George and the Unbreakable Code

by Stephen Hawking

  “Which helps us how?” George was perplexed. He prided himself on being able to keep up with Annie, however many imaginative leaps she made. But this time he couldn’t track her thought processes.

  While he was talking, Annie was busy unraveling a cable for Cosmos. “Which plug connects to your wind generator?” she asked. George pointed to a plug in the corner. As he did so, he realized what Annie was driving at.

  “The glasses!” he cried. “That’s what you meant, isn’t it? Ebot goes into space, and when he gets kidnapped—or robo-napped—we can see through the special glasses and find out who or what I AM is! And maybe even where!”

  “Well done, Einstein!” said Annie, pressing the power button on Cosmos’s keyboard.

  The dull screen changed to a bright rectangle as the supercomputer woke from his deep sleep. Unfortunately, Cosmos was not the only person in the house to wake from a slumber at that moment. The sound of heavy thumping announced that the twins had clambered out of their cots and, like evolution itself, were advancing inexorably.

  “How may I assist you today?” purred the world’s cleverest computer.

  “He sounds like an automatic elevator, not a cranky genius supercomputer,” George whispered to Annie.

  “Ew!” she said. “Creepy, isn’t it? I don’t like him when he’s polite. It’s so not him! Yikes—look out, George, here come your sisters!”

  Juno and Hera threw themselves down the final few stairs and toddled merrily into the kitchen. They spotted Ebot standing there and squealed with delight, imagining that he was some kind of enormous toy. They ran toward him with outstretched arms—in a way that must have triggered an alarm system in Ebot’s robotic circuits, as he backed away from them, heading toward the playroom, the girls in hot pursuit.

  “Hello, Cosmos,” Annie continued cheerfully as the trio disappeared. “We’ve got a mission for you.”

  “How fascinating,” said the supercomputer in his silky voice. “However, I am currently commanded to only help with your chemistry project.”

  “Ah,” said Annie, remembering what her father had done. “And is it possible to override that command?”

  “If you know the access code to perform the newly installed override function,” replied Cosmos, “then please go ahead.”

  Annie glared at the computer and then glanced at George, who was looking frustrated. “I could try hitting all the keys, like Ebot did … ,” she whispered. George nodded, and she struck a random selection of keys just as Ebot had done when George had been directing him from space. But nothing happened.

  “Think of something in space that we need to do for your chemistry project!” hissed George. “And then Cosmos will have to open the portal because it’s part of your project so you won’t need the override code.”

  “Okay! Good thinking! Right, well, Cosmos,” Annie said, playing for time. “We … need … to … find … protein in space! It’s the next subject for my chemistry project!”

  “Protein in space,” repeated George. “Absolutely. That’s exactly what we have to do. We’ve got carbon and water—now we need you to find us a location where we can identify space proteins, Cosmos.”

  Obligingly, Cosmos opened up the doorway to space, drawing a rectangle with beams of light, which then filled out to become a solid, door-shaped object hovering just above the floor in George’s kitchen. When the door swung back, the view was not of anywhere inside George’s house—or even any location on planet Earth.

  Over the threshold, once again, lay space itself—enormous, unexplored, mysterious, and mostly empty, apart from events of extreme violence or patches of terrifying beauty. In some parts, you might land safely on a distant exoplanet in orbit around a star other than our sun. In others, you might drift through the great clouds of a nebula. Or you might find yourself battling against the explosive, angry forces of a quasar, one of the most luminous, energetic, and powerful objects in the universe. The universe itself was dangerous enough, and their previous space journeys had been fraught with peril—but at least on those adventures they had been able to rely on Cosmos to help them out of danger. Now it looked like the supercomputer was all too eager for them to walk straight into it. It was a terrifying prospect.

  “Wow!” Annie breathed as she and George looked out through the doorway onto the seemingly endless landscape of space. But as Cosmos zoomed closer into his chosen spot, the view grew darker and murkier—until it looked as though the portal led into a sandstorm, with rocks and dust whistling by at great speed.

  “Where is this?” George asked Cosmos in amazement and horror as he watched the chunks of debris flying past, so close that he could almost have reached out and caught one—though they were moving at such a speed, they would have snapped off his hand if he’d tried it.

  “This is a disc of dust around a young protostar, around 375 light-years from Earth,” said Cosmos calmly. “In the interior of this disc, you will find some of the basic materials needed to make the kind of proteins that Annie seeks; the sort that are found in the building blocks of life itself.”

  THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF LIFE

  Dr. Toby Blench

  Life (plants, animals, and humans) is based around the element carbon. This is because it is better at forming very complex and stable molecules than any other element. There is also a lot of it in the universe, carbon being the fourth most abundant element. These facts mean that, apart from hydrogen, there are more known molecules containing carbon than all the other elements put together.

  However, you need more than just carbon to create life. Another essential piece is water. Around 60 percent of the human body is water. It is so important because it is involved in many of the processes that make the body work, and also it is involved in, and makes a very good solvent for, the reactions that are needed to make the complex molecules that life is made from.

  A very important set of these complex molecules that life is made from are called amino acids, which contain carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur. There are only 20 different amino acids in the human body, but they combine in lots of different ways to make much larger molecules called proteins. These are found throughout the body and have many different jobs: they help make hair, muscles, and ligaments; they help provide structure to the cells in your body; they are in blood; they help you digest your food; and do all sorts of other important jobs in your body.

  So, you can see how in just a few steps, very simple things like atoms can become something as complex as life.

  Through the doorway, they saw larger lumps of rock smashing into each other, swirling around in the chaotic and violent environment of a young solar system. Everything was traveling in the same direction, but within the stream of material there were still sizzling crashes and mighty impacts.

  “This is how the Earth was formed,” murmured Annie. “Cosmos is showing us how a solar system comes into being and how it gets the ingredients to create life.”

  “Please step through the doorway!” ordered Cosmos.

  “No thanks,” said George quickly. There was no way he or Annie were joining that swirling high-speed soup. “C’mon, Cosmos! We can’t go through that portal—we need a destination in a nearby solar system where we can safely go for a little spacewalk. Can you change the portal location, please?”

  “Negative.” Cosmos sounded quite unpleasant now. “I can’t open the portal for no one to go through. That’s against my operational rules.”

  “Is it?” said Annie in surprise. “I’ve never heard you say that before.”

  “I’m running a new operating system now.” Cosmos confirmed their fears that he was no longer the same computer they had known and loved.

  Annie and George looked at each other in horror, wishing they had never thought up this plan. If only they could time-travel back by half an hour and change it.

  “Such an action—opening the portal with no passenger to transport—will cause me to crash, with fatal errors,” Cosmos went on.
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br />   “We’ll have a fatal error if we step out into that,” said George, viewing the dangerous scene beyond the doorway. Even Ebot would only last seconds if he was sent into that roiling cauldron. George could see that Annie was glancing around frantically as she tried to think of a way out of this predicament. His heart sank—he could tell that she had no more idea what to do now than he did.

  “Someone,” said Cosmos nastily, “has to go through the portal door.”

  At that moment someone—or three someones; or rather, two someones and an android—came back into the kitchen: the twins were dragging a rather ruffled-looking Ebot with them.

  “Breakfast,” said Hera in a very determined voice as she unglued her sticky hand from Ebot’s.

  “Oooh,” said Juno, pointing at the doorway. “Sand!”

  “We can’t,” George told Cosmos firmly. Perhaps he just needed to stand his ground. Maybe he would be able to win the computer over by rational argument. “We can’t send anyone or anything through the portal into that place—as you know perfectly well, Cosmos.”

  Ebot was smiling in a kindly fashion as Hera jumped up and down on his foot. He must have put the space helmet down somewhere as his hands were now free. Juno was still transfixed by what lay through the doorway.

  “Build sandcastle?” she asked Annie hopefully, pointing to the place where the spinning rocks hurtled past.

  “No, Juno,” said Annie, gathering the little girl up onto her lap and holding her very tightly. “No babies in space. That’s not allowed.”

  “A space passenger has to go through the portal,” said Cosmos in a threatening voice. “If nothing physically passes across the threshold, the system will explode!”

  Annie looked sadly at Ebot, who was now entertaining Hera with a tap-dancing routine, whisking his feet out of the way as she tried to trip him up.

  “It’s funny,” she said to George. “When I thought about sending him to space before, I wasn’t bothered about what happened to Ebot. But now it makes me feel really miserable. It’s like we’d be sending him to his death, and that just isn’t fair.”

  “Well, he isn’t alive, so he can’t actually die,” reasoned George. But he agreed with Annie. “We still can’t let him go through the portal. To start with, it would be wrong; and if Ebot is destroyed, we’d have even less chance of working out what’s going on.”

  “Who is going into space?” Cosmos’s voice sounded really horrible; it was the sort of voice that sent chills down the spines of all who heard it. Even the two toddlers shivered; Juno hugged Annie even more closely, and Hera hung on to Ebot’s leg.

  “If no one goes into space, I will explode, and take this whole house with me. None of you would survive such a calamitous event.”

  Annie’s jaw dropped, and George’s eyes were as round as marbles. He gulped. “Blow up the whole house?” he said in disbelief. “You wouldn’t—you couldn’t—do that!” For a minute he imagined what that would look like: if the house exploded, all the other houses in the street would go up with it, creating a domino effect. The whole road would be destroyed.

  “There’s one way to find out,” said Cosmos. “Let’s put me to the test, shall we?”

  “But you would annihilate yourself as well!” said Annie in a high-pitched voice. “Why would you do that? Don’t you want to survive?”

  “I’m not a living being,” said Cosmos. “I just do what I’m ordered to do by the rules that govern my operating system. This is a rule, and I will be forced to follow it if you don’t send someone through the portal.”

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “Are you sure?” asked Annie slowly, as though she was giving the supercomputer the chance to back down. “Are you sure this is what you have to do?”

  “Yes,” replied Cosmos. “I can—and will—auto-destruct anytime I like. In fact, it’s a security feature your father recently fitted me with in case I was captured by hostile hands. And I can do it in a very spectacular fashion. Would you like to see some fireworks? Oh, sorry …” The computer sniggered. “Would you like to be a firework?”

  “I’ll unplug you,” said Annie, who sounded close to tears.

  “I can’t allow you to do that,” said Cosmos. “If you try, I will blow the system anyway.”

  “Annie,” said George decisively, “there’s only one thing for it. We’re going to have to send Ebot into space or we are all going to be reduced to dust rather than life-forms!”

  “Ebot … ,” Annie called softly.

  The android turned round, giving her a smile that was so exactly like her father’s that her heart turned over.

  “I can’t do it,” she wailed to George.

  “I’ll take over,” he said. “Ebot!” He was sitting on the other side of the space doorway, and now gently but firmly called the robot and motioned him forward. “Hang on.” George turned to Annie. “He’s not wearing his helmet!”

  “It’s not like he’s going to need it,” said Annie grimly.

  “True,” said George. He realized this space trip was not going to help them understand the situation in the world at large. Right now, they needed to concentrate on saving their own lives before they could save anyone else. “Ebot,” he continued. “We need you to come here. Step forward through the space portal.”

  But George didn’t see until it was too late that Hera was still attached to Ebot’s leg. The android limped forward, carrying Hera along on his left foot, until he stood facing the doorway to space.

  Suddenly Annie noticed George’s sister and gave a loud scream, pointing at her.

  George had a moment of bloodcurdling terror when he realized that his stubborn little sister was facing certain death. Ebot was still edging forward … any minute now he would cross the threshold to space and be gone.

  “C’mon, Hera,” said George urgently. “Let go.”

  “No!” She held on to Ebot’s leg, her favorite doll tucked under her arm.

  “Hera”—George used his deepest voice, hoping he sounded a bit like his dad—“you have to let go!”

  “Won’t!” she yelled, clinging on even more tightly.

  The android was moving ever closer to the threshold; he looked as if he might step into the maelstrom at any moment, taking little Hera with him.

  “Careful, George!” Annie was wide-eyed with alarm now. Juno had buried her face in her shoulder, frightened by the tone of panic in her voice. “You might make him fall over and he’ll take Hera with him. Ebot, STOP! Don’t go any farther!”

  But either Ebot hadn’t heard or he was still working on fulfilling the earlier command. He stood on the threshold, silhouetted against a backdrop of shattering collisions and explosions around the dusty young star.

  “Hera!” ordered George. “Let go of Ebot’s leg! He’s going to jump, and you MUST LET GO!”

  “NOOOOO!” wailed Hera, gripping Ebot’s robotic calf with all her might. George tried to pry her little fingers open but couldn’t budge them. But Hera was so focused on hanging on to Ebot that her doll, usually clamped to her side, was dangling loosely by a single foot. Taking advantage of the moment, George grabbed the doll and threw her into the storm beyond the doorway. It was a desperate move, he knew, and he could only hope that the action of propelling something through the door would be enough to force Cosmos to shut down the space portal.

  He acted so quickly that he didn’t have time to wonder if his sister might attempt to rescue her favorite doll; and in truth, Hera might well have done so if she hadn’t been so transfixed by watching what happened next.

  For a nanosecond they saw the doll’s bright yellow hair against the backdrop of dust as she spun through the portal. Swept along, she seemed to turn and wave, and then disappeared forever, torn into tiny pieces … perhaps to be reassembled, many millions of years later, as part of a planet.

  George just had time to insert himself firmly between Hera and outer space, pushing her and Ebot backward, away from the threshold, with all his might.<
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  “There!” he yelled to Cosmos, holding tightly to Hera while Ebot continued to inch his way forward. “Someone has gone through the portal. You never said it had to be someone human or something alive—you just said it had to be a passenger! We’ve done it! You have to close the door.”

  “Cosmos, close the door!” screamed Annie. “Close it now! We’ve done what you commanded. You told us that something had to physically pass across the portal, and it has! You have to follow your own rules! That’s what you told us!”

  With a slam, the space portal closed, leaving George lying on the floor, a bulwark between his sister and Ebot, and space. Ebot toppled over backward, Hera still attached to his ankle.

  Just as the space doorway evaporated into thin air, leaving no trace, two other doors burst open: the front and the back. George’s mom and dad rushed in through the front door; while Annie’s mom came in through the back. All three looked as though they had had the shock of their lives.

  “You’ll never guess!” they gasped in unison.

  “Oh, try us,” said Annie. “You never know… .”

  Annie’s mom, Susan, and George’s parents, Terence and Daisy, looked boggle-eyed with surprise.

  George and Annie did a quick scan of the scene in the kitchen, to check that there were no telltale signs that would lead their parents to suspect a near-fatal space adventure had just taken place. But apart from a faint sprinkling of dust where the space doorway had opened and a few beings such as Ebot and Hera lying on the floor, there were very few clues. The grown-ups would surely never notice that anything was amiss. Just to be on the safe side, Annie tried to grind the space dust into the floor with her foot.

  “Annie!” her mother complained, noticing what she was up to. “Did you bring that dirt into George’s house on your sneakers?”

  “Oh, sorry—I’ll sweep it up,” she said quickly. It was so like a mom, even when a national emergency was erupting, to notice that the floor was dirty.