Accidental Gods (12 page)

Thomas said, “Let’s meet here again in two hours. Will that be enough time, Stephen?”

“Should be.”

“OK.”

There were nods all around.

***

Two hours later, they were back, and the familiar image of the Alpha planet moving slowly around the Alpha star was on the screen.

“Has it been moved?” Ajay asked.

Jenn’s voice came in over the speakers, “Yes. The move took place two hours ago.”

Stephen said, “Cool. It worked.”

Ajay said, “Let me look at the orbital numbers to make sure it’s stable,” and moved behind Stephen’s laptop. “May I?” he asked Stephen.

“Of course.”

Ajay ran an analysis on the last ten of the universe’s years, which had passed during their break. Most of the actual two hours had been lost to cloning the universe and starting the clone. The ten years took only a few minutes.

“It looks good,” Ajay said. “I think you did it.”

“OK.” Stephen beamed. “Now it gets a name,” he announced. “The program shall be called Coliseum, in memory of the Greeks.”

Ajay shook his head. “The Coliseum is in Rome.”

“I know, I know. But this is different. You remember that movie
Clash of the Titans
? I was just a kid, but I remember this scene where the Greek gods would sit up in Mount Olympus, and they had this
coliseum
thing, and they would put statues of people in it and move them around. The people would be forced to fight or just die or be challenged by mythical creatures.”

Lisa said, “I remember that movie. It was based loosely on parts of Homer’s
The Odyssey
, right?”

“I think so,” Stephen said. “I don’t really like to read that classical stuff. Anyway, I just think of that scene—where the gods are manipulating mortals—I remember it vividly. And it seemed appropriate to me.”

Lisa said, “The gods manipulating the lives of mortals. Nice imagery in both
The Odyssey
and the movie.”

“Coliseum, it is,” Thomas said with a smile. “I like your rationale.”

Jules walked in, carrying an open case of Amstel Light so cold the bottles were slick with condensation. Thomas had specifically asked her to bring Amstel, since that was Stephen’s preferred beer and this was his day. She popped one after the other open and passed them out until everyone had one.

Raising his bottle high, Thomas said, “A toast to our first successful nudge.”

***

Stephen was excited when he returned home at 6:25 p.m., extraordinarily early for him.

Still, as he walked in, Catherine said sarcastically, “Glad you could make it back at a reasonable hour.”

He had been working on Coliseum almost nonstop for months. He knew all the work had irritated Catherine. His working all hours hadn’t bothered her when she had lived in Austin and they had both been working crazy hours at IACP. It had been a given that he would work that hard, and she had accepted it, especially since that had been the situation when they had met—and had been the
cause
of their meeting. But now she had moved to Providence to teach at Brown, so they saw each other less frequently. Since she was visiting, she expected him to spend time with her, but this week had been bad timing because he’d been so close to finishing Coliseum. It was one of those things with him; once he was near the end, he just couldn’t stop until it was done. To Stephen, it was less a matter of when he could leave Coliseum alone and more a matter of when Coliseum would leave him alone.

He gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Hi, sweetie.”

“Good day at work?” She smirked. She found it funny to be the “wife” waiting at home.

“Great!” he said, far more enthusiastically than normal. “Want to head over to Uchi and get some sushi?”

“Let’s go.”

They sat outside in the temperate early spring weather sharing a bottle of wine. The bottle sat half empty on the small table in front of them.

“So what happened today?” she asked.

“We did it.”

“Did what?”

It had been six months since she had left IACP, and they hadn’t talked much about what he had been working on since.

“We completed our first nudge today!”

“You guys actually went forward on that crazy idea?”

“Yeah, and it worked,” he said, clearly excited.

“What did you nudge?”

“We moved a planetary orbit to fix a long-term problem with its position in the habitable zone.”

She knew they had to have moved several steps forward since she had left. She wasn’t surprised; these were some of the smartest people she had ever met—well, intellectually smart at least. They tended to be naïve on many other topics.

“That’s great,” she said, not really meaning it.

But she raised her glass in a toast, and Stephen clanged it with his glass. She decided it was best to avoid further confrontation on this topic while she was here, but she couldn’t keep doing this. She felt too strongly about what IACP was doing, and it galled her even more that, even though Stephen was the enabler, he was oblivious to the impact his work had on her. It wasn’t just the work itself that bothered her. It was his complete disregard of her opinions on it.

“Congratulations,” she said and sipped her wine.

He exhaled audibly. “You don’t like what we did?”

“I said congratulations.”

“After saying, ‘That’s great,’ with that long pause between. With you, that means the opposite.”

“You know me too well,” she said.

“Can’t we just celebrate?”

“Sure.”

She loved him, and she knew he loved her, even though the first time she’d said it to him, he’d used that corny Han Solo line: “I know.” But it had been how quickly he’d switched back to his own voice and posture after that and had blurted out, “I love you, too,” that had thrilled her. He had seemed so afraid of hurting her back then, even with a corny movie line.

She wished he’d do something like that now.

***

Catherine waited until a week after she had returned to Providence before she called Stephen to break it off. He had not taken it well. It had been hard for her too.

A few people noticed Stephen was grumpier than usual, but it wasn’t so much that many people commented on it. Lisa asked what was up, and he ran his hands across his nearly bald head and shrugged. She figured he was caught up with some big Coliseum problem or something. Besides, he had always been a little standoffish, so his behavior wasn’t really surprising. All the hard-core computer guys seemed to have a dark side.

Chapter 18

Year 6

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.

—Henry Ford

Six months had passed since the first nudge, and during that time, they had had to nudge the universe twice more. Both nudges had been necessary as a result of random objects colliding with the planet. During the accretion phase of a planet, collisions were normal, though still potentially disruptive. In these two cases with Alpha, they were definitely disruptive.

The first of these new nudges had been as simple as rewinding the universe and then destroying the asteroid before it could impact the planet. The other nudge had demanded more creativity. An asteroid almost the size of Mars had crashed into the planet and dramatically changed its orbit. So they had first backtracked to before the asteroid had hit the planet, with the intent of again simply destroying the asteroid. After further analysis, they became worried that this one was big enough that destroying—or even just deleting it—might have significant gravitational consequences on the still-developing planetary system, so they looked for other options. Don suggested that maybe it was an opportunity to turn that celestial liability into a celestial asset. He reminded the group that the Alpha planet didn’t have a moon yet, and a moon was one of the criteria he had laid out as important to the planet’s long-term potential for developing life. So they decided to try to push the asteroid into an orbit around the planet, and it had worked. With a single nudge—their third so far—they had solved two major problems.

SU-N3 Time: +8,100,000,000 Years

They had been lucky on this one. The oceans had formed naturally. The collisions of asteroids, comets, and other cosmic entities had created giant peaks and valleys in the crust of the Alpha planet. As the steam had finally cooled into liquid water, the ocean basins had filled in nicely.

Thomas sat on the rocky outcropping, wondering in amazement at the advances in technology that were able to deliver such stunning renderings of what seemed like real environments. Hurricane-force winds blew off the ocean across the rocky land from which he watched and pulverized the coast with huge, tsunami-class waves. Thomas was glad, at least in this environment, that the technology didn’t simulate touch yet, but the rest of the environment was nearly perfectly immersive. The wind smelled of salt, though only a hint, probably because the oceans were still in the throes of converting fresh water into salt as they reacted with the crust. That smell, along with the roar of smashing waves, the hiss of showering spray and cataracts of salt water rushing back down between and across the rocks, all combined and seemed to trick his body; he could almost feel the wind and constantly felt compelled to grab hold of the rock to keep from being blown away.

There was still nothing alive on the planet, but the conditions were almost right.

Chapter 19

Year 7

The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.

—Ayn Rand,
The Fountainhead

SU-N9 Time: +12,500,000,000 Years

Stephen, Don, and Thomas had been moving through the rain forest for an hour. The rain fell hard now and pattered on the leaves, creating an eerie rattling sound. Stephen kept looking over his shoulder, thinking something was behind him. Between the new hologram technology Thomas had brought in recently and the full environmental audio, he had to constantly remind himself that the only thing behind them, in reality, was a door to the hallway. Somewhere, a six-and-a-half-foot hairline rectangle hidden within all that greenery and dripping water, stood between him and the
real
world. He thought for a moment, maybe, they should consider altering the audio to act like you were there, since this would feel even more real if there were sounds of plant life crunching underfoot.

Suddenly, Stephen gagged. It smelled like a combination of rotten eggs and a dead body, like he was stopped at an eternal red light in the Texas heat with a deer carcass decaying in the median, right outside his open window.

“Oh God,” he gasped and covered his mouth.

Don puked, directly through the holographic greenery, all over the floor. The distinct mix of doughnut and Red Bull didn’t help the smell or the situation.

Thomas instinctively pulled his shirt over his face. He looked somewhat like an old-timey bank robber. What Stephen could still see of Thomas looked ill.

“Turn off the smell!” Stephen yelled.

“Yes, sir.”

“Oh God,” Don said. “Did something die?”

Stephen said, “I don’t know, but it certainly smells that way.”

Thomas said through his shirt, “Jenn, move us to another room—same position in the SU. No smell this time. And send someone to clean up this room.”

“Done. Simulation coming online in Rendering Room 4.”

***

They took a few steps through the dense jungle again. Don had scrubbed the smell off himself in the bathroom, rinsed his mouth out, and then changed. He was now wearing an IACP T-shirt. Thomas turned and tried to peer through the foliage in various directions. Huge, dripping-wet tropical leaves walled them in on every side.

“Hey, Stephen,” Thomas said. “Maybe you can make us some virtual machetes with Coliseum.”

Stephen laughed. “That would be cool, but that would require real-time processing, and we don’t have that yet.”

“Oh, so if we did, you could do it?”

“Damn it. Stop pinning stuff on me.”

Don asked, “Hey, what’s this?”

In the closest edge of the floor’s strip of screen directly in front of them, barely visible because of all the large greenery, were three prickly looking semispherical fruit-like things about half the size of watermelons.

“Oh!” Thomas exclaimed.

“Fruit?”

“Not just fruit,” Thomas said. “They look almost like durians!”

Stephen asked, “What’s a durian?”

“You guys haven’t been to Asia?”

Don said a little sheepishly, “Never made it there. No.”

Stephen said, “I don’t really like to fly so only on the trip to India for Ajay’s wedding.”

“There is this fruit in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and I think even Singapore, called a durian. It’s supposed to taste great. Some people call it the ‘god of fruit.’ But it smells so bad that it’s banned in some areas. The few times I got a whiff of it, it smelled something like what just hit us in Rendering Room 3. Rotten eggs and something else I can’t describe.”

“Decaying flesh?” Stephen added helpfully.

“Thanks for that.”