The Falcon Network
Prologue
It was the middle of the Second Great War. Nations had been at peace with each other for quite some time now. They had developed space travel a few centuries ago, and just as they were about to send the first manned ships outside their solar system, disaster struck. The guerrillas took over Nabla’s government, fully supported by most of the population. They threatened to attack Beta if they didn’t back down from their exploration missions. It was not clear for the rest of the world what was their intent, or what they stood to gain from this hostility. Then, Nabla launched an unwarranted nuclear strike on the capital of Beta, violating countless centuries of nuclear nonproliferation treaties, and prompting Beta to strike right back. Of course Nabla foresaw this, they had the element of surprise— the element of shock— in their corner, and by that point they had targeted most research facilities in the rest of the world. Politicians, scholars, civilians, no one was spared from this attack. And everyone wondered, “why?” It would take a couple millennia for the survivors to get back to a kind of normal world, but they would never even get close to recovering space travel. History was much too traumatic for anyone to dare to try…
The general consensus was that Professor Tom Johnson was a genius. A couple of months back, out of nowhere, he published a paper where solved the Hodge conjecture and managed to use it to close a fundamental gap between quantum theory and general relativity. This took the academic world by storm, as every theoretical and applied physicist and mathematician was astonished by the result.
“You’d need years of formal training to even begin to understand what exactly a cohomology is,” said an MIT professor in an interview for Quanta, “and a whole PhD to even begin to try the methods Johnson used.” Tom, at only twenty two years old, had no formal training in mathematics, physics, or any natural science.
One of Tom’s high school physics professors was quoted saying, “if you had told me Tom would solve this unsolved problem in mathematics and then apply it to physics, I would have laughed at you. He almost failed my class!” The reporter was trying to figure out how Tom managed to solve two problems that had managed to stump some of the greatest minds for the last century.
“The ideas just came to my mind one day,” this was what Johnson had said. “I was talking with a friend and he explained to me about topology. Later that night, I started reading the basics, and it all just seemed so natural and logical. Finally, when I got to the Hodge conjecture, the answer was there, staring at me. I simply wrote down what I saw.” The reporter later added that they were not able to contact this friend for comment.
Tom had a modest apartment with his girlfriend in Boston. He’d been offered tenure at every major university after his publication, no one wanted to pass on the opportunity to have one of the greatest minds of the century teaching and researching at their institution. In the end, he chose MIT. He met his girlfriend a couple of years back in a ‘Hike with Strangers!’ trip, where they instantly clicked. She, as everyone else in the entire world, was surprised with this side of her boyfriend. She’d also never seen any interest from him in math or physics. However, both of them enjoyed Boston, and she was happy for him.
“What are you doing?”
“Oh, I’m preparing some notes for the talk I’m giving in UChicago. What do you think of my opening line, ‘Thus, it is the time we must switch our focus, and consider the transfer of information, which lies at the base of my proof’?”
“It sounds way too dramatic for a physics talk.”
“You’re right, it is too dramatic. I’ll ground it a bit.”
“Sure thing. I’m going on a run, do you want to come?”
“Oh, I kinda need to finish this. Have fun though.” Tom gave his girlfriend a kiss as she left, and he continued working on his talk. A few minutes later, he set a paper with some math equations down on his desk and began staring at it.
“This worked the first time,” Tom said to himself as he kept staring at it. He continued staring at the paper for more than an hour. His girlfriend returned, and asked him what he was doing.
“Nothing. I was just trying to look for inspiration, but I couldn’t find it.”
“Aw,” his girlfriend saw his sad face. “Well, you can help me take a shower, I bet that’ll cheer you up,” and she started walking away, towards the bathroom.
Tom’s gaze switched from the paper to his girlfriend multiple times, until finally he stowed the paper away on his desk and stood up, laughing on his way to the shower. He hadn’t solved anything new since the conjecture. He taught introduction to topology, and he had to rely on his students for what should have been the most basic questions. He had solved the Hodge conjecture, and he legitimately understood everything he had done, he could explain it to a toddler if asked to. But he didn’t know anything else. As soon as he deviated from the proof, everything faded away and he was back to being the high school kid who almost failed physics.
BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-
The high-pitched sound of the alarm continued as a red light flickered over a single desk. This was the only light flashing in a row of thirty, in a room lined with dozens of identical rows. Each desk was manned by an engineer.
The elevator slowly made its way down from the fiftieth floor, and it dinged as it reached the sixteenth floor. The high-pitched alarm continued. As the elevator doors opened, a tall, gray man exited, followed by two even taller security guards. Everyone continued working as the three men reached the source of the sound. The engineer at the desk was ready for this situation. It’s just like the training, he thought to himself as the three figures approached him.
The tall, gray man got to the desk, the security guards staying slightly behind.
“General Corbin, good morning. This is station BT034, supervised by—”
“Initiate the data transfer, BT034.” Corbin’s voice was unexpectedly dark. The sort of voice you’d hear from a man who had lost everything. The engineer had never heard anything like that before.
“Yes, of course,” the engineer said, trying to shake off the shiver that came after listening to Corbin. “The retrieval of this universe happened only minutes ago. The universe had not been on our radar at all, I am the first engineer assigned to it. The alarm started flashing as soon as I received it.”
“Project it on the screen,” Corbin said calmly. The engineer pressed a few buttons, while he shook another shiver he’d gotten from his voice. The room was uncharacteristically quiet. You could normally hear some of the engineers talking amongst each other, or the clack of improperly typed keys. Now however, you could not hear a single thing. A pin would not dare to fall. After a few minutes, the general finally broke the silence. “I’m wondering, why did the radar identify such an unimportant universe? Only one planet with intelligent life, not a single soul outside it. Three different people scanned, and no one seems to be able to think about their world geography…”
The engineer got a closer look at Corbin’s pale skin while he continued to analyze the planet. Everything about him seemed slightly off. His skin was a touch too gray, his hair a touch too bright, his fingers a touch too large. Not enough to warrant a long stare, but just enough so that if you were to stare for long enough, you’d realize.
“Fascinating. This universe also happens to elude every standard protocol.” The general thought for a couple more minutes. “No, this universe happens to elude every standard, elite and black protocol.” As he finished saying this, he grinned. Somehow, the engineer found this even worse than his expressionless face. At least before, he could picture him as some kind of emotionless alien. Now, he had to make peace with the fact that the general was just like him. “Someone planned this,”
Corbin typed some code into the screen. The engineer knew that high command was able to write code with their thoughts. Seeing it happen in front of him however, looking at the general doing the things that would take him minutes or hours, in mere seconds, was a lot scarier than he thought it would be. I’m this easily replaced, he thought to himself, shivering one final time. Suddenly, another universe popped into his screen. Corbin straightened his sweater and began to leave back to his office. He reached the elevator, and one of his security guards followed him in. The elevator doors closed, and the elevator began to rise back to the fiftieth floor. The other security guard stayed in the room, which continued to be quiet all throughout the day. Well, I guess it wasn’t just me, the engineer thought to himself as he resumed his work.
Aileen’s room was dark and musty. There was a single light emanating from her laptop. She was sitting on her bed, reading a preprint of a paper on information theory that had just been submitted, furiously annotating it with suggestions.
“You know, working in the dark is bad for your eyes,” said her friend while switching the lights on.
“…”. She glanced at him with the same death stare she’d give the authors of the paper if they were in front of her. “Now why the hell did you do that?”
“There’s been an update. The alarm in Asturia went off.”
Aileen almost fell while quickly jumping out of her bed. She was wearing her favorite pair of light blue running shorts, and a white tank top, the same thing she always wore when she was thinking. “Fuck you. I’ve told you this already, you can’t just start talking about this when I’m dressed like this.” She was genuinely mad. She hated when Nathaniel did this. “Don’t say another word, I’m going to change.”
Nate didn’t understand why Aileen took her clothes so seriously; she was a genius, a thousand times more intelligent than him. It’s just an outfit, he thought, never noticing the condescending face he made whenever he did.
“Stop making that face.” Aileen returned to the room dressed in a pink polo, a light gray and white argyle golf vest, and a white skirt, long white gloves covering almost all the way to her elbows, long pink socks that reached her knees, and a pair of white golf shoes.
“I’m not making a face.” Nate couldn’t help but throw in a few glances at her. A part of him thought she looked stunning. “Why the club?”
“It wouldn’t make sense to dress as a golfer and not bring a club now, would it?” Aileen’s outfit really did serve a purpose. It helped her get in the mood for the situation. They were about to do something crazy, she might as well dress something crazy.
“Whatever,” he shook his head, the condescending face appearing once more. “It all happened a couple hours ago. Our people on the inside tell me that Corbin’s reaction was very uncharacteristic. He smiled when he saw that your little show lied just outside every protocol.”
“I’d kill to see that,” Aileen smiled.
“You don’t mean that,” he said in a serious tone. “Corbin left shortly after that, and no one has seen him since. He’s likely still in his office.”
“This is going to be so fun,” she said while smacking her lips together. She went into her work room and immediately began setting everything up.
“I know this is just like a game for you, but don’t forget that a lot of people depend on us. If this doesn’t work, we’ll likely never get another shot.”
“I know. I won’t let you down.” Aileen replied with a smile, fake enough for him to see that she didn’t mean it. She played into the version he had of her in his mind. The least he suspects, the better, she thought to herself. This meant so much more to her than what Nate could ever imagine. If he knew how much it meant to her, he never would have let her join the team.
Aileen felt amazing every time her work room began to light up. She thought back to when she was a girl. She had loved dismantling things, and she would look through people’s trash, constantly finding smart watches, phones or televisions with minor defects that people would simply replace. She’d sneak them back into her garage and would open them to see what was inside. She’d always imagine that some day she’d have a room just like this, where she could simply turn on her monitors and start coding up her robots that would do everything for her. Aileen sometimes wanted to go back to her days opening up computers, things were a lot simpler back then.
“Okay, one more time,” she murmured to herself. As the final, large flat screen monitor in the center of the room finished booting up, the image of Tom Johnson appeared on the screen. It felt almost like watching a movie: he was sitting down at his desk, looking at the paper with equations in front of him, waiting for divine inspiration to hit.
Aileen quickly glanced at the paper on the screen, “my man, the answer is literally just the first non-trivial zero of the Zeta function. You can figure that out,” she said to herself as she began to type some commands into her computer.
BEEP—… BEEP—… BEEP—…
A radar-like sound started emanating from one of Aileen’s background monitors.
“Now, where exactly are you, Corbin…”
She continued typing more commands, trying to pinpoint the general’s location.
“Aha! I found you…” The movie switched from the image of Tom to that of a man in a suit.
Corbin’s office was surprisingly shiny, the white and transparent contrasting with his gray skin and dark clothes. Everything was perfectly organized and filed away, and just like in Aileen’s work room, there was a monitor in the center of the room. The monitor showed the image of a man in a suit. General Corbin put on a headset, and as if it were a videogame, he began to change the image in front of him.
“But sir, this violates every treaty! You can’t possibly be serious,” said one of the advisors to the man in the suit.
“I’ve received credible intelligence that they’re launching the first attack! We must not hesitate” replied the man in the suit. Corbin had planted this idea in the man’s head. The headset allowed Corbin to talk to whomever was on the other side of the screen. He became the voice in their heads, and he could implant new memories and thoughts as he pleased. They thought the ideas were their own.
Corbin thought-typed some commands into the monitor.
“Actually sir, I’ve also received some of these reports you mention,” the advisor replied, agreeing with the man in the suit.
Meanwhile, Aileen had seen all of this unfold on her screen.
“Shit,” she said to herself. “I’ve gotta move fast.” She typed some commands into her computer. Suddenly, Tom reappeared on the screen. He was still looking at the paper with the equations in front of him. Aileen began putting a headset similar to the one Corbin had used.
“Hey, I need your help,” she said out loud into the headset…
Hey, I need your help. Tom thought to himself. In reality, this was Aileen. Of course, Tom didn’t know this yet.
“Sure thing, what’s up?” Tom instinctively replied to the thought of someone needing help. “Wait, why would I need my help?” He was confused.
This isn’t you, it’s me
“What do I mean this isn’t me? God, I’ve been looking at this paper for way too long, I’m starting to hallucinate.”
The answer is the first non-trivial zero of the Zeta function. Now, can you pay attention? There are important things happening.
“The first non-trivial zero…” Tom immediately began to remember the time he read about the Riemann Hypothesis, just after he had solved the Hodge conjecture. The only thing was, that had never happened. ”What the hell is happening? I’m really going crazy now, aren’t I? Is this how all the math people feel?” Tom began to freak out.
Shut up, agh. Listen. I. Am. Not. You.
After some more back and forth, Aileen managed to convince Tom that she was, indeed, from another universe.
“Okay fine, I’ll play your game. Suppose you do exist. What do you want from me?”
Well, some people from my world want to blow up your world. We are going to stop them.
“And how exactly are we going to do that?”
The TLDR, during the Second World War, your government gave MIT a kind of ‘nuclear safeguard’. The lab cannot launch any strikes, but it can deter them. No one but a few retired professors know this. I’ve already arranged for you to have access.
“And you just happen to know this, why?”
You can basically read all of the information once you are connected to a person. And well, seven degrees of separation, it’s not hard to get to the juicy secrets. Oh by the way, nice shower. I like your girlfriend.
“Stop trying to flirt with my girlfriend.”
Sorry. We’ve got to go though.
“Cool. I mean, if I do happen to have access to a top secret military facility, I guess you’re right after all.”
Corbin watched as the man on the suit laid back, looking at the progress of the nuclear strike. Suddenly, the advisor entered the room, with a worrisome look on his face.
“Sir, there was a block on the nuclear strike,” said the advisor.
Corbin was significantly mad. “You have got to be fucking with me. There goes the element of surprise. Who is this scum trying to mess with my protocol?”
The general typed some code, and after the same radar-like sound that Aileen had heard before finished playing, the general found a second connection source. “I knew there was something going on,” he murmured to himself.
He switched the image on the screen to the source he had just found, and Tom Johnson appeared. He was in the secret laboratory, surrounded by green and black radar screens on light brown carcasses, a row of what must have been the most uncomfortable chairs in the world, and more of the latest technological advancements from the forties.
Corbin tried to initiate a connection with the professor but the connection failed, which meant someone else was already connected. He immediately halted his connection efforts, as he remembered reading an information theory paper where the authors theorized that a two-fold connection to the same person could result in catastrophic effects. He’d never do anything to compromise himself.
Back in her work room, Aileen’s alarm turned off. It meant that someone had tried a two-fold connection with her.
“Yes!” she said with a small swing of her golf club. She called Nate. “He found me. He’s coming.” She hung up, without leaving Nate enough time to answer.
A few minutes after Tom had gotten to the laboratory, someone started opening the hatch that he had used to enter the room. He instinctively jumped backwards when this happened.
“What should I do?” Tom was shaking.
Just, say everything I tell you to. Just say what you’re thinking.
The hatch opened and a security guard popped into the room.
“Get away from the controls!” shouted the guard.
Tom obediently got away from the controls.
Hello father, Tom thought to himself.
“What?” Tom was confused.
Just say it!
“And shut up!” the security guard began replying.
“Uh, h-h-hello father,” Tom finally said.
When Corbin heard Tom say this to the security guard, he took off his headset abruptly. On the screen, the security guard immediately collapsed dead to the ground.
“That fucking child,” he murmured to himself.
“WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED?” Tom shouted. “He’s dead! Like, not breathing dead! Is that going to happen to me?!” he was panicking.
Hey, Tom, relax. Now, take a deep breath. Tom did. After all, it was his idea.
What you just saw, it’s called a ‘forced connection.’ My father isn’t fond of having to deal with conversations like the one we’re having. He forcibly connects and takes full control of the bodies he connects to. You need complete concentration to do that though, and I’m guessing that figuring out it was me took him off the zone.
“Wait, is your dad one of the bad guys?”
He’s my father. He’s not my dad. He never was. And yes, he’s the one trying to blow up your world.
“But why? What do we have to do with you? We don’t have this technology, do we? We don’t even know you exist.” Tom began to panic once more.
Again, take a deep breath.
I assure you this won’t happen to you. If I were forcibly controlling, your mind would have died the moment I took over, your body would’ve just been a puppet by this point. You’re still here, aren’t you? Now, we’ve got to focus. It won’t be long before father returns.
A few moments later, the hatch began opening once again. This time, a receptionist fell through to the lab.
“I see you’re still throwing tantrums. Just like when you were a child, Aileen” said the receptionist, in a voice that mimicked that of the general.
“This world isn’t a threat. You’ve seen it yourself.” Tom tried to be as faithful to his thoughts as he could. He realized he was just a pawn in a bigger game. But now was not the time for existential dread. He had to stay focused. He had to deal with a force that had just collapsed one of the strongest people he had ever laid eyes on as if it was nothing.
“Why are you inside a receptionist?” Tom continued to relay Aileen’s thoughts.
“In this? I don’t care, I can choose whomever I want.”
“I mean, why aren’t you in this?” Tom assumed she was referring to him, so he pointed at himself. “Surely it would have been easier.”
“I sometimes forget how ignorant you can be,” said the receptionist. His voice had not changed in tone one bit.
“Oh, you’re talking about the paper on two-fold information? The one I wrote?” Tom was surprised when he said this. He wondered how long Aileen had been planning this for.
In his office, Corbin quickly glanced at his second monitor and thought-typed the name of the paper he had read.
“A Theoretical Basis for the Mechanism of 2-Fold Implantation” by Aileen Corbin.
He reread it as quickly as he could, only this time, he found a critical misstep that completely reversed the conclusion. The paper was a fake.
Back in the laboratory, the receptionist continued. “Am I to understand you published fake research to distract me? I’m quite flattered, I must say.”
“Try it, then.” Tom was scared to death, but for some reason, he trusted Aileen.
As soon as Tom finished saying that, Aileen began preparing a piece of code that she had never actually used before. This was her own creation, the thing she had worked on for years. It’s time, she thought to herself.
General Corbin prepared the jump into Tom Johnson. He typed the necessary commands into his screen, and as he did, the receptionist on the screen fell to the ground. Tom simply stood there, completely still, afraid that if he’d move, he’d mess up Aileen’s plan. Although Corbin was unsuccessful at first, he pushed through this time. He shook his head in disbelief, hating himself for not noticing such a simple mistake on the first read. The jump failed a second time.
“You must focus,” the general murmured to himself. He tried to jump for the third time. Again he was unsuccessful…
Hello, father. Did you miss me?
Aileen always reminisced about her childhood when she entered her work room. She remembered all of her time dismantling TVs.
“Come here, Aileen,” she’d hear her father say.
“I’m coming, dad.”
“What did I tell you about stealing the neighbors’ televisions?”
Her father had always had that dark, void voice. She grew up hearing the same voice that had sent shivers down the engineer’s body.
“I’ll give it back,” Aileen always complained.
“That was not right. You know what happens when the things you do are not right.” She could see her father slowly stand up, to his tall, dominating stance. She was only a child.
Every time she’d reminisce about her childhood, and would remember the happiness of dismantling electronics— her father would creep into her memory. He was never a dad. A dad would never have done that. Every time she snapped out of it.
But now, she was inside her father’s mind. Today, she was grateful she was not a child anymore.
“What the fuck is this!”
Corbin ripped the headset out of his head and turned off the monitor. He cleared his head, and thought of nothing for a few minutes
“It must have been a glitch of some sort, having two different connections at the same time to the same person. That bitch’s paper was incomplete once again.” Corbin was fuming mad.
But then, he began to think. She had access to my memories. I am compromised. Corbin took a quick glance at the bottom drawer in his desk. This is what I was told in the training. He started to remember:
“If your memory is ever compromised, you must make the ultimate sacrifice, for the good of our universe. We must not let this power fall into the hands of the enemy,” Corbin could hear the marshal lecturing as if it was yesterday.
I must not let the enemy win.
Corbin opened the bottom drawer and looked at the sophisticated device inside. He had almost forgotten it existed. Then he heard banging on the door. They’re here, he thought to himself. It’s now or never. He grabbed the device and pointed it at his head.
The door to his office swung open, a few glass statues falling as it did.
“General Corbin, for violations against the sovereignty of foreign universes, you are under—” Nate, Corbin’s arrest officer, was interrupted by a loud BANG coming from the device in Corbin’s hand.
“No!” Nate cried as he saw the general fall to the ground. “No, no, no, NO!” Nate couldn’t wrap his head around what had just happened. He eventually called Aileen.
For the last couple of years, the theory Aileen had been working on was on how to create a link within the same universe. In order to follow the law of conservation of information, the original engineers had discovered that by triangulating black holes in multiple universes, one could transfer information without losing anything in the process. The process however, could not be mimicked within the same universe. That was, until Aileen figured out a way to do so. She could, with some very careful planning and clever manipulation, implant an idea to anyone she wanted.
Aileen answered her phone with the video chat setting. “What happened? Did you get the general?” she asked Nate with the biggest, most confused fish eyes she could manage.
“Yes. Well, no. It’s complicated. The general killed himself right as we were coming through the door,” Nate replied. He, again, had his condescending face.
Aileen had changed outfits once again. This time, Nate could only see the top. A green bug costume, with a couple plushies hanging beside her. Topped off with green eyeliner and green lipstick.
“Why do you video answer with that outfit, I’m trying to deal with something serious, you know.”
“I’ve told you a thousand times already. It. Helps. Me.” Aileen replied the same way she always did.
“Anyway, I’ve got to work on fixing this,” Nate replied just like he always did. “Good job Aileen. At the very least we should have enough evidence to expose this entire operation as a way to maintain power. You have saved countless lives across countless universes.” Nate hung up.
Nate had never cared enough to look up Aileen’s real last name. He never cared enough about Aileen to notice her reality. All he could ever see was a smart girl made dumb because she cared about her outfits.