The Omega Theory

by Mark Alpert

  Then another soldier grabbed Michael’s right arm. He looked almost identical to Angel and wore the same type of flak jacket, its pouches bulging with bullet clips and grenades, except that the name tag on his jacket said JORDAN. This soldier stood exactly where Tamara had been a few seconds before. Without saying a word he turned to the crater. Then he and Angel marched forward in lockstep, dragging Michael toward the edge.

  Michael thrashed his legs and jackknifed his body, just like the hooded man had done, but Angel and Jordan were too strong. They pulled him forward until he stood on the crater’s rim, looking straight down at the flames below. Terrified, he dug his heels into the ground, frantically trying to back away from the brink. The sandy ledge under his feet suddenly crumbled. He began to fall, his legs sliding with the sand into the crater.

  Then, above the sound of his own screams, he heard Cyrus yell, “Stop!” Angel and Jordan, who still held his arms, yanked him out of the crater and threw him backward. He flew through the air and landed in the sand several feet from the crater’s edge. His head rang and his heart pounded. He was still screaming, but he noticed that the screams coming out of his mouth weren’t just noise anymore. They were words and numbers. He was screaming the code.

  “Mixer equals Hadamard . . . qureg phase . . . qureg eigen . . . mixer phase for i equals zero . . . controlled multiply phase and eigen . . . return phase measure.”

  He lay there on his back for a long time, reciting the program. He wasn’t hurt, but he felt nauseous and weak. Cyrus bent over him, holding his recorder above Michael’s mouth to catch the flood of code. Angel and Jordan stood behind him, their faces lit by the gas fires. And way, way in the background, Michael thought he heard Tamara crying.

  He finally reached the end of the program. Cyrus stood up straight and turned off his recorder. “All right, let’s get back to the camp,” he said. “We need to input the code and see if we have the whole thing.”

  Cyrus stepped away from the crater, heading back to where the pickups and Land Cruisers were parked. Angel and Jordan saluted him as he passed. Then Angel bent over Michael and offered his hand. “Come. We’re leaving now.”

  With one more scream, Michael scrambled to his feet and flung himself at Angel, slamming into the soldier’s chest and grabbing the pouches of his flak jacket. Before the man could react, Michael head-butted him, smashing his forehead into Angel’s nose. Angel fell backward, stunned, and Michael landed on top of him. Then he rolled away from the soldier and curled into a ball, folding his arms across his chest and pressing his forehead to his knees.

  He heard more shouts and footsteps. Other soldiers grabbed him and picked him up. But Michael kept himself curled in a tight ball as they carried him back to the pickup. He didn’t relax until they’d dumped him into the truck bed. Once he was sure that the soldiers weren’t watching, he moved his hands down to his navel, stretched the waistband of his pants, and slipped in the small sphere he’d removed from Angel’s flak jacket. It was an M67 fragmentation grenade.

  16

  DAVID SAT IN THE BACKSEAT OF AN ARMORED LIMOUSINE, GAZING AT THE verdant Israeli countryside. The car belonged to Shin Bet and the driver was none other than Aryeh Goldberg, Shin Bet’s telecommunications expert. He’d been assigned to help the FBI follow the cell-phone trail of Oscar Loebner, aka Olam ben Z’man. Lucille sat next to Aryeh in the front of the car, while Monique—who was feeling much better after a day and a half of rest—sat in the back with David. It was two o’clock in the afternoon and they were headed for the Soreq Nuclear Research Center, and David hoped to Christ that they would make some progress before the end of the day. He felt a panicky ache in his chest, which got worse whenever he thought of Michael.

  Aryeh had tuned the limo’s radio to a Tel Aviv station that played bouncy Israeli pop songs. He chatted with Lucille as he drove down Highway 1, discussing how they would handle the interview with Soreq’s security chief. David glanced at Monique, but he couldn’t catch her eye—she was looking out the window at the Judean Hills. She hadn’t said a word since getting into the car. Lost in thought, she absentmindedly rubbed her injured arm, running her left hand over the right sleeve of her jacket to feel the bandages underneath. The light streaming through the car window illuminated half her face—one brown ear, one swooping eyebrow, one darting eye. David knew his wife well enough to recognize what was happening. She had an idea, and she was thinking it through.

  After a while the highway straightened and leveled out. They left the Judean Hills behind and drove across the coastal plain. There were bright green fields on both sides of the road, some planted with crops and others strewn with wildflowers. A Hebrew version of a Michael Jackson song came on the radio and Aryeh started humming along. Then the car hit a pothole and they all bounced in their seats and Monique let out a grunt. David looked at her again. “You okay?”

  She nodded blankly. Her eyes were still darting, sliding back and forth but not focusing on anything. Then she closed them and let out a long whoosh of breath. When she opened her eyes a few seconds later, they fixed on David. “I know what Olam was talking about.”

  “What? What do you . . . ?”

  “Remember what Rav Kavner said at the yeshiva? About all the crazy Kabbalistic crap that Olam was spouting? And the idea he was so obsessed with?”

  “You mean about the Sephirot? And meyda?”

  “Yeah, all that bullshit. I couldn’t figure it out when we were at the yeshiva, and then I forgot all about it when those assassins started shooting at us. But now I know what he meant. Olam was talking about digital physics.” She moved closer to David, leaning across the limo’s backseat. “In his former life as Oscar Loebner, he was a computer scientist, right? But he knew a lot of physics, too, because his specialty was developing simulations of nuclear explosions. So it’s just natural that he would combine the two and—”

  “Whoa, slow down!” David held up his hands. Although he was a historian of science, he didn’t know as much about recent advances as Monique did. “What’s digital physics?”

  “Jesus, David, you gotta do a better job of keeping up. Digital physics has been hot ever since the nineties, when John Archibald Wheeler wrote his papers on it. You know about Wheeler, right?”

  David nodded. “Of course. He’s the guy who coined the term ‘black hole.’ He died just a few years ago.”

  “He was a professor emeritus in Princeton’s department when I was teaching there. Wheeler was a great physicist, a visionary. And in the last years of his life he started going in a new direction. Some of the people in the physics department thought he was getting a little loony in his old age, but I respected him for it. He was trying to solve one of the biggest mysteries of science—why the universe is comprehensible. Why it follows orderly, mathematical laws that we can discover and understand, like Einstein’s field equations or the laws of quantum theory.”

  He nodded again. This was starting to sound familiar. The mathematical nature of the universe was a prime topic for historians and philosophers of science. “What did Wheeler’s papers say?”

  “He argued that the traditional picture of the universe was outdated. Most people still think of elementary particles as tiny billiard balls, rolling around on the table of spacetime, but Wheeler knew this view was ridiculous. An elementary particle has no physical substance. It’s just a collection of quantum values—energy, charge, spin, and so on—so it’s more logical to think of it as a packet of information. And spacetime itself is information, too, a giant array of values specifying the curvature of the dimensions. Wheeler called this hypothesis ‘It From Bit.’ All physical things arise from information.”

  “Wait a second. I’ve heard of It From Bit.” David searched his memory. “It’s an update of an older idea, right? The theory of the computational universe?”

  “Yeah, it’s the same thing, more or less. When two particles collide, they exchange information. They go into the collision with one set of values—the input—and
come out with another, the output. So the interactions between the particles are like the mathematical operations that take place in a computer chip. And the programs that coordinate the particle interactions are simply the laws of physics, the unified theory. You can think of the whole universe as a big computer that’s been running for the past fourteen billion years. That would explain why the universe follows mathematical laws. The world is inherently mathematical because its particles are always calculating.”

  David gave her a skeptical look. He knew that a few physicists and computer scientists had been toying with the idea of the computational universe ever since the 1960s. But most researchers dismissed the concept, which was why David had never paid much attention to it. “It’s kind of an oddball idea, though, isn’t it? More of a metaphor than a real theory, don’t you think? Sure, the universe may function like a computer, but that doesn’t mean I’m really just a collection of data.”

  “Why not? Most of what we observe is an illusion. Objects feel solid even though their atoms are mostly empty space. Gravitational force is actually a bending of spacetime. So why can’t we be composed of information?”

  “So you’re saying that we’re all living inside someone’s PC? Like in the Matrix movies?”

  Monique shook her head. “David, please. In those movies, the people’s minds are plugged into a simulation that’s running on some freaky computer that took over the world. But if It From Bit is right, the whole damn universe is a kind of natural computer. You can’t leave the program, because that’s all there is.”

  David was a little surprised at how impassioned Monique was getting. He’d always considered her a fairly conservative scientist, reluctant to accept any hypothesis until there was solid evidence supporting it. The fact that she was so enthusiastic about It From Bit gave him pause. Maybe, he thought, it wasn’t such a wacky idea after all. “But if the universe is a computer, who programmed it? God? You think He created the world by writing some software?”

  “Well, that’s obviously what Olam believed. He thought the Sephirot were God’s programs, remember? But the It From Bit hypothesis doesn’t require the existence of a divine being. The program could’ve evolved on its own. It could’ve started with a single piece of information, the primordial bit arising spontaneously from the quantum vacuum. Then the calculations proliferated, churning out scads of random data. Eventually, strings of instructions emerged from the data and became the laws of physics, the universal program that organized all the computations. This program generated the Big Bang, the expanding fireball of particles and radiation. Then more complex algorithms emerged, creating galaxies and life and consciousness.”

  “But what’s the purpose of this computer? What’s it calculating?”

  “It’s calculating us. The computer is all around us and we’re its results. The program guided the formation of our solar system and the evolution of our species. Our brains are smaller computers that arose from the larger one. Or you can think of them as subprograms running on top of the universe’s operating system, just like PowerPoint and Explorer run on top of Windows on your PC. Except the universe isn’t as buggy as Windows, thank God.” Monique smiled. “And there’s another difference from an ordinary PC: the universe is a quantum computer. It’s the particles that do the calculating, like in the quantum computers that Jacob Steele built. In essence, he was hacking into the universal computer.”

  She was out of breath by the time she finished. Still smiling, she reclined against the plush fabric of the backseat and waited for David to respond. He stared at her for a few seconds in silent admiration. Monique could be pretty damn persuasive. “Okay,” he said, “but what about the Caduceus Array? What’s the connection between that and It From Bit?”

  “The purpose of the Caduceus Array was to prove the hypothesis, to show that it’s more than just a metaphor. Oscar Loebner the computer scientist figured out a way to confirm Olam ben Z’man’s crazy theory.”

  “But how could the Caduceus Array do that? It’s just a couple of clocks linked together, right?”

  “Loebner’s strategy was to focus on the flow of time. Time is one of the most mysterious concepts in physics. Theorists have been speculating for decades about why time exists and why it moves in just one direction. But time’s role becomes clear if you think of the universe as a computer. A computer program organizes its calculations in a step-by-step sequence, so every computer has a clock. With each tick of the clock, the calculations move another step forward—at the first tick, for instance, the program adds two numbers together, then at the second tick it multiplies the sum by a third number, and so on. A one-megahertz computer has a clock that ticks a million times per second, and a one-gigahertz computer—”

  “Yes, yes, I know,” David said. “Its clock ticks a billion times a second.”

  “Which makes it more powerful, because it can run more calculations in the same amount of time. But the clock of the universe would work a little differently, because time itself is determined by the universal program. And because the program is constantly adjusting its own run time, it would leave a telltale clue in the physical world: the flow of time would fluctuate ever so slightly from place to place. These variations wouldn’t be easy to detect—you’d need a pair of very precise clocks located thousands of kilometers apart. But the discovery would prove the existence of the universal program and show that It From Bit is literally true.”

  “So you think that’s why Jacob Steele got involved? He heard about Loebner’s idea and thought he could share the Nobel Prize by building the Caduceus Array?”

  “Yeah, it makes sense. Jacob would’ve had no trouble designing the clocks, because they used the same trapped-ion technology as his quantum computers. And he could pay for it with the money he diverted from his DARPA grant.”

  “And what about the disruptions they detected on the morning of the Iranian nuclear test? Have you got any ideas about what might’ve caused those?”

  She didn’t respond at first. The limo’s backseat became quiet, and David heard another song on the Israeli radio station. Then Monique took a deep breath and shook her head. The passionate determination that had animated her face ever since she’d started talking now seemed to dissipate. She turned back to the car window. “No, I haven’t figured out that part yet. All I know so far is that the disruptions were a surprise. But what caused them . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  David looked out the other window. Panic tightened his chest again. Michael had been gone for three days now. They didn’t know who his kidnappers were or why they’d taken him. The only clues came from a mentally unstable Israeli scientist who’d apparently tried to prove that the universe was a computer. And they couldn’t find him either.

  Pressing his forehead to the car window, David closed his eyes. Then he felt Monique’s hand on his shoulder. It slid down his arm, slowly and gently. When it reached his hand he clasped it, lacing his fingers between hers. Neither said a word.

  Five minutes later, the limo exited the highway and headed west on a two-lane road. Aryeh stopped humming and turned off the car radio. “Almost there,” he said. “That’s the gate for Palmachim Air Base.”

  David looked ahead and saw a landscape of sandy hillocks, dotted with thornbushes and olive trees. Running across this scrubland was a high barbed-wire fence. Beyond the fence David caught a glimpse of the Mediterranean, less than a mile away.

  Aryeh drove the Shin Bet limo to a guardhouse manned by soldiers in Israeli Air Force uniforms. He spoke a few words in Hebrew to the commander, who checked Aryeh’s ID and waved them through the gate. The road continued toward the sea, passing several asphalt landing zones half hidden among the dunes.

  Lucille peered through the windshield, then turned to Aryeh. “This is a helicopter base, right?” she asked.

  “Correct,” he replied. “We station Black Hawks and Cobras here. And this is where we launch our missiles and satellites. Our country may be small, but it’s full of
clever people, yes? Many scientists besides Oscar Loebner have worked in this place.”

  “Well, let’s hope Oscar talked to one of them when he came here last Tuesday. We need a lead on this guy.”

  As they neared the base’s runway, Aryeh made a right turn and headed for a cluster of low buildings. In the middle of the complex was a structure with an oddly shaped dome. It looked like a white teacup that had been turned upside down on its saucer. David recognized the building from the work he’d done for Physicists for Peace, which had compiled a catalog of the world’s nuclear facilities. It was a five-megawatt reactor, the centerpiece of the Soreq Nuclear Research Center.

  Aryeh parked the car in a lot about a hundred yards from the reactor. Then he stepped outside and led them to the lab’s administration building. The office of Rahm Elon, Soreq’s security chief, was on the first floor.

  David got a little worried when he walked into the office—Rahm was a fierce-looking soldier, tall, olive-skinned, and impressively muscled. He wore sunglasses and an air-force uniform, and he carried an oversize Desert Eagle pistol in his belt holster. Standing behind his desk, Rahm shook hands with Aryeh. Both men smiled and exchanged a few pleasantries in Hebrew. But Rahm stopped smiling when Aryeh introduced him to Lucille, David, and Monique. He clearly wasn’t comfortable with the presence of the Americans on his base.

  They took seats in front of Rahm’s desk. Aryeh leaned back in his chair. “So we’re wondering if you’ve made any progress,” he said, switching to English. “My G-man friends are eager to find Mr. Loebner. Or Olam ben Z’man, as he now prefers to call himself.”

  Rahm nodded, but his expression remained cold. “We’ve confirmed that Loebner was on the base Tuesday night,” he said. Then he closed his mouth and stared straight ahead.