Lost in Yesterday
By: Miki Yamuri and liljennie
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Prologue
Immersive virtual reality had long been a fantasy or a pipe dream, but new quantum technology had made it a reality. With the advent of VR also came VR war. VR had become so realistic that it had become commonplace for one nation to actually challenge another to all-out war through VR.
In one way, this was a far better alternative to actual conflict, since no one and nothing was actually hurt. There were rules both parties to the war game had to agree to so other types of conflicts could be avoided. But in another way, VR war was more savage and devastating than real war could ever be, because all-out war could be waged that broke every rule that prevented war from destroying humanity outright – no rules existed against virtual weapons of mass destruction, because nothing was truly destroyed.
Meanwhile, with mankind’s imagination as wild and strange as it was, there were also other … let us say, more sensual types of virtual reality simulations, of course.
Its revolutionary VR technology, with its infinite customization and solid-seeming simulations, had made the new company “Yesterday on Demand” an almost overnight success.
The company’s in-depth library of customizable VR simulations had grown to become the largest collection of data on the planet as the company’s clientele become global within days of their product’s release.
World leaders had finally agreed to a peaceful meeting in one of the more elaborate and pleasant utopian VR programs after many years of much more violent virtual interaction.
The idea was that any who might have nefarious ideas could destroy the quantum server that was hosting the simulation, but it would cause no damage to the participants except an instant or two of disorientation if the link was severed.
All the leaders were in their own nations and using their own connections, safe at home – or so they thought. The flaw in the plan was an unknown or perhaps overlooked aspect of the quantum system they were using. After looking over all the data at a later time, hindsight was still 20/20, after all.
Certain quantum energy states are particularly susceptible to random energy transitions, which could change the structure of the energy states and frequencies radically enough it could cause evolutionary changes in the quantum particle.
By some major cosmic coincidence, at the exact time all the world’s leaders, their families, and their invited guests were within the system, a sudden flux of high-energy particles slammed into Earth’s atmosphere from a supernova millions of light years away, creating wonderfully beautiful auroras.
Under normal circumstances, this would have been totally unnoticed by the Earth, aside from those watching the night skies. But for those who were bound in the virtual quantum utopia, it was a different story.
No one realized that superpositions of quantum states were the evidence that some scientists had been searching for to prove the existence of alternate realities.
Some particles actually existed in many different continua simultaneously, and that included the ones that were used in the quantum computing that made the new VR technology so immersive. In that moment, all the quantum particles changed frequencies as they were bombarded by the energised particles from space, evolving into other types of particles. Some of these were filtered out by the error correction protocols built into the system. Normally this was a good thing.
Unfortunately for the world, the particles that had been altered had caused other particles to change frequencies due to the bonds between them. A cascading effect multiplied the alteration of particles by millions of times. For every particle struck by a cosmic ray from a supernova, a million particles were altered and discarded by the corrective protocols – and this burst of discarded particles just happened to include most of the quantum reassembly matrix that made the mental interconnects of the world’s leaders and the VR utopia program possible.
The bodies of the leaders and all their invited guests, including their children, jerked sharply as their life essence vanished. The error correction protocol removed the corrupted particles that constituted their life energies from the system exactly as it was designed to do – however, it also caused the leadership of every nation on Earth, children, and all their guests, to become lost within the infinite and unexplored alternate realities of multidimensional space.
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Lost in Never was
Many men and women, together with their children, appeared suddenly in one of the strangest places they could imagine. Things their eyes focused on could, after a bit of concentration, seemingly change form into the intended object they wanted, but other than that, nothing anywhere was in any way recognizable.
“What … is this?” asked Alicia Jiménez, the president of Mexico. Her husband and daughters were confused, but the children were more fascinated than frightened. She looked around at the stark white background that seemed to go on forever, punctuated by floating blobs of brightly colored gel of some sort.
They were seemingly still sitting on chairs, but they were also white and seemed to blend into the white surroundings. It was difficult to see the floor, as that was white as well. There were no shadows, and it was unclear what direction the light was coming from.
The president of the United States, Jimbo Blortnik, replied, “Aw, it’s prob’ly just some technical glitch. They’ll git it fixed soon as they can.” However, he paid no attention to his third wife. None of his several children were present.
“C’est fascinant,” said the wife of the French Prime Minister as a white bird flew away. It had been a blob of orange gel until she had focused her attention on it, but then it had changed form and come to life.
“So beautiful, my dear,” said her husband, but he was looking at her.
“The bird?” she asked.
“No … my wife,” he replied. “This is not the place we expected. But we are still here. Anywhere you are … is home.” He took her hands. She blushed.
“Awww,” said most of the women and a few of the men.
“Blech,” said most of the children, assuming they had been paying attention. The rest of them were trying to poke at the colorful floating gelatinous blobs.
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Back on Earth
Needless to say, back on Earth the situation was critical. Sabotage accusations and assassination threats coupled with urgent talk of nuclear retaliation towards all nations by the other nations ran rampant.
Just as the situation came to a boil and the world was on the razor’s edge of nuclear conflict, one lowly individual who had just been awarded his PhD in quantum physics explained and showed the physical proof that the accident had been a misunderstanding of how the system responded to rapid changes in energy levels and frequencies. His timely announcement stopped the world from destroying itself. It was in no way any one person’s or government’s fault this had happened.
The bodies of all the world’s leaders, their wives, guests, friends, and children still lived, but the state they were in was more like a coma. Their hearts beat, and their lungs breathed, but there was minimal brain activity other than autonomic. Medical technology could theoretically keep the bodies alive indefinitely. Returning them to consciousness was something they had absolutely no idea how to achieve.
However, the young Dr. Thomas Tamero was determined to prove his theories of extra dimensions were accurate. The quantum math, frequencies, and energy states all agreed with his equations. He now knew bonded quantum particle teleportation was possible, and that it would only take a bit more research for matter teleportation to be possible. That would have to be put on hold for now, though, because there was obviously a larger issue that needed to be resolved.
Dr. Tamero was also positive that the leaders and their families weren’t in a coma, but their brain activity existed in an as yet unknown quantum state and was simply occurring in another place beyond what most people thought of as real. The math proved it. Just because he was the youngest person to ever receive a PhD in physics, that didn’t mean he didn’t know how to do the simple math.
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Thomas fretted many weeks and worked even longer hours attempting to resolve the problem and perhaps find a way to retrieve the misplaced life forces. He had to discover what the energy and frequency evolution of the discarded particles from the quantum reassembly matrix were at the time of the particle dump and what caused the data evolution cascade.
It took many hours of close scrutiny and computer processing power, analyzing the state of the system’s database at the time of the loss. Searching for a needle in a haystack might have been easier, but the young man was determined.
The first thing he accomplished was making it possible to shield the critical data from external corruption. This proved to be excessively hard, since quantum particles existed in more than one continuum simultaneously. He discovered the perfect controllable way to solve the issue.
He used a large scale controllable Bose-Einstein condensate to stabilize and shield the quantum reassembly matrix particles. This meant that any corruption beyond that point would not facilitate the kind of data loss cascade experienced from what current archived data showed was caused by a random energy influx of cosmic radiation.
To control his new shielding BEC, Thomas used newly-discovered optoelectronic components that operated at extremely high speeds, using ultrashort pulses of light to manipulate atomically-thin semiconductors. This light speed manipulation also reduced quantum data corruption by an amazing 99% systemwide.
He achieved this reduction by designing nanoscale antennas that transformed far infrared light into vertical electric fields within atomically thin rare materials. Thanks to his novel antenna design, the resulting electric fields could reach strengths of several megavolts per centimeter, which gave him more than enough control.
The technique allowed real-time control of the electromagnetic quantum particle frequency structures on timescales of less than a picosecond – the system could adapt to random frequency variations in a trillionth of a second. He was sure this could fix the main cause of the data loss.
Thomas was creating new technologies as he went, and those were going on to revolutionize one industry after another. Dr. Tamero was instrumental in the development of the first chip that integrated electronic, photonic, and quantum components. This integration allowed the chip to generate consistent streams of correlated bonded photon pairs, which were the essential building blocks for many quantum applications that were virtually unaffected by the random energy variations other quantum systems suffered from.
He also spent a great deal of time creating a BEC/ion trap delicate enough to capture and analyze any morphing of frequencies to the quantum particle streams before they were discarded to resolve any critical data losses.
Qubits are fickle, as qubit devices can lose state due to decoherence or operational errors caused by stray energy pulses. But the new BEC device Thomas had created could protect qubits from such errors.
As Thomas tirelessly worked to create the necessary equipment to produce the hoped for actions, he worried constantly about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. He knew all the particles currently in use existed in many continua simultaneously.
The major task at hand now was discovering all of the energy frequencies of the lost particles. In an infinite sea of possibilities, best description would be a needle buried in a 40-acre haystack which would have been easier to find. And the Uncertainty Principle didn’t make it any easier.
“Maybe I’ve made some discoveries that nobody has before,” said Dr. Tamero during one interview, since he’d become quite famous while working on this problem, “but nobody can beat quantum fluctuations.”
“Can you explain … quantum fluctuations, in terms that a layperson can understand?” asked Sharon Imihara, science reporter for Worldwide News.
“Well, you and I experience the classical world,” he replied as he waved his arm around, “where everything we can directly sense is made of billions or more atoms. But on the scale of the very tiny, you can’t measure something about one electron without using another electron, or another similarly very small particle, to bounce off it. But when you do that, you affect the electron you’re trying to measure.”
“Right,” said Sharon, “it’s like you have a room full of ping-pong balls in the dark, and you can only find any of them by throwing another ping-pong ball, but that moves the one that you hit. By the time you figure out where that one was, it’s moved somewhere else.”
“Yes,” said Thomas. “But in the world you and I live in, we could always ask, ‘Well, why don’t we just turn on the lights?’ Fine, and we can do that and see all the ping-pong balls. But what are the lights doing? They’re just bouncing a bunch of tiny photons off the ping-pong balls, much less mass, so they barely affect the ping-pong balls at all. But … when we’re dealing with very tiny particles, there are no lights to turn on – no even tinier particles to bounce off the electron. There is just nothing we can do. What this means is there’s an upper limit on how confident you can even be about where anything is or how it’s moving.”
“And that’s the Uncertainty Principle,” Sharon replied.
“Exactly,” Thomas said. “Now, I can describe the quantum world as tiny particles, or as ripples moving along in a quantum field like they do on the surface of water. I can write equations that show that any particle exists in a superposition of energy states, and how that superposition of states evolves with time.” He wrote some equations on the whiteboard behind him as he spoke. “But in the end it all comes down to the same thing – there is a limit to how much we can know about a system of particles, and that limit has nothing to do with how good our equipment is or how clever we are. The limit is just a part of the universe, and all we can do is work with it.”
“Hence what you’re trying to do,” replied Sharon.
Thomas said, “Right. We have to identify the bonded pairs of measurable quantities because we know that uncertainty will come in. But if we pick measurables that aren’t related to each other, the uncertainty principle never enters the equation. The question is how to do that practically, and how to get usable data out of it. This device … well, it pushes the Uncertainty Principle to its limits.”
“And you need to, in order to find the missing people …”
“We’ve got to observe the previously unobservable,” said Thomas.
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Never was
In a realm bound exclusively by quantum mechanics that didn’t really exist in any form mankind was familiar with, a large group of people moped about, and from the sounds, they were suffering from severe depression and worry.
The children, however, were completely captivated by their new magical playground. Slowly, then with more rapidity, they learned how to sculpt whatever their thoughts were out of those weird floaty globs.
One of the young women, a daughter of the Canadian prime minister whose name was Jennie, stood up, clenched her fists and stomped her foot, demanding, “I … WANT TO GO HOME!”
There was a sound that all could hear, but none knew what it was, then reality around them changed and reformed. When things became solid, the group now stood next to the young woman’s childhood home in the mountains. The others stood around with incredulity written all over their faces. The children were totally ecstatic about a new large area to play in.
Alicia went up to Jennie. “This is … your home?”
“The home I grew up in,” said Jennie in wide eyed astonishment. “Or, as close to it as makes no difference.” She walked toward the A-frame log cabin home through the suddenly cool air, and Alicia followed. “In Alberta.” She opened the door, which was unlocked, and inside it was cozy. It was heated by a wood-burning stove, which crackled quietly. “There should be …” Jennie went on, climbing up the stairs to the bedrooms. “It’s my childhood room,” she said, opening the door to a small but comfortable bedroom filled with colorful furnishings and toys. She picked up a soft toy moose that was lying on the bed. “It’s Monty the Moose,” she said. “I haven’t seen him in … years.”
Alicia was looking around the house. “It’s … read all this from your memory?” she asked. “But how? Without a program? Without being designed by … at least an AI based on a description, if not a human 3D artist?”
“I don’t understand either,” said Jennie. “But … somehow it’s perfect.”
The adults got over their fear and began to slowly explore their new environment. Everett Johns went back to the door and opened it. Everyone was expecting to see a complete white out, since they had entered the house, instead, what they saw was the beautiful mountain landscape. It still included a huge lake and a waterfall off in the distance.
They could feel the warmth of the sun, the coolness when they first arrived had warmed, hear the birds in the trees, and even the irritating gnats and mosquitoes were something they even more than tolerated. It actually brought them comfort.
Alicia asked, “Is this place for real?”
Jennie went to one of the trellises that bordered the steps leading up to the porch and picked one of the large roses. She brought it to her nose and took a sniff. The wonderful aroma of a dark red velvet rose assaulted her nose. She said, “It seems real to me.” She looked down and saw one of the rose’s thorns had pricked her finger. “ Real enough that it can make you bleed.”
Jimbo Blortnik was wandering around the porch and said, “Well, y’know, this is pretty an’ all, but I got lots prettier buildin’s back home. I wanna see one o’ them.”
Nothing happened. “Hey, how come the leader o’ the free world don’t get what he wants? This thing got some kinda left wing bias?”
Alicia replied, “Well, I prefer this natural beauty to some penthouse apartment with fake gold plated toilets anyway.”
“Hey, now, I’ll have you know it’s real gold on them toilets,” replied Blortnik, bristling.
“Look, this is fine for now,” said Suleiman Aolé, president of Burkina Faso, stepping between them. “Much better than the strange white place. Why not simply enjoy this as we wait? Certainly the world’s best minds have been summoned in an attempt to repair this problem.”
“I wonder what it could be,” pondered Edward Stephenson, British Prime Minister. “Ordinarily, one would think, they would simply shut down the simulation once they saw it wasn’t working properly. And yet, here we are.”
The prime minister of India replied, “Perhaps they do not yet realize that there is a problem.”
One of the younger children asked, “What is they knows theresa prollums … but has no iders wha it wus or how ta fiss it?”
The group of adults looked at the child with real concern on their faces as the wisdom from the mouth of babes had the profoundest of truths. The realization of that possibility was more than something they all were worried about.
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Dr. Thomas Tamero was sort of an eccentric when it came to video games and their virtual reality programs. The actual VR system was rather expensive, but there were alternatives.
One was the VR helmet. It performed well, but lacked the solidity and reality of the complete system. It operated well enough to satisfy a gamer’s urges, though.
The other was the plain old arcade-style handheld controller. It was rugged and could take a real pounding. Its numerous buttons were all customizable and could be adapted to work with the VR helmet, which was a noticeable improvement to the gamer’s experience.
Thomas leaned back in his comfortable fighting chair. He missed the full experience his VR rig at home gave him, but this was superior all by itself.
He knew there was a state of worldwide emergency and that the world’s leaders and their families were in some kind of limbo, their bodies in comas while their consciousnesses were who knows where, but he needed some downtime now and then, and besides, it wasn’t as if he was the only one working on this. Hundreds of the world’s top scientists and computer experts were taking shifts around the clock.
In the middle of a major contact on the game, the system disconnected and powered down for no reason he could discover. He restarted the system and reconnected. To his total amazement the entire map was recreated perfectly. Even after a host system shutdown, it recovered. No gaming data loss of any type. For a quantum particle dependant system … this was incredible.
Thomas sat up straight immediately and went into the diagnostic section of the UI. According to the log files, the gaming simulation had been stored in a separate buffer prior to total system loss. All the frequencies and … OMG!!! That’s it!! he thought to himself.
He immediately logged into the interchange. After the usual security data checks, he was logged into the main R&D section and accessed the archived data on the original accident. To his utter shock, he found a huge storage device that contained almost exactly what he was searching for had been securely and safely saved incase of further needs.
He quickly left the research and gaming he had been doing and began an intensive search for the original buffer and its storage frequencies. The results were both good and bad. The good news was that the buffer device had been stored in a safe zone to maintain its integrity. The bad news was that the safe zone was a Bose-Einstein condensate being stored at the excessively secure Cryo Institute.
Thomas sat back in frustration as his mind raced through as many scenarios as he could. Even given who he was and what his current universal clearance was, it fell far short of immediate access. Darn … he would have to jump through many hoops and insure every I was dotted and every T crossed.
Well, fine, then, if they wanted him to write a scientific paper just to gain entrance, that was just what he would do. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t already written hundreds of them. He put his VR helmet back on, and as his control interface … he used a plain old keyboard.
The Cryo Institute’s interface now appeared like a futuristic city-state whose immigration office he was visiting, applying for entry. The generic, faceless bureaucrats image behind the counter called out, “Next,” as he got to the front of the queue.
“Applying for admission,” said Thomas.
“You’ll need to fill out this form,” the employee said, giving him a stack of VR paper an inch thick. Just as Thomas expected, most of it was an explanation for why he should be granted access.
So he filled it out, typing furiously. Thomas explained about the quasicrystalline safety buffer in the stream circuit of a video game system. He drew intricate and accurate graphs to go with his equations. He also showed the reason for the accident and what had happened to the buffer. And he kept on going, until he was out of space. He handed the completed VR forms to the official.
“Very well, then, let’s see here …” said the bureaucrat, looking bored. “All right … account name, passwords, certificates … and the usual essay … hmm hmm … wait. This is … we have what? What is this?”
The official continued to read. “You’ve … shown the major deficiency in error correction to the current system and the damage that could happen again to the nanoparticles in the intermix chamber if this issue isn’t corrected immediately? How … could this be? There’s this great an issue in error correction?”
Gasping, the official went on. “You’re saying that … since the energy in a nanoparticle is related to its volume and surface area, repeating the calculations for nanoparticles of increasing sizes allows you to extrapolate the total energy inside a larger block of quasicrystal? And … you’ve discovered that two well-studied quasicrystals were enthalpy-stabilized, one an alloy of scandium and zinc, the other of ytterbium and cadmium?”
“That is correct,” replied Thomas. “This means that their state is stable even at low temperatures, as opposed to the more common entropy-stabilized situation. They’re far more ideal for cryostorage than your current solution, which is unstable at low temperatures, and that is why I need access to the buffer now, before it degrades. Please, all I need is access to the condensate in cryostorage to determine what the frequency and energy readings are on the suspended particles.”
“This is … a breakthrough!” said the official. Thomas suspected that in real life, the company’s security AI system had summoned increasingly higher levels of human employees and that he was now actually talking with the Cryo Institute’s head of security. “What did you say your name was? … Wait, you’re Dr. Thomas Tamero? Holy … I’m approving your access immediately.” In the virtual reality, the bureaucrat stamped the form with a rubber stamp, imprinting “APPROVED” in glowing ink. “Are we … permitted to use this new discovery in our internal systems?”
“Yes!” replied Thomas. “And I’ll sign whatever you want, just please, let me see the buffer matrix now! I have to see it before the information degrades! It may be those people’s only hope!”
“Fine, we’ll discuss that later, Dr. Tamero. Please, come this way …” In the virtual reality, he was being given the keys to the city, while in actuality, the Cryo Institute had just obtained a breakthrough discovery for free that would save it untold millions if not billions of dollars, while he had just been granted access to the Bose-Einstein condensate and the data it contained. If only he could read its data and transfer it to a more stable storage solution before it degraded …
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Needless to say, Thomas once again became obsessed. He had managed to not only get the exact data he had hoped for, he had managed to save the entire storage facility prior to what would come to be called a nanoparticle evolutionary change due to entropic energy losses.
Thomas sweated the long hours until the condensate readings had stabilized in the new matrix. To his great relief, none of the energy levels or frequencies had morphed …. Or had they?
There was no such thing as a higher resolution, at least so he thought, but what he saw almost blew his mind. He swore he saw vague shadows of an impossible formation of some type of micro - landscape within the quantum energy. He thought he could also see through the micro - haze, what impossibly appeared to be an A frame log cabin among the energy hazy mountain passes.
Darn! Seems pareidolia was operating at its finest. He knew pareidolia was the tendency to see a meaningful shape or pattern, particularly faces, in random or ambiguous images. Thomas fumbled with his best equipment for a better view, but better technology simply didn’t exist yet. Best he could do is the faint ghostly impressions.
With total incredulity, Thomas calculated the frequency and energy readings he would need to reconstitute the necessary neural patterns and leave the other seeming materials behind. To his amazement, his theories on bonded matter teleportation fit the bill perfectly.
It was so perfect, in fact, that Thomas, suspicious of that seeming perfection, took an extra month of readings and calculations to make sure. All he had to do was enable a bonded matrix within the crystalline assembly chamber. Thomas looked around the lab area. His eyes fell on several pieces of equipment marked “set aside till later.”
A large smile crossed his face as he moved it to the work station and plugged it into the grids. That old attempt at a mental navigation system will work perfectly …
All he needed to get from this electronic nightmare was the quantum-targeting assembly and the reassembly center. He was positive, as he started yet another complicated equation, that the quantum reassembly matrix particles would not morph if retained within the BEC.
It also meant another very important thing … Heisenberg notwithstanding, he had found a way to avoid uncertainty. The BEC actually insured that the energy patterns and frequencies were frozen in whatever and how many states they had happened to be in at the time they entered the BEC field.
Thomas immediately called the Coma unit. The phone rang twice, then a voice answered, “This is Dr. Velcorath. How may I be of service?"
“My name is Dr. Thomas Tamero. I’m the leading …”
The now-excited voice replied, “Yes, yes, I know who you are! Let me say what an honor it is to talk to you.”
Thomas chuckled. “Thank you for the flowers, Doctor.” Thomas sat back in his chair. “I need to discuss with you the possibilities of a major experiment with many hundreds of your most political patients."
Dr. Velcorath was silent for a space, then asked, “It’s the world leaders and all their guests … isn’t it?”
Thomas replied softly with a sigh, “It is, but this also has a large potential for great news. I believe I have discovered a way to reintegrate them all. I would need several others to check my work, but I feel we should have all of them back in a month or two.”
Dr. Velcorath almost fell out of his chair as the shock of this wonderful news ran through him. He was going to have his wife and child back!
“That’s incredible news!” Dr. Velcorath shouted excitedly, “When do you feel we could get started?”
Thomas’ eyebrows went up. “Hows this sound, Doc? As soon as you’re able to handle the construction of new devices.”
Dr. Velcorath replied, “OK, guess that means I’ll see you within about three hours. Let me clear my plate. Darn, this is so exciting!” the phone went dead.
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Thomas had assembled his R&D team in one of the Cryo Institute’s large conference rooms, where they recreated the necessary equipment to keep the the world leaders, guests, wives, and children's bodies alive while the other needed devices for the upcoming procedure were being constructed.
Thomas and his team had taken the neural transponder circuits from the neural navigation system he was building and with a touch of reworking combined it with the quantum reassembly matrix. The BEC shielding surrounded all the delicate parts, insuring no external energy would contaminate the streams.
For each of the individual bodies, Thomas and his team built a special cylinder large enough for the body on its padded tray to slide inside. Surrounding most of the upper end of the cylinder was the rebuilt and modified Neural Quantum Reinsertion Matrix, as they’d called it. From this device, a connection was made to the new BEC storage chamber, where the lost qubits were frozen in time.
Everyone present folded their hands and stood in respectful silence as the many bodies were brought into the room and each placed into one of the tubes. After their life sustaining equipment and monitors were functioning normally, the end of the tube was sealed.
Wispy white vapors began to rise from several hoses and the exotic equipment they were attached to as the liquid helium coolant began circulating.
Dr. Velcorath walked between the cylinders holding his wife and teenaged daughter Trina. He looked up and might even have had a tear in his eye as he said, “ Dr. Tamero … I …. I don’t know how to thank you. Even if this doesn’t work exactly as planned, at least we attempted it.”
Thomas smiled, “Thank you once again. Don’t worry, all the calculations show a good chance for success. Everyone be ready … 5 … 4 … 3 …”
About that time one of the other researchers activated the intermix matrix. Large wispy clouds of vapor formed as the near absolute zero helium circulated, and the BEC shield was brought on line.
“2 … 1.” Thomas hit the energize button.
A trilling tingling musical sound permeated everything. All the tubes lit up brightly and glowed blue before fading away. The ends of the tubes opened, and the trays slid out. All life monitors showed full green … the brain activity monitors showed wakeful activity.
It happened so suddenly that it scared everyone. Without warning, Trina sat up and began to scream. Just as suddenly, a young man of about the same age sat up, and he too screamed.
Dr. Velcorath ran over to his daughter Trina and gently took her by the shoulders, “Take it easy, Trina. Everything is all right now.”
She said, “I’m not Trina … I’m Bobby Frentes.”
The young man stopped screaming and said with terror obvious in his voice, “I’m Trina.” She held her arms out and looked down, “Now … I’m not myself … I’m … some guy. Bobby, I think?”
Immediately, the team started running several gentle tests on all the other awakening individuals to insure they were who they were supposed to be. Disorientation and some confusion was all the rest complained about. Trina and Bobby were apparently the only two who had been somehow switched.
Thomas was going nuts trying to figure this out. Looking at one screen after another, he muttered to himself, “According to all the math … any misallocations of the neural waveforms should have been completely impossible due to the differential quantum qubit frequency modulations …”
Members of the team were interviewing Trina and Bobby, trying to find out what they had been doing or where they had been when the transfer had occurred. Nothing seemed obvious – they hadn’t been near each other or even looking at each other. They seemed to kind of know who each other was; that was all.
“This isn’t making sense,” said Thomas, “There is literally no way to –” He paused. “Wait a minute … there is one very unlikely way.” He scribbled some equations on his notepad. “Quantum tunneling,” he said. “There’s a tiny chance. It’s … let’s see … wow. We could do this every day for the next century and not see it happen. So we don’t know it’s the cause, but it could be.”
“But … but Dr. Tamero,” came Trina’s voice in a plaintive whine, “what can we do now?”
“I …” Thomas began, then he paused. “I don’t know yet. But rest assured that I will not stop working on this conundrum until I can learn how to fix it. But … how to cause a quantum tunneling event …”
Trina and Bobby had been seated next to each other, while all the various dignitaries and their families were demanding their phones, aides, and information about what had happened in the time they’d been away. The two teenagers looked at each other in shock, each of them seeing themselves.
Trina’s dad gingerly helped her from the tubes platform. He said, “Relax. I promise being in Bobby’s body may be a shock, but you won’t be disappointed if we can’t do anything about it. You’re still my child, and I still love you.”
Bobby spoke up in a whiney voice, “But Daadd. This is … horrible. I’m notta guy … an suddenly I am. Daddy … Imma trans now, like it or not.” Bobby’s parents were at his side, even though he was now in a girl’s body.
Trina nodded and said, “Yeah, we both are now. Only issue is, we aren’t the same kind of trans. Genetically, we are the gender our body portrays."
Dr. Velcorath said, “Due to the severity of this accident, the high uncertainty and difficulty in preserving qubit energy states and frequencies, and this type of recovery, I am truly amazed we got any of you back at all.”
Thomas turned to the data entry terminal and started looking over any and all collected data during the transfer. He sorely hoped he would be able to find at least a ghost of a way to cause some form of quantum tunneling.
He looked over at the young man and young woman. He shook his head in sympathy as he pondered for a bit about the issues they would face if he failed. Thomas turned back to his research as he once again doggedly sought that needle in a cosmically large haystack.
Quantum tunneling, as Thomas knew, was a phenomenon where a quantum particle passed through a potential energy barrier, even if it didn’t have enough energy to surmount it classically. It was due to the wave-like nature of particles in quantum mechanics, allowing them to penetrate barriers and exist virtually in many other quanta with a certain probability simultaneously.
The energy barrier must be finite in height and relatively thin for tunneling to occur with a significant probability. The particle's wave properties were essential, including frequency and energy quanta, as the wavefunction needed to penetrate the barrier. This phenomenon was more prevalent at the microscopic level due to the required thinness of the barrier and the particle's wave-like nature, although the rules appeared to be the same on the quantum scale, although a much more random happening.
In the back of his mind, Thomas had one other idea, though: you didn’t need quantum tunneling to happen if there was no barrier to begin with. If he could only produce a direct pathway for the neural patterns, he could make this happen again, but the problem was that he had no idea how it had happened in the first place. There was no indication of exactly which barriers the signals had tunneled through, when, and in what order, to produce the phenomenon he clearly saw before him with his own eyes. These two young people’s minds had obviously switched bodies – yet absolutely no other participants had. Or … had they?
For now, the young man and woman were going home with their parents … Trina, now in a male body, was going home with her father, Dr. Velcorath. Bobby, now in a female body, was going home with his father and mother, who were highly-placed officials in the Australian government. But Thomas … was wondering.
Thomas had been working with government officials at the highest level possible during the course of the crisis – the highest level that hadn’t been in a coma. He still had direct lines to some of them, and he called one now – the number for the deputy director of the CIA. They had been doing their best to keep tensions calm and the world out of a state of total war during the crisis.
As he expected, he was told that he would be called back and should wait in a secured area, so he went to the room in his laboratory suite that had been designated for such things, regularly swept for surveillance devices, always kept locked, and so forth. He scanned his palm print and entered the code to access the room, then … waited.
The call came shortly. “Dr. Tamero,” he said, answering the phone.
“Thomas,” said the voice of the deputy director, Sandra Sommerfeld. “I can’t talk long. What do you have?”
“Are you sure Trina and Bobby are the only two who switched bodies?” asked Thomas.
“No,” Sandra replied. “I’m never sure of anything. Do you think there were other cases we missed?”
“Yes,” Thomas said. “I’m not sure either. But here’s the thing: Publicly I said the explanation was probably quantum tunneling. I can explain the phenomenon to you, but for now let me just say it’s really unlikely. But it can happen. Here’s the thing that’s really unlikely, though. It would take not just two, but thousands of quantum tunneling events to happen, at exactly the right times and in the right order, for this to happen.”
“Super unlikely,” said Sandra. “You’re saying it was engineered.”
“The chances are quintillions to one against it being an accident,” said Thomas. “Bobby and Trina … I assume you’ve done background checks on them? They don’t know any state secrets?”
“Of course we have,” said Sandra, “and we have people watching both of them – then and now. There’s been no opportunity for them to learn anything confidential or compromising. Bobby certainly knows about Trina’s birthmark by now, but that’s neither here nor there.”
“So they were probably an accident,” Thomas said. “There’s probably at least one other swap that’s taken place, and that’s the one that was intentional. Somebody’s in someone else’s body, and I’m sure it’s not for fun.”
“Got it,” said Sandra. “We’ll look into it. Thank you. Are you still going to look into how to reverse it?”
“Yes,” Thomas said. “But this just got more dangerous, if you can believe it. If it looks like I have a solution, they might think I’ve figured out how they did it.”
“Have you?” Sandra asked.
“Not yet,” said Thomas. “But I probably will soon.”
“Can you make it look, publicly, like it’s really difficult and you’re having a lot of trouble figuring it out?” Sandra asked. “And meantime have a solution ready soon?”
Thomas thought a moment. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll claim to be going on the assumption that it was quantum tunneling. I’ll run simulation after simulation, trying to get a quantum tunneling event to happen. It’s very unlikely, so that progress will appear to be slow. Meanwhile I’ll use machine learning to analyze the transfer data and work out how to do this on purpose. I estimate the analysis will take between a day and a week. Then I’ll have to test it.”
“Good,” said Sandra. “I’ll contact you via the usual methods if we come up with anything about who else might have swapped.”
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Trina stood in front of the bathroom mirror in just a pair of track shorts. She flexed Bobby’s muscles and felt a tingling rush at how handsome a body she had. One thing she did notice was a strange dark stubbly shadow that covered her face. She rubbed her hand over her chin and marveled at how much it felt like sandpaper.
She remembered her dad putting soap on his face and shaving it off. Trina knew how to shave as a girl, so how to do it wasn’t really an issue as she took her dad’s can of shaving cream and squirted a dollop into her palm. She then spread it all over her face and shaved as a male for the first time.
She’d even managed to do it without nicking herself. She was pleased as she took a warm damp washcloth and rinsed the remainder of the shaving cream off.
On the other side of this coin was Bobby sitting in a warm comfortable tub of bubbles. Needless to say, he was mind blown to actually be a girl. It was for real.
Bobby’s mom poked her head in the bathroom door and asked softly, “Would my baby need Mommy to show her how to shave her legs?”
Bobby was mindblown already, and this question didn’t help in the least. Nor did the fact that his mother took him gently by a leg, then started rubbing some type of sweet-smelling jell all over his leg. Then she brought out a lady fair razor and slowly demonstrated how to shave legs … and other special places.
Bobby had never told anyone nor acted in any way like it, but the fact that he was now a girl was a childhood fantasy come true. A thought ran through him for an instant. “What about Trina? The girl whose body I wound up in? What if she’d also like to …? Nah … that would make this too perfect.”
His mother showed Bobby how to properly shave the places girls shave. She also told Bobby she would show her how to use the hair removing laser pen. It was easy, but time consuming, and the hair wouldn’t ever grow back.
Bobby felt real embarrassment when his mom held out a cute pair of panties and said nonchalantly, “Step in, baby.”
Bobby stood and looked at the panties she held out for a bit, then stepped in. Bobby was amazed at how good it felt to have them pulled on. The other wonderful thing was that they fit … no tucking, binding, or gaffs.
“Mom?” Bobby asked. “You’ve never … I mean … shown me how to do stuff like this before.”
“Well, you weren’t a girl before, Dear,” she said. “To tell the truth … I always wanted a girl. While you are one … will you let me help you be one? There’s no telling when they’ll figure out how to fix this – or if they will at all.”
“I … I guess it’s OK, Mom,” said Bobby in his new feminine voice. “I don’t know how to be a girl, but now I have to be one, so I guess I need your help.”
“And you can have it, Honey,” said his mom. “Let me show you how to put on a bra. Just like the panties, I’ve bought you some that I think should fit.”
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Meanwhile, a particular official from a nation that believed itself to be unfairly treated and that the rest of the world considered a rogue harbor for terrorists was in another official’s body in another nation. His country was on the verge of a nuclear breakthrough – weapons systems the like of which the rest of the world had never seen. But there was just one part that they couldn’t get working … so they’d made a deal with another country who had a different part they couldn’t get to work in their own nuclear weapon system …
He’d been picked because of his excellent memory. He could read pages of schematics and draw copies of them perfectly, even if he didn’t understand them. They’d tested and trained him over and over for years. This had to be perfect, because there’d only be one chance. The rest of the world couldn’t know that their two nations were exchanging information or had made a deal, because they’d bomb all their nuclear labs … so it had to be untraceable.
Back in his home country, his counterpart was in his body, similarly trained and doing something similar, no doubt. She was being given a tour of their nuclear weapon systems and shown all the plans and schematics. And he, in her body, was here, as they set him down in front of their computers and showed him all their plans. He memorized them as he’d been trained to do.
This would take a while … but when he and his counterpart were done, they’d simply find a way to swap their minds back, with all that valuable information coming along, untraceably. They wouldn’t even have to meet in the same place. The scientists had figured out how to do this and had caused so much confusion that nobody had noticed this happening.
And soon, two of the world’s least predictable nations would have its best nuclear weapons.
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“Thomas,” said Sandra. “We think we know who it is. There’s too much coincidence for it not to be.”
“Excellent,” Thomas replied. It was one week later. He knew how to switch Trina and Bobby back now, in theory, but he was just starting tests on lab mice. Mice trained in a maze could be tested by switching their bodies with mice who had never seen that maze before. “There’s a snag, though. If they switched and accidentally involved Trina and Bobby at the same time, they’re going to need Trina and Bobby to switch back at the same time in order for the … agents or whatever to switch. It’s a matter of quantum symmetry. It won’t work unless they do the double switch. All the equations say so. I can confirm it with a lab test soon.”
“Please do,” Sandra replied. “If you’re correct, Bobby and Trina are both in danger. People will be coming for them.”
“Of course, it works both ways,” said Thomas. “If Bobby and Trina want to switch, they’ll need the two agents.”
“That’s if they want to switch,” Sandra said. “I’m seeing some intelligence that suggests they may not want to.”
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Bobby and Trina began to hang out with each other while their parents were busy worrying their heads over swapping them back. Neither one was prepared for the attraction and other strange gender specific feelings and emotions that tingled intensely through them.
Bobby had never really given any thought to his male physique, but now that he was in a girl’s body, seeing it made him feel so weird. There were many urges and deep desires and needs that slowly developed.
Trina’s biggest issue was what on earth to do with this huge lump that kept swelling up in her pants and pinching every time she came near to Bobby. Something that was really starting to bother Trina were the intense wants and desires that had begun to flood her male body. Then again, Trina had to acknowledge that her female body was very sexy and cute.
Bobby on the other hand was forced to accept the fact he was super attracted to a male. As a male, he had always been athletic and kept his body well developed. Now he understood why so many of the girls were attracted to him.
Bobby was caught in the same spider’s web and it scared him a bit as he and Trina held each other intimately close, and French kissed for a long time under the shade of the old oak tree. They both knew that there were security agents from at least two countries aware of their locations and activities at all times … but to them, that became less important for the moment.
By this time, neither one wanted to swap back but wanted to continue exploring this new thing. The emotions and desires grew in intensity as they kissed and intimately caressed each other in very pleasant places.
Thomas, on the other hand, was doing what he said he would do and did more intense research on quantum tunneling, hoping to mislead whomever might be watching. The first thing Thomas did was try his best to make it seem as if he were attempting to discover how to make tunneling more probable. He even reduced the energy barrier thickness, since thinner barriers increased the likelihood of tunneling.
A lower potential energy barrier increases the probability as does systemic resonance. Having systems in resonance (in phase or harmonic with one another) can enhance the tunneling probability. The most frustrating thing was, you can't create a quantum tunneling event, you can, however observe its effects. It is not something that can be "created." It's a severely probabilistic event, not a guaranteed one. You can, however, observe and utilize quantum tunneling through specific setups.
Quantum tunneling is essential in various phenomena, including nuclear fusion in stars, the operation of flash memory, and the functionality of scanning tunneling microscopes. The issue is still present, the tunneling aspect is random, although the probabilities of its occurrence can be improved. The act of tunneling decreases the wave amplitude due the reflection of the incident wave when it comes into the contact with the barrier but does not affect the wave equation.
Meanwhile, on the down low, Thomas was having a neural net analyze data about the other possibility: there was no need for quantum tunneling if there was no potential barrier. There had been subtle sabotage that had simply removed the barriers at precisely the right times … or almost precisely, as there’d been one more swap than they’d planned for. If it hadn’t been for that mistake, they might have gotten away with it unnoticed. But the question was exactly where to bridge the circuitry and when.
Within a week, Thomas had a theoretical answer and was testing it. However, the saboteurs certainly already knew this answer – they’d made it happen once, so they could do it again. They’d probably been working on this for years, while he had days. But they … weren’t Dr. Thomas Tamero.
“So,” said Sandra during one of their secure phone calls, “it seems as if Bobby and Trina have no interest whatsoever in switching back.”
“Well, that simplifies the problem, then, doesn’t it?” Thomas asked.
“It does,” Sandra agreed. “All we have to do is … eliminate one of the agents, and their entire plan is spoiled. According to what you’ve told me, they will need both agents and both Bobby and Trina, or they can’t swap back.”
“That’s what the symmetry of the situation states,” said Thomas. “Obviously they’re going to pull out all the stops to kidnap Bobby and Trina, as well as to safeguard their agents, until they can get them all positioned for the swap.”
“Yes,” Sandra confirmed. “Now, they don’t necessarily have to be in the same physical location, do they?”
“They do not,” replied Thomas. “They just have to all be hooked up to a connected quantum VR system at the same time, and it doesn’t have to be a Yesterday on Demand system, either. It can be a custom one, walled off from the rest of the world – but the connection points still have to be in communication with each other.”
“That confirms what we understood as well,” said Sandra. “We’re monitoring all private VR communications, especially encrypted ones. We can’t necessarily decrypt the data, but if we could, we couldn’t reveal that, you understand.”
“Of course,” Thomas replied. “If anyone makes a move on either of those kids, though, you’ll know they’re ready.”
“You’re right,” Sandra agreed. “They’re not going to tip their hand like that until their plan’s shifted into high gear. But I have one more question.”
“What’s that?” asked Thomas.
“If Trina and Bobby have really decided they don’t want to switch back … what happens if someone tries to force it to happen?” Sandra paused, then added, “Is there any documented case so far of anybody being swapped who didn’t really want to be, at least on some level?”
“Hmm,” Thomas said, “no, not really since this technique is new – there’s no way to tell whether the lab mice are willing, but no unwilling humans have been swapped. The agents wanted to swap, because that was the plan. Trina and Bobby seem not to want to swap back, so it may be that at some level they wanted things to be this way. There’s no evidence that anybody can truly be swapped against their will. But what if they put guns to their heads? That’ll go a long way toward motivating someone to want something.”
“Good point,” said Sandra. “Let’s both work on what to do if the worst-case scenario happens.”
“Understood,” replied Thomas. He went back to his testing. Mouse 23 may or may not have been one who’d been taught the maze, and he may or may not have been swapped with another mouse who may or may not have learned the maze too – the computers knew, but Thomas didn’t. “OK, 23, let’s see how you do.” He pushed the button that opened Mouse 23’s cage and let him into the maze’s entrance area.
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Bobby looked at her new self in the mirror in her room. Her mother had purchased her a complete wardrobe. She had insisted Bobby put on the cute bikini panties. She helped him into the bra. Then she handed him a pair of jet black footed leggings and a poofy sleeved top.
When he had finally dressed, the vision looking back in the mirror’s reflection was absolutely a goddess. The leggings showed off her beautiful figure. There was the faintest hint of the panty line. The top showed just enough of his cleavage to be really sexy.
Now, Bobby felt a pleasant tingle run through him when he thought of Trina. He looked around and saw the phone. She smiled and dialed Trina’s number.
“Hello? This is … Bobby.”
“Hi, this is Trina. I was hoping we might could go to the Skinny Monkey and get a burger and fries ...”
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Meanwhile, Thomas was doing his very best to appear to be researching a way to create and cause more quantum tunneling, when in actuality, he was following quite another revolutionary path. He’d originally been trying to duplicate what the terrorist nations had done, but now that he knew that the goal was to prevent them from swapping the agents back, along with Bobby and Trina, he had other ideas.
During his experiments over the years, Thomas had discovered a new way to make intercrystals, which were similar to regular crystals but had nonrepeating patterns, although they still had crystals’ symmetries. According to the research equations, intercrystals demonstrated electronic characteristics not previously observed, opening the door to progress in other areas such as advanced electronic devices like the ones he was trying to invent, quantum computing, and seemingly magical sustainable materials.
One way to create intercrystals was by layering one-atom-thick sheets of graphene on top of a crystal of hexagonal boron nitride (a compound made of boron and nitrogen), with each sheet slightly rotated relative to the one beneath. This produced moiré patterns (similar to the visual ripples that appear when two fine mesh screens overlap). This small structural shift dramatically influenced the way electrons traveled through the material. Thomas had found more efficient and faster ways to produce them, and not only with graphene.
But the benefit of intercrystals was that they gave Thomas a new handle to control electronic behavior using geometry alone, without having to change the material’s chemical composition. Although a healthy dose of electromagnetic attraction at certain frequencies coupled with the already perfected BEC shielding aided tremendously. It was like replacing one type of conductor with another just by pressing a button.
When a quantum state was preserved because of the material’s topology, it was referred to as a topological excitation. These states were naturally much more resistant to noise, and Thomas' newest protection additionally used magnetism – a much more common and accessible ingredient – to achieve the same effect.
By harnessing magnetic interactions, he was able to engineer the robust topological excitations required for topological quantum particle transfers without fear of any type of contamination. This coupled with his BEC shielding aided in the invulnerability of the quantum particle streams.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle showed that there was a fundamental limit to the precision with which the position and momentum of a particle could be known simultaneously. The precise position of an atom would detrimentally affect the momentum, and vice versa … until now.
With this new approach, with the magnetic manipulation coupled with the BEC, Thomas had actually created a way to achieve a dual precision and more accurate view, which was thought to be impossible due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
Thomas leaned back in his arm chair and began further research as his search protocol brought up a very old article. Thomas read it with a smile.
Horace Lamb had discovered in 1900, before Werner Heisenberg was born, and well before the development of quantum physics, a way to show a vibrating particle’s energy loss. Lamb was interested in describing how a vibrating particle in a solid could lose energy to the solid.
Using Newton’s laws of motion, Lamb had shown that elastic waves created by the particle’s motion fed back on the particle itself and caused it to damp - that is, to vibrate with less and less energy over time.
Thomas’ eyebrows went up. Now he knew exactly how they had done it. They’d used a “damped quantum harmonic oscillator,” a quantum-scale version of a guitar string’s motion, and simulated a controlled tunneling event. Unfortunately, it had snagged other unintended bonded particles along its path, resulting in Trina and Bobby’s swap.
In other words, the high energy state of the quantum bits hadn’t been contaminated; they’d been reduced in energy, which had led to the decay of other more important bonded energy frequencies requiring frequency replacement which had been collected due to the necessary bond through Trina and Bobby to fulfill the required quantum state. The return interference had created a frequency shift that had resulted in the unintended swap.
“But we’ve still got the same problem,” said Thomas to Sandra the next time they securely communicated. “They need to switch their agents back, and Trina and Bobby are still quantum-entangled with them, so they need those two kids.”
“But here’s the thing,” said Sandra. “There hasn’t so far been even one attempt to kidnap either of them, or a member of their family, or any of their friends. I don’t get it, except perhaps that they don’t realize Bobby and Trina are involved yet. Once they do, they’ll stop at nothing. But so far we haven’t detected a transfer attempt that we haven’t been able to foil. They’ve tried to swap the agents back, but we’ve used your suggestions to detect that and shut it down.”
Thomas replied, “But sooner or later they’ll find out. It seems to me that the only way to stop them from trying, so those two kids will be safe and won’t have to keep looking over their shoulder their whole lives, would be for at least one of those two agents to be … eliminated. But I’m sure you’ve already thought of that.”
“Of course we have,” Sandra replied. “And don’t think we haven’t been trying. It’s really hard to infiltrate those two countries. Do you have any ideas, based on what you’ve discovered?”
“Well, I now know how to swap two mice,” said Thomas. “That’s been thoroughly tested. I’ve swapped them and swapped them back, and I now believe my own results, with double-blind controlled experimentation. I’ve also proven my theory to my satisfaction that two swapped pairs can be quantum-entangled, and can only be swapped back if all four are involved. The intercrystal technique can be used to easily make such mind swaps easy or impossible – if intercrystal conductors are part of the system.”
“There’s no telling what technology the terrorist nations are using,” said Sandra. “But if we do it right, and do it quickly, maybe we can make sure they have no choice. How fast can we manufacture a lot of intercrystal VR conduits?”
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Over the next few weeks, the only VR connection conduits available on worldwide markets were now made using Thomas’ intercrystal innovations. This meant that without any of his special modifications using electric or magnetic fields, VR connections were faster and more efficient – a lot faster. Users were raving about how great the experience was now – so responsive and realistic that they could scarcely tell they were in a virtual reality.
At the same time, agents from every nation in the free world were subtly sabotaging all VR connection conduit materials made previous to this innovation. Even devices that had been sitting unused on store shelves or in warehouses would now no longer work due to a mysterious decay that was happening.
This was done using another innovation of Thomas’ invention. Electromagnetic waves of a certain circular polarization had no effect on the new intercrystal conduit, but degraded the old forms of conduit.
Then one day Sandra contacted Thomas. “Just wanted to let you know quickly – it’s red alert. The agents tried to swap, and this time we weren’t able to prevent them from making a connection. And we can’t tell on our end whether it worked or not – but according to your experiments, it can’t have, because they didn’t involve Bobby and Trina.”
“So that’s it,” said Thomas, sitting forward in his chair tensely. “They’re going to look into why, and they’re going to find out about those two kids. I’m sure all your agents are on alert. They’ve both got targets on their backs. So do all their friends and family. Even Internet friends.”
“We were already watching them,” said Sandra, “but now we’ve got boots on the ground, following them at all times. They won’t like it, but it’s necessary. There’s one bit of good news, though.”
“What’s that?”
“They did use a VR unit that involves your new intercrystal technology,” said Sandra. “It looks as if they don’t realize that it’s something to be avoided.”
“And you didn’t do anything to stop them using the intercrystal’s properties,” said Thomas. “Good. It means that in the worst case scenario, there may still be something we can do.”
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Trina could scarcely control himself as he called Bobby. He’d really become used to the new body over the past few months and had been thinking of himself as a boy now.
“Hello?” came a voice that Trina might once have identified as hers, but it sounded like a different person now – both of them had changed, not to mention Bobby’s different accent.
“Bobby! Hi!” said Trina. “How’ve you been doing?”
“OK, I guess, even though our government has all these security agents following me all the time. Everyone in my family, really. And all my friends. They go wherever we go.”
“Oh, I know!” said Trina. “And these stupid secure phones the government agents have me using – they’re so slow, and they keep making me sign in, and they don’t have all the apps and games I like.”
“Same here!” said Bobby. “But at least they can still make calls. I bet they’re listening in, though.”
“Probably,” Trina said. “Better them than whoever they’re trying to protect us from, I guess. I wish I knew when this was gonna be over. Can’t they catch these people?”
“Yeah,” agreed Bobby. “Meanwhile, want to go out somewhere? We’re still in the US for a few more months.”
“I’d love to!” replied Trina. “At least they’re not keeping me from doing that. They’re going to follow us, but they won’t stop us. They never have so far.”
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“So, sorry about that, Mr. Monroe, I wish I didn’t have to take over the whole restaurant whenever I wanted to go out, but that’s just what happens …”
“Oh, don’t worry about it, Trina,” said the owner of the Skinny Monkey Family Restaurant. “Maybe I have to close down for the regular public, but I’m going to have a bunch of government security people for customers, in addition to you and Bobby. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.”
After hanging up the phone, Trina sighed. He wished his life could go back to normal. “I don’t want to go back to being a girl,” he said. “But I wouldn’t mind having to do without the massive extra security detail.”
“When did he say he’d be ready for you, Trina?” asked Gerald, one of her security guards, always hanging around dressed in black with sunglasses, even indoors.
“Six p.m.,” Trina said with a sigh. “We should leave about 5:30.”
“I’ll notify the drivers,” Gerald said, getting his phone out.
Meanwhile, it was the same with Bobby. Her guards were only slightly different – just as numerous, but the ones that were around her all the time were women. She didn’t get to drive anywhere, she couldn’t be alone, and she could barely find a way to be together with Trina.
“Just pretend I’m not here,” said Phyllis, Bobby’s current bodyguard, standing right behind her.
“I’m trying to do my hair,” said Bobby. “Can you please … step back a bit?”
Phyllis shifted slightly. “It’s the best I can do,” she said.
At 5:25 on the dot, both of them were separately ushered into their respective bulletproof SUVs, driven by security personnel from their respective governments, of course, and at precisely 5:30 p.m. they started making their way to the restaurant, approximately equidistant from both of their residences, which was of course why it was on the list of security-approved establishments that they were allowed to go out to.
And at precisely 5:42, they both drove across bridges that both exploded simultaneously, causing their bulletproof SUVs to plummet into the water below.
When they regained something resembling consciousness, they weren’t together. Bobby and Trina both found themselves restrained on uncomfortable tables, their arms and legs bound tightly, with some kind of helmets over their heads so they couldn’t see.
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“Damn it!” yelled Sandra. “They paid whole neighborhoods to move out so there’d be thousands of houses and apartments for us to search! Are all personnel on it? Anybody not searching?”
“Just you and me,” said her assistant.
“Damn it!” she yelled again. She got out her secure phone and called Thomas. “We’ve got a problem,” she said. “They’ve made their move.”
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“This is bad,” Sandra said. “Our options are to find and kill one of the agents, find and disrupt their transfer equipment, find and rescue Bobby or Trina, or … well, find and kill either Bobby or Trina, which I really don’t want to do.”
Thomas sat up straight in his chair and slapped his forehead, “Darn, what kind of an idiot am I?”
Sandra’s eyebrows went up in surprise, “OK, dummy, just what makes one of the brightest men I have ever known say he’s an idiot?”
Thomas brought out his portable tablet computer, booted it up, and made sure it was logged into the secure network properly. “I just realized that neural frequency transfer is exactly the same principle as …” He trailed off as he began typing furiously now that the computer had booted fully to command prompt.
Sandra asked, “Well? Don’t keep me in the dark. What is it?”
Thomas replied as he continued typing furiously, “I need you to get me an armed security detachment. They need to be informed they will be taking charge of and containing two spies. I do not know if they will be armed and dangerous at the time they arrive.”
By this time, Sandra’s expression was one of serious concern, “OK, I’m on it now. How large of a detachment you think? And where do they need to be?”
Thomas replied, “Small one of about twelve agents. And … right here.”
Thomas held up his tablet’s screen so Sandra could see it on her phone. There were equations on it – they were severely complex and referred to frequencies and particles she had never even heard of. Then, certain aspects of the designs she was seeing reminded her of the equipment Thomas had used to restore the life forces of the dignitaries and their children. But there was also a map with a highlighted building. It was … her own building, the one she was in right now. “My building?”
Thomas said with a tinge of excitement, “That’s right. Right in the lobby. We have the frequency ranges the agents used in their failed last attempt – not that they’ll use exactly the same thing next time, but they’re using our conduits, and they’re probably limited in their choices by now.”
Sandra said, “Yes, and I can get you most all of the energy readings at the time if you need them. Still, you haven’t told me anything yet.”
Thomas stopped typing and looked at Sandra, “Oh, sorry. Some time ago, I discovered bonded teleportation of macroscopic objects was possible. It’s exactly the same technology as the swap tech, only the targeting array is adjusted slightly differently. Instead of building a teleporter, I built the neural transporter. It’s the exact same except for the frequency targeting range adjustment. With a simple adjustment, I can have both agents there instantly. All I have to do is physically locate them … and of course the moment they activate their transfer equipment, they’ll show me where they are …”
Sandra said quickly as she took out her other phone and hit the rapid dial, “The detail will be here shortly. I’m also notifying R&D to assemble in the transfer room immediately.”
Thomas didn’t reply, all he did was went back to furiously typing and filling his computer’s screen with super complex equations.
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Bobby felt a familiar tingling in her skull. “No no no you aren’t sending me back! You can’t do this!”
Elsewhere, Trina was struggling with his bonds. “I won’t let you! You hear me? I can tell what you’re trying to do!”
And then … both of them stopped. The tingling sensation had ceased. Around them, they heard their captors shouting in confusion, though they didn’t understand the languages.
A moment later, they heard nothing, because they were sitting down in their living rooms at home. They both took out their phones – Trina’s was still in her pants pocket, while Bobby had to look around for her purse. It wasn’t anywhere she could see. Then it appeared out of thin air, on the floor right next to her chair. She grabbed for her phone – and it rang.
“Bobby?”
“Trina?”
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Sandra’s security detail was a bit surprised when two people just appeared out of nowhere among them – just a bit. They immediately zip tied the agents’ hands behind their backs and started searching them for weapons or other objects of interest. Several guns were pointed at the terrorist agents as the security forces marched them to the holding cells.
“Both packages delivered,” said one of the security agents into his secure phone.
“Excellent work,” said Sandra, in her office. Then she contacted Thomas.
“I trust you got my … special delivery,” Thomas said.
“Under lock and key,” Sandra replied. “And what about Bobby and Trina?”
“I just sent them to their homes,” said Thomas. “There’s no telling what those terrorists would have done to them if I’d just left them where they were. Fortunately, they were also connected, so I knew their exact coordinates as well.”
“Only a few more loose ends to tie up,” said Sandra. “Send me those coordinates, and I can have agents at both locations. We have to round up as many of them as possible. We might even be able to capture their equipment.”
Thomas typed on his computer. Sandra’s phone got a message. She forwarded it on to her agents.
“What about the explosions?” asked Thomas. “Were those agents hurt?”
“These terrorist nations, they pulled off one very precise operation,” said Sandra. “The agents who were driving Bobby and Trina are in rough shape. They’re alive, but we’ll have to wait to see whether they pull through. It’s not as if they were alone out there, though. Everybody watches each other’s back.”
“Let’s hope they make it, then,” said Thomas. “Meanwhile, do you think Trina and Bobby are still in danger?”
“With the agents locked up, I don’t think so,” Sandra said. “But as long as those two agents are still in each other’s bodies, aren’t Trina and Bobby still … quantum entangled, or whatever you called it?”
“Well, I have an idea about that,” Thomas said. “It can’t disentangle them, but if I’m right, it can twist things so horribly that nobody will ever untangle it. Bobby and Trina will be safe.”
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The news that matter / energy transport was possible rocked the planet. As rapidly as they could, new teleport loci were built and were appearing everywhere. Liquid fuels were no longer used for transportation and the gases produced by combustion were falling rapidly in the planet’s atmosphere. Some people even had their cars converted into teleport loci – set your destination, get in your car, turn the key, and be teleported there.
The new moon habitat, Luna City became extremely popular. On the far side of the moon, one of the most advanced telescope arrays mankind ever designed had been assembled. It operated even better than a space based one due to the stability of the scope’s base, and it wasn’t disrupted by the millions of satellites that now orbited Earth.
The newest Space Construction Facility at the Earth / Moon Lagrange point had begun building several ships to carry teleporter platforms to other places. Due to the fact there were no living creatures on the ships, the thrust vectors could be extremely high without danger of harming anyone due to inertial damage. The new nuclear reaction drive could put a platform on a certain selected planet in about two years.
Thomas had received several requests from Bobby and Trina, asking if they could perhaps have a means to visit each other in a more timely manner. Ah, young love … so sweet, he thought as he read their emails. So he customized two transfer stations, their targeting arrays already shielded so nothing could contaminate the streams. Their touch screen targeting user interfaces were simplicity incarnate and self-explanatory. And now they had Thomas’ custom programming.
Thomas had given the two of them the ability to travel wherever they could find spatial coordinates for instantly … although he didn’t exactly tell them this. Thomas felt it would be a better surprise finding it out on their own. In the meantime, there were presets for each other’s homes. All they had to do to visit one another was stand on the pad and press the button.
As for the two spies, well, there were many people who had found others to switch bodies with. There were even services appearing online that would attempt to match people with others who wanted to switch bodies, and a legal infrastructure had appeared to deal with official body swaps.
Thomas simply made arrangements to handle some of these cases, and took some volunteers who agreed to help him in the name of national security or nuclear non-proliferation, who would remain in the same bodies while still helping.
He simply entangled a self-contained network of swap portals with one another, guided by a computer. With one person standing on each pad, the computer calculated a series of 1024 randomly-determined transactions limited by the stipulation that those who wished to be swapped ended up in the intended body, and those who didn’t wish to be swapped ended up in the same body.
And, of course, one of those who ended up in the same body was one of the two spies.
Then he did the same thing, only with the other spy as one of the participants in the swap meet. The result was that all of this would have to be undone in exactly reverse order for the two spies to ever return to their own bodies – that plus Bobby and Trina’s swap reversal, of course. But since Thomas had wiped the records of exactly what transactions had been performed and in what order, it would take the terrorists a very long time to figure out the proper sequence and recover their information – assuming it could be accomplished in the spies’ lifetime.
Finally, Thomas got Sandra to leak just enough information about what had been done to the traditional and social media. The two terrorist nations would have no choice but to give up on this plan. No, if they were going to get their information, they’d have to capture the spies directly, an attempt that would be far easier to detect and foil than the electronic transfer of neural mind data. They’d just be kept in two separate teleport-shielded prisons … and all prisons were now teleport-shielded, of course.
“We could just execute them, you know,” said Sandra, far more casual about such things than Thomas, during one of their secure chats.
“I can’t be a party to that,” Thomas said. “Of course, there’s nothing I can do to stop you if you choose to advance such a plan, but I refuse to be involved.”
“You wouldn’t, say, store their neural data in one of your permanent Einstein things?” Sandra asked.
Thomas said, “Then their bodies would be comatose. Vegetables. Their minds would be permanently isolated. And what would you do with their bodies then? Repatriate them? As if they’d keep them alive on life support. Might as well just kill them right now.”
“It’s on the table,” Sandra replied. “I’m just looking for a less-lethal means of ensuring they never return home with their secrets.”
“It doesn’t have to be never,” said Thomas. “One day soon the major nuclear powers will make those secrets obsolete, I’m sad to say. On that day, we might as well let them go.”
“Or bargain their freedom for prisoners they’ve taken,” Sandra mused. “But you’re right – their usefulness to their homelands is waning day by day.”
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“Rdy!” Bobby texted to Trina. Trina popped into view on Bobby’s teleporter pad, and the two hugged, putting their phones away.
“Thank you Dr. Tamero!” said Bobby.
“Definitely,” Trina agreed. “So much better than being driven somewhere in a motorcade.”
“I’ve still got security guards, though,” Bobby said. “They’re just … you know, not in my room all the time.”
“I just wish these things could take us somewhere else,” Trina said. “I can go to your place, and you can go to mine, and that’s great, because now that your family’s gone home we’re on opposite sides of the world, but … can’t most of these things go to other places?”
“I guess,” said Bobby. “Anywhere where there’s a teleport pad, anyway. If you know the code. And the password, if it’s locked.” She played with the touch screen, which neither of them had experimented with before; they’d only pressed the main button to visit each others’ pads. “Wait … what’s this?” She looked at the window, which now displayed controls she’d never seen before. Trina looked too.
Together they read, “Teleport anywhere in the universe? Enter coordinates?”
They looked at each other in astonishment.
------------------------------ THE END ------------------------------
Story Circle
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Lost in Yesterday
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