Complete Stories (126 page)

I like the space-filling Big Flash a lot better than the old-timey single-point Big Bang, which is way too theophanous for me. That’s a fancy word that means “from the hand of God.” I may not have gone to college, but I read a lot, and I think for myself.

I see the two branes as mates; our home space is like a nurturing mother, fertilized by vivid encounters with her spouse. When they embrace, energy wells up like water from a spring. It must be wonderful. I’ve never actually had sex myself.

After each flash, the branes are driven asunder by the hateful forces of dark energy. But eventually the spiteful dissipation ends, and the pair trysts again, cycle after cycle, time without beginning or end.

Cosmologists estimate that the most recent Big Splat was fourteen billion years ago, and they suppose the next to be a trillion years away. But on this last point, I differ. I have reason to believe the other brane is going to smack into us very soon—which is why I’m out here in Maw’s pasture spelling out my message with rocks as fast as I can lug them.

It’s an especially hot day, which is a warning sign in itself. The approach of the father brane is diddling the fundamental constants of nuclear fusion, and our sun is burning brighter than ever before. I’m taking apart a whole stone wall to write this message, this very narrative that you read.

I’ve tried to get out the word via email and my blog, but nobody takes me seriously. I’m not, strictly speaking, a legitimate scientist. People dismiss me because I don’t have all those fancy initials after my name—and maybe because I live with my mother on the family farm. Paw’s been gone for years. We used to breed horses, but Maw thinks there’s more money in chickens.

I’m curious about how the world works, and I’m clever with electronics. When I’m not doing chores, I run the only computer repair shop in the county. I have a satellite broadband link to the Web. I read, or at least skim, every single cosmology paper that appears on the arXiv.org site, and that’s nigh onto two thousand papers a year, friend. No wonder I never had time to marry.

When I first learned about the cyclic universe, I was especially thrilled to know there are infinite numbers of planets. Not only do we have infinitely many planets in this cycle, there were infinitely many of them in the previous cycle, and will be in the next one, and so on. That really ups the odds that somewhere, somewhen, everything is just right. There’s an Eden planet with someone like me living there with a pretty wife, and he doesn’t have to clean up after any filthy chickens.

Thinking about the Eden world, I began wondering if I might be able to get signals from planets that are fabulously distant in space and time. What if twenty billion years ago, way back in the previous cycle, a planet twenty billion light years away had sent a signal aimed precisely towards my present location?

There is a small problem. Because of that Big Flash fourteen billion years ago, we can’t hope to receive any coherent radio or TV from more than fourteen billion light-years away. The energy from the splat would have scrambled any messages in the aether. But wait! What about signals in the form of gravitational waves? Yeah, bro.

I got the idea for my gravity wave detector from a dish of green gelatin salad that Maw had set on the table beside a roast chicken. She was carving up the tough old bird and the green gelatin was shivering, with the little bits of canned fruit jiggling up and down.

Man, it’s hot out here hauling rocks beneath our doomed sun. I’m using five or six stones per letter.

Long story short. I made my gravity wave detector from a bathtub full of green gelatin—my sense was that the particular shade of color might be important. I scavenged a couple of gyroscopic motion sensors from cameras, sank them into the gelatin, and wired them to a video display so I can see the gelatin jiggles as weird screens. Late at night, when the chickens are asleep and the traffic on the highway dies down, I see messages. Not that it’s all that easy to pick the signal from the fuzz. You might say I use my nervous system as the final processing filter. And never mind any no-can-do talk that the last cycle’s gravity waves are too stretched out by now to be decipherable. A mind is a powerful thing.

Just like I expected, I found a message from a planet in the last cycle, from a guy like me, but maybe happier. He was passing on the news that the cycle between splats is only fourteen billion years and not any trillion, and the collapse is far more abrupt than anyone realized. Good to know. Just to return the favor, I’m sending word into the next cycle—via gravity waves.

Any massive object gives off gravity waves when you move it—which is why I’m spelling out this message with stones. The rocks broadcast gravity waves as I set them into position and, for that matter, they’ll keep on sending out waves for awhile—because Earth herself is spinning around, at least until she melts into X-rays and Higgs bosons. Which will be pretty soon now, I reckon.

I feel funny all over, as if my molecules are coming apart. And the sun—it looks bloated and red, like it’s filling up half the sky. The cars on the highway must not be working anymore, because people are standing at the edge of the pasture pointing at me.

Pretty soon now, the branes are gonna be getting it on. Time for my last words.

I lived, I was real. And the end is coming sooner than you think.

============

Written May, 2008.

Nature Physics
, 2008

This is another take on the idea that I wrote about in “Colliding Branes.” Here I crushed the story down to under a thousand words, so as to publish it in the “Futures” series of short-shorts that appear in
Nature
and in
Nature Physics
. The idea in “Message Found in A Gravity Wave” is that a guy sends a message into a successive cycle of our universe by arranging some heavy rocks in a certain way—after all, any pattern of mass can give off a gravity wave. As a nod to my origins, I made the character an eccentric Kentucky farm boy.

Zack-5 Wigfall awoke with a sharp pain in his neck. He cursed, his mind running on a gerbil wheel of gloom. It was nearly dawn, time to start thinking about the day’s meetings and q-phone conferences.

He hated his life in Rochester, New York. The cold, wet spring; the scabby, gray city core; the low incidence of smiles—not that there was damn-all to smile about. Outside, in the dark, it was pouring rain. April showers.

Zack-5’s prototype, Zack-1, the original Zack Wigfall, inhabited a magnificent ocean-cliff mansion in San Francisco. And Zack-1’s three other qlones—Zack-2, Zack-3, and Zack-4—were stationed in, respectively, Paris, Tokyo, and New Zealand.

So why was Zack-5 stuck in stodgy, sodden Rochester? The upstate burg’s native megacorporation, Kodak, was spinning off a start-up called Qodoq. Qodoq would be marketing quantum-computing scraps of plastic as physical-world search engines; with a new Qodoq Scout, you’d never lose your car-keys again! Qodoq wanted a Zack qlone as their CEO, and they’d offered Zack-1 a substantial block of stock for making it happen.

Zack-1’s qlones were in demand for exec jobs because his personality was so well fitted to leading a high-tech company. He was a visionary scientist, a can-do engineer, a super-salesman entrepreneur. He’d designed a quantum-computational operating system and had ruthlessly built it into his own megacorporation, iQyoo. One of his biggest scores had been licensing the iQyoo operating system to the q-phone manufacturers, revolutionizing the cell-phone market.

Hiring a Zack qlone was like marrying royalty. And Zack-1 was still the only person being qloned at all. He’d invented the qloner in his garage lab, with a little help from his groundskeeper, Trevor Tang. The qloner had personalization circuits so that it wouldn’t qlone anything but a Zack.

Zack-5 had started life as a matter-wave copy of the original Zack’s quantum-mechanical state function, accurate to the full thirty decimal places that the uncertainty principle allowed. Being a nearly perfect qlone, he shared his progenitor’s memories and plans. But as the rainy weeks in Rochester wore by, his enthusiasm had sputtered and stalled.

Zack-5’s special task for Qodoq was to give their Scout product an interface by shoe-horning the iQyoo operating system onto it. He’d accomplished the port, nagged by a worry that he’d that he’d done it in a kludgy way. He harbored an irrational worry that his qloned body’s QRM or “quantum rights management” lock was interfering with his creativity. And then, to make things worse, he became obsessed with thoughts of Zack-1’s wife of many years, Woogie Wigfall.

Woogie was a woman of considerable wit and passion. In the nights, Zack-5 tormented himself with memories of her lovemaking; in the days, he longed for the proud beacon of her face. He ached with regret that he and Woogie might never meet.

He’d gone so far as to mention his problem to Zack-1 during one of their q-phone video talks. “Sure, Woogie can be great,” Zack-1 had responded. He shook his head, winced, shrugged. “But—just between you and me—we’re having some rough times. I think she’s cheating on me with Trevor.” Zack-5 suddenly recalled how selfish Woogie could be. “Look,” continued Zack-1. “You’ve got to find your own woman. The other qlones did. I envy you guys. You’re starting out as talented, well-connected geniuses. You don’t have to build it all from scratch like I did. You can do better than me. Get someone young and malleable. A gorgeous woman who worships you—or at least pretends to. Hell, you’ll have your pick.”

“The pick of Rochester?”

“And the second prize is
two
women from Rochester,” Zack-1 had said, smiling. “Seriously, when I’m feeling down, I make a gratitude list. And then I dive into my work. The Qodoq guys are counting on you, dog.”

“I want to be with Woogie,” Zack-5 had repeated, a little ashamed of how pitiful he sounded, but not all that ashamed, as it was only another Zack he was talking to. It was almost like the q-phone screen was a mirror.

“Very touching. I’ll tell her that. Now get over it, Z-5. After the Qodoq IPO, I’ll let you draw down a couple of mill. Quit the job then, if you like. Move wherever you want. Just don’t live near me. I’d hate to decohere you.”

The QRM lock made Zack-5 vulnerable to being converted back into a single energetic Higgs boson particle—just like the one he’d arisen from. If he were to encounter another of the qloner’s bosons, the QRM would kick into effect, with the net result being two Higgs bosons instead of two Zacks.

The point of QRM was to keep the qlones from qloning themselves, for Zack-1 didn’t want competition from derivative second-generation qlones. The qloner automatically embedded the QRM pattern within the wave functions of his qlones.

Zack-5 could mentally perceive his QRM lock—it resembled a warped polyhedron that hummed as if from a sustained bell-tone within. And there was no possible way to remove it.

And so he labored on alone in Rochester, constitutionally unable to relax, missing Woogie, hating his life, worrying that the QRM was making him just that one crucial notch less creative than he was meant to me.

Now and then he cheered himself up by talking to the other qlones. Zack-4 in Wellington, New Zealand, was particularly refreshing, as he actually envied Zack-5’s post. Wellington’s Antarctic-tinged weather was worse than Rochester’s, and iQyoo’s wares were a flop in the South Pacific.

Today Zack-5 had gotten up so early because he was expecting a call from Zack-2 in Paris, who was going to distribute the Qodoq Scout in Europe. Glancing outside Zack-5 saw that, for a wonder, the rain had let up. Rich pink and gold patterns were streaking the cauliflower clouds. Something for the gratitude list. Cloudy Rochester had wonderful sunrises and sunsets. Sitting on the side of his bed, idle till the call came in, he rubbed his neck, staring at the sky, healing the pain he’d woken with.

And now the q-phone rang. But, wait, the caller ID showed—Woogie Wigfall!

Everything grew sweet and slow. Languid with joy, Zack-5 pressed the answer button.

“Hello?”

Woogie’s screen image glowed like coal in a hearth. “Is this Zack-5?” Her voice was warmer than he’d remembered, although filigreed with a tremolo of pain.

“Zack-5, indeed. It’s so nice to hear you, Woogie.”

“You sound familiar.” She reached towards the screen, touching it with the tips of her delicate fingers, tan on top, pale underneath. She played a lot of tennis. “I’m calling about—about my Zack.” Her hand dropped away. Now he noticed the grief on her face.

“What is it?”

Woogie answered in a sudden rush, like someone jumping across a crack in the ground. “He’s dead. A broken neck. He was out last night dragonflying off our cliff with Trevor, and—” Her voice tightened, grew husky, pinched off. Briefly she sobbed, bringing tears of sympathy to Zack-5’s eyes. “Can you come out here right away?” asked Woogie.

“Yes. Absolutely.” In his mind Zack-5 went over the day’s schedule, planning how to shift his face-to-face meets to q-phone. “But—Zack always said that if I came to your house—”

“He’d want this. Last week he even told me that if anything were to happen, you should be the one to step in.”

Step in
. How broadly did Woogie mean this? “Great,” he croaked, his heart beating so hard that he could hardly talk.

“He told me that you’re crazy about me,” added Woogie, studying him. “I like that.” She had slightly full cheeks and a sharp chin. Before marrying Zack-1, she’d been a top socialite in San Francisco, thus the quirky nickname. Her given name was Wendy.

“I’ll be there this afternoon—darling,” essayed Zack-5.

Woogie flashed her brilliant, knowing smile. “I’ve already sent the jet. Tell the Qodoq guys you’ll come back soon. But maybe we just send them a fresh qlone.”

“Aren’t you forgetting about my QRM lock?”

“You and Trevor can work something out. He’s eager to help.”

On the flight to California, Zack-5 drank a highball of single-malt Scotch, as if throwing a wake for Zack-1. Poor guy. One minute he’d had been soaring off the cliff behind his house, the next he’d been lying dead on the rocks. It was no surprise that Zack-5’s own neck was aching, for there had been a lingering quantum entanglement between the prototype and the qlone.