Evolution & the Origin of Life

I've been thinking a bit about this topic lately. All you have to do is spend a little time browsing the internet to find the wildly varying information available. From researchers publishing their latest breakthroughs, to supporters of intelligent design offering supposedly scientific counterpoints, and everything in between. Honestly, it can be pretty confusing to those unfamiliar with the subject and downright frustrating to those who feel passionate about the issue.

I am not an expert. I might sometimes talk like I am, but I have no degrees or formal training on the topic, save for a year in college studying molecular biology (when that was my major). I'm not claiming to know anything absolutely, and quite frankly, I feel more comfortable when people concede a lack of perfect knowledge. For me, one of the strongest ideals of science is that it recognizes that data may someday appear that challenges even our most fundamental understanding of the way things work. Theories are only as certain as the data they describe, and their predictive power only indicates a reasonable confidence in their conclusions but never absolute certitude.

That certitude which exists in the minds of supporters of religious explanations for the origin of life (and everything else) is actually a weakness. It may seem counterintuitive, but this sense of an absolute truth that can be fully known prevents the believer from acknowledging new information that, though it may strongly contradict his belief, is strongly supported by objective evidence. If a believer could absolutely be shown to be wrong (not that I'm saying that can be done), I'm pretty sure he would still deny the evidence, because his belief system does not allow for the acceptance of such evidence. If, however, a scientist could be shown absolutely to be wrong (which is possible and has happened many times), she would simply have to reassess her understanding of that data and would have to offer an alternative theory that doesn't just account for this new data, but is highly predictive of it.

That is the strength of science. It is not a house of cards that relies on every theory it puts forth being true to hold it up. Science is more like a clay sculpture that can always be refined to a more accurate representation of reality, though perhaps never a perfect duplication of it.

To some degree, the intelligent supporters of creationism or ID recognize that it is impossible to argue against science without science, so they try to incorporate science into their explanations and refutations, confident that their assertions are a death knell to science. This is amusing because if you could prove the scientific method was faulty by using the scientific method, wouldn't that indicate that the process you used to prove it was faulty was, itself, faulty? This is a paradox of the same order of the statement "this statement is false". Fortunately, no such paradoxical proof has ever been offered, and I'm fairly sure that no such proof exists.

Instead of attacking the methods of science, creationists and ID'ers attack the data by cherry picking some data of their own. They often present physical evidence that might be interpreted in such a way as to support their beliefs, but ignore other evidence that refutes it or alternative explanations for their supposed evidence. Probability is also a favorite tool, as it is easily manipulated to achieve results that could support any number of viewpoints.

For example, many creation "scientists" boggle at the odds they calculate for the random creation of life. Their argument goes something like this:

"In the simplest known organism, there are about 5,000 genes. These genes must be in a certain configuration for that organism to exist. If you do the math, you find that there are 4.8 x 10⁵⁰ possible arrangements of those genes. Hence, the odds of that particular strand of DNA forming are 1 in 480,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000."

Wow, that number sure is impressive when you write out all the zeros. When you consider that the best estimates of the number of unique species on the Earth are about 10 million (and there may well be significantly more), it seems staggering to suggest that all that happened by chance.

Well, sure. Ok. If one were to suggest that at some instant in the past, atoms suddenly arranged themselves in the perfect configuration to build E. Coli bacteria, I would demand some pretty compelling proof. If you then went on to tell me that this happened randomly, I would probably walk away thinking you were crazy.

This is one of the major disconnects in arguments between evolutionists and creationists. Oftentimes, creationists go into a debate with an idea about what the evolutionist believes that is so far removed from reality, one can hardly blame them for questioning it. In fact, any evolutionist who believes that lightning struck a puddle of various chemicals, which then arranged itself into a perfect DNA molecule, is ignorant to the process proposed by most scientists.

It is important to note that, while we don't understand all of the processes involved in DNA or how it came to be, there is nothing in the structure or function of DNA that suggests it is defying the laws of chemistry. There are no remarkable compounds that just shouldn't be there, there are no chemical combinations that are impossible according to our current understanding.

That said, it is not absolutely impossible for these processes to have happened by chance. These staggering numbers that creationists offer (which I will demonstrate are misleading) still mean that it is possible, though highly unlikely by their numbers, that such things would have happened by chance. If you can prove that the chance that something occurs is not zero, you have just proved that it is possible.

Consider, for a moment, the following text: q@0oDt61m^eIDy%ag#eV4ivpws)h9r.

This text is a random string of 30 symbols from the set of all lower and upper case letters on a standard US keyboard as well as the numbers 0-9 and all the alternate symbols on those number keys. That means that any one of those symbols in that string has a 1 in 72 chance of being chosen at random (26 upper case + 26 lower case + 10 numbers + 10 symbols). That means that the odds of randomly typing that specific string of 30 characters is 1 in 5.25 x 10⁵⁵.

Wow! That's even less likely than the odds that the 5,000 genes in E. Coli bacteria just randomly flying together! And yet, there it is. It happened. Is it a miracle? No. Granted, that string of 30 characters doesn't mean anything, at least, it isn't intended to mean anything. Similarly, genetic code was never "intended" to mean something. Life didn't form based on chemistry's intentions, just the laws that govern it. That distinction is important because creationists need to think that the complex chemical reactions that are involved in life are somehow more special or remarkable than the thermonuclear reactions that power stars or the complex system of gravitational interaction that comprises a galaxy. The only remarkable thing about us is our ability to reason about whether or not we are remarkable.

Regardless, no reputable scientist is arguing that those 5,000 genes of E. Coli just suddenly assembled. Instead, scientists propose the very reasonable suggestion that on the early Earth, where organic compounds (those containing carbon and that are necessary for life as we know it) were in abundance and bombarded with all kinds of possible energies, from ultraviolet solar radiation to the still cooling planet's internal heat, assembled into more complex molecules over time. This is merely chemistry. One can perform experiments with chemicals thought to be in existence in early Earth and easily create amino acids, which are again a crucial part of life on this planet.

Over the course of probably geologic time scales, chemical reactions with organic molecules were happening simultaneously all over the Earth. In one of these reactions, the result ended up being some kind of molecule that was capable of replicating itself to some extent. There is nothing magical about this, nothing that requires supernatural explanation. Within the context of the laws of chemistry, it is perfectly possible for a molecule to exist that is able to replicate itself within a solution of its component parts. This self-replicating molecule was the precursor to our DNA.

There are numerous theories as to how DNA may have ended up within the nucleus of a cell, or within any part of a cell, but I will leave readers to investigate those on their own. If you haven't agreed with me thus far, you won't agree with any of the stuff that comes after. ID proponents often start with DNA in their arguments, especially because of the impressive probabilities against abiogenesis that can be derived (and exaggerated), so I thought I'd start there too.

Another favorite supposed science "gotcha" is the infamous and inviolable second law of thermodynamics. Specifically, this law states: The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.

It is the more general interpretation of this law, however, that creationists jump on. That interpretation states that the amount of order in any system will reduce over time rather than increase, unless there is some external force that acts to increase it. It should be pretty clear why this seems so significant to those who seek to prove that life was created by a divine intelligence.

The argument goes like this: A pocket watch is a highly ordered state of matter. It contains several tiny gears, cogs and springs, all perfectly suited to a specific purpose. If one were to come upon a pocket watch on a tree stump in the woods, it would be absurd to the highest degree to assume the pocket watch had assembled through some sequence of random events, especially if its discoverer knew about the second law of thermodynamics. The most logical conclusion, given the evidence, is that the pocket watch had an intelligent creator who cleverly crafted the watch with his own hands.

On the surface, that certainly seems reasonable. The parallels between a pocket watch and a living creature seem clear in this context. Living beings are also made up of many meticulously integrated parts that are perfectly suited for functioning in their native environments. If you remove one of its fundamental parts, it will cease to function (or at least cease to function as well as it once did).

So, what could possibly be wrong about this analogy? Furthermore, if the random assemblage of a pocket watch would be a violation of the second law of thermodynamics, then why isn't the random assemblage of a living creature? Well, keep in mind that what science claims about life is hardly random. Again, science believes that life originated via deterministic chemical processes, not that chemicals randomly combined in impossible ways. A pocket watch does not function through chemical processes. This is a pretty important point because there are no laws of chemistry that we know of that would govern a reaction that would result in even a single gear or cog in a pocket watch. Through non-chemical means, the natural formation of any part of such a watch in probabilistic terms is far less likely, by orders of magnitude, than the odds of a natural chemical reaction resulting in the precursors of DNA, which through natural selection evolved into increasingly more complex structures resulting in living cells.

So what of thermodynamics? Isn't a living creature a more ordered state than a pile of the same atoms sitting on the ground? How would one propose to explain that living things appear to violate the second law? For starters, let's revisit that pesky law:

The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.

Notice how I highlighted the word "tend" there. What the second law is referring to is a statistical reality that may not represent specific instances within that isolated system. Rest assured, over the course of time, the second law will result in an even distribution of entropy throughout the universe. That is, of course, unless the force of gravity in the universe is strong enough to overtake our expansion, but that's a whole other conversation.

Now, that last paragraph might seem like hand-waving. Verbal prestidigitation to allow for decreased entropy in living systems on a technicality. Well, if you think that's a poor explanation, you're right. The truth is, we don't need such technicalities to explain the supposed decreased entropy of a living system. This is true for two reasons.

First, even if a living system represents a higher state of order than a random pile of the elements that make it up, there were plenty of sources of energy that were around to be added to the system on ancient Earth. The planet was significantly less hospitable to modern life as we know it, but it was a boon to the chemical reactions that would give rise to life. Solar radiation, geothermal activity, cosmic rays, lightning and fiery impacts from the debris that littered the early solar system, just to name a few. Any or all of these sources could have provided significant energy to the chemical system that preceded life. This might suggest that life is one of the results of the entropy in the solar system moving toward equilibrium.

Second, consider for a moment some properties that all living things share. One of the fundamental properties of all life is a metabolism. All organisms must expend energy to perform the tasks of living, and so must obtain that energy from somewhere. Metabolism is the process by which organisms extract energy from their surroundings. We eat food and our body breaks that food down chemically to provide us with the energy we need to live. The most important thing about this system is that an organism's metabolism converts chemical energy into other forms of energy that are dissipated back into the environment, creating more disorder than the order required for a living thing to exist.

Just think about that. Simply by sitting there, your body is generating 98.6 degrees of heat by breaking down the food you've ingested and providing energy for respiration, circulation and all the other autonomic functions of your body. That heat is energy that radiates into the universe and heats it up. Even at rest, you increase the entropy in the universe every second. This energy exchange happens at all levels of life, and it is the crucial element to answering whether or not life violates thermodynamics.

With the points covered in the above paragraphs, it is pretty easy to demonstrate that life as a chemical process could have certainly arisen on ancient Earth without any direction from a greater intelligence. Once a molecule forms that can crudely copy itself, it is trivial to show that variation would have given rise to natural selection, which would have resulted in a more robust molecule. Further interactions with the environment and possibly ongoing chemical reactions would have gotten the ball rolling toward something we would consider life. All that would have been necessary from that point forward was time.

What really amazes me is that this whole process is stunning, a beautifully entwined confluence of physics, yet those who are opposed to these ideas seem convinced that science is somehow reducing life to something empty, hollow. The explanations of science don't allow for a soul or a divine creator, and this somehow lessens life's beauty and significance. Having an omnipotent being will into existence the diversity of life, fully formed, makes for great mythology, but it is truly awe-inspiring to know that the laws of physics alone are sufficient to account for all the wonder that surrounds us.

Pale Blue Dot

Sometime in the first half of 1990, as the Voyager 1 spacecraft hurtled beyond the edge of our planetary system, it spun around to take one final photo of the place from whence it had come, perhaps never to return again. Actually, Voyager 1 took several images in an attempt to capture a snapshot of the entire planetary system as each world orbits the sun. One of these pictures in particular, however, stands out as perhaps one of the most awe-inspiring and humbling images ever captured in the entirety of human civilization. It was entitled "Pale Blue Dot" by the man who campaigned to have the picture taken and who, in 1980, formally introduced the world to the "Cosmos". That man was Carl Sagan, astronomer, author and arguably the greatest contributor to our common understanding of the universe in modern history.

Sagan's words reflecting upon the significance of the "Pale Blue Dot" have been quoted and paraphrased many times. One wonders if it could ever be said better than this:

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

The sheer sense of humility inspired by such musings is chilling, and yet we should also be reminded of what we don't see beyond the confines of that photo. The image shows us as a part of the much larger grandeur of the universe. Granted, it is a very small part, but it is still a part. Carl Sagan also said, "We are a way for the universe to know itself," and while the universe may not have planned us for this purpose, or even planned us at all, I think we should rise to that challenge. This picture of a minuscule Earth sparkling in a ray of light is just a glimpse of the amazing perspectives that await us as we strive to meet that challenge.

To know the universe is a pretty enormous undertaking. We're making some strides, but we still have quite a way to go. Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 and took about 12.5 years to travel to a point where it would be about 6.1 billion kilometers from Earth, the distance from which the "Pale Blue Dot" photo was taken. A distance of 6.1 billion km is pretty far when you consider the distances we typically travel on the Earth, but on a universal scale, it isn't even a drop in the bucket.

Consider these points:

The universe was recently estimated to be 156 billion light years wide. As many of you probably know by now, a light year is the distance light travels in a single Earth year. Since light moves incredibly fast (a bit under 300 million meters a second), to say 156 billion light years definitely sounds like a lot, but words like "light year" and "billion" are simply words that we use to make it more convenient to talk about distances and numbers most humans couldn't even imagine. For the sake of demonstration, I am going to try to stop using these words to give you a little better idea of how mind boggling these numbers really are. My standard measurements will be in kilometers (km) and meters (m), admittedly abstractions themselves.

If the universe is 156 billion light years wide and there are (get ready) 9,500,000,000,000 (that's 9.5 trillion!) kilometers in just one light year, that means that the universe is 1,482,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (1.5 septillion) km wide! Looking at the distance at which the "Pale Blue Dot" was taken, which was probably about 6,054,558,968 km (give or take a few million km), we can do some simple math to figure out how that compares to the universe.

*doing calculations*

That means that the distance at which Voyager 1 snapped that picture was 1/242,950,819,672,131^th of the total diameter of the universe. To put that into perspective, if the width of the universe were 1 meter, the distance from Voyager 1 to the Earth in 1990 would be about .00000000000000412 meters. The shorthand for this tiny distance is 4.12 femtometers, which is about the diameter of an atomic nucleus (depending on the atom). This calculation, comparatively, reduces the Earth to a size smaller than a proton or neutron, probably smaller even than a quark.

While this comparison seems to relegate us to some insignificant proportion of the universe, that's only true looking down on this tiny blue speck from afar. If we instead look outward at the vast reaches of our universe, we see that there is so much yet to discover. We are travelers on a quest to answer every question that can be conceived. The universe offers us no shortage of opportunities to drive and satisfy our uniquely human brand of curiosity.

It's not going to be easy. Many things stand in our way, the most perplexing being the universal speed limit, the speed of light. Even significant fractions of the speed of light seem difficult to fathom given our understanding of relativistic speeds and the current level of our space travel technology. Even at the relatively impressive speed that Voyager 1 shoots out of our solar system, it is still only moving at 1/18,000^th the speed of light. We're going to have to come up with something a lot faster than that if we're going to explore even the closest corners of our interstellar neighborhood. I believe, however, that we are propelled by such an intense need to know, we will find some way to overcome these obstacles. Far in the future, when the intelligent descendants of the human species look back on this pale blue dot, I hope they will look on it with fondness as the starting point of the incredible journey that brought them to every corner of the galaxy and maybe, just maybe, to their first steps into the larger universe.

Letters from the Lost Man, Part 20

"Mike."

Whose voice is that?

"Hey, Mike."

Is he talking to me?

"Mike, buddy. I know you're awake."

Man, it's bright in here. I blink slowly and the world starts to resolve itself.

"There he is," the voice by the bed says encouragingly.

"Hello?" I ask dumbly, not recognizing the face that enters my vision.

"Mike, it's Tom."

I blink a few more times. Now that he mentions it, he does look like Tom...I think. I smile at him. "Yeah, hey Tom. Don't mind me. I'm just a little..." I sit up look around in confusion. "Am I in a hospital?"

Tom nods. "Yeah. Listen, Mike, don't worry. The doctors say you'll be fine. You just had a minor heart attack. If you just take it-"

"Heart attack?" I ask, bewildered.

"Yeah," Tom says calmly, "if you just take it easy, you're gonna be alright."

I lay back against the pillow. I can feel my heart pumping. It makes me feel a little light headed.

"Now look, Mike. I need to ask you something pretty important. I need you to relax and try to remember," he says to me in a very serious tone.

I look at him. "What is it?"

Tom sighs. "You remember the new girl at the office?" he asks.

My heart beats a little faster for some reason. "Uh, yeah. Lori, er, uh...Loretta?"

"Loretta, that's right," Tom nods. "Well, she's missing."

"Ok," I say hesitantly. While I'm sure I don't know what he's talking about, my chest seems to be pounding an answer. This can't be good for someone who recently had a heart attack.

"Well, Mike, the last time anyone saw her was with you," Tom says pointedly.

I shake my head. "What are you asking?"

He gives me a long hard look, then sighs again. "Mike, it's hard for me to say this because I know things have been difficult for you, but everyone knows about you two."

"Knows about...about what?" I ask, my nervousness matched only by my confusion.

Tom shrugs. "That you've been...y'know seeing each other," he answers, looking away.

I stare in disbelief, my head shaking of its own accord. "Tom, I...Linda..." is all I can manage to stutter.

"Linda's gone, Mike," he says sympathetically. "It's ok to move on."

It all rushes back to me. The bank. Linda's blood. Her lips moving. "No!" I shout, curling over onto my side and shielding my head.

"Mike, it's ok. Calm down," Tom tells me.

My sleeve is quickly soaked with tears. "Linda..." I whisper between sobs.

"Mike, we just need to know where Loretta is," he says with a hint of urgency.

Something about that tone tears me from my self pity. I look up at Tom. His eyes are quietly demanding. "Who's 'we'?" I ask suspiciously.

Tom leans back and looks up in thought. "Look, I didn't want to tell you this, but the police think..." he trails off.

"What?" I urge him on.

He looks at me with a pained expression. "Mike, they think you may have had something to do with it," he explains. "I'm here to help you before they get their hands on you."

"Tom," I begin, but I'm not really sure what to follow it up with.

"Is there anything you can tell me?" he asks, looking sympathetic again. "Is there some place where you guys usually meet?"

The memory of a church flashes through my mind. A small room. A syringe. Someone injecting me with something. I look up at Tom and shake my head.

He sighs. "Ok, you obviously need some time to rest. I'm going to be in the lobby. Call for me if you can remember anything."

Without pausing for my reaction, he walks out of the room.

I take a moment to look around the room. It's pretty sparse. There's no window. Not even a TV. Seems more like a prison cell than a hospital room. I sit up and swing my legs over the edge of the bed. Man, I feel really weak. I wonder if this is what it feels like after a heart attack.

Taking a breath, I slide myself onto my feet and stand. This is a very shaky process. My legs feel like they haven't worked in weeks, maybe more. I step carefully over to the door and turn the handle. At least, I try to turn the handle. It's locked. Why am I locked in my room?

Something definitely doesn't feel right about this. What's really going on here? I try to think back to where I was before I woke up here. I was at work. The day was pretty normal. I went home and fell asleep. But if I went home and fell asleep, where did I have the heart attack? How did anyone find me? Think!

I was home asleep and then... Oh yeah, there was that crazy dream about Linda. She was on the table. She turned to look at me. She said something that freaked me out. What was it? I close my eyes and concentrate.

"Richard..."

My eyes snap open. I shudder at the memory of Linda's lifeless corpse looking up at me. Why did she call me Richard? Does it have anything to do with my heart attack? She said that; then I woke up. I got some water. Then I got into the car and went...

Went where? Where would I have gone? Dammit, think, Rick!

Rick. Why did I just call myself Rick? What the hell is wrong with me?

"...we erased your memory..." a female voice echoes from the recesses of my mind. I close my eyes and try to remember more.

"...most of the subjects reported a surrealism to their memories. Some even had odd things go on, like what you might expect in a dream," the woman's voice explains to me from some time in the recent past.

When did that happen? It seems so familiar, but I don't know why.

"...come to this address: 1420 Mission Avenue. It's an abandoned church near the city limits..."

The image of a run down building with a steeple stretching into the night sky fades into view behind my eyelids.

"If you manage to get out, don't wait for me. We'll meet here."

Loretta. It must be. So, Tom was right; we were meeting somewhere, but it wasn't for the reason he thought. She was saying something about...erasing my memory? But she had said 'we'. What did she have to do with it and why did she tell me? I didn't actually do something to her, did I?

Again, I briefly recall someone injecting something into my forearm. Was that her? Maybe she did something to me...aside from erasing my memory. Maybe she's the reason I had a heart attack. I wish I could remember all of it!

The sound of someone turning the door handle catches my attention. I back away from the door to avoid being hit as it swings open. Someone outside says something I can't hear, then steps into the room.

"Mr. Menda, you really should be resting," the nurse says to me as she walks in.

I look out into the hallway before the door closes. It seems empty. "Yeah. I, uh, was just wondering why the door was locked," I say to her.

She smiles and says, "I'm sorry about that. Must've been locked by accident."

"Ok," I say hesitantly. "Does that mean I can leave whenever I want?"

"Well, Mr. Menda," she begins, "you've just undergone treatment for a heart attack. You've only been here for a day. We'd like to observe you for at least two more days before we start talking about whether it's ok for you to go home."

"Of course," I say, not bothering to keep the sarcasm from my voice.

"Now, come back to your bed and I'll go get you some lunch," the nurse promises. She adds, after looking around the room, "Let's get you a TV too, so you're not bored to death."

Eyeing her warily, I make my way back to the bed. If I weren't suddenly so hungry, I'd keep pressing her for more answers. Really, though, just her presence and the promise of lunch and a TV makes this seem more like a hospital than I thought it did a few minutes ago. Maybe that's just a justification for the other reasons I don't want to leave just yet. I definitely don't feel 100%. It won't do me any good to get out of here and have another heart attack in the parking lot. I'll wait another two days, but that's it. If they don't let me out, I'm leaving of my own accord.

Time passes interminably slowly. If it weren't for the clock on the wall, I'd swear they were lying about the passage of days. I try to distract myself with TV. When that doesn't work, I try sleep, but I'm just not tired. I feel like I've slept for months and just don't need to anymore.

On the second day, Tom comes to talk to me again. He pries pretty insistently about Loretta, but I still don't remember everything, so I let on nothing. He leaves, seemingly a little more frustrated than I might have expected. On the third day, a couple of cops show up.

"Good morning, Mr. Menda," on of them greets me. "If you have a minute, we'd like to ask you some questions."

I look around the hospital room and say in a sardonic tone, "I think I could free up a few seconds."

He smiles tightly. "I'm Detective Haskell with the Madison PD, and this is my partner, Detective Allen."

Detective Allen nods, looking stern.

I reach up and shake Det. Haskell's hand. "How can I help you, gentlemen?" I ask.

"Mr. Menda, we were wondering if you knew the whereabouts of a Miss Loretta Vine. She was reported missing three days ago and you were the last person seen with her," Haskell explains.

"Really?" I ask. "Where were we seen together?"

The detectives exchange a glance. This time, Allen is the one who speaks. "It was reported to us that the two of you are involved in a relationship. The last time Miss Vine was seen, she was getting into your car as you were leaving your mutual workplace. No one has seen her since."

I shake my head slowly. "I'm sorry, gentlemen. I have no recollection of any of this. I mean, I spoke to her a few times at the office, but that's it."

"I understand," Det. Haskell says with a furrowed brow. "We know you recently lost your wife. It's hard. You have feelings for someone and you're afraid it might be too soon. You're worried that you're dishonoring your wife's memory."

I look away, but say nothing.

"Did something happen?" Det. Allen asks, trying on the same reassuring voice his partner just used. "Maybe you got into an argument over your doubts about the relationship and things got out of hand."

I turn my gaze back toward them, narrowing my eyes. "What, so I just lost my wife and then turned around and kidnapped this woman?"

Det. Allen jumps at the opening. "Nobody said anything about kidnapping. Did you kidnap her?"

"No!" I snap, rolling my eyes.

"Where is she?" he shouts back.

Haskell puts his hands up and gives his partner a calming look. "Mr. Menda," he says, turning back to me, "no one is suggesting you did anything to her...yet. We have to investigate all leads. If someone says they saw you together, we have to check it out."

"So, I'm a suspect," I growl accusingly.

"You're a person of interest," he corrects me, "but if you have some idea of where Miss Vine might be, you would do well to tell us. People who care are worried about her. They just want to know where she is. If there's anything...anything at all you can tell us..."

"I'm sorry," I insist. "I don't know where she is."

Haskell sighs and reaches into his jacket. "Very well. Thank you for your time. If you think of anything, please give me a call," he says, handing me a business card.

I take the card, but offer no response. The two men leave me alone, once again, with my thoughts. My confusion remains, but above that is a resolve to find out exactly what's going on. It will be interesting to see if I am actually released today. Either way, I'm leaving this hospital tonight, come hell or high water.

"Good Morning, Mr. Menda," a chipper voice interrupts my thoughts.

I look up at the nurse who just stepped in. "Oh, uh, morning," I reply.

"Ready to go home today?" she asks me.

My surprise renders me momentarily speechless.

"We're going to get the doctor in here to check on you one more time. If he says you're ok, we'll send you on your way!" she explains with way more excitement than I'm sure she actually feels.

"Oh. That's great," I manage to say.

"Uh-huh," she says absently as she comes over and starts checking my vitals. She sticks my finger in a clip hooked up to a machine and also takes my blood pressure.

After writing a few things down, she smiles at me. "Ok, he should just be a few minutes," she reassures me before hurrying back out the door.

Well, that's interesting. I'm not going to get my hopes up, though. Just watch, there will be some kind of heart murmur or my blood pressure will be too high or something. They'll figure out something to keep me here for 'a few more days'.

About 15 minutes later, a young guy in a lab coat walks in with a stethoscope across his shoulders and a clipboard in his hand. He looks like he's fresh out of med school.

"Good morning, Mr..." He flips to the front of the file. "Ah, Mr. Menda. I'm Doctor Fulton."

I nod to him.

"Doctor Patel is on call today, so I'm going to be checking you out before you go home."

"Ok," I say.

He looks at the stuff the nurse wrote on my file. "Ok, that looks ok," he mutters. "Let's take a listen," he says, grabbing his stethoscope.

I pull off my shirt and sit up straight.

He listens to my chest for a few seconds, then tells me to take a deep breath. He repeats this in a few places on my chest and back. When he's done, he nods and slings the stethoscope back over his shoulders.

"Ok, Mr. Menda," he says, "you're heart sounds okay, breathing sounds normal. You're blood pressure's ok and everything else checks out."

While I find it hard to believe that my blood pressure is ok, given my brief grilling by the detectives, I'm greatly relieved.

"The nurse will stop by in a few minutes to give you some literature," he tells me. "You've just had a heart attack, so you should take it easy. I'd recommend maybe taking a few more days off from work. The stuff the nurse will bring will give you some info on how to proceed from here, foods you should avoid, exercise regimens, that kind of thing."

"Ok," I nod.

"Ok?" the doctor repeats, heading toward the door. "Great, you take care." With that, he quickly exits.

So...how about that? It seems like I actually will be leaving today. The nurse pops in just a few minutes later to give me the aforementioned 'literature', then wishes me well. Everybody seems to be in a hurry today, which suits me just fine.

I get up and put on my clothes. After making sure I have everything, I take one last look at the room and step out into the hallway. I half expect to see armed guards, or at least the two detectives hovering around, but there's no one. I look down the hall and see a green exit sign. I head toward it.

With every step that brings me closer to that sign, my belief that I'm actually getting out of here increases. By the end of the hallway, I feel better than I can remember feeling in quite a while. It's so strange. I've only been here for three days. Still, my excitement continues to mount as I follow the next exit sign, and then the next.

My heart skips a beat when, as I'm walking toward a set of doors through which I can see the parking lot outside, someone calls my name.

"Mike!" the voice repeats.

I look around. Tom comes jogging up to me. "Hey, buddy!" he says jovially.

Glancing back toward the doors, I return the greeting. "Hey, Tom. You still here?"

"Yeah, I stopped by to see if they were releasing you today," he says. "I guess they are."

I nod, "Yep."

"Well, good thing I got here when I did," he chuckles.

"Oh yeah?" I ask absently, eyeing the doors again.

"Well, yeah!" he says incredulously. "Otherwise you'd be walking home."

"Oh."

"What, did you think you drove yourself here in the throes of a heart attack?" he laughs.

"Hey, thanks for picking me up," I tell him sincerely.

Tom nods. "No problem, buddy. Now, let's get you out of here."

"Yeah," I agree enthusiastically.

Tom is pretty talkative as we make our way to my house. I have a hard time paying attention. The warmth of the sun on my face and the spectacle of the city distract me. I don't get it. I wasn't even in the hospital for a week. I apologize to Tom several times for spacing out on him. He just shrugs it off and continues talking. Oddly, he doesn't mention Loretta at all.

When Tom's car rolls to a stop in front of a vaguely familiar house, I look around in confusion. "Are we here already?" I ask.

"Yeah," he answers with a hint of concern. "You feeling ok?"

I take a long look at my house. I guess it's how I remember it. Something just seems...out of place.

"Listen, you want me to hang out for a while?" Tom asks.

I blink away my distracted expression and look over at him. "Thanks, Tom, but I think I'd just like to relax by myself for a while."

He nods. "Ok," he says, "but you call me if you need anything."

"I will," I assure him.

"Ok, buddy. Take care," he calls as I exit the vehicle.

"Yep, you too," I reply, pushing the passenger door closed.

I watch him drive off until he turns the corner at the end of the street, then turn to look again at my house. Everything feels a bit surreal. My house seems like something out of a distant memory, but I know I was here four days ago. Taking a deep breath, I walk up the driveway and step over to the front door. I easily extract my keys from my pocket and pick the right one with barely a glance. In a motion that definitely feels automatic, I unlock the door and walk in.

This place is empty. It's nice enough. I can see hints of my tastes here and there. I recognize everything and know my way around, and yet it feels like something's missing or maybe like it doesn't quite look like I remember it. It all serves to make me feel like I need to find out what's going on...now.

I lock the front door behind me and cross the living room, walk through the kitchen and out the side door to the garage. My awkward feelings persist as I quickly hop into my car and hit the button for the automatic garage door opener. As I back down the driveway and into the road, I look around to make sure no one's watching me. Guided by only the vaguest sense that I know where I'm going, I put the car in drive and proceed down the road.

I find myself wondering, oddly enough, if I'll ever make it back.

* * * * *

More on Determinism...

So, I recently read A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. Given my interests, it's surprising it's taken me this long to get around to reading it. I have to say that I'm sorry I didn't read it sooner. It's quite fascinating, if a bit over my head at times. It's amazing to me how counter-intuitive physics becomes when you break it down to the quantum level or try to stretch it back to the beginning of time. It's even more amazing that we've managed to figure out any of the parts beyond Newtonian physics, which is, relatively speaking, pretty easy to observe.

I can't imagine the internal conflict for the first physicists to investigate these advanced concepts. Bohr, Schrödinger, Einstein, just to name a few, must have been stunned by the things they discovered. Indeed, Einstein's objections to some of the conclusions he and his colleagues were coming to are well documented. I'm reminded somewhat of Darwin's inner struggle with the reality he observed with evolution and natural selection versus what his lifelong faith told him about the origin of species.

Most interesting, though, is what these researches discovered about what we don't know and, indeed, perhaps can never know. The most significant of these, in my opinion, is Werner Heisenberg’s formulation of the uncertainty principle. I have to admit, this is one of those things that kind of goes over my head. I'm sure if I were a better mathematician, I might "get it" a bit more, but I'm not, so I don't.

I understand only the most basic concepts that come from uncertainty. Let me sum it up in my own words. Uncertainty basically tells us that there are certain variables that cannot be known to the same level of precision simultaneously. These variables seem to be somehow complementary to one another, or at least, the possible methods of measuring them seem to be complementary in such a fashion that the more precisely you know one, the less precisely you can know the other. For example, if you measure the position of some particle with high degree of precision, you will be unable to measure its momentum with much precision at all. Conversely, if you've measured its exact momentum, its position will be a mystery.

I've actually known this specific example of the uncertainty principle for quite some time, but I always thought that it was merely a matter of weakness in our measuring capabilities. According to Heisenberg's work, however, uncertainty is actually a feature of the universe. It wouldn't matter how advanced our instruments were, we could never measure these things simultaneously to the same level of precision.

I was thinking about this the other day, trying to figure out if I could come up with a macroscopic example that would demonstrate how this could possibly be true, and I think I came up with one. Please bear with me as I try to set it up...

Have you ever played Outburst? How about Password? In these games, and a few others, you have a card with some words written on them in light blue ink. Then, over the entire surface of the card, there are a bunch of small, randomly-shaped, and transparent red splotches. The purpose of this red pattern is to obscure the words written in blue so that they cannot be read at a glance. The only way to read them clearly is to insert the card into this little red plastic window that comes with the game. The clear red window cancels out the red on the card and the light blue ink of the words stand out as a dark purple.

Another example of this same concept is those old red and blue 3-D glasses. When I was a kid, I had this book with a bunch of drawings of dinosaurs in this blue and red ink. When you looked at it through the 3-D glasses, the dinosaurs seemed to jump off the page. I noticed that when I put the red eye of the glasses over a part of the drawing, the red lines would disappear. Similarly, when I put the blue eye of the glasses over the drawing, the blue lines would disappear.

Ok, going back to the Outburst example, say you wanted to read the words on the card as clearly as you possibly could. The best way to do that would be to slip the card into the red window. Now, say you wanted to see the random red splotches as clearly as you could. To do that, you'd put the card into a blue window. Now, it is true that green would contrast best with the red splotches, but you would still barely be able to see the word in blue ink, which might interfere with how well you were able to see the detailed shape of the red splotches over that word.

So, what if you wanted to be able to see both the words and the red splotches in the best detail possible simultaneously? One might suppose that a purple window might work, but probably not very well. I doubt you could see either the blue or the red ink any better than you could in regular light. Even if it was better, it still wouldn't be as good as seeing either one color or the other in the windows specifically designed to cancel out the color you wanted it to.

Wow, are you still with me?

So, translating this example to uncertainty, the words in blue ink represent a particle's position and the red splotches represent its momentum. To know its position with a high degree of precision, you have to put it in the red window. For its momentum, the blue window is best. There exists no window, however, that would reveal both simultaneously as nicely as the red and blue windows reveal the blue and red ink respectively.

Well, how do you like that? I've just reduced one of the most puzzling (to me) aspects of quantum physics to the simple pieces of a family game. Though I admit, this may just as well describe a lack of understanding as it does the basic concept of uncertainty. I'd be curious to know what a physicist thinks of it.

Ok, so what the hell does this have to do with determinism? Well, when I first read that uncertainty was "built in" to the universe and is something we are not likely to be able to overcome, my whole idea of a deterministic universe started crashing around me. Now, keep in mind that I was sleepily reading this on a flight to L.A., so my brain wasn't at its peak. What I later realized was that it still doesn't necessarily rule out determinism. All it does is solidify the idea that the universe is ultimately unpredictable. Uncertainty assures that we will never have all the information necessary to propagate the laws of physics out theoretically to some future moment.

In my last post about determinism, I hypothesized about a computer that was powerful enough to hold all the information and perform all the calculations necessary to predict the future. I reasoned that such a computer could not be built because it would require infinite resources. Thinking about it now, I realize I may have been wrong about not only the reason it was impossible, but also its requirements. The reason it would be impossible is because uncertainty guarantees that we will never have all the information necessary to load into the computer. So, even if we had infinite memory, we wouldn't be able to fill it with the necessary information to perform our calculations.

Which brings me to its requirements. Would it really need infinite memory? My reasoning was that such a computer would have to include a simulation of itself resident in memory, which would set up an infinitely recursive situation. If we're talking about building a computer in the sense of a modern-day computer, that might not be far off. In A Brief History of Time, Hawking talks about the laws of thermodynamics and entropy. He says that in the process of storing data in memory or processing that data, a computer generates heat, which increases the overall entropy in the universe by a much higher degree than the order that is created by the memory storage or processing. So, my future-gazing computer would have to at least include in its simulation the amount of heat it outputs into the universe, which would require more memory and processing, which would increase the heat further...etc.

But, let's say we don't build the computer like a modern-day computer. Instead, we'll let the universe run the simulation itself. Or, at least, we'll have half the universe run the simulation. So, let's ignore uncertainty for a moment. All we have to do is freeze time and build a huge partition that splits the universe exactly in half and prevents any energy transfer between the two. Then, we arrange every particle in one half in exactly the same position as the particles in the other half. Once that's done, we use the laws of physics to manipulate one half as it will appear at some arbitrary point in the future. Now the only thing left is to start up time again. If you want to know what's going to happen in the future of the one half, you just have to look at the other half. Simple, no?

Actually, it's not simple. In fact, it's ridiculous. You have to throw out so many physical laws to accomplish this, in the end you're just dealing with fantasy. Ignore uncertainty? Freeze time? Build a perfect barrier between two halves of the universe? Even if you could do these things, what do you then do to calculate out the future of each particle in the half that's going to be your future universe? You can't use a computer, because that's what you're building. It's the whole reason for this insane project! The only option that leaves is to do it by hand or incrementally using weaker computers. Even so, if you could freeze time, you could take the preposterously ponderous amount of time required to calculate the future incrementally using your weaker computers.

I could go on, but it doesn't serve my point, which is that even if the universe is deterministic, which I believe it to be, it may as well not be. Daunting does not even begin to describe the most trivial of steps in calculating the exact future of the universe, and that's even ignoring uncertainty. Throw uncertainty into the picture and your nearly infinitely difficult task literally becomes impossible.

Now, let me propose a thought experiment to you. I'm not sure what conclusions you might draw from it, but I think its purpose is more to evaluate how you think about time (and time travel) than to determine whether or not the universe is deterministic. However, if any definite conclusions could be reached with this experiment, they might have some interesting implications about determinism. So, here goes:

Suppose I approached you and asked you at some specific moment to choose a random number between 1 and 100. If there are truly random events in the universe and human free will is a consequence of that randomness, then there is a 1 in 100 chance that you will pick a particular number within that range, regardless of any events that occurred in all of the universe's history before I asked you to choose.

Now, suppose at some arbitrary point in the future I traveled back in time to a point before I asked you to choose a number and, taking the place of my past self, I approach you at the same moment I did previously and ask you in exactly the same way to choose a random number between 1 and 100. Again, we are assuming that there are truly random events and our free will is a consequence of them. It shouldn't matter, then, that this already happened in the past I know. There should still be a 1 in 100 chance that you will pick a specific number in that range, which means that the number you choose this time might not be the same as the number you chose last time.

Think about how time travel is represented in science fiction. Does this thought experiment agree with that representation? Consider the hypothetical "what if you could go back and kill Hitler?" question. Well, what if you went back far enough that enough events that depended upon the random elements of a non-deterministic universe played out differently and maybe Hitler wasn't even born, or maybe he made different decisions that led to a different history than the one we know? In this hypothetical universe where random events truly happen and have noticeable effects, you wouldn't necessarily have to do anything to stop Hitler. It might just work out that Hitler never ends up doing what he did in our history, if he even exists at all.

There is, of course, one minor kink in this experiment. If the universe is deterministic, then the amount of entropy you inject into the past universe by arriving there via time travel might have a significant effect on future events as well. Just by being there, the energy your body gives off as it metabolizes calories might change how history plays out. Unless you can figure out how to travel to the past without adding more entropy to the past universe, you'd never be able to completely rely upon your observations to prove randomness. But to talk about figuring out how to prevent contamination of your experiment while traveling to the past, you have to figure out how to travel to the past in the first place.

Ultimately, we're no further along in figuring out whether or not the universe is deterministic. I still believe that it is, but I also still believe that it doesn't matter. And it seems like the more we know, the more we're starting to understand that we'll never know it all. We may end up knowing a lot of it, but some things in the universe will still remain a mystery. I'm ok with that.

* * * * *

Another Funny Thing Happened...

Oh, those college days. Who among us, the various alumni of higher learning institutions, does not have some crazy story highlighting the triumphs and terrors of that first taste of freedom mixed with responsibility? Maybe not everyone has such stories, but most do. Even so, I bet few have a story as crazy as this.

It was a Thursday, probably my favorite school day. Thursdays were great, first of all, because they were just before Friday, which was a pretty cool day in and of itself, being right before the weekend. Friday's only weakness was that, like Mondays and Wednesdays, they were likely to have the most hours of class if you were attending school full time. Tuesdays and Thursdays were great, though. Maybe one or two classes, usually electives if I had them on my schedule that semester.

Anyways, it was mid afternoon and I was taking a long detour off campus before heading back to my dorm. It was a moderate trek to the grocery store down the road, probably a half-hour each way, but it made for an invigorating stroll. The road took me by Professor Deepti's house. She was by far the best teacher in the whole university. Her house was modest, though I'm sure her salary wasn't. She lived there with her husband and her three young children, two girls and one boy.

Professor Deepti had a very generous open-door policy, even inviting students to her home for extra help. Her husband was also a professor and was just as brilliant, though in a different way. His explanations were always wordy and thorough, but his wife had a way of explaining things that was always simple and elegant. Whatever she said seemed to fool your brain into thinking it was relaxing rather than learning, so it soaked in the information until it was waterlogged with knowledge.

I hadn't visited in a while, seeing as how it had been two semesters since my last class with her, but we always greeted each other when we passed on campus. School must have just let out for the youngsters too because I saw those familiar three adorable faces bounding down the sidewalk toward the house.

"Mr. Jeff! Mr. Jeff!" they called out as they got close enough to recognize me.

"Hey, kiddos!" I yelled back cheerily.

The youngest, Anuj, got to me first and threw his arms around my legs. "Mr. Jeff, why haven't you been to visit?" he asked with a mild tone of accusation.

I laughed as the others caught up to their brother and joined the hug. They were a gregarious bunch, cute as buttons and sharp as tacks, all traits clearly inherited from their parents. I really felt bad for not coming to visit more often, but school usually kept me busy, and when it didn't, my social life did.

"I'm sorry, guys," I offered, kneeling down to be eye to eye with them. "I promise I'll come over more from now on." I really meant it.

"C'mon inside, Mr. Jeff!" Gita, the eldest, invited. "Dad will be happy to see you."

I doubted that. It's not that I thought Dr. Deepti disliked me. He just never seemed to show much emotion toward students. His passion was digital logic, and he only became animated and emotional when talking about it. The only reason he might have been happy to see me is because he would be able to shout binary and discrete math at me, rather than just at the air, which I often imagine he did when he was alone.

"I can't, guys, I'm sorry," I apologize again. "I'm expecting some guests tonight and I need to pick up a few things from the store." It was true. A couple of friends were going to come over around five and we were going to hang out for a while before going out.

"Aw!" the three kids shouted in unison.

"I'll be by soon, though, I promise."

"Ok," they said with more than a hint of disappointment.

"Really," I assured them with a grin. "Now, go do your homework!"

"Ok!" they laughed, bounding happily once again toward their house.

What a bunch of characters. I continued down the road, letting my mind wander back to Professor Deepti's class and how much fun it was. My thoughts meandered between that and all the other things going on in my life at the time. Two semesters ago didn't seem like a long time ago, and yet there were times when it seemed like an eternity. Lost in thought, I hardly noticed the rest of the walk to the end of the road.

I finally became aware of how far I'd come when the number of people on the sidewalk seemed to suddenly increase dramatically. As I turned the corner to continue on the last block before the store, I was suddenly in a crowd. People were everywhere, waiting on either side of the road like a parade was going to come pounding down the pavement at any moment. I heard no signs of a parade and wasn't aware of any holiday that usually justified a parade, so I just pressed on, walking in the bike lane to avoid pushing through the throng.

I made it to the store with no idea of what these people were hanging around for. I quickly got some drinks and chips and made my way to the register. I almost asked the cashier what was going on outside, but I figured I would figure it out sooner or later. As I stepped out of the store, I soon regretted not driving there. The drinks I bought weren't particularly heavy, but the handle on the plastic bag was cutting off the circulation in my fingers. It was rather uncomfortable.

Stoically, I shifted my grip on the bag and strode back toward the road. As I made my way through the store parking lot, I heard an odd buzzing sound approaching from the left. The crowd, which started just to my right, began to murmur. I looked left down the road.

Bicyclists. A large number of bicyclists, more than I had ever seen before or since, were speeding down the blacktop, their legs pumping as they advanced. The crowd started to cheer. It would have been cool, if only I weren't trying to get back to my dorm. I'm sure I wouldn't have had to wait very long for the bikes to pass, but I really didn't feel like navigating the crowd. Instead, I turned around and took the longer way back to the school down the next street over.

My detour didn't add that much time to the return trip, but I was bit tired by the time I got back to campus. I trudged up the few front steps to my dorm, plastic bags slung over my shoulder, and crossed the lobby to the hall that lead to my room. At least I was on the first floor.

The hall was pretty empty, which was unusual for this time of day. Usually residents had their doors open and a few people were coming and going. Most of the doors, though, were closed today and just one person was walking down the hall aside from me. She seemed to be a little older than most of the students here, but I couldn't be sure since her back was to me. I'm not sure if she came from another room, but it didn't really strike me as odd. It didn't strike me as odd, that is, until she reached the end of the hall, turned left, opened a certain door and walked in.

"What the..." I trailed off as I stared down the hall at the now closed door of the room she entered. It was mine.

I hurried down the hall, never taking my eyes off the door. When I got there, I dropped the bags and tried the knob. It was locked, just as I left it. I didn't see that the woman had used a key. It looked like she just opened the door and walked in. I fumbled through my pockets for my keys, unlocked the door and threw it open. I hurried into the room.

Empty. Everything just as I left it. I knelt down and looked under the bed. Nothing. There was only one more place to check. I ran over to the storage closet and whipped open the door. I looked around suspiciously.

Normally in a dorm room, checking out your closet wouldn't be much of an effort. In my case, I was what some of the students in my building called "lucky". I'm not exactly sure how it happened, but this building apparently underwent a major overhaul back in the 70's. It somehow worked out that there was a large shaft in one corner that went straight up to the roof of the building. The entryway to this shaft was my closet door. The dorm was only three stories, so it's not like it went all that high, but it was pretty deep from front to back, and when you were using the bottom of the shaft as your closet, it seemed fairly cavernous.

Like I said, I'm not sure how it worked out this way. We all guessed that they screwed up and had this corner that they weren't sure what to do with left over. On the upper two floors, everyone else's closet was on the other side of the room. I don't know why they didn't just put a ceiling in the space on the first floor to make it just like a big walk-in closet. I didn't complain. It was pretty cool. There was a little ledge at the back of the closet, at about the height that my ceiling would have been, that opened into some kind of duct, like for a massive AC unit. Up around the level of the third floor there was another ledge on the left wall, toward the inside of the building. The ledge couldn't have been more than a foot or two wide before it was walled off. There was also a large window against the back wall at about third-floor level that kept it pretty well lit during the day.

Normally, this was the most awesome closet ever. Right now, its size made it seem insanely dangerous. Granted, the only places to hide were the "ledge of death" and the "duct of doom", but seeing as how I just saw someone walk into my room, I had to check all the possibilities. I didn't have enough stuff in here to create any hiding places on my level, so I peered up at the ledge on the third floor. The sun hadn't set yet, and this side of the building faced west, so it was pretty bright.

As I looked at the empty recess in the wall, I suddenly felt foolish. There is no way anybody could get up there without a ladder, and it would have taken significantly longer than I had taken to run down the hall and into my room. The only other option was the duct.

At first, I only stepped back toward the front of the closet and craned my neck to try to get more perspective on it, but I could only see the wide metal tube curving downward behind my wall. I had to try to climb up there.

The shelf in my closet was off to the right, and a pole ran the length of the wall right underneath for me to hang my clothes. The back wall was pretty bare. My bike was leaning there, as well as some tennis rackets and a life size cardboard cutout of Angelina Jolie from a movie theater display. I moved the bike and jumped up, grabbing onto the ledge. It was a little slippery from all the dust up there. I pulled myself up, trying to get my foot against the side wall for leverage. Dust flew into the air and went up my nose.

Trying to hold back a sneeze, I squinted into the duct. It was dark. I looked along the ledge. There was a thick layer of dust all the way across, except for where my fingers had disturbed it. I didn't see any way somebody could have hoisted themselves into this duct without kicking up most of the dust that was there. Maybe I was just going a little crazy. Or maybe I was just tired. It could be that this woman didn't go into my room after all. Maybe she went in the door just before mine. I could have sworn...

"What the hell are you doing?"

The voice scared the living hell out of me. I lost my grip on the ledge and fell to the floor. I hit my head, but not hard. It was mostly my pride that was hurt.

"Oh my god! Are you ok?" Stephie asked, running into the closet to help me up.

Stephie was one of the friends I was expecting tonight. She was an almost-too-thin blonde girl, a little ditzy, but cute and sweet just the same. She wasn't my typical type, but I liked her anyways. I don't think she ever noticed, but she never treated me like I wasn't good enough for her either. I had just never made a move on her for some reason.

"I'm fine, I'm fine," I insisted as I accepted her hand and stood, my ears burning with embarrassment.

"what were you doing up there?" she reiterated, shaking her head in confusion.

I briefly considered telling her the truth. "Ah, I don't know," I shrugged. "I was just checkin' it out."

"Oh," Stephie said. "See anything?"

"Nah."

She looked around the closet. "I never got how you could stand this place. If this was my room I would be creeped out all the time."

A chill went through me, but I played it off. "Are you kidding, this is the most awesome closet ever!"

She shook her head again. "If you say so."

We walked out of the closet and I went out to the hallway to get the bags with the soda and chips.

Stephie gave me a funny look. "Why'd you leave that stuff out there?"

"O-oh," I stuttered. "I, uh, was just tired from carrying them from the store. I walked. I put them down when I went to unlock my door," I explained. It was all technically true.

Over the course of the next hour, Stephie and I just chatted while waiting for the others to arrive. The memory of the weirdness earlier faded a bit until I was sure that had just been mistaken about which room I saw that woman walk into. Pretty soon, Wendy and Eric showed up.

"Ok, time to get this party started!" Eric bellowed as he walked in the door, handing me a bottle in a paper bag.

Eric was a trip. Very boisterous, but always funny. He had short brown hair like mine, but he was a little bit taller than me and was definitely way cockier. I pulled the bottle out of the paper bag he handed me, already knowing full well what it would be. Grey Goose. Eric drank the stuff like water. I was sure he was an alcoholic, but he always bought the good stuff and brought it to parties, so nobody complained. College is pretty messed up like that.

Wendy was Eric's girlfriend, and as usual, she was hauling the bag of ice. She was practically Stephie's exact opposite, which made it so funny that they were best friends. She was a tall redhead, very sharp. She could be a little snooty sometimes, but once you got to know her, she wasn't that bad. You could tell she was probably picked on when she was a kid for being so smart and maybe not so attractive, but I bet anyone who picked on her then would be shocked now; she was a knockout.

I went into the closet and dragged out my cooler, which was pretty small, but it served its purpose. Wendy dumped in her ice and Eric put in the drinks I had bought. Stephie was regaling them with the story of my closet wall climbing and subsequent tumble. We all had a good laugh. The minutes flew and it started to get pretty dark out. Eric and Wendy were lounging on the bed, Stephie was in my desk chair and I was leaning against the wall.

Suddenly, Stephie leaned over and peered into my still-open closet.

"What is it, Steph?" Wendy asked.

Stephie shook her head and laughed a little nervously. "I don't know. Jeff's clothes are freaking me out over there. It looked like something was standing there in bandages, but I can see now that they're just t-shirts all bunched together on the hangers. Go shut the door, will ya?" she explained, aiming the last part at me.

Wendy and Eric laughed while I walked over to close the door. Stephie was always creeped out by the closet, but this time it was rubbing off on me. I had shrugged off my earlier experience, but now I felt a little uneasy. As I reached the door, I looked around inside the closet just to make sure everything was still normal. My eyes trailed up the wall to the third story ledge.

"What the..."

Since the sun had set, it was fairly dark up there, but the lights out in the courtyard shined almost right on the nook in the wall. I could have sworn I saw an arm pull back from the ledge and into the shadows.

"What is it?" Stephie called.

I stepped to the left to try to get a better angle on the ledge. It was too dark to make out a definite shape, but it seemed like there was something lying still in the far corner, about human sized, perhaps wrapped in bandages.

"Hello?" I called, reaching for the light switch.

Before my fingers could find it, another shape popped out from the other corner of the third-floor ledge. The eerie light provided by the lamps outside illuminated the pale visage of someone or something staring down at me. Thin, wisps of white hair clung to a nearly bald head glistening with sweat. It leaned unnaturally far over the ledge to get a closer look at me, its wide eyes unblinking, its head leaning from side to side as it considered me like a predator considers its prey. It looked only vaguely human, and it looked angry.

*     *     *     *     *

I know this sounds like the beginning of a really bad horror movie. It was actually a dream I had the other night, and it scared the crap out of me. It loses something in the translation I think. I wish I could tell it in a way that would terrify you as much as it terrified me. Hope you enjoyed it either way.

Letters from the Lost Man, Part 19

4:26 AM.

The numbers shine through the darkness and sear onto my retina. Even when I blink, I see the green hour floating in nothingness, contrasting the dim red light that floods my bedroom. It's an ungodly hour, but strangely familiar. Who would be calling so early?

"Richard," the faint voice on the other end says.

"Mmm?" I mumble.

"Meet me again tonight. I think I have an idea."

There's a click followed by the dial tone. Sleepily, I hang up the phone. I hate when dreams filter through to reality. It isn't long before sleep claims me again; the green numbers superimposed on my retina fade to blackness.

6:30 AM.

Once again, I'm awakened by noise. The alarm clock blares its monotone Reveille, dragging me unceremoniously from the depths of unconsciousness. I walk across the room and turn the damned thing off. Once more, my day has begun.

All-in-all, the day seems pretty normal. People at work don't seem to be that bad today. Even the events of that day three months ago seem more distant. The pain seems dulled. I almost feel...happy. Crazy dreams from the night before fade away until I no longer remember why they seemed so important. I went to bed really early. Must've slept thirteen hours or so. This must be what it feels like to be well rested. Maybe I'll try it again tonight.

The hours at work don't necessarily fly by, but at least they don't drag. When five o'clock arrives, I'm pleasantly surprised. I wish Tom a good night and head home, eager to find the comfort of the bedcovers waiting to envelope me once again. As I get closer to home, I start feeling pretty tired. I don't know how that's possible, given how much I slept last night. I barely notice pulling into the driveway and stumbling through the door. My head hitting the pillow is not an event I can recall.

*     *     *     *     *

What is this place? It gives the impression of a white hallway. It is so brightly lit that all the corners blend in with the walls, floor and ceiling. As I walk its length, I get the impression of doors passing on either side of me. Straight ahead, a black rectangle marks an open door at the end of the hallway. I step toward it through a silence so pervasive, not even my feet make a sound as they hit the floor. The doorway looms before me.

Inside, the room is dark. A single light shines on a long metal table. The figure of a woman lay beneath a white sheet upon the table. Holding my breath, I step up to it. The silence is unnerving. I almost can't work up the courage to pull back the sheet.

Linda's face, a very pale blue, stares lifelessly up at me as I take away the covering. There is a large opening in the side of her skull that is caked with dried blood. Fear and sadness well up within me.

The milky eyes snap to me with surreal speed. The mouth of Linda's corpse moves sickeningly, her jaw locked in rigor mortis, but her lips squirming over her white teeth. Her neck snaps and jerks as she turns her head toward me.

"Richard," she says with a deep, guttural whisper.

It takes some time for the screams in my bedroom to die down. It takes some time for me to realize they're coming from me. Being in a waking state takes some time to provide me with comfort.

*     *     *     *     *

11:20 PM.

I sip my water slowly and wonder what the hell happened to my life. More immediately, what happened to my day? Now that I'm here, sitting awake in my bed, the whole day seemed like a dream. Last night was the first time I've felt like things have been real for a long time. I remember during the day thinking that everything that happened last night was a dream, and I gladly forgot about it. Now, as I struggle with myself about whether I'm going to drive out to the church again, it all seems like crystal clear memory.

I have to go. One thing's for sure, I can't sleep now. Every time I think my dreams can't get any worse, I wake up in more terror than I've ever felt. I don't know how my brain can possibly manufacture such twisted imagery. If this is all a side effect of memory programming, I need to get away. I'll try anything.

The poorly-lit streets of the city outskirts seem even scarier than last night. More streetlamps are out. The various boarded up, chained or otherwise barred windows and doors look more disheveled and creepy. Suspicious characters hiding back in the shadows seem to watch me, the whites of their eyes reflecting more of my headlights than I seem to think they should. I know it's just my paranoia, but I feel like everyone and everything is focused squarely on me tonight.

When I finally pull up in front of the church, I quickly jump out of the car and hurry to the back. The moon is obscured by clouds, so my footing isn't nearly as sure as it was before. Still, I manage to make my way to the door that once again stands open to receive me.

I take another glance around before venturing into the shadows with a, "Hello?"

As it did last night, another door opens inside the church and I hurry over to Loretta, who's waving me over nervously.

"Hi again," I greet her, my casual tone belying my own anxiety.

She offers me a quick smile and indicates the chair, closing the door behind her. "Let's get right to it," she says, moving quickly to her own seat.

"Why, what's up?" I ask, sensing a hint of concern in her voice.

She sighs. "I'm not sure if we have much longer. I expected you a little sooner."

"I'm sorry, I..." I begin apologizing.

Loretta holds up her hand. "No time for that," she says. She reaches over to a little table beside her and picks up something wrapped in a handkerchief. She unfolds it and pulls out a vial and two syringes.

"What's that?" I ask apprehensively.

"It's an anesthetic," she says simply.

I swallow. "What for?"

She looks at the floor for a moment, seemingly gathering her thoughts. "Richard, we are not going to hack our way out of here," she says.

"Oh?" I ask, eyeing the needles.

She shakes her head. "I've been thinking and thinking and I can't come up with a way that we're going to do it without them figuring out what we're up to first. I think it might already be too late for that. Given what I felt about today, I think they may already suspect that something is up. They're changing the treatment."

"Uh-huh," I nod distractedly. Then, I realize what she just said. "Wait, why wouldn't they just separate our link or pull one or both of us out?"

Loretta shrugs. "I don't know. The thing you have to remember is that time for us in here isn't the same as it is in the real world. If all these memories were written in real-time, this treatment would be useless. We can write an entire lifetime up to middle-age in a matter of six months or so in most cases, even less in a few others."

"So, it might have been only minutes or even seconds since the last time we saw each other?" I ask.

"Yes," she answers.

My eyes travel back to the needles. "So, what's with the anesthetic?"

"It's called bupivicaine. It's usually given in an epidural, but I'd like to administer it to both of us intravenously..." she explains quietly, trailing at the end.

"Right, and you make that sound bad," I say, my concern growing every second.

She nods. "It isn't good. Intravenous administration can lead to hypoxemia and cardiac arrest, as well as a host of other effec-."

"Wait, I don't get it," I interrupt her, my tone rising. "Are you saying you want to commit suicide? How is that possible, isn't this all fake?"

"Richard, calm down," she orders, her own voice unnaturally serene. "I'm not talking about suicide, though the risk of death might be as high as in the real world. The thing is, what happens to us in here often has an effect on us out there. The first time you woke up and spoke to me, you told me you thought you had been shot in the side. Well, a short time before that you had started bleeding internally. That's what happened before Dr. Spector had me start you on the new program. Something caused you to believe that you were suddenly shot, which caused you to hemorrhage in the place you perceived the bullet hit."

I blink silently for a moment. "So, how is this not suicide again?"

Loretta sighs heavily. "Again, there is a risk involved, but here's what I think will happen. I'll administer the shot in a dosage that will, hopefully, not kill us. We'll simultaneously go into cardiac arrest. Out there, they may think it's due to what they're doing to Mnemosyne. Either way, they'll have to disconnect us from the machine to treat us. They'll probably inject us with epinephrine and defibrillate our hearts and, well, you get the idea."

I nod skeptically. "Right, and if we're not dead by then?" I ask.

"Well, if we're not dead, we should be ok. Maybe a bit weakened by the treatment. I don't really know. I've never done this before. The most important thing is, though, that they will have to keep us disconnected from Mnemosyne for a little while, and I suspect they will probably refrain from administering sedatives until they can figure out what happened or until they decide what to do with us," she explained.

"And in the meanwhile we..." I prompt, still not really sure what this will buy us.

"It will buy us time, Richard," she says, reading my mind. She leans across the space between us and puts her hand on mine. "This is the only option I think we realistically have. As long as we don't let on that we know anything's up, there's no reason we can't fool them while we look for an opening."

"Unless they already know about..." I wave my hands at the room around us. "This."

She shakes her head. "About this specifically, they don't. And even if they do, it doesn't do us any good to think that way."

I sigh. "Do you really think we have a shot with this?"

Loretta shrugs. "I don't think we have a shot without it."

I lean back in my chair. As much as I'd like to think there's another way, I have to agree with her. I don't see how we could figure anything else out that wouldn't alert the outside to what we were doing. Clenching my jaw, I nod and roll up my sleeve.

"Ok," she says with a hint of relief. "We might not be in the same room. If you manage to get out, don't wait for me. We'll meet here."

"Wait, here?" I ask, confused.

She nods. "This address actually exists. I believe it really is an abandoned church," she says.

"Yeah, but what if they-" I begin to ask.

"If they know about this place, then they'll know about any other place we agree to meet. At least this place is outside their facility. We'll have an easier time getting away if we meet up somewhere else. Just be careful when you try to get here. I have the feeling that won't be a problem for you."

I think about that for a moment. Sounds awfully risky to me, but she's right. What other choice is there? I offer her my arm. "This better work," I muse.

"I think it will," she reassures me.

She takes my wrist and pulls my arm a little closer so she can look for a vein. She pushes a likely suspect on my upper forearm with her finger, feeling its contour under my skin. With a satisfied nod, she pulls the cap off the needle and pushes the tip into the vial, drawing out the liquid slowly as she peers at the graduated marks on the side of the syringe.

"Ready?" she asks as she pulls the needle out of the bottle and ensures there are no air bubbles.

I nod. "As I'll ever be."

With an almost apologetic smile, she takes my arm again and gives one last preliminary probe for my vein before sticking in the needle. It's a slight sting followed by a vaguely cool sensation creeping up my arm. Loretta's smile widens and she steps back and promptly disappears. The room goes black.

What is this? I spin around in the darkness, stumbling across a creaky wood floor. A chill descends through my whole body and I start to shiver. I need to get out of here. I feel my way through the darkness and bump into a wall. It feels like peeling paint on drywall. Continuing along the wall, my fingers reach what seems to be a doorway.

Throwing open the door, I trip into the next room. My body feels so cold. I'm starting to feel a bit like the world is spinning. I can vaguely see a door in the darkness leading to the outside. I move toward it shakily. The edges of the door seem to keep wavering. My head starts pounding. Why can't I breathe?

Gasping for air, I tumble through the door and onto the dried grass outside. Wheezing sounds escape between my lips as my racing heart keeps pumping blood to my head. I think I'm going to explode...or suffocate...or freeze to death. Blackness creeps in. I think I'm dead. I'm dead...

*     *     *     *     *

The world beyond the darkness is a flurry of activity. Beeps and voices send ripples through the void, showing me the way. The sound is muffled, but it's getting louder. Where am I?

"Charging."

"Wait...we have sinus rhythm. He's back."

I'm back. Good, there's something I'm supposed to do. What was it? The sounds are getting muffled again. Maybe I'm not back. I'm so cold. It feels like I'm lying on a bed of ice. People are talking still. What are they saying? I hear the steady beep of a machine. A steady beep, that's a good thing, right? I don't know. All I want to do right now is sleep. Blackness creeps in. I think I'm alive...