2545 A.D.
"Lisa, show me the New report. I need to know what's happening outside." said Alex as he sat on the floor of his lab in the Central Eurasian Ministry of Science. "Sure thing, Alex" replied Lisa, the AI lab assistant Alex had programmed in first few years at the Ministry. The hologram projector sparked to life projecting the slightly translucent, blue tinted image of a woman in her mid 20's.
The woman looked to be of east asian, possibly Korean, descent. The countries that used to make up the continents of Europe and Asia had merged to form the Central Eurasian Union a few hundred years ago. Despite technically being a single country, most people referred to themselves by what their country used to be called. People living in London were just as British as ever and residents of the Seoul metropolis still preferred to be called "Korean."
The hologram started to move after loading for a few seconds and her voice became audible. "This is Ann Choi with the EBC World Service. The Prime Minister has issued a State of Emergency this morning after rising tensions with the People's Republic of North America have lead to the arming of Nuclear Missiles in the provinces of Hawaii, New England, and Costa Rica. The parliament is attempting to resolve the issue diplomatically, but is urging all residents to prepare for evacuation to the nearest fallout shelter. Women and children under the age of 15 are being asked to start evacuation procedures immediately."
"That's enough Lisa. Turn it off." said Alex. "It's exactly what we saw coming. It's exactly what we were trying to prevent. I guess the Universe decided she had taken enough of my hubris."
2544 A.D.
A short, thin man in his 50's wearing grey flannel trousers and a plaid button-down shirt walked onto stage in front of a quiet audience of just over 6,000 scientists and journalists from around the globe. News cameras clicked on and the background music playing from the sound system faded down to an inaudible level before shutting off completely. As the man reached the podium in the centre of the stage, the small red LED on top of the microphone illuminated indicating it was live. "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the 42nd annual Central Eurasian Ministry of Science expo." said the man. "Every year the opening night keynote holds exciting announcements of the Ministries latest projects and most thrilling discoveries, but this year we truly have something special for all of you. Please allow me to introduce the brightest physicists I've ever had the pleasure of working with, Dr. Alex Rector." The audience erupted in applause in anticipation of what wonders of science were about to be unveiled to them.
Ever sense the countries of Asia combined with the already existing European Union to for the Central Eurasian Union, much cultural focus has been put on the Ministry of Science and the advancement of technology in general. With promises of nearly unlimited funding, scientists and visionaries alike flocked to the newly formed Union with the hope of advancing their studies and making some kind of dent in the world. This promise of funding for research was a welcome change from the attitude of the only other large government left on Earth: the People's Republic of North America. Leaders, and by extension citizens, of the People's Republic were considerably more "conservative" than those of the CEU. They viewed advancement of science and technology as a "nice to have" rather than a necessity. There hope was that by nearly eliminating all funding of research, they could lower taxes and encourage research through private enterprise while still having more money to help end hunger and housing issues. While nobel in intention, most scientifically minded individuals saw this as short sighted since it essentially eliminated the kind of blue-sky research so often benefitted by public funding.
Blue-sky research was precisely the aim of the CEU's Ministry of Science. Their mission statement even included the phrase, "…to promote the advancement of Human knowledge and technology with the hope of improving life for all of the Universe's inhabitants, even if such technology is not a commercially viable product." Each year at the Ministry's expo, researchers unveiled and presented about their work in the past year. Scientists from around the world came to the expo to learn of other research being done in their fields and for the chance to work with and discuss ideas with some of the world's greatest minds. Many times research released at the expo, while not intended for a specific real-world application, was licensed by corporations for use in products the researcher's had never dreamed of. Despite the CEU's parliament meeting regularly each week, most considered this expo to be the real gathering of the leaders of the world.
The Expo's chairman left the stage as Alex Rector walked up to the podium. Alex was a tall, thin framed man who looked young for all that he had accompanied in his life. He had medium length dark brown hair neatly parted to one side and thick, square-rimmed glasses reminiscent of the hipster anti-movement in the 2010's. He wore a brown tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, navy blue trousers, a white oxford-cloth button down shirt, a navy-blue bow tie, and brown leather-soled bluchers. Alex had a special fondness for clothing that reminded him of the college professors of old. The tweed jacket in particular had become something of a trademark for Alex, wearing it anytime he had to make a public appearance. Alex's first appearance at the expo was 24 years prior, in 2520. That year he and his team made waves throughout the scientific community for their work with Quantum Entanglement. Quantum Entanglement, a form of quantum superposition, had been a well known property of quantum mechanics since the days of Einstein and Schrödinger.
Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, those studying the unique, counter-intuitive property figured out that two particles could become entangled after being in physical content with each other. Once entanglement was achieved, any measured state of one particle was reflected in the other. This was proved early on by simple experiments with entangled photons passings through polarizing filters. If each single, entangled photon is unpolarized, it consistently has a 50% chance of passing through a polarizing filter. However, once one of the members of an entangled pair passes through a polarizing filter, both photons become polarized. Further, they found this link to be unaffected by distance between the two particles. Despite having a good surface understanding of how Quantum Entanglement worked, harnessing it for use in technology or even understanding why it worked seemed to elude all.
This is what made Dr. Rector's presentation in 2520 so ground breaking. He walked onto stage that year, a total unknown in the community, holding a small black box the size of a briefcase. He sat the box down on a table next to a Laptop and connected the two devices via their fiber-optic ports. A projector then illuminated and showed live video of Alex's research assistant nearly 9700 kilometres away in a lab in Hong Kong. Alex than explained that the two identical looking briefcases were point-to-point wireless data transceivers with unlimited range, that operating via Quantum Entangled particles. "Next," he said, "I'm going to transmit a 1 Terabyte data file from my laptop right here in London to my assistant's laptop in Hong Kong." He continued, "I want you to notice two things: First, the overall bandwidth as evidenced by how quickly the transfer happens. Second, we have an accurate atomic clock both here and in Hong Kong. As soon as the first bit of information is sent, the time will displayed on the screen. When the first bit of information is received on the other end, the clock will display it's current time. So the difference between the two displayed times is equal to the time it took a single bit to travel 9700 kilometres."
At this point, the audience was interested, but still didn't think that a completely unknown factor, still fresh out of college, would have anything too world changing to present. That attitude lasted another few seconds. Alex turned to his computer and pressed the enter key. A rapidly moving progress bar appeared on the projector screen and completed in about 5 seconds. The progress bar disappeared and was replaced by several lines or large monospace font:
File Size: 1TiB
Elapsed Time: 4.9998000001 Seconds
Baud Rate: 1.759 Tbps (1,801.493 Gbps)
Bit Sent: 09:12:23.4756179377 UTC
Bit Received: 09:12:23.4756179398 UTC
The audience sat silently processing what they had just seen. Transfer speeds approaching 2 terabits per second weren't unheard of when the devices were connected using a fiber-optic link and cable wasn't more than about 2 meters long. Long distance communication, though, was much harder. Typically speed-of-light limitations, signal degradation, and packet loss resulted in transfer speeds an order of magnitude slower. However, this wasn't the truly impressive thing about Alex's blatantly understated demonstration. The two atomic clocks showed that the first bit traveled through the first transceiver, across the continents of Europe and Asia, and into the second transceiver in just 9.8 nanoseconds. A photon traveling at the speed of light in a vacuum would take 32 milliseconds to travel that distance – 3.3 million times slower than what just happened. This proved what many had conjectured for years: the state reflection of quantum entangled particles happened via a fabric unaffected by general relativity and the universal speed limit of 299.8 kilometres per millisecond.
After the audience sat quiet for a few seconds, stunned at the implications of this demonstration, they erupted into a tremendous applause. In the following two years, this technology was licensed by thousands of companies across the world and implemented into every technology imaginable. Everything from cell phones and portable computers to orbital satellites and exploratory deep-space craft. No longer did aerospace engineers need to worry about maintaining line-of-sight for communication via high-speed lasers or about providing ships with enough electrical power to communicate via transitional RF radios. A new age of unlimited range, unlimited bandwidth, low power communication was quickly ushered in and welcomed by everyone.
His presentation in 2539 had won him the funding equivalent of Carte Blanche. This year, in 2544, expectations for Alex's presentation were significantly higher than his first. Both he and his team have gotten the reputation of surfacing without much ado, making a world-altering announcement, then disappearing again for a few years. Like most introverted, analytically minded people Alex was far more interested in actually doing his research, than announcing it. Alex started his presentation:
A few hundred years ago, in 2042, George Baumgärtner made history. He and his research partner, Sven Riese, were Physicists working out of a CERN laboratory in Geneva. On October 22, after years of studying the quantum foam that makes up our universe, they ripped a hole in the very fabric of space-time itself and injected synthetically produced exotic matter produced by the Large Hadron Collider. This is impressive for countless reasons, but mainly just because the LHC was actually working that day. I guess the mechanics do manage to get it up and running at least one day a year.
Knowing his jab at the Large Hadron Collider was good-natured, the audience chuckled. When it was initially built in 2011 the LHC seemed to have problems repeatedly – at one point breaking because a bird flying overhead dropped a Baguette into a cooling vent. This event had since become known as "The Death Star Incident."
Particle collider reliability aside, the result of this experiment is forever recorded in history: Baumgärtner and Riese opened a wormhole about 0.5 millimetre across that existed stably for 3 seconds. Not long, but it was leap from anything previously recorded. During that 3 second window, they used a small laser to send a burst photons into the wormhole. As predicted, they instantly shot out the other side of the wormhole with equal velocity relative to the openings orientation. Since this breakthrough wormhole technology has improved significantly. Now we can accurately and safely send interstellar ships from Earth into the orbit of another planet in another galaxy.
The audience could tell Alex was getting excited about whatever it was he was about to announce. He started to lose some of the formality in his tone and his pace increased to the point where it seemed he was just talking to himself – just thinking out loud and allowing a few thousand people around him to glimpse what was going on inside his head. Those who worked with Alex were all too familiar with this pattern. He would be strangely silent for hours or days at a time, pondering a problem, working out equations, and modelling the universe inside his head. Then, when the last puzzle piece fell into place and he finally true grokked the problem domain and it's implications he would explode into a fury of words. As his brain processed and walked around the model inside his head, exploring all of it's implications, he seemed to vocalise every single brain wave in real time. Every thought and detail and equation. Hardly anyone would could keep up with him, most would just stop whatever it was they were doing and listen. Some kept a tape recorder ready so that they could go back later and study his words. In public, he managed to keep his pace down to a rate where a mortal could keep up, but only barely.
What hasn't been developed, though, is precision in where exactly the other end of the wormhole opens. When the Central European Ministry of Aeronautics plans on putting a ship into orbit around another planet, say Gilese 581 g, the tolerance of the spacecraft's exit point is in the range of about ±500 metres. For something the size of a Prometheus-class carrier, a 1 kilometre tolerance is not a big deal. However, for my interests we need to do much, much better.
Last time I was on stage here at the expo I presented technology I helped to develop which enabled instantaneous transmission of binary state between two points using quantum entangled electrons. While being instrumental to many of the communication technologies in use today, it has a major disadvantage. To perform the initial entanglement of the two particles they must be in physical contact with each other. This means that the particle, after it's entangled, must physically travel to it's new location. This isn't normally a big deal, but what if we wanted to communicate with something that we can't physically travel to? What can't we physically travel to, you might say? What about, say…the past?
For centuries historians have studied the past using records and artefacts excavated form the ground. Our understanding of history as recent as 1900 A.D. is flawed and incomplete. Before electronic records existed, humans didn't have a durable means of information storage. We had no concept of backup and archival. With the age of documentation beginning in the early 2000's and the popularisation of the internet, we think we understand what people's thoughts and feelings and motivations at various times were, but we don't really know. Without being there, how could we? At the same time though, we all know we can't go to the past. One of the few records we have left from pre-2000 is Einstein telling us that. Our or our technology's very presence in the past would certainly mess up the timeline, cause unresolvable paradoxes, and destroy the Earth if not the Universe in the process. The question is then: how can we observe the past as if we were there without actually being there?
Two years ago, I asked this very same question to a good friend of mine, Zoe Derrick. Zoe is a neuroscientist and without a doubt one of the most brilliant people I know. She, also intrigued by this question, had an idea. What if we were able to take someone in the audience of an important event – perhaps Adolf Hitler's storming of a Beer Hall on November 8, 1923 – and perform the neural equivalent of a wiretap? We already know their are specific passageways in the brain that carry raw optic and auditory information. If we could record the electrical impulses flowing across the neurones the make up these busses and then playback those impulses into someone else's brain in current day, we could in effect create a virtual world allowing us to see and feel the past with our own senses.
People in the audience sat forward, starting to connect the dots of what Alex was talking about. It was odd that he had so suddenly taken an interest in history. He had always been so focused on moving ahead and improving the future that he never stopped to contemplate the past – at least not to anyone's knowledge. But regardless of the quick shift in his research focus, they idea of watching the future unfold around you was fascinating.
There's a certainly a few caveats to achieving this idea. Up until recently, at least. Since that conversation, I've been working on cooling those caveats. Firstly, how do we access the past? Many of you are probably familiar with my theory that a wormhole in process of forming the tunnel that connects the two endpoints, could be reflected off of something generating a large amount of electromagnetic energy – perhaps the sun. We tested this theory last year, with a surprising result. The wormhole did indeed bounce off of the sun and open near the entry point. In fact, in opened exactly on top of the wormhole's entry point 30 years in the past. We were able to verify this result by tracking the path of the tunnel through the quantum foam using a device based off Baumgärtner's original schematics. We're still having some trouble controlling exactly what point in time the wormhole opens, but the equations are coming along.
The quick, matter-of-fact, plainness with which Alex spoke these last few sentences betrayed the incredibility of what he had just said. Everyone in the audience, less one person, was in a confused state of disbelief and shock. They wanted so badly to believe what he said, but time travel? How could they? It was he stuff of science-fiction, not physics. It don't make any sense. Time travel was the kind of fringe science myth that lost a person all respect in the community, not something someone as brilliant physicist like Rector would discuss, let alone claim to have done. Unless, of course, it was true. The sheer impossibility is the only thing that made it even slightly believable. The sole person who wasn't shocked by the statement was Zoe Derrick, the neuroscientist that Alex spoke with such fondness about. Zoe was one of the few people Alex truly admired, and one of the only that truly rivalled his intelligence. She, already knowing the details of the announcement as well as the aspects Alex was being less than truthful about, simply sat back into her chair and smiled. In the back of her mind she hoped he wouldn't get caught up in the moment and accidentally say too much.
Caveat three: how do we wiretap a brain? This was Zoe's contribution to the project. She worked out that since the brain is so parallel and fault tolerant in everything it does, a few key neurones could be hot-swapped in the brain without affecting the function, memory, or general integrity of the brain itself. In fact, with the appropriate delivery mechanism, the recipient doesn't detect that anything has happened at all. Up until now, such a delivery mechanism didn't exist – we would've had to use laser surgery to physically replace the key neurones. Unless of course you had a wormhole that could be opened with such precision, that it could target a single neurone.
We've created the technology to open just such a wormhole now exists. This time at the expo, I don't have a black box for you. I don't have a ready to buy product or even a specific product in mind. But I think that what I do have for you will exceed anyone's expectation of what I came here to talk about today.
The projector in the stage flickered to life and the lights in the room dimmed. "What you are about to see," said Alex "is a high-definition, full colour video with stereo audio. Nothing new. Except of course, it was recorded before the video camera was invented." At that instant, the screen came life with a video taken from 5 to 6 feet off the ground – the point of view of a man. The man was walking throughout a grassy field where the knee-high grass looked like it had never been mowed before. The sky was a brilliant bright blue with a few clouds visible. Trees in the distance were swaying in the wind, it looked like the was a stiff breeze in one consistent direction. The man was walking towards something no one in the audience had ever seen before. It was a wood framed monstrosity in the shape of what looked – sort of – like a bi-plane. Two equal size cloth wings displaying a definite aerofoil shape sat on top of each other with a few feet in between. In front of the wings was a large protrusion leading to a third wing, much smaller than the first. Behind the two main wings were two symmetrically placed propellors tied by belt and pulley to a single small engine.
After seeing this contraption for a few seconds, someone in the audience said audible, "It's the Wright Flyer!" This proclamation rebounded around the room as people realised what they were looking at. The story of the Wright brothers was commonly told along with a description of the plane the built – the first manmade object to achieve controlled, powered flight. No one was really sure, though, if the story was true. It was always assumed that over time the story was exaggerated and twisted. Since all photos and records of the plane's actual existence had long since been lost, no one had the ability to truly prove the story was fact.
The man in the video walked closer towards the biplane and circled around looking at various parts. He checked to make sure the control surfaces on the forward elevators were functioning properly along with the rudimentary warping system on main wings. Walking behind the craft, he looked closely at the two propellors tied together via a chain and sprocket to the small engine. Carefully, he inspected each propellor for cracks and imperfections. Not knowing how something he had carved himself out of a piece of giant spruce would react to being spun at a few hundred revolutions per minute, he wanted to make sure there were no signs of damage or weakness. He called out to his brother, "Wilbur, we're good to go." With some difficulty Orville crawled between the two wings into the centre of the craft. He laid on his stomach on top of the bottom wing in a harness connected to cables that manipulated the control surfaces of the craft. By leaning his body to one side or the other he could control the roll and yaw of the plane. Both the pitch of the forward elevator and the engine's throttle were controlled by levers directly in front of him.
"Starting the engine now, Orville." said Wilbur. The engine directly behind Orville sputtered to life with the distinctive sound of an early, badly tuned, piston driven, internal combustion engine. Everyone knew this sound from watching old movies – the few Hollywood World War II movies still existing from the 20th century were particularly popular, especially in Western Europe. Though never hearing one in real life, almost anyone could recognise the powerful roar of a World War II era piston driven aircraft. The sound of the engine on the Wright Brother plane sounded minuscule by comparison, but the percussion and timbre of the engine proved it's ancestry to the later, more powerful variants. The piston engine, more specifically fossil fuels, had long since been outlawed. The environmental damage from fossil fuel emissions nearly destroyed the planet along with humankind in the mid 21st century. Around this time, after decades of bickering between between scientific fact and massive governmental resistance to change, global laws were finally passed to severely limit carbon footprint. Gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, coal, and natural gas were all outlawed as sources of combustable fuel. Finally having their businesses economically threatened, large corporations stepped forward to develop cleaner technologies. Most of the world eventually settled on clean forms of electric power, coming from a combination of wind, solar, and increasingly nuclear fusion, to replace their once essential fossil fuels. If it wasn't for the advent of chlorophyl based power plants, the carbon in the atmosphere would still be at the dangerous levels it once was.
Orville once more tested each of his controls, moving the elevators up and down, warping the wings left and right, finally throttling the now running engine up to it peak power output and back down to idle. Satisfied that everything was working as expected he gave an approving thumbs up to his brother who was now standing off to the side. Orville centred the controls and pushed the throttle all the way forward. Wilbur then pulled a lever to release a weight suspended from a tower at the end of the runway. The weight, connected by rope to the aircraft, started to fall dragging the plane along with it. The place accelerated quickly towards the end of the wooden runway, all the while getting lighter on its feet. Finally, just a few feet before the end, the plane lifted elegantly into the air and disconnected from the rope catapulting it along.
Gradually it reached 10 feet off the ground and continued to climb. 20 feet. 25 feet. Finally at 30 feet the craft levelled off, struggling to propel it's immense mass any further into the air with just a 12 horsepower engine. Orville worked the controls to ensure the wings stayed level and the plane kept it's straight course. After just a few seconds with the engine quickly running out of power, Orville adjusted the controls to start his descent. Seemingly much more slowly than it's takeoff, the airspeed slowed and altitude decreased. Orville turned the value to cut fuel to the engine and stop the propellors rotation. Within just a few seconds, the plane touched the ground and skidded to a stop in the grassy field. Dirt and dust and grass flew into the air propelled by the inertia of the 300 kilogram machine.
Once he had come to a full stop, Orville looked around and crawled back out of the machine. Wilbur still running to catch up with him yelled out, "We've done it Orville! We've finally done it." Orville replied with excitement and adrenaline brimming in his voice, "Yes we have – and I feel like this is just the beginning."
The screen went black. The projector shut off and receded back into the floor. After a few seconds, Alex finally broke the silence that had fallen upon the audience.
What you have just seen was indeed live video from the Wright brother first powered flight in 1903. Live video shot, not by a camera, but by the eyes and brain of Orville Wright himself. Zoe and I were able to use the techniques and technologies we've developed to replace a few parts of Orville's brain with neurones we had quantum entangled. The paired neurone remained here in the present. Then, using an advanced oscilloscope Zoe developed, we were able to record the visual and auditory signals of Orville Wright in real-time. Having recorded these brainwaves, it was a simple matter to process them in a way that mimics the brains sensory input centres and export it as a video. So in conclusion, present to you a work in progress: time travel is possible.
With this declaration, Alex turned and walked off the stage hoping to avoid all human contact and intent on disappearing as soon as possible. The presentation was essential, he knew that. If he avoided presenting his work at the expo any longer it would raise suspicion about his work. People, especially the parliament brass funding his project, would start to wonder what it was they were funnelling a billion credits per year into and what the result would be. At the same time, he knew that if he said too much or revealed the true power of their findings to anyone, his technology would find it's way into the wrong hands. Only Alex and Zoe knew the true nature of the monster they had created. They intended on keeping it that way.
Lorne Rowland was a tall man. As he walked down the street on a rainy mid-morning in London, he did his best to remain unnoticed. He had made a habit of wearing the most average, uninteresting clothing he could. Today that meant a black peacoat over a light grey suit and blue linen shirt with walnut-brown leather-soled shoes. Dark square-rimmed sun glasses framed his round, clean-shaven face and contrasted against his light brown hair. He walked briskly through the crowded streets, holding a black umbrella ahead of him to shield the rain. When he reached an intersection about a mile away from his starting point, he hailed an automated cab. After stepping in and closed the door, he gave the computer the address of his favourite pub. The cab sped off towards the other side of town.
About 10 minutes later, the cab pulled off the street in front of the pub. Lorne payed in cash and exited. He strolled slowly down the street and turned into a darkened alleyway. With one of his leather glove clad hands, he reached into his coat pocket and retrieved a small, cheap looking disposable cell phone. Consciously trying to avoid looking at the phone – in case anyone was watching – he dialled the first number on speed dial, waited 5 seconds, and hung up. Far in the distance he heard the distinct bass sound of the shockwave of an explosion – a sound the Lorne knew all too well. Immediately with one hand he flipped the phone around, removed the battery and dropped it to his feet. Still trying to avoid being noticed, he stepped on the phone with his heel to crack the screen and ensure no one would power it up again. Turning to leave the alley, he flicked his ankle and kicked the mangled phone underneath the dumpster behind him. He dropped the battery in a waste bin as he walked by and entered the pub looking forward to his favourite lunch: Shepherd's Pie and a pint of Guinness.
"Good Morning, Lorne! Come on in and have a seat at the bar." said Smithy, the pub's owner, in a thick Irish accent. "What'll you have today my friend?" he continued. Lorne removed his sun glasses and walked in. "Just my usual, I think. Shepherd's Pie and a pint. Also, do you think you could turn on the Telly? The newsreader in my cab said something's just happened downtown." "Sure. Any idea what it is?" said Smithy. Lorne didn't need to reply. The bartender reached up and turned on EBC One News and instantly saw Lorne meant. The newsreaders, still unsure of what was happening, remained silent and let the live video play. The video showed the once beautiful Parliamentary building, the most important governmental building in the Western third of Eurasia, had been decimated. A mushroom cloud rose out of what once was the north wing of the building. Debris and ash were strewn through the streets. People were running horrified, not sure what had happened or if other buildings would follow. Everyone in the pub went silent as the television caught their attention. Breaking the silence Lorne spoke up, "And Smithy – I think I'll take a dram of whiskey too."
Lorne Rowland is a man of many facets. To most, he was uninteresting, normal even. Everyday he bicycled into London where he worked as a software developer writing financial prediction algorithms. He lived alone, kept mostly to himself, and occasionally flew model aeroplanes on the weekends. To his few close friends though, Lorne was a genius. Or perhaps a madman. The line between the two is always so close it's nearly impossible to tell which side a man is really on. What is certain, though, is that he was a visionary who would go to almost any length to achieve his goals.
Lorne was born in Wales in 2491 to a single mother. His father, Erik Rowland, died before he was born. His entire life, his mother told him stories of the great things his father did, how he was a brave man who fought for what he thought was right, how he gave everything he had to the cause – eventually even his life.
The Brown Coats, or simply "The Resistance" to anyone who didn't sympathise with their motivations, was the last major resistance force to fight against the unification of Europe and Asia as the Central Eurasian Union. During the planning stages of the unification through to well after the legal formation of the Union, groups had fought to remain free and out of reach of the CEU's grasp. Many people feared that granting so much power and land to a small parliament was the first step down the slippery slope to dictatorship. With the wounds of past dictators and the damaging affects of communism and governmental corruption fresh in their minds, they feared that all but absolute freedom was a risk.
Erik Rowland and the others who would go on to form the Brown Coats, felt that no good could come from a continent wide union. Rather, they suggested that government with it's formally defined laws should be done away with completely. They professed that they very concept of a law, a formally defined rule, was flawed and that they caused more harm than good. Erik was famously quoted as saying, "Laws only give people the ability to find loopholes. Laws give people sanction to do whatever they choose whenever they want. The concept itself is a mistake." Rowland felt that loopholes allowed people to be law-abiding, yet still exploit the faults of the law's written word. This then gave sanction to their conscience, allowing them to commit far greater wrong-doing than if the law itself didn't exist. The only way around this, in his mind, was to eliminate laws and encourage people to live by a set of moral principals. He thought that a culture where someone thinks about how his actions affect others, rather than if his actions are breaking any laws, would create a far more peaceful thriving society than what had existed in the previous few thousand years of human existence.
This ideal formed the core philosophy of the Brown Coats. The organisation, crystallising around Sarajevo, managed to stay out of the CEU's intelligence operatives for a long time. This invisibility couldn't last though, especially as the group grew and became more and more popular among libertarians and anarchists. Parliament, which generally tried to take a passive stance so as not to arouse fears of a police state, feared the the group was gaining momentum to quickly. They decided their only choice was to class the Brown Coats as a terrorist organisation, something which had to be eliminated swiftly.
Hearing of this ultimatum, the more anarchistic members of Brown Coats quickly armed themselves and ceased control of the provence of Bosnia. Seeing no other option, Erik Rowland along with fellow Brown Coats Cyril Dušek and Andrijana Kovač signed an order declaring independence from the rest of the Central Eurasian Union. This order was not met with kindness from the Union's Parliament. Instead, seeing this as validation of the group as a terrorist organisation, the military struck with the swiftness of a viper. Within a few days, they erected a wall around Bosnia and laid siege to Sarajevo. Rowland saw his dream collapsing around him, but didn't see a way out. His initial goal was peace and freedom. His only desire was to be free from Government and it's inherent corruption and interference with his day to day life. However the result of all he worked for was chaos and bloodshed.
As one of the founders of the Brown Coats, Rowland knew the outcome of every option, including surrender, was less than ideal. The Union had strict policies regarding how they dealt with perceived terrorists once captured – none of them involved living. The only way to further his ideal and everything he had worked for over the past decade was, not to live as a man, but to die as a symbol. Overnight, he arranged for a refugee transport to leave Bosnia. On board that transport was his pregnant wife, Natalie, and a dozen other Brown Coats who had managed to remain unknown and unphotographed. All were equipped with fake documents so that they could deny any involvement with the organisation.
Erik, knowing this was the last time he would ever see her, helped his wife into the truck that would lead to her freedom. Holding back tears he reassured her that he would figure something out and that he would see her again. "Wales is the most beautiful place I've ever been." Erik said as he tried to appear strong. "I want you to go there and buy a house. I want you to raise our son there, away from the shadow of this fighting. He shouldn't know who I am or all the destruction I've caused." Unable to speak, Natalie simply nodded head. With tears streaming down her face, she closed her eyes and embraced him one final time.
Erik stood in the road transfixed as the truck drove off into the silent blackness of the night. In a few hours time the truck would cross the Bosnian border. The border guards posted at the wall would undoubtedly stop the vehicle and run checks on the passengers. If any of them were identified as or connected to known Brown Coats, they would all be imprisoned. He hoped that last-minute fake documentation they had created would be enough.
Erik Lorne Rowland II was born in a small cottage in Wales 3 months later. Despite working full-time as an History teacher, the 300 square foot cottage was all his mother, Natalie, could afford. Since the situation in Bosnia was being handled as a anti-terrorist operation, new coverage and reporters were strictly prohibited by law. The broadcast news refused to acknowledge anything was even happening in the provence. When Natalie asked those whom she met if they had heard anything, they denied knowing that anything at all was out of the ordinary in Bosnia. She wan't sure if they were truly ignorant of the situation or if they were protecting their own safety by denying all knowledge – either way contempt for the government built within her.
A year after her escape from Bosnia, she anonymously purchased a grave plot and stone for her husband. She still hoped that some day she would here a knock on the front-door and see Erik standing there with his trademark smile and big, warm eyes. She hoped, but she knew it would never happen.
Over the next 20 years, Natalie did her best to uphold her husband's wishes. She told him that his Dad was the bravest man she'd ever known, how he had dreams of a better world, and how he worked hard to make those dreams come true. She would often tell stories of Erik's heroism, his idealism, his larger than life personality, and most of all how much he cared for people. Despite never knowing him, Lorne grew to love his father. He became like a mythological figure, a pseudo-demigod of sorts. His entire life, Lorne simply wanted to support and protect his mother, and to be as good in her eyes as his father was.
Throughout school this incredible drive to be better was apparent to all. Lorne excelled in school, seemingly without having to try. He studied enough to get solid A's through high school without ever making it his true focus. His real passion was programming. Since he was a little boy Lorne had learned to take his toys apart and reassemble them as something better or faster or different. He loved to build and to create. A few years later his mother introduced him to computer programming; she showed him how anything he had dreamed of building in the real world could be built in the virtual world. His creative side was fascinated by the freedom from constraints that programming provided; his mischievous side was in love with the idea of finding and exploiting flaws left by other, lesser programmers. He was brilliant at understanding massively complex systems and how each of their moving parts worked together.
In his senior year of high-school, partly a prank and partly a harebrained scheme to impress a girl, Lorne had the idea to infiltrate just such a system. He had discovered a few weeks prior that the traffic control centre, the super computer that remotely controlled the routing of all autonomous vehicles in Wales, had a flaw. With a simple exploit he could login as the root user on the computer and access it's dashboard. From there he could control the flow of traffic in all of Wales. As a naive and fairly innocent 18 year old, he decide what better than to divert all traffic away from a section of the M4 for a few hours, so he and his soon-to-be girlfriend could ride their bikes down the motorway uninhibited. What he didn't count on was arousing the interest of the Ministry of Intelligence.
Later that same week, Lorne received a knock at the door by two men in generic black suits and sunglasses. His first though was to wipe the storage on all of his computers. Quickly he opened a terminal window and typed the command rm -rf /. As soon as he hit enter, the men at the for gee tired of knocking. One man drew his sidearm and other held up a translucent blue device that looked like a screwdriver to the door handle. After a brief high-pitched squeal the locked door flew open. They entered slowly clearing and sealing off each room as they went. After a few minutes of searching, they found Lorne hiding with his mother in her bedroom closet. With a pistol pointed at each of their heads, Lorne and Natalie both surrendered their hands and dropped to their knees. The first man pulled a Retina scanner from his pocket and opened the clamshell style device. He held it up to Lorne's left eye. It produced a bright light directly into his eye, causing the pupal to constrict fully. It then took a picture of the iris and uploaded the image to the Ministry's network. The man then did the same to Natalie. A moment later, when the results downloaded back to the device, the man eye's widened. He nodded to the other man who was still pointing a gun towards them. "We came here today because of your son's recent excursion down the M4, but Natalie Rowland?" the man said. "This is so much more interesting. I didn't think I would ever hear that name again. When did you move here? Around 2491, right?" Natalie confusingly replied "Yes, I did."
You see, after that mess in Bosnia – its still classified, but I'm sure you already know all about it – I was in charge of interrogating a few key people extracted from the rubble. Specifically someone name Erik Rowland. Erik was tough to crack, I couldn't get much from him at all. He was just so set on that 'freedom from laws leads to peace' rubbish. My partner and I weren't getting anywhere, so we drugged his coffee. After that he just kept going on and on and on about wanting to see you and his newborn son.
"What did you do to him?" interjected Natalie. Grinning slightly, he replied "The Central Eurasian Union has strict laws for dealing with terrorists. You know that. After I had extracted all the information I cared to, we imaged his memory, and disposed of him like the rest." Natalie couldn't hold back her tears any longer. Her head fell to her hands and she began to weep bitterly. "As the family and supporters of a convicted terrorist, we have no choice but to collect both of you for processing." said the man. Before Lorne couldn't even think of what to do he jumped to his feet and lunged at the man holding the gun. He threw the man to the ground and wrestled the gun from his hands. Despite never handling a gun before, he learned quickly. In less than a second he fired three shots. The first two into the chest of the man he tackled, the third into the head of the man with the retina scanner. He was to late. While he was wrestling for control of the gun, the first man fired a single shot into Natalie's forehead. Four rounds were fired and three bodies lay slumped on the floor. It was all he could do to pick himself up off the ground away from his mother. He threw his laptop along with some clothes into his backpack, walked out his front door, and started running. He's been running ever since.
"Why would somebody do that?" Smithy asked. "Why would someone go and try to blow up the Parliament. Sure, London's no Utopia these days, but I think we've got it pretty good. Certainly a lot better than those poor folks over in North America." Lorne sat for a moment thinking about the blissful ignorance of Smithy's words. "Yeah, we do have it pretty good." he said. "But don't you ever wonder what they aren't telling us? Don't you ever lie awake at night thinking what's happening that isn't on the news? What happens to all those people that go missing every year? Why is the Eurasian Broadcasting Corporation the only legally allowed news source in the whole continent? Why do we have elections every four years that, for as long as I can remember, always result in the same people being elected to Parliament? Don't you ever wonder if any of what we know is real? Or if the stories we here about actually happened? What if it's all a lie?" Speaking these words Lorne leaned on the bar and stared off into the void, not at any one thing in particular, just emptiness. It was the sort of thousand yard stare you see on soldiers fresh out of battle. The kind of stare that veterans seem to fall into more and more, like it was ever drawing them in. The older they got, the more they had to fight it. It was the look of someone who was haunted, someone who had both seen and knew too much. A bearer of stories and details and facts that no one should be burdened with – memories that shouldn't exist.
On that fateful day when Natalie was murdered, Lorne walked out of Cardiff and never returned. He never stayed in one place more than a night or two. When the weather was nice he sleep in a hammock in a tree. Sometimes he'd meet someone in a local bar or hole-in-the-wall and they would invite him to stay a night in their spare room or on their coach. Eventually, by doing an odd job here and there, he earned enough to purchase a small tent and some basic backpacking gear. Over the next year, he slowly walked his way east across the entire continent of Europe. He was careful not to tell anyone his real name and to spend only cash. He wore thin cloth gloves to mask his finger prints and dark sunglasses to hide his eyes from cameras. He became an expert at blending in. He didn't know who he was running from, what he was looking for, or where he was going, but moving was the only thing that felt safe.
For the first time in his life, he decided to research who his dad really was. He acquired access to a public network terminal and starting searching around the darkest corners of the internet. He found indexes pointing to articles that mentioned his father's name, but the articles themselves were gone. It was like "Erik Rowland," who ever he really was, had been redacted from history. Although disappearing over night almost a year ago, Lorne still had some friends on Usenet he knew he could trust. Together, they hacked into one of archive.org's backup servers and starting digging through old records. What they found frightened them. Starting around 2480 Erik Rowland began appearing in article's everywhere. Journalists wrote about his radical philosophical ideals. They wrote how he wanted to do away with laws and teach people to live by principals, by a moral code that only your own conscience could enforce. His ideals were so far removed from the budding police state that was Eurasia. As time past, article continued to increase and become more and more favourable. His ideas were catching on with a huge percentage of the population. But then, in 2491, they stopped. Articles about Erik ceased completely. In all the backups after 2491, the same articles that at one time praised his genius and promoted his ideals were gone. Some of the past articles's wording had been changed to attack Erik. Some of the articles vanished completely. Someone had clearly gone through ever written word in print and on the internet and changed the articles, all with the goal of wiping Erik Rowland out of history. They wanted him to have never existed and they went out of there way to make people believe he never did.
Lorne was shaken to his core. As long as he could remember he had a subtle distrust of the government, but he never had a good reason to. They maintained roads, payed for school and college for students, and funded hundreds of billions of credits of scientific research every year. Taxes and unemployment were low, people seemed to live happy, if uneventful, lives. Still though, it had always seem to be just too good. It had always wondered in the back of his mind if it was all just a facade that hid something much uglier. The evidence to support just such a belief was staring him dead in the face. Taking old news articles – something though to be absolutely immutable – and changing their wording to support your current viewpoint was something truly sinister. "The implications of this are enormous!" typed Lorne into a secured IRC window with about 10 other people connected. "My dad can't be the only time they've done this. It means that any history we've read, any past events we've researched, we have no way of knowing if those articles were accurate or not. Even if somebody remembers what an article used to say, who's going to believe them? What's more likely: someone misremembered a fact or the written word changed?"
Lorne's friends on IRC were identified strictly by usernames. They never told each other where they were located, what they real name was, or what they looked like. The only way they all knew each other was who they said they were – and that someone else wasn't just using their username – was an RSA key pair used by each member. The key pair identified the user and allowed them to connect to the chat server securely. Username bits1ay3r replied, "This explains a lot actually. I've always why so many historical records before 2000 are gone. We have the most highly funded science ministry in the world, but we couldn't preserve some paper and film a few hundred years? After 2000 the only archive format was digital, so they, whoever did this, didn't need to destroy records. They just changed them." It made sense. It made absolute beautifully logical horrifying sense. At that moment, Lorne made a decision. His father's goal in life was to help people to live by a set of principals and to free them from the burden and corruption that comes with formal government. He had no idea how to make people live by principals or to make them act with their fellowman's best interest at heart rather than their own. He could, though, help free them from the government ruling over them.
Lorne inserted a 1 terabyte flash memory stick into the side of the terminal. With a few quick keystrokes he downloaded as many archive.org backups as he had space for and saved them to the memory stick. He pulled out the memory stick and deleted any evidence he had used the terminal. After the screen went black, he extracted a small microfiber cloth from his backpack and wiped each of the keys, ensuring no DNA or finger prints were left. Satisfied no one would be able to tell he was there, he left. As he walked out of the internet café, he felt new purpose in life. Walking across Europe, running from some unseen enemy, had served it's purpose. Now though, he had a mission. No matter how long it took or how far he had to go, he was going to make his father's ideals into reality. He was going to destroy the Central Eurasian Union.
Zoe patiently waited back stage for Alex to finish his presentation. Just outside the building service entrance, her Audi A4 sat ready to help the two of them escape whatever was about to happen. Over the muffled backstage speaker, she heard "So in conclusion, I present to you a work in progress: time travel is possible." "Gosh that's a crappy way to close a speech." she thought, amused with Alex's seeming love of monotone, understated words. As Alex walked off the stage, Zoe did her best to run and hug him, her high heels and skinny jeans slightly impeded this, but she managed to make it to him without breaking an ankle. Alex squeezed her tightly, picking her off the ground a few inches as a side effect of his height. Zoe loosened her grip and kissed him on the check. She whispered into his ear, "Let's go, My car is outside."
Zoe and Alex had met years earlier at a party in college. They had both went to Oxford – Alex majored in Quantum Physics and Zoe in Neuroscience. From the first time the met they noticed something different about each other. Geniuses seem to have an uncanny ability to pick the smart people out of a crowd. Not people who went to college or who thought they were smart, rather people who were really, truly brilliant. At first introduction Alex and Zoe sensed that about each other. It took Alex the next three months to work up the courage to ask Zoe out on a date. As soon as he did she decidedly said no. It wasn't that Zoe wasn't interested in Alex – she was – but she was a smart, pretty girl with a dizzyingly busy social life. Alex, on the other hand, was a socially awkward, introverted guy who mostly kept to himself. She really liked Alex, he was so sweet and nice to her, but ready to date him she was not.
Alex was crushed. Although he had played the words over in his mind a thousand times before he actually asked her out, he hadn't really considered the possibility of her saying no. "I'm so awful at this." he thought as he walked back to his flat. He still saw her occasionally around the quad. He still kept in touch with her and talked to her whenever he had a passable excuse, but he never had the courage to ask her out again. Time passed and they both graduated. Zoe went on to become one of the leading experts in her field, making many advancements in the areas of brain augmentation and interfaces. After graduation, she didn't hear from Alex for years.
After Alex had success harnessing Quantum Entanglement for faster-than-light communication, he enjoyed his newfound pseudo-celebrity status. When he was fresh out of college, receiving funding for a project or experiment often took months. He had to apply for multiple grants, write papers explaining his work, what he hoped to learn, and how it would benefit humankind. Often times by the time he finally received funding for a project, he had already lost interest in it or had his attention captured by something else. He would always carry out the work, but his mind was always focusing on the next experiment or idea or equation. After that life changing appearance at the Expo, though, no one seemed to require explanation before providing funding. Suddenly it was possible for him to submit a budget to the Ministry and receive the money the same week, without them even asking what the money was for. Taking advantage of this newfound freedom he slowly and steadily requested budget increases. He didn't always know what he would use the money for, but he knew it would be needed eventually. The economy in the Union was thriving, but he was still careful to keep his funding to a small enough percentage of the Ministry of Science's total budget that no one would notice the steady increase.
A year months after his unveiling of Quantum Entanglement upon the world, Alex came across some information that peaked his interest. He was logged into a secure IRC chat with some of his old internet friends. His whole childhood, Alex didn't have many friends in real life. Growing up in Glasgow, he never seemed to fit in with his classmates. They were always playing football and going to parties. Alex was shy. He felt unbelievably awkward at parties and couldn't have less interest in sports. Instead of trying to change and become more like his schoolmates, he turned to the internet for friends. In the deepest corners of the internet, he discovered other people like himself. People that liked physics and who wondered why the universe worked the way it did. He found people who made a hobby out of writing programs to simulate particle interactions. Alex clinged to people like this. The quest of knowledge and comprehension was absolutely vital to who Alex was as a person, and for the first time in his life he found other people with the same thirst. He was in love.
Through high school and college he held on to these friends. Every friday night him and about 10 other people would log on to private IRC server one of them maintained. Normally they wouldn't talk about anything too heavy. Just what was happening in each of their lives, anything interesting the had built or observed lately, what films they had watched; it was the kind of trivial chatter only observed between people who really know and are comfortable with each other. On this particular night though, the IRC chat was different. One person, going by the username hax1ngwhales, had disappeared from their weekly chat nearly a year ago. Tonight, again without warning, he was back. hax1ngwhales was a computer programmer and occasional grey-hat hacker. He normally meant well with his hacking escapades, but sometimes his curiosity and sense of adventure did get the best of him.
A few weeks before hax1ngwhales disappeared, he started talking about just such an occasion. The girl he had been awkwardly crushing on for the past few weeks, really the only method of flirting he had, mentioned that she thought it would be really fun to ride her bike down the M4. In addition to being highly illegal, the computer controlled cars traveling nearly 400 kilometres per hour would shred anyone who tried. His only thought was "Challenge Accepted." None of the others could find records to prove it, but he claimed to have gained root access to the traffic routing supercomputer in Wales. Then using the dashboard, he routed all traffic away from a section of the M4 so that he and his crush could ride their bikes down the motorway. Irresponsible, sure; but impressive none the less. After this incident, though, he just disappeared. He stopped showing up in chat on Fridays. He had plans to participate in an upcoming code-a-thon and the yearly pwn-to-own competition held by Defcon. He never showed up. Something was clearly amiss. One of the main draws an benefits the internet provided was the anonymity of communications. However, this also proved to be a downside. No one knew how to contact hax1ngwhales and see if he was okay. No one even knew his real name. He was the latest in what had come to be known as information-suicide. He could very well be doing fine in the real-world, but as far as his friends could tell he was wiped out of existence.
The night he returned, everyone was shocked to see him. They had all accepted that he was gone. Either dead, in jail, or injured so badly he couldn't type. He brought with him tales of the past year of his life. Breaking protocol, he said he was currently at some internet café in Serbia. He had walked there from Wales with nothing but a backpack, a one person tent, and single change of clothes. He told them how government spooks broke into his house, slandered his father, and murdered his mother. He bled into the keyboard as he typed, finally talking to people he knew after a year of running from a force he couldn't see. He was terrified and tired and angry. He felt guilty and responsible for his mother's death. "If I didn't pull that stupid prank with the M4," he said, "we would've never caught their attention." Then, to everyone's surprise he decided to forgo the last remaining bit of his online anonymity. He typed:
I'm tired of being anonymous. I'm tired of people not knowing who I am. My name is Lorne Rowland. My father was Erik Rowland. The spooks at my house said my father was a terrorist in Bosnia. They killed him in 2491. I need to know if this is true.
For what seemed like an eternity no one said a thing. Then, Alex broke the silence. "I'm here for you brother. We all are. How can we help?" Relieved that his old friends hadn't changed, they were still the great, dependable people he remembered, he pitched them his plan.
I've researched my father and the situation in Bosnia using what's available only. I see his name pop up in indexes everywhere, but the articles are all missing. It's like they've been erased by someone trying to coverup what actually happened over there. The Electronic Freedom Foundation is the closest thing to an Anarchistic organisation thats allowed to exist publicly, so they would be the least likely to cooperate with a government cover up. They're also the main organisation funding archive.org internet archive project.
archive.org though is an obvious target, so the data in their production database will most likely be just as corrupted as everyone else's. I think our best bet to figure out whats really going on will be to compromise one of they're backup servers. Even if they've been coerced into editing articles and redacting information, they most likely will have let database backups conveniently slip through the cracks. We can download backup snapshots of their database from around 2491 and compare deltas to see what archives have been edited.
Everyone agreed that this was a solid plan and most likely their best bet. Another person in the IRC channel said that they had a good friend who owed him a favour and sometimes worked with archive.org. He asked him to discretely install Lorne's RSA public key on one of their lesser used web servers. Within minutes, Lorne connected to the server via SSH and started doing network reconnaissance. After a few nmap scans, he identified his target: wback07. As he figured out their backup strategy, he typed into IRC.
It looked like once per month they dump the entire database into SQL files and gzip it. Then once per hour, they detect and backup deltas the same way.
He logged into wback07 and explored the data directory. Mainly interested in 2490-2492, he download everything he could and saved it to the IRC servers disk so that others could access it. Then, he placed what he could on his 1TB flash drive.
After examining the data, Alex was enraged. His government, the same government that openly promoted peace, scientific advancement, and freedom of information was lying to their own citizens. They were changing the past so that it agreed with whatever they told the population. The news, books, public internet, it was all a lie and a masquerade. He could no longer trust any record or any event past or present. Lorne was perhaps the most enraged in the group, after all, it was his peace-loving philosopher father that they had renamed a terrorist and executed as a criminal. Lorne's grey hat had just turned black. His hacker ethics and moral code no longer applied to the Central Eurasian Union. He viewed on that day to commit his life to exposing this lie to the rest of the world and bringing justice to politicians who supported this dictatorship.
Lorne left the chat that night with similar, although perhaps less violent, ideas. He had spent his life up to this point in search of underlying truth and order in the universe. To learn that the nation that supported his research and quest for knowledge was itself a massive untruth distressed him to the core. Like Lorne, Alex wanted to reveal the truth to as many people as possible. Unlike Lorne though, he didn't feel like taking on the Central Eurasian Union directly would accomplish anything. Instead he felt that a revolution, if it was going to succeed, had to come from a majority population. The population would need to be educated and made to see without a doubt the lie their government had told them. The question was how? How can any one man proclaim corruption and lies without just being classified as a lunatic? Then, Alex had an idea.
Alex had long theorised that the fabric connecting two quantum entangled particles seems to exist outside of normal space-time. Since it operates faster then general relativity would permit it to in our universe, there was no other explanation. Given that, it seems fully possible then that quantum entanglement would function not only across vast distances, but across time itself. If this were true, quantum entanglement would provide the means for communicating with the past and allowing people to see with their own eyes how events actually played out. If it worked, it would be the one form of historical documentation that the Union couldn't tamper with. Such a solution, though, required more than physics expertise.
Sending a quantum entangled particle to the past was a feat, but it wouldn't directly allow communication with the past – not without having someone from the past cooperating with you and manipulating the particle to send information. In order to make it work without an inside man, they would need to directly intercept electronic signal transmissions and interpret them in the present. In secrecy, Alex immediately got to work. In his lab he set up a series of digital camera and audio processing equipment to test on. He studied existing wormhole technology and its limitations. Using the work of the founding physicists, he was able to refine wormhole control to the point where he could use it to replace a single transistor inside an integrated circuit with an identical transistor. In his experiments though, he realised a flaw in his plan. Traditional electronics were anything but fault tolerant. Transistors operated at switching rates approaching 10GHz, so the few milliseconds it took to hot swap a transistor resulted in a few million lost cycles. This generally upset the device enough to cause a reboot or other unrecoverable fault.
Devices based on organic computing didn't suffer the same flaws. Organic computers operated on similar principals to traditional electronics, but used synthetics neural networks rather than silicone transistors. Neurones switch at speeds several orders of magnitude slower than modern transistors, meaning that systems were designed to process with massive amounts of concurrency and redundancy. These factors combined to create an environment much more forgiving to Alex's concept of hot swapping. With this knowledge, Alex realised he needed help. Wire tapping brain chemistry was beyond his knowledge as a physicist. He needed the knowledge of a neuroscientist and he knew just who to call.
Zoe stared intently at a 3D holographic projection graphing the results of an experiment she ran earlier that day. She was studying the effect of radiation on the mutation of brain cells. Specifically she was interested in how radiation could be used to increase cognitive function – a sort of permanent nootropic. She looked away for a moment and saw the clock read 11:13pm. She had been staring at the same results for 4 hours and wasn't getting anywhere. "The data will still be here tomorrow. Maybe a stiff drink and some sleep will make sense of it for me." she thought. She packed her laptop into her messenger bag and headed towards her car. While she walked through the darkened hallways towards the parking garage, her phone vibrated. "Who's calling me eleven-thirty at night?" she said, audibly annoyed by the idea.
"Hello, this is Zoe." said in a half asleep, half ticked-off voice. "Zoe! Hi, this is Alex Rector. You probably don't remember me, but we went to Oxford together." Zoe stopped in her tracks. "Alex? Of course I remember you. You're that brilliant physics major who's head was always in the clouds." she said laughingly. "You always seemed to find excuses to call me in college, but I haven't heard from you in years…" "I know." Alex interjected. "I wanted to do a better job of keeping in touch. I just got distracted with work…and I figured I was probably annoying you anyway. I know it's short notice, but would you have time to get coffee in the morning?" "Sure, I guess. Is everything ok?" she asked. "Everything's fine." he said "I just have an idea I need a second opinion on – I think you'll be interested in it."
The next morning, around 10 AM, Alex nervously sat in his favourite café. It was tiny, old house in Geneva with hardwood floors, lots of exposed red brick, and a wood burning fireplace. He had no idea how they got away with having a fireplace, burning wood releases quite a bit of carbon into the atmosphere, but he wasn't going to say anything about it. There was something so much more comforting about spending a winter day in front of a real wood fire, rather than the electric heat we use now. Consciously trying to avoid looking nervous, he ordered an espresso macchiato which he sipped while the latest copy of a physics journal on his tablet.
About 10 minutes later, Zoe walked in and immediately recognised him. He stood up to greet her and reached out to shake her hand. He was pleasantly surprised, though, when she ignored the handshake and instead hugged him like she would an old friend. They sat and she called the waitress over and ordered a cappuccino. "How have you been?" Alex asked. She thought for a moment and replied, "I've been well. I'm still working on researching the effects of radiation on the brain, trying to figure out a way to reliably mutate brain cells in a way that increases cognitive function and memory. We're hoping it will be of use for Alzheimer's patients." "That's interesting. Have you had any success with it?" Alex asked. "Unfortunately, not yet. We can get cells to mutate in reliable ways using radiation, but that's easy. So far it's just been impossible to get the cells to mutate in anyway that actually benefits them. It seems every possible mutation actually results in net damage to the cell. It sounds weird to say, but we're starting to think that cells are already as optimised and efficient as they're ever going to be." "Really? I would never have thought that. It's hard to imagine something organic being perfect as it is." he said. "Yeah, I can't explain it either. But we're not giving up yet. Anyway, what have you been working on lately? It seems like you've been avoiding media appearances like the black plague ever since your presentation at the Expo."
I have been. I can't stand being in the spotlight like that. I'd much rather just do my work and let someone else take care of talking about it. That's partly what I wanted to talk to you about. As a neuroscientist, if you could monitor the electrical impulses being generated by specific neurone in the brain, what could you do with that information? For example, would it be possible to record impulses from the optic nerve and then use that information to reconstruct a video? What about sound? Are there herons who's impulses could be monitored and reconstructed as digital audio?
Sure, I suppose so. There are key neural pathways that all that information passes through. It would just be a matter of building some kind of FPGA unit to actually make sense of that data. But if the brain can make sense of the data, there's no reason why a computer couldn't. What is it you're working on exactly?
"It's a long story" he said. "I'm ok with that. I don't get enough time anymore to just talk to interesting people. I'd like to hear it." Alex started at the beginning and explained what he'd help to uncover about their historical records, and how he was trying to build a way to see the past. He finished, "It's the only way I can think of to really figure out what's happened in the past and what lies we're being told. I just can't stand the though of not knowing…every night it eats away at my soul, knowing the truth is out there, but not knowing what it is. What do you think? Do you think it's possible?"
"It's a lot to take in" Zoe said. "But I think figuring out which neurones to watch and then interpreting the data they produce will be the easy part." "Really? You think so? Because I've got the other pieces taken care of already." Alex said. "Wait, really? You already know how to send particle into the past?" Zoe said surprised. "Yes." Alex replied. "I've already done it."
"So, can I consider you part of the team?" Alex asked her, hoping it would go better than the last time he asked her to do something. "Absolutely." Zoe answered "How can I say no to the man who's just figured out time travel?" Alex laughed. "Glad to have you onboard, Zoe. There no way I can pull this of by myself." Zoe stared into the distance for a moment and added, "You know, there's something interesting about this project that I think we're overlooking. We're focused funnelling information from the past to the present by wiretapping neurones. But what's to stop the flow of information from traveling the other direction. What's to stop someone from wiretapping some ruthless dictator's motor control centres and making him fire a bullet into his own head?" Somehow Alex hadn't thought of this. "Hmm…well nothing I suppose. Nothing except the fear of creating World imploding paradoxes."
Paradoxes were the philosophically tricky bit about time travel. A paradox would occur whenever a someone made a change to the past which would then affect the future. For example if a man were to travel into the past and kill his own Grandfather, then he himself would cease to exist. Not only would he be gone, he would never have existed. This is troubling, though, because if the man never existed, who killed his Grandfather? Alex, like Einstein and many other scientists, theorised that some unseen force in the Universe itself would prevent a person from changing the past. It frightened him, though, because he had absolutely no way of know if that was actually true. It could be that the Universe wasn't self-preserving and that such a logical inconsistency in the timeline would actually just wipe the timeline from existence completely. Perhaps changes to the past were allowed, but like Newton's equal and opposite forces, a corresponding change to normalise the effects would always take place.
Zoe laughed. "I suppose that's good enough incentive for me. But we will need to keep close watch over who know's about this tech – especially it's theoretical ability to change the past." Alex agreed wholeheartedly. If they were going to do this, the details of how needed to stay a secret. Alex finished his coffee and pondered this power for a moment. "You know…" he said, "as scientists we're instinctively afraid of accidentally making a change to the past. But who's to say the timeline and history we remember isn't the way we remember it because of just such a change. What if not altering the past would cause out present to change? What if the universe itself will self correct for any interference from us in such a way to preserve the timeline?"
"We're trying to expose the timeline for what it is, so people can see what has actually happened in history. But…what if we could just change the timeline so that the truth was never obscured?"
"How much for the peppers?" Lorne asked an ageing Turkish women. "20 credits per Kilo" she replied. Nodding, Lorne reached into his pocket, pulled out a dull silver coin worth 5 credits, and handed it to her. She grabbed a few of the peppers from the table and placed them on cheap spring loaded scale. 270 grammes. Satisfied with that, she pushed the scale towards Lorne and he put them into his canvas tote bag.
It was early on Monday morning and Lorne was wandering through a vast bazaar in Istanbul. After his discovery in Serbia, Natheer, once of his IRC friends, offered him the spare room of his house. Since he was already in Serbia – and had walked there all the way from the UK – the relatively short walk to Turkey seemed like nothing at all. After spending a year walking and living in a Tent, the thought of a soft bed and hot shower was too tempting to pass up. "With an off the grid base established", he thought, "I'll be able to short out my next action and my plan of attack." He knew his end goal, to enlighten the population of North America to the point where they will overthrow the ruling Parliament. He didn't know, however, how to actually accomplish that goal. As he wondered through the bazaar that day, he hoped that soon he would have the answer to that question. He pulled out a small scrap of paper to check his shopping list:
☑ Rice
☑ Lamb Shank
☑ Saffron
☐ Chilies
☑ Garlic
The peppers were the last thing on the list, so he decided to head back to his room to start the lamb marinating. He was shopping for food for a meal later that day. Cooking was stress relief to Lorne. For as long as he could remember, he had been absorbed in thoughts. As a child, he would sit for hours and ponder ideas he had, questions he had asked in the past, and the answers other had given him. He read books compulsively and never stopped searching for knowledge. Even on vacation, he would start to seek out answers, he would question why things were the way they were. Cooking was his meditation. Cooking was the one thing he had found that stopped his one track mind. The simple joy of julienning an onion or chopping some peppers occupied his hands and mind enough to require full attention, yet was a simple, repetitive motion that didn't require much or any thought. It was Lorne's way to find peace within entropy.
Now that he had somewhat permanent living quarters that included a small kitchen, he took advantage of every opportunity he had to prepare a meal. Out of gratitude for his generosity, he would purchase ingredients and cook dinner for Natheer and his family about every other day. Before long Lorne had become a member of the family, looking to Natheer and his wife Mary as an older brother and sister. Tonight, however, was different. "An advantage of walking across Europe," he thought, "is that you do make a lot of interesting and resourceful friends." Some of those friends happened to be able to connect him with dissidents here in Istanbul who shared a similar goal as Lorne. Lorne's hope was to become part of the dissident network here in Istanbul and eventually to start to use that network to destabilise the CEU.
"Bzzz. Bzzz." Lorne looked up from his cooking and hurried over to answer the door. "Samir! Omar! It is good to see you. Come in and have a seat. Dinner is almost ready." Lorne hugged the two men as they came in. Samir and Omar had known each other for several years, but had only recently been introduced to Lorne. The normally cautious men trusted Lorne simply because he had been introduced to them by such a close friend in Serbia – and they were impressed by how much Lorne seemed to loathe the CEU. They gathered around a table and snacked on the hors d'oeuvres Lorne had prepared. Samir took a piece of flat pita bread and doped it in the plate of seasoned olive oil in the table. Looking at Lorne, he asked "I'm curious Lorne, your a Caucasian man from Wales in your late 20's. What are you doing here in Turkey? What brought thou here?" "I was hoping you ask that." Lorne replied.
What would you say if I told you that everything you read in history books about the founding of the CEU, all the news you watch on TV or read in the papers, all the elections are political reforms we hear about – what if i told you they were all a lie? What if I told you that I had uncovered evidence that our democratic parliament-centric was actually a totalitarian aristocracy? How would you feel if everyone in the entire union had been brainwashed to believe that certain events in the past never even occurred?
Omar looked at him puzzled. "To answer your question, we already believe the CEU to be an aristocracy. Elections are healed every few years, but the same people continue to win again and again. Even if the elections aren't fixed, that shouldn't be allowed. A true democracy needs more diversity than that." Samir stopped Omar, "I agree completely Omar, but Lorne, you sound like you're speaking in vague terms about something very specific. Can you elaborate?" "Do you remember a man from Bosnia named Erik Rowland?" Lorne asked. "Yes, of course." said Omar. "He was a visionary who helped many people to see that living by principals was a wiser course than laws." "Do you know what happened to him? Why he doesn't write anymore?" questioned Lorne. Omar answered again, "Unfortunately yes. According to the News, he just went crazy one day. They said he overdosed on drugs, sprouted a Messiah complex, and convinced all his followers to slit their own wrists. Then he killed himself too. I don't know what changed, he seemed like such a smart guy." Lorne exhaled deeply. "He was." Lorne said.
Erik Rowland was my father. He died before I was born, but my whole childhood my mom told me stories of how brave and smart he was. But that isn't how he died. He never took drugs or grew a Messiah complex. He certainly didn't have followers, just students. But his ideas scared someone in Parliament. They decided he had to be disposed of, so they took a black-ops military unit and captured him and all of his students overnight. They interrogated him like terrorists and they slaughtered them like dogs.
Lorne was getting visibly choked up by saying this. He stiffened his upper lip and pulled himself together. "If this were all they did, I would have every right to be angry. But they didn't stop there." Lorne pressed a button on a remote and a hologram appeared on the table. In the hologram two news stories published on the same day in 2490, both from EBC One News, appeared. The main content image and source URL were both the same. These were by all accounts the same article. Except that they weren't. On the left the headline read, "Visionary Philosopher Erik Rowland Urges Life by Principals." Or the right it read, "Dangerous Terrorist Leader Erik Rowland Urges Revolution." The story on the right went on to praise Rowland and his ideals, calling him the saviour from an increasingly violent, self-centred world. The story on the right described him as a chaotic, psychotic serial killer who wouldn't stop until the CEU was dismantled. Lorne explained:
The story on the left is an EBC One News article as it was originally published in 2490. I was able to extract it from an Archive.org database backup made just an hour after the article went live. The article on the right is the text that can be viewed by going to the EBC's website right now. From the change log I was able to reconstruct using Archive.org delta backups, I was able to determine that this new version of the article overwrote the original just one day later.
I've done similar delta comparison's with other articles and historical records, uncovering numerous startling alterations. For example, how and when was the Central Eurasian Union formed?
Samir replied, "In the early 23rd century, the already existing European Union was struggling financially. The economically booming nation of China bought there debt and pushed for a governmental union. In exchange, for becoming a single nation, China planned to cancel all of Europe's debt. Then over time, the remaining nations of Asia join the union to enjoy sovereign protection." "That is what they teach in school and what's written in all of our historical documents." Lorne said. "But it's not what happened."
According to these documents, in the 23rd century the European Union had completely recovered from the Eurozone crisis of 200 years prior. By this point they were an economic powerhouse – but they saw an opportunity. China and other east-asian countries were badly suffering the effects of pollution and an economy that relied on massive low-cost production. Citizens of those countries were growingly displeased and unwilling to put up with the working conditions in many factories. They were tired of being a second world nation.
The Eurozone didn't like the though ton an Asian revolution. They relied on those countries to provide them with cheap manufacturing which they used to power there own economy. Instead of peacefully combining with China for the betterment of all, they conquered it by force. They decimated there government and upper-class and enslaved the middle and lower classes. Instead of cheap labor with bad working conditions they got free labor and inhuman conditions. They rewrote history so that we wouldn't know how horrors that took place that brought this nation into existence.
"That's just the tip of the iceberg." Lorne finished. "I've even found records that suggest the Allied Forces actually won World War II, and that Adolf Hitler was responsible for the Holocaust." It's mind boggling." In amazement Samir said, "If what you've just showed us is accurate, we can not be silent. The people must know. It would be a sin against all if we didn't preach such a message." "That's why I'm here in Turkey, my friends." Lorne said, answering the question Samir originally asked him. "I need to make this household knowledge, but to do that I feel that we need to start by dissuading the implicit trust in the CEU that so many have."
If we're going to expose the Beast for what she is, we must first weaken the common man's faith in her. We must show them that their government is not as infallible as they might believe.
"What are you suggesting?" asked Omar. "According to the News, the violence and crime has declining for years. No one really think's that's accurate, but all the released data says it is. If we can figure out who's intercepting and altering those numbers before they go public and who's bribing the authors and new agencies to go along with it, then we'll have a target. Once we have a target, we can covertly study the target and find it's weak points. Once we know it's weak points, we can strike it and we can cripple it. Then, a refreshing trickle of real news will reach people for the first time in centuries." After they start to see that conditions in the world aren't actually that good, exposing how their minds have been blinded in the past should be considerably more palatable.
Samir took a sip from his glass of red wine and thought about this plan. "You have my full support and the support of my friends." Samir said. "We've lived in darkness for too long. Let the information revolution begin and let mankind finally see the light of what this disgusting aristocracy really is."
Lorne and Samir quietly walked down a darkened isle way in an ominously vast room. Racks upon racks of blade servers laboured away on both sides of them, lining the isle for what looked like at least 200 metres. Next to this isle, there were a hundred more just like it – all filled with servers and power supplies, RAID disk arrays and network switches. Trays filled with thousands of strands of bundled fibre-optic cables lines the unfinished ceiling. Cheap fluorescent lights hung from the rafters in among the cable trays, but not one of them was on. The only light source enabled at the moment were the millions of blue and green LED's that flashed to represent network traffic and hard drive activity. Apart from the slight whooshing sound made by the iridescent blue liquid coolant flowing through miles of translucent silicone tubing that wicked heat way from the power supplies and processors, the room was silent. Lorne and Samir walked slowly and deliberately to avoid disturbing that atmosphere and setting off an alarm. They didn't dare make a sound, let alone turn on a flash light. Remaining undetected was a key part of their mission. If they were compromised or if they left any trace of their even being there, the purpose would be naught and void. They were in the biggest data centre either of them had ever seen, a data centre that by all official accounts did not exist.
Since the night Lorne had invited Omar and Samir over for a meal and to explain his findings, they had been researching and gathering as much intelligence on the Central Eurasian Union as they could without attracting too much attention. Via deliberately anonymous sources in some of the less scrupulous corners of the web, they had come across a tip on how such a massive undertaking as rewriting history had taken place. The source described a massive supercomputer with an unimaginable amount of processing power. The data centre which housed this computer didn't have an address or a point on a map. The Union had gone to great lengths to hide the building itself from prying eyes, even removing the ariel photos from satellite images.
The cloak and dagger surrounding this place did anything but dissuade Lorne from finding it. Since hearing of it's existence, Lorne had setup what equated to a massive man-in-the-middle attack on the CEU's network. With a few well placed taps he was able to watch packets flow across the network backbone in real-time. By filtering this massive amount of data by a few known factors, like being destined for an IP address matching that of a known EBC database server, Lorne was able to isolate specific routes as being "interesting." These routes—generally carrying an encrypted SSL VPN tunnel—originated somewhere deep in the Romanian wilderness, jumped all over the continent bouncing from one proxy server to another, and finally ended at the EBC's main datacentre. What made these routes interesting was twofold: gigabytes of data traveled across these routes every day and it all originated where nothing was supposed to exist. The source IP addresses always came form Romania, yet no matter what map or satellite image he examined, nothing was there. Pining to investigate, Samir and Lorne planned a trip to the Romanian wilderness. With the cover story of being adventurous backpackers, they planned to spend two weeks camping and searching for the datacentre they knew must exist.
After six days of walking and finding no signs of anything but wilderness, Samir crested the top of an ridge and was astonished at what he saw. In the valley below was what looked like a bunker. It rose just 8 feet above the ground, was made entirely out of drab concrete, and had walls sloped back at an angle as if to deflect gunfire. There were no windows of any sort and there appeared to be only one door. "It looks more abandoned than fortified." Samir called out over the radio. "Stay where you are—I'm one click out and heading towards your position." replied Lorne.
"Have you seen any activity?" asked Lorne when he reached Samir's position. "No, I haven't." said Samir, "In fact, the whole building seems dead. There's no lights, no guards, no patrols. I wouldn't be surprised if all it took to get in was a lock-pick." "Seems odd for a CEU building, don't you think?" asked Lorne, "Do you think it could be a trap?" Samir thought for a moment, still gazing wondrously at the building. "I suppose it could be, but the CEU doesn't know either of us exist. If they did we'd be gone already—sent to one of the prison camps where they send people they're actually afraid of. So if we don't exist, why would they have set a trap for us?"
Later that night under the cover of darkness, Lorne and Samir made their approach on the building. Cautious to avoid any unexpected surprises—trip wires and land mines mainly—they finally made it to the buildings sole door. "This is definitely an old bunker." said Lorne as he examined the door searching for vulnerabilities. "It's probably left over from some forgotten war thats since been written out of history." Samir laughed at the thought, "Clever, don't you think? If we're right, the server's here are the tool used to erase history—so to cover up their ability to do that, they erased the historical reason for the existence of the building that houses it. Paradoxical irony at it's finest." Lorne smiled. "'Paradoxical irony?' I thought we had agreed you weren't allowed to coin phrases anymore." he quipped in response.
Turning his attention back to the task at hand, Lorne removed his backpack and extracted an Altoids tin. Inside the tin was a complete set of hacker contraband: a key logger, network tap, flash drive full of rainbow tables, promiscuous wifi antenna, and most importantly right now: a physical lock pick. "This building really is ancient. There's two locks. The top is a deadbolt and the bottom is the latch. Open them both and we're in. Shine this right at the top keyhole" he told Samir, handing him a compact LED flashlight. Using the lock pick, Lorne carefully compromised the the two locks and entered.
"I still don't understand. Why are no no guards—no humans—anywhere to be seen?" questioned Samir as they crept down an isle packed with whirring servers.
Because this is the skunkworks project to end all skunkworks projects. No one has clearance to be here. I bet out of the million people who work for the Union, only 10 even know this place exists. Fewer still have ever been here. To employ soldiers to guard this place would be to acknowledge it's existence. It's safer to prevent anyone from…
Lorne's eye's widened as saw exactly what he had been looking for: an active network switch with an open port on the front. Without finishing his sentence he beelined toward the equipment rack. He set down his backpack, pulled out his laptop, and plugged it into the switch. He opened a terminal and quickly typed a few commands into the computer.
$ sudo ifconfig -a
"Perfect—their internal network is wide open. I already have an IP address." he said. "I was worried that they were going to have MAC address filtering. I've seen that on a few of the more paranoid networks I've infiltrated. Now lets see what it is the spooks actually do here…" With a flurry of keystrokes, the network of servers around Lorne seemingly became an extension of his own mind. He quickly figured out the location of the database master and the backup servers. "What are you finding?" asked Samir. A few seconds later Lorne replied:
I wasn't expecting this kind of architecture. There is a sizeable database that seems to be pretty busy—all 10 of the slave servers are at 70% capacity. But thats not the core of the network. According to these nmap scan, there's over 1000 servers linked together in a kind of mesh. Each of the them can talk to all of the others directly. I've never seen anything like it, but if I had to take a guess, it's some kind of a neural network. An artificial brain of sorts.
"Like an artificial intelligence?" asked Samir. He had long been intrigued at the idea of artificial intelligences, but as far as he knew no scientist had ever succeeded in creating a self-aware program. "That is what it looks like. I'm going to try and intercept some traffic between two nodes." said Lorne, "Maybe that will shed some light on what—wait…look at this. One of the mesh nodes just sent a string of packets to the database master. The only reason to do that is to write something to disk." With a few more keystrokes he displayed a screen of text. "This is the content of those packets". Samir leaned closer to the screen. "You're right, it's a SQL INSERT statement. And its inserting…a newspaper article. It's dated next week."
Lorne was silent. He sat back and pondered the evidence in front of them. "News—that history—is being rewritten. We knew that. We came here to figure out who was doing it—to try and put a face on our enemy. I think we just found our answer, not to who, but to what." Samir interjected, "Wait…are you suggesting that the articles are being written by an artificial intelligence?" "What other answer is there?" Lorne asked. "Think about it. This database has records of ever news article on EBC's servers with the addition of stuff that hasn't been published yet. Stories about things that haven't happened yet and maybe never will. Every day, server here open a roundabout VPN tunnel to the EBC's data centre and transfer gigabytes of encrypted data. I think it's safe to say that that data is tomorrow's news. It's all being synthesised right here."
"So here's the inevitable question," said Samir, "what do we do about it?" "Exactly what we had planned on." answered Lorne, "We compromise it."
The export server is setup to select a packet route to the EBC's datacentre by bouncing off a selection of proxy servers. That makes it harder to track where the connection is originating from and where it's heading. I have a bot-net of compromised computers I keep around for occasions just like this. I'm going to setup the export server to always proxy it's connection through at least of of my bots. We can capture raw packets from there.
"It's a VPN though, what are we going to do with encrypted data?" asked Samir. "It's encrypted for someone who doesn't have the RSA keys." corrected Lorne. "We though, have physical access to the server. In other words: bow before me for I am root." Samir smiled, "Ok, I'll stop coining ridiculous phrases just as soon as you give up overdoing the grandeur of root."