Endworlds - Nicholas Read [67]
“It turns out that when you go small enough, the matter we’re all made from is the equivalent of light particles—photons—coded to take physical form as solids, gas or liquid. It’s the boson that interprets, or codes, how the light should manifest as gas, liguid or solid, and with what properties. A kind of photonic DNA, if you will.”
Kriegmacher snorted in amusement. “So when my pappy used to call me ‘Sunshine’, he had it right.”
“More or less,” said Belgium. “Now stay with me here. When you pass light through a prism, it breaks into a rainbow of colors we can see in the visible spectrum, plus others we don’t see that are beyond our vision. Each color exists at a separate frequency, all riding the same beam of light. So if solid matter is actually made of light, what do you think you’d find if you could project reality through a prism and split it out to its different frequencies?”
The General had read enough science journals to know something about M-theory. “The current thinking is you might find parallel dimensions, an infinite number of copies of the universe . . . Wait, you’re not telling me—”
Boston interrupted: “All in good time, General. There’s another concept we want you to grasp first. We are at the early stages of being able to program the bosons that instruct photons how to function and which frequency to project. In our early experiments we found that when two photons are entangled, one will take the other’s characteristics. Like a carbon copy. Once joined through this process of entanglement18, even when we separate and place them miles apart, whatever we do to the master photon also happens to its copy. Like remote control but without any conventional form of connection, physical, wireless or otherwise. We discovered that waves of dark matter provide that link. Dark matter forms the majority of the universe, normally invisible to us, and it functions like a nervous system that connects everything, everywhere, at the same time. In fact, tapped into the right way, the same object can exist in all places at the same time.”
Straightening a crease from his dress pants as he processed the information, Kriegmacher asked: “So what’s your plan here? Clone everyone’s particles, and use dark matter to send our duplicate bodies across the galaxy in the twinkling of an eye? That’s mankind’s Great Escape?”
The Austrian cleared his throat and a moment of silence passed. “General, it is healthy that you are a skeptic, but this will go faster without sarcasm. To answer your question, using this spukhafte Fernwirkung we have teleported photons only, not complex structures, and only for several miles. When we do there is a ten percent degradation of material, so we are a long way off any practical human application over distance, even if we knew of a suitable planet, which we don’t, despite Hubble’s best efforts. However . . .”
The projector brought up a new image, a schematic front and side line drawing of what looked like a window.
“. . . if you entwine specially charged photons on a simple object, say a thin sheet of glass, and cause one side of it to vibrate at a different frequency of reality, it becomes part of the dimension that exists in physical form there, which is invisible and immaterial to us here. But with the glass being transparent, you can look through.”
“To where?” Kriegmacher asked, curiosity rising.
Oxford picked up the thread: “Another world, General. An overlay, in the same location as our own, physical in its own right but not connected to the events in our dimension at all.
They let that sink in.
When the General finally spoke again, he had joined the dots. “Easier than sending people to the other side of the galaxy, you want to send them nowhere, just a different version of