Creation

by Greg Chase

  Sam thought his head should start hurting right about then, but to his surprise, a calm settled over his thoughts.

  Dr. Shot made himself comfortable in the big chair. “The issue is time. The standard analogy for time has always been a river. I gave that a lot of thought. If it’s a river, we know the starting point: the big bang. And we also know the end point—or rather, points: black holes where matter is compressed out of existence. There’s a very interesting similarity between the big bang and black holes: neither exhibit time. Black holes are considered so dense that even time stops, and the big bang, just prior to being the big bang, existed without time. I speculate that the two extremes are actually the same thing. Black holes compressing matter and sending it back to the big bang. The two events happen simultaneously, creating a series of wormholes, if you will, in time and space.”

  Dr. Shot poured Sam another drink.

  Sam was keeping up. Everything the scientist had said, Sam had more or less heard before.

  Dr. Shot drained his glass in one gulp. “Next, we have the issue of dark energy. Black holes swallow planets and stars. All that matter becomes energy. But where does that energy go? My theory is it’s traveling back in time toward the big bang.”

  Sam had always thought dark energy was a cheat. The scientists couldn’t make a workable equation for matter blown out of the big bang, so they added in a huge-ass number that perfectly balanced the equation and said, “Well, you just can’t see it.”

  The old man continued. “Imagine we’re flowing down that time river. Think about what the riverbank would look like. Not much of anything at all—it’d be stationary relative to our movement. Just like dark energy.”

  Still sounds like a made-up answer.

  “So now we have a beginning and an ending for time and the riverbank time flows by. Then I went back to what happens to the water in an actual river. It doesn’t all move the same. At the center, the river moves faster than along the banks. Friction slows the water down, just like how time moves faster out in space than it does close to a large gravitational mass.”

  Dr. Shot was getting on a roll. How long would it be before Sam got left on that riverbank or some sandbar of the conversation?

  “Next item I considered: everything rotates. This is a weird one. From atoms to the galaxies, there’s rotation. And if you stop that rotation, really stop it, like at the atomic level, guess what? Nothing. No little itty bit of matter exists. It’s only there if it’s moving.”

  Sam had always figured the concept of parts of atoms not existing when you stopped the atom had more to do with the inability to see anything that small. But that was never his field.

  “Energy and matter are related. They’re basically the same thing. Einstein speculated about that long ago with his theory of relativity. It takes one hell of a lot of energy to equal matter, but they are equal.”

  Sam leaned forward. “So there’s your answer. Stop matter, and it becomes energy.”

  “Not quite. For matter to revert to energy, there’d be a big release of energy even at that small scale. Stop an atom, and it just disappears.”

  Sam settled back in his chair. There was no point in arguing something this man had already given a lot of thought to.

  “Have you ever just sat by a river?”

  For a moment, Sam thought it was a rhetorical question, but Dr. Shot quietly waited for a response.

  “When I was a kid, my grandfather used to take me fishing,” Sam said. “That was before such things were outlawed. I used to love the way the river would make gurgling and splashing noises. Happy sounds and happy memories.”

  Dr. Shot gave Sam a moment to enjoy the memory. “Ever watch the whirlpools while you were fishing?”

  “Yeah, there was this one river. A little waterfall, maybe four feet high, dumped into this big pond. Right where it hit, there was a rock that swirled the water. One of the biggest fish I ever caught swam up from that eddy.”

  “Vortexes rotate. Imagine our time river again, running up against that black energy riverbed. Imagine the spinning that friction might create.”

  Sam shook his head. “But you’re mixing up time and energy. Energy and matter are related, but you’re talking about time whirlpools.”

  “Exactly right, exactly right.” The way the doctor bounced in his chair made Sam wonder if Ellie had spent much time in this office. “Do you know one of the easiest ways to increase energy? Feed it back on itself. If you take time and turn it back on itself, like in a whirlpool, you end up with tremendous energy. Enough to create matter.”

  Sam scratched his head. “So you’re saying planets are running along the side of the river? That’s why they rotate and why they exist?”

  “Sort of. You’re thinking of the river in three dimensions, which isn’t quite right. All that dark energy doesn’t flow past the edges of the galaxy; it flows past us at an atomic level—or even more fundamental than that, I suspect, but I haven’t come up with a good vocabulary for that level of existence yet.”

  “Then why isn’t there matter all over the place? Why only in galaxies?”

  The old man sat back. “At the center of every galaxy is a black hole. From our perception of time, we see a planet-eating destroyer. But if you were to reverse time, we’d see black holes as galaxy creators. They’re the rocks in the time stream that create the whirlpools.”

  Dr. Shot drew a figure eight on the chalkboard. At the bottom he wrote Big Bang, on the top Black Hole and, where the lines crossed in the middle, matter. “Maybe time isn’t so much straight lines as curved lines that intersect. One side is our forward-moving time, and the mirror opposite is time moving backward. Something like this would allow for matter only in the here and now. Funny that it would resemble an infinity sign.”

  Sam smirked as he looked at the drawing. “Reminds me of the way man used to think he was the center of the universe. Here, you’re saying matter is the center of time.”

  Light reflected off the bald head as the old man inspected his own drawing more carefully. “Matter only exists where the future and the past meet, whether that’s time moving forward or backward. So why wouldn’t that intersection be all important?”

  “Sure puts a new spin on the old saying, The present is all that matters.”

  Dr. Shot looked up from his chalkboard. “I’ve always enjoyed linguistic coincidences. Gives me hope for time travel. Like someone sent these little sayings and ideas back in time for us to discover.”

  Sam picked up the chalk and drew two wheels inside the loops of the infinity sign. “But wouldn’t this idea negate time travel? You could move the wheels faster or slower, but that would only affect how fast you moved through the present. Or is this what you’ve been trying to tell me? Is this how you can be so old?”

  Light twinkled in Dr. Shot’s eyes. “It’s still mostly theory. Whatever it is that’s happening to me isn’t something I did in the past.”

  Sam nodded as he put his finger on the intersection of past and future. “If I imagine these wheels moving, I can only see them rotating in one direction. So how would something you do in the future effect how you live now? You can’t throw an idea out there then turn the wheels backward to send it into the past.”

  The old man nodded slowly as he picked up the chalk. From the point of intersection, he made a series of dots leading out along the future line until they circled the wheel. “Ideas moving forward in time eventually catch back up with us.” The dots continued around the wheel, eventually coming back into contact with the present.

  Sam shook his head. “But that’s not something tangible. From your speculation, it can’t be physical matter. I’m not even sure that would be energy. It’s just the passage of time.”

  The fingers of the old man’s hand showed remarkable dexterity as he twirled the chalk. “There’s no time without matter, and there’s no matter without energy.”

  Sam pressed his lips tightly together. “Why wouldn’t there be time withou
t matter? Seems like time would be something that would exist independent of anything else.”

  Dr. Shot drew wavy lines before the words Big Bang and after Black Hole. “The accepted theory is that there was no time in these regions. Without matter, there’s nothing to define time. Time, at least as we know it, is the record of matter being subjected to energy. How fast does something move, decay, or develop? Time, matter, and energy are intricately connected.”

  Sam accepted the unknown. It was nice to have someone speculate on answers without being so emotionally invested they couldn’t consider other points of view. “Do you think that’s why universes are flat disks—energy ramming head-on into energy going back in time? I mean, that intersection would create round objects, but the whole collision of past and future would be uniform across the universe at least.”

  The old man nodded. “Yes, I think so. If you have two forces directly opposed to each other, you get a more or less flat surface. But they aren’t equal, and they don’t stop each other. They pass through each other, creating these whirlpools. Take a spinning object and subject it to bombardment from a force differing in direction from its axis, and you get a sphere. Not all galaxies spin on the same plane.”

  Sam felt dizzy. There were too many swirling forces in too many directions. Somewhere, the old man had contradicted himself, but Sam’s brain was too tired to figure it out. Dr. Shot would undoubtedly say any discrepancy was the result of the problem existing in a different dimension. Scientists were always making up answers.

  Dr. Shot didn’t seem to notice. “The current question I’m working on is gravity. If you take time, turn it back on itself, and multiply that by—well, by a planet—you might get a vortex. Such strange things, vortexes. Centrifugal force would indicate that we should all be thrown off this rock. But a vortex pulls you in. If matter is little more than a time vortex, maybe that will lead to an answer.” The man took a drag on the glass pipe.

  Sam sipped at the tequila. “Then why wouldn’t planets be large funnel shapes?”

  The leather chair made scrunching sounds as Dr. Shot settled back into it. “Interesting. Energy spins in time. The vortex created is what we know as gravity. After all, anything in a river that encounters a whirlpool gets sucked in like gravity. But the center of that vortex is where all the energy would accumulate. And turning around an object inside a vortex would create a sphere. So maybe mass and gravity are just two effects from the same cause, not actually one causing the other.”

  Sam didn’t want to interrupt some great understanding that might be taking place. The man handed over the pipe, but Sam refused. It was becoming hard enough to follow along.

  The man’s eyes returned to Sam, who waited for the next great revelation. “You hungry? I have a fridge here in the office with some fruit and cheese. Good organic stuff. I can’t stand that synthetic food-like crap.”

  Sam stifled a laugh at the change of pace. As he took a bite out of a hunk of cheese, the muscles around his temples worked out their tension. Had his mind ever worked this hard? The food was quite good and a welcome break.

  The doctor resumed his seat in the large chair. “So that’s the theory that I work from. If you think about it, we’re all time travelers. We’re all moving from the big bang toward some black hole. We’re just mostly all traveling at the same speed, so we don’t think of it as unusual. But even within the confines of the solar system, there are some of us moving faster than others. The bigger the planet, the slower you go. For the most part, that difference doesn’t play enough of a role to really affect a person’s lifetime relative to someone on a different planet. That time vortex we all share, known as the solar system, makes all the changes in the vortexes’ speeds from planet to planet barely big enough to notice.”

  Sam snorted. “Lifetime. I like that.” Was that even a joke? Or am I just really baked?

  Dr. Shot smiled politely. “What people really mean by time travel is going back in time. Or shooting far enough into the future that they miss some of the in-between time. I don’t imagine you’ve ever seen a hummingbird.”

  “Only in videos,” Sam said.

  That damn high-school course in extinct species had had a really depressing effect on everyone. It was a good place to pick up girls, though. Let them think all life could end, and they’d have sex with just about anyone.

  “Hummingbirds experienced time very differently than people. You could say tortoises might be on the other end of the scale, moving very slowly through their very long lives.”

  Sam snapped his fingers. “So you’re a tortoise?”

  Dr. Shot shook his head. “I’m not a tortoise but more like the kid sticking his hand out the hovercraft window, catching the wind.”

  Sam grew serious. “You’re saying you can drag your body along that dark energy? Slow down your path through time? That’s how you can be so old?”

  “Very well done, my boy, very well done indeed. Now, if I can just do the hard part of figuring out how.” The twinkling old smile reminded Sam of his grandfather at Christmas. “All I can tell you is it’s not a machine. And I’m hardly the first to discover the secret of peace.”

  Some idea played at the corner of Sam’s mind. “Would this explain the trouble the Tobes have communicating with their Jovian brothers and sisters? We can adjust to differences. A tortoise can supposedly communicate with a hummingbird. But beings based on technology would have real problems if their time signatures didn’t match up.”

  “Yes, I believe so. It’s the language barrier, as Joshua describes it.” Dr. Shot flipped the switch on the desk. The window view screens resumed their display of the palatial garden. Sam’s head began to buzz again with the familiar noise of the Tobes’ silent connection. The older man put a hand on Sam’s shoulder. “Best not to discuss these ideas for the time being. I still like playing some thoughts close to the vest.”

  Sam had no idea why anything Dr. Shot had discussed should be a secret, but then, having the secret to the fountain of youth might attract a lot of attention. He fidgeted in the chair, attempting to find a way back up to his feet.

  “One other thing. Might not mean much, but then again, it might prove useful. You remember how I said Rendition had bought my company? And how my company had bought up other companies and so on?”

  It hadn’t been that long ago. “Sure.”

  “Well, that process goes back to some of the first computer operating systems. Early on, someone got the bright idea of not selling the systems, just leasing them. So when someone would buy a computer, they weren’t actually buying the operating system, just the license to use it.”

  Sam wasn’t sure what that had to do with anything. “Okay.”

  Dr. Shot leaned his head to the side. “Well, legacy software and all. Take these systems all the way out to the present day—”

  Sam figured out where this was headed. “No one owns the Tobes. People are just licensing their use.”

  “Technically, Rendition owns the Tobes, but yes, individual buyers do not. It’s really old legacy systems that the lease applies to, but everything is built on the past. No way to pull that brick out of the base of the pyramid.”

  23

  The meeting room for Rendition’s board of directors was unlike any Sam had encountered. View screens not only covered every wall but also every other surface as well. Transparent displays stood in front of every chair on the conference table. The floor and ceiling concealed all manner of projectors and light enhancers.

  Lud leaned in toward one of the table displays. “Set the room for eight attendees.”

  Like a house of mirrors, the seven-sided table divided into eight. Each station reminded Sam of the bridge on Persephone. Transparent screens surrounded every high-backed leather chair. You could run the world from one of these locations.

  Exactly right. The confirmation didn’t give him any comfort. Watching eight of the most powerful people in the solar system vie for control didn’t sound like a fun way to
spend the afternoon.

  “I wanted to give you a peek at what you’ll be in for,” Lud said. “I’ll sit on one side of you, Dr. Shot on the other. Jacques will be next to me. The board’s used to the two of us being in charge. Hector Delcourt, the representative of the Mars Consortium, will be next to Dr. Shot. Then Michael Baldwin from the North American Government because the continent’s largest corporation—the government—demanded a seat on our board. And finally, the two members from the Moons of Jupiter: Jayde Zuri from the Europa Corporation and Rolf Hartman from Callisto Corps.”

  Sam lowered his body into the luxurious chair. Miniature cushions inflated, the area supporting his back grew firm, and the chair rose by an inch. A throne meant to enhance the king. Nice.

  Anything for you. The response confirmed that the chair was actually Tobe adjusted.

  Screens lit up around him from every angle: information on his wealth, Rendition’s stock price, the status of the Jersey City redevelopment project, everything he’d want to know. At least it’s not all in my head. Given the chance, the Tobes would happily make his daily life exactly that complex.

  Lud put his beefy hand on Sam’s shoulder. “You’ll be the only one to see this information, but each board member will be seeing their own version of what they want. You, me, Jacques, and Dr. Shot will be the only ones physically present. The rest will hologram in, though like the Tobes, they will appear perfectly solid to you. As you focus on their images, the screens will bring up whatever you want to know about each member.”

  “What can we expect?” Sam asked.

  “Everyone has their own agenda. I’ll be on your side, of course, though if you want me more involved with The Foundation, I’ll have to step back from Rendition. That’ll leave Jacques in charge, which he’ll love, but he’ll press the corporation more firmly toward taking over the world.