A short sci-fi story about the discovery of matter transmission technology. Copyright Terry Cornall 2022
“OK, Alan, release the ball,” I said.
“Ball’s away,” replied Alan gratuitously, looking at the switchboard on the test-rig. Then he spoke for posterity. “Test object released at …”
“Crap, never mind that, look at what the damn thing is doing! The energy reading is climbing like a rocket!” I shouted and then I looked askance at him and said in my best ‘dread foreboding’ voice, “Where did you put the output end of the singularity?”
“Sixty centimeters to the right, where you said to!” He rushed to check the configuration parameters, pulling up a fiendish looking file full of long, complicated number sequences.
“Yep, third field, labeled whitehole offset, oh, oh, sixty. Oh, oh… oh my!” Alan looked embarrassed. “That should have been sixty, oh, oh, shouldn’t it? I think the output end is at zero, zero, sixty which would put it on the Z axis and directly above the input end. Oops, my bad.” He looked at the large, opaque tank, then at the energy readings which had gone to hundreds of kilojoules whilst we had worked out what had gone wrong, and was still climbing exponentially.
“Um, don’t you think we should stop it? He asked tentatively, not daring to catch my eye as I went apoplectic at about the same rate as the energy of the looped wormhole.
“You know what you’ve done don’t you,” I screamed. “It’s falling through the input, appearing above where it started from, gaining zero point six kilojoules in a rapidly shortening period, then doing it all again!” I pointed at the tank. “Wait long enough and we’ll have enough energy to replay Hiroshima! It’s energy goes as time squared!” I glanced at the energy reading again. “It gained half a megajoule in the first ten seconds, then two by twenty seconds, eight meg by forty seconds. It’ll double in energy every one point four seconds.”
“Yeah, yeah, perpetual motion, blah, blah,” Alan mumbled as he flicked switches to close down the experiment. “Can’t happen, there’ll be some losses in the system that’ll cause it to asymptote out. Air friction or something.”
“You didn’t leave air in there!” I gasped. “We’ve got no idea what that’ll do!”
Alan waved a calming hand at me distractedly. “No, it’s hard vacuum as per spec. Give me a little credit, that was just an example.” He toggled a switch rapidly, then stared at it. “Um, it won’t go off. The establishment and stabilization system has stopped running, as designed, but so has the termination code. " He managed a sickly grin. "The good news is that the maintenance software is running just fine. The singularity is still there.”
“Aaargh!” I started tearing at my sparse hair. “Classic Sci-Fi scenario! Runaway reactor feeding off its own energy and can’t be stopped! It melts its container and sinks to the core to devour us and we all die or it sets fire to the earth’s atmosphere and we all die! It’s Fermi's Trinity Test Apprehension wrought with wormholes!” I spun and pointed at the power supply. “Pull the plug…”
Alan stood there with the plug dangling.
“Nope,” he said, pointing at the energy reading that had climbed to millions of Joules and showed no sign of slowing. It was still going up at an alarming rate.
“I can shift the far end and break the loop, I think,” Alan shouted suddenly and leapt for the chair. Then he stopped, gave a short curse and ran back and put the plug back in. He grabbed the chair and sat and waited impatiently for the configuration computer to reboot.
I tried a few calming breaths, but it was hard with the energy graph going closer and closer to vertical like it was.
“OK,” Alan shouted and ticky-tacked rapidly at the keyboard. “Let’s put the sucker where it should have been.” He modified the file and saved it, then pulled up the initialisation GUI for the singularity generator. He had just hit the button with a “It’ll take a few seconds to have effect,” when a thought struck me.
“Wait!” I shouted belatedly. “How much damage will all that energy do when it’s dumped in the tank?”
Alan leapt from his chair and ran for the doors. “You’ll find out in a few seconds!”
His words were cut off by protocol breach alarms as he slammed the big red emergency button and then barged through the exit doors. His heels were clipped by huge steel doors slamming vertically down. And he’d shut me in.
“Coward!” I screamed, clawing at the door frantically. “Let me out!”
A dull thump resounded throughout the room as hundreds of Megajoules were suddenly transferred to the floor of the tank. The energy graph stopped climbing and then began falling as the tank cooled. A dull red glow was visible around the base of the tank and then it slowly dimmed back to its normal silver.
“Come on, Doc,” a voice crackled over the speaker in the silence as the alarms cut off. “You designed the tank to take a small nuke, didn’t you? The energy equivalent of a few hundred bags of fried potato crisps wasn’t ever going to cause a problem.” I could hear the supercilious sneer in his voice.
“Yeah, well how come you scarpered so quickly,” I mumbled, suddenly realizing just how little energy we were actually dealing with. Megajoules sound scary, but we eat a few of them every day.
“Well, you know, accidents happen and all that. Split-second judgments have a habit of going wrong.”
"Still, that energy came from nowhere" I mumbled.
"I know what you're thinking, Doc", murmured Alan.
“Yes, and shut up about it.” I warned him. “If Weinberger gets wind of this before we get something with my name… our names on it, he’ll take all the credit for it. Get your arse back in here and clean things up. Make the alarm look like a trivial event of some sort – a power-spike when you tripped over the power cable maybe. Copy those logs to an authenticard and then purge them from the test-rig systems. Make two copies. Make sure you get both our biosigs on the cards."
The breach-doors cranked slowly back up, as if suspicious that something was going to come ravening through them from the dark void between universes, unleashed by our fiendish experiment. Instead Alan walked through them.
“Well, that’s nice of you to let me share the credit, Doc,” he said sincerely. “Doesn’t happen often that a tech gets his sig on something this big. Free energy! Wow!” He fairly beamed excitement and avarice. “This is going to be worth Terabucks!”
“Yeah, well, this serendipitous screw-up was your doing really, wasn’t it? Fair’s fair.” I turned back to the tank to check for heat damage. “Besides, I want someone to share the crap that’s going to hit the fan if they work out we nearly vaporized the lab.”
....
It was five years later. Weinberger worked for us now as publicity hack, a job he was especially good at. We’d banged together a prototype perpetual energy machine. After publicly demonstrating it and getting Weinberger to convince them that it’s be easier not to kill us and try to keep it quiet, we’d licensed it exclusively to a consortium of oil companies for a few squillion dollars.
Of course, the fools had then tried to make people pay even more for it than they did already for oil, so that hadn’t lasted very long. The public was gullible, but they weren’t completely stupid and it didn’t take three degrees in physics to work out that something called a perpetual energy machine delivered free energy.
After the oil companies had botched the job of getting the benefits to the people, we’d convinced a few governments to nationalize them and let us have a go. Our solution was green and cheap and really easy to use. Not free mind you, because we had to make a profit after all and pay off all that expensive research we had done, but it was a lot better than burning dead fossils and filling the atmosphere with heat-retaining gasses.
Our energy systems used a battery-like plug-in called a P.E.M, short for “Perpetual Energy Module”. They didn’t have to be very big or heavy to deliver a few hundred kilowatts for cars, and they could be miniscule for a few watts for video cameras. Even PEMs for a few megawatts weren’t hard to put together, and the construction companies and the military really ate them up.
Now they were everywhere and a built-in three year ‘safety of operation auto-shutdown margin’ made sure that people kept coming back for more. (Weinberger thought that up. Not all his ideas were useless.) In the end, the shutdown procedure we'd had issues with at the very beginning had turned out to be fairly easy to solve. Instead of an energy dump like our first frantic effort, it was easier to just narrow the wormhole down to a microscopic width to stop the transfer.
We did think about merging the ends of the singularity by forcing the blackhole end into the whitehole end and making it collapse on itself. Simple really, and the theory said it should work. Of course, you had to be very careful not to get that back-to-front. Sending the 'out' end through the 'in' end was definitely contra-indicated. We weren’t quite sure what it would do, but one of the terms in the elegantly simple equations that described the result was tentatively labeled “The end of the universe quotient”. So we decided on the safer option, even though the equations were really messy and the process was much harder to control.
Apart from the energy generation plants that had started it all off, our biggest success had been mass transport. It was what Weinberger had been trying for in the first place, but his field equations had been all over the shop before I cleaned them up and made it work. Alan’s goof in the first test had been lucky, even if it had been really obvious in retrospect. If Weinberger hadn’t been off wining and dining our government sponsors that day instead of working at the coalface like he should have been, I’d still be fetching and carrying and correcting his tensor maths.
Now everything traveled by looped singularities. Wormholes, in the pop-speak. Well, almost everything. We still hadn’t convinced people to use it. Of course, the teething problems we’d had with the live animal trade hadn’t helped with the completely erroneous perception that wormholes weren’t safe. Hah, more sheep got run over by aircraft than had been turned inside-out and sent to Saturn by mistake.
Well, they’d come around eventually, once we’d had a few years of flawless operation with the sheep and cows and things and Weinberger had worked his magical propaganda upon them. Meanwhile, I intend to stick to the corporate airbus 380A with the swimming pool, auditorium and six bars, if they ever manage to complete it.
Having cornered energy and transport, we were still working on using singularities in manufacturing and medical processes. Alan has some plans to use a combination of selective probability quantum froth and nuclear synthesis chains to produce just about anything we want. Admittedly, his first attempt at ice-cream had tasted a bit funny, and had then dissolved into a translucent green slime and crawled off under the test-bench, but it was early days yet.
Medical uses were fairly obvious, especially when one overly adventurous member of our gung-ho “guinea pig” test team went into one end of a wormhole with his system all blocked up with a serious viral head-cold, but came out the other end with her Y chromosomes replaced by Xs. Oh, and the viruses were gone as well. Alan reckons that with a little work we could filter out all kinds of other undesirable things, like tumors, halitosis, lawyers, that kind of stuff.