Departure(42)
“With the political buy-in, things turned to technical challenges, questions like rising sea levels and alteration of ocean currents. With each solution, we were actually tackling much larger global problems that humanity would have had to solve sooner or later anyway. For us, the creation of Atlantis really demonstrated what the foundation was capable of, but also what the human race, working together, could accomplish. Atlantis was proof positive that we could change the face of the Earth—literally.”
The future version of me fades away along with the sandy beach and dam, and Future Harper once again stands in the empty stone-floored room with us.
“At the opening of Atlantis, the Titans had one more surprise, one final marvel that had been kept from the world, a revelation no one saw coming, an unparalleled achievement. Follow the green arrows into the interactive portion of the tour to learn about the opening of Atlantis and the final Titan Marvel, as well as hundreds of other topics.”
The green arrows light the floor, directing us through an archway ahead.
Future Harper slowly fades away, and the room shrinks until we’re standing in a square space about fifteen by fifteen feet. Frosted glass panels line the sides, ceiling, and floor, the only break in them dead ahead, where a panel stands open, revealing another room with similar panels.
Grayson and Harper are the first into the next room, which is roughly the same size as the first. The panels here appear to be giant touch screens. They display a list of topics, some highlighted with pictures. Only a few panels are operational, however. Most are cracked, covered in spidery white lines and spray-painted black block letters: “Titans Killed Us All.”
We spread out in the room, scanning the panels.
Harper taps a link labeled “Museum Staff,” then “Harper Lane.”
The panel changes to a page with a photo of Harper at a glass-topped desk and a lengthy write-up below. My eyes don’t get past the title and subtitle:
Harper Lane
1982–2071
She was eighty-nine.
Beside me, Grayson is working the panel to the left, headed “The Grayson Shaw Affair.” I can’t help but scan it. The article details his self-destructive life and how he came to be the public voice of opposition to the Titan initiatives, arguing that his father and the Titans were desperate for fame and attention. The irony.
At the bottom, a little note says that Grayson Shaw hasn’t appeared publicly in several years. There have been rumors that he’s undergoing late-stage treatment for irreversible cirrhosis of the liver.
The only person not working the panels is Yul. He stands in the center of the room, deep in thought.
“You know what all this means, don’t you?” I ask him.
He glances up at me slowly. Reluctantly, he nods. I can’t tell if it’s guilt or fear in his eyes.
24
Grayson, Harper, and Sabrina turn away from the frosted glass panels to focus on Yul and me in the center of the room.
I step closer to Yul. “You said you’d give us answers after Titan Hall. What happened here, Yul?”
“I only know about some parts.”
“Which parts?”
“Q-net.”
“What about it?” I ask.
“I created it.”
Interesting. “I thought the Titans did.”
“I’ve been working on it for years. I think the Titans only invested in it, provided the money to make it accessible to everyone.”
“What is it?”
“A quantum network, a new Internet. It’s a way to move data around the globe instantaneously, using quantum entanglement. It will revolutionize computing. It was all experimental until a week ago, when the first Q-net nodes went active. For months I’ve had this problem with data corruption. Every time I sent a burst of data, it came out wrong on the other end. There was a pattern to the corruption, so I wrote an algorithm to filter it out. When I looked at the data the filter had extracted, I realized it was organized.”
“Meaning?”
“It was a message.”
“From?”
“The future.”
Yul’s words hang in the glass room for a second.
“The sender claimed to be from the year 2147,” he presses on. “I thought the stress had finally gotten to me. I took a day off, went to the doctor, got a full workup. I was fine. The next messages proved beyond a doubt that they were from the future.”
“How?”
“They predicted events that would happen the next day. The exact vote tallies for parliamentary elections in Tunisia, for example—right down to the votes cast for every candidate for every office. The arrival times, down to the minute, for every flight that landed that day all around the globe, including every delayed and canceled flight. A few days went by, me demanding proof again and again, them answering correctly every time.”
“How’s that possible—messages from the future?”
“They were altering entangled particles that existed in their time, organizing them to make a readable message in our time.”
Oh, now that makes sense.
Yul reads the expressions around the room and spreads his hands like a high school science teacher giving the complex lecture that’s over his students’ heads, the one he dreads every year. “Imagine we’re back on the beach we just saw, but we’re in the year 2147. Imagine we can put on a special glove, and when we reach down to touch the grains of sand on our beach in 2147, it makes a copy of that beach, in every instant in which it’s ever existed. There’s a string that reaches across space-time, connecting the grains of sand on our beach to those same grains on that beach in every other moment. We can adjust its length, choosing which beach our string connects to. So now the grains of sand on our beach in 2147 are connected to the same grains on the same beach in 2014. We bend down and draw a message in the sand, and it appears in 2014. I saw that message—on my beach in the past. That shared beach is Q-net, and the data on my hard drive, the digital bits, they’re the grains of sand. Because this was the first moment that Q-net existed in our time, it was their first opportunity to send a message back—this was the first instant when the quantum particles that form the network became entangled. Those particles are the grains of sand in the analogy.”