by Paul Anlee
Kathy heard the scare quotes. Could that be what happened to Darian and Larry? Had someone been monitoring the lab all along, waiting for them to prove the RAF worked? If so, maybe Darian wasn’t dead, after all. Maybe they’d just picked him up, picked them both up, and Darian panicked. Maybe they’re still alive.
Deep down, she knew that wasn’t the case, but she needed to cling to the hope. Apart from a few incoherent flashes of Darian’s memories, they had nothing to link Larry’s disappearance to Darian’s. In the “memories”, they saw glimpses of an argument or struggle that might have been between Darian and Larry, or it could have been the two of them against someone else. It wasn’t clear.
And then there was Greg’s crazy nightmare. They had no objective evidence the individuals in the dream were linked in the real world. Even if the subconscious association was clear, dreams were completely unreliable as evidence.
And Darian’s last lattice call to them gave no hint of unusual strain between Larry and the rest of the team. The fact that the original RAF generator was also missing implied someone had taken it. Darian and Larry were the obvious suspects.
Not enough data—they’d decided together.
The enigmatic microverse hovered implacably. Greg was fairly certain it could be safely kept at its present size inside the vacuum chamber. “After all, besides the stuff we feed it, how else can it grow?” Neither dared to venture a guess.
The couple split their time between analyzing the gray microverse and finishing the new RAF generator. If we can get the new RAF generator working, maybe we can use it to figure out where the orb came from and how to shut it down.
Throwing themselves into their work eased the burden of processing the loss of their coworkers. The ongoing struggle to separate their own thought processes from the many fragments of Darian’s mind was exhausting, all on its own.
They agreed to keep their lattices offline most of the time, even though working with so little dendy enhancement meant everything took ten times as long as it should.
Greg connected his lattice communications once, the day Kathy asked, “What if the generator is still here? What if it’s just hidden nearby?”
He kicked himself for not thinking of that earlier. It would explain why the microverse is locked to the one position. He switched on his external comms and sent the INACTIVE command. Nothing happened, not even an acknowledging ping from the laptop. It’s nowhere nearby, and nowhere near a router or it would have answered—he concluded. He switched off his comms before Darian’s lurking thoughts could invade.
They continued testing the new RAF generator, using multiple layers of redundancy to catch any minute fluctuations of data, until finally the true test loomed before them. They moved the device inside the vacuum chamber. If it created another planet eater, there would be nothing there to feed its growth.
They aimed the antennae to a spot half a meter to the left of the gray sphere, stood back, and reviewed their preparations.
“Well, there’s no reason to put it off any longer,” Greg announced. Exhausted but excited, he loaded their simplest configuration file, and switched the generator to ACTIVE.
A small, blue sphere appeared beside the gray one, exactly where they’d predicted.
Kathy exhaled one long, slow breath. “It really does work,” she whispered.
Staring at the hovering microverse, Greg found the experience oddly anticlimactic. I should be elated. This is the greatest scientific discovery ever. This validates Darian’s theory of the virtual particle chaos and the natural evolution of the universe. We’ve unlocked the deepest mystery of all: how anything exists.
But I feel like I’ve seen this before. Or at least part of me has. Darian’s memories of seeing his first microverse mingled uncomfortably with Greg’s perception of this new bubble, making the invention seem more like a confirmation of an earlier experiment than a new discovery.
He shook his head, refocusing on the work at hand. “Let’s try feeding this thing and see if we just ended up with a different kind of matter-absorbing sphere.”
They spent an hour trying to push all kinds of matter into the new blue sphere. Everything passed through the sphere untouched. It took nothing from this universe and became no bigger during their testing. To be sure, they fed a steel ball bearing into the neighboring sphere. It absorbed the matter and grew as predicted. They breathed a collective sigh of relief. The two microverses were fundamentally different.
“Let’s do the interferometer measurements and get some parameters on this microverse. Then we can ramp up to some of the more complex configurations.”
They spent the next couple of days making and measuring temporary microverses whose physical properties differed in increasingly more complex ways from the normal—their own—universe.
Greg grew irritable and impatient carrying out the methodical paradigm he and Darian had set up some months before. “You know, Kath, we may be pushing the boundaries of scientific knowledge with this, but we haven’t really learned anything new about the...the Eater.” It was the first time he’d used the name.
“I know,” replied Kathy. “All the microverses we’ve made collapsed the instant we turned off the RAF generator. If we can’t figure out how to make a stable one, how can we figure out how to collapse it?”
They pored over RAF theory until their brains ached. They slept in fitful shifts, watching over one another so the other could remain alert to fragment-induced episodes. Over several days, they developed a few reasonable hypotheses. None stood up to experimentation.
They were stymied. There was no one to turn to; their mentor was gone. By default, they were the leading world experts in the field and, thanks to their dendy lattices, they were exponentially more knowledgeable and faster at intellectual processing than anyone in the world. They felt alone, confused, and scared.
Through trial and error, they found that working in thirty-minute bursts minimized the interference from Darian’s memory fragments, while allowing enough concentrated effort to make progress. Either that or Darian’s memories about the RAF were integrating with their own thought processes. So long as they kept their attention limited to that specific area of work, they could avoid stimulating too many painful and confusing intrusions.
“We need to try altering the Eater directly,” Greg announced at the end of one particularly long stint with the equations.
“Don’t you think it’s too risky to impose a different RAF on it?” For the past week, neither of them had looked inside the darkened isolation chamber.
“More dangerous than doing nothing? Look, we have no good hypotheses about the Eater. It’s so different from the microverses we’ve been working with that I’m not sure they’re related at all. Our current RAF theory doesn’t cover it. We don’t know if it’s going to remain stable inside the vacuum chamber or if it’s going to spontaneously grow to the size of the galaxy sometime in the next second. After all this time, we still have absolutely no idea what we’re dealing with.”
“Nothing indicates an unpredictable growth rate.”
“Not yet. We think we understand why and how it absorbs everything that comes into contact with its surface but do we really? What if our ideas are completely wrong and its growth is not smooth, not linear, and not equivalent to mass absorbed?”
“You don’t really believe that’s possible.”
“No, I don’t. But who knows? My point is, we understand so little. We need more data, and the data we’re getting from the RAF microverses doesn’t resemble anything we know about the Eater.”
Kathy paced the lab, modeling the RAF equations in her head for potentially explosive interactions between multiple fields. There was too much uncertainty to draw a reasoned conclusion. Her nervous pacing took her to the corner of the lab abutting the containment closet. She slid the blackout blind to one side and turned on the viewing light. She peered into the chamber at the Eater, seeking inspiration.
“Greg? Have you been fe
eding this thing?”
“No, are you nuts? Of course not. Not for days. Why?” He rushed over and looked into the chamber. The Eater was definitely bigger than the last time he’d seen it. Only slightly bigger, but enough it was noticeable to the naked eye. That wasn’t a good sign. “Maybe we have a vacuum leak. What’s the pressure in there?”
Kathy checked the readout. “It’s holding steady at 10-17 torr, practically a perfect vacuum.”
“Then where is it getting raw material from?”
A terrifying suspicion poked at Kathy’s mind, inspired by one of Darian’s memories. “Just a second,” she said, diving into the equations to examine her hypothesis. In less than a minute, she shared her thoughts and a corresponding model with Greg.
“Tell me I’m wrong,” she pleaded. “Tell me I’ve overlooked something.”
“Oh, crap,” he replied. He looked ill. “We have to go see Dr. Wong. This is way above our pay grade.”
6
“I don’t believe that would be ethical...or legal.” Dr. Rasmussen, MD, PhD, did his best to remain calm and professional.
“Mm. Well, the definitions of legality can be rather fluid.” Reverend Alan LaMontagne crossed his legs, leaned back in the immaculately clean visitor’s chair, and rested his folded hands in his lap. He preferred a casual approach, leaving any threats to Jeff, his personal bodyguard and fixer.
Jeff stood at ease by the door, hands crossed behind his back. His muscular build was visible beneath a precisely tailored suit. The weapon everyone knew had to be there was indiscernible in its shoulder holster.
“Yes, I suppose but, frankly, I’m surprised that as Leader of the Church you would even think to pose such a question.” The doctor’s eyes flitted uncomfortably between the Reverend and Jeff.
“Your surprise is of little concern to me,” LaMontagne replied, brushed a piece of lint from his lapel, and watched it fall to the doctor’s polished tile floor.
He thought his idea was absolutely brilliant. Why didn’t Darian Leigh himself think of this?—he wondered. He already knew the answer: youth, and a lack of faith. Mortality is seldom the concern of the young. Darian had been little more than a child when he first worked on the dendy lattice. Besides, God does not speak to the unworthy, and Darian Leigh was not a Believer.
When Larry Rusalov first brought the stolen RAF generator to him, LaMontagne spent a full week playing around with Reality Assertion Fields. He spun dozens of universes, each a few centimeters across, and played with their properties. But without a fully-equipped lab to properly analyze the physical laws of each microverse, the investigations soon bored him.
Never a particularly good student, especially in the physical sciences, LaMontagne had gravitated toward Divinity College. He loved reading the ancient texts, and felt a uniquely personal connection with his God through them. He discovered that his rich voice and his ability to appeal to a deep, emotional connection with the Divine often won arguments where logic and reason failed. It was no surprise that he grew to value emotion and psychology over logic and evidence.
LaMontagne was more intrigued by the processes going on inside his own brain than in tinkering with micro universes. He might have abandoned the device altogether had he not found himself unexpectedly drawn to the young Darian Leigh and to the prodigy’s early work in dendy lattice design.
The Reverend spent weeks immersed in study, wandering through Darian’s childhood medical history, child-psychologist evaluations, and teachers’ reports.
References to a secretive company Darian’s mother had founded caught his eye, which led him to classified documents describing the science behind the Dynamic Neural Nano Dots. Dendies, everyone called them; billions comprised a single dendy lattice. Accessing the proprietary information had not been easy, but their security was no match for him. Darian’s private files on the pilfered computer sitting on his desk rounded out the Reverend’s deepening knowledge.
And then came the epiphany, Divine Inspiration like a beam from Heaven.
The idea was intriguing: in write-only mode, a freshly-assembled dendy lattice placed into an infant’s developing brain could hypothetically be slaved to that of an existing lattice in an adult. Such an arrangement could force the receiving mind into becoming a perfect copy of the transmitting mind. It might take a decade to complete the copy, but he could think of no reason it shouldn’t work.
It was evident to his divinely inspired mind that such an intimate union of two brains would permit the departing soul to bridge the gap from one corporeal host to another at death. I could achieve immortality by moving into a younger body, again and again, as needed. I will bear witness to the arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven! I must personally oversee the preparation of humanity. There is much to do but God has shown me the way.
The Reverend realized how diabolical his idea might sound to a third party, especially one lacking his own deep faith. Doubt is for the weak. He thanked the Lord for choosing him as the worthy recipient of His Light and immediately began designing the changes to his dendy virus that would prepare him to take up the Heaven-ordained path.
The doctor was saying something.
“Pardon me, you were saying?” LaMontagne asked.
“I said, you can’t possibly imagine I’d sanction reconstructing a dendy virus from living tissue, let alone altering it to some unknown purpose.”
Dr. Rasmussen, Chief of Neurosurgery and Neuroscience at the University of Texas in Austin, had been the Reverend’s ideal candidate to help implement the next step in his personal evolution.
LaMontagne was amused by the irony. How many years did I fight to exclude that word, “evolution”, from school curricula throughout Texas? But the word best described what he proposed to do. He was about to evolve.
He leaned forward and smiled congenially. “Doctor, not only will you sanction this, you will help me make it happen.”
Taken aback, the doctor searched for a suitable reply. “Reverend, you must appreciate the university has guidelines about this sort of thing. I’m not free to assist you in this even if I wanted to, which I most certainly do not.”
LaMontagne motioned Jeff forward. The bodyguard stepped toward Rasmussen, his hand reaching under his jacket. The doctor flinched, then relaxed when Jeff produced nothing more ominous than a display tablet. Jeff leaned forward to show Rasmussen the screen. It was a recent photo of the doctor and his family enjoying a summer day at their private lakeside cottage.
Rasmussen’s eyes flicked back to LaMontagne; panic and pleading etched his previously self-assured face. “Leave my family out of this! I swear, if you go anywhere near them…if anyone goes near them....”
The Reverend’s smile broadened.
Rasmussen picked up his desk phone. He’d had enough of the discussion. It was time to get Campus Police involved.
Jeff placed his hand over the doctor’s and firmly guided the handset back into its cradle.
“Dr. Rasmussen,” the Reverend pitched his voice in its most reasonable tone, “surely you can see I’m determined to have my wishes carried out. Perhaps you’re also beginning to realize I have the means and the will to ensure my wishes become your wishes. Save me the inconvenience of having to persuade you any more vigorously than necessary.”
Rasmussen tried one last desperate plea. “Why don’t you just get the entire virus genome synthesized?”
LaMontagne stood and walked over to the large window at the far end of the office. He put his hand to his chin as if he were considering the option. He laughed.
“My dear fellow, you know that would be impossible. DNA synthesis is closely monitored. A wide variety of genes, including those used in growing dendy lattices, are prohibited. Alterations to the virus in my possession would not raise any suspicions if the required oligos—the small sections of affected DNA—were ordered separately. But to order an entire synthetic genome, that would be noticed.”
The doctor swallowed. He was all out of ways to say no. “No
body’s been doing active research in this area since it was declared off limits a few years back. I presume you’re not interested in academic investigations on the virus. You intend to infect yourself, don’t you? You want to become the new Darian Leigh!”
LaMontagne regarded the doctor with an expression so benign and serene, it was as if the three of them had been discussing where to go for dinner. “The virus is not designed to be used on me.”
Seeing Rasmussen’s confusion, he explained, “I’ve already been exposed to the dendy virus, rather successfully as it turns out.
“No, I’ll be providing the tissue to rebuild the virus. The subject for transmission is in the process of being selected. We’ll be ready once your people have added these few new sections and confirmed the entire viral sequence.”
Rasmussen considered the Reverend's proposal. Scientific curiosity vied with revulsion. “Are you asking me to remove some of your brain tissue and extract the viral DNA from that? And to infect someone else with it? Are you insane?”
LaMontagne laughed aloud. “I assure you that I have all my faculties, and then some.” He walked over and leaned in, putting his face within inches of the doctor’s.
“Look into my eyes,” he said. “You see my determination. Perhaps you’ll even see a hint of the Divine Spark that Our Lord has seen fit to grace me with. You’ll also see that I understand, completely, everything I’m asking you to do.”
The two men glared at each other, one commanding, the other defiant.
The doctor was the first to look away. “This is unconscionable,” he said. His eyes narrowed. “What’s to stop me from simply killing you during surgery? Or from causing permanent brain damage? I presume your man here wouldn’t be able to distinguish an intentional act from an accidental one in the middle of an operation. Or what if I were to make an honest mistake?”