Here & There

by Joshua V. Scher

  * * *

  * Not even remotely, but I’m taking this guy’s word for it. This was a class for nonmajors?!

  * * *

  “Which leaves us with option number three, the most promising means of teleportation, or as I like to call it, Tele-fax-ation.”

  The class let out a fairly large laugh this time. Most likely this had less to do with the humor and more to do with releasing some of the communal stress that had been built up, considering the contortionistic logistics of traveling through the multiverse.

  “So, how do we do it?”

  Reidier opened his hands outward to his audience, inviting suggestions. None came.

  “As with all of our seeming sci-fi conundrums the solution is pretty straightforward—at least in theory.”

  Reidier raised his eyebrows conspiratorially. He pulled a remote out of his tweed pocket and started the slide show presentation. Slide 1 read 5 Steps from Here to There.

  Next slide, Step 1: Communication.

  “The first thing we need is a reliable means of communicating. There are several important factors wrapped up into this . . .”

  Next slide, Bandwidth, Speed, & Security.

  “The holy trinity of web surfing.”

  Reidier paused for the laughter. Next, an image of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.

  “Why bandwidth? As I’m sure you know, an image of a person, like, say, a digital photograph, takes up a lot of memory. A video of them even more. Imagine how much information is in the whole shebang. Anyone care to venture a guess as to how many atoms make up the average one-hundred-and-fifty-four-pound human body?”

  Sporadic numbers leapt out of the darkness, a hundred million, a billion, ten billion, a billion billion.

  “The average human body, which is 99 percent hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon is made up of over seven thousand trillion atoms.”

  Next slide, a model of an atom, nucleus and orbiting electrons.

  “Inside we also have electrons, protons, neutrons which yield twenty-six thousand trillion trillion total interacting particles inside each of us. Not to mention electrical patterns in our musculature and brain waves. Clearly we’ll need a lot of bandwidth.”

  A slide of the cartoon image of the Road Runner.

  “Next up, speed. We all want our internet connections faster and faster, it only makes sense we’d want our teleportation quick as well. With this technology, however, it’s not only preferable but crucial. Obviously with teleportation we want to ‘beam’ you from point A over at least a somewhat significant distance to point B. The longer it takes, the more information is lost.

  “Right now we can transmit at the speed of light. So if we were to teleport someone from here to say Cape Town, it would take just under half a second.”

  The class laughs.

  “Doesn’t seem like that big a delay, does it? But let’s say we wanted to go from here to the top of Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain on Mars, assuming we are in the closest orbit.”

  A slide of a photograph of what looks like an irritated red wart, until the photo zooms in a little to transform the wart into a huge mountain jutting out of the massive rust-colored landscape of Mars.

  “That trip would take over four minutes. And while that might not seem like a long trip, timewise, consider the mode of transport. Depending on how we actually build our scanning system, the you that is teleported is actually missing four minutes of existence or is four minutes out of sync with your time frame. After a couple tele-ports, the effects would add up. Is that travel time now acceptable?”

  Reidier casts an inquisitive glance out to the class. Only sounds of bodies shifting in seats echo back to him.

  “Agreed. So, for our teleportation machine, we will require a mode of instantaneous communication. And that brings us to our last necessity of our communication technology: security.”

  On the screen, familiar green numbers trickle down as seen in The Matrix.

  “If our communication isn’t perfectly secure, someone could either hack our transmission and redirect our transported essence, duplicate our transported essence, or, even worse, alter our transported essence with a literal and virtual virus. Identity theft would take on a whole new, more literal meaning.

  “Contemporary security systems all rely on classical physics which allows, at least in principle, any physical properties to be measured without disturbing them. But if we were to encode our transmission in measurable physical properties of some signal, then we open ourselves up to undetectable tampering. In order to avoid this, we’ll need to utilize something called quantum cryptography. As much as I’d love to get into that with you, I think I’d be forced to forfeit the status of gut course from my curriculum classification.”

  A few snickers.

  A slide pops up that reads, Step 2: Scanning. “Obviously we’re all familiar with scanners and the basics of how they work, or at least what they do. Take an image, divvy it up into pixel-size quantities, digitize the information, and voilà. So all we would need is a three-dimensional version of this.”

  Up comes a slide of a cartoon of a man being sandwiched into a flatbed scanner.

  “Furthermore, it would need to be capable of measuring and organizing a good chunk more than just the twenty-six thousand trillion trillion total interacting particles inside each of us, but also whatever information we need to describe them: momentum, location, spin, et cetera.”

  A student pipes up, “So this alterative is like just as unrealistic as the other two.”

  “Well, there are some tricks available to us. For instance, hydrogen atoms are fairly fungible. One hydrogen atom is just as good as the next, it doesn’t really matter where exactly the electron is inside of it at any given moment. As long as we get all the intermolecular dynamics lined up right, we could compress that number significantly. We could even possibly go more macro and use anatomy models for organs and such to fill in the blanks as problems arise with anomalies. Either way, at least the body is manageable. The brain might require us to stay a little more detail oriented.

  “There’s a striking difference between measuring order versus measuring complexity. Consider the complexity of . . . Mr. Siemens’s brain.” Reidier gestured to a student sitting to the right side of the front row.

  The class laughs.

  “It is a staggering proposal, isn’t it? Anyhow, his brain is a complex organ that has an exact configuration of a myriad of microstructures in each neuron precisely designed for systemic functioning . . . but that’s just its complexity. How the gunk is put together, as opposed to how it functions.

  “It’s the order of complexity that’s crucial. The brain’s impressive power comes from its parallel organization in three dimensions. How it functions and manages electrical patterns is our mind. And obviously we don’t want to lose that.”

  Siemens, apparently, shouts out his thanks.

  “Now I know, you’re all sitting there thinking, ‘But what about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle? Isn’t that going to taint our measurements?’ To which I say, let the engineers worry about that.”

  Reidier thrusts his hands into his pockets and grins at his class with a particularly pleased expression. The class laughs on cue, as if they realize they’re supposed to.

  “Truth be told, the solution actually lies in the mechanical problem. In order to account for the trillions of bits of information and manage the communication of those trillion bits, we will need a suped-up supercomputer. One that would shame all the other supercomputers put together.

  “We need a quantum computer, which is to say a computing device that, rather than storing data in bits, i.e. ones or zeros, stores information in qubits. With qubits, a quantum computer can hold a single bit of information that could be both zero and one at the same time. For example, a quantum coin toss would be both heads and tails as long as no one actually looked at the coin. If they did, then the coin instantly would become one or the other. That’s the trick. As long as we don’
t look, it won’t choose and both possibilities exist. A sort of peekaboo computer chip.”

  Reidier beams a smile out to the class, perhaps trying to gauge if they’re still with him.

  “Or imagine two marbles in a bowl. The marbles have similar charges so that they repel. As they both try to settle at the bottom of the bowl, repulsive forces push them to come to rest on opposite sides, a little bit up the slope. The marbles are now in a state where we can’t move one without affecting the other. They will only move in tandem.* Of course, the benefit of this paradoxical computer is twofold. One, it provides us the exponential computing power we need. Peter Shor came up with an algorithm that proves a modest-size quantum computer can solve unfathomable problems in fractions of a second. Miraculously, a collection of a mere three hundred atoms, each storing a single quantum bit, could hold more values than the number of particles in the universe. It would render almost every military, diplomatic, and commercial code laughably vulnerable. The most powerful computer ever, and we wouldn’t even have to see it.

  * * *

  * Why does that seem so familiar?

  * * *

  “I would have brought one with me today, but when I put in my request for a prototype to the department head, he did what department heads do, formed a committee.”

  More laughter.

  “The committee ruled, as most unimaginative bureaucracies do, that it was impractical to acquire technology that wasn’t yet in existence. Then they surprised me by delivering a dozen to this very table.” He sweeps his arm, palm opened upward, over the empty table. “Problem is, I just can’t find them.”

  Reidier pulls his glasses down and leans in very close to the tabletop in mock search. The students giggle. Reidier rights himself, shrugs, and continues.

  “The second benefit of this computer is it allows us to circumvent Heisenberg’s pesky little principle. As long as we leave all the information gathering to, and in, the computer, it can account for all the possibilities without affecting any of the actualities. Our quantum computer allows us to know without knowing.”

  A female voice shouts out something unintelligible.

  “Yes, Ms. Echeverria, I suppose that is like Mr. Siemens. However, for our purposes let’s just accept that we can drive a car without understanding how an internal combustion engine functions.

  “Which brings us to . . .”

  Slide pops up that reads:

  Step 3: Duplication

  Step 3: Duplication

  The class laughs.

  “Right, so now that we can both scan and transmit everything we need to know about you, we just have to make, well, you. Once again, the physical construction is the easy part. With some help from a couple trillion nanoscale assembly machines, in some type of amniotic soup consisting primarily of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon, we should be able to construct you in no time.

  “Of course we can’t forget the mental replication, as well. Although with Mr. Siemens it might be easy to overlook.”

  Reidier smiles at Siemens in the front row.

  “So using a series of very intricate and accurate electromagnetic wave inducers, we match the exact impulse patterns in your brain and musculature. Now we’ve finally gotten to the tricky part. This latter stage sort of straddles the fence between step three and step four.”

  A slide with an image of a brain straddling a fence between duplication and animation.

  “Step four is the animation step. The proper duplication of the myriad of electrical impulses flowing throughout your body and, more importantly, your brain, must be, well, sequentially instantaneous. As soon as we’ve properly matched up all your brain waves, your brain must be housing a consciousness to take over the management of electrical patterns. In other words, consciousness. Otherwise, the patterns of charge will simply dissipate. Your brain would no longer be your brain. Nor would a nonelectrically patterned and stimulated brain be able to house a mind.”

  Reidier trails off, one hand stuck deep in his tweed pocket, the other rolling a piece of chalk absentmindedly between his thumb and fingertips. His gaze focuses somewhere beyond the blackboard. It’s only for a few moments. Nothing really. One might mistake it for a simple pause to swallow or to just get one’s bearings in moving on to the next point of the lecture.

  Enhancing the magnification however, one sees his eyes shift quickly from left to right. He’s pondering, not pausing. Thinking. It’s as if he’s writing equations in the air that only he can read. Looking closely, one can even see him get to the end of a line and then jump up to reread the invisible equations that hang in midair. Then he smiles, satisfied, and continues.

  “So, assuming we’ve already solved the communication, speed, and bandwidth issue, as well as the blueprinting and reconstruction of the entire molecular landscape, then we find ourselves in a netherland that straddles the boundaries of both stages three and four. We must not only map out, mirror, and induce cognitive patterns; we must do so instantaneously so as to avoid any loss of information, somehow transforming a static mind into a kinetic one. The transference of consciousness requires an animate host and therefore goes hand in hand with what I’ve thoughtfully termed Golem’s breath, but you might better understand it as the Frankenstein problem.”

  The class laughs. It’s not the laughter of humor, but of tension release. Clearly this last part of Reidier’s lecture has unsettled them.

  “Without this step, all we’ve successfully done is shipped a body, not a person. I’d imagine that our pattern inducer would also be part of the animation process. Like jumper cables or a defibrillator for the mind.

  “As folklore describes it, when Rabbi Bezalel created the Prague Golem in the sixteenth century, he carved the word emet into the creature’s forehead. It means truth or reality.”

  Reidier sighs to himself.

  “For our machine to create reality, it must maintain absolute truth in tracking, transmission, and induction. Just like the Golem.”

  Reidier opens his mouth as if to continue speaking, but hesitates.

  “It also resonates with our final step.”

  Next slide, Step 5: Elimination. The class is quiet.

  “The end of the rabbi’s story climaxes with him rubbing out the first letter of the emet so that only met remains on the Golem’s head. Met means death in Hebrew.”

  The class remains quiet.

  “We have to eliminate the original. Otherwise we get into metaphysical issues, and my math only takes me so far.”

  Again, nervous laughter.

  “This step isn’t as drastic as you might think. Most likely the subatomic scanning process would disrupt the microuniverse that is you to such an extent that you would most likely disintegrate anyway. Luckily, by that time, you’ll already be in South Africa or at the top of Olympus Mons.

  “So, there we have it. Teleportation in five easy steps. What’s next?”

  The final slide is an animation of a caricature of Reidier standing on the left side of the screen, dissolving, and reappearing on the right side of the screen.

  Transcript from the audio log of the Office of the Director of the Strategic Technology, Donald Pierce; 2/1/2007, 3:52 p.m.76

  “Kerek, thanks for meeting me. How fortuitous that you were free,” Pierce says. The sound of a chair screeching as it’s backed up, presumably as Pierce stands.

  “I had finished work early and just gotten home.”

  Chairs rattle as they sit.

  “My apologies, I didn’t mean to take you away from family time,” Pierce offers.

  “Not at all. As long as we don’t go too late.”

  “Of course not. Great lapel pin, by the way. Where’d you get that?”

  “Eve got it for me at a flea market with some matching computer-chip cufflinks. What brings you up to Providence?”

  “A meeting down in Newport and to work out some of the financials with the university. Thought I’d give you a ring.”

  According to Pierce’s calenda
r, he did have a meeting with Rear Admiral Russell Wisecup. However, it was set up later that evening, for the following day.*

  * * *

  * What am I supposed to do with this? Mom finally surfaces for a brief paragraph only to submarine me with innuendo. She barely even says anything, just drops in a little scheduling factoid. Is she commenting on a Departmental oversight? Some typo in the calendar, some screwup in notes?

  Or is she insinuating something bigger? Something about Pierce? Maybe he hadn’t set this up but was planning on it. Or maybe he was a liar who used this as a cover. She never really seems to trust Pierce. Then again, she doesn’t trust anyone. Who cares if it’s just an excuse?

  Unless it’s not Pierce at all who she’s making the insinuation against, but rather the Department. She’s questioning their records. What they’re giving her. Subtly accusing them of sabotaging her work.

  I’m going to need a little more help here, Hilary. You’re leaving an awful lot up to the reader. Trusting me to be smart.

  You can’t do that, at least not in my line of work. The reader isn’t to be trusted. Readers are lemmings. They need to be led. Back around the turn of the century, a grocery store owner took out an ad in the city paper. He wanted two words on a single page, “Post Toasties.” He had too much stock of this new cereal and just wanted to get people asking about it. Somewhere along the way, somebody screwed up, and the entire page was filled with Post Toasties Post Toasties Post Toasties. The newspaper charged by the word. The grocer thought he was going to go bankrupt from the cost. By the end of the day, the entire cereal aisle had sold out. All it took was repetition and a couple hundred “good” readers.

  Readers need to be told. They need guidance. Simplicity. The power of suggestion can’t be wielded lightly. It can be subtle, sure, but not ambiguous. Drink Coke; Think Apple; Mistrust Pierce.