by Isaac Asimov
The only thing in my old universe that wasn’t destroyed was me. My body doesn’t exist anymore, and in fact now never existed. But when the singularity expanded from a point to an entire universe in its own brane, my consciousness expanded with it. That’s why I permeate this universe, which I named Tom since it all came from me. Every proton, electron, quark, lepton, tachyon, it’s all me.
But I miss Mary, the rose of my existence. In my human form I had never appreciated her as I did now—and her death, or non-existence, was my fault. Was there any penalty, any torture, I did not deserve?
I had actually done far worse, destroying the universe, billions of humans, and—as I soon learned—quadrillions of intelligent aliens scattered throughout the universe. Yet these were just numbers, faceless hordes I’d never meet or miss. With Mary, it was the ultimate betrayal, her life snuffed out by me, the one person she should have been able to trust, in the second worst betrayal of trust I would ever know.
Once free of my body, I had the quantum computing power of the entire Tom Universe at my beck and call, and I made use of it. I was a little confused during the Planck epoch (first 10^-43 seconds after the Big Bang), but sometime during the Grand Unification epoch (up to 10^-35 seconds), I figured out what had happened. By the end of the Inflationary epoch (10^-32 seconds), I’d analyzed the previous universe and simulated in my mind all that had ever happened that I cared to see. (Of course, I never knew about these various “epochs” during my previous life.)
Seeing all that I had obliterated in such detail forced me to face what I had done. They were not just numbers or faceless hordes. They were real, intelligent beings, both human and alien ones throughout the universe. Their hopes and dreams not only wouldn’t be realized, they no longer ever had hopes and dreams, or even existed. My crimes were almost imagining. It took a hundred years to get past my depression.
But I learned something else in my analysis of my old universe. I learned what Joey and my sweet Mary had done. That made me forget about all I had destroyed.
I decided there were three things I needed to do, three goals that I would devote my entire being toward achieving.
I actually have very little direct influence over what happens in the Tom Universe. I barely have the horsepower to knock a stray pencil aside without a billion years’ notice. I can move tachyons about, but what’s the point of that? I’m the weakest of the five forces of nature, the other four being gravity, electro-magnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. I have so little influence over anything with real mass that nobody, not even the Einsteins from both universes, would deduce or detect me. And yet, in cosmological time, I get a lot done.
It took a huge force of will to concentrate on moving things just so, but I did so for billions of years as I influenced the movement of atomic particles this way and that, according to my calculations. It’s not easy when you have to constantly recalculate, thanks to the blasted Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the bane of my existence. I remember how difficult problems used to give me brain cramps; imagine a brain cramp the size of the universe. That’s what you get when you spend a few billion years concentrating on one thing. But I got results. Professor Wilson would have been proud.
With my influence over the course of a billion years, matter in one star system coalesced subtley differently than it would have otherwise. Two hunks of rock, a few hundred pounds each, would have missed each other, but with billions of years of focused thought I got them to collide just so. A large chunk of rock broke off one of them, and took off into space, a meteor. (Actually a meteoroid, but I prefer the colloquial term.) The second hunk of rock ricocheted off the first and hit another meteor, knocking off another large chunk of rock. This meteor took off in the same direction as the first one, about a minute behind, just as I’d calculated.
Those two meteors would take care of my second and third goals. But for now, forget about those meteors. They won’t be heard from again for ten billion years.
My first goal was the toughest. Mary, sweet Mary, how I missed her! I set about recreating her and my old universe in all its details, right from the beginning. With the quantum computing power of the Tom Universe, I could extrapolate all that had happened, and set about duplicating it.
You can call me God, since I applied whatever light touches were necessary to recreate my old universe. Trust me, galaxy formation is not an easy thing when a ninety-pound weakling at the beach can kick sand at you and all you can kick back with are a few photons. Just to get the raw materials needed I had to create supernovas, and explode them just right. But a photon here, an electron there, and it adds up if you do it long enough. Soon I had the matter and energy needed, all in the right place at the right time. I created our solar system, Earth, life, evolution, hamsters, and eventually Homo Sapiens, all exactly as it had happened in my old universe.
It wasn’t easy affecting evolution since I could barely nudge a strand of DNA. I could move an atom so it affects a molecule, which affects a nucleotide, which affects the DNA. It took many millions of years, and I almost died for want of a galactic-sized aspirin. I had second thoughts about recreating history exactly as before, since that meant Hitler, bubonic plague, cooked spinach, and acne—five years of it for me—but any changes would alter future history, and I couldn’t risk that. Once I’d set the initial conditions early in Earth’s history, the rest was inevitable, with minor adjustments now and then, thanks to Heisenberg. As to the rest of the universe, I let it evolve on its own, and it ended up pretty close to the original.
Finally the Tom Universe reached TOM, the Time of Mary.
Oh, and me too. I got to watch both of us grow up. With me, it was diaper changing, playing with Joey, bullies stuffing me in lockers, dropping the fly ball to right field that blew the big playoff game—damn, I wanted to change that—then off to college. With Mary, it was diaper changing, ballet classes, middle school queen bee, high school prom queen, boyfriends I didn’t know about, then off to college where she finally buckled down and studied. We met, we dated, and then Joey joined us as we formed our lab group.
Joey, Joey, Joey. The things I know about you now!
But now I had Mary back. I couldn’t hold her in my arms because I didn’t really have arms, unless you count eighteen billion human arms, since they are all part of me. But after 13.7 billion years of planning and execution, her beautiful mind and body existed again. I had achieved my first goal.
I caressed her with the molecules that bounced against her body, as well as from within, since the very matter that made up her body was me. I felt her at every level of existence, the limbular, cellular, molecular, nuclear, and lepton/quarkular. Such sweetness and beauty…
…and such betrayal. There I was, just as before on that fateful day, experimenting on my singularity, unknowingly about to destroy the universe…again. And there, in Dr. Wilson’s office nearby, on his sofa, were Mary and Joey, just as before, with their bodies—made from me!—entwined, their lips locked. Mary’s purity ring lay on a table nearby.
I’d played it out in my mind a trillion times, always with the same result. Small bursts of cosmic rays spontaneously burst into being throughout the universe as I heaved universal shudders of horror. How could they?
In my youth as a universe, I could never go beyond that moment. What point was there? Mary and Joey betrayed me, and must pay the price.
And yet, as I matured as a universe, my youthful hot-bloodedness was replaced by a more experienced thoughtfulness. It took nearly 13.7 billion years—just a few brief million years before Mary, Joey and I would come into existence again—before I could bring myself to look past the betrayal and calculate what would have happened if I hadn’t destroyed the universe. It was just a simulation in my cosmic mind, and yet it seemed almost real to me.
* * * *
“I can’t believe we did that,” Mary said as she dressed. “Right here, not fifteen feet from the lab.”
Joey was silent as he pulled up his pa
nts and put on his socks and shoes. When he was done, he continued staring at his feet.
“We’re his best friends, and look what we’ve done,” Mary continued. There was a long silence. Mary stared at her purity ring for a long time before putting it back on. Catzilla stood nearby, staring with accusatory eyes.
“We can’t ever tell him,” Joey finally said. “It would be too much for him.”
“How can we face him?” Tears streamed down Mary’s face.
“We won’t,” Joey said, his face granite.
A week later, Joey transferred to another university, which he claimed focused more on his areas of neurological interest. For several years he maintained occasional email contact with Tom before fading into his past. He never contacted Mary again.
Mary missed a week of school, citing illness. When she returned, she surprised Tom with a candlelit dinner and the finest French food. Thoughts of singularity expansion were put on hold. Later they would work out the theoretical framework for consciousness—including singularities and their part—and their research would revolutionize the field. When Tom wanted to expand a singularity, she convinced him the dangers were too great.
A month after the candlelit dinner, Tom proposed. They married, had three kids, and had fifty happy years together.
* * * *
I replayed over and over in my mind the simulation of what my life would have been like with Mary. The life I’d lost, and the two lives I was about to kill. A cosmic tear rolled down my metaphorical cheek.
For ten billion years, the two meteors had shot through space for their long-planned rendevous, my second and third goals. Now I watched as they approached Earth, just a few million years to go. What have I done? My betrayal was far worse than theirs. Mine was the greatest of all possible betrayals.
One of the meteors meant nothing to me; its destination deserved its fate. I focused my will from every corner of the universe on the other meteor as it soared through space. If I could just nudge it to the side, even a few feet.…
I could have calculated in an instant if I would be successful, but I did not. If I was going to fail, I didn’t want to know, and I didn’t want to waste even a snippet of my mental energy on anything except saving Mary. I strained with all my mind, stretching the very fabric of the universe to the limit. If I had enough time, I could move mountains, but I did my best work in billions of years, not millions.
The meteor lurched slightly to the side. Would it be enough? I pushed and pushed, praying feverishly to whatever god there might exist beyond me. I could feel the meteor as it continued to veer off course.
It entered the solar system, still nearly on course. Fear permeated the universe as I watched it draw closer and closer…all I can do now is watch.
The first of the two meteors, now the size of a marble after going through the atmosphere at twenty-six miles per second, comes through the roof. As I’d planned ten billion years before, it strikes my other me, seconds before he/I would start the expansion in the singularity in my brain that would have led to the destruction of the Tom Universe. My head splatters in spectacular fashion, with red flowering out in a contrived Fibonacci pattern of great beauty. I’ve saved the Tom Universe and all its occupants from myself, my second goal. Billions of humans and quadrillions of intelligent aliens will now continue to exist. I no longer care.
The second meteor is only a minute behind. I’d fought it for millions of years, straining with every fiber of my being, and yet it is only barely off target…would my efforts be enough? I had been too afraid to calculate in advance. I can now see Mary and Joey in Dr. Wilson’s office, just as in our original universe, their bodies entwined in ways I would not believe possible if I weren’t sensing it with the very matter they use to do it with, their bodies. Joey, my good buddy and friend, is on top, facing Mary, who makes moaning sounds that I’d heard in my simulations a trillion times before.
A second before the meteor arrives, I see my efforts are for naught. The meteor is off target by only a few inches. My piercing scream shoots through the Tom Universe, unheard by anyone as it echoes through my cosmic mind, rattling constellations throughout my universe on the microcosmic scale.
The second meteor slices through Joey’s back and Mary’s stomach, leaving behind matching holes the size of Frisbees in their bodies and a trillion times larger in my heart. Catzilla, who’s been hiding under a nearby table, scurries from the room in fear. My third goal, revenge, has been achieved.
In desperation I let loose a storm of tachyons toward Mary’s head. Since tachyons are essentially massless, I can maneuver them easily. The tachyons flood the singularity in her brain, which begins to expand.
She will live! Embodied in her own universe, just as I am. Just as I had done, she will recreate our universe, and eventually me, and we will be together again…pleasure coarses through my universe.
And then I freeze, my metaphorical jaw dropping. Mary’s expanding singularity is not alone. Tachyons have also flooded Joey’s brain, and his singularity is also expanding.
I make one last use of the quantum computing power of my universe, and see the horrible truth. Joey’s and Mary’s universes, now in their own branes, are too close together. Their branes are on a collision course that will destroy both, leaving me alone in universal misery.
“NO!” I cry as pain explodes through me. Closer and closer the branes move together for their inevitable rendevous.
I react mindlessly, writhing in agony as my metaphorical muscles convulse. This has little effect on matter, but like corks shooting from bottles, tachyons shoot out everywhere, permeating the very fabric of my universe.
Singularities everywhere begin to expand. Not just the billions inside human brains, but also the quadrillions inside intelligent creatures throughout my universe. Quadrillions of new universes emerge and expand, in close proximity to their neighbors, overloading the uncountable branes. The branes, no longer in equilibrium, collide with each other like dominoes throughout the cosmos. One by one they pop like soap bubbles, until there is nothing, there never has been anything, and just as my existence ends, there is no pain.
WILD SEED, by Carmelo Rafalá
When the bough breaks.…
Karlyn ano-Kerr grips the interface around her head with heated disgust. Synapses are breaking down, some are shifting their pulse rhythms, others are stuck in flux; millions upon millions of nanos are running around, clueless, as if zapped by a heavy dose of the stupids.
She can’t understand it; the rooting had been flawless, the bio-programmers for Beta habitat integrated without rejection from the aboriginal millifibers and coaxed by their artificial programmers to grow natural habitats, enclosed and self-sufficient. It had been a textbook performance.
Then why is it collapsing, she chides the static-ridden threshold. Why? Why? Why?!
Karlyn writhes in her seat in the control bubble of the landing bug and seethes at the decay of her beloved systems-control ganglia. Her program buoy shudders. Algorithms manifest themselves and scatter past her like so many dead leaves on a Veronian wind burst. The leaves brush past her; the massive tangle of information before her strikes a discordant note.
She doesn’t need this now. Another failure…
From orbit, Cruz des-Manas is running cross-checks on the System Platform’s induction flow and stabilization subroutines. She sees him in the digilandscape distance. He appears as an octopus whose many tentacles flicker about at what looks like a swarm of large black flies. Beta is collapsing in upon itself.
“Systems are shutting down all over,” says Cruz. “Keep your eyes open. I suspect a possible leak over to the remaining ground systems.”
“My program buoy is sinking,” Karlyn whines. Her frustration begins to sting. She had sent out for a pattern trace, but so far no luck. The nanopolice had staggered back, babbling incoherently. She huffs. The surroundings become hazy, as if a sheen of ice has formed over an invisible glass window before her. The effect warps the l
andscape and things appear milky, distant and unclear.
“Organiform supports are dying,” announces Cruz. “Hold on the final coding sequence for the nodules. Karlyn, rig to reboot.”
“I know!” She sets up the program again. “No dice,” she says. “She’s sinkin’ fast!”
“Recommend we cut contact with Beta. Avoid possible contamination.”
Beta is not the only thing sinking, she thinks, as her stomach hits her lap. Whatever the problem is, she’s sure it’s her fault.
As she prepares to invoke the nanocrobe buffers to coat and isolate the undamaged programmers, a lightning crack ruptures the digisky above. Beta Platform, who’s garbled double speak has dominated most of her interchannels, howls and discharges a static burst.
With quick efficiency, her biolastic suit’s response mode kicks in. A silver screen goes up, catches the burst, amplifies it, and sends it right back at the Platform. There is a shower of blue-white particles, a wrenching noise that threatens to shatter her ears. Suddenly she is thrown clear, and the digivisor on her interface pulls back like melted plastic and withers.
She sits in her organiform chair, head aching, and curses Beta’s bloody haemoglobular flow.
“And that, as they say, is that,” says Cruz. “I’ll check our backups. If this happens again we’re gonna have problems growing the colonists.”
“Yes, I’m fine, thank you!” she blurts. “Agh!” Her suit is peeling, the heat from the breakdown beginning to burn her skin. She works frantically and manages to pull it off. It crinkles up on the floor and turns from metallic grey to deep black.
“Something must have gotten through to my buoy. My suit has disintegrated.”
“Just the overload burst. I’ll grow you another.”
