CHAPTER TEN
Explanation
“Find anything yet?” Motega marched into the lab with the Sheriff in tow.
“Not exac—” Alina started to say before she noticed the Sheriff.
“Alina, this is Sheriff Kevin Hunter. Kevin, Alina.” Motega motioned to the computer. “Can I drive?”
Alina stood up and let Motega sit at the computer. After a few clicks the graphs, charts and calculations for the experiment went away. He brought up a diagram, a demonstration of the experiment. “This is the QED,” he said. “The real one is behind that door.”
“QED?”
Alina nodded. “That stands for Quantum Entanglement Device.”
“And this... this QED is what pulled us forward 87 years?”
“No,” Motega said with a terse shake of the head.
“But that boy from the future, Eric, he said he found this machine, the only thing still standing in South Mapiya, and pressed a big red button—” The Sheriff raised his hands, as if giving up with a shrug. “And pulled the whole town into the future.”
Motega shook his head again. “I think this experiment caused it. After all, the town did appear right when that kid hit the button, but we weren’t pulled forward in time. We were suspended for 87 years.”
“Suspended?”
“Quantum Entanglement works at the atomic level,” Alina explained, reaching over Motega’s shoulder to point at the computer. “The two packs in the diagram here are entangled with each other. Basically, what it means is that if I measure the spin of atomic particles in one pack, I know the entangled particles in the other pack have the exact opposite spin.”
Kevin nodded and glanced back at the closed door where they said the machine was. “I’m not following. What does entangled mean?”
“Quantum Entanglement is when the state of two particles is identical but opposite. Always.” Motega sighed and leaned back in the chair, trying to figure out how to explain it to someone without a science background. “Say I could cut a die in half such that we had two complete, six-sided dice in an entangled state. I give one die to you and you travel to Tokyo. I keep the other die with me. To all appearances, these are two completely different dice, each with their own set of sides numbered one through six.
“Except that in this example, if I roll my die here in Mapiya and it came up with a one, your die in Tokyo would display a six. If you rolled a five, my die would say two. Always. No delay and no exception. This is because they are entangled,” Motega’s hands shook, starting to get excited now, “to the point that we can communicate because we are certain of this behavior.”
“Well, I have a cell phone, Mr. Wilson,” Kevin said. “Or I did before this accident rendered it useless. Why don’t you just give me a call in Tokyo?”
“Frankly, it’s just too slow,” Alina said, stepping in.
“Slow?”
“Your phone has to turn your voice into digital data. It then sends that data, over the air, to a cell tower. The tower transmits it to a satellite, which may have to send it to another tower or satellite, and eventually it’s sent down to our phone.” Alina glanced around, as if looking for an audience, but Kevin was it. “All of that travel can take several seconds, and it relies on your having a solid connection to your cell phone’s network.”
Motega took over again, the two of them working together for so long they went hand in hand. “With Quantum Entanglement, it doesn’t matter how far away you are. The reaction is instantaneous and undetectable. Imagine taking a device with this ability to Mars, or farther. Instead of having to wait minutes for a round trip communication with Earth, and being reliant on direct line of sight, we could communicate at any distance immediately. It’s the kind of thing that will make space travel, even interstellar travel, palatable, let alone possible.”
“I think I’m starting to get it,” Kevin said. “But how does this suspend a town in time?”
“I calibrated the machine to entangle the particles in two gel packs on top of the machine,” Motega said, trying again. “They’re linked; no matter how far apart we take them, the link is lasting and instantaneous.
“But, I didn’t take into effect a secondary field that extends just outside of the machine. I don’t know how it got there.” Motega grabbed the mouse and clicked around, examining another diagram. “The second field is like a double rainbow, outside of but reflective of the first.”
“So, South Mapiya was engulfed in a Quantum Entanglement field?”
“Yeah,” Motega said with a nod. “How’s that for a tagline?”
“Sounds like something out of a science fiction movie.”
“It’s a little different than the first, though,” Alina said. “Somehow every particle in the town was entangled with another particle.” She looked at Motega, her eyes betraying a mixture of excitement and fear. “Do you think the entanglement went through another dimension?”
“You could be right.”
Kevin stood up straight and ran his fingers through his hair. “Now this is really getting out there.”
“Well, believe it. We’re living in it.”
The Sheriff started pacing. “Okay, so, another dimension. We’re talking about something like parallel earths or other worlds?”
Motega shook his head. “That’s a common misconception to make the sci-fi stories work.” He sighed, looking down at the ground, wondering how to now explain this, too. “There are those in Quantum Mechanics research that propose that there are many universes, maybe even parallel universes. It’s more of a result of needing them to make the math work than actually interacting with them.
“We see the world in three dimensions,” he said. “Four if you count time as a dimension. The study of Quantum Mechanics is revealing that there are many more dimensions, perhaps up to 11. Maybe more, who knows? But they exist here, in this very world that we see, not some alternate universe. These other dimensions are just so small that we can’t perceive them, kind of curled up in on each other.”
“You lost me again,” Kevin said, his turn to get exasperated. “Sorry, I’m sorry. I’m trying really hard to follow along here, but how can a dimension be curled? How can we have more dimensions? If I’m— Agh!” He placed his hand on the wall and rubbed his temples. “If I’m flying in a helicopter I can go up and down, left or right, and backwards or forwards. Three dimensions. 3D.”
“Don’t beat yourself up about it,” Motega said. “It’s nearly impossible to conceptualize, let alone understand. Here—” He pulled out a drawer and found a pen. “Let’s say you’re looking at this pen from half a mile away and the pen is a mile long. What would you see?”
“At that distance I suppose I’d see a straight line.”
“Right,” Motega said, holding up a finger. “One dimension. If an ant was crawling on that long pen you’d have to give only one coordinate to find its location. And if this was the only thing we knew you’d swear that there was only one dimension.”
“But the pen exists in three dimensions,” Kevin said, nodding. Motega could see the dots connecting in his head.
“Right. If you zoom in close enough, and maybe drew a line around the pen at regular intervals, it’d start to become apparent that there was a second circular dimension curled up alongside the first.” Motega set the pen down. “It’s impossible to visualize these smaller dimensions, but they are there.”
“Okay, so, this device was turned on,” Kevin said, going over it again to make sense of it. “And some particles from somewhere else were entangled with the particles from South Mapiya. And we were, what, wrapped up into one of these smaller dimensions?”
“Kind of. At least, each atomic particle was, possibly,” Motega offered. “And when that kid hit the button, the particles reversed. We returned to the normal world of the perceivable three dimensions and,” Motega waved his hand, “whatever else was here was wrapped up into that teeny, curled, 11th dimension.”
“We were suspended in time for almost 90 years.” Kevin sucked in air and held it. “This could be a problem,” he said.
“Yeah, we’re a town out of time.”
“No, I mean—” He looked at Motega, shaking his hand a bit anxiously now. “Could it happen again?”
“That is the question, isn’t it?”
Kevin glanced at his watch. “It’s almost nine o’clock,” he said with a chuckle. “That must mean we’re close to six o’clock now; this is going to be a long day. I’ve got to reset this.” He fiddled with the watch a bit. “Let’s keep in touch. I don’t know what we’ll do with our phones no longer working with the new technology, but there’s a police office in South Mapiya. I’ll probably still be found there for the time being.
“Oh, and if you need a place to stay, the school in South Mapiya — it’s just a little to the west — is being set up as a temporary shelter for any left homeless from this.”
“Thanks, Sheriff,” Motega said. “But we were staying at a hotel here at the south end of town. I’m hoping they’ll let us keep using the rooms for awhile.”
“Okay. Well, it’s there if you need it. I’ll probably be staying there. Take care.”
“Oh and Sheriff, you might want to check out the old armory down the street,” Motega suggested. “I thought I noticed the back door open as I walked by.”
“Sure. I’ll add that to the list. Thanks.”
Motega waited for Kevin to leave before standing up and letting Alina sit back down. “So,” he said, searching for some hint from her. “Did you find anything?”
“Not exactly.” She pulled up the graphs she had been using at the time of the experiment and Motega looked on over her shoulder. They both knew what the graphs were showing. On the left was a graph showing the projected field over time, on the right the calculated field. The line on the left graph rose exponentially until it reach a diameter of about a foot, enough to engulf the case above the machine holding the gel packs. “Look at what happened here on the right,” she pointed out. “The field increases until it splits here.”
“The Double Rainbow effect, I was right.”
“Yeah, but the second field increases exponentially until it approaches but doesn’t reach 500 billion feet.” Her eyes glazed over as she was calculating in her head. “That’s about 100 million miles.”
“So we could have entangled with any particles from here to the sun or the edge of the solar system.”
Alina nodded. “But that’s not the worst, Motega. This couldn’t have just happened. Not with our calculations; not the way we designed and built that machine.”
“You don’t mean—?” Motega said, not wanting to say it out loud. If it was impossible, if it wasn’t a design flaw...
“Someone sabotaged it. Do you think Dravin could have broken in here?”
Motega stared at the screen, racking his brain for some other explanation. There must have been some mistake, something they overlooked. Perhaps something so basic that they hadn’t even considered it yet. Finally, he slowly nodded. “Yes,” he said. “If he wanted to, I’m sure he could have found a way.”
“Motega, what do we do?”
He looked Alina in the eye, his mouth pulled tight. “We have to stop him from getting access to this machine.” But it wouldn’t be that easy. His right hand subconsciously tapped on the small bulge in his jacket. Dravin was devious, he knew. He’d be doing everything to get back into the FBI right now to get control over this project. “Whatever the cost, we have to stop him.”