Time Travel: Recent Trips Read online

  "I don't think I blame you for Jeff anymore. I really don't."

  "Things change, moments get away from you, the past pays a visit, and although there's no blame, still nothing is forgiven. It's hard to live here. It always has been," he said.

  "Will—" she started to say, but his father drowned her out.

  "Whooh whooh!" his father yelled by the window. "Whooh whooh!" The house shook with thunder.

  A great striated wall moved past the glass. Will wondered if his healthy son was trapped inside there somewhere, if inside that wall he might find his wife's love again, or some other Will, some other life. He tried to say something to Tracy, but he couldn't even hear himself, so loud everything had suddenly become. He could feel time circling outside the house, circling again, raising its voice and ready to run them down.

  THE MAN WHO ENDED HISTORY: A DOCUMENTARY

  Ken Liu

  Akemi Kirino, Chief Scientist, Feynman Laboratories:

  [Dr. Kirino is in her early forties. She has the kind of beauty that doesn't require much makeup. If you look closely, you can see bits of white in her otherwise black hair.]

  Every night, when you stand outside and gaze upon the stars, you are bathing in time as well as light.

  For example, when you look at this star in the constellation Libra called Gliese 581, you are really seeing it as it was just over two decades ago because it's about twenty light years from us. And conversely, if someone around Gliese 581 had a powerful enough telescope pointed to around here right now, they'd be able to see Evan and me walking around Harvard Yard, back when we were graduate students.

  [She points to Massachusetts on the globe on her desk, as the camera pans to zoom in on it. She pauses, thinking over her words. The camera pulls back, moving us further and further away from the globe, as though we were flying away from it.]

  The best telescopes we have today can see as far back as about thirteen billion years ago. If you strap one of those to a rocket moving away from the Earth at a speed that's faster than light—a detail that I'll get to in a minute— and point the telescope back at the Earth, you'll see the history of humanity unfold before you in reverse. The view of everything that has happened on Earth leaves here in an ever-expanding sphere of light. And you only have to control how far away you travel in space to determine how far back you'll go in time.

  [The camera keeps on pulling back, through the door of her office, down the hall, as the globe and Dr. Kirino become smaller and smaller in our view. The long hallway we are backing down is dark, and in that sea of darkness, the open door of the office becomes a rectangle of bright light framing the globe and the woman.]

  Somewhere about here you'll witness Prince Charles's sad face as Hong Kong is finally returned to China. Somewhere about here you'll see Japan's surrender aboard the USS Missouri. Somewhere about here you'll see Hideyoshi's troops set foot on the soil of Korea for the first time. And somewhere about here you'll see Lady Murasaki completing the first chapter of the Tale of Genji. If you keep on going, you can go back to the beginning of civilization and beyond.

  But the past is consumed even as it is seen. The photons enter the lens, and from there they strike an imaging surface, be it your retina or a sheet of film or a digital sensor, and then they are gone, stopped dead in their paths. If you look but don't pay attention and miss a moment, you cannot travel further out to catch it again. That moment is erased from the universe, forever.

  [From the shadows next to the door to the office an arm reaches out to slam the door shut. Darkness swallows Dr. Kirino, the globe, and the bright rectangle of light. The screen stays black for a few seconds before the opening credits roll.]

  Remembrance Films HK Ltd.

  in association with

  Yurushi Studios

  presents

  a Heraclitus Twice Production

  THE MAN WHO ENDED HISTORY

  This film has been banned by the Ministry of Culture

  of the People's Republic of China and is released

  under strong protest from the government of Japan

  Akemi Kirino:

  [We are back in the warm glow of her office.]

  Because we have not yet solved the problem of how to travel faster than light, there is no real way for us to actually get a telescope out there to see the past. But we've found a way to cheat.

  Theorists long suspected that at each moment, the world around us is literally exploding with newly created subatomic particles of a certain type, now known as Bohm-Kirino particles. My modest contribution to physics was to confirm their existence and to discover that these particles always come in pairs. One member of the pair shoots away from the Earth, riding the photon that gave it birth and traveling at the speed of light. The other remains behind, oscillating in the vicinity of its creation.

  The pairs of Bohm-Kirino particles are under quantum entanglement. This means that they are bound together in such a way that no matter how far apart they are from each other physically, their properties are linked together as though they are but aspects of a single system. If you take a measurement on one member of the pair, thereby collapsing the wave function, you would immediately know the state of the other member of the pair, even if it is light years away.

  Since the energy levels of Bohm-Kirino particles decay at a known rate, by tuning the sensitivity of the detection field, we can attempt to capture and measure Bohm-Kirino particles of a precise age created in a specific place.

  When a measurement is taken on the local Bohm-Kirino particle in an entangled pair, it is equivalent to taking a measurement on that particle's entangled twin, which, along with its host photon, may be trillions of miles away, and thus, decades in the past. Through some complex but standard mathematics, the measurement allows us to calculate and infer the state of the host photon. But, like any measurement performed on entangled pairs, the measurement can be taken only once, and the information is then gone forever.

  In other words, it is as though we have found a way to place a telescope as far away from the Earth, and as far back in time, as we like. If you want, you can look back on the day you were married, your first kiss, the moment you were born. But for each moment in the past, we get only one chance to look.

  Archival Footage: September 18, 20__. Courtesy of

  APAC Broadcasting Corporation

  [The camera shows an idle factory on the outskirts of the city of Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, China. It looks just like any other factory in the industrial heartland of China in the grip of another downturn in the country's merciless boom-and-bust cycles: ramshackle, silent, dusty, the windows and doors shuttered and boarded up. Samantha Paine, the correspondent, wears a wool cap and scarf. Her cheeks are bright red with the cold, and her eyes are tired. As she speaks in her calm voice, the condensation from her breath curls and lingers before her face.]

  Samantha: On this day, back in 1931, the first shots in the Second SinoJapanese War were fired near Shenyang, here in Manchuria. For the Chinese, that was the beginning of World War Two, more than a decade before the United States would be involved.

  We are in Pingfang District, on the outskirts of Harbin. Although the name "Pingfang" means nothing to most people in the West, some have called Pingfang the Asian Auschwitz. Here, Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army performed gruesome experiments on thousands of Chinese and Allied prisoners throughout the war as part of Japan's effort to develop biological weapons and to conduct research into the limits of human endurance.

  On these premises, Japanese army doctors directly killed thousands of Chinese and Allied prisoners through medical and weapons experiments, vivisections, amputations, and other systematic methods of torture. At the end of the War, the retreating Japanese army killed all remaining prisoners and burned the complex to the ground, leaving behind only the shell of the administrative building and some pits used to breed disease-carrying rats. There were no survivors.

  Historians estimate that between two-hundred thousand
and half-amillion Chinese persons, almost all civilians, were killed by the biological and chemical weapons researched and developed in this place and other satellite labs: anthrax, cholera, the bubonic plague. At the end of the War, General MacArthur, supreme commander of the Allied forces, granted all members of Unit 731 immunity from war crimes prosecution in order to get the data from their experiments and to keep the data away from the Soviet Union.

  Today, except for a small museum nearby with few visitors, little evidence of those atrocities is visible. Over there, at the edge of an empty field, a pile of rubble stands where the incinerator for destroying the bodies of the victims used to be. This factory behind me is built on the foundation of a storage depot used by Unit 731 for germ-breeding supplies. Until the recent economic downturn, which shuttered its doors, the factory built moped engines for a Sino-Japanese joint venture in Harbin. And in a gruesome echo of the past, several pharmaceutical companies have quietly settled in around the site of Unit 731's former headquarters.

  Perhaps the Chinese are content to leave behind this part of their past and move on. And if they do, the rest of the world will probably move on as well.

  But not if Evan Wei has anything to say about it.

  [Samantha speaks over a montage of images of Evan Wei lecturing in front of a classroom and posing before complex machinery with Dr. Kirino. In the photographs they look to be in their twenties.]

  Dr. Evan Wei, a Chinese-American historian specializing in Classical Japan, is determined to make the world focus on the suffering of the victims of Unit 731. He and his wife, Dr. Akemi Kirino, a noted Japanese-American experimental physicist, have developed a controversial technique that they claim will allow people to travel back in time and experience history as it occurred. Today, he will publicly demonstrate his technique by traveling back to the year 1940, at the height of Unit 731's activities, and personally bear witness to the atrocities of Unit 731.

  The Japanese government claims that China is engaged in a propaganda stunt, and it has filed a strongly worded protest with Beijing for allowing this demonstration. Citing principles of international law, Japan argues that China does not have the right to sponsor an expedition into World War Two-era Harbin because Harbin was then under the control of Manchukuo, a puppet regime of the Japanese Empire. China has rejected the Japanese claim, and responded by declaring Dr. Wei's demonstration an "excavation of national heritage" and now claims ownership rights over any visual or audio record of Dr. Wei's proposed journey to the past under Chinese antiquities-export laws.

  Dr. Wei has insisted that he and his wife are conducting this experiment in their capacities as individual American citizens, with no connection to any government. They have asked the American Consul General in nearby Shenyang, as well as representatives of the United Nations, to intervene and protect their effort from any governmental interference. It's unclear how this legal mess will be resolved.

  Meanwhile, numerous groups from China and overseas, some in support of Dr. Wei, some against, have gathered to hold protests. China has mobilized thousands of riot police to keep these demonstrators from approaching Pingfang.

  Stay tuned, and we will bring you up-to-date reports on this historical occasion. This is Samantha Paine, for APAC.

  Akemi Kirino:

  To truly travel back in time, we still had to jump over one more hurdle.

  The Bohm-Kirino particles allow us to reconstruct, in detail, all types of information about the moment of their creation: sight, sound, microwaves, ultrasound, the smell of antiseptic and blood, and the sting of cordite and gunpowder in the back of the nose.

  But this is a staggering amount of information, even for a single second. We had no realistic way to store it, let alone process it in real time. The amount of data gathered for a few minutes would have overwhelmed all the storage servers at Harvard. We could open up a door to the past, but would see nothing in the tsunami of bits that flooded forth.

  [Behind Dr. Kirino is a machine that looks like a large clinical MRI scanner. She steps to the side so that the camera can zoom slowly inside the tube of the scanner where the volunteer's body would go during the process. As the camera moves through the tube, continuing towards the light at the end of the tunnel, her voice continues off camera.]

  Perhaps given enough time, we could have come up with a solution that would have allowed the data to be recorded. But Evan believed that we could not afford to wait. The surviving relatives of the victims were aging, dying, and the War was about to fade out of living memory. There was a duty, he felt, to offer the surviving relatives whatever answers we could get.

  So I came up with the idea of using the human brain to process the information gathered by the Bohm-Kirino detectors. The brain's massively parallel processing capabilities, the bedrock of consciousness, proved quite effective at filtering and making sense of the torrent of data from the detectors. The brain could be given the raw electrical signals, throw 99.999 percent of it away, and turn the rest into sight, sound, smell, and make sense of it all and record them as memories.

  This really shouldn't surprise us. After all, this is what our brains do, every second of our lives. The raw signals from our eyes, ears, skin, and tongue would overwhelm any supercomputer, but from second to second, our brain manages to construct the consciousness of our existence from all that noise.

  "For our volunteer subjects, the process creates the illusion of experiencing the past, as though they were in that place, at that time," I wrote in Nature.

  How I regret using the word "illusion" now. So much weight ended up being placed on my poor word choice. History is like that: the truly important decisions never seemed important at the time.

  Yes, the brain takes the signals and makes a story out of them, but there's nothing illusory about it, whether in the past or now.

  Archibald Ezary, Radhabinod Pal Professor of Law, Codirector of East Asian Studies, Harvard Law School:

  [Ezary has a placid face that is belied by the intensity of his gaze. He enjoys giving lectures, not because he likes hearing himself talk, but because he thinks he will learn something new each time he tries to explain.]

  The legal debate between China and Japan about Wei's work, almost twenty years ago, was not really new. Who should have control over the past is a question that has troubled all of us, in various forms, for many years. But the invention of the Kirino Process made this struggle to control the past a literal, rather than merely a metaphorical, issue.

  A state has a temporal dimension as well as a spatial one. It grows and shrinks over time, subjugating new peoples and sometimes freeing their descendants. Japan today may be thought of as just the home islands, but back in 1942, at its height, the Japanese Empire ruled Korea, most of China, Taiwan, Sakhalin, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Burma, Malaysia, and large parts of Indonesia, as well as large swaths of the islands in the Pacific. The legacy of that time shapes Asia to this day.

  One of the most vexing problems created by the violent and unstable process by which states expand and contract over time is this: as control over a territory shifts between sovereigns over time, which sovereign should have jurisdiction over that territory's past?

  Before Evan Wei's demonstration, the most that the issue of jurisdiction over the past intruded on real life was an argument over whether Spain or America would have the right to the sovereign's share of treasure from sunken sixteenth-century Spanish galleons recovered in contemporary American waters, or whether Greece or England should keep the Elgin Marbles. But now the stakes are much higher.

  So, is Harbin during the years between 1931 and 1945 Japanese territory, as the Japanese government contends? Or is it Chinese, as the People's Republic argues? Or perhaps we should treat the past as something held in trust for all of humanity by the United Nations?

  The Chinese view would have had the support of most of the Western world—the Japanese position is akin to Germany arguing that attempts to travel to Auschwitz-Birkenau between
1939 and 1945 should be subject to its approval—but for the fact that it is the People's Republic of China, a Western pariah, which is now making the claim. And so you see how the present and the past will strangle each other to death.

  Moreover, behind both the Japanese and the Chinese positions is the unquestioned assumption that if we can resolve whether China or Japan has sovereignty over World War Two-era Harbin, then either the People's Republic or the present Japanese government would be the right authority to exercise that sovereignty. But this is far from clear. Both sides have problems making the legal case.

  First, Japan has always argued, when it comes to Chinese claims for compensation for wartime atrocities, that the present Japan, founded on the Constitution drafted by America, cannot be the responsible party. Japan believes that those claims are against its predecessor government, the Empire of Japan, and all such claims have been resolved by the Treaty of San Francisco and other bilateral treaties. But if that is so, for Japan now to assert sovereignty over that era in Manchuria, when it has previously disavowed all responsibility for it, is more than a little inconsistent.

  But the People's Republic is not home free either. At the time Japanese forces took control of Manchuria in 1932, it was only nominally under the control of the Republic of China, the entity that we think of as the "official" China during the Second World War, and the People's Republic of China did not even exist. It is true that during the War, armed resistance in Manchuria to the Japanese occupation came almost entirely from the Han Chinese, Manchu, and Korean guerillas led by Chinese and Korean Communists. But these guerillas were not under the real direction of the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Zedong, and so had little to do with the eventual founding of the People's Republic.

  So why should we think that either the present government of Japan or China has any claim to Harbin during that era? Wouldn't the Republic of China, which now resides in Taipei and calls itself Taiwan, have a more legitimate claim? Or perhaps we should conjure up a "Provisional Historical Manchurian Authority" to assume jurisdiction over it?