daylight, drawing away from a row of two dozen artificial mounds, each mound turfed over and pierced with a short tunnel, each tunnel the entrance to a Turing gate, each gate a portal to a different sheaf, a different alternate history.
There were bigger interchanges at Chicago, San Diego and White Sands, but the Brookhaven interchange was the oldest. It was where the Many Worlds theory had been experimentally validated when the first Turing gate, a mere hundred nanometers across, had been forced open in the high-energy physics laboratory in 1963, where the first man to travel to another sheaf had taken his momentous step in 1966, and where the first cloned gate had been produced in 1969.
Cloning gates using symmetry-breaking technology based on the Feynman-Schwinger-Dyson n -manifold manipulation was the only way of providing multiple points of entry into any sheaf. The physicists and mathematicians who developed the first Turing gates had quickly discovered that each time a gate accessed a new sheaf, a stochastic energy-horizon phenomenon created a unique quantum state or signature that no other gate could ever reproduce. This so-called quantum censorship principle meant that only one gate could link the Real with a particular sheaf, and that link would be lost forever if the gate was shut down. Although it was theoretically possible to produce secondary links via an intermediate sheaf - to travel from the Real to the First Foot sheaf via the Nixon sheaf, for instance - it was impossible in practise, because locating a particular sheaf in a multiverse of possible sheaves was, as Murray Gell-Mann, one of the leaders of the original Brookhaven Project, had put it, like finding a needle in a haystack the size of the Universe. Before cloning technology had been developed, there had been only a single, fragile link between the Real and any other sheaf. Afterward, primary gates were locked away in a facility more secure than Fort Knox, cloned copies were deployed in large interchanges and clandestine facilities, colonies were established in a dozen wild sheafs, and the Real was able to take control of the destiny of other, less fortunate Americas and establish the Pan-American Alliance.
There were more than a hundred cloned gates in the Brookhaven interchange, linking twenty-two different sheaves to the Real. Stone saw a long freight train drawing out of a grassy mound like a chain of scarves from a magician’s sleeve, saw other trains waiting in sidings or on loop roads or loading bays of the marshalling yard. Strings of passenger cars and strings of freight cars, well wagons loaded with shrouded tanks and helicopters and APCs, reefers, grain hoppers, tank cars.
AH-6 ‘Little Bird’ helicopters, quick and manoeuvrable as humming birds and armed with rockets and .50-calibre machine guns, swooped and hovered overhead, checking each arriving train. More than three years after President Carter had put an end to empire-building and declared that the business of the Pan-American Alliance was not war but reconciliation and reconstruction, the Real was still vulnerable to terrorist attacks by misguided patriots and militias and fanatics loyal to former regimes in client sheaves.
The railcar rocked over a gleaming web of rails under signal catenaries, gaining speed as it headed toward a tunnel set in the grassy mound covering another gate. Again the sudden plunge, the sharp judder, the momentary black headache, and then the railcar was slowing under a sky sheeted with low clouds, sliding into a station under a geodesic dome of grimy white Teflon.
The air under the dome was hot and wet, and tasted of diesel smoke. Crowds moved everywhere beneath banners hung from scaffold towers.
BROOKHAVEN: GATEWAY FOR RECONSTRUCTION
AND RECONCILIATION.
DEMOCRACY AND SOVEREIGNTY FOR ALL AMERICANS.
ONE NATION UNDER MANY SKIES.
STILL WINNING THE WAR.
Soldiers in all kinds of uniforms (Stone wondered if most were recruits from post-nuclear-war
There were bigger interchanges at Chicago, San Diego and White Sands, but the Brookhaven interchange was the oldest. It was where the Many Worlds theory had been experimentally validated when the first Turing gate, a mere hundred nanometers across, had been forced open in the high-energy physics laboratory in 1963, where the first man to travel to another sheaf had taken his momentous step in 1966, and where the first cloned gate had been produced in 1969.
Cloning gates using symmetry-breaking technology based on the Feynman-Schwinger-Dyson n -manifold manipulation was the only way of providing multiple points of entry into any sheaf. The physicists and mathematicians who developed the first Turing gates had quickly discovered that each time a gate accessed a new sheaf, a stochastic energy-horizon phenomenon created a unique quantum state or signature that no other gate could ever reproduce. This so-called quantum censorship principle meant that only one gate could link the Real with a particular sheaf, and that link would be lost forever if the gate was shut down. Although it was theoretically possible to produce secondary links via an intermediate sheaf - to travel from the Real to the First Foot sheaf via the Nixon sheaf, for instance - it was impossible in practise, because locating a particular sheaf in a multiverse of possible sheaves was, as Murray Gell-Mann, one of the leaders of the original Brookhaven Project, had put it, like finding a needle in a haystack the size of the Universe. Before cloning technology had been developed, there had been only a single, fragile link between the Real and any other sheaf. Afterward, primary gates were locked away in a facility more secure than Fort Knox, cloned copies were deployed in large interchanges and clandestine facilities, colonies were established in a dozen wild sheafs, and the Real was able to take control of the destiny of other, less fortunate Americas and establish the Pan-American Alliance.
There were more than a hundred cloned gates in the Brookhaven interchange, linking twenty-two different sheaves to the Real. Stone saw a long freight train drawing out of a grassy mound like a chain of scarves from a magician’s sleeve, saw other trains waiting in sidings or on loop roads or loading bays of the marshalling yard. Strings of passenger cars and strings of freight cars, well wagons loaded with shrouded tanks and helicopters and APCs, reefers, grain hoppers, tank cars.
AH-6 ‘Little Bird’ helicopters, quick and manoeuvrable as humming birds and armed with rockets and .50-calibre machine guns, swooped and hovered overhead, checking each arriving train. More than three years after President Carter had put an end to empire-building and declared that the business of the Pan-American Alliance was not war but reconciliation and reconstruction, the Real was still vulnerable to terrorist attacks by misguided patriots and militias and fanatics loyal to former regimes in client sheaves.
The railcar rocked over a gleaming web of rails under signal catenaries, gaining speed as it headed toward a tunnel set in the grassy mound covering another gate. Again the sudden plunge, the sharp judder, the momentary black headache, and then the railcar was slowing under a sky sheeted with low clouds, sliding into a station under a geodesic dome of grimy white Teflon.
The air under the dome was hot and wet, and tasted of diesel smoke. Crowds moved everywhere beneath banners hung from scaffold towers.
BROOKHAVEN: GATEWAY FOR RECONSTRUCTION
AND RECONCILIATION.
DEMOCRACY AND SOVEREIGNTY FOR ALL AMERICANS.
ONE NATION UNDER MANY SKIES.
STILL WINNING THE WAR.
Soldiers in all kinds of uniforms (Stone wondered if most were recruits from post-nuclear-war
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