Accidental Gods (14 page)

Chapter 22

Week 3: Thursday

Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.

—Angela Carter

Mike,

I need your help with this. Please keep it quiet.

Thomas

----

Thomas Gray, PhD

Executive Director

Institute for Advanced Computational Physics

“OK, then,” Mike mumbled. “Let’s see what’s so important I have to ‘keep it quiet.’” He opened the pdf attachment.

“What the hell?” he asked himself.

The document displayed a series of images that appeared to be a language but not one he could identify. It vaguely resembled pictographic languages, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and cuneiform. It looked more evolved, but not in the way modern languages like Chinese and Japanese had developed from the formalization of pictographic languages.

“What the hell
is
this?” he asked himself, getting more excited.

It almost had the flair of an invented language, like one of J. R. R. Tolkien’s. The pdf file was only two pages, but those pages were covered edge-to-edge in writing. Mike was certain he’d never seen an alphabet like this before.

He pressed reply but couldn’t be sure in doing so what he was getting himself into.

Tom,

What is this language? I don’t recognize it. What do you need?

Mike

-----

Mike Wilson, PhD

Department of Linguistics

University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

He pressed send, and the message disappeared.

Thirty seconds later, his phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Mike, it’s Thomas. Can you talk?”

“You’re Thomas now?”

Thomas laughed. “Yeah. No one has called me Tom since undergrad. But we can catch up on that later.”

“Sure. So what’s with that language?”

“It’s kind of sensitive. The real question is, do you think you could translate it?”

“Well,” Mike said, “two written pages with no context is pretty much impossible to translate. Do you have any more, or could you tell me what the context is? If you can provide either of those—preferably both—it might be possible, but I can’t promise.”

“Are you free this weekend?”

“I just finished my last class for the term. I’m pretty free for the summer. Just working on a paper. You know the drill, publish or perish.”

“Can you be ready for a flight in two hours?”

“Um, I guess so.”

“We’ll send a car to your house in two hours.”

The line went dead.

***

Two and one quarter hours later, he was at the airport, but in a section he had never seen before with his laptop case slung over his shoulder, banging against his opposite hip while he dragged a humongous suitcase on wheels behind him. Mike left the car and walked into the General Aviation Building at the University of Illinois Willard Airport and headed straight to what appeared to be the ticket counter—easy to find since there was only one.

The counter attendant smiled when Mike approached.

Mike told him, “I’m Mike Wilson. I was told to come here for my flight.”

The attendant studied his computer for a second, looked up at Mike, looked back down, and hit a key.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “Your plane is ready. Please come with me. Let me get your luggage.”

He grabbed Mike’s bigger bag, collapsed its long dragging handle, lifted the bag off the floor by its side handle, and led him out the back of the building.

It took Mike a second to realize they were walking right onto the airport tarmac and toward a small private jet, a Citation V Ultra.

“
Holy shit
,” Mike said to no one in particular, “I guess Tom’s been doing well.”

A smiling woman in business attire appeared in the jet’s open door and climbed down the stairs.

She smiled at Mike. “Hi, Dr. Wilson. I’m Jennifer. I’ll be your flight attendant today. It is very nice to meet you, sir.” She extended her hand.

Mike shook it, still gawking at the plane.

Jennifer took Mike’s bag from the counter attendant, said, “Follow me, sir,” and was on the third step back up the jet’s stairs before Mike could stop her.

“Jennifer,” he said again. “Please, let me get that for you. I’ve packed a few reference books in there, and—”

“I can get it, sir,” she said as she turned back toward the top of the stairs and went up them with Mike’s bag as if it were a half-empty attaché case.

Mike stopped just inside the jet when he saw that there were no rows of seats. Instead, four large leather recliners loosely surrounded a low, well-polished, oval coffee table.

Jennifer gestured Mike toward the chairs. She had already tucked his bag away somewhere.

Mike chose one of the aftmost two chairs, laid his laptop case on the carpeted deck next to it, and perched tentatively on the chair’s edge. He blew out a long breath and allowed himself to slip back and sink into the chair. He rubbed his temples, wondering what could possibly warrant all the expense and attention.

Jennifer asked him quietly, “Would you like a drink, Dr. Wilson?”

“Please call me Mike. Do you have Scotch?”

“Is Macallan 18 fine?”

“Wow. That would be great.”

“If you would, Dr. Wilson, while I fetch that drink for you, would you mind turning your seat fully forward and buckling in?”

He did, noticing only then that the chair even had a seatbelt, as if Jennifer had conjured one out of thin air with the words “buckling in.” She brought his Scotch, neat, and then disappeared around a panel in the forward area as the plane began to take off. The force pulled him deeper into the chair, the well-cushioned leather holding him in a firm embrace. Then the surface of his Scotch tilted toward him ever so slightly, and the airport sank from sight and was replaced with the bright-blue sky. Mike added to the Scotch’s tilt himself and took a sip, wondering what in the hell Tom had in store for him.

Chapter 23

Week 3: Thursday

In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.

—Charles Darwin

As soon as the jet had stopped noticeably climbing, Jennifer returned to Mike’s seat with a sealed manila envelope.

She smiled as she handed it to him and said, “Dr. Wilson, Dr. Gray asked that I give you this once we were in the air.”

He tore open the envelope and pulled out a stapled set of papers. It looked like the typical academic-paper format.

Stamped on the first page was “Confidential Prior to Publication Date.” The second page was formatted like a magazine article’s opening page: headline, authors’ bylines, and a picture. The picture in this case looked to be an electron microscope image of a microbe of some kind, possibly a bacterium.

Mike looked at the opening page.

Evolution of Simple Life in a Computer Simulation

University of Texas at Austin

Institute for Advanced Computational Physics

Thomas Gray, Ajay Narula, Stephen Eggleton, Lisa Davis, Don Ward

He flipped to the next page and began to read,

The Institute for Advanced Computational Physics was founded to work on projects to advance the cutting edge of physics research. Our initial objective was to model the big bang in a computer simulation. The hope was that we could gain a deeper understanding of what was necessary for the big bang to occur and the specifics of how it happened and the moments that followed at the dawn of the universe.

Mike glanced back at the electron microscope image and said, “Oh shit. This couldn’t be where the language came from. Could it?”

To do this, we spent years modeling physics—including the codification of quantum mechanics—to make it possible to run the simulation.

Then we had to make key decisions about what the start-up values of our simulated universe would be. So we made the obvious and easy choice to use the same values as our own universe. We did this for two reasons:

              1. Because our desire was that the outcome of our experiment would yield insight into the birth of our universe, it made sense for our model universe to resemble our own as closely as possible.

              2. Since if our model ran long enough after the big bang, the results would closely resemble our universe (see point one above), this would likely prove the veracity of our model—i.e., if 100,000,000 years after our simulated big bang, the universe looked roughly like our best calculations for how our own universe looked at 100,000,000 years, it would be highly likely that our model was accurate.

The simulation faced many obstacles at the beginning, including limitations in computational power and storage. These obstacles slowed the process and often forced us to innovate. Some of our innovations, though, ultimately gave us the financial freedom to accomplish far more than we had originally expected.

In our fifth year

“Holy
crap
, holy shit,” Mike said, getting chills. “
Five years.
This
is
where the language came from.”

In our fifth year, we were already well over 100,000,000 years into a simulated universe’s development. This is when we made a major strategic decision that would impact all of our work going forward.

We decided that we would seek life in our simulated universe. Further, we decided to encourage it.

“Son of a bitch,” Mike said. “You
did it
, didn’t you? Fantastic!”

Jennifer reappeared, probably responding to him talking to himself, and walked toward Mike’s chair. “Do you need anything, Dr. Wilson?”

“No, thank you though,” Mike said, just now realizing he was raising his voice as he was getting excited.

Jennifer disappeared behind her panel again.

At this stage, our simulated universe—internally, we simply call it “SU”—was quite large, like our own universe. This made it impossible for us to watch all of it at any scale other than its largest. In our simulated universe, we are like gods and, as such, are effectively omniscient. However, a seemingly infinite amount of information exists at the smallest scale, and since we are only human, we cannot absorb the information contained in an entire simulated universe at once. The sheer amount of information was overwhelming.

So we developed subordinate programs that acted as scanners. They searched for two things: planetary systems similar to our own and anomalies. The reason for the first is obvious; the second is perhaps more opaque. Since we were not sure how life would develop, we thought incongruent activity in any star system might indicate something of interest.

This new scanning mechanism immediately identified several planetary systems with blueprints similar to our own. We investigated several of these systems and felt that they had reasonable potential of developing life, but they were still millions of years from such an event.

So we took the unusual step of cloning the SU universe (we have the computational and storage capabilities to run multiple simulated universes). With the cloned SU, we chose the Alpha system, the planetary system we had identified that had the most likelihood of developing life.

And we
nudged
it.

We slightly altered the orbit of its second planet, which we’re calling “Alpha.” This planet was about the same size as and in an orbit reasonably similar to that of Earth, but it was slightly closer to its star. Adjusting the orbit was difficult. It required changes to the underlying physics, and we were not sure what ripple effect that might create in this simulated universe—which we called SU-N1, the N1 designating it as the first nudge.

After this step, we watched to see if our tinkering with the universe caused any serious breakdowns or anomalies. It did not.

After another million years, our Alpha planet had developed oceans similar to those of the primordial Earth. Substantial analysis of the Alpha planet’s surface revealed shallow coastal areas where the water had a reddish-brown tint. Chemical analysis showed that this color change was caused by an abundance of amino acids. We believe the appearance of amino acids was a result of an electrical charge of some type causing an atmospheric reaction similar to that of the Miller-Urey experiments conducted at the University of Chicago in 1953.

As a quick aside, it is important to note that it would be impossible to watch hundreds of millions of years of evolution, so we chose to check in at million-year intervals. Even if we know the time interval at a very granular level—say, ten years—it is impossible to observe for the entire duration hoping to catch the exact moment of a singular event. This is an area where we are developing new technical functionality to enable us to watch for specific events and observe the surrounding details as they happen. This gives enough time for things to happen but not so much that we miss important evolutionary steps.

We checked again after another million years. By this point, macromolecules had emerged, in concentrated form. We were able to isolate polypeptides, the precursors of proteins, and polynucleotides, the precursors of DNA. Thus the primordial stew necessary to create life was in place.

Mike said quietly to himself, “And then you created life, didn’t you, Tom? Not only that, you created intelligent life, and now they’ve created a written language that you can’t decipher.” Mike smiled and grunted a one-huff laugh. “A god who doesn’t know what his creations are saying.”

At this point, we again took matters into our own hands and began a second
nudge
. This nudge actually consisted of several small steps, after further cloning SU-N1 to create SU-N2, a name we debated because in reality the second nudge is a derivative of the first, not the initial universe.

Over a period of two years, we carefully manipulated the macromolecules to…

Mike sighed. This was not his thing. He flipped through the rest of the paper, another four pages that droned on about RNA this and DNA that. He was sure a lot of people would find that deeply fascinating, but with his general aversion to scientific literature and two glasses of Scotch further slowing him down, he pulled the mystery-novel sneak: he skipped to the end and read the last paragraph.

In conclusion, although our simulated universe has seen the development of simple bacterial life, this does not necessarily mean that more-advanced life will develop. We will have to wait and see how evolution in our new universe progresses.

“Interesting,” Mike muttered under his breath. He knew IACP was far beyond bacteria, since Mike was pretty sure it took something substantially further up the evolutionary ladder to write. This article hadn’t even been published, and it was clearly out of date, presumably by design. Mike was excited to find out where this language came from but couldn’t help but wonder why they were keeping it a secret.