The Death of the Universe: Rebirth: Hard Science Fiction (Big Rip Book 3)

by Brandon Q Morris

  “I work while you two get drunk. Typical,” said Katya. “Did you at least bring me some breakfast?” She sat up and pulled her jacket around herself.

  Sasha could smell her morning scent. It reminded him of the night he’d spent with her. He’d like to hug her now. But the work had to come first. “I... no,” he said.

  “What great colleagues.” Katya stood up and pulled on her coat and scarf.

  “There was only kasha anyway,” said Yuri.

  “I could kill for a bit of warm kasha,” said Katya. “I have to go and freshen up. The model is already in the memory as an object program. You can test it while I’m gone.”

  “We will,” said Sasha. “Sorry I didn’t think of bringing you breakfast. I didn’t know you’d spent the night here.”

  “It’s okay, but I now need to eat something. I’ll see you in two hours.”

  “We really should have thought of Katya,” said Yuri.

  “I assumed she’d gotten up before us and left already,” Sasha replied.

  “Come on, let’s start work. Have you adapted the file names to the model?”

  Sasha flipped through the stack of cards. He found the card with the relevant line and swapped it out with a corrected version. Then he got the card reader to load the whole program.

  USER 419997

  There was the roof symbol.

  TIME 600

  “Do we really want to give it ten minutes? If there are errors, then it could mean we have to wait unnecessarily.”

  “It’s fine, Yuri, I thoroughly tested my program yesterday.”

  “If you say so.”

  *EXECUTE

  Sasha leaned back. The cursor blinked. Now they just had to wait. After two minutes, the brightness of the cursor appeared to fluctuate. What did that mean? The cursor pulsed; bright, dark, bright, dark. Maybe a manufacturing defect?

  Sasha pointed at the screen. “Weird, right?”

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” said Yuri. “But your program must be almost finished?”

  Sasha nodded. If Katya was here, he could ask her how complicated her model was. But there would be no point in starting with the most challenging version. She’d probably created a simple model first. He scratched his chin.

  “This is going nowhere,” said Yuri.

  Sasha had to agree. The program had far exceeded the ten minutes assigned to it. Shouldn't the computer respond with an abort? Sasha pointed at the screen. “Crashed?” he asked.

  “The machine doesn’t crash. But maybe your program is overriding the commands from your terminal.”

  “And that means?”

  “I have to press a few keys on the console, and then we’ll be back at the start.”

  “Do it, Yuri.”

  “Only you’ll have to be patient. When I reset everything, the information is deleted from the cache.”

  Of course, he’d forgotten about the LED display with the 8 x 48 lights.

  Yuri made a note of the configuration. Then he pressed a couple of keys.

  Sasha’s screen went dark, then the cursor reappeared. “Any interesting data?” he asked.

  “Yes, look—the start of the memory area your program last reserved is coded in caches 5 and 6. Do you notice anything?”

  Sasha added up the binary numbers indicated by the red lights. The number, converted to decimal, was larger than 200,000. “The memory load is too high,” he said.

  “Correct.”

  “The memory was sufficient when I tested the program.”

  “With a test model and test data,” said Yuri.

  “I was also able to work with the real data no problem.”

  “But not with the real model. That means the model must be the problem. It’s increasing the memory requirements more than we thought.”

  “Katya won’t like that,” said Sasha.

  “I think you underestimate her.”

  “A hundred and ninety thousand,” said Yuri.

  “That’s still too much,” said Katya.

  But she didn’t seem upset, she was calmness personified. Yuri was right. She was obviously enjoying the challenge. She persisted in trying to decrease the size of the model without leaving out any essential features. Sasha helped her as best he could, but she had to do most of the work because physics wasn’t his field.

  “Come on, boys, don’t give up now, one last try. The file name is 23.obj.”

  Sasha changed the file name on the punch card and fed the data into the computer.

  “*EXECUTE,” he typed.

  Katya stood up and wandered around amongst the cabinets.

  “A hundred and eight-six thousand,” said Yuri.

  Katya slapped her thigh. How many attempts was that?

  It was 29, if Sasha hadn’t miscounted.

  “We’re not getting anywhere with this today,” she said. “I need some fresh air.”

  They put on their coats and left the building. It was unusually warm outside and drizzling, and the mist was turning the path into a slide. They walked with their arms linked.

  “Where are we actually going?” asked Sasha.

  “It doesn’t matter where,” said Katya. “The main thing is to get some air.”

  They went along the street until they got to the Lavrentyev Prospekt. Then they turned right toward the monument. No one said a word. The rain was more like a fine mist. Now and then Sasha wiped a drop from his nose. The air smelled clean, almost like after a storm. The precipitation must have washed away all the filth. The snow in the park next to them looked much grayer than yesterday. But that could also be because the sunlight had made it glitter yesterday.

  A URAL truck passed them. It dashed through a puddle and Sasha, who was on the left, was splashed with water.

  “Govno! Shit!”

  They stopped. Katya looked at the damage and laughed. “You look like a wet dog in a fur coat,” she said. “I love dogs, just so you know.”

  “More like a wet lamb,” said Sasha, taking Katya’s hand.

  They heard another vehicle coming and stepped safely out of the way. But the car, a blue Moskvitch, stopped before it got to the puddle. The front passenger wound down the window. “What happened to you?” he asked. “Do you need help?”

  “No, it’s only water,” said Katya.

  “That’s all right then. Where are you going?”

  “Just out for a walk.”

  “Do you want to see a lot of water?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re driving to the reservoir. Something’s supposed to be happening there.”

  “What?”

  “You’ll see soon enough.”

  “It’s bit far on foot.”

  “Then get in!”

  The rear door of the Moskvitch opened and a hand beckoned from inside the vehicle. There was at least one person in the back already, plus the three of them. Yuri and Katya went to the car and were about to climb in.

  “Wait, it’s only meant for five,” said Sasha.

  “It doesn’t matter. Come on, we’ll all fit easily,” said Katya.

  The car stopped in front of a huge dam. One passenger got out, then another, and so on until seven people were standing around the Moskvitch.

  “Thanks, Vitali,” Katya said to the driver.

  The man and his three friends were from the Institute for Organic Chemistry. They climbed up the side of the dam on a specially cut track. The car looked smaller with each meter they climbed. A five-person car in which seven people could fit...

  Man, they were stupid! Every memory cell of the BESM-6 had 48 bits. Their data was accurate to 8 bits. So six data points could fit into each memory cell, not just one. They only needed a sixth of the memory for the data and then they could correspondingly increase the amount of space for Katya’s model. That should solve their problem!

  “I have an idea about how we can reduce the size of the data caches,” said Sasha, grabbing hold of Katya’s shoulder.

  “We’l
l worry about that tomorrow. Look!”

  Sasha took off his jacket because there was a hot wind up there that seemed to be coming straight off the Kazakh steppe. It brought with it small grains of sand that hit him painfully in the face. He scrunched up his eyes. In front of him lay a broad plain—the frozen reservoir—and it was cracking everywhere. At the same time, a clattering sound filled the air. The warm air was thawing the ice and the wind was carrying the moisture with it so that small grooves formed in the ice layer, into which more frozen chunks were falling. Hence the clattering sound!

  Then it began to get dark. Vitali, the driver, had walked down to the edge of the reservoir. He beckoned them. His friends were gathering wood. A short while later a camp fire was burning. Their hosts had brought two bottles of vodka with them, which they were now passing around. Sasha would have preferred dinner, but it seemed he’d have to go without the evening meal today. The effects of the alcohol would soon mask his hunger.

  Suddenly Vitali was standing there in just his underpants. What was he doing? “I’m going for a swim,” he said.

  That must have been a joke. The water would still be icy. His three friends, undressed, too, and all marched to the shoreline. Sasha cautiously held his hand in the water. It was actually surprisingly warm—at least the top two or three centimeters. That must have been due to the hot wind. Their hosts stood in the water up to their knees, passing around a vodka bottle. But no one tried to actually swim. It was probably still too cold for that.

  Katya waved him over. Arm in arm, they ran back to the fire, laughing. He wrapped his arms around her and they kissed.

  April 20, 1984, Akademgorodok

  *EXECUTE

  Sasha had entered the command so often he could now find the roof symbol without looking. He stood up. “I’m going to take a walk,” he said. He disappeared down one of the walkways.

  The warehouse was a proper labyrinth. He only knew the way to the exit down in the basement. He slowly walked past the control cabinets, reached a cul-de-sac, turned around, and tried another way. He’d been working on his program the whole morning. If every cache contained six values, then direct addressing was no longer possible. He could no longer say, “Give me the value in mailbox 27.” Instead he needed an additional parameter. “Give me the value first from the left in mailbox 27.” Although he’d performed the conversion pretty well, the devil was always in the details. And when he’d tested it he’d noticed lots of errors.

  He hoped they’d be able to get down to the actual work now. The scientists from the other institutes wouldn’t have endless patience. His father wasn’t the only person with connections. If they didn’t deliver results, they’d be kicked out of the room sooner or later.

  “Sasha? What does this mean?” asked Katya.

  What? He walked back toward his friends. He ended up in another cul-de-sac before he found the right way.

  “Numbers are running across the screen,” said Katya.

  “That was quick,” he said. He stood in front of the screen and looked at the output. They were large numbers—he counted no less than three digits. “I’m afraid that doesn’t look good,” he said.

  “Still too little memory?” asked Katya.

  “Your model deviates too much from reality.”

  “I understand.”

  “So is that it then, for the inflation thing?” asked Yuri.

  “No, of course not. But we can’t use it to prove Starobinsky right.”

  “So is his theory wrong?”

  “I didn’t say that. It’s just that our data doesn’t prove it’s right.”

  “And the American?”

  “He could also be right. Let me set up a model for his version of inflation theory—then we’ll know.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t,” said Yuri. “Imagine if we succeeded—we’d have spent huge amounts of resources and money only for Guth to get the Nobel Prize. Komikov will rue the day.”

  “He will anyway if we don’t deliver the ultimate weapon he’s expecting.”

  “I think we should continue, for the sake of science.”

  “Thank you, Sasha.” Katya looked at him in a way that made him want to hug her. He hadn’t really earned that look. He didn’t have anything to back up his hunch, but somehow he didn’t believe their data contained proof of inflation theory—either that of Starobinsky or Guth. And it wasn’t likely there was a weapon in it either, but rather something completely different, something with the potential to change the course of the world completely.

  Sasha shook his head. He’d never paid much attention to hunches. Why was he starting to now?

  April 21, 1984, Akademgorodok

  The first thing he noticed about Katya were the rings under her eyes. She was sitting at the computer again, typing. Her hair was pressed flat against the side of her head. She must have slept here again. Her coat wasn’t lying on the floor anymore.

  “Good morning, sleepyheads,” she said, sounding more cheerful.

  “Have you already finished with the Guth model, or what?” asked Sasha.

  “Would I sound so happy if I hadn’t?”

  No, probably not. They weren’t allowed to talk until they’d finished their work. “Very nice,” he said. “You’re really good,” and he didn’t just mean her work.

  “I’m a little afraid now,” said Yuri.

  “Afraid?” asked Katya.

  “You know we’re not allowed to publish our results without permission. And we’ll hardly get that for confirming an American theory. It wouldn’t be a very good end to our project.”

  “Maybe we’ll be lucky. The Nobel Prize committee sometimes shares the Prize between theorists and practitioners,” said Katya.

  “You’re dreaming,” said Yuri.

  *EXECUTE, entered Sasha.

  This time it was Katya’s turn to take a walk. She obviously really hoped they could confirm the Guth model of inflation. But when had that ever happened? Soviet researchers confirming what American’s had thought up? The Ministry would suppress their work unless there was something to be gained by it. Or had times changed? Was Katya pinning her hopes on the fact that Brezhnev was now two general secretaries ago?

  Sasha swung on his chair. He was nervous. On the one hand, he wanted Katya to be happy. On the other, he didn’t want things to end this way. If Yuri and he were right, their group would be spread out to three of the four winds. There would probably be no careers for them. Or would there?

  Something was happening on the screen. Columns of numbers were scrolling up from the bottom. “Katya, you need to come here,” he called.

  She appeared as though by magic between two control cabinets. Then she came to stand next to him. She smelled so good again. He especially liked her smell in the mornings. So it took him a while to register the values that his program was putting out. The numbers were far too big. The deviation was even higher than in the Starobinsky model. Katya didn’t say anything, but the corners of her mouth gave her away.

  He stood up and put his arms around her, but she pushed him away.

  Then his girlfriend had disappeared without saying where she was going. He whiled away the time further optimizing his program. They’d need new models, and maybe more memory.

  Katya resurfaced just before the end of the workday. Her face had brightened. She was obviously feeling better. “I have an idea,” she said, smiling.

  “For a new model?” he asked.

  “I’d like to go to the German Club today.”

  “The what?”

  “The German Club.”

  “But none of us speak German. Or do you?”

  “Not a word, but it doesn’t have to stay that way.”

  “What’s the real reason?”

  “Nothing. I just want a diversion. The German Club meets in the House of Scholars, where we’ll meet some new people. Better than hanging around in the hostel.”

  Lying around, thought Sasha. He would have been happy to do a bit of lying around,
with Katya of course, in his or her bed, he didn’t care.

  He sighed. The German Club then.

  The room reminded him of a classroom. There weren’t any desks, but there was a whiteboard. At the front of the room was a table with a gaunt man of around 30 sitting at it. Next to him sat a pretty woman who looked about 40 and seemed to know everyone. Another 20 or so people were sitting in the seats arranged in 5 rows, with room for 10 more.

  Near the front on the right sat Vitali, the Moskvitch driver who had taken them to the reservoir. He waved at Katya. Had she been to see him during the day? Had he invited her to the German Club?

  Sasha’s cheeks grew hot. He demonstratively fixed his gaze on the woman at the front, probably the chairperson. She had dark, curly hair, a large bust, and was heavily made up, but in a way that was decorative and not overdone. She greeted everyone in German. Then she switched to Russian and introduced the guest—the man at the table was called Bernhard Geier. He was from Germany, a chemistry graduate, and was going to report on something about electronic pattern recognition with the help of graphs and fuzzy logic.

  So that was why they were here! Sasha apologized mentally to Katya. The Moskvitch driver must have given her the tip. The pretty chairwoman retreated to the back of the room, where Sasha noticed a slide projector. Dr. Geier, who obviously worked at the Institute for Organic Chemistry, thanked her in Russian for the invitation. Then he switched to his native language.

  Sasha was about to lean back, disappointed, but then the light went out and the projector cast the first image onto the whiteboard. Dr. Geier had apparently converted the entire contents of his lecture into comprehensible slides. The man was a pro! He probably instructed students in his homeland. Sasha didn’t understand a word he was saying, but the slides very clearly explained the concepts behind what he was saying.

  Katya tapped him on the shoulder. “It’s great, isn’t it?” she whispered.