The ÜberCollider

“Jay, the chronoton report?”

“Right here,” Kubacki offered, moving to touch the datastrip to a thumbclip he was putting on his thumb. “Well, sir, it’s the proverbial good news-bad news.”

“I’ve always hated that expression,” said Gavin Atilano, the President of the Earth colony on 25th Century terraformed Mars.

“No, Mr. President, you just hate the bad news.”

“But you and I are always doing the good news-bad news thing.”

“That’s because there’s always good and bad news.” Atilano rolled his eyes at the ceiling. Then he fixed on Kubacki’s blue eyes.

“I’m an optimist, Jay. Let’s have the good news first.” Kubacki, relieved, looked ready to jump right in. “Please keep it kind of simple.”

“Great. Well,” he began, “just as the Higgs assigns mass to objects as the state vector for all of the operators within a given field—”

“That’s simple? English, please.”

“Oh, sorry. O.K.” He paused. “We’re all screwed, sir.”

“That’s the good news?”

“Oh, no, sorry. I went out of order,” Kubacki apologized. “The chronoton assigns time to everything. We’re still unclear as to how it assigns duration or which direction in time that the particles are assigned, but it does seem to follow quantum field management.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning,” Kubacki continued, becoming more excited, “we can now theoretically travel vast distances without the time needed to do it.”

“Oh boy,” Atilano said.

“All things are interrelated,” Dr. Kubacki continued, “even the same thing as it exists in infinite existential possibilities along the spectrum of position and time. Our mistake has always been looking at ‘things,’” he said, using air quotes, “instead of the interrelationships of things that make them the things we say they are. The relationships are all they really are, all there is. They don’t exist at all if they don’t interrelate. It’s just another flavor of relativity. They can’t exist independently. The bundles of properties average out. We don’t see the fields for the individual items.” Atilano frowned.

Kubacki kept trying. “Chronotons imbue the bundles of relationships with time. They give them the speed of ‘is,’” again with the air quotes. “The speed of ‘is’ is a simulcast.”

“Please skip the air quotes.”

“Alright, forget all that. The short version is that we can. We can communicate faster than light—instantaneously, actually—either with radio or physical matter, by simply observing the chronotons in a field.” Now he had Atilano’s attention. “No more half-hour radio or longer waits, Mars-to-Earth. Theoretically, we can travel anywhere by observing the field, then going myopic again toward the individual thing…a spaceship…a man.”

“Can we do that now?” Atilano asked. Kubacki laughed a little snort.

“No,” he puffed out, “we wish. Not yet. But it’s just a matter of time, which is pretty funny when you think about it.” Atilano had a foreboding that he shouldn’t be celebrating just yet. “You do get it, right, sir? 'A matter of time'?”

“Jay,” Atilano said, “I understand enough to know I should be thrilled. But I’ve only heard half the story, haven’t I? What’s the bad news?”

Kubacki swallowed hard. He knew midnight was coming for him and that his carriage was about to turn into a pumpkin. “The bad news is the anti-chronoton.”

“I know about the is-not particle. I understand the media affectionately dubbed it the s'not particle just to add a political distaste to it.” He looked at the ceiling.

“I actually like the term. I use it. I’m somewhat negative to the whole concept of is-not, existentially—ha! who wouldn’t be, right? Negative—get it? So the slang kind of softens the Armagedden of it all.”

“Well, you can wax picturesque all you want, but is-not was the whole reason for the Go Slow protocol.”

Kubacki was a pale man, but now he went white. “We didn’t go slow enough,” he muttered guiltily.

“Excuse me?”

“I said we didn’t go slow enough.” Atilano looked at him with alarm. “Remember we all thanked God for the 4.5% overabundance of chronotons over the anti-chronotons?”

“Yes,” Atilano answered cautiously.

“The temporal boom—the chronic boom, as they say—that we experienced changed the field vectors. It’s only at a 4.25% advantage now.”

“Alright, so we’re at 4.25% now. All seems the same around here,” Atilano pointed out. “I can live with this.”

“It’ll be the same around here as long as there’s any overabundance of chronotons. Even a 0.0001% advantage would be good enough.”

“But we’re at 4.25%. So we’re still good.”

Kubacki blinked nervously. “It’s decreasing.”

“O.K., that’s bad,” Atilano said, thinking out loud. Then to Kubacki, “How low will it go?”

“It’s not going to stop at 0.0001%, Mr. President. After 0%, who knows?”

“You don’t know if the rate of decline in anti-chronoton percentage will slow or not. I mean, it might slow and stop. As long as it stops anywhere above 0%, we’re good.”

“It won’t slow. It seems to be accelerating.”

“How do you know it won’t slow? It can stop accelerating.”

“O.K., granted, I suppose it could. It’s new science, after all. But it’s a reverse Fibonacci pattern, and each iteration is always less than the iteration before it.”

Atilano thought for a moment and then asked a question whose answer he realized was probably too simple to be true. “Can’t we just turn off the ṺberCollider?” he asked the scientist, smiling hopefully.

“It would be hard, but doable.”

“O.K., O.K., that’s good.”

“No, that’s bad.”

“Bad? What’s the downside?”

“The field collapse would be bad for the Martians. They would all…go away.”

“To where?”

“To oblivion, of course. And all their city, biome, the works.”

“That would be a crying shame,” Atilano said.

“A tragic shame…for science.”

"After all, they were minding their own business being extinct for three billion years until we yanked them into our present with the damn ÜberCollider. And I must say they were really good sports about it all."

"True," Kubacki agreed.

"Oh, we were so clever. Temporal reconciliation to allow two epochs to coexist. Us and them. I mean, what could possibly go wrong, right?"

"Famous last words, sir."

"Is there any way to save the Martians, to keep…all this?” Atilano pointed out of the window to the wonderland that temporal reconciliation had wrought.

“We can let the collider run until we’re all s'not.”

Atilano looked at him with disapproval, then said, “Why wouldn’t they be s'not, too?”

“They have chronotons, too, in their very biochemistry."

“So you seem to favor letting this run on…for science?”

“No. Then we ourselves are probably all going to go away,” Kubacki said gravely.

“I don’t want to go away…” Atilano started.

“…to oblivion,” Kubacki finished. “Neither do I.”

"Oblivion," Atilano muttered. "Wonder how that feels."

“I don’t know,” Kubacki answered. “But if I had to guess, I would say temporal chaos.”

“Is that a fancy term for oblivion?”

“No, just a terrible feeling of existential self-doubt that comes right before.”

"How terrible a feeling? Depressed? Just bummed out?"

"Well, bummed out enough to want to tear yourself apart—physically."

“Can you make me understand that better?”

“Are you a mathematician?”

“No,” Atilano answered. “Never mind. But we will survive if we turn it off.”

“Yes, probably.”

“Probably?”

“There’s a very tiny chance that turning it off may not let it decommission smoothly.”

“And?”

“It may send us to oblivion anyway, along with the Martians.”

“Well, we can’t win. No one wins. So,” Atilano sighed, “if we let it run and the anti-chronotons dominate the field, and you, me, the rest of us have never been…What about my children, my—” He stopped himself. “This is bad,” he said when he spoke again.

“It could be worse.”

“Great. Do the Martians know about this?” Atilano asked, turning back toward the window.

“Yes,” Kubacki answered.

Atilano spun around. “Are you joking? How long have they known,” he asked Kubacki angrily.

“They’ve always known, sir,” he answered. “It's what happened to them three billion years ago.”