Diamonds in the Sky (4 page)

Finally, the tech bent down to where she could see her. Already it was getting hard for her to keep her eyes open. “Okay, you’re good to go. Lights on or off?”

“Off, please.”

“Productive dreams!”

The tech moved away, and a moment later darkness descended. Dana thought she could hear the HVF thrumming all around her, but that was absurd — the room was thoroughly soundproofed. For the next four hours the only information going in or out of this room would be through her neural cables.

Dana keyed her access code into the numeric pad under her right hand. It was awkward, but she’d learned to cope with a right-handed world. Then she took a breath, closed her eyes, and pressed ENTER.

* * *

When she opened her eyes, or seemed to, Dana saw what appeared to be a loose, fuzzy ball of stars. It floated ahead of her in the darkness at chest level; if she wanted to, she could lean forward and put her arms about half-way around it. A thin, tepid warmth came from the ball, like the heat of a single match at arm’s length, gently warming her chest and the underside of her chin.

This was her dataset. This was the accumulated result of decades of observations, some of them her own, from telescopes and dishes all over the Earth, above it, and around it. And the HVF was her gateway to truly understanding it.

The fuzzy ball of “stars” was actually a representation of the entire visible universe — a ball of galaxy clusters fourteen billion light-years in radius, with the Earth at the center. Since the universe began fourteen billion years ago, the farthest anyone could see in any direction was fourteen billion light-years. There might be more universe beyond that limit — in fact, there almost certainly was — but there was no way for anyone on Earth to know anything about it.

This view was not really possible in the physical universe, of course. If Dana had really stood at this point in space, only the nearest galaxies to her would look like this. The galaxies farther away would appear younger, because their light was coming from billions of light-years away and was thus billions of years old, and the light would also be redshifted because they were moving away from her. The view beyond that would fade into the chaos of the Big Bang. But in this simulation, she saw the entire visible universe in its “current” state, all at the same time, with no redshift.

Dana moved the control panel from its default position on the right to within easy reach of her left hand, then zoomed in a bit, enlarging the ball to about three times her own height. Or alternatively, she thought, shrinking herself to a mere ten billion light-years tall. The rapid apparent motion made her dizzy; she had to stand still, blinking her simulated eyes, for a long moment until the sensation went away. At this scale the warmth of the ball was more apparent, like a bonfire some distance away, and Dana could easily see the structure of the universe — rather than an even distribution across space, the galaxy clusters were grouped into walls and filaments, like the walls of bubbles in foam, with mostly empty space between. One of her professors liked to say that it looked like the inside of a pumpkin.

She reached out her hand and took one of the filaments between her thumb and forefinger. The strand of galaxy clusters felt like a warm, grainy string between her fingertips, and as she tugged gently it resisted weakly. It felt a bit like pumpkin guts, actually, though stretchier and slimier … almost like gritty mucus.

This was the “haptic” part of the Haptic Visualization Facility — the simulation of the sense of touch. Haptic feedback gave Dana information on gravitic attraction, density and composition of the interstellar medium, average stellar population and temperature of the galaxy clusters, and much more, in a way that she could appreciate both consciously and intuitively. But because the sense of touch was so ancient, located in the brain’s most primitive areas and integrated most closely with the autonomic nervous system, it was surprisingly difficult to fool — an effective touch simulation required massive amounts of computing capacity. And to simulate this enormous dataset, hundreds of exabytes, she needed every bit of the HVF’s considerable power.

Which was why she had to make the most effective use of her time. She’d experienced HVF simulations before, though never one this large; she shouldn’t be wasting precious minutes marveling at the technology. Honestly, what had gotten into her?

Dana turned to the control panel to zoom in a little closer. But as she turned, another wave of vertigo overtook her, and the galaxies seemed to flare in intensity. She closed her eyes against the sudden bright colors…

… and the view didn’t change.

Again she closed her eyes. Nothing. The galaxies in her view continued to shine vibrantly, almost overwhelming in their brightness and variety of colors. She squeezed her eyes tight shut, feeling the muscles tense, but they didn’t shut out the view.

Instinctually she put her hands to her eyes, but that didn’t help either. She felt her closed eyes beneath her fingers, but her hands didn’t block the view.

Now she was getting a little frightened. She pulled her hands away from her eyes and held them in front of herself.

She couldn’t see her hands.

She couldn’t see herself at all.

She felt herself. Her body was there. Her hands could touch it, and she felt her hands on her body. Her simulated hands on her simulated body. If she were actually running her real hands over her real body, she’d feel the straps and the tug of the IV. Was her body writhing on the couch, straining against its straps, or lying passively? She couldn’t tell. Her own body might as well be fourteen billion light-years away, it was so far beyond her perceptions…

No. Stop it. Don’t panic. There was just some kind of glitch in the system. The HVF software was one-of-a-kind, constantly under development — largely by Computer Science graduate students — and it did have more than its share of bugs. She’d work around this bug the way she’d learned to work around so many others.

But it was still unnerving not to be able to shut out the view of the universe. Especially since it seemed to be getting more vibrant and dynamic by the minute. In fact, it was becoming overwhelming. The light of a hundred billion galaxies pierced her vision with an almost physical force.

Unthinkingly, she put up her hands to block the light … and felt them tangle in the threads and membranes of the universe. Trapped like a bug in a spider’s web. Her heart pounded and she thrashed in helpless, irrational panic.

One of her flailing, invisible hands smacked into the control panel, sending it sailing off into the darkness to her left. She tried to grab it before it got away, but succeeded only in pressing several buttons … including the Hide button in the upper right. The panel vanished, still moving quickly away.

And she began to fall.

Dana shrieked as the structure of the universe expanded, or she shrank. Filaments and webs of galaxies whipped past her, stroking and clinging and tickling her hands, her face, her legs … some particularly dense knots of young galaxies burned her skin like hot sparks.

She must have triggered a continuous zoom toward the center of the simulation; it felt like a factor of ten every ten seconds. She groped for the hidden control panel, but the onrushing galaxies were so bright … and she couldn’t even see her own hands … and her head spun, and she had trouble keeping focus. No matter how far she reached, the control panel was nowhere to be found.

And if she couldn’t find the control panel, she couldn’t hit the panic switch that would shut the simulation down.

This shouldn’t be happening, she told herself. As amazing as the universe was, and as impressive as the haptic interface was, she shouldn’t be so overwhelmed by it. It had to be some kind of interaction between the glaucoma drugs and the interface drugs.

Knowing this didn’t help. She was still
falling
! Plummeting uncontrollably through the universe a quintillion times faster than light. And her heart and guts wouldn’t listen to her brain.

She was now a hundred million light-years tall, and shrinking rapidly. The bubble-like structure of the universe quickly grew so large that it became invisible, replaced by clusters of galaxies … the forest vanishing, the trees becoming individual. Each galaxy cluster was a loose ball, basketball-sized or so. She collided with one as she fell, sending tiny galaxies scattering in every direction; the sensation on her skin was like sand grains in a sandstorm. Intellectually she knew it was only a simulation, but she still felt guilty for the destruction she’d caused.

Dana fell through the dense wall of galaxy clusters into the empty space between. Ahead of her another strand of clusters grew and grew, visibly separating into individual galaxies as she watched. They didn’t twinkle like stars seen from Earth — the interstellar medium was hard vacuum, compared to Earth’s atmosphere — but they seemed to vibrate with drug-induced intensity, their light reaching out to claw at her eyes.

She searched frantically for the control panel, feeling all around the place it had vanished, reaching as far as she could … but again and again her invisible fingers found nothing. Her heart pounded in her throat and she fought down panic. It was getting harder and harder to remember that this was a simulation. Her primitive monkey brain insisted she was plummeting to her death.

She fell into the strand of clusters, galaxies flashing by on either side. Each galaxy was now hubcap-sized … she must have shrunk to only a million light-years tall. The galaxies were beautiful and terrible, shimmering glowing confections, spirals and disks and strange elongated commas. Most had a thick bulge in the center, a dense conglomeration of stars … the heat of the nearby ones felt like a burning road flare, and their gravity tugged at her stomach as she fell past. A barred spiral galaxy smashed itself to bits against her invisible leg as she passed, feeling like a hot buzz-saw of stars on her calf. She cried out from the pain. Another galaxy, this one an irregular elliptical giant almost half as big as she was, came rushing up at her and she curled up in terror, but it just missed her.

What if the galactic core, with its super-massive black hole, had hit her? Could she die in the simulation? There were supposed to be safeguards … but the HVF was no ordinary sim, and between software bugs and experimental drugs she might be beyond its parameters.

She looked around, fighting down nausea as her invisible, simulated head spun. After that last near-miss she seemed to have fallen into another empty area, this time a space between galaxies within a galaxy cluster. Based on how large that last galaxy had been, she must be about a hundred thousand light-years tall now, and the average distance between galaxies in a cluster was a few million light-years. She might be safe.

But as she looked down, she realized she was not safe. She was falling toward the center of the simulation, and that center was Earth. The spiraling disk of the Milky Way, Earth’s home galaxy, grew and grew before her, looming with broad flat inevitability. It was like driving at full speed into a solid wall of headlights.

Dana’s headlong rush seemed to slow as the Milky Way expanded to fill her view and more, spiral arms resolving themselves into broad rivers of individual stars, but she was still going to hit it hard. She angled herself forward, held her arms ahead of her like a diver, and held her breath.

The galaxy had grown to about a hundred times as wide as her height, so she was perhaps a thousand light-years tall, when she smacked into one spiral arm. Stars and nebulae and interstellar gas battered her extended arms and face, but by now she was moving slowly enough that the blow was more like a sudden hailstorm than slamming into a wall. She gasped from the rough, scouring impact, but she didn’t think she’d broken anything.

Stunned, she fell into the galaxy as though it were a mighty ocean. The shock of her body passing through the interstellar medium made new stars spring into life, crackling like popcorn on her leading edges.

She was still shrinking. The hail of stars rapidly thinned to a hot drizzle. Soon she was mostly falling between them, with only the occasional searing impact. She must be about ten light-years tall now; the stars were about as far apart as the length of her leg. Each individual star was too small to be anything other than a blazing-hot bright point.

She fell through near-emptiness for a long time before one star began to distinguish itself from the rest, directly ahead, as she knew it must. The Earth’s sun.

How much longer could this game go on? Would she slam into the Earth, her body breaking open from the impact? Or would she keep going, deeper and deeper, vanishing into subatomic space?

No. She knew that her dataset didn’t include anything smaller than a satellite.

Unless her drug-addled brain kept going without data, making up smaller and smaller particles while her body gibbered in some mental hospital…

A stiff, gritty breeze began to push at her, chilling her skin and making her blink. She was falling through the Oort cloud, the thin sphere of cold gas and chunks of ice that surrounded the sun out to a distance of two light-years … twice her own current height.

The Oort surrounded her for a long time, as she shrank from a light-year to a light-month in height, her progress continuing to slow. Even at only one light-month tall she was still a hundred times bigger than the orbit of Neptune, the outermost of the true planets. There was an awful lot of mostly empty space in the solar system.

She was a comet now, falling inward from the Oort. Would she leave a tail behind herself as she approached the sun?

The solar system itself began to come into view before her now, the orbit of Neptune a skinny blue ellipse no longer than the palm of her hand. The ellipse only existed in the simulation, of course; the planet itself was far, far too small to be seen. Smaller ellipses just visible within Neptune’s orbit were the orbits of Uranus, Saturn, and Jupiter; Earth’s orbit was indistinguishable from the sun at this scale. She continued to decelerate, though still moving at an apparent speed that would certainly kill her if she slammed into a solid object with her physical body. And she was heading right for Earth.