"Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to a new era?"
-- James Wolf
For the longest time we wouldn't have dared to leave a paper trail, in case something were to fall into the Wrong Hands. But our security has grown as we have realized our true situation and learned to make the best use of it, and now we agree the time is write for me to write the History, the Paper on our endeavor. I will try npt to fall into the traps of elaboration and excessive research (procrastination) that plagued my Master's Thesis. I will just write it down as it happened.
As you will soon see it would be impossible for me to begin at the beginning, so I will begin at my beginning instead, and start the Paper with my story.
My name is Ebbe Geistsieg, or "Eb" for short. I was born in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1980, and grew up nearby at Fontana Dam, which is a vacation resort built around a large hydro-electric dam in the northwest corner of the state of North Carolina.
The dam was built by the Tennesseee Valley Authority during World War Two, supposedly to provide electricity for aluminum processing in Knoxville so they could build planes and ships, but also to provide electricity for uranium enrichment at Oak Ridge, as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project. Oak Ridge used some of that power to enrich the fuel for the atom bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. All this was told to me by some very old timers I met growing up in the woods around the lake above the dam.
The resort was a complex of cabins in the piney woods, with a general store and restaurant, boat and horse rentals, hayrides, and the usual. My dad's family, the Geistsiegs, and my mom's family, the Nietsteins, ran the resort.
Jerry & the dam
Looking back, I'd say I had a pretty cool childhood, but at the time I couldn't wait to get out of Fontana Dam. I studied hard at public school in nearby Juneberry, North Caroline, did well in math, joined the math club and entered a few competitions (yes, they do exists) and managed to swing a scholarship to Georgia Tech. in mathematical physics.
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I picked the school because of all the engineering schools I considered, it was in the town that had the biggest reputation for partying and hot woment. That was on the advice I got from my older and more worldly cousin Jerry. I escaped Fontana for "Hotlanta."
But mostly I only saw the classrooms, labs and dorms, and later student apartments of the Georgia Institute of Technology. Oh, I tried the student cafes, night clubs, Transvision Vamp concerts and stuff, but I never really came out of my shell. Most of my social contact came from a TA job and arguing with my roommates over the phone bill. (Unless you count family visits, and the time cousin Jerry showed up and convinced me to loan him my student ID so could get some dental work done at the Student Health Center while posing as me.)
So I studied. I studied what I love, which is chaos theory, fractals, power laws, and the various kinds of differential equations that helped me understand them. I breezed through my bachelor's in Mathematical Physics and was working on my Master's Thesis in Applied Mathematics, A New Heuristsic For Characterizing Iterated Maps, when the events occured that turned my life completely upside down. Or maybe I should say "backwards" instead.
I got a letter one day from the International Chaos and Scientific Computing Institute (ICSCI) in Albuquerque, which was offering me a "scholarship" of sorts to a conference I'd wanted to attend but couldn't afford to, the Society of Indistrial and Applied Mathematicians (SIAM) meeting on Duynamical Systems. It was where all the heavy hitters in chaos would present papers. Plus, it was in Orlando, Florida, near Wlat Diney World, and they were throwing in tickets to the EPCOT theme park. They even opffered to fly me down there in a chartered plane, but I knew I'd skip that in favor of driving. The only catch was that I had to participate in a post-conference day-lonmg meeting and agree to sign a nondisclosure agreement and have my remarks recorded. It was all very mysterious.
The conference itself was a blast. Yorke was there and Feigenbaum was rumored to be. The Soviet contingent claimed prior invention of all the '70s breakthroughs back in the '30s, and bragged that this was why they could build bigger rocket boosters. An enigmatic Air Force oficer was spreading the word that DARPA was funding wavelet theory. Whenever anybody wanted to belittle someone else's work, they'd say "well, it's interesting, but it isn't chaos." One young Czech mathematician sitting next to me at lunch kept complaining about the "crazy old cats" who were the grand old men of chaos theory -- he also kept calling them "senile felines."
Oops, I'm rambling.
The conference was a blast, EPCOT was a blast, and then came the mysterious post-conference meeting.
They paid for a bunch of us to stay over at the conference hotel, the Marriott on International Drive at Sand Lake Road, and in the morning two stretch limos took us all to a nearby plant of Martin-Marrietta, an aerospace defense contractor with a huge engineering complex just a mile west on Sand Lake Road.
We were checked in through "man-trap" style security doors, past armed guards, into what they call a "Tempest" room, or "SCiF", for Secure Computing Facility. To a phycisist it is nothing but a giant Fraday Cage, which shields against all forms of radiation going in or out.
This was all explained to naive little me at the time by another attendee named Hector, who complained "they didn't tell me this was a DOD job."
"DOD?" I asked.
"Department of Defense," he explained.
Inside, we were taken to a conference room, where a table and chairs awaited us. We each had a track light shining down at our seat, where we each had a blotter, a note pad, a gold pad, a water glass, a small microphone and a name plate with our name, title and affiliation. At the end of the room was a white board and podium, and at the other end a video camera on a tripod, with camera man and separate soundman in headphones.
It turned out to be a very stellar group. All of the attendees of this secretive meeting were doing brilliant work in applied mathematics. I wondered how I got into such a crowd. I was just "Ebbe Geistsieg, B.S. Mathematical Physics, Georgia Institute of Technology." (I found out later that my advisor thought my work was brilliant, and when he was invited to attend but couldn't go he recommended me. Little did I know how this would change my life, and history.)
I wish I could remeber who all of the participants were in the meeting, because I don't know what became of the name plates, no lists were distributed, and they're all dead now, and I lot my luggage anyway. But I'm getting ahead.
At the appointed hour -- I think it was 9 AM -- the overhead recessed lights dimmed, and track lights brightened on the podium. Into the spotlight walked the Dragon Lady. (At least that's what I called her later.) She was a short, buxom blonde woman with an accent from Easter Eurpoe. That's all my country boy ears could tell. (I found out later she was born in Romania and grew up in Croatia and Poland.) She introduced herself as Roza Razor, and said she was popular scientific journalist doing a piece for Discover Magazine. Which I had a hunch nobody believed. She buttered us up for a while, talking about how we were chosen for Our "outstanding research" and our "creative yet rigorous thinking," and then got to the question: "Completely hypothetically, what would be the consequences of being able to communicate with beings in a universe which was moving backwards in time relative to ours?"
For a long time it was quiet, just a few coughs and the whir of the camcorder. "Anyone?" the woman prompted.
"Well the first thing they'd say to us is goodbye," someone quipped, and everybody chuckled.
Not necessarily," interjected an artificial life researcher from the Santa Fe Institute whose name I've forgotten. "If they'd already figured out that we were going backwards relative to them, they would say 'hello' to us as their last message to us -- also our fist message from them -- just to be polite."
Now there was open laughter.
"But of course this is ridiculous," said an older phycisist from Los Alamos. (I wish I'd remembered the names as well as their fields and affiliations!) "We don't want the lady printing this in her magazine. It's impossible, what she's asking about, mainly because it violates causality."
"Of course," someone chimed in.
The silence resumed. Again there were just a few coughs and the whir of the camcorder.
"Surely you gentlement have something else to say," the Dragon Lady prodded. "We have been very generous with you. Please be generous with your thoughts and ideas."
A person whose name I do remember, Dr. Oder from the math department of San Diego State University, said, "The most interesting information thing they could send us is what we're going to send them later. That would would ultimately allow us to send messages backwards in time.
"If you're looking for a story on backwards time travel, look at the latest research on wormholes. Morris, Thorne, and whatshisname --"
"Yurtserver -- Yertsever," provided the old physicist, correcting himself.
"Right, at Cal Tech," the mathematician went on, "have shown that a wormhole can in theory send information back in time, but of course this violates causality too, so we don't know if this is really possible. There have been some very p[ainful attempts to prove it isn't possible after all, but nothing convincing. The whole thing was covered pretty well last year by John Cramer in Analog magazine, but there's been so many new developments you could probably get a fresh look at it. Talk to Hawking, he likes being interviewed, and he has a lot to say about it."
"And Visser at Washington University, the one in Missouri," added the old phyicist. "he thinks if a wormwhole formed a path back in time, that virtual particles would form superluminal loops, using uncertainty to borrow energy from themselves, and as these loops amplified they would pinch the wormhole shut."
A bearded astronomer stuttered, "th-there's some interesting cosmology work, too, you know, on how regions of n-negative entropy gain could arise in a d-dilute expanding universe. I could get you some p-preprints."
The Dragon Lady was expasperated. "Well, thank you for this wealth of information, but I really do implore this assembly to address the question. Forget about the mechanism. Assume the conditions are a given. What would the consequences of communication between two universes, each of which is moving backwards in time relative to the other?"
"Violation of causality!" harrumphed the old phycisist.
"Right!" added the AI guy. "Grandfather paradoxes. Causal loops. Undecidability. Cats and dogs living together..."
Again laughter, and then the silence. Cough cough, whir.
As if it was her secret weapon (and later I thought maybe it was) the D.L. signaled for the caterers to come in with a cart of orange juice, cappucino, croissants, bagels, bear claws and some kind of tasty egg casserole squares. We took a break to graze.
As I waited behind the old phyicist to get my caffeine boost, he muttered to no-one in particular, "darned thing's as nutty as this bear claw."
When we returned to our places, I noticed that Dr. Oder hadn't left his seat. He was drawing or doodling something on his pad of paper.
"Well," D.L. began, "it looks as though perhaps our Dr. Oder has something to add? Or may I call you Redonin?"
He picked up his name plate, "Dr. Redonin Oder, Department of Mathematics, San Diego Sate University," and turned it to look at, saying, "I don't know where the hell they got this info on me, my friends have always called me 'Red,' and I'm from Austin, I just work in San Diego. And I consider myself first and foremost a science fiction writer. This math thing is just my day job."
"Okay, 'Red,' you know that's what my name means, 'Roza' is 'red' in ____." She was amping up the Dragon Charm. "Do you have something to add?"
"Yes, ma'am," he chrmed right back, "I surely do."
He held up his drawing:
A1 A2
universe A ---+-----------+--->>
| |
<<---+-----------+--- universe B
B2 B1
"Here's a little picture of two universes moving backwards in in time relative
to each other. Each universe is a line. Universe A has its past on the
left and its future on the right; universe B is the opposite."
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party with "area students" (dancers from Club Juana) finds out from babe in Madoinna lace blouse.
Resists going to Santa Fe, wakes up in plane, finds sleeping bag, as crashing, puts on bag, exits plane.
Found by Old Joe, he leaves to ____
Roza shows up, tells tale, scuffle, Jowe returns and chloroforms her, upon her waking up with Scopalamine (sp?) patch she spills beans, Old Joe takes her to Yetis, Eb takes sunglasses and flycycle
Ebbe finds cousin Jerry in Nashville, almost gets drunk with him,
goes to Fontana, w/ help of civil engineer builds long maser,
Eb uses body to fake death, back to Okefenokee.
Throws dart at map, hits bend in Owyhee River in SE Oregon, takes I-10 W to Vegas area, thru Area 51 - jets, up to Black Rock Desert. Burning Man.
Lives as homeless in Santa Monica,
picked up by W Hollywood TD speed freak, dares him to prove story, calls around to CalTech, finds out abvout Stanford gal, Acc connection, gives him bus fare.
Send math to phycisist, "stlaks" as homeless w/ signs, "SOMETIMES WRITING THE WRONG GRANT PROPOSAL CAN GET YOU KILLED," gets in car w/ her and friend, Creekside Inn (B)
friend storms off to write grant proposal, dies in Treasure island car crash, TD dead in Fed Bldg break-in
go w/ physicist to dome in redwoods, living like Ewok, undergraound ex-pot farm, build long laser, golden ratio shorter, contacts underground on other side
sword Excalibur
NYE 1999/2000 attacks defered.
Anna: Did Otto peep?
Otto: Did Anna?
Black Rock Desert in NW Nevada
Nor-Tol Cycoltron built in tunnel for Nor-Tol RR, Norfolf to Toldeo wide-gauge, drilled through Appalicians near VA/WV border, started in early '80s to allegedly connect container docks at Norfolk with ones in Toldeo on Lake Erie, actually for pilot sub program.
from Prague Mini-Guide
Continue towards the river and you will pass the Golden Well and the Golden Serpent
on the narrow street called Karlova, before reaching the huge building called the
Clementinum. In an attempt to form a great Catholic seat of learning, the Jesuits spent
two centuries buying land and building this massive complex. Soon after it was
completed in 1773, they were forced out of the country and the Clementinum was
handed over to the University.
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Ramblin' Wreck
I'm a Ramblin' Wreck From Georgia Tech and a hell of an engineer.
A helluva helluva helluva helluva helluvan engineer.
Like all the jolly good fellows, I drink my whiskey clear,
I'm a Ramblin' Wreck from Georgia Tech and a hell of an engineer.
Oh, If I had a daughter, sir, I'd dress her in White and Gold.
And put her on the campus to cheer the brave and bold.
And if I had a son, sir, I'll tell you what he'd do,
He would yell "TO HELL WITH GEORGIA" like his daddy used to do.
I wish I had a barrel of rum and sugar three thousand pounds,
A college bell to put it in, and a clapper to stir it round.
I'd drink to all the good fellows who come from far and near,
I'm a ramblin, gamblin' hell of an engineer, Hey!
Last update 08-Jun-02000 by ABS.