Read Love Story: In The Web of Life for Free Online

course, that's what you do."
    I sensed the cold tone in her voice. I asked,
"Any chance you might like to visit the desert again?"
    "I really can't right now; my
end–of–school–year testing and grading, and my night school
courses, will keep me buried until the end of the term," she
replied stiffly. "There is someone at the door; I have to go now.
Say hello to the kangaroo rats for me. Goodbye."
    I felt deflated. I would have to start over in
that department also.
    "Too bad," I thought, 'Tina was fun to be with,
unless she was talking nonsense about metaphysical things. No
long-term future there.’
    I sat quietly for a few minutes, just Hesperus
and me, and watched his followers deploy. 'Hesperus, does your life
ever come apart,' I wondered.
    Then, I heard, "Good evening (as you believe time to exist), we are
happy to be able to communicate with you again."
    I thought, 'Oh, no. I don't need this
now.'
    It was Uriel, I looked around and saw a
sandstone boulder that the landscapers had placed near the patio.
It had a bright spark of light on the side of it. "Congratulations
on the settlement of your patent case," said Uriel.
    "How do you know about that?" I asked, somewhat
intimidated.
    "For now, we shall only say that we could see
it coming when we last communicated. It was a probable
future."
    "I believed wining the case was a certainty. I
have to believe that when I am working on a case," I
rebutted.
    "That's the way it works," Uriel's sound
continued, " Belief causes a probable
future to manifest. We will get to that
later."
    I was surprised. I was starting to feel that
talking to a speck of light and an extra-dimensional intelligence
was a natural thing to do. This time it couldn't be a
dream.
    "I have been sitting here looking at the stars
and thinking about space-time," I interrupted, "That subject is
about black holes, the Big Bang, galaxies, mathematics that few
understand, not anything I am trained or interested in. It is too
abstract for my thinking."
    "You have correctly identified the problem,"
said Uriel. "Space and time in the sense of the cosmos are
incomprehensible to all but a few of your species. Let's talk about
space and time in terms of what you call a movie film.
    "There is a story recorded on the frames of the
film. Suppose that story starts with a man looking at the stars in
a desert, then moves to a woman talking to him on the telephone, in
Los Angeles, then moves back to the man in the desert, then to a
restaurant, where he has dinner. The next day he travels back to
his office, the story ends with the man returning to the same
desert where he talks to a speck of light. When the movie film in
on the reel, stored in the movie company's vault, there is no time
or space in the movie. On the film, frames in the desert looking at
the stars come first and the frames of the woman in LA are next,
and the frames of the restaurant are next etc. There is no physical
time, there is only a sequence of film frames: there is only
timing; some things happen before others."
    "I can understand that," I replied. "When
someone projects the film, there is the illusion of
time."
    "Correct!" Said Uriel. "The illusion of time is
only in the story. The director might have shot the film out of
sequence, shooting the office scene first then shooting all the
desert scenes, shooting in the restaurant, and then shooting the
woman on the telephone. The timing of scenes was made in the
editing room."
    "OK," I said, "time is an illusion in movies.
What has that to do with reality?"
    "Let's switch the metaphor," continued Uriel,
"On your planet, there is something that we are amazed by, it is
called YouTube. People make videos of something of interest to
them, then add keywords, and upload it to 'the cloud' of all
YouTube videos. 'The cloud' is not in a single physical space. As
in the movie I described before; the video may have had only the
illusion of time. Anyone can search for the videos by keywords or
by the address and