The Chronoliths

“Babylon’s considerably east of here,” Sue said. “But yeah.”

In the lobby restaurant we seated ourselves at a table across the room from the only other patrons, a group of IDF men and women crowded into a red vinyl booth. Our waitress (the only waitress) was an older woman with an American accent. She claimed not to be troubled by the evacuation even though it meant she had to sleep at the hotel: “I don’t like the idea of driving around these empty streets anyway, much as I used to complain about the traffic.” The entree for tonight was chicken almondine, she said. “And that’s about it, unless you’re allergic or anything, in which case we can ask the chef to make an adjustment.”

Chicken all around, and Morris ordered us a bottle of white wine.

I asked about the agenda for tomorrow. Morris said, “Apart from the scientific work, we have the Israeli Defense Minister visiting in the afternoon. Plus photographers and video people.” He added, “There’s no substance to it. We wouldn’t be here if the Israeli government didn’t already have all the information we can give them. It’s a dog-and-pony show for the news pools. But Ray and Sue get to do some interpretation for the laypeople.”

Ray asked, “Are we giving him Minkowski ice or feedback?”

Morris and I looked blank. Sue said, “Don’t leave people out of the conversation, Ray. It’s bad ma

“Slow reading,” Morris said.

“We spend a lot of time translating math into English.”

“Hunting metaphors,” Ray said.

“It’s important to make people understand. At least as much as we understand. Which is not very much.”

“Minkowski ice,” Ray persisted, “or positive feedback?”

“Feedback, I think.”

Morris said, “I still feel left out.”

Sue frowned and collected her thoughts. “Morris, Scotty, do you savvy feedback?”

Half of what I did with Sue’s code involved recursion and self-amplification. But she was talking far more generally. I said, “It’s what happens when you stand up in the high school auditorium to give the valedictory address and the PA starts to squeal like a pig in a slaughterhouse.”

She gri

“You have an amplifier between the mike and the speakers. Worst case, they talk to each other. Whatever goes into the microphone comes out of the speakers, louder. If there’s any noise in the system, it makes a loop.”

“Exactly. Any little sound the microphone picks up, the speaker plays it louder. And the microphone hears that and multiplies it again, and so on, until the system starts ringing like a bell… or squealing like a pig.”

“And this is relevant to the Chronoliths,” Morris said, “because — ?”

“Because time itself is a kind of amplifier. You know the old saw about how a butterfly flapping in China can eventually brew up a storm over Ohio? It’s a phenomenon called ‘sensitive dependence.’ A large event is often a small event amplified through time.”

“Like all those movies where a guy travels into the past and ends up changing his own present.”

“Either way,” Sue said, “what you have is an example of amplification. But when Kuin sends us a monument commemorating a victory twenty years from now, that’s like pointing the microphone at the speaker, it’s a feedback loop, a deliberate feedback loop. It amplifies itself. We think that may be why the Chronoliths are expanding their territory so quickly. By marking his victories Kuin creates the expectation that he’ll be victorious. Which makes the victory that much more likely, even inevitable. And the next. And so on.”

This was not new territory for me. I had inferred this much from Sue’s work and from speculation in the popular press. I said, “Couple of questions.”

“Okay.”

“I guess the first is, how does this look to Kuin? How does it play out, that first time he sends us the Chumphon stone? Wouldn’t he be changing his own past? Are there two Kuins now, or what?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. You’re asking me whether we understand this better on the theoretical level. Well, yes and no. We’d like to avoid a many-worlds model, if possible—”

“Why? If that’s the easiest answer?”

“Because we have reason to believe it’s not true. And if it is true, it limits what we can do about the problem. However, the alternative—”

“The alternative,” Ray supplied, “is that Kuin is committing a kind of suicide every time he does this.”

The waitress brought us our meals on a cart covered with linen, then rolled the emptied cart back toward the kitchen. Across the room the IDF people had finished di

“Changing what he’s been,” Sue said between mouthfuls. “Erasing it, replacing it, but that’s not exactly suicide, is it? Imagine a hypothetical Kuin, some back-country warlord who somehow gets hold of this technology. He pulls the switch and suddenly he’s not just Kuin, he’s the Kuin, the one everyone was waiting for, he’s the fucking Messiah for all practical purposes, and for him it was never any different. At least some part of his personal history is gone, but it’s a painless loss. He’s glorified, he has lots of troops now, lots of credibility, a bright future. Either that, or the original Kuin’s place has been taken by some more ambitious individual who grew up wanting to be Kuin. At worst it’s a kind of death, but it’s also a potential ticket to glory. And you can’t mourn what you never had, can you?”

I wondered about that. “It still seems like a big risk. Once you’ve done it, why push the button a second time?”

“Who knows? Ideology, delusions of grandeur, blind ambition, a self-destructive impulse. Or just because he has to, as a last resort in the face of military reversals. Maybe it’s a different reason every time. Anyway you look at it, he’s right in the middle of the feedback loop. He’s the signal that generates the noise.”

“So a small noise becomes a loud noise,” Morris said. “A fart becomes a thunderclap.”

Sue nodded eagerly. “But the amplification factor isn’t just time. It’s human expectation and human interaction. The rocks don’t care about Kuin, the trees don’t give a shit, it’s us. We act on what we anticipate, and it gets easier and easier to anticipate the all-conquering Kuin, Kuin the god-king. The temptation is to give in, to collaborate, to idealize the conqueror, to be part of the process so you don’t get ground under.”

“You’re saying we’re creating Kuin.”

“Not us specifically, but people, yeah, people in general.”

Morris said, “That’s how it was with my wife before we broke up. She hated the idea of disappointment so much, it was always on her mind. It didn’t matter what I did, how much I reassured her, what I earned, whether I went to church every week. I was on permanent probation. ‘You’ll leave me one day,’ she used to say. But if you say something like that often enough, it has a way of coming true.”

Morris thought about what he’d said, pushed away his glass of wine, reddened.

“Expectation,” Sue said, “yes, feedback. Exactly. Suddenly Kuin embodies everything we fear or secretly want—”

“Slouching toward Jerusalem,” I said, “to be born.”

It was an idea that seemed to cast a chill across the room. Even the rowdy IDF teenagers were quieter now.

“Well,” I said, “that’s not especially reassuring, but I can follow the logic. What’s Minkowski ice?”

“A metaphor of a different color. But that’s enough of this talk for tonight. Wait till tomorrow, Scotty. Ray’s explaining it to the Defense Minister.”