The Merchant’s War

" 'Fun, in a scary way'... yes, that's true enough. But she scared too many cousins, Huw, cousins who lack your sense of fun. I did what I could to protect her. If she surfaces again, well, circumstances have changed, and it may be possible to distract her pursuers, as long as she is not involved in the regrettable business unfolding in New York. But for the time being, she is not available, and so I am turning to you."

"I'm, um, I'm at your disposal, sir. How would you like to proceed?"

"Write me a report. No more than three pages. Tell me what you're going to do, what resources you need, what people you need, and what you expect to learn

from it. I want your report no later than the day after tomorrow, and I want you to be ready to begin work the day after that."

"Sir! That's rather-"

"What, you're going to tell me you've never written a grant proposal in a hurry? Please don't insult my intelligence."

"I wouldn't dream of it, sir! But it's going to cost, people and money-"

"Let me worry about that. You just tell me what you need, and I'll make sure you get it."

" Wow! Thank you-"

"Don't thank me, boy. Not until it's over, and we're still alive."

END TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Hu was alarmingly young and bouncy, a Vietnamese-American postdoc with a ponytail, cargo pants, sandals, and a flippant attitude that would have annoyed the hell out of Eric if Hu had been working for him. Luckily Hu was someone else's problem, and despite everything, he'd been cleared by security to work on JAUNT BLUE. Which probably means the Republic is doomed, Eric thought mordantly. Ah well, we work with what we're given.

"Hey man, the professor told me to give you the special tour. Where you wanna start? You been briefed or they dropping you in it cold?"

Eric stared at him. "I'll take it cold."

"Suits me! Let's start with... hell. What do you know about parallel universes?"

Eric shrugged. "Not a lot. Seen some episodes of Sliders. Been catching up on some sci-fi books in my copious free time." The writers they'd sounded out hadn't been good for much more than random guesses, and without priming them with classified information that was all they could be expected to deliver. It had been a waste of time in his opinion, but-"and then there's the day job."

"Heh. You bet, boss!" Hu laughed, a curious chittering noise. "Okay, we got parallel universes. There's some theoretical basis for it in string theory, I can give you some references if you like, but I can only tell you one thing for sure right now: we're not dealing with a Tegmark Level 1 multiverse-that's an infinite ergodic universe, one where the initial inflationary period gave rise to disjoint Hubble volumes realizing all possible initial conditions."

Eric crossed his arms and frowned. "So you've ruled that out." Asshole? Or show-off?

"Yup!" Hu seemed unaccountably pleased with himself. "We can get there from here, which rules out Level I_v because in a Level I multiverse the parallel universes exist in the same spacelime, just a mind-bogglingly huge distance apart. Which means we're dealing with either a_; Level II, Level III, or Level IV multiverse. I'm in the cosmology pool-we've got an informal bet running-that it'll turn out to be a Level IV theory. Level II depends on a Linde chaotic inflationary cosmology, in which you get multiple branching universes connected by wormholes, but travel between universes in that kind of scheme involves singularities, and the phenomenon we're studying doesn't come with black holes attached."

Bumptious enthusiast, no social skills. Eric decided. He forced himself to nod, draw the guy out. "So you're saying this isn't a large scale cosmological phenomenon-then what is it?" Some of this stuff sounded half-familiar from his physics minor, but the rest was just weird.

"We're trying to work out what it is by a process of elimination." Hu thrust his hands in his pockets, looking distant. "The thing is, we have no theoretical framework. We've got a lot of beautiful theories but they don't account for what we're seeing: we're looking at an amazingly complex artifact and we don't understand how it works. It's like handing a nuclear reactor to a steam engineer in the nineteenth century. If you don't understand the physics behind it you might as well say it works by magic pixie dust as slow neutron-induced fission. Absent a theoretical understanding all we can do is poke it and see if it twitches. And coming up with the theory is, uh, proving difficult." He slowed down as he spoke, finishing on a thoughtful note.

Now's as good a time as any... "What's the black box you think you're trying to reverse-engineer?" Eric asked, [toping to draw Hu back on track.