From The Dent in the Universe:
Walrus hadn’t been home since Friday morning. His eyes were tinged with red, and his hand never strayed far from his double-caff RageCola. He and Workshop 3 smelled earthy. Even the ever-present perfume of fabric softener couldn’t mask the essence of overworked Walrus.
But he was happy, drunk with exhaustion, and clearly excited about something. Stephen had to think back a way to remember the last time he’d seen this particular version of Walrus. It had been before the sChip discovery. “Okay, show me something cool.”
Walrus laughed and did an awkward little dance. “Okay! Sit!” He cleared some bench space in front of two monitors. “So, first, I’ve submitted a pull request for a firmware patch for the console OS and a patch for the time servers. We won’t have another global outage. That’s a guarantee. So. Cool. Moving on. What I’m going to show you is what happened with the customer machine. That was—as I expected—it was a fluke, a complete accident. The kid spilled his freaking fizzy pop on the controller and fried it… but goddamn! The result is so, so cool.”
Stephen held up his hands. “Walrus, slow down. Complete sentences. What is it?” Walrus nodded.
“Okay. Yeah. So. The outage. The customer device that triggered the outage had some carbon scoring on the controller from a soft drink spill. But what it caused was a phase variance along the I/O bus. The sChip interpreted that phase variance in a really unpredictable way. It accepted it as an input attribute for the quantum tunneling tensor array. And the array responded by sending the sChip signal… well, you’ve got to see it. I hacked an sChip to replicates the Rashad Event with a little more control. Here. Type a message. Anything.” He placed a Bluetooth keyboard in front of Stephen. Before him was a pair of displays with simple command-line interface consoles.
Stephen picked up the keyboard and typed, Watson, come here. I want to see you.
Before he hit enter, the display on his right blinked and displayed a log entry. The display directly in front of him showed the log of the interaction, a white line of text that showed what he’d typed, Watson, come here. I want to see you, and the time sent, 630231 milliseconds. The display on the right, the one that flashed before he hit enter, showed the same.
Walrus said, “Look at the timestamps. The sending input occurred at 630231 milliseconds. The receiving event happened at 629931 milliseconds.”
Stephen looked puzzled. “The clocks are off? That’s a 300…?” he checked his math, “300-millisecond difference.”
Walrus grinned. “Negative 300 milliseconds. The clocks aren’t off.”
“The time server is off?” Stephen knew that was the culprit in the outage.
Walrus shook his head. “Nope. These two chips are in perfect sync to FTL time.”
Stephen stopped and thought. The message appeared to be arriving 300 milliseconds before it was sent. “I’m not getting it,” he said.
Walrus laughed and did his little dance again. “Yes! You are! Tell me what you see.”
Stephen said slowly, “The message looks like it’s being received before it was sent, 300 milliseconds before.” Walrus grinned, and Stephen continued, “But that’s not possible. What’s causing the discrepancy? If the clocks aren’t wrong and the time server was working properly…?” He shook his head.
Walrus’s grin widened. “It’s a time machine.”
Stephen leaned back a bit from the desk. “Right.” Walrus let it sink in. “What do you mean?” He thought Walrus was speaking metaphorically.
Walrus laughed and said, “I mean, this is a time machine.”
Stephen looked at the set-up in front of him. It was a hacked sChip on a breadboard and a couple of displays strung together with cables and alligator clips. This wasn’t a time machine.
Walrus relented. “I’ve tweaked the power supply to dial in a tiny phase variance in the I/O to this sChip, like our customer did by accident. The tensor array interpreted this as an attribute, sending the signal to a point in time before it was sent. 300 milliseconds before. About a third of a second.”
Stephen recalled the chain of events. The right display refreshed a fraction of a second before he hit enter. Examining the log, what he had typed was there. Watson, come here. I want to see you.
He frowned and thought for a few seconds. “A third of a second? It’s the least impressive time machine imaginable,” he said. “This crashed the time servers?”
Walrus nodded, finished his cola, tossed its crushed container in the recycling bin, and peeled open another. “Essentially. I’ve cleaned up the effect, and I’m not messaging the time server. The timeserver would have ignored an invalid time sync transaction. It’s programmed to dump garbage bits. This wasn’t garbage, it was a perfectly normal sync transaction, but the handshake was out of order. The time server software questioned its own reality. It wobbled, tried to regain its equilibrium, and tipped into cascade failure.”
“It’s fascinating, but…” Hard-wired by the last six years to search for a new product, Stephen’s mind was searching for a use for what he was seeing. “I mean, it is cool, but it’s useless—a weird trick of physics. What can we do with it?” He thought for a little more. “This is IP data?”
Walrus shrugged, “It’s a packet like any other packet.”
“So, if it’s packets, then it’s IP, then it’s anything. Form data, text, jpegs, audio, video, holo.”
Walrus nodded and grinned, “Sure. You could surf the web of 300 milliseconds ago…”
Stephen interrupted him, “Can we extend that? Could we rig these in series? Go back further?”
“We could do it more elegantly than that—How much further?”
“You tell me, what’s the theoretical limit?”
“Well, you’d need a receiver. So whatever we end up making would only go back to the first chips that go online. We make a chip today, turn it on, in a week, we could go back to that moment but not before, right? The longer we’re online, the further back we can send things.”
Stephen shook his head. “We couldn’t go back further than tonight?”
Walrus nodded. “There would be nothing to send it to. As soon as we flip the switch on our time machine, we’d be establishing a time horizon. But say we turned on a receiving device tonight. In a year, you could send a message back to tonight. That would be a year in your past. In two years, you could send a message back two years, on and on, until the end of the world.” He laughed and said, “You know that old site, The Way Back Machine? The internet archive? This would be like that but live. You could actually surf the web of the past. Leaving comments on a video from a year earlier.”
Stephen frowned dismissively and said, “What good would that do? I can leave a comment on that same video today. The entire internet is available back to the 90s.”
Walrus smiled, “But it’d be radical!” Radical was not the goal. Stephen needed a killer application, a product everyone would want. Walrus’s stomach growled loudly. “Man,” he said, “I’m starving. Wanna order a pizza? Hey man, that’s what we could do!” he said jokingly, “We could use it to order pizza a half hour ago, so it arrives…” and he snapped his fingers.
Stephen froze. His pupils widened. Instant Pizza. Instant delivery. Instant gratification.
The entire computer industry of the last forty years was built around delivering everything as quickly as possible. Meeting the desires of the customer. Right. Fucking. Now. If no one ever went broke underestimating the American people’s intelligence, as Mencken might have said, it would follow: no one ever went broke catering to their impatience. From instant pizza, Stephen’s mind jumped to instant shopping orders. Same-day delivery would pale compared to instant delivery. Want that pair of jeans? They’re at your door as soon as you hit the checkout button.
From there, he jumped to just-in-time manufacturing inventory. From there to military logistics. From there to disaster preparedness. His mind vaulted from application to application to application, all from Walrus’ pizza. This cognitive whirlwind took place in two or three blinks of his eye.