The Deplosion Saga

by Paul Anlee

“It wouldn’t matter either way,” LaMontagne replied. “Unless the surgery and the subsequent genetic engineering is a complete success, his orders are the same with regards to yourself and your family.”

  “You’ll kill us all.”

  The Reverend spread his hands and shrugged as if it were out of his control. “Let’s not speak of such unfortunate consequences. We stand on the edge of a new era. Let us speak only of positive things and of exciting new advances. I’m offering you a unique opportunity for a role in this story, in my story. You will be remembered for ages.”

  Rasmussen scowled. “You offer me no alternative,”

  “Did God offer Moses an alternative? Did He offer Noah an alternative? I’m giving you a chance to split the seas, to build an Ark. This miracle I ask of you is a request from Yeshua, not from me. You will be serving your Church and your Savior.”

  Rasmussen looked miserably from LaMontagne to Jeff, to the floor. “I don’t see that you’re giving me any choice.”

  7

  “So the microverse continues to grow and there’s no way to stop it?” Dr. Wong, Chair of the Physics department, stared at Greg and Kathy with surprising composure.

  The couple had tumbled into his office and blurted their observations in overlapping turns, then backtracking, circling back, and jumping ahead with no regard for whether he was keeping up. Knitting the information into a single coherent thread, Wong gathered that a nightmare scenario was becoming a reality.

  He and Dr. Stella Trent listened intently while Greg and Kathy described the details of the Eater's growth. “Are you sure about your measurements?” Dr. Trent asked.

  Greg reviewed his perceptual records once again. “Well, I only eyeballed it, so I might be off by as much as 0.05 percent,” he conceded. “That doesn’t really change the overall issue, does it?”

  “No, but we need to take accurate measurements before we raise the alarm,” Dr. Wong replied. “I trust your conclusions but if we’re going to report this, we’ll need to be more precise. Dr. Trent is an expert in ultra-fast laser spectroscopy. Dr. Trent, would you please help us verify the measurements?”

  “Oh, right,” Kathy interjected, drawing out the “right” in case anyone missed the sarcasm. “We need more accuracy. It’s not enough to know the planet will be destroyed in approximately two or three years. We need to have the exact date.” She glared at the Physics chair. “Seems to miss the big picture, doesn’t it?”

  Ignoring Kathy’s rude comment, Dr. Trent tried to clarify her own understanding. “Tell me again how this thing is different from a black hole.”

  Kathy sighed. It was a challenge to speak about the science behind the natural laws of physics to people without lattice-enhancement. She made an effort to slow down and lay out the explanation in a simpler, more linear format.

  “The Eater has no gravitational field; it only absorbs what it comes into contact with. We only have two data points: the size of the microverse two weeks ago, right after we isolated the Eater in the vacuum chamber, and today. Nonetheless, the model and measurements agree almost perfectly. We’re confident it’s absorbed no real particles since we last looked at it, but it’s bigger today than two weeks ago.”

  “So you think it’s absorbing virtual particles?” Clearly, Trent didn’t believe it.

  “There’s no other source of matter available to it. Sure, it can absorb non-fermionic particles, like a photon of light. But that’s minuscule; remember e=mc2? When we model the type and density of virtual particles we’d expect to arise in that volume of vacuum, it matches the expected growth of the microverse due to absorption of those impinging particles.”

  “I’m no expert on the Standard Model, but how could you possibly predict the density of virtual particles in a particular space? They can’t even be detected.”

  “The calculation was developed by Darian Leigh and Greg. It hasn’t been verified yet, except that the calculation is part of the RAF theory. The best evidence for the correctness of RAF theory is the fact that we can create microverses.”

  “Well, it sounds kind of circular to me, little better than String Theory,” Dr. Trent grumbled.

  Dr. Wong was quick to come to the defense of Darian’s work. “As predicted by the theory, one of the microscopic universes made by the RAF generator has a measured ability to alter the speed of light within it. We believe this to be the most significant scientific discovery since General Relativity or quantum mechanics.”

  “Is there any way to independently verify that the microverse is actually absorbing virtual particles, apart from its rate of growth,” Dr. Trent challenged.

  Kathy’s voice was slow and even, “The theory predicts absorption of virtual particles gives off a kind of Hawking radiation. That’s the only similarity to a black hole, really. As singlet virtual particles are absorbed, their virtual partners find themselves alone in a universe of real particles. They try to interact with adjoining matter.”

  “So it could be radioactive?”

  “Not really. Most of the particles don’t interact with real particles at all. They’ll just zip away to infinity. A small number should be able to interact with the electromagnetic quantum field, and a much smaller number with the Higgs field. We can detect the EM field interactions with a standard static charge test or through spectrometry. The most obvious confirmation is that the EM interactions give off a weak mixed spectrum of photons.”

  “Mixed?”

  “The sphere looks gray.”

  Stella Trent was satisfied with the answer, and moved on. “If the RAF generator created this Eater microverse, why can’t it be used to collapse it?”

  “We don’t completely understand how this particular microverse remains stable without the RAF generator,” Greg admitted. “Something’s set up internal resonances within the microverse. It’s incorporating whatever it absorbs into its own structure. Until we understand how it’s doing that, we can’t break down the field stability.”

  “Can it be better isolated?”

  “Ha!” Kathy laughed aloud, startling everyone. “How can you isolate something from virtual particles? They arise spontaneously out of the quantum vacuum. Where there’s nothing, there’s still the quantum vacuum.”

  The room went quiet. The four of them stared in different directions, avoiding eye contact.

  Dr. Wong waded into the silence. “Do either of you have any recommendations?”

  “We need to buy as much time as possible,” Kathy said. “We have to build the biggest possible isolation chamber so the microverse can expand freely without coming into contact with anything. It’ll have to be done carefully, without disturbing the existing chamber until it’s surrounded by a new vacuum.”

  Greg calculated a few seconds. “The biggest vacuum chamber in the world might give us twenty years. Any way you look at it, sometime, around two decades from today, the Eater will break out of whatever we can build to isolate it. Then it’ll grow rapidly until it consumes the entire planet. Even if we could isolate the entire top of Burnaby Mountain, it would only delay the inevitable by about a year.”

  “We’ll keep working on characterizing the microverse,” Kathy jumped in, trying to sound optimistic. “And, of course, we’ll share our data and theories with the international community.”

  “Whatever good that’ll do,” Greg muttered. “Together, we’re a thousand years ahead of the rest of the world’s experts combined.”

  “And if you can’t figure out how to stop it, what do you recommend?” asked Dr. Trent.

  Kathy and Greg looked sideways at one another; their voices came out as one. “Run.”

  8

  three frantic and terrifying months of intense investigation flew by and Kathy and Greg were no closer to discovering how to stop the Eater microverse from growing, let alone shutting it down completely.

  The cheerful, delicate cherry blossoms heralding spring and the annual renewal of life in Vancouver had come and gone. The couple hardly noticed.
>
  Death—for them and of all of humanity—was coming for Earth. If the calculations were correct, they might have twenty-some years, but it was as inevitable as the setting of the sun.

  They supervised the construction of a gigantic isolation chamber around the small existing one. The Physics building had to be modified to make space for the new structure. Floors below and the roof above were opened up and the ground underneath excavated. Colleagues’ labs were relocated completely. Nothing they did would stop the Eater’s growth but it would give them a few decades before it broke out of its containment. Anything less meant doom in three years or fewer.

  No one was happy about the expenditure, but President Sakira had rammed the project past all opposition. “For critical new research,” she explained to the public. “Millions in new funding will depend on this.” she said to. She offered the full story to the Board of Governors only in camera.

  There was no hiding it; the dome of the new chamber rose ten meters above the roof of the building. It drew criticism, complaints, resentment, and speculation.

  It also brought a further twenty-two years, seven months, fifteen days, and four-point-three hours, give or take thirty minutes before the Eater would reach its chamber walls, absorb them, and start growing in earnest. If allowed unrestricted, exponential growth, it likely would consume the entire planet in no more than two weeks. Fortunately, most living beings wouldn’t have to witness the end, since Earth’s atmosphere would be gone within a few days of the containment breach.

  Kathy and Greg sat patiently outside the Prime Minister’s office in Olympia, Washington, emerald of the newly formed coastal nation of Pacifica.

  Dr. Sakira paced back and forth in front of them. As President of Simon Fraser University, she was accustomed to being a key person in meetings, and was seldom kept waiting.

  Kathy and Greg were accustomed to being nobodies. Greg was amused by Sakira’s irritating sense of self-importance. He never would have imagined that, one day, he’d be waiting for a meeting with the Prime Minister. He couldn’t imagine being impatient about it.

  The political paroxysm that had rearranged the United States and Canada into several new countries had somehow resulted in the British-style parliamentary system being adopted along the entire West Coast. Decades of frustration with one stalemated Congress after another led Pacifica to turn its back on the idea of a republic and choose, instead, the longest-surviving democracy in the world as a template.

  The Founding Fathers of the United States of America had intentionally chosen an inefficient and ineffective model for federal government. By the twenty-first century, nations were playing increasingly larger roles in global economics and trade; countries could no longer afford such an obstructive model.

  The door to the office of Prime Minister Francine Hudson opened and her Chief of Staff emerged. She motioned to Dr. Sakira. “The Prime Minister will see you now.”

  Kathy and Greg stood and smoothed their clothes. This is it—Greg sent by lattice message.

  Let’s hope so—Kathy replied.

  The Prime Minister and two men waited inside the utilitarian office. Greg recognized Dr. Lewis Schmidt, Minister of Science, Technology and Advanced Education. He needed a lattice query to identify Michael Oberg, the Minister of Defense.

  The report we sent has clearly been effective in raising the appropriate level of panic—Greg sent. Kathy suppressed a smile.

  The PM stood and came around from behind her desk. She forced a smile that didn’t reach her eyes as she extended her hand. “Dr. Sakira. And this must be your team.”

  “Yes, Madam Prime Minister. This is Dr. Katherine Liang and Dr. Garugamesh Mahajani, Kathy and Greg, from our Physics Department. They are the only remaining members of Darian Leigh’s project team, as far as we know. Dr. Leigh and Dr. Valeriy Rusalov are, most regrettably, still missing and presumed dead.”

  The Prime Minister’s handshake was firm and cool. “I’m very sorry for your loss.” She turned to the two men, already seated. “I’ve asked Ministers Schmidt and Oberg to join us. This thing your people have cooked up probably falls more in Minister Schmidt’s purview, but it also presents a threat to National Security.”

  Greg started to say, “We didn’t cook this…,” but Dr. Sakira spoke over him.

  “I hope we are here to discuss solutions, not to allocate blame, Madam Prime Minister.”

  The PM and Greg both glared at Sakira, but for different reasons.

  As if she hadn’t heard, Prime Minister Hudson casually shifted her gaze to her Science Minister. “Dr. Schmidt tells me your people have created something called an Eater, Dr. Sakira. I can’t imagine the physics behind that but he assures me it is catastrophically dangerous. So tell me, what do we need to do to put this crisis to rest?”

  Dr. Sakira glanced at Kathy, who looked at Greg. He volunteered nothing.

  Dr. Sakira sighed. “Dr. Mahajani, could you please outline our plan for the Prime Minister and her Ministers?”

  Greg shrugged his shoulders. “There’s not a lot anyone can do. Kathy and I are trying to understand this thing and find a way to collapse it. Failing that, the planet will be destroyed in a little over twenty-two and a half years.” He was surprised at how casually he was able to report on the planet’s imminent demise.

  A snort escaped from Minister Oberg. “Madam Prime Minister,” he said. “You can’t expect us to take this nonsense seriously. How many global doomsayers have we all put up with over the past fifty years? If it’s not deadly epidemics, global warming, or the end of money, it’s something else. Twenty-two years! None of us will even be in these seats in twenty-two years. To respond to this supposed crisis would be political and economic suicide for you, and for the sovereignty of our young country. The vultures are always circling. They’re just waiting for an opportunity to swoop in, feast on our remains, and take over.”

  The PM turned back to Dr. Sakira. “He’s right. How do we know this disaster is any different from the dozens of other projected disasters that never panned out?”

  Kathy jumped in, “This is not some vague thing that might or might not happen. There is no complexity to it. The math is clear. In twenty-two years, seven months, and fifteen days, the Eater will contact the sides of its isolation chamber. Once it does, our atmosphere will be gone in a few days. Two weeks later, Earth will no longer exist. It won’t be polluted, or flooded, or too hot, or too cold. It will be gone. Plain and simple.”

  “That gives you plenty of time to understand and remedy the situation, doesn’t it?” As past Vice-President of Research at Stanford University, Dr. Schmidt was used to dealing with excitable scientists caught up in the various disaster scenarios of the day.

  “Believe me, we are desperately working on understanding,” replied Kathy. “If we can’t figure it out in time, the world ends. There will be no time to make a Plan B in five or ten years. There may not be enough time to execute Plan A, even now.”

  “That’s right. The calculation is a best case scenario. If anything gets into the chamber, even air, it could be over sooner,” Greg chimed in to emphasize her point. “We’ve worked out a plan to evacuate as many people as possible from Earth over the next two decades. Even with a concerted global effort—which is sure to be a nightmare in itself—we’ll only be able to save a few million people. And that’s only if we’re able to get some new technologies up and running, and concentrate the planet’s entire global resources and manufacturing base on the problem.”

  “Madam Prime Minister,” the Defense Minister jumped in, “such an effort will bankrupt the entire planet at a time when a new financial crisis is looming. If we take this on, we’ll destroy the country.”

  “The country will be destroyed anyway, as soon as the Eater breaks free. We are at Ground Zero!” Dr. Sakira’s voice was uncharacteristically shrill. She cleared her throat and addressed the PM in a more diplomatic but firm tone. “Madam Prime Minister, I don’t welcome this any more than you do. But you nee
d to call together the other world leaders and figure out a plan, or the entire human race is doomed.”

  “This is absurd!” said Oberg. “Lewis, please. Tell them.”

  The Minister of Science slowly flipped through the pages of Greg and Kathy’s report. “Normally, I would agree with you Robert,” he said after some time. “But Drs. Liang and Mahajani were…gifted dendy lattices by Darian Leigh a while before he disappeared. I have no doubt their individual brain power now exceeds that of every scientist on the planet, possibly combined. They understand this Eater better than anyone in the world. If they say they may not be able to stop it, we need to listen to them.”

  Kathy looked at the man gratefully. “Thank you. We do have a plan. We can move enough people to asteroid colonies so humanity will survive even if the planet doesn’t. If we do manage to stop the Eater, we can move them back.”

  “If this is the result of humanity’s best efforts, I’m not certain we deserve to survive,” the PM said. She walked to the window. The room was silent while she stared out at the lush green hillsides and still waters of Capitol Lake. A flock of ducks was coming in for a landing on the lake.

  She turned back to the expectant faces with grim determination. “Well, my Administration won’t be the one that condemns this planet to death by inaction. We will communicate this report to our allies, first, and convene a meeting of the G26 world leaders. We’ll see who’s willing to help.”

  Nobody moved as they imagined how this news would go over around the world. The Prime Minister clapped her hands together loudly, startling everyone. “Let’s get started, people,” she said. “We have a world to save.”

  9

  Secretary of the Treasury Corbin Totts was enjoying a quiet Sunday afternoon in his garden. It was the first time he’d had a chance to relax and reflect since his appointment to President Mitchell’s new cabinet. This Administration was the first officially elected one in the New Confederacy, a triumph of grassroots democracy.