Jon tried hard to keep the dismay from showing on his face. It was clear now that Harry was in the grip of an incredibly detailed paranoid fantasy. He needed help and he needed it soon. For the moment, though, the best thing to do was to humor him.
Harry threw his arms wide in excitement. “You know what the very first utility was that I discovered?”
Still trying to remain impassive, Jon shook his head.
“A programming utility that writes programs! All you have to do is feed in parameters and specifications. Once I get up to speed on it, I’ll be able to write an interface to Big Moe as quickly as you can peel an apple. I’ll even be able to write a program to implement Shor’s algorithm in an hour or two.”
Harry stopped talking and stared at his friend. “Why so glum, Jon-boy? This is great stuff I’m telling you.”
Jon had just been plotting the best way to get Harry a psychiatric evaluation without him realizing it was happening. Apparently he had dropped his guard long enough for Harry to detect something was wrong. Jon quickly thought of a dodge to explain his glumness.
“I’ve really got a situation. It’s this guy, Eric Meyers—”
“Meyers! Was I right about him or what?”
“You were right in spades, Harry. This guy is the most obnoxious bastard I’ve ever run into.”
“A complete prick,” Harry added.
“Meyers says he’s going to see that I’m fired if I can’t produce an overview of your new operating system by tomorrow.”
“I can’t let that happen to you, Jon. Besides, I need you too much. I see you’ve got your notebook with you. Let’s do it.”
Jon shook his head in confusion. “What do you mean?”
“We’ll put together your overview. It shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes.”
An hour and twenty minutes later, Jon’s hand was cramped and sore. He had filled his notebook with over a dozen pages of detailed notes. To keep up with Harry he’d had to write so fast that his handwriting was almost indecipherable. As he closed the book, he suddenly felt completely worn out. He looked at his watch and saw that it was six-thirty.
“Well,” said Harry, still vibrant, “All you have to do is pretty-up what I just told you, dump it into Word, and you’re set.”
“Thanks, Harry,” Jon responded automatically. He felt like a wrung-out dishrag as he moved toward the door.
Harry smiled. “Remember that 1949 Studebaker I promised you?”
Jon was nonplused. He had no idea what Harry was talking about.
Harry reminded him of the bet he had made the other day, that he could build a brand new 1949 Studebaker using the nanotechnology that was part of the quantum computer system.
Jon was stock still and silent as a wooden Indian.
“Just give me a call as soon as you have it,” he said finally, unsure of whether to fuel Harry’s delusion.
“That’s a deal,” said Harry as Jon turned to leave.
Jon walked down the hallway, retracing the route back to his office. His thoughts were as black as they had been since their trip back from Tartan’s Crag. We’re headed toward a train wreck, he thought.
Chapter Twenty-One
After Jon left his office, Harry realized that he needed to visit the men’s room. Five minutes later, while washing his hands, he studied his gaunt face in the mirror. There were dark circles under his eyes and his pupils were dilated, even though the lights in the men’s room were bright. In the back of his mind he realized that he should be tired, only he wasn’t. He felt absolutely great, euphoric even. He leaned over the sink, splashed some cold water on his face, and felt even better
On the way back to his office, he picked up a can of soda and a chocolate bar in the break room. An attractive middle-aged woman with prematurely gray hair was seated at the table, eating a granola bar and reading a newspaper. When Harry entered the room she looked up and stared at him with an odd look on her face, finally bursting into laughter. What the hell is she laughing at? Harry thought and then quickly dismissed her from his thoughts.
When Harry returned to his office, he stretched his arms and moved them in a sort of boxing motion to loosen up his shoulders. Then he touched his toes a couple of times to relax his leg muscles. As he did this, he noticed for the first time that when he had zipped up in the men’s room, he had zipped up over his shirttail. Eight inches of it stuck out of the top part of his fly. “Jeez!” he said aloud as he fixed the problem. He stretched once more before again taking his seat and logging back on to Big Moe.
A half minute later he experienced the odd resonance he always felt when the Josephson’s junction activated. It was a pins-and-needles type sensation at the top of his skull. As the effect heightened, he had the usual eerie feeling that he was in two places at once. He was distantly aware of his body as a dead weight in his chair and was tuned into the rhythm of his heartbeat. But his mind had been liberated. It was as though it had risen above the earth and was floating across a vast horizon. An ocean of information roiled below him, like waves in a sea, an endless ripple of data structures, twisting and breaking pell-mell.
Harry watched as the directories emerged from the ocean of data. They were in a profusion of shapes and figures: dodecahedrons, octahedrons, icosahedrons, and countless other geometric forms Harry couldn’t even guess at. Already he had spent hours trying to access them but they had resisted all his efforts. He had been able to open only the root directory, which he had accessed by using a mental trigger originating in his own mind. The Josephson’s junction then passed it to the quantum computer as a command. The trigger was a simple, fundamental concept in the theory of numbers: every integer greater than one must be either a prime number or the product of prime numbers.
Before Harry issued the command for the root directory, he looked out again over the vast sea of data, with directories rising out of it like markers. What could they contain? He looked out at the most distant directory on the horizon. It was a nonagon, a curiously shaped nine-sided structure. How he yearned to access it! What marvels would it reveal? What new worlds would open up?
From far away, Harry could hear his physical self, slouched in a chair in his office, sighing deeply. For the moment, access to the higher directories was just a pipe dream.
Harry issued the mental command for the root directory and found himself in a very different place. Here the sea of data did not roil and pulsate. It was calmer, a tiny estuary flowing from the sea of data above it. Nine buoys, the folders in the root directory, floated in the small inlet. The nearest one, shaped like a long cylinder with metal bands wrapped around it, was the nanotechnology utility for nonorganic materials. It had been the first one he had explored.
The next folder was the nano-utility for organic constructs. Its programming features would allow a new kidney, or any organ, to be built based on just a snippet of DNA. The programming was as intuitive and as obvious to Harry as was the programming in the first utility.
The next utility was used to create microscopic nano-bots that could be programmed for any purpose ingenuity allowed. Already Harry had passing familiarity with its main features.
The rest of the directories he had yet to explore. His eyes settled on the most distant one, one that he had hardly noticed before. To his surprise, it was a nonagon, a nine-sided polygon just like the one he had stared at moments ago. The only difference was that it was contained by three sets of parallel lines. He stared at it briefly and decided that he could not resist the temptation.
As soon as Harry fixed his full attention on the nonagon, he found himself surging toward it. It was almost like being on a surf board, shooting across the crest of a wave. The exhilaration ended abruptly when he found himself floating directly above the nonagon. It had a distinct color—an incandescent yellow-orange—and produced a definite pitch. What was it he had read about the Riemann Hypothesis? The distances between prime numbers could be represented almost as a harmonic series. Was the ringing pitch the ch
aracteristic frequency of this domain? Confident that he would soon find out, Harry took the last step by issuing the root command again.
And then ….
Panic. Complete and utter panic. Harry found himself in the midst of total oblivion. It was formless, lightless—a terrible void swallowing him into nothingness. He no longer had even the most remote sense of his own body; he was without breath or heartbeat, as though he had never existed.
A pins-and-needles tingle started at the top of his head and Harry came into possession of a new piece of information. He would be okay—he just had to hang on.
At the center of the darkness he saw a sudden pinprick of light. In the same instant, Harry felt an enormous tug as an immense field of gravity bloomed into existence. There was an explosion of light, millions of times brighter than the sun. The light expanded outward, sweeping him along as time and space and matter snapped into being in front of him.
Harry was body-surfing on the immense wave of light. Euphoria succeeded the terror of moments before. He recalled the thought experiment that had started Einstein on the path of Relativity Theory. The young Einstein had tried to imagine himself travelling on a beam of light. Einstein’s thought experiment couldn’t have been nearly as vivid as this.
Harry felt the vibration of the Josephson’s junction again and suddenly understood what was happening to him. He was watching the birth of the universe—the Big Bang. He was experiencing a complete cosmological simulation within the quantum computer’s virtual reality.
He watched the quark-gluon plasma cool into clumps of matter, the clumps of matter attract other clumps of matter. The clumps of matter were transformed into proto-stars.
A minute of Harry’s time equaled millions of years of cosmic time as galaxies formed, creating and seeding the great expanse of Space-Time. And Harry flew above it all, a spirit-mind witnessing all of creation. He followed it in wonder, losing all sense of himself.
The ecstasy, the exultation, lasted far longer than he would have thought possible. He watched as stars were born, saw them evolve and gain systems of planets. He watched suns die in the immense blasts of supernovae and saw their ruins degenerate into stellar remnants and turn into Neutron stars during intense gravitational collapse.
But gradually it all became too much … way too much.
Harry was again seated in the chair at his workstation. His shirt was soaked with sweat and he experienced profound lassitude—the same void that had followed his sporadic sexual encounters, none of them recent. He felt empty beyond belief, burnt out and exhausted. He hung his head and breathed deeply, trying to regain his composure. Without intending to, he fell asleep.
When Harry came to, it was nearly four a.m. He was surprised to find himself rested, almost completely recovered. He stood from his chair and stretched. On his desk he saw the candy bar and a soda that had been sitting there all night along. He cracked open the soda and took a sip. It was room temperature.
When he sat down, memories of his incredible tour surged back, marvels of the universe raised to the highest power. It was then that he remembered his promise to Jon about making the 1949 Studebaker using the nanotechnology module.
I can do it in the time it takes to peel an apple, he said to himself.
It actually took him a bit longer.
Chapter Twenty-Two
At five-thirty a.m., Jon Graeme’s phone rang. It continued to ring half a dozen times before Jon was roused from sleep and picked up the receiver.
“Yeah?” he said, coughing to clear his throat and glancing at the red numbers on his digital clock.
“You said to call you,” said the voice.
“Who the hell is this?” Jon said. He was still struggling to wake up.
“Jon, it’s me. Harry. You said to give you a call.”
“I did?”
“Come on down,” said Harry. “I’ll meet you in the parking lot across from Building C at six-fifteen. I’ve got something to show you.”
Before Jon could reply, the receiver clicked. Harry had hung up.
Jon groaned loudly. What the hell is that guy up to? he thought.
Jon lay back on the pillow and shut his eyes. The smart thing to do would be to go back to sleep. But while he tried to relax, fragments of yesterday’s conversation with Harry drifted through his mind. He groaned again and sat up in bed, alarmed. He had seen the subtle change in Harry’s behavior since his fall at Tartan’s Crag. In the past few days it had become more pronounced. The increasing stress marked Harry’s face. Had his friend finally had an out-and-out psychotic break?
Jon rushed through his morning routine at double speed. Shortly before six a.m. he was out the door, carrying a cup of coffee and a granola bar. At this hour of the morning, traffic was light and he was able to hit all the lights on the feeder roads that led to the main highway. The trip passed in a blur. By the time Jon arrived he was completely awake.
As he approached the parking lot across from Building C, Jon saw Harry standing in front of a car parked off by itself in the far corner. Jon rolled into the space opposite Harry’s.
As he drew near, Jon saw that Harry was even more disheveled than he had been the previous day. His eyes were red-rimmed and wild looking.
“There it is!” he said exultantly. He made a sweeping gesture with his arm.
Jon stared at the powder blue 1949 Studebaker Champion coupe.
“You painted your Studebaker blue?”
Extreme disappointment flashed across Harry’s face. He put his hand on Jon’s shoulder and turned him around.
“Over there,” Harry said. “There’s my old Studebaker.”
Sure enough, Jon could see the old clunker Harry usually drove parked two rows down from them. Unlike the new Studebaker, there was morning dew on its windshield.
Jon did an about-face toward the 1949 Studebaker Champion. Its finish shone, brand new, as though the car had just rolled off the factory production line. The chrome glistened in the sun. The bright sheen on the powder blue paint job was pristine.
“Go ahead,” said Harry. “Open the door and take a look inside.”
Jon opened the door. The interior was spotless. It even had that special, distinctive new-car smell. Jon slid into the front seat and stared in amazement at the dashboard. It too was pristine and authentic. Jon was so taken aback that he could not quite comprehend what Harry was showing him. It was just too fantastic.
“Where did you get it?”
Harry’s face fell. “You didn’t believe a fucking word I told you about making a Studebaker. You think I’m some kind of nutcase.”
Jon didn’t reply. He just stood and stared at the powder blue Studebaker.
“You made this?” he finally said.
“You still don’t believe it, do you?” Harry snapped.
Before Jon could reply, Harry continued. “I could make another hundred just like it in the next twenty-four hours. Would that convince you?”
“No, you don’t have to do that,” said Jon, hesitating over the words. “I believe you … now.”
“Well, that’s good. Because if I made a hundred of them in the parking lot here, even the dummies in the front office might think something funny was going on.”
“Amazing, absolutely amazing!” said Jon as he ran his hand over the shiny new bumper.
Harry walked in front of it and opened the hood. “Take a look. There’s just one thing wrong with it. See if you can spot it.”
Jon leaned over the engine. Finally the answer dawned on him.
“There are no seams and no welds. It looks like it’s all one piece.”
“It is one piece. You don’t need any welding when it’s assembled on a molecular level.”
“Amazing. Absolutely incredible!”
“Just don’t tell anyone, okay? If anyone asks, just tell them I bought it on eBay.”
“Sure thing, Harry.”
Harry slid behind the wheel. He shut the door and rolled down the window.
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br /> “I’ve been looking forward to this since four a.m. this morning. I’m going to take her for a spin. Then I’ll get some breakfast and head home for a nap. If Ted asks about me, tell him I’ll be in this afternoon.”
Suddenly Harry smiled. “You must have dressed in a real hurry, Jon.”
“How can you tell?” Jon asked.
Harry laughed. “Because your fly is down!” As he said this, he put the car in gear and started to drive away. Its engine hummed like a top.
Harry drove out of the lot and approached the exit ramp. Finally the powder blue 1949 Studebaker Champion coupe turned onto the highway and disappeared from sight.
When he reached his office, Jon felt like he was in a trance. The combination of the early morning hour and Harry’s mind-bending demonstration had left him in an altered state. He walked over to the window and gazed out at the forest of pines. A morning mist hovered just above the ground and at the edge of the forest Jon could see three deer grazing. He watched their delicate and graceful forms for several minutes until the trio moved as one back into the trees.
Jon sat down at his desk and booted up his PC. As it hummed to life, he shut his eyes and realized that he was about to embark on an incredible adventure. The boundaries between what was and was not possible had changed. He decided at that moment that he would have to think it all through very carefully before making any decisions. But first, he had work to do.
He glanced through the dozen or so pages of notes that he had taken last night and found them almost indecipherable. Carefully and methodically, he wrote them all up again, fleshing out the abbreviations and filling in the gaps.
After an hour his notes were in a much more coherent form, but there was still much more work to be done. Harry had given him nothing but a collection of epigrams and one-liners. The real challenge would be to put them together in a clear, expository format. He put checks next to the key lines that would comprise his thesis statement but quickly saw that something was missing. What was lacking was a clear description of the Josephson’s junctions. He remembered that Lettie had a write-up of them in one of Big Moe’s documentation directories, which he found after searching for a few minutes. A quick read-through revealed that, with a few easy changes, it was a perfect starting point for his document.
The Infinity Program Page 16
