Vinnie gets a far-away look in his eye. I wait. “Ya know, Sy, there oughtta be a way.”

“A way to what?”

“I ain’t giving up on this faster-than-light communication stuff. I know Einstein said it couldn’t happen because it’d flip cause and effect and he didn’t like that, but that feels too much like philosophy books I’ve read that boil down to, ‘This thing can’t be true because I don’t want it to be.’ Maybe there’s something we ain’t thought of yet.”

“Lots of people have played with that challenge for decades. Do you have any fresh ideas?”

“A couple possibles. Lessee if I’ve got this straight. We’ve got two separate message channels going — one that works instant-like for information between entangled quantum thingies, and one for everything else that’s stuck at lightspeed or less. Suppose I’ve got two entangled pizzas— nah, we’re really talking quantum stuff like electrons and photons so I’ll just say particles. Suppose I’ve got two entangled particles that are some ugly mix of red and green but we know when they’re de-linked they’ll be opposite. I send one to you the regular way but they’re still linked. I look at the one I still got and it’s red, say. The same moment, yours instantly went green but you don’t know that yet until you look or you get status information from me through the not‑instant channel. So the problem is getting information to leak between the two channels, right?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“OK, try this one. How about I use a magnetic field or something to force mine to red? And maybe a set time later I make it green to confirm I’m in control and it’s a real signal.”

“Sorry, as soon as you manipulate properties in part of an entangled system you break the entanglement and the other part is free to do whatever it wants to. Next?”

“Uhh … time synchronization. How about you and me set a certain time for me to look at mine? You can watch yours and when it flips or not you’ll know.”

“All that does is move the manipulation to the other end of the setup. Me looking at my particle resets yours to whatever color mine isn’t and that breaks the entanglement. Next?”

“Maybe something with a bunch of particles all entangled together? How about—”

“Nup, can’t base a strategy on that. Like everything else quantum, entanglement is statistical. There’s no guarantee that even in our two‑particle system I’ll see green if you see red — the odds are high but not 100%. There’s a proven theorem that says if two particles are ‘maximally entangled,’ adding a third to the system reduces the odds that any two will coordinate their behaviors. A bunch of particles would be even less stable. It’s called the monogamy theorem, care to guess why?”

“Physics fun with metaphors again, cute, but I can see this is a good one. You got anything?”

“Not having to do with entanglement, but I have been playing with a different idea, sort of a blank‑sky approach.”

“You mean blue‑sky.”

“Uh-uh, blank. Think about a sky made of dark matter. Dark matter’s subject to gravity but so far as we know it has absolutely no interaction with electromagnetism of any kind — doesn’t play with electrons, light waves, nothing. Einstein based part of his relativity work on Maxwell’s electromagnetism equations. In fact, that’s where the idea came from that ‘c‘ was the speed limit for the Universe. It was a good idea and there’s a huge amount of evidence that he was right. Everything in our Standard Model except the photon is subject to the Lorentz factor. Both light and gravity acting on normal matter travel at c‑speed. Well, maybe the value of c has something to do with how quarks work. Dark matter doesn’t have quarks. What if dark matter has a different speed limit, maybe a lot higher than c or even no limit at all? Maybe we could exploit that property somehow. How about a dark‑matter telegraph?”

“I’m thinking of my Grampa’s recipe for rabbit stew. ‘First you gotta catch your rabbit,’ he used to say,”

~~ Rich Olcott