THE PRISONERS
A short story
Leo inserted a placeholder at the final chapter of A Brief History of Technology and looked up to see it was time to shut his bookshop for the day. Not for the first time did he feel thankful for the renaissance of the physical book. It almost made him want to put a vinyl disk on the turntable, but in fact he preferred the slightly-less-retro CD option. The Brief History’s final chapter was a rushed addition to the 2nd Edition, necessitated, of course, because THEY interceded. Rather than start on that chapter right away, Leo poured himself a drink, a spiritual muse for his reverie
Looking back on it, Leo had to admire THEIR wisdom But he didn’t mean the physics savvy of figuring out how to evade the maddening limitation of the speed of light. Rather, THEIR deep achievement was in realms psychological and cultural: to “show” us THEMselves, and to insinuate the stars into a possible future for humanity, without us going into an existential crisis. In his optimistic moments, setting aside the usual crazies and their conspiracy theory nightmares, Leo dreamed this sanity might persist …
… and indeed one could argue that while human history shows a jagged path of progress and regress, when viewed over centuries and millennia that journey has taken us from folly to less folly. Leo had a long fascination with this history – our struggles, cruelties, stupidities and absurdities, but also our achievements in aesthetics, science, literature and (oh so rarely!) politics. But what now? Now that the blinkers are gone, now that we have THEM? He poured a refill and wondered where he had put his BlueRay of 2001: A Space Odyssey He had a lot of discs of old movies.
Leo had one foot in the past, and the other in the future.
Outside, above the striking edifice of Table Mountain, bright Venus was the harbinger of night and its ornaments: not a celestial sphere, but an almost infinite 4d spacetime Leo reflected on what a cruel joke that infinite sky was before THEY spoke.
Let’s remember what we knew. Our Hubble sphere, the observable universe, is about 14 billion light years in radius, the maximum distance light or any signal has travelled since the big bang. About what may exist beyond the Hubble horizon we can only speculate. And that radius is drawn from us, planet Earth, not because we are the centre of the universe, but merely because that is our only vantage point. Planet Earth. Milky Way galaxy. One infinitesimal planet, one insignificant galaxy in the immensity of the observable universe, a universe filled with stupendous numbers of galaxies and planets and neutron stars and black holes and so much more
We can see a lot of that! With our instruments we have studied the light created only 300,000 years after the big bang, light that was free to propagate after the universe became transparent as neutral atoms first formed. We see distant quasars, gigantic black holes swallowing matter. We can see the smudges of the first galaxies to coalesce out of the featureless primordial stuff of the early universe. We can see these things, we can study them,
learn from them, just as we learn from fossilised trilobites. But we have no trilobites in our aquariums. And we cannot travel to the stars. We are stuck on planet Earth and its environs, prisoners of our economic and technical limitations, for sure, but also because of the cruel joke: nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, as Einstein showed in 1905. Einstein’s relativity, and Hubble’s discovery of the expanding universe and hence its immensity, gave our minds and our imaginations the universe but also forbade us to touch more than a vanishingly small part of it!
Leo thought it was as if the Laws of Physics were mocking us, keeping us as prisoners in our solar system.
And then it changed.
While some of the early details are evidently still a secret, it is clear that THEY slowly made THEMselves known to carefully selected authorities, governments, organisations, even some individual people. It is clear THEY had been watching us for some time. It seems probable that the dissolution of the last of the big authoritarian regimes on Earth, which coincided with an extended period of no significant warfare, encouraged THEM that we might be ready. At least to take some baby steps.
How did THEY become aware of us? One view is simply that THEY detected radio and other electromagnetic emissions from the Earth, studied them, learned our languages, discerned our culture. Maybe THEY heard Orson Welles’ World of the Worlds radio broadcast and found it amusing? For THEY can see the funny side, apparently, or at least they give that impression. (But what about all the crap we radiate into the universe? Why didn’t that put THEM off?) Another hypothesis is that THEY intercepted Voyager 1 and loved Gould’s interpretation of Bach, but that is usually discounted as inane. Yet another is that THEY long ago seeded life on Earth and have come back to teach THEIR children. Or that while THEY didn’t seed life itself, THEY did intervene in hominid evolution to produce a fully sentient species, with strains of Ligeti playing eerily in the background?
At any rate, THEY gradually started to communicate with trusted and relevant people. As far as the general public knows, no human has ever seen one of THEM. The communications have been by text and images of things that are not THEMselves. (Maybe we are not yet ready for the big reveal?)
One day the stories of the first humans to know will be told. That day has yet to come. One can imagine the psychological discontinuity they must have experienced, to know that human history and society is suddenly taking its most radical turn ever, to perhaps feel the dread that popular culture always told us we should feel when the aliens came. But they dealt with it, and THEY helped by taking it ever so slowly
The Minutes of certain International Committees will probably show that an early decision by the humans was to not blurt out the whole truth right away. Rather, they used their own psychological stealth tactics on the general population. White lies, in other words. It started
with vague reports in the press that the SETI program had detected possible signals of intelligent life beyond the Earth. But these signals were ambiguous, not clear indications of ET, more data and analyses were needed, they said. But the seed had been planted. Gradually, over a span of years, the reports became more definite …
Venus was fed up with the whole “alien chic” thing. Sure, the initial burst of creativity was fun to capture for Vogue and other magazines, especially when “little green men” and other tedious tropes were avoided. The fact that we have no idea what THEY look like, or even if they wear clothes at all, opened up the field of haute couture for quirky innovation (But what if THEY are indeed nudists?) However, just as Hollywood, despite CGI, was never able to come up with a convincing rendition of an alien – Heptopods? Jar Jar Binks? Klingons? – so the limitations of human creativity were reached, and Venus got bored. As a film buff, she remembered that Kubrick decided not to show the aliens in 2001 because any such attempt would look ridiculous. Very wise, she thought. She hoped the fashion houses were ready to move on. But to what?
And maybe I should also move on, mused Venus: Nature photography? Current affairs? Perhaps just art. As she got on the Tube, she thought: Why not visually catalogue – well, catalogue is not quite right, too linear, too didactic – why not artistically capture humanity’s reaction to their new reality, now that this world is really starting to take shape? Not a coffee table book that is never opened, something more edgy …
There is endless speculation about THEIR motives. Are THEY simply altruistic? Are THEY xenophiles? Are we, indeed, THEIR children? Have THEY done this before with other intelligent species on other planets? How common is intelligent life anyway? For whatever reason, THEY will not answer these questions. And then, the inevitable: Do THEY have dastardly hidden motives?
Albert had to admit that his life, though comfortable enough, was just a bit boring. Paper pushing for the Federal Government was not known for its exhilaration, and he felt the futility of working for months on programs that eventually got the chop. He had the ambition once of being a physicist, of helping us understand how the universe works, how the universe is. But it seemed an improbable career path, and so with family pressures and the like, he made a safe choice. (Should he have become a patent clerk instead? But he is no Einstein.)
Albert’s real life happened in his spare time. He liked watching old movies. Walking his dogs. Eating poutine. And he maintained his interest in physics. He often attended public lectures There is one tonight by Distinguished Professor Anne Unruh from the University of British Columbia. It’s on the physics of the faster-than-light technology THEY have dangled before us:
“Before I delve into the fundamental physics of the FTL drive, it has to be understood clearly that what THEY have given us is the knowledge that this is possible, and the basic ideas behind it. THEY are very clear about refusing to gift us a working spaceship They have merely provided The Interface, a “black box”, for FTL communication with THEM. It is up to us to actually work out how to build the drive. It is up to us to conjure the political will, public consensus and organisational nous to do it, or perhaps to choose not to do it! And it is up to us to develop a world economy that has the oomph to undertake such an unprecedented project. My opinion is that this is THEIR way of maximising the chances that we will be culturally mature enough by the time we have a functioning device …
“It makes me proud that a human already had the basic physics idea! Some time ago, in 1994, a young Mexican physicist called Miguel Alcubierre Moya published an academic paper entitled The Warp Drive: Hyper-fast travel within general relativity. Being well-educated and interested members of the general community, you no doubt recall that general relativity is Einstein’s theory of gravitation. Einstein showed that gravity is the manifestation of what we call “spacetime curvature”. Space curves so that the trajectories of objects change from what they would have been were space as flat as a sheet of paper. These curved trajectories are exactly what we ascribe to the action of a gravitational force. Spacetime is not an inert stage on which physics plays out, but is very much part of the drama. Spacetime is a dynamical object, like all the stuff inside it. It is often expressed this way: the stuff inside it tells spacetime how to curve, and spacetime tells the stuff inside how to move, in an intricate pas de deux
“But there is an astonishing twist. For it is not just the stuff inside spacetime that tells spacetime how to curve. Spacetime itself non-linearly tells itself how to curve. Not only that, but even completely empty spacetime – what we call the “vacuum” – also tells spacetime how to curve The discovery back in the late 20th century that the expansion of the universe is starting to accelerate showed us that the energy of the vacuum – we once called it “dark energy” – is beginning to take over driving the expansion of the universe. But rather than slowing it down as normal stuff does, the vacuum energy causes the expansion to gather pace …
“Empty space is a fascinating place! Empty space is not a Stygian void of nothingness, but merely the lowest energy state any universe can have. We have long known of its quirkiness. Not only is it accelerating our universe, but the discovery in 2012 of the “Higgs boson” established that the vacuum is full of a peculiar field that gives rise to elementary particle masses
“THEY have, in short, told us that Alcubierre was onto something. He wrote down a solution of Einstein’s equations that featured spacetime expanding and contracting in such a way that a volume of space – that might include a spaceship! – is transported in a manner that seems to violate the limitation of the speed of light. Actually, FTL is a misnomer, though I fear we’ll continue to call it that. The local speed of light limit is never violated by any actual particle or object. Think of it this way. The expansion of the universe means that as you look at spatial points further and further away, they are receding at ever higher speeds. At some distance, the expansion speed equals that of light, and beyond that distance it exceeds it. But what is causing two points in space to separate from each other FTL is the stretching of space itself – a completely different matter from projectile motion – and that stretching is perfectly in accord with Einstein’s theory. Let me leave you with that image. I’m sure you don’t want to see the math
“The Alcubierre/alien drive is a solution of Einstein’s equations, but there is a catch. The form of energy you need in the equations is peculiar: it has negative energy density. No ordinary source of energy will induce the required kind of spacetime warping. But THEY have assured us that if we think about the peculiar physics of vacuum energy in the right way, then …
“So, all the past doubts about the realisability of the warp drive have been dispelled. I now want to tell you about my sketch of a working FTL spaceship. Its main component I call the Casimir engine … ”
Albert came out of the lecture slightly dazed, and strangely excited. Maybe we really can build this thing! It was the first time he had heard of an actual proposal for an FTL drive. Now that would be a program he’d be happy to work on, no matter how minor the role would be.
Old-Time Movies (NanoBLOG community):
@LeoMarvel: Hey, has anyone else been watching 2001 lately? I’m drawn to it for obvious reasons But I can’t get over the feeling that there is something very peculiar about this
@VenusJ: @LeoMarvel What are you feeling? BTW, did I tell you about my new project? I’m gonna start by showing the Monolith teaching homo habilis, ha ha ha
@LeoMarvel: @VenusJ I dunno. I kind of feel that maybe something significant is just out of my grasp … very odd. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with! Will it fit on a coffee table? Can I sell it?
@VenusJ: @LeoMarvel No!! But I won’t give any more away . Hmm, you sound like HAL: I know I've never completely freed myself from the suspicion
that there are some extremely odd things about this mission, ha ha!
@LeoMarvel: @VenusJ It’s like something is niggling my peripheral vision. But when I move my eyeballs it recedes out of my sight …
@Albert-not-Einstein: @LeoMarvel @VenusJ Hi there, friends Yeah, I watched it again too …
@Albert-not-Einstein: @LeoMarvel @VenusJ Oh … Just a moment. Just a moment.
@VenusJ: @Albert-not-Einstein @LeoMarvel Now you’re at it too, Al? I know you know all the lines …
@Albert-not-Einstein DM @LeoMarvel @VenusJ: I have a hunch, guys … hmm … At the very least it might be a decent short story idea … we’ve talked about writing one often enough … I know someone called Suzanne who could help us.
Draft of short story: TheFirst, by Venus Jones, Leo Marvel, Albert Smith and Suzanne Streiter.
Intro ideas:
The Hotel Chelsea on 23rd Street has seen a bit. Everybody from Mark Twain through Dylan Thomas to Allen Ginsberg has lived there. Today a small, somewhat dishevelled man walks through the lobby and takes the rickety elevator. He is greeted by a bespectacled gent, who says “Hello, Stanley” in a soft Somerset brogue. They are brainstorming what they hope will be “the proverbially good science fiction movie”. The Englishman’s name is Arthur …
® LM: That’s a decent first para, at least a place to start. Not everybody knows about 2001 these days, of course, so we have to say somewhere that this takes place in 1964 or 1965.
The development:
® VJ: We have to figure out at what point they start talking about the Monolith and the “education” it gives to homo habilis and then how it could be that THEY found out about these discussions – that will be tricky, but maybe THEY had intercepted some electronic communication about the project – it was in the media, after all – and were not beyond bugging the phones … something like that … have to work on it.
Amongst themselves, Arthur and Stanley called it the “Stargate”. It was much, much later that it would get its official name of “The Interface”. It must be said that even receptive minds like theirs were discombobulated when The Interface first opened before them, and THEY spoke. And not just the first time … strange things happen at the Chelsea, but never before like this …
® VJ: We’ll need to tell the human side of this very well, and that will test our writing abilities. Can you help, Suzanne? Questions: Why did A&S go along with it? How did they come to trust THEM? Why didn’t they spill the beans? Were they terrified? What were they thinking years later: the movie has been out in the public, and THEY have gone silent … ? But I suppose they knew THEY would step back; they were told THEY would? And they kept the secret? Evidently, they did. Their egos were stroked, of course!! THEY trusted them with the most astonishing information ever … such a delicious conspiracy, especially for Arthur!
® AS: Also need a rationale for why THEY intervened. What bothered THEM? THEY evidently didn’t want to stop the project. Did THEY want to make sure it was done extremely well, so that it would have an impact? Ahhh … maybe THEY really *did* intervene in hominid evolution, and felt the time was ripe to sow the seed of that idea in human culture in a memorable way? (An aside: Would it be insulting to Stanley’s memory to propose that direct alien intervention was what made the movie so good??)
® LM: Lots of work for us to do here. But we have some ideas. Let’s keep workshopping them, and not settle too soon on a definite narrative.
® SS: Just remember that writing good fiction is hard work. We will need to write a few versions of the story before we produce one we like …
The ending:
And so Arthur and Stanley were The First. The first to be contacted by THEM. The first to be trusted by THEM, and to trust THEM back. The first to ever-so-subtly prepare us for THEM. They did not know what to do next. Nor do we.
But we will think of something.
® AS: OK, fine for now, and the allusion to how the novel version ends is niceish. * * *
The Vigilant removes the plug from her skull socket and takes a break from eavesdropping on the short story writers. It is still quite a long time before the Intervention Council needs to make a decision about it, but they must be kept informed and that is the Vigilant’s job. It’s not that she likes this secret surveillance, but of course understands the absolute necessity. Temporal Engineering is a very delicate matter indeed. Life and death. Existence or neverexistence, to be more precise. She has no idea, nor does anyone else, why reality is like this. But you have to deal with it. Or go into never-existence.
It is all very unfortunate, but that is the price of living. There is the History. The many millennia between Leo and Venus and Albert and Now is documented in great detail and certain aspects of History must not change Those must not change The cost of change would be neverexistence.
In a thousand years past from Now – and the date is known very precisely – People take the decision to create themselves. It is the Temporal Bootstrap. Do not go back in time and kill your grandfather. Rather, the People give their distant ancestors a sentience booster shot. They have/had to, to create People. To evade/have evaded never-existence. One false move could do it. The Temporal Bootstrap loop must never be cut. Delicate, very delicate.
There are millions of vigilants of course, with their quantum-gravitational machines and neural interfaces. History is long. History is detailed. So much can go wrong. The Vigilant’s responsibility covers a distant but crucial part of History: in a mere half-millennium People go from the music of the spheres to the first inklings of Spacetime Engineering. Crucial History No false moves.
For Spacetime Engineering can do more than just create a warp drive. It can also create a closed timelike loop, a time machine in effect. The warp drive is just an entrée, used as a lure, a Trojan horse, an irresistible temptation Something to capture the imagination, to inspire even, to get them in. Something easier to understand than the Paradoxes of time travel. More palatable by far than the realities and terrible responsibilities of the Temporal Bootstrap. And, anyway, the Trojan horse is what History said happened/happens. So, no choice.
They must not be made aware of it Leo and Venus and Albert are not at the correct point in History. They will never know how unimaginably peculiar History is. They will never know that they had to look deeper to find the truth. Though it was clever of them to guess about Arthur and Stanley. History is not infinitely detailed. Not everything causes never-existence. But some things do. The Intervention Council has a tough job, the toughest job of all. The Vigilant tries not to think about the Paradoxes. Most People cannot understand the Paradoxes, not even now with all the genetic modifications that enhance the People. Why does the Vigilant not survey a little way ahead to see what becomes of the short story? But she must not. It is a Paradox. Free will. Determinism. Or not. Causality, but not as we know it. History, but with quantum uncertainty? She wonders what it must be like to be one of the Few who know the Paradoxes. She shudders.
The hell of it is that the Trojan horse, the warp drive, reveals only intense solitude Thousands of planetary systems are visited by now, and all are dead apart from some slime-like life here and there. And the creation of a closed timelike loop into the Future of Now is Forbidden. The
Few have Forbidden it. There is no cheap lunch. So, People keep looking the hard way, searching more planetary systems, monitoring for signals. You never know. People need something People need an exit People cannot find an escape from History on their own The Temporal Bootstrap is a prison.
THE END
University of Melbourne, CWRT10001 Creative Writing 1
Submission: The Prisoners
Author: Lucy Bloggs, Student No. 3104008 Grader: Dr Karsyn Moldova
GRADE RUBRIC:
Plot clarity: This is OK, though many readers will miss the probably obscure allusions and thus puzzle over some aspects But it is generally sufficiently self-contained Have you worked out how to make time travel selfconsistent rigorously enough? I doubt it, and therefore the Paradoxes at the end have a whiff of deus ex machina about them. I appreciate that clear self-consistency is a lot to ask, but then you didn’t need to write a story with time travel in it, did you? Grade = PASS.
Plot originality: Clearly derivative of science fiction tropes such as warp drive, aliens and time travel Re the last of these: are you aware of the parallels with Asimov’s The End of Eternity? I suppose that almost any story on time travel will play around with variations on the Grandfather Paradox, and tinkering with history by time travellers. So, I grant you some licence with that. The bit about warp drive being used, though for slightly obscure reasons, as a Trojan horse for time travel seems new, so a tick there. Giving Clarke and Kubrick a pioneering role as subtle human voices for the not-so-alien aliens I liked, actually. And that cleverly lets you get away with being derivative through use of the plot line from 2001 You should also be given due credit for the twist at the end – decent attempt Overall, I think it is fair to assign: Grade = H3.
Characterisation: Almost non-existent, but of course you are limited in what you can achieve in a very brief short story. The names, places and occupations of the main characters seem randomly chosen? And because of that, the only way to connect them is through the online chatter section, which given the starting assumptions about where they live is fair enough, I suppose, but did you really think about this enough? Anyway, characterisation is something that would need to be developed considerably were you to use this story as the basis for a novella or even a novel. Grade = PASS.
Structure: Not bad. Breaking up the narrative with a mini-lecture, a blog exchange, and a short story writing process was fine. You liked the self-referential nature of that, I imagine? Grade = H3.
Style: Look, you definitely improved your writing towards the end. The early sections were a bit pedestrian at times, and you seemed confused about how to imbue your language with lyricism, which you clearly wanted to do I know that finding your true voice is challenging, and your attempts at lyricism sometimes fell a bit flat. Perhaps you were worried about sounding pretentious? A valid concern. But, I did like the last section. You seemed to get your language flowing better there. I know this is your very first creative writing submission in the degree, and that you are likely to improve. Keep practicing! Grade = PASS.
Other comments: I know that you also have a science degree with a major in physics, and frankly that showed in the public lecture passage While I think that narrative vehicle is fine per se, it went on a bit too long in this story You were too concerned about making the physics plausible. But, you know, this is creative writing! You are allowed a fair amount of poetic licence, so I’d be wary in the future about letting mildly irrelevant pedagogy get in the way of the thrust of a story. It should be about the human condition, not the science. I liked the title, by the way, and how humanity goes from one kind of imprisonment to a deeper form. That was cool, though very melancholy.
OVERALL GRADE: PASS (Don’t be discouraged, Lucy! It is very hard to get more than a PASS in any humanities subject at UoM!)