Here & There

by Joshua V. Scher

  Unless she can’t be explicit. Maybe it’s too dangerous? Maybe Mom was worried about being too straightforward. She needed a back door. A way out. Plausible deniability. Maybe she was scared about being right. About being obvious. About finding out.

  Maybe I should be too.

  * * *

  “Speaking of the family, how are they all settling in?”

  “Still unpacking but settling in. The boys love the house. And I found a Whole Foods.”

  “Eve like the house?”

  “The house is beyond our imaginations.”

  Pierce pauses and then gives Reidier an out. “It is a lovely house. Still, Providence is an adjustment, I’m sure.”

  “It’s a charming town. The architecture, the history. Utterly charming.”

  “It is, isn’t it,” Pierce concedes. He pushes a little more, “Nonetheless, you grow up in Paris and everything else is bound to be a little underwhelming.”

  “Eve didn’t grow up in Paris,” Reidier corrects him.

  “No?”

  “Spent her early years in Morocco,” Reidier says.

  “That’s right. Guess she’s been a bit of a vagabond from the get-go. Bouncing around the Francophonie. Moving must feel second nature to her by now.”

  Reidier grunts a yes, yes.

  “How’s your lab?” Pierce interrupts. “Have everything you need?”

  “More than I need.”

  “And your home setup has everything too?”

  Reidier doesn’t answer right away. “Yes. It’s exactly what I . . . I work odd hours sometimes, and the convenience of—”

  “What was it they said Einstein did? Worked for two hours, slept for twenty minutes, something like that?”

  “Einstein was a notorious long sleeper. He said he needed at least ten hours a night,” Reidier says.

  Pierce whistles, “I guess bending space took a lot out of him. Ten hours. Maybe I should have gone into academia, at least for the naps.”

  Reidier laughs.

  “Anyhow, glad the transition’s been smooth and everything’s up and running. Incidentally, I think we may have a solution for your power issues. Ironing out the details, but I think it should give you everything and more. As well as our test site.” Pierce waits a moment and then adds, “So as soon as you’re ready, we’re ready.”

  “Mm,” Reidier grunts. “I am, there’s still work to be worked out in stage four.”

  There’s a rustling of fabric and a slight clatter of a spoon rattling against a porcelain saucer. It sounds like Reidier has gotten the Director’s attention, and he’s leaning in. Still, Pierce doesn’t interrupt the silence. He waits for Reidier.

  “As you know, I’ve been wrestling with stages three and four. Toying with fMRIs77, MEGs78, TMSs79 and ██████████ █████████████████████ █████████. While the results have been informative, they’ve yielded only superficial success.” Reidier hesitates. “It’s a limited process at best, and one that can only be improved upon if we have the option of destroying the brain we’re scanning.”

  “That’s not off the table, if it’s necessary,” Pierce interjects.*

  * * *

  * What the hell is Pierce talking about? Even if we give him the benefit of the doubt and we’re only talking about animal testing, what the fuck? How is that on the table? How is that even near the table? What’s the use in teleporting brain-dead mice or monkeys? And why doesn’t Mom call him on this? It’s like saying the Tuskegee syphilis experiment shouldn’t be “off the table.”**

  * * *

  ** A quick little Wikipedia search yielded an unsettling revelation. Because of Tuskegee, informed consent is now required EXCEPT for US Federal agencies, which can be kept secret by Executive Order. See Code of Federal Regulations Title 45 Part 46 Protections of Human Subjects 46.116.c

  * * *

  Reidier takes it in stride and merely continues, “While that would allow us to obtain dramatically higher spatial resolution of the brain, it won’t get us any closer to the mind.”

  “I see. So physical scanning is not at issue here.”

  “Not at all. What’s tricky and fascinating about humans is that our brain is sort of holographic. In a hologram, information is stored in a diffuse pattern throughout a large region. Destroy three-fourths of the hologram, and the entire image remains. Our memories work that way.”

  “Seems in line with what you’ve already been developing,” Pierce says.

  “It is; it’s theoretically sound,” Reidier sighs. “I just haven’t gotten anywhere with it.”

  It seems Pierce has a keen insight into the delicacy of the creative process. Whether that’s been developed over the years on the job or is an instinctive quality that helped him ascend through the ranks is ultimately inconsequential. What matters is that in spite of the obvious power dynamic and Pierce’s exploitative motivations, he knows how to nurture dispositions like Reidier’s. He knows that a word of encouragement and support can sometimes be even more damaging than harsh criticism to a creator who’s stuck with his creation.

  He waits.

  Silence.

  There are no sounds of Pierce shifting position, and most likely, he has kept his expression neutral.

  After several moments, Reidier continues, “A few years ago a team at UCSD successfully connected artificial neurons with real neurons in a California spiny lobster, but they still can’t capture a single lobster thought. And that’s just a lobster.”

  A utensil drops on a plate.

  “But the human brain,” Reidier sighs again, “it’s composed of a huge number of relatively small distributed systems, all arranged by embryology into a complex social architecture controlled by serial and symbolic systems that develop much later. I can plumb the brain’s architecture, I can rebuild it. But—”

  “Thought is proving to be a little more elusive?” Pierce asks.

  “Yes, it is. The subsymbolic systems will translate fine. At least in theory.” Sounds of someone fidgeting with a sugar packet. “I think they’re somehow hardwired into the architecture. It’s the symbolic systems.”

  “The subsymbolic is, what? The nuts and bolts or plumbing of thought?”

  “Pretty much. Think about a ten-year-old catching a fly ball. All he sees is the trajectory of the ball from his spot in the outfield. To figure out the ball’s path in 3-D space requires solving a host of simultaneous differential equations. Even more equations are needed to predict where the ball’s going. And then a dozen or so more to translate this information into the outfielder’s movements. Very few ten-year-olds know calculus, but a lot know how to catch a fly ball. So the problem is collapsed and translated into the appropriate action all through subsymbolic systems of thought.”*

  * * *

  * Ok, so the subsymbolic systems are just the autonomic “nonthinking” systems. Biological management. Breathing, heartbeat, digestion, that sort of thing. Although from the way Reidier’s talking it seems like it also includes conscious “nonthinking” stuff like grabbing, walking, evacuating, whatever.

  Just a little rocket surgery.

  * * *

  Pierce waits, and then prompts Reidier with, “So the transference of subsymbolic thought will work? Mobility, autonomic systems, developed habitual action?”

  “Yes, theoretically.”

  “That’s fantastic.”

  “It’ll be no small feat. Still, it’s far from comprehensive. Or useful.”

  “Because a teleported subject will be able to run and catch a ball, but not know what a ball is.”

  “I think that’s probably correct,” Reidier says.

  The two sit quietly for a few moments.

  “Especially the way we’re going about things,” Reidier continues. “It’s very linear. Very one-to-one. See something, copy something. Even running numerous processes simultaneously still won’t capture the parallel mode of symbolic thought.”

&nb
sp; “Not yet,” Pierce offers.

  “And, who knows, maybe I just haven’t figured out the right methodology yet to capture that patternicity. I wonder if coming at it from a different way might be more successful. The analogy of catching a ball kind of got me thinking. Maybe we don’t need to know everything to get everything.”

  Pierce once again waits patiently. He doesn’t want to spook the wild idea.

  “Consider thermodynamics,” Reidier posits. “How do we measure the behavior of gas molecules? Depends on how many particles we’re talking about, right?”

  “And the size of the container, but yes. If we’re only talking a few thousand or so molecules per cubic meter, then we’d have to track them individually.”

  “Exactly, consider each one as an individual particle with its own trajectory,” Reidier says. “We’re at the whim of entropy as the molecules dance around the room willy-nilly, bouncing off of each other or not, trying to find the most chaotic arrangement.”

  Pierce continues Reidier’s line of thought, “But if we have a sufficient number of particles, at a measurable density—”

  “Then we can treat it like a gas, rather than a bunch of particles.”

  “And apply the law of thermodynamics,” Pierce concludes.

  “Which works extremely well. The interactions of a single molecule within a gas are hopelessly complex. But the gas itself, comprised of trillions of molecules, has many predictable properties.”

  Now, it’s Reidier’s turn to sit in silence as he lets his idea permeate Pierce. Reidier has dealt with enough grant givers and corporate sponsors to know how to send out an impulse and see how it bounces back, how to lay out enough technological breadcrumbs to lead a patron down a new path, but not too much to come off as patronizing.

  Based on the rustling against Pierce’s microphone, he presumably has leaned back.

  Finally, after nearly two minutes of quiet, Pierce speaks. “So what would be your gas cloud?”

  “Quarks.”

  “Trillions upon trillions of quantum particles?”

  “If I stayed at the subatomic level, I’d be left, so to speak, with the outside of a house without any plumbing or electrical. Like a movie set.”

  “How . . .”

  “There’s the rub. I . . . I’m not certain yet, but I think the trick is in the communication tech. Using the trillions of entangled quark pairs. ████████████ ██████████████████ ██████████████ ████ ██████████████ ████████████████the transitive property. ██ ████ ████████ ██████████████ but it’s all done simultaneously, and it’s all treated like one giant pattern wave rather than a trillion trillion bits of information. Dips down here, up there, then flips. Like an echo inverting.”

  “A quark echo,” Pierce says.

  “Yes. I got the idea from a Murakami book about a unicorn skull.”

  Another few moments of silence punctuated by sips of a beverage.

  “That kind of math, though, you’d still need an awesome amount of computing power,” Pierce says.

  “Not as much as you would initially assume. The key will be parallel logic gate arrangement.”

  “Mm. We’re toying with the idea of purchasing a couple thousand Xbox consoles, linking them all together, and running Linux on them to make you a nice little supercomputer.”

  “Toys-R-Us will be pleased,” Reidier says.

  “Microsoft won’t be, unless we buy a couple thousand games too.”

  The two of them laugh. Eventually the moment passes, and they sit in silence.

  “So no need for any nanoreproduction?”

  “None at all. The target manifestation would be aggregated and organized through quantum induction, the quark echo as you put it, assuming we weren’t teleporting into a vacuum, but into some type of environment that had available quarks.”

  “All quarks are fungible—”

  “One’s as good as the next.”

  More silence, until Pierce breaks the reverie with another probing question, “Am I correct that by taking ████████ ███ A and B, ██████████████ █████, C, ███████, D, thereby bypassing the problems of ███████ Principle entirely?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  Now it is Pierce who grunts. “So as a result of the scanning and transmission process, the subject would be annihilated.”

  “The subject would be conveyed,” Reidier restates.

  “At the target end.”

  “Yes, exactly where we want to teleport the subject to.”

  “But on our end, on a quantum level, the original subject would have been completely altered. Dismantled. The echo would resonate it into oblivion.”

  “But their essence, their pattern would be extracted, preserved, and rendered.” Reidier pauses, but only for a few moments. His tone conveys a slight sense of nervousness as does the increased rhythm of his speech pattern. “What it does is streamline the process that we’ve already set out, precluding the need for the █████ Phase. It circumvents any ethical considerations that could arise in the future.”*

  * * *

  * Even if all this weren’t blacked out, who the hell would get it? Where are you going with this, Hilary?

  * * *

  “What about the original information? Could it be stored? A redundancy, in case there’s a problem with the rendering?”

  “With quantum cryptography there isn’t any need—”

  “Redundancy, Dr. Reidier, bolsters probability projections. Redundancy compensates for accidents.”

  “Yes, of course. With essentially zero transmission cost, you simply send information multiple times. In which case, storage would be necessary, theoretically, and a lot of it.”

  Pierce’s voice abruptly switches in tone as well, to a more conciliatory, reassuring timbre. “Absolutely. It’s a very promising hypothesis. One that you should definitely extrapolate upon.”

  The sounds of sipping.

  “Still,” Pierce continues, “the Department bureaucracy is somewhat of a juggernaut. The higher-ups are most excited about progress. The progress you’ve already made as well as your projected progress.”

  “Aren’t you the higher-up?”

  Pierce chuckles. “Not even remotely. I run things. Make sure everyone has what they need to succeed. I don’t call the shots. But the fellas that do, they couldn’t be more interested in your work. And your success.”

  “Yes, of course. What I’m concerned about, however, is a misstep.”

  “Scientific progress is riddled with missteps. In fact, one could argue almost every major discovery resulted from some sort of trip-up. We’re more than scientists in this venture. We’re explorers. There’s no map.”

  Reidier starts to interject, but Pierce continues over him. “Of course, you need to tease theories out, rethink, rejigger, but you’re focusing on the endgame, and we’re not there yet.”

  “Don’t worry about me getting bogged down, it’s just my process for working out a problem.”

  From the sounds of a table creaking, Pierce must be leaning in. “It’s not you I’m worried about. It’s them.”

  “The higher-ups?”

  “Yes. For them it’s about trajectories, investment velocities, and sunk costs. And what you want will require even more investment from the Department.”

  A few moments of silence.

  “Kerek,” Pierce commiserates, “I know how excited you must be about this new possibility. Hell, I’m excited too. Your work might obliterate velocity altogether, but to get there you’re going to need momentum. And do you know what gives us that?”

  “Progress.”

  “Tangible progress,” Pierce concurs. “Something we can point to and say, ‘Look what we did!’” He continues on, in his soft colluding to
ne, “The work you’re doing is colossal. It’s more than game changing. We’re talking Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Einstein. You’re not on the shoulders of giants. You are a giant.”80

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  “The more success you have, the more power you’ll command, and the more leniency you’ll gain. Let’s give you the time you need to develop your theory and influence you’ll need to implement it if it proves good.”

  A few moments of quiet.

  As deduced by the increase in volume of the whisper, Reidier leans in to Pierce, “You’re right. That does make the most sense, I guess.”

  “You were doing what you were born to do: consider, contemplate, and conjure. But if you’re trying to dig tunnels, you can’t expect the mountains to just sit there.* You’re going to need some support and some cover. Let me do that for you. Ok?”

  * * *

  * No matter how much thought I put into this, how many people I run it by at work, I still have no clue what that little manipulative turn of phrase means.

  * * *

  “Sure, Donald.”

  “Good. So, what we need are some tangible goals to achieve and build on. Goal one: teleporting a physical object. Goal two: a dynamic physical object, like a ticking clock that continues to keep time. Goal three: a biological organism, something that most likely doesn’t tangle us up in this mind-transfer dilemma you’re working out. Finally, goal four: a biological organism that evidences memory, like a trained rat. What do you think?”

  Reidier considers Pierce’s plan. “I’ll have to amend it with subsets. For instance, with Goal one, it’d be best to start with an elemental object, say carbon in the form of a cube of graphite and then progress to a more complex organization of carbon, like a diamond. I’ll need room for a number of evolving iterations.”

  “Sounds like progress to me. You move a diamond, and I guarantee we’ll get continued, generous support. We keep moving forward, and in the meantime, you’ll work out the math on this other way. Hm . . .” Pierce hangs the sound in the air like a snare.