Redemption Ark

And so Galiana had tried to do something similar with human minds. The Exordium chamber was a device for coupling one or more augmented brains to a coherent quantum system: a bar of magnetically suspended rubidium that was being continually pumped into cycles of quantum coherence and collapse. During each episode of coherence the bar was in a state of superposition with infinite counterparts of itself, and it was at this moment that a neural coupling was attempted. The act itself always forced the bar to collapse down to one macroscopic state, but the collapse was not instantaneous. There was a moment when some of the bar’s coherence bled back into the linked minds, putting them into weak superposition with their own parallel-world counterparts.

In that moment, Galiana hoped that there might be some perceptible change in the experienced consciousness state of the participant. Her theories, however, did not say what that change might be.

It was, in the end, nothing like she had expected.

Galiana had never spoken to Felka about her detailed impressions, but Felka had learned enough to know that her own experience must have been broadly similar. When the experiment began, with the subject or subjects lying on couches in the chamber, their heads swallowed in the gaping white maws of high-resolution neural interfacing trawls, there was a presentiment, like the aura that warned of an impending epileptic seizure.

Then there would come a sensation that Felka had never been adequately able to describe outside of the experiment. All she could say was that her thoughts suddenly became plural, as if behind every thought she detected the faint choral echo of others that almost perfectly shadowed it. She did not sense an infinity of such thoughts, but she did sense, faintly, that they receded into something, diverging at the same time. She was, in that moment, in touch with counterparts of herself.

Then something far stranger would begin to happen. Impressions would gather and solidify, like the phantoms that take shape after hours of sensory deprivation. She became aware of something stretching ahead of her, into a dimension she could not quite visualise but which nonetheless conveyed a tremendous sense of distance and remoteness.

Her mind would grasp at the vague sensory clues and throw some kind of familiar framework over them. She would see a long white corridor stretching towards infinity, washed out in bleak colourless light, and she would know, without being able to articulate quite how she knew, that what she was seeing was a corridor into the future. Numerous pale doors or apertures, each of which opened into some more remote future epoch, lined the corridor. Galiana had never intended to open a door into that corridor, but it seemed that she had made it possible.

Felka sensed that the corridor could not be traversed; one could only stand at its end and listen for messages that came down it.

And there would be messages.

Like the corridor itself they were filtered through her own perceptions. It was impossible to say from how far in the future they had come, or what exactly the future that had sent them looked like. Was it even possible for a particular future to communicate with the past without causing paradoxes? In trying to answer this, Felka had come across the nearly forgotten work of a physicist named Deutsch, a man who had published his thoughts two hundred years before Galiana’s experiments. Deutsch had argued that the way to view time was not as a flowing river but as a series of static snapshots stacked together to form space-times in which the flow of time was only a subjective illusion. Deutsch’s picture explicitly permitted past-directed time travel with the preservation of free will and yet without paradoxes. The catch was that a particular ‘future’ could only communicate with the ‘past’ of another universe. Wherever these messages were coming from, they were not from Galiana’s future. They might be from one that was very close to it, but it would never be one she could reach. No matter. The exact nature of the future was less important than the content of the messages themselves.

Felka had never learned the precise content of the messages Galiana had received, but she could guess. They had probably been along the same lines as the ones that came through during Felka’s brief period of participation.