The Reality Thief (Deplosion Book 1)

by Paul Anlee

  Darian nodded. “So you altered the operating system?”

  “The BIOS, actually. It overrode parts of the O/S in RAM after booting up. I figured you were less likely to look there than in the O/S itself. Anyway, it wasn’t that hard to do. I just added a little redirection to certain interrupt handlers. You would have had to follow the machine language byte by byte to notice it.”

  “I was almost at that stage. I decided last night to just start over and build a second generator.”

  “I would have just made the same change to that one too.”

  “Why?”

  Larry shrugged. “Lot of reasons, really. For one, I don’t like the way you’ve all been treating me, like some half-witted lab monkey at the beck and call of geniuses.” His voice shook with barely-controlled emotion.

  “Larry, everything we are, everything we know, everything we can do, all of this was offered to you.”

  Darian’s voice was little more than a whisper, so quiet that Larry had to strain to hear it. But instead of the calming effect that he was aiming for, Darian’s words only fueled the rage welling within his colleague.

  Larry sat back down, putting the control console between Darian and himself. “You guys think you’re some kind of young gods, altering the human brain, playing around with the laws of nature. It’s just too much.”

  “Scientists have been doing that kind of thing for centuries.”

  “Well, maybe we’ve gone too far, too fast. Maybe there are some things we aren’t meant to know.”

  “You don’t really believe that.”

  “How can you claim what you’re doing is for the good of humanity? None of you are even human anymore! Why should we trust you to do what’s right for the rest of us?”

  “The hardware may be different, but the program running on it is still human,” replied Darian evenly.

  Larry’s fists clenched, and the veins in his neck and forehead bulged as he fought to control his fury.

  Darian was ready to bolt. He searched his lattice for some basic self-defense moves; he hoped it wouldn’t come to violence.

  Larry hunched over the keyboard and tapped a few keys while Darian looked on, dumbstruck. What’s he up to?

  “I only wish the other monstrosities were here with you,” Larry spat. “You are abominations before God. Someone needs to put an end to this.”

  “We are many things, Larry, but, come on, really? Abominations? Who are you getting this from?”

  “If you’d had any shred of humility, I might not have been forced into this. But you think you know everything. I’d destroy this machine and all your notes, if I thought it’d do any good. But you'd just recreate it all, wouldn't you? How can humanity trust you to develop this for the good of all of us? You just don’t know when to stop. Will you only be happy once you become immortal and all-powerful? Is it your goal to challenge God, Himself?”

  Larry took a shuddering breath. His eyes, which only moments before had been projecting bitterness and raw fury, now reflected only deep sadness. The sadness worried Darian more than the anger.

  “Goodbye Professor,” Larry said. “Oh, and don't worry about Greg and Kathy. I have plans for them, too. And then I’ll make sure the RAF generator ends up in more responsible hands than theirs. I’m sorry, but you’ve forced me into this. It’s been nice knowing you. Or maybe not.” He pressed the ENTER key.

  A hazy gray field materialized around Darian, encapsulating him from the bottom of his shoes to the top of the last stray hair on his head.

  Darian threw his arms out to both sides, feeling the unyielding boundary of the containment field. He tried to take a step but his foot slid down along the inside surface. He was trapped.

  He instructed his lattice to connect to the laptop controller but it was already too late; the communication lines were inactive. Every system that should have been connected to the controller was offline. There was no way in.

  He found a stray open line leading from some other equipment to the outside world and connected to the local power grid. Working furiously, he bypassed the university’s Systems security and killed the electricity supply to the lab.

  The hall light streaming in through the observation window cut out, and was replaced by the harsh glare of an emergency backup. In the lab, however, nothing changed.

  He’s really thought this out—Darian realized. Well, at least the outage will trigger a maintenance alarm. They take power outages seriously in the science buildings. Frantically, he searched for other alarms he could activate remotely—smoke, heat, water—but Larry had beat him to it. How is that even possible?

  Larry laughed—a deranged, heartless laugh, full of hatred. “That won’t do you any good. The RAF generator will work for hours on battery. In a few seconds, this microverse holding you is going to collapse. Every molecule, atom, and particle making up the great Darian Leigh will disappear from this universe forever, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”

  He came around the desk, bringing his face within inches of his mentor. The transparent gray barrier was all that stood between them.

  “Do you see what you’ve done? Do you see?” he yelled. “You created this…this affront to nature. You! And now, through me, the universe—the one true universe created by God Almighty—is going to take its vengeance and erase you from existence. Can you feel it closing in around you?”

  He stepped back and pointed an accusatory finger at Darian. “I, Valeriy Illyovich Rusalov, having found Darian Leigh guilty of the greatest arrogance and hubris against God, banish you from His universe!”

  For a moment, Larry’s eyes softened, and Darian thought he might be feeling remorse for his actions, for his colleague’s impending fate.

  “Enjoy your sentence in Hell,” Larry finished, his voice disturbingly devoid of emotion.

  Darian struggled as the sphere began to shrink in on him. He tried unsuccessfully to control his terror. Using his lattice to clamp down on his emotions, he allowed himself to go numb. He ignored his imminent death, and filled his mind with RAF equations.

  He’d learned a lot in the past few hours: the basic RAF theory was correct; fields could be formed even in the presence of matter. The fields Larry was generating permitted selective interaction between the enclosed and external universes while preventing other actions. He could hear and see through the bubble that held him captive, but he couldn’t push through it.

  He hoped what he’d learned could somehow save his life.

  He sped through the hundreds of thousands of equations that he and Greg had devised over the past few weeks, looking for anything that might fit what he now knew to be true. There had to be a way to nullify this field before it destroyed him.

  He had enough computational power to work with the equations or to operate his own internal RAF controller, not both at the same time. Whatever he came up with, there’d be no second chances.

  At last, he found a set of equations that might work. A pitifully small one, but that would make it easier to generate the required field. The parameters showed enough flexibility to allow a few changes on the fly. He hoped it would be enough.

  Outside, in the larger universe, Larry looked several inches taller than he’d been a couple minutes ago. This confirmed Darian’s fears. Larry isn’t trying to trap me or kill me; he wants to obliterate me.

  What else have I got to work with? The laws of this microverse started out similar to our own universe, except this one is shrinking with me inside it. Oddly enough, it doesn’t feel any more limiting; I must be shrinking along with the sphere. The space between electrons and the nucleus is compacting. Normal biochemistry still seems to be functioning. Electrons aren’t being squeezed out like in a neutron star, not yet.

  He must have set the generator to step down through a series of standing wave functions that determine the size of electron orbitals. And because atoms are mostly made up of empty space, there’s potential for a lot more compression before electron shells start over
lapping with protons and neutrons. At some point, though, there’s not going to be enough room for everything; life-supporting chemistry is going to become impossible. Unless Larry has figured out how to convert me into a nuclear being—and I doubt that—I am going to die.

  He wondered if Larry intended to keep him alive long enough to feel the electrons being crushed out of his molecules or if he’d stop before that point. His best guess was that Larry could shrink him by a factor of more than ten thousand without completely eradicating him. Is he going to keep me alive inside this bubble or destroy me?

  Darian wasn’t sure which would be worse. Either way, he would be dead pretty quickly. I have to reverse the collapse, and now.

  He shut down the search programs and brought his RAF-generator control program to the forefront. He set his internal generator to ACTIVE, and projected fields that he hoped would return his prison to conditions more similar—according to his frenzied calculations—to the natural universe in which he belonged.

  The fields he cast wove in and around the ones Larry was using to produce the collapsing bubble. Amazingly, the shrinking halted. It started to reverse. In spite of his lattice-dampened emotions, Darian was elated. His computations must be close; he’d bought himself some time. Darian felt a wisp of hope.

  “What the…? Oh, no! No, you can’t! No, no, no, no!” Larry babbled when he noticed the sphere growing larger. “What are you doing?” Changes were no longer being mediated through his machine alone. He ran behind the desk and sat in the operator’s chair, furiously stabbing away at the laptop.

  “Ahhh, very clever, Dr. Leigh! You’ve been busy!” He thrummed his finger on the keys. “So that’s how you figured out the RAF theory was correct. You found a way to implant or grow an internal RAF generator. I’m impressed! But I imagine the amount of energy you need to power those computations must be making you very hungry by now. Isn’t it?”

  He strode back to the grayish bubble separating him from Darian. “You can’t beat me. You know that, right? You might be smarter and faster but I have much, much more experience with this system. I know what it’s capable of, and what it’s not capable of. You have only theory.”

  He banged in some new commands and the bubble compression resumed. This time, instead of a smoothly shrinking sphere, the microverse jumped from one change to another every few seconds. It shrank several percent, and then inflated a few percent. Its net movement, though, was definitely working toward collapse.

  He’s attached the series to a random number generator–Darian thought. He knew the algorithms intimately. While they might appear random to the uninitiated, they were reasonably predictable as long as they were tied to the internal calculations of the microprocessor. He examined the changes to the radius of the field and tried to match the values of the pseudorandom seed number.

  Darian worked out the sequence and generated opposing fields to the collapsing steps. The random oscillations of the gray sphere slowed in frequency, and the radius began to grow as Darian permitted certain favorable RAF changes to pass without interference.

  Larry watched the growing sphere, momentarily confused.

  Only a few more steps and the laws inside will match the natural universe again! Darian would be free in less than a minute.

  Larry punched in new commands. Only seconds had passed since Darian figured out the pseudorandom field generation, and already the gray microverse had nearly regained its original size.

  “Yes!” Larry cried out, and pushed a final key. The field instantly collapsed by thirty percent, and then another twenty percent.

  Darian employed countermeasures, trying to follow the rapid changes Larry was generating, but he couldn’t keep up. The field shrunk another ten percent, and another. He now stood under a meter tall.

  The field collapsed a further fifty percent. Changes were coming too fast and the steps were too large. Darian couldn’t get enough samples to counter the rapid changes.

  Larry pushed another key, got up from behind the desk, strolled over to address the gray, translucent sphere containing a very small Darian.

  “Nothing more to say, Professor?” Larry waited for an answer but there was none. He returned to the desk and pressed a final key. The sphere shrunk to a few centimeters.

  Darian screamed in frustration, sending out wave after wave of random changes to the fields, hoping against hope that something he did would disrupt the collapse of the microverse or buy more time to work, but the collapse was inevitable.

  Darian knew he was done. I can’t keep up with all of these changing configurations Larry keeps throwing at me.

  The next change shrunk the microverse to a millimeter. In a final act of desperation, Darian dumped himself—everything he knew, everything he remembered, everything he was—into one final lattice transmission to the only people he trusted.

  The data that comprised the essence of Darian Leigh poured out of him on multiple channels in uncoordinated, overlapping chunks, seeking paths along any available transmission modality to its intended destination. It took up temporary residence wherever there was available memory: in bits of lab equipment, in cell phones, in smart appliances, in HVAC systems, in automobile navigation systems, in inactive computers all over the lower mainland.

  Darian sent whatever he could, as fast as he could, but there was too much data and not enough time. Then an idea occurred to him, maybe a way to survive the collapse. He had one last hope to preserve the integrity of his essence—not by fighting against the fields that were destroying the very matter he was made of, but by accepting this new universe into which he was being forced. He smiled one final, peaceful, microscopic smile and sent a new configuration to his RAF generator.

  In the lab, Larry watched the gray bubble shrink beyond the threshold of visibility. Gone! He stared at the empty spot where the microverse had been. His triumph was complete.

  Now, I’d better get out of here, too. He walked back to the desk, shut everything down, and tucked the laptop inside his backpack.

  Grabbing his coat off the back of the chair, he took one last look around the lab that had been his second home for the past half year and departed.

  48

  LARRY DIDN’T ANSWER THE DOORBELL OR HIS CELL PHONE.

  “Larry! It’s Greg! C’mon, dude, get up! It works! Hey, let’s go! Larry, are you in there?” He pounded on the wooden door of the basement suite but only succeeded in waking up the neighbors. They were none too pleased about Larry’s rowdy pre-dawn visitor.

  “Hey! Do you mind? Shut up down there!” A window slammed shut immediately above their heads, making Greg and Kathy jump.

  “He’s either out cold or he didn’t make it home last night. Let’s go,” Kathy suggested.

  “Yeah, I guess. Hang on a sec, maybe the window’s open,” Greg pushed at the flimsy aluminum frame but it held tight. They cupped their hands around their eyes and tried to peer in past the cheap cotton curtains, but couldn’t see or hear anything that gave them reason to stay. “C’mon, let’s go.”

  Great. Chalk up yet another reason for Larry to be resentful. Well, he can’t say we didn’t try—Greg grumbled to himself. They got in the car and headed out to the expressway.

  “It’s weird that he’s not answering his phone,” Kathy said. “Do you think he’s okay?”

  “Yeah, he’s fine. Probably just switched it off. He used to do that all the time. You’ll see. He either crashed at the lab or on somebody’s sofa.” They rode the rest of the way in silence; it was still too early in the morning for sensible conversation.

  Greg signaled, slowed down, and turned into the university parking lot.

  The flood of data hit their lattices without warning.

  Flashes of speculative physics, RAF electronics, and new designs for dendy lattices mixed with memories of a childhood that neither of them had lived and washed over them in an exquisitely painful, mind-wrenching torrent.

  Halfway through the turn, Greg’s brain became completely
inundated. Without meaning to, he let go of the steering wheel and gripped his head. Darian’s desperate outpouring overtook his own sensory input, and the whirlwind of images wrested away his consciousness. He heard voices crying out, and it took him a moment to recognize them as his own and Kathy’s.

  Unguided, the car rolled into a shallow ditch and came to rest against a spruce sapling. The two scientists were too busy fighting for their sanity and their identities to notice.

  As soon as the first few gigabytes had begun pushing their way into their consciousness, Kathy had understood what was happening. Darian is dying!

  She knew but, with all the incoming data, it was too much to process. She fought for control over a small part of her lattice and, for a split second, stemmed the incoming jumble of thoughts, images, sounds, and emotions. The narrow window was all she needed to assign her lattice the specific task of deactivating her external communications, and then she gave in to the stream.

  Three more excruciating seconds passed before the isolated subroutine managed to stop the incoming rush completely.

  Kathy felt her muscles relax and she slumped in her seat, letting her mind recover from the shock of trying to process all that data. She looked over at her partner, and managed a weak, “Greg? You okay?”

  He was hunched over the steering wheel, unmoving. The windshield is intact. No sign of blood—she noted. Using what was left of her strength, she reached out to touch his arm.

  As her fingers neared his sleeve, Greg let out an incoherent grunt and pitched backward, bolt upright in his seat. He grabbed both sides of his head, arched back further than she thought physically possible, and opened his mouth in a silent scream of agony. She shook him roughly and screamed, “Greg!” but couldn’t break him out of it.

  Desperate, she wrapped her subroutine in a viral program, opened her lattice long enough to send the package into the data torrent, and shut it down again.