The Light of Other Days

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As the virtuals kept playing there was a hubbub of conversation, even heckling questions. ‘Impossible!’ ‘Wormholes are unstable. Everyone knows that.’ ‘Infalling radiation makes wormholes collapse immediately.’ ‘You can't possibly –’

Hiram's giant face loomed over the seething quantum foam. He snapped his fingers. The quantum foam disappeared, to be replaced by a single artefact, hanging in the darkness below their feet.

There was a soft sigh.

Kate saw a gathering of glowing light points – atoms? The lights made up a geodesic sphere, closed over itself, slowly turning. And within, she saw, there was another sphere, turning in the opposite sense – and within that another sphere, and another, down to the limits of vision. It was like some piece of clockwork, an orrery of atoms. But the whole structure pulsed with a pale blue light, and she sensed a gathering of great energies.

It was, she admitted, truly beautiful.

Hiram said, ‘This is called a Casimir engine. It is perhaps the most exquisitely constructed machine ever built by man, a machine over which we have laboured for years – and yet it is less than a few hundred atomic diameters wide.

‘You can see the shells are constructed of atoms – in fact carbon atoms; the structure is related to the natural stable structures called “buckyballs”, carbon-60. You make the shells by zapping graphite with laser beams. We've loaded the engine with electric charge using cages called Penning traps – electromagnetic fields. The structure is held together by powerful magnetic fields. The various shells are maintained, at their closest, just a few electrons’ diameters apart. And in those finest of gaps, a miracle happens…’

Kate, tiring of Hiram's wordy boasting, quickly consulted the Search Engine. She learned that the ‘Casimir effect’ was related to the virtual particles she had seen sparkling into and out of existence. In the narrow gap between the atomic shells, because of resonance effects, only certain types of particles would be permitted to exist. And so those gaps were emptier than ‘empty’ space, and therefore less energetic.

This negative-energy effect could give rise, among other things, to antigravity.

The structure's various levels were starting to spin more rapidly. Small clocks appeared around the engine's image, counting patiently down from ten to nine, eight, seven. The sense of energy gathering was palpable.

‘The concentration of energy in the Casimir gaps is increasing,’ Hiram said. ‘We're going to inject Casimir-effect negative energy into the wormholes of the quantum foam. The antigravity effects will stabilize and enlarge the wormholes.

‘We calculate that the probability of finding a wormhole connecting Seattle to Brisbane, to acceptable accuracy, is one in ten million. So it will take us some ten million attempts to locate the wormhole we want. But this is atomic machinery and it works bloody fast; even a hundred million attempts should take less than a second…And the beauty of it is, down at the quantum level, links to any place we want already exist: all we have to do is find them.’

The virtuals’ music was swelling to its concluding chorus. Kate stared as the Frankenstein machine beneath her feet spun madly, glowing palpably with energy.

And the clocks finished their count.

There was a dazzling flash. Some people cried out.

When Kate could see again, the atomic machine, still spinning, was no longer alone. A silvery bead, perfectly spherical, hovered alongside it. A wormhole mouth?

And the music had changed. The V-Fabs had reached the chant-like chorus of their song. But the music was distorted by a much coarser chanting that preceded the high-quality sound by a few seconds.

Aside from the music, the room was utterly silent.

Hiram gasped, as if he had been holding his breath. ‘That's it,’ he said. ‘The new signal you hear is the same performance, but now piped here through the wormhole – with no significant time delay. We did it. Tonight, for the first time in history, humanity is sending a signal through a stable wormhole –’

Bobby leaned towards Kate and said wryly, ‘The first time, apart from all the test runs.’

‘Really?’

‘Of course. You don't think he was going to leave this to chance, did you? My father is a showman. But you can't begrudge the man his moment of glory.’

The giant display showed Hiram was grinning. ‘Ladies and gentlemen – never forget what you've seen tonight. This is the start of the true communications revolution.’

The applause started slowly, scattered, but rapidly rising to a thunderous climax.

Kate found it impossible not to join in. I wonder where this will lead, she thought. Surely the possibilities of this new technology – based, after all, on the manipulation of space and time themselves – would not prove limited to simple data transfer. She sensed that nothing would be the same, ever again.

Kate's eye was caught by a splinter of light, dazzling, somewhere over her head. One of the drones was carrying an image of the rocket ship she'd noticed before. It was climbing into its patch of blue-grey central Asian sky, utterly silently. It looked strangely old-fashioned, an image drifting up from the past rather than the future.

Nobody else was watching it, and it held little interest for her. She turned away.

Green-red flame billowed into curving channels of steel and concrete. The light pulsed across the steppe towards Vitaly. It was bright, dazzlingly so, and it banished the dim floods that still lit up the booster stack, even the brilliance of the steppe sun. And, before the ship had left the ground, the roar reached him, a thunder that shook his chest.

Ignoring the mounting pain in his arm and shoulder, the numbness of his hands and feet, Vitaly stood, opened his cracked lips and added his voice to that divine bellow. He always had been a sentimental old fool at such moments.

But there was much agitation around him. The people here, the rat-hungry, ill-trained technicians and the fat, corrupt managers alike, were turning away from the launch. They were huddling around radio sets and palmtop televisions, jewel-like SoftScreens showing baffling images from America. Vitaly did not know the details, and did not care to know; but it was clear enough that Hiram Patterson had succeeded in his promise, or threat.

Even as it lifted from the ground, his beautiful bird, this last Molniya, was already obsolete.

Vitaly stood straight, determined to watch it as long as he could, until that point of light at the tip of the great smoke pillar melted into space.

…But now the pain in his arm and chest reached a climax, as if some bony hand was clutching there. He gasped. Still he tried to stay on his feet. But now there was a new light, rising all around him, even brighter than the rocket light that bathed the Kazakhstan steppe; and he could stand no longer.