The Unforgiving Minute Read online

  The Unforgiving Minute

  Quantum Physics can be Murder

  A Science-Fiction Thriller

  by

  Paul Casselle

  Written & compiled with Scrivener

  First published on Amazon Kindle May 2017

  (Version 101.3 – Kindle edition)

  ASIN: B071F3Z41S

  The Bit in the Middle Publishing

  Disclaimer

  This book is a work of fiction. The accuracy of any scientific ideas presented in this publication must not be construed as science fact. All characters depicted in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Copyright

  Paul Casselle has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work. This book may not be distributed in any format or digital medium without the written permission of the author.

  [email protected]

  © Paul Casselle 2017

  Dedication

  Thank you! - You know who you are.

  If you can fill the unforgiving minute,

  With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

  Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

  And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

  If (extract)

  Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

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  Part One

  “Before you stick your finger in there, we need to talk.”

  Professor Edward Phillips looked up at his research assistant Alan Newton.

  “Talk about what?” he asked evasively.

  Alan gave Phillips a sour smile.

  “We shouldn’t be doing this, you know that.”

  The Professor looked down at a small black box resting in his lap. In the left-hand top corner, a single red LED glowed like a precious jewel.

  “We have no idea what will happen,” continued Alan.

  “Yes we do,” countered Phillips.

  “No we don’t,” Alan turned his gaze away from his employer and mentor.

  Phillips stroked the box, as if it were a beloved pet.

  “It’ll either work or it won’t,” said Phillips nodding his head. “It’s a very sound theory.”

  The Professor looked around the sitting-room as if searching for support. Towering stacks of papers covered most surfaces. A number of piles had toppled and lay unresurrected, gathering dust. The room and Phillips mirrored each other well; shabby and neglected. Under one of the tables was the only inanimate object that was free from a film of dust; a large blue suitcase.

  The professor turned his attention back to his research assistant. He could not understand the young man’s disquiet. After all, it was Alan who had done most of the calculations. In fact, it was his thesis that started the whole thing off; A dangerous concept: The Many-Worlds Hypothesis & Quantum Suicide.

  “But that’s it, Professor,” Alan watched Phillips as he continued his visual tour of the room. “It is a very sound theory, but it is just a theory.”

  The Professor brought his attention back to the black box in his lap. He gently lifted it into the air.

  “This looks pretty tangible to me,” Phillips said mockingly.

  Alan could now clearly see a hole in the side of the device. The grey-haired professor slowly circled his finger around the perimeter of the aperture with the delicacy and quiet excitement of performing an act of sexual stimulus.

  Alan exhaled nervously.

  “Please, I’m begging you. Just wait until we understand… until we know what we’re doing.”

  Phillips stood up and walked a few paces. He put the box on a table. As he spoke Alan listened, but did not take his eyes from the device.

  “Look,” Phillips pontificated, as if giving a lecture, “the quantum theory of multiple universes is understood, mathematically. All we are doing is taking it to the next level; using a quantum event to cause a divergence of histories. If we can make this work, we will have done more than anyone before us. An infinity of multiverses will no longer be identical.”

  “… and they can never be rejoined; they will be totally different forever.” Alan paused and swallowed hard. “We are messing with the fabric of space and time. We have no way of knowing what damage we may be doing.”

  “And that’s you theorists all over, isn’t it?” said Phillips, his tone uncharacteristically harsh. “You do your calculations and theoretical modelling, but when it comes to getting your hands dirty you squeal like a stuck pig.”

  “That’s not fair,” said Alan, his voice rising in pitch and volume. “I’m fearless when it comes to taking the universe apart, but that can be done without reckless experimentation. A theory can be revised, a physical catastrophe can’t.”

  “Without proof, a theory is little more than an initial hypothesis,” the Professor argued. “A starting point; the rantings of a madman. We need irrefutable, empirical proof.”

  Alan shook his head.

  “Didn’t Einstein say, ‘God doesn’t play dice with the universe’? What makes you think you can?”

  “I’m not playing dice. I’m not gambling,” said the Professor calmly. This universe of ours is totally knowable, Alan; there’s no mystery. Everything is deterministic; cause and effect, cause and effect. If you know the cause, you can predict with one hundred percent certainty what the outcome will be.”

  “But… but…” Alan stammered, “that’s the problem. Even if that were true, the world is too complex for us to calculate the possible effects of every interacting cause.”

  “But it is possible. Even if we find it nearly impossible to do.”

  “No Professor,” Alan retorted, “the universe only seems deterministic from our perspective. At its core it is fundamentally random. And it’s a reckless hubristic man that thinks he knows more than… more than…” he pointed vaguely towards the heavens, but said no more.

  Alan’s impassioned speech catapulted a memory into the Professor’s mind and, before he realised it, he was speaking.

  “You’re as weak as my wife,” said the Professor in a wistful voice.

  An awkward silence fell on the argument.

  “You’ve… you’ve… never spoken about your wife before.”

  Phillips’ eyes were distant.

  “She’s dead,” he said stoically.

  “Yes, I know.” Alan replied nodding. “Nobody in the department talks about her.”

  “And what does that tell you?” said Phillips, harshness returning to his tone.

  “I… just wondered what happened… Why do you think I’m like her?”

  The older man stared at his researcher for some time.

  “Okay,” he said finally, “like you, she believed the universe should be left alone. That we have no right to interfere with it. She would argue that because we live in the Middle world; much bigger than atoms and much smaller than the universe, we can only see the tiniest part of the whole. We can speculate, but must not touch.”

  “Well, I agree with that in principle,” interjected Alan confidently.

  “Well, I don’t,” Phillips said angrily. “What she totally missed is that unlike primitive human society, now we can see into the vastness of the heavens and deep into the infinitesimally small quantum world. We’re no longer hampered by our physical limits because we now have incredibly sophisticated technologies. Just like you, she practiced a non-interventionist policy. But you two do differ in one fundamental aspect. You put your trust in physical laws, she put hers in something far less sound.”

  Alan furrowed his brow questioningly.

  “God,” said the Professor simply.


  “Oh, she was religious?”

  “A Jehovah’s Witness!”

  “That must have been fun!” said Alan, seeing more levity in religion than Phillips allowed himself to.

  “No, not really. She died of cancer because she wouldn’t let medical science intervene. She believed God…” Phillips’ voice snared on emotion, “… would be there for her.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” said the Professor pulling himself back from the brink of anger. “It’s not your fault.” Phillips shook his head in small staccato movements. He looked reproachfully at his assistant. “Actually it is.”

  “What?” Alan looked stunned.

  “It’s people like you and her that fill the world with theoretical ideas, but you’d still be writing your notes on clay tablets if it weren’t for people like me; people who have the balls to say it’s down to us, God isn’t coming.”

  “But that’s reckless, Professor, when you have no idea what the repercussions will be.”

  Phillips looked at Alan with a wry smile.

  “That may be true. It may be impossible for us to calculate everything and so predict the repercussions…” His smile broadened and he ran his tongue over his lips. “So, there’s only one way to find out.”

  He moved quickly to the table, picked up the small black device and thrust his finger into the aperture. This action caused the release of a single electron within the box. A detector measured the spin of the particle; spin-up or spin-down, and from the binary outcome, an action was triggered. There was a second’s pause; enough time for Alan’s expression to turn to horror and Phillips’ to fear. The machine produced a subtle click and Phillips screamed in shock.

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  Part Two

  The Professor pulled his finger from the device. A bead of blood balanced on the end where the box had pricked him with a fine needle.

  Alan looked at him, “Well?”

  “Nothing,” said Phillips, “except this.”

  He held up his blooded finger, then put it to his mouth; sucking the redness from it.

  With his finger still between his lips, distorting his speech, Phillips continued.

  “Did anything happen here?”

  Alan shook his head.

  “No, just your pathetic scream,” Alan said sarcastically.

  “So that means that if nothing happened to me, something did happen to all the other ‘me’s in fifty percent of the universes, right?”

  “But we don’t know what,” countered Alan.

  Excitedly Phillips started thumbing through the papers on his desk. Clouds of dust drifted across the room.

  “The theory is quite clear as to what should happen,” Phillips said without looking up. A drop of blood splashed onto the desk and Phillips returned his finger to his mouth. “The other fifty percent must have time-travelled.”

  Phillips had hoped it would be his fifty percent, but that was the thing that was nearly impossible to predict; in which half of the universes the subject would time-travel and in which half he would not.

  “Alan, I may not have travelled, but it did work. My god, we’ve just split an infinity of identical universes into two sets of totally different ones.”

  “You can’t be sure.”

  “Alan, look at me.”

  The young man looked up. His blond hair a little dishevelled and his clear eyes wet to overflowing.

  “Alan - there are an infinity of ‘me’s out there who have just invented time-travel.”

  Alan rushed forward and grabbed the box.

  “I can’t take any more of this,” he shouted moving quickly towards the door.

  “What the hell are you doing, Alan? Give that back.”

  “No, we’ve done enough damage. Actually, we have no idea how much damage we’ve done. My god, Professor, you’ve got to stop.”

  Phillips stealthily approached and took hold of the box. The two men fought to get possession, but neither would give in. Out of the corner of his eye Phillips noticed Alan’s left hand beginning to slide a little. The older man violently twisted the machine. Alan’s hands were ripped away from the device leaving his pulling energy nowhere to go but to send him flying backwards.

  It was all over. Phillips had the device, and Alan lay unconscious on the floor.

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  Part Three

  His flesh melted from his skeleton and fell in heavy, liquid lumps to the floor. At least that was Phillips’ perception of the current situation. His five senses; sight, taste, touch, smell and hearing, were all completely non-functional, and yet, in the total darkness of a terrifying moment, something inside his head was sure his flesh was sliding from his bones; but there was no pain. Phillips made a mental note; no pain was observed during the time-passage. Then in a flash of light, which he had no idea how to describe for his journal, he was sitting comfortably in the winged armchair, next to the fireplace, in his own sitting-room. He immediately looked up to share everything with Alan, but Alan was not there.

  He felt a little stunned that something, rather than nothing, had happened. He looked up at the clock on the wall; ten past ten. For the very first time, a man had travelled three hours into the future.

  The small black box snuggled in his lap. A green LED flashed slowly indicating recent activation of the device. Phillips always thought of it as The Device. He didn’t have the gall to call it after its actual function. ‘Time Machine’, seemed just too ridiculous. Device would do for now; even if now had become a less certain term than it had been three hours before…

  Sitting in his armchair, a month later, an irreducible question, poked at his scientific brain, So what did all this mean? You spend your life working to create something new, something startlingly new, like cold fusion or manned-flight or turning lead into gold, but what then? Phillips believed that great scientific discoveries and inventions are either used for earth-shattering paradigm shifts or comically banal hedonism. Humanity tends to act with either god-like majesty or churlish depravity; rarely anything in between. He had not let his species down. Since the first successful time-passage he had been playing with The Device like a kitten with a ball of wool. Mostly, he had been using it to side-step any situation he didn’t want to endure. Three weeks ago he had avoided a boring student debate by time-passaging to the following morning. Last week he time-passaged from waking up to having lunch at the university, completely missing having to give the inaugural first years’ lecture. And just yesterday he had avoided an embarrassing prostate examination by jumping to the moment after his GP’s surgical gloves had been removed.

  He had spent his life working at universities, and every break-though and invention in which he had been instrumental had been stolen by the various academies. The Device had been his own work in his own time. This was his and no-one was going to take it from him. When he felt the time was right, and he was satisfied with his results, he would announce his astonishing invention to the world. Until then he was going to enjoy himself as he so often wanted to and so rarely did. Just now Phillips was having the time of his life; literally.

  The one thing that kept troubling him was the strange disappearance of Alan. He hadn’t even left a note; his mobile phone just went to voicemail and no-one at the university had seen him for weeks.

  It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and Phillips was at home. As it was Friday, he had finished his university duties for the week and was looking forward to writing up further notes on The Device. The phone rang. It was the Dean.

  “Hello, Phillips?”

  The Dean, who always claimed superiority by calling everyone by their surname like a public school headmaster, had an unmistakable voice. An anachronistic cross between Prince Charles and Margaret Thatcher.

  “Yes, Dean.”

  “Are you busy?”

  “Not particularly, but it really depends what you are going to ask of me.”r />
  “Come now, Phillips. You act as if I always ask something of you.”

  “You do.”

  “Do I? Does it get me anywhere?”

  “Rarely, but you’re welcome to give it a go.”

  “Okay. Drinks, Phillips. I need you to come for drinks.”

  “When?”

  “Tonight, old boy. Party from the University of Tokyo. They’re insisting on meeting our Professor of Particle Physics.”

  “Japanese insisting!?”

  “Well, more requesting; inscrutably.”

  There was silence on both ends of the line.

  “You will come, won’t you, Phillips? Take one for the team and all that.”

  “I promise to do my professional duty.”

  “Good. See you later old man. Drinks at eight.”

  The line went dead.

  Phillips smiled to himself as he got The Device ready. He flicked the on/off switch and the red LED glowed. Then, after checking the exact time on the wall clock, he set the next day’s date and the current time, plus five minutes, on the display on the top of the device.

  Checking the clock again he noted he now had three minutes left. He sat in his armchair and turned the device in his hands exposing the finger sized aperture. He watched the clock count down the seconds to the time he had set on the machine’s display. At that exact time, he thrust his finger into the aperture and closed his eyes.

  He stayed like this for the next few seconds before lifting his eyelids. He found he was still in the armchair, but that didn’t mean anything bad; he often returned to the armchair after a jump. The LED had changed from steady red to flashing green. That simply meant the machine had activated; the outcome was still not certain. What had just occurred could be one of two scenarios. A, he had jumped to the following day or; B, nothing had happened. The only way to tell was to check the date on his computer or some other device. If it was the next day, he had successfully jumped, if not, then he would have to go for drinks, and tomorrow, at this exact time, an even stranger thing would happen. He opened his laptop. The date had not changed. Drinks then, he thought, and amuse-bouches with chopsticks.