Timeline - Michael Crichton [62]
“Jesus,” Stern said, watching. “What does that feel like?”
“Nothing,” Gordon said. “You don’t feel a thing. Nerve conduction time from skin to brain is on the order of a hundred milliseconds. Laser vaporization is five nanoseconds. You’re long gone.”
“But she’s still there.”
“No, she’s not. She was gone in the first laser burst. The computer’s just processing the data now. What you see is an artifact of compression stepping. The compression’s about three to the minus two. . ..”
There was another bright flash. The cage now shrank rapidly. It was three feet high, then two. Now it was close to the floor—less than a foot tall. The woman inside looked like a little doll in khakis.
“Minus four,” Gordon said. There was another bright burst, near the floor. Now Kate couldn’t see the cage at all.
“What happened to it?”
“It’s there. Barely.”
Another burst, this time just a pinpoint flash on the floor.
“Minus five.”
The flashes came more quickly now, winking like a firefly, diminishing in strength. Gordon counted them out.
“And minus fourteen. . .. Gone.”
There were no more flashes.
Nothing.
The cage had vanished. The floor was dark rubber, empty.
Kate said, “We’re supposed to do that?”
:
“It’s not an unpleasant experience,” Gordon said. “You’re entirely conscious all the way down, which is something we can’t explain. By the final data compressions, you are in very small domains—subatomic regions—and consciousness should not be possible. Yet it occurs. We think it may be an artifact, a hallucination that bridges the transition. If so, it’s analogous to the phantom limb that amputees feel, even though the limb isn’t there. This may be a kind of phantom brain. Of course, we are talking about very brief time periods, nanoseconds. But nobody understands consciousness anyway.”
Kate was frowning. For some time now, she had been looking at what she saw as architecture, a kind of “form follows function” approach: wasn’t it remarkable how these huge underground structures had concentric symmetry—slightly reminiscent of medieval castles—even though these modern structures had been built without any aesthetic plan at all. They had simply been built to solve a scientific problem. She found the resulting appearance fascinating.
But now that she was confronted by what these machines were actually used for, she struggled to make sense of what her eyes had just seen. And her architectural training was absolutely no help to her. “But this, uh, method of shrinking a person, it requires you to break her down—”
“No. We destroy her,” Gordon said bluntly. “You have to destroy the original, so that it can be reconstructed at the other end. You can’t have one without the other.”
“So she actually died?”
“I wouldn’t say that, no. You see—”
“But if you destroy the person at one end,” Kate said, “don’t they die?”
Gordon sighed. “It’s difficult to think of this in traditional terms,” he said. “Since you’re instantaneously reconstructed at the very moment you are destroyed, how can you be said to have died? You haven’t died. You’ve just moved somewhere else.”
:
Stern felt certain—it was a visceral sense—that Gordon wasn’t being entirely honest about this technology. Just looking at the curved water shields, at all the different machines standing on the floor, gave him the sense that there was quite a bit more that was being left unexplained. He tried to find it.
“So she is in the other universe now?” he asked.
“That’s right.”
“You transmitted her, and she arrived in the other universe? Just like a fax?”
“Exactly.”
“But to rebuild her, you need a fax machine at the other end.”
Gordon shook his head. “No, you don’t,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because she’s already there.”
Stern frowned. “She’s already there? How could that be?”
“At the moment of transmission, the person is already in the other universe. And therefore the person doesn’t need to be rebuilt by us.”
“Why?” Stern said.
“For now, just call