“And they had more success?” said Mahnmut. “But we know that something went wrong about fourteen hundred years ago, right about the time the Earth was showing all that quantum activity.”
“Something went wrong,” agreed Orphu. “But it wasn’t a failure of the quantum teleportation. The post-humans—or their thinking machines—developed a line of quantum transport based on entangled particles.”
“Spooky action at a distance,” said Mahnmut. He’d never been very interested in nuclear physics or astrophysics or particle physics—hell, in physics of any form—but he’d always enjoyed Einstein’s damning phrase attacking quantum mechanics. Einstein had owned a wicked tongue when it came to shooting down colleagues or theories he didn’t like.
“Yes,” said Orphu. The Ionian obviously didn’t enjoy getting interrupted. “Well, spooky action at a distance works on a quantum level, and the post-humans began sending larger and larger objects through quantum portals.”
“Percheron stallions?” said Mahnmut. He didn’t especially like being lectured at.
“No record of that, but the horses on Earth seem to have gone somewhere, so why not? Look, Mahnmut, I’m very serious here—I’ve been thinking about this since we left Jupiter space. Can I finish without the sarcasm?”
Mahnmut metaphorically blinked. Orphu did not sound so insane any longer, but he did sound serious . . . and hurt. “All right,” said Mahnmut. “I apologize. Go ahead.”
“We know that the post-humans accelerated their quantum research—fooling around, really—about the time we moravecs abandoned it, about fourteen hundred Earth years ago. They were punching holes in space-time left and right.”
“Excuse me,” said Mahnmut, interrupting as softly as he could. “I thought only black holes or wormholes or naked singularities could do that.”
“And quantum tunnels left activated,” said Orphu.
“But I thought quantum teleportation was instantaneous,” said Mahnmut. He was trying hard to understand now. “That it had to be instantaneous.”
“It does. With entanglement pairs, particles, or complex structures, shifting the quantum state of one member of the quantum twin-set instantly changes the quantum state of its partner.”
“Then how can there be tunnels activated if the . . . tunneling . . . is instantaneous?” said Mahnmut.
“Trust me on this,” said Orphu. “When you’re teleporting something large, say a small slice of cheese, just the amount of random quantum data being transmitted shoots the shit out of space-time.”
“How much raw quantum data would be in, say, a three-gram slice of cheese?”
“1024bits,” answered Orphu without hesitation.
“And how much in a human being?”
“Not counting the person’s memory, but just his or her atoms,” said Orphu, “1028kilobytes of data.”
“Well, that’s just four more zeros than a slice of cheese,” said Mahnmut.
“Mother of Mercy,” whined Orphu. “We’re talking orders of magnitude here. Which means . . .”
“I know what it means,” said Mahnmut. “I was just being silly again. Go on.”
“So about fourteen hundred years ago on Earth, the post-humans—it had to be the post-humans, since our probes at the time were sure that there were just a thousand or so old-style humans left, like almost-extinct-species animals being kept around in a zoo—the post-humans began quantum teleporting people and machines and other objects.”
“Where?” said Mahnmut. “I mean where did they send them? Mars? Other star systems?”
“No, you need a receiver as well as a transmitter with quantum teleportation,” said the Ionian. “They just sent them from somewhere on the Earth to somewhere else on the Earth—or in their orbital cities—but they had a big surprise when the objects materialized.”
“Does this has something to do with a fly?” asked Mahnmut. His secret vice was old movies from the Twentieth Century to the end of the Lost Age.
“A fly?” said Orphu. “No. Why?”
“Never mind. What was the big surprise they got when they teleported these things?”
“First, that the quantum teleportation worked,” said Orphu. “But more important, that when the person or animal or thing came through, it carried information with it. Information about its own quantum state. Information about everything it shouldn’t have information about. Including memory for the human beings.”
“I thought you said that the rules of quantum mechanics forbid that.”
“They do,” said Orphu.
“Magic again?” asked Mahnmut, feeling the tug of alarm at the direction Orphu was headed. “Are we talking Prospero and Greek gods here?”
“Yes, but not in the way you sarcastically mean,” said Orphu of Io. “Our scientists at the time thought that the post-humans were actually exchanging tangled pairs with identical objects . . . or persons . . . in another universe.”
“Another universe,” Mahnmut repeated dully. “As in parallel universes?”
“Not quite,” said Orphu. “Not like the old idea of an infinite or near-infinite number of parallel universes. Just a few—a very finite number—of quantum phase-shifted universes co-existing with or near our own.”
Mahnmut had no idea what his friend was talking about, but he said nothing.
“Not only co-existing quantum universes,” continued the deep-space moravec, “but created universes.”
“Created?” repeated Mahnmut. “As in God?”
“No,” said Orphu. “As in through acts of genius, by geniuses.”
“I don’t understand.”
Deimos had set. The Martian volcanoes were visible now in starlight, masses of clouds creeping up their long slopes like pale-gray amoebae. Mahnmut checked his internal chronometer. One hour until Martian sunrise. He was cold.
“You know what human researchers found when they were studying the human mind millennia ago,” said Orphu. “Back before the post-humans were even a factor. Our own moravec minds are built the same way, although we use artificial as well as organic brain matter.”
Mahnmut tried to remember. “The human scientists were using quantum computers way back in the Twenty-first Century,” he said. “To analyze biochemical cascades in human synapses. They discovered that the human mind—not the brain, but the mind—wasn’t like a computer, it wasn’t like a chemical memory machine, but was exactly like . . .”
“A quantum-state standing wavefront,” said Orphu. “Human consciousness exists primarily as a quantum state waveform, just like the rest of the universe.”
“And you’re saying that consciousness itself created these other universes?” Mahnmut followed the logic, if it could be called that, but he was shocked by the absurd implications.
“Not just consciousness,” said Orphu. “Exceptional types of consciousness that are like naked singularities in that they can bend space-time, affect the organization of space-time, and collapse probability waves into discrete alternatives. I’m talking Shakespeare here. Proust. Homer.”
“But that’s so . . . so . . . so . . .” stammered Mahnmut.
“Solipsistic?”
“Stupid,” said Mahnmut.
They floated along in silence for several minutes. Mahnmut assumed that he might have hurt his friend’s feelings, but that wasn’t important right now. After a while, he said over the tightbeam, “So are you expecting to find the ghosts of the real Greek gods when we get to Olympus Mons?”
“Not ghosts,” said Orphu. “But you saw the quantum readings. Whoever these people are on Olympus, they’ve punched quantum holes all around this world, all centered on or near Olympus. They’re going somewhere. Coming from somewhere else. The quantum reality of this area is so unstable it may actually implode, and take a chunk of our solar system with it.”
“Do you think that’s what the Device is built to do?” asked Mahnmut. “Implode the quantum fields here before they reach some critical mass?”