Here & There (55 page)

Lorelei finally caught her breath.

“So that’s how you got the scar. Playing Jesus in a pageant play?”

“Not me. I was the asshole getting Summer’s brother high in the parking lot.”

“You were the stabber, not the stabbee? But then how . . .”

“Well, her brother and I were still pretty baked, and we were doing a piss-poor job of not laughing about the whole damn thing in the hospital waiting room. Everyone tried their best to ignore us until I saw a nurse by the vending machine and just yelled out, ‘Funyuns!’ Summer’s brother lost his shit, and her father lost his mind, and he just came at me yelling about how goddamn funny I thought everything was, how ironic, how elitist, how heehaw my Yankee perception, how funny did I think it felt, and he sunk the Bic pen he had used to sign some hospital forms right into my side.”

Lorelei stopped cold.

I knew she would. I knew what I had been doing the whole time.

“Danny, I’m, I . . .”

“Sometimes even pretend stories have real consequences,” I said, grabbed my knapsack full of Hilary’s folders, got out of the car, and slinked away down the path to the water, to the dock. Lorelei didn’t follow.

He’s spinning his magnets in a bowl again.
¹¹⁴

Metal rings against metal while Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” plays quietly on his computer.

Reidier’s possessed, chanting over and over: Trust the ghost, trust the ghost, trust the ghost.

In regione caecorum rex est luscus
*

*
In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Hilary is drifting, drifting, drifting, and I’m drowning in her wake.

PS Can someone please tell me what happened to the fucking twins??? Otto 1 and Otto 2. Ecco the echo.

Boom the bomb dropped, and there’s been no sign of them in the rubble.

WTF?

What to see?

What to see?

2C

To sea

Too sea

XVII

All sciences

are now under

the obligation

to prepare the ground

for the future task of the philosopher,

which is to solve the problem

of value,

to determine the true hierarchy of values.

~Friedrich Nietzsche

Where ambition can cover its enterprises,

even to the person himself,

under the appearance of principle,

it is the most incurable and inflexible of passions.”

~David Hume

Rule III.

The qualities of bodies are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies

whatsoever.

~Newton

Woman is not a collection of mere memories.

She is a creature of will, of sense and sensation . . .

it is there . . .

you may touch her,

and effect profound change.

~Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley

Speaking of ghosts . . . how about a listen?

Excerpt from University of Chicago iTunes episode, Dr. Kerek Reidier lecture from his Physics of Science Fiction course, December 12, 2005

“When a reporter asked Peres if it was possible to teleport both the body
and
soul, he answered, ‘Only the soul.’”

Reidier lets the counterintuitiveness of the anecdote sink in. Students shift, uncomfortable with the statement but unsure as to why.

“Any biology majors here?”

A lone student speaks up about how he took Bio 20.

“All right, Mr. Siemens. Assuming you were at least half as engaged
with that class as with my riveting lectures, you should have a sufficient grasp of humanity.”

A laugh ripples through the class.

“What makes us who we are, biologically speaking?”

There’s a prolonged
ummmmmm
from the darkness.

“A hint then: What is the building block of life, that which sequences our very existence?”

Mr. Siemens excitedly shouts out, “DNA!”

“And how does it do that?”

Mr. Siemens launches into great detail about how DNA replicates itself through unzipping its double helix and replicating two mirror images through base pairing, and how the specific arrangement of the four nucleobases of A, T, C, G is what dictates every physical trait about us.

“Exactly!” Reidier cuts Mr. Siemens off. “DNA is a blueprint for us. Psychology and development aside, that’s all we are, a signature pattern, from which our entire bodies are constructed. That’s all anything is, really. Matter is nothing more than rigidly ordered energy. Every bit of matter is simply a precise pattern held in check by forces until they wink out of existence.”

Reidier let the concept sink in.

“The entire human genome is simply a sequential binary code containing roughly eight hundred million bytes of information. So, what does this mean for our purposes?”

No responses are proffered.

“We never have to teleport a ‘thing.’ Nothing need be transmitted through space. Only information. If the pattern of an object is extracted, it can then be used on the other end as a blueprint to make a perfect copy.”

“How would that work though? Aren’t we more than patterns?” another student asks from out of the darkness.

“Not at a quantum level. At the quantum level, all that exists are patterns. Wave functions.”

“But the wave function would be disrupted by the extraction, no?” interrupts another student.

“Very astute, Ms. Echeverria. That is the essence exactly. You can extract and transmit any and all quantum information as long as you’re willing to destroy the original in exchange for an exact replica on the other end.”

To demonstrate what he’s pointing out, as well as to provide some much needed comedic relief, Reidier holds up a piece of chalk in his right hand, waves it about dramatically, says abracadabra, palms the piece of chalk, and smashes it against the surface of his desk. He then dramatically opens his left hand to reveal another piece of chalk. While not an exact replica, the point is made.

“Voilà!” Reidier brushes the pulverized pieces of chalk dust off his desk. “Just need to wipe the slate clean, so to speak.”

The class laughs.

“Scientists are currently doing this by transmitting information through a Brassard circuit. But, can you tell me what other problem this presents?”

Ms. Echeverria appears to mumble an answer.

“Precisely. Next time with more confidence, though, please. No upspeak in my class. For a full-scale teleportation, like of a person, it would take a huge amount of data processing.”

Another student pipes up and suggests using a supercomputer.

“Not a bad suggestion, Mr. Hurwitz. However, right now it would take our current supercomputers billions of years just to find the prime factors of a thousand-digit number. Our sun would die before we could even teleport your left foot.”

Some snickers.

Mr. Hurwitz keeps pushing, “What about your quantum computer?”

Reidier smiles and looks back at the remaining chalk on his otherwise empty desk. “Let’s hope I didn’t just smash it.”

The class laughs.

“But yes, a quantum computer would be able crunch these numbers at the velocity we’d require. As long as they’re not disrupted by Loschmidt Echoes.”

Reidier moves to the board and with his piece of “teleported” chalk writes down the equation:

M
(
t
) = ∣〈
ψ
∣
e
^{i(ℋ
₀
+Σ)
t
/
ħ}
e
^{-iℋ
₀
t
/
ħ
)}
∣
ψ
〉∣
²
,

“It’s a rather simple mathematical expression that basically describes how sensitive a quantum system is to changes in energy. The problem it points out is that quantum particles are so sensitive that when you run energy through them, as one does through computer circuits when asking them to perform calculations, the adjacent shifts in energy disrupt or destroy the states of neighboring quantum particles. Right now, as it is, nobody out there,” Reidier gestures out the classroom door to the world at large, “has been able to put together a long enough string of quantum circuits to make a computer. The quantum particles can’t help but fuck with each other.”

The class erupts with laughter at Reidier’s dropping the f-bomb.

“The other minor issue is that physicists can’t seem to agree whether or not time and space can actually be broken down into discrete quanta, i.e. fragments of information. Basically, it’s a debate about whether energy and matter are ultimately digital or analog in nature.”

*

*
Presumably here, dear, sweet, gone-round-the-bend Hilary is referring to another installment from Reidier’s Leo’s Notebooks, see
page 302
. I guess her codebreaker has cracked open another fragment.

Ἀναξαγόρας
¹¹⁵

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¹¹⁶
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¹¹⁷

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