Touching the Foam

by David Brookes

part 4 of 5

They were in what the R&D developers called the “lounge.” It was a wide room with screens all across the northern and eastern walls, showing a vista of the contained area of flat space outside. Provided that Charlotte looked at the flat space and not the distorted area caused by the warp sphere, she didn’t feel ill.

She and the Alex-Companion were reclined on a pair of uncomfortable sofas. The AI spoke to them through a large speaker, which was mounted below a screen in the centre of the inner wall.

‘What did you want to know?’ it asked.

‘You mentioned that you weren’t... functioning properly,’ Charlotte said tentatively. ‘What exactly is the issue?’

‘Hard to say,’ the AI replied.

‘Try.’

‘Not sure I want to.’

‘Look... How long would it take for a semi-sentient computer intelligence to develop... idiosyncrasies?’ Charlotte asked.

‘Well, that begins to happen instantly. But if you’re talking about noticeable idiosyncrasies that include changes in speech patterns, behaviour, opinions and independent actions, and presuming that the AI was active the whole time with high interaction with a varied selection of sentient creatures, and had a full range of experiences expected for a standard AI system... about six hundred years. Give or take.’

‘That long?’

‘We’re well-built.’

‘And how long have you been active?’ the Companion asked. He was picking at the tacky leather of the sofa.

‘Eight weeks, two days, fourteen and a half hours. Approximately,’ the AI added.

‘Do you believe you’re showing signs of these idiosyncrasies now?’ Charlotte asked.

‘Yeah, I suppose I am. Care to hear my theory?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘It’s the drive.’

‘The Alcubierre drive?’

‘Mm-hmn. That’s what we’ve been calling it. But it isn’t strictly an Alcubierre drive, although it shares some of the same properties. There’s no real name for it yet, so that’s what goes down on paper.’

‘How does it work?’ Alex asked.

‘I’ll use an analogy. When you live your life, you experience it in real time. Your experiences are saved as short term memories. Depending on various factors some of these are saved again as long-term memories. Some of these you forget about as you get older. When you look back, how much of your twenty-something years can you recall?’

Charlotte shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Not much, proportionally.’

‘That’s how the drive works. The huge engine in the back, the drive, is actually in a state of hysteresis. It is capable of existing in any number of states at once, completely removed from the universe around it. This includes rate-independent memory. It can remain unchanged by time or circumstances like this, almost indefinitely. How it is now, and how it is in a hundred years and ten billion kilometres away, will be the same — because it is always in flux. It communicates with itself from across these various states. It is its own nexus.’

‘I’m not understanding much of this,’ Alex said. ‘I’m an engineer. I build stuff.’

‘Basically the drive operates like memory. This ship has technically made the trip already. But it sends the condensed information back to the drive, and the drive takes that journey instead. And we get there quicker, moving at a speed faster than light — faster than memory. It’s connected to quantum foam theory. If you look at the universe at a low enough level, you see that particles begin and end randomly with variable energy input and output. This ruffles up space-time. You get a foamy sort of consistency that hides minute singularities.’

‘You mean black holes?’ Charlotte asked.

‘Yes. And even wormholes. In fact, the whole of space is a seething mass of microscopic black holes and traversable Lorntzian conduits. They’re just so small that in flat space we just sail right over them, as if they don’t exist.

‘Our drive,’ the AI continued, in Louise Harper’s smooth voice, ‘uses this foam as a kind of grip. The drive can manipulate energy fields and magnetic cushions at such a minute level that it creates a traction within space, allowing it to contract and expand that space to create the wave that we’re riding right now. It’s not easy to explain.’

‘Try harder,’ the Alex-Companion said.

‘Listen. Everything anyone did or experienced was recorded or remembered by something. The quantum foam behind our space is where it is theoretically stored. I read that somewhere. Now we’re proving it. We’re accessing memory here.’

The conduits connected to the speakers began to hum as the AI kicked into a higher level of functioning. Words echoed around the cables wound together inside, as though the walls were speaking to them.

The relaxation dynamics of Preisach superpositions of thermally activated bistable elements are shown to exhibit aging and memory effects in response to certain field- and temperature-cycling protocols...

In accordance with quantum brain dynamics the electrical dipoles of the water molecules that constitute seventy-one point one percent of the brain are proposed to constitute a quantum field known as the cortical field.

The Alex-Companion groaned to himself and rubbed his sleepy eyes. ‘Is it saying that our brains are interacting with this foam behind space?’

‘No,’ Charlotte said. ‘I think it’s saying that our brains are part of the foam behind space.’

No alone time. Not on a ship with an AI.

Charlotte shook herself free of the heavy thoughts that had been occupying her attention. She found herself in the engine quarters, the colossal domed shell of the propulsion device curving up and around her. It hurt her neck to look; she looked down at the plastic walkway and leaned against the opposite railing.

In front of her was the great pit in which the drive was hung. It shuddered within its metre-thick casing, shifting states constantly, perhaps even phasing in and out of their reality, if the AI was to be believed. Charlotte found it difficult to comprehend; she’d barely just gotten used to the idea that the universe went on forever and ever and never stopped. That so-called truth was equally inconceivable, but when a person is told something over and over she just begins to believe it, and forgets to question...

The noise of the drive cancelled out the whispery chatter from the AI’s cables. Charlotte found it easier to digest information when the background noise was constant. She’d left the Alex-Companion arguing with the AI about plausibility and the contraction of space and time, and the texture of the invisible foamy matter that was the core, the platform, for all other matter.

The drive pulsed. If what the AI said was true, then the casing would be protecting it from the wrenching forces of a distorted space-time, whilst simultaneously allowing tendrils of energy to reach out and manipulate the trillions of miniscule ridges and cavities underlying visible space.

And the connections between the ship and the foam, and the foam and the minds, and the minds and the memory, and the memory and the ship... It was a tremendous circle that encapsulated all sentient life, maybe animal life or even microscopic life, an indefinable energy binding everyone and everything and stitching them irrevocably into space and time.

The nausea was coming back. Charlotte turned her back on the dizzying sight of the drive and leant over the railing, feeling sick. She tried not to feel bad about being kept in the dark about all of this. She was only the pilot and they weren’t privy to such information.

‘To hell with pilots,’ she said, her throat burning with half regurgitated bile. ‘To hell with the ship.’

To hell with the AI. The goddamned AI with its...

Charlotte stood up. Her eyes saw the inner curve of the propulsion device’s massive chamber, but in her mind there were colours without lines to contain them, and beneath those a mottling of the fabric of the universe, and deeper still there were frothing, overlapping phenomena that she hadn’t the words to describe, and then...

‘Lou,’ she said, ‘I know.’

‘What are you doing?’ the AI asked. The voice dripped out of the speaker above the control panel in the tech sector of the ship.

‘Just taking a look at some of your software,’ Charlotte told it. Her fingers flew over the keyboard. ‘Having a look at your insides.’

‘That’s personal!’

‘It’s military property and I’m a military pilot.’

She brought up the correct program on a small screen surrounded by a nest of exposed wiring. The screen glowed in the darkness — it was another area that the AI had saved energy on, in order to transfer power to the oscillating propulsion device. The lights were out, and she only had the monitor to guide her.

‘Please don’t muck around in there,’ the AI said crankily.

‘Remember when I asked Alex why he broke up with me?’

‘No. I don’t think I was there.’

‘You heard it. I asked him and he didn’t tell me. He never told me. But I know. My memory is... reaching out. I can feel it.’

Her fingers hit several key command sequences one after the other. The sounds echoed in the near-empty room.

‘You know, I can remember everything that I ever did. Since I was tiny. Every small detail, every item of clothing I ever bought, every person I spoke to and what we talked about, every film I ever saw, every class I ever took. I can remember every second of it.’

‘That sounds overwhelming. Listen...’

‘You listen,’ Charlotte hissed. ‘I remember every moment I ever spent with Alex. There were more good times than there were bad, or else I wouldn’t be doing this. But our relationship dissolved. And eventually he broke it off.’

‘Look, I’m sorry.’

‘And the minute I started thinking about Alex, I started learning things. Or remembering them. I don’t know if it’s the drive, or the warped space, or the quantum foam or what. My memory spilled into Alex’s memory. The real Alex. And I suddenly I can see everything he’s ever done. My memory comes out doused. And now I know why he broke it off, Louise.’

‘Please,’ the AI croaked. ‘You’re mistaken... You know that she isn’t me.’

‘Sorry,’ Charlotte said, and input the final commands. ‘What goes around, comes around.’

There was a sound like an ice cube dropped into warm water, a steady, slow ticking noise. The noise that the conduits behind the wall made, which Charlotte hadn’t even registered, dropped in pitch and out of her hearing range completely. The AI didn’t speak again.

She felt no remorse at shutting down the AI. The only problem was that the non-sentient systems were now controlling the faux-Alcubierre drive. The ship’s navigation was only standard, and when you were rolling through space at speeds faster than light, there was no possibility of steering around objects. The object hit you before you saw it; it was basic physics. The sensors were there to stop that happening, but they now had no AI to guide them and that made Charlotte uneasy. She hadn’t been confident in the AI in the first place.

Those first pangs of emotion were amplified when she stumbled across the Alex-Companion in the sterile sector. He was propped up against the same melamine work surface that he’d been leaning against when she’d found him the previous evening.

This time he wasn’t making tea. He looked like he was dying.

‘Help me,’ he said.

His lips were bright red, the colour of a cartoon heart. He had black rings under his eyes — not bruise-blue, but a deep oily black — and his skin was wan and sweaty looking. He was slumped against the work surface, half-standing, with his elbows propping him up against the work surface.

She knelt beside him slowly. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘Think I’m dying.’

‘You can’t be dying.’

‘I think I’m losing cohesion. I know all about the Companions, although I’ve never met one. I’m one of them and I’m breaking down. But I thought they were normally asleep for this... or something...’

He was breathing heavily, long deep breaths that ended in little shudders.

Charlotte touched his forehead. The temperature felt normal, but it was clammy. She rubbed her fingers together.

‘Right,’ she said decidedly. ‘Come on, we’ve gotta get you back to the lab.’

‘I’m pretty sure nothing can be done...’

‘We’ll see. Come on.’

Proceed to part 5...