Temporal Contingency Read online

  “This is one of two fully functional transporters known to exist. The other is the one I constructed on Big Sigma a few months ago.”

  “Oh, right,” Lex said, nodding.

  “I’ve been tinkering with it for a while. In theory it is revolutionary, but like so many of the other doodads the Neo-Luddites keep around, there’s a good reason these things aren’t in general circulation. The range is short, the power requirements are sky high, but there’s one limitation that trumps the rest.” He opened a drawer and pulled out what looked like a length of pipe with a short antenna on one end. “You need one of these beacons to target the thing. What good is a vehicle where someone else has to get there first to set up your arrival?”

  “Well that’s sort of how all space travel works, what with the transit corridors and—”

  “Exactly. It’s not new. It’s not better. It’s just inefficient and nonscalable. So I started working on it.”

  “Shall I remove Squee and Solby from the room?” Ma asked over the nearest speaker.

  “Oh, right. Yeah,” Karter said. “I don’t know why, but funks just can’t help going berserk when I power this thing up. I must have lost fifteen Solbies in the last month from him jumping into the reaction chamber during a test.”

  “Have you ever stopped to think maybe you’re not living life appropriately if you accidentally kill your own pet often enough to require backed-up copies of it?”

  “No.”

  Another mechanical arm appeared in the doorway, this one holding a covered bowl. When it was set down and the lid was removed the scent instantly attracted both funks into the corridor. The door shut behind them.

  “Where was I?” Karter asked.

  “I honestly have no idea,” Lex said.

  “Oh, right. Fixing the flaws. I’ve been banging my head against this one off and on for weeks in experiments and much longer on paper. Pretty quickly I worked out how to set coordinates. But when I tried transporting something from a known location into the chamber all I ever got was a little pop of vacuum. When I tried to send something out, which half the time was Solby, it just sort of went. Hell if I know where. Then, about a month ago, it struck me. I wasn’t being specific enough in my coordinates. All I was giving was three dimensions.”

  “But there are only three dimensions,” Lex said. “Well, I mean, not counting the uh… what do you call it… the Carpinelli Field dimension.”

  “First off, why wouldn’t you count that one? Second, that’s an entirely different meaning of the word dimension than I’m referring to. Third, shut up and listen, I’m trying to educate you. Superstring theory says there are ten dimensions. Other theories count differently. We typically only focus on X, Y, and Z because those are the ones we can purposely move around in.” He tapped and swiped at one of the screens. “You still leave your slidepad in offline mode?”

  “Not so much anymore,” Lex said.

  “Well put it in offline mode now.”

  He reached into his pocket and revealed the palm-sized, mostly transparent card that served the purpose of a keychain, personal computer, communication device, identification, and practically everything else a civilized person needed to get by in life. With a few simple commands, he shut off its radio. Right about when he was finishing, he felt a tingle in the air and heard a clank in a waste receptacle beside the control panel.

  Karter pried the lid off the receptacle and pulled out a similar slidepad. He handed it to Lex. He turned it over in his hand and started to sweep through the screens. It was a little temperamental. The screen was somewhat glitchy and slow to respond. After a minute or so, Karter became impatient.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Okay… you had a mediocre copy of my slidepad dropped into your trash can.”

  “Check the time on the trash one.”

  He glanced at it. “It’s about two minutes ahead.”

  Karter snatched the functional slidepad from Lex and tossed it into the reaction chamber, then punched a button on the console. Before it finished the arc of its flight, lights in the space station dimmed and flickered, and a dim purple flash around the slidepad caused it to flicker away.

  The lights slowly recovered, and Lex looked at the device in his hand. If it was anyone else responsible, he would be working his way through the dozens of ways in which the duplication, manipulation, and destruction of the slidepad could have been done. It was easy enough to fake. But this was Karter. The man had no interest in pulling wool over anyone’s eyes, unless it was to test some sort of wool-eye-pulling apparatus that would somehow end up as a weapon of mass destruction a few weeks later. At the very least Karter believed he’d just sent this device back in time. There was no point in arguing with him about it. Particularly not when there was a much, much better point to argue about.

  “Karter… you built a time machine?”

  “Bah. Time machine is so limiting. It’s still a transporter, but one that moves objects between four-dimensional points in space-time, rather than three-dimensional points in space,” he said. “I had practice picking four-dimensional coordinates thanks to the Magic Mirror, but I’m still working on dimensions five and six. It’s possible the reason I’m having a hard time is that they don’t exist. Even if they do, I’m probably not going to work on anything past six. Beyond that we get into points existing in universes with different initial conditions, which means different laws of physics, and—”

  “Whoa, whoa, hold on. You invented a time machine, and you brought me here. Tell me you aren’t planning to send me to destroy these things in the past before they multiply.”

  “Of course not. That’s absurd.” Karter scoffed.

  “Good.”

  “You can’t destroy them, that would cause a paradox or a divergent timeline,” he clarified. “You’re going back in time to fly a ship into the cluster when it is considerably smaller and introduce a GenMech of an altered design, then hang around long enough to be sure its modifications propagate through the rest of the swarm.”

  “… That sounds much, much harder.”

  “Much harder to survive, maybe.”

  “Survival is something I’m kind of interested in, Karter! Why exactly won’t the destruction angle work?”

  “I’m through tutoring this idiot. Ma, take over.”

  “It would have been preferable to explain these concepts in the fabrication lab. Its screen is of much higher quality,” Ma said. “However, visual aids should not be necessary for this aspect of the competing causality theories.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Karter said.

  “There are several schools of thought regarding the behavior of the universe when the linear nature of the time component of the nonquantum universe is violated. They fall broadly into the subsets of ‘many worlds’ versus ‘single world.’ In the many-worlds interpretation of reality, each possible outcome exists in its own isolated universe. In single world, there is one possible arrangement of outcomes that is rigidly established from the beginning of existence to the end. If we take the present situation as our illustrative example, you are being sent back in time due to the presence of an immeasurably large swarm of self-replicating machines. You propose we send you back to destroy them. That would result in a sequence of events that would bring us to this point in history, but would deprive us of the threat of robots. In the single-world theory, this would mean that the motivating incident, the ‘cause,’ would have been removed by the reactionary incident, the ‘effect.’ Thus, a paradox would form in that succeeding in removing the robot threat would also prevent you from traveling back in time to remove the robot threat, which would allow the threat to arise, and thus—”

  “Don’t get stuck in a loop, Ma, we’re only halfway through the explanation,” Lex said.

  “I apologize. Logical paradoxes are problematic for me. It is not known what the result of the paradox would be, but most theories indicate violating causality would result in the dissolution of existence retr
oactive to the Big Bang.”

  “That’s bad.”

  “If superstring theorists are correct and there exist multiple parallel timelines diverging with each possible outcome, then removing the robotic threat in the past would not destroy all of existence. It would instead allow the universe in which you made the change to progress without the threat, but that universe would necessarily be a different one than the one you left. You would be locked into a plane of existence that is not your own, and our plane of existence would continue unchanged.”

  Lex blinked a few times.

  “Your facial microexpressions are not indicative of understanding,” Ma said.

  “… I’m… sort of following,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “I’ve got one thing figured out. If you want to make someone stop stressing about being kidnapped, show them the world is doomed and then try to explain quantum physics to them.”

  “A fascinating psychological observation, though one of limited application.”

  “It sort of sounds like nothing I can do is going to actually help.”

  “That is partially correct. No action you can take will produce the desired outcome. However, actions you have already taken may have produced the desired outcome.”

  Lex’s shoulders slumped and he sighed.

  “Any minute now his brain’s going to give up on him and he’s going to keel over,” Karter said. He marched up to Lex and leaned down to shout at him. “It isn’t your job to understand what’s going on. It is your job to do what we tell you to do like a good little lab monkey!”

  “The issue at hand is not that the problem exists, but that the problem is unsolvable in its current state. Our task is thus not to remove the problem but to render it solvable without altering it in any way that has been observed between the inception of the problem and your temporal offset.”

  “… I need to change things without changing things?”

  “You need to change things without things appearing to be any different until after you’ve left.”

  Lex squinted and leaned back.

  “Your facial microexpressions are now indicative of dawning understanding.”

  “Okay… okay, you’re sending me back to replace the current design with an inferior design, so that when we get to now, they’ll be super easy to defeat.”

  “Not quite,” Karter said. “We can’t introduce an inferior design, because these things have some fairly rigorous internal performance assessments, and flawed designs are given lower replication priority. Plus, these things are going to have thirty years or so of artificial natural selection to shake out any potential flaws, so we can’t guarantee an Achilles heel will survive.”

  “So what’s the plan then?”

  Karter pulled a scrap of paper from a pocket of his jumpsuit and handed it to Lex.

  “We’re going to make them better,” Karter said as Lex unfolded it.

  Sketched out on the page was a rather slick and well-engineered version of the mechanical monstrosities Lex and the others had clashed with on a planet called Movi. It had four spidery legs, with an additional pair of smaller ones around a central node of assorted scaled-down fabrication tools.

  “The GenMech version D,” he said, crossing his arms. “Its reaction speeds are fifteen percent faster, its energy efficiency is twenty-four percent better, and most importantly, its program memory requirements are reduced by a whopping eighty-nine percent without any reduction of functionality through improved efficiency and the application of modern compression techniques. That last bit is the stroke of genius because the size reduction allows the executable code and the database to be run entirely from volatile memory, making the nonvolatile memory entirely redundant. This design doesn’t even have nonvolatile memory. Brilliant, right?”

  “I’m… sure it is,” Lex said.

  Karter slapped his forehead with one hand and pounded the control panel with the other. “Think, Lex!” he said. “If the design is better than all the others, which this is, it will get top priority and other units will adapt and propagate according to this new base. Volatile memory is volatile. As in it doesn’t stick around for long after power down. We already know two things about these bots. After studying the initial design and comparing it to the result of their evolution, we know they overwrite and eventually ignore aspects of their own design that serve no purpose, such as those pesky kill switches that would have made this whole thing a nonissue. We also know that EMP bursts can knock them down, but don’t keep them down because they can boot from primary storage. If we make their primary storage useless, and they modify their design to exclude it, then they won’t be able to recover from EMP. One well-placed CME Activator chucked in the nearest star could wipe out every single one of these things that comes in range of it. Almost all military ships already carry EMP countermeasures. It might still be a hell of a clash, but we’d be able to come out on top when the time comes to fight these things.”

  “Wait, if these things are all orbiting the same star, couldn’t you figure out how to make it go supernova? Or collapse it into a black hole like they almost did with Bypass Gemini?”

  “Try as I might, I never got as far as the prototype phase for my nova igniter. Very hard thing to test. And lest we forget, it took a major construction project to get apparatuses in place to collapse a star. No way we could pull something like that off without triggering the GenMech migration with all of our activity.”

  “Well how about—”

  “Lex, what are the odds that an out-of-work delivery boy is going to come up with a solution that a supercomputer and her creator overlooked?” Karter said.

  “… Fair enough.”

  “I suggest we discuss the specific details of the proposed plan in order to prepare Lex for his tasks,” Ma said. “That will involve taking him to the hangar and discussing the specifics of the ship, which is likely to be relevant to Lex’s interests.”

  “Oh, okay, let’s do that,” Lex said, perking up at the mention of something that might actually play to his strengths.

  Lex and Karter approached the door and opened it, each being immediately assaulted by their respective funks. As they paced down the corridor, Lex turned to the inventor. “So… you actually worked on something that would cause a star to go supernova?”

  “Of course. That’s the Holy Grail of WMDs… Well, the holy hand grenade, I guess…”

  #

  Karter paced along ahead of Lex. As he walked, he fished in his pocket and explained his master plan.

  “The broad strokes of the mission are very simple. If our calculations are correct, and they probably are—” he began.

  “Probably?” Lex said.

  “—we’ll be plopping you just outside the detection range of the GenMechs. Step one is just seeing if they’re there.”

  “Hang on, you said probably.”

  “They’re going to be there. So then what you’ll do is swoop in, undetected. That’ll be tricky, but we’ve got some features on the ship we put together that should ease things a bit.”

  “Why is it only probably?”

  “Quit fixating on the minutia,” Karter snapped. “Once you’re in the thick of it, you’re going to deploy the GenMech version D.”

  “Wait, GenMech VD? Tell me that isn’t supposed to be funny.”

  Karter gritted his teeth. “You’re going to want to keep an eye on it. These things are very dumb, which turns out to be fairly effective security against infiltration. If certain criteria aren’t met, they’ll reject other GenMechs and consider them simple sources of resources. It’s a variation of that aspect that resulted in the Poison Pill. This time, though, we had to meet that criteria. It includes a few different expected transmissions and emissions, and the correct values of both an internal self-integrity check and an externally enforced checksum. Getting those two software checks to pass was tricky, since we’re drastically changing the software, but with some brute-force adjustment and the judicious application of filler data
, we’ve got something that’ll sneak past. That’s the most fragile part of this mission, though. You cannot allow the GMVD to be destroyed.”

  “I’ve got to protect it from the other bots if they attack it.”

  “You’ve got to protect it from everything. We’ve got it in a specially designed case that’ll keep it safe from anything that’ll scramble its circuitry, and we’ve got a re-flasher built in in case the software is damaged and you need to code it back in. My design should pass with flying colors, but we only win if it passes on its flawed genes, and it only does that if it survives. Just like real evolution. Once you’re satisfied the design adjustment has been accepted—and it’ll be pretty obvious, since the local bots will start reconfiguring themselves to match—your job is done.”

  “How do I activate the time machine to get back?” Lex asked.

  “You don’t. The time machine stays here, remember?”

  “… So how do I get back?”

  “The old-fashioned way. You’re going to wait it out. You head to the southern hemisphere of Big Sigma, activate the cryo-sleep module we’ll provide you with, and when the clock hits present day it’ll activate a beacon and we’ll go thaw you out.”

  He squinted. “That last part sounds familiar…”

  “It should. It’s in section 1.21 G of the employee handbook you signed off on, under the heading ‘Temporal Contingency.’”

  They passed the across hallway, and a gripper arm was waiting with a printed handbook open to the appropriate page. Karter snagged it and handed it off to Lex.

  “Man. You are on the ball today, Ma,” Lex said, taking the booklet and looking for the appropriate heading.

  “I’ve had time to prepare for and anticipate the requirements of this briefing,” she said.

  “Let’s see… in the event that an intended effect or unintended side effect of product testing results in a negative temporal offset, employees are required to perform one of the following procedures. Option 1, self-terminate in a method that leaves no physical evidence. Conversion to vapor or plasma preferred…”