Wormholes, Immortality and Gadgets
by Robert B. Marcus, Jr. and Kim Frank Richardson
part 1
The gorilla watched the photography camp for three days before he walked out of the forest, into the camp’s main tent, sat down and started typing on the laptop computer.
The photographer in the tent was a tall, thin, scowl-faced man. His first reaction was pants-wetting terror. His second reaction was mild curiosity. His third and dominant reaction was that he might make a small profit off this trip yet, even though the pictures he had taken so far were crap. But how was he going to capture a four hundred-pound gorilla by himself?
It never occurred to him to wonder what the gorilla was typing.
The gorilla was having his own troubles. Watching humans effortlessly type on the keyboard, it had never crossed his mind that he might have problems. His fingers were too big, and the arrangement of the keys did not make much sense. But, by using only his little fingers, he was able to type slowly.
While the gorilla struggled to finish his series of equations, the man was quietly searching the tent for a rope. He didn’t find one, but he did find a heavy pot, which he discarded when it occurred to him what might happen if the pot didn’t render the gorilla senseless.
The gorilla finished typing, stared at his manuscript, clicked print with the mouse, then sauntered out of the tent. The man was still looking for a rope and didn’t realize the gorilla was gone for another five minutes. When he finally noticed, he began yelling and screeching at the top of his voice.
After he calmed down a little, the man ripped the paper from the printer in disgust, wadded up the gorilla’s proposed theory of quantum gravity, and tossed it into the trash.
The gorilla’s solution was right, of course.
* * *
The gorilla had realized he was smarter than others of his kind as far back as he could remember. While the rest of his band foraged for food, he carefully studied the sun, picturing in his mind the thermonuclear reactions that powered it. At eleven years of age, while others of his generation looked for mates, he studied the rock formations in the mountain that was their home and deduced the geological evolution of his terrain. While others slept during the late, dark hours of the night, he studied the heavens, tracked the planets in their orbits, and understood that he stood on a small chunk of real estate orbiting around an insignificant star far from the center of that star’s galaxy. Later, as he ran through the mathematics of gravity in his mind, it was clear to him that this galaxy, large as it was, was merely one of countless strewn across the heavens.
Food came easily if you were smarter than the competition, and he quickly learned the signs of the forest that correlated with lunch. For fun and more exotic treats, he could steal food from humans in a nearby town or from photography safaris like this one.
* * *
The gorilla was not about to give up easily. It was time to move forward and advance his knowledge. To do this, he had to learn to communicate with humans. One human in the photography camp had completely ignored his equations, but maybe he hadn’t approached the problem correctly.
Maybe most humans weren’t interested in quantum gravity. Probably, he should pick something more relevant to their daily lives next time. Still, it was a little frustrating to have his work torn up; he had spent almost a week deriving those equations.
* * *
A small village was located about two hours’ walk to the north. In the village was a school, and the school had a library. It was a small library but, for him, it was a source of external knowledge. When the gorilla was about five years of age, he wandered near the town and observed a group of children sitting under a tree reading books, though he didn’t know what a book was at the time. Curious, he borrowed a book the children left under the tree. At first, the black splotches on the white sheets were meaningless to him, but after watching another session of the children, he quickly understood that these strange objects conveyed information.
Knowledge. The gorilla craved knowledge. He had deduced many things from his immediate environment but, even at his young age, he realized the world was big, and he could directly observe only a small fraction of it.
He learned to read very quickly, helped by the fact that there were several reading primers, full of pictures as well as words. Within six months he’d read every book in the library, even though he had to learn three languages.
After his research in the library, he realized what mankind had done in the world. They created airplanes, cars, computers and little boxes they used to communicate with others far away. They built tall buildings and great bridges. He even had read about man going to the moon. He wanted to be part of it. He wanted to help them advance and achieve things they hadn’t done yet.
So now, trying to decide how to communicate with humans, he sat in his cave skimming through a horde of books he had borrowed last week. What did they need? What interested humans? What would help them the most?
One of his best areas was physics, partially because it was a field in which so much was intuitively obvious, and it was easy to derive almost everything else. Discovering a small book on General Relativity led to an interest in Einstein, which in turn gave him the idea to derive quantum gravity. That had been a waste of time. What now?
A book on cosmology gave him the answer. Wormholes! That was it! A few science-fiction novels he read made it clear that humans wanted to travel between the stars. Wormholes would make that possible.
The problem was a little tougher than he expected. It wasn’t that wormholes were impossible. No, they were very possible. It was just that they couldn’t stay open long enough for even a quark to traverse. Wormholes blinked in and out of existence faster than the vibrations of an atom. How could a wormhole be kept open? The answer was obvious within seconds: repulsive gravity. In certain quantum states, matter theoretically became repellant, instead of attractive. But how could he create this?
It took him three days to derive a method of producing exotic particles that repelled normal matter. A wormhole full of this exotic antimatter would stay open. And, oddly enough, these particles weren’t hard to produce. In fact, if you knew where to look, they already existed.
This time, the gorilla carefully thought out what he was going to type. It would take only thirty lines of equations. Any competent physicist could follow his derivation.
* * *
The man and a woman were in the large tent when the gorilla lumbered in. The man, the scowl still on his face, was more surprised than the first time.
The woman just stared, unmoving, her dark black hair damp and stuck to her neck in the muggy air.
“What in—”
By now the gorilla was typing furiously at the computer, the equations bouncing onto the screen like paint spots being flung there. He wished he could draw, so that he could place pictures between some of the equations.
“Adison,” the woman began, “that gorilla looks like he knows how to type.”
“Sure, sure,” Adison Cumberbatch muttered, searching for his tranquillizer gun. “No doubt he’s in the jungle steno pool.”
“No, Adison, I’m really serious,” the woman persisted. “I’m sure he’s not just banging on the computer keys.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Now where did I put that damn thing?!
The gorilla finished with a flourish, looked around, concluded that the man was probably searching for a gun, and decided he had exhausted his welcome. He moved the cursor to print, and the equations were soon flying onto the paper.
He left.
It might take them a few years to develop the technology to produce the exotic antimatter and control it, but since he left instructions for that as well, maybe not all that long. He was excited. Interstellar travel was now possible in his lifetime.
Inside, the man cursed and cursed.
“What did he type, Adison?” the woman asked.
The man stomped over to the computer, ripped the paper out of the printer and examined it.
“What does it say?” she asked.
Adison Cumberbatch, whose greatest accomplishment in mathematics was balancing his checkbook the one month he’d written no checks, could make no sense whatsoever of the equations in front of him. The letters and numbers appeared somewhat orderly, but...
“Gibberish,” he replied. “It’s all gibberish,” he spat, tearing the papers into tiny little pieces.
* * *
This time the gorilla was upset. So much work for nothing! His head drooping down to his chest, he slowly walked back to his cave.
If only he could talk. Communication would be so much simpler. But no matter how hard he practiced, his vocal cords refused to cooperate. They just weren’t built correctly for speech.
Surely his intelligence could make up for this slight anatomic defect, he thought. One of the books he had borrowed from the library had included a book on neuropsychological testing with a series of practice intelligence tests. He had taken them and estimated his IQ at 578, though the tests were not meant for anyone with that high a score, primarily because such a score was impossible. Humans had an average IQ of 100. The average gorilla, on the other hand, had an IQ of... Well, it was depressing for him to contemplate the IQ of the average gorilla, but it was really too low even to measure in spite of the fact that a few others of his kind could learn thirty to forty simple words and communicate by sign language with humans.
With his level of intelligence, he should be able to make humans understand. But how? Few of them were fluent in sign language, and none of the humans in this photography camp knew it.
* * *
Until he was twelve, he wondered if his gift could be passed on to his progeny. At that point, his hormones raging, he took a mate in the confusion which ensued after the death of the band’s silverback. A sweet young three hundred-pound thing, who obviously adored him. But except for creating a baby, their interests were vastly different.
The child, a boy, unfortunately, took after his mother, quick of foot for a gorilla, but slow of thought. He could look in his child’s eyes and see the vacant stare he observed when he looked into the eyes of every other member of his species. The spark was missing. His own child — his only hope for real companionship — was as dull and stupid as every other gorilla ever born, except for himself.
He never tried again. He realized that perhaps another child would bring a different result, but he couldn’t take the chance. The mutations were most likely only in his somatic cells, not his germ cells.
The pain was too great.
* * *
It was clear that the humans in the photography camp were not capable of complex communication. True, they possessed a computer, but they barely understood it. Obviously, they were different from the humans who had written the books from which he had learned so much. There was only one thing to do. One plan which might bring him in touch with those who might understand.
After failing to communicate his thoughts about the interstellar wormhole drive, he quickly decided on his next gift, but first there was the matter of distance. He had thousands of miles to cross.
Although the solution was rather obvious, he was not enthusiastic about it. Wasn’t there another way? He mused for days, but no way to buy a ticket and travel by air occurred to him. Sure, he could easily manage to find the money for the price of the ticket. But the passport would be a problem. Even if he found a way to forge the passport, it would be a little hard for the airline agents at the airport not to notice that he was larger and a little more hirsute than the average human. At least his luggage wouldn’t be lost, because he had nothing to pack.
The clear sunny day was an omen as he walked to the small camp at the base of his mountain. There was activity in the camp, a good sign.
Taking a deep breath, he went into the tent, sat down at the computer and started typing. He typed and typed, paying no attention to what was on the screen. They wouldn’t understand anyway. Impatience swept over him. How long was this going to take? Why wasn’t the man ready — the one who kept wetting his pants? How many times did it take?
Adison Cumberbatch was ready but, now that the pressure was on, he still couldn’t find the tranquillizer gun.
“It’s right here,” said the woman, handing it to him. “You couldn’t find your own nose in the mirror.”
“Shut up! I have everything under control.” He fired the tranquillizer gun. The first dart slammed into the back of the gorilla’s chair. The gorilla shook his head. What a dolt!
The second dart whizzed by the gorilla’s head and broke the computer screen, which exploded in a puff of plastic.
“You idiot!” the woman yelled, taking the gun away as the gorilla turned and scowled at them. He stood up to his full height and gave them the best target he could. This time, with the woman shooting, he felt a sharp sting in his chest, then the room began to wobble and whirl around him. That was the last thing he remembered for a long time.
* * *
He awoke to find himself on a plane, which landed about six hours later. From the plane he was taken by truck to a large zoo in Atlanta, Georgia, where he became part of a new exhibit. Even though it would have been easy to escape, he chose to stay there for a while until he learned more about his surroundings.
Three other gorillas were in his large cage, which had both an indoor and outdoor section. The indoor section was private, but a small length of the fence surrounding the outdoor portion was next to the walkway where the humans came to observe. The other gorillas immediately sensed something different about this new gorilla and ignored him. That was fine with him, because he wanted to figure out a way to communicate with humans, not gorillas.
It proved harder than he expected. He couldn’t speak and had no computer. A few weeks later a little girl dropped a paper notebook near enough to the cage for him to reach it. About a week after that, the small male human named Edgar Inglebert, who cleaned the cages, dropped a pen. With the pen and the blank pages in the notebook, the gorilla was able to write a message to Edgar, although the writing took a little time to master.
Copyright © 2024 by
Robert B. Marcus, Jr.
and Kim Frank Richardson
