Day 2 (Immobile)

SOLAR MAXIMUM NEARS
To us here on the ground, it's just a big ball of fire. It comes
up in the morning, makes our day unbearably hot or not nearly
warm enough depending on the time of year, and it goes down at
night. But to scientists, our sun is an only-barely stable
churning mass of superheated plasma - and it's getting more
interesting by the hour.

Every day, of course, it's sending helpful light and heat along
with not-so-helpful ultraviolet radiation and X-rays our way. But
like our own planet, the sun has its seasons - they just take
longer.

``The appearance of sunspots - this is an indicator of solar
activity, how likely it is you'll see flares and such - peaks
every eleven years or so, give or take.'' Dr. Alan Ledford of
NASA explains. ``Solar flares may look pretty, but in reality
they're billions of tons of matter, and they can reach speeds of
up to a million miles per hour. That's just the actual matter
part, they're sending even more radiation our way than normal.''

That radiation takes the form of X-rays, most often, and luckily
doesn't tend to reach us here on the surface. But it can wreak
havoc with sensitive electronics, especially those already in
space.

``Anything that's not properly shielded is vulnerable.'' the good
doctor points out. ``Sattelites especially, because they don't
have the benefit of the Earth's magnetic field which would
ordinarily protect them.'' Our helpful magnetic field poses
problems of its own, however: ``You've got to remember, flares
like this are small change to something the size of the sun, but
compared to the size of our planet they're massive massive
beasts. They're so large they can temporarily alter our magnetic
field. This results in power surges, outages, etc. This is
especially dangerous now given that so many more things have
electronic components than did ten years ago.''

As far as advice goes, ``There are a few basic precautions you
can take. Surge protectors are a good idea anyway, and having a
ready supply of drinking water is never a bad idea. This sounds
like a big event, but the worst we're likely to see is an outage
or two.''

1 Immobile

He'd been right. The crazy bastard had been right.

Over the years, Doctor James Caster had tried to maintain ties to
his old colleagues. One he'd fallen out of step with rather
quickly, however, had been ex-professor VonCannon. ``Crazy bastard''
was a description that suited him well, and Caster had no reason
to think he'd improved outside of academia... but there was
something about the theories that James just couldn't let go.
It'd been over a decade at this point, he knew. Whatever contact
information he had for the disgraced professor was likely to be
long outdated. But he'd been right!

Caster had himself long ago deserted the halls of his university
for the greater paycheck of private industry, specifically the
halls of Vervicom Software. It hadn't really been his job, years
ago, to oversee VonCannon's work, and it certainly wasn't his job
now. Something had taken hold of him, though. Perhaps it was
guilt over having to fire the old man, perhaps the sort of
old-fashioned scientific inquiry he'd had in his youth, whatever
the reason, Malachai's theories kept tumbling in Caster's head,
refusing to be shaken.

How long ago was it that he'd started his own experiments? He'd
begun shortly after the beginning of the year, at least begun
physically creating things. The checking of the math, the
interpretation of the theories, that had taken place on and off
since... well since he'd had to fire VonCannon. Perhaps his
'guilt' theory was more spot-on than he'd like to believe.

His attempt at re-creating the Disappointment machine had been a
monumental failure which, in the twisted logic it employed, meant
it was successful. He still had the thing, in fact, rusting in a
corner of his workshop. He didn't show it to newcomers anymore -
he could no longer stand seeing people let down by the thing. It
was around that time he'd started feeling more acute sympathy for
Malachai, because when word of the re-made Disappointment machine
got around he started getting quite a few strange looks and
became the topic of corporate rumor rather quickly. That hadn't
stopped him, though. He felt what he assumed was the same sort of
fever VonCannon had - the theories were right! He'd prove it, if
not with math that nobody else could understand, than with a
real, working prototype.

The Immobile Machine... that was a greater challenge. VonCannon's
math looked insane, but even to this date there were people
dedicated to studying it. The moment it became known around the
office that he was looking into it, in fact, the previous rumors
of his senility assumed a more cautiously optimistic note. A
number of people had stopped by to warn him, with greater or
lesser degrees of subtlety, that while his current research was
approved, he was dangerously close to following the path that had
damned the professor. Caster had reminded them that it was, after
all, him who had done the damning.

So months, then. He'd been working on the Immobile machine for
months. The only resources he had were Malachai's impossible to
follow publishings and flawed blueprints that he shouldn't even
have [(0x0018) Blueprints were made available to Vervicom's mainframe to create the appearance of unethical behavior on the part of Professor VonCannon and to further estrange him from industry, which it was discovered slowed progress to an even greater extent than academia had.] - blueprints he knew were wrong in some crucial area but which,
eventually, he had no choice but to follow. Taking his work home
with him as he had in this instance had been a violation of
professional ethics, his own personal code of honor, and any
number of NDAs he'd signed. He wasn't even sure why he'd done it,
other than to spare himself the humiliation of being discovered
working on a mostly discredited machine that was likely to fail
utterly. Regardless of the reasons, though, he had his own
workshop at home, and he'd constructed a fully functional
Immobile machine there.

Well, mostly functional.

He could see with his own eyes that it wasn't there. He'd flipped
a switch and there'd been a loud 'pop' - this was caused not by
the vanishing of the machine though it had indeed done so, but
rather it was the sound of all the electronics in his house being
destroyed by an electrical surge
[(0x0020) The surge was part of a secondary effort to dissuade
Caster from involving VonCannon in industry - though initially it
seemed to fail in this task, it was a vital part of later
changes.]. The machine certainly wasn't present now, so far as he could
tell, but whenever he'd think back he'd recall its presence. It
didn't take him long to realize that the machine had only been
immobile in time an instant before the surge had taken place, and
thus it was traveling along normally... a second behind
everything else.

The details of his failure didn't matter, though. Because even
though he hadn't replicated the experiment exactly, he'd gotten
farther than anyone else on the planet except for VonCannon
himself. Caster found himself admitting, over a decade too late,
that he'd been wrong.

He picked up the phone before remembering that it was likely to
be dead. He picked up his cellphone and began dialing, walking
excitedly around his work area.

``You've reached Doctor Malachai VonCannon'' the gravely and
unsteady voice of the ex-professor had not improved, but Caster
didn't care - the number was still good! ``I can't be bothered to
answer the phone at the moment. Leave a message. Maybe I'll call
back.'' The recording ended abruptly.

James still didn't care. He began speaking excitedly into the
phone. ``Mal - or Doctor VonCannon, however you'd prefer - I'm
sorry.'' he knew he'd have to get to this point quickly, lest his
message be erased in its first few moments of playback. ``I
buckled to the board too quickly, and I was especially wrong in
accusing you of colluding with Vervicom.''

He paused a moment to catch his breath and noted the smell of
smoke in the air. Probably just his computer or something equally
expensive smouldering from the surge. He continued not caring.

``More importantly, you were right.'' he spoke rapidly into the
phone, grabbing his coat as he left his workshop and entered his
kitchen. The air here was more hazy, but he paid it no attention.
He was leaving anyway. ``I'm guessing by the fact you haven't
changed your number that you're still in your warehouse downtown.
I'm on my way. If I could get ahold of the machine I'd bring it
with me, but I suspect you know how hard it is to move an
Immobile machine. I'll be there in no time.''

He hung up. His coat was on and he was out the door and, very
soon afterward, in his car. If he'd looked back at that moment,
he might have discovered that he had just left a building that
while not yet truly on fire, seemed to be inevitably sliding in
that direction. He didn't look back. He drove.

James Caster lived in the suburbs. His commute to the Vervicom
campus in the city normally took him an hour, but it was a
weekend and thus it took him half that to reach the city. During
the drive, he had time to wonder about the smoke he'd smelled
earlier. What if something had been more than damaged? Sure, he
was insured, but that was small consolation when one's house
burnt down. How would it effect the machine? That was the more
important question. Hell, what would the firefighters think of a
device they couldn't see but nonetheless remembered being there?
There would be some uncomfortable questions asked, he was sure.
He was certainly hoping that Vervicom would be willing to forgive
him for doing research on his own - given the amazing results
this was likely to be the case.

He couldn't shake the feeling, deep down underneath the heady
triumph and haste to share the news, that something was very very
wrong. The fact that the city's power appeared to go out
[(0x0040) The Mason Nuclear Power Plant had for years been
preparing to modernize their preparations for the next solar
maximum, however key e-mails had apparently been misrouted and
the project was delayed, thus enabling the power outage. Though
it failed, again, to stop Dr. Caster, it opened up an entirely
different and more fruitful path.]
the moment he exited the freeway did nothing to diminish this.

Two impulses fought within him. First, there was the need to go
faster, to reach Dr. VonCannon as soon as possible. Underneath,
though, the nagging worry got worse. Caster at first drove
cautiously, but as minutes went by and nothing lept out of the
cross streets to challenge him, his speed steadily increased.
Finally his caution was gone altogether, replaced by a third
impulse, one which combined the need to share the information
with the fear that if he didn't - and soon - it would be too
late.

He was right. One mile from VonCannon's warehouse, a streetcar
struck him
[(0x00C0) Regrettably, this was the only solution to the Caster
dilemma].

---

Previous - Next

Day 1 (Prologue)

The Coincidence Machine

by Roger Ostrander

(begin run 16383)

Prologue

You couldn't fail to build a disappointment machine.

That, Professor Malachai VonCannon decided, had been his downfall. That insight he'd had while walking in the rain to his car: he had of course forgotten his umbrella, and was thoroughly soaked by the time he'd reached his spot. He'd been looking forward to the heater and, via it, becoming a great deal more dry. So when he cranked the starter and the car failed to respond at all he'd been, well, disappointed. The car was, to him at this moment, a disappointment machine. That's when it came to him. A machine built to induce disappointment. He couldn't fail to build it, after all, because even if it was never completed it would still have carried out its purpose, i.e. disappointment. It was revolutionary and not just a little bit insane of him to even consider it. But what if it worked? He'd have invented an entirely different sort of machine, a machine that worked on contradictory principles (after all, he thought, who could build a machine that worked even if you failed to build it?). He had to do it.

He hadn't paid a great deal of attention to the important question, 'What if it worked'. That was exactly the issue, as it turned out, exactly the turning point of his career. It had worked, all right, it had worked too well. What the good professor had failed to realize was that building a disappointment machine was not only self-fulfilling, it was also ultimately futile. The better you built your disappointment machine, the more it disappointed not only you, but those in charge of funding you.

It had been a disaster. No scientific journals would publish the results, no respectable committees would even discuss it - perhaps most embarrassing, he could not even seem to attract research assistants any longer. If it hadn't been for the immobile machine, he would have likely given up altogether.

The concept was simple enough and, like its spiritual predecessor, completely at odds with itself - a machine that did not move at all, and thus could be used to propel other objects at high speeds. The machine wasn't moving, but the rest of the universe was. In theory it required virtually no energy and if done correctly would even provide energy, but experiments had never gone that far. Professor VonCannon had worked on the theory himself, vetted everything himself and, since no respectable outsider would even speak to him, tested everything himself. He'd even figured out the proper time of day and year for activation to prevent the machine from, say, slamming into the Earth's crust at extremely high speeds. So nobody was more surprised than him when he activated the machine and it vanished entirely.

A despondent Professor VonCannon was on the verge of resigning, but rather fatalistically published his research into the machine anyway. He was unsurprised at the initial response, which consisted mainly of jeers and calls for his dismissal. The surprise came a short time later when more cool-headed and rational scientists looked at the math behind the theory and found it strangely sound. The reason the machine vanished, it was determined, was because it was not only anchored in space, but time as well. The fact that nobody - not even the professor himself - seemed able to replicate this feat went unremarked. The professor had moved on to his next big machine, and nobody else was able to understand enough of his logic to be able to perform the experiment again. It didn't seem to matter, though, because if the professor's logic was true then it was possible to create a portal through time, using just such an immobile machine as an anchor. You couldn't travel back any farther than the anchor had been made, but it was astonishing just the same.

He'd gotten back his credibility. Journals clamored over each other to publish his works, reprints of his earlier discredited research into disappointment were in high demand, and research student applications flooded his inbox. There seemed to be nothing else to do at that point but build the time machine he'd theorized could be done.

So he had, and once again everything crumbled around him.

For one thing, he was the only person who knew he'd done it. You couldn't see the wormhole he'd created, because it was only the size of a few atoms and if he didn't keep it in a specially prepared isolation device at all time it would evaporate. So he'd made a machine that, to everyone else, just seemed to be outputting random data.

There was a wormhole, he knew. It was transmitting data, probably from some point in the future, he knew. The machine he'd built to enclose it (the time machine, as he'd dubbed it) was picking up this data and outputting it. The data just seemed entirely random. Everyone else doubted the existence of the wormhole entirely, given that nobody could reproduce the experiment that allegedly created it. As before, the professor's credibility vanished, his colleagues deserted him for the most part and his students went back to other research that had a higher likelihood of attracting grant money.

That wouldn't have ended his career, if the time machine didn't seem bent on burning down the university [(0x0001) Both the professor's work and the professor himself were incompatible with academia. These changes were necessary to ensure his working in an independent environment] . Ever since its construction there had been random power fluctuations everywhere on campus, in some cases disabling such university systems as the on-campus power plant, fire suppression and its backups, and most distressingly to the students, the campus Internet connection. They began at the precise moment of wormhole creation, and were persisting despite everything Professor VonCannon did to try to shield the machine.

Rather than take the disruptions as evidence that a wormhole was in their midst, as the Professor insisted, his colleagues had advanced the alternate and to everyone else more plausible theory that VonCannon was insane, and his machine was purposely drawing bizarre amounts of energy, in turn causing these problems. It was this that had earned him an invitation to the office of Doctor James Caster, Dean of Engineering, and begun the entire train of thought about his downfall.

Caster held a thick sheaf of used printer paper and gestured at Professor VonCannon with it. ``Do you know what this is?'' he asked seriously.

Malachai shrugged. ``Aren't you going to ask me to sit down?''

``It's all the complaints I've received about you.'' Caster continued, ignoring the professor's question.

Professor VonCannon decided that ignoring the other person's statements was a two-way street. ``Because when people call their colleagues into their office to give them a stern lecture and/or a firing, usually the first thing they say is 'would you sit down'.''

Dr. Caster glared. ``This is a serious matter, Mal.''

VonCannon sat. Doctor Caster had been one of the few members of the faculty who had argued against sacking him the first time he'd made a machine that appeared defective to all observers. VonCannon's later celebrity had been what propelled Caster into the position of Dean to begin with, and James knew it. That Malachai's staunchest supporter seemed at the end of his tether was poor news indeed.

VonCannon's seating seemed to calm the dean down somewhat. The latter sighed. ``This is just the hardcopy, letters that people bothered to mail in.'' he said. ``You don't even want to know what my e-mail looks like.''

``I have some idea'' Malachai replied. He'd long ago set up a program to filter out the large volume of negative publicity he'd attracted.

Dr. Caster was quiet for a time. He put the paper down on his desk and sighed nearly silently. Finally, he spoke. ``The Board of Trustees called me in yesterday.''

There was no good response to that. Professor VonCannon had achieved tenure years before any of the insane machine ideas had come to him, and even during his initial hard times because of the Disappointment machine, he'd never been told his job was in danger. Hopefully he was misinerpreting what Caster was saying.

``Really?'' was the most noncommital thing he could think of.

Dr. Caster's hesitation in continuing told VonCannon everything he needed to know. James pressed on regardless. ``It is their view that your behavior is... unstable. They see your experiments as dangerous in the extreme, and putting the entire campus at risk.''

``You know that's not the case.'' Malachai shot back before he could stop himself.

``Do I?'' Caster's response was equally quick; it was clear he'd been asking himself the question for some time. ``I have only your word for it that this machine of yours really does what you claim it does. Now I know you, Malachai. I spoke up for you when nobody else would. Only this time, there's real danger.''

``Ah, that's it.'' Professor VonCannon was a great deal angrier than his tone was letting on. ``You have my back when it's harmless to do so. 'Let him stay, he has some funny ideas but he is harmless', is that it?''

James' brow furrowed. ``Yes.'' he said bluntly. ``As far as the board is concerned, funny ideas are harmless. Fires, on the other hand, electrical problems, that's what's harmful. When I say the board called me yesterday, I mean they called me at home, at 8:00 in the evening, for an emergency meeting. There was a fire in one of the dormatories; if one of the students hadn't been near a fire extinguisher when he saw it, there wouldn't be a Simmons Hall anymore. This is the first time that the fire suppression systems going down has resulted in an actual fire, but both the board and I fear that it won't be the last.''

Malachai managed to look even more frustrated than the dean. ``This is my fault how, exactly? You're allegedly a man of science, James, but you're behaving like the skittish public. You have no proof that it's my machine causing these disruptions! Have you spoken to your colleagues in the physics and astronomy departments? Perhaps if you had you'd know that we're at the solar maximum? Disturbances are to be expected.''

Caster leaned forward. ``Then shut it down.'' he said simply. ``If solar activity is to blame for our malfunctions, then they will continue and I myself will sign the paperwork funding your machine.''

Professor VonCannon had, in truth, had that very same idea much earlier on. He shook his head. ``I've already given thought to closing the wormhole'', he said, as though his wormhole were fact and not very much in dispute, ``and it wouldn't be difficult. Any significant interruption in the flow of power to containment would allow its energy to dissipate, after all. No, the problem becomes that I have already recorded what information I could decipher from the rift. If I close the wormhole, it cannot be reopened. Another one can be created, certainly, but it would not be linked to this one. It stands to reason, then, since this is a hole through time - not space - that I cannot close it before I transmit the information I have already received.''

James looked at VonCannon askew. ``So what you're saying is that, in order for us to preserve the time-space continuum, we have to keep you employed.''

``Not at all.'' the last thing Malachai needed at this point was rumor going around that he'd threatened to hold Causality hostage. ``Simply that I can't safely shut down the wormhole yet.'' He took a deep breath. This was his last hope at salvaging his work... ``It could be moved.''

Dr. Caster considered this. ``You said that any interruption in power could destabilize it.'' his expression didn't indicate one way or the other whether he believed that the wormhole even existed, ``How do you propose it be moved? And where to?''

Inwardly, Professor VonCannon breathed a sigh of relief. His work would be safe. ``The machine itself has a built-in uninterruptible power supply; I didn't want minor electricity issues to destabilize reality, after all. It can go without external power for weeks at a time. As for where it should be moved to, I own some property in the city in the industrial district. I am certain such an area would be more able to deal with a machine whose power demands are as... unique as mine.''

``You've been thinking of this.'' Caster's voice wasn't an accusation, but it had a slight edge to it.

``The writing did seem to be on the wall.'' VonCannon admitted. ``I simply want to continue my work.''

Dr. Caster shook his head. ``I'm sorry - you can keep the machine running as long as it's effect on the campus has been mitigated, I know how much it means to you, but the board insists that all research into it cease. They seem to think that further damage might be done.''

Professor VonCannon took out a sheet of paper and put it on James' desk, smoothing out the folds. ``If you sign the paperwork to get my machine moved downtown, I'll sign this paper and you can bring it to your board.''

Caster looked at the sheet. ``Are you sure?''

``I want to continue my work.''

James nodded. ``All right. You've got my blessing.''

Without another word, VonCannon signed his resignation letter. In actuality, it was a letter he'd drafted back when the Disappointment machine had been created. He'd simply changed the date. This move, he knew, had been coming for a long time.

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