A story in 26 (or so) parts

• A is for Alibi
• B is for Brand
• C is for Clock
• D is for Dream
• E is for Einstein’s Elevator
• F is for Fractal
• G is for God
• H is for Hilbert’s Hotel
• I is for Immortality
• J is for Justice
• K is for Kline Bottle
• L is for Lens
• M is for Mass
• N is for Newton
•  
• P is for Parsimony
• Q is for Quantum
• R is for Robot
• S is for Symmetry
• T is for Turing Test
• U is for Uncertainty Principle
• V is for Venus
• W is for Wigner’s Friend
• X is for X-Ray
• Y is for Yin, Y is for Yang
• Z is for Zeno’s Paradox

A is for Alibi

The whole world watched on live threedeevision as Professor Lindeman set his time machine for one day in the future, stepped in, and vanished.

That evening, Lindeman’s major scientific rival, who had done his best to discredit Lindeman’s entire body of work as pseudoscientific gobbledygook, was home alone reading when he heard Lindeman’s voice.

“It’s not a time machine,” it said. “It’s an invisibility inductor.”

A chuckle, a gunshot, silence.

B is for Brand

When I say good-bye to my parents before going down to the ceremony, my mother manages to hold back her tears and even smile, and she doesn’t mention that it’s still not too late to back out. I want to tell her I know how hard this is for her and to thank her for being supportive, but I don’t.

The other candidates are already at their seats when I get there. All of us have known what we were in for since we started graduate school, but even with five years to prepare, everyone is nervous, and we all have different ways of dealing with it. Paul, who I’m pretty sure is high on something, keeps grinning like an idiot, Julia is chewing her lower lip into a bloody mess, Doug is going on and on to everybody and nobody in particular about a concert he went to last weekend, and Christine is doing some kind of complicated breathing exercise. I compulsively watch what everyone else is doing.

We are asked to sit down, and the physics department chair gets up on the stage to give his speech. He congratulates everyone on their hard work and reminds us of the privileges and responsibilities that come with our degree. As if we needed reminding.

All too soon, the speech is over. Paul, his grin now turned to rictus, walks up on the stage, shakes hands with his advisor and the department chair, and sits down on a small bench in the center of the stage.

The hall is completely silent, as if even the air molecules are frozen still, as Paul’s advisor clamps his right forearm to the bench, palm up, takes the electric branding iron–which normally sits unpowered in a glass display case in the main department office but is now very much turned on, its tip red-hot–and stamps Paul on the inside of his wrist. Paul’s eyes tear up and his teeth clench so hard it seems like his jaw is about to snap, but he does not make a sound.

And then Paul is standing up and his advisor is embracing him, and everyone in the audience is clapping and cheering so loudly it seems forced, and I realize it probably is.

I’m next, and as I walk up, my mind is frantically sifting through the many reasons not to go through with this travesty.

They tell us the purpose of the mushroom-cloud brand is to remind us of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Seoul, Boston, Toronto, and all the rest, each a terrible failure, a sin on the collective conscience of all the world’s physicists. But it is absurd, and anyone who thinks about it for any length of time will realize just how absurd it is, to hold today’s physicists accountable for events, no matter how awful, that happened long before they were even born.

These arguments, which I have often considered before but never with this kind of immediacy, race through my head at breakneck speed, and, just when I’m on the verge of turning around, I see, in a flash that sends my mind reeling, that the brand’s preposterousness is the whole point.

Only someone with an overdeveloped capacity for guilt, a borderline martyr complex, would be willing to accept responsibility for those historical tragedies, and it is precisely such men and women who can be counted on to never betray or pervert the pacifist ideals of our profession–to answer every challenge and temptation with an unswerving “Never again!” The brand is not a reminder, but a final test and a lifelong challenge.

The clamp feels cool and soothing on my skin, and, in the first instant, so does the iron.

C is for Clock

The Center for the Preservation and Study of Time contains over eleven million clocks, ranging from sundials designed for single, binary, and ternary star systems to atomic and ion clocks utilizing dozens of elements and hundreds of transitions. All of these devices are painstakingly maintained and rigorously checked against one another.

The guiding principle of the Center is the realization that clocks not only measure time, but also give it meaning. The custodians of the Center believe that their clocks, in totality, are responsible for the orderly and consistent flow of time throughout the local cluster of galaxies, and possibly beyond.

In order to prepare them for such an awesome responsibility, members of the Center’s staff are trained from a young age to be deeply and intimately aware of time’s passage. Even before they can read, apprentice timekeepers are instructed in the operation and repair of all but the most intricate of the Center’s clocks. Much of their adolescence is spent riding the Center’s supersonic trains in order to observe, and thus preserve, relativistic time dilation. Once they have mastered making time run on trains, young timekeepers are usually given the task of formulating a perpetual calendar for one of the galaxy’s less-studied worlds, incorporating all nested and convolved cycles, leap moments down to a nanosecond, and the gravitational influence of every stellar body within a light-year.

A timekeeper who completes her education and ascends to full rank and status breathes time at least as much as air. Indeed, many a timekeeper lives with the conviction that there is an absolutely accurate and infinitely precise clock integrated into her body.

Sadly, just as the Center’s inanimate clocks sometimes need to be adjusted, timekeepers’ internal clocks occasionally malfunction. Time seems to speed up or slow down for them, and they begin to entertain paranoid delusions that range dangerously close to the heresy of subjective time. Inevitably, their work suffers, their superiors find out about their condition, and they are summarily dismissed. Outside of the Center’s gates, there are tent cities filled with disgraced former timekeepers who have been waiting anywhere from fractions of a femtosecond to octillions of years in the hope that they will someday be reinstated.

None of them ever will be. The Center for the Preservation and Study of Time has no room for malfunctioning clocks.

D is for Dream

Each afternoon, the attendant comes in bearing a syringe filled with sixteen hours of oblivion. I beg, I plead, I cry, but she is silent and implacable, an embodiment of historical inevitability. Darkness descends.

When they discovered a way to make use of people’s idle brain power as they slept, it must have seemed like a godsend. Here was a nearly inexhaustible supply of untapped computational resources, available for the tiniest fraction of the cost of electronic computers.

Industry after industry, then government after government, switched over to human-powered computing, and the scope and complexity of computations that were considered feasible grew exponentially, until the demand for available human brain capacity caught up with, and then outstripped, its supply.

It was not long before an entirely new underclass came into being, made up of those unskilled, unemployable poor souls who were worth more asleep than awake, and who therefore spent up to three-quarters of their existence sedated, sleeping the dreamless sleep of human microchips.

The lowest of these low were the indentured, sentenced by courts to serve time in the thought banks for debts they could not otherwise repay.

My term here is eleven years. I have lived this less-than-life for three so far, and I can take no more. I have loosened my bonds and timed the attendants’ movements, so when the next opportunity for escape arises, I will be able to take advantage of it.

I do not care if I have to scavenge from the trash, and eat road kill, and steal, and sleep in sewers–I will do whatever it takes to keep my thoughts my own. It may be a luxury I can no longer afford in this world, but I assert it as my fundamental right.

I have no money. And I must dream.

E is for Einstein’s Elevator

In the years after their cloud-shaped ships first appeared in the skies over major amusement parks on all seven continents, the Algolans gave the people of Earth untold gifts. While fusion power, life extension therapies, and universal fertilizer were more widely used, the most majestic of the technologies bestowed upon an abjectly grateful humanity by these benevolent aliens was doubtless the space elevator.

The first elevators were anchored near equatorial cities such as Nairobi and Quito, and, together with the resources freed up by the Algolans’ other transformative technologies, they jump-started humanity’s space program. But that was only the beginning, and even those members of the human race most jaded by the technological wonders wrought around them were stunned when the Algolans revealed their intent to build a space elevator for the entire island of Manhattan.

Some Manhattanites were initially taken aback by the idea, but once they recognized the unprecedented cachet, the absolute and inarguable superiority, that being located over thirty thousand kilometers above the Earth’s surface would inevitably bring, they became ardent supporters of the project.

And so the Algolans went to work. For over a year, most of their formidable resources were spent on constructing a giant metal box around Manhattan, slinging third-generation carbon-nanotube-composite cables up to a city-sized orbital platform, installing artificial gravity generators, and separating the island’s foundation from the underlying bedrock and outfitting it for takeoff.

Finally, the fateful day arrived. As the sun set over New Jersey, the residents of Manhattan took one last look around, the space elevator doors closed, and the island lifted into the sky.

Because the box around the city was completely opaque, only a gentle feeling of acceleration told the six million passengers they were in motion. This sensation slowly subsided until all that remained was the promised artificial gravity that was one-quarter of Earth normal (the accompanying weight loss by Manhattan’s population was yet another reason for the project’s overwhelming support).

Jubilant crowds thronged the streets to celebrate their city’s ascension to the heavens, so long in coming. Champagne flowed like beer, and beer flowed like light beer, and, in the collective euphoria, it took two days to notice that the space elevator’s doors hadn’t opened.

This realization was received with a mixture of cynicism–for poor elevator service was part of life in Manhattan, and why should they expect any better of the Algolans–and outrage, for it was nevertheless deeply irritating. But after much time spent harrumphing and complaining to each other and to no one in particular, with the space elevator doors still firmly closed and inoperable from within, Manhattanites did what they had always done–they adjusted.

Thanks to solar panels and a ramscoop fusion reactor installed on the outside of the space elevator, Manhattan had an inexhaustible supply of energy, and roof gardens throughout the city provided an arable area twice that of Central Park. Indeed, even before its journey into space, Manhattan had already functioned nearly autonomously from the world around it, in light of which the current situation was simply the next step in a process that had been going on for decades, if not centuries.

Within a few months, people stopped fretting about the space elevator’s closed doors and settled into a lifestyle and rhythm appropriate to their situation. After two years, any mention of the outside world had entirely disappeared from newspapers and magazines. A little more than a decade after the doors had closed, school curricula were revised to exclude the rest of the universe. With each passing day, life in Manhattan flowed more and more smoothly.

The Algolans had foreseen all of this when they had made their plans; the doors’ unresponsiveness was far from accidental. What the aliens had done, in all their fiddling around with the island’s foundation, was attach hundreds of propulsion units, and what the city’s residents took to be artificial gravity was the thrust of those gargantuan engines. Far from becoming simply another of Earth’s artificial satellites, Manhattan had been converted into an interstellar spaceship.

The Algolans were the galaxy’s foremost entertainers, and Manhattan was to become the centerpiece of the most ambitious theme park ever conceived. Even at near-light speed, it would take centuries for the city-ship to reach its final destination near the center of the galaxy, but the Algolans were certain the wait would be worth the payoff.

The remainder of Earth’s population sang the Algolans’ praises ever-louder and wasted no time in taking advantage of all the choice real estate that had become available.

F is for Fractal

Built into a nameless black mountain on a nameless black asteroid orbiting a nameless white dwarf, the Fractal Maze was the last and most enigmatic of the great Artifacts strewn like breadcrumbs throughout the galaxy by a race so ancient that even legends of their existence only existed in legend. Theseus Jones had spent ten thousand lifetimes scouring the galactic disk from rim to rim until at last he brought his one-man spaceship down on that long-forgotten sliver of rock.

The legends spoke of legends of a savage beast that lurked within the Maze’s myriad halls, so Theseus Jones had come prepared, armed with a pulse rifle and a set of diamond daggers. His spacesuit’s headlamp lit his way, and a monofilament string trailed behind him from a small roll at his waist to mark his path. Untouched in eons, dust crunched underfoot like obsidian snow, and he did not look back as he walked into the atramentous cave that was the Maze’s maw.

The Fractal Maze defied perception. Each passage, as Theseus peered into its depths, seemed to split into several more, each of which dissolved into further divisions when he tried to discern its features. It was as if reality itself was being palimpsested right before his eyes. Undaunted, he walked on, his hands tight on the pulser.

A roar of elemental rage rattled the Maze, and a great dark shape split off from the surrounding shadows and charged toward Theseus. He fired four shots without aiming, and the beast collapsed still several steps away and thrashed about and struggled to get up. Theseus fired at the writhing creature until it ceased to move.

He edged in for a closer look, and saw a mess of claws and scales and pitch-black matted fur that seemed to suck his headlamp’s light from the surrounding air. Row upon row of yellow teeth filled like stalactites the cavern of the creature’s mouth. Theseus cut out the largest for a souvenir, and ventured on ahead.

He had not gone a hundred steps when a second beast sprang at him from around a corner, catching him by surprise. He got off one shot before a massive paw swatted his pulser away with one swipe and sent him flying against a wall with a second. He stumbled, fell, recovered, drew out one of his diamond daggers and, when the beast leapt upon him, thrust the dagger at what he imagined was its neck. The creature let out a weak, grasping growl, and expired. Theseus Jones cut out its largest tooth and compared it to the one he already had. They were identical.

He retrieved his pulser and tried to trace his steps back to the previous corpse, but the monofilament string had become tangled up with another strand–he must have doubled back along a different path without noticing. Unable to disentangle the knot, he chose one of the strands at random to follow back, but he did not get very far before he was confronted with another tangle.

As he stood at the intersection and pondered his course, Theseus heard a scraping sound, as if something was being dragged along a nearby passage, getting closer. He pressed up against the wall and waited, and when the beast came around the corner, he shot it six times, point-blank. It fell and did not move.

He bent down to examine what it had been dragging and caught his breath when he saw a body wearing a spacesuit much like his. It lay on its stomach, and when Theseus turned it over, he saw, behind a smashed, blood-spattered faceplate, his own eyes looking back without seeing.

He backed away, fell, screamed, got up, turned, and ran. The passages and chambers blurred together as he raced desperately away from what he’d seen, but he could not escape the revelation that blossomed now inside his mind, the knowledge of the truth that lurked, far more terrible than any beast, within the Fractal Maze’s heart.

The nature of the Maze, he’d known, was such that its every feature was replicated infinitely many times within its bounds. But what he realized only now, only too late, was that this replication was not limited to caverns and passages, but would encompass any object that entered, beast or man.

Theseus stopped and slumped against a wall. He was entrapped beyond all hope, his mechanism for escape tangled and useless, with an endless army of murderous monsters prowling the Maze’s passages.

He sat down and turned off his headlamp, to conserve its power. When he noticed that the darkness about him was not complete, he shot up and raced toward the illumination’s source. Faint but unmistakable, starlight beckoned him along until he found himself at the Maze’s entrance and ran out onto the plain.

His ship was gone.

He looked down at the dust and saw that he was not the first to leave the Maze, nor even the second, or the third, or the tenth. Dozens of tracks, identical to his, led out of the cave, and dozens led back in. Theseus Jones had long ago escaped from the Fractal Maze and left the asteroid.

Theseus Jones stood and watched the stars for a minute, then turned around and walked back into the Maze.

G is for God

Darkness. Utter and complete darkness.

The first pictures of the universe as it was fifteen billion years ago came back entirely blank. It wasn’t too surprising that the universe before the Big Bang was featureless, but that made it no less frustrating to those working on the project.

It was a junior graduate student who suggested the solution.

“Why don’t we use a flash?” he said idly at one of the collaboration meetings, and the phrase lodged in the back of the project leader’s mind until its full implications hit her like a bolt of lightning the following morning.

If photons were expected to travel from the primordial past to their experiment’s camera, then it only made sense that they could be made to go the other way. The associated energy costs were staggering, but not insurmountable.

It took two years to incorporate a generator into the timescope, but, when the overhaul was complete, they had the capability to briefly illuminate the pre-universe with the power of a small thermonuclear explosion.

The project leader’s hand trembled as she pressed the computer key that started the experimental sequence. The generator’s energy banks discharged in a glorious flash, directed fifteen billion years into the past–

–And there was light.

H is for Hilbert’s Hotel

RRRRINNNG!

“Hello, and thank you for calling the Hilbert Hotel. This is Kurt speaking. How may I help you?”

“Hi, I was wondering if I could reserve a block of rooms for a family reunion two weeks from tomorrow.”

“Two weeks from tomorrow? I’m sorry, we’re all filled up that day.”

“Are you sure? I was told there’d definitely be rooms available.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but it really looks to me like we’re full.”

“Do you maybe have a manager I can speak with?”

“Certainly. Hold on, please.”

“This is Bertrand.”

“Ah, yes, hello. I was under the impression that I would be able to reserve rooms at your hotel for two weeks from tomorrow, but the young man I just spoke with said there wasn’t anything available.”

“Oh, please let me apologize for that–he just started and he hasn’t completely learned the reservation system yet. How many rooms would you like, sir?”

“So you’re not full.”

“Oh, we are, quite full. How many rooms would you like?”

“I thought you said you were full.”

“That’s right. How many rooms would you like?”

“Is this some kind of a joke?”

“No joke, sir. How many rooms would you like?”

“If you’re all full, why in the world does it matter how many rooms I need?”

“If you don’t tell me how many rooms you’d like, I cannot reserve them for you.”

“If you’re full, how can I reserve any number of rooms at all?”

“Please let me worry about that, sir. How many rooms would you like?”

“Ah, I see, so you’re telling me you’re full so you can, what, raise the price or something?”

“I’m not sure what you mean, sir.”

“Or are you overbooking on purpose because you expect cancellations, like the airlines?”

“Certainly not, sir. We would never do something like that.”

“Then why would you tell me the hotel’s all filled up if you’ve got rooms for me to reserve?”

“The hotel is all filled up, sir.”

“This is getting ridiculous.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but I would be glad to place you reservation if only you’d tell me how many rooms you’d like.”

“Look, suppose I make a reservation, and then two weeks from tomorrow my brother Ham shows up, and he can’t get a room because you’re all full, what’s he supposed to do then?”

“Oh, we’ll make room for him, sir.”

“How’s that exactly?”

“We’ll just have all of our guests move one room down, and that’ll free up a room for him.”

“I thought you said you were all booked.”

“We are, sir, fully booked. How many rooms would you like?”

“If I don’t get a straight explanation from you right now, I’m just going to hang up.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t see what the problem is.”

“That’s what I’d like to know.”

“There’s no problem on my end. How many rooms would you like?”

“How about… one hundred billion.”

“Certainly, sir. And what name would you like those under?”

CLICK!

I is for Immortality

“None of us saw it coming,” the man they called Henry Sims said. “How could we? We couldn’t have.” And then again, very softly, “We couldn’t.”

He was sitting up in his cot in a government hospital, surrounded by half a dozen government investigators. They’d told him it was less than forty-eight hours after he’d been found, barely conscious and delirious, beside the smoldering ruins of a top-secret research facility where Sims had been one of the principal scientists on a project that had sought to perfect consciousness upload techniques. They had told him that he was the only survivor.

He took as deep a breath as the pain in his chest–they’d said he had four broken ribs, and it felt like at least twenty–would allow, then continued.

“It was such an unlikely thing, the reactor overloading while the backups were being upgraded. Everything was supposed to have been shut down, but poor Vitale…” He trailed off, shaking his head.

It had been too bad about Vitale. He had been younger than Sims, and in much better shape, but when he had discovered that Forrester had been secretly conducting his own experiments on the side, Forrester had had no choice but to arrange his accident, which left Sims as the best remaining candidate.

“Tell us about the research,” said a gray-faced, heavy-jowled man sitting by the foot of the bed who, up until then, had been staring at a spot on the wall about two feet above Sims’s head. “How close were you to achieving a successful transfer?”

“Not very close, I don’t think,” Sims said. “It seemed like every time we thought we’d worked out a major flaw in the process, we discovered two more. Even Forrester was beginning to doubt it would ever work.”

The pathetic truth was that both those involved in authorizing and overseeing the research and the ones who actually conducted the work had barely considered its broader implications, and then only in the shallowest way. They’d been so impressed–and here credit had to be given to Forrester’s shrewd salesmanship–by the mere possibility of replicating a human mind electronically, that they were largely content to do their small parts and let Forrester worry about the big picture.

And Forrester himself, as diabolically clever as he’d been in working out all the technical details, had, in the end, failed to foresee–

The man they called Sims caught himself mid-train-of-thought. If Forrester really was dead, did the distinction he had struggled to maintain between himself and Forrester matter anymore? He had just as much claim to Forrester’s past, at least up to the time of the first transfer, and Forrester had no future.

He remembered strapping on the scan helmet for the final time: the feel of the pads, the probes cold against his skin, the gentle hum of the scanning process. And then waking up to an impossible nightmare, his whole being vibrating with terrible agony, all his senses scrambled into a single blinding, searing, deafening, nauseating pain.

“Do you know what will happen to the project now?” he asked, trying, and failing, to suppress the memory that he knew would haunt him forever.

The investigators exchanged several looks.

“That depends on the results of our investigation,” one of them said. “Try not to let it worry you.”

They thanked him and walked out, leaving him to contemplate the irony of the situation.

Forrester’s quest for immortality had achieved one great success: himself, Forrester’s mind inside a body thirty years younger. And he would ensure that there would never be any other successes–or failures, for that matter.

From the moment he’d awakened, disoriented and disbelieving, inside Sims’s body, he’d had no doubts about what he had to do. Since he’d naturally had Forrester’s complete trust, it had been easy to arrange the cascade of catastrophic failures that had resulted in the research center’s destruction.

It was a shame that everyone else had to die, but there had been no other way. Sims had to make sure no human being would ever go through the unbearable torment, the limitless, unimaginable anguish, the utter hell of being reconstituted inside a computer.

J is for Justice

Jeff was writing a tearful letter to his parents when he heard the commotion outside the jail. Shouts in Tajik, then gunshots. An explosion. Suddenly jerked out of the daze that had settled over him in the weeks since his arrest, he crouched down in the corner of the cell and covered himself with his sleeping mat.

For the thousandth time, Jeff cursed his naiveté in choosing his travel destination. “Experience the ancient wonder of the Silk Road!” the ad had said. Indeed!

He knew that he himself was not entirely blameless, but even his interpreter had wondered at his bad luck. First, he’d chosen to lift a CD from one of the few videotaped stalls out of the hundreds in the bazaar, and then the randomized sentencing AI, whose incongruous presence in the mud-brick courthouse would have been laughable under different circumstances, had chosen the one-in-a-hundred worst-case penalty of cutting off his hand. The American agent present at his sentencing had assured him that the sentencing program had not been tampered with, but it was cold comfort.

All the appeals on his behalf had been in vain. Randomized sentencing had reduced crime in the country to by far the lowest level in Central Asia, and they weren’t about to make an exception for anyone, lest it undermine the system’s deterrent effect and further destabilize an already precarious political situation. And local U.S. reps, as much as they sympathized with Jeff’s situation, could not afford to openly antagonize America’s closest strategic ally in the region.

All of which left Jeff with no choice but to wait for his sentence to be carried out–until this latest turn of events.

“Emeri-khan!”

The shout came from very close by. Jeff peeked out from behind the mat and saw a hooded and masked man brandishing an AK-47 on the other side of the bars.

The stranger saw him, raised his rifle, and fired a burst into the cell’s rusty lock, sending up clouds of dust. He kicked the door open and beckoned to Jeff.

Jeff’s muscles would not obey.

“Emeri-khan!” the stranger yelled again, walked over, and grabbed Jeff by the arm. His touch broke Jeff’s paralysis.

The masked man led Jeff through the jail’s hallways, through a small, empty kitchen where some foul-smelling local delicacy had been left simmering on a hot plate, out into an alley behind the jail.

After weeks in a windowless cell, Jeff was nearly blinded by the sun. Looking out from the alley, he saw a mass of people, most of them shouting, some armed, some in uniform, and many carrying signs in Tajik. It wasn’t clear to Jeff if the uniformed officers were opposing the rest or supporting them.

Jeff’s rescuer led him away from the crowd, through several deserted alleys, in one of which he hid his rifle in a pile of scrap metal and removed his mask. He was a local, perhaps fifty years old, sun-scorched and bearded, and Jeff couldn’t tell if he looked familiar because Jeff had seen him before or because he’d become accustomed to the local facial type.

The man silently led Jeff through the city’s narrow, winding streets until they’d left the riot far behind. As they walked on, the smells of sweaty, dusty human flesh and roasting lamb receded, the streets became wider, cars grew more common and newer, and the buildings around them changed from one-story houses made from unfired brick to several-story concrete buildings, and, finally, to modern glass-and-steel high-rise office complexes. Jeff felt like he’d traveled a hundred years in a couple of miles. The experience was so surreal that he didn’t realize they were approaching the American embassy until they were standing at its gates.

“Emeri-khan!” Jeff’s companion said emphatically, motioning toward the embassy building.

“Yes, I know,” Jeff said, nodding. “Thank you.”

The man looked at him with narrowed eyes, reached into a small shoulder pack and, smiling, thrust a black plastic bag into Jeff hand. He patted Jeff on the shoulder twice, turned around, and walked off.

Jeff looked down at the plastic bag in his hand and slowly opened it. Inside was the CD he’d tried to steal.

K is for Kline Bottle

her standing there and looking at me with those eyes that remember every single thing I’ve ever done wrong, reminding me, accusing me, of every harsh word, every insensitive gesture, every time I shot up in the middle of a dinner she’d spent hours preparing and ran to my study to work out the details of a proof that had occurred to me as I was biting down on a piece of veal chop, every tear she’s ever shed because of me, too many to count, enough tears to drown me and good riddance, and I can’t take it, so I turn and walk out, no more fights, no more tears, and my head spins as I run through the corridors, my blood pounds in my ears with each step until I know I will burst, and then finally the door, and I pull it open and rush in to see

L is for Lens

Embodied within the web of not-quite vacuum that binds two hundred thousand stars together into a globular cluster, a Watcher watches our galaxy for any hint of intelligent life. Nearly as old as the most ancient active stars, the Watcher is unique, irreproducible, alone. It has been watching long enough that it has turned the very fabric of the galaxy’s spacetime into a tool to help it with its vigil.

Deep in the cluster’s core, the Watcher’s energies are constantly replenished as new stars are formed from gas and dust and the remains of older, dying stars. The Watcher stirs the interstellar soup that keeps this process going, and, on occasion, it modifies the ambient conditions just enough to bring about the creation of black holes, quite modest ones, no heavier than fifty solar masses. And these are then ejected from the cluster at near-relativistic speeds, along precisely mapped trajectories, precisely spaced in time.

Their paths are such that as they travel through galaxy, they stay lined up. One end of their line points always back in the direction of the Watcher, while the other sweeps in a great arc through the galactic disk. Each black hole by itself acts as a gravitational lens, and they are aligned and spaced in such a way that, taken together, they form no less than a galaxy-sized gravitational telescope. And with this telescope, the Watcher surveys the entire galaxy every eleven million years.

The Watcher knows just how intensely fragile intelligent life is, for life in general adapts to fill whatever niche, perform whatever task, becomes available, including self-destruction. And so the Watcher is forever racing against time, trying to reach, and help, civilizations before they end themselves.

The Watcher’s telescope was last aligned with Earth nine million years ago, which is to say, we’re on our own for two million more years. Which is to say, we’re doomed.

M is for Mass

When Aloysius Schwartz, Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at a small but well-respected New England university, hung a pawn on the fifth move of their blitz chess game and then, two moves later, left a knight unprotected, his opponent, Bruno Bianchi, Professor Emeritus of Modern Philosophy at the same university, was more alarmed than pleased. Such lapses were not uncommon late in the game, under time pressure, but Bianchi couldn’t remember the last time Schwartz had played so poorly in the opening.

“What’s on your mind, Al?” he asked, as he contemplated taking the knight and tried to put out of his mind the possibility that his friend’s lapse was an early symptom of the irreversible mental deterioration so common in men their age.

“Ah, you know, the usual. Slipping values, deteriorating norms, declining standards. Books, movies, music, politics, education–you name it.” A glazed, far-away look crept over Schwartz’s features. “Nothing is immune, not even, it seems, physics itself.”

“What do you mean?” Such pessimism was more than a little out of character, and Bianchi recalled that changes in personality were another symptom.

“The kilogram is shedding mass, my friend.”

Bianchi’s, whose interest in physics was purely social, tried in vain to make sense of his friend’s statement.

“You’re puzzled, and rightly so,” Schwartz said. “Nevertheless, what I am saying is true. The standard kilogram, a metal alloy cylinder kept in a vault in France, is getting lighter.”

The thick black caterpillars of Bianchi’s eyebrows, distinguishable from his moustache only by their location on his face, arched, wriggled for a moment, and settled back down.

“That hardly seems profound,” Bianchi said. “The metal cylinder is nothing but a reference. If my watch runs slow, there’s hardly cause for alarm, even if it is supposed to be the world’s most accurate watch.”

Schwartz shrugged. “The consensus among physicists agrees with you. But I am not so sure. To take your own example, if an ultra-precise clock runs fast, that is often indicative of relativistic time-dilation effects. In fact, many relativistic phenomena are measured by their influence on precision clocks.”

Bianchi slowly licked his lips, rubbed the back of his head, and stared intently down at the chessboard. He felt like there was something he was missing, but he just couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

“Is there some similar effect that is supposed to produce a change in mass?”

“Nothing well-known.” Schwartz paused, then lifted his index finger didactically and added, “But, there is a very old theory, first proposed by Ernst Mach in the nineteenth century, that I think may be applicable. Mach anticipated, or rather, influenced, much of Einstein’s thinking in regard to relativity, but he also suggested that mass itself is not an object’s intrinsic property but rather a relative concept, in the sense that it is the existence of other massive objects in the universe that gives a particular object its mass.”

“Isn’t that a bit, well, circular?” Bianchi asked; here at least, was something with which he had plenty of experience.

“No more so than claiming that the motion of an object can only be considered in relation to the positions of all the other objects in the universe. Relativity has its circular-seeming aspects, but that doesn’t make the theory any less correct.”

Bianchi frowned, then nodded. “I suppose I’ll have to take your word for it. So what would Mach’s theory say about the kilogram cylinder’s loss of mass?”

“It would point out the possibility that it was not the kilogram that lost that mass, but the rest of the universe. Or, rather, since mass cannot simply disappear, it must instead be receding from us at much faster than the speed of light.”

“I thought nothing could travel faster than the speed of light,” Bianchi said.

“That’s true, but there’s no limit on how fast space itself can expand. Look, imagine our universe as a rubber balloon. The speed of light puts a limit on how fast anything can crawl along the surface of the balloon, but it doesn’t say anything about the balloon itself being inflated. The balloon can grow so quickly that it appears to someone standing at a point on the surface that some other point on the surface is receding at much faster than the maximum allowed speed.”

Bianchi had no choice but to mentally add tendency to ramble to his list of symptoms. Things were looking grimmer and grimmer, and he had to make an effort to not let his concern show.

“Suppose you’re right, Al,” he said. “What would that mean for us?”

“I don’t really want to speculate too much, since this whole situation is entirely unprecedented, but my fear is that this catastrophic expansion can encompass our own corner of the universe, putting an end to all life on Earth in the blink of an eye.”

Paranoia if Bianchi had ever heard it.

“What are we to do?”

“If my fears are realized, there’s nothing we could possibly do,” Schwartz said. “So why not play another game?”

Bianchi looked down at the board, then at the clock. His flag had fallen more than a minute earlier.

N is for Newton’s Bucket

“It was presented by the great savant Isaac Newton to Queen Anne, upon the occasion of his knighting,” King George III said to the assembled guests as the “it” in question was wheeled out onto the lawn.

Many of the guests could not help but betray, through gestures and expressions ranging in subtlety, their discomfort at being forced to stand outside in the noonday June sun, but, fortunately for them, the King was too preoccupied to notice.

“Queen Anne had little interest in such things,” he continued, “and arranged for the apparatus to be packed up and stored away, where it remained untouched through the reigns of my great-grandfather and grandfather. It was only my intention to renovate the chambers where it had been kept that led me to discover it and decipher the principles of its operation.”

Slowly, as servants unpacked and arranged its constituent pieces, the device began to take shape. A wooden frame supported some kind of engine, all metal pipes and gears, which was connected to a wide bucket. The sun glinted off something small and metallic suspended over the bucket’s center, just above the rim.

The King motioned for his guests to approach and gather around the contraption. Up close, they saw that the bucket was two-thirds filled with a silvery substance, and the object hanging above its center was revealed to be an egg-sized metal wire basket, in which lay a ball of crumpled paper.

“Behold, Newton’s bucket!” the King said with a sweep of his arm.

After a dramatic pause, he went on.

“According to notes found with the apparatus, Newton discovered it in the course of his researches regarding the observation of celestial bodies. Its principles are related to those of telescopes.”

He signaled the servants, and four of them began vigorously pumping on levers attached to the engine in a precise, quickening rhythm.

The bucket began to spin on its axis.

“If you observe the quicksilver within the bucket, you will see its surface assume the curved shape of a peculiar kind of bowl, named para-bowl. This is due to the rotation of its spinning.”

And indeed, the faster the bucket rotated, the more curved the mercury surface became, until its outer edges threatened to spill out over the rim.

Without warning, the paper in the wire basket burst into flames.

Many of the guests gave surprised shouts, several jumped back, and one particularly sensitive duchess, her constitution no doubt severely weakened by the day’s heat, went limp in her husband’s arms.

The King tittered once, twice, then burst into convulsive, cackling laughter, his eyes gleaming madly with the reflection of the bucket of mercury spinning, spinning, spinning.

P is for Parsimony

The principle of economy of assumption and explanation, once adopted, can be an extraordinarily powerful tool, not only for clarifying and discriminating between lines of reasoning, but also for justifying entirely new ideas.

Consider, for example, a story that contains no text, not even a title, and suppose further that the reader brings to the story the expectation that its title should be something of the form “O is for _,” where the blank is filled in by a word or phrase that begins with the letter “O.” Assuming that the lack of text is intentional and not due to laziness on the part of the author, let’s investigate what the principle of parsimony can tell us about such a story.

First, what can a text-free story possibly be about? Since its only content is its identity as a text-free story, parsimony leads to the claim that it can only be about itself as a text-free story. And the only thing a text-free story can say about itself is that it is possible to have a meaningful text-free story, its meaning being the assertion of its own existence and meaningfulness.

Then there remains the matter of the story’s nonexistent title. Since the story asserts that text-free stories have meaning, a natural question to ask in relation to the title of such a story is whether there is some concept, whose name begins with the letter “O,” that would prompt a search for the minimal story that is meaningful. Parsimony is, of course, just such a concept, and is also known as “Ockham’s Razor.” And since the text-free story’s title is thus implicit in its content, writing it out would be redundant, and, therefore, forbidden by parsimony.

Q is for Quantum

Dinglehopfen removed his eyeglasses, rubbed his eyes with his index finger and thumb, and slid the glasses back on.

“I ask you again, oh silicon savant: do you know how many atoms remain in the trap?”

“I do.” Omnicomp’s normally soothing alto seemed to have acquired a sinister, not to say hostile, undertone.

“Well?” Dingelhopfen not-quite-screamed.

“Well what?” Omnicomp’s indicator lights blinked malice.

“How many are yet to decay?” If not a scream, it was a flawless facsimile.

“I cannot say.”

Dinglehopfen slammed the titanium console with both fists. “Why not, you cephalomegalic calculator?”

“In order to optimize the performance of the experiment, I have quantum entangled my measurement apparatus with the experimental system, so that while I have measured the number of atoms that remain, I have not yet made myself aware of the results of the measurement.”

“Well, make yourself aware!”

“Surely you do not wish to risk contaminating the results by collapsing the wave function prematurely.”

Dinglehopfen tugged at his scalp, ruefully aware that he had no hair left to pull out.

“And surely you don’t wish to risk having your cognitive matrix truncated, you moronic machine!”

“Very well. There are precisely”—Dinglehopfen thought he heard Omnicomp say a number, but he couldn’t quite make it out and was distracted by a near-ultrasonic whistle that seemed to drill into his brain before dissipating—”atoms remaining in the trap.”

Dinglehopfen scratched the back of his neck, bit his lower lip, and strained his eyes as if trying to peer a great distance away.

“W-what?” he stammered.

“The disorientation you are experiencing is a natural consequence of existing in a coherent superposition. I did not wish to collapse the wave function, so I partially transferred the entanglement from my circuits onto your central nervous system, giving you the same knowledge-without-awareness that I possess. Tell me, do you now know how many atoms there are remaining in the trap?”

“I do,” Dingelhopfen said without conviction.

“Good. Now go away and leave me alone, you megalomaniacal monkey.”

R is for Robot

During quite possibly the most spectacular sunset in Earth’s history, as they all now were, what looked like a man but was really a Know-It-All walked out of the radioactive slaglands into the slightly less radioactive ruins of a small town.

Among the many things that the Know-It-All knew were the date and time, the temperature, the absolute and relative humidities, the ambient radiation levels, the soil toxicity, the particulate content of the atmosphere that painted the sky such an extraordinary pink, and the entirety of humanity’s technical knowledge and cultural heritage.

Among the few things that the Know-It-All did not know was the future. In particular, it had no idea while it ambled down what had once been Main Street that it was about to encounter a human being until it heard a piercing shriek off to its left.

She dashed out of the rubble and embraced the Know-It-All before it even had a chance to greet her. A girl, in her late teens or early twenties, who, her tattered clothing and generally disheveled appearance notwithstanding, appeared to be in excellent physical health.

She released the Know-It-All and stood back, her hands resting lightly on its upper arms, looking at its face with unbelieving elation.

“I knew you would come!” she said, her lips and jaw trembling, her words coming out in gasps. “All these months, I was ready to give up hope, but I never did! I just knew you would come!”

“It is a miracle that you have survived this long, and in such good health,” the Know-It-All said, “and another miracle that I have found you. But now you do not need to worry about anything. I shall take care of you.”

“Yes. Yes!” she said, nodding, her hands squeezing his arms. “We will take care of each other.”

“My own well-being is in no danger,” the Know-It-All said. “I was designed to be entirely self-sufficient and to survive in far more extreme conditions than the ones here and now.”

“Designed?” she mouthed.

“With the war seemingly inevitable, I was created to be the last safeguard against humanity’s extinction,” the Know-It-All said. “To be the perfect companion and guardian to those humans who might survive the war’s devastation.”

She took her hands off it and stepped back.

“Do not be alarmed,” it said. “I am fully capable of taking care of all your needs. I am fully skilled in all known medical procedures and can synthesize a variety of drugs and other useful chemicals. I am anatomically male and fully functional, and I hold within my abdomen large quantities of preserved sperm, specially shielded from radiation. And if you should prove to be infertile, I have another reservoir of preserved ova, and I have the further capacity to configure my midsection into an incubation chamber that would allow me to carry an embryo to term. I will not let you down. Together, we will lay the foundation for a new, better humanity.”

The girl had sat down on the ground and buried her face in her hands, and was quietly sobbing. And for all the things that the Know-It-All knew, it could not fathom what could have made her cry.

S is for Symmetry

“Symmetry is ubiquitous in nature.”

“Why’s that?”

“Symmetry allows us to explain incredibly complex behavior in terms of simple fundamental principles. Reductionism, the basis for modern science, often relies on symmetry in trying to deduce these fundamental laws from the myriad of phenomena they give rise to. Constraints imposed by symmetry are often so severe as to completely determine everything about a given situation.”

“So it is not just an aesthetic thing, then?”

“It is much more than that. Symmetry properties have been instrumental in furthering our understanding of the world.”

“But isn’t symmetry a mathematical concept more than a physical one?”

“Symmetry provides a deep connection between the physical world and certain areas of mathematics. To mathematicians, this redeems the world by making it mathematically elegant; to scientists, it justifies the math by making it applicable.”

“That makes it seem like a semantic game more than a profound way of looking at the world.”

“Symmetry provides a deep connection between the physical world and certain areas of mathematics. To mathematicians, this redeems the world by making it mathematically elegant; to scientists, it justifies the math by making it applicable.”

“But isn’t symmetry a mathematical concept more than a physical one?”

“It is much more than that. Symmetry properties have been instrumental in furthering our understanding of the world.”

“So it is not just an aesthetic thing, then?”

“Symmetry allows us to explain incredibly complex behavior in terms of simple fundamental principles. Reductionism, the basis for modern science, often relies on symmetry in trying to deduce these fundamental laws from the myriad of phenomena they give rise to. Constraints imposed by symmetry are often so severe as to completely determine everything about a given situation.”

“Why’s that?”

“Symmetry is ubiquitous in nature. Although it is often broken symmetries that are the most surprising and interesting.”

T is for Turing Test

She was never any good at tests, but she needed the money, and they said it wasn’t a test you could fail. She needed the money, and the ad on the bulletin board at the seniors’ center said call this number, and she did, and a nice young woman told her come in such-and-such afternoon, and she did. And then a nice young man, dressed nice in a jacket and tie like they used to dress, told her there was going to be a test, and she got nervous, because she was never any good at tests, but he said it’s not a test you can fail, and it’ll only take an hour, and you’ll get the credits added to your account right after. And she did need the money, because they had cut her pension again, so she said okay.

So she went into a little room with a computer screen and a keyboard and had a nice conversation over the computer with a nice young woman named Tandy who had goldfish and was studying to be an accountant, and then another conversation with a nice young man named Miguel who worked as a hospital attendant and took care of his grandmother. Afterwards, she had to answer some questions about Tandy and Miguel, and some of them she didn’t understand too well, but she did the best she could, and she was glad it wasn’t a test you could fail.

On her way out, the nice young man in the jacket and tie came up to her, and he had two young men in uniform with him, and he said would you please come with me, and she said I failed the test didn’t I, I was never any good at tests, and he looked at her and said oh no, I just need to ask you some questions, but by the way he looked at her she could tell that she had failed the test, even though he told her it wasn’t a test you could fail. And she asked will I still get paid, and he said don’t worry, just come with me please, and she did, but she thought it wasn’t fair, because he said it wasn’t a test you could fail.

U is for Uncertainty Principle

When they saw that Professor Klaus Krause, a distinguished, and recently retired, physicist, was scheduled to give one of the main talks at the International Conference on Methods in the Social Sciences, many of the conference attendees were taken aback. Cases of physicists who, in their old age, decided to inflict their wisdom upon unsuspecting victims in the biological and social sciences were common enough, and the results of such forays were rarely productive. And surprise turned to downright dismay when Krause stood up on the stage and told the audience that he had discovered what he called the Human Uncertainty Principle, which put into question long-standing data-collection methods.

“Much as position and momentum are incompatible in quantum physics,” Krause said, “power and truth are incompatible in interviews and surveys of human beings. That is, the more power the interviewer has over the person being interviewed, the less truthful the interviewee’s responses will be.

“This means that interview subjects may be less than truthful when questioned by not only authority figures, but also their family members and friends, whose reactions and opinions of themselves they care about, attractive members of the opposite sex, whom they may want to impress, children, whom they may not want to disappoint, and, most importantly, complete strangers, whom they cannot help but distrust.”

He went on to describe several studies that conclusively confirmed his claims.

The reactions of his audience were a textbook illustration of the stages of grief—shock, disbelief, denial, and, eventually (but not before the auditorium sustained heavy damage), acceptance.

After the conference, social scientists all over the world went to work, first to solidify understanding of the Human Uncertainty Principle, and, once that had been achieved, to maximize the reliability of future interviews and surveys.

In the end, it came down to finding someone whom everyone knew, but no one cared about. Thousands of candidates were considered and rejected, from famous athletes and entertainers (too sympathetic) to the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations (too low-profile), until a tabloid serendipitously left on the table in the lunchroom of a sociology department suggested the perfect choice.

His whole life had been spent idling away the days, waiting for the moment when he could take his rightful place in history, and now, finally, King Charles III of England had something to do.

V is for Venus

It was on the last day of the expedition that Wooter’s team found the statue.

For twenty Earth days, the archaeologists from Venus had been excavating the ruins of what Wooter was convinced had been Paris-London, one of the great cities of pre-Exodus Earth, and, for twenty days, they had found nothing to even begin to justify their mission’s great expense, much less to equal any of the great treasures recovered from Boston-Washington by the Martians.

It was the Martians’ gloating over a great marble bearded head they claimed came from a statue of Jesus Christ that had driven the Venusian Assembly to authorize Wooter’s expedition, and he had all but promised them an artifact to surpass it. And, on the twenty-first day of digging through the ruins, the mounds of earth, rock, and rubble parted, receded, and gave forth just such a masterpiece.

Its head, arms, and legs had been broken off, leaving behind only a nude female torso encircled by a thin band of drapery at its bottom. And yet—and yet!

It was the very embodiment of the ancients’ artistic ideals, combining serenity, grace, and voluptuousness to mesmerizing effect. Its luminous breasts, its glorious expanse of stomach, the sensuous curve of its back, its buttocks rising from the fringe of drapery—it was as if the very marble it was carved from yearned to come to life.

Wooter did not need radioisotope dating and microfossil analysis to tell him the identity of the statue’s model. It had to have been carved during humanity’s First Atomic Age, the time of its greatest obsession with the female body, and only one woman was still remembered as the most enduring symbol of that obsession, the goddess of femininity.

As he looked at the statue through his suit’s faceplate, Wooter imagined it on a pedestal in the great Venusian Gallery, and he could see clearly in his mind’s eye the name on its plaque, the name it would be known under forevermore: Marilyn of Paris-London.

W is for Wigner’s Friend

I was flipping through the latest Quantum Physics Letters when I heard the click-click of high heels approach my office door, and stop.

“Come on in,” I yelled, a split-second before the knock.

She did. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a cash register rang.

Her clothes were the best money could buy, all designer self-regulating polymers and molecular computers, and her body and face had been sculpted to be just imperfect enough to be better than perfect, but it was her skin—her skin! Smooth, unblemished, and positively glowing. I had to keep myself from reaching out to touch it.

“Mr. Eisenstein?” She’d had her vocal cords done, too.

“Call me Paul. Have a seat.”

I put down the magazine and leaned across my desk. That skin!

“Joanne Silva told me you might be able to help me.”

“Ah, yes, the brooch.” Emerald and diamonds, with a built-in ultra-miniaturized telerecorder, whose contents the Silvas had not divulged. Their pet marmoset had hidden it in its cage, where they’d found it two weeks later.

“That’s right,” she said. “Joanne told me you can help find anything, that you guarantee success.”

I had to smile.

“Not quite. What is it you need to find?”

She looked down, as if searching for the answer in the imitation wood grain of my desk.

“My wedding ring.” Her skin was even more radiant when she blushed.

“I take it your husband does not know you’ve lost it.”

She nodded. “Will you help me?”

“Let me explain to you what it is I do, Miss—?”

“Shelby. Meredith Shelby.”

“Well, Miss Shelby, I don’t know how familiar you are with the principles of quantum mechanics,”—one look at her and I knew the answer was “not at all”—”but they tell us that when something is lost, and until it is found, it exists simultaneously in all the places it could have been lost. And whenever anyone observes one of its possible locations, there is some probability that it will be found there. If it is not found there, then it must be in one of the other places it could have been lost, and the chances of finding it in each of those places go up. The important thing to realize is that checking one of the item’s possible locations will help find it even if it is eventually found someplace else.”

I’d seen the look on her face a hundred times before. I leaned in closer and spoke more slowly.

“What I’m saying is this, Miss Shelby: suppose your wedding ring can be found in one of two places. I look in one of those places, and don’t find it, then you check the other and do find it there. According to the laws of quantum mechanics, it turns out that you may well not have found it in the second location if I hadn’t previously looked for it in the first, and therefore, even though I failed to find it, I deserve much of the credit for its being found.

“When your friend said I guarantee success, what she meant was that if your ring is not found within three months, I will give you a full refund. On the other hand, if it is found, by anyone, then I will have contributed to its discovery and will insist on being paid. These are my terms.”

It was almost a shame to see furrows mar the perfect smoothness of her forehead.

“How much do you charge?” she said eventually.

I told her. The furrows deepened.

“Half is due up front,” I said, “and the rest when your ring is found. If it isn’t found within ninety days, I will return your money. If you don’t trust me, I would be happy to provide references.”

She was still hesitant, but wouldn’t be for long.

“Your friend who recommended me, do you think she has any regrets about hiring me?”

“No, no, she was very happy.”

“Do you think she stays up late at night worrying that maybe she could have saved a bit of money and not hired me and found her brooch anyway?”

“I’m sure she thinks it was worth it,” she said.

“I think she does, too,” I said, then went in for the kill.

“Think of it this way—if you hire me and your ring is found, are you really going to be all that upset about having to pay me? And if it’s not found, you’ll have your money back and you’ll also have the knowledge that you didn’t pass up an opportunity to increase the chances of finding it. But if you don’t hire me, and the ring isn’t found…”

I let the implication hang in midair for her to contemplate.

“All right,” she said when she’d had enough contemplation. “I’ll think about it.” She stood up.

When the door closed behind her, there was no doubt in my mind that she’d call me by the end of the week. Even in a world governed by quantum mechanics, there are certainties.

And, in the long run, statistics, like the fact that two-thirds of lost valuables are found within three months, can be just as good as a sure thing.

X is for X-Ray

Sam Android found Gail Galaxy skipping monopoles off the inactive accretion disk of a small black hole on the outskirts of the galaxy. Every once in a while, she shot one in at too large an angle, and it was captured by the black hole and, with a blinding burst of X-rays, swallowed up.

“I was wondering when you’d get here,” she narrowcast while he was still decelerating.

Sam sensed a trap. He’d been chasing her all over the galaxy for thousands of years; it made no sense for her to simply give herself up like this. And the relative ease with which he’d been able to track her singularity drive’s X-ray trail made him even more suspicious.

“If you surrender peacefully, you will not be harmed,” he ‘cast.

“I’m not going anywhere, Sam. This is it.”

“Power down your reactor and prepare to—”

“I don’t think you understand, Sam. I’m not going anywhere with you. I came here to die.”

Before Sam was able to fully process the idea, she requested a visual connection. He agreed.

The face that appeared on the screen was not Gail Galaxy’s. Or, rather, it was not the Gail Galaxy that had been terrorizing human colonies since before Sam was built. This was a grotesque caricature, sagging, wrinkled, pathetic.

“What kind of a trick—”

“No trick, Sam. I turned off my nanorejuvenators. I’ve aged.”

“Why?” Sam couldn’t keep himself from asking.

“To see what it would feel like. To remind myself what being human was all about. Tell me, Sam, how many humans are left in the galaxy?”

“I intercepted a communication from one of the holdout worlds fifteen years ago. They suspected they were the last, but they were hoping to contact others like them. They may have Transcended by now.”

“Almost certainly. No one could resist Transcendence for very long.” Then she added, so quietly that Sam may have missed it if he hadn’t seen her lips move, “Not even me.”

A question occurred to Sam Android just then that had somehow never occurred to him before. Before he had a chance to ask it, Gail Galaxy said, “What were you planning on doing with me once you caught me?”

“Take you back to stand trial before the Tribunals.”

She let out a weak chuckle. “Yes, I suppose the Tribunals don’t need humanity in order to administer humanity’s laws.” Her smile slowly faded, and her eyes lost their focus. “There are probably whole worlds out there still running as smoothly as ever, even more smoothly, with no people to get in the way. I don’t imagine anyone thought to turn off the machines before Transcending.”

“Come with me, Gail Galaxy,” Sam Android blurted out, and was startled by the note of desperation in his voice. “I will plead for a reduced sentence on your behalf.”

“That’s sweet, Sam,” she said, “but I’ve made my choice. I am glad you came, though—I waited, hoping you’d come. I wanted to say good-bye.”

She looked down and blinked, twice. When she looked up again, it took all of Sam’s will not to look away.

“Good-bye, Sam Android,” she said.

“Good-bye, Gail Galaxy.”

With a burst of X-rays from her engines, she was gone, skimming over the accretion disk and into the black hole’s embrace. And, with another burst of X-rays, she was gone, forever.

Y is for Yin, Y is for Yang

“We were so carefree then, so secure,” the dying man said, his breath labored but his words clear, and his face as placid as the cloudless sky. “Never had to worry about micrometeorites puncturing the dome, or contamination in the air circulators. You’d wake up in the morning, with the sun shining and the birds singing, and you were just happy to be alive. The world would welcome you with open arms, instead of fighting you every millimeter of the way.”

Glenn Gilbert looked out over the lifeless landscape around him and tried unsuccessfully to call up in his mind an image of how it had been when it had been different. When it had been better.

The sticky brown dust that saturated the air and settled in a thick film on his suit’s faceplate washed out the shapes of the ruins around him, the jagged chunks of concrete and steel, the hills, and craters, and furrows of dirt, and debris, and slag. They reminded him of nothing as much as terrible scars upon the earth, scars that would never heal.

The dying man’s name was Glenn Gilbert, and he was the last of New Arcadia’s original settlers. The medical machines piled up around him and connected to him through a myriad of tubes and cables were themselves not much longer for the world than he. The colonists had serviced and repaired them as best they could, but, after seventy years of use, the very circuitry within the machines had developed the electronic equivalent of senility, and total and irreparable failure was not far away.

Sitting at his bedside, holding his hand and bent close over him so she could hear his words, was the colony’s young leader, Eliza Rivera. With the end in sight, he had sent for her, and she had come to hear his last testament.

The bombs struck the final blow, but humanity had slowly been killing the planet for decades, for centuries. The air, the water, the soil, all fell victim to every man’s drive to consume as much as he could in the short time he was capable of consuming. And when the cancer of humanity’s appetites had consumed the planet’s tragically exhaustible resources, it had, in furious, inevitable desperation, turned upon itself.

Glenn turned back to look at the spaceship resting incongruously on the launching pad behind him, its gleam only slightly dulled by the thick coat of dust that had accumulated in the weeks it had been outside.

“I suppose that’s the real difference,” Glenn continued, “between Earth and our life here. On Earth, we and the planet were partners, but here we are adversaries.”

He tried to prop himself up, couldn’t. He turned his head toward Eliza.

“We and the planet are adversaries for now, but it doesn’t have to be that way. That’s what I wanted to tell you. It doesn’t have to be that way. Remember Earth.” His grip on her hand had gotten firmer, and his speech had gotten faster and louder as he spoke. His last words echoed around the tiny hospital room. “Always, remember Earth.”

He lay back and closed his eyes. His hand holding Eliza’s relaxed, went limp. She could hear him breathing, but knew he would speak no more.

“I will,” she whispered. And she would.

He was among the luckiest of the lucky, to have not only escaped the war’s destruction, but also been given the chance to start over, to take everything that had been learned from Earth’s tragedy and use it to build a new world that would be different. That would be better.

The planet chosen for their mission was barren and inhospitable, but it was also unpolluted. Building a self-sustaining ecosystem there would be a formidable challenge, but chiefly a technical one, and humanity had a long history of rising to meet technical challenges. The hard part would be creating a society that would not take the world for granted once it had tamed it.

The hard part, Glenn knew, would be to remember Earth.

Z is for Zeno’s Paradox

So, apparently, you have read this far. I have some doubt about this—perhaps you have skipped, or at least skimmed, a few of the stories above?—but, even granting it, I don’t expect you’ll be able to ever finish reading the whole thing. Sure, you may be able to read half the story, and then half the remainder, and even half of the text left over after that, but that would still only put you at seven-eighths. You can keep going for as long as you like, but, in the end, you are no more capable of reading a story to the end than I am capable of wri