King of All I Survey

I wanted to get off the topic of me and my potential shortcomings as a leader. "Anyway, if the rest of the folks at Island of Tranquility could focus on practical applications of the technologies, that would be helpful. Unique combinations of technologies or ways to use them that haven't been done before, Joe can provide you access to what already exists in the early stages of any ideas or concepts so you're not chasing after things that are already being sold."

"Hmmm. I'm sure they'll do their best." He paused and shrugged as if he didn't think it would be a fruitful effort. At least that's what I read into it.

"Is there some problem with that?" I asked.

He shrugged again, "Well, it's just not what most of us would rather be doing. You've got a team of top-level scientists, but for the most part we care more about how and why things work, than we do about making new things that work.

Let me use an analogy. Let's think of the fundamental forces, particles, and energies of the universe as Lego building blocks. Everything everywhere is made of these Lego blocks, but we don't know all the different shapes and colors of Legos that exist, we don't know all the ways they can fit together, or why some don't fit together when it looks like they should. The people you've got on Island of Tranquility are mostly interested in sorting through the giant pile of Legos and organizing them into neat little groups. These ones are all the same shape but are different colors or different sizes. These ones are specialized and have moving parts, like a pulley wheel or a hinge. These ones are all blue. And so forth. We want to go through the whole jumbled pile of Legos that have been dumped on the floor and figure out exactly how many different types there are in the pile, and different ways they are like or not like all the other Legos. We want to know if they can attach to each other and if, when they do attach to each of the others, does that change the way they work. Like if I attach both sides of a hinge block to the same larger block, the hinge doesn't open and close any more because it's held in its place on both ends of an unmoving block. Anyway, we don't really care if you can use those Legos to build a really tall tower, or a Star Trek Death Star. Their idea of fun is just looking at all the details of each individual block and sorting them into different little piles. Then resorting them based on different criteria. They could sit in a pile of Legos and do that for their entire careers with a big happy smile.

"Now, though, you're asking them to build really tall towers, and those Star Trek Death Star things with the Legos in the different piles, mixing the piles up and hiding the individuality of each Lego, by locking them all into a rigid shape some eight-year-old can play with. No offense. That's just not fun for them and not anything they really care about. Now, if you've got someone who really loves to build things out of Legos, whether from a plan or just something from their own imaginations, they might benefit from having little sorted piles of Legos so they know exactly what they have to work with. Or someone might even say to them, 'I want to build that Death Star thing, but it needs a swiveling antenna dish, can you find me a piece that will looks like this or can work to make other pieces swivel freely without falling off.' Then, the researchers can do what they do best and what they like best: find out what properties would be needed to make Legos swivel and see if there are any Legos with those properties in the big pile. So, they can be helpful and work with the builders. They can even build things on their own if they have to, but if they do, their heart isn't in it and it's generally not what they're good at."

I couldn't hold back any longer, "Professor, I'm sorry but you're wrong."

"What? Maybe I'm not explaining this right…"

"No. I mean Death Stars are from Star Wars, not Star Trek. You said someone might or might not be interested in building a Star Trek Death Star. Well, there's no such thing, so…"

"Ha! That's just my point, Timothy! I don't care! You need to know exactly which story it's from. I just wave my hands in the air and say it's from one of those space movies and that's all I really need to know about it."

"OK, Professor, but it's really hard for me to take anything you say seriously if you mix those two up. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and hear you out. What did you say after the part about asking someone to build a Star Trek Death Star? I kind of didn't hear the rest…"

"Ha! See, space movies interest you and listening to people who know real things doesn't, so you 're not as good at it," He winked.

"So, you're saying that asking the researchers to think of new products is like sending a die-hard Star Wars fan to a Star Trek Trivia contest? He might get one or two questions right, but he's not going to win, and he's not going to have fun."

Wagner slammed his open palm down on his knee. "Ha! Now you've got it!"

"Huh," I said insightfully. "Then if I want to win both contests, I've got to put the two of them together on a team…"

Wagner shrugged, "That might work, so long as each one is allowed to focus on what they do best, when their particular skills are needed. I suppose though there are some who know both space movies. George, for example, is always putzing around trying to save himself some work or make himself more comfortable. He'd spend two weeks working on an idea that's going to save him an hour's work. The heat-capturing ceiling fan blades were his idea. "We were having lunch together under a regular ceiling fan shortly after we got here. He said he was sweating too much to think properly, and there should be a better way to cool down than just blowing the same hot air around. A week later he showed me his equations, and some rough sketches. Joe used that to make a couple samples with the fabricator, and we tweaked it until we had it just right. For George, though, that's as far as he cares to go. Build one prototype that keeps him cool, and he's done. Somebody else might say, 'hey, we're absorbing all this heat from the air, why don't we use that energy to spin the fan blades, and whatever's left over we can use to charge a battery or feed it back into the island power grid, if we didn't have the dark energy generators, of course. Not to get off-topic, but dark energy doesn't actually exist, so we might want to change the name of those."

Joe's voice cut, "It was the closest translation I could come up with based on the existing Earth understanding of the universe at the time. Other civilizations, of course, know that the effects that Earth scientists attribute to dark energy are a function of relative differences in gravitic pressures and their effects on what you call time, but you don't really have a word for that effect. The generators in question extract a very, very minute amount of this 'gravitic time-pressure differential' and a sort of 'transformer' to alter it into stored electrical energy."

"So," I said, "we're actually what slowing down the expansion of the universe?"

"King Timothy, Maybe you need to review the lessons or have some of the implanted learnings repeated…" Joe corrected me, "You should already know that if you define speed as the distance covered over time, then distance isn't the only variable for a given period of measured time. The pace of time itself is a variable, and the distance light seems to travel in a year, a light year by definition, varies with the rate at which time is flowing for the observer and for the traveling light. Some of the galaxy's leading scientists argue that the concept of distance (a measurable space between here and there) is an illusion that emerges from our perception of time. But that's largely because they don't have all the right math tools to determine the correct solution. A barrier that, in all the universe, only Doctor Wagner will be allowed to overcome if he is up to the task."

"Ha! You forget, I've got all the time in the world to find the answers, thanks to the rejuvenation protocols."

"I do not forget."

"Ha! Except in the vicinity of a very large so-called Dark Energy Generator!" Wagner cackled with excitement.

"Yes, but I simply to do not allow such devices to be scaled to a level where the effect is significant as all." Joe countered.

I could feel my eyebrows scrunching together. I had learned all this, but to me it was kind of like Star Wars versus Star Trek to Professor Wagner, not really something I had needed to know, but something here leaped out at me. "Wait a minute, are you two saying that if someone made a sufficiently large dark energy generator, they could wipe out a portion of Joe's memory?"

"Yes, yes, and a tiny bit of processing capacity, but that would be a much, much lesser effect," Wagner stated smugly.

"Joe?" I asked, needing confirmation.

"Yes, it's true. However, I would simply use quantum manipulations to ensure that such a device did not function at a scale or efficiency to produce such an effect. In fact, I have biased all of these devices to lose efficiency with scale to simulate a part of the obscuring physics and mathematical principles that I propagate to all the civilizations of the universe… except Earth now, due to the understanding King Tim and I have reached."