Mercury Shrugs

by Robert Kroese

  “This is the inner sanctum of the Outpost,” said John. “The Iris of the Eye, if you will. A bit overwhelming, I know. Give me a moment.” He pointed at one of the icons at the base of the dome and it lit up. He then made a sweeping motion with his hand and the entire display was swept clean. They were left in darkness except for the glow of the floor and the icons around the base of the dome. He pointed at another icon and suddenly the display was filled with what appeared to be an aerial photograph of a desert landscape. In the middle of the display was a small blue pyramid.

  “That’s the Outpost,” John said. He moved his fingers over the display and the landscape shifted down until the blue pyramid was at the top edge of the display. He pointed his finger at what looked like a swarm of insects on the bottom of the display. “And those are your pals.” He pinched his fingers together on the swarm and then drew them apart, and the display zoomed in on the group. They could make out Green Mercury standing in front of the crowd. John touched an icon at the bottom of the display and suddenly the room was filled with the sound of Green Mercury addressing the crowd.

  “—am not stalling,” he was saying. “I just think it would help us all get to know each other if we each said who our favorite Gilmore Girls character is. Personally, I’m abstaining from the question on the grounds that—”

  Green Mercury’s voice was cut off as John tapped the sound icon again. “And here’s a view from a bit farther away,” John said, putting his hands on either side of the display and then making a motion like slamming cabinet doors. The display zoomed out until the people and the pyramid receded into tiny dots and then disappeared. The beginnings of a mountain range came into view on the left and a river cutting through the desert on the right. John made the cabinet-closing gesture again and the display zoomed out even faster. Soon a body of large field of blue appeared on the right, and as the view continued to recede, the coastline of eastern Africa became identifiable. Several seconds later the curve of the Earth became visible, and soon they were looking at the planet as if from a hundred thousand miles in space.

  “How are you doing that?” Red Mercury asked. “Some kind of satellite?”

  “Extrapolated perspective,” said John. “You could call it the God’s eye view.” He jabbed at an icon on the bottom of the display and then made the cabinet-closing motion once more. Earth continued to recede, but more slowly, and the several other planets came into view.

  “The perspective is off,” said Blue Mercury. “Earth shouldn’t be that big compared to the other planets.”

  “It’s a logarithmic map,” murmured Balderhaz.

  “That’s right,” said John, nodding. “Think of it as series of concentric circles. Rather than showing all parts of the universe on a linear scale, each circle represents a field of view several orders of magnitude larger than the one before it.” While the Earth remained stable in the center, the planets receded from the edges, forming a spiral around the Earth. Soon a field of stars crept onto the display from the outer edges. “That’s the outer ring of our Milky Way galaxy,” said John. “Then the Perseus Arm.” They watched as the stars moved toward the center, forming a ring around the hazy mass of stars enveloping the solar system. “And here come the neighboring galaxies.” Several masses, most some variation on a glowing spiral, crept onto the display. “There’s Andromeda, and that’s the Large Magellanic Cloud. And then the more distant galaxies.” Many more tiny spirals and other glowing forms came into view. “And then the rest of the cosmic web, a ring of cosmic microwave background radiation, and finally a ring of plasma around the outside. Gentlemen, I present you the entire observable universe.”

  The three angels stared for a moment, awed by the sight.

  “And now say goodbye,” said John. “Because you’ve mucked it all up.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  “You’re blaming us for mucking up the entire universe?” said Red Mercury. “That seems a little harsh.”

  “If the shoe fits, wear it.” said John. “The proof is in the pudding. He who smelt it dealt it. You’ve broken the causal schema of the universe. The universe is made of pretty resilient stuff, but it can only be stretched so far. You’ve torn a gaping hole in the Ontological Skein, and we’re stuck with it. It’s as simple as that.”

  “I get what you’re saying,” said Blue Mercury. “Trouble in paradise. We messed up history by going back in time. In a perfect world, this never would have happened, but sometimes bad is bad.”

  Red Mercury nodded. “We’re walking on a thin line here,” he said. If this is it, let me know. But you know, I’d like to believe that the heart of rock and roll is still beating. That’s the power of—”

  “Please stop,” said John. “You broke the Ontological Skein by both going back in time and not going back in time. It’s a miracle you’re even here.”

  “Fine,” said Red Mercury. “We broke your skein thing. But you can’t seriously tell me that’s somehow going to screw up stuff in the Andromeda galaxy. That’s got to be, like, millions of light years away!”

  “You’re missing the point,” said John. “Once you’ve broken causality, there’s no limit to how fast light can travel. Hell, once causality is broken, there’s no reason that it even has to remain light if it doesn’t want to. If there’s no causality, a photon could suddenly turn into a giant purple chicken, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”

  “But causality isn’t broken,” said Blue Mercury. “I’m willing myself to speak and words are coming out of my mouth. The sound waves are traveling through the air, your ears are picking them up, and then you’re reacting to what I say. That’s all cause and effect.”

  “It’s not completely broken,” said John, “but it’s damaged. And that damage is going to spread, like cancer. Eventually it could even spill over into other universes, and then I’ll lose my job for sure.”

  “What is your job, exactly?” asked Red Mercury.

  “I’m an observer,” said John. “The Ontological Observation Society sets up these outposts to gauge the effects of ubiquium on nothing.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Blue Mercury. “You said you gauge the effects on nothing?”

  “Of course,” said John. “If you start with something, it skews the experiment. We build outposts like this one and put them in the middle of nowhere to see what happens.”

  “You mean that literally,” said Red Mercury. “The middle of nowhere.”

  “Obviously,” said John. “This is basic ontological engineering. Nothing is simple, really. A child could understand it. It takes a while, but eventually some sort of causal scheme tends to manifest itself. In the case of this particular universe, it was what you would call the big bang.”

  “You caused the big bang?” Blue Mercury asked.

  “Are you listening to anything I’m saying?” said John. “No, I didn’t ‘cause’ the big bang. Causation didn’t take hold until after the big bang.”

  “So how long have you been here?” asked Red Mercury.

  “Meaningless question,” said John. “Time didn’t exist before the big bang either.”

  Blue Mercury frowned. “But how can there be a before the big bang if time started with the big bang?”

  “There wasn’t,” said John impatiently. “That’s my point.”

  “Okay,” said Red Mercury, “but you’re saying you’ve been here since the big bang?”

  “Well, yes,” said John. “But you have to understand that time works differently inside the Outpost. Existence is largely determined by observation, so if no one is around to observe something happening, it doesn’t actually happen. The Outpost in effect observes everything, but insulates me from becoming quantum entangled in every event that happens in the universe.”

  “Like a tree falling in the woods,” said Red Mercury.

  “Exactly,” said John. “In the absence of observation, the tree makes no sound, but if you had placed a recording device near the tree, you’d have a r
ecording of a tree falling. The Outpost insulates me from becoming entangled in every miniscule event in the universe, so for me they don’t actually happen. Mountain ranges rise and fall around me without me being aware of it. But if I wanted to go back and view the complete history of the creation of a particular mountain range, the Outpost has the recording at my disposal. So although I’ve been here for billions of years, it hasn’t felt nearly that long.”

  “Hold on,” said Blue Mercury. “You’re saying that time passes faster outside the Eye? How long have we been in here?”

  “Relax,” said John. “I synched the dimension we’re perceiving as time inside the Outpost with the passage of time outside about 80,000 years ago. Switched to real time, you might say. About the time the apes showed up.”

  “The apes have been out there for 80,000 years?” asked Red Mercury.

  “Not those apes, obviously,” said John. “A different batch. The first ones evolved into homo sapiens. I don’t know what the deal is with apes and alien monoliths. Eventually they show up and start hitting each other with bones. It’s not always apes, of course. Sometimes it’s transdimensional beings of oscillating phase energy. Man, I could tell you some stories. The point is, once the apes or their equivalent show up, I know shit is going to start to happen. Sentience. Consciousness. Observation. Perception. All the big names in ontological engineering. Unfortunately, the manifestation of consciousness is sometimes associated with a breakdown in causation, which is what we have in this case. There’s nothing for it but to shut the whole thing down.”

  “Just to be clear,” said Blue Mercury, “you’re claiming to have created the universe.”

  “Creation is a causal term,” said John. “Your language lacks the words to describe what it is I do. I monitor the outpost. The outpost observes-and-brings-into-being reality. But it’s not a causal relationship. Time and causation themselves flow from the Outpost. They take many forms, but generally reality settles on three or four dimensions. Sometimes it gets stuck at one, which is pointless. Two dimensions is dull as dishwater too. Once you get above four dimensions, observation gets tricky because causation becomes muddled when the dimensions start folding back on each other. The best of all possible worlds, so to speak, is when you’ve got three predominant dimensions with a fourth acting as a sort of organizing force.”

  “Three dimensions of space, plus time,” said Balderhaz.

  “Precisely,” said John. “Once you’ve got setup like that, it’s only a matter of the fourth dimension before consciousness arises, which is when things really start to happen. Sentient minds are capable of observation, and observation gives rise to being. Once there are enough points of observation to keep the universe going without the Outpost, I would normally shut the eye down so it could be redeployed elsewhere. Or nowhere, more precisely. Unfortunately, consciousness sometimes starts getting it into its head to start meddling with the causal schema, which can result in damage to the Ontological Skein. And if that happens, I’m under strict orders to shut down the universe.”

  “But that’s insane,” said Blue Mercury. “You can’t obliterate the entire universe at the first sign of problems.”

  “I didn’t,” said John. “The Outpost’s sensors went crazy a few hours ago, by your reckoning of time, so I knew something was going to happen. I don’t shut things down until I know the risk.”

  “Hold on,” said Red Mercury. “You said you exist outside of time. So shouldn’t you have known this was going to happen from the beginning?”

  John shook his head. “Being outside of time is not the same thing as being omniscient. When I observe your universe, I have to interact with it on its own terms. Yes, I could move forward on the time axis, but that skews the results of the experiment. If I went looking for causal anomalies in the future, I would just end up causing causal anomalies in the future. Fortunately, my sensors can pick up energy patterns that correlate with anomalies, so I can prepare for them before they happen. I made a backup of the universe at the point where the sensors began to pick up trouble, so I could revert to it in case the damage got out of hand. Observe.” John made a wiping motion with his hand and the display disappeared except for a semicircle of icons near the outside. He tapped one of the icons, which looked suspiciously like a file folder. The folder appeared to open, and an image of Earth popped out of it, filling the center of the display. John tapped on the Earth and suddenly they were looking at the same desert plain they had been observing earlier—except both the blue pyramid and the people were missing.

  “This,” said John, “is what the universe would look like if you had never shown up. It’s only a simulation, of course. This version of the universe doesn’t actually exist, but I could deploy it if I wanted to.” For a moment, his finger hovered over an icon at the bottom of the display that looked like a volcano erupting, or maybe a fountain spewing water. But then his hand dropped to his side.

  “Looks fine to me,” said Blue Mercury.

  “Where’s the Outpost?” said Red Mercury.

  “I had to subtract it from the simulation,” said John. “That’s the problem. This version of the universe is relatively stable, but only because the Outpost is missing. The Outpost exudes what you might call the force of being, preventing the universe from regressing into nothingness. At this point, it’s essential to the universe’s existence. This universe isn’t self-sustaining yet. It only looks stable because I’m feeding it artificially. Watch.” He reached up and tapped a small blue pyramid on the bottom of the display and the icon turned gray.

  As they watched, the display became grainy, eventually getting so bad that most of the image was obscured.

  “What’s wrong with the video?” asked Red Mercury.

  “Nothing,” said John. “That’s what’s going to happen when I redeploy the pyramid.”

  Soon they were just staring at a blank field of dull gray. The Mercurys shuddered in unison.

  “Gentlemen,” said John, “you just watched a universe regress into absolute nothingness.”

  Chapter Forty-Two

  “But why?” asked Red Mercury. “Why does the universe disintegrate? It seemed perfectly fine.”

  “Not enough points of consciousness,” said John. “If you’d appeared a thousand years later, the local tribes might have grown to the point where the universe could rest on their shoulders, but we’re not quite there yet. Existence depends on observation. You need a critical mass of sentient observers to sustain a universe.”

  “So leave the Outpost active for a while longer,” said Blue Mercury.

  John shook his head. “Keeping an Outpost active in a universe where causation has begun to break down is like giving steroids to a cancer patient. You just feed the cancer.”

  Balderhaz nodded. “You can’t deploy the universe without the Outpost because it’s not self-sustaining, but you can’t deploy it with the Outpost, because the Outpost exacerbates the breakdown in causation.”

  “Between a rock and a hard place,” said John. “Between the devil and the deep blue sea. Scylla and Charybdis. Out of the frying pan—”

  “We get it,” said the Mercurys together.

  “But your simulation showed a stable universe at first,” said Red Mercury.

  “Because, as I said, I was keeping it alive artificially,” said John. “I added a minimal flow of ontological energy, just enough to keep it going but not enough to feed the causal anomaly. Think of it as putting a throttle on the flow. The simulation is being fed the equivalent of roughly one one-thousandth the output of the Outpost.”

  “Can you duplicate that effect in reality somehow?” asked Blue Mercury. “Throttle down the flow of energy from the Outpost?”

  John shook his head again. “It doesn’t work like that in reality. The Outpost is inside the universe. Imagine a radioactive heating element in a closed, insulated room. You can channel the heat with fans and ducts as much as you like, but you have no control over the amount of heat generated. Al
l that heat is going to end up in the room, one way or another. This simulation depends on there being a controllable source of energy outside the universe.”

  “Multiple universes,” said Balderhaz. “One with the Outpost, and others without. The alternate universes act as safety vents for the universe with the Outpost. The energy is split across a thousand different universes, so the each get enough to sustain them without feeding the breakdown in causation.”

  “I’m not authorized to create multiple universes,” said John.

  “Who gives a shit what you’re authorized to do!” cried Blue Mercury. “Would it work or not?”

  “Theoretically,” said John with a shrug. “But I can’t do it.”

  “You mean you won’t do it,” said Red Mercury.

  “The Ontological Observation Society has strict rules about these things. One failed universe is a mark on my record, but it’s not the end of the world, so to speak. But if I set up a thousand different universes and something goes wrong… the shit hits the fan. The pooch is screwed. You can’t unring that bell. There’s no way to contain the damage at that level. It could spread across the entire multiverse. No, I’m afraid it’s out of the question. I’ve got a few housekeeping chores to do, but then I’ll be shutting this place down.”