The Dent in the Universe by E.W. Doc Parris
Series: The WalrusTech Series, Book 1
Release Date: Monday, May 29 2023
Publishing Company: Magic Genius Books
Cover Artist: Magic Genius Books
Primary Plot Arc: Speculative Fiction
Genres: Horror, Science Fiction
Length: Novel / 93,000 Words / 346 Pages
Keywords/Categories: Time Machine, Zombie Pandemic, zombies, sci-fi, science fiction, speculative fiction, horror, Irresponsible Tech Companies, Quantum Mechanics, new release, announcement, giveaway
Blurb
To resuscitate his fading celebrity, tech CEO Stephen Lucas would sell his soul for one more hit. When the subspace network for his holographic gaming empire crashes, his hardware guru makes a discovery proving that, though the mechanics may differ a bit, Einstein was right once again— information can be sent backward in time.
Lucas sees a dream product for procrastinators. Want a pizza now? Send your order back in time 30 minutes. Forgot to make reservations at that chichi french restaurant two weeks ago? No worries. Buy that PowerBall ticket. Invest in that stock. Make a FaceTime call to a loved one that passed away a month ago.
In a culture built on instant gratification, Lucas knows he has a hit that will make Wall Street sit up and beg. But when he rushes into beta testing, he learns that the stuff dreams are made of can quickly become the stuff of nightmares.
Warnings: violence, torture, body horror, branding, implied cannibalism.
✨ Exclusive Excerpt ✨
Stephen paced slowly to stage right as the bright colored clouds muted to a fathomless black mist. “So. You know we like to bring you one new thing, something absolutely new every year. But, y’know, it’s hard to keep secrets. The game tech business has become sort of cutthroat. The big three are all, y’know, trying to outdo one another. And the tech blogs are competitive too. Right? They’re trying to out scoop one another. Where’s Horace Gruber? There you are, you son of a bi… There you are! How many times have our patent filings ended up on your home page? We love Horace. We do. But, it’s hard to keep a secret in this business with guys like him doing his job so well.”
His golden eyes soberly swept the entire audience. “So, that’s why we took extra precautions to make sure today would be a surprise.” The audience groaned, desperate with anticipation. “This past year, we made a breakthrough. It’s a new chip. A new design. A whole new science. Because it’s so new, we had to develop a whole new fabrication technique for it. But we kept it really secret. We filed all of our forty-seven patents through subsidiaries and shells. We built all the new fab plants from scratch so the bloggers that watch our production supply lines, like Gruber here, wouldn’t see it coming.
“This is no-shit magic genius stuff. So, what is it?” He took a sip of water. A heroic black and white 3D portrait of Walrus Roberts, a chubby Sasquatch man-boy with a gap-toothed smile, appeared behind him. “We’ve established you’re all familiar with Walrus, right?” The audience erupted into loving applause. “Well, way back in 2028, he came to me and said, ‘wanna see something cool?’” The words WANNA SEE SOMETHING COOL? appeared in flat, white, eight-foot-tall bold Helvetica as Walrus disappeared. “You know when Walrus says that, I get ready to write checks. What he showed me two years ago was the basis for what we’re going to show you today—” he smirked at the cameras live streaming to nerds around the world. “—before we show the rest of the world.”
The holo dissolved to a black square eclipsing a distant light. As Stephen spoke, the square rotated to reveal a golden iridescent electronic chip. “We call it sChip, and it’s going to change everything,” He looked out at the audience. “The sChip is the first new thing in computer networking since Ethernet or WiFi. Look at it. It even looks different from a normal silicon chip. That layer of gold is only 3 atoms thin. Remarkable. But what does the sChip do?”
A 2d polaroid of a college dorm with kids playing old-school video games connected by a coaxial cable network appeared. “In the early days of gaming, when they were all playing on PCs and 2D displays, they’d cobble together a network with ethernet and coax in their dorm rooms or computer lab. The games were nothing like what we have now. The polygon count was low, the frame rates and resolution were horrible, 2D pixels like boulders. Remember pixels? No Holopanels! But those games rocked! Those tiny networks with big ethernet meant zero latency. Then the internet came along, and at first, it was…” The auditorium speakers erupted with the sound of a 56k baud modem connecting over dial-up. The audience laughed at the archaic noise. “Dial-up was terrible. Eventually, they got cable modems, and that was better. Most of us in this room remember when fiber became a thing. Some of us, if we lived in the right neighborhoods, got fiber-optic. That should have been better, but it really wasn’t. I mean, it’s supposed to be the speed of light, right?” He took a sip. “What’s the deal? Why does the network suck so bad?” One word filled the Holopanel. LATENCY.
“Latency,” Stephen lingered for a moment to savor the word. “Latency. No matter how you connect to your friends for multiplayer games, you still have to deal with latency. All of your IP traffic flows through thousands of miles of cable, circuits, and lag-inducing switches. None of it was ever meant to handle the bandwidth requirements of today’s holo-data. Somebody shoots you, and you don’t know you’re dead for a quarter of a second. That’ll ruin your whole day.” A holo recording of a first-person shooter depicted the ignominious death of a soldier. Bill Paxton’s voice from Aliens streamed over the speakers “Game over, man! Game over!” The audience laughed but recognized the importance of the problem.
“So, Walrus asked, ‘What if we could eliminate latency completely? What if we could create instantaneous chip-to-chip connections?’” Stephen raised his eyebrows. “‘I’m all ears!’ He showed me his plan for the sChip. The S stands for Sub-Space, and if that sounds like science fiction, I’m here to tell you it is. Walrus filed a patent. The first of forty-seven. Look at this title.” The panel showed the awarded patent “‘A Method for Relaying Datagrams Across a Non-Dimensional Domain Utilizing Quantum Tunneling Via Einstein-Rosen Bridge.’ Sure! Why didn’t I think of that, Walrus?” The audience laughed gently. They were getting the show they’d hoped for.
“Walrus took his deep understanding of quantum mechanics and explored a phenomenon called quantum tunneling. He figured out how to make an electron tunnel from one chip, through sub-space, and emerge on another chip wherever it is—no network in-between. It took us most of the last year to figure out how to fab a solid-state quantum-tunneling tensor array that allows us to send IP network traffic across the sub-space domain. Why? Because it’s faster than light. It’s instantaneous networking. Let’s see what that looks like.”
Tour Excerpt
Before he hit enter, the display on his right blinked and displayed a log entry. The display directly in front of him showed the log of the interaction, a white line of text that showed what he’d typed, Watson, come here. I want to see you, and the time sent, 630231 milliseconds. The display on the right, the one that flashed before he hit enter, showed the same.
Walrus said, “Look at the timestamps. The sending input occurred at 630231 milliseconds. The receiving event happened at 629931 milliseconds.”
Stephen looked puzzled. “The clocks are off? That’s a 300…?” he checked his math, “300-millisecond difference.”
Walrus grinned. “Negative 300 milliseconds. The clocks aren’t off.”
“The time server is off?” Stephen knew that was the culprit in the outage.
Walrus shook his head. “Nope. These two chips are in perfect sync to FTL time.”
Stephen stopped and thought. The message appeared to be arriving 300 milliseconds before it was sent. “I’m not getting it,” he said.
Walrus laughed and did his little dance again. “Yes! You are! Tell me what you see.”
Stephen said slowly, “The message looks like it’s being received before it was sent, 300 milliseconds before.” Walrus grinned, and Stephen continued, “But that’s not possible. What’s causing the discrepancy? If the clocks aren’t wrong and the time server was working properly…?” He shook his head.
Walrus’s grin widened. “It’s a time machine.”
Stephen leaned back a bit from the desk. “Right.” Walrus let it sink in. “What do you mean?” He thought Walrus was speaking metaphorically.
Walrus laughed and said, “I mean, this is a time machine.”
Stephen looked at the set-up in front of him. It was a hacked sChip on a breadboard and a couple of displays strung together with cables and alligator clips. This wasn’t a time machine.
Walrus relented. “I’ve tweaked the power supply to dial in a tiny phase variance in the I/O to this sChip, like our customer did by accident. The tensor array interpreted this as an attribute, sending the signal to a point in time before it was sent. 300 milliseconds before. About a third of a second.”
Stephen recalled the chain of events. The right display refreshed a fraction of a second before he hit enter. Examining the log, what he had typed was there. Watson, come here. I want to see you.
He frowned and thought for a few seconds. “A third of a second? It’s the least impressive time machine imaginable,” he said. “This crashed the time servers?”
Walrus nodded, finished his cola, tossed its crushed container in the recycling bin, and peeled open another. “Essentially. I’ve cleaned up the effect, and I’m not messaging the time server. The timeserver would have ignored an invalid time sync transaction. It’s programmed to dump garbage bits. This wasn’t garbage, it was a perfectly normal sync transaction, but the handshake was out of order. The time server software questioned its own reality. It wobbled, tried to regain its equilibrium, and tipped into cascade failure.”
“It’s fascinating, but…” Hard-wired by the last six years to search for a new product, Stephen’s mind was searching for a use for what he was seeing. “I mean, it is cool, but it’s useless—a weird trick of physics. What can we do with it?” He thought for a little more. “This is IP data?”
Walrus shrugged, “It’s a packet like any other packet.”
“So, if it’s packets, then it’s IP, then it’s anything. Form data, text, jpegs, audio, video, holo.”
Walrus nodded and grinned, “Sure. You could surf the web of 300 milliseconds ago…”
Stephen interrupted him, “Can we extend that? Could we rig these in series? Go back further?”
“We could do it more elegantly than that—How much further?”
“You tell me, what’s the theoretical limit?”
“Well, you’d need a receiver. So whatever we end up making would only go back to the first chips that go online. We make a chip today, turn it on, in a week, we could go back to that moment but not before, right? The longer we’re online, the further back we can send things.”
Stephen shook his head. “We couldn’t go back further than tonight?”
Walrus nodded. “There would be nothing to send it to. As soon as we flip the switch on our time machine, we’d be establishing a time horizon. But say we turned on a receiving device tonight. In a year, you could send a message back to tonight. That would be a year in your past. In two years, you could send a message back two years, on and on, until the end of the world.” He laughed and said, “You know that old site, The Way Back Machine? The internet archive? This would be like that but live. You could actually surf the web of the past. Leaving comments on a video from a year earlier.”
Stephen frowned dismissively and said, “What good would that do? I can leave a comment on that same video today. The entire internet is available back to the 90s.”
Walrus smiled, “But it’d be radical!” Radical was not the goal. Stephen needed a killer application, a product everyone would want. Walrus’s stomach growled loudly. “Man,” he said, “I’m starving. Wanna order a pizza? Hey man, that’s what we could do!” he said jokingly, “We could use it to order pizza a half hour ago, so it arrives…” and he snapped his fingers.
Stephen froze. His pupils widened. Instant Pizza. Instant delivery. Instant gratification.
The entire computer industry of the last forty years was built around delivering everything as quickly as possible. Meeting the desires of the customer. Right. Fucking. Now. If no one ever went broke underestimating the American people’s intelligence, as Mencken might have said, it would follow: no one ever went broke catering to their impatience.
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Author Bio
E.W. Doc Parris is an American writer known for matter-of-fact, hard science fiction grounded in the current scientific weltanschauung, leavened with wit, and kindled by the warmth of human relationships.
Born within the nation’s capital Beltway, Doc makes his home in the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge. A self-taught software developer and solutions architect, he’s made a decent living over the years as a set designer, graphic designer, animator, 3D modeler, iOS developer, puppeteer, and educator.
In addition to his centuries-spanning WalrusTech Reality series, Doc is currently working on his next novel, Land of Nod, an exploration of A.I., nanotech, and the human brain’s neural network.
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