“What?” The question took Sandra by surprise. “No, I guess I don’t.” Though she had noticed a cross on a chain around Angel’s neck, just visible under his collar. “You do, I’m guessing?”
“I’d say about ninety percent,” Angel said. “But that’s not the point. Let’s say there is a God, for the sake of argument. Or a super-powerful alien intelligence. Or an artificial intelligence that just dreamed us up one day. Whatever you like.”
“I think you should keep programming.”
“I am programming.” And in truth, his fingers had never stopped moving across the keys while he talked. “Humor me, okay?”
Sandra didn’t know where he was going, but he seemed earnest. “Okay. There’s a God. So what?”
“Our deity, or alien, or whatever he is, created the world. But instead of doing it fourteen billion years ago, he did it twenty thousand years ago.”
“You’re kidding me,” Sandra said. “We’re talking about Young Earth Creationism here? The whole world, slapped together in six days by an Almighty Being? You’re a scientist! For heaven’s sake, there are galaxies out there that are billions of light years away. Just point a telescope at Andromeda, and you can look at something millions of years old.”
“You’re missing the point.”
“I guess I am.”
“The universe is billions of years old,” Angel said. “I’m not suggesting otherwise. But let’s imagine that our godlike being created the whole mess—billion-year history and all—ten thousand years ago.”
Sandra paused to work that one out. “So, then God’s deceiving us? He created a fake fourteen-billion-year history? The dinosaurs and the Carboniferous period and the Andromeda galaxy, they never existed? It’s all just a scam? ‘April Fools. Love, God.’”
“Right. Not very nice of him, maybe. But here’s the question: would it matter?”
Sandra threw up her hands. “Of course it would matter. If it never happened, it’s like a big cosmic joke.”
“But what’s the difference, practically? The history is still there. It’s still consistent, following the same predicable laws. You can still study it and learn things that are true. And as far as we’re concerned, that history is gone. Vanished in smoke. All that really matters is what we can learn from what we have now. What it left behind.”
“I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”
“What does it mean for history to be ‘real’? What about last Tuesday? Was that real?”
“Of course.”
“How do you know?”
“I was there. I remember it.”
“But your memories are just a set of electrical impulses and neuron states. What if an AI just dreamed you up five minutes ago? It could have made you complete with your memories of your life, paperwork and souvenirs from your childhood, dental history, etc., every bit of it consistent. But not real.”
“You’re a creepy little man.”
“But if he did, you wouldn’t know the difference. It wouldn’t make any practical change in your life going forward. The history of last Tuesday is exactly the same whether it ‘really’ happened, or God just created it that way. Unless you’re a varcolac, it’s only the present and the future that you can do anything about.”
Whatever he was trying to do, it wasn’t making her feel any better. She crossed her arms. “So what’s the point? Where are we going with this?”
“The point is you. You’re so tangled up in knots about whose history is real, yours or Alex’s. You figure one of you must have ‘really’ experienced the events of your childhood, and the other is just a fake, a carbon copy created fifteen years ago with the same memories, but who was never actually there to experience them. You’re each terrified that you’re the imposter, and afraid that the other one knows it. But it’s a false fear. Your memories are both genuine.”
Sandra paused, taken aback by the sudden twist of subject. “You can’t be certain of that.”
“Certain? There’s nothing certain in life, not any of it. But why agonize over something you can’t change? If you popped into being five minutes ago, or fifteen years ago, or have always existed, it doesn’t change now. You’re here. You’re real. Embrace the person you were, and make sure you have reason to like the person you’re becoming. The past you can’t change. The future is what matters.”
Three hours later, Angel had twelve quadcopters up and spinning in the cage. “Let’s see how this works,” he said. “I’ve created a few unit test scenarios to prove out the mechanics.”
The copters spun up as a unit, and then suddenly disappeared together and reappeared on the other side of the cage.
“Wow!” Sandra said. “You did it!”
“So far so good,” Angel said. “We haven’t put them through their paces yet.”
Each of the copters held a different colored flag, to differentiate them by sight. They hovered in a line in order of the visible spectrum, red to blue. Then, suddenly, the colors changed as if with the flick of a switch, following the same order from blue to red. Sandra watched in confusion as the flags changed colors again, each of them rippling through from red to orange to green to blue. But the flags were just cheap plastic, nothing special. How was Angel making them change colors?
It took her a moment to realize what was happening. Each copter was simultaneously leaving its own position and instantaneously taking the position of the next copter in line. The copters themselves seemed not to move, making it appear as if the flags were changing colors.
Sandra whistled. “I hope you got the timing right. They’ll destroy themselves if two of them appear in the same spot at the same time.”
The copters began flying through the cage as a unit, veering and banking in tight formation, but all the while the flags were changing colors, indicating that the copters were actually trading places as they flew. Angel grinned. “I hope so, too.”
“How could you do all this in only a few hours?” Sandra asked, amazed.
“It’s really not hard from a software perspective. The copters model the rules of their universe and use the model to know, ahead of time, exactly what will happen when they maneuver in certain directions. All I’ve done is add a rule—the ability to change vector position to a new one, instantaneously. Most of the programming was already in place.” The quadcopters began bouncing balls back and forth to each other, continuing to rotate positions seamlessly. “It makes very little difference to the software which of the copters is in a given place, or that the rules of the actual universe don’t usually allow such movements. Now, watch this.”
One of the copters began to perform radical high-speed turns, racing forward and then suddenly flying to the left as if defying its own momentum. It did it again, this time completely reversing direction as if it had struck an invisible wall, without slowing down or showing any discernable jerk.
“How are they doing that?” Sandra said.
“They’re teleporting to their own location, only with a frame of reference rotated by 90 or 180 degrees. Momentum is preserved, so from their perspective, it’s as if the whole universe rotated to the right, and they kept traveling forward as usual. They can do it in any direction, with any orientation, making them more or less infinitely maneuverable, without the usual limitations of momentum and centrifugal force. It means, in essence, that they can turn without turning. They move the universe instead of moving themselves.”
“It’s amazing.”
Angel shook his head. “But it’s not going to work.”
“What do you mean? It works perfectly.”
“They do some neat tricks, I’ll give you that. But we need to break your sister out of a maximum security prison block. We don’t know where they’re holding her, and once we find them, the copters themselves can’t teleport her out. They can only move things with a smaller mass than themselves. Even working together, a human being is far too massive. Worse, we can’t communicate with them from the outside. Unless we go into the prison ourselves, they would have to be completely autonomous, with a flexible plan that could anticipate any eventuality. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I’m that good, especially not in one night. The copters are a tool, but not a miracle. We still need a plan.”