How It All Began
Cornell University14 February 2002
Deidre Griest carefully maneuvered the last piece of wire into her hand-crafted circuit board and soldered it into place. The board was the last part of an array of junked televisions and computer parts making up what she called the Bridge. Assuming the math was right and she wasn’t crazy the Bridge, once powered up, would create a pinhole between her universe and another one, allowing her to see what was on the other side. Of course, if she was crazy then it’d probably explode and there’d be a hell of a mess to explain to the Provost.
She waited for the last few connections to cool down, double-checking to make sure against loose wires or anything physically wrong with the Bridge. Assured that everything was where it was supposed to be, Deidre plugged the Bridge into a throwaway laptop. The machine booted up agreeably enough, the custom drivers recognizing the Bridge without complaint.
“Right,” she said for the benefit of her test log. “Mark I Bridge test number one. The device is powered on–” flip of a switch, check the meters “–and currently on standby. Control systems are responsive. No faults detected in the assembly.” She let out a quick breath. “Right then. Activating system–” Deidre punched the go command into the laptop “–and let’s see–”
“If this thing works,” said a voice very much like Deidre’s but not quite identical. Deidre blinked hand and looked at the cathode-ray tube that served as the Bridge’s main viewport. In the middle of the screen was a crisp and clear image of a woman a few years younger with punked out hair and clothing but also the same eyes and the unmistakable Griest nose. Deidre tapped the screen twice, just to make sure she wasn’t hallucinating, and waved tentatively.
The the younger Deidre looked back, confused, then broke out a huge grin. “Hey, it worked!” she said. “Hi, other me!”
Noah Anderson adjusted his tie irritably. By rights he should’ve been working on the Boskone post-mortem, calling Scaled about his electric aircraft proposal and any number of things a professional serious person in the realms of business and fandom should be doing instead of standing outside a warehouse in upstate New York waiting for a lunatic. But his fandom contacts told him something was up in a very big way, and Noah trusted his contacts. More to the point, Noah trusted his instincts. Those instincts told him that whatever was going on inside that warehouse was worth checking up on, no matter how the wait in the mid-spring morning chill wore on his patience.
As he shifted around and grumbled, a rental sedan pulled up to the warehouse and stopped beside him. A tall black woman in jeans and a windbreaker got out and gave Noah a puzzled look. “Noah?” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“Tanith?” Noah replied. Tanith Curtis was a name in the Chicago fan circles, and the two had a professional relationship going back a decade. “I could ask you the same thing.” Very little could get Tanith out of her city, making her appearance in Ithaca all the more startling.
“I got an invitation to see something ‘world shaking.’” Tanith shrugged. “It was delivered by people I trust, so I figured what the hell, right? I’m guessing you were invited too?”
“Something like that, all delivered by ninja in the night, very hush-hush secret stuff. I probably shouldn’t have come but... I got curious. I have no idea what it means.”
“Well then I can help you with that,” a new voice interrupted. Noah and Tanith turned to see a woman in a labcoat and black gloves standing in the doorway. The newcomer smiled slightly. “Ms. Curtis, Mr. Anderson. I’m Deidre Griest. We’ve never met in person before, but we’ve had some online correspondence, if you remember?”
Tanith cocked her head in thought. “Griest,” she said absently. “Oh, right, you did some programming bits for A-Cen a couple years ago. I thought you left fandom.”
Deidre shrugged. “I wasn’t going to lose track completely but academia and, er, medical issues took over my life for a bit, and then it was back to academia where, well. That’s what you’ve come to see.”
“Some sort of new invention?” Noah said dryly. “Let me guess, you’ve built a spaceship in your garage.”
“Invention, yes. Spaceship... not exactly. Please, come in.”
The interior of the warehouse was divided up into a dozen different offices and makeshift workbenches, in the center of the floor a clear spot was carefully marked out with chain link fencing. A group of students in the traditional garb of the college student worked on unidentifiable pieces of technology around them. “I know it doesn’t look like much,” Deidre remarked, “but what you see here is the biggest quantum leap in human affairs since the development of agriculture. We’re not on the bleeding edge of science so much as we’ve taken a running leap into the abyss and are getting a good look at things man wasn’t meant to know.”
“That’s very nice hyperbole,” Tanith said, eyebrows raised. “But that doesn’t explain what you’re doing here.”
“That’s a little tricky to explain,” Deidre hedged.
“Please try, Ms. Griest,” Noah said, irked. “I’d rather not have been dragged out here for fancy statements and bullshit.”
“Alright, fine. You’ve seen the reports of the people everybody seems to be calling the Inspired, right? Sudden bursts of genius coming up with inventions or theorems that break all the known rules?”
“I’ve seen them,” Tanith said cautiously. “I’ve also seen that most of these so-called Inspired aren’t the most stable people in the world.” The implication hung thick and greasy in the air. Deidre shrugged.
“Stable is in the eye of the beholder,” she said. “Granted the guy who puts on a cape and calls himself a supervillian isn’t the model of mental health, but I doubt his inspiration made him that way. In any case, what we’re working on started out as an investigation on where inspiration comes from and turned into something much, much more.”
Noah leaned in a little, intrigued despite his sinking fears that yes, he had been dragged out to Ithaca to listen to a madwoman. “And that is?” he asked.
A bell tolled inside the warehouse. “Perfect timing,” Deidre said. “Easier to show you than to explain.” As she said it, a flash of swirling light came from the fenced-off portion of the floor, and all of a sudden the space was occupied by a beat-up panel van, standing on clawed feet instead of wheels. Tanith and Noah stared as the driver’s door opened and a stocky, bearded man in flannel climbed out with a pet carrier in one hand.
“Hey, boss lady!” The man lifted the carrier high. “Got you a prezzie!”
It was the size of a turkey and covered in short dun feathers. It looked up at the humans surrounding it with a vaguely confused expression, then scratched its sinuous neck with a powerful, clawed hind leg.
“It’s,” Noah gaped, stared, gaped a little more and started again. “It’s a velociraptor.”
The stocky guy from the van – introduced as Sam Wildman, “part of the research and acquisitions department” – shook his head. “Nah,” he said, pointing at the dinosaur’s hind leg. “The sickle claw’s wrong, and this looks to be an adult. It’s a dromaeosaur of some kind, but I don’t know which. Haven’t really seen a lot with the skin on.”
“Did you get pictures?” Deidre demanded. Wildman grinned.
“Did I get pictures? Boss, I got me some amazing pictures! About a mile from insertion there was an entire herd of hadrosaurs and some ceratopsians sharing a meadow, maybe a hundred animals all told just grazing on the ground cover. Incredible stuff. Bitey here was sniffing at the car when I got back, managed to lure him in with a bit of sausage.”
“Time travel.” Noah said, giving Deidre a hard look. “You’ve invented time travel, haven’t you?”
Deidre shook her head. “Nope, time travel’s… well, it’s not completely impossible if I understand the math, but it’s a great deal more, hm. Well. In any case, this isn’t time travel.”
Noah scowled. “Then explain that!” he snapped, gesturing at Bitey.
“This isn’t traveling backwards and forwards through time, Mr. Anderson,” Deidre said. “We’re moving across it. Sidestepping to alternate realities.”
“So you’re not interfering with Earth’s history...”
“Nah,” Wildman said laconically. “We’re playing tourist on a counterpart Earth that for whatever reason is still in the age of the dinosaurs. And it doesn’t stop there. We’ve gotten a look at, oh, a couple dozen different worlds so far.”
“What are they like?” Tanith asked.
“A few a like dinoworld, uninhabited by sapient life but have megafauna,” Deidre replied. “One’s a hellworld like Venus, really scary. Most of the ones we’ve seen so far have radically different histories, like Rome never fell or Song China expanded into India or the Mongols crossed the Pacific to California, stuff like that. We’re staying away from the inhabited places for now, but they’re next on the list.”
“Interesting,” Noah said diffidently. “But dinosaurs and alternate history aside, I’m not sure this qualifies as a quantum leap on the level of agriculture.” Wildman snorted and gave Deidre an amused look.
“You used the agriculture line?”
“Just because it happens to be true,” she said loftily. Locking eyes with Noah, she continued. “The technology is still in early stages, Mr. Anderson. But soon we’ll be able to seek out worlds not only as advanced as ours, but worlds more advanced. We’ll be able to bring art, culture, science and technology back that will enrich our world a thousandfold.”
“Such as?” Noah asked.
Deidre shrugged off her labcoat, causing Noah and Tanith to take an involuntary step back. What they’d thought was a glove of some kind on her right hand was actually a layer of artificial material covering her arm all the way to the shoulder. “My sophomore year at Cornell,” she said, “some drunken asshole of a fratboy clipped me going about sixty-five while I was on my motorcycle. My arm was wrecked, almost to the point where the doctors wanted to remove it. I built a prosthetic, but that only gave me fifty percent functionality and it lasted maybe two hours unless I had a wall socket to plug in on.
“My first real test of the dimensional technology, I accidentally contacted an alternate version of myself from a high-tech reality who’d had something similar happen to her. She built herself a completely new cybernetic arm, and she sent me the plans to do the same thing. Once I figured out how to send objects through she sent me the tools I needed to do the job properly.
“That is the potential, Mr. Anderson. We have unlimited access to everything. We can bring it home and use it to make the world a better place. And that’s where you both come in. We’re just about at the edge of what we can accomplish on our own; if we’re going to do this right, we need operating capital, political influence and someone who can keep track of big organizations.” Deidre pointed at Noah. “You have the money to upgrade our facilities, and the pull to get a fair hearing from the world when we’re ready to go public.” She pointed at Tanith. “You’ve got the organizational skills and experience to make a large group work, and you’ve got a conscience. We can’t simply hoard all this for our own enrichment, it has to be shared for the greatest possible common good.” Deidre spread her hands. “That’s the pitch. The biggest thing in recorded history, and if you want in on the ground floor now’s the time to say it. What’ll it be?”
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery
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Cornell University14 February 2002
Quote:Test log seventeen: I’ve filled six notebooks now with math and notes that I only dimly remember writing in the first place. It’s all workable... I think. It doesn’t resemble the sort of incoherent gibberish that I’d expect if I sleep-wrote it, or if I had been writing while stoned. The math is absurdly high-level, almost to the point of needing new notation, but it fits together.
Research indicates that others around the world have been making similar discoveries in a similar dissociative state, something I find reassuring and troubling at the same time. Reassuring because I’m not the only one, troubling because at least one of these people has taken to riding a zeppelin of his own design around and calling himself “Baron Zorbo.” I fear that whatever force is driving my math might also drive more unusual instincts, but I suppose I can deal with that another day.
Professor Newman has seen a carefully-selected sample of the equations backing today’s experiment and was impressed enough that he wanted to bring the Dean in. I’ve fended him off so far, but it won’t hold up forever. Publish or perish might be the mantra but damn everything I want positive experimental proof of the multiworld continuum before letting it get out...
~***~
Deidre Griest carefully maneuvered the last piece of wire into her hand-crafted circuit board and soldered it into place. The board was the last part of an array of junked televisions and computer parts making up what she called the Bridge. Assuming the math was right and she wasn’t crazy the Bridge, once powered up, would create a pinhole between her universe and another one, allowing her to see what was on the other side. Of course, if she was crazy then it’d probably explode and there’d be a hell of a mess to explain to the Provost.
She waited for the last few connections to cool down, double-checking to make sure against loose wires or anything physically wrong with the Bridge. Assured that everything was where it was supposed to be, Deidre plugged the Bridge into a throwaway laptop. The machine booted up agreeably enough, the custom drivers recognizing the Bridge without complaint.
“Right,” she said for the benefit of her test log. “Mark I Bridge test number one. The device is powered on–” flip of a switch, check the meters “–and currently on standby. Control systems are responsive. No faults detected in the assembly.” She let out a quick breath. “Right then. Activating system–” Deidre punched the go command into the laptop “–and let’s see–”
“If this thing works,” said a voice very much like Deidre’s but not quite identical. Deidre blinked hand and looked at the cathode-ray tube that served as the Bridge’s main viewport. In the middle of the screen was a crisp and clear image of a woman a few years younger with punked out hair and clothing but also the same eyes and the unmistakable Griest nose. Deidre tapped the screen twice, just to make sure she wasn’t hallucinating, and waved tentatively.
The the younger Deidre looked back, confused, then broke out a huge grin. “Hey, it worked!” she said. “Hi, other me!”
~***~
Ithaca, New York20 April 2003Noah Anderson adjusted his tie irritably. By rights he should’ve been working on the Boskone post-mortem, calling Scaled about his electric aircraft proposal and any number of things a professional serious person in the realms of business and fandom should be doing instead of standing outside a warehouse in upstate New York waiting for a lunatic. But his fandom contacts told him something was up in a very big way, and Noah trusted his contacts. More to the point, Noah trusted his instincts. Those instincts told him that whatever was going on inside that warehouse was worth checking up on, no matter how the wait in the mid-spring morning chill wore on his patience.
As he shifted around and grumbled, a rental sedan pulled up to the warehouse and stopped beside him. A tall black woman in jeans and a windbreaker got out and gave Noah a puzzled look. “Noah?” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“Tanith?” Noah replied. Tanith Curtis was a name in the Chicago fan circles, and the two had a professional relationship going back a decade. “I could ask you the same thing.” Very little could get Tanith out of her city, making her appearance in Ithaca all the more startling.
“I got an invitation to see something ‘world shaking.’” Tanith shrugged. “It was delivered by people I trust, so I figured what the hell, right? I’m guessing you were invited too?”
“Something like that, all delivered by ninja in the night, very hush-hush secret stuff. I probably shouldn’t have come but... I got curious. I have no idea what it means.”
“Well then I can help you with that,” a new voice interrupted. Noah and Tanith turned to see a woman in a labcoat and black gloves standing in the doorway. The newcomer smiled slightly. “Ms. Curtis, Mr. Anderson. I’m Deidre Griest. We’ve never met in person before, but we’ve had some online correspondence, if you remember?”
Tanith cocked her head in thought. “Griest,” she said absently. “Oh, right, you did some programming bits for A-Cen a couple years ago. I thought you left fandom.”
Deidre shrugged. “I wasn’t going to lose track completely but academia and, er, medical issues took over my life for a bit, and then it was back to academia where, well. That’s what you’ve come to see.”
“Some sort of new invention?” Noah said dryly. “Let me guess, you’ve built a spaceship in your garage.”
“Invention, yes. Spaceship... not exactly. Please, come in.”
~***~
The interior of the warehouse was divided up into a dozen different offices and makeshift workbenches, in the center of the floor a clear spot was carefully marked out with chain link fencing. A group of students in the traditional garb of the college student worked on unidentifiable pieces of technology around them. “I know it doesn’t look like much,” Deidre remarked, “but what you see here is the biggest quantum leap in human affairs since the development of agriculture. We’re not on the bleeding edge of science so much as we’ve taken a running leap into the abyss and are getting a good look at things man wasn’t meant to know.”
“That’s very nice hyperbole,” Tanith said, eyebrows raised. “But that doesn’t explain what you’re doing here.”
“That’s a little tricky to explain,” Deidre hedged.
“Please try, Ms. Griest,” Noah said, irked. “I’d rather not have been dragged out here for fancy statements and bullshit.”
“Alright, fine. You’ve seen the reports of the people everybody seems to be calling the Inspired, right? Sudden bursts of genius coming up with inventions or theorems that break all the known rules?”
“I’ve seen them,” Tanith said cautiously. “I’ve also seen that most of these so-called Inspired aren’t the most stable people in the world.” The implication hung thick and greasy in the air. Deidre shrugged.
“Stable is in the eye of the beholder,” she said. “Granted the guy who puts on a cape and calls himself a supervillian isn’t the model of mental health, but I doubt his inspiration made him that way. In any case, what we’re working on started out as an investigation on where inspiration comes from and turned into something much, much more.”
Noah leaned in a little, intrigued despite his sinking fears that yes, he had been dragged out to Ithaca to listen to a madwoman. “And that is?” he asked.
A bell tolled inside the warehouse. “Perfect timing,” Deidre said. “Easier to show you than to explain.” As she said it, a flash of swirling light came from the fenced-off portion of the floor, and all of a sudden the space was occupied by a beat-up panel van, standing on clawed feet instead of wheels. Tanith and Noah stared as the driver’s door opened and a stocky, bearded man in flannel climbed out with a pet carrier in one hand.
“Hey, boss lady!” The man lifted the carrier high. “Got you a prezzie!”
~***~
It was the size of a turkey and covered in short dun feathers. It looked up at the humans surrounding it with a vaguely confused expression, then scratched its sinuous neck with a powerful, clawed hind leg.
“It’s,” Noah gaped, stared, gaped a little more and started again. “It’s a velociraptor.”
The stocky guy from the van – introduced as Sam Wildman, “part of the research and acquisitions department” – shook his head. “Nah,” he said, pointing at the dinosaur’s hind leg. “The sickle claw’s wrong, and this looks to be an adult. It’s a dromaeosaur of some kind, but I don’t know which. Haven’t really seen a lot with the skin on.”
“Did you get pictures?” Deidre demanded. Wildman grinned.
“Did I get pictures? Boss, I got me some amazing pictures! About a mile from insertion there was an entire herd of hadrosaurs and some ceratopsians sharing a meadow, maybe a hundred animals all told just grazing on the ground cover. Incredible stuff. Bitey here was sniffing at the car when I got back, managed to lure him in with a bit of sausage.”
“Time travel.” Noah said, giving Deidre a hard look. “You’ve invented time travel, haven’t you?”
Deidre shook her head. “Nope, time travel’s… well, it’s not completely impossible if I understand the math, but it’s a great deal more, hm. Well. In any case, this isn’t time travel.”
Noah scowled. “Then explain that!” he snapped, gesturing at Bitey.
“This isn’t traveling backwards and forwards through time, Mr. Anderson,” Deidre said. “We’re moving across it. Sidestepping to alternate realities.”
“So you’re not interfering with Earth’s history...”
“Nah,” Wildman said laconically. “We’re playing tourist on a counterpart Earth that for whatever reason is still in the age of the dinosaurs. And it doesn’t stop there. We’ve gotten a look at, oh, a couple dozen different worlds so far.”
“What are they like?” Tanith asked.
“A few a like dinoworld, uninhabited by sapient life but have megafauna,” Deidre replied. “One’s a hellworld like Venus, really scary. Most of the ones we’ve seen so far have radically different histories, like Rome never fell or Song China expanded into India or the Mongols crossed the Pacific to California, stuff like that. We’re staying away from the inhabited places for now, but they’re next on the list.”
“Interesting,” Noah said diffidently. “But dinosaurs and alternate history aside, I’m not sure this qualifies as a quantum leap on the level of agriculture.” Wildman snorted and gave Deidre an amused look.
“You used the agriculture line?”
“Just because it happens to be true,” she said loftily. Locking eyes with Noah, she continued. “The technology is still in early stages, Mr. Anderson. But soon we’ll be able to seek out worlds not only as advanced as ours, but worlds more advanced. We’ll be able to bring art, culture, science and technology back that will enrich our world a thousandfold.”
“Such as?” Noah asked.
Deidre shrugged off her labcoat, causing Noah and Tanith to take an involuntary step back. What they’d thought was a glove of some kind on her right hand was actually a layer of artificial material covering her arm all the way to the shoulder. “My sophomore year at Cornell,” she said, “some drunken asshole of a fratboy clipped me going about sixty-five while I was on my motorcycle. My arm was wrecked, almost to the point where the doctors wanted to remove it. I built a prosthetic, but that only gave me fifty percent functionality and it lasted maybe two hours unless I had a wall socket to plug in on.
“My first real test of the dimensional technology, I accidentally contacted an alternate version of myself from a high-tech reality who’d had something similar happen to her. She built herself a completely new cybernetic arm, and she sent me the plans to do the same thing. Once I figured out how to send objects through she sent me the tools I needed to do the job properly.
“That is the potential, Mr. Anderson. We have unlimited access to everything. We can bring it home and use it to make the world a better place. And that’s where you both come in. We’re just about at the edge of what we can accomplish on our own; if we’re going to do this right, we need operating capital, political influence and someone who can keep track of big organizations.” Deidre pointed at Noah. “You have the money to upgrade our facilities, and the pull to get a fair hearing from the world when we’re ready to go public.” She pointed at Tanith. “You’ve got the organizational skills and experience to make a large group work, and you’ve got a conscience. We can’t simply hoard all this for our own enrichment, it has to be shared for the greatest possible common good.” Deidre spread her hands. “That’s the pitch. The biggest thing in recorded history, and if you want in on the ground floor now’s the time to say it. What’ll it be?”
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery
FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information
"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"