Zero-G

by William Shatner

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  Usually dedications are made to people you love, to people ­peripherally ­connected with the book, to ideals, dreams, vague motivations. In this case, I would like to dedicate a thank-you to a wonderful creative artist.

  This book reflects Jeff Rovin’s skill as an artist—events that could happen, might happen, will happen are dramatized. His imagination, his knowledge of arcane facts, his sense of drama are astounding. I have ­never worked with a more creative and inspiring cowriter. None of us knows the future, but here is an imagining of ­possibilities. My hat’s off to you, Jeff, along with my shirt.

  PROLOGUE

  0G: STAR FIRE

  YUKI OGAWA KNEW that her husband, Makoto, was dead.

  The realization did not come from a news report or a personal message from the Japanese Oceanic Research Organization over her Individual Cloud. It was a sense the woman had, perhaps her artist’s empathic nature; it was definitely something spiritual, a quality that even the most sophisticated SimAI programs could not match.

  Sitting at her easel, painting a canvas, Yuki hovered in mid-stroke, her shoulders rigid, her emotions on hold, waiting to see if her IC confirmed the feeling. If it were true, it was not entirely surprising; Makoto was in a facility constructed by the lowest bidder, in an extremely dangerous location. It would even be fitting, given her husband’s parting words as she had helped him pack for his ongoing underwater study for the JORO.

  “Neutrinos are all about life and death,” he had maintained as he slid the seven slim, rectangular pouches of shirts, pants, underwear, and socks into the molecular-defrag messenger bag specially designed to hold them as if they were a single folded towel. “They show us a picture of the universe’s birth, yet they reveal themselves in their own annihilation—”

  “Armageddon and eternity—again,” she said. “Why can’t you talk about baseball, like Hayao?”

  Makoto smiled self-effacingly. “I read a treatise on how a batter can hit a ball twice in one swing. Does that count?”

  The thirty-seven-year-old woman had grabbed his face then, her hands flat on his cheeks, and kissed him before he could go on. It had the desired effect. They were both smiling when she leaned back.

  “I will explain your work to your son as tiny, tiny particle research,” she said kindly. “He’s still too young to understand quantum philosophy.”

  Makoto’s smile became paternal. “Does his youth mean that he should not be exposed to grand ideas?”

  “In fact, it does,” she replied firmly. “Let his head fill with boyhood.”

  Yuki activated her IC with a gesture, tracing a finger through the air before her forehead. Some people preferred to use virtual hands guided by eye movements; she liked the tactile interface that involved her real fingers. There was a ballet-like grace to it, as opposed to the optic twitches and jerks that had created a generation of migraine-prone youth.

  She moved closer so the outer data rim could touch Makoto’s IC, which was always on. She thought about the Lasting Individual Video Experience file the four-year-old had created the night before. It came to life, her eyes full of the child’s image. Though it appeared solid and immediate, it was merely a shimmer along her neurons induced by the IC’s shifting electric fields.

  “He created this LIVE file for you,” she said as they shared the 360-degree image. She sent it toward him with a thought, mentally adjusted the hovering volume slider down to zero. The boy began talking, silently, facing his father. “You can listen to it later. Look in his eyes, at his expression. All he knows is that his daddy is gone, again, for many more months.”

  “I know, I know,” Makoto acknowledged, annoyed with himself. “I have to go and he must be made to understand. I will find a way to better explain it.”

  He backed away, breaking the connection. Yuki shut it down. By focusing on finishing his preparations, Makoto had shut her down. It wasn’t rudeness; it was necessary efficiency.

  “The death of anything, even radioactive decay, may help us to understand the birth of everything, including the cosmos,” he had said as he walked through the bedroom door of their bayside home. The condominium was not far from where he had first met her, painting a sunset. “One day, Hayao will understand the importance of my work.”

  “You haven’t asked if I do,” she said.

  “I’ve only been home a week.” He smiled. “You and I had more pressing personal matters.”

  One kiss and three hours later, after a hypersubmarine ride that had him slashing through the North Pacific in an air pocket of the ship’s own creation, Dr. Makoto Ogawa was hunched over his IC in the expertly designed research facility. Deep underwater, it faced the Sea of Okhotsk to the north, the Sea of Japan to the west, and the East China Sea to the south.

  Electron neutrino, muon neutrino, tau neutrino, he thought as he studied feeds from the facility’s instruments. Each particle was now known to be its own antiparticle, destroying each other in a gamma flash whenever they collided, but passing invisibly through other matter. They were indifferent to every force except gravity and the mechanism by which nuclei erode. They were indifferent also to all but the strongest magnetic fields, one hundred million Gauss and higher—which, despite the neutrino’s absence of electric charge, can still affect the particles via their transition magnetic moment.

  That was what Makoto was here to study. He shook his head, tracing the air with his eyes, opened the still-muted LIVE image his son had recorded.

  Yuki is correct, the physicist thought. Hayao wouldn’t understand any of it. Invisible space dust left over from the Big Bang, everywhere, all the time. Dust containing messages in quantum code that are the key to understanding who we are, where we came from, where we’re going, and why.

  “If we can only look closely enough,” he said in frustration. The Simulated Artificial Intelligence, a scan of his own brain that anticipated information that would be of interest to his real brain, picked out nothing unusual. Yuki once told him about Michelangelo stepping back from one of his sculptures, so lifelike, so hard-won from the marble, and raging at it, “Why can you not speak?” Makoto felt the same way. The damn particles were all around him and he cursed his eyes, his IC, his brain: “Why can you not see them?”

  Makoto managed to frown with one side of his mouth and grin with the other side. Yuki was right about that too. Hayao would not have understood, appreciated, or been excited by any of this. What would the logic of a little boy have suggested? “Make yourself smaller, Father”? “Use an electron camera”?

  No, Makoto thought, which was the cause of his smile. The boy would have said, “Father, ask Mother to paint you a picture.”

  “The clarity of youth,” Makoto murmured, then reactivated the LIVE recording to add comments of his own. “Hayao, the complexities of science and the universe do not yield to simple solutions,” he said. “To study a particle that has never been seen, we have spent seven billion globals and endured pressure that would crush your great-grand-aunt’s steel skull. You have hit that with a bat, you know how hard it is.” He paused, smiled. “Life costs a great deal. Life creates pressure. You will learn, in time, to accept that.”

  He thumbed off the recording. Hayao still wouldn’t understand—not now. But one day he would. It has been said, repeatedly, that no generation ever app
reciates their parents’ wisdom until it is too late. All the stories his father told him about living in a time when there were only smartphones and computers, no ICs to allow tapping into the networks with a thought—all that was just so much noise, as his own stories about medical advances spurred by molecular experiments in zero gravity and societal advances brought on by cybernetic electronometry must be for his son. Hayao listened because Hayao was happy to hear his father’s voice. But even that would stop, one teenage day.

  Makoto touched Hayao’s file and continued making his own LIVE response as data streams scrolled up, down, and sideways around him—patterns without change or revelation.

  “My son,” he said, “I do not expect you to understand what it was like before you could contact people, watch all manner of entertainment, and control appliances with your mind alone . . . let alone understand the importance of space dust. One day you will learn how studying neutrinos can pave the way for even greater leaps. I am here prying their secrets from them . . . or at least trying. They are stubborn.” He stopped short of adding, “Like your mother,” because Hayao wouldn’t understand the appreciative humor in that. “The truth is, my son, no matter how much our world changes due to the action of one generation—younger or older—the other will never quite understand it. But you must believe this: I have been where you are, young and just scratching at life, still seeing it as a little boy must. When you reach where I am, you will understand the larger family of which we are a part, the family of humankind.”

  He paused the file but did not mark it for access by the boy. Not yet. Yuki would tell him, “It isn’t necessary to explain everything, Dr. Ogawa,” but there was so much more to say. Makoto was a scientist and science required context. He wanted to explain that their nation, which had thrived by providing high-tech entertainment for so many decades, had turned to the sea to forge their future. Hayao should know—from his father’s mouth, not from an interactive technology, that as the rest of the world expanded outward, Japan had looked to the ocean floor for food, electricity, and colonization. The boy should care that the same tectonic faults that caused earthquakes were now being used to provide access to the “firepacks” that powered much of the Far East. Those facts were a part of the vital reason that his father wasn’t home to play with him.

  Makoto breathed out deeply. If, in fact, he were working on the firepacks, Hayao might think that was exciting. But nearly massless, invisible particles from almost fourteen billion years ago? Not much to brag about on his sociodates.

  It isn’t like it was when I worked on the International Terraforming Project in 2039, he reflected.

  Back then, a recent graduate of Tokyo Tech, Makoto had spent nine months huddled near the North Pole for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, proving that oceanic power stations, vaporizing ammonia in the warming waters of the Arctic to produce electricity, might—in great enough proliferation—begin to help reduce that warming. Makoto and his colleagues oversaw one, then dozens, of those generators, which—alongside the firepacks and the development of commercial fusion—helped end, for all time, the burning of fossil fuels. Concurrently, artificial sea ice crafted by a North American team—aided by the micrometer-thin Sunshade suspended in space, at a gravitationally neutral L-1 point between the Earth and the moon—had halted and begun to reverse global warming, saving the planet from rising sea levels and environmental catastrophe. That work was easy to explain at cocktail parties and in classrooms, Makoto mused.

  How could Hayao understand, let alone explain, that neutrinos appear to us only in the traces they leave as they pass through water and tritium—glimmers of Cherenkov light and telltale electron spectra—or in the unique gamma ray signature of their self-destruction in deep space?

  Makoto resisted the urge to delete his unfinished recording.

  “Yuki, I could use your help,” he sighed as he redoubled his concentration on the study. “I must think, now, not just as an adult but as a boy.”

  As an adult, Makoto thought his work was profound. If he and his fellow scientists did it right, they’d see and record an afterimage of the universe in its first second of life, a period after the Big Bang when the temperature went from impossibly hot to semi-impossibly hot, when the first particles managed to form—these particles, the ones he sought. And in that way, perhaps, Makoto and his team could discern why matter is here at all.

  Makoto looked past the flashing numbers and letters at the spectacular neutrino telescope he had helped create. Just as the early-twenty-­first-century PTOLEMY experiment at Princeton had scrutinized decay products from a tiny sample of tritium for signs of relic-neutrino capture, Makoto’s DORARGOS project—named for a mythical Japanese creature that was all eyes—watched for telltale electrons from an enormous tritium disc surrounded by magnets and sensor arrays. Around the disc in a huge, clear, doughnut-shaped sea lab, Makoto and the scientists observed the telescope, the ocean, and their own living quarters.

  The information the telescope brought them, like almost all data in 2050, appeared directly before their eyes, either hovering in the air or on the surface of the walls or tabletops where they sat or stood, depending on each individual’s choice of IC electronometrics.

  The IC, he thought. Another useful spinoff from useless political chaos.

  Who would have thought that IC and so much more would be the result of a cynical political-economic sleight-of-hand? When China wanted to distract the world and itself from the dual crushing problems of pollution and unbalanced population, the nation of nearly two billion looked to outer space. Rather than clean their air and water or learn to treasure female babies the way they revered male offspring, the central government tried to colonize the moon in 2026. They failed, spectacularly, losing several crews before settling on the construction of a space station.

  America reacted to the Chinese push the way they had in the mid-twentieth century, when the Soviets had first tried to claim space—with an accelerated thrust back into space, building their own station and their own moon base. The Russians settled for just a space station. The reasons were maddening to Makoto but the results were epic.

  Just as the original space race had spawned countless advances in all the sciences, this early-twenty-first-century space race, spurred by telecommunication and internet giants, produced so much new technology so fast that the politically or religiously or nationally motivated naysayers were all but swept away in a high-profit frenzy of communication, medicine, reproduction, and entertainment—along with the need to crush new crimes like mindjacking and narcetics. It was difficult to complain about the state of the world when your cancer was healed in an afternoon by MedIC programs, your life expectancy was upward of a century, and climate could be adjusted to increase food production anywhere on Earth.

  “And it was all set in irrevocable, some would say predestined motion all those billions of years ago when neutrinos popped into existence or decoupled or whatever in fact they did right after the Big Bang,” Makoto said to himself. Maybe that’s what he should tell Hayao. “I’m here for you, my son, because everything you are, everything you have, everything you love started with—”

  Makoto didn’t look up. He didn’t have to. The symphony of data was interrupted by a suddenly sour note. The anomaly came to him like a fat uncle’s finger in a wedding cake: multicolored streams were all flowing in one direction when, suddenly, a black point shot in the other direction.

  Reactions from his fellow scientists began to burble on the edge of his IC.

  “. . . not a tectonic event . . .”

  “. . . no known geologic analog . . .”

  “. . . unprecedented energy pulse . . .”

  Makoto’s own thoughts locked them out. He was focused on the dark point:

  A gamma ray emission line, with the distinctive spectral shape of neutrino annihilation—but not in deep space. Impossibly near—inside th
e sensor array itself—and of impossibly vast amplitude—

  Then another word appeared in his mind. Makoto did not know where it came from: his own mind, a fellow scientist, or even a particle itself ripping through his brain and stimulating, informing neurons.

  Over.

  As the sea lab ruptured and erupted around him, reality seemed to stretch out around Makoto in all directions, flooding his consciousness with more colors and awareness than he’d ever thought possible. For a flashing instant he felt no sensation, since the experience was processed before the pain.

  Was this life or death?

  Dr. Makoto Ogawa never found out. He strangely, peacefully, even gratefully accepted the universe on its own still unfathomable terms—

  And then he was over.

  The IC did not confirm Makoto’s death. Yuki Ogawa looked out her window, as the rest of megalopolis looked out their windows, as Tokyo Bay erupted. She moved a finger to search her IC but it shuddered when control shifted from Tokyo to a FALL site, the nearest Functioning Alternate Logistics Link.

  The woman immediately knew that erupted was not the right word. Where there was once a sky and a horizon, outside the window of the bayside apartment was a towering wall of water. Something had thrust it toward the heavens.

  “Hayao,” she said, holding her hand to him as he looked curiously at the way the walls, floor, and ceiling were shuddering.

  “Is this a new game?” he asked.

  “No, come with me,” she replied.

  Since she was calm, he was calm, and they walked together. Not down the stairs to the street—yelling and crying like all the others, at least those they could hear over the onrushing roar—but up the steps to the roof of the apartment house.

  Yuki and Hayao stood there for a moment, hand tightly in hand, looking up at the looming wall of water that had become the sky. There was no crest at the top, only sprays shooting upward as though they had lost all weight. They did not come back down.