by Paul Anlee
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. “Nobody’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?”
“It wouldn’t matter either way,” LaMontagne replied. “Unless the surgery and the subsequent genetic engineering is a complete success, his orders are the same with regards to yourself and your family.”
“You’ll kill us all.”
The Reverend spread his hands and shrugged as if it were out of his control. “Let’s not speak of such unfortunate consequences. We stand on the edge of a new era. Let us speak only of positive things and of exciting new advances. I’m offering you a unique opportunity for a role in this story, in my story. You will be remembered for ages.”
Rasmussen scowled. “You offer me no alternative,”
“Did God offer Moses an alternative? Did He offer Noah an alternative? I’m giving you a chance to split the seas, to build an Ark. This miracle I ask of you is a request from Yeshua, not from me. You will be serving your Church and your Savior.”
Rasmussen looked miserably from LaMontagne to Jeff, to the floor. “I don’t see that you’re giving me any choice.”
12
“So the microverse continues to grow and there’s no way to stop it?” Dr. Wong, Chair of the Physics department, stared at Greg and Kathy with surprising composure.
The couple had tumbled into his office and blurted their observations in overlapping turns, then backtracking, circling back, and jumping ahead with no regard for whether he was keeping up. Knitting the information into a single coherent thread, Wong gathered that a nightmare scenario was becoming a reality.
He and Dr. Stella Trent listened intently while Greg and Kathy described the details of the Eater's growth. “Are you sure about your measurements?” Dr. Trent asked.
Greg reviewed his perceptual records once again. “Well, I only eyeballed it, so I might be off by as much as 0.05 percent,” he conceded. “That doesn’t really change the overall issue, does it?”
“No, but we need to take accurate measurements before we raise the alarm,” Dr. Wong replied. “I trust your conclusions but if we’re going to report this, we’ll need to be more precise. Dr. Trent is an expert in ultra-fast laser spectroscopy. Dr. Trent, would you please help us verify the measurements?”
“Oh, right,” Kathy interjected, drawing out the “right” in case anyone missed the sarcasm. “We need more accuracy. It’s not enough to know the planet will be destroyed in approximately two or three years. We need to have the exact date.” She glared at the Physics chair. “Seems to miss the big picture, doesn’t it?”
Ignoring Kathy’s rude comment, Dr. Trent tried to clarify her own understanding. “Tell me again how this thing is different from a black hole.”
Kathy sighed. It was a challenge to speak about the science behind the natural laws of physics to people without lattice-enhancement. She made an effort to slow down and lay out the explanation in a simpler, more linear format.
“The Eater has no gravitational field; it only absorbs what it comes into contact with. We only have two data points: the size of the microverse two weeks ago, right after we isolated the Eater in the vacuum chamber, and today. Nonetheless, the model and measurements agree almost perfectly. We’re confident it’s absorbed no real particles since we last looked at it, but it’s bigger today than two weeks ago.”
“So you think it’s
absorbing virtual particles?” Clearly, Trent didn’t believe it.
“There’s no other source of matter available to it. Sure, it can absorb non-fermionic particles, like a photon of light. But that’s minuscule; remember e=mc2? When we model the type and density of virtual particles we’d expect to arise in that volume of vacuum, it matches the expected growth of the microverse due to absorption of those impinging particles.”
“I’m no expert on the Standard Model, but how could you possibly predict the density of virtual particles in a particular space? They can’t even be detected.”
“The calculation was developed by Darian Leigh and Greg. It hasn’t been verified yet, except that the calculation is part of the RAF theory. The best evidence for the correctness of RAF theory is the fact that we can create microverses.”
“Well, it sounds kind of circular to me, little better than String Theory,” Dr. Trent grumbled.
Dr. Wong was quick to come to the defense of Darian’s work. “As predicted by the theory, one of the microscopic universes made by the RAF generator has a measured ability to alter the speed of light within it. We believe this to be the most significant scientific discovery since General Relativity or quantum mechanics.”
“Is there any way to independently verify that the microverse is actually absorbing virtual particles, apart from its rate of growth,” Dr. Trent challenged.
Kathy’s voice was slow and even, “The theory predicts absorption of virtual particles gives off a kind of Hawking radiation. That’s the only similarity to a black hole, really. As singlet virtual particles are absorbed, their virtual partners find themselves alone in a universe of real particles. They try to interact with adjoining matter.”
“So it could be radioactive?”
“Not really. Most of the particles don’t interact with real particles at all. They’ll just zip away to infinity. A small number should be able to interact with the electromagnetic quantum field, and a much smaller number with the Higgs field. We can detect the EM field interactions with a standard static charge test or through spectrometry. The most obvious confirmation is that the EM interactions give off a weak mixed spectrum of photons.”
“Mixed?”
“The sphere looks gray.”
Stella Trent was satisfied with the answer, and moved on. “If the RAF generator created this Eater microverse, why can’t it be used to collapse it?”
“We don’t completely understand how this particular microverse remains stable without the RAF generator,” Greg admitted. “Something’s set up internal resonances within the microverse. It’s incorporating whatever it absorbs into its own structure. Until we understand how it’s doing that, we can’t break down the field stability.”
“Can it be better isolated?”
“Ha!” Kathy laughed aloud, startling everyone. “How can you isolate something from virtual particles? They arise spontaneously out of the quantum vacuum. Where there’s nothing, there’s still the quantum vacuum.”
The room went quiet. The four of them stared in different directions, avoiding eye contact.
Dr. Wong waded into the silence. “Do either of you have any recommendations?”
“We need to buy as much time as possible,” Kathy said. “We have to build the biggest possible isolation chamber so the microverse can expand freely without coming into contact with anything. It’ll have to be done carefully, without disturbing the existing chamber until it’s surrounded by a new vacuum.”
Greg calculated a few seconds. “The biggest vacuum chamber in the world might give us twenty years. Any way you look at it, sometime, around two decades from today, the Eater will break out of whatever we can build to isolate it. Then it’ll grow rapidly until it consumes the entire planet. Even if we could isolate the entire top of Burnaby Mountain, it would only delay the inevitable by about a year.”
“We’ll keep working on characterizing the microverse,” Kathy jumped in, trying to sound optimistic. “And, of course, we’ll share our data and theories with the international community.”
“Whatever good that’ll do,” Greg muttered. “Together, we’re a thousand years ahead of the rest of the world’s experts combined.”
“And if you can’t figure out how to stop it, what do you recommend?” asked Dr. Trent.
Kathy and Greg looked sideways at one another; their voices came out as one. “Run.”
13
Shard Trillian wandered the streets of twenty-first century virtual Manhattan, trailed by his limo. Everything about Alternus fascinated him. He was as enchanted by the quaintness of this peculiar, primitive inworld, ripe-for-the-taking, as he was confounded by its wondrous, needless complexity.
Alum had described the inworld perfectly. The detailed briefing He’d sent to Trillian covered everything a person needed to know to fit seamlessly into life on Alternus, the rogue simulation of ancient Earth. Alum’s information had made acquiring sustenance, lodgings, transportation, and money a trivial matter. Trillian, himself, had long ago purged his own memories of those times, or maybe they’d been expunged for him by Alum, as irrelevant detritus of a forgotten, and forgettable, era.
Trillian marveled at the huge variety of distinct societies co-existing on this one planet. Many had representatives in this city. How do they manage to interact with one another, to get along in spite of their differences? How could they come together in this great melting pot and yet maintain distinct cultures?
The antiquated idea of money particularly fascinated him. Money hadn’t been used in the Realm in ages. It astonished him that some people acquired trading power far beyond that of their peers. Even more intriguing, privileged positions were not based on closeness to God but on the type of work one did or their popularity among the larger populace. Some people acquired even more power by increasing the money available to them through something called “investments.”
He had to laugh at this last concept. It seemed that if you could convince others to give you some of their money, and you temporarily gave that money to someone else still, though it wasn’t yours in the first place, the people to whom you gave it would pay you back even more. You got to keep the difference between the amount you got back from them and the amount you had to return to your source of the money. The more money you amassed, the more power you were perceived to have.
It was all so wickedly deceitful. Why didn’t the first lender simply find the last borrower and provide the money directly to them, pocketing the profit the intermediary would have earned? Were they incapable of finding the opportunities themselves? If so, why didn’t they simply engage the services of the person who was most competent?
And what was “day-trading”, owning parts of active businesses for such short periods of time, all about? It seemed such a delightful game, except the traders Trillian investigated took winning or losing entirely too seriously.
If only the real humans of the original era had spent half as much effort on technological development, improving their world, or tending the natural environment as they did on these financial games. Their world could have been a garden of abundance instead of the dying cesspool it was becoming. So much futile activity, simply to choose winners and losers. Alum would never permit such nonsense within the Realm. Trillian was grateful he lived in an era of peace and prosperity for all. Still, Earth was a lot of fun.
Once he managed to hack into Alternus through the DonTon inworld, he set about making himself comfortable. He expected it might take a while to figure out which characters in this sim were leading the conspiracy against Alum, and whether they were involved in the strange incursions in the Virgo cluster.
One could easily forget Alternus was a simulation; its computer-generated physics were amazingly real. Sensory input on all channels was as rich as the real universe. The designer must have dedicated enormous computational resources to the program. No matter how far back into the side streets and alleyways he wandered, he could not detect a single false front: no giveaway shimme
ring or blurry facades, no building he could not access.
And, oh, what extravagant sights, sounds, smells, and even tastes! Thankfully, food was varied and delicious because one had to eat regularly to avoid feeling hunger pangs. Discomfort and pain, even physical damage to the avatar body, felt as real here as they did in the outworld. Phenomenal work. Absolutely phenomenal.
After passing a pleasant first night in what billed itself as a luxury hotel, he started looking for more suitable accommodations. He hired a real estate agent to look for something comfortable, but not too ostentatious, in the five-to-ten million dollar range. No need to draw unwelcome attention to his presence.
The housing advertisements listed a few apartments near the Central Park area. Within a week, he was able to establish acceptable housing and furnishings. The apartment reminded him of one of his nicer quarters in the Cybrid garden asteroid off Andromeda 514.7, only a bit smaller.
Though he had hacked in, bypassing the conceptual virus of the standard portal, he was nevertheless required to interface with the sim. That meant he had to live by the rules of this inworld as much as anyone. Theoretically, he might have been able to tweak the inworld supervisory program to gain magical powers but he was concerned the Supervisor might vigorously resist such reprogramming and take action. So he pried at it delicately; there might come a day when he needed an edge in confronting the original designer.
Compared to the inworld Supervisor, he found the so-called security of the Alternus “banks” to be laughable. It took him less than half a minute to trace the local flow of wealth, set up a new account, and transfer significant amounts of money into it from a large institution called the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
He wasn’t sure what exactly it was reserving. It certainly wasn’t reserving judgment on his request to move a hundred million dollars from its numerous accounts to his empty one.
He set up a banking security consultancy under the name Jack Trillian. If it was that easy to steal from a central bank, smaller companies would be desperate for his services. Security consultant would make a great cover for his inworld activities.