Today we finally get to learn what 'Dolphin Punching' means.  Yesterday we left off with Squint and Kris getting shot at by their friends, or at least he thought they were his friends.  What will happen now?

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Chapter 25 - Requiem For A Paradox

  The next thing I knew I was on the floor, face down.  Top had a wad of gum stuck to the bottom of her shoe.  I could see the bottom of her shoes because she was laying on her back, so was Ali.  Neither of them were moving, but there was smoke coming off of them.  And there were little red glowing dots darting back and forth all around the room.  “What’s going on?” I asked, but nobody answered.  I looked behind me and saw Kris peaking over the top from behind the couch, just two eyes blinking from behind a fluff of hair.  “Are you okay?” I asked.  Kris nodded and then pointed down at my wristwatch. 

  I looked at my watch too, just in time to see some weird things that I thought looked like fiber-optic cables.  They were quickly retracting back into the watch.  When the watch finally got back to normal I stood up slowly, the red laser dots were gone now and I was looking down at two severely damaged robots which only appeared to be my friends on the surface.  But underneath, they were smoldering hot chunks of twisted metal and partially-vaporized microchips.  Kris slowly started to come out from behind the couch.  She said that my watch must have come with an Aim-Bot app pre-installed.  Then we started snapping selfies while making emo faces in front of the broken robots until the real Ali and Top arrived. 

  Once we all got together again everything started to just feel right.  Ali explained to me that goats were now tiny, and everybody just called them squirrels for some long-forgotten reason.  Kris explained to Ali and Top what had happened with the robots and my aim-bot watch.  Top, who now had a burnt tongue mumbled incoherently a lot during gaps in the conversation.  And I just kind of took it all in, like osmosis.  Over time things started to make sense. 

  Suddenly I understood.  Everything seemed so clear to me now.  Then fourteen birds flew by the window and I forgot what I was thinking about.  Ali was now telling me about her experience at the pizza shop, and Top was mumbling in agreement with her.  Then, slowly, I started to understand again.  I was a time traveler from the distant past.  This is currently about five thousand years in my ‘future’, but it’s really the ‘present’ for everyone else.  I got here when Ali found me and brought me back to life with her quantum computer on Earth.  She had taken me under her wing and taught me how to use the modern computers too.  But I wasn’t alive like I was before, now I was a computer program ‘living’ in some kind of virtual or parallel reality, like a synthetic heaven, running on a quantum computer back at home-world Earth.  I was not currently on the real Earth, in fact, it wasn’t even the same universe; the quantum computers opened doorways to other parallel universes by operating on the fabric of existence itself.  And everybody in this new present time seemed to just treat these other parallel worlds as if it was some kind of a virtual reality video game. 

  The people who I saw wearing ski masks said they were looking for a time traveler.  I was a time traveler, but I wasn’t sure it would still work anymore now that I was a computer program.  My ‘avatar’ (my new body) was like a solid hologram being inserted into the parallel realities by the software running on a quantum computer somewhere on the real Earth.  As far as I knew, my avatar could not be inserted into the real reality on Earth because I was just a software program there, the computers could probably project a non-solid hologram, or maybe even 3d print a clone of me.  But my existence as I am now with my consciousness could only live in the parallel worlds made by the quantum computers. 

  So there was no way of knowing if I would still be able to time travel because I wasn’t a mortal organic being anymore.  If my computer program stopped running for whatever reason, then I might not be able to come back again. 

  But who were the ski-mask people, and why did they need a time traveler so badly?  Ali interrupted my train of thought and said, “What do you mean, Squint, what’s a ski mask?”  I asked her how she always seemed to know what I was thinking.  She mumbled something about debugging and then asked me again what a ski mask was.  I explained to her about what a mask was and then she told me about the masked people, “Oh, you’re talking about facial redaction.  They’re just connected by proxy servers.  They do that to be anonymous so that the computer logs don’t show who they really are.  And the computers just render your experience in a way that you would recognize.” 

  “Oh, okay.  So everyone who has their faces blanked-out isn’t actually after me?  And the squirrel goats aren’t conspiring with them?” I asked, feeling kind of silly now.  They looked at me with funny expressions and agreed that I was paranoid.  I began to feel a little safer now that I understood things better.  Just then I realized something. 

  “I gave that robot eight Satoshi’s!” I exclaimed.  Everybody laughed, and Top said she didn’t think that I was going to get those Satoshi’s back.  “No,” I said, “I mean we can track the money to find out who sent the robots.” 

  Ali corrected me, “Well, we won’t be able to find their identities because Bitcoins are anonymous.  Anybody can open a Bitcoin account without identifying themselves.  But we could use the block-chain to see all the things they bought with the wallet that you sent your Satoshi’s to.” she said to me. 

  Then I realized that there was a walrus in the room with us, barking and clapping its flippers at me.  It just sort of appeared there like it had teleported in.  “Hey,” Top shouted at the walrus, “Private meeting, noob.  Shew shew!  Get out of here!”  She jumped to her feet and waved her arms at the walrus, it turned to run away and then disappeared as quickly as it arrived.  “Freaking newbies,” Top remarked, “What were you saying Ali?” 

  “Wait, was that a walrus?” I asked.  “No, Squint, that was just a mermaid avatar.  I told you there was genetic pollution.  We have mermaids now... among other things.” Ali said with a somber look.  I couldn’t help but ask, “That was a mermaid?  Wait, you mean there’s things like that in real life that mutated from people?!” And I almost fell off the couch.  Everybody was laughing except for me.  All of a sudden I was beginning to realize that the real world has much bigger problems than I did.  It made me feel small by comparison.  I couldn’t even imagine what the real world might be like by now, after thousands of years of industrial pollution, global climate changes, and the inevitable human conflicts. 

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” said Ali, “The real world isn’t a paradise anymore, but we can make heaven with quantum computers now, that’s why everybody spends so much time in the computer worlds.”  I finally started to understand what she had been saying.  “Maybe that’s why they wanted a time traveler,” I thought out-loud, “Maybe they just want to fix the world by changing how the past leads up to the present.” 

  “Yeah, or maybe they just wanted to enslave the human race with advanced technology or something.” Top commented.  Now I really began to understand how serious the situation was.  I had no idea what the proxy people really wanted with time travel, but we might be able to find a clue if we looked at the Bitcoin block-chain records. 

  Ali must have read my mind again, because just then she sent a private message to my heads-up display which contained a web-link.  Clicking on the link opened a financial report of all the funds in the robots Bitcoin wallet, including all of the transactions ever made into and out of the wallet.  I gratefully thought the word ‘thanks’ back to her and began looking for clues immediately. 

  Apparently whoever it was had already spent my eight Satoshi’s, and they had a lot more money in their wallet too.  They had so many Bitcoins more than what I got from the watch business that it made me wonder how in the world they managed to get such a huge wallet.  But when I looked for where all those Bitcoins came from I ran into what I thought was a dead-end, they had all been acquired by mining.  Nobody had sent the mountain of money into that persons wallet, they claimed it all from the Bitcoin mining process.  All the little transaction fees that added up from everyone everywhere amounted to even more money than what had been generated in the early days of Bitcoin when the coins needed to be distributed to the public.  Bitcoins had stopped being generated a long time ago, no new Bitcoins had been created from mining in a very long time, but they were still being mined because the people who still mine them got to claim the transaction fees from everyone else who spent any Bitcoins during the mining process.  And apparently, whoever was searching for time travel had been mining Bitcoins for quite a long time. 

  Then I started looking at the other side of the report, the money that had been paid out from the wallet.  I didn’t recognize a lot of the words for the things that they had been buying, but I could guess that a fair portion of it was for Bitcoin mining equipment.  I didn’t want to just guess though, so I did a little good old fashioned web surfing to find out what three of the phrases I didn’t understand really meant. 

  The first phrase I didn’t understand was Sally Rye.  The Internet said it was a simple bread made from Salvia Divinorum, a rare variety of the sage herb which was also the most hallucinogenic plant known to humanity.  This particular Rye bread is apparently the main ingredient in a controversial antibiotic, Salvanillin-90,  which apparently does wonders for drug-resistant bacteria.  It is very difficult to over-dose on, and is completely non-habit forming.  But it tends to make it’s patients go totally and absolutely crazy for a few minutes as they experience tremendously intense hallucinations from all of their senses.  Patients who have used Salvanillin-90 began questioning reality and the nature of their existence to such a degree that some of them stopped believing their own thoughts, while others began saying ridiculous things like how they could perceive time itself or manipulate causality with nothing but their willpower. 

  The second phrase I didn’t understand was Enders Irony.  More Internet searching revealed stories about how a constellation had been discovered in the night sky which demonstrated the Pythagorean Theorem in its geometry (a right triangle, with three squares, one square on each side of the triangle).  Many people believed it was a proof that the universe was indeed created by an intelligent designer, aka, God.  But others pointed out that any constellation could be drawn in the night sky, because on a clear night any telescope could find stars all over the place.  The debate had lasted for many generations because all of the stars in the Pythagorean Constellation were just bright enough to keep inspiring people to point at the constellation and talk about it.  Nobody could ever ‘prove’ one way or the other with facts and mathematics that God did or didn’t exist.  Until one day somebody used the Pythagorean Theorem to prove that it didn’t necessarily matter if anyone ever did manage prove the existence of God, because technically the math worked out equally in both cases; in other words the universe just is what it is, completely regardless of how it happened.  This new argument blew the entire debate out of the water, which had some bizarre and unforeseeable consequences on many aspects of society, politics, and the economy.  If God were truly inconsequential then a very large portion of human accomplishments were actually completely pointless.  The world leaders panicked and tried to make too many changes all at once.  A lot of people rebelled, leading to terrorism and war on a massive scale.  In fact, civilization nearly collapsed because of that one simple math trick, and the human race barely survived.  Many people died during that time when it was believed that God didn’t matter.  As a result, quantum resurrection technology was extensively researched.  Many hundreds of years later, once resurrection was finally achieved and perfected, the generation at the time effectively became immortal.  And the head scientist who was credited for making it really work, Doctor David Ender, said in a famous quote that ‘resurrection technology never would have been made possible if it weren’t for the consequences of the Pythagorean Constellation’.  The quantum computer network which everyone affectionately referred to as Heaven (because it allowed all the resurrected minds to populate the parallel universes which the computers opened up) was code-named Enders Irony.  Which, ironically became the reasoning behind modern Machiavellian philosophy, exactly as it was predicted by Dr. Enders co-workers. 

  The third phrase, Dolphin Punching, actually turned out to have nothing at all to do with dolphins or punching.  And this one surprised me because until that point I had no idea that humans had regained contact with extra terrestrials since the last break-away civilization attempted to ruin Earth with alien technology.  Apparently, some alien races were extremely intelligent.  So smart in fact that some ‘dolphins’ (as the alien’s brains were called) could put our quantum computers to shame.  And ‘punching’ referred to the act, or the art, of using quantum computers to ‘punch into’ or to render ones conciseness into a living alien brain (AKA ‘dolphin’) in a parallel universe.  The computers handled all of the technical processing and the dolphin punchers benefit from the dolphin’s super-advanced intelligence.  Most people do this to become much more intelligent while they’re ‘dolphin punching’.  Possessing an alien brain with a human consciousness wasn’t easy, they say, but the payoffs were huge for those who could master it and gain the dolphins mental capabilities for creativity and problem solving.  Scientists, mathematicians, and many others spend a lot of money on the dolphin punching industry.  And the solutions they bring back have kept humanity rolling in fresh new technology at a steady pace for a very long time.  They swear the dolphins aren’t hurt in the process, the dolphin’s consciousness gets compartmentalized into a separate mental partition and they just sort of go about their lives uninterrupted, completely unaware of the mental intrusion. 

  There were other words and phrases that I didn’t understand, but my mind was struggling to keep up with these future concepts so I bookmarked the financial report and decided I would look at it again later.  That’s when I realized that Ali, Kris, and Top were all starring at me.  What was so interesting about watching me think, I wondered. 

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Did you enjoy reading today's chapter?  If so then stay tuned for more tomorrow. 

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