The Persistence of Luna Courtney

“I was told you needed this?” Leigh was hovering at the door — he seemed uninterested in coming in. Luna stood up and pulled a card from the bottom of her jeans pocket. Since Leigh wasn’t entering, she walked over and held the card to the device he’d placed on the couch. He did the same with a card of his own and a little tag on the device it lit up. His card flashed amber and then hers flashed green.

“When do you need it back?” she asked.

“My next presentation’s Friday” he said, disappearing into a cubicle.

She slipped the device into her backpack and grabbed her pullover from the back of the chair. Striding through the open plan area, Dr. Luna Courtney wondered how other people thought they could concentrate in this environment — She’d been arriving early each morning to commandeer a private room ever since she knew she could. Walking through now she could hear team meetings bleeding out into the space and at least one poor engineer having to re-explain themselves.

After lunch, the aroma of chorizo and lentils still lingered and a few sugar granules casually dotted the table. Luna shifted her coffee further to the other end and flicked on her tablet. It immediately nudged her to read an email from Jim. She was helping him at his school the following day and he was suggesting that she re-order a couple of things in her presentation. The presentation she’d put effort into planning. She flicked off the tablet and reached for her coffee again.

The next morning, Luna made her way to the school. She quietly sat on a spare chair in reception and looked over her notes. Earlier, she’d anguished over the order changes that Jim suggested but now nothing seemed to be jarring aggressively. She fidgeted in her seat.

The reception seemed to also function as the principal’s waiting room and when the door opened a grumpy man ushered in a small boy sitting next to her. Seeing Luna, the principal attempted a welcoming smile — unduly tasking a stranger with reprieve from the tedium of the day — but Luna was grasped too tightly by her notes to respond.

The Robotics and Electronics teacher was delayed. Jim was an old family friend of Luna’s and after finally telling him what she’d been working on, she found herself volunteering to present to his high school class. The more experienced engineers are giving the industry presentations, she thought, so I guess it’s fitting I take the kids.

“Jim.”

“Sorry it took me so long”, he said, being cut off by a pleasant chime fading in over the loud speaker. “They shouldn’t have actually been in my class until after the period change”, he ambiguously pointed his finger up toward the sound, “but somehow these kids always seem to be there before the bell”.

Jim and Luna walked down the school corridor. It smelt of metal lockers hiding gym bags and burned out second hand laptops.

“Anything you manage to cover they’ll be fascinated by.” Jim said, “Thanks for doing this.” and he stopped outside a classroom door. “This is us.” Jim opened the door and released the bleeps and blurps of gadgets in a bustling electronics lab. Some of the students looked up while others kept on tinkering. All the surfaces looked recently polished and the shelves and their piles of electronic parts looked as though no dust had ever fallen there.

Jim apologised to the previous teacher for keeping her and then adopted his Mr Sivai voice, “Thanks for being patient everyone, now if you can all put your projects away and pull out your notebooks we’ll get started.” He then moved an anti-static mat on the bench so it was in front of Luna and she pulled the Pro-Active CPU card out of her backpack and placed it down. She’d only brought a non-working model so the mat wasn’t necessary — Jim was just making things more presentable. After Luna closed her backpack, Jim took it off the desk and put it on the bench underneath.

“Today we’re very lucky to have Dr. Luna Courtney talking to us about her work on the Pro-Active CPU, how it works, and what that means for her industry. Please give her your full attention and if you have any questions be sure to raise your hand instead of simply calling out this time.” A number of students looked at a boy in the second row and a keen eye also may have noticed Jim specifically trying not to. Jim patted Luna’s shoulder and then stepped back toward the whiteboard.

“Good morning everyone.” Started Luna, “As Mr Sivai mentioned, my name is Dr. Courtney. I work for Caesura as an engineer and I’m here to tell you about the Pro-Active CPU we’ve developed. Has anyone heard about the Pro-Active before?”

“Yeah, it’s the newest deferred processor”, came the immediate response from the boy in the second row. He looked at Mr Sivai and scratched his head as a thin veil to raise his hand in the question’s wake.

“Yes, that’s true, Abda”, Dr. Courtney responded (The boys pencil case exclaimed his name) “but I’d be surprised if anyone knows how it works.”

A couple of students looked like they were thinking about putting their hands up but Luna continued, “Who’s heard of a wormhole?” She didn’t pause, “A wormhole is a tunnel through space that can act as a bridge to traverse a long distance in an instant.” Immediately an eager student shot her hand up. “If I open a wormhole between Earth and Mars” Dr. Courtney continued, “someone would be able to step through it and be on Mars in a very short amount of time. What’s more, if I were to be on Mars with my phone and I were to stand near the wormhole, the mobile phone reception on Earth would also leak through the hole and I would be able to make a phone call just like I could from Earth — Because radio waves go back and forth through the wormhole as well.” Eventually the eager girl abandoned her interruption.

Luna finished the thought, “Practically though, it would be very difficult to make a wormhole big enough to send objects and people through, but luckily it’s the radio waves that we’re really interested in.”

Luna relaxed a moment and glanced over at Jim. He was standing behind her finishing an oddly detailed drawing of what she had just described. Mars, Earth, a figure, and a tunnel. He was adjusting it to fit a cell tower when it suddenly clicked that she’d sent him some of the examples. She looked back at the class and found another student with his hand up.

“How much energy does it take to open a wormhole that only needs to send through radio waves?”

“Good question.” She said, “Large wormholes take amounts of energy that we just don’t have, but tiny wormholes are more achievable. Below a certain size the wormhole stability becomes more about the materials used and their arrangement than it is about supplying power. Opening the hole in the first place, however, is a different story and that still takes a large amount of energy.” Luna avoided the specifics but the student still nodded attentively.

“Who knows how GPS works?” She asked. Several students raised their hands and Jim rolled the whiteboard up toward the ceiling. He pulled down another with a GPS drawing already started.

“GPS satellites orbit the Earth.” the eager girl explained, “If your phone can see more than a couple of them it can triangulate its position based on the time differences reported by the satellites.”

“Yes, that’s right” Luna didn’t expect such a complete response. “Can anyone tell me one of the problems that the satellites have to deal with?”

No one put their hands up this time.

“Millions of phones requesting a response at the same time?” called out a student.

“No, that’s actually a myth” the first girl cut in again, “The satellites simply broadcast their timestamp, they don’t process anything. Miss, are you talking about time running at a different speed?” She squinted and scrunched her face, seemingly indicating she thought that was too obvious.

“Yes…urh..” Luna looked back at her and paused.

“Brija” the girl filled in the gap.

“Yes Brija, it’s the speed of time I’m referring to” For a second Luna wondered whether to continue explaining–-Brija’s intonation had given her pause. She skipped ahead and went on, “Because space and time are one fabric, time reacts differently close to Earth than it does further away, just like gravity. Time flows faster in space than it does on Earth. Einstein also predicted a second form of time dilation, however, which is that the faster an object moves, the slower time becomes for that object. While GPS satellites are in space and should run slightly faster, they’re also in orbit — travelling at about 14,000k’s an hour. Overall, this means time for them is slightly slower. Even with highly accurate atomic clocks, the flow of time itself is different, and so they still get out of sync with any clock on earth and need to be adjusted regularly.”

Luna looked down at the Pro-Active CPU card on the table. Before getting cornered into talking about Relativity, she ploughed through again.

“This is the Pro-Active CPU we’ve been developing. Not only has it got two ends of a minuscule wormhole right inside it, but one end of the wormhole is a little further forward in time than the other.” Luna looked up to see that almost every student in the class had their hand up.

“Caesura opens both ends of the wormhole in their production facility in Kalgoorlie. They enclose each opening in its own, self-contained, module and launch one from each pair into orbit. The cheapest models stay in orbit for only a year, but when they are brought back down, one end of each wormhole is about 0.01 seconds later in time then the other. Both ends are paired up again and installed in a card like this one.”

“Dr. Courtney, perhaps we should take some of the questions before continuing” Jim said, “Claire, what would you like to ask?”

“I’ve been wondering, Dr. Courtney, why the speeding up of time due to a further distance from Earth’s centre doesn’t cancel out the slowing down of time from moving at higher speeds. It seems to me that since the speed that must be travelled to stay in orbit is also based on distance from the Earth’s centre, the two time-dilations must be related.”

“The two dilations are related — they’re actually based on the same principle.” Dr. Courtney was expecting a question about the device. “But related doesn’t mean they will be equal.” Luna immediately signalled a boy in the back row to ask a new question.

“Ms. Courtney” The boy said, “Is the idea that you can ask a computer in the past a question so that it can pre-calculate the answer?”, Dr. Courtney nodded enthusiastically and the boy continued, “0.01 of a second doesn’t seem like a very useful time difference.”

“For a computer, 0.01 of a second is a significant amount of time, however, it gets longer — let’s continue and I’ll explain.”

The raised hands eased and Luna continued, “Also in this module, is a wireless transmitter and receiver that is fairly similar to the Wi-Fi that we use every day, but it’s a little bit different. The Wi-Fi we use everyday broadcasts a static name all the time. When you come to school today, you can connect to the Wi-Fi network named eduroam and tomorrow when you come to school and connect it will still be called eduroam. That’s important so that your computer can always connect to the same network quickly and easily. This card, however, needs to know more information. It needs to know the network name and when in time that network is broadcasting from.”

“Ahh!” breathed the boy at the back.

“Like the cell tower could feed its radio waves through to Mars, the Wi-Fi signal in the card transmits through the wormhole and ends up 0.01 seconds in the future. When the signal comes out the other side it goes through the wormhole again and ends up another 0.01 seconds in the future — And it does this repeatedly.”

Looking around the room, everyone’s gears were clearly turning.

“So at any point in time…”, Luna paused to take a sip of water, “…At any point in time, the computer in the present can see all of these signals being broadcast from the past at 0.01 second offsets. It can choose which Wi-Fi signal it wants to connect to by looking at the time broadcast with each one. Using that, this particular model can send a question to itself up to 100 seconds into the past. That’s what this numbering on the side indicates .01/100m”

“So the wormholes are only 1cm apart?” Asked Abda.

“If the computer has the answer before it even initiates the calculations, doesn’t that create a paradox?” asked another boy. “Why would it need to ask the question if it’s already got the answer and if it doesn’t ask the question it won’t actually have the answer.”

“Yes, it’s very confusing thing to understand…” Dr. Courtney began.

“Actually, I kinda get it, Dr. Courtney”, cut in Brija, “but I don’t think it’s quite a paradox. What you’re describing…”, she turned to the other student, “is only a paradox if the computer doesn’t send back the question after receiving an answer.”

“Exactly!” Luna jumped on the wave. “One thing that we decided to build in right from the start was the ability to keep answer and question on separate systems of CPU and memory. The CPU spoken to by the user must transmit the question through the wormhole before the CPU that did the calculations is allowed to reveal it has the answer.”

“So the main processor is isolated from the user interfacing CPU?” asked Abda.

“I don’t think that’s necessary” said one of the other boys at the back — though Luna couldn’t quite place who. She found him when the boy continued, “If a human went back in time and told themselves something, then when that younger self gets older again they might decide it’s unnecessary to go back in time and tell themselves the same thing since they already know this time ‘round. Then, there’s huge potential for a paradox.”

“Yes, you’re referring to the grandfather paradox” Dr. Courtney added.

“um.. I don’t know — I haven’t heard of it. My point is, though, we’re not talking… Oh… does the grandfather paradox refer to going back in time and killing your own grandfather before you were born?”

“Yes, well done” Mr Sivai chimed in with his own sense of achievement.

“..um…” The boy looked pleased. “Anyway, my point is that we’re not talking about humans sending messages back in time. It’s a computer, if you program it to send the question regardless, it’s going to do it, it’s not going to look at the answer first out of curiosity and then decide not to send the question. It’s just going to do what you programmed it to do.

Luna regretted dumbing things down, “The reason we still isolate the two is in case the user crashes the computer…”

“Oh yeah!” called out Abda, “If the power dies just before sending the question back, does the processing CPU still do the calculation as if it received it?”

“What do you mean?” asked Brija. “It wouldn’t receive it.”

“That’s just it! If you intend to ask the computer a question that takes 10 seconds to calculate, then it will start calculating the question 10 seconds before you ask it. If you then pull the plug out a split second before actually asking it, what happens? Did it spend 9 seconds calculating the answer only to never have received the question or did it actually never receive the question and never start calculating?”

Luna jumped in, “Be careful. As Electronics Engineers we can never test every scenario. We must simply make sure everything operates predictably. Even though the systems are isolated from each other, if the power goes out they will still both shutdown. In cases where the question doesn’t get sent back, the processing CPU can’t cause a malfunction because it cuts out too.”

“But surely you’ve tested it anyway. Surely you’ve monitored the processing CPU and then purposely caused a crash before the question’s sent. Does the processing CPU start making the calculations and then stop or does it do nothing from the start?”

“It does nothing, but we didn’t need to test it actually, because even if we experience a shutdown in just the user interfacing system, and the question never gets sent, we get no answer in the other system.”

“But does the processing system start making the calculations before the power cuts out?” Asked another student, “Not getting an answer doesn’t necessarily mean nothing’s happened. Maybe it starts making the calculations and then they simply stop when the question is prevented. Or maybe at that point it keeps processing calculations but can’t actually remember what for.”

“It’s certainly unlikely” Luna said, “It still doesn’t matter though, the only aspect we need for the computer to function is the output, which we cease to get in this case, so the question must be asked again.”

“It doesn’t matter for the output” the student argued, “but surely it would teach us about how time works.”

“And, I’d imagine…” said Brija, “maybe even something about free will.”

“What does that mean?!” blurted Abda.

“Well…” Brija paused and ordered her ideas internally. “If the computer starts calculating the answer but we never send back the question, I imagine that indicates the likely-hood of other timelines from which the question did get sent — I’m not sure if that has a relationship to free will or not — but on the other hand, if the computer never starts calculating the question because it never received it, that implies that our actions are predetermined”.

“Yeah, that’s probably more interesting” said Abda.

“I dunno, the nature of time is pretty intriguing too” Brija gave the boy who mentioned it a sheepish smile. She paused. “Actually, I think… if the question came from another timeline…” said Brija, “I don’t see a reason why the calculations would suddenly stop”, And before Abda asked, “Meaning… if the calculations start but at the last second we don’t send the question we should still get to the answer. Because it’s tuned into a question sent from another timeline-–so to speak. It has already received the question.”

“Free money” said Abda.

“Alternatively though…” She looked in Luna’s direction and thought it through, “If it starts calculating but does stop when we don’t send the question, I guess the universe thinks it’s predetermined but isn’t”.

“Meaning what?” Mr. Sivai thought this was grand.

“I mean that it’s some sort of mix between determinism and free will. The present starts reacting based on future expectations of now but then has to adjust to our deviations later.”

The class thought this through for a few moments and independently decided the duality was poetic, but all differed in opinions of its plausibility.

Abda asked, “Could that be the Mandella Effect?”

“Wow, I guess it could be related.”

“Alright folks…” Mr Sivai cut them off.

How would they even test all this? Thought Luna. And for a moment was forced to contemplate free will.

The next day Luna’s breakfast tasted the same as usual and nothing in her routine caused her to think about free will. When she got to work she found the first private room available and because it was Thursday she settled in to look over the data that had come in from the Wednesday tests. From all the data she considered throughout the morning the new models seemed to be performing according to projections.

Apart from Leigh, no one really disturbed her. Leigh came to the door to get the display model back. This time he came in and seemed to look around a little curiously. In truth, he was longing to use the room, but he was always stuck in the open plan area because Luna got in early and nabbed it every day. Dr. Courtney wondered why Leigh chose to work in such a distracting environment, How could anyone focus on what they intended with everything vying for their attention?

At the café over lunch, the barista’s pivoting behind the counter diverted her thoughts to satellite orbits. It came to her that the closer a satellite is to the gravitational body the faster it must move to escape its gravity. Which means both the proximity and speed cause time to move slower the closer the satellite is to Earth — It can’t cancel out like the student was thinking. Luna wondered why she didn’t realise that at the time — but she wouldn’t mistake it again.

The Persistence of Luna Courtney by Dale de Silva
My other work can be found on ublik-om.net