Conversations With Myself - 26. Déjà Vu All Over Again

December 1983 • Chris-17

“What’s this?” I asked aloud as equation after equation materialized in my brain, seemingly from out of a dense fog. The equations looked vaguely familiar, and then it dawned on me — these were like the equations I’d shown Professor Dawson just a few days before, except that there were differences. Key differences. For one thing, there were a lot more terms than I’d used in mine. Holy shit, there were spatial derivatives of time! Where the fuck did those come from? But then it dawned on me. I’d naïvely assumed that time is locally invariant. It was a natural assumption that everyone else made too, but clearly that wasn’t the case. If we were going take into account multiple realities and alternate time lines, time couldn’t be spatially invariant. It couldn’t even be an independent variable. Even if we were simply changing the past the way we’d originally thought, we’d still need a mathematical construct with variable time. Hell, we’d need a construct that allowed for time to be discontinuous. Space too.

Finally looking up at myself, at the ‘me’ of the future, Chris-24, I asked, “Where’d this come from?”

“Our son, Andy, will come up with this in 2004,” he answered.

“Our SON?”

“Yes, our precocious, extremely bright fifteen-year-old son, and he did it in a single night, too.”

“This… this is amazing,” I responded as the equations continued to appear out of the mist. “Whoa, I would have never thought of doing that,” I added. “And this formulation allows for discontinuous space and time as it must! ” I exclaimed as I went on. “ Nothing else does that. That’s why we have such a poor understanding of what goes on inside the event horizon of a black hole.”

“Or at the moment of the Big Bang,” Chris-24 added. “I’ve only had a few days since I got this stuff from Chris-31, and I had to re-derive all of it from scratch, but already I’ve reached some startling conclusions. Dawson may have a photographic memory, but we decidedly do not.”

“Speaking of which, why didn’t we pass these equations back through Professor Dawson?” I asked.

“I’ll get to that in a minute, but it’s important you understand what these equations represent. It’s important that you have these equations… this new version of Superstring Theory, as they may well hold the key to collapsing all of the various alternate timelines into a single, stable coherent reality.

“String Theory may have fallen out of favor and languished for the last decade or so, but it’s about to be revived and in a big way in your time. Even so it will be controversial and won’t catch on much until nearly another decade has passed. By the early twenty-first century, most physicists and a lot of lay scientists will accept that there is something to the theory, even though there has never been a way to prove its validity.

“What our son has developed is light-years beyond the original String Theory or even the Superstring Theory that will be developed from it. It is the closest thing we have ever had to a true ‘theory of everything,’ to borrow a phrase that will be often used in the future. In fact, if we define a series of spatio-temporal operators based on an n!-dimensional space, where ‘n’ is a prime number, all of the equations reduce to this single, simple formula… call it the ‘e=mc2’ of Superstring theory.”

I was shocked by the simplicity of the resulting equation, but it contained a series of mathematical operators that were neither linear nor continuous, and time, rather than being represented as a fourth dimension, was represented as a quantum state. Interestingly, there were only six independent spatial dimensions, not including time. I would have expected far more — something much closer to infinity. The elegance of the formulation almost made it believable as an ‘equation of everything’. That it was mathematically equivalent to the rest of the equations I had been shown was nearly impossible to believe.

“These equations can fully explain what may indeed be happening with the application of TTT, but they also could be misused to wreak havoc in ways you cannot imagine. As such, even though there are few people on earth who could understand them, they cannot be allowed to fall into the wrong hands. We must keep all of this from Professor Dawson.”

“I understand what you’re saying, but what does discussing it with Professor Dawson have to do with the equations falling into the wrong hands?” I asked.

Sighing, “Chris-24 explained, “In the original timeline, Dawson remained a professor of Physics until 2006. With his involvement in TTT, however, things changed and he will disappear in 1989.”

“Whadaya mean he’ll disappear?” I asked.

“That’s just it… we don’t know. He’ll disappear without a trace, and history will change. Some major events will never happen. The Berlin Wall will still fall in 1989…”

“The Berlin Wall’s gonna fall?” I asked with incredulity.

“So I’ve been told,” Chris-24 responded, “as will the whole fucking Soviet Union. Or at least that’s what was supposed to happen. With Dawson’s disappearance, however, the USSR will come roaring back to life. The Red Army will march right into Eastern Europe and retake the Warsaw Pact countries by force.”

“But did they actually use TTT to do that, or just knowledge from the future?” I asked.

“Hmmm… That’s a good question,” Chris-24 responded. “I dunno. The presumption though, is that Dawson will defect in 1989…”

“Or be abducted by the Russians,” I countered.

“Perhaps,” Chris-24 acknowledged, “but regardless, TTT will fall into the wrong hands. Therefore we have to assume that anything we share with Dawson will ultimately fall into the Russians’ hands.

“Chris, you must never, ever share any of this with Dawson. He must never see any of these equations. You must never even acknowledge their existence. He must never know anything more than he does right now. What he knows now is little different from what will be found in the literature in 1989.”

“So why take a chance on sharing them with me now?” I asked.

“Like I said,” Chris-24 responded, “these equations are the key to unifying all the branches of time… to collapsing all the different realities into a single reality. Our counterparts in the future, and Andy, are working on this. Once a solution is found, there may not be much time to apply it. It’s likely the solution will need to be applied in each time period in which we’ve used TTT, including yours.

“Now if you think about it, you’ll realize you’ve already forgotten the equations…”

Thinking about it, I realized I could barely remember what they looked like, let alone their content, so I interrupted, “Fuck! You’re right.”

“You’re going to have to be up to speed on this Chris. You’re going to have to derive all of these equations from scratch, in secret. Not only that, but you’re going to have to get Chris-13 to do the same.”

Chuckling, I said, “I’ll hafta get our thirteen-year-old self to do what our fifteen-year-old son will do twenty years from now… but what about 1972. How the hell would Chris-13 be able to convey the equations to Chris 6? There’s no way we would have been capable of understanding the equations in 1972, let alone to have derived them.”

“We couldn’t reach back that far if we tried,” Chris-24 explained. Even last year, when I first contacted you, your brain was pretty much an adult brain…”

“Try tellin’ that to Mom and Dad,” I interrupted.

“But it’s true!” Chris-24 countered. “That doesn’t mean we didn’t still have some growing up to do, but structurally, our brain was fully formed in 1978, if not a little before. But if you tried reaching back to 1976, to Chris-10, you would find you couldn’t. Even at ten, we weren’t the same person we are now, let alone at age six. Dawson can reach back to 1972, and from there back further, but the earliest we can reach back is 1978.”

“Then how the fuck can we fix things without involving Dawson?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Chris-24 admitted, “but I’ve been told we’re working on it in the future.”

After a few minutes of silence as I thought about what Chris-24 had said, I had another, very scary thought, and so I asked, “What if Dawson comes up with it on his own? He knows what we know, and he’s smart enough to derive it on his own.”

“Hmm… Maybe we can deliberately throw him off track.” Chris-24 suggested. “Maybe we can give him a logical, but flawed, approach to the problem…”

“He’ll know if we try to deceive him,” I interrupted.

“Which is why anything we give him has to be a legitimate approach,” Chris-24 answered, “just not the right approach.”

“I dunno,” I countered, “it sounds pretty risky.”

“Our counterparts in the future have access to resources you can’t even fathom, Chris. The best minds of the twenty-first century will be working on it. Nobel Laureates. Maybe even people Dawson trained himself. There’ll be no reason for him to suspect the work as anything other than legit. Us either, for that matter.

“In the meantime, let’s hope and pray he doesn’t come up with anything on his own…”

<<<<<<<<·>>>>>>>>

December 1990 • Chris-24

I was having trouble sleeping. Actually, I’d been having trouble for a while — ever since I learned that Charles Hudson was an agent of the Chinese government — a Chinese spy, for Cripe’s sake. But he was a British citizen! He’d even talked about getting out before Hong Kong reverted to the Communists. How could he be working for them instead? The facts were irrefutable, however. He’d be caught red-handed in 1987, tried and convicted in the UK and sentenced to life without parole. Could he have been framed?

Still, I had to face up to the fact that he was a danger — a danger to Wang, and a danger to me. As much as I loved Wang, was it possible that Hudson had recruited him as a spy — that he’d indoctrinated my lover? No, that just wasn’t possible. Wang Lee was pure — of that I was certain. I loved Wang. He seemed so earnest, and so kind and loving. He was a passionate lover who gave back far more than I gave him in return. There was no way it could all be an act.

However, regardless of how I felt about Wang, I had to accept that he was compromised. Hudson was the man who had rescued him from an unspeakable existence. Hudson was Wang’s hero, his savior and his lover. There was no way he could look at it objectively. I couldn’t even dare to suggest that Hudson was a spy. To do so would mean the end of what we had.

The fact was that none of my counterparts in the future could recall anything about an affair with Wang Lee. It was as if he’d materialized out of thin air. That he was now such an integral part of my life could only mean that someone had gone to extraordinary lengths to change the past — to change events in my time. I’d already been sidetracked by the Russians, and now it was the Chinese?

I shouldn’t have been surprised. TTT was the ultimate power. With it, anyone could alter the past to suite their own needs. Hell, with enough patience, perseverance and resources, the Manhattan Project could be made to fail. Without our invention of the first atomic bomb and bogged down in a war with Japan, Russia could have taken advantage of us, and if they developed the bomb first, they could have taken all of Europe, and Alaska, and whatever fucking else they wanted.

And if the Chinese could get their hands on TTT, they could go back and avoid the disaster that was the Cultural Revolution. With the relentless pursuit of industrialization that would later characterize their economy, they could have surpassed the Russians and the Americans while we were still embroiled in the Cold War. Yes, TTT was the ultimate power — except that it was only the tip of the iceberg.

Thanks to the efforts of my son — my darling baby boy — an Einstein in the making — I was now in possession of the theoretical underpinnings of the Universe itself. Stephen Hawking would one day call it the ‘Theory of Everything’, but he would never have it. No one would ever have it until my son, at the age of fifteen, put it all together in a single night. Now, thanks to him, I had it in my possession. With the background provided by Chris-31, I had derived the key equations of an new kind of Superstring theory, and passed the theory on to Chris-17. Soon Chris-13 would have it, and we’d be able to do whatever it was that needed to be done.

With Wang sharing my apartment, however, writing any of this down was not an option. Were the equations in my possession to fall into the hands of the Chinese, the notion of rewriting history would seem like child’s play compared to what they could do. Conventional concepts of space and time would be irrelevant. The past, and the future would be irrelevant. And if they fucked up, our very existence could become irrelevant.

But how could I keep the primary focus of my research from Wang? Wang was my lover, my confidant and my best friend. He might not have been a part of my life before, but he sure as fuck was an integral part of it now. There was no doubt in my mind that Wang was innocent in all of this — and Hudson was using him as a pawn to get to me. I wanted nothing more than to protect Wang from his ‘savior’, but doing anything to drive a wedge between the two of them would only get us both killed. Hudson was like an incurable cancer. Removing him could only be fatal.

I could not and would not leave Wang, but I had to accept that anything I told him could end up in the hands of the Chinese. Much as I loved him, I had to act as if it was he that was the spy. I had to keep what I was doing for OTT absolutely secret, even from him. Nothing I did in Rankin’s lab was private, so keeping notebooks or computer files there just wasn’t an option. Likewise, although Lawrence Livermore was very secure, I didn’t trust the Feds to keep their hands out of my work. Having TTT fall into the wrong hands, even in our own government, would be a fucking disaster.

Thanks to my affiliation with Lawrence Livermore, however, I now had in my possession a prototype Macintosh Quadra 900 personal computer. This was a model that wasn’t even slated for release to the general public until middle or late next year, and I could never have afforded to buy one on my own — it was going to cost almost as much as a small car!

Yet for all its sophistication, the Quadra had a number of serious limitations that made it unsuitable for work that needed to be kept secure. The large, 300 MB hard drive, could easily be removed and accessed simply by connecting it to another Macintosh computer. The Mac itself had an open operating system without even the most rudimentary form of password protection. Anyone could access it by simply turning it on. And on top of all that, it crashed a lot — no more than IBM PCs did, but it was fucking annoying.

On the other hand, the Macintosh operating system did not have a command line. It was accessed entirely using a graphical user interface. For this reason alone the military considered the Mac to be a much more secure computer in the long run. Unix-based computers like Sun, and PDP-based VAX systems that were common in academia, could be accessed through their network connections. Password security would be of little use in preventing a government agency like the KGB or whatever passed for a spy agency in China, from breaking in. Because the Mac wasn’t in any way designed for remote access, the only way to break into one, would be through physical access.

But Wang had physical access, and when he came to visit, so did Hudson. Wang and I shared an apartment. There was nothing to keep either of them from simply turning my computer on and downloading the contents of the hard drive to a portable device of some sort. Hell, they could simply use a stack of floppies! Because of this, I had to take extraordinary measures, and for that I turned to Frank Sanford.

Frank and I hadn’t spoken to each other in years — not since the day he walked out the door with the cash in hand I’d given him as a supposed refund of a university lab fee. Since then, he’d sent me a birthday card and a Christmas card every year, so I knew where he lived and that he was finishing his degree in Computer Science at Cal Tech. I’d just never been able to bring myself to reciprocate — not after the way he’d so casually walked right out of my life. Still, in spite of all of that, there was no one in the world I trusted more with TTT than Frank, and so it was to him that I turned now.

Meeting him in a small restaurant in Modesto, he handed me a package and said, “Inside you’ll find a hard drive that’s the exact same manufacture as the one that was shipped with your Mac. The only difference is that this one has a capacity of 500 megabytes, whereas yours has only 300 megabytes of storage. Otherwise they’re identical. That’s $382 you owe me, by the way,” he added as he held out his hand and smiled the smile I’d once come to love.

Taking out my wallet and counting out my hard-earned cash, I responded, “This is sure setting me back a fair bit.”

“Like I said over the phone, you could’ve practically bought a whole PC for not much more than that, and we could’ve loaded a pre-release version of Linux on it for free.”

“And then anyone with Internet access could’ve hacked into it,” I pointed out.

“How many people have Internet access?” Frank asked. “How many people even know what the Internet is?”

“The people who’d be interested in my work would know,” I replied. “The Russians would know. The Chinese would know.”

“Which is why we’re using hardware-level 256-bit PGP encryption on the hard drive that’s in that box I gave you,” Frank countered. “Even if they had access, it would take centuries to break into your files. Besides which, the entire partition is completely hidden, just as we discussed.”

“Could you explain how that works again?” I asked Frank. “I still don’t understand it.”

“It’s really not all that difficult,” Frank began, causing me to roll my eyes. “The original drive in your Mac is a 300 megabyte hard drive, of which about 270 is actually usable. The reason is that the 300 megabyte figure is the drive’s raw capacity. You can write that much data to the drive, but then you’d have to completely erase it and start over if you wanted to write anything else to it. If you want to read, write and erase data randomly to and from the drive, it has to be partitioned in such a way that you can find your data after you’ve written it. To that end the drive is divided up into sectors and the sectors into blocks. There is a header file on the drive called the directory that tells your computer where on the drive each data file is stored. There are different schemes, or formats for doing this, depending on the operating system.

“For example, your Macintosh computer uses an operating system known as System 7…”

“Eight,” I corrected him. “This is the first model to run MacOS 8.0 rather than 7.9.”

“I see…” Frank responded. “Hopefully they didn’t make any changes to the way the hard drive is formatted. In any case, Macintosh computers use a formatting scheme called HFS, which simply stands for ‘Hierarchical File System’. Computers running DOS or Windows, or one of the flavors of UNIX use completely different formatting schemes that are incompatible with each other, although there are software programs that will let you read one kind of formatting on a different type of computer, which is why we still have to be careful.

“Now located on each hard drive is a bit of circuitry that serves as the interface between the computer and the drive. This is called the controller and it includes a bit of non-volatile memory... that’s memory that doesn’t disappear when you switch the computer off. In that bit of memory is stored information on the physical layout of the drive… the number of platters, the size of each platter, the number of sectors and their locations and so on. It also contains the partition table, which tells the computer how many partitions there are and how they’re formatted. UNIX computers typically have multiple partitions whereas Macs typically use a single HFS partition.”

“What does any of this have to do with keeping my data secure and secret?” I asked.

“I’m getting to that now,” Frank responded with his trademark smile — the smile that made him look so beautiful. “What I’ve done with your drive there, is I’ve modified the controller firmware to make it look like there’s only 300 megabytes on that drive. An expert might notice that something’s off, ’cause the density’s too high and the number of platters too low for this model, but short of opening the drive up and taking a look, there’s no way to verify that the capacity is more than 300. And that 300 megabytes is filled with a 270 megabytes HFS partition, as it should be.

“What I’ve done with the extra 200 megabytes is I’ve filled it with a 160 megabyte encrypted HFS partition. It’s completely invisible ’cause not even the drive controller knows it’s there. Not even a diagnostic program like Norton Disk Doctor would be able to find it.”

“So how do I access it then?” I asked.

Handing me a floppy disk, Frank said, “After you’re done with this, erase it securely, then burn it. There’s a single file on here that appears to be nothing more than a picture of the two of us from a long time ago. The pic is in the data fork, but the file has a tiny resource fork as well. Download a copy of ResEdit from the Internet and use it to change the type and creator codes to ‘APPL’ and ‘JSUS, respectively. There’s a small bit of computer code in the resource fork, written in 68040 assembler. When you run the app, it will overwrite your computer’s parameter RAM with code that lets you access the hidden partition.

“When you boot up your Mac, hold down the control key as it boots. The control key isn’t used for anything on the Mac… at least not yet… so no one should think to do this. It will bring up a blinking question mark inside the icon for a floppy disk. It’s the same symbol used for a missing boot drive. When you see it, type in capital L, capital P, the number 2 and in lower case, ‘gro0ves’, with a zero in place of the second letter ‘o’. I’m sure you remember the significance.” Indeed I did and couldn’t help but smile. “If you do it correctly, the computer will mount the virtual disk partition instead of the real one, and proceed to boot off of it.”

“One more thing,” Frank added. “For extra security, if you fail to enter anything or press any keys for more than thirty seconds, the computer will automatically eject the virtual partition and reboot off the real one. Pressing the escape key will do the same thing. To all the world it will look like your Mac crashed and you restarted it.

“I’ve included a SCSI adapter cable with the hard drive. When you get home, the next time you have at least four hours you can count on being alone, hook one end of the cable to the hard drive and plug the other into the SCSI port of your computer. Reboot and then insert the floppy and run the program that’s hidden in the picture. In addition to rewriting the PRAM, it will transfer over everything that’s on your existing hard drive to both the real and virtual partitions of the new one. It will then reboot the computer from the new drive, securely erase the original hard drive, securely erase the floppy, and shut your computer down. You can then open the case of your Mac, remove the old hard drive and replace it with the new one. Now to add yet another layer of deception, I suggest using a hair dryer to heat up the label on the original hard drive, carefully peel it off and slap it on the new drive.”

“Very, very cool,” I responded. “Very 007.”

“That’s because I’m really a CIA operative,” he said with a straight face, and then we both burst out laughing.

“They will have to torture me if they want my equations,” I added. Swallowing hard, I realized that with the Chinese, it might well come to that.

<<<<<<<<·>>>>>>>>

December 2011 • Chris-45

I felt myself getting closer and closer to the ultimate release. Frank was buried deep inside of me. The sweat glistened upon his skin and the look on his face was of utter ecstasy. Spasm after spasm of pleasure washed over me as I felt Frank’s release as well. We’d long since abandoned using condoms — after all, what was the point. We were a committed couple. Frank and I were among the handful of couples that had tied the knot before Proposition 8 had put the kibosh on gay marriage in California.

Yet the piece of paper was merely symbolic. Marriage actually increased our tax rate, while providing few, if any, protections that weren’t already available through domestic partnership laws. Still, we felt strongly that marriage was our right, and we’d be damned if we were going to let anyone deny us what heterosexual couples already enjoyed. We’d have gone all the way out to Massachusetts if we’d had to to get hitched, but we’d been lucky. We were among the few gay couples to have married in California. Still, we had little doubt that same sex marriage would one day be legal in California. As unlikely as it seemed, we knew that someday, it would be the law of the land, even if President Dole was doing all she could to limit our rights.

“That was nice,” Frank said as he came down from his bliss, “but you know, everything’s changed again.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“After the hostage incident, it was Paul, that got together with you. He sought you out to offer his condolences. It was he that moved in with you, into the house in Alameda. You and he got married, and raised Andy, and put your lives back together in the face of tragedy.

“But now, it was you that sought me out. The two of us became friends again after you finished your PhD. You tried to be a hetero and knocked Jen up. The one good thing to come out of that was Andy. Too bad you fucked up and had an affair with that Lee guy. I don’t remember much about that, which I guess means the outcome is still uncertain, but you came to me for help keeping your Mac safe from his prying eyes.

“Anyway, after Jen was killed by the Iranian terrorists, you sought me out. You needed a friend, but we found so much more together, and here we are,” he added as he kissed me on the nose.

“Of course I remember of all of that, but I have no memory of ever even dating Paul, let alone being with him.”

“In the original timeline, you actually married Jen.”

“Me a hetero?” I exclaimed more than asked in astonishment. “That’s hard to believe…”

“You and Jen were married until Andy finished high school,” Frank went on, “and you also had a daughter…”

“A daughter!” I shouted, but then I had an image in my mind of a freckle-faced girl, maybe ten years old, who was passionate about science fiction. “Karen,” I suddenly remembered. “Her name was Karen, but until you mentioned her, I’d completely forgotten she ever existed.”

“In this reality, she never did exist, Chris,” Frank explained. “That’s one of the things I just don’t understand about multiple realities. How can there be people who exist in one reality and not in another? If and when the realities combine, does that person suddenly exist in both, or in neither, or as with Schrödinger’s cat, is their existence indeterminate, dependent on whether or not we remember them?”

“That you are aware of multiple realities is spooky,” I responded. “It’s really fucked up shit, you know? I don’t see how it’s even possible. Yet somehow, I myself was able to remember my daughter from another existence.”

“I’m not sure I understand it myself,” Frank continued. “I’m just a computer scientist… not a physicist… but as I see it, the science behind what you call TTT is a naturally occurring phenomenon. You didn’t create something new in OTT... you merely discovered something that was already there, and exploited it. Perhaps there are some of us who are gifted with the ability to do what you do in OTT without the need for all that technology. I may not be able to communicate directly with myself in an earlier time period, but I am at least aware of the changing landscape of time, and I’m able to do something you aren’t able to do with TTT… at least not yet. I’m able to sense the existence of the multiple realities that arise from attempting to alter the course of time.”

“It kinda boggles the mind,” I agreed as I gave my husband a quick peck on the lips.”

“Is Andy still coming over tomorrow night for dinner?” Frank asked, and then, looking at the clock by the bedside, corrected, “Actually, I guess it’s tonight.”

“As far as I know, and he’s bringing Ray.”

“I still can’t get over that Andy has a boyfriend,” Frank responded. “It’s just that he seemed so straight, you know? He was a real ladies man, but then all of a sudden, he started going out with a guy. I know some gay guys go out with a lot of girls, just to prove to themselves that they aren’t gay… Lord knows, you did in the original reality. I just never would have thought Andy was gay.”

“He swears he’s not,” I countered, “and I believe him. Andy never needed to prove to himself he was anything he wasn’t. He was always comfortable that his dad was gay, and he never thought there was anything wrong with it. No one was more surprised when he fell for a guy than Andy was. As far as he’s concerned, he’s still mostly straight, but just a little bit bi. Apparently his gay side is just enough for him to have fallen for Ray. And I do have to admit, Ray’s a great guy. They seem well-matched.”

“Yeah, I have to agree,” Frank chimed in. “It’s too bad about Proposition 8. I really think Ray might be the one for Andy, and vice versa.”

“Not that I disagree, but I don’t think Proposition 8 matters to Andy at all. I don’t think he would ever have gotten married, not even to a woman, not even if he had kids. Andy doesn’t really believe in formalities like marriage. He isn’t interested in a ceremony and he doesn’t see the point in having a piece of paper. If he meets someone he wants to spend his life with, they’ll simply move in together. That’s just the way Andy is.”

“Yes, I think you’re right,” Frank agreed, “but it doesn’t mean I agree with it. A piece of paper does matter. It's a sign of commitment between two people, and it keeps the rest of the world from interfering where they have no right to interfere. That piece of paper guarantees property rights, the right to adopt, and the right to be at the bedside of a loved one when they lie dying. We fought long and hard for the right to have that piece of paper. It’s so much more than a symbol of our love for each other.”

“Honey, I couldn’t agree more,” I said before planting a kiss on Frank’s lips. The kiss deepened and became passionate, and before long, Frank was deep inside me once again.