Singularity

by Bill DeSmedt

  “I’m sorry, Jack,” Marianna said, “but I’m still not clear on the ‘why.’ Say Grishin actually could create this, this abomination. What’s in it for him?”

  Jack leaned forward and began to talk again. At least it looked like he was talking—the sound had suddenly cut out.

  “Mycroft, what’s happening?”

  Mycroft bent over the console. Diagnostic mini-windows sprang into existence in response to his spoken and keyed-in commands. “We’re losing DSL bandwidth, Jonathan,” he reported. “It happens, especially after a storm like the one last night. Let me see what I can do.”

  Mycroft tapped at the keyboard again. “There, that should be better: I’ve lowered the video frame rate to free up more room for the voice-band.”

  With its refresh rate cut in half, Jack’s image was now perceptibly stuttering, looking more like a series of still photographs than realtime video. But the sound was back. Sort of. “So, what I think Grishin—with Vurdalak—closed timelike curve—”

  “Can’t you do something? We’re missing every other word, or worse.”

  “Working, Jonathan.”

  “What’s going on?” Marianna was staring at a blank window where the Antipode telemetry had been.

  “Jack, can you repeat? You’re breaking up here.”

  Jack’s mouth was no longer even close to synching with his words, what there were of them: “—way too dangerous—grandfather paradox—”

  “Mycroft, were losing him!”

  Jack’s face assumed a haunted look, a look that froze there as one last burst of speech came through: “—global causality violation—”

  And with that, the videoconferencing window filled with snow.

  35 | Closed Timelike Curve

  “NOTHING?” KNOX GLARED at the dead videoconference window. “Archon’s shelling out five hundred a month for that VDSL hook-up of yours. How in hell can the bandwidth go to zip?”

  “The automated diagnostics are checking it right now, Jonathan. If you’d like me to see to it personally, I will. I suspect, though, that Marianna would rather have the answer to her question first.” Mycroft looked to her for confirmation.

  She nodded a response, but Knox wasn’t having any. “Same thing, no? We need the connection back up for Jack to tell us what Grishin’s planning with his singularity.”

  “I believe Jack already has told us that, in a manner of speaking.” Knox hated it when Mycroft went all delphic on him. “Well, aren’t you going to share?”

  “It was the last thing he said. But perhaps it would be better if he tells us in his own words.” Mycroft leaned forward to the console mike.

  “Lestrade, search directory ‘Adler libe’ for ‘naked singularity,’ ‘closed timelike curve,’ and, uh, ‘wild-eyed speculation.’ ”

  Best match: Beyond the Black Horizon,’ QuickTime file containing three out of three subject terms. Duration: four minutes seventeen seconds. Play it? “Go ahead, please.”

  A new window appeared on screen. It held a freeze-frame image of Jack Adler’s head and shoulders, cowboy hat and all. Alongside Jack, an intaglio displayed the same blinking question mark that the SEKO-i sim had ended with. Lou Christie’s rendition of “Beyond the Blue Horizon” lilted softly in the background.

  As the song drew to a close, Jack’s image came to life and said, “Hi there. Ready for some wild-eyed speculation?”

  “Where’s this coming from?” Marianna asked, “I thought we were offline.”

  Mycroft paused the video. “We are. This is running locally.” He smiled at her, all innocence. “In light of your expressed concerns about Weathertop’s communications security, I deemed it unwise to stay logged on to Austin any longer than necessary. So I downloaded the contents of the physics simulations library as soon as Jack gave me entree, then closed the link. Everything we were watching, from the Big Bang to the SEKO, was resident on Lestrade here. As is the—mmph!” The rest of his words were muffled by the headlock Knox had him in, the better to administer a vigorous Dutch rub. “Yes! My man, Mycroft! Do we love this guy, or what?”

  “I—ow! Jonathan, please, try to restrain yourself!”

  But Knox was already past his momentary breach of decorum and back to business. He released Mycroft and asked, “What was that search-term again? ‘Closed timelike curve’ ? Jack said that too, at the end. Something about Grishin and Vurdalak and closed timelike curves.”

  The curious phrase sounded familiar somehow, and not just from the aborted videoconference. Then it clicked. Oh-oh!

  “Guys!” Marianna was getting impatient. “Would someone please tell me what’s going on? What’s a closed timelike curve?”

  “It’s, it’s a euphemism. Kip Thorne at Caltech came up with it, to put the media off the scent when they started sensationalizing his research. I’m still not sure how or why, but Jack seems to think Grishin’s planning on using Vurdalak to create one—a closed timelike curve, that is.”

  Knox glanced over at Mycroft, saw him nodding agreement. Right track, then, more’s the pity.

  Marianna didn’t look nearly as pleased as Mycroft with Knox’s performance. From the frown on her face to her folded arms to the way she was tapping her foot, her body language was silently screaming at him Answer the damn question!

  She’ll have to know sooner or later. He took a deep breath and said, “A closed timelike curve is a physicist’s way of talking about time travel.”

  “Time travel?” As she was speaking the words—shouting them, more like—Marianna flashed on a curious, half-forgotten image, of a sealed wall-safe in a secret lab, with something visible through its glass door that hadn’t been there a moment before. She brushed the stray thought aside in order to concentrate on glaring at Jon. “Time travel?”

  “Look, Marianna,” Jon began. “Try to keep an open mind on this. I agree, it’s kind of far out.”

  “Far out?” She became aware she was yelling again and dialed the decibels back down into the merely strident range. “Look, Jon, I cannot go back to Pete with this. Hell, he couldn’t even get past miniature black holes. How do I tell him it’s all about some mystical closed time-wise—”

  “Timelike,” he said. “Closed timelike curves. And there’s nothing mystical about them. ‘Timelike,’ for instance, just means . . . Uh, what does timelike mean, Mycroft?”

  At moments like this, an eidetic memory helped. Mycroft looked inward momentarily, then said, “ ‘Timelike’ refers to any mode of motion that takes more time to cover a given distance than a photon would. In other words, that does not require equaling or exceeding lightspeed—which is, of course, prohibited for material bodies by special relativity. In our current context, a closed timelike curve refers to a path that would allow anyone who traversed it to travel backward in time without going faster than light.”

  “Thanks,” she said, “that makes it so much clearer. Where’s Jack when we need him?”

  Mycroft sounded crestfallen as he said, “Jack’s right here. Lestrade, continue.”

  “If you linked in from the SEKO simulator,” Jack’s recorded introduction resumed, “then you saw how it runs out of gas right where Einstein’s tensor calculus breaks down. Once the equations that embody our best understanding of macroscopic physical law start churning out nonsense, it’s time for science to pack it in. That doesn’t stop us from speculating, though. So, for the next couple minutes we’ll try taking a peek under the hem of Mother Nature’s gown.”

  Marianna breathed a sigh of relief. No offense, but for unscrewing the inscrutable a canned Jack Adler beat a live Mycroft any day.

  “The bad news is,” Jack was saying, “were going to have to do without the pretty pictures this time around. This stuff goes way beyond the limits of our visualization technology, beyond our own human visualization faculties too, maybe. So, if you don’t mind, I’ll just talk you through it.” The image gave an apologetic shrug.

  “Now, let’s imagine we’ve stripped the event horizon off of ou
r singularity, and it’s standing there in what my granddaddy used to call its bare nekkids. What’s it like? Going out on a limb here, but I suspect the first thing we’d notice is, no more Hawking radiation. It’s an artifact of the event horizon, after all, and when that goes away, it should too. That wouldn’t matter much one way or the other for the stellarsized holes, since their radiation output is so low to begin with. But it’d mean you could even cozy up to a primordial-sized singularity without getting fricasseed.

  “So, say you could get in close, what would you see? Wish I had a nickel for every time somebody’s asked me that one. But try thinking about it like this: the singularity itself’s just a point source. So you wouldn’t be able to see it at all—too infinitesimally tiny. What you might see is instantaneous cross-sections of all the worldlines caught up in its vortex. Sort of a smorgasbord of local history, only with everything all happening at once.”

  “Like ‘The Aleph.’ ” Marianna whispered.

  “Like which Aleph?” Mycroft had overheard her and paused the video again. “Aleph as in the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet? Or as in Cantor’s symbol for the cardinality of transfinite numbers?”

  “Neither,” she said. “As in the short story by Jorge Luis Borges. Haven’t you read it?”

  “Not that I can recall,” Mycroft said. In his case, that must simply mean no.

  “Well,” she went on, “Borges’ Aleph is this thing in the basement of a Buenos Aires apartment. It looks like a one-inch sphere, but somehow it contains everything there is—lions and tigers and bears and such. Gaze into it and you see all the objects, all the actions, all the times and places in the universe from every angle all at once.”

  “Perhaps it’s in the Library.” Mycroft turned to his console mike. “Lestrade: Borges, ‘The Aleph.’ ”

  A text window appeared on screen and began scrolling, the original Spanish side-by-side with Andrew Hurley’s English translation. Lestrade’s synthesized voice began to recite, not without feeling, the opening lines about the death of the narrator’s unrequited love, Beatriz Viterbo.

  “Lestrade: Stop,” Mycroft said. “Search ‘lions and tigers and bears.’ ”

  No match, Lestrade reported. Going to closest near-miss. Marianna looked. There were no lions or bears in the lines Lestrade had matched, but there were the tigers she’d remembered all right, part of a catalog of phantasmagoria that went on to list pistons and Persian astrolabes and armies, not to mention all the ants on the planet.

  “Lestrade: Pause,” Mycroft turned to Marianna: “Is that the passage you meant?”

  She set down her coffee mug and walked over to the console for a closer look.

  “Lestrade: Back up a bit,” she said into the microphone. “Pretty good speaker-independent recognition,” she added to Mycroft as, after a momentary pause, the text began to scroll back.

  “Speaker adaptive, actually,” Mycroft said. “Lestrade has been listening to you the whole time you’ve been here.”

  “There! I mean, Lestrade: Stop!” she said, and then she began to read aloud herself, about all the actions of human history, all squeezed into the same infinitesimal point, all rolled up into one single gigantic instant, “ ‘. . . and I felt dizzy, and I wept,’ ” she finished, ‘“because my eyes had seen that secret, hypothetical object whose name has been usurped by men but which no man has ever truly looked upon: the inconceivable universe.’ ”

  Marianna fell silent then, confronted by her own visions, not of the inconceivable universe, but of its fiery, inconceivable destruction. It took her a moment before she realized that Mycroft had started the video again.

  “Whatever it looks like,” Jack’s image was saying, “the key point is, you’d get to see it up close and personal. With no Hawking radiation to fry you, and no event horizon to trap you, there’d be nothing to stop you from skirting the singularity and coming back on out again. And that’s where the real trouble starts. Because the singularity puts out a gravitational field of, far as we know, infinite power. Enough power to do really weird things to space and time.

  “How weird? Well, what if I told you there are orbits around a singularity—closed timelike curves, we call them—that could let you arrive before you left? Meet yourself coming and going. Or your older self would meet your younger self, whatever. Weird enough for you?

  “Okay, you say, that’s pretty weird all right, but where’s the problem? You give yourself a wave and wish yourself a nice life. End of story, right? Wrong. Because what if your future self somehow prevents your past self from entering that orbit in the first place? Then how’d that future self get back there to do that? What you wind up with is an effect that can negate its own cause, because the effect can precede its cause chronologically.

  “Now, we expect this sort of thing goes on all the time inside black holes, and it just doesn’t matter. Normal cause-and-effect can go to hell in a handbasket, so long as it stays under wraps, behind the event horizon. What’s different here is there is no event horizon. Turn this kind of craziness loose on the outside universe, and you’ve got yourself global causality violations, grandfather paradoxes galore. Worst case, you could wind up punching holes in the fabric of spacetime—and you don’t want that, believe me. So let me wind up our magical mystery tour here with an important safety tip . . .”

  The blinking question mark in the small corner frame was now surrounded by a red circle with a diagonal line through it. Jack’s image grinned and snapped the brim of its cowboy hat. “Just say ‘no’ to naked singularities!”

  A fade to black and then Lou Christie was singing a reprise over closing credits.

  Jon turned to her. “Remember the ‘scary stuff that the real-live Jack was talking about before? Well, this is it. Do you know about grandfather paradoxes?”

  “Isn’t that where you go back in time and kill your own grandmother before your mother is born?”

  “Well, yeah. Only without the gender-bending.”

  “I prefer my version. With grandfathers, how can you ever be sure? Grandma might have been entertaining the gardener on the side.” Marianna stopped then. Could Jon’s flippancy in the face of the monstrous possibly be catching? He certainly didn’t seem so blasé about this.

  “This is what Jack was trying to warn us about, right at the end there, before the link went dead,” he said. “What Grishin could do with Vurdalak.”

  Rips in spacetime? Global causality violation? Scary stuff, for sure. But it didn’t seem right somehow—didn’t seem to fit. She gazed into the depths of her cooling coffee.

  “We’ve been asking the wrong question,” she heard herself say. “We’ve been trying to figure out what Arkady Grishin would want with a singularity, when what we should have been asking is . . .

  “What could the KGB do with a time machine?”

  36 | Big Bang

  WHAT COULD THE KGB do with a time machine?

  Marianna’s question hung in the air. For long moments the only sound to be heard in Weathertop’s greatroom was the anachronistic ticking of an antique brass clock.

  Knox’s mind kept edging in toward the topic, only to skitter away again. That hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach was back. Closed timelike curves, time machines—it was all a little too close to his own quantum-inspired nightmare.

  Meanwhile, Marianna was waiting for an answer.

  “Too many possibilities,” he said at last, after it became clear no one else was going to speak. “Too many hinge-points where things could have turned out differently.” Too many knots and elbow joints of sheer potentiality, too many snags where the veneer of everyday reality might wear thin, allowing what lay beneath to gleam through . . .

  “Different how?” Marianna broke in on his thoughts. “Better or worse?”

  “Hmm? Oh, better for Grishin, worse for us.”

  “Give me a for instance.”

  Knox sighed. “Well, how about the 1991 putsch? The KGB’s Alpha Group commandos were supposed to detain Y
eltsin at his villa the morning of the coup. Never happened somehow, but it wouldn’t take much tweaking to make sure it did. And, say what you will about old Boris, with him out of the picture that takeover could have worked.”

  “Way too late in the game,” she said. “By the beginning of the nineties, the Soviet Union was already dead and just looking for a place to fall.”

  “A lot of people weren’t so sure back in August of ’91,” Knox reminded her, warming to the debate and grateful for the distraction. “In D.C. they were bracing for another half-century of Cold War, I seem to recall.”

  “How about Lavrentii Beriya?” Marianna said.

  “The old NKVD chief? Possible. He looked like a shoo-in for the Premiership after Stalin died in 1953. Didn’t happen, thank God. It took another three decades for the secret police to maneuver one of their own into the top slot, and even then Andropov didn’t last long enough to make much of a difference. But, say they could fix it so Beriya did come to power in the early fifties. Give the KGB a free hand and thirty years’ head start, and I don’t like to think about the consequences.”

  “Jon? Remind me again why I’m supposed to want to stop Tsunami from happening?”

  “It’s damned if we do, damned if we don’t, for sure.” Literally, in his case at least. “But at least holding off on the strike keeps some options open. Speaking of which, could we make that call now?” He glanced at his wristtop; there were, believe it or not, more pressing pretexts for an anxiety attack. “We can play guess-the-master-plan some more afterwards. Right now we’re running up against your communications-blackout deadline.”

  “You’re right,” Marianna said. “We’ll have to go with whatever we’ve got.”

  She reinstalled her handheld’s battery, then looked up at him again. “Keep thinking about those what-ifs anyway. You never know.”