Disclaimers in part 01
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"To assess the damage is a dangerous act."
~~Cherrie Moraga -- This Bridge Called My Back~~
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SATURDAY, JULY 1, 2000
LONE GUNMEN HQ
EARLY AFTERNOON
BYERS:
"Superstrings?" Langly says.
"What?" Frohike asks.
Langly practically chokes. "You mean, like with UFO's and shit?"
I can't speak, and feel myself going white. I was right all along. It really was a UFO drive -- one that had been modified and installed in a stealth plane, whose black box we apparently acquired somehow in August of 1998. It's a miracle nobody is actually dead yet, and that probably has more to do with Fletcher being unaware that we have the black box info than anything else. I pull a chair under me and sit down.
"Oh, man," Frohike says, shaking his head and chuckling, "Mulder's gonna love this."
I'm feeling extremely claustrophobic right now, as though the walls are leaning in to listen.
"This one was definitely a three microdot problem," O'Casey continues, his face a combination of excitement and uneasiness. "Feynman said that nobody understands quantum mechanics. To a great degree, he's right. But I think I came a step closer last night. He'd shit himself if he were still around to see this. These equations are a thing of absolute beauty."
He settles himself in a chair, puts his feet up on the desk, and props his hands behind his head, grinning like the Cheshire cat. Langly and Frohike sit as well, and takes a deep breath before diving in. "Do any of you guys understand superstring theory at all?"
Frohike and Langly shake their heads. "Apparently, not enough," Frohike
offers.
O'Casey looks at me.
"Well," I say, "from what I understand, it's a unifying theory that encompasses Einstein's theories and the effects of gravitation, as well as electromagnetism, the nuclear force, and the 'weak' force, and also seems to account for the proliferation of elemental particles like gluons and such. It proposes that the elemental particles are essentially 'string loops' at a Planck level that vibrate in different harmonics within ten dimensional space, beyond our perceived four dimensions of height, depth, width and time. I understand that some work has been done postulating multiple universes based on these theories. I know enough to recognize some of the equations, though I really have no idea how to interpret them. But how could some kind of... operational interstellar drive be derived from equations demonstrating the theory?"
"Not bad for an amateur," O'Casey says, nodding at me. He turns to talk with all of us, sounding more like a physics professor with each passing moment -- in tone more than content. "What the cute one says is essentially correct on a basic level, though of course I could quibble with all sorts of minor details. See, any form of space travel has to take into account Einstein's theory of special relativity. In order to go fast enough to get through interstellar distances in a reasonable amount of time, so that you're something younger than a pile of dust by the time you get there, you have to accelerate pretty darn close to the speed of light, at least in comparison to any speed anyone travels at on the surface of Earth."
"Whoa, whoa, slow down a second here. Just exactly how fast are we talking?" Langly asks.
"Well, the speed of light is just under 300 million meters per second. A typical jet plane will get up to maybe 300 meters per second, on the outside -- that's 0.0001 percent of light's velocity. We're talking a difference that makes it look like slugs and cheetahs would tie in a race. Going at the speed of a jet plane, it would take you up to 15 years just to get to the sun, and most of the interesting places in space are probably millions or billions of times farther away than that. Light, on the other hand, takes 8 minutes to get from the sun to us. But the problem is that when you accelerate enough to get up into the useful speeds, like maybe a few percent of the speed of light, Einstein's equations start to kick in and time dilates."
"So what you're saying is, what looks like 8 minutes to you traveling through space may seem like 15 years to your friends and family back home," I observe.
"Exactly. And any alien society that sent its astronauts off into deep space only to not see them come back for centuries or maybe millennia would never have much of an opportunity to learn anything or communicate with us at all."
Frohike snorts. "So useful space travel in a reasonable time for a society of biological life forms is pretty much impossible. We knew this, Mulder's ideas notwithstanding."
"In normal space, yes. But here's the thing -- Einstein's theory of relativity is derived from classical physics basically by adding a dimension: the three-dimensional space of width, length, and depth is assumed to be only a part of a four-dimensional space-time continuum. Without that extra dimension, even the time-dilation thing that lets the pilot of a ship age less than his comrades back home wouldn't be there, and the only way to travel through space would be to put people into suspended animation for hundreds, thousands, even millions of years at a time. So by essentially broadening space to include time as a dimension along with the three of space, we still have serious problems with space travel, but it's become one step closer to being doable."
Langly says, "So maybe if you add even more dimensions to space and time, you could figure out a way to make space travel easier? Like all those extra dimensions Byers mentioned."
Sean grins and says, "Give Blondie a Nobel prize!"
"For what," Frohike says, "stating the obvious?"
"Hey, he's trainable," Sean continues. "Just as Einstein's theory of relativity brought physics from three dimensions to four, modern theories, including superstring theory, take it up from four to ten or eleven -- maybe even twenty-six in some formulations. The theory is that we don't notice these extra dimensions beyond space and time because the Universe is really really small in those directions. It's like Flatland; a two-dimensional being living on the surface of a piece of paper would notice its length and width but not its thickness. So if there really are these extra dimensions out there, we can do the same thing to Einstein's space-time that he did to Newton's separate space and time: make it just a part of a larger Universe."
"So how does this make long-distance space travel possible without Einstein's time dilation effect, then?" I ask.
"Think of it this way. Let's say you're Trotsky in Moscow right after the Revolution, and you want to send the Red Army directly into Washington to spread workers' rule to the States. You might run into a problem taking the Pentagon by surprise, because the shortest distance from Moscow to Washington along the surface of Earth -- a great circle path -- is still thousands of miles. But imagine that you had some kind of tech that allowed you to burrow straight through the Earth -- pop into the ground and dig a tunnel straight through. You would be traveling a straight line in three-dimensional space; the shortest path in three dimensions instead of the shortest path in two. You could get there much more quickly, not to mention having the element of surprise on your side. Of course, this hypothetical scenario would probably never work because you'd have to go right through the Earth's inconveniently placed molten core, but if you take the analogy and move into ten- or twenty-six-dimensional space --"
I see where he's going with this. "And an alien Moscow could send their Red Army straight to Washington through a hyperspace tunnel without actually traveling through the millions of light-years of space in between."
"Abso-freaking-lutely, cutie." He winks at me.
"Will you cut that out," I snap. I'm really not in the mood for his attitude toward me. The last thing I want is for him to attempt to end the afternoon by groping my ass.
"Just like Star Trek," he continues blithely, ignoring me. "Instead of creeping along in four dimensions through impulse at less than the speed of light, you kick on the warp drive and take a shortcut through sub-space as fast as the multidimensional Universe would allow. You might even be able to travel from an entirely separate four-dimensional Universe into our own through the higher dimensions linking them, if the cosmos is set up that way."
"Aliens from the Universe Next Door," Frohike says with a snort. "So tie this into your theory, punkass. You're wasting our time."
Sean snorts and glares at Frohike. "Well, my geezer friend, superstring theory posits that the basic structure of all matter, energy, space and time is these little strings and loops, as well as claiming that they vibrate in, like, twenty-six different dimensional directions. So if you're in a spaceship that's made up of all these little vibrating strings and loops, and you're wanting to slip all the little pieces of matter in the ship 'sideways' into a few of those extra dimensions instead of hanging around in these four, what would be the easiest way to accomplish that?"
I grin, suddenly understanding. "Just send some energy into those strings and loops to make them vibrate in different directions than they normally would." Unfortunately, my glee is short lived. This is scaring the crap out of me. The implications leave me with an icy lump in my stomach.
"Bingo. The problem is that these superstrings are reeeally fucking tiny. I mean, dude, the individual atoms in an apple are to the size of the fruit as the apple is to the entire planet Earth; the superstrings are just as much smaller than those atoms as the atoms are smaller than the apple."
Frohike whistles in appreciation. "That's pretty goddamn tiny."
"Yep. It's totally cool. I told you those other dimensions had to be pretty small for us to not notice them. So you see, the technology to actually do anything like this hyperdimensional space drive is, like, way down the line from where we are now. The amount of energy you'd need to manipulate objects that tiny at controlled frequencies and directions," he squeezes his thumb and forefinger together and looks closely between them, "I mean, like, it just completely blows my mind, dude."
"Awesome, man," Langly says, peering at Sean's fingers.
They're obviously very stoned. We need to focus. "Can we please get back to the information on the disk and refrain from the groovy commentary from the peanut gallery? This is serious, guys."
"Right, right, of course." O'Casey turns back to the screen, tapping it with a forefinger. "So this technology to travel through space fast and easy is far ahead of anything we're even remotely close to having. Hundreds, maybe thousands of years ahead of us. That's why the information here is so unbelievable. You see, this is essentially the blueprint for a working star drive that actually can produce enough energy and manipulate it minutely enough to do exactly what we were talking about; make all the superstrings in a ship vibrate sideways into a higher dimensional space so that the ship can, to all intents and purposes, just 'vibrate' from their alien Moscow right to the White House lawn in the blink of an eye."
"So, you mean it's... it's sorta like an oscillation overthruster?" Langly asks.
O'Casey grins. "Two points to the Blue Blaze Irregular!" he says, giving Langly a high five. "Yeah, that's essentially what's happening. Like Buckaroo Banzai's jet car, the ship slips into the 8th dimension or something, and ends up on the other side of the galaxy before you can say 'no strike teams, Tommy.'"
"This tech has got to be extraterrestrial. There's no way the boobs in the shadow government could come up with this on their own," Frohike says, looking around uneasily, suddenly far more sober than he was a moment ago. "This is what Mulder's been looking for all these years. This disk is material proof that the government is not just in contact with aliens, but experimenting with their technology as well."
O'Casey nods. "You got it. But that's not all this is. It's also proof that there are alien races out there with technology -- with the power to pop across interstellar distances in an instant and send as many of them as they want, wherever they want."
This makes me very, very nervous. No, actually this terrifies me. "Just like the Red Army tunneling through the Earth to topple the democratic way of life."
Sean nods, subdued and rather uneasy himself now. "I hope, for the sake of everyone's ways of life, that the alien races we're talking about here subscribe to an ideology as much based on freedom and equality as Trotsky's version of communism, because with this tech, they could just as easily perform a Stalinist purge on us, or eat us all for breakfast, or turn us into mindless Borg drones with no individual identity -- with nothing more than the push of a button."
We all turn to look at the computer screen. The files displayed there have taken on an ominous tone, and the coded information, the graphs and tables that are usually a day's work to me, now fill me with an overwhelming sense of dread. It's become obvious that not only are we in mortal danger, but the entire human race as well. It shakes me and leaves me feeling as frightened and helpless as I've ever felt in my life.
I have no idea why Monroe or Fletcher, or anyone else, for that matter, could possibly want to collaborate with forces of this nature. Then again, the lust for power is so strong in some people that they'll do anything, cooperate with anyone, to get it. Spender, the smoker, is precisely the sort of man who would sell his soul for power like that. Assuming the aliens don't just decide to have everyone for breakfast, collaborator or not.
I remember Mulder's tales when he returned from Antarctica after rescuing Scully. I'm not keen on being a breeding machine for the greys. The idea of my friends, my family, of everyone I've ever met, and of all the billions of people I haven't, turning into gelatinous gestation pods for an alien species turns my stomach. If I have to face Monroe to keep this from getting back into the shadow government's hands, I will.
I turn to O'Casey. "Unfortunately, from what we can determine, they're not exactly Ghandian pacifists. Is that all you can tell us?"
He nods. "Unless you guys want to spend a few years getting post-grad physics degrees, yeah."
"Then I guess your part of this is done."
He pulls the zip disc from the computer and starts to pocket it. "Okay guys. Thanks for the fascinating conversation. I'll just be packing up my Nobel prize, and I'll see you at the awards ceremony."
I snatch it from between his fingers. "Sorry. This is too dangerous to go anywhere. If we manage to survive this mess, maybe you'll see it again. In the meantime, if you have this and anyone finds out, you're likely to wake up one morning dead." I turn to my desk and call him a cab. The dispatch is about three blocks from here, so it should be here soon.
O'Casey blinks. "Hey man, that's my Nobel you just snagged. I may be easy, but I'm damned sure not cheap. No freebies here."
Frohike looks at him. "We were under the impression you did it for the challenge, and as a favor to Sari."
He grins. "Mmmmm yeah, Sari. Wonder if she's busy tonight?"
"Her parents are still in town," I snap at him. "I suspect she'll be quite busy with them until they leave." Frohike and Langly look at me and get stupid grins on their faces. "And don't either of you get started with me. We have some serious work to do once the Doctor here is gone."
Sean frowns. "You're fucking with me, dude. Gimme back my disk."
"I can't. I'm serious. I'd really rather you didn't die for it."
"God, why is everybody so fucking melodramatic all the time?" he snarls.
Langly looks at him. "My girlfriend got shot up over this, dude. It's some fuckin' serious shit. You should know that better than we do. You know what this means. You know a lot of people would kill for it."
O'Casey nods, slightly more sober. "Jesus H. Christ, all right already. But don't think I'm not coming back for this when the coast is clear."
I nod. "Fine," I tell him. Anything to get him out the door and out of our hair. His assistance has been invaluable, but I don't want him to become a liability, or a responsibility.
"You sure you won't go out to dinner with me?" he asks, eyeing me with far more interest than I care for.
"Not tonight," I tell him. "I'm washing my hair."
He snorts. "Like I've never heard that one before."
The buzzer rings, and I look up at the front door camera display. It's one of the Sikh drivers from the cab company.
"C'mon, Physics Boy, you've saved the day and your work is done," Frohike says, taking Sean by the shoulder and guiding him to the door. "Go home and forgot you ever met us. It's the safest damned thing you could possibly do right now."
When he's finally out the door, I collapse back into a chair, the guys gathered around me. "We have to destroy this stuff."
Langly's eyes open wide. "What?"
"You've got to be out of your mind, Byers," Frohike says. "That's our ace in the hole."
"It's the key to a bloodbath I don't even want to imagine."
"Or what'll save our asses from the aliens," Langly says. "If they can get here with it, maybe we can get there, and blow their fuckin' grey butts off before they can kill us all."
I sigh and look up at him. "Langly, we have to know where 'there' is before we can go there and do anything, much less 'blow their fuckin' grey butts off'."
He blinks. "Oh. Right."
They're too stoned to understand the true implications of our situation. If Fletcher knew about this, we'd be dead already. I think Monroe does know -- his digital fingerprints are all over the files -- and that's why he's been after us, though for him I think any excuse would do. Why he hasn't succeeded yet is the puzzle. Then again, he's probably more of a hacker than an assassin, and I thank whatever deities might be out there for that mercy. The cold lump in the pit of my stomach just gets bigger. Nothing feels safe right now.
"I have no idea how we're supposed to protect ourselves while we have this information, guys." Or anyone we care about. I think of Deborah and Mel Scarlett and Sari, of what we brought them into when we let them into our lives. We told them about the dangers, but none of us ever conceived of something like this happening. I pull the disk out of my breast pocket and look at it. I'm holding the most dangerous information on the face of the planet in my hand. It burns.
"The same way Skinner did with that DAT tape Mulder got," Frohike said.
I look at him. "Albert Hosteen and the code talkers?"
"Not exactly," he replies. "But the same principle applies. We have to get this information out as widely as possible, spread it everywhere, so that it can't be buried. O'Casey already knows about it, and he actually understands most of it. We have an advantage already."
"Only if Monroe doesn't know we consulted him, man," Langly says. "Otherwise, Physics Boy is gonna be road pizza. Just like us. We gotta keep this under wraps until we figure out what to do, and find some hole to hide in. I wanna hide us all deep, and pull a rock over us."
"I still think we need to destroy it," I tell them.
"No way, Byers," Langly says. "They'll kill us anyway, just on the off chance we actually saw the important stuff. And besides, if we destroy it, then there's no way in hell that this planet's gonna have a prayer of defending itself when the shit hits the fan. This is the key, dude. This can keep everybody alive, and get us out from under the shadow poobahs."
"If it gets published, and if O'Casey explains it so that people know what it is, every government on the planet will be rushing to build one of these things for planetary defense," Frohike urges.
That's only one side of the argument. "Or building one to destroy any other government they see as a threat. Can you imagine one of these in the hands of Iraq? Or Libya? And what about India and Pakistan? I mean, look at what our own government was planning on doing with Pinck in Indonesia, for God's sake!"
"It's a bigger threat than any human government, Byers!" Langly's shouting now. "We know what's out there. Mulder's seen what those things are capable of. Lunch, man. Every goddamn single one of us is gonna be lunch! All fuckin' six billion of us! Do you think they won't understand that?"
Frohike nods. "He's right, Byers."
"But the only part of this we have proof of, Langly, is the potential to build interstellar ships. You know Mulder and Scully haven't got any concrete evidence. What little they had went up in smoke last year when their office got firebombed. Who's going to believe any of it?"
Frohike snorts. "Anybody with the brains to know that this proves the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life, and the fact that it's been here."
He has a point. It may not convince the masses, but a lot of the top scientific minds on the planet would have to be convinced by this. "Maybe we could take it to the United Nations and see if they'd create a special council to coordinate a global effort," I suggest.
"Yeah, right," Langly says. "I got two words for you. Marita Covorrubias."
My stomach twists. Frohike pipes up again. "That's why we need to take it public, Byers. It needs to be out there for everyone to see. All of it. The black box data, the analysis you did, the equations -- everything."
"That's going to take about a week to arrange, guys. How do we stay alive in the meantime?"
"Like, Fletcher still doesn't know we have this. He's hanging back still, hoping we'll give it to him if he keeps up with the threats," Langly says. "So we just keep stalling him. Tell him we're thinking about giving it back, but he's gotta call off Monroe. We tell him we need a week to make up our minds or something."
"Tell him we need a week to be sure we're safe and he's kept his word about leashing Monroe, you mean," Frohike replies. "Get a brain, blondie."
"That might work." I think for a few moments while the guys debate about how to approach Fletcher with the 'deal.' Fortunately, Frohike's too hung over to get into a shouting match with Langly, so I'm spared that particular pain while I'm working things out.
"Okay guys, here's what I think we'll need to do."
They quiet and look back at me.
"We need to make a bunch of copies of this. Two for the safe, one for each of us to carry at all times. Several for safe deposit boxes. One for O'Casey--"
Frohike interrupts me. "Wait a minute. You want us each to carry one around? That's nuts!"
"Is it?" I look Frohike in the eyes. "If they get one of us, they get the information back and maybe they'll think that's the only copy, and they'll stop looking. I don't know if they'd be satisfied with that or not, but even if one of us is injured or... or killed, it might protect the other two. And it might protect Deborah and Mel and Sari, at least until the information can go public. After that, it'll be too late. They won't have any reason to hurt any of us."
Langly shakes his head. "Except for revenge."
"They might do that even if we gave it back to them without making any copies," Frohike says. "Either way, we're screwed. Byers may have the right idea here. Maybe all they care about is getting the information back. Maybe we should give a copy to Fletcher? We could tell him it was the only one."
I tap a corner of the disk on the table nervously. "Fletcher's said before that he thinks we're too useful to kill. Even if he thinks we're buffoons, we might use that to our advantage. I'm sure he'd believe it if we told him that Monroe scared us, and we would give him back the info if he'd rein the man in."
"We should contact him Monday," Frohike says.
"Why Monday?" Langly asks.
Frohike looks at him as though he's grown a second head. "You think for a second that guy's gonna be in his office on the weekend? Get real. He's gonna be out porking some poor unsuspecting chickadee."
"Stupid as it sounds, I have to agree with Frohike's analysis."
Langly looks at both of us, then nods. "You got a point. What now?"
"You get over to Deborah's. Frohike and I will stay here and start burning copies of this thing. You'll get yours when you get home later."
His eyes light up and he smiles. "You mean it? You're not gonna make me stay here and work?"
I shake my head. "Get out of here before I change my mind. Oh, and take a cab. You're too stoned to drive." I only wish I could spend the rest of the afternoon with Sari and her family, but this is not to be. Frohike and I have too much work to do. We need to get on it.
End part 16