Here & There (20 page)

CONTROL ROOM - 15:51:05

Dr. Reidier turns to IS1 and raises his eyebrows in a “Check it out” manner.

O’Brien nods encouragingly.

DR. REIDIER

Well that was dramatic.

TARGET ROOM - 15:51:55

Dr. Reidier stands over the prototypical orange.

The HIGH PITCH of the Quark Resonator fades out.

Dr. Reidier cautiously pokes at it.

The rind resists momentarily, but suddenly capitulates and gives way. A thick, brownish orange juice pours out, covering the pad and dripping down into the lower hemisphere of the acrylic sphere.

GEARS SPINNING NOISE ramps up and down as the Boson Cannons and Pion Beams retract.

Dr. Reidier smells the tip of his finger (which has some of the “juice” on it). Then lightly dabs it on the front tip of his tongue. He squints his eyes in contemplation.

Dr. Reidier turns to face the control room.

DR. REIDIER

Well, that’s funny. Saccharinely sweet . . . There’s no acetic acid.

(pokes at rind)

Maybe that and the D-limonene volatile oil in the rind are what flared up on the transmission side. Muffled the quark echo?

(beat)

O’Brien? Thoughts?

Over the intercom

IS1 O’BRIEN (OS)

Fail again, fail better, sir.

DR. REIDIER

Nobody likes an insubordinate, O’Brien.

Dr. Reidier brushes his fingers against his thumb rapidly, in an effort to shake off stubborn residue.

DR. REIDIER (CONT’D)

Cleanup on aisle 6.

VII

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

~Friedrich Nietzsche

Shallow men suggest luck or circumstance. Strong men claim cause and effect. Discovery is itself a lie told by the ego.

~Zampanò

Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.

~Dostoevsky

Excerpt from University of Chicago, iTunes University episode, Dr. Kerek Reidier lecture from his Physics of Science Fiction course, December 5, 2005

“Judging from a number of your test scores, today’s lecture might be of particular interest: how to build a time machine in four easy steps.”

A laugh ripples around the lecture hall.

“I see I’ve struck a nerve. As always, what we’ll be addressing is not the immediate feasibility of an idea, but rather its theoretical viability. We all remember Lois Lane’s painful date with destiny.”

Another murmured laugh.

“While Superman had the ability to fly and be super strong, he could do nothing to prevent the trauma from the rapid deceleration her body experiences when the Man of Steel catches the high velocity Lois in his arms after she falls out of a helicopter. Likewise Superman cannot help us with time travel, even though he tried by flying backward around the earth and reversing its rotation. I’m afraid once again he underestimated the damage of deceleration. And also showed a complete lack of understanding of temporal dimensional analysis.”

Pause.

“But let’s get on with our four steps in time as laid out in Seife’s Appendix.”
⁵¹

Reidier flicks on a projector, flicks off the lights, and brings up his first PowerPoint slide. It’s a figure of a man standing in his kitchen sticking his arm through a black spherical blob hovering in midair. Across the kitchen, another blob hovers, out of which comes the man’s hand holding a coffee mug, which he extends to cavemen percolating coffee over a fire.

“Step one, construct a small, but stable wormhole, making sure to keep both ends at the same point in time. Like say, in your kitchen. Yes, I can anticipate the hands shooting up the darkness beyond my projector, but this is neither the time nor the place to pursue such banal inquiries as to how we would build one of these. For that you’ll need to take my course next trimester or just go buy one at your local annelid shop.

“Step two, attach one end of your wormhole to something very heavy. Take the other end and stick it to a spaceship that can achieve
speeds of at least 90 percent the speed of light and send it on its way. Due to the time dilation
⁵²
described by Einstein’s relativity equations,
⁵³
every spaceship year will be roughly equivalent to 2.3 years on our beloved terra firma. Clocks at each end of the wormhole will tick away at different speeds. For ease’s sake, let’s say we sent out our expedition in 2000.”

Next slide, a diagram of the spaceship flying through space (represented as a flat ribbon) away from Earth. The mouth of the wormhole is still attached to Earth, the tail to the ship like one long celestial string of spit. Off to the right, the ship heads toward the edge of our universe, and the ribbon of space U-turns below, entering hyperspace (picture a horseshoe-esque path).
⁵⁴

“Everybody with me?”

Silence in the dark.

“Good. Step three is relatively easy. We wait for a bit. Say forty-six years, Earth-time. Then we find a nice M-Class planet, like Reid-upiter, and bring the wormhole there.”

Next slide, same horseshoe-bent space layout, Earth where it was on the top prong but directly beneath, on the bottom prong, the spaceship now rests on Reid-upiter. The wormhole stretches taut between the two, an obvious shortcut through real space.

“Now, by passing through the wormhole, you can go from 2046
on Earth to 2020 on Reid-upiter. Or vice versa. If you were especially forward thinking, you could have started our little mission way in advance with, ironically, step four. You could have sent a message to Reid-upiter long before you began, and arranged for the Reid-upiterians to do the reverse process, beginning in 1974, Reid-upiter time that is.”

“By the time you got there in 2020, the other wormhole could bring you back to Earth for the year 1994, i.e. six years before you even left. Using both the wormholes together, you could skip from 2046 Earth time, to 2020 Reid-upiter time, to 1994 Earth time and have jumped back in time more than a half century.”

“A bit of advice, sell your dot.com stocks at the beginning of 2000 and then short the hell out of them.”

More laughter in the dark.

Often the creation of this report feels like time travel.
*
Traveling from familiar settings to alien surroundings, only to double back again and find that, even though I’ve gone in a circle, I’ve arrived in a completely different place. A shuffle of papers puts me four years back, and a shift of the eye to another pile on my desk drops me in at only a few months ago.

*
Amen, Mama. Amen.

In those notes, those short stories, those video records, e-mails, journals, and audio recordings, everything is as it was. Safe. Or at least preserved.

Unlike a true time traveler, I can effect no change, create no paradox. I am impotent. A mere detective hunting echoes. The tracks are elusive and deceptive. It’s like reading Braille with gloves on.

The source material itself is, not unreliable, but somewhat skewed. It’s the nature of the material. As Luc Sante suggested, it’s impossible to separate self-consciousness from the confession.
⁵⁵
It is not simply an act of laying oneself bare, exposed, and completely vulnerable. A confession is still framed in a narrative, situated within context. Additions and omissions are inevitable, even though quite possibly unintentional or unconscious. E-mails are written to someone, journals for a “secret” reader. Lectures are a performance. And videos offer a confined frame of verisimilitude. But is the footage from the nanobugs objective?

The occupants of 454 Angell appear unaware of the NBs’ existence. To a certain degree, we can accept their feeds as “true” performances. Still, in this ubiquitous unedited coverage, a distance—an inauthenticity—exists. Educated to be cinematically literate, inundated with the mores of reality TV, I find myself longing for tracking shots, a close-up on a character’s eyes, a focus on a subconscious fidget. Without it, I feel like I am being held at arm’s length.

Ironically, the constant coverage and terabytes of video records of the Reidier home obfuscate rather than illuminate. It’s like that old story where the cartographer of the Empire set out to draw the most comprehensive map of the kingdom: he pays so much attention to detail that it ends up exactly covering the territory. As Baudrillard says,
“The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory . . . it is the map that engenders the territory.”
⁵⁶
As time passes, it is the territory, the original subject, that deteriorates to shreds, slowly rotting, but the map persists. Explorers of the now can do little more than wander around “the desert of the real.”

I am not sifting through the remains of the Reidiers, but the allegory of them. The cartographer’s mad project has digitized their essence, performing a sort of alchemy that reduces their lives to two dimensions. Baudrillard’s insights have an uncanny resonance in this world where “the real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks, and command models—and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational . . .”
⁵⁷

So the reality of the Reidiers will be reduced and reconstituted out of the record of the Reidiers—something new, mined out of both the self-aware performance of video blogs and writing and the non-stop feeds from microscopic nanocorders.

In other words, something hyperreal in a space with no atmosphere.

I only discovered the record of Eve’s episode in Chicago after weeks into watching them settle into Providence. It wasn’t the NBs picking up some kitchen conversation or some pillow talk. No. Despite their saturation of surveillance, the Department still missed this somehow.

It was footage, once again, recorded by Reidier’s motion-detecting webcam.

Reidier sits at his desk chair working on his computer, facing the camera. His eyes zigzag, tracking movement across the screen as he clicks away with his mouse. It’s an unnerving viewing experience, watching the outside world from inside the computer, as blind to what’s on the screen as we are to the color of our own eyes.

Reidier finally leans back and stares at the computer. Presumably he found what he was looking for. His eyes remain fixed on one point on the screen, i.e. he’s not reading or searching.

After several minutes, he reaches forward and makes a decisive click. He rests back in his chair and watches a video that we can only hear.

The light sounds of someone shifting papers around. Slow. Sporadic.

An occasional patting sound.

At a distance, muffled by walls and floors, a door opens, footsteps, door closes. Stamping of feet.

“Allô?”
Eve’s dampened voice.
“Allô . . .”

Muted sounds of activity upstairs. The closer light sounds of paper shifting have stopped.

“I am back. And famished. Where is everybody?” Eve singsongs.

More footfalls and dimmed shuffling sounds. A creak as a door opens.

In a much clearer, unobstructed voice Eve announces, “I have found you. I know you’re down here. The light led me,
oui
.”

Crisp, bare clunks increase in volume, like someone pattering down old stairs into an open basement.

“Aha! Z’ere you are!
Mon petit
.”

A baby giggles. Rapid kissing sounds.

“
Où est ton père?
⁵⁸
In the bathroom? Hm? Rye?” she calls lightly.

At a distance, a door opens, footsteps, door closes.

Murmuring.

“Allô . . .”
Eve yells.

“Eve?” Reidier’s dampened voice rings out.

“Oui?”

At this point, Reidier, sitting at his desk, watching this video, shifts positions. He was leaning back, in a somewhat slouched position, but here he changes his posture. He leans hard on his left elbow while pressing down on the right armrest with his right arm, in order to push himself in the opposite direction and extend his torso over the left side of the chair. Simultaneously, his right leg rises up, and he places his right foot on the edge of the chair. Finally, he brings up his right arm and drapes the crook of his elbow over his right knee. It’s a disheveled fetal position.

His face remains expressionless.

Back in the soundscape, more muffled footsteps.

“Down in my office?” Reidier calls.

“Oui. Avec Otto!”
she responds, with a tense tone.

“What did you say?”

A door creaks open.

“Rye, why did you—”

Three footfalls on the stairs.

Silence.

A piercing scream distorts the recording.

From here on out, everything is a muddled cacophony of sounds. Rushing footsteps. Crying boys. Eve screaming. Reidier distinctly saying “Holy Christ” at one point and “Let’s just get a hold of ourselves” at another. Thunks and thumps of furniture crashing to the floor. More wailing from the boys. Several repeated frantic
“Ce qui
se passe?”
⁵⁹
Thundering pairs of footsteps up the stairs. Door slams. More distant rapid pairs of footsteps. More distant door slams. Muffled cries in the distance.

Silence.

The unseen video clip ends. Reidier still sits in his desk chair. He then leans forward, clicks with the computer mouse, and plays it all again.

Reidier watches it eleven times. He never reacts physically, never emotes. The only evidence of some sort of tumult is in how he keeps replaying it. However, if one were to mute the sequence, it would appear the same as if he were studying the various iterations of an experiment.