Steve’s Shorts: The Apprentice…
[This one is just for fun: this bawdy of evidence suggests that time-travel is impossible. But who knows what happens in a parallel universe?]
The Apprentice
Copyright 2016, Steven M. Moore
“You’re late. I’ll buzz you in.”
Late? I know that!
Jeff Langley’s car had broken down…again! He’d had to call a cab, a trip that had cost him nearly all his cash. He also expected the cops to tow the car—that charge would bankrupt him. He wasn’t happy with the prospect of asking dear old Dad for money. The I-told-you-you-needed-an-advanced-degree sermons were becoming tiresome.
The voice on the intercom had been garbled and hard to understand, but the buzzer sounded. He walked into the old lab building, one of the oldest on campus. Why the security? He pulled out the slip of paper. It had gone through one wash of his jeans. “Technical assistant wanted. Must have experience writing code to connect and control different electronic equipment installations. Inquire with Prof. G. Hoff, Brook’s Lab, Room 5H.” He found stairs at the end of a dark corridor and began to climb. Guess elevators didn’t exist when they made this building!
He knocked at 5H.
“Wait a moment!” The voice was muffled. There was a pause. “Come on in. Take a seat. Not literally, of course.”
He looked around, but saw no one. Rows of workbenches were covered with equipment and parts, tools, and takeout cartons. “Professor Hoff?”
There was a tall object that looked like the Mercury space capsule sitting on its large end. A hatch opened and a young woman in a bikini stepped out as if the capsule were a gateway to a Caribbean resort. She had short hair and no tan, though, but bikini straps were strained in all the right places.
“Don’t look so damn surprised. It gets hot in there.” She grabbed a lab coat, threw it on, and approached him. “Gail Hoff.” He shook her hand. She inspected him from top to bottom. “Pretty scruffy. I don’t like stubble. I’m guessing you’re Jeff Langley. Are you mute?”
“No, you just surprised me.”
She shrugged. “I get that a lot. Even other physicists are expecting G. Hoff to be a man. My subject matter also helps explain why I’m tucked into a lab in this godforsaken corner of the campus. I’ll probably not get tenure and will have to find a job in a small college in the middle of nowhere.” She poked him in the chest. “I reviewed your rap sheet, Jeff, and liked what I saw. A bit of a rebel like me, right? I can’t pay much. 30k per year plus all the usual worthless benes, like a 401(k) and healthcare that will leave you broke if you get seriously ill. OK with that?”
Nice to know she has to pause for a breath. 30k per year? He smiled. 30 divided by 0 was an infinite raise! “Sure. Am I just supposed to jump in or will you give me an explanation of what you want from me?”
“Mostly jump in. I have no idea how you work your magic, and you probably won’t understand or care about how I work mine.” She waved at a whiteboard covered with multi-colored equations. “I keep running out of markers, but that’s the gist. My equations are like a doctor’s prescription, though. And I run out of letters, hence the Cyrillic.”
“Theoretical physics?”
“Applied is a better word. I’m as much an engineer as physicist, but I’m not good at getting devices to talk to each other electronically. I can do it if pushed—it’s like flossing my teeth—but I prefer to let an expert do it—like a dental hygienist. Electronics lab was my hardest engineering subject. That’s your mission, Mr. Ethan Hunt, if you’re willing to accept it. Be forewarned: the mission might become impossible. For now, I just need another pair of hands.” She took the lab coat off and tossed it into a chair. “Strip down unless you want to make an omelet out of your huevos.”
“Pardon?”
“It gets hot in the capsule. Even hotter with two people. Just don’t get any ideas, Mr. Hunt. That mission IS impossible!”
He smiled and began stripping.
They spent the rest of the day connecting circuit boards together, she in her bikini and he in his briefs. He just followed the woman’s directions. A bit after 4 p.m., she tossed tools into the chair with the cracked upholstery that filled most of the capsule.
“Time for a beer, my friend. Student center pub. I’ll treat. Get dressed and I’ll meet you downstairs in the foyer.”
***
Hoff eyed Jeff. “Got a family?”
“Mom died when I was five. My old man is a stiff-necked ex-military dude who wanted me to go to the Air Force academy. I didn’t have the grades. I did OK in electrical engineering, but I was sick of school after the BS. As far as I’m concerned, that degree has a double meaning.”
She shrugged. “You have a job. That’s better than many people. That reminds me. You’ll have to go early to personnel tomorrow morning and sign a bunch of papers. Try to get to the lab by 9:00.”
“That’s it? I’m hired just on your say-so?”
“Yeah, I’m your last and only roadblock to financial survival. Personnel sent me your resumé. You were the most qualified candidate.”
He grinned. “Really? How many were competing for the job?”
She looked at him over the brim of her glass, her eyes twinkling and eyebrows dancing. “One. You. The salary isn’t great, like I said. My grant’s not very large either. I gave up two conferences to hire you—admin calls it ‘creative accounting.’ I think I can mold you. Think of me as Dr. Frankenstein and yourself as Igor. Your operative response should always be, ‘Yes, master.’”
He squirmed a bit in the seat and the vinyl complained. “Gee, thanks. Just what does your research involve?”
“Experiments in time displacement,” she said with a smile. She drained a third of her beer, wiped off her upper lip, and laughed at his expression. “Yes, what the sci-fi writers call time travel. From H. G. Wells to James P. Hogan. The latter author came closer to the truth, according to my calculations. The many worlds of quantum mechanics, better known nowadays as quantum histories.”
“I wasn’t very good at physics.”
“Oh, this is far beyond what you’d see even in a PhD program in physics. Cutting edge.” She held up her arms that were covered with nicks, scratches, and a few bandaids. “This will be your torture from now on, Igor. I’m the brains; you’re the brawn.”
“Why the secrecy?”
She winked at him. “The Pentagon classifies almost anything it finances.”
“Wow! The Pentagon. Why aren’t you swimming in dough?”
“And why aren’t you making 100k? Because the money comes from DARPA and no one besides me believes my research is going to go anywhere. By the way, you have to fill out a security form. You’ll pass without problems unless you’re moonlighting for that narcissistic asshole in Russia. And even if they fail it eventually, you’ll have a temporary for a year, which is time enough for me to get a ton of work out of you. Most things are only classified so people can cover their asses anyway. If I’m successful, they’ll probably make my research into a black program so it can never embarrass them.” She put the now empty mug down. “Say, do you want a burger? I’m hungry. I think I forgot breakfast as well as lunch today.”
They had another beer with the burgers and Hoff drove him home. “Thank goodness we had the burgers to help absorb the alcohol.” She hiccupped. “Say, this neighborhood is a bit sketchy, Jeff. With your car in the police lot, how will you get to the U tomorrow?”
“There’s a bus stop three blocks from here. I only have to make one change. I’ll head out early to get all the personnel business done. I promise to be on time.” He looked around and saw no one. “Lock your doors and don’t stop for anyone.”
“So gallant. Chivalry is NOT dead. Don’t worry. I have a gun in the glove compartment. Gun laws here are lax, and there’s no way I’m going to allow a bunch of thugs gang-rape me. I’ll empty the cartridge blowing their balls off!” She blew him a kiss and took off.
***
The two beers and food had made Langley sleepy, but when he hit the sack, sleep wouldn’t come. He lay thinking about Gail Hoff’s curves. Geez, she looks good in a bikini! How old is she?
He got up, drank some water, knowing he’d finished the instant coffee, and sat down at his old laptop, an old one an aunt had bought for him when he graduated from high school. He went to the university website and did what he should have done before: research his new employer. Hoff had two PhD’s, one in EE and the other in physics. She had received them when she was twenty-one. She was an assistant professor on tenure-track. I might be older than she is!
Her bio didn’t have a pic—Gail Hoff maybe didn’t want people to know she was a woman—but the mental image of her was enough to continue to toss and turn and then have some erotic dreams. They weren’t strong enough to seek the average pubescent teen’s outlet, so he would toss and turn some more until he fell asleep. He awoke the next morning exhausted.
The robot-like people in HR wasted almost an hour of his time. At least the forms were online. If there were mistakes, he would only have himself to blame. He was especially careful with the security questionnaire. He’d used pot for the first and only time in Middle School, hadn’t liked the strange feeling, and stuck with sampling his father’s liquor supply. So he lied about that and wondered why they didn’t ask if he was an alcoholic. Was Hoff? She threw down beers like she were a Bavarian Brunnhilde.
Had he ever been arrested? That was another time-sensitive question. Did stealing a copy of Penthouse in seventh grade count? He decided the Pentagon would probably approve of that, thinking that masturbation was a sign that he was just an All-American guy and therefore not a security risk. He hadn’t heard about the organizations they asked about, except the Communist Party. Was Joe McCarthy or Ronald Reagan’s ghost going to read the form?
He walked out of HR with a headache like when he took the SATs. Another reason not to go to graduate school was avoiding the GRE. He was tired of standardized tests. It was unfair: now kids could opt out of them because parents thought the tests harmed their fragile psyches, a thinly veiled way of hiding their laziness to learn. Geez, I’m sounding like my father!
During the walk to the far corner of campus, he continued deep in thought, much of it negative and depressing. He knew work with Gail Hoff would be challenging. He wasn’t too worried about the technical end of it. In spite of his bad grades, he thought he had exactly the skills she needed. He was more worried about the social interplay. He found her attractive if a bit weird, was interested in getting to know her better, and would find it hard to focus. Why can’t Professor Huff be some old ogre with a beard?
At her lab, he took his seat at a workbench and began to organize the mess. He was messy too, but he needed it to be his mess.
“Do you have a tutorial about your research I can read in my spare time?” he said to her when she popped out of the capsule in her bikini.
“I have the proposal I made to the Pentagon. You have to dumb things down for them, so it’s a good start—pop science level with zero equations. They just want the bottom line about how the research fits into their bottom line. And how much they’re wasting. They’ll throw money at almost anything, though. I once saw a preprint about human consciousness and quantum mechanics financed by them. God knows what they wanted that for.”
“That will be fine to start, I guess. Maybe you can give me an elevator pitch.”
“A quick summary? Sure. I’m designing a capsule that will pick a particular ten-dimensional quantum history —actually a tensor bundle of them—and move backwards and forwards in time. You can think of it as a ten-dimensional rotation. Or Dr. Who’s red telephone booth for time travel.”
“Ten? Aren’t there just three?”
“And time makes four, but ordinary space-time is just a manifold in a ten-dimensional space. I can see your eyes glazing over. It only gets more complicated. Read the Pentagon proposal tonight and we’ll talk more tomorrow.’’ She unrolled a large sheet of butcher’s paper. “This will make more sense to you. I want to wire all this so that we’ll have remote control of the capsule.”
“If the capsule goes back in time, won’t that break the connection?”
“No, silly boy. The capsule doesn’t go back in time. A connection is made to a copy. There’s probably a large number of quantum histories where capsules are displaced all along the time continuum. Mind boggling, right? But it’s all explained in my mathematics.”
“Why are you doing this, professor?”
“Because I can? Please. You make me feel old. Call me Gail. Can you make sense out of my diagrams?”
“I’ll spruce up the layout a bit, but yeah, it makes sense. Do you have MATLAB’s Instrument Control Toolbox?”
“We’ll get it if you need it and I don’t have it. I assume that’s some kind of computer software for connecting up all sorts of goodies. Will it save us time?”
“You’ve got it. I’ll check your workstation. I might have to write a few ancillary C++ routines.”
“Go for it. I’m back into my telephone booth. We’ll make it a race to see who finishes first.”
***
After four, they headed for the campus pub again.
“I’ve told you about myself,” Langley said, stealing a fry. “What’s your story?”
“Nerdy, skinny, pimply, and sickly kid who liked science and math a lot. Liked showing up all the STEM guys too, especially those who eyed the cheerleaders. Now the problem is that most men are attracted to me for all the wrong reasons and run the other way when they find out I’m a lot smarter than they are. Seems like they tolerate that in dogs but not in women, although we have a president who equated the two in his campaign.”
“My mom had those experiences, but she still found her soulmate. My father’s pretty smart too, even though he has a broom handle up his butt. He seemed always to put me down.”
“Was he a pilot?”
“Test pilot, then desk jockey. Mom’s death hit him hard. He takes it out on me, I think.”
“Maybe you just need to talk to him more. Daddy was a plumber and Mommy a housewife. They were always surprised they had spawned a genius, but I love them. I don’t like to be called that, by the way, so don’t.”
“Are they still alive?”
“Sure. They live in Philly. I should call them more, but I forget.”
Langley smiled. “Like you forget to eat? What do you do for exercise?”
“I get up at 5:30, down an energy drink, jog five miles, and then come home and eat like a pig, if I remember to do so. Sometimes while I’m jogging, I get an idea, though. Knocks the hunger right out of me. What about you?”
“Gym, when I can afford it. I might be able to now. Our healthcare plan helps out with membership.”
“It does? I didn’t know that. Maybe I can meet a dreamy guy in a gym somewhere.” She shook her head. “Nah. I don’t have time for that crap. Guys always think that gals want to be pursued for a while—fancy dinners, concerts, day trips, whatever. They’re pimps and johns all in one. Who has time for that crap?”
“I don’t have that problem.”
“You’re not gay, are you?”
“No. I just can’t afford fancy dinners and the like. Look at me. You’re buying burgers and beers for me until I get my first paycheck.”
“You can’t work if you’re starving, big boy. That’s my agenda: Turn you into my slave. Igor El Segundo.” She finished her burger in three bites. “We should be ready for a test by the end of the month. If it’s successful, you can pay for the beers and burgers with that first paycheck. Or maybe champagne instead of beers.”
***
The month passed quickly.
“What’s in the packages?” said Langley, looking up from his workbench. It was unusual for him to be earlier than his boss.
“I bought champagne, just in case. Today’s the big day. It goes into my old dorm fridge.” She sat the first package down on another bench and unwrapped the second. “My batting trophy. Dad gave it to me when I hit one out of the park by accident in a slow-pitch game. I was a disappointment to him. I sucked at baseball, but he wanted to encourage me. I was more into the science.”
“Baseball is a science? I thought it was a game.”
“It has interesting physics, and you can look at stats and apply probabilities to figure out what batters can or should do. I used to do that as a kid until equations became more interesting.” She waved the inexpensive statue. “The odds for that homer were pretty low, a lot lower than the Cubs winning the series, which were pretty high actually. But, just for example, did you know fastball pitchers have a greater probability of ruining their arms before thirty than a knuckleballer.”
“Makes sense. They throw harder.”
“They throw hard, even the curve balls, and those really maximize the torque. A knuckleballer can go until he’s an old man. I think Tim Wakefield retired somewhere in his forties. Today’s fastballers are lucky to last beyond twenty-five before they need at least Tommy Johns. That’s why teams are going to a larger pitching rotation.”
“So the trophy was segue to a lecture about the physics of baseball?”
“Heavens no. There are plenty of good books on that subject. It’s just a worthless statue we can use to test the time displacement.”
“No fond memories of dear old daddy associated with it?”
“He always wanted a boy. I could play catch with him. I have better memories of that than the damn trophy, because I couldn’t live up to it. It’s going to sit right on that old dentist’s chair when we do the test.”
He smiled. “I’m about ready. I have two more digital readouts to connect. What if it doesn’t work?”
She gestured to the whiteboard filled with equations. “I’ll have to find the error.”
“Expecting just one?”
“That’s a low blow.” She walked to the capsule, reached inside and put the trophy on the seat, and shut the door. “There are some things that still aren’t clear to me. We might want to stand back in case the capsule explodes.”
“You never said that before.”
“It occurred to me last night when I was taking a bubble bath.”
“I’d like to have seen that.” She frowned. That created wrinkles on her forehead but accentuated her dimples. “You getting an epiphany, I mean.”
She shrugged. “I like a bit of flirting now and then, but we don’t have time for it now.”
“What could cause the explosion?”
“More an implosion, I guess. Implosion here, explosion there—maybe even a sonic boom. Who knows? The air might be displaced with the trophy.”
“What about the seat? Everything else inside the capsule?”
“There’s a focusing mechanism for the displacement field. I hope to adjust it to the size of the trophy.”
“A human sitting on that chair can’t be displaced then?”
“If I don’t have the field focused properly, maybe just part of our test subject would go.”
“That would be inconvenient. Better to try with the trophy first.”
“Precisely.”
***
They thought the first test was a success. The trophy disappeared. Hoff broke out the champagne, cracking a skylight window when she popped the cork. She and Langley were still sipping it and going over the experimental data when he jumped back from his bench. A shimmering in the air coalesced into the trophy.
“Did someone in the past send it back?” he said after calling her over.
She picked up the trophy and looked at it from all angles. “That’s not possible. You know I didn’t provide for an automatic return. This shouldn’t be here. It should forever be two weeks, more or less, in the past.”
“Unless it went into the future,” he said. “And less than an hour has passed.”
She thought a moment and then grabbed his cheeks and kissed him on the lips. He only tasted more cheap champagne, not quite the first kiss he had dreamed about.
“You’re a genius too!” She dashed to the whiteboard and circled a yellow minus sign with a purple-colored pen. “A little error in the damn sign is the reason for a misstep in time.”
“I know you tried to make a rhyme, but couldn’t there be more than one incorrect sign?”
“Aha! You’ve read the story about the famous physicist Dirac who made exactly that comment when another physicist ended up with an answer differing in sign from the one in a preprint he’d handed out. I have to check it all, of course, including all the calculations in my notebooks too. But my gut tells me we found the source of the problem.”
“No, I didn’t read that story about Dirac. And considering your gut probably only had champagne for breakfast, I’m not sure I’d believe what it tells you.”
She danced around the room. “We can’t go back in time. It looped! We can only go forward. That has to be it.”
“OK, suppose the trophy went into the future. Doesn’t your conjecture imply it can’t be sent back to the past?”
“Yes, yes. I’ll bet that’s in the equations. All those time travel stories are wrong. You’ll never be the time traveler’s husband.” He knew he looked like a deer in headlights. “That’s just rhetoric, Jeff. I’m making mock of a book, about as far from hard sci-fi as you can find.”
“Are you a sci-fi fan?”
“If you mean Star Wars, which is really fantasy, or Star Trek, which is completely unscientific, the answer is no. Good sci-fi is a reasonable extrapolation of current science and technology, always dangerous but a lot of fun. It motivated me to become a STEM student.”
“So, what’s the next step? If things can only move forward in time, and they can’t be sent back, where does that leave us?”
“Maybe with a happy Pentagon. They’ll be able to see how a strategy plays out. Hmm. That’s not such a good idea, is it? Is the future unchangeable too? It wouldn’t do for people to sit around moping because they already know failure is coming their way. Or spending a whole bunch of money because they can see they’ll win the lottery. We’re talking quantum histories, here, Igor, complex probabilities describing how God plays dice.” She picked up her backpack. “Ciao. I’m going home to think about this.” At the door, she spun around. “On second thought, come with me. I’ll bounce ideas off you.”
Langley was hesitant. Will the first time she invites me up to her apartment be as disappointing as that first kiss? He picked up his backpack and followed her, smiling. On second thought, he decided that first kiss had been worth it.
***
Hoff’s apartment was in a better part of town than Langley’s own, but more space meant there was more junk spread around. She brushed piles of preprints off one of the kitchen counter stools.
“Sit. I’ll get beers.” She went to the fridge and stooped to get the drinks. She froze.
“Are you all right?”
He went to her and tapped her on the back. She stood and turned to face him.
“There’s no problem. I already described the answer. We just have to get back into the context of the Many Worlds Theory of Quantum Mechanics.” She started pacing like she was in a trance. “The displacement selects a vector bundle of quantum histories connecting time A to time B and propagates along it. That doesn’t mean that events at B are predetermined. In fact, they can’t be, or we wouldn’t have quantum mechanics, period. Whatever we ‘see’ isn’t what necessarily will happen when we move from A to B. It will more likely be different every time we do it.”
“The beers, Gail?”
“Oh, yeah.” She handed one to him but stared at the top of her bottle. “Not twist top. I’ll get a church key.”
Sitting next to her at the kitchen counter seemed the most natural thing in the world to him. She began to massage his neck.
“I’ve decided you’re my inspiration: Schumann’s Clara Wieck, Keats’s Erato, Fred Flintstone’s Wilma…” She trailed off and withdrew her hand. “I guess I’m as bad an employer as I am a slow-pitch batter. So sorry. You won’t sue me for sexual harassment, will you?”
“I would never call it harassment,” he said with a smile.
That’s when she showed him the sport she was good at.
Later, Langley turned over in bed, saw Hoff naked in the moonlight filling a whiteboard with equations, and sighed. Being a time traveler’s husband is probably easier than being a physicist’s husband. He turned back over and went to sleep.
***
“I’ve actually cooked breakfast,” Hoff said, ripping the sheets and blankets off Langley and jumping on him to straddle his body. “Do you know what that means?”
“I have no idea.”
She pounded his furry chest. “It means you’ve domesticated me, Igor. Tamed me. I’m yours.” She jumped down. “A bacon and egg scramble, and then I’ll tell you my ideas.”
His cooking was worse, but not by much. The bacon was undercooked—he immediately thought of Trichinella spiralis—and there was too much pepper. He couldn’t tell about the eggs. The coffee and toast were good, though.
She jumped off her stool and ran to a recliner. “Come, sit, my master, while I wheel in my whiteboard to enlighten you on the mysteries of the quantum world.”
“Put on something before you do, please.”
Her lip trembled as she began to pout. “You don’t like my bawdy body?”
“It will be distracting if you’re trying to explain time displacement. Don’t you have a bathrobe?”
“You’re wearing it. I guess the space for the tits makes room for your shoulders.”
Langley saw the pink robe for the first time. The shoulders still felt tight, it didn’t cover his chest, and it was short, barely covering his privates. “OK. Proves my point. You’re distracting me.”
“I have some flannel pajamas. I’ll put them on. They’re a bit floppy, so you won’t see any curves at all.”
He plopped into the recliner and wondered if she was hyperactive as she went back to the bedroom. She can solve the nation’s energy problems all by herself! He was exhausted, and she was prancing around like a sprite in the woods.
She soon returned, wheeling the whiteboard, but with only pajama tops.
“I couldn’t find the bottoms. Just don’t look at my ass.” She paused in front of the whiteboard and pointed at an equation with her marker. “The culprit is here. I already knocked him for a loop. That’s a pun, by the way. Time loop. Get it? You were absolutely right. We tried to send the trophy back, but it looped and went forward instead. You can’t go back in time! That’s a no-no. Verboten. Taboo.” She stamped her foot. “But this fix shows that we can look forward—not physically, but with EM radiation, at least if we can have the slightly nonlinear version I need in ten dimensions to make things all come together. You could do that several times at once and get slightly different results. By doing a whole bunch all at once—my kingdom for a quantum computer—we can map out the probability that certain events will happen.”
“Isn’t that like a Monte Carlo simulation?”
“That’s classical probability, Jeff, not quantum mechanical. Of course, we’d need infinite energy to ‘view’ the infinite number of histories, in addition to the quantum computer. With finite power, we’ll only be able to ‘see’ a greatly reduced subset, so we can only do with likelihoods.” She had used one index finger and the marker to put quotes around ‘view’ and ‘see.’ “Bottom line: we can junk that capsule and the old dentist’s chair. We just need a widescreen TV with lots of pixels.”
“And a lot of software to turn what you were describing into video output.”
“No matter. I’m ready to write progress report numero uno for the damn Pentagon. I’ll make it as abstract as possible, of course.”
“Why’s that?”
“Heavens! You wouldn’t want them to understand it, would you? They were thinking I was inventing a time machine!”
***
Action on the southern border! No, it’s not Trump beginning the construction of The Wall. It’s Chen and Castilblanco fighting terrorists, a cartel, and neo-Nazi militias. In Angels Need Not Apply, the deadly duo from the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” go undercover to fight crime as part of a national task force. This novel is available in all ebook formats.
In libris libertas!
