“To make more money.” “To get calls through faster.” “To service the customers.” At each of these rapid-fire answers from the audience, the lecturer smiled and shook his head, pointing at yet another raised hand.
“You’re all correct,” he finally said, pacing up and down in front of the lectern, “those are good reasons, and each of them will happen. But,” he spun on his heel, splaying all ten fingers at us, “each of you is also Wrong. The real reason has to do with our vast wired network, the millions upon millions of interconnections we have made, the untold quadrillions and quintillions and octillions of possible interconnections among these customers that are possible.”
His voice now a whisper, the lecturer turned and pressed a large red pushbutton on the wall behind him. The entire wall rolled away, revealing a rough surfaced rear-projection screen. “I am now ready—you are now ready—to understand the whole truth behind The Phone Company. Why it must remain one unitary system, at least in the U. S. of A., why we must maintain our interconnected network as the world’s leader. The rest of the world, backwards as they are, they’ll never catch up. And for us, that’s good. They won’t get the Alternities goodies like we do.”
The class, me included, gasped as the rear-projection screen suddenly filled with the five words that changed our lives: There Are Seven Parallel Universes. The lecturer smiled at our gasping reactions.
“How can there be?” the Harvard man said, standing and pointing to make his point.
“Simple,” came the answer, “the Many-Worlds Theory of Quantum Mechanics allows an uncountably infinite number of parallel universes, each stemming from tiny decisions in a mother world. Next question.”
“How do we know this?” This from the lone female in our class, a nerdish but shapely and attractive woman with the unlikely last name of Borg.
The rear-projection screen faded its stunning revelation, replacing it with an image of thousands of overhead wires in 1890s New York. “Around the turn of the century,” the explanation came, “The Phone Company started getting complaints about unknown crosstalk—voices that shouldn’t have been there—especially in New York. Close investigation by the Western Electric research team revealed that the strange voices were not coming from our subscribers, but from elsewhere. Where ‘elsewhere’ was, they couldn’t tell.
“But the situation grew more serious as we jammed more and more wires into a given city. Those early pioneers tried filters, everything, to cut down on the unwanted noise. It was only when they set up an experimental lab and talked to some of those other voices that we finally understood what was happening, that we were able to establish two-way communications with other alternate worlds, worlds of different histories.” We were spellbound, and the lecturer obviously was enjoying himself. “I mean, can you imagine what happened when Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, US citizen from Scotland, found himself speaking with Dr. Ing. Alexandre Lighthorse du Belle, citizen of the Confederate States of North America?”
We all sat gaping, stunned but not disbelieving. The wildest stories of science fiction were true! Yet there was more to come.
“But it was only when Bell Labs got into the picture in the 1920s that they found out how it was all happening—the real reason that there ever was a Bell Labs in the first place, you may have guessed. And the secret was, the enormous number of interconnections, the huge number of miles of bare wire all interconnected and switched together, somehow induced connections between our universe and several of the closest parallel universes.” The lecturer shrugged. “Again, this has something to do with the eigenvalue solutions of the Wave Equation, they say. Beyond that, you get into spinors and I can’t answer anything. I just know that our new electronic switching system will make those inter-world communications much faster and better than ever before.”
“Why only seven?” Borg asked.
“We surmise that only six alternate universes have been sufficiently wired up, like we are, to allow the parallel universe induction to occur.”
Harvard man, still standing, turned to lecture the rest of us. “So, either those are the only six, or only six of an infinite number of parallel universes. Either of those possibilities is staggering. What a concept!”
The rest of that day was a wonder. We learned that all of the parallel-Universe analogs of The Phone Company had cooperated to share information among themselves. We got the deForest triode amplifier, we gave the Strowger switch; we got a rather primitive version of solid-state physics; we traded them Claude Shannon’s work on information theory. And on and on, up through masers and lasers and aerogels and virtual reality, a profitable collusion of seven cornucopias with secret knowledge. Based on the benefits of this arrangement, The Phone Company early on had secretly convinced the government to maintain a monopoly in this country; to break up such a scheme would have cost us immensely.
And, to hedge against our foreign cousins finding such a treasure house, we sent secret emissaries abroad to ensure that no other country would ever be so wired as to access the alternate worlds. In the British Isles, for example, we made sure that the venerable Post Office would run their system. In all the other monarchies, we were able to whisper about the threat to security that unfettered telephony among the peasants might pose. After many years, only tiny Finland was able to construct any system comparable to ours. Fortunately for us, this little country never met the minimum parallel world induction requirements, and so no other nation ever found out about It—until…
For most of this century, The Phone Company had It made, and the rest of the country along with us. But sure enough, somewhere along the line, we got too complacent and someone else caught on. We figure it must have been when the scientist W. Edwards Deming and his entourage went to Japan in the late 1940s to teach the defeated enemy how to manage quality in their reborn factories, teaching them all about Bell Labs’ statistics. Some smart Japanese must have figured out our secret, because in the late ’40s they began wiring up Japan every bit as heavily as we had wired the US.
“OK, so they’re coming aboard, so what?” was the general line taken at our New York HQ. “Maybe we can learn something from parallel-Japans as well.” But those wise guys had learned our whole game, not just the technical side: they began to lobby inside our government to break our wired system apart, to make us fall below the parallel-worlds induction level. And they did, and it worked; we in The Phone Company had failed to continue to convince the powers-that-were of the benefits of our system. Personally, I don’t think some of them in Washington ever even believed we talked to other worlds.
To make a long and bitter story very short, this is what happened: on January 1, 1983, as required by law, the Bell System was divided into seven smaller “Baby Bells.” I was in a regional switching control office, watching the huge display screens as the long lines were physically separated at the switches. To my sorrow, as region after region of the US went dark, I could see the connections to the parallel worlds winking off, dissipating. Within minutes, all connections to the goodies and freebies of six other Alternate Phone Companies were severed, and for the first time in over eighty years, we at AT&T were Alone.
There is no need to detail the enormous personal sacrifice we all felt, especially those 20,000 persons who had lived their lives to maintain the nodal points where inter-universe communications had been taking place. They were, of course, laid off. No one ever revealed The Secret because they wouldn’t have been believed, and jobs were scarce, and each one needed a good reference to find new work elsewhere.