When Your Clever Fiction: Makes You a Dangerous Reality
by Mark Thomas
Staff Writer
THE WRITER’S DREAM OF QUANTUM MACHINES
“A book is a loaded gun in the house next door.” (Ray Bradbury)
All writers know the possibilities. Write something about someone’s military or spy agency, and you can have your life dismantled, taken from you or worse. Science fiction writers and futurists who dream up spec military or spy technologies [unaware they were deployed 30 years ago] live under this weight.
Some you’ve heard of. Others you never will.
But you’re a science journalist writing on exoplanets – black holes – galaxy formation and entertaining features about time dilation. Anything and everything to do with astrophysics and cosmology.
So, finding the CIA in your office when you stepped in was hardly something you were expecting. Not that your work isn’t profound, it’s just not that profound.
Now at your desk finishing the brief you were handed by a guy whose mother probably disliked him, about a code of unknown origin appearing in quantum computers in the states, the UK, China and presumably elsewhere, you look up at him – then at the Asian girl making herself at home at your bookshelves.
“You have linguists. And computer scientists.” Funny, now returning your eyes to the Rapid Technologies Operations Director, whatever the hell that is, how you’d expected a change in that enriching expression.
Hardly. Not a break in that disarming eye-contact.
Rather than try to match this veteran who probably teaches intimidation techniques, you return to the brief with ‘why you’ sprinting through your head. And what’s implied here. Unknown origin. Terrorists? A rogue regime maybe put together a quantum box for communications or spying – and has everyone, including the CIA rattled?
Logical, but it doesn’t answer the why you question, unless…
“…Mr Flemish.” You’re pulled to the girl at your shelves now paging through a short story collection you had published while in college. Never made Best-Seller, but the AMAZON reviews even from non-family members were inspiring. “Your story ‘Recursion of a Kind.’ A copy of this found its way to our analysts three weeks ago.”
Just like that, it’s flashing lights and explosions and a course correction – pulling up the plot of a short you wrote over a long weekend 12-years ago while still living in the dorms. Hardly picturing fame and glory. It was you and Denise Mathias playing bed tents, as you recall.
But now you’re listening – mind open and fully engaged.
CONSIDER ONCE THE WORDS YOU’LL USE: TWICE THE ONES YOU’LL WRITE
“Fate, it seems is not without a sense of irony.” (Morpheus from The Matrix)
Image by StockCake
With a genuine grasp of dramatic timing, the pause executed with precision, she continues. “In this story, you depict a young writer, yourself I assume, tasked with deciphering an alien transmission that can’t be deciphered. By any of Earth’s scientists. Even by advanced AI.”
“You’re kidding.”
She eyes you over the book.
“No.”
Accepting this is serious, is weird. But getting past it, you land on the obvious; they’re also stuck. And there’s the ‘why you’ implausibly on the table. You turn to the window to bring up your MC and the clever little fiction you knitted him into.
“Ivan Case. He takes the transmission from SETI’s radio telescope – works it for months trying to figure out what an advanced culture would want to ask or tell us. Taking his ideas to pattern recognition software, they decipher their language and the warning.”
Turning back to the senior agent – now rising from his chair, you realise; they’re not here to arrest or question you on something you’ve written. This is conscription! You’re being drafted by the CIA into a story you hatched on a Saturday night in the student centre convinced work ethic was your path to freedom.
“There’s a Black SUV out front. I’ve already spoken with your editor. And Tian here will get a call to your landlady.”
“And if I said no?”
“Would you?”
Boy, he’s good. Saying no to this would be like declining a tour of the ISS or a position on the Enterprise.
Watching him to the door, you’re stuck for words – already with your mind working on it. Quantum computers. Entangled cubits. If their scientists; probably the best in the world, have it right – and this is communication, it could be from anywhere. Interstellar or even from galaxies away.
Or conceivably more frightening – they could be in the neighbourhood and within reach.
Now at the door, your recruiter turns to the young woman. “I’m sure he understands he’s not to communicate or share this… but…” He turns to face you with an expression that’s almost fatherly. “…why don’t you stay, in case he forgets.”
After slamming that message home, he heads out into the corridor leaving you with Tian who holds for a minute, then gives you the watch cue.
“Really?” You swivel in your chair and stand.
She grabs the door and waits looking bored. “It worked.”
Pulling your blazer from the chair, you head out from behind your desk reviewing how Ivan went about it in your story – and how you’ll proceed in this one - in the real world. All while resenting the boss-guy for killing your phone privileges.
WE’RE ALL FUTURISTS: OUR MINDS LIKE DYNAMIC TIME MACHINES
“Imagining the future may be more important than analysing the past.” (C.K.Prahalad)
Image by StockCake
Leaving the elevator at the lobby with Tian, a spy who looks more suited for a classroom in some Middle School, you head out through the front doors. Right now, you don’t know what’s ahead or even where you’re going. It’s all too fast. And the recruitment was a thing of beauty. Like they’d rehearsed it after crunching your bio through some strategy program.
But honestly? The guy was right. Would or even could you say no to this? Go back to your job never knowing the outcome.
Now with the SUV in sight - your agent buddy in the back and driver in front, Tian, spooked by something grabs your arm and pulls you back, slamming you against the building just as the SUV explodes in a movie-like fireball with an orange and black mushroom rising from the street.
Glass falls in waves from the offices. Alarms and sirens – car horns and people screaming - running. The street scene is chaos.
Concussion stunned, shielding your eyes, you follow an odd distortion, like a spherical drone bending light around it rising above the street.
Suddenly, there’s Tian in your face yelling at you above the warp-10 tinnitus you’ve developed. “Are you okay?!”
After a nod, she grabs you again – this time wrenching you away from the building shoving you north along the walk. Running now along 4th, you snap a look back at the fire – then at the police cars and ambulances flashing by.
At the corner, she pulls you right onto Foster through a mob of onlookers heading towards 5th then to the alley where she stops for a breath.
“Why are we running?”
“Habit.”
“Habit?!”
“Okay, training.” Obviously rattled, she looks over your shoulder and spots an autonomous cab. “There.” Following her across the walk, she turns to you with her hand on the door. “All right, I’m a linguist.”
“I guessed.”
You climb into the cab with her following you in. After punching in a destination on her phone, she turns to you with the cab swinging a U-turn.
“The windows were glowing orange. Brightening to white.”
Looking at her, you can see she’s as clueless as you are about why this sci-fiction plot you were pulled into has suddenly become an action-adventure script.
“What could do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why would they want to kill you?”
She takes a moment before turning – giving you time to reconsider that one. When she does, the question is there without her asking it.
“Me?!”
“I need a few minutes to think.”
Now even more shaken, you sit back and turn your eyes to the front. “Why me?!
“Who knows? Bury something in that story our analysts missed?”
If that was meant to cut you short – to get you to stop bugging her while she decides what to do next, it worked. You’re suddenly staring out the window trying to remember. The research you did – your main character - how he put it together.
It was a crazy time for you. Unsure and insecure about everything.
And there’s something you can’t get away from. If someone were after only them, they could have killed them at any time. Or just ordered them to stand down – go work on something else.
That was timed to get all three of you. Which leaves you wondering while heading out onto the Bay Bridge for who knows where: what did you write into that story that’s made you a threat to someone or at least important enough to kill with some experimental weapon in front of your building?
The neat little surge you felt at the office has changed. With someone trying to kill you, there’s a surge all right – it’s just not neat and certainly not any fun.
WHEN GOING BACK TO THE BEGINNING: IS THE ONLY WAY FORWARD
“He who cannot describe the problem will never find the solution to that problem.” (Confucius)
Image Courtesy of UC Berkeley
The drop off at UCB was unsurprising. It seems you’ve begun thinking like your companion. It’s public, crowded, and they have a computer science department with one of the top engineers in the world. And a quantum computer.
Heading across the campus, Tian who also studied here, pulls you into the café to talk, probe you for ideas and share what she came up with while crossing the bay.
At a table in the back, she hits you with a request: give her everything you know about quantum computing, quantum entanglement and how you married the two in your quirky, impossibly prescient sci-fi episode. And be polite with the technical jargon. Prior to this assignment, she thought quantum mechanics was silly.
After giving her the basics on entanglement, what Einstein called Spooky Action at a Distance – how sub-atomic particles like electrons separated by vast, possibly infinite distances somehow act as if connected – mirroring each other’s action, you dive into your story and how you wove it into your plot.
“They were manipulating cubits in their computers 419 light years away – cubits entangled with ours in quantum boxes around the world. The code, indecipherable – assumed to be communication was appearing everywhere.”
“Bring in your sci-fi writer.”
“Ivan Case.”
She snaps a look up at you. “Here.”
A quick scan out the windows at the campus. “I know it, so, yeah.”
For the next 20 minutes you go deeper into the plot – telling her how your MC, a kid working on a joint major in journalism and linguistics went through various logical assumptions until finally, after months landed on the one that seemed most plausible.
One the scientists, critical of him at the start couldn’t shoot down. And when he started seeing what he believed were recursive strings – matching his hypothesised warnings – and they began falling into place with the pattern recognition software, and a language started to unfold, the scientists discontinued their criticism.
“Information sharing?”
“Yeah. About a stellar mass object. One that would pass through our solar system pulling things apart in 37 years. They were giving us the coordinates, its mass and velocity along with how we could divert it.”
She goes back to her coffee considering everything you’ve given her. Obviously trying to piece it together with the sophisticated attack earlier.
Which also gives you time to think. There’s something illogical about this. Why would they want to kill a writer – but not just the writer – the entire team assigned to figuring out the language of the communication. Unless… “Hey…”
She naps eyes up to you – and follows them out the window to the trio of guys who just have that look. That they don’t belong here on a university campus.
Ready to accept your intuition, she looks for the back door - finds it and whispers. “Back there. Slowly though. Drop our phones in the bin on the way out.”
When she cues you, you’re up slipping through the students heading for the back and the next step in this developing adventure.
CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT: FANCY JARGON FOR WINGING IT
“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered.” (G.K. Chesterton)
Image by StockCake
Now outside, heading across Faculty Glade you’re pulled left when Tian takes your arm and guides you into the path between buildings. It’s quiet and dark like a long gangway. And oddly for a mid-week-day morning, vacant.
“You had an idea. Something else you were going to share.”
“When?”
“In the café. Before you spotted those guys, you were going to say something else.”
“I was.”
You reach the North Field quad and cross the trail into the trees to the rock outside Wheeler where you park for a moment to rest, catch a breath and talk. With her scouting in all directions including up, you push on giving her your half-baked, half-thought-out theory.
“What if they are sharing? Just not with you. And not about any possible threat coming our way.”
She points to the bench at the rock. Together you head for it and sit. “Like what kind of information?”
“Oh, I don’t know. How about advanced technology? Like bizarre laser weapons that bend light so they’re invisible.”
She looks you in the eyes for a long minute then gazes off to think. And what’s odd here is how, in such a short time, you’re working like a trained team. And how on the same page you are. “Someone else figured it out – and we were an acceptable nuisance until…”
“…you found me. Or my book, then me.”
She thinks for a moment. “Right… and saw us getting there.”
After ten minutes working that one through, running down the list of possible suspects, she leans forward with her elbows on her knees. And for the first time, you get this feeling she’s not enjoying her job or any of this. And less in control than she’d like to be. She runs her hands up through her hair then looks at you.
“We don’t have weapons like that.”
You see it in her eyes. The disquiet. And her sudden openness to your theory. And to you.
“I didn’t think so.”
“No one does.”
Shoving your hands down into your pockets, you lean back and stare off into the trees. “Or didn’t.”
She chuckles - once again shaking her hands through her hair then leans back. “God…. I should have taught.”
With the slowed pace settling in, you sit there watching the world go by on a bench you know well. During an earlier, freer, less cluttered time of your life. A time when you were dreaming up plots like this – not living them.
“You wrote that story here?”
Staring at her, you’re aware immediately, oddly what she’s about to suggest. And not only are you warming to the idea, you’re also warming to her for thinking it.
“Up there. Chatham House.”
She takes a finger to her lips and begins chewing her nail – still with her eyes locked on yours. “Could you?”
“Whoa…” Now it’s your turn to lean forward with your elbows on your knees and head down considering actually doing it – what Ivan Case did in your story, but more.
How bizarre. Pulled into a story you wrote – right here. Ironically, you may have written part of it on this bench.
“I mean… yeah. Or, maybe, but… to what end? You want the blueprints to some psycho weapon system?”
“No. I was thinking of a reverse call. Telling them a little about us – or a lot - and why they need to stop.”
Right now, you realise why the two of you are here. And why you seem to work so well together. Not just the adversity. It’s deeper. Before getting up, you take her hand and give it a squeeze. And a quick smile saying how much you appreciate that – and her.
And how sure you are you’re going to make this work. Whatever that means.
PLACING TRUST: IN INTUITIVE COLLABORATORS
“Without faith, without belief in something, what are we?” (Thomas Malory)
Image by StockCake
It took over an hour to find Professor Blake – the head of the university’s computer science program and a legend in AI research, but ironically little to convince him to sit and listen.
He seemed almost eager. Oddly eager.
After following him from a lecture up through Wheeler to his office in Birge, you’re quiet, listening to Tian explain the work they’ve been doing at the agency, how months earlier they’d hit a wall – and how your book found its way to them ultimately leading them to you this morning. And the action-adventure scene in front of your building.
He’s a stoic type. Focussed. Sits with his hands clasped in front of him – listening, never moving. And strangely unmoved by this.
When she finishes, he eyes the two of you then stands without a word, walks to his window and stares out. For minutes you and Tian sit, watching, wondering what he’s thinking and whether you’ve erred in your belief he’d be willing to help.
“You believe you can do this.” He turns from the window and looks right at you. “Never mind that. Of course, you do, or you wouldn’t be here.”
He moves swiftly to his desk and grabs his phone. Standing there, he starts talking while rapid-texting messages.
“The software you were using at the CIA…” he glances up at Tian. “…Who wrote it?”
“A contractor, I think. I don’t know which one.”
Now talking even faster while still shooting off messages, he looks up at you. “You know where Lewis Hall is?”
“Up near the theatre.”
“Get there. But don’t try to go in. Wait for me.”
Now he takes the phone to his ear. “John, it’s Jackson. Hold on a minute.” He pulls it down and looks at you. “Stop at the bookshop on the way and pick up some notepads and pens. Lots of them.”
“Like, spiral notebooks?”
“Yeah.” He gives you a telling look then shoots eyes at Tian. “And dump your phones on the way if you’re foolish enough to still have them.”
Together you and Tian head for the door where you stop and exchange looks. How odd it is within one morning the two of you are already thinking alike. Almost too inviting.
“Professor?”
He looks at you. “Yes. For the past six months. And we’re stuck at the same wall her agency is.”
There’s a neat jolt that comes with validation. And it’s not just you. Tian turns to you with a smile on your way to the lifts.
“We made the right call.”
“You did.” You stop at the lifts and wait.
“We both did.”
A long look in a university corridor on your way to go talk to aliens with a quantum computer and all you can add to this charged, sensitive moment after stepping in is…
“I wonder who all those texts were to.”
When the doors close, she smiles, shakes her head and nudges you against the wall.
THE HUMAN MIND: A TRUE ENGINE OF CREATION
“The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.” (Arthur C Clarke)
Image by StockCake
Meeting Professor Blake’s team as they arrive is as humbling as it was meeting TX-9 the university’s quantum computer.
These are people whose books you’ve read or listened to on podcasts. Others you only know from their reputations. Some are from here, others from MIT, UCLA – there’s even a pair of astrobiologists from Oxford.
What a stunning talent pool he’s assembled. All here working under the radar of our governments, for some reason. You wonder and feel the urge to ask during introductions, but you’re timid. Not even sure how you’re to act around them.
So, you put it off and get busy. Deciding to wait for them to decide.
Anyway, you and Tian make a workstation in a corner of the vast lab stealing desks and chairs from an outer office. But no computers. Spiral notepads and pens from the campus store working 10 metres from the highest technology in the world.
Something that looks like it belongs on the Enterprise.
The scientists have a hard job. In ways, yours is harder. Picturing them. Imagining them. Dreaming up creative visions of their planet – their cities – their technologies besides the obvious. All with hopes of it leading you to a dialogue – a transmitted communication that will match the recurring output coming from that gargantuan computer.
You spend entire days over the next seven weeks away from the lab walking the halls or the campus with headphones in a science-fiction writer’s blur. But not a blur of ecstasy. Pain. Like a novelist on a deadline suffering beneath a crushing weight of writer’s block.
Sometimes it’s stimulating – at others debilitating.
And with each step that seems to be moving you towards that elusive Point B, you end up back at the one question that rests at the heart of this. That of…
“Purpose.”
ABANDONING OLD PATHS WHEN SEEKING NEW TRUTHS
“You must look past what you know and open your mind to what you don’t know.” (Yoda)
Image by StockCake
You’re in the campus café late one night with Tian. Nearly three months, sleeping on sofas in Birge Hall or at the Faculty Club with the profs. Food delivered from the local restaurants – and only venturing in here on special occasions.
Or when you’re just down feeling defeated like tonight. And always late trying to avoid a replay of that first day.
And filling those spiral notebooks with stories – parts of stories – plot lines – ideas for stories. Spec societies – spec systems of government – hypothesised beings. Hypothesised catastrophic scenarios like in Recursion spurring them to reach out to us with a warning.
Tian’s been great help – a good sounding board. But you’re always – every session ending up right here.
“Yeah. Why.” She drops her head to her hand and turns to the window - looks out at the rain which has been coming down all day. “Why ring up an alien world from God-knows-where to give them advanced weapons… or anything?”
It’s been a long day and week, and you’re exhausted sitting there in your university sweats – your entire wardrobes now from the campus store, and you’re at melt-down again. Nothing you’ve imagined – not one conversation when taken to the pattern software Blake wrote has produced anything.
And he’s good. The minute they install and begin working with his latest program, he starts on the next version. Then the next and the next. Like a machine, he works.
“Why is their communication so indecipherable by us? The smartest scientists – linguists – astrobiologists, some of the brightest minds. Maybe the smartest humans on…”
And it strikes you. Mid thought – going on 11pm in the café, it registers. And for the life of you, it’s like; why now? Why here when you’re ready to give up?
“What if it’s not meant for us?” Tian lifts her head and turns to you – waiting for the rest. "And what if they’re closer than we thought? As in…”
“…I told you weeks ago to cut that out. Your half-finished ideas are driving me nuts.”
Sitting back, your mind starts sketching an image of that first day. The weird light-bending orb or whatever it was that vapourised Tian’s boss in his shiny SUV. Technology even she admitted ‘we’ don’t have. ‘We’ being any of us.
You sit forward – fast. And start firing off your theory in rapid whispers.
“Your scientists spent six months – came up empty. Blake and everyone here – the top people in the world. How could they not decode a message? From anyone – or any being, especially with a computer designed for just that, unless… unless they don’t want us to.”
“…you mean…”
“…I do. All the way, I do. Think about it. What could devise a language so sophisticated, it’d be indecipherable - by us? Specifically, to be kept… from us.”
“Why? It brings us back to purpose.”
“Right, but I think you answered that one three months ago.”
“They don’t trust us?!””
You stare at her. “Be a pretty good call on their part, wouldn’t you say?”
She turns to the window to think – then, suddenly sends a hand across the table grabbing your arm. When she turns to you, no words are needed.
Together you leave your table at the glowing orange windows and head into the café sprinting for the counter with Tian yelling: “Get out! Leave through the back door! Now!!”
Just seconds after getting everyone out into the quad you’re thrown to the ground when the café explodes outward. Glass – roofing – timbers – store fixtures – everything pulverised, coming down like burning hail.
After a quick scan of the sky for that distortion, but not finding it in the rain, you grab Tian and pull her up – and start heading away from the university onto Bancroft.
“Aren’t we going to go tell Blake?!”
“Think so?”
Running now for a taxi, after almost getting blown up again by aliens with stealth technology they most definitely got from Star Trek, you find yourself laughing while looking back at Tian who is so totally not finding humour in this.
And all you can think of is: be careful of what you put down in print these days, for it may certainly get you killed.
THE HEROES AND THEIR JOURNEY: FROM UNKNOWING TO THE UNKNOWN
“What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates his fate.” (Henry David Thoreau)
Image by StockCake
You don’t know, and there’s a chance now in the cab heading to the airport; you never will - the final chapter – the outcome from all this.
But one thing is certain; they know who and where you are… always. Watching, listening to every word. And more importantly: they know what you know. And that has made you and Tian a danger to them.
If they’re here in orbit, or even on the planet concealing their existence and have recruited our quantum computers for some greater good – perhaps no one will ever know. Not the CIA. Not the Chinese, the Russians, Europeans or even Blake and his team of internationals.
We’re not in their league.
Tian is fine with your decision to take whatever money the two of you have and go live somewhere on a boat or a beach or an island – somewhere remote – somewhere safe. Where they may consider you less of a threat.
In all the story lines you’ve written over the last three months, you chucked every one that described them as hostile. You could be wrong, but at this point; you really don’t have another hand to play.
Now on the freeway, you turn back and watch the San Francisco Bay Area fading into the fog and rain certain of little, but certain somehow, you’ll never see it again.
And there’s sadness in that. Just not enough to matter now.
“Want to share it?”
Turning, you plant your head against the seat and look at Tian. “No matter where we go, we’re always going to be watching. Trends. Behaviours. Statistics. Climate. Wars. Tech. All of it. Trying to determine if we did it… nature did it… or they did it.”
She drops her head to the seat and looks at you.
“Okay… so a beachy cabin without devices.”
Smiling, you turn and drop your head back closing your eyes for the trip to the airport. “That’s goofy. You’re a goofy spy.”
She chuckles, turns and now closes her eyes. “That may be. But there’s something you should consider.”
“What?”
“That it’s the goofy spy who keeps saving our asses from the aliens who keep trying to blow us up for your goofy story.”
A quick turn on the seat to face her with the widest grin – before checking once more to see if the windows are glowing.
Mark Thomas (T. E. Mark)
