McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [104]
“Well,” I said. “Let’s have a look at it.”
He strode in a tight circle, gesticulating like a demented rap singer as he spoke.
“First of all, the math is outrageous. I mean it is completely out of hand, but wicked elegant.”
“Skip the math, Chuck. I’ll trust you on that.”
“Space-time bends, which means there can be shortcuts between specific points.”
“Oh, sure,” I said, as if this were common knowledge. “You’re talking about wormholes. I saw it in a movie.”
Chuck gave me a look like I was a pup that had crapped on the porch. His voice was patient, yet clearly annoyed.
“I prefer to call them ERBs. It’s an acronym for Einstein-Rosen Bridge, since they came up with it in the thirties.”
“How do you get inside one?”
“Here’s the simple way of thinking about it. I make a photocopy of DNA and convert the image to digital information. I attach each binary numeral to a p-brane, and send it into an ERB, using a particle beam. And voilà!”
“Nothing to it. Like making rice that won’t stick.”
“Two drawbacks,” he said. “Time travel is one-way.”
“You mean you get stuck?”
“No, that’s impossible. Writers make that stuff up. Think of e-mail. You send a message, but unless your friend is wired, he can’t receive it. Right now, time travel is one-way until we build a machine to reconstitute the information. It’s possible, but the math will take quantum computing.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a computer that uses the spinning nuclei of atoms to represent binary code. Ike Chuan out at MIT has one up and running, but the field is still young.”
“You said two drawbacks.”
“Controlling destination,” he said.
“What’s to control? I mean if you’re going to Des Moines, it’s always there. Des Moines never changes.”
“You have to adjust your thinking to a model. Imagine time as a wet mop in a bucket with the strings all tangled together. An ERB is your route into the bucket. You just don’t know which string you’ll land on.”
“Like getting on a bus to Des Moines and winding up in Cedar Rapids.”
“I know you’re being facetious, Chris. But you’re actually close. It’s more like going to a depot and getting on the first bus you see, knowing it’s leaving soon, but not knowing where it’s headed.”
“None of that explains my ghost.”
“It’s not a ghost, Chris. You are perceiving digital information encased in a cluster of mobile and sentient p-branes. This ghost suddenly manifested, right?”
“About a month ago.”
“The same time when I completed my machine. According to my hypothesis, you are being visited by yourself. The fact that you came here today is proof. There’s no choice but to send you into the bucket. We have to fulfill our end of time’s bargain. Your ghost compels it.”
“You’re out of your mind, Chuck.”
“No, I’m afraid that you quite literally were out of your mind when you haunted yourself last night.”
“You can’t shove me through an ERB down a mop handle to a bucket in Des Moines.”
“What’ll it take to try?”
“New glasses,” I said, “and a car.”
“You can have my car, Chris. I abhor the combustion engine. Such little innovation in all these years. And I can arrange for new glasses through my insurance.”
I sighed, wishing I’d asked for cash since he’d acquiesced so easily.
“Chris,” he said. “What have you got to lose?”
The fact was, I had nothing to lose except my life and I didn’t like my current circumstances anyway. Twenty years ago I’d set out to be a Great American Writer. I wanted to live in New York with literary buddies but instead I was divorced and unemployed with few friends in a small Midwestern town surrounded by corn, soy, and white people. Everything I owned was secondhand. I didn’t even have insurance. I was lonely and my work was going nowhere. It occurred to me that if Chuck could send me into the future, I could read my story, then return and write the ending.
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll give it a whirl.”
“Good.” He nodded, his eyes delirious with suppressed happiness. “I