I heard about it in the science columns. “Faster than light travel?” With all the usual caveats. Quarks and splitting waves, the regular mysteries. To be honest, I'm not sure how my car works, either. Not that we would need a car, they promised, before long. They could instantly move objects anywhere in comprehensible space. That's what the papers started using, comprehensible space. This was in 030, then in 032, the University of Iowa announced that they could send humans from pt A to pt B instantaneously. But with a caveat: you needed to be nearly dead for it to work.
It was your cells, the way the body breaks down over time. If things were already beaten up - “broken in,” my father said, touchy - you could make the jump without feeling much worse. If, in contrast, you were in fine physical shape it was like putting on 50 years and getting 5 kinds of cancer and heart disease in half a second. You went into shock and died. At least the monkeys did.
Zoom forward 48 years. Last week I, under a depressurized fake diamond done a mile under the surface of the Atlantic, I had a nice giant-squid dinner with red wine, paid the check, and came to my seaside apartments in Wilmington, Delaware. Easy to forget, with such convenience, how it took 20 years to iron out the bugs. They were good years. We sent our nuclear waste to Neptune, like that. No more 10,000-year hazard signs.
But it took 20 years to work out the bugs, and then the multiverse problem, the low-resolution copies walking through walls - some people believe that's where ghosts came from through history, other universes, more advanced, going through the same technological steps, sending their flesh and blood to turn gray in our part of the cosmos, creaking our rocking chairs. But I want to talk about my father.
I think of him every day. He was an aphoristic old man. He had me when he was 40. I was 22 when he took the trip. What the hell are you at 22? Too young to know your father. Too small a window.
My father send them an email right after the Morris story came out. They figured it out with one of the physicists, Morris, whether that was his first name or last I can't remember, just Morris, who was 62 with malignant brain cancer. He figured he made a perfect guinea pig, filled him with morphine, and he survived longer - 47 minutes - than any silver-suited monkey. Nothing had lasted longer than about a minute until then. They moved him from one end of a University of Iowa basketball court to the other. Not even a blink. You can't be at two places at once, you're just there. Only about 200 people in the world really understand it. They shouldn't have done the experiment. But he only had 6 weeks to live and all was forgiven, a medal for the man on his coffin, his last words at minute 45, sucking oxygen and stuffed with IVs, to a gathering of physicists in polo shirts: "I became, at the last moment of my life, the next great problem to be solved." And a smile.
So for 5 years, until the designed the corrective algorithms, the very sick were our pioneers. My father had the big C, same as his father, right in the gut. He was filled with nano and chem and biological agents, but they still couldn't scissor it out like they can now. It was a time bomb. He was a bastard about it. Wouldn't tell the truth to my sister and I. We knew he was getting miserable. Mom wouldn't have anything to do with him.
had a year to live and not much to look forward to. You took a one-month course. They would dope you up, put you in a special suit, and you were flashed to some far place, taking pictures and reporting what you saw, heart beating furiously, floating in the zero gravity. You'd release a canister that could be captured back to earth, hopefully, and then you would enter the gravity. We're still getting some of the messages from out of the light years. My father's canister came back but we're going to have a party, tune a dish to his frequency, use some of the analysis software, and be here for his true last words, sent in a burst. I know them already. 43.93 years ago. Upsilon Andromedae. Here I am, 77 years old and change. Not too much longer for me, another 20 years before I shrivel. There's a little hiss on the machine now. My father's voice, his last moment, just arriving.
They never got his canister. They sent two others.
And then a stream of sound, a hiss.
It's gorgeous
They came for a month after that
The month they came for the month the m