Accidental Gods (4 page)

Chapter 4

Year 2

If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.

—Niels Bohr

Racks of computers filled the data center, their whirring in constant battle with the industrial-strength air conditioner for aural supremacy.

Several thousand IACP-custom-built, rack-mounted slave computers were lined up in fifteen of the twenty rows in the data center. Each CPU ran a highly specialized derivative of Linux developed by Stephen and his team, responsible for linking all the computers and effectively communicating instructions and the state of each computer’s little corner of the simulated universe. Each slave also had to talk to another set of computers that also made up a massively parallel supercomputer in its own right. This smaller supercomputer was a more traditional Linux Beowulf cluster. It was the master, and its job was to tell the slave machines what to do. These machines, together, sorted out minor details and maintained stability in the simulated universe. The heavy lifting, however, was done by a cluster of quantum computers that did all of the predictive math required for the overall state of each slice of Planck time.

The configuration would easily put it on top of the world’s supercomputer list. Larry spent a lot of time tracking how they were faring against the list of top five hundred at www.top500.org. Computationally, the IACP system was worlds above anything on the list because it was so specialized, but even in memory and raw number of processors, it was on top. The master Beowulf cluster would be in the top five by itself
.
Of course, Thomas wouldn’t let Larry submit their system for the rankings, but at least he could compare. He figured there might be something at the NSA on par with what they were doing, but those guys were even more secretive than the IACP.

“Today’s the day,” Larry said, beaming.

Thomas said, “Let’s fire it up.”

“All systems are on,” Larry said. “Sync them up.”

Stephen was sitting at a console at the end, monitoring the health of the overall system. Ajay was behind him watching. All this computer stuff was not his forte. Turning these things on was always the hardest part, since the thousands of computers had to synchronize with each other. Stephen pushed the button to begin the processes.

Across the data center lights started blinking, creating a starry little universe of their own. Larry and his cohort Bleys, who somehow always managed to be in a row of computers unoccupied by anyone else, were running around checking to make sure each individual computer was running correctly.

“Fifty percent synced,” Stephen shouted out.

Thomas had moved over and was now with Ajay, watching over Stephen’s shoulder.

The scintillation of lights slowed noticeably as the LEDs on the fronts of the synchronized computers turned solid.

“Got one bad one here,” someone called out. Stephen figured it was Bleys, since he didn’t recognize the voice. “Row seven, rack nine.”

Larry disappeared down the appropriate row, a replacement computer in his hands.

“Seventy-five percent,” Stephen reported.

This time, Larry called out a row and rack number, and Stephen got the briefest glimpse of Bleys rushing to his location to swap in another replacement.

“Ninety percent,” Stephen continued his count.

Three more bad computers were quickly replaced before Stephen yelled, “One hundred percent!”

Cheers went up.

Thomas asked, “So do we try to start universe processing now?”

“Let’s do it,” Stephen said. “Larry, are we all clear?”

“Ready!”

Stephen pushed another button. “The big bang begins with one button.”

Thomas laughed.

“It might take a few minutes to create the starting conditions,” Stephen said as they waited.

Ajay added, “It might take more than that. During the first era, that first unit of Planck time, it has to resolve a lot of open issues, so it might take a while to sort that out.”

Everyone was antsy, watching the monitor for any signs of progress.

Then there was a popping noise.

“What’s that?” Stephen shouted.

Smoke came from the back corner, near rack 1, row 1.

A siren wailed, and Larry yelled, “Get out!”

Everyone ran for the door. Gas hissed, and the halon gas fire suppression system kicked in. Larry shut the entire system down and followed everyone else out.

They watched from outside the room’s hallway window. The data center filled with the gas. The fires slowly went out.

Stephen frowned.

Ajay said, “Well, that wasn’t the big bang I expected.”

Everyone glared at him, even Thomas. Ajay shrugged as if to say, “What?”

Then Stephen laughed. “What was I thinking?”

Thomas asked him, “What do you mean?”

“It’s software. You should know as well as anyone. It never works the first time.”

Larry nodded. Bleys had already fled, as if being outside the data center was somehow dangerous—like sunlight to a vampire.

Ajay looked uncharacteristically introspective before he finally said, “I wonder if it worked the first time when our universe ‘turned on.’”

***

It turned out that two things had caused the smoky disaster of the team’s first attempt. First was a flaw in the cooling of the custom-built computers that did the low-level physics. Fortunately, that particular flaw was relatively easy to fix. Larry had thought he and Bleys might have to rebuild every computer, but a few spacing changes in the racks did the job. Each computer did require minor tweaks as a result. It was two months of tedious work, but it was a lot easier and took far less time than rebuilding all the computers from scratch.

The second problem was software-related and had really embarrassed Stephen. The system was supposed to be self-correcting and self-balancing but had aggressively clustered activity to gain a slight performance “improvement.” Instead of spreading the work evenly across the entire data center, the system had taxed only eight of the nearest computers with all the work. The heavy processing had not only caused those eight computers to get excessively hot but had also caused the other seventeen computers in the same rack to overheat, multiplying the problem. From there, it hadn’t taken long for the entire rack to go up in smoke, literally as well as figuratively.

After three months, the team had gotten the initial problems fixed and had worked out all the other kinks, and this time, when Stephen pushed the button, the system fired up perfectly and gave the right answer:

Universe Processing: Initiated

Big Bang: Complete

Simulated Universe: Initiated

SU Time: 0

Cheers went up.

“Wow!” Ajay said as if he hadn’t expected it to work.

Thomas beamed. “OK, tonight I’m taking everyone out to dinner at III Fork’s. Big steaks for everyone!” Then he thought for a moment and added, “Except for the vegetarians. You guys can have fish or vegetables. They have those, too.”

In the excitement, no one thought much about the next step: rendering the universe.

That took another three months to get right.

Chapter 5

Year 2

It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.

—Captain Picard to Data,
Star Trek: The Next Generation
, “Peak Performance”

As he watched Thomas putting on the VR helmet, Stephen couldn’t help but blurt out, “What we need is a holodeck!”

Lisa asked, “You mean like Star
Trek?”

“
Next Generation
,” Stephen added, “where you could see, hear, touch, and smell entire simulations. True virtual reality in every way.”

Ajay smirked and asked Lisa, “You’re a Trekkie?” He jutted his thumb at Stephen. “I expected it from him, but you?”

Thomas finished adjusting the helmet and said, “Render simulation from time zero.” He opened his eyes to the darkness, the VR helmet snuggly on his head.

“Beginning render,” Jenn said.

He could hear her typing on her keyboard, and Thomas saw in amber characters:

SU Time: 0

The readout, a reference to the simulated universe’s age, disappeared, and then Thomas watched as a small pinprick of light emerged in the middle of his vision and grew into a tiny sphere. In the blink of an eye, the tiny sphere jumped from the size of an LED to the size of a headlight and then continued at its previous expansion rate. Thomas would have thought it a computer glitch if Lisa and Ajay hadn’t forewarned him of that brief inflationary period.

Thomas said, “So Hawking and Penrose were right.”

“What’s that?” Jenn asked.

“Nothing or…” Thomas paused for a moment before continuing, “…at least our math works in here.”

Thomas pushed a small knob in his right hand forward, and his view zoomed in. The sphere grew rapidly in size and brightness, and he passed through the edge of the expanding universe and into its interior. Although he knew the renderer could not produce an actual tactile sensation, he had an uncanny sense of passing through a viscous barrier.

Inside was a dazzling sea of light, like he was adrift underwater with bioluminescent plankton in every direction. But it seemed the computer could not fully render it, and sometimes, it would clip to an infinite inky blackness.

Then it blinked out.

“What the hell?” Thomas shouted.

“Um, that’s it,” Jenn said.

“That was barely an hour.”

“Yeah. That’s all our systems can handle.”

Thomas pulled off the goggles and squinted in the bright light of the tiny room. Jenn was a blurry dark-headed mass in front of what looked like an ordinary PC.

“Didn’t we just spend millions of dollars on a state-of-the-art storage system with ten petabytes of storage?” Thomas asked.

“Yes.”

“And you’re telling me it can only hold an hour or so of rendered data?”

“Yes.”

Thomas did a quick calculation. “That’s two point seven terabytes per second. How did no one notice this before?” He rubbed his eyes.

“This is the first time we’ve run it,” Jenn said. “And this stuff is all new. It’s really hard to tell what it’s doing.”

“But universe processing is still running?”

“Of course,” Stephen said.

Jenn was clearer to Thomas then, brown eyes, closely filed nails poised above her keyboard.

Thomas asked her, “Then what’s it doing?”

“I don’t know. My guess is the universe is expanding, but it’s not getting written anywhere.”

Stephen nodded in agreement.

Thomas sighed. “Well, we can analyze the storage issues for our new universe now. Sounds like we’ve got two major hurdles: a storage problem and whatever the hell was going on in there. We’re going to need to find out if that first ten minutes happened as expected, also, why the computer seemed to get confused on what it was supposed to be showing us.”

***

Ajay, Stephen, and Thomas watched the large screen in the rendering lab. It was showing a replay of the ten minutes recorded from the simulated universe.

Thomas asked, “So? Is that what’s supposed to happen?”

Stephen said, “Technically. Looks like it ran and recorded correctly…at least up until we ran out of storage space. In my opinion, the system did what it was supposed to.”

“Maybe,” Ajay said. “It looks like we are seeing what some call a ‘sizzling sea of quarks’ before things settled down. Though, technically speaking, light should not yet exist. I think this is just a computer being confused about what it should be drawing.”

Thomas asked, “So, you’re saying what I saw shouldn’t have even been visible?”

Ajay shrugged and set the VR helmet in the seat of the chair. “We will need to run much further into the future to know if the system is doing its job. Energy, not matter, is dominant for the first ten thousand years. Photons can’t move freely until about three hundred and seventy-seven thousand years after the big bang. How can the renderer show anything we can even understand or visualize before that much time has passed? We’ll start recognizing things once hydrogen starts condensing and clumping up to form the precursors to stars and galaxies. Stars don’t start being formed until the universe is about one hundred and fifty million years old. It’s possible we don’t even recognize things until our universe is a billion years old. Then…we might see something we are familiar with. That is, if the system is working as intended.”

“One hundred and fifty million years?”

“Probably. Maybe a billion.”

Stephen punched the back of the chair. “Damn it!”

Ajay flinched and squinted. “What?”

“That’s going to require a lot more storage than we anticipated.”

Thomas frowned.