Transcendent (12 page)

When our meltdown-proof, terrorism-proof plant came online and started to feed its first watts into the grid, we were very proud of what we’d achieved. Super-safe and super-clean, we used to say. We even won the economic argument, even though the costs of our competitors, at the time renewables like solar and wind power, were tumbling. That New York station is still operating today, even though its economic justification has gone away a little.

I was thirty-two years old. I was married to Morag, and we had a son, Tom. We were very happy. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I guess that was in some ways the peak of my life. I would never have believed that things would fall apart so quickly.

My work suffered first. I admit I didn’t see the Higgs revolution coming—but then, few others did.

Higgs technology came out of cosmology. The physics of the early universe was exotic. In our era some particles, such as the quarks that make up protons and neutrons, are massive, while photons, particles of light, are massless. It is an elusive critter called the Higgs field that gives objects mass. But when the universe was less than a millionth of a millionth of a second old, and it was still hotter than a certain crucial temperature of a thousand trillion degrees, the Higgs field couldn’t settle.
Every
particle was massless. The universe was filled with them, flashing across unraveling spacetime at lightspeed. But when the universe expanded and cooled the Higgs field condensed out, like a frost settling on blades of grass. Suddenly everything changed.

And when the Higgs field condensed it released a flood of energy, cosmos-wide. It is just as water freezing to frost must release heat energy: it was a phase transition, as the cosmologists say. And that vast injection of energy powered the universe into a surge of “inflation” that dramatically accelerated its expansion. All this is cosmology; it can be seen written in the relics in the sky—the remnant background Big Bang radiation, the gravity waves that slosh back and forth—a story deciphered when I was a boy.

What changed our world was the development in the 2020s of a new breed of particle accelerator so powerful it was able to emulate, in tiny spaces and brief instants, the tremendous energy density and temperature of the early universe—hot enough, in fact, to drive out the Higgs field from a bit of matter. And when the Higgs was allowed to recondense, it released a flood of energy—vastly more than the energy input, under the right conditions. If that sounds like something for nothing, it isn’t: it is just as in a fission bomb the relatively small energy of conventional explosives is used to liberate the much greater energies locked up in atomic nuclei.

As soon as control of the Higgs field was achieved, even on a small experimental scale, its potential was obvious. Here was an energy source of much greater density than anything we’d dreamed possible before—and we could tap it, tap an energy that had once driven the expansion of the universe itself. It was even as safe as you could wish, far safer even than our new-generation nukes.

When you try to predict technological trends, it’s easy to follow straight lines. For instance computer power, measured in operations per buck, has been doubling every couple of years since long before I was born, and has continued to follow that trend, more or less, ever since. Maybe you could have foreseen some of the consequences: a world in which a machine equivalent of human-level intelligence has long been passed, a world in which artificial self-awareness has become a commodity, and a part of everyone’s life. What’s much harder to predict is what comes out of nowhere, out of left field. I was still a kid when the great orbital astronomical observatories confirmed the universe’s biography from the Big Bang to the present. And out of that great cosmological revolution has come a new power source for cars and planes and cities—and, maybe, starships. Who’d have thought it?

Not me, that was for sure. In the late 2020s, as I followed these sudden developments in the technical literature, I was alarmed.

In terms of my career, it needn’t have mattered, maybe. We had only just brought that New York station online, and others of the same design were sprouting around the Great Lakes, and in Nevada and California. There is an asset inertia with big technology; you can’t throw away your whole infrastructure just because somebody somewhere has a bright idea.

But the fact was, somebody
had
had that bright idea.

A new long-term national energy strategy began to emerge, born out of existing trends, notably the painful weaning of America off of oil, and the possibilities opened up by Higgs. “Generation distribution” was the catchphrase. Every block, every home, would be a source of energy, from photovoltaic cells, rooftop wind turbines, maybe even biofuel crops in the backyard. And everybody would be connected into a local microgrid, from which you would draw energy when you needed it, store energy in hydrogen fuel cells in your basement, and even sell power back when you had a surplus. The microgrids would be connected up to larger regional, national, and international grids, supported by key nodes that would, in the first phase, by existing-technology power stations, including old hydrocarbon-burners and our new nukes, but these would be phased out as soon as they paid off their development costs, and replaced by Higgs generators.

It would be distributed, robust at every scale, clean and environment-friendly, and soaked with smartness. The administration began to fast-track enabling legislation, such as to force the utilities to purchase energy from any supplier. It was a great vision.

But in the longest term there was no place for nuke technology, and I knew immediately that my chosen field was a conceptual dead end. Maintenance projects might have seen out my working life, but all the creative energies, and some serious government R&D money, would be focused, quite rightly, on the new Higgs-field technologies. Even as it came online my New York station was obsolete—and so, in a sense, was I, in my early thirties. I couldn’t bear it. I wanted to be in the frontline.

I argued with Morag at the time. She pointed out that we had a kid, and plans for more. The world didn’t owe me a living, she said, no matter how hard I chased my dreams.

But I wouldn’t listen. At age thirty-four, I quit my job and took an academic post at Cornell. I would be teaching the fundamentals of physics to reluctant students, while researching the new Higgs-field technologies.

It didn’t work out. There was already a whole generation of grad students armed with a hands-on knowledge of the new prototype unified-field energy systems—I was already too old, at thirty-four. I continued to make a living, but I’d got myself stuck up another blind alley, and was a lot less well paid. I was unhappy. Morag was justifiably unhappy, too, unhappy at my choices, at the way it had worked out. We loved each other, but I guess we took it out on each other. We didn’t mean to hurt Tom, but he was there. Call it friendly fire.

Then Morag got pregnant again. It was actually an accident, we weren’t sure how we could afford it. But we embraced it. It was going to be a new start, we decided, us and the kids. As Morag’s pregnancy developed I started to feel more content than I ever had before. Maybe I was starting to realize that there is more to life than childhood dreams, and whatever disappointment I felt was fading in the light of a richer joy.

And then, and then.

Grief doesn’t begin to describe it. It was like an amputation, maybe, a loss of half of myself. I went through the motions of my life, I ate and slept and rose again and got dressed and worked, but it all seemed purposeless, a charade. And my emotions raged, as uncontrollable and inexplicable as the weather. I even took it out on my memory of Morag, as if she’d somehow rejected me by dying. The ultimate jilting.

Oh, I looked after Tom, materially anyhow. I never disappeared into drink or drugs or VR fantasyland, the way a lot of people expected me to, I think. I kept working, going through the motions of class after class, semester after semester, one faceless cadre of students after another, though I gave up on the idea of any original work. I kept functioning. Maybe it was “stoicism,” as one artificial-sentience therapist assured me. The way I see it, I just kept up the shell.

After Morag’s death, I lost a decade. That’s how I look at it now. Then, one day, I found myself inhabiting my life again.

When I looked around I was suddenly in my forties. Tom, in his late teens, had grown away from me, not surprisingly. And if I thought my career was stuck when I was thirty-four, it certainly was now. It’s a depressing progression. By twenty I knew I would never be an astronaut. By thirty I knew I would never be a brilliant engineer. And by forty-five I was all I would ever be, for the rest of my life.

But I still needed money. I kept up my teaching at Cornell, but I put some feelers out for consultant work.

I got a lucky break when Shelley Magwood contacted me, out of the blue. She was in one of my early cadres of students at Cornell. By age thirty or so she had already made herself rich with shares in a start-up company specializing in aspects of the new Higgs-field technologies.

She carved me out consultancy assignments based on Higgs, and on my deeper experience in the nuclear field. For a transition period the two technologies would have to work together providing power to the common grid, and there were interfaces, protocols, loading balances, and other technical details to be worked out.

So the work kept coming. I did it well enough. Shelley said I had inspired her, as a teacher; without me she wouldn’t have carved out her own successful track, and so forth. I appreciated the morale boost, and the money. But we both knew Shelley was doing me a favor.

Then Shelley drew me into another of her ventures.

“I remember how you always used to throw in space technology applications into your lectures,” she told me. “It was obvious where your heart was. I think you might enjoy working on this.”

When the request-for-proposals for the project that became the Kuiper Probe arrived, Shelley’s consultancy company was small and nimble enough to be able to position itself to grab the work, but smart enough to see the potential for the future. “This is only a paper study,” she told me. “But it might get picked up. And even if not, we’re going to be
paid
to think about how to use Higgs to drive spaceships. We’ll be like Renaissance shipbuilders, holding a patent on sail technology, just as Columbus is about to embark. . . .”

Shelley quickly put together a team with a number of freelancers, like me, and input from various other companies on specialized aspects. We rarely met; almost everything was done remotely, as Shelley’s “paper” study, actually a software abstraction, was driven to successive levels of design detail.

Kuiper was an obvious application for Higgs technology. But for me, it was no more than a start to use this miraculous energy source as a way to drive steam rockets. In the long-term, I dreamed, control of the Higgs field could give us control of inertia itself: we could banish mass. I imagined a day when vast spaceships would float from world to world, light as thistledown.

My God, I loved the work. It paid pennies, but it kept me sane.

Shelley emerged from her quick review. “So you haven’t screwed up too badly. But your mind must be with Tom. Mine would be.”

I tried to tell her something of my relationship with Tom. “Everything changed the day Morag died,” I said. “I took ten years to get over that. If I ever did. And Tom—”

“Tom thinks you miss the dead baby more than you love him. Is that it?”

That shocked me. “It isn’t true,” I said. “It never was.”

“Maybe not,” Shelley said. “But these things get stuck in your head.”

“How would you know?”

She looked a little uncomfortable. “When I was younger I had a lot of rivalry with my father. He was a tough character. Didn’t suffer fools gladly, he always said. But the trouble was he couldn’t distinguish between a genuine fool and a kid trying to learn.”

I listened to this carefully; she’d told me little about her past. “I think I remember him.”

“Oh, you met him during my college days. Parents and teachers. He was always on his best behavior, at open days and graduation. And he was never cruel. He was loving, but in his own way. But
his
way was a stream of put-downs. I grew up thinking I could never be good enough for him—until one day I decided I was going to beat him.”

“And that’s why you work yourself to the bone.” We’d had arguments about her work-rate and its effects on her health right back to our college days, when I tutored her.

“Anyhow that rivalry stuck. And then he died, before I had a chance either to beat him or give up the chase . . . Now I’m stuck with it.” She glared at me. “Nobody gets out of the past without scars. What you have to do is deal with it, and move forward. Right now Tom is all that matters.”

“OK,” I said. “But things may be a little more complicated than that.”

I was thinking of my visitations by Morag.

I felt an impulse to tell her, to confess. I still hadn’t even told John about it. But I was starting to think I ought to open up to somebody about it. But, as well as I knew Shelley, I had no idea what her reaction would be. I guess I was afraid of losing her.

Maybe she intuited some of my confusion, if not the reason for it. She leaned forward. “Focus on Tom,” she said. “The project doesn’t need you right now. But he does.”

I nodded. The moment passed, and my secret stayed intact a little longer.

Chapter 10

During their long interstellar jaunts in the monastic silence of his ship, Reath encouraged Alia to study the history of mankind. “If you don’t know where you’ve come from,” he would say, “you certainly don’t know where you’re going.”

And in this study, as he had been throughout her life, it was the small, dark, unhappy form of Michael Poole that was her companion, and her anchor point.

Humanity was thought to be some six hundred thousand years old, six hundred thousand years since the root stock had diverged from still more primitive forms. For the first hundred thousand years, mankind was confined to Earth—a period that had actually ended in Michael Poole’s own lifetime. This era was a lengthy and mostly uninteresting saga of a groping toward rationality and material command, amid endless wars.