by Paul Anlee
Kathy shrugged in frustration. “If you proceed down that path, you get to Solipsism: I can only know I exist because I experience my thoughts and no one else’s. I don’t know if you are conscious or even if you exist because I can’t experience your thoughts. However, Alum can feel your thoughts. He knows you exist as much as he’s aware of his own existence.” She raised one eyebrow. “Unless, you don’t think he exists as anything other than a duplicate you?”
She had come uncomfortably close with that question, and LaMontagne had rushed to assure her that his adopted son and heir was an independent person.
That one discussion, months ago, had planted the seed for today’s experiment. If Alum could actually follow LaMontagne’s death and share his glimpse of Heaven as his soul entered, perhaps the doubters would come to know what the Reverend already knew to be true.
His doctors agreed he was unlikely to make it through the night. He could feel his heart struggling for each beat. Soon. Soon.
The small group of witnesses was quiet company, at least outwardly. Communications among them had been non-verbal for quite some time now. Lattice conversations were faster and less subject to misunderstanding.
At first, the nurses had been spooked at the sight of the four of them sitting in concentrated silence, only occasionally raising a finger or gesticulating to emphasize some unheard point.
The last time a nurse had been by was to try to get LaMontagne to eat something. Despite not having any appetite for days, he did his best to choke down some of the tasteless food. After one or two tentative bites from each of the food groups the nurse retreated, leaving him in peace.
It was dark outside, and LaMontagne closed his eyes. Alum took his hand so he wouldn’t fall sleep. They’d discussed this. The Reverend preferred to be as awake and alert as possible when his final moment came. He wanted to die fully conscious, so he could better attend to his protégé’s sharing of the experience.
I know I’ve said this before—Alum sent to the only father he’d ever known—but I just want to repeat how privileged I feel that you chose me to share the most important part of your life with.
You were the perfect son—LaMontagne replied, by which he meant, always obedient and a sponge for information. I was never sure how much independence to allow you. I’m glad I chose to let you grow up as a unique person in the end.
It must have been hard, to deny your own perfect immortality and grant me the freedom to become my own self—Alum acknowledged.
As one gets older one realizes God did not mean for us to live forever, except in the presence of His grace.
A dark thought registered across Alum’s face. Or in the presence of the Adversary—he added.
LaMontagne scowled. The Fires of Eternal Damnation are not for the likes of us. Our good deeds in the Lord’s name assure us a place by His side.
Alum smiled slyly and waited for the Reverend to realize he was being kidded. Yes, Father. I know. Our destiny is to save humanity in Yeshua’s name, that they may receive His infinite love. He spoke in all sincerity.
And fear His infinite power—the Reverend added for good measure.
Yes, how can humanity be guided only with the carrot and not the stick as well?
The Reverend smiled. He had chosen well and taught even better. Alum was wise in the ways of leadership and would make a good steward of the people, bringing them to their salvation in service to the Lord.
The visitors watched him exhale a long and even sigh of contentment. The sounds of rattling trolleys and medical staff being paged drifted in from the hallway.
Alum stood. Trillian, Kathy, and Greg followed suit, the three of them peering intently for a sign from the younger man. LaMontagne’s chest had not risen since the sigh.
Is the moment here? Should I call a nurse or doctor? Remembering the Reverend’s wishes, Alum instead reached out more deeply with his lattice. He remembered what it was like to be deeply connected to the Reverend’s every perception, thought, and memory.
The three visitors waited, alert to his every gesture, as he made a deeper connection to his father’s mind, brain and, he hoped, soul.
After a few minutes, Alum reached over and closed his adopted father’s eyelids. He looked away and found the others searching his face expectantly.
Did you see your father entering Heaven? Did you feel his soul depart? He didn’t need the lattice to read the questions in their eyes.
In many ways, their eyes matched those of Alum’s congregation as they pleaded for good news from their Lord and Savior. Everyone wanted to know the truth. No, they wanted to know The Ultimate Truth.
Alum considered his father’s peaceful face. The man looked more comfortable in death than he’d ever looked in life. He felt love for this man who’d given him a life he’d never have known without him.
He also hated him deeply and passionately. The Reverend had been raping his mind since before he could talk, imposing his fanatical ideals and dreams on Alum’s infant brain.
Alum let the three sets of eyes bore into the back of his head and wait for their answer a little longer. He wondered how long they’d wait before asking.
After a while, he shook his head and said, “No. Nothing at all.”
27
For Jeff Junior, the End began when Alum received a phone call from the scientists in Vancouver.
They’d been chatting in the study when the telephone rang. Alum picked up and, without so much as a greeting, listened in silence to the excited voices at the other end of the call.
“I see. Thank you. I’ll be there soon,” was all he said, and he hung up. With no further explanation, he asked Junior to scramble the security and flight teams, and prepare the private plane for immediate departure to Vancouver.
Only once they were settled in the comfort and privacy of the executive cabin did Alum confide in Junior, revealing all he knew about the Eater. “All” turned out to be frightfully little.
Once he got over the shock, Jeff Jr. felt privileged to be included. Only a small number of individuals worldwide knew that the planet-ending threat Alum referenced in his sermons was a real and impending physical danger, not some vague biblical prophecy.
On arriving at SFU, they met Greg and Kathy at the east entrance of the Academic Quadrangle. Neither Alum nor Jeff Junior had visited the award-winning campus, and the scientists paused in the shade of the structure so they could all appreciate, if only for a moment, the peacefulness of the reflecting pool, grass, and trees in the central green space. It was a perfect June day.
After some light chitchat about their trip, the two scientists ushered the visitors along the sheltered perimeter to one of the many stairwells incorporated in the columns that supported the top three stories of the complex.
Inside, they wound their way down through a confusing maze of multi-level corridors leading to the subterranean levels and an instrumentation area cryptically labeled, “RAF Characterization Laboratory.”
One entire wall of the lab consisted of a section of the enormous spherical vacuum chamber.
It looks more like a machine room than a lab, at least according to any sci-fi movie I’ve ever seen—Junior thought. He was not impressed.
Besides one segment of the gigantic storage tank, the room contained an old disassembled laser setup and a desk with a laptop.
Where are all the instruments?—he wondered.
“….we’ve been thinking about this all wrong,” Dr. Mahajani had been saying.
Greg—Junior reminded himself. The pair were awfully informal for two lead scientists. Too familiar. Unprofessional. Junior didn’t like it.
“Have you figured out how to collapse the Eater?” asked Alum.
“Not exactly,” replied Dr. Liang. Kathy—Junior remembered.
Greg explained. “As you know, the Eater takes everything that it comes into contact with into its own sphere and laws of nature.”
Junior wasn’t sure he’d understood correctly. How can there be
more than one set of “laws of nature?” Isn’t that why they were called “laws” in the first place? But he knew better than to interrupt.
Alum, Greg, and Kathy chatted away, completely unperturbed by all the cryptic concepts being thrown around. Struggling to keep up, Junior likened the chamber—really a reinforced LPG storage tank—and its alternative laws to some kind of fantasy video game.
“Unfortunately, we still have no idea why the Eater persists as its own universe. We don’t know what’s driving it, or how to turn it off,” Greg admitted. “So rather than trying to undo it, which so far has been a frustrating waste of time, we thought, why don’t we just move it?”
“Move it?” Alum asked.
Kathy jumped in. “Yes. Containing the Eater inside this huge vacuum chamber for two decades has only slowed down its growth. But once the Eater reaches the walls of its enclosure, which could be anytime in the next few years, Earth will be done in horrifically short order.”
Junior was shocked by how cavalierly she spoke about the end of the world until he realized she’d been living with this reality for almost twenty years. He’d only learned of it on the plane ride to Vancouver.
“Why not make a bigger vacuum chamber and buy some more time?” Alum asked.
“This was the biggest we could build, given the engineering challenges, at the time. With thick enough walls, it might be possible to double or triple the size,” answered Kathy. “But it wouldn’t be easy, and it would only give us another decade or two before it breached the new chamber.”
“And in the extra decade or two, couldn’t we save many millions more?”
“Theoretically, yes. But the chamber might not be structurally stable and could fail suddenly, even catastrophically. And it would be an enormous engineering challenge to remove the top of Burnaby Mountain in order to construct a huge new chamber around this one. Remember, we would have to keep it intact and in place while building the new enclosure.”
“That does sound problematic.”
“Nothing like that has ever been done before. Regular blasting of the bedrock of the mountain would stress the existing chamber, and introducing even the tiniest crack in the existing chamber could bring immediate disaster.”
“I see. Implosion.” The Church Leader nodded thoughtfully. “What if we were to use the blasting ray we use in asteroid construction?”
Kathy ran some quick models. “That would help, but it would still be a challenge. If either of the chambers fail in the middle of construction, the current one or the new one, we’d have no more than a few days to live, at best.”
“Okay, so only as a last resort, then.”
Kathy nodded. “Yes. But thinking about how to increase the size of the vacuum chamber gave us an idea. The biggest vacuum we know is in outer space. It would be the safest place to store something like the Eater. What if we could move it out there? How much time would that buy us?”
Unable to contain himself, Greg jumped in. “The answer is a lot, depending on where we put it.”
Alum’s expression was so guarded even Junior couldn’t tell what he was thinking. “Providing you could move it, where would you suggest?”
“I’d prefer to send it off into interstellar space, but Kathy feels that would be criminally irresponsible.”
Kathy interjected, “You can’t just have an all-consuming microverse floating around. What if it bumped into someone else’s home planet? Or another star? Or a black hole?”
“That would be someone else’s problem,” Greg answered. He held up his hand to quell Kathy’s protest. “I realize that wouldn’t exactly be neighborly, so we settled on a slow solar orbit, out between Neptune and Pluto. It’s pretty much a pure vacuum out there, and should work for a few million years. Our descendants can worry about what to do next.”
Alum stroked his chin while considering the idea. “I presume this discussion isn’t purely hypothetical. Can you actually move it?”
“Once we had the initial idea, it wasn’t hard to go from there,” answered Kathy. “We understand enough about its composition to generate the equivalent of a magnetic field to exert a pulling force on it. You know, like a tractor beam. All we’d need to do is equip a number of rockets with properly-tuned tractor beams and guide the Eater out to the edge of the solar system.”
“There are a few challenges,” added Greg. “The best way would be to build the tractor beams right into the isolation tank and move the whole thing. That’d keep the Eater contained the whole time. It doesn’t have much mass in this universe, but the vacuum chamber is heavy. Moving it would have to be done quickly but carefully, in order to minimize the chance of rupture in the atmosphere.”
“I see,” said Alum. He was lost in deep thought, his expression somewhere between neutral and frowning—a reverse Mona Lisa. A smile emerged.
“This is wonderful news. Really. You are both to be congratulated. You’ll be celebrated as heroes for your work today. You may have saved the Earth and all of humanity. Thank you both.”
He shook their hands solemnly as they grinned at each other awkwardly.
* * *
Back at the hotel suite, Alum stormed into his bedroom and slammed the door behind him.
Junior was left standing in the silence of the shared living room, uncertain what to make of his boss’ behavior.
I don’t get it. They figured out how to save the world! Why on Earth would Alum, the holy leader of tens of millions of its inhabitants, be angry?
He ordered a pot of coffee from room service and switched on the television. He could wait for answers. He was used to waiting for his enigmatic leader to bring forth enlightenment in his own good time.
Alum emerged within the hour. “I have a mission for you,” he announced, holding out a small container no bigger than an old-fashioned pillbox.
Junior’s blank stare compelled the younger man to explain.
“This is a special kind of a tracker. It contains something called ‘entangled matter.’ The counterpart is at home. It will allow me to transport things instantly from Austin to wherever that box is.”
Junior’s mind was full of questions. How was that even possible? What was this “entangled matter” and how did it work? What would his boss want to transport from Austin instantly, and where to? He contained his curiosity.
“I want you to stick that against the side of the vacuum chamber that contains the Eater. Preferably right above the lab we visited today.”
Junior accepted the pillbox. “No problem. What will you use it for?”
Alum tried not to look irritated. “Jeff,” he used Junior’s first name, something he rarely did, “we’ve known each other a long time. Because of that, and because of the even longer relationship between our fathers, I’m going to answer your question.”
He took a deep breath. “My father and I, both received inspiration directly from the Holy Lord that this planet has become filled with wickedness. God has planned a cleansing of humanity, and it has fallen to me to select those who will carry Yeshua’s promise forward.
“I have prayed hard on this. I don’t believe preventing the destruction of this world, the origin of humanity, falls within God’s plan.
“The world has become an evil place. Therefore, this plan to save it must be grounded in evil. Clearly, it has been inspired by the Adversary, so that he can continue to sway the people from the path of Righteousness. I can’t permit that.”
Jeff Jr.’s horror and disbelief grew into a physical pain deep in his stomach. He’d always followed Alum’s direction without hesitation. The man spoke to God!
He was having a hard time, though, understanding how God could desire the destruction of the Earth, the crowning jewel of His Creation, and everyone on it except for a few million select individuals. Why would God prefer utter destruction over the practical solution the scientists had found to avoid it. That made no sense.
Junior calmed himself using the exercises his father had taught him. Focus on t
he Light of our Lord—he would say. Alum is the Light that prepares the Way for Yeshua to return to His people.
As difficult as it was to understand and accept, Junior decided he had to trust Alum. He relaxed his shoulders and looked the leader in the eye. “Yes, sir. Do I just set the box on the roof, right out in the open?”
Alum relaxed when he saw the tension leave Junior’s body. “Yes, don’t worry; it’ll be fine there.
“Drs. Liang and Mahajani will be working intensively in the lab over the next few days, trying to construct the means to remove God’s vengeful sword from Earth. Placing this device against the vacuum chamber will allow me to transport an explosive there, and to release that glorious weapon from its constraints at the right time.
“There’s one more thing. I know this part is going to be difficult for you to understand, but it’s not enough just to release the weapon. The scientists that created that monster, that demon-spawn of science, cannot be allowed to live.”
Alum had anticipated Junior’s shock and dismay, and jumped in before doubt could take hold. “I know, murder is wrong in the eyes of the Lord. But trust me, this is part of His plan.
Uncharacteristically, Junior interrupted. “But you seemed like old friends with them.”
“Sure,” Alum nodded. “I’ve known them practically all my life, and we’ve worked together at times. But those times have come to an end.
“God used them to bring about His final Judgement, and now Satan works to pervert that. As he always does. The only surprising thing is that they’re listening to the Evil One’s voice rather than our Lord’s. The Adversary must be permanently stopped.
“The time has come, Jeff. Our Church is ready. I’ll announce to our Lord’s faithful followers that they should gather this Sunday if they care for their salvation.”
Junior bowed his head in acceptance of Alum’s wisdom.
28
Jeff Jr. picked his way cautiously across the roof of the SFU Science Centre. Gathering storm clouds obscured all but the faintest hint of moonlight, making it a challenge to pick his way around the snaking pipes, capped ducts, bulky air conditioning units, and sharp corners of the fume-hood vents serving the labs below.