A short sci-fi story about physics and physicists and their apparatus. Copyright Terry Cornall 2022
Author's note: A lot of the weird ideas that Cynthia comes up with were initially just barely authentic or even complete garbage out of my fevered imagination, but as I read more I find more and more of them have (or something like them) been proposed or considered by real scientists in the past.
"Gerald!" came a scream from Cynthia in the bathroom.
"What?" I screamed back, with no great sense of urgency. Cynthia was a bit excitable, and I was feeling nice and relaxed. Great sex and a bottle of champers will do that.
"I've had an idea!" she screamed again, which was quite unnecessary as she was now standing at the foot of the bed, clutching a towel around herself modestly.
"Do tell, I invited", patting the bed suggestively.
"Forget all that stuff we presented at the conference today," she said excitedly, "I've got a better explanation!"
"What, all that stuff it took us, well you, two years to nut out? All that ten-dimensional geometry stuff explaining where the missing ninety seven percent of the universe got to, all that stuff they are going to give us, actually me, I hope, the Nobel Prize for? All that stuff?"
"Yes! We don't need the extra dimensions after all! I think old Benedetti was right. Space-time is fractal!"
I groaned. Fractals. Really. One of those brilliant ideas of the last century that had gone absolutely nowhere. Cynthia had been reading obscure mathematics tracts again.
"Yeah, but don't you need at least one extra dimension to go fractal into?" I asked wearily. Cynthia was brilliant, but she was scatterbrained with it. That's one reason why I was her boss. Officially at least. Not that she noticed.
"No, just like you don't need extra dimensions for space-time to 'curve' into," she explained, dropping the towel and shaping a roundness with her hands. "Imagine a sphere."
I didn't have to. I was staring at a couple of beauties. Brilliant, scatterbrained and built like an AISI 316L stainless-steel, beryllium-faced fusion chamber, that was Cynthia.
"A sphere is three dimensional, four in space-time," she stated. I nodded. No argument so far, but I knew it was going to get a lot worse before she was done. At least she didn't start off with the tensors this time. Not that they were hard to follow, just so outdated and needlessly complicated.
"Now imagine the surface of the sphere all mountainous, and the mountains all covered with rocks and the rocks all covered with grains of ash, that volcanic ash that is all bubbled and pitted and now imagine the molecules of the ash and so-on down to the subatomic level. Fractal, right? But still four-D?"
"Uh-huh," I nodded witlessly again, starting to be intrigued. "This is gonna be about Relativity's metric tensor, isn't it?"
"Yes, in a way, but stop interrupting," she chided. "Einstein's stuff depends on the tensor metric being smooth. Mine doesn't. Now imagine the quantum foam that fills the space-time down there at the Planck size. All those virtual particles popping in and out and whipping space-time into a lather. Imagine it as a fractal foam, with smaller and smaller sized bubbles, down-down forever, at least as far as we can measure. Also, there is the theory that gravity waves ought to leave a permanent residual distortion of space as they fade past. This should leave lots of little ripples too. Now consider the General Relativity mass/stress equation, and the consensus curvature of the space-time, even in vacuum. How much energy would there be in the stresses in that foam if we didn't accept that half the reduced Planck length is the smallest unit of measurement? After all, we aren't trying to measure simultaneous position and momentum of anything so the Uncertainty Principle shouldn't stop us."
I did a quickie calculation in my head. I'm not completely stupid, they don't give away PhDs for nothing, not yet. A little light went on inside my brain.
"A shipload of it!" I calculated again. "If we forget about Planck, and Heisenberg, and take it to the limit, we can crank the energy density up as far as we like!" I jumped off the bed and grabbed her and danced her around the room. "Enough to account for the missing energy easy-peasy!" Then a thought struck me. I groaned. "No, this is going to turn into Zero-Point Energy, isn't it? They'll just normalise it away."
"Can't," she grinned. "The idea behind ZPE normalisation is that only changes in energy are important, so that some infinite but constant energy level can just be ignored. But what if it isn't constant? What if it is changing?" I grinned back, hoping she was right. She usually was though.
Suddenly there was a banging on the wall, and a shout from the astronomer in the next room of the conference hotel. "Keep it quiet in there will you? Bloody physicists got no consideration! I gotta go to work tonight!"
We fell giggling onto the bed. Cynthia was on top and she grinned at me and wriggled her hips sensuously. Good science always got her aroused. It could be a bit embarrassing at times, especially at a lecture by someone like Harkins, who was one-hundred and fifty years old if he was a day, even if his current bod-shell was pretty and new. Anyway, I wasn't going to waste any time thinking about that, as for a little while we forgot about space-time geometry and tried out a bit of topological experimentation of our own, Kama-Sutra style. That was another book she'd dug up out of the archives and one I heartily approved of.
....
"Gerald," mused Cynthia dreamily, some delicious time later as she ran her hand over the wrinkled bedsheets, smoothing a small patch. "What would you get if you ironed the wrinkles out of space-time?"
We both stared at the smooth patch, then I grinned and answered, "Well, I'm not sure, but you could guarantee it wouldn't be a bachelor's universe!"
Cynthia snorted derisively, and so I thought a bit more seriously about it. "I guess you'd get that shipload of energy back, wouldn't you? It'd be like burning coal, or fusion, only cutting out the chemicals or mass. Converting space-time directly to energy. Wow, talk about your ultimate fuel source, the fossil continuum!"
"I think I know how you could do it," she said quietly, making my heart skip a few beats.
"Yer what!" I croaked inanely, after gasping down a breath. "Are you serious?"
"Mmmmm?" Cynthia murmured sleepily. This was a very dangerous moment. I'd learned the hard way not to interfere with her thought processes, having interrupted her once in mid-daydream and caused her to lose her thread for a fortnight and so we lost the discovery of the first Grand Unified Field Theory because Fredericks and her team beat us to it by a week. Ours was ultimately a much more satisfactory theory, but it only got second place. But Cynthia was dropping off to sleep! There was every chance she'd wake up in the morning and say, "Sorry, what theory of space/energy conversion?" I had to work delicately, but fast.
"How would you convert wrinkles to energy?" I whispered in her ear, my heart thudding noisily in my chest and I opened a notepad in my head-space as I waited anxiously for an answer.
"Stretch it tight," she murmured. "With a Star Trek warp engine."
Starrtreck warp engine? Did I know a scientist named Starrtreck? Or was that Start Reck? I knew a Shaun Wreck, but he was just an aptly named vehicle maintenance guy. His engines just went 'Whirr' and the only thing that he warped was the cost/profit margin on my yearly service schedule. I scribbled it down anyway. Perhaps it would jog her memory in the morning.
Next morning, Cynthia looked at me with amazement over her fruit-salad with fibre additives. "You've never heard of Star Trek? Incredible! Just how did you waste your youth anyway? The Gen after Next was one of the best Sci-fi tridee series ever." She helped herself to a disgustingly healthy spoonful, then grinned.
"Anyway, that warp-engine thing I said was just a joke. No-one ever built one, though some guy did investigate it. Decided it might even work, if he could get hold of a large chunk of exotic mass, or some dark energy." She poked an anonymous chunk of fruit thoughtfully.
"No, what I had in mind was an Elsier Q-foam comb." Cynthia looked up at me sharply. "You've heard of Elsier, I hope?" Nodding sagely, I took a bite of toast so I wouldn't have to answer. She'd explain soon enough. Always did.
"Yeah, well, the theory, developed by Elsier from work by Unruh , Schwinger, Hawking, Lifshitz and Casimir was that in a strong electric field what happens is that oppositely charged pairs of spontaneously occurring anti-particles that bubble up out of the quantum foam, like electron-positron pairs, get separated and can't recombine. Something like how black-holes are supposed to evaporate via Hawking radiation, actually." My jealous eyes detected a certain dreaminess in her expression when she mentioned Hawking, so I quickly popped in an intelligent question to distract her.
"But that doesn't happen, does it?" Well, I thought it was a good point. "Otherwise we'd be up to our ears in energy debt owed to the Q-foam from all those particles. They are supposed to annihilate before the universe notices, aren't they?"
"Hmmm, no, the Elsier Effect hasn't been observed, perhaps because the E fields weren't strong enough to overcome the attraction between the pair at such close range, or maybe because the positron was annihilating on some other electron." A slight wrinkling of her forehead revealed furious calculation.
"But what if we resonated the E field, and tossed in an oscillating mag field as well to get the field strength up at certain points? And made sure that the split pairs were kept in hard vacuum so the positron couldn't find any electrons and pop out of existence?"
I spotted that one and quickly said, "You mean hit vacuum with EM rays? Say high energy photons like Gamma rays?"
"Uhuh, and have a magnetic bottle standing by for the positrons, a bit like the old Livermore Titan Laser experiment, but with vacuum as the target rather than gold. And we'll really need high energies. Maybe above VHE Gamma. Gigs or Tera eVs at least, I guess. Yottawatt lasers," she drawled happily.
"How does this tie in with fractal Q-foam?" I wondered, dismissing for the moment the practical difficulties involved in generating photons that it normally took a collapsing hyper-novae to produce. And glad, given the look on her face, that Cynthia didn't yet have access to anything more powerful than a Petawatt laser.
"Well, I was thinking that sucking virtual particles apart like that would flatten out the wrinkles, at least locally. Then we'd be able to measure the decrease in quantum fluctuations by counting the positrons and it should decrease over time. The way in which it does so would tell us a lot about the nature of the foam, don't you think?"
I was thinking that it was a pity they didn't award more than one Nobel Prize per person. Maybe if Cynthia could get some exotic maths involved, and that wouldn't be hard, by the sound of it, I could be a candidate for a Fields Medal instead?
....
"Gerald!" came the scream from the kitchen. I leapt to my feet and ran. Cynthia and kitchens had an unfortunate history. You should never let a scatterbrained scientific klutz loose in a place that had sharp objects and hot stuff in it. Keep them in the super-collider where it is all nice and safe.
"What!" I yelled.
"I've had an idea!"
"OK," I changed down a gear but kept running. Some of Cynthia's ideas in the kitchen involved explosions. Sure, some in the lab involved explosions too, but they were usually so colossally huge that there was no way she could actually conduct the experiment. Kitchen explosions were accessible enough in scale to be very dangerous. I found her reclining thoughtfully against the gas stove, which was on and threatening to set fire to her lovely auburn hair, so I discreetly moved her aside and turned off the gas, which was boiling the saucepan dry anyway.
Whilst I served up the vegies and checked the steaks, I asked, "What was the idea, and can you pour the wine please? The muscato, if you will." I grinned at her. "I feel like something sweet and sticky."
She poked out her tongue at me and then stuck her head in the fridge and I thought I heard her say, above the sizzling meat, "Do you think that the laws of physics could be subject to natural selection?"
"Sorry, what? Physics and selection? Aren't you getting your disciplines confused?"
"No, really, do you think there's any way that 'fitter' universes could somehow outcompete less fit ones? Because their laws are better suited to propagation? To making baby universes, I mean."
I served the slightly overdone steak, just the way she liked it, and replied, "Listen dear, I think you should stick to physics." At the table, I pulled her chair out for her and placed the plate. "Offhand I can think of three things wrong with that idea." Seating myself, I reached for the steak-sauce, and Cynthia slapped my hand.
"I seasoned it. At least try it before you kill it with sauce."
"Mmm," I mouthed around a slice of the steak. "Yummy, what did you use?"
"Moroccan. So what's the three objections?"
No surprise there. We both adored the latest batch of spices on the Moroccan theme that we'd discovered.
"One, universes don't have kiddies. Two, there's nothing to provide the selection pressure, and three, um, three, er, because it's a silly idea that creationists have been dragging around for decades and nobody takes it seriously." I chewed thoughtfully. "Still needs a bit of sauce, I reckon."
Cynthia glared at me, then passed the sauce. I'd have to wait to see if the glare was for the objections to her idea, or because I wanted the sauce.
"For your information, universes possibly do have kiddies. Either through the oscillating big-bang mechanism, or creation inside black holes, or via intersections with neighboring universes." She tossed her head and took the sauce away from me. And then squeezed a good dollop onto her steak.
"Bit dry," she commented. "You cooked them for too long. Anyway, I just thought of another propagation mechanism, and a means of providing the selection pressure as well." She looked at me intently and in contradiction of all good etiquette, waved her fork at me. "What else do universes beget?"
"Stars, galaxies? Blackholes and whiteholes, super-strings? Cosmologists?"
"You are thinking too much like a cosmologist," she grinned. "Think more like Darwin."
"Barnacles? Beetles? Turtles? Beer?"
"Closer, but go up the tree of life a bit. Or down really, as he called it a descent."
"Man, you mean? How does that help your hypothesis?"
"Not man, as such," she replied airily. "Intelligent life, is what I was thinking of. Haven't people been wondering for centuries, once they got past the idea that the whole shebang had been created just for them, haven't they been wondering how it is that the laws of physics of this universe had been so finely-tuned to suit their survival? Isn't it a fact that any number of almost insignificant changes to the natural constants would have rendered the universe a cold, dark place, or a hellhole, within a million years?"
"Yeah, but the Anthropic Principle explains all that. If the universe weren't good for life, we wouldn't be here to complain about it. So this particular universe must be good for us. Doesn't mean that there isn't a whole lot more out there that aren't."
"Exactly," she claimed, as if I had just proven her point instead of damning it with a counter-theory that was well accepted.
"Sorry?"
"Well, if you, or at least some intelligent life-form, was going to create a universe, wouldn't you make one that was good to live in? Doesn't that provide your missing selection pressure? Universes that are compatible with life tend to lead to even more compatible ones once their children become intelligent enough to create more universes. Those that don't give rise to life die childless, whereas universes that get engineered by intelligence will almost certainly be good for more life. It's like liverwort."
"Huh?" I must remember to hide her biology books. Or else read them so I could follow her logic. "What's like liverwort?"
"Alternation of generations, silly. Intelligent life is a universe's sporophyte phase. Which then leads to new universes just like, or even better than, the old one."
"That should be the other way round. I definitely think that we are the sexual phase, and the universe is the asexual one," I mused. I kinda liked her idea, though it ran badly counter to my atheistic leanings.
She eyed me speculatively and then looked down at the remnants of her steak. "I'm not hungry anymore, and it's dry anyway." She gulped her wine. "Let's go to bed. Leave the dishes to the biots to clean up and come and prove to me that you really are the sexual stage of the life-cycle."
I wasn't going to argue...
....
Later, half asleep, I thought I heard Cynthia say, "All we need now is a way to make baby universes..."
....
Next morning I awoke to find Cynthia already awake and seated at the breakfast table, looking pensive and rolling a small silver ball between her fingers.
"Made your universe, have you?" I joked, remembering her last comments of the night before.
"Yes," she answered calmly, and then flipped it to me. "Have a look."
Catching it with some trepidation, I was relieved to find it was just a wrinkled up ball of silver-paper from a chocolate wrapper. There were also traces of chocolate on her lips.
"Tell me, Gerald," Cynthia mused. "What would happen if Planck's constant wasn't?"
"Wasn't what?"
"A constant. What if it was getting bigger?"
"Well, last time I measured it was in primary school using some LEDs, some toy diffraction gratings and a ruler and we got six point six something by ten to the minus thirty-four. That's just about as small as anything can be, but you know better than I do that it's tied into everything quantum, from black-body radiation and photon energy and subatomic particle behaviour, atomic and molecular structure, the Uncertainty Principle all the way to mass/energy conversion and even the speed of light. After all, we used that fact to make the connection between quantum and cosmology in the Grand Unified Theory of Everything last year. What makes you think it's getting bigger? It's been measured pretty damn well over the last hundred and something years. Certainly with greater precision than afforded by the instruments Miss Goldstein's science club had at hand."
"Hmm, yes," Cynthia replied. "Could you be a dear and look up the values from all the measurements please? No need to include your school-years' efforts though." She batted her eyes, "And I'll make you some coffee. New Guinea Gold?"
I sighed and closed my eyes to link to the net. Cynthia could surf it like nobody else could, but she didn't like it much. Too slow, she complained. Preferred books that she could speed-read; so last century. I waited a second before the results tabulated in my vision patch, then I graphed them and walked through the results, staring thoughtfully and with beginnings of alarm.
"If I remember correctly," came her sweet avatar's voice in my inner ear, "The precision of the measurements has improved over time, so the value has been, not surprisingly, a little different every time, but, startling coincidence, since the early Teens it has also been slightly larger every time, and surprisingly far out of the estimated error range from previous measurements. Check out the pre-published data too. It's interesting, nes pas?"
I just nodded dumbly. She was right. It was getting bigger. I noted that the last few measurements had been flagged as doubtful by both the experimenters and reviewers, though they hadn't given any reasons other than waffle about 'possible theoretical invalidity' in the experimental method. An instant's calculation showed an exponential growth pattern, if you ignored the error bars and included the recent 'dubious' data. Nobody had dared to question that it was a constant, despite growing evidence to the contrary. Still a pretty insignificant trend now, but if it was real and not just experimental error or misinterpretation, give it a millenia or two and humanity'd be able to tell the difference in the macroscopic world. If we survived the experience.
"What gave you that idea?" I wondered as I blinked the net to standby. She handed me the coffee and took back the wrinkled silver ball.
"I was musing about the locality constraint we put in physics yet contrariwise, we also require universal constants like Planck's length. Doesn't make sense to me that we can have everywhere a constant yet insist that things can only be affected by local events. Then I was thinking about fractals and scrunching and smoothing this paper," she flattened it out and flexed it between her hands a couple of times to demonstrate, until a too vigorous tug ripped it in half. She looked down at the two halves and continued, "And it occurred to me that the dark energy that opposes the force of gravity and keeps our universe expanding was a bit like the material unwrinkling. Then I thought to myself, "That means that the fractal dimensions are decreasing, and the smallest unit of measurement is increasing, that is, Plack's length. Then I remembered the hooha about the recent measurements being way out of whack with the theory." She looked up at me again, with some wonder in her eyes. "But what happens when we run out of wrinkles? Does spacetime just stop expanding and hold in equilibrium, or rip, or rebound?"
I automatically took a sip of the coffee, just because it was there. I don't think I tasted it though. "Stopping, I could live with, who cares if the universe stops expanding. And rebounding sounds ominous, but with a far, far away kind of badness. OK, we might have a big crunch in a few billions of years, so what? It won't bother me. Ripping, on the other hand, I don't like the sound of that at all."
Then another thought struck me. "But don't worry about it, kiddo. I strongly suspect we won't be around to see it. I can't really imagine that we'll survive living through what is going to happen when Plank is big enough that quantum is something that happens in the 'real' world." I snorted out a strangled laugh. "But look on the bright side. Maybe we'll finally be able to do that deBroglie experiment where you fire elephants through a double slit to show interference patterns!"
....
"You know," Cynthia sighed, as she sat in my lap and ran her hands through my hair, which was nice, but a bit disturbing when I was in the middle of a meeting with a head of department at my work, "I wonder what time is."
"It's 4pm and I'm in a meeting, dear," I replied gently, shaking off the net-fugue momentarily. The suit that I was meeting with wouldn't notice that I was gone for a few minutes. My avatar was pretty good at pretending to be me.
"No, not what time it is, silly, but what time actually is! Why we only go forward in it. It's like we are astronauts, afloat in an empty space, travelling along at a constant velocity, unable to stop, or speedup, or change direction because we can't accelerate, can't get a purchase. There's nowhere to stand, in time." She chuckled morosely, "In space, no-one can hear you scream, but in time, no-one can ....." she paused and her beautiful eyes grew wider and the pupils dilated alarmingly.
"No-one can what?" I asked, trying not to drown in her eyes.
"Everyone can see you, hear you, feel you. You are never alone, in time. We are all there, aren't we? All at the same time, all on the same wavefront, the same expanding bubble. From the first moment until now, the bubble has been expanding, at the same rate of one second per second, I guess, unless the inflationary period also ramped-up time as well as space. I wonder if time travels at the speed of light? I wonder if we could outrun it in a faster than light spaceship? If I went back in time and killed your grandfather, would you go do mine for me? If I had one? Then we could escape paradox, and perhaps escape to paradise in an FTL spaceship...."
"Call you back," I told Miss Jackson, my boss. "Cynthia is having issues with time. You know what happened last time..."
"OK Gerald, you go do what you gotta do." Miss Jackson looked worried. She hadn't really been able to explain how Cynthia had managed to disappear for two days last time, only to re-appear again five minutes after she first went away. It had startled me too, to be honest. How can someone be missing for two days but only gone for five minutes? How did we even work out that it had happened like that? Was it like Jodie Foster's character in the movie Contact? Was there a 5 minute gap of static that went on for 2 days? I just hoped that my grandfather was going to be/had been careful about someone that looked like a beautiful, incredibly intelligent young woman, back in the day. I knew damn well that he probably hadn't/wouldn't be.
....
"Gravity waves," murmured Cynthia, dipping her pinkie into the bathwater and making ripples, relaxing and enjoying the principle of least action, "and everything else waves back at it." She held out her hand and I handed her the shampoo. Dreamily, Cynthia closed her eyes and started to lather her lovely hair. Then, she stopped suddenly, her eyes still shut. "You know, I think I know why we have so many anomalous gravity waves being detected. Also why Fermi's Paradox. "
"Oh, do tell?" I replied, sitting back down on the little chair beside the tub and reaching out to try to stop the foam from spilling down onto her face.
"It's aliens," she stated bluntly. "They're using gravity waves to communicate. So much better than EM." She raised five digits and ticked off points on each finger. "Nothing stops them, there's not a lot of interference apart from the occasional black holes falling into each other, they have enormous bandwidth." She carefully opened one eye and stared at the remaining two fingers. "And it takes a really advanced civilization to generate and even detect them, so not a lot of inane newbie chatter and wanting help with their homework," she exclaimed triumphantly, folding down the ring finger. Her pinky remained upright. "Umm, can't think of anything else," she admitted.
"So Fermi's Paradox about 'Where are all the aliens?' is just because we've been listening with the wrong physical layer? Like someone staring at their Morse receiver wondering why no-one wants to chat?" I mused, to distract her from that obdurate pinky before it upset her.
"Yup. We'll have to work out what they're saying. Maybe they are transmitting schematics for how to make a gravity wave transmitter and we can join the interstellar Facebook."
"They are probably just trying to sell us stuff, like 'Fifty easy five hundred year instalments of a terabuck and you too can have your very own Dyson Sphere' sort of thing." I thought it would be nice to have a Dyson Sphere. So much sunlight. "How can we join the party, d'you think? Any thoughts on a transmitter?"
"Hmm," Cynthia wrinkled her brow as she glared at the remaining raised digit. She was going to think of another point or bust. She was OCD that way.
"We need to modulate spacetime somewhat. And I think that the signals we are seeing now are all too far down in the base, to be honest. I think we are missing the higher frequencies due to poor instrumentation, so I am guessing we need to modulate it pretty fast. That's not hard, but getting enough energy into it might be. We might need to manufacture neutron stars or something."
"Like when two neutron stars spiral together, they're supposed to radiate, because their quadrapole moment is non-zero?" I tossed that in just to prove I knew something about this discussion.
"Not non-zero, dear, theory is that it just must be changing. The second time-derivative must be non-zero."
"Oh, I see." So much for that attempt to impress her. "Well, anyway, captive artificial neutron stars sounds a bit out of reach for this year's budget." I paused and racked my brains for a recalcitrant memory. "Wait, I thought there was some relativistic coupling between gravity and magnetism, some gravitomagnetic radiation, a bit like with EM? Could we use that?"
"Something like that was proposed, even before General Relativity," she conceded. "Heaviside, I think, came up with Gravitoelectromagnetism in analogy to Maxwell's Laws for EM, though the mention of a gravitomagnetic field is confusing because it has nothing to do with actual magnetism. They even measured some energy loss from a spiraling system of masses that seemed to confirm the theory, but never detected waves directly, or managed to produce them as far as they knew. Gravity Probe B way back in the naughties confirmed it too, with frame-dragging. Hmm, bears a re-visit, I suppose." She reluctantly admitted defeat and lowered her hand with the obstinate pinky. Then she raised it again with a shout, splashing water everywhere. She grinned at me and closed the pinky down and shouted, "And unlike phones, gravity is not on a locked-in contract plan!" Then, pleased at her defeat of digital intransigence, she closed her eye and said "Now, rinse please."
I poured a small bucket of water over her head to slough away the lather, and she gasped. "You could have made it warm water, Gerald!"
"Ooops, my bad. I was thinking about gravity waves. Sorry."
"You will be," she laughed and with surprising strength reached up and pulled me into the bathtub with her, where we had a wonderful time making waves of our own.
Much later, when all the splashing had stopped and we were relaxing in bathrobes in front of an open fire, she mused, "So if livable planets are a penny a dozen like we think, and there are so many of them and so there must be billions of civs using g-waves to chat, the whole universe must be awash with sloshing messes of gravitational radiation by now. Like the bathroom, which you have to clean up before the maid comes in tomorrow. She gets quite strident about things like that, you know."
"Pooh, let her screech," I waved dismissively. "It's what she was designed for, after all." I didn't see the little frown that creased Cynthia's brow, as I was laying with my eyes closed and my head pillowed in her lap.
....
Cynthia shut down her head-net connection with a sigh. "There," she stated emphatically with some satisfaction, "that's another one done."
"Whassat dear?" I asked half-heartedly. I was trying to fill out my tax forms online and having a hard time of it. Their link structure was giving me a headache, whizzing my focus about from forms to regulations to examples and back again. Why couldn't they use a decent AI to help me out, like everyone else did? It didn't need to be an enhanced model, just a run of the mill standard intelligence unit would have done the job. Instead, they expected me to make all the decisions myself. I really should have let Cynthia take care of it, but she sometimes got the dates of things wrong. Damn good though she was with space-time and deep-time and even geological time, she wasn't good at understanding mundane time and they didn't like that at the tax office. Besides, she'd been busy.
"Another solution to Shrodingly's equations, dear," Cynthia replied off-handedly. She did them like other people did crosswords.
"Oh? How many bodies this time?"
"All of them."
"Erk?" I put the tax office on pause. This was much more important and certainly far more interesting, though would probably give me just as much of a headache.
"What do you mean, 'All of them?' "
"The whole shebang," she waved her hands around vaguely. "Or at least our bit of it. The Universe, you know?"
"You calculated the wave-function for the whole universe," I stated, deadpan. "How did you manage that? Your best effort so far has been the lithium atom. Nobody else even knows how to start to frame the question for such a huge problem."
Cynthia grinned. "I didn't really know where to start either, so I started with the solution and worked back to the question." She giggled. "I cheated, like looking in the back of a murder mystery novel to find out whodunnit!"
It looked like Cynthia's anachronistic literary traits, shuddersome though they were, might be paying off.
"But hang on, how can you have done that? We don't have a solution to work backwards from. And what about relativity? How did you account for that? Schodinger doesn't, as you know."
"Yeah we do have a solution! We live in it! Look around you, at the universe. We know how it behaves, more or less, and we have a rough understanding of space-time and gravity and stellar evolution and quantum and the Einsteinian, Newtonian, Lagrangian and Hamiltonian representations for the system's energy density and so-on, especially if you consider the fractal space-time stuff we came up with. Then there's Dirac's equations for all the standard particles. Even if a good part of the universe does appear to be missing, we think we know what it should be. That was enough to give me a good idea of what the solution must look like, and at least the order-of-magnitude values of the various parameters involved. It wasn't too hard to bootstrap it based on what we see around us and then fine-tune it down from there to something that at least looked like the total energy operator. Then I just had to plug that into Schrödinger's and all the other wave equations, cross-checked with Heisenberg's matrices and a rat's nest of Feynman's path integrals, run the time-evolution back and forward for fifteen or so billion years for a few million times until the equations equilibrated, and pick the one that worked the best. Rinse and repeat." She tossed her hair. "As for relativity, well that was a bit of a fudge, but I just had to toss in Klein-Gordon and Dirac and Proca and so-on and the latest work by Weasly and Von Krank helped, but don't tell Weasly that until after we publish otherwise he'll try to sabotage us. Piece of cake. Now, take me out to dinner please so we can celebrate?"
Once in the car, I put it on auto and dared to ask. "So what does the solution look like?"
Cynthia levelled her lovely dark eyes at me, paused, maybe to contemplate if I could take it, then shrugged and blipped the equations across, with annotations and visualisations. I had more-or-less recovered by the time we reached the restaurant, and yes, I had a doozy of a headache. That was just from the sheer scale and grandeur of the visuals, let-alone the maths. I reminded myself once again that I ought to be terrified of her and really should just run and keep running. But I wouldn't, not without her. We held hands as we walked from the carport to the dining room, behaving outwardly like all the normal couples and families around us, but my mind was stunned, lost somewhere out there in the Universe. I had no idea where hers was, but I was sadly certain it wasn't a place I could share with her.
....
As we stepped through the door we were effusively greeted by the Maitre'd. Chatting ebulliently, the sleek biot asked after my health, before politely seating Cynthia at the table for two in the little nook we always asked for and then it waved over to a subordinate waiter-biot and bowed itself off to deal with new arrivals, wishing us bon-appetite.
Whilst Cynthia planned a meal for us, I glanced at a note from work that had announced itself in my headspace, and reeled in shock. It was a recall notice for Cynthia. Miss Jackson, head of our AI research department, had decided that Cynthia's problems with time, considered alongside her propensity for carelessness concerning violent explosions, indicated a major design flaw and her line was to be discontinued and she was recalled for disposal. There was a tag attached to the note, a voice message. It was from Deidre, Cynthia's replacement. She said that she'd be waiting for me when I got home from dinner and that she looked forward to a rewarding professional relationship with me. There was no vitality in her voice at all, just the standard, pleasant feminine modulations.
I stared forlornly at Cynthia as she bantered charmingly with the waiter. So what if her time sense was a little anachronistic and her safety-systems a bit erratic? I was sure I'd never have another scientific calculator as good as her.