One Second Per Second Read online

  One Second

  Per Second

  S. D. UNWIN

  Copyright © 2021 by S. D. Unwin

  All rights reserved

  ISBN-13: 979-8715378941

  For Heather, Stephen and Gareth

  ONE

  I swerve a tumbleweed the size of a Mini Cooper. They just come at you one after another, one with another. It’s not possible to dodge them all so some you just have to take head-on, let them roll over you and make them a problem for the guy behind. Growing up I couldn’t wait to get out of this place. And now I’m back. Physics was my ticket out. In a way, I left town with the circus because many of my heroes, the men and women who had ignited my love of science, now seem quite clownish in hindsight. Even my greatest hero, Albert Einstein, had been wrong in so many important ways–ways that have shriveled my confidence in any understanding of things. Time is the fourth dimension. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light. All the profound insights that put my dear Albert at the top of the physics heap now turn out to be BS. And though physics got me out of this place, it also brought me back.

  I show my pass at the site gate, drive across five miles of southeastern Washington state desert then park in the TMA lot. That’s the Time Management Agency. Clever name. They figured that if the agency’s name was ever mentioned indiscreetly then it’d be assumed its mission is work efficiency. You know: how to plan your day or politely end a Zoom call. The TMA Building stands center among half a dozen smaller structures. Not a lot of architectural detail was lavished on these buildings that look like trailers grown up without supervision. More metal than glass or brick, and usually shrouded in a shimmer of brutal desert heat.

  I brace myself. I had left at least three arguments on simmer last night and will be required to pick them up where I had left off. I just had to decide in which order I’d take them on. Argument 1: I say it’s better to reverse Protocols #1 and #2 because that’d accelerate Phase A outcomes. On reflection, I was wrong. I’ll save that one until last because my being wrong makes my opponent no less of an asshole. Argument #2: This one relates to an arcane point of quantum field theory and about which only I and my opponent care. Finally, Argument #3: I cannot remember what it was but I was animated and rude. Someone will remind me.

  Kasper Asmus. Is he really going to be my first conversation of the day? Kasper has the mantle of most arrogant little shit on campus, and he’s up against some pretty stiff competition.

  “Did you read my paper?” he asks as a good morning.

  “No, sorry, not yet,” I reply looking toward the kitchen where coffee will be found. His incredulity is unconcealed. “That it?” I ask, noticing the stapled sheets in his hand. “Let me look now.” That’ll peeve him–me taking just a cursory glance outside the snack room when I was supposed to dedicate a full evening to it. I read. “What is this?” He stares at me, then swivels to look.

  “What do you mean?”

  “This notation. What is it?” He sees the problem and smiles smugly.

  “That’s my block mathematical notation,” he says.

  “Is it? I see. You’ve developed your own notation.”

  “Yes, it’s better–succinct.” I don’t look up.

  “So I don’t only have to understand your idea, but have to learn your invented notation first?” No answer, so I look at him. He’s satisfyingly discomfited. “Did you consider cuneiform?” He stares stupidly. “You know, instead of English. That’d really slow us up.” I put the paper back into his hand and walk toward the coffee.

  I don’t know why I have to be like this. He’s a young guy full of ideas yet I get satisfaction in beating him down. Was I always this way? He’s brilliant and maybe his new notation will be universal in ten years, but I just can’t get past not liking him. I should be nurturing him. Am I the asshole? Isaac Newton was an asshole–jealous, suspicious, conniving. Maybe it goes with the territory. Like I’m in Newton’s territory. But then Einstein was a nice guy, wasn’t he? No, I can’t be an asshole. No asshole worries about being an asshole.

  The hot, black coffee hits the spot and I navigate cubicles toward the control room. No one nurtures anyone here. Why is that? And it only seems to get worse. Is it to do with everyone being very smart? Maybe it does go with the territory. Before I came to TMA I’d worked in friendly, collegial environments where everyone was respected and had a voice–everyone was valued and contributed through civil discourse and compromise. And in those places I would have been hard-pressed to find a single first-rate mind. If true, it’s a depressing correlation.

  I enter the control room and see Jenn is in the Big Chair. Half a dozen others are scattered around consoles and facing a wall screen displaying a projection of the Earth’s surface. Maybe two dozen red lights pinpoint locations on the map with a caption below each: University of Maryland, College Park; Delphi Pharmaceuticals, Edinburgh UK; University of Mumbai, India ...

  “Quiet night?” I ask Jenn.

  “Not especially,” she replies.

  “Correlations?” I ask.

  “No,” she says. That’s always a relief. It means the incidents are probably not a concerted effort and are no more than random events across the globe.

  A green light illuminates in South Korea. “Yonsei University. Twelve seconds per second”. That’s a moderate forward rate, but I’ve come to understand that time is fragile and what seems like a small time acceleration can be catastrophic with the potential for lives lost, futures vanished, and civilizations buried before they see the light of day. It’s unfathomable to me that nature puts no safeguards in place to prevent this sort of thing. So it’s left to us to deal with it: a handful of arrogant jackasses in a few tin buildings in the middle of nowhere.

  All eyes are on the map. “Confirm echo?” Joe Alvarez asks without looking back.

  “Affirmative to echo,” Jenn says. Here I’m used to feeling nothing. You’d expect at least a tremor, a rumble or a crack of lightning given the scale of what just happened, but no. Nothing. The only evidence of something having happened is that the green light in Korea turns red.

  “Completed,” Alvarez says.

  “Completed confirmed,” someone calls. Another disaster averted. We get about a dozen of these a day. Zero on a good day, twenty on a bad one. But we deal with each of them. One second per second is how it should be and we do our job making sure that that’s what happens, always, everywhere. For a team that barely knows what we’re doing, we do pretty well. So that one’s over for us, but in the other Washington the paperwork is just gearing-up. There will be investigations, government-to-government dialogs, voluminous findings, and action plans.

  Jenn is staring at that new red light to make sure it stays red. It’s never routine and that’s not a chair I want to sit in. I look back through the glass wall of the control room and Kasper Asmus has his nose up against it. Now there’s someone who does want to sit in that chair. We lock eyes and he blinks first.

  TWO

  The greatest scientific challenge of our age had never been to invent a machine that enables time travel; it was to invent one that prevents it.

  Some think that the universe was designed. If it was, I’m guessing that whoever did that job doesn’t include it on their resume. It’d be too much of an embarrassment, and so they’d have a 14 billion year gap that would need to be explained at their next job interview. That the universe is indifferent and disinterested is a truth with which most of us are reconciled. But we had thought that at least the world made some sense–that what we see and experience is some rough approximation of the way the universe actually is. How could my heroes have had any way of knowing how untrue that is? Of knowing that nature’s most basic building block, its most fundamenta
l ingredient–time itself–is in reality a bit of an imbecile and in dire need of adult supervision. What I do is manage time.

  One second per second is the perfect pace for time. It’s dead center of the Goldilocks zone–just right and not open to improvement. It was good enough to evolve life on Earth; just fine to produce great ideas like democracy, human rights and cheese, and even a universe of galaxies, stars and worlds came into being at that comfortable pace. It all happened at one second per second. Fifty years per second hurtling into the future, or negative millennia per second plummeting into the past are the stuff of chaos. And yet the universe, it turns out, is just fine with it and its consequences. Time travel, once figured out, is embarrassingly easy. Nature puts no barriers to it in place, and even makes it hard to avoid. If there is any kind of cosmic plan, it’s one in which time is chaos, and people, civilizations and realities its playthings. My day job is to confound that plan.

  THREE

  There may be tumbleweed but there are also grapes. I drive by uncountable rows of neatly-trained vines into a Red Mountain sunset. The Dog Star Winery is a modest garage-like box compared to the faux-chateaux structures further up the vine-covered slope. Its parking lot is crowded with cars and guests who have overflowed from the tasting room. The Release Party for the newest Dog Star Cabernet is an invitation-only affair and I recognize some of the revelers that I circumnavigate or push through to get to the winery entrance. Inside, guests have formed huddles and as always, the biggest huddle is centered on Bess. I grab a glass of red from the bar and look around for someone I might know. I’m not one for breaking into an ongoing conversation so I wait and sip.

  Bess always told me you need two things to be a successful winemaker. Making okay wine is one of them but the second one is more important. It’s having a good backstory. Bess’s business partner has the okay wine covered but Bess is the one with the backstory. Astrophysicist turned winemaker: eyes lowered from the heavens to the earth. Nonsense of course, but how many other wineries can claim an astrophysicist? Bess sees me and breaks out from her huddle of admirers.

  “I know, sorry,” I say quickly. I’m late.

  “Fuck, Joad. I’ve got eighty people milling around, getting drunk and wondering if there really is a new release,” she says smiling, but not for me.

  “You didn’t have to–” I begin, then her face creases into a yet wider smile as a passing admirer puts a hand on her arm.

  “None of this matters to you, I know–”

  “It does matter,” I say. She shakes her head, smile still intact. “I don’t have a job where I can just take off an apron and head home.”

  “I know. You have a very important job, Joad.” Unlike me is left unsaid and the smile slips.

  “This? Now?” How ever she was about to reply, and her big, brown, crazed eyes foreshadowed something savage, it is put on hold as her business partner calls her over. I nod a thankful greeting at him. In fairness, the treatment I can look forward to is deserved because Bess had reminded me not to be late at least three times over breakfast. I return to the bar for a second glass. Den, the partner, is Byronic with heavy, overly-tended eyebrows which alone announce a supercilious arrogance. He and Bess are well-coordinated. Black hair hanging straight from a middle parting, his a clip shorter than hers, loose white open-neck shirts and infeasibly tight black jeans. Like twins. Incestuous twins (I’m almost certain). He puts his arm around Bess and leads her out to the barrel cave. It’s not really a cave because garages, as a rule, are not attached to caves. At some point, and I don’t know exactly when, Den became the type of person Bess admires.

  After a few minutes they emerge from the cave and Den helps Bess up onto the bar.

  “Welcome,” she says softly but it commands the attention of the room. “I’m excited.” She laughs and someone whoops. Winery staff circulate with trays of red wine and I grab a glass. This is the launch of the 2018 vintage which has been three years in the making. I do a mental calculation. Yesterday’s Vancouver event could have taken someone back to that harvest in a third of a second. That was a bad event by any standard, the kind that turns your flesh cold. Negative 315 million seconds per second. At that acceleration, it’d take four minutes to get back to the founding of the Roman republic. And the further back some hapless wanderer travels, exponentially greater is the potential for disaster. At least that’s the theory.

  Bess knows nothing about my job, but at least she knows she knows nothing. My story to her is only a half-lie, yet still distant from truth. She stopped asking of course, but where there’s dishonesty between a couple, it can be tough to limit. As far as Bess and anyone else who asks is concerned, I work on an academic project to detect exotic fundamental particles. And that’s almost true. Just how exotic those particles are, and why I do it–those are the things within the wall of secrecy.

  The particles are called tachyons. It turns out that when nature sits back and looks on gormlessly as time acceleration occurs, then these tachyons are emitted and at TMA we’re in the business of detecting them. Tachyons are the strangest little buggers but thank god they exist, because without them, and without our pinpointing where they came from, we’d be in a world of incoherence and chaos.

  And when I say they’re exotic, I understate it. While the speed of light is the upper limit for all other things, for tachyons it’s the lower speed limit. That’s as slow as they can go. Einstein thought that nothing could travel faster than light, but these mad little things shoot through Einstein’s grave at warp speed.

  “I love the color–it’s a deep ruby isn’t it?” Bess has started the tasting of the new Dog Star release and is holding her glass up to the fluorescent light. “There’s the usual blackcurrant, but do you get the herbal notes? Lavender? Some licorice, too?” There’s excited affirmation of her analysis, verging on the sycophantic. Den nods approvingly. He’s the one who makes this booze but she’s the one who sells it. I really don’t get any herbs at all.

  We’re surrounded by twenty acres of Dog Star vineyards, lovingly tended and surgically harvested. Thirty miles north of here, buried below a shanty town of overgrown trailers is a 700-acre tachyon detection array. It sits silently, stirring only to send an electrical signal that illuminates a green light on a map half a mile above when a tachyon source is detected, triangulated, pinpointed, and analyzed. Then, when the director–the one in the Big Chair–so decides, the tachyon beam is reflected, phase-shifted, amplified, and beamed back to whence it came, destructively interfering with the source emission. This seems to do the trick. We’re not a hundred percent sure why, but the temporal acceleration is arrested and we’re saved. Saved from what is something we’re not entirely sure about. I’m comforted in my ignorance by the fact that throughout history, many inventions seemed to have worked long before anyone knew why. How long did it take after the invention of the transistor for a real understanding of semiconductors? I can’t remember because the Cabernet is kicking-in. Of course, at stake with transistors was tinny music and not the very fabric of space and time.

  I think I do taste the lavender now but I reach for a second glass to be sure. Hearing my name yanks me out of my muddled thoughts. Bess is reaching for me from her elevated position and her audience is looking back at me, happy to be involved. I walk through the parting throng to hold Bess’s hand as she jumps down from the bar. This is why I’m here. The astrophysicist backstory is much more compelling with an actual, practicing physicist in the family.

  “My wonderful hubby, the physicist” Bess announces and I grin uncomfortably as I receive a round of undeserved applause. “How do you like the Cab?” she asks in a stage whisper.

  “Lavender. Licorice?” I say, holding the glass up to the light and swirling it. “Love it.” Den slaps me on the back and everyone laughs.

  FOUR

  My father looks back at me. Sometimes he’s there and sometimes he isn’t, but today there’s no mistaking the long jawline and wide handles of pre-combed hair tr
ying to escape each temple. He picks the worst days to appear. I walk into the kitchen and Bess looks up from her tablet. I pick up the kettle, weigh it and plug it in.

  “That bad?” Bess asks. She knows my hangovers require tea.

  “You happy? Was it a success?” She nods without looking up. I lean on the counter and stare at the kettle.

  “Den happy with it?” I ask. She looks up. I look back.

  “Yes, thank you,” she says. “Very happy.”

  “I’m sure,” I say and leave to get dressed. I can pick up tea on my way to work.

  I liked Den at first. He was a savvy business partner for Bess. When she, like many new arrivals to southeastern Washington, got into the local wine culture and decided that teaching physics at Washington State University had never been her calling, Den was there for her. Many a Microsoft or Amazon executive decided that their wealth had become sufficiently obscene and that they’d retire to become winemakers, buying 100-acre vineyards with sofa change. But for us, plowing our meager savings into a vineyard and winery was a very big deal. There’s the old adage that to wind up with a small fortune in winemaking you need to begin with a large one. Den gave us a comfort feel that our investment was perhaps unwise, but at least not psychotic. This is the low bar for the wine business so I was grateful to him. I didn’t even notice at first that he was targeting more than Bess’s enological talents.

  The man who had looked back at me from the bathroom mirror was a Den. He might have lacked the business talents, and he knew nothing of wine, but there were some things he and Den had in common. My father had had a long career in promiscuity and it had shaped my life, my mother’s and brother’s, too. My memories are of anger and misery, and it was cruel of nature to let this DNA hide in my younger self, only to surface and now confront me in the mirror. It may have turned out that physics is quite feckless, but genetics is actually malicious.