Boulder Creek Apartments
Boulder Colorado
Present Day
“Are you positive you want to do this?” Tara Mukherjee asked, as the two of them rose from bed to begin their momentous day.
“Positive?” Harv Leonel asked. “What a question. What have we been doing all summer?”
They brushed their teeth and showered and dressed, and still the question hung unspoken in the air: are you sure today’s the day you want to climb into the time machine?
And the answer, equally unspoken, hung just as loudly: there is no doubt, Tara my dear.
“Do you want eggs?” Tara asked him. He was usually the one to make breakfast, but today felt different—very different—and she wanted to mark the occasion somehow.
“Mmm,” he said, thoughtfully. “And toast. We’re going to need the carbs.”
They ate in near silence, speaking only of the weather (sunny) and the morning headlines (gloomy). There was a sense that none of that mattered, but what else was there to talk about? He was right: Tara had spent the whole summer helping him build his damned machine. Who was she to tell him (to ask him? to beg him?) not to use it?
As they piled the dishes in the sink, he grabbed her and kissed her hard, and she kissed him back even harder, because she was pretty sure she loved him. How else could she explain all this? She’d been postdocing in the Paleogenetics department of CU Boulder—a prestigious posting to be sure—and he’d come in on the last day of classes to ask her a question about the Y-chromosome. Although he was clean-shaven, his black hair looked overdue for a visit to the barber, and like a lot of white Coloradoans, he had a tanned, vaguely weather-beaten look about him. But his crooked smile was catchy, and later that same evening she was kissing him deeply in a bar on The Hill, even though he reeked of bourbon and thic-nic vape, and the day after that she was riding shotgun in his Jeep through the mountains at a hundred KPH, with her hand on his thigh the whole time, and that night she’d fallen into his bed and done things good Hindu girls were not known for doing.
And then somehow she was spending all her spare time in his lab, in the basement of the Engineering Center. How could she not? He wasn’t unusually handsome or charming, but he was scary smart, and a little dangerous, and he was interested in the quantum computing and quantum storage aspects of the human genome. The “quantome,” he called it.
“The potential number of memory states in a single chromosome is three-to-the-two-billionth times the number of genes,” he’d told her offhandedly, the first time she saw what he was building. “That’s ten to the thirtieth times more than the number of atoms in the known universe. A big number! But if the chromosome has four arms, the equations don’t balance and the coherent states collapse.”
Tara’s paleogenetics colleagues had expressed skepticism, to say the least. What did some EE professor know about genes? But Tara’s specialty was tracking the Y-chromosome haplogroups—the way they diverged from the original A00 group of Y-Chromosome Adam, and split and spread and died out and conquered the world. She knew that misshapen little chromosome down to the atomic level, and the more she listened and thought and looked up and confirmed with data, the more convinced she became that Harv Leonel was really fucking onto something. It did look like a trinary quantum compiler—or “ternary,” as Harv called it—in nontrivial and seemingly non-coincidental ways. Had evolution crammed such critical genetic functions into such a small, strange space because that structure, you know, did something?
The thought still sent shivers down her spine, and it had crossed her mind more than once, that she might conceivably share a Nobel Prize with Harv if she helped him prove his point. But that wasn’t why she’d helped him. No, that wasn’t why at all.
“You trust me?” he asked her as he gathered up his backpack and keys.
“Nope,” she said honestly. “But I want to.”
He was twenty-two years her senior, old enough that he could legally drink anywhere in the world on the day she was born. He probably had. He’d probably smoked pot all through her Indian school years, and fucked his way through more young women than she cared to think about. She knew that he was divorced, and that it had been ugly, and that he’d both vowed to never get married again and then, at some point, retracted that vow. She hadn’t asked him why or when, or what it might mean for the two of them.
“Ready?” he asked her at the door.
No, she wanted to say. Not at all. Not at all. But instead she forced a smile and a nod, because this was everything he’d ever dreamed of, and she didn’t want to be the thing that stood in his way. She particularly didn’t want to find out that the work was more important than she was, that he would press the activation trigger whether she was in the room or not.
He drove them to work, as always, and although the traffic prevented him from really opening up the throttle, she could feel him burning beside her with impatience and reckless energy. The experiment had been funded and approved by the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Electrical Engineering department’s own slush fund, mainly because Harv hadn’t quiiite disclosed that he was planning on using a transcranial magnetic stimulator to couple the output feed directly to the hippocampus of his own brain.
“It’s a sort of a time machine,” he’d told her on their third date. “Bringing information from the distant past and imprinting it in a living memory. Who knows? There could be a whole library in there.”
And somehow it hadn’t sounded crazy at the time.
Oh, Harv. God damn it.
* * *
The lab—their lab—was a bomb crater of wires and video displays and liquid nitrogen dewars. Over the course of the summer, the chaos had gradually faded into the background of Tara’s perception—just part of the normal mess of real-world science—but today she saw it with fresh eyes, as if for the first time. Electrical and fibe-op cables ran loose on the floor, not anchored with runners or even duct tape, but just hastily thrown from one gray box to the next, streaming precious power and data and femtosecond timing pulses to where they were needed. All around were comics and cartoons, taped to the walls and to the equipment: The Far Side, XKCD, Cyanide and Happiness, Calvin and Hobbes. Anything to do with time travel. Anything to do with quantum computing or brain stimulation. The lights were already on, and Gurdeep Patel was already here, carefully stepping from one spot to another and checking things off on a clipboard.
“Hey, boss,” Patel said, nodding.
“You’re here early,” Harv observed.
“You too.”
Patel was Harv Leonel’s actual assistant—a grad student slaving for his PhD and earning even less than Paleogenetics was paying Tara. He was a bright young man, but kind of blissfully acquiescent to whatever was happening around him. As far as Tara knew, he had no idea that what was about to happen had not been peer-reviewed or even peer-discussed. Harv had thrown some verbiage in the proposal that hinted in this direction—just enough that he could claim good-faith disclosure later on, but not enough to provoke any inquiry by the review committee.
The possibility should be explored, that the quantome interacts directly with the human brain, or that it can be made to.
Had Patel understood the deception? Would he be here if he did?
“Hey, Mukherjee,” Patel said to her.
“Hi, Patel.” Do you know your thesis advisor is about to fry his brain?
With surprising restraint, Harv picked his way over to the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance station—the heart of the time machine—sat down on the little wheeled office stool, and started powering up the systems one by one: Controller, check. Chiller, check. Gyrotron. Sweep generator and transmission line. Probe. Detector. Amplifier. Processor. Check, check, check.
Then he ran the primary diagnostics, and the full diagnostics, and the expanded diagnostics, and finally began reading signals from a dummy target—an actual trinary quantum compiler, roughly ten times the diameter and several thousand times the mass of the Y-chromosome target underneath it.
“Are you okay with this?” Tara asked Patel quietly.
Patel shrugged. “Sure. Why?”
“I have my doubts.”
“Mmm. A little late for that.”
She nodded. “Yeah. That’s correct.”
“Do you want me to hold your hand?”
That was a joke: Patel knew perfectly well that she and Harv were an item. Why else was she here? Last week Harv had finally managed to wrangle a small, retroactive stipend for her time in the lab, but it was little more than minimum wage, and she’d never specifically asked for it. No, she was here for Harv, with Harv, because she couldn’t have stayed away if she’d tried. And she hadn’t fucking tried.
“I just might let you,” she told Patel.
That was a bit much, and she regretted it immediately. The fact that Patel was attracted to her was nothing unusual—a lot of men were, and in her worst moments Tara thought perhaps all of them were. She wasn’t fond of her wide nose or wide hips, her acne scars and her too-deep voice, but she had all the right parts in all the right places, and that seemed to be more than enough to turn heads. But Patel—shy, polite, Indian to the core—was good at keeping his attractions under wraps.
True to form, Patel ignored the remark, and went back to checking items off on his checklist.
The NMR read the spin states of the Y-chromosome’s atomic nuclei as though they were simply four billion quantum bits. Not quite a world record for quantum computing, but certainly one of the most powerful machines ever built. That was, if “built” were the right word for something whose key features had evolved naturally. Arguably, the Y-chromosome itself was the computer, and the NMR was just a way of accessing its computations, or alternatively, of probing the information stored within it. Of course, reading these massively entangled states would massively scramble them, which is why the chromosome sat in the center of a special microchip bathed in liquid nitrogen; this staved off decoherence for just barely long enough to allow the NMR to probe all two billion qubits.
The machine had performed flawlessly in last week’s trials, basically proving that the Y-chromosome (unlike any of the other twenty-two chromosomes in the human genome) could be made to operate as a quantum computer. That didn’t mean it was one, but if not, then it surely was an amazing coincidence. Since that time Harv—when he wasn’t drinking or vaping or being swept off to bed by Tara—had focused his attention on the Ultra High Resolution Transcranial Magnetic Stimulator and Electroencephalogram rig, known here in the lab as the TMS/EEG, or simply “the bathing cap.”
“The hippocampus of a human brain actually speaks a very simple language,” he’d told her, “The flow of information is basically unidirectional, with recurrent waves of inhibition and excitation tapping out the Morse code of our memories. In some minor ways it’s also a quantum-mechanical process, but it’s not the same language as the trinary compiler, so the signals need to be translated from what we call the frequency domain to what we call the time domain.”
Time domain. The phrase was sexy, and had resonated in her mind like a kind of poetry.
But she didn’t understand most of the math behind it, and she’d somehow imagined the translation code would be the work of months, or even years. In fact, it had taken just five business days, with Saturday and Sunday off for couples’ stuff. Even Harv seemed surprised how easily it had come together. And here they were: no way to test it except on a live human brain.
“All systems nominal,” Patel told Harv. “Test lights green. The rats have not chewed through any cables during the night.”
Another joke: there were no rats in this bottom-corner subbasement of the mazelike Engineering Center. There were no humans, either. As always, they had the place to themselves.
“Diagnostics are all green so far,” Harv said. “Just waiting on the final transforms.”
It took a high-end desktop computer nearly five whole minutes to convert the signals into something a human brain could read.
“You doing okay?” he asked, looking in Tara’s direction and sounding genuinely interested in the answer.
“Fine,” she told him, unconvincingly.
“Still think we should try it on pigs first?”
And here was yet another joke: pigs had most of the same neural and genetic wiring as humans, but they lacked the deep frontal lobe interconnections that made it possible not only to remember things, but to think about thinking about the remembered things. Without that, the hippocampus could not recognize the TMS signals at all. It was the equivalent of asking whether pigs could code the NMR’s processing firmware, or write up the paper when they were through.
She answered, “I do think we should talk about having a physician standing by.”
Harv seemed to think about that for a moment, but Tara could imagine the calculations in his mind: a doctor would insist on knowing what was going on, and would then insist on halting the experiment until some lengthy and unspecified safety criteria could be satisfied. But who was qualified to develop the safety criteria for a thing like this? Harv Leonel, that’s who.
“I’ll be fine,” he told her. “Hell, the Wright brothers risked their brains a lot more than I’m about to.” Then: “Fourier transform complete. The lights are green. TMS is accepting the input.”
“Congratulations,” Patel said.
“And to you,” Harv acknowledged vaguely as he stood up from the stool and picked his way over cables to where Patel and Tara stood: beside the surplus orthodontist chair that Harv had fitted with a surplus polygraph, so his vital signs could be coarsely monitored during the experiment. Fitted also with the rubber TMS/EEG cap itself, and the explosion of wires trailing out of it.
Without fanfare, he smeared electrolyte gel on all the appropriate contacts, sat down in the chair, put on the chest strap and the finger bands and the wrist cuff, and finally the TMS/EEG cap itself, which he secured with a silly-looking rubber chin strap.
Tara checked all the sensor feeds and stimulator outputs—a process which by itself took almost twenty minutes. Working from a manual bank of switches, she would activate one of the seventy electromagnets in the skull cap, feeding a low-amplitude square wave into a tiny portion of Harv’s brain. She would then verify that the pattern was picked up by all six electroencephalograph sensors around it, and then turn the switch off and verify that all six sensors returned to measuring normal brainwave activity. Of course, she was an expert in Y-chromosome haplogroups, not brainwave activity; the TMS/EEG connected to a computer running off-the-shelf software that handled all of the details. One by one, more lights went green, and more boxes were checked off on Patel’s clipboard.
Really, it was a blessing that Harv had invested the time and budget on all these status LEDs. He’d agreed to abort the test if even one of the lights came up yellow, but none of them did, and soon the final diagnostic was complete. This chaotic mess of equipment—some new, some surplus, some scavenged from other departments—was somehow working exactly as intended, and Tara had to appreciate that it really wasn’t disordered at the functional level. Harv and Patel—and later Tara herself—had started with an elegant design, and had simply been forced to fit it all together based on the available space and furniture and electrical sockets. Based on time and budget and the fact that nobody was checking up on them for OSHA and fire code violations. And of course, classes would be starting soon, making everything on campus at least ten times harder, and so they’d worked as quickly as they could, without ever really pausing to reflect.
Now, waking from that sex-fueled dream, she had to face the fact that she was complicit in whatever was about to happen. She might get a Nobel Prize, yes, and a cover story in Nature—the grandmommy of all the legitimate science journals. But she might also be the target of a criminal negligence probe. Walking away now would not change any of that, so she simply pressed forward, doing her best to make sure the plan was executed as flawlessly as possible.
“I’m leaning the chair back,” Harv said. Another concession: he’d be in a full orthodontic reclining position when the TMS signals were activated.
“Okay,” Patel said, unnecessarily. He was sitting across the room, by the emergency stop button, leaning forward slightly to get a better view of Harv as the ortho chair rolled slowly backward and then came to a halt against its rubber stops.
Harv’s right hand was on the TMS activation trigger: a white handheld button assembly like they used in hospitals for requesting painkiller from an IV feed. Or lethal barbiturates for voluntary euthanasia patients. Tara touched Harv’s other hand, and could not stop herself from saying, “It’s still not too late to stop this.”
“I know,” he said.
And pressed the fucking trigger.
University of Colorado Engineering Center
Boulder, Colorado
Present Day
Harv didn’t feel anything when he pressed the button, and his first thought was that the machine wasn’t working. Why would it, on their first real try? His second thought was that he was glad he hadn’t made any promises around this phase of the experiment. If he had, this could have been a black mark on his professorial record, which could negatively affect Patel, and maybe even Tara, if it weren’t handled adroitly. See? There was nothing wrong with a little secrecy.
“Anything happening?” Patel called out from across the room.
“Not so far,” Harv told him. “Not that…”
And
his
third
thought
was
that Jack was going to burn his wrist again if he didn’t step back a few inches from the firehole.
“Watch your hands, laddie!” Harv barked.
Jack was flinging coal into the furnace with a square-headed shovel while Harv watched the fancy new brass-and-glass pressure gauge he’d installed on the boiler, and with every throw the bandages on Jack’s left hand brushed within a sixteenth of an inch of the firehole’s riveted iron lip, which stood just a whisker shy of cherry-red hot.
Except that Harv’s name was Clellan Malcom Leonel, and even with no shirts on beneath their overalls it was hot as blazes and dark as night in this brick goddamn shithouse, and why in Christ’s name hadn’t he constructed this clarty half-lever engine outside, and damn the Clyde weather anyways? Cunard had better like the design, that much was sure,
and
his
fourth
thought
was
what the fuck was that?
He sat there doing nothing, saying nothing, for several seconds.
“Harv?” Tara asked.
“I’m okay,” he said, without thinking.
What the fuck was that?
“Is there a sensation?” Patel asked, holding his pen above the clipboard, ready to jot down any impressions.
Still, Harv said nothing. What could he say?
“Harv?” That was Tara again, sounding concerned.
“Yes, there’s a sensation,” he told them both. “If you could call it that. I may have misunderstood the nature of the quantome’s stored information.”
Tara looked a bit angry at that. “Jesus, Harv. Would you care to elaborate? Are you all right?”
And it was a fair question, because they were, after all, pumping strong magnetic fields into the center of his brain. He felt a faint buzzing sensation, like a subsonic hum just below the auditory threshold, and a taste like pennies dipped in apple cider vinegar.
Chuckling nervously, he said, “This is why pioneers experiment on themselves. Tara, I think I just experienced an episodic memory. Not an implicit informational recall. I mean, I was there. For a moment. In Scotland, maybe?”
To this, Tara said, “Seriously? Seriously?” She paused, then added, “You’d better not be shitting us. Patel, let’s turn this thing off before we hurt him.”
But for the moment, Patel was more curious than concerned. “That’s interesting, Harv. I always thought episodic memory was a possibility. I mean, the hippocampus is basically just a switchboard. It doesn’t really differentiate between different connection types. What exactly did you see?”
“Two people,” Harv said. “working on some kind of steam engine. Indoors. It was very hot. I was…I was only there for a second or two, but I felt everything. Sweat rolling down my back. This is amazing.”
“Turn the machine off,” Tara said again.
“I’m okay,” Harv assured her. “Thank you for being worried, but the sensation’s not unpleasant. Let’s keep going.”
And so they waited for several seconds, and then several seconds more.
“Anything?” Patel asked.
“No, I don’t think so. What’s the field strength?”
“Three point five Tesla, same as it was five minutes ago.”
To Tara, Harv said, “My great-grandfather came from Dumbarton, Scotland, on the river Clyde. Have you heard of something called Cunard?”
“It’s a British cruise line.”
“Hmm. I wonder…when that was? My family lived in Scotland for quite a while.”
“They weren’t from there originally,” she said. “Your Y-chromosome is from a haplogroup called D-M174, which is very rare. Not Scottish at all. Statistically speaking, it got there by way of Tibet or Hokkaido, or the Indian Ocean. Harv, I don’t like this. You’re assuming you’ve…”
“Mmm?”
She pointed at his head. “We don’t know what’s happening in there. You’ve experienced a vivid… You’re…”
“It’s fine,” he told her.
But that sounded dismissive, and he regretted it immediately. He and Tara had fallen in together fast and hard and dizzily, and her concern for his welfare was quite a bit more than professional. He didn’t realize, until this moment, how much he’d been missing that. The divorce was almost six years ago, and while it was not particularly hard to find someone to sleep with in Boulder, he had singularly failed to locate anyone who actually wanted to hold his hand. Tinder had failed him, and OKCupid had failed him, and GeneMatch had failed him, and the women his own age who sometimes flirted at faculty parties had ultimately come up short as well. But somehow the Paleogenetics department at the University of Colorado had not. He didn’t really know where he and Tara stood, or what was going to happen, or whether what they were doing was even good for her. But he cared what she thought.
More gently, he said, “I think we’re really onto something, Tara. I do. I’m fully lucid, not in any pain. I feel a slight electrical sensation in my face and head, which I’m pretty sure is normal. And I swear to you, something happened. I experienced a detailed memory. That’s more than we could have hoped for.”
“Mmm,” she said, noncommittally.
“Look, if it hurts, I promise I’ll stop. Okay? But we need to do this. It could be a major breakthrough. Could be the big time, for all of us.”
“Mmm,” she said again. Then, “Okay, you’re right. This is why we’re here.”
“It is, yes. And thank you for caring about me. Patel, will you please increase the field strength to four point oh?”
Patel scratched his scalp with the pen. “Um, okay. You sure?”
It was as high as the magnets could go. It was, in fact, the highest field strength commercially available for transcranial magnetic stimulation. Any higher and they’d’ve had to build the TMS themselves—something even Harv was reluctant to do. And yes, the machine and its accompanying instructions came plastered with all kinds of FDA warnings. But the software did allow for that setting, as long as the focal point was deeper than six centimeters past the skull. Based on the 3D brain scan data that guided the machine, Harv’s hippocampus was roughly 7.5 cm from the magnets, so yes, the program would allow it.
And they were so close. So close to something. There was information in the Y-quantome, and they had written it into his memory. They had. Years of thought and study brought him to this point—physics, chemistry, electrical engineering, and neuroscience, all focused in narrowly on this one highly specialized endeavor. Was he even suited for anything else at this point? As a scientist and as a human being, Harv could no more turn away than he could choose to stop blinking his eyes.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m sure.”
“Absolutely sure?”
“Yes, Patel, I’m absolutely sure. You may proceed.”
“Okay. You got it.”
Patel put down his clipboard and leaned out over the keyboard, pecking in commands.
“Unlocking. Changing the setting. Enabling. You ready?”
“Yep. Hit me.”
Patel pressed enter
and
the
world
went
dark