Days of Atonement

by Walter Jon Williams

  Loren put his Xeroxes down on the smooth cool surface of the control bank. At a loss for what to do next, Loren looked into the holotank and saw, in gleaming chrome-steel letters on a background of depthless blue sky and scudding cloud, the words HOLO CYBERCOPS III. A computer game.

  “So,” he said, “this is what the taxpayers’ money is going for.”

  Steffens grinned. Holo images glowed in his silver front tooth. “I’m being paid by one of the contractors, not the government.”

  “That’s okay, then.”

  “Actually, I’m just a techie, not a Ph.D. They pay me to fix things, but they didn’t manage to break much today.”

  “We completed our checklist,” said Kurita. His tone was defensive.

  “Was there anything in particular that you wanted to see?” Steffens asked.

  “I don’t suppose you were here on Friday.”

  Another grin. “Everyone was here on Friday.”

  Rolling through Loren came the realization that Steffens had a cleft palate. That’s why he had a missing tooth. And the mustache covered the scar on the upper lip.

  “Dr. Jernigan?” Loren asked. “Dr. Dielh?”

  “Especially them. They were running the show.”

  “Amardas Singh?”

  “Sure. He’s someone you can’t miss.”

  “And,” looking back over his shoulder at the softly closing door, “Mr. Patience?”

  Steffens gave a puzzled little scowl, then looked at his partner, who shrugged. “I didn’t see him.”

  “Hey,” said Kurita. “Show him the Big Bang.”

  “Good idea. You want to see the creation of the universe? We’ve got a recording, and it’s pretty good.”

  Loren looked from one to the other and tried to make up his mind whether they were playing some kind of joke.

  If they were, he thought darkly, woe unto them.

  But they were both bending over the console, tapping with rapid-fire enthusiasm on the keyboard.

  “There,” Kurita said. “We’re out of the games file.”

  “Use Version D. That’s the most complete.” Steffens looked up at Loren. “It’s got great special effects.”

  “Look up there,” said Kurita, pointing.

  Something had come into existence atop the long console, a cube-shaped shift in the light, a quality of emptiness, marked by brief specks of light, somehow different from the emptiness that had been there before. Like Kurita’s T-shirt, it seemed a window into something else, an emptiness that was somehow projected from another place, perhaps another world . . .

  “Another new process,” Kurita said.

  “Holography without tanks,” Loren said. “I saw it on the news.”

  “Right.”

  “Fire one,” said Steffens. Kurita hit the Enter button.

  There was a dazzling flash of white light in the empty cube. Bits of brightness seemed to scatter, tumbling, some of them doing weird loops like uncoiling springs. Loren blinked. Steffens gave a playful open-handed slap to the back of his friend’s head.

  “Idiot. Use slow motion.”

  “That was slow motion.” Rubbing his head resentfully.

  “Another order of magnitude.”

  “Just a sec.” Tapping keys.

  “Make that two orders of magnitude. Slow it right down.”

  Steffens glanced from Loren to the holographic cubes and back again. “With the room-temperature superconductors, our linear accelerators can get higher energies than CERN, and without any damn silly twenty-seven-kilometer circle, either. And the whole thing happens at far less expense in electricity— an older-generation collider takes enough power for a major city, and the electricity is used mainly to run the compressors and pumps for the old-fashioned superconductors, and we don’t use those.”

  “So what are you doing now?” Loren said. He felt he’d been lost the second he walked into the room. “You’re using the accelerators?”

  “No.” Loren saw that silver-winking grin again. “It takes a lot of coordinated effort to run the accelerators— this room would be full of people. We’re just rerunning the highlights of Friday’s party.”

  “Oh. It’s recorded. I see.” A trickle of interest lifted Loren’s spirits. Maybe he’d see something, after all. He frowned at the empty holo cube. “What was that you said about the beginning of the universe?”

  “Oh, yeah. See, if you cook matter hot enough, you can duplicate the conditions just after the Big Bang, when the universe consisted of very energetic particles combining, coming apart, and recombining under conditions of extreme heat and pressure.”

  “The Bang plus maybe a zillionth of a second,” said Kurita.

  Loren looked at him. “Say again?”

  “We can’t duplicate the exact conditions of the Big Bang. We don’t have enough energy. But we can get within a fraction of a second.”

  “A zillionth?” Loren said. He gave a laugh. “That’s a scientific term?”

  “Well.” Steffen’s eyes turned vacant for a moment. He seemed to be mentally rewinding his conversation, recalculating, starting over.

  “Ten to the minus thirty-fifth second, which is a ten with a decimal point and thirty-five zeroes in front of it.”

  “A one with a decimal point and thirty-four zeroes,” said Kurita. “Let’s not make it more difficult than—”

  Steffens slapped him on the back of the head again. Loren could hear Kurita’s teeth clack together. “A damn short time, anyway,” Steffens said. “The theory is that the further back you go toward the beginnings of time, the more simple and symmetric nature becomes. The electromagnetic force and the strong force haven’t split off, though gravity has, so you get all kinds of particles and conditions that don’t normally exist in our relatively cool universe. You’ve seen Discovered Symmetries out on the Fairgrounds?”

  Loren nodded. “Fairgrounds?”

  “What we call the main area. There’s this famous statue called Broken Symmetries at Fermilabs in Illinois, which is supposed to represent the way nature became less symmetric and more, ah, fractured after the first few seconds of existence. Instead of having one unified force controlling things, you have electromagnetic force and gravity and the strong and weak nuclear forces. And assuming that you give any credence to Kaluza-Klein theories, you get eleven dimensions falling into four, because there isn’t enough energy to sustain the others.”

  “I don’t understand any of this,” Loren said.

  “At ATL we’re supposed to be able to crank up the LINAC to the point where the symmetries start becoming visible again. So we’ve got a more optimistic sculpture.” He bent toward Kurita, who was still working at the keyboard. “Thank you,” he said, “for not interrupting”

  Loren watched this well-honed routine with a familiar amusement. Put a couple gimme hats on them and drinks in their hands, they could hold their own in the rustic comedy contest with Bob Sandoval and Mark Byrne down at the Sunshine.

  “You’re making it too complicated,” Kurita said. “Kaluza-Klein theories are unnecessary to your point. And otherwise you’re too vague.”

  “Hard to be both complicated and vague at once, huh? I must be a genius.”

  “If you were a genius,” smiling maliciously, “you’d have finished your thesis three or four years ago.”

  “You can’t finish a thesis when everything that happens at work changes my fundamental understanding of the things I’m writing the thesis about.”

  Kurita looked up at Loren. “He has lots of excuses.”

  Enough of this comedy, Loren thought.

  “How do you—” Loren searched for a way of phrasing his question. “How do you do all of this, exactly? Cook your particles, or whatever it’s called.”

  “Okay. We’ve got two linear accelerators, and they’re aimed at one another. We fire protons out of one and antiprotons out of another, and the two meet and annihilate one another. It’s like—” He peered at Loren. “Do you ever go duck hunting?”<
br />
  “I’m going later this week.”

  “Me, too. Now suppose we went duck hunting together. Suppose we put the muzzles of our shotguns together and pulled the triggers at the same instant.”

  “Suppose we don’t,” said Loren.

  Steffens went on as if he hadn’t heard. “There’d be an explosion as all the bird shot and the chemical and heat energy collided. That’s what we do with the LINACs. We slam bird shot— protons and antiprotons— into each other and take pictures of the explosion. And annihilations produce a lot of energy and heat and elementary particles and further annihilations and energy and so on, until you get to ten to the twenty-ninth degrees Kelvin, which is nearing the heat of the Big Bang that created the universe . . .”

  “Okay. I see your point.”

  “And the profusion of particles that constitute matter are simplified to a few, and perhaps we get glimpses of the higher seven dimensions as predicted by Kaluza a hundred years ago or whenever . . .”

  Kurita looked up again. “Leave Kaluza-Klein out of it, okay? You don’t need it in this explanation.”

  Steffens raised a hand as if to slap the back of Kurita’s head again, then thought better of it and dropped his hand. “It’s my thesis topic, okay?” He turned to Loren and gave an apologetic look. “It’s something I’ve been waiting to find confirmation for. But there’s no evidence so far. Everything keeps falling into what Tim calls this energy sump.”

  “Tim Jernigan?”

  “Yes. The energies keep falling away. No one knows what’s happening.”

  Kurita looked up again. “The energy doesn’t fall away all the time. It’s intermittent. That’s why everyone’s so perplexed. Why my colleague is annoyed”— that malicious smile appeared again— “is that on those occasions when the experiments have worked perfectly, he still hasn’t found his six extra spacial and one extra time dimension.”

  “It’s hard to find them,” Steffens said, more to Kurita than Loren, “because we’re using four-dimensional detector arrays and we can only detect the shadow of extra dimensions in our space, not the real thing.”

  “I appreciate the explanation,” Loren said. “But this extra dimension stuff goes way over my head.”

  Kurita smiled sunnily. “My colleague’s head, too.”

  Steffens looked at him. “I haven’t noticed a published thesis from you, either, bucko.”

  “Mine’s further along than yours.”

  “Huh. We’ll see.”

  “I’ve got the simulation cued up.”

  “Then run it, moron!”

  Loren decided he was going to have to introduce these guys to Sandoval and Byrne. They were clearly competitors in the same Bozo Sweepstakes.

  Loren turned back to the holo cube as Kurita pressed Enter. A dim line, a silver trail, appeared along the center of the cube.

  “That’s the angle of the beam pipe,” Steffens said.

  In the bottom of the cube chrome-bright numbers rolled, a minus sign followed by a big number 10 with smaller numbers above the right-hand corner of the image, the scientific notation that Kurita and Steffens had been using and that Loren only dimly remembered from high school. The number reached zero, and the minus sign turned into a plus.

  There was a sudden speeding brightness, a horizon filled with primal fire, and then blasting out of the center of the explosion, like shrapnel from a grenade, were tiny objects— perfectly focused spheres, unblurred by motion and hyper-real, almost offensively real. Suddenly the image froze, hovering over the dark surface of the console like the harbinger of an apocalypse. The time counter was frozen at 10-56.

  “The interaction’s almost ideal,” Steffens said. He stepped closer to the image. “Symmetry’s already broken, because gravity’s broken off from the superforce, but there’s plenty of other things to look at. The physicists haven’t had time to identify but a few of these particles— lookee here.” He crooked a finger at Loren, who obediently stepped closer. Steffens put his hand into the image. A dark tiger-striped cloak shimmered over his palm and fingers— strangely, the hand looked less real than the frozen image.

  Steffens pointed at a blue marble. If Loren looked close, he could see a lowercase d written on the surface. “That one’s been identified as a d quark. Quarks possess this quality called color, okay, but the actual color of quarks in this simulation doesn’t signify anything— all quarks are coded blue in this simulation, and most of what’s been identified so far are quarks, because that’s mostly all that can exist at these temperatures.” Loren wondered idly what a quark might be. Steffens’s finger moved to a little orange sphere with Z written on it. “There’s an intermediate vector boson. If you look closely when we start the simulation again— I saw this earlier— you’ll see it decay into an electron-positron pair and a Higgs particle. Hey.” He peered into the image and gave a little hop, trying to see better. “Is that a Centauro event?” Speaking to Kurita. “Would you rotate the image one-eighty?”

  “Which axis?”

  “Y.”

  Steffens turned back to Loren. “Bet no one’s noticed this yet.”

  Kurita tapped keys and the image rolled over like an obedient dog. Steffens pointed at a bright fan of shining spearlike tracks. “See here? This spray of particles? That’s—” He hesitated, remembering his audience. “Well, it’s something you hardly ever see in nature.” He looked at Kurita. “Mark this and log it, okay?”

  “I sure as hell will.” Kurita wore a smirk. “That’s my thesis.”

  A cube appeared in the center of the holo image, then tracked (Kurita tapping keys) until it stood over the event. Kurita kept tapping keys.

  “He’s got to log it in four dimensions, counting time,“ Steffens said. “Then we can get on with it.“

  Kurita finished and the cube disappeared. The image rotated again until it regained its former alignment.

  Steffens pulled his hand back. “Okay. Next.“

  Kurita tapped a key and the simulation advanced, the bright fragments coiling outward like a time-lapse video of a thundercloud forming over an isolated New Mexico peak. The action was still happening too fast for Loren to follow, even assuming he knew what to look at.

  “Stop!“ said Steffens.

  The image froze. Time was 10-29.

  “Here’s where it all goes to hell,“ Steffens said. His voice was heavy with disgust. “See these guys?“ He waved his hand through an expanding cloud of tiny bright particles. “Photons! Electrons! Neutrinos!“ He pointed an accusing finger deep into the mass. “And there’s a neutron! We shouldn’t have these things yet!” Another ferocious stab with his finger. “And over here’s a proton!” There was disgust in his voice. “They should exist only for an instant and then be blown apart!” He withdrew his hand and shrugged. “In a little while we’ll start forming deuterium, and then it’s all over. At this stage there should be a lot more energy in here. But it’s gone—most of the energy from this interaction got dumped somewhere.”

  “The energy sump,” Loren said.

  “That’s what Tim calls it, yeah.”

  Kurita tapped a key again. The explosion grew, the brightness lessening as it diffused. Particles shot out of the frame of the holo. In the end there was nothing, just the shadowy image of the beam pipe. The cube disappeared. End of demonstration.

  Loren tried to decide how he felt about all this. A vast complex, with the latest technologies, and all for the purpose of cataloguing the behavior of things no one could see. Was it salvation or a sin? And if sin, which one? Vanity?

  They were trying to cook up the Creation. And what the hell did that mean?

  It annoyed him that he didn’t know the answer.

  “What happens if you get all the way back to the Bang itself?” Loren said.

  “We won’t,” said Steffens.

  “Do you see God?”

  Steffens started to answer, then didn’t. He seemed uncertain what attitude to take to this question.

  Kurita ro
se from his chair. “What do you mean, we won’t?” he said. “Remember what Pascual Jordan said back in World War II? He said he could create a star out of nothing, because at the point zero its negative gravitational energy is numerically equal to its positive rest mass energy.”

  Steffens waved a hand near his ear, as if to brush off a mosquito.

  “If you create a star, from there it’s just a tiny step to creating a new universe,” Kurita insisted. “With inflation theory it should be easy.”

  “I’m serious, here,” said Loren.

  “I’m not a cosmologist,” Steffens said. Loren couldn’t tell which person he was talking to.

  “Create yourself a star,” Kurita urged, “you could become your own god.”

  “Go back far enough,” Steffens began, definitely talking to Loren this time, “back before symmetry breaking, back before Kaluza’s eleven dimensions start to fade, and there the universe is simple and elementary, and if you don’t see God, you can at least see his handwriting. Because you’d see the fundamental laws of the universe, and you can’t get any closer than that.”

  A spectral chill washed up Loren’s spine. These people, the two comedians and their superiors, were approaching the divine. Or had the divine, instead, approached them?

  Loren was beginning to suspect that it had.

  “Of course,” Steffens added, shrugging, “I’m an atheist, so I’m not exactly an authority on matters theological.” He fell silent for a moment, then added irrelevantly, “I was raised Quaker, though.”

  “I was raised Baptist,” Kurita blurted, “but so what? Listen! We can make a universe! It’ll be terrific! Some thesis, huh?”

  Steffens looked at him patiently. “Shut up, Yoshi.”

  “What’s it like working with Tim Jernigan?” Loren said. Time, he thought, to get this interview back on track.

  “I don’t work with him much,” Steffens said.

  “Our job,” said Kurita, “is to fix things when they break. Not talk about experimental physics with Ph.D.’s. But I have talked to him. For a big shot, he’s pretty approachable.”