Split Second (26 page)

46

This word hit the room like a
fifty megaton bomb. Blake’s mouth hung open once again as he tried to steady
himself.

Teleportation?

Of course, teleportation
, thought Blake. How had they missed it?

Because Knight had done a
brilliant job of misdirection, as Cargill had said. Getting them to think
small, and solely about phones, really had prevented them from taking the next
logical leap. As magicians had learned many ages earlier, human beings were
easy to misdirect.

“The Earth moves through space
at a rate of two hundred and forty-two miles per second,” mused Walsh, as if
talking to himself. “So in
half
of a second,
we’d be looking at . . .” The physicist paused, reluctant to even finish.

“About a hundred and twenty
miles,” whispered Jenna, completing his sentence.

All three newcomers to Cheyenne Mountain
began speaking at once.

Cargill held out his hand as if
it were a stop sign. “Before we get too far ahead of ourselves,” he said loudly
to be heard above the clamor and to stifle the excited cross-talk, “let me
start at the beginning.”

“Good idea,” said Blake after the
commotion from his side of the table had died down.

Blake rose and poured himself a
glass of water from a nearby pitcher, and then poured one for each of his
companions. Walsh took a long drink immediately, with an expression suggesting he
wished it were alcoholic.

“We began with the goal of
tapping dark energy, as you know,” said Cargill. “And then Edgar Knight made
his discovery, and we started considering the possibilities. Including human
duplication. But before we wasted any time discussing this further, we conducted
a series of experiments.”

“Right,” said the UCLA physicist,
“because you couldn’t be sure anything could live through the time travel process.”

“Correct. We had no idea what effect
this might have on life, and especially sentience. So we began by sending back
an assortment of bugs, one by one. A pill bug, an ant, a spider. We ended up
with perfect copies, and none seemed to be any worse for wear.” He paused. “And
just to be clear, the words
copies
or
duplication
are just used for
convenience.”

“We understand,” said Walsh. “You
aren’t making a copy, per se. You’re taking an older version of something and
sending it back in time to join a version that is a split second younger.”

“Exactly. So after we tried this
on bugs, we sent back hamsters. They did fine, also. Finally, we made a copy of
Joe’s dog, a black cocker spaniel and poodle mix named Dash,” he explained, nodding
toward Joe Allen seated beside him. “It was the most important test of all.”

“Why?” said Blake.

“Because if anything had changed
in Dash’s brain,” guessed Walsh, “it would manifest itself behaviorally. And a
man knows his own dog. Joe would know if there was anything different about
him.”

Cargill nodded. “That’s right.”

“You’ll be happy to know,” said
Allen, “that Dash made it through with flying colors. The trip through
forty-five microseconds of time had absolutely no effect on him whatsoever.”

“And the duplicate is still
alive?” asked Jenna.

“Absolutely. Dash and Dash have
become the best of friends with himselves.”

Jenna couldn’t help but smile. “This
isn’t the first time you’ve used that line, is it?” she said.

Allen grinned. “You caught me. But
I still find it amusing every time.”

Walsh turned once again to
Cargill. “So did you then try it on a human?” he asked.

“No,” said Cargill. “That’s where
Edgar and I stopped seeing eye to eye. My feeling was that duplicating a person
wouldn’t be stepping onto a slippery ethical slope, it would be rocketing down
an
ice-cliff
.”

He paused. “Imagine there were two
of any of you. Two exact copies, both of them
you
, just taken from different frames of your life. Since
forty-five millionths of a second is too short to even notice, it’s as though
two of you budded off into identical copies in an instant. So what if one of
you commits a murder and leaves a fingerprint behind? Can
you
get off, claiming your other self did it? And who has signature
authority? Which one of you owns your money and car? Your kids? Your girlfriend
or wife? Who is the real Daniel Walsh, or Aaron Blake, or Jenna Morrison?”

Blake whistled. “I can see where
this could be tricky,” he said. “And I’m sure the more you think about it, the
more complexities arise.”

“Absolutely,” said Cargill.
“Imagine making
ten
copies of
yourself. Just as easy with Knight’s process as one.”

“But you’re saying Knight wanted
to try it anyway,” said Jenna, “despite these issues.”

“Yes. He acknowledged the issues
existed and needed to be addressed. But he became obsessed with the
promise
. His intuition told him that he
should be able to configure the device to go back further than forty-five
microseconds. He saw that as the holy grail. When he realized that Nathan
Wexler had almost certainly cracked this nut, he must have been
ecstatic
.”

“But it’s still only half a
second,” noted Walsh. “And, apparently, Nathan’s equations show that this is an
absolute limit.”

Cargill shrugged. “He’d like to
be able to go back even further,” he said, “meaning, of course, a greater
distance, but a little more than a hundred miles would still suit his interests
perfectly. He was a
Star Trek
fanboy
as a kid, and of all the technology on this show, the transporter machine
ignited his imagination the most. He fantasized about perfecting a technology
that would allow him to beam from place to place. He spent years working on
such a device, but decided it couldn’t be done, at least not for hundreds of
years.”

“Until this came along,” said
Blake.

Cargill nodded.

“But this device
isn’t
a
Star Trek
transporter machine,” protested Walsh. “Yes, you can send
yourself a hundred miles away, but you
duplicate
yourself in the process. So every time you beam yourself to the grocery store,
you create the pesky problem of having another you with a claim to all of your
possessions.”

“I agree,” said Cargill wearily.
“But Edgar didn’t. He envisioned a machine that would do time travel and
incineration in one fell swoop.”

“Is that supposed to be a joke?”
said Jenna.

“I’m afraid not. Let me explain
how he envisioned this working. Say this room is a time travel device. Imagine
you stand here with an electronic transmitter in your pocket. One that is
programmed to trigger the instant it detects that you’re no longer at the GPS
coordinates of this room. Now you send yourself a half-second back in time,
which effectively moves you over a hundred miles in space
—
although it’s really
the Earth that’s doing the moving through space, not you.”

 
“Yeah, we get that part,” said Jenna
impatiently.

“When you arrive,” continued
Cargill, “your transmitter knows you aren’t in this room anymore, and instantly
transmits a signal to the time travel device here. The signal does two things.
It tells the computer to cancel the time machine’s upcoming operation so it
won’t send you back in time yet again. And,” he paused for effect, “it causes
the device to flash incinerate the
old
you, the one waiting to go back in time.”

He arched an eyebrow. “There are
some complexities that would need to be worked out. And Knight would have to
make improvements in incineration technology, but he didn’t think this would be
all that challenging.”

Blake knew he wasn’t following
all the intricacies involved, but the take-home message was clear. And
horrifying. “So basically, teleportation creates a copy of you, and Edgar
Knight’s
solution
to this,” he said
incredulously, “is to
kill
one of the
copies each time?” He shook his head in disgust. “Really?”

“Really,” repeated Cargill.

“That’s awful,” said Jenna,
aghast. “
Beyond
awful. I don’t even
have words for it.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” said
Walsh.

“I feel the same way,” said
Cargill. “But Knight didn’t. He argued this was exactly the way the transporter
machine worked in
Star Trek
, which
never seemed to trouble anyone.”

“But this
isn’t
how it works in
Star
Trek
,” said Blake. “We’ve just been over that.”

 
“I’m afraid it probably
is
,” said Cargill. “I didn’t realize this either before Knight
brought it up. Physicists have analyzed a number of episodes of the show, and
most agree this is how the transporter machine works, more or less. How such a
device would
have
to work. You step
onto the
Enterprise’s
transporter pad.
Your information, your
pattern
, is
scanned into a computer. And then you’re
destroyed
,
basically melted down. And a second later a copy of you is reconstituted on the
planet below.”

“That can’t be right,” said
Blake. “It’s still the same
you
on
the planet.”

“No it isn’t. A number of
episodes reveal this. Episodes in which a crewmember’s information is trapped
in the pattern buffer, and there is a delay in reconstitution. Or in which
two
copies of a transporting crewmember
are produced. Or in which the transporter errs and creates kid versions of
adults.” Cargill shook his head. “So even in the show, the person standing on
the planet isn’t the same
you
who was
standing on the ship. That
you
was
disintegrated.”

“Wow,” said Jenna, dumbfounded.
“No wonder Dr. McCoy had such an aversion to the damn thing.”

Cargill smiled. “Amen to that,” he
said. “And while it seems pretty horrible for the one getting flash fried, Edgar
argued that in practice you would say to the computer, ‘I want to go to the
grocery ten miles away.’ It would calculate the right number of forty-five
microsecond intervals it would need to send you back in time to get there. And
the correct polarity and orientation of the field to move in the exact right direction.
You would give the order, and the next thing you would know, you’d be at the
store. The budding off and incineration of your alter ego would be all but
simultaneous, and
you
wouldn’t have
any awareness of it at all.”

“But the other you would feel
the pain of being fried,” said Blake.

“Not if you did it fast enough.
No pain. Just disillusionment, like on
Star
Trek
. It really would be the same. All you know is that you’re standing on
the transporter pad one moment, and the next you’re standing on the planet—or
inside a grocery store.”

“Could you really signal your
arrival from a hundred miles away before the time travel device triggers a
second time?” asked Jenna. “We
are
only talking half a second.”

“Easily,” said Cargill. “Modern
cell phones can take your voice, digitize it, bounce it off satellites, and
reconstruct it, so your friend a thousand miles away hears you say hello, with
much less than a half-second delay. Admittedly, the cell phone industry was having
problems with conversational latency several years ago, but the improvement
since then has been dramatic.” He shrugged. “Not that you would use a cell
phone for this, anyway. But bottom line, a half-second to communicate an
instruction a hundred miles is child’s play.”

“So Knight was convinced such a teleporter
was feasible,” said Jenna.

Cargill nodded. “Working out
clean, instant incineration was the only real hurdle, and Knight estimated he
could clear this within five years.”

“So was this his utopia?” she
asked. “A world with
Star Trek
transporter devices that eliminate cars and congestion, but with just one
tiny
little
unfortunate side effect
—
you
have to die every time you use it.”

“This is part of his utopian
vision, yes,” replied Cargill. “But he also envisioned a world of free energy,
unlimited food, and unlimited wealth. You can see the potential for this even
with the suitcase-sized version he described.”

Cargill paused. “But there was
so much more he wanted to do. He also saw a world with unlimited copies of
Einstein. Of Mozart. Of Da Vinci. You think a tennis final between the two
greatest tennis players in history, Federer and Nadal, would be a close match.
Knight wondered what a match between Federer and
himself
would be like.”

“It’s demented,” said Jenna,
“but I can’t deny the benefit of a thousand Einsteins. But if you could make
endless copies of the best people in every field, where would everyone else fit
in? How would they get jobs?”

“That’s just one of a multitude
of ethical issues you run into,” said Cargill, taking a page from Blake’s book
and pouring himself and the two men seated beside him glasses of ice water.

“Another is who gets to make
these calls,” said Walsh. “Who decides how many copies of Einstein to make? Who
decides which people in the population are impressive enough to warrant being
copied?”

Blake marveled at how quickly
they had all started thinking of the process truly as duplication, and not time
travel.

“I’m guessing Knight wanted to be
the one making these decisions,” said Jenna.

“That’s for sure,” said Cargill.
“If someone had to play God, he figured he had as good a case for it as anyone.
He
is
one of the most brilliant people
of his generation, and he did invent the device.”

“So what do
you
want to do with this technology?” asked Blake. “
You
meaning Q5. What would you plan to
do with Nathan’s work?”