by Jim Lombardo
The neon waving lines of the monitor’s screen saver flashed like a beacon from another world. Like the bracelet, the monitor seemed unharmed by the earthquake. A warning popped up, indicating remote battery power was down to 5%. Anderson wiped off a nearby chair and sat down, shook the keyboard clean, and clicked Enter. The final slide he had viewed from the last batch of collisions the night before appeared on the screen. This one resembled a white dandelion. A hint of a wry smile formed on his face as the fragments from the colliding particles had created a crude smiley face, complete with two eyes and nose. Using the mouse, he was able to command the computer to present the collision as it had appeared almost one billionth of a second earlier. At this instant in time, the smiley face was ever slightly more compressed, but still recognizable as the world-famous icon. He then backed up one more billionth of a second and the collision image was compressed even more, with a significantly smaller face that was only barely recognizable. Toggling backwards and then forward through the three images, he watched as the bits of matter dispersed to magically create the smiley face, much like a cartoon animation. He backed up and repeated the show several times more as the amusing animation provided him an unexpected and moving moment of joy.
Then something quite subtle, but unusual, caught his eye, and the childish grin disappeared from his face. He noticed that although the debris fragments were all expanding at an approximately equal rate from the center of the collision, the single roundish particle that comprised the right eye on his smiley face seemed to have hardly moved at all. Anderson focused hard on just that one smidgen as he repeatedly proceeded back and forth over the three slides. This tiny fleck was acting uniquely. He asked the computer to provide him with the previous 10 images magnified by a factor of 10, and also to make the beginning location of the right eye the center. Anderson then clicked quickly through what was 10 billionths of a second to examine the eye’s behavior. It was moving. But it was moving differently. He considered the direction it was traveling, and chills ran down his body. His breathing quickened, and he pushed himself back from the desk. Rivers of tears cascaded down his face. “Holy sweet Jesus in Heaven! That’s going southwest! We did it!”
Chapter Sixty
True
One of humanity’s most admirable qualities is the ability to find humor in the most perilous of circumstances. After the existence of the newly created object at the Titan detector was confirmed through sensitive underground listening devices, and its significance was explained to the world, ideas were proposed for encouraging a successful union between the two entities. Someone had positioned two chairs at a small circular dining table covered in white linen, with wine and cheese on top, near the estimated rendezvous point, which was a pasture in the British village of Ramsbury, about 34 miles from Titan. The town’s name seemed quite appropriate given the anticipated ramming together of the two voids. People were phoning in to radio stations with requests for romantic songs dedicated to the objects, to encourage the blossoming of their relationship. The most popular girl’s name for newborns was now Hannah.
The initial projections were for the encounter to occur in about a week and a half, at which point the original entity would be 62 miles in diameter, with a radius stretching 31 miles in the direction of Titan. The new entity, which was migrating in almost the exact path as the original had, and which shared other strikingly similar characteristics and tendencies, would by that time have traveled about 34 miles away from Titan, and would be about a quarter of a mile in width. Hannah reassured the world that even if the second object were microscopic in size, the result would be the same, that is, a reversal of the expansions.
Not a single person was able to understand her math or logic on the subject. However, ultra-fast supercomputers were supporting the mathematical reasoning behind her original theorems, once accounting for the new factors she had devised, and their complex relationships to each other. Even though the computers could not help any human understand what was going on in Hannah’s brain, they were able to at least confirm that her voluminous formulas and equations were simply…true. She remained in New Mexico to monitor the two objects on a continuous basis, while still limiting interaction with her parents in order to minimize any interference with her primary focus.
The larger globe was now visible from a distance of over 200 miles, appearing like a huge black planet rising over the horizon, its surface pocked with firestorms. A ringed depression surrounded the sphere for a distance of a couple of miles, where the earth had sunken in, as the beast swallowed up rock and soil along its outer edges from underneath. The top of the orb had permeated the stratosphere at a height of 7 miles, and scientists were now concerned about the ozone layer, which lay at an altitude of 12 to 30 miles. Damage to this protective gas layer would allow harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun to penetrate the Earth, posing a grave danger to all living organisms. The ozone layer also played a key role in controlling the temperature of the planet, and that presented a threat as well.
Despite the cataclysmic events of the past month, human casualties had fortunately been kept low. Entire villages in an expanding circumference were being methodically wiped from the map, but civilians had heeded warnings and evacuated as far away as possible, using whatever means of transportation were available. The mega-quake had caused a significant amount of property damage in the geographical areas not yet overrun by the gargantuan globe as well, but fatalities were limited there too, because those areas had also been abandoned, with the exception of those involved in dealing with the crisis.
The media was now exclusively devoted to covering the emergency. Almost the entire human race, from pole to pole, was gripped by the unfolding story. The Inuit in the Canadian Arctic, the Maohi on the island of Tahiti, the Malagasy of Madagascar huddled together around television sets, radios, and computers, watching, listening, and wondering what outcome awaited human civilization. There were only a handful of remote locations where word of the crisis had yet to travel. These included communities with only primitive technology, those isolated by water, dense forest or desert, and some tribes who resisted interaction with modern civilization. They all went about their daily lives, blissfully oblivious to the menace that the world was contending with.
The same was true of all non-human life forms, without the ability to comprehend the situation. Whales majestically careened through the murky deep of the oceans. A dragonfly rested atop a water violet in a marshy meadow. A male emperor penguin stood guard faithfully in the frigid dark at the bottom of the planet with an egg warmly nestled between his feet and furry underbelly. For these animals, life was familiar. Also unwitting, but holding a stake in the outcome, existed a being, adhering to the walls of a deep, narrow geological pocket that had been meticulously sheathed in gold. The tube-shaped entity inhabited a large moon orbiting a gas planet adrift in the heart of the Andromeda galaxy. By a unique process of cellular regeneration and rejuvenation, this species was biologically immortal, except in cases of trauma, which the void would eventually inflict if not disrupted.
Satellite imagery monitored the steady growth of the first object, and ground teams tracked the smaller one as the two progressed on a direct collision course. A few days after creation of the new object, scientists were able to more accurately predict that the union would occur in seven days, the following Sunday morning, between three and four o’clock a.m. Greenwich Mean Time. An official countdown clock overseen by EPIC was reproduced and broadcast all over the world, including on enormous digital displays in Times Square in New York and Piccadilly Square in London, as well as countless other media centers around the world.
Chapter Sixty-One
Enlightenment
Hannah was now broadcasting addresses every morning from Los Alamos. They were all relatively brief, straightforward, and rather repetitive, because nothing of significance had changed in her mind. She reassured everyone of her firm belief that the objects
would both begin reversing course after impact. Listeners were implored to do their best to continue on with their lives as normally as possible. Eat your meals. Take your medicine. Plant your crops. Do your job. Get your sleep. Say your prayers. Support those around you who depend on you. Hannah explained that everyone’s efforts would allow for a faster and more orderly return to normalcy after the crisis was over.
As usual, she beseeched people to be unfaltering in their faith that mankind would overcome this challenge, just as it had so many times before. Concerned that her reports might become monotonous, she decided to end each one with a “special morsel of the day” to keep people tuned in and attentive. One day she announced the release of a new application named the “Hann-app,” which could be downloaded onto mobile devices, and provide updates and emergency information.
After her Friday address, with a mere two days left before the projected union, Hannah sat alone in her underground chamber, motionless and in total silence. With her elbows resting on the table, she held her head in her hands with her eyes closed for 30 solid minutes.
Monica watched her daughter through the two-way camera with concern, and nudged Marshall.
“Everything okay, Hannah?” he asked into a microphone.
The words shook her out of her meditative state, and she looked up at the camera appearing both dazed and annoyed.
“Please, Marshall. You can bug me in 48 hours. Yes, I’m totally okay.”
Hannah stretched her arms out for a few seconds, then pushed her hair back from her face. She nudged her chair away from the desk a bit, folded her arms in front of her, and then lowered her chin down to rest upon them. Slowly her eyelids sealed shut again. She sat without flinching for another hour and a half.
“Is she sleeping?” Marshall wondered aloud.
“No, she never sleeps,” replied Monica. “She does this all the time. Probably just resting her eyes while she works. This is unusually long for her, though.”
Then suddenly Hannah’s head lifted. She unfurled her arms out in front of her with palms up and her eyes opened.
“Ohhhhhhhhhh!” she said as if she had just been told the surprising answer to a question of unimaginable intrigue.
All Hannah’s life, despite her superhuman brilliance, there had always been tantalizing questions that continued to nag and befuddle her. These went all the way back to the time she had watched a plastic baby bottle falling out of Monica’s overstuffed bag in the first days of her life. What was causing the effect that pulled things towards the ground? How could space and time ever have a beginning? How could they ever have an end? On the other hand, how could they not have a beginning or end? Both scenarios had always seemed impossible. The pendulum was swinging back and forth in the swings at the playground, and in the grandfather clock at Kip’s office in New York. But why was it swinging back and forth in the Universe? Equally confounding, and no less intriguing, was, why did she exist? She thought back to that first time she had seen her own reflection off the glass of their TV back home. And why did consciousness exist? That had always seemed bizarre to her. Why did the Universe’s matter transform itself into something that could actually think about itself? That seemed entirely unnecessary from a physics standpoint, or from any standpoint. She had always yearned to find the answers to these questions, and now twisting that thorn in her side was the true necessity to unlock that final mystery door to corroborate her plan for destroying the object.
All of the mathematical equations of the past month, along with every one of her life experiences over the past six years had surged throughout the neural network of her brain for two straight hours. During this period, one hundred billion nerve cells pulsed with searing intensity, collaborating amongst each other via waves of electro-chemical signaling, riding upon one hundred trillion synaptic connections. Hannah was striving valiantly for clarity. She was struggling to be free from her cerebral restraints. Around the one-hour mark, she had decided to initiate a selective purge of some unessential information from the databanks of her mind to boost her conceptual intellect further. It was as if she was trying to reach the clouds in a hot air balloon, and knew she had to shed sandbags to get to them. She was comfortable and accustomed with this process, at least on a smaller scale, even though it was irreversible, requiring her to relearn the deleted information if ever desired. Suddenly gone from her brain cells was the entire Finnish language that she had taken pride in perfecting, along with such files as the one with 401 English words that were 17 letters long. Later on she could always get these back if she wanted.
At the one and a half hour mark she realized she was going to need even more neurons to extend her reach, and she committed to permanently deleting memories from her life that had been occupying an exorbitant amount of room. Unfortunately, the more meaningful the experiences were to her, the more embedded they were, and hence more neurons were being dedicated to them. Regrettably, once removed, these memories would be lost forever. She would need to rely on pictures, videos, or storytelling by others to learn of them. But she desperately wanted to get to those clouds. She deprioritized removing Robin, the troubled bird savant from the genius camp, as Hannah knew that he depended on their friendship to keep his demons at bay. Also non-negotiable was parting with the memory of Ellie, the young cancer patient she had befriended. No doubt she’d need to rely on the inspiration Ellie provided, as she worked to eliminate other human problems in the future. These included hunger and chemical addiction, and one malady that she considered the most devastating and destructive of all—aging.
But in the space of just a few minutes, she wiped numerous treasured remembrances from her brain. Gone were her last two birthday parties, as well as a family camping trip to Acadia National Park in Maine. She even dislodged and expunged the day she had rescued her father and herself from the riptide at Good Harbor Beach. During this process, Hannah watched every detail of these events rapidly recede and perish into the eternal abyss, unwinding in reverse order like a movie playing backwards at ultra-velocity. “!editpir a s‘tI !yddaD ,oN !yddaD ,oN”… “!yddaD ,evaw a semoc ereH”....“!deah-ttub gniylf ouy ereh kcab teG” Though it grieved her, she felt she had to let them go.
And then all of a sudden, there was the explanation in front of her. All held together in her mind. The final curtain had drawn open to reveal what had been hiding behind it. To all of Hannah’s questions were the interconnected answers for everything. The simplicity astounded her. It was as if she had seen a magic trick that completely baffled and amazed her, but then after being told how it worked, was suddenly demystified, and she couldn’t believe how shortsighted she was not to have figured it out long ago.
Imagine being dropped onto a path that is bare and unmarked, with nothing around you to help you with your bearings. This walkway represents both space and time, and you’re strolling along, wondering where the path began and where it will end. You have a compass with you that confirms you’re facing forward in a perfectly straight direction, so certainly the path must have a starting point, and it must have an end. Nothing can go on forever. Yet there is an easy way that it can. After a while you’re shown a three-dimensional map of your route, and given that new perspective you see that you’re actually walking inside of a gigantic wheel that is turning in the opposite direction with each step you take. Your brain had been considering forwards and backwards, without taking into consideration that the road itself was moving in another dimension of up and down, and in an instant you understand how this path is never-ending.
However, what if your brain didn’t have the ability to conceive that other dimension of up and down? Then you would forever be perplexed as to why there was no end to be found, walking in either direction. Now dwelling mentally in the realm of a higher, super dimension, Hannah was observing a map of the entire Universe, and everything filed neatly into place for her. She realized that the way in which conscious beings viewed and experienced sp
ace and time was just as warped as these two phenomena were themselves. Hannah could see that man’s interpretation of both space and time were creations of the brain, and that was the only place these renderings existed.
Wow...immaculate...perfect. That’s beautiful, she thought. So, finite, yes, but still unbounded. I get that. Of course, no beginning, and no end. It turned out that space and time were inextricably interwoven, and actually were two parts of the same thing, spacetime, which explained why the mind-bending questions about them had always sounded so similar. So time really does fly, she mused. And when someone says they’ll be there in a short ‘space of time’, that’s literally true.
It was now crystal clear to her how spacetime could spring out of nothing. Hannah reasoned that the unique quality of both space and time was that although they were certainly something that life forms recognized and had to contend with, they were not actually anything at all. They were both immaterial. It was real that when you wanted to go to the store, you had to travel through space to get there. And then when you arrived, you might have to wait a half hour for the store to open. You could even purchase space and time by renting a hotel room for a week. But could you ever see space or time? Could you ever touch them? Could you pick up some space and move it somewhere else? Could you hold time in your hand? The fact was that neither of them actually existed. In fact, if anything, space was the exact opposite of something existing. That rendered such questions as, “When did time begin?” and “Where does space end?” as nonsensical, because how could something start or end if it never existed in the first place? It was like asking when Batman was born in real life, or exactly how far away from your home Gotham City was. Even the character’s creator couldn’t provide you those answers. Space and time could arise from nothing because they always were nothing.