Split second, p.35
Split Second, page 35
Wexler nodded thoughtfully.
“Now that Knight is out of the picture,” continued Jenna, “we’re free to go back to our lives, of course. But I’ve really begun to like these people. Aaron is flat-out amazing, as a detective, as a commando, and as a human being. I can’t wait to hear how he managed to get you out of there, and I have some Aaron Blake stories of my own to tell. As far as I can tell, Lee and Joe are good men also.”
“So you would recommend we join them?”
“I would. But I’ve had a chance to get to know them. So take your time. Do the same. And then decide.”
“You have yourself a deal.”
“Good. And while you’re at it, if you do decide to join Q5, I think we should get married. Make it official.”
Wexler’s jaw dropped to the floor. “Sounds good to me,” he said after he had gotten over his initial shock. “If I’m remembering right, you’ve always been the one who didn’t want to hassle with this. I’ve been pretending we’re already married for over a year now anyway.”
“Then it’s settled,” said Jenna, who realized her new eagerness to finally tie the knot was a direct result of having seen Nathan die. Maybe this would be a good technique for couples therapy, after all. “But if we’re going to marry, I have one request.”
“Anything,” said Wexler.
“I get to choose the location of our honeymoon.”
“Done,” he said immediately. He raised his eyebrows. “Anywhere in particular you had in mind?”
“As a matter of fact,” she said, breaking into a broad grin, “I do. Just outside the rings of Saturn. In an experimental spacecraft that we’d beam there. Of course, this will require you to figure out how to use the fifth dimension to push through space, rather than time.”
“Of course,” said the physicist in amusement. “I was guessing you’d want to honeymoon at a resort in Hawaii. But, you know, the rings of Saturn would have been my next guess.”
Jenna laughed. “And just so I don’t put any undue pressure on you,” she said, “I’m willing to postpone the honeymoon until you’ve succeeded. I realize that coming up with the most profound breakthrough in human history might take you a while.” She shot him a playful look. “But don’t take too long.”
Nathan Wexler grinned. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, his eyes dancing. “I’ll get to work on that right away.”
From the Author: Thanks for reading Split Second. I hope that you enjoyed it. As always, I’d be grateful if you would consider putting up however many stars you believe the novel deserves on its Amazon page, as this is immensely helpful in getting a book noticed.
Finally, feel free to visit my website (where you can get on a mailing list to be notified of new releases), Friend me on Facebook at Douglas E. Richards Author, or write to me at doug@san.rr.com.
SPLIT SECOND: What’s Real, and What Isn’t
As you may know, I conduct fairly extensive research for all of my novels. In addition to trying to tell the most compelling stories I possibly can, I strive to introduce concepts and accurate information that I hope will prove fascinating, thought-provoking, and even controversial.
Although Split Second is a work of fiction and contains considerable speculation, some of it does reflect reality. Naturally, within the context of a thriller, it is impossible for me to go into the depth each topic deserves, nor present the topic from all possible angles. I encourage interested readers to read further to get a more thorough and nuanced look at each topic, and weigh any conflicting data, opinions, and interpretations. By so doing, you can decide for yourself what is accurate and arrive at your own view of the subject matter.
Before I begin, I have to report there were many times during the writing of this novel that I thought I must be crazy for attempting this particular plot. Thinking about the logic of time travel made my brain hurt, and I pulled out handfuls of hair on numerous occasions trying to wrestle this to the ground.
Time travel is always complex, but when you’re dealing with only forty-five microseconds, duplication, teleportation, paradox, possible branching timelines, and so on, it can be maddening to figure out, especially if you’re trying to get it as logical and self-consistent as possible. I spent many hours filling pages with diagrams and having to repeatedly change the plot when I realized I had gotten the logic wrong. And if trying to understand the complexities of this particular plot wasn’t difficult enough, trying to explain it in a way that had any chance of being understandable in fewer than a million pages was challenging as well.
This being said, since no one really knows how time travel might work, I had to take certain liberties in telling this story that didn’t have a firm basis in logic, and I can’t guarantee I didn’t miss something in my analysis. All I can say for sure is that I did the best I could.
With this out of the way, let me get right to the meat and potatoes:
Idiocracy (or Are We Getting Dumber?): This is a real movie, with the premise I outlined in the novel. I found this movie amusing, but be warned that it isn’t for every taste, and many might find it offensive.
As to the accuracy of the movie’s premise, this is controversial, and very complicated, so for those who are interested, I would recommend Googling fertility and intelligence, dysgenics, and the Idiocracy effect.
From my research (and, as always, my analysis is not infallible, so I encourage readers to come to their own conclusions) it appears that studies do show an inverse correlation between education and fertility, such that the more educated you are, the fewer children you will have, on average. A 1991 study, for example, conducted by the US Census Bureau, found that high school dropouts averaged 2.5 children, whereas college graduates averaged only 1.56 children.
This inverse correlation also seems to exist between wealth and fertility, at the individual level and with respect to nations, which has been named the demographic-economic paradox. To illustrate this point, Karan Singh, a former minister of population in India, famously said, “Development is the best contraceptive.”
While there is some correlation between educational attainment and intelligence, IQ isn’t entirely determined by genes, and there are other complicating factors, so the higher reproductive rates among the less wealthy and less educated translate into a fairly small reduction of species intelligence (and again, this is quite controversial and still under discussion). Even so, over centuries and millennium, this could have a very noticeable effect.
Critics of this analysis point to something called the Flynn effect, which is the observation that average IQs have actually been slowly rising since 1930, most likely due to better nutrition and quality of life, although new studies have shown this trend slowing or even reversing of late. Proponents of the Idiocracy view suggest that these average rises would have been even greater if not for the increased fertility of the less intelligent, and point to the recent reversals.
This last reminds me of a conversation I had with my mother. I was born in the days before women were warned about smoking and drinking while pregnant. (These were also the days in which my sister and I would never wear a seatbelt, would sleep on a platform against the window above the backseat of our car, and in which my sister would slather oil on herself and use a reflecting shield to maximize the amount of sun hitting her body while at the beach).
When I learned that my mother smoked while she was pregnant with me, I teased her about this. She would have none of it. “My smoking obviously had no affect on you,” she insisted. “Look how smart you turned out to be.” To which I replied playfully, “Yeah, but think of how smart I could have been.”
Dark Matter and Dark Energy: The information presented with respect to dark energy, dark matter, quintessence, the ancients’ belief that the world was composed of four elements (earth, air, fire, and water), that we are totally clueless about the composition of a vast majority of our universe, and so on, is as accurate as I could make it, although highly summarized and not rigorously presented.
The following passage is entirely fictional:
“Nathan told me that physicists were making some progress identifying this energy, but he was certain there would never be a way to use it. You could tap in—maybe—but even if you managed this, Nathan’s calculations, and those of others, showed you’d never be able to control it. It would be all or nothing. Drinking from a firehose. Tap it and the minimum energy you would release would be more than enough to vaporize the Earth, possibly the entire solar system.”
What I find most fascinating about all of this is how little we really understand our universe. Despite the amazing progress we have made, we may only be scratching the surface. While this is sobering, it is also exciting. Humanity has accomplished quite a lot, but think of what we might be able to accomplish if we could unlock the many mysteries still remaining.
The Nature of Time: I endeavored to make this entire discussion as accurate as possible, but this is a very complicated subject, and I hope I didn’t make readers too crazy and confused. The relational theory of time is real, although I’ll leave it to readers to decide for themselves if they think time could exist before the universe came into being. The block universe is a real concept that falls out of relativity, and one to which many scientists (including Einstein) subscribe.
I find Zeno’s paradoxes a lot of fun, and I encourage you to Google them. I included the one about the two arrows frozen in time, although I’m not sure how clearly I was able to get across the point of this in the limited space I allowed myself for this task.
My favorite of these paradoxes is called Achilles and the Tortoise. Imagine a tortoise is given a large head start in a race. Well, before Achilles can catch the slow critter, he has to travel half the distance they are separated. But while he’s traveling half, the tortoise is also moving ahead. So now he again must travel half the remaining distance before he can catch the reptile. But again, in the time this takes, the tortoise will have moved forward a small amount. By the time he travels half the remaining distance again, which continues to shorten, the tortoise moves forward again. And so on, forever.
In this way, thousands of years ago, Zeno presented a logical argument that Achilles should never be able to catch up to the tortoise, in a way that was quite difficult to disprove for some time (even though we all know Achilles will, in fact, catch and pass the tortoise).
Apologies if my abbreviated presentation of this paradox isn’t clear, and I won’t take the time to provide the resolution to it here, but if you’re interested, just Google Achilles and the Tortoise and you will find all you need.
Time Travel: Feynman diagrams are real. They do model antimatter as going backward in time, and are exceedingly useful. Richard Feynman was a remarkable man, and this is just one of his many contributions to science.
The chronology protection conjecture is an actual concept. The idea of retrocausality is real, and certain experiments with entangled particles in quantum physics suggest that an observation made now can change something that happened in the past. I didn’t include these experiments because the background required to understand them is fairly extensive (and I have to admit, I don’t fully understand them myself :)).
The logic of duplication and translocation is my own, but it makes some sense, at least to me. Duplication isn’t all that controversial, appearing in countless works of fiction. I’m sure we all remember scenes in which two Marty McFlys exist at the same time (one on stage performing and one backstage).
To my knowledge, however, duplication, with or without translocation, has never been presented as the sole point of time travel the way it is in Split Second, and all time travel stories with which I am familiar send people and objects back hours, days, and years, rather than millionths of a second.
When I began the novel, I thought I had two basic choices for how time travel would work. Either time travel only affected a single timeline, or time branched whenever time travel caused a change in the past. For a variety of plot-related reasons I won’t go into here, I couldn’t use the single timeline. But the idea of infinite branching timelines bothered me. The more I thought about this, the more I didn’t like it.
If you wanted ten copies of Nathan Wexler, you would get ten different universes, each branch containing a different number of Wexlers, one through ten. And if you repeated this a million times, as you would need to do to scale up an infinitesimal amount of explosive, for example, you’d be creating a million different universes. This just seemed wasteful to me, and if this many universes were allowed, who would really care what happened in the one featured in the narrative?
So I came up with a blended model, which is presented in the book. A single timeline that ignores paradox. A universe that just accepts where it is at, without worrying about how it got there, and moves forward on this basis. And this I came to really like. It brought to mind the way I write novels, and made great sense in this context. My novels are my own personal universes, and sometimes the cause of a change I make no longer exists (because it came from a different universe, a different version of the novel). But even without a discernible cause, the effect remains. The novel goes forward, just accepting the change, and not caring how it came to be.
After I had the rudiments of the Split Second plot worked out, I read four books on time travel, How to Build a Time Machine (Brian Clegg), Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe (J. Richard Gott), Time, a Traveler’s Guide (Clifford A. Pickover), and Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction (Paul J. Nahin).
Sadly, while there was some fascinating material here, almost none of it was useful for my novel. It was either too complex, not relevant to my plot, or required engineering impossible even for a species a thousand times more capable than ours (creating wormholes, rotating Tipler cylinders, and so on).
In this case, since I couldn’t find anything scientifically feasible that could work, I created my device from whole cloth. Siphon a massive amount of the nearly infinite energy of the dark energy field (which is real), use this to drive matter through the fifth dimension (which could be real, but hasn’t been proven), and voila, time travel to 45.15 microseconds in the past (chosen because I thought 58 feet was a good distance).
Earth’s Movement: The paragraph detailing the Earth’s various movements through space (rotation, revolution, etc.) is accurate, at least according to Scientific American. We really are moving through the universe at 242 miles per second.
The Star Trek Transporter: Alas, many, if not most scientists believe that Captain Kirk is destroyed and recreated each time he “travels” through the transporter. I find this fascinating. Even knowing this, Edgar Knight would happily use such a device. I encourage you to consider what you would do. I’ve given it a lot of thought, but haven’t firmly decided if I would use a transporter or not.
I considered addressing some of the philosophical implications of this in the novel, but finally decided against it. Here is one example: Basically, the cells in your body are dying and being replaced all the time. It isn’t clear if 100% of your cells are replaced during your lifetime, or how long this might take if they are, but a common, albeit controversial figure often cited is seven years (if you Google, “does the human body replace itself every seven years” you will find any number of articles on this subject).
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.
“Now that Knight is out of the picture,” continued Jenna, “we’re free to go back to our lives, of course. But I’ve really begun to like these people. Aaron is flat-out amazing, as a detective, as a commando, and as a human being. I can’t wait to hear how he managed to get you out of there, and I have some Aaron Blake stories of my own to tell. As far as I can tell, Lee and Joe are good men also.”
“So you would recommend we join them?”
“I would. But I’ve had a chance to get to know them. So take your time. Do the same. And then decide.”
“You have yourself a deal.”
“Good. And while you’re at it, if you do decide to join Q5, I think we should get married. Make it official.”
Wexler’s jaw dropped to the floor. “Sounds good to me,” he said after he had gotten over his initial shock. “If I’m remembering right, you’ve always been the one who didn’t want to hassle with this. I’ve been pretending we’re already married for over a year now anyway.”
“Then it’s settled,” said Jenna, who realized her new eagerness to finally tie the knot was a direct result of having seen Nathan die. Maybe this would be a good technique for couples therapy, after all. “But if we’re going to marry, I have one request.”
“Anything,” said Wexler.
“I get to choose the location of our honeymoon.”
“Done,” he said immediately. He raised his eyebrows. “Anywhere in particular you had in mind?”
“As a matter of fact,” she said, breaking into a broad grin, “I do. Just outside the rings of Saturn. In an experimental spacecraft that we’d beam there. Of course, this will require you to figure out how to use the fifth dimension to push through space, rather than time.”
“Of course,” said the physicist in amusement. “I was guessing you’d want to honeymoon at a resort in Hawaii. But, you know, the rings of Saturn would have been my next guess.”
Jenna laughed. “And just so I don’t put any undue pressure on you,” she said, “I’m willing to postpone the honeymoon until you’ve succeeded. I realize that coming up with the most profound breakthrough in human history might take you a while.” She shot him a playful look. “But don’t take too long.”
Nathan Wexler grinned. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, his eyes dancing. “I’ll get to work on that right away.”
From the Author: Thanks for reading Split Second. I hope that you enjoyed it. As always, I’d be grateful if you would consider putting up however many stars you believe the novel deserves on its Amazon page, as this is immensely helpful in getting a book noticed.
Finally, feel free to visit my website (where you can get on a mailing list to be notified of new releases), Friend me on Facebook at Douglas E. Richards Author, or write to me at doug@san.rr.com.
SPLIT SECOND: What’s Real, and What Isn’t
As you may know, I conduct fairly extensive research for all of my novels. In addition to trying to tell the most compelling stories I possibly can, I strive to introduce concepts and accurate information that I hope will prove fascinating, thought-provoking, and even controversial.
Although Split Second is a work of fiction and contains considerable speculation, some of it does reflect reality. Naturally, within the context of a thriller, it is impossible for me to go into the depth each topic deserves, nor present the topic from all possible angles. I encourage interested readers to read further to get a more thorough and nuanced look at each topic, and weigh any conflicting data, opinions, and interpretations. By so doing, you can decide for yourself what is accurate and arrive at your own view of the subject matter.
Before I begin, I have to report there were many times during the writing of this novel that I thought I must be crazy for attempting this particular plot. Thinking about the logic of time travel made my brain hurt, and I pulled out handfuls of hair on numerous occasions trying to wrestle this to the ground.
Time travel is always complex, but when you’re dealing with only forty-five microseconds, duplication, teleportation, paradox, possible branching timelines, and so on, it can be maddening to figure out, especially if you’re trying to get it as logical and self-consistent as possible. I spent many hours filling pages with diagrams and having to repeatedly change the plot when I realized I had gotten the logic wrong. And if trying to understand the complexities of this particular plot wasn’t difficult enough, trying to explain it in a way that had any chance of being understandable in fewer than a million pages was challenging as well.
This being said, since no one really knows how time travel might work, I had to take certain liberties in telling this story that didn’t have a firm basis in logic, and I can’t guarantee I didn’t miss something in my analysis. All I can say for sure is that I did the best I could.
With this out of the way, let me get right to the meat and potatoes:
Idiocracy (or Are We Getting Dumber?): This is a real movie, with the premise I outlined in the novel. I found this movie amusing, but be warned that it isn’t for every taste, and many might find it offensive.
As to the accuracy of the movie’s premise, this is controversial, and very complicated, so for those who are interested, I would recommend Googling fertility and intelligence, dysgenics, and the Idiocracy effect.
From my research (and, as always, my analysis is not infallible, so I encourage readers to come to their own conclusions) it appears that studies do show an inverse correlation between education and fertility, such that the more educated you are, the fewer children you will have, on average. A 1991 study, for example, conducted by the US Census Bureau, found that high school dropouts averaged 2.5 children, whereas college graduates averaged only 1.56 children.
This inverse correlation also seems to exist between wealth and fertility, at the individual level and with respect to nations, which has been named the demographic-economic paradox. To illustrate this point, Karan Singh, a former minister of population in India, famously said, “Development is the best contraceptive.”
While there is some correlation between educational attainment and intelligence, IQ isn’t entirely determined by genes, and there are other complicating factors, so the higher reproductive rates among the less wealthy and less educated translate into a fairly small reduction of species intelligence (and again, this is quite controversial and still under discussion). Even so, over centuries and millennium, this could have a very noticeable effect.
Critics of this analysis point to something called the Flynn effect, which is the observation that average IQs have actually been slowly rising since 1930, most likely due to better nutrition and quality of life, although new studies have shown this trend slowing or even reversing of late. Proponents of the Idiocracy view suggest that these average rises would have been even greater if not for the increased fertility of the less intelligent, and point to the recent reversals.
This last reminds me of a conversation I had with my mother. I was born in the days before women were warned about smoking and drinking while pregnant. (These were also the days in which my sister and I would never wear a seatbelt, would sleep on a platform against the window above the backseat of our car, and in which my sister would slather oil on herself and use a reflecting shield to maximize the amount of sun hitting her body while at the beach).
When I learned that my mother smoked while she was pregnant with me, I teased her about this. She would have none of it. “My smoking obviously had no affect on you,” she insisted. “Look how smart you turned out to be.” To which I replied playfully, “Yeah, but think of how smart I could have been.”
Dark Matter and Dark Energy: The information presented with respect to dark energy, dark matter, quintessence, the ancients’ belief that the world was composed of four elements (earth, air, fire, and water), that we are totally clueless about the composition of a vast majority of our universe, and so on, is as accurate as I could make it, although highly summarized and not rigorously presented.
The following passage is entirely fictional:
“Nathan told me that physicists were making some progress identifying this energy, but he was certain there would never be a way to use it. You could tap in—maybe—but even if you managed this, Nathan’s calculations, and those of others, showed you’d never be able to control it. It would be all or nothing. Drinking from a firehose. Tap it and the minimum energy you would release would be more than enough to vaporize the Earth, possibly the entire solar system.”
What I find most fascinating about all of this is how little we really understand our universe. Despite the amazing progress we have made, we may only be scratching the surface. While this is sobering, it is also exciting. Humanity has accomplished quite a lot, but think of what we might be able to accomplish if we could unlock the many mysteries still remaining.
The Nature of Time: I endeavored to make this entire discussion as accurate as possible, but this is a very complicated subject, and I hope I didn’t make readers too crazy and confused. The relational theory of time is real, although I’ll leave it to readers to decide for themselves if they think time could exist before the universe came into being. The block universe is a real concept that falls out of relativity, and one to which many scientists (including Einstein) subscribe.
I find Zeno’s paradoxes a lot of fun, and I encourage you to Google them. I included the one about the two arrows frozen in time, although I’m not sure how clearly I was able to get across the point of this in the limited space I allowed myself for this task.
My favorite of these paradoxes is called Achilles and the Tortoise. Imagine a tortoise is given a large head start in a race. Well, before Achilles can catch the slow critter, he has to travel half the distance they are separated. But while he’s traveling half, the tortoise is also moving ahead. So now he again must travel half the remaining distance before he can catch the reptile. But again, in the time this takes, the tortoise will have moved forward a small amount. By the time he travels half the remaining distance again, which continues to shorten, the tortoise moves forward again. And so on, forever.
In this way, thousands of years ago, Zeno presented a logical argument that Achilles should never be able to catch up to the tortoise, in a way that was quite difficult to disprove for some time (even though we all know Achilles will, in fact, catch and pass the tortoise).
Apologies if my abbreviated presentation of this paradox isn’t clear, and I won’t take the time to provide the resolution to it here, but if you’re interested, just Google Achilles and the Tortoise and you will find all you need.
Time Travel: Feynman diagrams are real. They do model antimatter as going backward in time, and are exceedingly useful. Richard Feynman was a remarkable man, and this is just one of his many contributions to science.
The chronology protection conjecture is an actual concept. The idea of retrocausality is real, and certain experiments with entangled particles in quantum physics suggest that an observation made now can change something that happened in the past. I didn’t include these experiments because the background required to understand them is fairly extensive (and I have to admit, I don’t fully understand them myself :)).
The logic of duplication and translocation is my own, but it makes some sense, at least to me. Duplication isn’t all that controversial, appearing in countless works of fiction. I’m sure we all remember scenes in which two Marty McFlys exist at the same time (one on stage performing and one backstage).
To my knowledge, however, duplication, with or without translocation, has never been presented as the sole point of time travel the way it is in Split Second, and all time travel stories with which I am familiar send people and objects back hours, days, and years, rather than millionths of a second.
When I began the novel, I thought I had two basic choices for how time travel would work. Either time travel only affected a single timeline, or time branched whenever time travel caused a change in the past. For a variety of plot-related reasons I won’t go into here, I couldn’t use the single timeline. But the idea of infinite branching timelines bothered me. The more I thought about this, the more I didn’t like it.
If you wanted ten copies of Nathan Wexler, you would get ten different universes, each branch containing a different number of Wexlers, one through ten. And if you repeated this a million times, as you would need to do to scale up an infinitesimal amount of explosive, for example, you’d be creating a million different universes. This just seemed wasteful to me, and if this many universes were allowed, who would really care what happened in the one featured in the narrative?
So I came up with a blended model, which is presented in the book. A single timeline that ignores paradox. A universe that just accepts where it is at, without worrying about how it got there, and moves forward on this basis. And this I came to really like. It brought to mind the way I write novels, and made great sense in this context. My novels are my own personal universes, and sometimes the cause of a change I make no longer exists (because it came from a different universe, a different version of the novel). But even without a discernible cause, the effect remains. The novel goes forward, just accepting the change, and not caring how it came to be.
After I had the rudiments of the Split Second plot worked out, I read four books on time travel, How to Build a Time Machine (Brian Clegg), Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe (J. Richard Gott), Time, a Traveler’s Guide (Clifford A. Pickover), and Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction (Paul J. Nahin).
Sadly, while there was some fascinating material here, almost none of it was useful for my novel. It was either too complex, not relevant to my plot, or required engineering impossible even for a species a thousand times more capable than ours (creating wormholes, rotating Tipler cylinders, and so on).
In this case, since I couldn’t find anything scientifically feasible that could work, I created my device from whole cloth. Siphon a massive amount of the nearly infinite energy of the dark energy field (which is real), use this to drive matter through the fifth dimension (which could be real, but hasn’t been proven), and voila, time travel to 45.15 microseconds in the past (chosen because I thought 58 feet was a good distance).
Earth’s Movement: The paragraph detailing the Earth’s various movements through space (rotation, revolution, etc.) is accurate, at least according to Scientific American. We really are moving through the universe at 242 miles per second.
The Star Trek Transporter: Alas, many, if not most scientists believe that Captain Kirk is destroyed and recreated each time he “travels” through the transporter. I find this fascinating. Even knowing this, Edgar Knight would happily use such a device. I encourage you to consider what you would do. I’ve given it a lot of thought, but haven’t firmly decided if I would use a transporter or not.
I considered addressing some of the philosophical implications of this in the novel, but finally decided against it. Here is one example: Basically, the cells in your body are dying and being replaced all the time. It isn’t clear if 100% of your cells are replaced during your lifetime, or how long this might take if they are, but a common, albeit controversial figure often cited is seven years (if you Google, “does the human body replace itself every seven years” you will find any number of articles on this subject).
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.
