by Paul Anlee
“A little while after they disappeared, one of our night patrolmen accidentally walked right through the sphere, and it killed the poor guy. That was before we knew about it and cordoned it off. My point is, there was a bullet-sized hole right through the guy, exactly where he’d walked through the sphere, and he died there on the lab floor. So that couldn’t have been what happened to Darian or Larry. If it had, we would have found their bodies in the lab.”
“Okay, but if it was as small as you say, how could it have made them disappear?”
“Honestly? I don’t know,” Darak answered. “I realize that it’s unlikely he’s still in there, but where else could he have gone? He wouldn’t have abandoned us or the project. I just have to make sure before I destroy it forever. I have to.”
Stralasi contemplated a moment. “If it’s so important to you, I guess you have to try; but how do you know you’ll be able to get out, once you go inside?”
“I’ve been beyond the edges of the universe. Do you honestly think that can trap me?”
“Well, those ‘jump blockers’ the Angels used on you seemed to stop you quite effectively,” Stralasi pointed out.
“They only stopped me because of you. If I wasn’t worried about losing track of you, I could have escaped them easily.”
“Aren’t you worried about losing me now?”
“No. You’ll stay on Eso-La while I go inside the Eater. If I need to, I can find you there.”
“It’s a big universe. What if you get lost?”
“I won’t get lost.”
“But what if you do?”
“I won’t.”
Stralasi could see his argument was going nowhere. He’d simply have to trust Darak. On the bright side, living out what might be his final days in Crissea’s company wasn’t the worst possible way to die. He ceded the point. “Okay. Take me to.…”
Before the monk could finish the sentence, he was standing in Crissea’s reception garden.
“Did you find it?” she asked.
On seeing her, Stralasi grinned nearly ear to ear.
“We did,” he answered.
“Where is it?”
His face darkened. He didn’t know what to say.
“Oh, Ontro, it’s heading toward us, isn’t it?”
“It is,” he replied. “But don’t worry. Darak has a plan to divert it before it reaches Eso-La.”
“How long before it gets here?”
Stralasi couldn’t lie to that face. “About a year.”
Crissea’s brow furrowed. She looked down without uttering a word and rolled a loose stone with her foot.
The Good Brother held his tongue and let her process the news in her own way.
When she raised her head, her eyes were bright. “Darak will save us.”
* * *
After he sent Stralasi away, Darak stood alone by the window in the detector chamber. He stared at the Eater and prepared to enter.
What he was about to do was going to be a lot more dangerous than he’d let on to Brother Stralasi, and getting back out alive was a lot less certain, but he had to try. He had to know.
The first time it had occurred to him that Darian might be alive inside the sphere had been millions of years ago, but by then Alum had already set the destructive ball on an intergalactic journey and refused to tell anyone where it was. When pressed, all he would say is, “Security reasons.”
The secrecy was understandable. What if the wrong people were to find it and…?
Darak had fully believed Alum had sent the Eater away on a distant and reasonably safe course, one that would keep it away from human habitation for billions of years. When he was finally free from his most critical duties and started looking for the Eater, it was no longer within a dozen light years of where he’d last seen it. He’d searched for decades but, with no clues and with a growing number of issues demanding his full attention, he’d eventually dismissed all thoughts of his former mentor and friend, Darian.
His curiosity about Darian’s disappearance and the whereabouts of the sphere might have ended there if it hadn’t been for Alum’s disgusting campaign of genocide against the Aelu. After that, Darak had needed some time away from Alum and the Realm, and he sought the solace of his Eso rebels.
His visit to the original, struggling Eso planet brought back memories of ancient times and his unquenched curiosity about Darian’s fate. It was there he decided to leave Alum’s service and resume his search for the Eater.
He placed Soltron detectors in the Eso system, and went off exploring while the detectors acquired data. His journeys took him all over the universe and beyond.
Enough reminiscing. It’s time to see what’s inside the Eater, and to find out what’s left of Darian Leigh—if anything.
24
“So what’ll it be, son? Eggs or pancakes?”
Darak understood the question, recognized the language as ancient English, but he was too surprised to answer. He didn’t recognize the middle-aged man who asked the question any better than he recognized the house.
Where am I? How did I get here, sitting at this kitchen table?
The place was of ancient design. It took him a few seconds to query his archives and identify the style of house and furniture.
Early twenty-first century Earth.
That narrowed the search. He thought of everyone who might have called him “son” around that time. Nobody came to mind. Acting on a hunch, he ran a similar scan of memories specific to Darian Leigh.
“Dad!”
The man smiled patiently. “Yes, son?”
Darak swallowed. “I mean, you’re my Dad, Darian’s dad.”
“Have you been lost inside that lattice of yours again? What is it, this time? A new neural net algorithm? Another dendy design?”
Darak shook his head and rested his hands on the glass tabletop. It fit right in with the brushed metal fridge and stove, and with the chrome-legged chair on which he was sitting. All exactly as he remembered it.
As Darian remembered it.
His head swam with confusion. Why am I in Darian’s kitchen, in the home he and his father shared in Berkeley while he completed his first PhD? He knew where “his” room was: up the narrow flight of stairs, first door on the right. He knew where “his” lab was on campus, and he knew “his” favorite route to cycle the two miles to the university.
Of all the possible scenarios Darak imagined encountering inside the Eater, this one had never entered his mind.
Where am I? Has the Eater been absorbing matter all this time, just to restage parts of Darian’s life?
“So…eggs or pancakes?” Darian’s Dad—Paul was his name—asked again.
“Uh, pancakes, I guess,” he answered. The man nodded and started looking through cupboards for the necessary ingredients.
While Paul began cooking, Darak wandered into other parts of the house. Everything was exactly as he remembered it. The brown fake leather sofas, the IKEA reading lamps, and the mismatched pine coffee tables all had a surreal familiarity.
Could the Eater have activated my ancient memories? Am I dreaming? Or is this somehow real?
Walking down the hallway toward the front door, he passed a mirror and stopped to look. The glass reflected the image of a teenager, a sixteen year-old Darian.
Darak put his hands to his face and traced the contours of a face he found both strange and familiar. How is this happening?
He’d explored thousands of bizarre universes in the past twenty million years. He’d spent ages playing with various combinations of natural laws just to see what kind of technologies he could invent and to watch how odd forms of life might evolve. And yet, in many ways this particular universe, at once both unexpected and familiar, was the most surprising and the strangest of all.
He opened the front door onto a tiny patch of grass Darian and Paul had called a yard.
How big is this world? Does it extend all the way to the boundary with the outside universe? Is it
larger inside than its external radius?
There were too many questions; he didn’t have time to find the answers.
What bothered him most of all was the extremely low likelihood that he would’ve shifted at random inside the Eater and happened to appear in this microverse in the body and home of Darian Leigh.
The odds were beyond imagining. Something directed him here. But what? Well, only one way to find out.
He shifted to a different place inside the Eater microverse.
* * *
He was lying in bed, staring up at a suspended ceiling. The metal rails on each side of the narrow bed and the pale yellow curtain pulled around it told him he was in a hospital.
He felt exhausted. Every muscle in his body ached as though he’d just run a marathon.
“Hey, you’re awake. How are you doing, honey?” A nurse pulled the curtain aside and stepped into his space.
He could read her name tag: Ranson, it said. Behind her was an unoccupied bed. The wheels of two more beds showed beneath their respective curtains.
Darak tried to sit up but fell back with a groan.
“Ohhh, I hurt everywhere,” he answered. Or someone answered. The voice sounded younger than his own.
“That’s to be expected. You had quite a seizure.”
Seizure?
“Did my dad leave?”
The words tumbled out of his own mouth but…Dad? Wow, where’d that come from—he wondered.
He didn’t feel completely in control of his body. It was as if he were watching some antiquated inSense movie.
The whole experience was a mind-bending combination of active and passive. He seemed to be partly reliving memories of things that had happened to Darian, and partly acting on his own intentions.
“Yes, he did, sweetie. Just a little while ago,” Nurse Ranson replied. “It’s late. I’m going to give you a little something to help you sleep.” She held out a paper cup with a small yellow pill inside.
Darak hadn’t seen a pill in over a hundred million years and he wasn’t about to take one now.
What effect would it have on the real me, on the mind that thinks it’s inside this young body? Could just being here affect me? The real me? Better not linger here too long. He shifted again.
* * *
The bubble was shrinking, closing in around him. He was trapped! Larry laughed. It was a mean laugh.
Larry? Darak hadn’t thought of his old friend and lab mate this much in over a hundred million years, but he recognized the young scientist immediately.
Larry looked bigger than normal. In fact, everything outside the bubble looked larger than normal.
“Nothing more to say, Professor?” Larry asked.
Professor? He’d never been Larry’s teacher.
Darak recalled a different time, when he’d had a different name, a different life.
“Larry! It’s me, Greg. Get me out of here!” His voice sounded odd, not like his own at all. Was he becoming disconnected from himself? But which self? Darak? Or Greg? Or Darian?
The young man who’d been his best friend during their early postdoc years stopped laughing. He tilted his head, drew closer, and peered into the bubble. Then he threw back his head and roared.
“Ahhh! You got me! That was hilarious. You, Greg? You think I’m stupid, or blind?”
Annoyed, Larry returned to the ancient RAF generator on the desktop and played with a few buttons.
“It won’t be long now and you’ll be gone from this universe forever, and humanity will be safe from your brand of hubris once again.”
“Larry, wait!” Darak/Greg/Darian cried. “Don’t do it. This microverse isn’t what you think. It doesn’t go away. It starts to grow and grow, until it consumes the entire Earth.”
Larry glared at him. “Your lies won’t save you. You and the other geniuses are all the same. You think I’m stupid because I didn’t take your pill.” He checked his computer screen, made a few adjustments, and pushed a button.
The bubble prison pressed inward a little faster. Darak/Greg/Darian pushed back against it, both physically and with his RAF generator.
Nothing! No change! Darak felt his/Darian’s growing desperation as he generated and projected all manner of fields at the shrinking shell.
Wait. Why am I caught up in this?—he wondered. He stepped back mentally and let the scene play out.
On one level, he could sense Darian’s panic and his equally fierce determination to survive. He recognized the moment when Darian, in a frantic attempt to have something of himself carry on, transmitted all of his knowledge, memories, and personality to his assistants’ lattices.
Even now, millions of years after the event, Darak remembered the utterly overwhelming flow of data that had blasted him and Kathy without warning or explanation. Somehow, the bubble had allowed the electromagnetic transmissions to escape but had kept Darian inside.
As Darian’s constituent atoms collapsed, their electrons spiraled inward toward their nuclei. His desperate transmissions fell into a frequency range that could no longer penetrate the bubble; they reflected off the barrier and ricocheted within the collapsing microverse.
The sphere’s boundary delineated a region of incompatible natural laws; the entire external universe rejected interactions with the matter inside the bubble. Slowly, the differences between them grew.
Darak watched helplessly as Darian’s universe became smaller and smaller. Though he was dragged along with his former mentor, he realized his perspective was not a physical one, but a psychological one.
Darak regained control of his mind and perspective.
He finally understood what was happening. Not that long ago, he’d traveled outside the universe he once shared with Darian, Kathy, and Larry. The journey made him realize that the concept of “outside” had no real spatial significance. Outside just meant different.
If there was no way for the particles of one universe to interact with those of another, the two could occupy the exact same space and it would be the same as if they were separated by infinite distance.
Space, like time, was relative to the matter of the universe. Any universe. If you didn’t interact with any matter in one universe, you had no way to tell how near or far you were, relative to any matter in that universe. If there were no particle interactions, there was no way to talk about occupying the same space.
He watched the disturbing scene play out as Darian struggled to understand the nature of the Reality Assertion Field that Larry had cast to create this isolated domain. Darian had been new to the practical applications of the theory he’d developed. He kept trying to modify the RAF that contained him, and it had spelled his doom.
That was so sad. Larry’s and Darian’s careers were, at the heart of it, destroyed by religious belief. Larry couldn’t accept that God wasn’t needed to explain the existence of natural laws in the universe. He couldn’t accept enhanced intelligence. He couldn’t accept that we could alter the laws of nature without God’s blessing. He felt threatened, and his refusal to step outside the rigid constraints of his beliefs led him to murder Darian. Which led to the destruction of Earth.
So what happened to Larry? Where did he go between killing Darian and the Earth being destroyed? The scene shed no light on that, but Darak was pretty sure Reverend LaMontagne was somehow involved. It was the easiest way to explain the Reverend’s own enhanced-IQ lattice and his familiarity with RAF theory. Did he take it by force, or did Larry willingly hand it over?
Darian’s transmissions must still be echoing around inside this microverse. That would explain how I’ve been “remembering” his experiences as if I were him. When I incorporated his persona to save my sanity, it changed me. It must be making me supersensitive to the transmissions inside the Eater. They’re resonating too easily with my lattice and bypassing my security because they’re as much mine as his.
Darak blocked all external transmissions into his lattice. The previously vivid images became ghost-li
ke and easily distinguished from the homogeneous dense grayish “matter” of this microverse.
In Darian’s last attempts to survive, he’d built an entire universe, albeit a tiny one, with one purpose: to preserve whatever he considered essential. Not his body. He knew that couldn’t be preserved and, besides, the corporeal was irrelevant to anything Darian thought important. He sought only to preserve his mind.
The poor guy just wanted to find some way to live. Darak listened to the memory of Darian’s internal voice. He heard the moment when his terrified mentor realized the only possible way to survive was to stop fighting the field and to accept his fate.
Darak stayed with Darian’s memory as he neared the limits of life-supporting chemistry. At the end, Darian’s new understanding led him to try compensating for this strangely compressed matter comprising his new universe. He’d hoped to place a limit on how small he would get, by allowing new matter from the outside universe to enter and add to his own. If only he’d had a little more time, or a little more understanding, he might have been able to save himself.
Darian never realized how little Larry understood what he was playing with, and he had no idea that his final modifications would create the Eater—Darak realized.
He ran the equations in his mind. He could see how Darian’s best guesses kept running up against Larry’s ignorance, creating something that incorporated itself into whatever it touched. The fields reinforced each other; they led to a stable and growing universe of its own.
Darak had a lot more experience with artificial universes. He could see the solution that had eluded Darian ages ago. The fields are easy enough to turn off, but if I do that, the absorbed matter will suddenly appear in the external universe. All that mass travelling at near light speed would instantly be subject to the natural laws of real space.
He did a quick calculation. The energy release would be equivalent to a supernova. Everything in the ESO 461-36 system would get hit with a lethal dose of radiation. And not just Eso-La; they’d be first, but others as well. How can I diffuse this bomb safely?
