The Infinite Network

Chapter 1
Multiverse Theory

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Chapter Description: Ben, Jennifer and their electrician, Lara, prepare to test their newest piece of tech.

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[img align=left; footer=’’; border=0; showfooter=1;]http://i.imgur.com/PfOOW.jpg[/img]

“This is really incredible,” he said, grinning.

“Ben, this is going to make us famous. I’m not even talking about money right now, I’m talking about pure fame. Watson and Crick? They’re nothing compared to us,” she laughed, brushing her long blonde hair out of her eyes.

“Just remember, I’m getting my name first,” Ben reminded her.

“Yeah, yeah, you only get that if you test it first, remember?” she said, pointing a finger at the metallic frame lying on the grass.

“Hell yeah I’m going to test it first! This is some Neil Armstrong business for the year 2034!”

A voice came calling from over the hill, its source still hidden, “Hey! Are you guys finally going to tell me what’s going on? Or should I keep my eyes on this thing.”

“What’s it reading?!” called Jennifer back over the hill.

“Uhh, the flux or the…” a voice came back.

“The flux!”

“Uh…fifteen hundred fermions per femtosecond,” the woman’s voice said after a small pause.

“Is it stable?”

“Looks like it.”

“Okay, come on up!” Jennifer said, excitedly.

“Alright, so are you guys all set?” Lara said, finally visible coming up the hill, her hat pulled low over her eyes, “My eyes hurt from staring at the read outs.”

“Yup,” said Ben, putting his large hands into his pockets, “Now come here for a second and I’ll let you know what the procedure is.”

As Lara walked over to where Ben and Jennifer were standing, she noticed him pulling a small but thick laser pointer out of his pocket, which he always used to illustrate his points, no matter how simple. She surmised he must have paid a lot of money for it.

“To sum it up? We’re making a phone call,” Ben said, flatly.

“What?”

“You know how the Skype-Network phones work in the city? Quantum entanglement? They basically have one “atom” in the phone you’re using and that connects on the same frequency with a pair particle for every other phone in the network. Since the particles are entangled, they are mirrored perfectly, with literally zero delay. That’s how you can instantly transmit data from here to Bangladesh City, if you wanted, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, I knew that much, but you’re not talking about using a paycell, you’re talking about time travel.”

“No, not really, at least, not how people usually think of ‘time travel.’”

“Okay…” she said, confused.

“You’ve heard of multiverse theory, right?” Ben asked.

“Yeah, there’s millions of other universes out there. It’s pretty much accepted now, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but not millions of other universes: infinite other universes!” Ben continued, “Think of each one of those universes as a separate phone in the paycell network. Our universe has particles that wirelessly communicate instantly with all other universes, all other possibilities. If we want to travel back in time, all we have to do is ‘call’ the universe that currently looks like our past and flip the particles.”

“So you mean…” Lara said, raising her hand to the shining metal frame on the grass.

“Right. That’s our phone. Anything inside of that rectangle gets transmitted to the other universe and vice versa. We just flip the ‘polarity,’ so to speak. The other universe has a phone, too, of course, otherwise they wouldn’t ‘pick up,’ so when we want to come back, we just hit the redial button,” he finished, smiling.

“So it’s not really time travel?” Lara asked, finally understanding the complexity laid before her.

“No, like I said, it’s more like a swap. We take a piece of the universe that looks like our past and put it in our universe, while the part of the universe that looks like their future from ours goes in theirs.”

“That’s a mouthful,” Lara said, bewildered again.

“You should try programming the damn thing,” Jennifer interjected, grimacing and slapping a flat computer slate that hummed quietly on the field table, “Anyways, should I prep the grid?”

“Yeah, let’s get going, did you pick one yet?” Ben asked, smiling in apprehension.

“Sure did,” Jennifer said, pulling an orange out of her pocket.

“The orange of the future.”

Jennifer walked over to the metal frame lying in the shaggy grass and placed it gingerly in the center. She made sure it would not roll before she stepped away, satisfied.

“Let’s start the scanner,” Jennifer said, causing Ben to walk over to the computer slate and flip a small meter on which crackled slightly.

“This is what scans for potential matches: universes that match ours in every way except for the parameter we’re looking for. In this case, the future. We can analyze the spectral readings here,” he said, pointing to a chart showing several columns with major elements before continuing, “if you see the listings, the elemental composition is the same, but the quantities of each are different, but in order of periodic number. Know what that means? They’ve decayed. Half-lives. Same elements, longer time. This universe is us, right now, twenty years down the line.”

Jennifer smiled, her patterned skirt flapping slowly in the breeze, as she watched Lara attempt to understand. She looked obviously impressed. Lara tried very hard not to touch any of the instruments.

“Almost ready? Don’t forget, don’t mess up that rack. If the metal moves after we’ve connected the link, it’s almost as good as cutting a wire. We’d lose it, and trying to re-track those coordinates would take years to brute-force.”

“Yeah yeah,” she said, staring at the piece of fruit, motionless in the grass, “Alright, I’m set to go!”

The two scientists readied themselves behind the computer, nearly bursting with anticipation. Jennifer stood awkwardly behind the pair, looking between them with curious intrigue, unsure of what to do with her delicate hands. As the only blue collar person on task, she certainly felt a little out of place. Electricians usually don’t get trained for this kind of thing, she thought.

“Here we go!” Ben said, flipping the final switch. He and Jennifer stared at the orange in anticipation. As the machine hummed quietly, they felt Lara brace herself as if she was expecting an explosion. Instead, it was quite the opposite.

The orange, and that was all, slowly began to grow mold. It shriveled slightly, then moreso, collapsing in on itself as the fuzzy blue and black mold took over the sphere. Eventually the skin became brittle, blackening slightly and then, nothing. It simply remained a tiny, dark, shrunken mess.

While Lara expected an explosion when the switches went off with a satisfying whirr-click, she finally got one as Ben and Jennifer hugged each other tightly, laughing maniacally.

“Wait, was that it?” Lara asked, pointing at the rotten fruit.

“Was that it?!” the two said, incredulously, in unison.

“It worked perfectly!” Ben said, ecstatic, “The orange from our universe is now twenty years in the future! The orange from the future is now here!”

“Then why did I see it rot? Shouldn’t it have been instantaneous?” Lara asked, confused, once again.

“Each particle swaps with its partner instantaneously, but not all particles swap at the same time,” Jennifer explained, as if the point were obvious.

“Okay, okay, enough stalling, let me get in there!” Ben said, pushing the girls aside easily and stepping in the metal rectangle, firmly planting his feet. He straightened up, impressively, to his full height. His broad shoulders blocked the shimmering sun from the girls view. He reached down and tossed the blackened orange aside.

“Shouldn’t we try to reverse it, Ben?” Jennifer asked, watching the husk of the orange roll down the hill towards the electrical lines.

“Who do you want to be on the cover of Time? Us or that orange?” he said, smirking.

“Good point. Where to?” she asked, pointing to the dial with a slender finger.

“The past. That way, if I mess up, I can make the corrections and save time!” he said, chuckling.

“How old are you, Lara?” Jennifer asked, leaning against the table casually.

“I just turned thirty-three,” she replied.

“Ooh, me too! Well, I’ll be thirty-four in two months, is what I meant,” Ben said excitedly.

“Thirty-three years into the past it is. You’ll have to let us know how stupid the haircuts were back then when you get back. Remember, this won’t be like the orange. Your past self wouldn’t have just been sitting in the woods like that orange would have been in the future. I’ll start the scanner.”

“I’m ready when you are.”

“Alright and….go!” Jennifer said, flipping the switch.

Nothing happened. Ben stood awkwardly still in the patch of grass, not moving for fear of messing up the system. Still nothing happened.

“Shouldn’t he have disappeared? Is something wr—“ Lara started before being interrupted by a confused yelp from the rectangle.

“Hey! Hey what’s going on!” Ben suddenly exclaimed, looking at his own arms.

“What’s wrong?” Jennifer asked, looking at the dials.

“I don’t know! I don’t know! Something’s wrong, something’s happening to –“ he trailed off suddenly, looking at his arms more closely.

His arm hair was retracting. Disappearing into his skin. Was it an effect of the equipment? He felt like he was sinking. He was! Was he being translocated into the other universe wrong? He never considered how this would feel. He wasn’t sinking, he realized with horror. He was shrinking!

“Jennifer! Where is the lock coming from?”

“Uh…it’s not here! It’s…it’s coming from way off the map!” She scanned the screen furiously, “It’s coming from Connecticut, I think.”

Ben’s heart sank. His calibrations were wrong. The scanner and the frame didn’t matter. The scanner worked. It found everything that was constant with the universe, except for time; however, it didn’t limit it to the rectangle. The scanner had found his “past” self and was swapping him out. The look on Jennifer’s face confirmed his fears.

He looked around, panicked and tried to jump out of the rectangle. It didn’t matter. The rectangle didn’t matter. It was just a piece of metal. As he ran towards the equipment, he felt his pants loosen and fall to the soft ground. He realized he now was two feet shorter than Jennifer or Lara. He guessed he felt like a seven year old now. Was this the way the machine transitioned? He didn’t care anymore. It was too late. He rushed towards Jennifer, hoping she could help him, but she stared back in the same horror that was reflected on his own face.

“Hewp me! Hewp!” the now five year old Ben screamed, pulling on Jennifer’s long floral dress. He ran over to Lara and grabbed onto the denim of her jeans, pulling at them desperately as he spiraled under four years of age, his pants completely having fallen off, his bare penis, now only a pathetic inch long, on open display. His arms and legs truncated quickly, losing their impressive musculature while simultaneously ballooning with baby fat.

The intelligence that once could have created such a technical wonder faded from his eyes, his brains being replaced, particle-by-particle with mush from another world, another time. Knowledge of the Wolfram equations being swapped with vague memories of bright colors. Comprehension of alloy resistances being swapped with tinkling mobile music. Libraries of books swept away to be replaced by swathes of soft, billowing baby blue fabric.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Lara said, looking to Jennifer for assistance. None came.

Still transforming, the barely-toddler version of Ben fell backwards, now unable to stand . His shirt melted away into the air along with his jeans as they were transported unfathomable distances across space and time. All that was left in the light green field was a tiny baby boy, gurgling under the sun, writhing in the dirt.

The infant kicked his chubby heels playfully up at the two grown women before pulling his feet up toward his mouth where he sucked noisily on his bare toes, completely unashamed. The baby closed his eyes in the bright sun, a small stream of drool running from the corners of his fattened cheeks, down his chin and onto his naked chest, glistening in the afternoon light that filtered in across the horizon through the aspen trees nearby which lined the field.

As the last neurons were swapped infinitesimally far away, Ben realized he felt stupid. How could he have made this mistake? He was never going to get back. He was gone. Replaced. He was a pathetic little scientist. It didn’t matter anymore. Any corrections he made, he realized, trapped behind the babbling, pudgy body that he hardly controlled, his bare feet still in his mouth, his tongue childishly probing between his toes against his most inner attempts to control himself, were useless.

He wondered where his adult body had gone. Was it lying on a changing table as he spoke, somewhere in his old home in Connecticut? Was it propped up in a high chair, being spoon fed by his young mother? Was it rooting around in a diaper, stuck in a playpen? He’d soon find out. Permanently. Unable to relocate and transmit back home without a nearby call computer. He was so helpless and stupid. He felt more like the baby he already was. With that, the last neurons left instantaneously swapped configurations, and he gleefully gurgled to the open sky, releasing his saliva covered foot from his mouth and jostling happily on the ground.

As he did so, a crinkling disposable diaper materialized around him, in a complete reverse process of how his adult clothes had vanished. It encircled his waist, slowly coming into view as the particles of the air transmuted to that of the baby garment. Jennifer and Lara watched on in amazement as the process completed with a whirr-click of the machinery behind them.

Jennifer surveyed the scene for a moment, then seemed to grudgingly accept the situation. She knelt down, scooping up her diapered former colleague and propped him up on her waist as she lifted the metal frame up with her hand.

“Well, Ben, you’ll certainly be on the cover of Time now. Just…probably not in the clothes you were expecting,” Jennifer said, a wry smile on her face.

As if he could comprehend, Ben began to cry softly in response. He kicked and balled up his fists childishly, tears beginning to stream down his round face. Wriggling in her arms, he wailed like any other infant would, burying his face in her bosom, her pale hands warm on his smooth bare back.

“Aww, what’s the matter, Ben?” Lara asked.

“Do you really have to ask?” Jennifer laughed, jostling the baby in her arms.

Jennifer propped him up, sitting him on her right forearm while supported by her left as she brought him in for a tight embrace. She suddenly felt a warm sensation on her right hand as her coworker unknowingly let loose in his diaper, his bowels releasing and letting slip a full load of baby poop into the seat of the 33 year old Pampers brand diaper. The familiar scent of “daycare” and “nursery” suddenly became apparent and the girls exchanged a knowing glance at one another.

Lying him down on the field table, they undid the tapes on his diaper, removed it and wiped the clumps of brown baby poop caked on the thighs of their former co-worker.

“Thirty-four next month,” laughed Jennifer, wiping Ben down with a nearby wipe that she normally reserved for cleaning the electronics. Little Ben finally began to calm down now that he no longer was wearing his soggy, poopy diaper.

“Yeah right. He looks younger than my nephew, and he’s ten months,” returned Lara, handing Jennifer another wipe, “Do we have another diaper for him?”

“What do you think?” Jennifer said, pointing to the green fields that lay in all directions.

“I guess we’ll have to pick some up.”

“He can stay our little nakie boy for now!” she said, picking up her tiny coworker by the armpits and lifting him into the warm air, his naked body on full display for the women. Ben kicked babyishly in the air, placing his thumb into his mouth as Lara tickled him on his exposed tummy, eliciting a smile from him around his thumb, “Isn’t that right?”

“I’ll start packing up. I think we need to contact the shareholders.”

“Good idea, Lara,” Jennifer said, cradling the nude infant in her arms. She brushed his wispy brown hair softly with her hand. “Sorry, Ben, I think I’ll be getting my name first now.”

[img align=left; footer=’’; border=0; showfooter=1;]http://i.imgur.com/DhjfB.png[/img]

 

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