Bed of Nails Read Online Free PDF Page A

released as heat.”
    “Hold that thought,” said the florid psychotic.
    A foul, metallic smell like rancid goat cheese permeated the room. There’s the sweat of work, the sweat of fear, and there’s this—the sweat of insanity. The stench oozed out in chemicals dispersed as the Ripper’s aura. The Goth was intoxicated.
    “The big bang,” said the Ripper.
    “The birth of the universe.”
    “The cosmic seed was a featureless point of space-time, speckled with tiny lumps of radiation. Then bang ”—the Ripper thumped the table—“and the universe grew. The tiny lumps evolved into larger lumps, and eventually into galaxies, stars, us. Now back to that thought you’re holding. Where’d you store it?”
    “In my memory.”
    “How?”
    “The same way a computer stores memory. In it, energy moves an electron within the hard drive. In me, it lights up a neuron in the memory bank of my brain.”
    “So you remember the past?”
    “Yes.”
    “Why can’t you remember the future?”
    “Because time runs forward.”
    “Like this?” the Ripper said. He flipped the hourglass over on the table so the sand began to flow.
    The Goth nodded. “From the past to the future.”
    “So that’s the arrow of time?”
    “Uh-huh. It points in that direction.”
    “Why?” asked the Ripper.
    “I don’t know.”
    “Because the arrow of time is the arrow of entropy.”
    “Who says?”
    “Hawking. You know who he is?”
    “Sure. The astrophysicist. A Brief History of Time. Supposedly the brightest scientist since Einstein.”
    “Entropy is disorder. Start with that. The reason the arrow of time is the arrow of entropy is that the beginning was a low-entropy seed, and after the big bang exploded to expand the universe, what followed was a future of greater disorder. That’s why we know a film that shows fragments of shattered porcelain coming together in the shape of a cup is running backwards.”
    The Ripper tapped the cup on the table.
    “Heat—roiling, chaotic heat—increases entropy. As you said, the energy that sparks a neuron in your brain to create a memory is released as heat. Because entropy increases in the same direction as the arrow of time—in other words, from the past to the future—that’s why memories are made in the past.”
    “Sounds logical,” said the Goth.
    “So what about black holes?”
    The eyes of the Ripper could be black holes, the Goth thought. So intense was the pull of the psycho’s stare that it seemed to suck the flesh of his face into both dark orbs, creasing and crinkling it into the squint of all squints. His upper lip receded like a rising curtain from the lower edge of his teeth, the tips of his canines jutting down like a vampire’s fangs. Here was a man, from the Goth’s point of view, who gazed at wonders that others couldn’t see.
    “How do we explain the weirdness of black holes? Collapsed stars so dense that not even light escapes their gravitational pull. Regions out there”—the Ripper’s eyes rolled back into his head—“where the density of matter approaches infinity. Black holes”—the eyes returned—“warp space and time in bizarre ways.”
    “Time warps,” said the Goth, hypnotized.
    “Black holes slurp up stars, gas, and anything else they can. What gets eaten never reappears. Since that matter is lost eternally, we’re left with the question, Where did it go?”
    “Time warps?” repeated the Goth.
    “Consider the topology of this plastic cup.” The Ripper picked it up and held the mug out between them.
    “What’s topology?”
    “The mathematics of deformations in geometric constructions. Do you see how the handle is actually a distorted extension of the cup itself? In 1935, Einstein theorized that a super-dense object would curve space-time—the combined mathematical representation of space and time—so tightly that it would form a kind of ‘throat’ linking two different regions of space. The same way a cup distorts into a handle,