King of the Worlds (9 page)

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Few understood the particulars, but even Dylan, not a scientist by any means, could wrap a few neurons around the theory. Essentially, Quantum Travel capitalized on the property of “entanglement”—what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”—to encode and relay information literally instantaneously. In short, when two particles are entangled, their relationship is such that, no matter how far the one is from the other, as soon as you observe one of its properties—spin, for example—you
instantaneously
know something about the properties of the entangled other, even if it's billions of light years away. For a while there, quantum mechanics were gun-shy about the prospect of using entanglement to transfer classical bits of information because the essence of that initial observation was randomness and Heisenbergian uncertainty, and if you fiddled with one of the entangled particles too much, the particles quickly decohered, or became disentangled. Such was the prevailing view anyway until 1984, when Jun Watanabe, a thirteen-year-old wunderkind conducting research at Kyoto University, made a suite of revolutionary discoveries, viz. 1)
all
subatomic particles are always-already entangled with infinite other particles throughout the universe; 2) one can predict with remarkable accuracy the locations of these entangled particles by reading the “signatures” of the proximal particle and plugging just seven measurements into an algorithm adapted from the fractal-geometry work of mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot; 3) decoherence as such doesn't exist, i.e. perturbed particles simply switch allegiances, and 4) there exists on Earth a (now patented, government-classified, much-speculated-about-but-almost-certainly-fish-based) catalyst that can collapse probability waves into predetermined measurements one hundred percent of the time. Watanabe had figured out, in other words, how to
steer
the quantum universe, making him about as close to godlike as any human, let alone adolescent, had ever been (though, as he made painfully clear in his 2009 memoir,
Action at a Distance
, mastering the microscopic world didn't help him get laid in the macroscopic one until he was well into his twenties). He'd also established, in short, that the uncertainty principle was every bit the cop-out quantum physicists had always insisted it wasn't. To this day, no one really understood the theoretical-metaphysical underpinnings of quantum entanglement—most suspected the existence of hidden dimensions or wormholes—but Terrans had gotten the manipulation of it down to an exact science, and so far it was an achievement they hadn't found matched by any alien civilization. Galactic neighbors had built some very impressive starships, to be sure, bona fide marvels of engineering, but none could reach superliminal speeds, whereas humans were now traveling regularly at millions of times the speed of light, which, a little arrogantly, they'd once called “the cosmic speed limit.”

Of course, QT wasn't
really
travel at all. Your body was scanned at the source as
information
, transmitted instantaneously, and then reconstituted via a RiboMate ribosome-matrix printer at the destination in under twenty seconds (directions for the self-assembly of the RiboMate itself having been transmitted in advance, but this was where Dylan's pop-sci resources gave out altogether—per Arthur C. Clarke's third law, it all seemed like so much magic to him). Unlike earlier 3-D printers and molecular assemblers, which had relied to some degree on sampling and compression technology, the RiboMate was lossless. According to every study yet conducted, when you “arrived” at your destination, you really were one hundred percent you, with no margin for error, no noise. Still, QT remained controversial among a certain segment of the Terran population. The fly in the philosophical ointment, old hat for any Star Trek fan, was that for at least a dozen seconds, unavoidably, there existed in the universe two identical copies of “you,” one at the origin, the other at the destination. As soon as the all-clear signal was received via entanglement, the RiboMate instantaneously—and painlessly, at least in theory—dematerialized you and recycled your molecules for subsequent matter compilations. Some Terrans worried that QT, a.k.a. destructive copying, was in fact a form of suicide, that the “you” who emerged at the destination was not the same you who departed. If you asked the arrived passengers themselves, however, they would tell you, to a person, that they were indeed the very same people who had departed. Even if the two weren't
numerically
identical, they had the very same DNA, the same memories and scars, the same haircut and wardrobe, even the same microbes, and their recent experience diverged for a few minutes at most (new laws, and port-security AIs, forbade the simultaneous existence of two or more incarnations of the same hominid for any longer than three Earth minutes). Those who opposed QT outright were generally of a religious persuasion. These were people who believed quite literally in the idea of an immaterial soul, the special sauce of personhood, which they took to be non-transferable. For them, the copy was at best a kind of zombie, all the material of the original but without its God-given essence, a flute without breath. Dylan had been religious enough as a kid to understand that objection, but his life as an adult had suggested to him over and over again that man makes God at least as much as God makes man, and having QT'd once himself, he could attest that his inner life, his
spiritual
life if you like, was every bit as deep and rich and sensitive to wonder as it had ever been. (But then it was undeniably a copy attesting this, so you'll have to make up your own mind on the matter.)

The little hiccup in consciousness necessitated by QT was no more troubling to Dylan than any power nap. For all practical purposes at least, there was no need to dwell on the philosophical conundrums. Much more urgent than whether or not you were being murdered elsewhere at that very moment were questions like “What time is it?” “Where can I catch a cab?” and “Who among you is human?”

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The recently adopted pan-Terran currency. One of the more interesting sociological effects of the discovery of life on other worlds was the degree to which human-human relations had been reconfigured in the collective human psyche as non-zero-sum. Wars ceased, dictators abdicated, wealth really did trickle down, and the Terran quid was born. Zero-sum sentiments were reserved for those warlike planetary civilizations the explorers were bound to discover any day now. To be sure, Earth was still no utopia, but it was a good deal closer than it had been during Dylan's time there.

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Practically every sentient being in the known galaxy was plugged into an omni now, and even those few Luddites who weren't—the Amish, for instance, and the purplish-green civilization on 2Pac—were accounted for by it. Dylan remembered that for a time there on Earth, the number of screens-per-home had proliferated like a cancer. People had their TVs, computers, phones, e-readers, cameras, video cameras, biometric devices, telescopes, translators, etc. It was only a matter of time before a sort of technological gravity, and common sense, made them converge into a singularity. Dylan, like many members of his generation, still preferred the omni VII (smart contact lens and wireless earbud rig), but most of his students these days had the more immersive cortical implants, which were a double-edged sword in the classroom; in theory, he could—and did—limit student access to the Omniverse, but they always found workarounds. Some of their parents conducted their marriages between planets or moons for years at a time via omni, which relayed bits of communication via entanglement just as the teleporters relayed bits of biochemistry (information is information is information). For a monthly fee, the omni would even project full-blown holograms, and theoretically, though it was at present outlawed by the Mons Olympus Accord on the Reproductive and Reduplicative Rights of Human Persons (2005), you could even impregnate someone via omni if you had the right matter printer on the other end. Those given to slippery-slope arguments believed the next logical step would be for hominids to forego external reality altogether and live permanently in the sorts of virtual reality game worlds that had become so popular in the past decade. Naturally some were doing this already, spending the entirety of their lives in the shadows of the Omniverse, shooting virtual junk into their virtual arms and zipping around on lightcycles or wrecking on the halfpipe without any real pain. You still had to surface to eat non-virtual food, however, and the daily reminder that you were spending the majority of your life inside Plato's cave was enough to undermine the pleasure for most people. Dylan himself had experimented with VR as a form of holiday escapism. He'd tried the drugs and slept with the succubae, and they had brought him great audio-visual stimulation, to be sure, but consciousness is a layered thing, and throughout all his virtual amusements there was always some nagging awareness one hierarchical level up that none of it was “real,” and the reward centers of the brain responsible for secreting the dopamine and whatnot really did seem to care whether you had earned their rewards in the real world or not. Some of the more affluent junkies, with the assistance of months-long IV drips and waste-disintegrating diapers, had taken to having their avatars don virtual VR rigs, and then to have those avatars don virtual VR rigs, etc. in an effort to confuse the cortex into believing that some level or other of this intracranial utopia was real. For Dylan at least, VR amounted to mere rehearsal for life. It was like reading literature that way, but not half as artful. Whenever he surfaced from a session of VR, he felt vaguely sick and needed a nap to undo the psychic pollution, whereas a good book, especially one printed on a felled tree, made him feel nourished and awake and alive.