The Edge Read online

  Just when the chaos seemed to be at its peak, and nobody was sure of anything anymore, Philo appeared. No one knew his last name, who he was, or where he came from. He would just talk to people, and they would feel good, it would all be OK. At first, he would just talk to a few people on the street, then small groups in living rooms and parks, then auditoriums and stadiums, and his message was this: It doesn’t matter what your pasts are, and your futures are limitless, the only thing that matters is the now, and the only thing that matters in the now is being nice, and treating others decently. It was a simple message, and one that, deep down, most people knew was true. Philo was extremely charismatic, and tens then hundreds of thousands, then millions followed his every word. Philoism, or Philoianity became a religion.

  An atheist senator from Vermont demanded that since niceness was part of a religion, it was a clear violation of the doctrine of separation of church and state to have niceness taking place in government offices. The senator from North Cyberspace pointed out that niceness never was much of a problem in government offices, particularly at the DMV.

  The message of being nice to each other was not a new one, it had been suggested countless times in history. Usually the person who suggested it was ignored, sometimes tortured or imprisoned, sometimes a group would take it up as a religion, usually it would fail in a few years, or last among a small group. In one case a group was somewhat successful at it, and then realized they could become much more successful if they switched their tactics from being nice to threats, persecution and torture. They became a major religion.

  This time, it seemed to be working, people were being nice on a large scale, wars stopped, at least for a while, crime decreased, and the IRS simplified tax forms. (They admitted they had been making them unnecessarily complicated out of spite.) Then Philo disappeared. It happened right in front of TV cameras. (If you’re thinking, “Shouldn’t this be HoloTV or something this far in the future?”, yeah, it should be, but a lack of an agreement on standards between Sony, GE and Wal-Mart/Time-Warner/Disney has kept it off the market. Excuse me if I seem bitter.) It was being broadcast to two billion people. In the middle of sentence, Philo stopped, looked at his watch and said, “Oops, I forgot I had an appointment, got to go, remember, be nice.” and with that, he disappeared, and was never seen again.

  3.

  The next day, Sally awoke to a pleasant morning, and decided to go for a morning swim in the stream. Voluntary immersion in water for adults was not generally approved of in her village, but she found it refreshing, and found that she didn’t stink as badly as the other clan members. She had also discovered that putting the food-beast skin clothing into the water and shaking it around washed away most of the mud, it didn’t smell quite as bad, and looked a bit nicer.

  As she walked naked out of the stream, she had not the slightest idea that she was being watched. Three hunters from a nearby village who had been looking for a very special food-beast for their chief were watching her from some nearby bushes. They were discussing who was going to do what with her when Fluffy walked up to her for an ear scratching. The lead hunter suddenly remembered they were overdue back in the village, and they had better get moving or the chief would not be very happy, so they left.

  Sally spent a few more days in her pleasant little camp, but she became increasingly restless, and was not sure why. Fluffy seemed a bit antsy, pacing back and forth, and spent hours staring down a path that headed off to the west. She decided to continue on her journey, and set out once more. She walked for several weeks without spending any more than a few nights in any place, the weather began to cool off and the days grew shorter, she veered south, to warmer weather, more proof of her “really big, really round rock” theory, she thought.

  Just about the time she was thinking she should have stayed in the place she had stayed that first night, she came to a clearing, and saw something that was totally beyond anything for which her limited experience had prepared her. She quickly turned and ran away. Then she stopped, thinking to herself, “Wait a minute, I’m a rational person, the only one in my village, why am I running away from something that did not threaten me, just because I’ve never seen anything like it before, I might as well be screaming and putting rocks over my eyes.”

  Sally was not only the only rational person in her village, she was one of the two most rational and intelligent people on the planet at that moment, and the other one had only arrived about two hours earlier. Still, she could not totally overcome her stone-age upbringing, and was shaking severely as she forced herself to walk back to the clearing. It was very large, larger than the largest food beast, it didn’t look to be alive, though. She kept her distance while looking it over. It had several colors on it that she had only seen on birds before.

  As she looked closer she saw it had strange markings on it. She guessed that it was a made thing, rather than a natural thing. She had seen pictographs before, some of the men in her village painted pictures of themselves throwing sticks at food-beasts for fun, and she had once sneaked into her uncle Darrell’s secret cave, and saw paintings that looked like Darrel trying to make offspring with a medium size food-beast. But this was something different, then she saw something familiar, an image of a creature she had seen before, a small animal that sometimes lived in the rivers and had two big front teeth that it used for chewing sticks and trees, and from which her clothing was made. What Sally could not have understood were the words next to the image that said, “Go Beavers”.

  She stepped back and said aloud the rough equivalent of “What the hell is it.” She jumped back, stumbled, and fell down when a voice said, in her own language, “It’s a Winnebago.” She jumped up and started to run away again, but once more stopped herself. As she entered the clearing again, the voice spoke again, “Ah, you came back, good, I chose the right timeline, are you okay? Can I get you something, a lemonade, maybe, how about some Oreos? William loves Oreos.” Of course Sally’s language did not have words for things like “timeline”, “lemonade”, or “Oreos”, but the voice used long descriptions that Sally almost understood. She was pretty sure that “William” was a ridiculously short name for a person. She said, “Where are you? Who are you, and did you say Winn-a-bado?” It said, “I’m Bob, and I’m not a who, I’m a what. William could probably explain it to you better, but he’s in the shower right now, he fell in the mud while picking some berries, he’ll be out soon, and no, I said ‘Winnebago’, have some lemonade.”

  Sally was slightly relieved, in her language, a winn-a-bado was a large poisonous snake, which this clearly was not. She did notice that Fluffy was just sitting there playing with his tail, and he was usually pretty good at picking up on the presence of anything threatening before she did. She was thirsty, but wasn’t sure from Bob’s description that lemonade was not a kind of beer. She said, “No, thank you, who’s William?’

  “This is William’s Winnebago, and I’m his computer.”

  This made no sense to Sally, and she just stood there for a minute, until Bob said, “Oh, here’s William now.” At that moment, the door on the Winnebago opened, and a man stepped out, looked over, saw Sally and said, “Bob, there’s a cavewoman staring at me.”

  “Yes, I know, her name is Tralalililea Mundopote Exni-Slodge, but I’m going to call her Sally, I think she’s okay in this timeline.”

  Sally didn’t understand the gibberish that William and Bob were speaking, but she did recognize her own name, “Hey, how did you know my name.”

  “I guessed.” Bob said.

  “How did you know her name?” asked William

  “You know that I don’t know everything that happens in every time line, but I am pretty good at probabilities, I calculated that, even though we landed seventy-four point three kilometers from the nearest village, there was still an eighty-four percent chance that we would encounter a lone cavewoman, and if we did, there was a ninety-two percent chance that her name would be Tralalililea Mundopote Exni-Slodge, I gu
essed, and she just confirmed it.”

  “Good guess, what do we do now?”

  “William, that is entirely up to the two of you, you could start by offering her some lemonade.”

  Sally was familiar with the concept of different languages and translators, sometimes, when other clans visited, they would not speak the same language, but they would bring someone who could, so while it was a bit weird with a translator she couldn’t see, she could deal with it. So she spoke to William, “So, are you from, like, past the forest, or something?”

  She was surprised when whatever it was that Bob said to William took a lot less time than what she said. But then, when William spoke, Bob’s interpretation took a lot longer, “Yeah, something like that, it’s a long story.”

  William was surprised when Bob’s translation seemed to take several times longer than what he had said, either Bob was embellishing, which was not like Bob, or Sally’s language was not very compact. He had read theories that languages tend to become more condensed as time passes, or, more correctly as we suffer from the perception that time is passing. It would therefore make since that if you extrapolated back, oh, say fourteen thousand years into the past, that languages would be very inefficient.

  Sally said, “It seems to me that since, in my language it takes a long time to say something as simple as ‘I’m feeling a bit peckish, I think I might go out and pick some berries’, that if we’re going to have any meaningful conversation, I really am going to need to learn your language. I’m not busy or anything.” She smiled, she found him strangely attractive, for someone who wore skins of a kind she had never seen before, but then, he was the first adult male she had ever seen other than her father, who wasn’t covered in mud.

  William watched her as she spoke for what seemed like ten minutes before Bob translated. He found himself strangely attracted to her in spite of her being dressed in a tunic made from what looked like beaver pelts. She reminded him of a neo-hippie girl he had dated while an undergraduate whose name was Cili, she’d been pretty hot, but left something to be desired in the personal hygiene department. Sally looked cleaner.

  “Uh, yeah, that sounds like a good idea, uh, I’m not real busy right now, either. Do you want to come in for a while?”

  Sally didn’t think it was proper for a woman to go into a man’s cave or hut unless they were going try to make offspring, and she just wasn’t ready for that. At that point, Fluffy stood up, looked at William and growled, William had not noticed the tiger up to that point, he stepped back slowly, ready to jump back into the Winnebago and slam the door if necessary.

  Sally said, “Fluffy! Nice! Maybe another time, it’s getting a bit late, and I need to find a cave or something, Maybe tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, maybe tomorrow.”

  “There is a cave suitable for human shelter just northwest of this clearing.” interjected Bob.

  4.

  William wasn’t making up the part about not being busy, he really had nothing to do for another month, he was thinking of learning to play the piano, but that could wait, he could not go anywhere, unless he wanted to delay his planned trip in order to make small side trips, and it just wasn’t worth the delay.

  The antimatter generator on the Winnie would take a month to recharge the hyper-capacitors to the level necessary to make the large jumps that Bob had calculated as being the most efficient way of getting to the highly convoluted outer surface of the Macroverse. Some jumps would be shorter, when the optimum timing to make a transition depended on the relative position of a universe that would only be near for a brief time. Originally, Bob had estimated the trip would take over twelve years, with the requisite recharging time, but then he had found a shortcut through a quasi-parallel loopback that passed through the distant past.

  The Winnebago was hardly stock. It originally was a 2109 model that his grandparents had used a few times before giving it to him after he received his Master’s, so that he could take a few months off to see the United Provinces and States of North America (Formerly Canada, the USA, and Mexico, but excluding most of Idaho) before he continued his studies.

  After William had made a few bucks in the Time-Travel Business, he sold out, and designed a new more portable time-travel system he installed in the Winnie, he made a few trips to the future, where, in 2206, he upgraded the original cold-fusion drive to the latest antimatter drive, which would not need refueling for at least five hundred years. In 2225, he had the matter synthesizer installed, so he would never run out of food or supplies. In 2274, it was the Mecha-MedTM system. In 2335 he had the pressurization package and orbital thrusters installed, and finally, in 2382 he had the final modification made.

  He did all this with one thing in mind. While everybody else wanted just to go to the past or future, William thought about possibilities. Every possible universe, every possible past and future existed, but what constituted “possible”?

  With his vast resources, he decided to find out. Bob said that all of his nodes seemed to be clustered in universes clustered along a central axis of the Macroverse, so that, while he was able to navigate the whole thing, he only had a vague idea what was going on in the vast majority of it, but he speculated that more “normal” universes were located in the middle, and that they would become stranger as one moved outward, with the most bizarre being at the fractal edges. William intended to find out what was there.

  5.

  After breakfast, William thought she might be ready for the truth, and they went for a walk around the clearing. He said, “Sally, I think you’re ready for the truth.”

  “The truth about what? What have you been lying to me about?”

  “The truth about where I’m from… I’m from the future.”

  “The future, ...right… Let me guess, you’re from the moon, and you just don’t want to tell me. The Earth’s a big ball, and people live on it. The Moon’s a big ball, maybe people live there, too, you could be from there. Here, I can through a rock to the moon.” She picked up a rock and threw it at the crescent moon. “Okay, well that fell a little short, but maybe it could be done. Maybe you’re from the stars, hey, I could throw a rock to the stars, but only at night. But from the future? Here, let me throw a rock to yesterday, wait a minute, where’d it go? It was just here... YESTERDAY!” She stomped off.

  William went after her, “Sally, stop, please believe me.”

  She turned, her fists clinched at her side, and said slowly, “When you can tell me exactly how you came from the future, I will believe you. One thing I learned a long time ago is that I can’t just take somebody’s word for something, if I could, I would still be back in my village, crying every night and begging the sun not to abandon us. Make me understand it and I will believe you.”

  “I will try, I hope you can learn mathematics and physics as easily as you did English.”

  6.

  Sally actually was even faster at physics, in her early twenties, she had already deduced most of what was known prior to Archimedes, and some of what Archimedes and even Galileo had discovered. William had to teach her basic mathematics, which, once she understood the concept of abstract symbols, she breezed through rather quickly. He suspected she had an eidetic memory, when it came to new concepts, it took her a little while, but once she understood any given concept, she would advance, almost at superhuman speed, sometimes to the point of boredom.

  One morning she pointed at the piano, “What is that thing, we walk around it all the time, but you never touch it, it’s pretty, but what’s it for?”

  “That’s a piano, a musical instrument.”

  “What’s a musical instrument?”

  “You told me about the chanting in your village. Did anybody make sounds with objects to go with it?”

  “Some of the men banged sticks and rocks together, and a couple of them tried squeezing small animals, but that didn’t work very well.”

  “Well, those were primitive musical instruments, this is a much more advanced
musical instrument.”

  “You hit it with rocks and sticks?”

  “No, you play different notes on it.”

  “Notes?”

  He wasn’t sure how to explain it, he wasn’t a musician, “Bob, would you put on some music please?”

  Bob played the first movement from the third Brandenburg Concerto. Sally stood transfixed. When it was over, she asked, “That was made with this?”

  “Oh, no, that was played by ten people with ten instruments, one of them is a harpsichord, similar to a piano. Bob, play a piano solo.”

  Bob played Beethoven’s Piano Sonata #14, Sally listened intently. “Can you play that?”

  “No I was planning to use my spare time on this trip to learn.”

  “Can I touch it?”

  “Sure.” He sat her down on the bench, he raised the lid, and opened the fallboard. He showed her how the keys caused the hammers to strike the strings. Then he gently took her right hand and placed it on the keys, “Now press just one key.”

  She did, and then another, she moved all over the keyboard, trying different keys, and combinations, different velocities, William showed her how the pedals worked.

  Then she paused, “Bob, please play that piano solo again.”

  He did, she listened with her eyes closed, and then she played a passable rendition. When she was done, she closed the fallboard, “I like that, I think I’ll want to do that again sometime.”

  William wasn’t sure what to say, was there anything she couldn’t do?

  They continued with math studies. She understood Euclidean Geometry almost intuitively. When they got to calculus, she started to slow down, she was only progressing at three or four times the rate a bright junior college student could.