#10 Ley Lines

 

QUANTUM ANONYMOUS #10

Ley Lines

 

Ley Lines were Fabian’s leap into legend.

Absolutely no one else working on this project had thought to combine gear with ground.

Ley Lines do that naturally; they are organically occurring, electromagnetic pathways that crisscross the Earth. Every sailor who’s ever seen a compass go a bit batty knows they’re real. But Fabian had the vision to realize how they might work as natural quantum signal amplifiers. From there, it was my job to create the way we tapped into ‘em. 

I did that by synchronizing the Quantamp’s oscillator frequencies with the energy detected along those lines. Can’t tell you the specifics of the gear, but let’s just say I made a resonant coupling between the quantum states of sound and the Earth’s geomagnetic field. And let’s just say that took quite a lot of bloody work.

Luckily, nobody was looking much over me shoulder. When it came to Quantum, the big guns were elsewhere. You had CERN itself all in a whirl with Nobel laureates and that set. US was giving it the full push over at Los Alamos and Stanford. Cambridge and King’s College London had their labs, The Sorbonne had theirs, and all them had their pedigrees and clearances and all that mucky muck. Nobody really expected much from a few odd birds making rock and roll records. Especially one whose first job was scraping coal and whose latest engagement was with the motor pool. Dark horse is one thing. I wasn’t in the bloody race at all.

Which left me alone to fumble in the dark.

That’s exactly what it took to succeed.

My engineering and Fabian’s vision dropped us right into Quantum. The Ley Line criss-cross of sound and space created our loophole in reality. My calculations and mechanical creations gave us the key. Adding things up, it looked good on paper. When played through The Quantamp, the right power chord in the right magnetic field would “bend” natural physics into an opening of the space time fabric.

So we figured.

But we didn’t figure how that would all add up, when the switch was flipped and the chord was hit.

No idea what the “Quantamp Experience” would be.

Absolutely nobody knew what would happen.

Reminds me of the atom bomb, it does. Did you know that half the scientists on the project thought it would light the world’s atmosphere on fire? They had calculations to prove it, too. Buggers were sure the very air we breathed would all be up in flames, the instant it detonated.  

Dropped the bloody thing anyway, they did.

It was the only way to see.

That’s how it was for Quantum.

There was only one way to see:

Turn it on and rock.

I’m just saying this now as a matter of course, but back in the BBC studios of 1964, we were all rather rattled.

The BBC, as Fabian had it charted, was set along a particular Ley Line without much resonant frequency. Which was blasted lucky, for us. We were trying to understand this thing while we were building it. That’s like learning to fly while you’re inventing jet travel. Some experience in the air would help things, considerably.

But nobody had been over the horizon we were reaching for.

First thing happened when crossing that horizon was “time slips” and “perceptual shifts”.

Fabian, of course, came up with those names. Makes ‘em sound rather pleasant, doesn’t it? Something you’d surprise your bird with. “Fancy a Time Slip?”

The reality was more disorienting. Here’s what happened. You’d walk into the lab with your tea. Put it down, fiddle a bit, then pick it up and you were drinking whiskey. Just like that, Quantum changed your drink. Nobody in the room but you. No whiskey in the studio, neither. Spooky business, right? Whiskey wasn’t something to complain about, really, but how it sorted itself was rather unnerving.

Even so, I preferred the “perceptual shifts” over the “time slips”. Nothing right about those buggers at all. 

Imagine starting your Quantamp sound check at precisely 7.15 in the evening. (We never played with the gear during regular BBC business hours, see.) Picture yourself head down and back into it till you’re seeing double. A right proper all-nighter. You stand up, stretch out, look at the clock and you’re gobsmacked,

It’s 7:12 PM.

So there you are, feeling like you’ve been at it all night, but really you’re back two minutes.

Naturally, such happenings attracted military types.  

REME was on the scene in short order. And I was still theirs, see. Once I had signed on with REME, I was considered royal military property. Just like another wrench or hammer, really. Only the tool was me. And heavens, did they use me. Looking back I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole thing was staged from the go—my hand off to Fabian, working my way into the BBC through that computational machinery... Probably a military back channel the whole time. And me thinking “what luck!”. What a knob I was, back then.

But I will give points to my younger self for achieving stabilization.

That was the military’s main concern with The Quantamp.

A stable, steady world was rather important to the military. What that lot wanted without a shred of doubt was a right proper reality to drive their bloody tanks through. That meant none of this “time slip” and “perceptual shift” bother.

Well, that was an understandable objective and just about impossible to nail down. But I did it.

That happened through trial, error, and lots of Fabian Kevorkian getting in the bloody way.

When that visionary finally had the vision to let his gear head twiddle away, I battened down the proverbial hatches.

Mostly I accelerated the transition from multiple quantum states into a single, classical state in rapid but stable stages. Did this through a rather brilliant and still top-secret arrangement of control circuits that reasserted the conventional order.

That conventional order returned through what was termed “quantum collapse”. (Sir Fabian again. Bloke had a way with words, didn’t he?)

Orchestrating a proper “quantum collapse” remains an art form, even today.

You can tell the caliber of your reality pilots by how gently they collapse the wave.

I got the hang of that, straight away. Mostly it’s done by feel. Bit like tuning engines. Or potting the nine on a double bank. Some physics, some feel, and you’re on.   

Our location helped make my learning curve rather painless. We were lucky to be working along low frequency, localized Ley Lines. Rather like paddling about in the baby pool.

More rigorous frequencies would have had us diving into much deeper waters. Had that been the case, reality might not be the same.

But we were lucky. And I mean that in the collective “we”-- as in planet earth. Consider the details:

For one brief moment in time, the fabric of reality itself was managed by a lad from Wales with a pint in one hand, and some needle-nose pliers in the other. 

Well, that lad’s luck at plugging in through lower Ley Line frequencies was Heaven sent. Kept all this reality modulation a localized business, during those BBC experiments in 1964. “Time slips” and “perceptual shifts” were confined to the immediate studio environment. You might say that what happened in Vegas stayed in Vegas. That left our collective reality untouched.

Which doesn’t mean this business wasn’t 100% mental.

And we were just playing around with things.

Quantum got serious- quite serious- when Erik Evol plugged in his guitar.

But maybe it was Quantum that plugged into Erik Evol.

Still trying to figure that one out.

More the Morrow.