Time Frame (Split Second Book 2)

by Douglas E. Richards

  “Which is why you always blame the fifth dimension for all the bizarre results we see with time travel,” said Cargill. “All the results that seem impossible and random.”

  “Exactly,” said the physicist. “And someone with decades of mathematical training, capable of grasping higher dimensional mathematics, might eventually be able to make sense of it all. Understand precisely why the rules are the way they are. But even without this training, I’m hoping my introduction at least gives you a sense as to how higher dimensions can lead to head-scratching results.”

  “It does,” said Blake. “Thank you.”

  “And this is only the beginning of the thought experiments you can do,” said Wexler. “Imagine if there was a line between two Flatlanders. They could no longer see each other. But as three-dimensional beings peering down from above, we could see them both. Not only that, we could see inside of them. We could reach down and pull out their insides, without breaking their skin.”

  He threw up another image on the screen.

  “Wow, Nathan,” said Daniel Tini wryly, “fancy graphics aren’t your strong suit.”

  Wexler laughed. “You don’t think there’s a computer animation job waiting for me at Pixar?”

  Tini shook his head in amusement.

  “I like using basic images,” explained Wexler. “The simpler the better in my book.”

  “If simple is your goal,” said Jenna with a twinkle in her eye, “then you’ve achieved perfection.”

  “Thanks,” he replied. “I think.”

  He pointed to the image he had just displayed above his head. “Here we have a Flatland bank. The Flatlander shown is blocked from the money, just as surely as we’d be blocked by a vault on our own world. And he can’t see how much money is inside, if any. But looking down from above, we can. Not only that, we can reach inside and take the money without any trouble.”

  “So things that are enclosed in one dimension, impenetrable, can be wide open in another,” said Jenna.

  “That’s right,” replied Wexler. “Basically, we’d seem omniscient and omnipotent to the poor Flatlanders. We could say hello, and our voices would seem to come from nowhere. We could reach down, pick up this Flatlander, lift him through a dimension his mind isn’t capable of recognizing, and plop him down inside the vault. To him, it would seem that he had teleported through an impenetrable barrier.”

  Blake nodded. “So by analogy, a fifth-dimensional being could reach inside of us and remove one of our kidneys without breaking any skin. Could enter a bank vault like it offered no protection. Could seem to be a disembodied voice. Could materialize anywhere, and disappear from anywhere.”

  “Yes,” replied Wexler. “It’s possible that God is a fifth-dimensional being. Or maybe more correctly, any being living in a fifth dimension would seem like a god to us. As far as teleportation through space goes, dimensions can be curled up. Imagine you’re a 1-D creature living on a strand of DNA. DNA is supercoiled, like a string you keep twisting until the twists begin to twist on themselves, and then twist on themselves again. This supercoiling is nature’s way of fitting three billion base pairs of DNA inside a microscopic cell. If you uncoiled the DNA in a single cell and stretched it out, it would be over six feet long. To put this on a scale easier to understand, if a human cell were twelve inches long, the DNA strand inside of it, when uncoiled, would extend for fifty-six miles.

  “If you’re a Linelander,” he continued after a brief pause, “only capable of perceiving the first dimension as it curls through the second and third, you’d have to travel all fifty-six miles along this supercoiled spaghetti to get from one end to another.”

  He arched an eyebrow. “If you’re me, on the other hand, you’d realize the beginning and end of the supercoiled DNA rope are just twelve inches away from each other. I’d just have to take a single short step to bridge this gap. To Linelanders, I’d disappear at the starting line and reappear, fifty-six miles away, in an instant.”

  “Which is what teleportation would seem like to us,” said Cargill.

  Wexler nodded. “These are just simple analogies,” he said. “I’m leaving out a multitude of complexities. But these are the basic concepts of how some of the things we’re trying to accomplish should be possible.”

  “Wow,” said Blake. “My head hurts, as promised. But some of this is actually making sense to me. Well done.”

  Everyone around the table, whose expressions had been spellbound, seconded this praise, except for Tini, who knew the subject matter almost as well as his colleague.

  “Thanks,” said Wexler. “But as I mentioned, this was just the warm-up act. If you really want your mind to be blown, stay tuned. Once I provide just a little more background, I can move on and share a preliminary finding I’ve made. One that I haven’t told anyone about, including Daniel or Jenna. One that, if true, will turn out to be the most consequential discovery in all of human history.”

  This extraordinary statement hit the room like a cyclone.

  “Is that all?” said Cargill wryly, regaining his voice and his sense of humor after several seconds of stunned silence. “And here I thought you might have discovered something important.”

  49

  All those seated around the conference room table stared at Nathan Wexler with unbridled anticipation. Had anyone else made such a bold claim, he or she would have been thought insane, or at least met with disbelief. Not this man. This was a man known to be modest and unassuming, to downplay his breathtaking discoveries—not a man given to hyperbole.

  “Before I share the punchline,” began Wexler, “there is some additional background you need to know. The good news is that this pertains to a time travel suppressor field, our number one priority, so it’s absolutely relevant.”

  “To say we’re all ears doesn’t even begin to cover it,” said Cargill.

  “My work on discovering a way to suppress time travel is going very well,” said Wexler. “Much better than I thought. I’m now confident I can come up with a solution, and soon. Even better, since time travel is a fifth-dimensional effect, I should be able to block it in that dimension.”

  “Is that a good thing?” asked Blake.

  “Very good. Blocking time travel across a large area will require a tremendous amount of dark energy. By doing this beyond our three-dimensional universe, the suppressor field will have virtually no effect on us. I’ll be sharing the mathematics of the situation with Daniel later today, but I did prepare a few images to give you an idea of how you might block an effect in another dimension.”

  “Are your graphics as sophisticated as the last batch?” said Jenna impishly.

  “I wish,” replied Wexler, managing to keep a straight face.

  Laughter broke out around the table.

  “I’d love to give you an example of the true situation,” said the physicist, “as it applies to time travel. But I can’t. If higher dimensional analysis is tricky, trying to do this and fold time travel in at the same time is beyond treacherous. So I have to use a simple, imperfect substitute.”

  “Which is?” said Jenna.

  “Vision,” he replied. “Eyesight.”

  Saying this, he sent an image to the screen overhead.

  “Here are two flatlanders,” he said. “A and B. A can’t see B because there is a barrier blocking his view.”

  Wexler paused. “Now let’s suppose that a Flatland version of Edgar Knight—hopefully not a psychopath this time—invents a device that can bring the third dimension into play. He’s able to place a mirror overhead,” he said, bringing up another simple graphic, “capable of reflecting B’s image to A’s eyes, so A can now see him.”

  “A would have no awareness of the mirror,” said Wexler, “or anything above his head, for that matter. To him, it would seem like he was seeing through a wall. Now, if you wanted to block this effect, suppress it, if you will, you could do this in the third dimension. Like so,” he finished, bringing up the last of his image collect
ion.

  “Suddenly the magic trick won’t work,” he said. “But A has no idea why it’s now blocked when it wasn’t before. The disruption occurs in a dimension he can’t sense, and doesn’t impact his world in the least.”

  “Okay,” said Cargill slowly. “Sounds like you have a good plan of attack worked out for our kettle suppressor. But this can’t be the breakthrough you were talking about.”

  “No, this is just important background,” replied Wexler. “As I said, an imperfect example. I told you such a suppressor would have virtually no impact on our universe. The key word is virtually. With the real suppressor I envision—which is much more complicated than in this example—the impact wouldn’t be zero. It would be exceedingly small, but not quite zero. I calculated it out. The good news is that if we built a suppressor capable of blocking time travel across the entire globe, the impact would be so negligible that our sensors could barely detect it. If we were to suppress time travel on a planetary scale, the math suggests space-time would be distorted around the suppressor a minuscule amount, resulting in a slight interference to solar photons passing by.”

  Wexler paused, shook his head, and erupted into a delighted grin. A grin that looked like it might never go away. “It was then that I had a wild thought,” he said, looking like a five-year-old who had fallen onto a mountain of chocolate. “I thought about a flickering star over a thousand light-years away. One formally designated KIC 8462852.”

  Daniel Tini jolted to attention, almost coming out of his chair. His eyes widened and his mind was clearly racing. “Tabby’s Star?” he whispered as if he had just been injected with pure adrenaline.

  Wexler nodded.

  “No fricking way!” he shouted. “You calculated the effect a suppressor would have on our universe if it was vastly scaled up, didn’t you? You examined it at galactic scales?”

  “I did,” gushed Wexler.

  “Can you two slow down,” said Jenna, “and bring the rest of us along for the ride.”

  “Sorry,” said Wexler sheepishly. “Should have known Daniel would connect the dots right away. Does Tabby’s Star ring a bell for any of you?”

  He surveyed the room and saw nothing but blank stares.

  “I’ve been doing a lot of talking,” he said. “Daniel, do you suppose you could bring them up to speed?”

  “Of course,” replied Tini, whose enthusiasm now matched that of his fellow physicist. He paused in thought, deciding how best to begin. “The Kepler Space Telescope has been looking for planets around distant stars since 2009,” he said. “Not just looking for them, but finding them. Thousands of them. The method for doing this is fairly simple. It just stares, unblinkingly, at 156,000 stars, and measures their brightness.”

  Tini paused. “You may be asking, why measure the brightness of a star if you’re looking for a planet? The answer is that distant planets don’t give off nearly enough light for a telescope to see. But if a planet is orbiting a star, once each orbit, it will come between the star and Kepler’s sensors. When it does, the star will appear to dim—just a touch.”

  Blake nodded thoughtfully. “So if a Kepler way out in deep space were watching our sun,” he said, “it would appear to dim every three hundred sixty-five days as the Earth blocked it.”

  “Exactly,” said Tini. “Our sun would dim by a tiny fraction of one percent. This dimming, and its repetition at precise intervals of time, would tell Kepler the size of our planet, and the duration of its year.”

  There were nods all around, indicating Tini’s audience was still with him.

  “In 2015,” continued the physicist, “a woman named Tabby Boyajian was studying data from Kepler and noticed a star dimming in impossible ways, about thirteen hundred light-years away.”

  “Which explains why you called it Tabby’s Star,” noted Jenna.

  “It’s also been called the WTF Star,” said Tini. “The official story is that WTF comes from Boyajian’s paper, which she wrote with forty-eight other authors, entitled KIC 8462852: Where’s the Flux.” He paused. “Where’s the flux—WTF. Get it?”

  “That’s the formal story,” added Wexler. “But believe me, when people use these initials, they’re thinking about the other meaning of WTF. A sentiment that has never been more appropriate.”

  “When you say it dims in impossible ways,” asked Blake, “what does that mean?”

  “It means Kepler has observed a dip in the star’s brightness of over twenty percent!” replied the physicist excitedly. “Over the course of just a few days. That’s one hell of a flicker. Twenty percent! First it detected a dimming of almost fifteen percent, and a few years later over twenty. A planet the size of Jupiter would only cause a dip of about one percent. And Tabby’s Star has exhibited other, frequent, dips in brightness smaller than these. And they are all non-periodic! There is no way these observations are due to an orbiting planet. And no other star ever observed behaves even remotely in this way.”

  “So what is responsible?” asked Allen.

  “Cosmologists have come up with any number of theories to try to explain it,” said Tini. “But they’ve all failed. No theory has yet been able to account for all the bizarre observations,” he added.

  Tini faced his physicist colleague and raised his eyebrows. “Until now. Right, Nathan?”

  Eyes widened around the table as the others finally realized why the two physicists had been so excited.

  “You’re kidding me,” said Jenna for the entire gathering.

  “It’s a preliminary finding,” said Wexler modestly. “I don’t want to get ahead of myself. But when I thought of Tabby’s Star, I decided to extend the math. It was a wild hunch, but worth exploring. As I said, suppressing time travel on a planetary scale only creates a negligible effect. But it turns out, if you were to set up a suppressor near Tabby’s Star so ridiculously powerful that it blocked time travel in a radius of roughly nine hundred light-years—creating a time-travel-free sphere with a volume of over three billion cubic light years—you’d see precisely what we’ve been seeing. The exact, seemingly random series of dimming events.

  “The fifth-dimensional math here is thornier than ever,” he continued, “and I need to refine the calculations to be sure I didn’t miss anything. But if I didn’t, the conclusions are clear. An alien version of Jenna Morrison, within an alien version of Q5, must have long ago decided that suppression of time travel was a good thing. Such a good thing, in fact, that this civilization blocked it in an unimaginably vast swath of interstellar space, covering many millions of stars.”

  “Unbelievable!” said Jenna. “I’m not sure where to even begin to process that. This is absolute evidence, not just of alien life and intelligence, but a civilization with next-level engineering capabilities.”

  “It’s also evidence that by making a suppressor a primary goal of our group,” said Wexler, “you put us on the right track. It looks like we’re now following in the footsteps of a galactic civilization.”

  “But how are they using this suppressor field?” said Blake. “Does it have gaps, like we envisioned, where time travel is permissible?”

  “It might,” said Wexler. “There’s no way to tell for sure. If there are gaps in the field, they’d be a very small fraction of the total. They’d affect the brightness of Tabby’s Star, but not enough so that we could tell the difference from the baseline. Not with Kepler’s current capabilities.”

  “So they might have implemented Jenna’s exact plan,” said Blake. “In fact, I’d be stunned if they didn’t. They’d have to have solved the problems Jenna is looking into now. How to control access. How to ensure time travel is used responsibly. And who should control access.”

  “Maybe they went the AI route,” said Tini.

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” said Jenna. “Are you suggesting they created an AI to police time travel permissible sectors within their suppressor field?”

  “Yes, exactly,” replied Tini. “They’d certainly be advanced en
ough to create an AI that would be benevolent and up to the task.”

  “There is a troubling aspect to this,” said Wexler. “When we start thinking about the policing of this suppressor field, we need to tuck another question into the back of our minds. Namely, is our use of time travel attracting attention from this galactic civilization?” He raised an eyebrow. “If we don’t choose to control time travel, will they control it for us?”

  Tini whistled. “So this new discovery of yours,” he said, “along with being magnificent, humbling, awe-inspiring, and a hundred other superlatives, is also a bit terrifying.”

  “What you said about this being the most consequential discovery in history is absolutely true,” said Cargill. “I never doubted your judgment on that, but this is even bigger than I’d imagined. This will change how humanity thinks about its place in the cosmos forever.”

  Wexler shook his head. “Not if we can’t disclose it,” he said. “Which we can’t. At least not yet. We’d have to first disclose time travel, along with my theoretical work. Our proof of this alien civilization is dependent on very sophisticated math pertaining to suppressing time travel in another dimension. Without disclosing everything, there is no way to prove that the dimming pattern of Tabby’s Star is anything but random.”

  “So another earth-shattering discovery we have to keep bottled up,” said Blake.

  “For now,” said Jenna. “But this gives us even more incentive to get our own suppressor up and running. To figure out how to manage a world with time travel in it. Once we do, we can disclose this also, and Nathan can get his twenty-seven Nobel prizes.”

  “I’d settle for just being able to live on the Earth’s surface,” said Nathan with a grin. “Being able to get out from under a mountain—literally—would be reward enough.”

  Cargill returned his smile. “It’s a deal. If you’ll work on teleportation, interstellar travel, a time travel suppressor field, and on proving the existence of an advanced galactic civilization,” he said, ticking these off on his fingers, “I’ll work on getting us an above-ground headquarters.”