|
"Welcome to Area 51, sir."
"Enough with the welcomes, Doctor. I've been welcomed to Area 51 by every G.I. flyboy from ground level to here... I know where I am, Doctor. What I don't know is what's going on here." "Yes, sir." "And?" "Sir?" "What's going on? I see lots of equipment, lots of blinking lights. I don't see any green aliens. You got any aliens there?" "Ah, no sir, sir. Never did." "Honest?" "Yes, sir. No aliens. At least, not physically." "Gonna have to speak planner than that." "We've messages from aliens, Sir. Well, not exactly messages. More like arguments... only we can't really talk." "So their hostile?" "No, sir. Not really. Just set in their ways." "But they're not here?" "No, sir." "Doctor, does it look like I'm having fun here -- chatting in circles with you?" "Want me to start at the beginning, sir?" "If that's how you make sense of it, be my guest." "Well, it happened a little while after the bomb, sir -- the Manhattan project, that is." "Now, don't you be playing fast and lose, Doctor. We didn't open this here base up for almost two decades after we dropped that bomb." "Well, yes... Originally all the work was theoretical, cosmologically theoretical. In 1957, though, Feyman proved we could start reading the constants, and possibly even write them." "Constants?" "Sorry, yes, the beginning, sorry sir. In 1957 Dr. Feyman proved that during the gravimetric excitement of a nuclear explosion a Szilard-Fermi polling device could read the cosmic constants that define the universe. The problem was that the "phrasing" of the question had to be entirely precise, and the question had to be, well, asked at exactly the right moment." "During the explosion." "Yes, sir. " "For several decades the work went on, but laboriously slow. There were countless explosions for which we got no answers, either because we phrased the question incorrectly, or the blast was out of our control. It wasn't until 1985 that we realized that we could open a sustained gravimetric state using the Gnoscerelabe." "Gnoscerelabe?" "I don't remember who came up with the name, but it's what we currently use. We call it the GL for short." "And it creates a sustained nuclear explosion?" "No, although that's what we were attempting to do... originally. But then it occurred to us that with enough fine tuning we should be able to aim the GL at the sun and get all the answers we want." "I thought the sun was fusion." "Well, yes, sir. There was some problems that we were going to have to overcome -- in that respect. So we built our first GL to test during the next scheduled explosion... only the thing worked when we first tested it. I mean, we just plugged it in and it worked. It didn't need a bomb, or a stable explosion. Well, that's not true -- it didn't need our explosion, because there already was one." "The Russians?" "No. I mean, there was already a sustained explosion happening somewhere in the universe." "The aliens?" "Yes, sir. We didn't know it at first, we thought there must be some other explanation. But we found out that they had one up and running themselves. Actually more that just one. Countless, hundreds of thousands. Billions. Billions of billions." "Why would they have that many? As power sources?" "Oh, no, sir. Not explosions but Gnoscerelabes. For all we know there's only one explosion... we've no way of telling how many there are. But there are countless aliens using GLs throughout the universe." "Reading universal constants?" "Yes, and setting them." "Setting them?" "Yes, well, not for this universe... for the next one. For the next big bang." "I'm not sure I follow you." "Well, with each GL you can not only peek around in the fabric of the universe... but you can set up which constants will be used the next time through." "Which is when?" "Well, thirty billions years, minimum." "And so we care?" "Well, wouldn't you? Essentially you're acting as the Creator for the next go around." "What, I push some buttons and next universe has pi set to four?" "Yes. Exactly. Only it's not just physical constants. In the last couple of years we've had it shown to us that most aspects of sentience are defined there as well. How we preceive dimensionality, how we establish communication, maybe even right and wrong." "So it's all of you, billions of billions, setting knobs and buttons for the next universe?" "That's the problem. It seems that the GL only responds to the majority. Right now the majority of the aliens, plus our one machine, seem to want to keep pi at, well, pi. Some days it drifts a little higher, some days a little lower, and once we even had it undefined. Frightened the piss out of us." "I don't follow you." "It seems that the GL responds just to the current user. One brain, one vote... as it were." "And so we only get one vote. They get billions upon billions and we get one vote." "Yes, well, unless we make a GL for each inhabitant on Earth." "Hmmm, I see." "Well, that's why we wanted to get you in the loop, sir." "Do you see any problems with this?" "With some members of the religious community, yes, sir." "They don't like aliens, you mean? God in our image and all that?" "Well, no, sir. It's a little more basic than that. I mean, if we're setting up the equations and possibly even the morality for the next universe, does that mean the previous universe did the same for us?" |