Miss Buddha (38 page)

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but the only way
to erase the data stored on a nonvolatile EPROM is to douse it with
a healthy helping of ultra-violet light? Strong ultra-violet
light.”

“That’s correct,” said
Julian. Ananda nodded in agreement, he must have researched this as
well—he
was
pretty
handy with his Mortimer.

“RAM, random access memory, on the other
hand, is easily erased, or changed.”

“Of course. It’s volatile. Just turn off the
power, or write something else to it. That’s how RAM works.”

Ruth smiled, apparently pleased with
herself. “What if,” she said, and pointed to her diagram. “What if
we have the Borneo laser report dually, both to a RAM receptacle
and an EPROM receptacle.”

Julian’s internal geyser rumbled again, and
then he shivered. Then grew very still, very vacuum: He saw, yes,
he saw.

“If we see a polarity change because we
look, even if there had been no change until we did, such a change
is easily made and displayed by RAM, but perhaps not by EPROM. Is
that what you’re saying?”

“I believe that the agreements that make the
EPROM work, run deeper than detecting a looking life. I don’t think
there is a way for the data recorded on the EPROM to be changed
once the particles realized they’re being viewed as to behavior.
And, just to be sure, we’ll keep any source of ultra-violet light
well away from the EPROM.”

“My god,” said Julian. Then, after a few
racing heartbeats, and a better look at the diagram, “I believe
that will work.”

Ananda smiled.

“Coffee for Julian,” announced Melissa.

Ananda made some room for it, and fetched a
coaster out of a drawer.

“What will work?” said Melissa, putting the
mug of steaming coffee down on the bamboo coaster.

Julian looked up at her. “I think Ruth has
come up with a way to outwit the twin particles.”

“Agreement,” said Ruth.

Melissa, interested, went to get another
chair, brought it, sat down. “I’m a big ear,” she said.

“We can’t prove that life is what
facilitates the non-local communication for whenever we look, the
particles know we’re looking and behaves as expected,” said
Julian.

“As agreed,” said Ruth.

“Yes,” said Melissa. “Ananda told me.”

“Ah,” said Julian, looking over at Ananda.
Then, looking over Ruth’s diagram, asked for a clean sheet of paper
and a pen, which the ever-efficient Ananda supplied.

“If I understand Ruth correctly,” said
Julian, while sketching out the Colombia-Borneo experiment again,
“even though the particles will detect that they are being viewed
by life, and so will conform accordingly, their actual state, or
pre-viewed state, will already have been recorded on the EPROM,
which cannot be reversed or altered when we finally look. The RAM
data will be changed—we know that they can manage that, because
they have done so in earlier experiments—but the EPROM data will
not.”

Ruth nodded. As did Ananda.

“So what do you hope to see?” asked
Melissa.

Ruth looked at Ananda and then at Julian.
“I’m not sure,” she said.

“We hope to see the state of the particles
when no one is looking,” said Ananda.

“Yes,” said Julian. “The state of the
particles when no one is looking.”

“Will that prove that life is the medium
that facilitates non-local communication?” Melissa wanted to
know.

“It will show what effect life looking will
have on them,” said Ruth.

“And what effect is that?” said Melissa.

“Well,” said Ruth. “Basically, without life
there would be no particles.”

“So, if life is not looking, there will be
nothing there,” said Melissa.

Ruth looked at her, then at Ananda, then at
Julian, then back at Melissa. Then said to all of them, with a
smile, “See, that’s why I chose her as my mother.”

“I think you’re right,” Ananda told her.

Julian was still catching up. “What exactly
do you mean?” to all of them.

“If life takes absolutely no interest in the
twin particles, there will most likely not be any particles there
at all,” said Ruth.

“And no data will be recorded on the EPROM,”
said Julian.

“Not until we look,” said Ruth.

“We’re going to need a large EPROM,” said
Julian.

“That is true,” said Ruth.

:

And that turned out to be the problem.
Non-volatile EPROMs were normally used to house smaller programs
that would stay active, or in place, even though the computer would
power down. Julian and Ruth spent the next three weeks both on
rescheduling Colombia and Borneo, and on tracking down a
sufficiently large EPROM. They estimated that to capture all the
data from the Borneo twin as it sped toward the Borneo laser would
take at least 2 terabytes, and the largest EPROM chip in production
was 1 terabyte.

Intel, however—owing much of its existence
to Cal Tech in the first place—promised that they could serialize
four 1 terabyte EPROMs for a total of 4 TBs which would be plenty,
with room to spare. Give us two weeks.

And two weeks later, they had the chips
(four sets of them, actually, to facilitate four individual
experiments), nicely aligned and ready for deployment.

They also adjusted the Cambridge particle
firing angles so that the twin particles would not reach their
respective beams for a full twelve seconds, which would give them a
meaningful window large enough to look, then not-look, then look
again. There was some concern that the vastly increased travel time
would minimize the difference of arrival too much, but this—once
the calculations were made—proved to not be a problem, there would
still be an easily measurable time difference between their
arrivals.

That settled, they also had a detector laser
installed at Cambridge, which would provide a sensor beam along
which the Borneo particle would fly en route to the Borneo laser.
This way they would have a complete data stream of that twin’s
behavior, first setting out, then on its way, and then at
arrival—displayed real-time on two trajectory screens, one RAM-fed
and one EPROM-fed (TSR and TSE in their diagrams).

“Twelve seconds,” said Ruth. “That’s the
travel time?”

“Yes,” said Julian.

“So, if we read the RAM-fed trajectory
screen for the first four seconds, then look away for four, and
then look back for the last four, we should receive meaningful
data.”

Julian nodded. “Yes.”

“Looks like we’re ready,” said Ruth.

“Agreed.”

::
86 :: (Pasadena)

The experiments—four separate ones run
precisely eight minutes apart, giving their engineers ample time to
exchange the EPROMs—took place the third week of January 2027.

The results could not have been more
conclusive, nor more astonishing. For Melissa had hit it on the
nail.

Imagine three computer monitors, connected
to individual Central Processing Units (CPUs) each of which is
receiving a direct fiber feed from their respective sources.

Monitor A (TSR—the RAM-fed trajectory
screen) will show the entire journey of the Borneo particle from
firing to arriving at the Borneo beam, a journey of twelve seconds,
as received and passed on by volatile RAM.

Monitor B (TSE) will show the very same
journey, but from data received and passed on by non-volatile
EPROM.

Monitor C will wait for the Borneo particles
arrival at its detection beam and then simply report its
polarity.

The Cambridge crew will of course have to be
aware of, and monitor (which amounts to viewing), the Borneo
particle firing, and so will exist it into place. But their
directions are that once fired, no further human observation of any
kind will be made at Cambridge.

Once fired, the only
viewing of the Borneo particle, anywhere,
by any life
, will take place at Cal
Tech, by Julian and Ruth.

At precisely four o’clock in the morning
Pasadena time (precisely noon in Cambridge) the first particle was
fired into perfect conditions. A countdown was given real-time over
audio connection, four, three, two, one, fire.

At four seconds past four, both Julian and
Ruth looked up from Monitor A and studied the ceiling for
one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-three,
one-thousand-four seconds and then looked back down at Monitor A,
which now showed the unbroken trajectory of the Borneo particle
toward its beam.

Four seconds later Monitor C reported that
the Borneo particle had, as expected, sensed the polarity shift of
its Colombia twin (which was fired as positive, then changed to
negative by the Colombia beam), and instantly turned negative as
well.

Monitor A now painted a long white streak
starting with a bright blip at the bottom left of the screen
(Cambridge) arriving at the top right (Borneo beam) twelve seconds
later, showing an unbroken journey.

Two deep breaths after that (one each)
Julian and Ruth turned their attention to Monitor B which showed
the bright blip at the bottom left—the firing of the Borneo
particle. Then:

A white streak heading for the top right
corner of the screen, reaching about one-third of the way before it
vanished. It then stayed vanished for about another third of the
screen (four seconds) before it re-appeared and completed the
journey to its beam.

Julian and Ruth looked at each other, then
back at the monitor. According to the EPROM, seconds five through
eight of the Borneo-particle’s travel had never happened.

They looked back at Monitor A, which still
displayed the full trajectory.

“Which is what we expect to see,” said
Ruth.

“And the Borneo particle obliges,” said
Julian. “Even producing a bit of revisionist history.”

“Well, we expected life to affect instant
change, revisionist or not, in RAM,” said Ruth. “And prove to us
that the Borneo particle never went away.”

Here they looked up and then stepped aside
as the engineers descended on their Monitor B computer to change
the serialized EPROMs to a fresh set.

This sequence of events was repeated three
more times, precisely eight minutes apart, with the exact same
result (apart from the Borneo twin’s reported polarity which went
positive-negative-positive, to match its Colombia twin, which was
fired negative-positive-negative then reversed by the Colombia
beam).

They reviewed the data on the four different
EPROM sets, and there was no doubt: in each test, the Borneo
particle vanished after four seconds and stayed vanished until
again viewed by life four seconds later, when it reappeared. Each
time.

There was no way of telling (without ruining
the experiment) whether the RAM-fed connected Monitor A (TSR) had
displayed the same information as the EPROM-fed Monitor B (TSE)
during seconds five through eight, for at eight seconds the
particle evidently revised the prior four seconds worth of history
stored in RAM to now show a continued presence; but without
violating prior agreements, as Ruth had put it, it could not alter
the history irrevocably burned into the EPROM.

Did this prove that non-local communication
was facilitated by life? Not as such, but what it did prove
rendered the non-local question moot.

What Julian and Ruth had proved was that not
only is non-local communication facilitated by life, the particles
themselves are made possible by life. Without life looking, there
are is no particle.

Without life looking, there is nothing
there.

“What does this mean?” was Melissa’s only
response to Ruth’s and Julian’s congratulations later than evening:
it was Melissa, after all, who had predicted this result.

“I’m not really sure,” said Julian. “But it
should shake a few people up.”

“It means,” said Ruth, “that I can begin my
mission in earnest.”

“It does?” Melissa looked to Ananda for
support. Surely not?

But Ananda only shrugged his shoulders ever
so slightly, meaning: Ruth had a point.

“No,” said Melissa, refusing to believe, or
accept.

“If there ever was a marriage of science and
religion,” said Ruth, facing her mother. “This is it.”

::
87 :: (Pasadena)

To make doubly and trebly and even more sure
than that, Julian requested eight more sets of serialized EPROMs
from the Intel labs, which arrived two days later. Two days after
that they repeated the experiment, this time eight times over,
eight minutes apart, with precisely the same result each time.

While there had been no doubt in their minds
after the initial experiment, Julian wanted to rule out any
possibility of mistake or fluke and as a result he now had twelve
sets of serialized EPROMs each one showing that at four seconds
(give or take some fraction) after firing, and for seconds five
through eight, the Borneo particle simply ceased to be.

No life looking = nothing there.

:

It was a warm for the season and sunny early
February afternoon. Ruth and Julian sat in his office, the set of
EPROMs safely ensconced in protective, UV resistant rapping, on the
desk between them.

William had brought tea for the two of them,
and Ruth was now sipping hers while Julian looked out the window at
the green meadow of a garden behind his lab. He breathed very
slowly, and very carefully, as if any sudden movement would disturb
the dream and wake him up.

Ruth, a little less awed by their success,
broke the silence, “What now?”

Still a little dazed and careful about
keeping the world in place—for this was a world he did not want to
vanish by some mental blunder of his, this discovery was too
amazing to take any chances with. Even so, he managed to say the
correct thing, what they must do next.