very good question. I asked him, of course. Well, you would, if you’re investing an eight-figure sum. He grinned at me and said not to fuss about that. I told him I was just an old worrywart and I’d quite like to know. He said it’d make us all rich. I said, Pieter, I am rich and I’d quite like to stay that way. Then he laughed and changed the subject.”
“But eventually—”
“Eventually.” Call-me-Bill sat up a little straighter. “He explained it, and I could just about follow; a way of accessing alternative realities, at will. A hundred bespoke Disneylands in your coat pocket, and all of them actually real. By then we’d built the accelerator and most of the machinery, so it was a relief when he told me it was – well, a toy. About the only sure-fire money-spinners these days are toys and bombs, and I was starting to think, with him being so damn coy all the time, it had to be a bomb. But a toy was fine. It was like being in on the ground floor for PlayStation.”
The toy that had killed Pieter. Still, on balance, better than a bomb. Nearly everything is.
“Anyway.” Call-me-Bill was stroking the desk again. “We carried on with the construction work, while Pieter did the maths. Then, just when we thought we were getting there, Pieter said he’d run into a snag. Well, more like a brick wall.” Call-me-Bill scowled, then went on: “He came swanning in, sat down where you’re sitting right now, and told us that the whole thing was impossible.”
“Ah.”
“ ‘Ah’ is putting it mildly. I’d just sold nine major TV networks and an airline to pay for all the junk in the cellar, and Pieter blithely announces that the laws of physics wouldn’t let us go any further. I was just weighing up different ways of killing him when he said, of course, that’s not an insuperable problem.”
Theo frowned. “But you just said—”
“Yes. And I forgot to mention, I made him put the maths up on that screen there, and we went through it together. He was quite right. The quantum phase realignment shift matrix we needed was quite simply impossible, in a Newton-Einstein-Hawking universe. Anything we projected outside our universe would be untraceable, and therefore to all intents and purposes lost for ever. It’d be like dropping a grain of sand out of an aeroplane and then landing and trying to find it again. You could go, but no way in hell could you ever come back.”
Not an insuperable problem, huh? “Go on.”
“Well, I’d more or less narrowed the choice down to strangling him or bashing his head in with a brick when he did that sort of wise-frog grin of his and said, well, it’s obvious what we’ve got to do now; and that’s the point, I’m afraid, where I started whimpering, and it was quite some time before he could persuade me to stop.
“The key proviso, he said, was in a Newton-Einstein-Hawking universe; which was a nuisance, he said, because that was precisely the sort of universe we live in, so achieving anything here was pretty much out of the question. But, he went on, as we all know, other universes are available. Somewhere, in the infinite diversity of the multiverse as hypothesised by Tegmark, Vanchurin and Wheeler, there must be one where what we want to do is not only possible but as easy as switching channels on your TV. So, all we needed to do was relocate the base of operations to this other, more amenable universe, and we’d be home and dry. This one where we are now would then be just another parallel reality, readily accessible from our new HQ. He said it’d be no different from moving a corporation when you don’t like the local tax laws or business regulations. You shift the office overseas, and carry on trading just like you used to, but without having to pay stupid amounts of tax or obey a bunch of fatuous local laws. And once he’d found a nice user-friendly universe, getting there wouldn’t be a problem; the bugger would be getting back again, except that it wouldn’t be an issue because of the YouSpace technology, which would deal with all that, because in a non-Newton, non-Einstein, non-Hawking universe you could do that sort of thing, no trouble at all. He made it sound like getting round the no-smoking rule by stepping outside into the street.”
Call-me-Bill paused for a moment,