The God Equation and Other Stories

by Michael A. R. Co

  “She will.”

  Nine days is a long time for anybody to wait.

  There’s nothing to do, little to eat or drink, they couldn’t build a fire or look for food. Worse, she didn’t find him attractive. With so much time on their hands, their conversations were always about the mission. But on some days, they would speculate, often argue, on the nature of time. It didn’t always make sense to either of them.

  “The Butterfly Effect,” he told her, trying to sound impressive “I learned that in a physics class back at the Philippine Military Academy. Just as the wings of a butterfly can cause typhoons at the other side of the globe, small changes in the past can create repercussions for the future. That’s what some scientists say.”

  “But only if the butterfly’s wings were big enough,” Fatima said.

  “You’re a physicist now, I see.”

  “We were sent here to destroy three vessels and everyone onboard. But why were we also ordered to make sure that we find and kill eighteen specific crew members?”

  “Because only eighteen survivors made it back to Spain,” he said.

  “Exactly. But you know what? I think history is very stable. The past is the past, what’s done is done, and all that crap.”

  “You’ve lost me. You’re saying we can or can’t?

  “To make significant changes in the future, we need to make significant changes in the past. That’s why we’re here.”

  “So you’re saying the Butterfly Effect theory is wrong? No ripples in the space-time continuum?”

  “Heck, there’s a ripple, all right. But it takes a big one. You don’t just create ripples in time—” She threw a fist-sized coral stone into the water and it plunged into an oncoming wave. Nothing happened. “You need the right kind of ripple—” She took a flat pebble and threw it so skipped it across the surface, jumping the waves. “It takes more than merely stepping into the past to change history. Many changes, big changes, are needed to make a difference. It takes effort. It takes precision. It takes will. Most important, Lieutenant, it takes sacrifice. And like that pebble, it’s not only a leap of faith, it’s a one-way trip. Victoria isn’t our target. It’s the eighteen survivors, the ones who made it back. We kill the magic eighteen, they never return to Spain, the Philippines will never come into being as a political entity, and a new alternative timeline is created, one where the people of the archipelago will be free, prosperous, and untainted by foreign oppression.”

  “You’re taking this awfully serious.”

  “It’s a serious mission, Lieutenant. History doesn’t just happen. It’s made by men.”

  “Yes, ma’am. And also by women.”

  “Indeed.”

  He unscrewed his canteen, tilted its neck briefly to his lips, and offered the rest to her. “I wish we could live long enough to see the fruits of our labor.”

  She cradled the canteen in her hands. “We’ll know in what, forty years? Check if Legazpi shows up? Just waiting nine days is already quite a chore. And you can forget about peeking into our own time.”

  “We’re like the Terminator. Except we won’t be saying ‘All bee bahk.’”

  “The Terminator had it easy. We aren’t machines, Lieutenant.” She took a small sip.

  “You’re right, ma’am. We just follow orders.”

  * * *

  Tomas repeated his question: “Who?”

  “Come again?”

  “Who named this island San Pablo?” he asked.

  “Ferdinand, who else?”

  He mulled this over for a minute, referred to their map, then said, “I think I’ll stick with its official name. Puka Puka. That’s what it says here.”

  She laughed for the first time since they met nine days ago. A genuine laugh without poise, without decorum. “Watch your tongue, Lieutenant!”

  He stuck his tongue out, crossed his eyes, trying to see the tip. This made her laugh even harder, and he laughed with her.

  When they had both recovered, Tomas said, “It’s our last night together in this island.” He winked at her.

  “And?” she said, wondering where this was leading.

  “I think we should start packing.”

  “Let’s wait till the morning.”

  “Then let me keep watch tonight. The whole night. I want you to get at least eight hours sleep.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  “I’ll be fine, ma’am. I’ve been sleeping all afternoon.”

  “Yes you did, you lazy bum! You sure about this?”

  “Trust me. I’ll take the whole shift.”

  She stared at him for a while.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant. That’s … really sweet of you.”

  “Good night, Captain.”

  “Good night, Lieutenant.” She stepped into the tent, and within minutes, was sound asleep.

  Tomas sat alone on the beach. He began to wonder how the evening would’ve ended if the two of them weren’t gay.

  He dismissed the thought with a shudder. Then he got up to take a leak.

  * * *

  She dreamt of her arrival.

  Victoria.

  Her black-tarred hull and dirty white sails faded into view as the morning mist cleared. Trinidad and Concepción, her larger sisters, crept slowly behind.

  She sprung to her feet and saw Tomas running toward her with an AK-47 strapped on his shoulder and another in his hand. He tossed her the carbine as she retrieved a full clip from her belt.

  “Lock and load, Lieutenant. This is it.”

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  The three ships were less than a kilometer away, perhaps no more than seven hundred meters. The sun cast an orange-red hue on the lifting mist, and she imagined the ships’ shadows stretching all the way to the beach. The sun was in her eyes.

  “You’re late, you bastards,” she muttered. “Though noon would’ve been better. Lieutenant!”

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  “Let’s say hello.”

  He knelt down, placed the rocket launcher on his shoulder, and pointed it toward Trinidad, the largest of the three.

  “Aim for the water line, starboard hull,” she said. “Wait for my mark.”

  The RPG-29 has an effective range of five hundred meters, only slightly farther than a 16th century Spanish cannon. But it’s more accurate and, when armed with a thermobaric warhead, far more destructive.

  “Range?” she said.

  “Six hundred meters.”

  “Give them a few more minutes.”

  “I can see people.”

  “Wave at them.”

  He waved. “I don’t think they see us.”

  The sea was calm, the breeze steady. The sun climbed slowly as the three ships approached. They were beautiful vessels, dark and dangerous, concealing a weak, hungry, scurvy-sick crew. This is too easy, she thought.

  “Four hundred meters,” he said. “Ma’am, they’re trying to find anchorage.”

  She gave the signal.

  A plume of horizontal smoke erupted on Trinidad’s starboard hull. Concepción’s turn came fifteen seconds later. As the two ships caught fire and listed to one side, Tomas acquired Victoria in his sights.

  Victoria veered to her right and blasted her cannons toward the island, but fell short, plunging iron into the beach, destroying only coral although one managed to hit a small sandcastle that Tomas had sculpted the other day.

  “Return the favor, Lieutenant!”

  With careful aim, he blew a hole into Victoria’s port side.

  * * *

  On January 24, 1521, three black ships of the Armada de Molucca spotted their first island in the Pacific. Fernão de Magalhães named it San Pablo. It was deserted. So they continued on with their journey, and would miss all the other islands and atolls in what would eventually be called French Polynesia. Fate would instead carry him and his men to the island of Homonhon on March 16, 1521, then onward to the kingdoms of Limasawa and Sugbu. By April 27, the body of the Capitan-General w
ould lay in pieces along the reefs of Mactan.

  On September 6, 1522, Victoria, with her crew of eighteen European survivors plus four Malays, arrived in Seville at Sanlúcar de Barrameda, led by Juan Sebastian de Elcano. The cloves and other spices she carried in her leaking hull inspired the Spanish king to send more expeditions across the Pacific in the following years. In 1565, conquistadores returned to the Islas de San Lazaro and began the systematic subjugation of the archipelago for cross and crown. His Catholic Majesty, King Philip II, wondered what had taken them so long.

  Centuries passed.

  Then late one night, exactly 182,590 days after Magellan stopped over at Puka Puka Island and without the Philippine Prime Minister’s knowledge or consent, two marines, Rodriguez and Estregan, prepared to sacrifice their future by attempting to change the past.

  “Whatever happens,” the professor said into his microphone, “try to remain calm. We’ve calculated that you will need to travel back by exactly 182,600 days. Send us a postcard—” In the next instant, the time displacement field expanded and obliterated everything in the spherical chamber before collapsing again into a sub-atomic singularity.

  If his group hadn’t intervened, he thought, the time machine would’ve been used by the Chinese. A world ruled from the dragon throne would be no better than one ruled by capitalist Europeans as far as he was concerned. Even if the communists could build another prototype, it would still take at least twenty years to produce and accumulate enough antimatter to power the device. But the matter, no pun intended, is moot.

  Professor Ibrahim smiled as he waited for the altered timeline to propagate across the decades. Although eighteen men will have to die, their deaths will effectively end a five-century-old insurgency by eliminating the root cause. With the Spaniards out of the way, the sultans and rajahs of Borneo, Sulu and Mindanao will have a chance to consolidate their power, push further north, and establish an archipelagic empire strong enough to repel any foreign invader. Five hundred years of freedom would be coming in just a moment as the new timeline rippled across the centuries; he and his crew would remain unchanged within the submarine, which was protected by the same displacement field generated by the singularity. He almost cried.

  A minute passed, then another, and another. Nothing seemed to be happening outside, nothing seemed to change.

  Perhaps they got lost, he thought. Impossible. He had personally reviewed the quantum equations with great care, and he was confident that they had accurately measured the total mass required for temporal displacement. Besides, they had navigational charts, and enough food and water to last five days, seven at most. What else could’ve gone wrong? Maybe sharks ate them. Or cannibals.

  The professor’s earphone crackled with static as the voice of one of his technicians came through.

  "Sir?"

  "What is it, Omar?"

  "Sir, um, I was doing supplementary research on the Magellan expedition, and I discovered a small error or rather, an oversight, in our calculations. It might not be significant to be alarmed about, and the team is putting together several possible mission scenarios, but we’re still wondering how this skipped our attention, though we’re doing our best to find out, and I don’t know how to say this but it could happen to anyone and—"

  "Oh just get to the point!"

  "Ah, yes, well, it’s about the year 1521."

  "And?"

  "It was a Julian year, sir."

  "Julian who?"

  "Not who, sir,” said Omar clearing his throat, “but what. It’s the calendar instituted by Julius Caesar over two thousand years ago. But then the Christians deleted a number of days from the month of October."

  "What the— why the hell would they do a thing like that?!"

  "Um, s-says here that it had something to do with fixing the vernal equinox on March 21 or to making sure that Easter always occurred in spring or maybe just to have a calendar named after their pope. Catholic history isn’t my best subject, sir."

  "Typical."

  "Sorry, sir."

  “When did this adjustment happen?”

  “In 1582.”

  “And how many days were deleted?"

  "Let me see... Gregory ordered the 5th to the 14th day of October to be stricken off... so that’s—"

  "Ten days," the professor said as his vision started to blur.

  "Yes, sir. Ten days."

  * * *

  They had arrived ten days too early.

  “I had a weird dream,” she told Tomas as they dismantled their camp and prepared to load everything they had into the rubber boat, “that we sunk three ships this morning.”

  Tomas stopped what he was doing. “You suggesting we should wait?”

  She looked at her ankle. “No, it was just a dream.”

  Tomas looked relieved.

  “I couldn’t see my feet,” she said. “I couldn’t see yours either. I don’t think we had any. We left them on the shore. As the ships burned, we floated across the water to finish off the remaining crew. But the lifeboats were empty except for one person who wore a pig snout made of papier maché like those worn at Venetian masquerades. I asked him who he was and he said he was with the media.”

  “Pigafetta,” said Tomas.

  “Actually, I think it was Juan de Zubileta, the ship’s page, who was listed among the eighteen names. He was barely out of his teens.”

  “So you shot him?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Because you realized he was just a boy.”

  “No, I couldn’t decide whether to aim for his head or his heart.”

  “That’s cold.”

  “He and I just stared at each other until I woke up.”

  “Ah, the burden of choice. Too bad it didn’t happen.”

  “Probably did, in another lifetime. Dreams can be windows to possible futures.”

  “I’ve always wanted to visit Guam. You think the natives will welcome us there?”

  “It’s too far, but there are dozens of other islands that we can reach with the extra fuel we have. Let’s island hop. We could head south, toward the Gambier Islands, or north to the Marquesas.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Call me Fatima. The mission was a failure. We’re civilians now.”

  He loaded the last piece of equipment, an unused rocket launcher, into their boat. “Fatima?”

  “Yes?”

  “Honestly, do you think our mission was a failure? What if by landing on this deserted island, even without encountering or interacting with any other soul, we still managed to make the right ripples.”

  “Tomas,” she said, “I hope you’re right. I mean it. Given the circumstances, I’d rather imagine, or better yet, believe, that space-time is filled with the flapping wings of butterflies.”

  The two marines launched themselves out to sea. They threw their weapons and munitions overboard as they passed through deep waters. They rode into the west but away from the sunrise.

  Captain Rodriguez and Lieutenant Estregan were never heard from again for the next five hundred years. Their place in history occurred only at the end of the year 2020 when they unwittingly volunteered to sit in a rubber boat, oddly placed in the middle of a spherical chamber, in the heart of a nuclear submarine.

  Things get repetitiously tedious and tediously repetitious from that point on in very much the same way the human story tends to repeat itself not in clean cycles but in convoluted knots of well-meant plans, disastrous failures, and sincere ignorance, all the while bobbing in an ocean of impudence and inevitability. So their story ends here, in 1521.

  They waited for as long as they could. Victoria never came to meet them.

  “Waiting for Victory” copyright © 2006 by Michael A.R. Co. First published in Philippine Speculative Fiction vol. 2, 2006.

  THE OFF SEASON

  I was young then, so long ago. I had just turned twenty-one. Friends threw me a little late night party and after a few rounds of beer and smokes, Boy
et—or maybe Fred—led me to the upstairs bedroom.

  "The guys have arranged a little surprise for you," said Boyet/Fred. He opened the door and switched on the lights. Lying on the bed was the cutest piss drunk chick I ever saw.

  "She’s all yours buddy," said Boyet/Fred. "You get dibs, it being your birthday and all. But I’m next, okay?" He shook my hand, patted me on the arm, and I found a condom in my palm. When he smiled I noticed his ill-fitting dentures, so maybe it was Fred. He locked the door on his way out. Thoughtful bastards.

  She wore a black tank top, a micro mini, and shoes with platform heels. She was like a limp doll, I thought at the time, probably in her teens. Was she really a pro? Her arms were folded above her head, and one of her long spread-eagled legs was hanging off the edge of the bed. Her face isn’t too clear to me now, but she had full lips, a straight nose, and was pretty hot enough to be someone’s girlfriend, you know, the ones with the face of an angel and the body of a whore. She smelled good, like sweet dessert, cinnamon or taffy. I raised her skirt, pulled her black thong to one side, and slowly inched my protected member into her. It was over in five minutes. She didn’t make a sound, although she might have snored at some point, and overall, I’d rate it as a lousy lay.

  Three hours later, they drove me back to my condo. I was in no condition to walk so they carried me to my living room, sang happy birthday, and raided my refrigerator. We had a few more beers and shared a joint. The room was spinning by the time they said their goodbyes, and I felt the urge to hurl. I threw up before I reached the toilet. I guess I blacked out.

  ***

  I dreamt of snow. My mother was spraying it from a can. She always liked to decorate the tree this way. I was six-and-a-half years old, and an only child. Christmas was always special if you’re the only child. It’s like having a second birthday five months away. I looked under the tree and it was still empty. “When are we going to put the gifts under the tree?” I asked, and my mother continued spraying snow on the branches and said, “Once we actually start receiving gifts.”

  “When are the gifts coming?”

  “Maybe by the first week of December.”

  “That’s too far,” I said.