Accidental Gods (7 page)

Chapter 8

Year 3

Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.

—Edwin Powell Hubble

Thomas sat back in the chair in the rendering lab. Jenn stood like a sentry behind her simple monitor and keyboard. Ajay and Lisa stood next to her, staring over her shoulder at the LCD’s large blank screen, which would show them a two-dimensional version of what Thomas would experience in virtual reality.

Thomas put the helmet on and adjusted its volume.

Now that they had gotten the first diamond storage system connected, they were able to progress much farther into the future. They still needed more storage, a problem Thomas hoped would be solved by the synthetic diamonds, but at least they could continue now, probably for a few million years.

Thomas blinked in the darkness and asked, “How far into its life has the universe processed so far?”

Jenn said, “Year eight hundred thousand.”

“OK. Start me at three hundred thousand.”

He heard Jenn type and then the amber readout displayed:

SU Time: +300,000 Years

Again, Thomas started outside the universe, but this time, it filled his entire field of vision. It was vastly larger than before. He zoomed in through the outer barrier, and immediately, a thundering bass blasted his eardrums and pounded through his head.

“Ahhh!” he screamed and fumbled with the helmet’s volume knob. “Kill the sound! Kill the damn sound!”

The sound stopped, but sharp pains throbbed in his ears, like echoes. He thought for a second that the blasts had completely and permanently deafened him, but then he heard himself breathing.

“What the hell was that?” he asked.

“Interesting,” Ajay said.

“Yeah, so interesting I’m almost deaf. Let’s try to manage that better next time. Like maybe slowly phase in the sound.”

“Sorry,” Jenn said. “I’ll do that from now on.”

“Just a moment,” Ajay said dismissively. “This might be important.”

While he waited for Ajay, Thomas moved his joystick and looked around. It was like he was in a dense fogbank. He almost expected the outline of the Golden Gate Bridge to emerge any moment.

Ajay said, “Quit looking around so much. Our screen is mostly a blur.”

Thomas ignored Ajay and propelled himself forward through the fog.

“It’s making me dizzy. Slow down.”

Thomas said, “Look away for now, then. You’ll get your chance to explore, too.”

As he flew through the fog, he periodically saw small eddies where the gas was subtly beginning to collapse. These, he knew, would eventually become embryonic galaxies.

Occasional ripples flowed through the fog, causing it to shift erratically. Thomas thought it strange that the ripples seemed to come from random directions. He wasn’t sure what they were, but it seemed logical that they—perhaps reverberations from the big bang—should emanate from the universe’s center instead.

“I think I know what that sound was,” Ajay said.

“Well?”

“That fog you are in is ionized gases and photons. It is clumped because the big bang caused quantum fluctuations that exploded out through space and formed what are apparently random denser clusters. Each clump tends to accrete as its burgeoning gravitational well pulls in even more gases. As this happens, the photons try to escape and create pressures that periodically erupt and send huge sound waves rippling across the universe.”

“Yeah, those were some pretty serious sound waves.”

“They are so intense that they influence the way galaxies are clustered. They pushed matter together in different ways.”

Then, in the blink of an eye, Thomas stepped one hundred thousand years ahead.

SU Time: +400,000 Years

It looked almost the same, but now he could make out more. The early fog of the universe had begun to clear and matter had further clumped into high-density regions, protogalaxies. The strangest thing he saw was that these budding galaxies were connected by eerie filaments that were barely visible at this scale. As he studied them, he realized what they reminded him of—a spider web—which made the yet-to-be-born galaxies appear as morning dew, glistening at the intersections.

“It’s beautiful,” Lisa said, watching the image on the large LCD display. “Let me put the helmet on.”

“No,” Thomas said. “Not yet.”

He heard Lisa sigh. It was one of her disappointed sighs, the ones he’d gotten to know so well before she had broken off their relationship at Caltech. So he did the same thing he had done then: focus completely on the technical. “Unfeeling,” she had called him then.

“Why does it look like a spider web?” he asked no one in particular.

No one answered for a few moments.

Then Lisa, her professional voice back, said, “Think of those filaments as creases formed in the universe. They’re caused by the growing gravitational impact of these…clusters of matter. Well, really it’s hydrogen.” She paused. She sounded tired. “Anyway, what we are seeing is hydrogen being drawn in by the gravitational fields of the denser clusters. Imagine you are camping and you string up a tarp because it looks like it’s going to rain. The universe is like the tarp. The filaments are like rivulets on a tarp when it’s raining. The small drops of water quickly flow down the tarp, causing tiny rivers to form on the tarp. The more rain that falls, the more pronounced these small rivers become and the more the water is drawn to them. Eventually, the rivulets lead the water to the lowest areas, causing small pools, or perhaps puddles, to form—the protogalaxies. As more water pools in those areas, the tarp sinks and the flow of rivulets goes there, making the pool even larger. There you have it, gravity explained with gravity.”

“And a camping metaphor,” Ajay added.

Lisa shrugged. “Hey, you got it, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t say it was bad.”

Thomas recalled Lisa telling him, at Caltech, about her camping trips as a girl. She was the only one on the team who had grown up in Texas, and she had spent much of her youth camping and hunting on her family’s ranch with her father. She hadn’t been back to the ranch, or camping for that matter, since her father had passed away while she was at Harvard completing her undergraduate degree. After that, she had poured herself into physics—the common thread that had pulled them all together. He wondered how much IACP’s location at UT might have influenced her decision to join the team. He also wondered how much she may have influenced his choosing UT.

He returned to studying the interconnected protogalaxies spread through space, a strange image to see rendered like this. It really did appear more like a dew-covered spider web one might see in the early morning while out camping than it did the beginnings of a universe.

It’s fragile like a spider web as well,
he thought. It was still young though, and another hundred million years would pass before the galaxies fully blossomed and stars formed. Their baby was growing up.

Chapter 9

Year 3

Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.

—Les Brown

The retinal scanner at the server room’s entrance parsed Larry’s eye and chirped its approval. He punched in his access code and scanned his card. The door’s locking mechanism clicked, and its seal broke with a hiss. He then swung the door open and stepped inside.

Already excessively paranoid, Larry had really ratcheted up the security in the data center since they had started using diamonds for storage.

Thomas followed, shivering from the blast of cold air through the doorway.

Larry was clearly excited as he led Thomas through the maze of computer racks that made up the data center. Larry walked faster than his normal laid-back gait, repeatedly glancing back at Thomas with an expectant grin and continually pausing to let him catch up. Even his pauses weren’t actual halts but were jittering, antsy sways leaning more toward where he was going than where he had been.

Finally, they reached another, thicker door. Larry put his eye up against another retinal scanner and punched in a code about three times longer than the one before. For whatever reason, he had not installed a card scanner on this door. This second door unlocked with an even louder hiss than the first. They both entered a slightly cooler room.

Thomas was intimately familiar with the odd blue glow coming from the back corner, but he hadn’t seen it emanate from there before. Also, this glow seemed of unprecedented magnitude.

Larry led Thomas directly to the source of that glow and, with a final half-pirouette around the last row of servers, complete with a dramatic flourish, revealed a four-foot-cubed synthetic diamond on a desk-high metal rack.

He said, “May I present to you, our own one hundred-kilocarat storage system. It will hold three hundred and fifty yottabytes.”

“That’s a lot,” Thomas said. He closed his eyes for a moment and then mumbled, “Seventeen billion years.” He seemed to keep calculating and then assumed a menacing look before arching his fingers together and saying, “Excellent.”

Larry thought Thomas looked and sounded eerily similar to the evil nuclear tycoon from
The Simpsons
, C. Montgomery Burns. Larry wasn’t sure, but he thought—and hoped—it was an intentional attempt at humor. He laughed anyway.

Thomas grinned.

Despite the blue glow, from their angle, the diamond appeared black, but upon closer inspection, Thomas realized the black was the mesh that covered the cube’s surface and that, when he looked at any side straight on, the gorgeous blue glow came tantalizingly through. Moving around the cube made it shift shades and seem eerily alive, like a portrait whose eyes would follow you around a room.

“Cool,” Thomas said. “Nothing like a glowing data center to impress the visitors.”

Larry laughed, only partially because it was true. People were always more impressed by how many blinking lights things had than what the machines behind the lights actually did.

Bleys leaned out from behind the giant cube. “Hey, Thomas, what’s up?”

“Hey, Bleys. Some nice work you’ve done here.” Thomas laughed.

He gazed at the entire cube as if he couldn’t believe it was real, the manifestation of some fantastic vision. Thomas closed his eyes in a slow blink and felt amazingly content. It was like the high of some very addictive drug, seeing another idea begin to manifest itself in the real world.

“
Great
work,” Thomas said.

***

Ajay stuck his head into Thomas’s office saying, “I’m out of here.”

“You off for the holidays?”

“Yep, I’m heading back to Mumbai for my annual trip. Two weeks with the family. I’m a little nervous, though.”

“Why?” Thomas asked. “Haven’t seen your family in a year?”

“No, I’m used to that. But for the last couple of months, my mom has really been pestering me to get married. Every time I talk to her.” He paused. “Also, she knows I’m not really making an effort.”

“My mom pesters me too, but that doesn’t make me nervous.”

“Yes, but
your
parents don’t come from a long history of arranged marriages.”

Thomas gulped. “Oh.”

“I’m worried there might be a special present for me this holiday season.”

Thomas tried to figure out whether Ajay was secretly excited about the prospect or horrified by it, but the other man’s expression was neutral. Thomas suspected Ajay might feel both.

“Well, good luck either way,” Thomas finally said. “Happy holidays, as well. I look forward to hearing about your ‘activities.’” He snickered.

Ajay sighed and then chuckled. “It would certainly spice things up. Happy holidays to you as well.”

Thomas walked with Ajay as far as the rendering lab. They shook hands, and Ajay left for his flight to India.

Thomas opened the rendering lab door and went inside. Watching the universe develop had become addictive.

Chapter 10

Year 3

We find them smaller and fainter, in constantly increasing numbers, and we know that we are reaching into space, farther and farther, until, with the faintest nebulae that can be detected with the greatest telescopes, we arrive at the frontier of the known universe.

—Edwin Powell Hubbard

The following week, the halls were mostly empty. It was that lull between Christmas and the New Year when most people took off. Thomas had flown home for Christmas but was already back. He was heading to the rendering lab to see how the universe was developing when his phone rang. It showed “Blocked” instead of a number.

“What the hell?” he said to no one in particular.

He picked up the line. “Hello?”

There was a brief pause, emblematic of an international call, before a familiar voice said, “Hey, it’s Ajay.”

“Is everything OK?”

“Yes. Everything is fine.”

“Let me guess—” Thomas laughed.

“I’m getting married,” Ajay admitted.

“Shocking. Did your mom pick well?”

“Yes, actually she did. I must admit I was quite surprised. My new fiancée and I are both excited about it. She’s going to move out here this summer.”

“When are you getting married?”

“That’s why I was calling. I want you and Stephen to be in the wedding. We are thinking sometime in February.”

“Wow, that’s fast!”

“I want to invite the whole team, too, if that’s OK?”

“Sure. I think it would be a nice break. Where?”

“Goa. Do you know it?”

“Nope. Is it in India?”

“Yes. It is the most famous beach area in India.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“I’ll e-mail the details to everyone.”

“Great! I’m looking forward to it. Enjoy the rest of your holiday.”

“I will.”

Click.

Thomas continued to the rendering lab, a little jubilance in his step. He was pretty amused by all this, not to mention curious. He was more than a little interested to meet Ajay’s future wife and to see how marriage would change him.

SU Time: +200,000,000 Years

This time, it was different. There was color.

Thomas was assaulted by a panorama of dusty clouds, brightly colored and lit from behind by cosmic light. It was spectacularly beautiful. No stars had spawned yet, but the early stew of an expanding universe shone brilliantly—painted with reds, oranges, blues, and purples. The dust, gases, and plasma danced, forming small, swirling eddies with primordial power. These eddies and whorls would evolve to become galaxies.

It changed slowly as he watched, awestruck at the birth of a universe.

After two hundred million years, the universe was starting to take shape. It would still be at least another hundred million years before stars would develop, but so far, things seemed to be progressing roughly as expected.

“A very good sign,” Thomas said aloud to nobody but himself. “A
very
good sign indeed.”