Page 143 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

The Quantum Reticulator

diverging and converging paths. He called the skein of past-to-future
quantum world lines a reticulation, and his device a quantum
reticulator. It looked like a tightly-fitting helmet connected by cables
to an electrical generator. He claimed that it would allow him to see
alternative events occurring at the same time; he would then describe
them to the satisfaction of his audience. If it were otherwise
impossible for him to have “seen” them, then he would have
demonstrated clairvoyance and could claim the Randolph Prize.
The performance—for such it must have seemed—of Simeon
Gibbons and his miraculous machine took place one afternoon in a
room the location of which was divulged to Gibbons only after the
committee had already assembled there. Thus trickery in the
environment was eliminated. Next, those examining scientists had
rigged up an apparatus to Gibbons’ specifications, but which was
constructed without his involvement and had been vetted for hidden
transmitters—another means of deception disappeared. That
contraption consisted merely of a standard laptop computer hooked
up to a projector. A program ran on that computer, constantly
generating a random set of five thousand six-character
combinations—2C8PF9, for example—thousands of times per
second. When one of the panel hit a key twice in rapid succession on
the computer’s keyboard, two things happened: on the first stroke,
the set of five thousand just generated was saved in a file; on the
second, one of the character strings in that set, again selected
randomly by a program generating a new sequence number
thousands of times per second, was projected on the screen for three
seconds. The program performed one other crucial operation: on the
first stroke of the key a signal was sent via an interface cable to the
quantum reticulator, activating it.
The metamaterials could only keep the reticulation of world lines
via faster-than-light signal transmission going for about five seconds,
and that only within the space-time of the helmet—Gibbons’ eyes
and brain. Extremely tiny variations in the interval between the first
and second strokes which would occur in the alternate universes
would manifest as a different random number coming up as the
pointer to a character string in the set already determined on the
common past world line. A version of Gibbons, therefore, in each
141