WWW: The Web We Wove

You just can’t tell about History.

I mean, things are changing so fast, it sometimes feels like the very past itself is not as solid as it used to be. At least that’s the take where I am. Or is that when I am? The terminology isn’t too precise. And here at AT&T (at least before it got broken up into a bunch of smaller, almost incoherent organizations), we engineers and scientists used to pride ourselves on lucid, accurate, precise, and correct terminology and language. However you say it though, one thing is clear to me: nothing is what it seems to be to all of you who work outside The Phone Company. History, least of all.

Let me try to make that a little clearer.

Have you ever had the feeling, during the last ten or fifteen years, that history just was not happening like we all thought it would? How strange that the world’s bad guys just sort of gave up and went away without a fight? How so many kinds of weird people and unusual ideas and outrageous political movements have sprung up, have even won elections? How even the historians can’t seem to agree on history any more, and how we argue about even our memories of recent events? I’ve got news for you: history hasn’t been what it should have been. It isn’t even staying the same.

And, my friends, that is truly scary.

I first experienced It over thirty years ago, when I got into Bell Labs, and by deep thought and worthy deed and sincere action convinced The Powers That Ought To Be how I was fit to be one of them (or at least on their team), and thus finally got my soul-grabbing alphabet soup of clearances. I accepted It with all my other duties, and took some pride in the fact that we in The Phone Company had undertaken such a cosmic task. Hey, it was the early 1960s (not “THE Sixties,” they didn’t arrive until about ’65 or so), and way back then we did as we were told. Well, more or less.

Anyway, I didn’t know the rest of the world knew anything about It until I happened to be at a drunken party at the 1985 World Sci-Fi Convention in Auckland Down Under. The room was jammed with sci-fi writers of all kinds, and as a guy fairly new to the field, I was kind of hanging out at the periphery, hoping my party trajectory would take me into an orbit that led ultimately to intersect with a Hugo winner somewhere, preferably a hard science type like Jerry or Larry or Charles or Greg or Hal or David or Poul. While I mused so, a tall, dark, and hairy author sidled up to me and whispered, “Where were you when the world changed, Arlan?” I gulped involuntarily and he stared down at me as if I Knew. Of course, I Did.

“You mean,” I replied, looking up as innocently as I could, fighting down the urge to panic, “when Apollo landed?”

He shook his head. “No, not that. When Things Changed.” I could hear the Capital Letters, he was that good. His voice lowered even further, and I practically had to stand on tiptoes to catch his speech, even though I didn’t really want to hear him say it. He was not a Company Man, after all. “I mean, Arlan, when all these alternate universes, alternate histories, started becoming our reality?” Damn it, he Knew! Inwardly I groaned; this would mean stacks of reports to be filled out, and assessments of situations, and loads of other paperwork I didn’t want to think about during the Sci-Fi Con.

“Eric, I don’t know what you mean. You’re talking about the new markets in sci-fi novels, the alternate-history ones you’ve started doing?”

Shaking his head, Eric snorted and grabbed me by the elbow, leading me into the smoking-room section of the Sci-Fi professionals’ party, where a heated debate was in progress. He shoved and squeezed, manipulating me into the heated core of the ongoing belligerence, and I found myself sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of a bedful of various famous, and nearly so, sci-fi writers.

One of them was obviously tipsy as well as loud, but fascinating for all that. “Hellfire, I can tell you when It All Changed—when Hinckley’s bullets missed Ron Reagan, right there in front of the Hinckley Hilton, downtown D.C. In the real world, George Bush became president in 19 and 81 and we didn’t get this godawful arms buildup and the trillion-dollar Star Wars program that’s going to destroy the economy and the world.”

Interesting thought, I thought, but way off base. Behind me a challenging voice chirped up, “No, in the real world, Lennon shoots Reagan. US declares war on Colombia.”

“Colombia?” somebody asked.

“Hell, yes. It’s Lennon’s Colombian coke that makes him do it!” The whole room roared in hilarity, marking the high point in the conversation, after which time the roomful of brilliant, creative, and weird minds latched onto other emerging subjects and the theory of How Things Had Changed evaporated into the stultifying mixture of smoke and air and body odor.

I uncrossed my legs and motioned Eric to meet me outside, on the patio past the sliding glass doors. Outside, he picked up the conversation. “Arlan, there you go. They know it, too. We’ve all of us sensed that things have changed. Trouble is, we just can’t pinpoint exactly when.”

I started to speak, but Eric held up a palm. “No, hear me out, really. I think we in the sci-fi field are just more attuned to alternate history, and I’ll be damned if I don’t think you and I and the rest of us”—he gestured toward the laughing crowd back inside the room—“are off on some kind of tangent, a bifurcated history or other weird timeline.”

I breathed deeply, controlling my initial fears. He doesn’t Know. He’s only speculating. I took comfort in that thought, but a more disturbing one took its place. But he does feel it, they all do inside there. 1 shrugged mentally. I can’t tell them, but they ought to feel lucky to be in one of the Seven Known Alternities. What godawful things might be happening in all the rest of the Infinitude?

Let me interrupt here to tell you The Story: How Things Were, How Things Got Cross-Wired (Literally), and How Things Came Apart. And ultimately, how that has to do with What We (Used To) Do At The Phone Company.

Time: July 1964. Scene: Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey. A secret chamber, half a mile below the surface, bright fluorescent lighting, walls daubed a dull light green. At the head of a class a lecturer speaks.

“Lady and gentlemen, you have, every one of you, successfully completed all the intensive coursework, endured the extensive barrage of testing, and secured your comprehensive security clearances.” The neatly dressed preppie scientist—all dark suit, white Oxford-cloth shirt, shiny thin tie, and blond crew cut—smiled at his little wordplay and several of my class of ten new recruits nodded and returned the smile. I didn’t; I felt like we were on the verge of some spectacular revelation and I leaned forward to catch every word.

“You have taken all the courses, you have understood the growth of the Bell System, all the way from Dr. Bell and Mr. Watson, through Mr. Vail, through the step-by-step Strowger switch up to today’s Electronic Switching System, the ESS Series that we are this very day installing for the first time.

“Does anyone know why we have spent billions and billions of dollars to replace perfectly good seventy-year-old technology, switches that have operated almost failure-free since they were invented by that undertaker who wanted to ensure that no human operator would take away his business by plugging them into another mortuary’s phone line?”

“To make more efficient the U. S. of A. phone system,” one greenhorn volunteered. An Indian. From India.

“To make more money.” “To get calls through faster.” “To service the customers.” At each of these rapid-fire answers from the audience, the lecturer smiled and shook his head, pointing at yet another raised hand.

“You’re all correct,” he finally said, pacing up and down in front of the lectern, “those are good reasons, and each of them will happen. But,” he spun on his heel, splaying all ten fingers at us, “each of you is also Wrong. The real reason has to do with our vast wired network, the millions upon millions of interconnections we have made, the untold quadrillions and quintillions and octillions of possible interconnections among these customers that are possible.”

His voice now a whisper, the lecturer turned and pressed a large red pushbutton on the wall behind him. The entire wall rolled away, revealing a rough surfaced rear-projection screen. “I am now ready—you are now ready—to understand the whole truth behind The Phone Company. Why it must remain one unitary system, at least in the U. S. of A., why we must maintain our interconnected network as the world’s leader. The rest of the world, backwards as they are, they’ll never catch up. And for us, that’s good. They won’t get the Alternities goodies like we do.”

The class, me included, gasped as the rear-projection screen suddenly filled with the five words that changed our lives: There Are Seven Parallel Universes. The lecturer smiled at our gasping reactions.

“How can there be?” the Harvard man said, standing and pointing to make his point.

“Simple,” came the answer, “the Many-Worlds Theory of Quantum Mechanics allows an uncountably infinite number of parallel universes, each stemming from tiny decisions in a mother world. Next question.”

“How do we know this?” This from the lone female in our class, a nerdish but shapely and attractive woman with the unlikely last name of Borg.

The rear-projection screen faded its stunning revelation, replacing it with an image of thousands of overhead wires in 1890s New York. “Around the turn of the century,” the explanation came, “The Phone Company started getting complaints about unknown crosstalk—voices that shouldn’t have been there—especially in New York. Close investigation by the Western Electric research team revealed that the strange voices were not coming from our subscribers, but from elsewhere. Where ‘elsewhere’ was, they couldn’t tell.

“But the situation grew more serious as we jammed more and more wires into a given city. Those early pioneers tried filters, everything, to cut down on the unwanted noise. It was only when they set up an experimental lab and talked to some of those other voices that we finally understood what was happening, that we were able to establish two-way communications with other alternate worlds, worlds of different histories.” We were spellbound, and the lecturer obviously was enjoying himself. “I mean, can you imagine what happened when Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, US citizen from Scotland, found himself speaking with Dr. Ing. Alexandre Lighthorse du Belle, citizen of the Confederate States of North America?”

We all sat gaping, stunned but not disbelieving. The wildest stories of science fiction were true! Yet there was more to come.

“But it was only when Bell Labs got into the picture in the 1920s that they found out how it was all happening—the real reason that there ever was a Bell Labs in the first place, you may have guessed. And the secret was, the enormous number of interconnections, the huge number of miles of bare wire all interconnected and switched together, somehow induced connections between our universe and several of the closest parallel universes.” The lecturer shrugged. “Again, this has something to do with the eigenvalue solutions of the Wave Equation, they say. Beyond that, you get into spinors and I can’t answer anything. I just know that our new electronic switching system will make those inter-world communications much faster and better than ever before.”

“Why only seven?” Borg asked.

“We surmise that only six alternate universes have been sufficiently wired up, like we are, to allow the parallel universe induction to occur.”

Harvard man, still standing, turned to lecture the rest of us. “So, either those are the only six, or only six of an infinite number of parallel universes. Either of those possibilities is staggering. What a concept!”

The rest of that day was a wonder. We learned that all of the parallel-Universe analogs of The Phone Company had cooperated to share information among themselves. We got the deForest triode amplifier, we gave the Strowger switch; we got a rather primitive version of solid-state physics; we traded them Claude Shannon’s work on information theory. And on and on, up through masers and lasers and aerogels and virtual reality, a profitable collusion of seven cornucopias with secret knowledge. Based on the benefits of this arrangement, The Phone Company early on had secretly convinced the government to maintain a monopoly in this country; to break up such a scheme would have cost us immensely.

And, to hedge against our foreign cousins finding such a treasure house, we sent secret emissaries abroad to ensure that no other country would ever be so wired as to access the alternate worlds. In the British Isles, for example, we made sure that the venerable Post Office would run their system. In all the other monarchies, we were able to whisper about the threat to security that unfettered telephony among the peasants might pose. After many years, only tiny Finland was able to construct any system comparable to ours. Fortunately for us, this little country never met the minimum parallel world induction requirements, and so no other nation ever found out about It—until…

For most of this century, The Phone Company had It made, and the rest of the country along with us. But sure enough, somewhere along the line, we got too complacent and someone else caught on. We figure it must have been when the scientist W. Edwards Deming and his entourage went to Japan in the late 1940s to teach the defeated enemy how to manage quality in their reborn factories, teaching them all about Bell Labs’ statistics. Some smart Japanese must have figured out our secret, because in the late ’40s they began wiring up Japan every bit as heavily as we had wired the US.

“OK, so they’re coming aboard, so what?” was the general line taken at our New York HQ. “Maybe we can learn something from parallel-Japans as well.” But those wise guys had learned our whole game, not just the technical side: they began to lobby inside our government to break our wired system apart, to make us fall below the parallel-worlds induction level. And they did, and it worked; we in The Phone Company had failed to continue to convince the powers-that-were of the benefits of our system. Personally, I don’t think some of them in Washington ever even believed we talked to other worlds.

To make a long and bitter story very short, this is what happened: on January 1, 1983, as required by law, the Bell System was divided into seven smaller “Baby Bells.” I was in a regional switching control office, watching the huge display screens as the long lines were physically separated at the switches. To my sorrow, as region after region of the US went dark, I could see the connections to the parallel worlds winking off, dissipating. Within minutes, all connections to the goodies and freebies of six other Alternate Phone Companies were severed, and for the first time in over eighty years, we at AT&T were Alone.

There is no need to detail the enormous personal sacrifice we all felt, especially those 20,000 persons who had lived their lives to maintain the nodal points where inter-universe communications had been taking place. They were, of course, laid off. No one ever revealed The Secret because they wouldn’t have been believed, and jobs were scarce, and each one needed a good reference to find new work elsewhere.

You can probably guess the rest of the story, at least the obvious parts. The Pacific Rim countries wired themselves up, pell-mell, putting in communications capacity they would never need, all in hopes of accessing the treasures of the parallel worlds. And by the mid-’80s, it became apparent they had made induction work: the enormous number of innovations in consumer products, in electronics, in just about every field, crushing our homegrown companies, causing unemployment and misery all over our land.

Oh, in a few places where we had supercomputers and the alternate universes had them in the same place, we maintained a minimal set of contacts, so that places like Los Alamos and Sandia and NASA occasionally got the rare jewel of research information. But nothing really useful to society at large.

This is, of course, the obvious part, something everyone could figure out, given the true picture of parallel worlds.

But there were non-obvious, nonpublic consequences as well, things that we at AT&T didn’t find out till later, too late. It turned out that each of the newly independent Baby Bells went hell-bent for induction, each on their own, and were already prepared, secretly, at the cut-over date, to maintain their own parallel induction capabilities. They didn’t miss a lick, although there were problems. Trouble was, rather than having one large, coherent system, the induction was locally strong in some places, weak in others. Result was, some Baby Bells could access some of the usual six parallel worlds, but because of massive concentrations in some cities, other Baby Bells started picking up many more parallel universe systems.

Some of those new worlds were really weird, I found out later. The information anybody over here got was sporadic, sometimes nonsensical (ESP machines? Inertialess drives? Video games?) Some worlds had their inductive wiring systems jammed up in one or two regions; there’s an Etowah Nation that talks in Cherokee to what used to be BellSouth; a Republic of Fremont in the Bay Area only; an Arabicspeaking parallel nation in Arizona. An incoherency of alternate worlds, which turns out to be a real mess.

All of that occurred real quick-like on January 1, 1983—the Real Day Everything Changed, when the alternate worlds began to get out of synch. There were bigger problems to come, though, much bigger. We had the seven Baby Bells wiring up to beat the band, and the Pacific Rimmers doing the same. You add to that the gargantuan increase in wiring our cable TV systems in particular, and by the late ’80s we were getting much too coupled to those other worlds. Sometime in that period, the past itself began to waver.

Since Bell Labs had been mostly broken up into ineffectual consumer-product groups, and since nobody else cared too much about nationwide telephone network research, there hasn’t been anybody to study the problem, but the last I heard was this: because of the scattered concentrations of wiring interconnections, some kind of balance among the parallel worlds was upset. Things got chaotic; result was, the past of World One (ours, naturally) got interchanged with the past of another world, and they all got mixed up, fairly randomly. We at AT&T began tracking the manifestations—people who swore they’d read that one famous person or another had died, but then found out it hadn’t happened. Things once lost turning up where they been searched for before, and vice versa. Anomalous artifacts in archaeology, weird lights in the sky, strange cults and sects, independent Presidential candidates, the whole works. And worst of all, a vague feeling permeating society that Something Had Changed.

We at AT&T grew horrified—suppose last month’s long-distance calling charges got shifted to another world as well? What if our past got shifted into some world with higher taxes? An accountant’s nightmare! We couldn’t have all our remaining investments at risk. So we got together with the other long-distance carriers and in unison we attacked the problem on all fronts, even got the Feds and all of their Labs involved. Suddenly, networking studies, neural nets, AI, became the big tiling. Our secret Internet fairly hummed with hypotheses, with possible solutions.

What we found was, with the profusion of more and more electronic products, with more and more PCs and laptops, the problem is just getting worse. Pockets of past-shifting are occurring randomly all over the world; business records, investment accounts, even genealogies are no longer solid. Historical “revisionism” is rampant, as different sets of scholars write on things they actually researched and remember, from sources that once were valid. Politics have changed so sharply that forty-year trends have reversed themselves; one election the people want big government, the next, a smaller one; and the most incredible politicians, ones who would’ve been jailed in previous years, get themselves elected over and over again. (Well, when the past changes, memories get confused and the populace responds accordingly—unpredictably.)

Actually, there is one solution to this situation, and all of us Phone Companies decided to do it a few years back, but it’s rather scary, too. With secret help from a government agency that was in The Know, we have been going full-bore to wire the whole world up in one unified network, to grow the Internet—with its information-rich video and sound version, the World Wide Web—so wide and far and fast that we will quickly warp our whole planet into one unified, stable history line, presumably a consensus past acceptable to most of us. The uncertainty is unnerving, but at least we’re better off than some worlds, at least we have a chance to stabilize our own past. And we Phone Companies here in World One are pushing as hard as possible, before another alternate world steals our history.

Because as bad as our known history is, we could have done worse. In some of those unfortunate other worlds, various incarnations of Monopoly still reign; weird things called a World Soviet Union, a Unified World State, a Corporate Continuum, an Axis Hegemony, and Le Monarchic du Monde de Napoleon XII. And in one particularly pernicious parallel universe, their version of the US government is even trying to add a ‘back door’ to each of their communications chips, a secret way into the network so that Big Brother can subtly intervene electronically whenever it senses a threat to itself, and prevent its Phone Companies from stabilizing their world’s past. From that regime’s horribly perverse viewpoint, a changing past is preferable to an unknown past that might kick them out of power.

Of course, you might expect such shenanigans from a world in which the US re-elects as a President some oversexed Yuppie yahoo. Thank the Eight Hundred Gods that in our own enlightened world, the Co-Regents are both ex-sci-fi writers who understand these kinds of things and are letting your Phone Companies, like us here at Alternate Telecoms & Telechron, try to nail down the past once and for all.

You just can’t be too careful about History!