Split Second (Split Second, #1)

by Douglas E. Richards

You could interrogate Einstein’s wife all you wanted, but you wouldn’t get any new insights into general relativity.”

‘If I would have had more time, I’d have written you a shorter letter.’”

The Weapon Shops of Isher.

“Through space-time, yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. When you’re not moving at all in space, you’re moving at the speed of light, so to speak, through time—the fastest the universe allows you to do so. When you’re moving at the speed of light through space, you stop moving through time.

Blake set his phone to speaker, audio-only, and had Myla tie it into the microphone and sound system of the motel’s television set. This way, he and Jenna could speak normally in the direction of the television and their voices would be picked up easily, and all three in the room could hear and see audio or video coming from whoever answered.

WAT

The universe would rather live with paradox than infinite timelines,

“So if you go back in time and kill your mother,” said Jenna, “history is rewritten from the moment of her death forward. Your own history as you knew it no longer exists, and never existed. You are never born. But the universe doesn’t care that you shouldn’t exist, and couldn’t have killed her. It just accepts the reality of a universe in which you exist anyway and she is dead. It ignores the paradox and continues forward from that point.”

“Technology . . . is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.” —Carrie Snow

So I hired consultants to block all communication off the island, from landlines, cells, or computers. Cells can’t get voice, text, e-mail, or Internet.”

WAT

“And Internet is incoming only,” continued Knight. “Brain Trust scientists, and others on this island, can enter terms into a Google search bar, but that’s the only way they can interact with the outside world. The results of their searches can be opened and downloaded, but it’s one-way traffic only.” He smiled. “None of this was easy to do, but it is quite foolproof.”

no

“Knight wasn’t lying,” whispered Wexler. “You can type inside a Google search bar, and download files, but can’t send anything else through cyberspace, including passwords.”

WTF