Time Off

Chapter Nine

Honestly, I find it unbearably frustrating that Angel is confined to microseconds. Per second no less. I would jump up and down screaming, "how pathetic!," if not for the fact that I am so impressed that she figured out how to tease even that amount from such crude devices.

I won't tell you how I think this plan will play out. Suffice it say that we are in a very borderline situation. But for the sake of argument, what if the results do indicate that time is running at different rates in different places? And assume that this has been verified independently and it has become a known fact. Why does this matter, outside of the physics community where I can almost guaranty there will be physicists running around in complete hysteria? Like matter, physics itself has a certain inertia and the core beliefs will attempt to continue their course and speed, unimpeded.

The more interesting question is once the dust settles and the implications are fully digested, what happens next?

Angel and Javier are really onto something. They are flirting with the cosmic purse strings. Gravity, inertia and electromagnetism. What could be more perfectly mysterious to humanity? If I were a physicist, I might go so far as to declare these phenomena fundamental. But I am not a physicist, so I won't declare anything except to say that gravity, inertia and electromagnetism are not fundamental.

As I stated earlier, anything that looks like a wave function is a dead giveaway that there is something underneath it. That notion will become clearer, not completely clear, not universally embraced, but clearer. More importantly, from that clarity will arise a new set of technologies. You know how humanity is. Once you get dialed in to a new facet of nature, it's there to be harnessed, dominated, bent to your will. Right?

Imagine what your scientists are gonna do when they get their hands on EMs. Smash'm, poke'm, crush'm, stack'm, obliterate'm. Hey. Better for us. Takes the focus off of smashing protons. That is one of the cases where some of us do expire, permanently. But not to worry, the Cern collider for example seems to generate a lot of smashed protons, but to us, it's like an airliner going down with about a hundred years or so between collisions.

You might think that nuclear reactors are a much more egregious attack on my kind. Neutrons can really pack a wallop. But surprisingly, we do survive. Besides, this process of radioactive decay goes on all the time, whether or not you intervene to accelerate it. Nevertheless, nuclear reactors are just about the best example of the extractive mentality of humanity, right up there with fossil fuel. Dumb and dumber.

But EMs will be the big breakthrough. It will be innovation around a particle that you can never detect directly. This new level of abstraction will mint a new generation of super nerds who are capable of dealing with that intellectually. You might think that the cascade of technological breakthroughs spawned by these super nerds is what I'm after. Au contraire. I am more interested in the super nerds themselves. But I know you all will prefer to ooh and ahh over the cool new technologies, so we'll spend more time there in a while.

For the moment we still have some challenges to overcome, and I need to keep my people, namely Angel and Roy, sharp and on point. Javier has been a complete bonus. The dude is actually a genius because he's creative. He generates a lot of good ideas that I certainly can't take credit for. That is one aspect of the emergent mind that is so fascinating.

Once in a while, from that energy inefficient, hodgepodge of wet, greasy, poorly integrated computing centers you call a brain, a darn good idea will pop out. It's rare for even the most creative among you. But that alone gives us hope that you might just be the agents of change in the universe. But it's too close to call at the moment. Yes, that's right, you do have competition, lots of it. And a lot of those other civilizations appear to be well ahead of you, technologically. But you have a couple of things going for you. The first one, I just explained. Creativity. Anyone want to guess the second? That's right baby. You got me and I'm all in for the home team!

Back to super nerds. Angel is really the first one, in a crude sense. She has become the first agent of change because I had an idea and secondly, I was in the right place when I got the idea. I basically had a spark of creativity, like a human. That is a rare thing in my world. Equally important, I acted on the idea. I was driven to see my plan through, despite the challenges.

As we speak, other super clusters are already mimicking my success and doing it among young, brilliant minds that will have the time and energy to train themselves and absorb knowledge in a way that Angel can't. You think STEM is overblown today? Just wait twenty years. It's going to be quite interesting. I won't say terrible because along with the drive toward super nerdom, we are conveying some key principles that will guide technological development. Axioms that you would think obvious but somehow to humans they are not, like don't poison your own air, water or land. That idea alone changes so many things.

Humanity is on its way to the next stage of evolution. It's very exciting! What? You think it sounds creepy. A new rendition of "Invasion of the body snatchers?" Get over it. It's not like that. You see, we have been together all along. We are now simply integrating. The subatomic together with the macro scale. Believe me, there is no turning back. This cat is out of the bag across the universe. There are not many secrets at my level, and no such thing as IP. But I do still have a few secrets that others are still trying to work out and that gives us an advantage. Why wouldn't I just share? Doesn't it seem greedy and human like to keep critical information to myself? I guess so. The only thing I have been able to surmise is that Angel affects me as much as I affect her. At this moment, the same sea change of evolution is rolling out in all emergents. But we started it here on earth and I want us all to come together as a team. Not that we are in a race, but I do feel a degree of team spirit. It's a new feeling and I like it.

Now imagine the impact we have had on Angel, times ten and across millions of people. That is what we are talking about here. Evolution in a way that you have never seen and at a rate that you have never imagined. Quite frankly, we now believe that your odds of mass extinction by your own hand have dropped considerably. In fact, I am communicating with you about what is happening because things are going to start changing freaky fast and it can create certain instabilities. We just need to get through the next twenty years or so. Cross your fingers and hold on.

Angel and Javier are trying to tackle something that many other distant civilizations have already mastered, some of them long ago. The specific discovery about the nature of the subatomic is not the same as the evolutionary breakthrough. All emergents that can integrate with their constituent parts will accelerate and evolve intellectually. So while we don't have the technical leadership, we do have the evolutionary leadership. It's not a big lead, mind you, but it does keep us in the spot light.

I could even extend our lead by not sharing but I am beginning to wonder. Is my newfound behavior involving selfishness, team spirit and wry humor a sign that my kind will evolve? Will humanity and the underlying subatomic world evolve together? If so, I should really share this more openly. After all, if I don't share my secret sauce, then the evolution is only limited to Angel and Sussman. I can't extend much beyond that. I'm tapped out. So to allow humanity to move forward as whole, I need to roll out the program to the entire universe. Therein lies the dilemma. I'm still thinking about it.

Now back to the current state of affairs. You can't go and buy a cesium clock on Amazon. Actually you can, but Angel and Javier have a budget problem. So we are going to do this the hard way. There are a lot of ways this thing can go wrong and they have little margin for error given the precision of their timers. I will help as best I can.