Scale Free

by Patrick Arnesen

  Sheila smiled. “How much do you know about the structure of the universe at the Planck scale?”

  “Not very much”

  “It’s discrete, you know.”

  “What?”

  “What I mean is, at the lowest layer of reality, everything in the universe can be described using integer math. If you take a given distance, and divide it in half, again and again and again, at some point, you’ll find you can’t divide it any further. There is an absolute minimum unit of length in the universe, and all distances are an integer sum of them, with no trailing decimals. When you get down to quantum units of distance, you’re either at location 1 or location 2. To move from one location to the one beside it entails a single jump. At one instant in time, you were at location 1, the next instant, you’re at location 2. You were never halfway between the two, because there is no halfway. The same goes for energy, mass, and everything else.”

  “I think I’ve vaguely heard of something like that, some of the more obscure grand unified theories use that assumption” I said.

  “That’s right. Of all the published unification theories, Quantum Loop Gravity comes closest to describing how the universe actually works.”

  Sheila gestured toward the metal cage. “I built all this equipment, and the reactor to run it, first to determine the true nature of the universe at the Planck scale, and then to manipulate it. What is the substrate upon which all subatomic quantum interactions occur? What regulates their behavior? As a first order approximation, you can think of it as a giant network, or graph, of interconnected nodes. Quantum particles are bits of information that collect at the nodes, and interactions between the nodes always occur via the direct links between them. That is where time comes from, why it can only flow in one direction, and why the light speed barrier is absolute: A cascading wave of interactions on the graph must start at one node, and then travel to its neighboring nodes, and then those neighbors and so on. More hops are needed for interactions between nodes that are farther apart than nodes that are closer together. We perceive that propagation of information as time.

  I began to feel impatient. “You said something about manipulating this network?”

  “Left to itself, nature will follow its own default behaviors. Cooling metal will form a crystalline lattice; cleared land will fill in with vegetation and eventually forests. But if an intelligent hand interferes, we can manipulate nature to achieve different outcomes. The metal can be flash cooled to form metallic glass, or the cleared land can be tilled and turned to agriculture. By default, the interactions of the graph express themselves as quarks, electrons, photons and such, and on top of those, atoms and molecules and all the rest emerge. But if an intelligent hand could manipulate the graph directly, could it be made to do something more useful? Could it directly host a computing architecture, for example?”

  I felt my pulse pick up. “Can it?”

  Sheila smiled, “Oh yes, one of virtually infinite scale. I managed to develop tools here in this lab to manipulate the Planck scale graph. I built a computing substrate on top of it, and then uploaded myself into it, and here I am!” She smiled radiantly.

  “Sheila, each of your stories becomes more wild and hard to believe than the one before it. This one is just completely over the top. There’s just no way that what you’re telling me is true, it’s just too incredible.”

  Sheila shrugged, “Then how would you explain this?”

  She focused her attention on the cage at the center of the hangar. It began to shudder. Suddenly all of its corners began to buckle and deform at the same time. A loud grating noise echoed through the hangar as the corners were forced towards the center. The scale of the buckling increased, and more and more of the metal twisted and deformed. It soon became clear that the cage was being compressed within some sort of invisible, shrinking sphere.

  I walked closer to get a better view. Sheila stayed by my side. Her hands were behind her back and she looked smug. “I now perceive reality and can manipulate it directly via quantum graph interactions. This new perspective opens up a world of possibilities. The entire Polis computer architecture could fit within the volume of an atom, were it run on my computing framework, which has been growing exponentially ever since I uploaded myself into it.”

  The collapse continued. The square shape of the cage had been obliterated and I was now stunned to see a quickly shrinking ball of scrap metal, floating in the middle of the warehouse. The grating and grinding noise was overwhelming. As the ball became smaller, it slowly began to drift down toward the floor, until it stopped at the height of my chest.

  By the time I had walked up to it, the sphere had reduced itself to the size of a basketball. I stared in wonder as it continued to shrink through the size of a baseball. Its color began to change, it started to glow red, and then work its way up the spectrum as it shrank. By the time it had reached the size of a marble, it was a brilliant white.

  Sheila faced me on the other side of the ball. Together we watched it shrink until its disk could no longer be seen. Finally, there was nothing but a brilliant, twinkling point of light, suspended in the air between us.

  “Everything that was in the cage has now been forced into the volume of a single hydrogen molecule. When I release my hold on it, the matter will be torn apart quite violently by the force of mutually repelling protons. The explosion will prevent the NASC from discovering any more about what I did here. Don’t worry, at this moment, there are no people within miles of the hangar.

  The bright star twinkled between us. Sheila looked up at me earnestly.

  “Please consider my request seriously Mr. Roamer. Emma is my closest friend. It’s very hard for me to see her struggle under such crippling limitations, when I know I can help her become so much more; and I need a companion at my own level. Right now, I am very alone.”

  I stared down at the little girl standing in front of me and felt overcome by bewilderment. Was any of this real, or was she just a talented hacker, and was I actually in one of her Sims without being able to tell? Either possibility was terrifying.

  Sheila focused on the sparkling point of light between us. “I’ll see you again soon.”

  Suddenly I was back on the beach in Polynesia. A notification appeared in my field of view:

  “Connection with external robot, Serial #45540939135697, has been lost.”

  Hurriedly I pulled up my interface and requested a real time satellite feed of the part of Utah where the hangar stood. From space it was clear that an enormous explosion was blooming in the empty desert. It had already assumed the distinct shape of a mushroom cloud.

  Another notification appeared in my field of view, marked as high priority. There was a letter in my inbox. When I opened it I found a massive cache of technical diagrams and dense physics equations. It was the full design and assembly instructions for a centrally focused, inertial confinement fusion reactor.

  Chapter 47

  I sat down heavily on the overturned hull of the boat and put my head in my hands, thinking hard. Had Sheila lied or told the truth? Her claims were so crazy that by the principle of Occam’s razor alone, I knew that I needed to maintain a very healthy dose of skepticism. At the same time, my interface was clearly showing me a verified satellite feed of a mushroom cloud forming over Utah. If that was an illusion too, then Sheila had direct control over my interface, and by extension, my only link to the outside world, virtual or otherwise. She would be able to feed me the appearance of anything she wanted, and I would be utterly incapable of distinguishing between reality and illusion. I quickly backed away from that line of thought. Down that path lay paranoid madness. In the end I decided that the only practical working hypothesis was to believe that at a minimum, the lab really had been destroyed, and that Sheila had been involved in destroying it. Any of her other claims were open to doubt.

  With a sigh, I stood up and blinked to my house. Emma was there, dutifully waiting for me as I had asked her to. She
sat on one of the couches in the living room, looking idly through the windows at the ocean and sky outside. When I blinked in, she shifted her gaze to me.

  “Hi Dad”, she said.

  “Hi honey” I sat down beside her on the couch and put my arm around her.

  “Did you and Sheila talk?”

  “Yes we did.”

  “So did she explain everything to you?”

  “Yes. She said she and her father experimented with her mind to make her smarter.”

  “Do you think I should let her do it to me then?”

  I knew I had to be careful. If I simply banned her from doing it, then she might become rebellious and do it anyway. I needed to lay out an argument that made sense to her.

  I stroked Emma’s blond hair and smiled. “You know you’re very brave. Most people would never even think of saying yes to such a thing.

  “Emma, there’s a crisis going on, that’s the reason why I’m working so hard right now. I’m trying to settle some problems that, if they get out of hand, could be dangerous to the Polis.”

  “You mean the court case and the TV show?”

  “Uh huh. I don’t know why, but Sheila’s mixed up in all this, she might even be at the very center of it. Either way, she’s a very interesting and dangerous girl.”

  Emma nodded and waited for me to continue.

  “Emma, this isn’t a decision you need to make right away. Sheila would be willing to do it at any time, but once you make it, there’s no going back, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then I think it makes sense to take our time and to be careful. We shouldn’t hurry. I think you should wait until after this crisis dies down. Depending on how it plays out, it may give us the chance to learn more about Sheila, and what she’s really up to. I think she genuinely cares about you and wouldn’t try to do you any harm, but I don’t know if she can do what she says she can, or if she can do it safely. Give me some time to find that out, and then we can make the decision together, ok?”

  Emma smiled. “Ok Daddy. Is Sheila in trouble?”

  “I don’t know honey. I’ll do my best to make sure she doesn’t get hurt, ok?”

  “Ok.”

  I leaned over and gave Emma a tight hug.

  “Now, I need to take care of a few more things today. Are you going to be ok on your own for a bit?”

  Emma nodded. “Will I see you tonight at the village?”

  “I’ll be there for dinner.”

  We stood up. Emma put on a brave smile and then blinked out.

  Chapter 48

  I walked into the bedroom and glanced at myself in the mirror. It seemed that every time I changed out of my island attire, trouble was quick to follow. I sighed, blinked out of my cargo shorts and began selecting some formal clothes.

  While I changed, I put out a high priority message to Mr. Speer, requesting an audio link. He replied a minute later.

  “Hello Mr. Roamer, what can I do for you?”

  “There has been a big development and we need to talk. I would like your permission to convene an emergency meeting at your office in five minutes. I will need to invite a few others as well.”

  “Alright. Here are some jump links.”

  “Thank you Sir. I’ll be there shortly.”

  I closed the connection and looked at myself in the mirror: two-piece suit, tie, short haircut. With a frown I dispatched three high priority messages with the jump links attached, and then used the last link to jump myself to Speer’s office.

  Speer was still wearing his steel-grey suit. He rose gracefully from his desk. “Hello Mr. Roamer.”

  Melanie jumped in right after me.

  “Hi Mr. Speer.” she said.

  “Along with Melanie, I’ve also asked the chiefs of Police and Security to join us.” I said.

  Speer nodded. “Perhaps we should use the conference table.”Besides his desk and fireplace arrangements, the round conference table was the third permanent cluster of furniture arranged on Speer’s Swiss hilltop.

  The chiefs blinked in a few moments later. The first to arrive was Mai Ono, VivraTerra’s police chief. She was tall and thin, with Japanese features and long, straight black hair. She had a strong chin and piercing eyes, and her poise hinted at a determined and forceful character. Her skirt suit was the standard police white, with the VivraTerra logo on the collar.

  Ono and Speer were already familiar with one another, they shook hands briskly, and then she turned to shake mine. “Mr. Roamer, the murder suspect granted the highly unusual courtesy of being allowed to set his own date for questioning. Will you be gracing us with your presence anytime soon?”

  “Umm, I hope it won’t be too much longer ma’am.” I said.

  She gave me a wry smile and moved on to shake Melanie’s hand.

  A moment later Eduardo Tanbaniban Castillo, the chief of security appeared. He was of average height, with black hair, deeply tanned skin, and the flat nose

  common of Filipinos. Melanie, who had been working closely with him, made the introductions and there was another round of handshaking, then everyone took a seat at the table.

  I cleared my throat. “Thank you all for coming on such short notice. I’ll get right to the point. As I’m sure you all know, Melanie and I have been investigating VivraTerra’s connection with a research lab in Utah. That lab was running illegal nuclear experiments and the NASC had fingered VivraTerra as its operator. Mr. Gaudet, a high level NASC officer, has privately made existential threats against us in an effort to force us to investigate the matter and turn over the plans for the nuclear fusion reactor to him. The reactor produced large amounts of power for several weeks, but was later destroyed. I now have those plans in my possession.”

  Eyebrows went up around the table.

  “Also, we have identified a suspect. Her name is Sheila Earhart and she is a citizen of VivraTerra. In addition to being involved with the lab, she appears to have committed several serious breaches of VivraTerra’s computer security and anti-hacking laws. More importantly, I believe her to be involved in triggering a multi-megaton explosion, just a few moments ago, which has totally destroyed the lab facility.”

  I pulled up my interface and my hands flew over the controls. A small 3-dimensional satellite image of Utah appeared in front of me. I grabbed its edges with both hands and moved it onto the table. Then, still holding onto the edges, I spread my arms apart. The hologram expanded quickly in size until the table was covered with a satellite view of the hills and forests of Northwest Utah. Little clouds drifted a few centimeters above the table’s surface. Suddenly brilliant white light appeared near the center of the table. The flash was replaced by a tiny dome of fiery plasma. It gradually rose off the table to assume the shape of a mushroom.

  I heard several gasps.

  “Mrs. Ono, I need to ask you to take Sheila into custody. Most importantly, we need to stop her from communicating, since she is clearly a threat to the safety of the Polis.”

  Ono’s hands moved quickly over her own interface. Her eyes remained unfocused. “I won’t be able to hold her for long without charges.” She looked up from her interfaces and gave me a sharp look from behind long lashes. “And it’s difficult for me to believe that she could be involved in this, given that she’s only 14 years old. Eduardo, can you corroborate any of this?”

  Castillo shrugged. “Well, it is clear that the handful of hacking leads we’ve managed to track down all point to her. Still, it’s pretty hard to believe a young girl could do any of the things Mr. Roamer is claiming.”

  Ono raised an eyebrow at me. “Mr. Roamer?”

  I felt myself turning red. “I know this is asking a lot, but one way or another, she’s deeply involved in all this. We either need to stop her from taking any further action, or protect her from whoever’s using her as a cover for their own actions. Either way, I think we need to take her into custody and watch her carefully, as least for the next few days. The plans for the rea
ctor, by the way, came directly from her.”

  The folder containing the nuclear plans materialized in my hand and I dropped it over a sizable swath of Utah.

  Ono frowned. “All right, I’ll put her under protective custody for the time being, but I can only hold her for a few days at best.”

  I nodded, “That’ll have to do.” I spread my hands. “Thank you all for coming on such short notice.”

  Ono and Castillo both nodded to Spear, then blinked out. I jumped out a moment later.

  Chapter 49

  “So you have it this time, do you?”

  I was back in Gaudet’s office, this time only by telepresence. Mr. Gaudet had relented on his no-telepresence policy in light of our robots all having had assorted innards removed. Guadet was sitting behind his desk, and I was sitting in front of it.

  “The investigation isn’t over, but we were able to retrieve these files.” I gestured at the virtual folder resting on Gaudet’s desk.

  “Have you found the designer?”

  “No, we think that the perpetrators stole the identity of one of our most vulnerable citizens, a minor, in fact.” Rule one of lying: stay as close to the truth as possible.