“Hundreds, thousands . . .” mumbled Bob, keeping his head down, keeping his eyes closed.
“All things that come to be, come to an end,” said the priest. “Everything tends to disorder until a reordering is due.”
Bob felt Nancy’s dead hand in his.
This suffering was too great.
31
SID AND VINCE sprinted the two hundred feet up the access tunnel to the main chamber. There wasn’t much time. Bob ran with them. Like everyone else, their display spaces were forced onto the image of Bob sitting on the bench next to Nancy, the priest kneeling in front of them. The wind whistled through the trees, carrying smudges of smoke that still rose from the burnt grass around them.
The entire present and past of the planet watched—ten billion humans, ten times that many resurrected humans, and at least as many sentient non-human creatures. Whatever languages they spoke, everything was being intermediated so they could understand. All were focused on Bob and the priest.
The priest squeezed Bob’s hand. “Do you want to end this suffering?”
Bob’s head was down. A tear streaked down his face from eyes squeezed shut. “Yes,” he replied.
The split copy of Bob stood in the middle of Sid and Vince, staring at himself on the roof of Atopia. “No,” he whispered.
Sid glanced at him. His psyche must have split when he died, and a part of him—his anger and fear—stayed with the priest on Atopia. The rest of him was here in the Commune. Sid was desperately trying to help Bob reconnect with himself, but Bob didn’t want to speak with Bob anymore. Sid worried that the priest might use Bob’s connections to launch an attack, but all the weapons were dormant. In fact, all of the weapons were disabled.
But it wasn’t the weapons he was after.
The oscillations in the space power grid weren’t just reverberations, not just echoes of the struggle for power in Atopia. The space power grid was steadily cycling power from around the planet, redirecting the energy into the capacitive storage grid outside of Lagos. The only thing connected to this was a supercollider. Mohesha was working to regain control of it, but this had been an afterthought.
Until now.
Sid pulled Vince back in their private workspace. “Have you ever heard of a vacuum meta-stability event?” The supercollider was designed to test extremely high-energy physics, creating miniature black holes, studying the very fabric of space-time. He pulled a graphic, a curved line down with a dip and then a lower dip in it.
Vince shook his head.
“A meta-stability event is an idea that the fabric of our universe is not in its lowest possible energy state.” He pointed at the first dip in the graph. “But that we’re in a dip, a local minimum.” He pointed at another dip in the curve, this one a saddle point lower down. “The problem is that there might be a lower dip nearby.” Between the dips was a small hill.
Vince frowned at him. “Get to the point, please?”
“The problem is that if a part of space—even a teeny, tiny part—manages to get over the energy gap and tunnel through it”—he highlighted the small rise, opening a small gap underneath it from one dip to the other—“then all of this universe will leak out into the other one.”
Vince stared at the small gap between the dips. “And you could use this supercollider to do that?”
“Maybe.” Sid didn’t know. It was just a theory. You could create miniature black holes with the collider, but they winked out as energy dissipated over their event horizons. He couldn’t see any other threat that made sense. Sid urgently messaged Tyrel at Terra Nova, telling them they had to destroy the collider somehow. A ping returned. They had already come to the same conclusion.
Vince and Sid stared at the graph in front of them. Bob was with them as well.
Sid turned to Bob, pulling him aside to sit on a packing crate. “You have to get in there, Bob.”
The mediaworlds roared as they watched the scene playing out on the roof of Atopia. People were questioning the synthetic realities connecting them to their old family, wondering how the system had glitched. Most of them were upset that whatever alternate reality they’d burrowed into had been disrupted.
Very few understood that Judgment was being passed.
On the roof of Atopia, Bob opened his bloodshot eyes. “Make it end.”
32
BOB SAT ON the crate and stared at Sid while his mind raced through the POND data. It was like he was having a conversation with himself, a self that had lived a hundred lives in a hundred different worlds. There was never any ancient civilization, at least, not one on Earth. It was all just a ploy, a feint to keep their attention elsewhere. Finally, all the pieces fell together. It all fit.
It was always him.
Bob was the fourth nexus. He was the Fourth Horseman. He was Death. And if Bob was Death, then the priest was the Destroyer. Jimmy had just been a pawn in a struggle that stretched across worlds. The priest had used Jimmy, preying on his weaknesses but also using his strengths, and in the same way the priest had used Bob. Used his ability to inspire trust, his emotive intelligence, to gain access at all levels. As if in a game of chess, Bob was moved into the center of events, the priest sacrificing one piece to win the prize.
The other side of the coin was Bob’s anger, his willingness to capitulate to others to solve his problems, his desire to hide behind the pain. He remembered the desert now, when he opened his mind to the priest, let him inside. He should have known. He did know. And yet he wanted someone else to take responsibility. To save him. To stop the suffering.
The priest had never been real, not in the physical world. It was an echo that had infected Bob, co-opted him. Reviewing the sensory stream from the POND data, it was something that was happening again and again, not just in this world, but in all worlds. Bob was never forced. He always invited the Destroyer in, and he always chose the end.
But, perhaps, not all was lost yet.
Bob was trying to connect into himself, but his other self wasn’t responding. When he died, the priest split Bob’s psyche, schisming off the parts it didn’t need. Or perhaps he’d done it to himself. His angry self was sitting on top of Atopia, holding Nancy’s hand, wishing for destruction.
Bob made one last push to get through to himself. To his relief, his other self relented for just a moment, and in the next instant he was sitting on the roof of Atopia, staring into the Destroyer’s black eyes. The priest smiled and released Bob’s hand, then stood and walked away.
Grabbing himself, he dragged both parts of him down to his family’s habitat.
“Stop this!” he said to himself. His emotional side glared at him from across their breakfast table.
“It’s too late,” the other Bob replied. “You had your chance on the beach. I said to stop, to save her, to save them, but you wouldn’t.”
“You need to make it stop.”
“So now you want to stop.”
A seagull sailed by, angling away on the breeze. The slow roll of the swells and setting sun gave the impression of a lazy end to the day. On the other side of the world, the collider powered up.
Less than three minutes remained.
Bob shook his head. “I don’t want to.”
“You have to.”
“Why?”
“You can’t kill all these people.”
“I’m not killing them.” Emotional Bob laughed. “They’re already dead. We haven’t been alive since Martin killed himself six years ago. Getting high, playing games, we’re as bad as they are.” He waved an arm at the waiting billions. “We don’t even exist here anymore.” Both sides of Bob felt the awful void.
Bob stared at himself. “Do you know about the POND data?” He forwarded copies of Sid’s data streams. “The priest used us.”
Angry Bob laughed. “Maybe we used him.”
A wave crashed
on the shore. Bob watched himself assimilating their past lives. He paused. It was a moment for truth. Had he pushed his brother over the edge to commit suicide? He looked himself in the eye. “You mean your suffering must end.”
Bob gritted his teeth. “Our suffering.”
“You know he took them away. Your priest, he’s the one that took Nancy and Mom and Dad.” Bob hesitated. “Even our brother.”
“Did he? Are you sure? And anyway,” said Bob, looking at himself and smiling, “if that POND data is true, then Sid and Nancy and everyone here is somewhere else as well. What does it matter if we end this one reality? The game here is lost.”
He was right.
The fragments of the POND signal, streams of Bob’s memories from other universes, contained snippets of conversations with Sid with Nancy in other similar but different places.
Two minutes now, came a warning from Sid. Two minutes until the supercollider could fire.
“This doesn’t need to be over,” Bob said to himself.
“What do you mean?”
Bob forwarded the details of a technical schematic contained in the POND message.
Both of him nodded. He might be angry, but he wasn’t entirely unreasonable.
“We haven’t much time.”
33
“MOM, THERE’S SOMEONE I want you to meet,” said Vince, holding Connors’s hand, pulling her attention into the world he was in.
His mother was watching an ancient cathode-ray television set, sitting in the living room of their old house on Bolton Street in South Boston. It wasn’t really a house. It was the ground level apartment of a triplex, but to Vince it was always home. He wondered how detailed this world was. If he walked outside, would he see the old neighborhood—three-level brick walk-ups with trees struggling up through cracked concrete, beat-up cars lining both sides of the street, his old friends Nick and Tony sitting on the stoop next door?
And was it all just a simulation?
Vince’s mother perked up, straightening her hair. “Oh my, it’s been a long time since you introduced me to anyone.” She leaned forward in her chair to get up.
Vince smiled. “It has been, Mom. It really has been.”
“This isn’t really the time,” hissed Connors under her breath. She was talking to her own dead mother in an alternate world when he jerked her aside.
Ninety seconds.
“This is exactly the time,” soothed Vince. “Bring your mother. We’re going up on the mountain.”
Vince secured a private spot in the wikiworld, on top of a mountain next to the Commune. The view eastward was pristine, and the sensor resolution made it feel like you were there, staring at the stars in the night sky. Vince had seen himself in the streams in the POND data. He’d seen himself through Bob’s eyes, a different version of himself, but still recognizable, living out there, somewhere else in some time and space. He’d also seen Connors. With him.
Connors started up a private world to talk, but Vince dismissed it with a flick of a phantom. “There’s nothing we can do.” Bob was gone. Vince felt that strange sense of freedom he’d felt in the jail cell. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, maybe nothing, maybe everything.”
But in his heart he knew.
From the corner of his eye, back in the cavern, he saw Zephyr smile at him. Vince smiled back. Zephyr stood holding hands with Willy and Brigitte and the Reverend. They were praying. Sid was sitting on a crate, talking to his own family.
Vince returned his attention to his mother. “This is Sheila, Mom.” It was the first time he’d used Connors’s first name.
His mother tottered forward, her smile and eyes wide. “It’s a pleasure.” She looked at Vince. “Did he mention my name’s Sheila, too?” She laughed.
Connors smiled and glanced at Vince. “No, he didn’t.” She had her own mother in tow, pulling her from her own world, their realities merging. “Mom, this is Mrs. Indigo, Vince’s mother.”
Thirty seconds.
“Come on,” said Vince, “there’s somewhere I want take all of you.” Extending his phantoms, he grabbed their attentional matrices and brought them up to the top of the mountain.
The stars spread like a carpet of diamonds above their heads.
“Vince, this is so nice,” said his mom, uncomprehending, but the reconstruction of her mind trusting like a child’s.
Hotstuff stood with them, and Vince’s mother looked at her and smiled. “Who’s this?” she asked.
“That’s a friend,” replied Vince.
Hotstuff winked at Vince, then smiled at his mother.
Thank you, Vince mouthed silently to Hotstuff. She knew what he was thinking anyway. For the first time, Vince wondered what she was thinking. He reached out and embraced her with his phantoms while reaching down to take Connors’ hand and squeeze it. “Can I ask you something?”
“What’s that?” Connors whispered.
Only seconds now.
“Can I kiss you?”
34
A PULSE OF protons was born, a tiny cloud of millions of hydrogen nuclei stripped down to their cores of three quarks glued together by the strong interaction force. In the intense magnetic field into which they were birthed, their combined magnetic charge accelerated them, pushing them around the thousand-mile circumference of the supercollider. Inside the protons, strong nuclear forces were orders of magnitude stronger than the electromagnetic or weak nuclear forces, each of these orders of magnitude stronger than gravity. Since the birth of this universe, this arrangement was how it had always been, but soon, it would be no more.
Around and around the collider the protons flew, their magnetic fields accelerating them ever faster. First, to ninety-nine percent of the speed of light. Time slowed down as their masses started growing exponentially. Onward toward the ultimate barrier they were pushed, to point-one percent, then to point-zero-zero-zero-one percent of the speed of light. Lights of cities around the world dimmed as the space power grid soaked up their energy and directed it into the collider.
The magnetic fields containing them shifted slightly, peeling off a few protons on each pass into a slightly different path, a path shared with a stream of protons traveling in the opposite direction.
And then it happened.
The smeared wave function of one proton lined up perfectly with a proton heading in the opposite direction. Their collision unleashed a density of energy not seen since a billionth of a billionth of a second after the birth of this universe at the edge of its creation. The burst of energy tunneled the combined proton’s wave function through the fabric of space, pushing it into a lower vacuum-energy state.
The collapse began.
On the mountaintop in Montana, Vince leaned down to kiss Sheila Connors. Vince’s mother was looking at the comet just rising above the horizon. “It’s beautiful,” she said in the instant that the wave front of the expanding lower-energy vacuum-state bubble destroyed them.
The bubble expanded at the speed of light.
In half a hundredth of a second, a fraction of the blink of an eye, the planet Earth was gone. For nearly nine minutes, the crew of the Comet Catcher mission, their space habitat a hundred million miles away, were the only humans remaining in the universe.
Five hundred and forty seconds after the initiation of the collapse, they too were gone.
At the initiation of the bubble, Bob had inserted information about himself into the collapse sequence. Contained in the POND data had been instructions describing how to encode information onto the surface of the space-time nucleation bubble that the meta-stability event would initiate. This universe would collapse, but a new one would reform, carrying with it an echo of the past. That echo would be Bob’s memories, thrown out in patterns of high-energy neutrinos across the fabric of the multiverse.
The bubble was destroying this universe,
converting it into another.
All the pain and suffering of the Earth had come to an end.
And within the bubble, all was calm.
Epilogue
BOB STARED AT the Great Seawall of New Amsterdam at the edge of Battery Park. It was the first time he had seen it with his own naked, natural eyes. If this place wasn’t still the financial capital of the world, they would have given up and moved to Manhattan by now. All the way up to Canal Street was at sea level now, guarded by an immense system of dikes and seawalls. Money was holding back the sea, but time was a thief and soon would steal it all.
“We need to wait a little bit longer.” Sid slapped Bob on the back. “The glasscutters need to verify us in person.”
The night was gray as the lights of the city lit up the sky, the concrete and metal and glass of the city the same color as the sky and the sea, all of it indistinct from the other in a precipitation that was neither rain nor mist, but something shifting in between.
He let a splinter sweep above the bay, sailing over the top of the Monument de Libertad, ringed by her own skirt of concrete that kept out the rising seas. Spinning further out to sea, he turned his point-of-view to look back at the twinkling city, extending his viewpoint far as he could see. Greater Sophia-Lisbon stretched down most of the east coast of the Republic of States, a hundred million people crowded into one unending metropolis.
They said the meek would inherit the Earth, but nobody had said anything about the kind of state it would be in when it was time for handover. The wind pushed a break in the clouds, revealing the faint twinkle of brave stars that tried to shine down on Gotham.
“Do you ever wonder why?”
Bob snapped his attention back into his body and looked at a man in a gray raincoat, with a hydrophobic shell, sitting on a park bench. The falling mist of rain danced away from him in a veil as the man looked toward the bay. That’s odd. No identity popped up in Bob’s identity algorithms. “Why what?” asked Bob.
The Dystopia Chronicles (Atopia Series Book 2) Page 33
