Tag: Parallel World

What We Call Science, They Call Treason by Dominica Phetteplace

Posted on by Paul Fraser

What We Call Science, They Call Treason by Dominica Phetteplace (Asimov’s SF January–February 2023) opens with a billionaire called Rodrigo asking the female narrator of the story to wear a new invention (an “emotional fitness tracker”) to a lunch date with an old college acquaintance.
After a long lunch with Will, and surveillance drones photographing them outside the restaurant, he and the narrator are picked up by Rodrigo the billionaire. Rodrigo reveals that he is from a parallel world, and they drive to a building and go through a portal to Rome 2, where they speak Latin, have to wear the bracelets, and learn that the citizens are panicking because the planet is going to be hit by an asteroid in 19 hours. Rodrigo wants to transfer useful technology before the asteroid hits, but the narrator thinks they can save the planet—so she goes back for her world’s “Space Codex,” while Will gathers hard drives full of Rome 2’s knowledge. Then, after the narrator delivers the Codex and returns to her own world for the second time, the portal dies.
The narrator subsequently becomes a billionaire thanks to the cold fusion technology of Rome 2 (but there are still problems with climate change and the super-rich) and the story eventually ends years later with Rodrigo arriving out of a portal (a “white hole”). He tells her that they managed to save Rome 2 from the asteroid but now have a problem with a black hole in the upper atmosphere. He also adds that Will is sending more files through a white hole to the Burning Man festival, and he’ll meet them there.
This is all narrated in a vaguely satirical tone—but I’m not really sure what the point of this piece is other than to make a number of glib contemporary observations:

I also wanted to solve the prison problem. The police drones took all “unregistered” citizens to nasty offshore islands. It seemed unnecessarily cruel once you looked into the details.
I spent my fortune several times over trying to fund alternatives but never succeeded. It turns out that having money isn’t enough to effect change: you also have to get other people with money to agree with you. Otherwise, their billions act as anti-matter to your own, totally canceling each other out. The other billionaires were fine with me trying to fix the climate, but they thought having a large, incarcerated class of people was essential to their economy. How else would you motivate everyone else to work for you?

It certainly doesn’t work as any sort of believable story.
* (Mediocre). 5,050 words.

Laws of Impermanence by Ken Schneyer

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Laws of Impermanence by Ken Schneyer (Uncanny #36, September-October 2020) is set in a world where text is never permanent but constantly changes:

In his Physics, Aristotle declared that textual transmutation accelerates over time, and that its rate depends on the length of the manuscript. No one questioned this doctrine until after Gutenberg, when it was found that even moveable type metamorphosed on its racks. Galileo Galilei was the first to test Aristotle’s assertion by rigorous experiment, creating multiple copies of manuscripts of various length, as well as printed books, and examining them against correctors’ copies repeatedly over a period of a decade. He determined, first, that all texts transmute at the same rate, roughly one word out of every fifty in a year; second, that this rate does not change with time; and third, that all changes are what he called “sensible,” meaning that they fit logically within the framework of the larger document and do not betray themselves by presenting apparent gibberish. Indeed, it was his assertion that the Holy Bible would be no less prone to sensible transmutation than secular texts that eventually led to his censure and permanent house arrest.
But it was Isaac Newton who demonstrated that textual transmutation was an inherent property of writing itself, devising his three Laws of Impermanence and describing mathematically the forces that make them inevitable.

Interwoven with the conceptual development of this idea are two other narrative threads: one is a story of a lawyer and a client family who have only two original copies of their father’s will (both of which have suffered 25 years of transmutation); the other concerns a letter from the estranged wife of Philip, the grandfather of that family, to her friend:

I’m writing this in a hurry and I’m going to put it someplace safe. I hope to God that you’ll never have to read it, that I’ll be able to tell you in person. But I thought I’d better get it down on paper in case the worst happens.
I’m frightened that Philip wants to kill me. He threatened to do it right after the divorce, and I almost went to the police, but he never repeated the threat, and I thought I was safe.
But today I’m not so sure. A neighbor on the island who’d been down at the port said she saw a tall man with a beard and a coat that sounded just like Philip’s, and I’m afraid he’s come here to do what he said he’d do.
I’m going to try to get away right now, to hide somewhere on the other side of the island. But if, God forbid, I wind up dead, remember: it’s Philip who killed me.

During the story (spoiler) this letter metamorphoses into one that is more vague (this second version suggests that, if anything happens to her, Philip is “morally responsible”) and then, finally, into a suicide note.
This is a conceptually clever piece of ideation that is well developed (I liked all the scientific references to scientists we know for other discoveries) and has a neat twist ending. I suspect it will appeal to, among others, admirers of Ted Chiang’s work.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 4,100 words. Story link.