So now I’m in a cold, dark cellar. I can sense the weight of the stone above me, but I can’t see anything. Up there I know there are undergraduates, professors, all noise and footsteps, but none of that makes it through the thick sandstone. The air is as dry and cold as any midwinter frost, and dark as an Ohio night.
But the dark isn’t complete, and I’m not alone. Two shadows flicker as two men take notes, make measurements, scratch heads. Their table is a block of rough sandstone a foot thick and five feet square, and on it rests an apparatus of mirrors and lights, floating in a bowl of silvery liquid. They are making a mistake, a calamitous mistake, the biggest, most wonderful mistake in the history of the world. Their experiment is doomed to fail, so conclusively there is no hope it could ever succeed again.
Come and see, I try to say to you. Look.
A single beam of white light from one side of the stone, split by the mirrors and dancing back on itself in all directions. The apparatus spins lazily in its silver bath, floating gently as the light burns its mark onto a sheet of photographic paper. The experiment is so delicate, so precise that a horse neighing in the street outside might disturb it; the merest sigh of disappointment could waste months of patient mathematics. It needs to be so sensitive as to be influenced by the spin of the Earth, the movement of the planets around the sun, the direction the beam of light takes as it races across the sandstone from mirror to mirror.
The two men straighten from their work. They don’t say a word. Their faces speak volumes.
Are you watching? I try to ask you.
Weeks of careful work, diligently working out the slightest variations in the speed of the light dancing across the sandstone. Weeks more, because this failure was so carefully constructed that it required the Earth itself to move and dance through the stars. They could see, these great men, how those next weeks would go. The same pains taken, the same precise care, the same results time after time. Failure. Devastating, career-making failure. The results declined to prove the hypothesis. The light’s speed around the apparatus refused to vary, not by the tiniest of fractions.
I try to turn to you, but you aren’t there. Of course. This is 1887. You won’t be born for at least another century. I’ve come too far. I can’t keep hold of you. I can’t picture your smile, the cock of your head as I tell you something you can’t quite believe.
I can’t stay here.
“Well, you know time isn’t a thing.”
And there you are. Young. You can’t be more than seven; long hair that hasn’t been clipped short yet tousling on your pillow. Arms wrapped around me, face buried in my chest as I hug you. I remember this night so well: living it, then watching it, watching again. It’s hard to believe that’s really me holding you. Pale yellow light from your nightlight: fine to set up the experiment, but you need bright white light once you properly start taking readings. I find myself looking for the slab of sandstone, the bath of mercury.
You sniff back a sob.
“You can’t just make stuff up to make me feel better,” you say indignantly.
I laugh, here and in the past.
“You remember going to see Grandma last week?”
“She made teacakes.”
“And do you remember going next week?”
“No!”
You pull your head back and glare, letting me know I’m being silly.
“Because time is like a river, yes? It’s always flowing in one direction, past to the future, out to the sea. You can’t swim against the tide. There’s only now, moving on and on so fast it can be scary.”
“Mummy is better at making me feel better,” you admonish.
I smile, here and there.
Another room, cold again, damp again, thick stone walls. No old men with whiskers and ties bent over a sandstone slab. Not now. This one is as large as an aircraft hanger, two, three. Lights everywhere, spreading their photons at that same constant speed. A platform suspended between two gigantic rings of metal, the two mouths of a snake that burrows through the Swiss mountains to eat its own tail, here and now. The building blocks of nature speed around inside that snake, collide and smash, and the secrets of the universe come spilling out. And there I am, on that platform, my hands in the guts of the machine, trying again to make it do what I need.
“This is still all pretty out there,” the man in the suit says.
“The Director approves,” I snap. “It’s been through every scientific and ethical committee you’ve thrown at me -”
The man in the suit has his hands up in surrender.
“Out there is good,” he says, placating. He casts an eye around the chamber. “Out there is what we spent €5 billion for. I’m not objecting to your time on the collider. If this comes off, it will change the way we look at the universe forever.”
I shrug, and turn my attention back to the computer screen.
The man in the suit gives me a look. Pity. Infinite pity. He knows, of course. The look tells me that. But I couldn’t see it, with my eyes on the computer.
“But it is pretty out there,” he repeats. “Are you ready for it not to come off?”
I don’t answer him. What could I tell him, to make him understand? He knows the physics: he knows the speed of light, the structure of spacetime, just the same way I do. He knows that this moment and the next have always been here, just waiting for us to catch up to them. Fixed in spacetime, inevitable. It only ever looked like it was uncertain because we couldn’t see it yet, that’s all.
“Feynman didn’t take the one-electron universe postulate seriously,” the man in the suit says. “Wheeler proposed it, and even he didn’t!”
“He accepted the idea that positrons might be electrons moving backwards in time.” I shrug. “Is it any more of a stretch to accept that it’s just a single electron pinging around spacetime? It fits the available evidence.”
“Except the number of electrons and positrons in the universe should be equal.”
“Maybe they are; have you checked the whole universe?”
The man in the suit smiles. There’s a look on his face like … nostalgia. He looks like he’s missed this. And I know that all I thought was that he was trying to get in the way. I wonder, not for the first time, what would have happened if I’d let him in a little more. But I didn’t, and I won’t, and I never will, so it’s a pointless thought.
“You’ve put so much into this,” the man is saying. “And there are so many moving parts: data compressing an entire human consciousness, recording it against a stream of electrons -”
“A stream of electron.”
He smiles, and again I don’t see it.
“Something’s bound to go wrong this time. Something unexpected. I just don’t want you to take it too hard. After … everything.”
After everything, before everything, this moment again, here like a bug trapped in amber. This one fixed moment of spacetime that – given enough time – it is inevitable I will see over and again. An entire human consciousness, encoded onto a stream of electron, spread throughout the entirety of spacetime as it pings forwards and backwards in time and annihilates itself in a stream of light. I see everything, from the first moments of the big bang as spacetime cools and takes shape, through to the moments before the end, the big shrink, the entire universe compressed into the size of an atom, ready to begin again, newer, stranger. I won’t be there, snatched away at the last moment to head back again.
From their perspective, I am just a single electron in a lab, transmitting impossible data about everything I have witnessed, everything anybody has ever witnessed. Success, as I measured it then. But I don’t begrudge not being here to analyse the data; only the time between the moments I spend with you.
The man in the suit is speaking again, but I am gone.
“Look at your light,” I say. Do I say it here, now, or there, then? It doesn’t matter; I say it to you.“You can see it because the light hits the receptors in your eyes. They used to think the light had to move through something, like sound through air or water. But because light is everywhere, the stuff it moves through has to be everywhere too. Only we can’t see or feel it, can we? Just the light.”
You cock your head, unsure of what this story is for. Because all stories have a purpose, you know that. Like Little Red Riding Hood telling you not to stray from the path, not to talk to strange wolves. You can’t see the purpose of this one just yet. But you listen.
“So some men worked out that this stuff we couldn’t see that’s everywhere must be like the wind. Sometimes it would be behind us, pushing us forwards; sometimes in front, pushing us back. Depending on which way we walk, we’ll go faster or slower, and we know it’s because the wind is there even though we can’t see it. So they did an experiment, seeing how fast light moved at different times of the year, in different directions. Because sometimes it would be moving with the wind, and sometimes against, and it would get faster or slower just by a little bit. And that would tell us the wind was there.”
“So they discovered the wind?”
Your eyes are bright, your fears momentarily forgotten.
“They were wrong,” I say with a smile. “So wrong it proved the opposite. The speed of light didn’t change, not in any direction. There wasn’t any wind.”
“And that means time isn’t a thing?”
You don’t sound convinced.
“Well … See, not only didn’t the speed of light change then, they found it never changed, not in a vacuum. If you go driving in a car -”
“I’m not old enough to drive, Daddy.”
“I’ll drive. We drive at 60 miles an hour, and you wind down the window and throw a ball in front of us, so hard it goes at one mile an hour. That ball is travelling at 61 miles per hour, yes? The speed of the car plus the speed you throw it. But if you shone a torch out of the window, the light would still be moving at exactly the same speed as if you were standing still. If I drove at the speed of light and you shone the torch, you wouldn’t be able to see anything because the light from the torch would be moving at the same speed as us.”
“That’s silly,” you declare.
“Isn’t it?” I agreed with a smile. “But it gets worse.”
Cold light, white. No windows to let anything else in. The air heavy with Peracide, every surface wiped clean and bacteria free. I envy the light, the speed at which it can leave. I have been everywhere in the universe, everywhen. This is the one place I don’t want to be.
Plastic curtains are drawn around us. The bed against the clean, cold wall is empty. She sits beside me in a plastic chair, hand in mine. We both look at the bed, hoping it won’t be long before they bring you back to it, even if you still sleep for a thousand years. That when they bring you back they can tell us what is happening, how they will make all of this all right again. She squeezes my hand, to let me know she is there.
“Don’t leave me behind,” she whispers.
I look at her, pretending to not understand.
“I don’t want to be here either. I know you can disappear into your work. I can’t. If you leave me here on my own, leave me with this …”
She stops, squeezes my hand again.
“Please don’t.”
I’m gone before I can hear myself lie.
You aren’t crying any more. I think I would be now, if I could. Instead, I just have this sadness, so large it cannot be contained within me and has to overflow hundreds of years in every direction. No matter where I go, the sadness is always there.
“How?” you ask.
“Speed is distance multiplied by time, have you done that in school?” You are shaking your head. “Well, you will and it is. But can you see the problem? If you’re travelling at the speed of light, speed is always the same. Roughly 300 meters per second. But for the sum to work, only the other numbers can change. Distance gets shorter the faster you go, and time moves at a different speed.”
“That is worse.”
“Told you. The only way you can make it work is if distance and time are really the same thing, with one fixed value that just looks like it’s changing because we’re looking at it as two things, not one. Time isn’t a thing. Space isn’t a thing. Spacetime is.”
You look at me suspiciously.
“Are you trying to make me forget to be sad with nonsense?”
“What it means, lovely, once all the maths get tidied away, is that just like every place on Earth is still there even when you can’t see it, so is every time. Time isn’t a river: it’s a landscape, and it’s all there, from the birth of the universe right through to the very last second. It’s all there, now. You just can’t see it. In spacetime, over there is where your mummy and I met. Over there is where you were born, and there’s the first time you spoke to us. I know it feels like everything changes and things disappear into the past, and that makes you a little sad and a little scared. But they’re not gone. They’re just over there. No matter what happens next, you and I will always be here, in this moment of spacetime; me telling you about time and giving you this cuddle. Even when I’m old and gone, I’ll still be here, now.”
But even as I say it to you, I feel myself slipping away.
So now I’m in a cold, dark cellar. I can sense the weight of the stone above me, but I can’t see anything. Up there I know there are undergraduates, professors, all noise and footsteps, but none of that makes it through the thick sandstone. The air is as dry and cold as any midwinter frost, and dark as an Ohio night. Except the dark isn’t complete, and I am not alone.
Except.
The two men are here, as stark and as cold as their surroundings, whiskers and frock coats of black shadow. But neither looks at the setup on the sandstone slab, and the beams of light don’t dance across its surface. One of the men finishes his calculations, and the other just stands. His face is blank. I have been everywhere in spacetime, bouncing forwards and backwards, always trying to find those moments with you, to hold on to them as long as I can before they slip away again. But I don’t remember this one. This moment might be new minted just for me, if that weren’t a physical impossibility. Nothing is new. Everything happened, then happens again. There is just this, forever.
“There can’t be any doubt,” the man with the calculations sighs. “How many more times do we have to torture ourselves? Every time the same results.”
The other man doesn’t reply, at first. His voice is quiet and brittle.
“I don’t see where else we can go from here.”
“We could go on,” the man replies, putting down his pencil.
“To what? It’s all gone, man. Everything, everything we built our universe on. Where do we go from there?”
“I don’t know,” the man admitted.
There was a moment of silence. Cold, dark silence. I can feel the pull of the electron flow trying to take me away from here, back round to you and you and you again. But this time, I resist. This one time, I resist. I want to know. I have seen everything, know everything that ever happened, and I want to know this. I stay, here, away from you, for as long as I can. I want to know.
“But I don’t want to anymore. I’m done with this, this endless repetition, this wallowing. It’s time to stop. I’m ready for what’s next.”
The other man wouldn’t look at him.
“I … I can’t accept it,” the other said.
His friend stood and placed a hand on his shoulder.
“We have to.”
But it is already a memory. I am sliding away, again.
And now I am in the monitoring, miles under the Swiss countryside. Feeds from the ouroboros snake through the Earth and into the computer in front of me. Wires attached to electrodes attached to my skull, ready to feed data back into the collider for the first time in its history. Normally we are only interested in the data we get out of the machine. But you aren’t here, and there is no normally any more. I sit on the edge of sending myself into the electron stream, eyes focused on nothing, tears in my eyes. I hover on the edge of infinity.
I look into the stream, but it isn’t there. This one speck of spacetime we have chosen, and it is empty. Nothing. I almost turn to the man in the suit and tell him he was right, we made a mistake. I made a mistake. There is no electron stream, no one electron racing forwards and backwards through time until it destroys itself in a burst of light. But then the word comes into my head and I know it is true.
Yet.
There is no electron yet.
Because I’m not there. We spent so many years willing ourselves to believe, that what seemed an infinity of electrons and protons was just one on an impossible journey through spacetime, and we never once stopped to consider where the journey started. But it started here, now. I am the electron stream.
I lean forward and pour myself into the stream, and there it is stretching out in my wake. I race forwards, speeding towards the far edge of reality, to bounce off and begin the long journey back again.
And now I’m in a cold, dark cellar. I can sense the weight of the stone above me, but I can’t see anything. Up there I know there are undergraduates, professors, all noise and footsteps, but none of that makes it through the thick sandstone. I think the air must be damp, but it isn’t. It’s just the cold. The air is as dry and cold as any midwinter frost, and dark as an Ohio night. Except the dark isn’t complete, and I am not alone. You can’t be more than seven, long hair that hasn’t been clipped short yet tousling on your pillow. Arms wrapping around me, face buried in my chest as I hug you.
Another room, cold again, damp again, thick stone walls. No old men with whiskers and ties bent over a sandstone slab. Not now. This one is as large as an aircraft hanger, two, three. Lights everywhere, spreading their photons at that same constant speed. A platform suspended between two gigantic rings of metal, the two mouths of a snake that burrows through the Swiss mountains to eat its own tail, here and now.
Cold light, white. No windows to let anything else in. The air heavy with Peracide, every surface wiped clean and bacteria free. I envy the light, the speed at which it can leave. How many times? How many times! There is only this moment. Throughout all of spacetime, the history of the universe, and there is only this moment. Nothing will ever be normal again. Where are you? Why can’t I find you?
“Are you trying to forget to be sad with nonsense?” I think I hear you say.
“That’s silly,” you say again.
And now I am at the monitoring station, miles under the Swiss countryside. Sitting at my seat, eyes on the screen but no longer seeing. I am lost to history, gone in the electron stream, because it is easier than being me here now. I am everywhere, all of spacetime. I am everything, because there is no difference between past, present, future. It’s all already mapped out, every spacetime event there waiting at its coordinates for us to catch up with it. And yet, in this moment, I cannot think what happens next. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe I just sit, plugged into history for the rest of my evers. Or maybe my hands twitch, reach up to pull an electrode from my forehead. Wipe a tear from my eye, and come back. It must already be mapped out, there in the landscape of spacetime it must already be. So why don’t I know?
“Don’t leave me behind,” she says, and I feel the squeeze of her hand.
I feel the pull of forever, and start to slip again.
Dale Smith is a writer and critic working Manchester, England. He mostly writes things about or related to the British TV series Doctor Who, but has also had original short stories published in Interzone, Escape Pod, Dream Theory Media and the Intergalactic Rejects collection. Find out more at http://www.dalesmithonline.com.
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