Chapter One
Beginnings
I was finishing up for the day, resetting everything from a long day of gaming. Everything seemed fine and the process went without a hitch. So why does my coffee taste like tea? Seems like a minor thing to you, I know, but it’s very perplexing and a sign that something went terribly wrong in the process. Something that could alter reality forever.
It wasn’t stale coffee, or bad coffee, or even flavored coffee, thank god they outlawed that shit back in 2543. No, you see tea has been extinct for several hundred years. That’s the problem, a big problem. The extinction occurred as a result of a failed experiment by a bio-tech agro firm to create a super anti-oxidant form of tea that would be a “natural” cure for all forms of cancer. The idea originated with a bio-tech company. The plan had been tested in a laboratory setting several times, data reviewed and vetted by a global committee of scientists and found to be a sound venture with no danger of side effects. This would have been the greatest discovery/invention of the millennium had it worked. The bio-tech company was planning to farm the tea in a controlled environment, indoors at a lab facility, then package and market it through medical industry channels.
The agro firm came into the picture after some lobbying to have the product, a product they had no hand in making, be considered food by the global food administration (GFA). Once the legislation went through, the agro firm stepped in and offered to help manufacture and market the product by having it distributed globally to tea farms all over Asia and elsewhere in the world. They were even going to subsidize new farms in underprivileged and developing parts of the world. This was a genius move on their part, they stacked the deck and came out looking like a cross between Mother Theresa and Martin Luther King. “Let’s help save the world by giving global farmers a chance to cure cancer.” Wow, the marketing campaign was insidious now that I think back to those days. It was like watching Hitler sell his final solution. These guys were slick, slicker than alligator shit, a line from one of my favorite old-time sing-along songs. But I digress. What did the agro firm have to benefit? The standard contract they’ve been pushing for centuries. We own it, all of it. We can come take it when we want. We manage the distribution and sales of the product, giving a salary to the “farmer”, a neuvo term for slave. Essentially we own tea, all species of tea everywhere, forever.
So, what went wrong? Well first off the bio-tech research only involved one species of tea that was chosen for its specific biochemistry and genetic properties. It had been easy to grow indoors and was hearty against all the chemical and gene alterations that were necessary to create the desired medicinal effects. In the hands of the agro firm the process was modified so that, once planted, nature would take its course and cause the gene mutation to spread through the world like a virus. In one season all forms of tea everywhere would have these new genetic markers making them intellectual property of this agro firm. To accomplish this the gene markers were modified, a modification thought to be benign. A second factor was that the trials were never conducted outdoors. There are soil impurities and environmental factors that were never taken into account. These points all contributed to the great catastrophe. That was a mess. A mess that has to be witnessed in person several times to fully comprehend. I’ve been there six times already and I still don’t believe my eyes.
But there is a silver lining. As the mutation spread, it also infected animals and people resulting in a complete elimination of all forms of cancer in all animal life on earth. You gotta piss your pants laughing at this little piece of divine justice! Of course “the A-firm”, as we like to call them, tried to claim ownership of this mutation in people but lost that battle in the global court system (GCS) since they hadn’t filed a patent covering the mutation in anything other than tea. They were too focused, too narrow-minded and effectively put a noose around their own neck. Two things resulted from this mishap. The first, obviously, cancer was cured. But more importantly the firm went bankrupt and lost all patents since they could not pay the maintenance fees. Food and many other products that depend on agriculture are now in the hands of the people again. Hurray, people, the glue that holds the world together. Lovely people. People who need people, blah, blah, blah…. Sorry, I get carried away when I get to that part. It’s in the hands of the people in the sense that the world government organization (WGO) controls it. Instead of taking bribes and kickbacks from A-firm they can skim directly off the top, by raising our taxes. The second change was that the word ‘affirm’ was removed from the English language due to the negative association with A-firm. Ironic how a positive word became forever corrupted by its association with a negative event. So, that’s the story of how tea became extinct. Why then is there tea in my coffee mug? It’s not even a good quality tea. It’s like the cheap shit you get in bags at the grocery store, back when they had grocery stores.
This is some bad shit and I’m getting worried. I need to figure out what went wrong with the game reset or this could be really bad. I don’t understand, I’ve never, never, never fucked this up. What am I going to do? Think. Remember. No one ever said being an arcade operator would be easy but this part of the job never goes wrong. God no, this can’t be happening. It can’t be hyper dimensional quantum interference, that much I can rule out. Hyperspace foliation! No, that wouldn’t do this as it’s a quasi-classical effect. Think, think. Ah! Asynchronization of the closed time-like parallel space-time copies! That would do it!! Could do it! But, didn’t do it. There has to be an incorrect initial condition. Something was not reset properly. But how, this is a no brainer. This never goes wrong. It’s never gone wrong.
So much for the greatest scientific discovery in the history of mankind. This shit is broke. Yeah, we cured cancer by accident but this was a true work of genius. A game changer for the history of mankind. About 40 years ago theoretical physicists found the Holy Grail, Einstein’s dream. They managed to discover the unified field theory and along with it a self-consistent theory of gravity and quantum field theory. They completely solved quantum gravity and can now calculate quantum gravitational effects as easily as they can calculate the emission spectrum of the hydrogen atom. But a few interesting surprises emerged. String theorists were right in some sense that our universe has extra dimensions. I give credit to Kaluza and Klein for that one, they were the true innovators. But string theory itself didn’t pan out. One surprise was that we discovered that dimensionality can vary in time! In fact we now know how to create and destroy extra dimensions at will. During the process of working out the theory researchers developed toy models, partial solutions that demonstrated how finite chunks of space-time could be copied and brought into the present. This is colloquially referred to as time travel, but it isn’t. Finally we learned that we could tunnel from one parallel version of space-time to another and back. What happens is that when a region of space-time is copied it is copied in the present, the present in the local neighborhood of the copier. The copy exists in extra dimensions so it does not interfere directly with the present space-time of the copier. However, tunneling can occur thus creating interference between the copies. This is where some sophisticated engineering was required to make things work.
By use of control mechanisms we are able to control the tunneling. We can hold multiple copies steady and prevent leakage from one to the other. I know you’re worried about the “tail”, that ubiquitous part of any wave function that makes spooky things happen. It is a concern but didn’t lead to our current predicament. We are able to monitor leakage in the tail and direct the runoff into extra dimensions, extra dimensions we create as we need them. It’s really amazing. Because the copies are finite in extent in their own “time” they need to be closed so that everything in time wraps around in a closed time-like curve. I’m trying my best to explain it, the math works out. This doesn’t mean that time in our sense does not move forward. The entire copy evolves with its time, cycling round and round, but always moving forward with respect to our time. Kind of like a helix. So every time, there’s that bad word again, a copy is made more dimensions are created and hence our space-time continuum gets bigger in a sense. This has created a sort of new environmental problem. We keep making dimensions to dump things in, copies of other space-time regions, quantum tail runoff, etc. It’s a kind of pollution and it has greatly increased the entropy of the universe.
This led to the development of “the Ache”, a mild headache like feeling that permeates the entire body down to the bones, for the entire Earth population (and probably for all populations in the universe). This is a level 2-3 pain that’s present 24/7. This is due to an increase in pressure from all the extra dimensions and the stuff in them. Since an extra dimension is everywhere, at every point in our space-time, every point of your body is under pressure. When people first started reporting symptoms migraine sufferers said they’d rather have a migraine than the Ache because you cannot focus attention on even one part of your body that feels Okay.
What have we used this unified field theory for? Historically the value of a scientific pursuit has been measured by the technology it produces. That’s one of the ways science benefits mankind. For a long time particle physics, high energy theory and general relativity have only produced huge money drains. Not a popular thing to do, spend countless tax dollars building machines to see if you can get another baryon state to pop into existence for less than an attosecond. You can’t make anything useful from an unstable particle. But we finally did make something the people wanted. The ultimate virtual reality game, paint ball with weapons of mass destruction. It’s an awesome sight to see. People also use this technology for exotic travel to other times and even for education. That’s my favorite thing to do. That’s what I meant when I said that you have to see it several times to fully comprehend it, referring to the tea catastrophe.
My favorite thing to do is go see Albert Einstein give his lecture on relativity at the University of Chicago in 1921. I use a ticket I purchased at a collectible shop each time I go. Funny how no one ever comments on the fact that it’s old looking, brown and stained. By the way that’s also how I know what tea tastes like. I’ve had it in other copies of the space-time continuum. But the “virtual” war games are the most popular experience. Imagine that you could go to World War Two and fight alongside the allied forces, storming the beaches at Normandy. Hell, you could go to an event in the copy and be Hitler, or you could push the button. All this is possible. We get some groups but individual play is the most popular. A copy of when you want to go is created then held in a closed loop state. The player is tunneled into the copy and once there can do whatever they want for a fixed amount of time. Since time is closed in the copy, when the play is over and the player tunneled back to the here and now, no time has passed. That is no time in the here and now, in our real universe. So you get to experience whatever you want, for as long as you want (long but finite) and no time has passed in your life.
I’m not explaining it very well, I know, but I do have a lot on my mind right now. This is helping me relax so, thanks for listening. These arcades were the invention of the theorists who worked out the unified theory and all the related particulars. They are very popular, actually the most popular form of entertainment. People don’t go to the movies anymore, they come to an arcade to enter another part of space-time to see a movie. It’s so popular and lucrative because no one has any motivation to do anything but get numb and escape. The WGO controls everything. It’s like communism on steroids. Corporate communism to be precise. And the Ache is a killer. Sometimes you can get relief while you’re in a copy due to inhomogenaeties in the hyper-dimensional pressure but that doesn’t last long. All aspects of life are regulated by the WGO except for this since it’s so new. It’s the newest last frontier in technology, and probably the last.
So that’s it, there is no more physics left to do. It’s over and done. We have solved the problem of the UNIVERSE! There is nothing left to learn and no surprises. Not unless god materializes before us and yells “Wait! I decree that the universe is no longer what you think it is.” It’s kind of exciting to learn about, but now no one learns physics in school except the basics. You know, classical general relativity (GR) and quantum chromodynamics (QCD). That’s all very pedestrian and you gotta understand classical space-time, nuclear physics etc., just to get by in the world. But you cannot study theoretical physics in university and make a career out of it. There is only one job for a theoretical physicist and that is arcade operator. We are the only ones who can do this shit and that kind of keeps the government in check. They are a little scared of us right now. You learn quantum gravity (QG), unified field theory (UFT), and all other aspects of theoretical physics at a trade school for the sole purpose of running an arcade.
I know you’re thinking this is a waste. Arcade games? You could change the world, go back and stop Hitler, stop the A-Firm and save tea! Why is this being wasted on games? Look, and pay attention, this isn’t some bullshit science fiction fantasy story. This is how reality works. You are NOT traveling IN time, no Back to the Future movie stuff. None of what I just explained violates causality, it can’t. You are not time traveling you are tunneling into a copy of space-time that exists in an extra set of dimensions right up next to you, so close you can touch it. You cannot go to the future or a copy of any neighborhood of a future event, and nothing you do in a copy of the past has any effect on the present. You retain memories of your game but that happened in the present not in the past or any type of past. So you cannot change the present by playing in these copies.
Since the first caveman became self-aware and realized he fucked something up people have been wanting to travel through time to change their past. You cannot do this but you can re-experience part of your past and see what would happen if you did make a different decision. But when it’s all over and you return, everything is the same as it was.
Except it isn’t.
Not this time.
God I really fucked up.
I gotta figure out how to fix this.