The Gilded Age, a Time Travel Read Online Free PDF Page A

Social theories come and go. Campaigns,
reforms, platforms, regimes; they all come and go. We struggled years ago. We
struggle now.” She shrugged. Old sentiments, but the words tasted fresh. “The
Mars terraformation and orbital metaworlds and telespace and hyperpoetry. Those
things are all right. Every kid dreams of getting morphed, getting a neckjack,
linking into telespace. But you know what? At this point? I don’t give a rat’s
ass.”
    Chiron
smiled. “But you do have a neckjack.”
    “Oh,
sure. Because Changchi had a season of prosperity when I was in middle school
and the first thing the administrators did was morph us kids for telespace. So
we could compete globally.” Zhu touches the neckjack installed behind her left
ear. “You think computer-constructed reality did a damn bit of good when the
rains didn’t come for four seasons after that, and they couldn’t seed the
clouds or herd a storm down from Siberia?”
    “We owe
much to telespace. The technique for herding rainstorms was developed in
telespace.”
    “That’s
nice. But my eyes kept looking at the dust that wouldn’t yield enough peas, not
at telespace. So.” She stirred restlessly on the divan. “You want to t-port me
six hundred years into the past? Why? Sorry, it doesn’t make any sense.”
    “Then
listen well. Listen carefully.”
    And
he told her about tachyportation, how the tachyonic shuttle translates matter
into pure energy, transmits that energy across spacetime faster than the speed
of light, and retranslates the energy into its original form at a destination.
Anywhere, any when. About the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications,
the venerable cosmicist think tank that had long devoted its private resources
to the study of the Cosmic Mind and the true nature of reality as a set of
probabilities always collapsing into and out of the timeline.
    “Okay,”
Zhu said, scratching her head. “I’m still listening.”
    “Don’t
worry, the shuttle is safe. We used shuttles to transport laborers up to the
Mars terraformation for decades before we attempted the past-travel app.”
    “Right,
the past-travel app,” Zhu said, unsure whether she was awed or appalled.
Changing people into energy packets and back again! Shooting them around space
and time like human cannonballs! Don’t worry, it’s safe! Yeah, right. “Have you t-ported, Chiron?”
    “I
sure have,” Chiron said and smiled wistfully. “I t-ported to San Francisco,
1967. To a space and time called the Summer of Love.”
    “But
how,” Zhu said, wrestling with these concepts, with the notion they wanted her to do this, “could you go to the past if the past has already happened?”
    “That’s
where the Archives come in,” Chiron said and poured her another Coke, which she
drank greedily, savoring the taste.
    The
Archives were the repository of all known information about the world,
preserved, recorded, and uploaded into telespace. Using telespace and some very
fancy searchware, the Archivists could analyze moments in the past.
    “Analyze
moments at a level of detail unknown to historians before,” Chiron said,
standing and pacing, his hands clenched behind his back. “The Archivists began
to realize that the closer they examined any given moment, the less they knew
about the complete reality. About people’s inner lives, what they heard and
smelled and tasted. What they remembered. What they felt .”
    The
Archivists also discovered that certain moments contained historical
ambiguities. They found gaps in the data, gaps they call dim spots .
    “Theory
and practice and philosophy intertwined.” Chiron sat uneasily back down in his
chair. “We cosmicists believe in a cocreatorship between humanity and the
Cosmic Mind, the force of Universal Intelligence. We’ve always wondered how you
could travel to a past that already exists, but the cosmicist answer is
consistent with the time paradox. If you’ve traveled to the past, you have
already done so.