Authors: Douglas E. Richards
But just to illustrate the philosophical
point, let’s imagine that this is true, that all of the cells in your body are
replaced after seven years.
So are you the same
you
that you were seven years ago?
And what if this only took a
single year to happen?
I’m guessing most of us believe that
even if every cell that existed in our bodies a year ago was swapped out with a
new one, the old us never died, and we are still the same person we always
were.
Okay, but what if this happened
in a single day?
You see where I’m heading. An
argument could be made that having one
you
destroyed on the transporter pad while another
you
takes its place is just an acceleration of this process. If you
don’t mourn for individual cells that die to make room for the new ones,
perhaps you shouldn’t mourn for the vaporized Captain Kirk.
I also considered exploring the
concept of what makes us conscious beings. Is this an emergent property of our
brains? (such that the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts). Or
something else entirely?
Randomness of Creativity:
Since Edgar Knight could make
endless duplicates of Nathan Wexler, it was important for me to explain why he might
still need Wexler’s work, that events sparking eureka moments are often fickle
and random. At first I presented a fictional example from
Back to the Future
, when
Doc Brown falls, hurts his head, and randomly comes up with
the idea for the flux capacitor.
I decided to remove this example since I had already
referenced this iconic movie several times, and there are far more compelling
examples from the real world, including the two I presented, Alexander Fleming
and Albert Einstein.
I should mention that I find Einstein to be one of the
most remarkable people who ever lived, and I find his story endlessly
fascinating. If you have the chance, I recommend reading
Einstein: His Life and Universe
, by Walter Isaacson (after you’ve
finished reading all of my books, of course:) ).
I am also fascinated by the randomness of our lives,
and nowhere is this more evident than the sperm lottery. Each person alive has
genetic material donated by a sperm that won a race against hundreds of
millions of competitors, a race it could never have won given even the
slightest change of circumstances. I couldn’t resist using the sperm example in
the novel.
Other examples abound. In my own life, I wouldn’t be
writing this note (or novel) if not for a string of incredibly unlikely occurrences,
all of which had to happen in the exact right way. In 2011, I had given up on my
dream of writing and decided to go back to biotech. But then one day I randomly
decided to get a book to read. Back then, I usually shopped for paperbacks on
Amazon, but this time I decided to go to the local bookstore; I have no idea
why. While there, a book by Boyd Morrison entitled
The Ark
just happened to catch my eye. I bought it, even though
there were dozens of other contenders that I almost purchased instead. And then
the author just happened to include a note at the end, explaining how he had
published the book on Amazon as an e-book, it had gone viral, and was later published
up by Simon and Schuster.
This got me to thinking. Maybe I should put my novel,
Wired
, online, and see if anyone would
read it. Boyd Morrison was living proof that good things could happen, so why
not? Believe me, I would never have done this if I had not read this note. In
2011, I was barely aware that e-books even existed (although I was filling my
house with physical books so quickly I was running out of places to put them).
Less than six months later,
Wired
became a
New York Times
and
USA Today
bestseller and my
writing career was off and running. But if I hadn’t gone to the bookstore at
the exact time I did, or if I hadn’t happened to notice this particular book,
or if . . .
Octa-nitro-cubane:
This explosive is real, although the hyphens are not. I added
these for ease of reading, since I stumble over the word,
octanitrocubane
,
every time I see it. These cubes of carbon do represent the most powerful
non-nuclear explosive known to man, and it is true that this substance is
nearly impossible to produce, requiring forty chemical steps to synthesize. In
fact, as I note in the novel, there has never been enough of this made to even
test (as far as I know).
Taxol and Hard to Synthesize Drugs:
The information provided about Taxol is true. I’m not
sure how many other drugs are out there that work wonders but can’t be made in
sufficient quantities (scaled up), but I suspect they exist.
I was once Director of Biotechnology Licensing at
Bristol-Myers Squibb, the company that developed Taxol. For many decades the Pacific
yew tree could make this drug, but humans couldn’t.
While at BMS, I negotiated two collaborations with
companies specializing in what is called natural products chemistry. One tried
to discover cures from chemicals found in microbes, and one from chemicals
found in sea creatures, and I was quoted in an article in the
Wall Street Journal
about one of the
deals, saying, “Nature is the world’s best chemist.”
This is very true. Nature can produce chemicals that
we can’t hope to match, and a significant percentage of all drugs now in use
were first produced in nature (aspirin was first derived from the bark of the
willow tree, there is a diabetes drug derived from a chemical found in the spit
of the Gila monster, an anti-coagulant used for many years was derived from
leech saliva, and so on).
With respect to the shell
company formed by Lee Cargill to duplicate difficult to manufacture cures, this
would never work in real life. T
he FDA requires a precise knowledge of every step in the
manufacturing process before they will approve a drug, and need to be able to audit
manufacturing sites to be sure they are up to standards. Alas, a mystery
process (time travel) would never fly with them, no matter how pure the end
product.
Faraday and Maxwell
: The information about these two icons is
accurate. For my plot to work, I needed someone to have invented time travel
without fully understanding the theory behind it, and the Faraday-Maxwell
comparison worked perfectly. To learn more about these amazing figures in
science, I recommend the book,
Faraday,
Maxwell and the
Electromagnetic
Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics,
by Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon.
Polygraph Tests:
My research suggests polygraph tests are
fairly unreliable, and that testers do try to fool subjects into making
mistakes. T
he strategy
for beating the test that I put forth is real, although the improved polygraph test
in the novel is fictional (it doesn’t exist in real life or even in the novel,
as it turns out).
UCLA Steam Tunnels:
There is no Kendall Hall at UCLA, but the
steam tunnels are real, and my description of them is more or less accurate. The
Welcome to Hell
graffiti did exist at
one time, according to my reading.
Originally in the novel, Dr. Dan
Walsh was a professor at USC. I knew that many older universities had tunnel
systems, and I thought having Aaron Blake use them to bypass surveillance would
make for a fun scene. The only problem is that USC doesn’t have any tunnels, so
I moved Dan Walsh to UCLA :).
Fairly recently, the school’s
newspaper was offering tours of the tunnel system. Here is an excerpt taken
from their website:
“UCLA’s underground tunnel
system, site of late-night forays by adventurous students and a subject of
campus folklore, plays an important role in keeping the university running
smoothly behind the scenes. Official tours of the underground tunnels can be
arranged with Leroy Sisneros, UCLA Facilities Management’s Director of
Maintenance and Alterations. Those touring the tunnels should wear closed-toed
shoes and be advised that the tunnels are very narrow and hot in some places.”
In researching UCLA, I read one reference
to a campus joke that UCLA stood for
Under
Construction Like Always
. I didn’t go to this school, so I have no idea if
this is something familiar to most students or not, but I thought it would be
fun to include.
Lake Las Vegas:
There really is such a place, and while
Knight’s island doesn’t exist nor do his armaments and security, the early
history of the resort, its dimensions, the fortunes spent to develop it, and
the vast size of the dam that was built to create the lake are all accurate.
This resort came up at a dinner
party I attended. A few of my friends were reminiscing about how they had flown
out to see it long ago, when it was under construction, but had been unable to
invest. At the time they had kicked themselves, but they grew to learn they had
dodged a bullet.
When they described the
magnificence of the resort and its checkered history, I was absolutely
fascinated, especially since I had visited Vegas any number of times and had never
even heard of it. I’m still amazed that there is a giant man-made lake in the
middle of the desert, surrounded by world-class resort hotels and other
properties.
At that moment I knew that this
location would have to be a setting in one of my books someday.
Cheyenne Mountain & Other Settings:
Cheyenne Mountain is real
and in use. My description of the main facility is accurate, although I created
a fictional expansion of the base because I wanted more room.
Here is a
link to a short documentary about the facility:
Science Channel Short Documentary on Cheyenne Mountain
Palomar Mountain is real. When my kids were little, I
used to take them hiking in the woods there, and they loved it. The Palomar
Observatory and Hale Telescope on top of this mountain are also real.
The underground military base at
Palomar is purely fictional. In the first draft of this novel, I included some
historical information about other underground facilities the government and
military had used, but left this on the cutting room floor.
Since I find it interesting, I
thought I’d restore a few paragraphs of this deleted section below:
For the most part the Manhattan Project, which led to the world’s first
nuclear bomb, had been done at secret above-ground sites, but the first ever
nuclear reactor was constructed underground, at a small site below the
bleachers at Stagg Field at the University of Chicago, and aptly named Chicago
Pile-1.
Unlike most reactors built since, this pile had no radiation shielding
and no cooling system of any kind. The brilliant physicist, Enrico Fermi, had
convinced those in charge that his calculations were reliable enough to rule
out a runaway chain reaction or an explosion. Later, the official historians of
the Atomic Energy Commission would point out that while the gamble had paid
off, these men had conducted "a possibly catastrophic experiment in one of
the most densely populated areas of the nation.”
This passage is accurate, and a little scary.
After receiving my master’s degree in molecular biology, I attended the
University of Chicago to earn an MBA, and lived just a few blocks from this
site. At street level is a sculpture and a steel plaque that reads, “On
December 2, 1942, man achieved here the first self-sustaining chain reaction,
and thereby initiated the controlled release of nuclear energy.”
The Torrey pine is an actual tree, and Torrey Pines is
a famous golf course. I know the Torrey Pines area well since my children both
graduated Torrey Pines High School (as did X-games superstars Shaun White and
Tony Hawk, interestingly enough).
The information about San Ysidro
is accurate, at least to an approximation. The number of border crossings, and
even highway lanes, can change from year to year.
Finally, Schriever is a real Air
Force Base near Colorado Springs, and it really is home to the 50th Space Wing.
Science Fiction:
The science fiction novels
and stories referenced in
Split Second
include
The Weapon Shops of Isher
, by
A.E. Van Vogt,
The Chronology
Protection Case,
by Paul Levinson, and
A
Sound of Thunder,
by Ray Bradbury (the one having to do with the possible repercussions
of killing a single mouse many millions of years ago).
In
an earlier version of the novel I included an excerpt from a haunting story
called
The Weed of Time
, by Norman
Spinrad, used to exemplify what a block universe would be like if our perceptions
allowed us to experience any point in time, instead of just
now
. Here is this deleted passage:
[Walsh speaking] “I read a
science fiction story about this concept as a kid, called
The Weed of Time,
that haunted me for weeks after I read it.
Basically, this guy ingests an alien weed that frees him to see time as it
really is. He is able to see, live, experience every moment of his life, from
birth until death, over and over again—any moment he likes. Like being able to
visit any frame of a movie, but still unable to leave the reel. In the earlier
movie frames of his life, so to speak, people come to believe he knows
something of the future.” Walsh smiled. “Which he does, of course, since he can
experience later frames of his life. But he explains that this will be of no
use to anyone.”