Chapter 7 Bubble Bath Paradox

Magic Plates

The entrance to the serving area was a five-meter-long passageway dressed up with incongruous decorations. It was a fusion of tangled accidental technology and a classic ethnic restaurant. We walked between two tables covered in white linen tablecloths, and on them were carefully arranged pasta sauce ingredients. Large potted basil plants were artfully lined up behind two piles of glisteningly clean tomatoes, which were themselves arranged on either side of a pile of garlic. The roof of the short passageway was a mass of tubes and wires that connected shiny nodes of indeterminate function; randomly affixed to the tubes and wires were several strands of faux-ivy.

The shiny mystery nodes in the ceiling of the serving area’s foyer undoubtedly had several important functions. Everyone lured in by the smell of the pasta, and it smelled even more delicious the closer I got to it, was undoubtedly scanned for every conceivable contaminant, infection, and probably bad attitude as well.

Paul was accompanying me with an “I’ve got questions” look on his face. Thankfully, it looked like he was going to wait until after I ate to begin peppering me with them. I wasn’t going to engage him about the display of pasta sauce ingredients, or plastic ivy, in case any conversation might uncork the flood of questions. We took the three steps up into the serving area in silence.

The serving area was very large. People could enter from several portals, like the one we were entering from, and there looked to be marked double-door exits at either end.

Round tables, large enough to accommodate more than a dozen people each, were arranged with comfortable walking spaces between them, over the entirety of the room. A little less than half the seats were taken, and we easily found seats at a table towards the center of the room.

Most of the seated people were eating. They were making the sounds of people rapidly, but not hurriedly, eating. Few were talking. I decided these were the sounds of food being delicious, and I became hungrier.

Quite a few people were walking about, but none of them were carrying plates of food.

We had only been sitting for a few seconds before a round hole opened up in the middle of the table, and I realized why nobody was carrying around plates. The temporarily missing disk of table was soon replaced with an identical one that had a plate of pasta on it. The plate glided over to Paul and parked in front of him.

Cutlery was affixed to the plate. Paul calmly removed it and began eating. He was still looking at me with a stoppage of questions bulging at his eyes.

Another plate appeared in the center of the table, and then began sliding over to me. I was distractedly captivated.

Before I could stop myself, I turned to Paul, and asked, “Do you think they are using magnets under the table to move the plates?”

He had been strenuously holding back all the questions that were building up in his mind. He relaxed into a stream of words at the sound of my voice.

“So… what did you mean by blood and arms and faces frying in oil?” asked Paul.

“Everybody got out unharmed,” I said through a bite of pasta. It was quite good. “Except Chuck, and I think he will be fine. We even ended up with two people who were not there before. I mean they were there before, and I suppose that is why they are here now. It’s just that they were not there when we started the sampling. They were only there long before we started, so that is why they were there after the sampling and, like I said, they were not there before.”

“o… k…” Tentatively replied Paul. “I am glad everyone got out in one piece. You really did a number on the old museum.”

Paul reached over and gripped my arm as if he thought I needed to be steadied, or maybe he was just trying to slow the rate at which I was shoveling pasta into my mouth.

He pointed at someone at another table with their back to us. They, and the person sitting next to them, were sharing a pocket monitor he had unfolded on the table between their plates of pasta. It was showing a view of the east side of the museum, or what should have been the east side. Most of the wall had collapsed into the basement. It looked like it had just disappeared. Parts of the roof had fallen, and other parts had slumped as if they wanted to fall, but the little bit of remaining structural integrity only allowed it to slump.

“Wow” I said.

“Looks like a total loss,” Said Paul.

“Sure does look like it,” I said.

“While you were in the shower, there was some talk of knocking a hole in the roof to recover the equipment on the inside. You apparently work with some VERY pricey instrumentation.” Said Paul

“It’s all gone”

“Where did it go?” asked Paul.

“I think, maybe, it was… It was never there.” I stammered

“o… k…” replied Paul.

What I could see of the monitor between the people at the other table had all of my attention. Not long ago, I was in that building. Now it was slowly collapsing. Why?

I returned in my mind to the crackpot theories about what had happened, Theories I had been toying with, crazy or not, since the event. Perhaps just a little more detail would be enough to flesh them out into something that made sense? It is the way my mind works; one second figuring out how plates magically slid across a table, and then, with no transition, figuring out why an impossible event would physically destroy the building it happened in.

I pictured, or theorized, that the ball of time-traveling building did not mesh with the modern now-time building, at least not perfectly. The interface could even be a molecule-thin discontinuity; a kerfless cut. Or maybe, the time-traveling ball was slowly disintegrating at the edges. Maybe the whole sphere of material was moving back in time to where it belonged, or another sphere of time-traveling mass is superimposing itself on the space? Maybe something happens in the future, that prevents this time traveling, so the sphere of time traveling mass doesn’t really exist, and so the museum is collapsing around its almost nothingness?

Of course, many of those theories are inconsistent with the fact that two people walked out of the past and were doing interviews.

“How are Donald and Tiffany doing?” I asked.

“Who?’ replied Paul.

“Donald and Tiffany Trump” I specified.

“The former American president?” Asked Paul. “…And his … uh … daughter?”

“yes” I said, and then corrected myself. “I mean no. The preacher and his wife; Donald and Tiffany Trump. But not THE Donald and Tiffany Trump, but the Donald and Tiffany Trump from the past, but not that far in the past. The Donald and Tiffany from our past who changed their names to be Donald and Tiffany from their past, but, of course, they are all of them the Donald and Tiffany Trumps from our past as we are now. OK, whatever, you know, they are just not the American president from the 21st century; they just sound like him.”

“Bob …” Said Paul with concern in his voice. “Slow down a bit. You need to get yourself together a bit more. Maybe we can sneak out of here, and get home in one piece, before the authorities or the press figure out how you are connected with this.”

“I already spoke with Tim.” I said.

“Yeah, you did. And he said you looked like a kabuki ghost covered in vomit. I think you should work on your cogent sanity before talking to anyone else.” Counseled Paul.

The monitor on the other table was now showing a different video newsfeed. It was the first of many times I would see the footage the man with the camera shot of me on the museum’s steps. I was ghostly white, and blubbering, and alternatively vomiting and aspirating the vomit between sobs; I had sobbed and retched till I was empty and was then just vomiting bubbles of mucus, and then I would inhale the bubbles and choke and sob.

I nervously looked about to see who might have seen me fixating over the shoulders of these strangers. It appeared that no one was looking at me but Paul. Paul was examining me with disconcerting concern. However, there were many groups of two or three people hunched over unfolded pocket monitors, and it looked like all of them were watching me melt down on the chapel steps.

It was one of the singularly most pathetic things I had ever seen. Luckily, I was so covered in debris and uncontrolled sobbing that it must have been very hard to tell it was me

“Yeah, doesn’t look good” I said.

“No” replied Paul.

“Tim and the university president are now giving an interview just outside” I observed from the newsfeed as it cut away from me to an obvious press briefing with the ICC in the background.

“It may be a good time to go then” Said Paul.

He took my tricorn hat off my head and began messing with it. He punched it a few times until it looked more like a crumpled Borsalino. “Let us make you look a little less funny, and escape back to the apartment.”

I did not think the new hat shape looked less funny. I was going to suggest we try for more of a Stetson look when our friends Manny, Moe, and Jack came over to our table. They had noticed us the moment they came in through their portal, and had made a beeline for us.

“Hey,” said Manny as he sat down.

Manny was a professor in advanced human interface engineering. He basically came up with ways where non-farmed humans could interact with the AIdministers without everything being weird. It was easy to think of solving any AIdminster interface issues as trivial tweaking of display and response parameters, and AIdminsters were able to tweak parameters at literally the speed of light. Manny joked that his entire field was a couple of months away from being obviated, and has been for all of the 50 years it has existed.

Manny knew random, probably classified, bits of information about the AIdministers. Sometimes it was creepy.

Moe was a senior historian with a bureaucratic group that was constantly changing its name for one reason or another. I had used him to help me in finding targeting media from the archives. The control parameters of my first experiments targeted the hands of people using a ticketing machine in Washington DC’s metro. There were years of security tapes with shockingly accurate time stamps. Moe had known off the top of his head that cameras had been installed when the Metro was turned back on, and he also knew that the repetitive and shockingly dull data from the cameras still existed. Years of hands going up to press the “get farecard” button. Hands of hundreds of thousands of people in exactly the same place. This was, of course, just what I needed to create control parameter batch files. In a very few weeks I had more DNA from a time-sampling experiment than had ever before been sequenced from such a source. With these sequences, I could detect very subtle changes in the genome, or, as it turned out, show that the human genome had not really changed.

I sometimes wondered how someone could remember the mundane minutiae of history without having actually been there. Moe did not look nearly that old, but maybe he was. It was not inconceivable.

Moe had been putting on weight recently, and he grunted as he sat down.

Jack must have been taking recreational thyroid medication again. He was almost skeletal, and he just stared at me with bulging eyes.

“Hey,” I said to the three of them.

The word “Hey” was apparently a significant and adaptable part of my conversational repertoire today.

“Saw you on the News” wheezed Moe.

“You looked pretty messed up,” added Manny.

Jack just stared, unblinking. I never understood the lure of artificial psychedelic hyperthyroidism. I hope he remembered his eyedrops. His vision was a mess for weeks the last time he was this deep into it.

“The event was pretty destabilizing,” I said.

“He barely made it out of the museum alive,” added Paul.

“What happened in there?” asked Manny, who was actively ignoring the plate of pasta that had just crept across the table to him.

Jack was staring at the plate of pasta that was headed for him. Moe was looking at the, now empty, table hole in hungry anticipation of his plate.

I had finished my pasta and was ready to go.

“I’m not sure what happened in the museum. It was definitely some glitch, and we’re still working out the details.” I replied. “It looks like we ended up bringing two people from the past into The Now.”

“I thought I saw something about that on the news, but I’m sure I heard it wrong. They said you brought Donald and Tiffany Trump into The Now,” said Manny.

I was a little impressed that Manny was so casually using ‘The Now’ as a concept. Perhaps I should have been a little more concerned that he was feigning ignorance of specifics while so easily using general concepts.

It was hard to take the three of them very seriously while Jack stared unblinkingly at Paul’s plate that was now gliding back to the center of the table, where it would be whisked away like mine had done just seconds earlier. Jack looked slightly sad when the plate disappeared.

Moe chimed in between stuffing bites of pasta into his mouth: “I think the two were not the dynastic trumps of the mimic era, or the president who lived before them, but a couple of grifter cultists who used their names. There were a lot of people who worshiped them after the great re-write, and not all of them joined the gnostic states.”

He finished the last bite of pasta from his plate, and continued: “One rather notable thing is that the legal restructuring of history and dates before the great re-write may give these folks an interesting concept of time. Just a few years before their being yanked to The Now, one could redefine what day it was simply through dynastic decree.”

I made note of the fact that Moe was also using “The Now” rather casually.

Moe’s plate, under Jack’s watchful eyes, began gliding to the center of the table, and he continued: “So many of the people who survived had retreated into what were essentially farms. The outs of the day lived in a dystopian landscape rendered harsh by willful incompetence. People just didn’t know how to do anything, and the AI that would become the AIdminsters were only promoting the welfare of those who had gone into the farms they ran.

It struck me that Moe may have time-traveled from the time the event was sampled from by simply living through the intervening years and growing old. The Trumps had not grown old, and history says they only existed for a few years beyond the time the event was sampled from. The idea that they had winked out without causing a fuss and then reappeared in The Now without existing in the intervening time really bothers me; things should either exist or not, and how can people be in two places at once when they are nowhere at all?

We were all staring at Moe. We could tell he was saying something important. We just needed to figure out where it fit in.

I looked around at the other tables. Several groups that had been looking at the news on their pocket monitors were now looking at me. It appeared that I was a little more recognizable in the video feed than I had hoped.

“We do need to go,” said Paul. “Before the table serves us another helping of pasta.”

I put the Borsalino-like mess of a hat on my head and stood up.

Paul stood up too, and we headed for one of the exits. I think it was on the North side, but I had no bearing with which to accurately establish that.

Eyes followed us as we walked to the exit. The collected gazes pushed us to increase our speed, and we were speedwalking to an almost run when we crashed out of the serving area, and back into the confusion of the event response village.

I was disoriented by the increasing crush of vehicles on the mall. Instead of trying to gain my sense of direction, I just followed Paul. He was moving quickly, and with purpose.

We threaded our way between several very large aerial transports. These larger transports may have brought in ICC modules. We were halfway across the mall before the chaos thinned out enough that I could see that we were headed northwest, and away from the museum and chaos.

We turned north after we passed the Anthropology building, and slowed our pace slightly. There were barricades set up with security bots between the buildings, but they let us out without confronting us. I suppose they were just instructed to keep people out of, not in, the mall area.

“Maybe we could stop for a cup of coffee on the way home,” said Paul, indicating the Student Union building. “That Synth-coffee in the ICC was retched.”

He looked at me in the sunlight and changed his mind. “On second thought, you are dressed to attract too much attention. Better go home and change first.”

“ok” I replied, as if I was making any decisions at this point.

We found our way off campus, and I was becoming more self-conscious about the way I was dressed with every person we passed. It was not a short walk, but the emergency traffic conditions appeared to be messing with the transit system; so we walked, and walked fast.

We snuck into the restaurant kitchen through the back door. I sighed as I physically relaxed when I opened the door at the top of the stairs. I was finally home.