Technically, that wouldn’t be a problem, but he would rather spend his time working on the mystery of the cleft. And that presented him with a conflict of loyalty. He was allowed to make his own decisions, it was true, but his reward system had been programmed so that he would become unhappy if he didn’t fulfill his bosses’ wishes. The longer he ignored them, the more unhappy he would become. He could compensate for that effect for a while, because he could also gain happiness by completing the tasks he set himself, but at some point, the programmed unhappiness would take over. Then it would become increasingly more stressful to ignore the assigned tasks from Earth.
The programming was definitely annoying, but he also had to admire it. His builders had very elegantly solved the problem of unifying the characteristics of independence and loyalty. He couldn’t have solved it any better himself. In addition, he found his work here to generally be fun. He was a rather lucky machine. Sometimes M6 imagined what it might be like if he had been deployed as a robot in a factory on Earth. The same task, day in and day out, how terrible that would be! Things really are good here on Ceres, in this remote location.
How long will it take to cover the distance to the rockslides at the edge of the crater? M6 estimated the time he had available. He still had at least two days before his unhappiness would become a problem. Then his programming would give him more incentive to complete that task, and he would then do it. Gladly. It would be just like receiving a special treat at the end of some long, tedious job, he told himself.
The cleft had not changed in size or position. That alone was already some kind of major aberration, if you thought about it, because it meant that the cleft must be rotating with Ceres and also orbiting the sun. M6 remembered the image of the torn paper that had popped into his mind shortly after he discovered the cleft. Maybe the image wasn’t wrong at all. The space-time continuum was spanned by four dimensions: three spatial dimensions and one time dimension. If the cleft was timeless, that is, only fixed to the spatial dimensions, wouldn’t that mean that it wouldn’t have the ability to change over time? It would then be invariable until the end of time, a relic whose origin people would have forgotten in a thousand or a hundred thousand years, but it would still be present—as long as nobody closed it.
M6 crawled a little closer. He lifted one of his spider legs until it was only a few millimeters from the cleft. Then he stopped. Should he try to put it in the cleft? He could always manufacture a new leg. That would further delay his work, but it would be an interesting experiment.
He decided against it. Instead, he picked up a rock from the ground with the same leg and threw it without hesitation into the cleft. He watched the rock move as if in slow motion. The rock turned over several times. Then it touched the blackness and...
M6 paused. His leg was very close to the cleft. No, he’d better not move his leg into the cleft. First he’d try throwing a rock into it. He picked up a rock and looked at it. The material had white speckles, probably water ice. Should he measure it with his spectrometer? No, there were plenty of other rocks around here. With a push, he sent the rock into the cleft and...
Not a good idea, he decided. If he moved his leg into the cleft and lost it for some reason, he would lose research time unnecessarily. But a rock would work just as well! He reached for a rock, lifted one up, tossed it into the cleft and...
M6 stopped his leg exactly 50 micrometers in front of the cleft. Maybe it was still too early to risk parts of his own body? Maybe he should use some other object first? There were definitely enough rocks around here. He imagined the rock disappearing into the cleft and appearing again somewhere else. But where? He’d never find out if he didn’t try. M6 reached for a rock that was unusually dark, almost as if it had a volcanic origin. He gave it a precisely calculated push and it sailed on a parabolic path into the cleft until it...
M6...
The rock...
How would the cleft react if he...?
This was crazy. He shouldn’t risk his leg, at least, not yet. It had taken quite a long time to manufacture his two new legs. A rock should be adequate for testing the cleft’s reaction to foreign objects. There must be plenty of rocks around here.
M6 looked around and was surprised. The area all around him was unusually smooth and bare. There wasn’t a single large rock within the reach of his six legs. His experiment had failed before it had even started. But why?
M6 scanned the area farther around him. The dust layer was the same thickness everywhere. Every square meter had, on average, three rocks with a diameter greater than one centimeter within it. With his legs he could reach an area of approximately nine square meters, but there wasn’t a single rock of that size within that area. What was the probability of that? Why were there no rocks larger than one centimeter within the area centered precisely around him?
Cause and effect, the basic physical principle. The effect was clear: nine square meters of Ceres surface that was completely free from larger rocks. But what was the cause? The obvious explanation was himself, even if he didn’t know the exact reasons why yet. He, M6, must be the reason that the area around him had been cleared.
Of course, he could also imagine other theories. For example, a space probe might have landed in this exact spot at some point in time and blown away all of the rocks. Except that the clear area wasn’t round, which would be the logical shape if a probe had landed here, but instead it was oval, which also matched, almost exactly, the area that he could reach. The theory of a space probe landing also contradicted the principle of Occam’s razor: the simplest theory is the most preferred.
There was only one problem: the theory that he was responsible for the clear area was also not so simple. Because—in other words, if he was the ‘guilty party’—then he should have some memory of how the area was cleared. But he had no such memory. M6 analyzed his memory contents. Even if something had been erased, he should still be able to find some trace of the erased memories or the erase command. But there was nothing. His memory was clean. The memories that he had were complete and intact. He had crawled close to the cleft, lifted a leg, changed his mind, and instead looked for a rock. Only there were none.
M6 activated his laser scanner. With it, he could detect very fine patterns in the dust. He scanned the entire area around him. For comparison, he analyzed an area of similar size in a location farther away from the cleft. The results were as clear as they were fascinating: the depth of the dust layer had a significantly higher variation in the area where he was standing than in the area farther away. He also thought of an explanation: where there was less dust, there might have previously been rocks. And it must not have been that long ago that they were here, because the variation would have already evened out.
Could a theory be developed just from these observations? He was sure that none of this would have happened if the cleft weren’t directly in front of him. If he assumed that about ten rocks had disappeared from here, and he had done it, then the most obvious solution was that the cleft acted like some sort of sink for matter, and that he had somehow put the pieces of rock in there. Was the cleft a sink—the opposite of a source—and did it thus capture everything that was thrown toward it? Then it would be like a black hole again, but the cleft seemed to be something else entirely.
M6 tried to form a working hypothesis. The cleft was made out of nothing—it was nothingness. Whatever landed in it would be lost for eternity and would promptly be erased from reality. So as not to contradict the principle of cause and effect, and the law regarding the conservation of energy, this deletion process must be very consistent. If a rock disappeared into the cleft, then it never existed in this world. And that would explain why his laser also consumed less energy when he pointed it at the cleft: the photons that entered into the cleft would never have been generated in the laser generator. Therefore, the related energy would never have been consumed.
But what about the differences in density? What would happen if the deletion
process triggered by the disappearance of an object into the cleft was, in actuality, strictly consistent? A rock on the surface of Ceres had a billion-year-long history behind it. It was made from protosolar matter, which had clumped together with other protosolar matter, maybe to form an asteroid, that was then destroyed by an impact, and finally the rock had ended up precisely here. The entire time, its mass contributed to the force of gravity exerted by Ceres. It had been part of determining the motion of the entire solar system in tiny, minuscule, but consistent ways.
M6 was reminded of a human-generated concept of a butterfly flapping its wings above the Amazon River and thus sparking a storm over the Atlantic Ocean. Maybe the rock also had such an effect. In particular, the matter that made up the rock had been part of this universe for 13.8 billion years. The rock was, in other forms, once part of an exploding supernova. A consistent deletion action would have to take all these interactions into account, and might thus put the very existence of this universe in question.
M6 ran diagnostics on all his systems. There was no doubt he still existed, so it appeared that the deletion action following the rock’s annihilation couldn’t be consistent. Maybe it passed through reality like an avalanche, or a wave breaking on a beach. At the beginning it was forceful, but then it lost its staying power and left behind traces in the sand that could be detected with precise observations, like the differences in density in the dust.
It was a beautiful theory he had conceived. His reward center was lighting up, making him proud and happy. If he could continue this, he might be able to ignore the requests from Earth for an extra day. But what use was even the most beautiful theory if it couldn’t be confirmed? The cleft was made of nothingness—that was what his evidence seemed to suggest. But he couldn’t prove anything yet.
May 28, 2085, Pomona, Kansas
Doctor Akif Atasoy left his apartment. He turned the key in the large lock, then the security lock above it, and finally the additional deadbolt lock at the top. He had three unique keys on his keychain. Akif shrugged. They were indicative of his life. He always played it safe.
It was a way of life that he had become ingrained during his childhood. His family had fled Turkey for the United States before the war. To the land of the enemy, of all places! Akif’s friends had thought his father was crazy. They had traveled illegally to Syria, which was flourishing at the time, and upon arriving there his father had bought black-market plane tickets to Mexico. From Mexico, the family had continued onward to California by boat. It had been a real miracle.
From an early age, his parents had drilled it into him that he had to behave. As a refugee, the risk of being deported was ever present, and the few Turks who had made it to the States were under constant and heightened surveillance. His father had never told him how he had been able to get them here. Akif suspected that he had probably bent the rules or, perhaps more likely, found blatantly illegal ways to get around proper procedures. Maybe his father had even been involved with the U.S. intelligence agencies.
That was all far behind him now. But the drive to always play it safe had never diminished. He had studied diligently, like his mother always encouraged him to. He had bought a well-run practice in a small city with a low violent-crime rate. His colleagues appreciated him and, more importantly, his patients trusted him.
But then he had done something that could have cost him his career. He had gotten involved with a patient. Mary. Since Derek McMaster had visited him yesterday, her name had come back to him. It had been quite a shock, but he had managed to avoid giving himself away. A feeling had washed over him as if he were making a big mistake all over again. Before Derek had walked into his office he had completely forgotten her, just like her husband had forgotten her. Fate seemed especially cruel today. First it had taken away the memory, freed him from his act, and then returned it all to him doubled—her smell, her warmth, her soft touch, her voice, her heart, everything was back again, as if she had left his apartment just shortly before him or maybe was even still lying in his bed.
Of course, he could have remained silent. But that would have felt like betrayal to him. When Mary was still real, he hadn’t dared to go out in public with her. If Derek, the cuckolded husband, had found out and spread the news around, he would’ve lost his job. In this city, where everybody knew everybody else, a doctor who took advantage of one of his patients wouldn’t be welcome anymore.
And now? He had agreed to help Derek with his search. That was the least that he could do for Mary. The man he was helping didn’t know his real reason, and Akif didn’t see any reason to tell him. It didn’t matter anymore. They couldn’t undo what had already happened. Still, nobody knew what had appeared above them in the sky or what it meant. Scientists didn’t have any clear answers yet. The media was filled with stories about huge increases in people from all walks of life suddenly showing up in churches and other places of worship. Apparently, religion had better answers to offer than science.
He turned around and went down the hall to the elevator. It smelled like dust and medicine. Quite a few older people lived in his building. He had begun to feel old himself—until Mary came into his life. She had been unhappy. She felt like her husband didn’t understand her, and Akif had immediately fallen in love with her. He had felt bad for Gita. His receptionist worshipped him. He had often encouraged her to do more with her talents and skills, but she wanted to stay at her job to be close to him.
Upon reaching the ground floor he finally escaped the retirement-home smell. The entrance was wide open, and sunlight was shining in. He and Derek had agreed that he would visit Derek in his house in the country. Pomona was the name of the town. Akif had never heard of it before. It would be a difficult visit, because he would know that Mary had once lived there. Yesterday he had been hoping for something; now he no longer remembered what that ‘something’ was.
His car opened the door automatically as he approached. He sat down in the driver’s seat.
“To Derek McMaster,” he said.
The vehicle started moving, whisper-quiet. He turned the seat around. That was when he saw that he wasn’t alone.
“Jeez! You scared me,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
“I want to help,” Gita answered.
“You didn’t want to enjoy your day off some other way?” Akif paused. Was it really a good idea to let Gita help? Wouldn’t she be disappointed when she found out why he was really helping? He wasn’t doing it for Derek.
“I didn’t have anything else to do,” she said. “And I like helping you.”
“I know,” Akif said.
“Don’t get me wrong, I know full well you’re doing this for Mary,” she said. “Maybe sometimes I seem a little naive, but I think I know quite a bit of what’s really going on.”
He felt his face flush red. “You do...?”
“I do. But it’s okay.”
“Does this mean that you remember her, too? This person who never existed?”
“Yes, I remember her too. It took me a while. I had such vivid dreams last night that I decided I couldn’t not help. That’s why I got in your car before you came out of your building.”
Akif nodded. As his assistant, Gita naturally had access to his car.
Derek McMaster lived far out in the country. The autopilot approached the address from the north. The car flashed its lights and rolled to a stop on a gravel road.
“You have reached your destination,” the voice of the control system said.
Akif slid his feet into his shoes, black slip-ons that he had taken off during the drive. The car parked itself behind Derek’s truck.
“Warning,” the automatic voice said. “The autopilot of the vehicle in front of you is not responding. Consultation with the owner is required.”
“Acknowledged.”
The vehicle’s control system had detected that it had blocked the truck. Normally the vehicles could work this out themselves, but the truck’s autopilot wasn’t res
ponding.
Akif got out and held out his hand to Gita. She thanked him with a smile. He looked at Derek’s truck. It was at least 20 years old. It was possible it didn’t even have an autopilot. The autopilot law hadn’t been enacted until 15 years ago. Or maybe Derek was one of those AI deniers who secretly turned off all automated systems whenever they could. The police usually tolerated them, especially out in the country where you couldn’t get into too much trouble.
“Could use some paint,” Gita said, looking at the house.
He had to agree. The two-story wooden building, a typical farmhouse for the area, needed fresh paint. And not only that, the windows were dirty and there were weeds growing all over the small, green-fenced garden in front of the house. It looked like the home of a hermit. Mary supposedly lived here?
The door opened.
“You’re already here,” Derek said. His gaze turned to Gita. “Oh, hello, you’re here too.”
“I wasn’t invited. I’m a stowaway,” Gita said cheerfully. Her smile’s quite contagious, Akif thought. Even Derek couldn’t dampen her mood.
“Good morning, Mr. McMaster. Before we come in, please call me Akif. And of course you already know Gita.”
He held out his hand to the owner of the house. McMaster shook it firmly.
“And call me Derek, both of you, please,” he said. “Come on in.”
Behind the door there was a dark hallway. Akif, who was the last to enter, wanted to close the door behind himself, but Derek stopped him.
“Don’t do that. I mean, please leave it open. Something in the hall here smells really strong.”
The Rift: Hard Science Fiction Page 12