Paul Melko - The Walls of the Universe

“Oh,” John said. “I get it. We can apply a voltage thread by thread to the device and figure out the diagram of its workings.”

“Yes!” Grace cried. “Then we just have to engineer material to match the thread’s characteristics and-voila!-we’ve reverse engineered the device.”

“Easier said than done,” John said.

“Most things are,” Grace said. “Let’s get started.”

It was a slow, painstaking process. They marked up an enlarged photo of the masses, and worked through each mass, tracing each thread’s faint glow, applying a voltage and measuring the resistance. They found that threads could be arranged in parallel or series, much like typical electronic circuits that Grace understood. They could also be arranged in elaborate sequences that reminded John of human nerve cells connected together in three-dimensional lattices.

They cataloged a thousand threads that weekend, and John estimated that the device held a hundred thousand such threads. But they got faster as they went along. John was worried that they wouldn’t be able to reach the center threads, but Henry and Grace showed him that she could move the threads out of the way with tweezers. The masses were not glued or otherwise bonded together.

“This is going to take a long time,” Grace said, wiping her forehead.

“I know, but it seems the best way,” John said.

“Agreed.”

“We can’t make this go any faster,” Henry said. “Only one pair of hands can reach into the device at a time.” He’d been drawing the diagram of the thing as they went, labeling it, snapping photographs.

John said, “But sooner or later, we have to turn that diagram into physical components.”

“I don’t know where to begin,” Henry said. “It’s one thing to draw it.”

“We can make some assumptions, maybe,” John said. “We can assume that the threads are homogenous. We can assume that they use current and that they have a capacitance and a resistance.”

“Unless they also have semi-conductor characteristics,” Henry said.

“Let’s find out!” Grace cried. She spent an hour on the phone with a company out of Canada that was open on Sundays, ordering oscilloscopes, transistors, diodes, semi-conductor materials with various dopings. John looked up when she said, “Just charge it to my corporate card.”

“How much is that costing?”

“Does it matter? Wealth has no value now that we know a million universes exist,” she said.

Henry grunted. “How many Mona Lisa s exist?” he said. “How many diamond mines in South Africa that are known elsewhere and not here? How many worlds in which pinball doesn’t exist?”

“There’s no value in material goods,” Grace said, “if material is infinite. The only good is personal happiness.”

“That’s a rather odd philosophy for a CEO of a corporation to take,” John said.

“You’ve changed everything, John,” she said. “Again.”

They finished up for the weekend, without John getting anywhere near the pinball factory. Suddenly it seemed irrelevant. The longer he could avoid Charboric and Visgrath, the better. Unfortunately, when John got home there was a dark SUV in the street in front of his apartment and Charboric was leaning on the rail of his apartment steps smoking a cheroot.

“Good evening, John. Let’s talk.”

“Charboric.”

“If I didn’t know how stupid it was, I’d think you were dodging me,” he said. He stamped the cheroot out on the cast cement stairs. There were at least half a dozen of the stubs littering the ground.

“It would be stupid, wouldn’t it,” John said. “But as you know, I have engineering school and a job and a life as well.” He opened the door to his apartment, considered for a moment not inviting the man in, then thought better of it. John was keenly aware of the device in his backpack. He let Charboric in in front of him.

“Why do you even bother with the backward physics of this world?” Charboric asked. “It’s not even worth knowing.”

John shrugged off his backpack. He walked it into the bedroom and laid it carefully on the far side of the bed.

“How long have you been here, Charboric? Fifty years?” Charboric nodded. “How long do you plan to live?” John asked. “I don’t rate my chances high of ever leaving.”

Charboric eyed John, then nodded again. “You understand something that Visgrath sometimes forgets.” Charboric’s expression softened, and for a moment John almost felt sorry for him.

“Engineering is a philosophy of science,” John said. “Even if the science changes, the process remains the same.”

“Indeed,” Charboric said. “But we sometimes lack the patience for study.”

“Knowledge is power,” John said.

“Power is power,” Charboric replied.

John shrugged.

After a minute, Charboric added, “Visgrath has explained our situation, has he not?”

“He has.”

“We’ve been trapped here for a long time awaiting rescue-we are not going to debate the benefit of that strategy. In that meantime we have made ourselves as comfortable as possible by exploiting what we know from other… locations.”

“Scuba,” John said.

“Local law limits the length of time we can exploit our ideas.”

“Patents.”

“The time frame for patents in this universe is twelve and a half years.”

“But you can still market a product after the patent time,” John said.

“The most profit occurs in the time of monopoly,” Charboric said. “Afterwards we sell the patent and adjunct company. We have little patience for competitive markets.”

“So after decades you’re running out of ideas,” John said.

“We’ve accreted a rather extensive entourage beyond the original dozen,” Charboric said.

“Thus your interest in pinball.”

“We knew it was an extra-universal technology. We of course know how to exploit technology here. The decision to invest was obvious.”

“But you don’t do competitive markets,” John said.

“It was a strategic decision,” Charboric said with a smile and nod toward John. “You’ve been mainline much more recently than we have. An alliance would allow us to exploit everything else that you might know.”

“But I’m not that old,” John said. “I don’t know that much.”

“You’d be surprised. You’ve been immersed in a highly technological world for your lifetime. There are hundreds of objects-inane in that universe-that are valuable here.”

John struggled to come up with some argument. “Yes, but everything was so different there.”

Charboric shrugged. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small spiral-bound pad of paper and a pencil. “Carry this with you. Write down anything you think of. Ideas will come to you when you’re driving or in the shower or taking a shit. Keep this with you. Write down what you remember.”

“Uh, okay,” John said. He took the pencil and pad. The pencil had teeth marks near the eraser.

Charboric stood up. “We’ll talk again in a week. Don’t dodge my calls. This is important. I’ll expect you to have ten ideas on that list. Ten good ideas.”

“Sure.”

Charboric paused at the door. “I don’t need to remind you how important secrecy is. Your business partners should know nothing of this.”

“Of course.”

John listened as the car door slammed shut on Charboric’s SUV. He looked down at the pad of paper in his hand.

“What the hell am I going to do now?”

He opened the pad and wrote: “Rubert’s Cube” at the top of the first page.

“What a dumb idea.”

He scratched it out.

Henry and John took turns going to class the next week. The one not in class spent hours hunched over the opened device in the old factory, tracing threads with the voltmeter. Slowly the neural mapping within the marshmallows took form. Grace drew the connections as they went along and John or Henry verified them so that there were no mistakes. If they made one, there was no way to correct it unless they started from scratch.