by George Mann
This was the year 2034. Morag, in her mid-thirties now, was occupied full time by her own ecosalvage projects in Africa, and rarely came home. It was difficult to absorb the changes this Scottish countryside had seen since Joe had first used Sheena’s money to buy his few acres up here (and Sheena, long dead, had never seen a penny of it back). First had come the pathogen panics as bluetongue and other nasties, driven by shifting climate zones, had overwhelmed the farms. The countryside had walled itself off, hundreds of miles of barbed wire isolating the fields from spores carried on tires and feet. But soon after that had come the pricing-out of private transport, the end of traffic, and then the great revolution in artificial food production that had led to the collapse of traditional agriculture everywhere. Now, even in Scotland and England, swathes of countryside were reverting to a state not seen since the Mesolithic, and ecologists like Morag mapped the changes as a depleted ecosystem tried to reassemble itself.
And in the middle of all this Joe Denham continued his patient, obsessive data gathering, year after year.
Morag saw his installation from a rise a half-mile before the pod car reached it. Joe’s cosmic ray telescope was an array of several hundred tanks of water, each as tall as Joe was himself, gathered in a rough polygon nearly a mile across. Each tank had a sensor pack attached to it and a communications antenna, and four big optical telescopes were set up around the perimeter of the array, including one that stuck out of the top of Joe’s control center, which was a garden shed with the roof cut open.
Morag knew the principle. The array was based on a properly funded design called the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina. It was designed to detect cosmic rays, high-energy particles coming in from space. When they hit the atmosphere such particles would create a shower of secondary particles. Joe’s telescopes looked for fluorescence in the air as these particles passed through, on their way to the tanks where they would create tiny flashes of light in the water. From these bits of information, Joe’s computers could reconstruct the nature and trajectory of the original cosmic rays—and he was able to use a subset of that data as evidence of the nature of the greater multiverse of the Bulk, and its interaction with the human universe.
It was a bold project, and it seemed to work, as far as Morag could tell. But it had taken Joe around fifteen years to get this far. His water tanks, scavenged one by one from oil refineries and other abandoned industrial facilities, were all shapes, sizes, and colors, and his array looked less like a science project than an art installation. Or even just a folly, the obsession of a madman.
He met her outside his shed. He was in his mid-sixties now, if anything he looked older than that, and in his quilted coat and elderly boots and with his self-cut hair he was like an eccentric sort of farmer.
He showed her into his shed and made her a coffee. There was a little bunk bed and basic kitchen stuff, a fridge fed by a generator somewhere, a heap of clothes. But most of the space was taken up by science gear. A ferocious draught came in through the open roof, where the telescope peered out like some long-legged animal.
The “coffee” was revolting. She wondered where he had got it. But she drank it for the warmth.
“It’s good of you to come,” he said. “Adam, the kids—”
“They’re all fine. With me in Africa.”
“It’s been too long.”
“Yes, it has,” she said fervently. “Look at the state of you.”
“Oh, don’t fuss,” he said, with a throaty old man’s cackle. “You’re as safe out in the countryside as in the gated cities, they say. It’s the shanty towns you have to avoid.”
“But you never were any use at looking after yourself, were you? When I was a kid I remember fretting over the way you never had your shirts ironed...”
He wasn’t listening. He looked haunted. “They’re trying to take away my computers, you know, or most of them.”
“I know.” This was why she had come; he had emailed her, and she had checked up herself.
“The government say the hoard I have here, elderly and unreliable as it is,” and he gave one of his laptops a slap, “is more than is ‘justifiable’ for my needs. Justifiable! So much for the fucking singularity by the way, whatever happened to that...? Sorry. They have no idea what I’m doing here.”
“That’s the trouble, Joe. They don’t have any idea. Why should they? I mean, you don’t work for any reputable organization. You don’t even write up your results anymore, do you?”
“What’s the point? Nobody was paying any attention to partial results. I got no citations to speak of...”
“All the government cares about is the raw materials locked up in your computers. The germanium, the silver, even the copper—there are shortages of all these things now.”
“I’m biding my time, about writing up,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard her. He stroked the computer he’d slapped, as if soothing it. “I’ll wait until I have conclusive results—the full monty. Then I’ll hit them with it all at once, fully backed up with data and references, none of this partial releasing. It will be unarguable.”
“What will?”
He looked at her, briefly puzzled, as if she hadn’t been paying attention. “My analysis of Calabi-Yau space. My map of the Bulk, and our place in it. There are branes all around ours, love, other universes, three, five, seven-dimensional constructs adrift in nine-dimensional space, influencing us with subtle whispers of gravity.”
“There is a cluster of them close to us, self-attracting, orbiting like a swarm of asteroids. All of them time-ridden, and if anybody lives there they are as mortal as us. But I’ve detected another cluster of branes, further off, tighter, more orderly. And they are static—time-free, constructs of pure space. Fragments of eternity. Why mortality here, why eternity there? I can’t answer that yet. But I feel I’m close to an understanding of why things are as they are...”
She reached out and took his hands. They were dry, the skin of his palms cracked. “Joe—you’ve been obsessing about death and mortality since Mum died. I don’t blame you. But don’t you think all this work is maybe some kind of rationalization? You’re projecting your own life onto the whole of the rest of the universe. Isn’t it better to let it go?”
He pulled back. “The last time I went back to Edinburgh, I was after a grant. They put me onto a counselor who came out with the same kind of stuff. As if I’m a kid who can’t cope with his hamster dying. Morag, the whole damn universe is dying. I know it’s hard to grasp, but it’s true. But, you see, I think—”
“What, Joe?”
“I think it didn’t have to be that way. Now. Are you going to help me keep hold of my computers or not?”
THE WORLD MINDS were scattered in the dark, around the mother who had so explosively born them.
Morag Denham might have understood their nature, if dimly. There was a great deal of information stored in the network of flows of mass and energy that characterized an ecosystem, which were in turn locked into the physical cycles of the planet that sustained it. Earth’s interdependent geological and biological systems, all unconsciously, worked together in a giant feedback loop to keep the world’s temperature at a level equable for life in the face of a steadily heating sun.
But in a complex ecosystem there was room for a great deal more information than characterized a simple thermostat. Patterns of ecocycles, in their robustness and resilience, made for satisfactory memory and processing systems. Even in Morag’s universe there were worlds where intelligence had arisen naturally from the data flows that cycled around complex entangled ecologies. On such worlds, thoughts were expressed in the swelling and dying of populations of plants and animals, and million-year dreams haunted extinction events.
So it was in that other dark sky.
The mother world waited for her children to develop complexity, to come to awareness, to formulate thoughts that crackled with the rise and fall of species, and to begin to ask questions: Where am I? What is this place
? What must I do? Then she began a slow process of dialogue. The community of worlds shared tremendous deep thoughts via gravity waves generated by the churning of their cores, or even via the firing-off of life forms in fresh volleys of meteorites: a sentence rudely dispatched in an alien invasion.
And gradually the mother and her children came to understand.
In the booming of gravity waves deeper and longer than any of them could generate, they sensed the structure of their own universe, and the architecture of the Bulk, the greater nine-dimensional cosmos in which it was embedded. They saw branes like their own, bound together by gravity just as the living worlds clustered, all living and dying. And they saw others, more distant, a handsome array of timeless universes, whose skiesswam with heat, and where no world ever grew cold.
And they saw, beyond doubt, that such an arrangement was artificial.
Whoever had done this, whoever had doomed whole universes to brevity and extinction, was surely much like themselves, surely as afraid of the gathering cold as they were. This the mother understood. But it was hard not to feel resentment as the universe so quickly aged, and the great chill gathered, and one by one her children shed their hard-won complexity and succumbed to the cold and the dark.
HE HAD WON. He had won! He had battled through a forest of symmetries, and now those others already ascended prepared to welcome him to his place in the constellation of 248. It was all he had striven for, all his life, since the instant of his birth.
Yet now it was in his grasp he hesitated. Others watched him, doubtful and uneasy.
He understood that it would not be long after his ascension that the last of the places was filled, when the universe, complete, would die, and he would die with it. And he knew now that it did not have to be this way. He had glimpsed other universes, that far-off cluster of the undying, locked in their own changeless symmetries.
And he had glimpsed other types of symmetries, as far beyond his own as his was beyond a newborn novice’s.
A simple regular polygon could have four points, a square—five or six points, a pentagon or a hexagon—it could have two-hundred and forty-eight points, any finite number. But as the number of points approached infinity the angular form aspired to another sort of symmetry, that perfect regularity of the circle.
So it could have been in his universe, he saw now. Not the stifling closure of a mere 248 vertices but the unending symmetry of the sphere. A symmetry with room for all who aspired to join it—forever. It could have been this way here, just as in those other realms.
And, once, that was how it had been.
Something, or somebody, had changed this universe, shattered its infinite order and blighted it with this crude spikiness. Replaced eternity with finitude. Replaced immortality with death.
Why should this have been done? He pondered this. Surely that greater agent was one not unlike himself. Surely that other had been born in asymmetry and struggled only for a symmetry of his own. That, at least, was a comforting thought, that in his own finitude and death he at least served the purposes of a greater symmetry, even if he could never understand how.
Enough. He was as content as he could ever be. He took his place, settling into the constellation of elect. He shone, one among 248 identical points of light.
Time ended.
JOE LAY THERE inert. Morag sat beside him, outside his isolation tent, and waited for the ghastly process of his dying to run its course. He looked wasted by his illness, yet he was still as tall and ungainly as ever; he looked too big for the bed.
The hospital room reminded Morag of her mother’s death, thirty-odd years ago. Of course there were differences. This wasn’t the NHS; long before this year of 2044 the welfare state had crumbled in an impoverished Scotland, and the health care had exhausted Joe’s own pitiful savings, and eaten up a good chunk of Morag’s own. There were few nurses around, only machines that tended to the needs of the ill and the dying.
But for all the changes, here was Joe spending his final hours lying on a curtained-off bed just as his wife had all those years ago. Although she hadn’t had the indignity of a clear-plastic isolation bubble separating her from the touch of her family. And she at least had died of a cancer which had a name, instead of the exotic, species-crossing, nameless disease Joe had picked up when he had stayed out one winter too many in the Lammermuirs.
There were times during the night when Morag, sitting by his bed, thought he might not wake again. But then, as another bright Edinburgh summer morning dawned, his eyelids raised with a faint crumpling sound, like paper. “Morag...?”
She was startled. Perhaps she had been dozing, sitting in this hard chair. Impulsively she reached for him, but her fingertips only pushed against the clear isolation membrane. “Dad. Joe. You’re awake.”
He shifted his head slightly, and she saw some brownish fluid being pumped through a pipe and under the sheets into his body. He saw her looking. “Feeding time at the zoo. I could murder a burger. Even a fucking NHS coffee. Sorry. Are the kids here?”
The “kids” were now both young adults. But they were here. “They’re exploring Edinburgh with Adam.”
“Good. Keep them away. Kids are more open to disease. Don’t want them catching my mumbo jumbo syndrome. So it got me in the end, eh?”
“What did?”
“Death. The Bulk. All those branes and anti-branes swimming around. They’re killing me in the end, just like every other fucker back to Adam—’ He was interrupted by a cough that came out of nowhere. His whole body jerked, as if convulsed, and she saw blood spray over the inside of his bubble. The machines around him adopted a new constellation of displays. “Sorry,” he said.
“Are you all right?”
He forced a smile. “Jumping like a flea.” His voice was papery, audibly weaker. “I’m seventy-five, you know. Not bad.”
“No,” she said. “Not bad.”
“You haven’t looked at my computers, have you?”
“Joe, there wasn’t time. We just cleared out the shed. The council were already taking away your water tanks. The computers are safe, but—”
“Read my paper. It’s backed up. The figures... I worked it out in the end.”
“Your map of the Bulk.”
“My analysis of the Calabi-Yau space, yes. I did it in the end. Like shining a torch up into all the dark, nine-dimensional halls we all drift around in. Listen. This is what I found—”
“Joe-”
“Listen.” He tried to reach her, but his claw-like fingers just scraped feebly against plastic. “Listen,” he whispered. “I saw two clusters of branes, mutually orbiting, like solar systems. One, far from us, has 248 members. All of them timeless, space dimensions only. All of them eternities. The other, the swarm we’re part of, has one thousand, nine hundred and eighty four. And they’re all unstable, like our universe. All of them have at least one time dimension. All of them doomed to birth and death, the whole damn cycle, and every living thing in them.”
“Here’s the thing, Morag, here’s what I saw. Our cluster is in a particular part of the Bulk. You saw my projections of it, the thing’s covered in spines like a hedgehog. We are in one of those spines. We’ve been shepherded here. And all the brane universes are on trajectories that force them to intersect...” He fell back, wheezing. “It needs more analysis. But I believe I saw the intersection, the close approach of another brane to our own, that destabilized our universe. I was able to track it back, like figuring out the flight of a bullet back to the assassin’s gun.”
“Destabilized?”
“Before that we were an eternity. The close encounter pivoted one of our space dimensions into a time. Pow, Big Bang, inflation, Big Rip, death—it all came about in that moment. A moment of Bulk time, I mean.”
“The words you use,” she said uneasily. “‘Shepherded.’ You said our cluster of branes was shepherded into the spine. What shepherded us there?”
“Or who.”
“Who?”
<
br /> He grinned; his teeth were discolored, and she wondered when he had last been to a dentist. “I believe it was intentional, Morag. And if not who, I can tell you why.”
“Why, then?”
“For energy.” He raised one hand and feebly closed a fist, over and over. “Universes exploding like gas in a piston chamber. The gravitational energy released by the dying universes just pumps up that spine—but what’s it used for? Maybe that damn cluster of smug eternals is the payload.”
None of this made any sense. “What are you saying, Joe?”
“That we’re in an engine. Like a rocket ship. Each exploding cosmos is like a grain of gunpowder in a firework, driving the whole damn thing forward across the nine-dimensional Bulk. That’s all we amount to, that’s all we’re for, our whole universe from beginning to end, Bang to Rip, all the galaxies and stars and planets, all the warriors and lovers and poets, all the births and deaths... And that’s why they destabilized our universe, and thousands of others. Artifacts, all of them, embedded in a greater artifact. Whole universes used as propellant.”
“Who, Joe? Who’s they?”
He tried to sit up. His mouth opened as he strained to speak, and she thought she saw the shape of his skull through his thin flesh, the dirty white hair in his scalp. “Who? That’s what I’d like to know. Where are we going? What is the purpose of this damn thing we’re all trapped inside? Oh, maybe they’re not unlike us. Aggressive expansionists, ripping up the environment. They must be, to build such a thing. We wouldn’t care about a handful of bugs stuck in a gallon of petrol, would we? But we should challenge them. Maybe we should team up with the other brane universes. Maybe we should go demand what gave them the right to condemn billions of sapient beings to the agony of mortality...”