Relativity (30 page)

He carefully opened the gate and then quietly unlocked the front door. Mum was still asleep in bed. She finally woke later that afternoon and wandered into the living room where Ethan was playing
Minecraft
on the computer.

“Sorry, sweetheart, I think I've come down with the flu.” She pulled her hair off her face and into a ponytail. “You must be starving.”

“Not really, Mum.” Ethan shook his head. “I'm fine.”

D
R. SAUNDERS
set up a pair of large speakers in two corners of his office: black cylinders, like thick pipes covered in dark mesh. On top of his desk, there was a stereo and subwoofer. The setup made Ethan think of a city skyline—hard angles along the horizon, as tops of the buildings tried to scratch the atmosphere, skyscraper to sky.

“My son is an audiophile,” Dr. Saunders said. “These speakers create 360-degree sound.”

Ethan sat down at the desk. “What are they for?”

“I've been thinking about what you said about seeing waves.” Dr. Saunders bent down to check the power point of the stereo. “So, I'm going to play you some music and I want you to draw what you see. Stand right back on the other side of the room, opposite the speakers.”

Ethan positioned himself against the back wall.

Dr. Saunders switched the stereo on. Black speakers emitted white noise. He pressed some buttons and music began, although Ethan didn't recognize it. Dr. Saunders turned the volume up. It was so loud that Ethan almost felt his eardrum straining, his jaw vibrating.

“What can you see?” The doctor shouted from the other side of the room.

Piano music, just a solo pianist. There was solidity to the sound, its notes were firm and grounding. Ethan felt the music inside his body—striking ivory keys resonating down his spine, reverberating deep through the minerals of his bones. He closed his eyes. Notes sent tiny impulses through his nerves. He opened his eyes again.

But Ethan couldn't see anything. No waves. Nothing at all. He stared at the speakers, unsure whether or not he was imagining them quiver slightly. Then, from behind the piano, an orchestra started to play.

Waves radiated from each of the speakers in concentric circles—rings of a bull's-eye, ripples that encircle a rock dropped in a lake. The waves had identical crests and troughs. Layers of loops, one after the next, surrounded each speaker. But when the two bull's-eyes of waves met in the middle of the room, they created a pattern. The geometry of the sound reshaped itself. Rings turned into diamonds.

As the textured music swept across the room, Ethan felt dizzy. Lines formed where the music collided; interference changed the wave front angles, making the waves uneven. In some parts of the room, sound stood still. In other parts, it blasted.

Dr. Saunders stood beside Ethan. “Can you see the sound waves?”

“Yes.”

“What's happening?”

“They're coming out from each of the speakers in circles. Then the circles get bigger, like expanding hoops. When the waves meet in the middle, it looks a bit like a weird, round chessboard,” Ethan said. It was difficult to describe. “Can you see them too?”

“No, I can't see anything.”

As he watched the ripples of sound, Ethan thought about his father. He wanted to talk to someone about finally meeting him. Maybe Dr. Saunders would understand. But Ethan was worried he'd get in trouble or that the doctor might tell Mum. Alison was the only person who knew. She'd made him tell her everything—hidden in his bedroom, speaking in whispers—about where they'd gone and what they'd said.

The halos of music were bigger and brighter now, round waves propagating outward with thickening clarity. Ethan's eyes stiffened; he didn't blink. Sound waves were invisible to everyone else but he could see them. This was his secret world. Entirely his own, his private experience of the universe.

Dr. Saunders handed him a sheet of paper. “Ethan, do you think you could draw the waves for me?”

“Sure,” Ethan said. He made a diagram of the concentric circles and their crosshatched pattern.

“Interesting,” the doctor said. “Could I keep this?”

Ethan nodded. “Dr. Saunders? I was wondering about something. Are there other ways to become a savant? Without having a brain injury, I mean. Maybe I was just born like this, able to see this stuff?”

Dr. Saunders raised his eyebrows. “Brain injury seems the most likely explanation for your savant abilities, Ethan. Cognitive scientists who specialize in savant syndrome believe it's caused by abnormal cross-communication between different brain regions. Your pattern-recognition and numeracy skills are highly developed, and the regions responsible for those skills sit beside each other on the left side of your parietal lobe. But yes, there are other ways to develop savant abilities. Cross-communication can also be caused by other neurological conditions. Autism. Schizophrenia. Epilepsy.”

“Seizures?”

“Your seizures could be a contributing factor. But it's safe to say they were triggered by the subdural hematoma. So no, I don't think you were born with your savant abilities.”

Ethan looked at his feet. Safe to say wasn't the same as certain; it wasn't conclusive proof. Trusting cognitive science sounded like believing theoretical physics. Quantum mechanics, black holes, dark matter and dark energy: they all floated tied to theory's anchor. Ethan didn't need to look into the spinning chasm of a black hole to know that they existed. But just like the exact mechanics of Ethan's brain, black holes hadn't yet been directly observed.

Shaken baby syndrome couldn't be the reason he'd had a brain hemorrhage if Ethan hadn't actually been shaken. There must still be lots of unknowns inside the brain, stuff doctors hadn't figured out yet. Whatever had happened to his synapses and neurons, it made him special.

“Are you okay?” Dr. Saunders asked. “You seem a little distracted.”

“What?” Ethan sat up straight and pulled himself out of his thoughts. “Yeah, I'm okay.”

Ω

ETHAN STARED INTO HIS BLUEPRINTS.
Words and numbers leaped off the pages; equations moved around like cartoons. He redid the Einstein field equations from scratch. Getting out of the wormhole would be the biggest problem.

“Building a time machine is boring!” Alison complained.

Ethan didn't look up. He scribbled something out on the page. What would Stephen Hawking do, he wondered. How did he figure out black holes weren't completely black, but actually emitted radiation?

Alison peered over his shoulder at the sheets of paper—sketches of the time machine, pages and pages of equations, numbers and diagrams—and pointed at the blueprints.

“That's a lot of drawings of doughnuts,” she said.

“They're not doughnuts.”

“Now I'm hungry. What are they, then?”

“Closed time-like curves. Gravitational fields bend the fabric of space-time and it makes something that looks like a doughnut. In geometry, it's called a torus. So to go backward in time, I just race around the doughnut, going further back into the past with each lap.”

“That made zero sense. You're going to race around a doughnut?”

“Yeah, kinda. We just need to warp the fabric of space-time, so it loops back on itself.” Ethan took a piece of paper and folded it in half. “Imagine this is space-time. The top half of the paper is the present, and the bottom half is the past. Then, if I poke this pencil through the top to the bottom, there's my shortcut. That's the traversable wormhole.”

“Wait, but why the doughnut?”

“Pay attention. It leads back in time. Like a looping door. Obviously I'll need to do a few laps to go back twelve years. Follow me!” Ethan led Alison to the laundry where he'd hidden at least twenty power boards in a garbage bag.

“We'll need lots of energy to power the time machine,” he said. “All the energy in the house.”

“Ethan, isn't that dangerous?” she asked.

“Maybe. It only needs to work for a second. Before the circuits get overloaded. But I still need to figure out exactly how much electrical current will open the wormhole.”

She wrinkled her nose. “What do you mean, open the wormhole?”

“Alison, I told you this already. Wormholes let you go backward in time, and enough energy will bend space so they open. There's a rule in physics that lets you borrow a huge amount of energy—as long as you pay it back quickly. It's called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.”

“Like a loan? How will you pay it back?”

“In particles, of course. With negative energy.”

Alison gave a hesitant nod. “Ethan, I know you have a special gift and everything. You definitely know what you're talking about. But are you sure this'll work?”

“Yeah, I've figured it all out. It has to,” he said. “Now, one problem will be getting the wormhole to exit in the right place in time. I need to go back to the exact moment I got sick when I was a baby. Twelve years ago. So I can prove my father didn't hurt me.”

“What happens if you get stuck?”

“That's where quantum mechanics comes in,” Ethan explained. “At the center of the black hole is a singularity. Where every law of physics breaks down and everything gets squished. I'd get squished in there.”

“Squished in a bad way?”

“Really bad. So I'm going to quantum teleport. Black holes emit tiny bits of radiation, made of entangled pairs of particles. Negative energy particles fall into the hole and positive energy particles escape. So inside the hole I'll take a measurement of myself together with the incoming Hawking radiation, and then I'll send the results back to you. Then that information can re-create me out of the outgoing Hawking radiation. Get it?”

Alison shook her head. “Ethan, this sounds really risky.”

“That's why we need the doughnut. Time travel is risky, but the closed time-like curve makes it safe. They did it once in Canada, using entangled photons. Don't worry, the photons were fine. I won't get hurt.” He paused and muttered to himself. “Wait. I almost forgot!” Ethan went to the bathroom and came back with a pastel-green can of women's shaving cream.

Alison laughed. “You're going to shave your legs? Suppose it'd make you more aerodynamic, so you'd go faster. Like an Olympic swimmer.”

“No, silly. It's the quantum foam.” Ethan shook the pressurized can and sprayed gel into his hand. It turned into a creamy lather, like a cloud sitting on his palm. “Quantum foam is the foundation of the fabric of the universe. It's subatomic space-time turbulence.”

“Speak English,” Alison said. She poked the wobbling shaving cream and put some on Ethan's nose.

“According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, energy curves space-time,” he said, wiping his face. “On a small scale, space-time is foamy. On a bigger scale, it's fabric. There's still one problem, though. I need to connect the energy so it becomes a single source. Like a little explosion. How can I make it all explode?”

“Ethan, I don't know.” Alison sounded annoyed. “You're not going to start a fire, are you?”

“I know what I'm doing. All I need is something really flammable that will merge the energy. Only for a nanosecond, like a fireball. Just trust me, okay?”

“Flammable sounds like starting a fire to me,” she said under her breath. She inspected the ends of her hair. “Flammable,” she repeated. She opened up her backpack and produced three little candy-colored jars. “Nail polish is flammable. If we pour it on the time machine, that might make the energy combine.”

“Alison! You're a genius!” Ethan grinned.

She shrugged. “I know. But it's quick-dry nail polish so the wormhole better open in under three minutes.”

“That'll be okay.”

“So how long until we can actually use the time machine?”

“I think we're almost ready. But I still don't know how much energy we need. The mathematics is really complicated. I need help with these equations.”

She sat down on the sofa and crossed her arms. “This would be way easier if we just had a flux capacitor and DeLorean.”

Ethan leaped to his feet. “You're right! The flux capacitor! That's the energy that sends them backward in time. We need to watch
Back to the Future
.”

“Finally!” Alison rolled her eyes. “Watching you do math is not my idea of fun. Hey, before we start the movie, can we go to the shops and get some doughnuts?”

Ω

EVER SINCE HE WAS A
teenager, Mark had suffered from migraines. Sometimes they made him throw up; pressure that crushed his brain until it squeezed his stomach dry. Auras appeared; his pulse throbbed through his skull. Once the pain was so bad, he punched a hole in a wall. Not much helped—painkillers, dark rooms, glasses of water—usually he just needed to wait and see it through. Ride the wave, while the migraine slammed him against rocks, eventually washing him up on the shore of the following day.