Accidental Gods

by Andrew Busey

  Accidental Gods

  Andrew Busey

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Use of quotes and trademarks is not intended to infringe on any rights. Any trademarks, service marks, or other rights are property of their respective owners.

  ACCIDENTAL GODS.Copyright © 2014 by Andrew Busey. All rights reserved.

  Revision 2

  www.accidentalgods.com

  In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

  —Genesis 1:1

  Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made…

  —Genesis 2:1–2

  According to the Bible, God created the heavens and the earth in seven days.

  It took us eight years.

  Prologue

  My goal is simple. It is the complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.

  —Stephen Hawking

  The thirty-seven-floor silver-gray monolith was one of the newer additions to the Austin skyline. It was one of the luxury residential towers that rose up with the rapid growth of city. This was the marquee address—highest quality construction, best location, views of the river.

  It was 2:29 a.m., but there were still lights on in the penthouse and a silhouette was visible in one of the windows. The penthouse was decorated in a modern style—opulent with a hint of sophistication, crisp lines, and elegant simplicity. The lit room was a large bedroom converted into an oversized home office with a large U-shaped desk made of dark wood facing the floor-to-ceiling windows. The desk was covered with large LCD screens, and the whir of computer fans created a subtle white noise.

  Thomas Gray paced the room in a spiral pattern, the binding force of his own imagined galaxy. Orbiting him like stars and planets were clusters of hastily written ideas on whiteboards, the windows, and Post-it notes on the walls. Dense books on the big bang, cosmology, string theory, and the birth of the universe covered the floor. His green eyes danced over all of it, constantly refactoring everything they took in.

  He scratched the slightly graying stubble on his chin with one hand and held a glass of wine, an expensive Bordeaux-style blend from California, in the other. As he swirled the glass gently, it left legs along the edge of the crystal that glowed a deep red in the room’s subdued light.

  Thomas stopped, briefly wondering if God or whoever had created this universe had talked to himself while trying to work out the kinks before actually turning it on. The sudden pause sent some of his wine spilling over the edge of the glass.

  The red droplets flew forward in what might be a vaguely predictable pattern if one had a near infinite amount of information from which to base those predictions. Of course, such calculations were nearly impossible in reality—one would need to know the exact speed of his pacing, the severity of the stumble, the tilt of the glass, the viscosity of the wine, and much more.

  All of this ran through Thomas’s slightly inebriated head before any of the droplets had made impact with the floor. As the wine hit the floor, the discrete droplets exploded into smaller beads, painting a plume of red across the floor and books.

  The spill replayed itself over and over in Thomas’s mind. He looked down at the wine splatter on the floor as an ancient fortune-teller might read tossed stones.

  “I know how to build a universe,” he stated to himself as if it were a simple matter.

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Year 1

  You may delay, but time will not.

  —Benjamin Franklin

  “This is our universe, and it is expanding like this…” Ajay said as he drew a Frisbee-sized circle with six arrows pointing outward from it on one of the dry-erase boards. He continued, “As I’m sure you know—”

  “Yes, yes. Do you have a point?” Lisa said. She took a step forward and crossed her arms causing her university ID to flip up from the edge of the breast pocket of her white lab coat. She always wore lab coats – it was her way of saying she was a practicing scientist and not living exclusively in a theoretical world.

  Ajay turned from the circle to Lisa. He cleared his throat with a polite, dainty cough.

  “My point is,” he said, “what’s outside the sphere?”

  Thomas watched Lisa as she spoke to Ajay. He was excited to be working on a new project, though it felt weird to be back in academia after a successful foray into the land of start-ups. He had carefully assembled his new team and could now partake in one of his secret joys. Thomas enjoyed putting people in unexpected situations, as it always yielded the most interesting results.

  Thomas had known Lisa since they were doctoral students together. She was still very attractive, in many ways even more than she had been. Now he found the power dynamic amusing as a beautiful, nearly six foot tall brunette in a lab coat argued with the five foot four Ajay who appeared mildly intimidated by the situation.

  He had been surprised when she had accepted his offer to work with him given their history—but he was glad she did. She was extremely intelligent and often had a unique perspective from which she approached problems.

  Ajay was the definition of proper, always dressed as if he were teaching a class at Oxford. Today that was a bow tie, crisp white shirt, and a tweed sports coat complete with patches on the elbows. His hair was so deeply black that it looked like newly mined coal and so thick that you couldn’t see even a hint of his scalp where it was parted. The slightest hint of wrinkles formed at the corners of his eyes.

  They were gathered in Bohrs, an average-sized conference room mostly consumed by a larger-than-average conference table made from a dark wood and polished to a reflective shine. Surrounding the table were a myriad of office chairs, most of which didn’t match. The glow of generic fluorescent lights filled the room. One of the bulbs hummed but had yet to start flickering. It was typical of university maintenance; they could polish the table to a blinding gleam but could barely keep the lights on. Some important support column forced a slight dogleg near the north end, keeping the room from being a rectangle. Stephen, one of the top artificial intelligence experts in the world, sat near the dogleg. He was running his hands through his blonde hair as he silently watched the interaction of Lisa, Ajay, and Thomas.

  In stark contrast to Ajay, Stephen wore cargo shorts, sandals, and a wrinkled light-blue shirt over a wrinkled T-shirt that maybe, once, had been white. His hair was cut above his ears but was an unruly mess, as if he’d just woken up. More likely, it was the result of his nearly neurotic habit of running his hands through his hair whenever he was thinking.

  This windowless inner room was on the third floor of the Rack—the Research in Advanced Computing Center—a four-story homage to brutalism in the middle of the University of Texas in Austin. Around the Rack was the city of Austin, then Texas, then the world, then the rest of the spinning Milky Way, and finally the universe—which Ajay had just drawn on the dry-erase board.

  “Nothing. Nothing is outside the sphere,” Lisa said. “Hawking and Penrose say the big bang created time and space. So, if you believe them, then it’s only reasonable to dismiss time and space from existing outside the sphere.”

  She let her arms drop and then straightened her lab coat and realigned her ID. Ajay kept looking at her until she spoke again.

  “It’s a brain-bender,” she said, “and isn’t relevant to our problems.”

  As if they were already executing a plan of action rather than embarking into uncharted waters! “Our problems…” Thomas chuckled under his breath excited that they were already taking ownership of th
e project. These were but the first of many technical problems. He was happy to be faced with technical and scientific problems rather than the administrative ones he had battled with for the past half year. It had taken most of that time to finally get everyone in the same place. Getting grants and a large funding package lined up as well as finding the right university merely exasperated the organizational headache. Once that was done, he had had to deal with university bureaucracy, gathering such an interdisciplinary group and negotiating coveted office space—they took up the entire third floor. Even this shoddy, generic university space was exceedingly difficult to get.

  They were now established as the Institute for Advanced Computational Physics and had one goal: to computationally model the big bang. It was a deceptively simple idea that was exceedingly difficult to execute on. Still, he was surprised no one else had tried it.

  “I…” Ajay paused in arrogant self-emphasis.

  The single syllable pulled Thomas back to the present.

  “I think it is relevant to our problems.” Ajay pulled out his marker again and drew a square around his original drawing. “Imagine, for our purposes, that we define this cube with whatever parameters we want, but it must contain the universe as it expands. So either the cube must get larger or it must begin large enough to hold the universe at its largest point, which, of course, assumes that we believe that the universe will contract at some point—a theory with which I happen to agree.”

  “Not everyone does,” Lisa said.

  This made Thomas smile. He knew Lisa wouldn’t brook Ajay’s arrogance. She would not hesitate to call him out if he went too far. This was going to be fun.

  Ajay quipped, “Thanks for that, Lisa.” He snapped the cap back onto the marker and slid it behind his ear in a smooth, mechanical motion. “So, the universe is expanding. In doing so, it’s also consuming. But what is it consuming? Certainly not what we would call space.”

  Thomas had just come from years of manufacturing high-end graphics cards. The leading maker of graphics chips had acquired the company he’d founded. It was fun for a while—pushing forward, incrementally improving the technology he had helped develop—but he was fundamentally a creator. He quickly became dissatisfied with only improving something. He had been thinking about non-gaming-centric applications for his technology for a long time.

  What if the technological advancements of his work could enable new innovations in physics? Prior to their work, consoles like the Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox had used one chip or maybe two in parallel and could deliver real-time physics. These chips enabled complex and realistic alien game worlds, but only in small settings and individual scenes. Thomas and his team had taken physics in games to a new level—both alien and real—and doing so had made them wildly successful.

  Thomas had theorized that thousands of physics processors run in parallel could perhaps simulate the big bang, presenting an opportunity for groundbreaking insights into the birth of the universe. The idea was clear and compelling, and after Thomas had first proposed it, modeling the big bang had become a pretty sexy idea in the world of physics. His commercial success made him an attractive recruit for any university; his name had marquee potential. That combination made getting grants and generating enthusiasm for the project a fair bit easier.

  Still, the administrative problems had been a headache. But now, his newly assembled team was finally in the first throes of the creative process.

  “If we can come up with a mechanism for expansion,” Ajay said, “maybe we can solve this ‘what’s outside the box’ problem, since, in our simulation, the cube I’ve drawn is simply computer memory that is empty and slowly being converted into organized bits as our universe expands over time. During the actual events, the ‘box’ would be a funnel, but for our purposes, a cube makes more sense.”

  Thomas looked at Lisa again. She wore horn-rimmed glasses, and her brunette hair was tied behind her head. This was her “professorial” look. He preferred her hair down. Thomas wasn’t sure whether she appeared nerdy or sexy or some alluring combination. The human resources demon in his head told him to stop thinking that way. It was hard though, especially since they had lived together for two years in Pasadena while they had been at Caltech.

  “That rolling edge,” Ajay said. “As the universe expands, it consumes what was previously empty—again, I hesitate to say ‘empty space’ because space has a different meaning in this sense. It would make sense that something is happening beyond the horizon at the edge of the universe.”

  Lisa pushed herself free of the table, into an attentive yet balanced stance with her hands clasped behind her back. “You’re suggesting there’s some matter-energy conversion going on not only at the big bang but also at the edge of the universe?”

  “Ding, ding. There’s the light bulb.”

  Lisa glowered at Ajay.

  Ajay picked up his can of soda and took a sip. The can’s condensation had left a wet ring on the conference table’s otherwise perfectly smooth surface.

  “Fine,” Lisa reluctantly conceded. “It’s an interesting idea, but what does it do for us?”

  Ajay set his drink down but missed his original spot, starting a second identical ring of moisture.

  “Maybe nothing,” he said. “I’m just thinking out loud. But it seems to me the two big bogey men in physics are as follows: what existed before the big bang, and what is the universe expanding into? There might not be anything on the edge except an advancing frontier of space. But what if it’s a perfect vacuum? Wouldn’t stuff be expanding into it at insanely high speeds? Filling it all up?”

  “Possibly.” Her eyes squinted, and she pressed her lips into a firm, straight line again.

  Thomas smiled inside. He knew that look meant she had dismissed Ajay’s course of reasoning as irrelevant or uninteresting.

  Ajay said, “Look, I agree it might be nothing, but we are trying to solve the basic equations of the universe. We need to at least consider everything that might impact the process. I mean, I guess it could be simple as a computer program. Someone could type ‘run bigbang /c=SPEED OF LIGHT /p=PLANCK CONSTANT /g=GRAVITATIONAL CONSTANT,’ and press enter. Then it runs, and all it does is consume more memory. I’m willing to try it that way. But I also want to at least think about what else could be going on.”

  “We’re going to make it just like that.” Stephen chuckled sarcastically as he ran his hands through his hair again. He liked the idea of a command-line driving their universe. “Don’t like the speed of light? Want it to go faster? Just enter a new SPEED OF LIGHT.”Lisa ignored Stephen and said to Ajay, “Interesting. So we put parameters on the universe and run it?”

  Thomas said, “That would take a lot of memory.”

  Ajay nodded in agreement. “A universe’s worth—every bit of time and space.”

  “Good one,” Stephen muttered as he rolled his eyes at Ajay’s attempt at computer humor.

  Thomas pulled out his cell and texted Larry:

  Thomas: come to bohrs now, you should listen to this

  Lisa spoke directly to Ajay now, “So you’re saying that—KABOOM!—this big bang happens and leads to the obvious questions: what ignited it, where did it happen, and what is it expanding into?”

  “Yes, obvious questions. But some are easily answered, at least for us. As to what ignited it and where it was, my former professor Stephen Hawking said, ‘As far as we are concerned, events before the big bang can have no consequences, so they should not form part of a scientific model of the universe.’ I think that is pretty relevant to us.”

  Thomas disliked Ajay’s habit, especially around new company, of mentioning his brief interactions with Hawking whenever he could. However, Ajay was brilliant, and Thomas couldn’t imagine this team without him. Besides, Hawking had been unwilling to move to Austin.

  “So, this is better,” Lisa said, “a defined starting point we can agree on. You’re really just talking about what it’s expanding into?”


  “Exactly. I mean at the point where the expanding universe touches whatever it is expanding into, there would seem to be something there, right? At the very least, a border or edge.” He glanced at his drawing. “Say you are leisurely flying through space and come to that edge, what happens?” asked Ajay.

  “You cease to exist? I don’t know. It’s an issue, especially since our friends at WMAP determined not only that the universe has boundaries but that it is reasonably flat and round like a squashed ball, not spherical, so your drawing is pretty accurate.”

  Ajay glanced at the drawing again. “I know.”

  Stephen mockingly raised his hand, “Excuse me, Professor. What is WMAP?”

  Ajay rolled his eyes and answered before Lisa could, “WMAP was a NASA satellite that measured cosmic background radiation temperatures. It told us a lot about the development of the universe and its time line. For example, the microwave background radiation we used to determine the age of the universe—about thirteen point seven billion years—and to identify this ‘inflationary era’ in the big bang.”

  Stephen smiled and replied, “What I meant was what do the letters in WMAP stand for?”

  Lisa said, “Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe.”

  Stephen continued, this time sounding genuinely curious, “The concept sounds neat, though. Do they have cool pictures like the Hubble?”

  Ajay answered, “They make microwave sky maps, which are kind of interesting; they look like world maps but show the radiation distribution across the visible universe—”

  “Back to the drawing,” Lisa interrupted, “so it’s not like you just curve around that edge. It must be an actual edge.” She waved her hand dismissively. “Whatever lies beyond that edge is also beyond our ability to understand.”