Japan’s surrender aboard the USS Missouri. Somewhere about here you’ll see Hideyoshi’s troops set foot on the soil of Korea for the first time. And somewhere about here you’ll see Lady Murasaki completing the first chapter of the Tale of Genji. If you keep on going, you can go back to the beginning of civilization and beyond.
But the past is consumed even as it is seen. The photons enter the lens, and from there they strike an imaging surface, be it your retina or a sheet of film or a digital sensor, and then they are gone, stopped dead in their paths. If you look but don’t pay attention and miss a moment, you cannot travel further out to catch it again. That moment is erased from the universe, forever.
[From the shadows next to the door to the office an arm reaches out to slam the door shut. Darkness swallows Dr. Kirino, the globe, and the bright rectangle of light. The screen stays black for a few seconds before the opening credits roll.]
Remembrance Films HK Ltd.
in association with
Yurushi Studios
presents
a Heraclitus Twice Production
THE MAN WHO ENDED HISTORY
This film has been banned by the Ministry of Culture
of the People’s Republic of China and is released
under strong protest from the government of Japan
Akemi Kirino:
[We are back in the warm glow of her office.]
Because we have not yet solved the problem of how to travel faster than light, there is no real way for us to actually get a telescope out there to see the past. But we’ve found a way to cheat.
Theorists long suspected that at each moment, the world around us is literally exploding with newly created subatomic particles of a certain type, now known as Bohm-Kirino particles. My modest contribution to physics was to confirm their existence and to discover that these particles always come in pairs. One member of the pair shoots away from the Earth, riding the photon that gave it birth and traveling at the speed of light. The other remains behind, oscillating in the vicinity of its creation.
The pairs of Bohm-Kirino particles are under quantum entanglement. This means that they are bound together in such a way that no matter how far apart they are from each other physically, their properties are linked together as though they are b
ut aspects of a single system. If you take a measurement on one member of the pair, thereby collapsing the wave function, you would immediately know the state of the other member of the pair, even if it is light years away.
Since the energy levels of Bohm-Kirino particles decay at a known rate, by tuning the sensitivity of the detection field, we can attempt to capture and measure Bohm-Kirino particles of a precise age created in a specific place.
When a measurement is taken on the local Bohm-Kirino particle in an entangled pair, it is equivalent to taking a measurement on that particle’s entangled twin, which, along with its host photon, may be trillions of miles away, and thus, decades in the past. Through some complex but standard mathematics, the measurement allows us to calculate and infer the state of the host photon. But, like any measurement performed on entangled pairs, the measurement can be taken only once, and the information is then gone forever.
In other words, it is as though we have found a way to place a telescope as far away from the Earth, and as far back in time, as we like. If you want, you can look back on the day you were married, your first kiss, the moment you were born. But for each moment in the past, we get only one chance to look.
Archival Footage: September 18, 20__. Courtesy of
APAC Broadcasting Corporation
[The camera shows an idle factory on the outskirts of the city of Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, China. It looks just like any other factory in the industrial heartland of China in the grip of another downturn in the country’s merciless boom-and-bust cycles: ramshackle, silent, dusty, the windows and doors shuttered and boarded up. Samantha Paine, the correspondent, wears a wool cap and scarf. Her cheeks are bright red with the cold, and her eyes are tired. As she speaks in her calm voice, the condensation from her breath curls and lingers before her face.]
Samantha: On this day, back in 1931, the first shots in the Second SinoJapanese War were fired near Shenyang, here in Manchuria. For the Chinese, that was the beginning of World War Two, more than a decade before the United States would be involved.
We are in Pingfang District, on the outskirts of Harbin. Although the name “Pingfang” means nothing to most people in the West, some have called Pingfang the Asian Auschwitz. Here, Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army performed gruesome experiments on thousands of Chinese and Allied prisoners throughout the war as part of Japan’s effort to develop biological weapons and to conduct research into the limits of human endurance.
On these premises, Japanese army doctors directly killed thousands of Chinese and Allied prisoners through medical and weapons experiments, vivisections, amputations, and other systematic methods of torture. At the end of the War, the retreating Japanese army killed all remaining prisoners and burned the complex to the ground, leaving behind only the shell of the administrative building and some pits used to breed disease-carrying rats. There were no survivors.
Historians estimate that between two-hundred thousand and half-amillion Chinese persons, almost all civilians, were killed by the biological and chemical weapons researched and developed in this place and other satellite labs: anthrax, cholera, the bubonic plague. At the end of the War, General MacArthur, supreme commander of the Allied forces, granted all members of Unit 731 immunity from war crimes prosecution in order to get the data from their experiments and to keep the data away from the Soviet Union.
Today, except for a small museum nearby with few visitors, little evidence of those atrocities is visible. Over there, at the edge of an empty field, a pile of rubble stands where the incinerator for destroying the bodies of the victims used to be. This factory behind me is built on the foundation of a storage depot used by Unit 731 for germ-breeding supplies. Until the recent economic downturn, which shuttered its doors, the factory built moped engines for a Sino-Japanese joint venture in Harbin. And in a gruesome echo of the past, several pharmaceutical companies have quietly settled in around the site of Unit 731’s former headquarters.
Perhaps the Chinese are content to leave behind this part of their past and move on. And if they do, the rest of the world will probably move on as well.
But not if Evan Wei has anything to say about it.
[Samantha speaks over a montage of images of Evan Wei lecturing in front of a classroom and posing before complex machinery with Dr. Kirino. In the photographs they look to be in their twenties.]
Dr. Evan Wei, a Chinese-American historian specializing in Classical Japan, is determined to make the world focus on the suffering of the victims of Unit 731. He and his wife, Dr. Akemi Kirino, a noted Japanese-American experimental physicist, have developed a controversial technique that they claim will allow people to travel back in time and experience history as it occurred. Today, he will publicly demonstrate his technique by traveling back to the year 1940, at the height of Unit 731’s activities, and personally bear witness to the atrocities of Unit 731.
The Japanese government claims that China is engaged in a propaganda stunt, and it has filed a strongly worded protest with Beijing for allowing this demonstration. Citing principles of international law, Japan argues that China does not have the right to sponsor an expedition into World War Two-era Harbin because Harbin was then under the control of Manchukuo, a puppet regime of the Japanese Empire. China has rejected the Japanese claim, and responded by declaring Dr. Wei’s demonstration an “excavation of national heritage” and now claims ownership rights over any visual or audio record of Dr. Wei’s proposed journey to the past under Chinese antiquities-export laws.
Dr. Wei has insisted that he and his wife are conducting this experiment in their capacities as individual American citizens, with no connection to any government. They have asked the American Consul General in nearby Shenyang, as well as representatives of the United Nations, to intervene and protect their effort from any governmental interference. It’s unclear how this legal mess will be resolved.
Meanwhile, numerous groups from China and overseas, some in support of Dr. Wei, some against, have gathered to hold protests. China has mobilized thousands of riot police to keep these demonstrators from approaching Pingfang.
Stay tuned, and we will bring you up-to-date reports on this historical occasion. This is Samantha Paine, for APAC.
Akemi Kirino:
To truly travel back in time, we still had to jump over one more hurdle.
The Bohm-Kirino particles allow us to reconstruct, in detail, all types of information about the moment of their creation: sight, sound, microwaves, ultrasound, the smell of antiseptic and blood, and the sting of cordite and gunpowder in the back of the nose.
But this is a staggering amount of information, even for a single second. We had no realistic way to store it, let alone process it in real time. The amount of data gathered for a few minutes would have overwhelmed all the storage servers at Harvard. We could open up a door to the past, but would see nothing in the tsunami of bits that flooded forth.
[Behind Dr. Kirino is a machine that looks like a large clinical MRI scanner. She steps to the side so that the camera can zoom slowly inside the tube of the scanner where the volunteer’s body would go during the process. As the camera moves through the tube, continuing towards the light at the end of the tunnel, her voice continues off camera.]
Perhaps given enough time, we could have come up with a solution that would have allowed the data to be recorded. But Evan believed that we could not afford to wait. The surviving relatives of the victims were aging, dying, and the War was about to fade out of living memory. There was a duty, he felt, to offer the surviving relatives whatever answers we could get.
So I came up with the idea of using the human brain to process the information gathered by the Bohm-Kirino detectors. The brain’s massively parallel processing capabilities, the bedrock of consciousness, proved quite effective at filtering and making sense of the torrent of data from the detectors. The brain could be given the raw electrical signals, throw 99.999 percent of it away, and turn the rest into sight, sound, smell, and make sense
of it all and record them as memories.
This really shouldn’t surprise us. After all, this is what our brains do, every second of our lives. The raw signals from our eyes, ears, skin, and tongue would overwhelm any supercomputer, but from second to second, our brain manages to construct the consciousness of our existence from all that noise.
“For our volunteer subjects, the process creates the illusion of experiencing the past, as though they were in that place, at that time,” I wrote in Nature.
How I regret using the word “illusion” now. So much weight ended up being placed on my poor word choice. History is like that: the truly important decisions never seemed important at the time.
Yes, the brain takes the signals and makes a story out of them, but there’s nothing illusory about it, whether in the past or now.
Archibald Ezary, Radhabinod Pal Professor of Law, Codirector of East Asian Studies, Harvard Law School:
[Ezary has a placid face that is belied by the intensity of his gaze. He enjoys giving lectures, not because he likes hearing himself talk, but because he thinks he will learn something new each time he tries to explain.]
The legal debate between China and Japan about Wei’s work, almost twenty years ago, was not really new. Who should have control over the past is a question that has troubled all of us, in various forms, for many years. But the invention of the Kirino Process made this struggle to control the past a literal, rather than merely a metaphorical, issue.
A state has a temporal dimension as well as a spatial one. It grows and shrinks over time, subjugating new peoples and sometimes freeing their descendants. Japan today may be thought of as just the home islands, but back in 1942, at its height, the Japanese Empire ruled Korea, most of China, Taiwan, Sakhalin, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Burma, Malaysia, and large parts of Indonesia, as well as large swaths of the islands in the Pacific. The legacy of that time shapes Asia to this day.
