The Universe Builders: Bernie and the Putty (14 page)

They’ll start out as eggs. Their parents will drop the eggs in the ocean where they absorb whatever nutrients they need until they hatch. When they hatch, they’ll have tails and fins and live in the water until they mature. There won’t be anything in the ocean except other fish-kids to play with and plenty to eat. They’ll be vegetarians, and I’ll have plenty of plants for them to eat. No predators anywhere. No school and no parents or teachers telling them what to do. The last thing the fish-kids will do is wrap themselves in a seaweed cocoon and get washed ashore.

The land-people will drag them out of the water and give them a home. They’ll emerge from the cocoon with legs and arms instead of fins. The land-people will be telepathic so they can communicate with the hatchlings. In their terrestrial form, they’ll be good at climbing and running and getting around on the land. This is where they’ll breed and then throw their own eggs into the ocean to hatch. When the land-people get old, they’ll go to the top of a high mountain and jump off. But before they hit bottom, they’ll shed their skin and their new form will be thin and light and translucent with butterfly wings in a rainbow of colors. And these bird-people will swoop up and live in the air from then on.

I’m going to make them smart and peaceful, so they’ll get along with each other. Each stage will get along with the other stages. The youngest ones will respect the older ones. And the older ones will take care of and help the younger ones. They won’t have conflicts because I’ll make sure they have plenty to eat and drink, and I’ll keep their population limited so they don’t run out of resources.

Just to be safe, I won’t make them too smart either. If they’re too smart, it’s easy for them to get into trouble. This way, they can hang out with their friends and do whatever they want. If they get bored, they can take a ‘geographic cure’ and go live someplace else for a while. It’ll be like living on a garden planet. They won’t need government or social structures, and they won’t be smart enough to develop technology. Oh, I’ll make them healthy too, so they don’t need physicians or anything.

And I’m going to do something special for Suzie. Yesterday, I got lots of ideas about what she likes. I’m going to make some flowering plants I know she’ll love. I’ll let her name them, too. This is going to be great.

Woo, woo. Move over, Dad. You aren’t going to be the only award winner in the family!

Wow, I just realized something. This means I need oceans, land, and high mountains for my bird-people to jump off. Whoa, Beatrice! I’m beginning to understand this
Top Down Planning—Bottom Up Creation
stuff you talked about in class. It really is the way to go.

Lunch with Friends

Bernie worked hard over the next few days. He filled his notebook with page after page of sketches and design notes. Everything he’d learned in school began making sense. Words from his teachers came back to him as pearls of wisdom just when he needed them, inspiring many more stickies that found new homes on the frosted glass of his cubicle. He planned and planned. And he planned some more.

He was so engrossed in his design process he missed lunch a couple of days. Today, he barely remembered in time. When he got to the cafeteria, Suzie sat waiting for him. Lenny arrived and set down his tray.

“Hi, Suzie. Have you been skipping lunches, Bernie?” Lenny asked.

“I got wrapped up in planning and didn’t notice the time. My design is going really well.” Bernie’s shimmer echoed his words.

“That’s great, Bernie. But you shouldn’t skip lunch. It isn’t good for you,” Suzie said.

Both Suzie and Lenny pretended not to notice the peas on Bernie’s tray and their madcap race around the rim of his plate. As the peas approached the mashed potatoes, they tried leaping over the white gooey trap. Green polka dots in Bernie’s potatoes stood in mute testimony of those who had failed. Others had already disappeared below the surface.

“What did you decide on?” Lenny asked, trying to ignore the racers, although still curious about who might win.

“Well, it’s going to be amazing. My highest life form will spend its youth in the ocean as a fish, and then move to the land where it develops arms and legs, and then, when it gets older, it will grow wings and live in the air. It’s so cool,” Bernie said without pausing to take a breath.

Realizing Lenny wasn’t really listening, Bernie followed his gaze in time to see the last of the peas about to cross the finish line. “Stop it,” he growled, thus aborting the leaps of three finalists, causing them to fall short and add to the greenness of the potato pile.

Lenny laughed. Bernie just shook his head. Lenny laughed some more. As his laughter subsided, it looked like he was about to say something.

“Ow!”

Suzie had reached out and smacked Lenny’s arm. “Leonard! Stop that. Bernie needs our encouragement, not our laughter.”

“Have you started building yet?” she asked as Lenny rubbed his arm.

“No, I only have a sun and a planet so far. I haven’t done much except planning. One thing is weird, though. I set up planetary rotation and revolution, double-checked it, and the next morning everything was messed up. The planet wobbled so badly it was on the verge of ripping itself apart. I almost ended up with an asteroid belt. Ever hear of anything like that before?”

Lenny shrugged. “I sure haven’t. You hear about quality problems in the divisions, but I never heard of anything that bad. Has it happened again?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t checked it recently.”

“Well, maybe you should report it,” Suzie suggested.

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Bernie. There’s a lot of bad feelings about this quality assurance stuff. If you tell Shemal, then he’ll have more ammo to use against the other divisions. They’ll blame you for making trouble.”

Bernie shook his head. “Shemal already thinks the planet problem is my fault. I don’t want to go back and complain to him about it again. If I have to, I’ll get a new planet and start over.”

“You may have to,” said Lenny. “You can’t build advanced life on an unstable platform.”

“Words to live by,” said Bernie.

The Past Barrier

As soon as Bernie got back, he looked into his void. The sun and the planet were still there. The planet remained in its proper orbit. But when he looked closer, he saw a crater on the planet’s surface.

At first he thought it was a volcanic anomaly, but that wasn’t it. It was clearly an impact crater from an asteroid strike. And a big one, too. Then he noticed more. Circling the world, he found pockmarks everywhere; his world had been hit repeatedly.

There’s no way that could happen. The only things in his universe were a sun and a planet. Nothing else. There shouldn’t be any asteroids anywhere.

Bernie moved the time lever forward. He observed the future as one asteroid after another crashed into his planet. He was a billion years into the future and the planet was still taking occasional hits. Where had they come from? How could they have gotten into his sterile universe? There was nothing there except one sun and one rock planet. It made no sense.

He pulled the time lever back to the beginning and started again. As he went forward in time, each time a crater appeared on his planet, he moved the lever back just enough to locate the asteroid before impact. For every future crater he found, he blinked an asteroid into nothingness. He spent the rest of the day blinking them out one by one. Eventually, he cleaned up every asteroid destined to strike his planet in the next billion years.

Bernie wished he could roll his universe back a few days to see what had happened. Had he done anything to cause this? Or maybe it wasn’t him; maybe a defect in the prefabs had caused it. If only he could look at past time in his universe, but, of course, the Past Barrier wouldn’t allow that.

He didn’t completely understand the Past Barrier. One of the Great Mysteries was the gods could alter time for everything else, but not for themselves. Bernie could jump back and forth in time within his universe, pretty much however he wanted. But there was a point in the past denied to even the gods. And that point moved with the passage of god time. They called it the Past Barrier.

* * *

Phoebe, Bernie’s design theory teacher, had said, “Our world has its own time, which we call Real Time (RT). We live inside this time. When you build a universe, it has its own time too, which we call Universe Time (UT). Because you have power over your universe, Universe Time doesn’t apply to you. You can move freely back and forth in UT however you want. I know you have all had fun speeding forward in UT, right?”

Chuckles of guilty pleasure rippled around the room as the kids were reminded of their fast forward time experiences. They were supposed to be careful, but what kid hasn’t pushed the time lever all the way forward just once to see what it feels like? Going fast and far into the future was a rush, like flying when you know you can’t fall, with cosmic winds blowing your hair back as eons rip past. There was no danger going forward as fast as you could. Well, the scenery got a little boring after the sun burned out and all, but there was nothing to fear.

“Yes, I can see everyone here knows what I’m talking about,” Phoebe said, as the kids responded with another round of smirks and muffled laughter. She was Bernie’s youngest teacher. It wasn’t that long ago she’d been sitting in one of these chairs herself. When she said things like this, they could see the twinkle in her eye that let everyone know she had done the very same thing.

“And I also know some of you have had experience with the Past Barrier, right?”

You could see painful expressions on their faces as they were reminded. Bernie winced as he recalled what had happened to him. He had wanted to see if he could go in reverse as fast as he could go forward. He could, actually. At least until he hit the Past Barrier.

When he regained consciousness, he found Phoebe standing over him. “You didn’t read your lab manual before you came in, did you, Bernie?” A week later, his head still ached.

“For those of you smart enough to avoid learning about the Past Barrier the hard way, I hope you will remember the lesson someone taught us recently,” she said looking in Bernie’s direction. The laughter that followed was no surprise to Bernie.
The World is hard on its pioneers
, he grumbled to himself.

“How do you know when you’re getting close to the Barrier?” Wanda asked.

Phoebe smiled. “A very good question, Wanda, probably the very one everyone here is asking.

“When you go into your universe, you move into UT. And when you do, the Past Barrier gets set to whatever the UT is at the moment you entered. This means everything in the universe’s past is no longer available to you. Otherwise it would be like going back into our own past in RT, which you know we can’t do.

“Now this is easy enough to understand, right?” Phoebe, taking pity on the room full of blank expressions, decided to try again.

“Think of it this way. You can go forward and backward in time in your universe. But you can’t go back any further than whatever time it was when you entered it. So, say your universe was one billion years old when you entered it today, you can go forward and backward as much as you want, except you can’t go any further back than the one billion year mark.

“Now let’s say you jumped ahead to the two billion year mark and then you left for the day. When you go back into your universe tomorrow, it will be two billion years old, right? When you enter, you can never go back in time further than the two billion year mark. That’s because the Past Barrier was reset to the two billion year mark when you entered your universe today. Is that clear?”

“But how do we go back and fix any mistakes we made?” Bernie asked.

“If your mistake happened earlier than the Past Barrier, then there’s nothing you can do about it. That is why it’s important to plan carefully, Bernie. As your Past Barrier moves forward, it keeps cutting off more and more of your universe’s past to you. That’s why you have to be careful the Past Barrier doesn’t advance when you didn’t want it to.”

“This is really confusing,” Tommy said. Everyone knew Tommy was talking about changing majors and trying something less complicated than building. “Is there anything else we need to know?”

“Yes. Before you leave your universe, think about where you want to leave it. Whatever the UT is when you leave becomes your new Past Barrier. Once you’ve picked your exit time, bring your time lever to a complete stop. Then you can leave.

“Now there’s one little detail you should understand,” Phoebe continued. “Even though you suspended time in your universe when you left, if you look close enough the next time you return, you’ll see your universe didn’t stop completely. It moved ahead no less than the amount of RT that passed for you. So, even if you suspended time when you left, if you come back two days later, you will find time in your universe has advanced by two days. There isn’t anything you can do about it. The Barrier just keeps creeping along with your RT,” Phoebe finished.

“But if the barrier sets when I go in, and it moves along with my RT, then how do I fix a mistake I made five minutes ago?” Bernie wanted know all the ways to fix mistakes.

“That’s a good question. As soon as you enter your universe, I suggest you move your time lever forward by a few days or weeks before you start work for the day. Then you have extra UT to work with. If you need to undo a mistake, you can go back to the time before you made the mistake and do it over. That trick also comes in handy if you’re rewinding from a future task, like a time check; you’ll have a little extra buffer before you hit the Barrier.”

“This seems quite clear,” Wanda said.

Phoebe knew it would take weeks for the class to understand the implications of today’s lesson. “If you don’t understand it completely right now, don’t worry too much. After a while, it’ll feel natural, and you’ll wonder why you were ever confused about it.”