by Andrew Busey
“Now?”
“Yes, right now.”
He knew it had to be important if she was calling him at home, this early, and this demandingly. That didn’t completely wake him, but it certainly snapped him back into reality.
He jumped in the shower—intentionally adjusted to “ice cold”—threw on some clothes, grabbed a Diet Coke, and hit the road.
He was halfway to IACP before he remembered that he’d left the girl in his bed.
Chapter 41
Week 9: Thursday, 5:18 a.m.
God is dead.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
He knew it was bad as he approached IACP and saw emergency-vehicle lights. The guard waved him through the gate, a somber look on his face.
Jules intercepted Thomas as he stepped out of his car.
“Have you read your e-mail?”
“No,” he said. “I came straight here.”
He reached to check his phone, but she had grabbed his arm and was already dragging him inside.
“Let’s go to your office,” she said.
“What happened?”
“It’s better that we talk in your office.”
“Just tell me,” he demanded.
“Fine.” She hesitated, though she still led him toward the elevators.
“Well?” he asked.
“Stephen is dead.”
He stumbled and then stood still, glancing around the lobby, dazed.
“Stephen is dead?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“We don’t know yet, I found him dead at his desk.”
“What?” Thomas shouted. “Here?”
He looked apoplectic.
“Calm down,” Jules said and took his arm again, more gently this time, and led him inside one of the elevators.
Chapter 42
Week 9: Thursday, 5:30 a.m.
I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.
—Epitaph of Robert Frost
Thomas hesitantly opened the e-mail, Stephen’s last words.
To the world,
Tonight I have become a vengeful god. A vengeful, wrathful god. It is not how I imagined it would be, and the results pain me almost as much as the cause. For the events of the last week to awaken such ferociousness within me makes me further wary of the power that we possess over that which we create. It is not me.
When we are gods, things change more deeply. It wasn’t our choice, and in reality, I may be the only one who truly exercised that power. To be a god, answering a dying prayer. Again, nothing I could ever imagine.
We have opened Pandora’s box.
A box we should never have opened. Now, it is a box that can never be closed. It is our nature. Our curiosity is unbridled. As a scientist, it has always been a dream to have a set of laws named after me. So I propose them now:
1. Human nature means it is impossible to not open Pandora’s box.
2. We won’t know it was Pandora’s box until after we open it.
Stephen’s Rules, if you will. You might find them contradictory, but I do not.
If you are one of the recipients of this e-mail that does not know what we’ve been working on at the Institute for Advanced Computational Physics for the last eight years, you probably think I’m babbling or have gone off the deep end. So let me explain.
Thomas looked at the “To:” field.
“Oh shit,” he blurted.
Everyone in IACP was copied as well as some people at UT and other individuals. In addition, Fox News, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Associated Press, and Reuters—along with a few others.
He continued reading.
Soon, the IACP will release a paper announcing the development of living organisms on a planet in a simulated universe. Many were aware of the simulated universe from our work at the University of Texas—a result of our attempts to model the big bang in a massively parallel, specialized quantum computer. It worked, far better than any of us expected.
I’m not sure if trying this was opening Pandora’s box or not. I suspect that happened when we took the next step: letting the computer keep working. We wanted to see where our newly minted universe would go. It went, and it went, and it went. But we didn’t know if it would go where we wanted it to go—so we nudged it along, toward our objectives, manipulating things at all levels, planetary orbits, molecules, natural disasters, and much more, to get what we wanted—the development of an intelligent civilization.
Yes. There is an intelligent civilization in a computer in the IACP facility.
At first, I didn’t really believe it was an intelligent civilization. After all, this is all in a computer. But I watched it develop. I worked with other IACP scientists to decipher their language.
As part of that process, I “met” a little girl, Nefirti. I watched her grow from a two-year-old toddler to a fourteen-year-old young woman. We have nearly her whole life on tape, yet she has never seen us. She didn’t even know we existed.
She was a beautiful, vivacious, smart little girl, and everyone at IACP loved her. Two nights ago, in an event none of us anticipated, she was sacrificed to consummate the pyramid of the current ruler.
I’m sure you are thinking, If you’re gods, aren’t you also omniscient and omnipotent? Well, yes, we are. Technically. In reality, we cannot watch everything. Changing things is difficult. There are ramifications. When we nudge things, we effectively create parallel universes, an expensive process that is also limited by supply of key components in our system.
So, by the time we realized this sacrifice had occurred, it could not be undone without substantial cost, a cost which IACP was unwilling to incur.
I watched the sacrifice after the fact. As she died, she called on her gods to curse the people who had done this.
Rather than being an observer, as we had been since the dawn of the universe—excluding, of course, specific nudges made to meet our evolutionary objectives—I chose to answer her prayer.
I destroyed the pyramid in which she was sacrificed. I killed the priests. I killed the Pharaoh in whose name she was sacrificed.
For interfering in their world, I am not sorry. I am only sorry I was too late to save Nefirti.
But I cannot make these choices. They are not mine to make. I can’t deal with this kind of power and this responsibility.
My hope is that by making this public, pressure will be put on IACP, that others won’t be able to abuse these powers like I have. That the people we have created will be protected and allowed to live and find their own destiny.
So, I sacrifice myself for them.
Stephen Eggleton
PhD, California Institute of Technology
Fellow, Institute for Advanced Computational Physics
Thomas looked up. Jules was staring at him.
“Did this e-mail really go out to all these recipients?” he asked, still stunned.
Jules shook her head. “Not all of them. Larry said the mail system caught the ones directed at media and kept most from being sent out—in line with our PR policy.”
“But everyone at IACP received it?”
“Yes.”
“What about UT and the others?”
“Yes.”
“What next?” he asked.
Chapter 43
God is, or He is not. But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up…Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estima
te these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.
—Blaise Pascal (Known as Pascal’s Wager)
Thomas was in hell. He was sure of that but not much else. He couldn’t believe the firestorm Stephen’s suicide had created. The vultures were already circling. It would have been nice if they had given him a little time to grieve. Stephen had been his friend for a long time, not to mention that the core IACP group had grown attached to each other through the ups and downs of the last eight years. They were family, something Thomas had not frequently acknowledged.
Thomas was also fighting an internal battle with guilt. He knew it wasn’t his fault, but he couldn’t get it out of his mind. He knew Stephen had been upset the previous night. Thomas wished he had taken Stephen to dinner and talked with him or listened or whatever Stephen had needed. Instead, he had left Stephen asleep at his desk and gone on a date.
Jules stuck her head in the door. “I hate to bother you, but UT keeps calling. They demand answers.”
“What do they want?”
“They want to talk about Stephen. So they say, but they seem a lot more intent on seeing the SU.”
“Figures.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I already sent an e-mail to everyone. No talking to anyone today. We’re on full lockdown. Talk to Ross and Jenn. If they’re up for it, have them prepare some images we can send out. Preferably from before all this shit happened. I don’t want to see an image of Nefirti on the altar. Probably best to get everyone working on something to keep their minds off this.”
“I’ll talk to them. What about UT?”
“Tell them to wait.”
Chapter 44
Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.
—Frank Herbert, Dune
It felt like she was drowning. She choked and tried to breathe. Her heart raced, and every part of her wanted to run or pound on something to make the world let her breathe. She knew at any moment she would die. Then she expunged the liquid from her lungs in one wet, heaving cough. She couldn’t stop coughing, but air finally entered her lungs. She wiped her mouth clear of the spittle she had expelled. She opened her eyes, confused. The hand she had just wiped her mouth with was covered in blood.
Her eyes adjusted slowly to the light. Is this a dream? she wondered. Or am I in the Darkness? Everything was blurry. She couldn’t tell where she was.
Then her last moments came flooding back to her: being tied to the altar, her curse, the searing pain as the dagger had pierced her body, and the loud clang of the dagger hitting the stone after it had passed through her. The Darkness. She was dead.
Her vision was still blurry, but above her heart, she could see a cut through the cloth. And yes, her tunic was covered in blood. She slid her hand under her tunic and inspected her chest, running her hand across where the dagger had hit her. There was no puncture wound, only a strange, barely visible scar. It was not the scar she would have expected the dagger to leave.
So it wasn’t a dream, she realized. Do they just repair your body when you arrive in the afterlife?
She heard a noise nearby and sat up. The padding, punctuated by an occasional clicking sound, came closer. She rubbed her eyes and blinked, until finally she could see a little better. She realized then that she was in her old room. Muu Muu was there, walking toward her, his claws clicking on the wooden floor. He appeared confused and disoriented, too.
She tried to go to him, but as she stepped off the bed, she fell to her knees. She was so weak that she barely managed to crawl across the room, meeting the large cat halfway. He nuzzled her, and she hugged him.
It took her several minutes to build up enough strength to finally stand. When she did, she walked on wobbly legs to the stairs, partially supporting herself on the cat, and started down, clutching the railing. The smell was horrific, but she had to know. When she entered the courtyard and saw them, her dead parents on the blood-soaked tiles, she turned and stumbled back into the house, out the back, and to the end of the dock—where she then collapsed.
It was eerily quiet on the river. The river had always been her friend. It had helped her relax. She was glad to see that it still flowed, which she took to be a good sign, and that helped her find her center again. At least she wasn’t in some frozen hell where time stood still. After she had cried for a long time and her vision had almost fully returned, her gaze was inexorably drawn to the pyramids. They were different.
She wiped the tears from her eyes and studied the pyramids more closely. It took her a minute to realize the differences. The newest pyramid was not there; only a crater remained where it had been. Wisps of smoke billowed up from the hole. Several of the older pyramids were damaged. Chunks were missing from their sides. One’s top looked like it had been swept off by a great hand.
Did my curse come true? she wondered. Or is this a trick of the afterlife?
Seeing the smoking crater girded her will, and she rose. Going to the palace was the only way to find out what else had happened.
***
Thomas, Mike, Ajay, Lisa, Larry, Jenn, and Ross sat in the primary rendering room analyzing logs. They were mostly trying to figure out if anything weird had been going on in the Alpha world.
First, they went to see what Stephen had meant when he had said, “She was sacrificed to consecrate the pyramid of the current ruler.”
So they saw her sacrificed on the pyramid. They saw her shout the curse.
“Oh my God,” was all anyone could say.
After a few moments of silence, Thomas finally asked Jenn, “Can you pull up a list of all access to the SU for the last three weeks?”
“Well, sort of. I can pull up everything that was shown in rendering rooms, but not necessarily who watched what. We’re a little lax on that. You have to go through a lot of security to get into this section of the building, but once you’re here, you don’t have to do anything special to access a rendering room.”
“But you have to log in to access Coliseum or Nefirti, right?”
“Yes. Coliseum logs everything to specific users. We can figure out anything anyone did with it.”
“OK,” Thomas said, more to everyone than just Jenn. “Let’s look at all world viewing first and Coliseum second. I don’t think the Nefirti system is going to tell us much, since it wasn’t working until the day all of this happened.”
“Got it,” Jenn said.
A string of dates and numbers appeared on the north wall. It showed the most recent date first.
“Are those numbers next to the dates coordinates?” Thomas asked.
“Yes,” Jenn said.
“Any chance you could turn them into locations?”
“I can, but it will take a few hours.”
“OK, how about this: just show activity between eleven p.m. and six a.m.”
Jenn hit a few keys, and the list changed. It was still long.
“Hmm. I guess we’ll have to wait.”
“Hang on,” Larry said and walked closer to the list.
He tapped the most recent time stamps, all of which were between 2:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m. on the night of Stephen’s death.
Larry glanced back at everyone else. “How is he looking at multiple time periods in the SU at the same time, in the same rendering room?”
“I’m not sure,” Jenn said. “Let me check the Coliseum activity.”
Another list, this one showing time and date stamps with commands next to them, appeared on the west wall.
Jenn said, “Interesting. It looks like he’s been buffing up Coliseum.”
“Really?” Thomas asked. “How so?”
Jenn tapped one of the lines. “Let’s see. Ah, here, it looks like he was running something akin to picture in a picture to allow him to see two times at once.”
“Interesting. Did you ever see that, Mike? Did you use it for the translation work?”
/> “Nope, but it might have been helpful.”
Thomas asked Jenn, “What did he do while the PIP was open?”
“Let me see.”
“Where on Alpha was he?”
Jenn tapped on the keyboard again.
On the east wall an image appeared. It was the sacrificial altar on top of the sixth pyramid. Nefirti’s body was there.
“What was he up to?”
“I don’t know, but this is what he was looking at when he opened the second window.”
Jenn used cut and paste to copy the commands Stephen had used from the Coliseum log.
A new image replaced the rendering log files on the north wall. It showed Nefirti before she made the curse.
“So he was looking at Nefirti, dead and alive?”
“Yes.”
“Then what did he do?”
Jenn and Larry both studied the Coliseum log.
“Holy shit!” Larry exclaimed.
“What did he do?” Thomas asked, irritation creeping into his voice.
“He did what was effectively a copy and paste from the living Nefirti to the dead one. It looks like he was trying to repair her. It looks like he even opened a console window to manipulate the world directly.”
“Why?” Thomas asked.
Jenn studied the commands again.
“I’m not sure. Let me keep looking. I’m going to lock the camera positions and run it forward again.”
They watched as the dagger fell from her chest, with almost the entire blade missing.
“Oh! OK, so this is when he did the initial cut-and-paste. He replicated the area of her chest just before the dagger penetrated it and then pasted it back right after. That basically cut the dagger off and put her…um…put her back together, I guess is the best way to describe it.”