04. Birth of Flux and Anchor (3 page)

Certainly there were a million better, easier, and more efficient ways to accomplish the same goal of human security and computer access, but all of them had been suggested by the great computers. This solution,, which seemed to work, had been created by far lesser machines with no potential of ulterior motives. The solution stuck because nobody trusted the million better, easier, and more efficient ways the computers suggested. When no one could even understand how those computers operated, they were hardly going to take their word that their solutions weren't laden with mine fields.

Much of this was known to the assembled group, and therefore just sketched in by Madalyn Graham in her introductory talk. Everybody knew who Borelli was, particulary
these
people, and everybody knew about the computer revolt, again particularly the assembled men and women in the auditorium. They were the grandchildren of the Borelli legacy, the business and government leaders of such nations as Nigeria, Australia, Argentina, India, the Pan-Arab League, Ghana, Kenya, Pakistan, New Zealand, and other nations who had taken control of the world in the century after the great Shut Down. They were also the representatives of the shareholders of Westrex Pty., Ltd., both government and private, the heirs to
Tierraspacio.

The ones whose best and brightest were taught to study and try to apply every word of Borelli's theories, to help finance and support the great breakthrough they had all just rewitnessed. And they now had to decide whether or not to participate in the greatest and most expensive gamble in human history.

"Borelli believed that our universe was only one of several, that there was at least one more," Madalyn Graham explained. "The black hole that swallowed everything, even light, he believed, had to eventually become so dense that it would break through the walls of space and time separating the unimaginably large bubble that is our universe from what was beyond. Such forces bent and even swallowed light, whose own power was so great that even time could not stand against it. That is the gateway, the Borelli Point, which we opened up—we, our own group, our own fathers and mothers— that punched through to reach
outside
the universe and allow what was there to flow in."

These were businessmen and politicians, not scientists, and probably few of them could really comprehend the enormity of what she was saying or believe that there was a somewhere outside of the universe, but she didn't dwell on the point. Very likely, none of them understood gravity either, but they certainly accepted its reality.

Borelli spent years trying to find particles that broke Einstein's speed limit. He quite possibly found several, but he never found a way to use them or understand how they did it, nor was he ever sure that what he and his computers and instruments were seeing was actually a faster-than-light particle or simply something they were misinterpreting. He ultimately abandoned the idea and returned to his first passion, the alternate, or parallel, universe. His math was correct, and so were his speculations, but he was six years in his grave, returned to his beloved Bologna that had been ravaged by his own devices, before others discovered how to punch through and use what was found there without destroying at least the immediate neighborhood of the solar system.

The Borelli Point, the hole through, was incredibly small, and was punched by complex devices that simulated the required densities at that point for brief intervals. Still, it opened up another, vaster universe. A universe that was, as Borelli had predicted, totally static.

It was a universe of energy, and perhaps it filled infinity and perhaps it only was next to ours. No one could ever be certain, for no one could ever really go in and take a look and no one dared keep a Borelli Point open. In a matter of seconds any machinery and much of the surroundings would be compacted, compressed, and drawn into that hole as surely as a hole in a spaceship hull would pull outside the contents and people inside. It was an artificial, transitory black hole they were creating, and while it wasn't
really
a black hole, it acted like one. The allowable time window before the rest of the universe decided it was a black hole and reacted accordingly was a matter of, at most, three or four seconds.

It was explained to nervous politicians that this was a built-in safety valve, that if it were left open too long, it would compact and draw in the very machinery keeping it open and that this alone would close it, but there were always the alarmists and the one in a trillion chance and all that, and everyone was dealing here with forces even the computers didn't understand, and experimentation anywhere inbound from the asteroid belt was strictly prohibited.

The other universe was not truly static, but it operated under its own laws and those laws were totally unlike, and unknown to, anyone from our own universe. As far as could be seen, the other universe consisted entirely of a uniform energy so dense that it acted almost like a liquid. Pulled into our universe, it didn't adapt to our laws at all, but stubbornly insisted on just sitting there, if it were contained. Of course, it was affected by gravity and all the other forces, and, as such, would disperse if not contained. It
did,
however, obey gravity like everyone thought everything should, and an artificial gravity field was created that held it, in the weightlessness of space, like water in a jar. The ignorant and those who led the ignorant grew fearful of such dispersed energy; the alien energy might reach Earth and do all sorts of horrible things. Some thought it already had, and blamed every misfortune, no matter how mundane, on the stuff.

It was given a long scientific name that not even scientists remembered half the time, and was dubbed by the press by the humorous term "ectoplasm," that being the ancient name of the energy that bound together ghosts and other supernatural forces. Refusing to strip it of its dignity, most scientists who worked with it or on programs or projects involving it took to calling it the Flux, always capitalized when written.

When the forerunners of Westrex succeeded, with their computers, in proving out a theory by one of Borelli's assistants, still alive, that since the energy was the same no matter where the hole was punched and that the amount flowing in was also consistent with the time the hole was opened, that perhaps this was a primal sort of energy, the energy from which all else was created, the race was really on.

The prevailing theory was that, since gravity affected Flux, there was, somewhere, on the other side of Flux, or perhaps also within it, another universe as alien to Flux or ours as they were to each other. Gravitational forces so strong that they gathered an enormous amount of Flux in one spot and kept compacting it into a smaller and smaller space came from this third force, until, finally, it reached its limit and literally punched a hole in its own space-time bubble and exploded into nothingness, creating our universe. Various religious leaders called the gravitational force God and theorized that Heaven was on the other side, but that was not something to concern the scientists.

Flux had burst from its own universe into ours and released its force with an incredible explosion. Thrust out into the nothingness, the Flux had done one thing that was of prime importance: it had changed. It had become all of the other forms of matter and energy that humankind knew.

For a long time physicists had been searching for the white hole, the source of that great primal bang, while also wondering why there weren't any more to be seen. Now they had the answer.

Apply various controlled forces to Flux, and Flux became something else. The early experimentation on that one was hairy indeed, and cost many an orbiting lab and many a life, as all great research eventually must. This terrified the ignorant even more, and there were clamors to shut it all down, but the leaders, while generally ignorant and fearful themselves, also saw the tremendous potential there.

Whoever tamed Flux and made it obedient would control everything, it was the Philosopher's Stone, but changing lead into gold wasn't the only trick it would do. Unlimited power, unlimited wealth. No shortages of anything, ever again. Utopia was at hand—if it could be tamed so that huge quantities could be used and transformed.

By the end of the twenty-first century, huge quantities had been stockpiled by laboriously opening and then closing the Borelli Points time and again while building bigger and bigger gravity wells in which to put the stuff. Still, there was enough to experiment with, even miniature Flux universes out there, beyond the asteroids, as isolated as possible from all forces except those humanity wanted to introduce.

Research had split after the breakthrough. The Soviets, whose vast Siberian complexes and population had escaped the terror of the Borelli pulses, had recovered well. Their space facilities were only disrupted, not rendered forever useless as the American and Japanese facilities had been. China had been virtually untouched. France had suffered horribly, but its own space and many of its research facilities were in South America and in the Pacific, and while its population had been horribly rent, its pride and sense of destiny remained intact.

Repulsed by the cost, the discoverers had let much research lapse while they turned inward to Earthly concerns and some projects on the moon and on Mars. As they had been when Borelli gave them the pulse defense, they again had the ball, the mastery, the lead, in everything in this new field, and they allowed it to evaporate as they tended to administering much of the world.

Others made the subsequent discoveries in their own labs. An object, reduced to energy in Flux, retained its identity. It was not Flux. It was another form of energy in Flux. Injected into a field of pure Flux, it actually made a trail in the stuff, a permanent trail, as if Flux changed into something else by the mere touch of anything else. Subsequent injections even near this newly permanent trail, or contrail, gravitated to the existing disturbances and then followed it, like a train on a track.

A dense object with a fairly strong gravitational field exerted itself on the Flux, and on the foreign energy within Flux, almost as if Flux were trying to expel the invader. It was probable that Flux itself moved somehow to these points, but there was no way to really measure it.

The theoreticians wondered about all this, and wondered, too, what the effect would be in the Flux universe if a foreign energy field were to be injected, reach a point where the gravity pull back from our universe was so great that with sufficient entry velocity and a leading shot of pure, dense energy of the sort used to create a Borelli Point, it might punch back out into our universe. There was no way to measure this with what they had.

The computers worked on the problem. Injected at the speed of light, but in a digitized and orderly manner, matter broken down into energy might well be reduced to an equation, or series of equations, written in energy itself. There were no losses in Flux, so there was the possibility of doing to even large and complex things what those early pioneers had done with a child's crude ashtray.

Perhaps, the computers mused, if there were a way to digitize this matter using the very force of the Borelli Point as its method, then the absence of this force might provide the complementary balance of the equation.

In other words, if there was a very slight theoretical possibility that something turned into energy in a very precise mathematical pattern by
removing
factors automatically present in the real universe, then it might be possible to have that object reassemble itself by merely reintroducing it to our universe and its own laws and constants.

It worked in theory, but it could not be tested in our universe. There were too many contaminating factors. The only way to prove or disprove it was to do it.

But even if it worked, how was anyone to know? What was the speed of light in that other universe? Where would an object come out? And how could it tell us that it got there? There could be no small tests, no sample runs. Sufficient Flux would have to be held in to handle a full-blown, self-aware computer with sufficient machinery to repunch a Borelli Point and at least send some sort of message back.

It took longer to finance the thing than to build it, and, in the end, every nation and every corporation doing
anything
in Flux research had to pool its resources, but the go-ahead was given. The sheer cost, and the low odds of getting any results whatsoever, almost killed it a hundred times, but it got done. It got done because every participant feared that if if wasn't done with them, it would be done without them.

"I heard someone mutter that it all seemed like magic," Madalyn Graham noted. "And, indeed, it
is
magic if we define magic as anything that works that we don't fully understand. The steam engine was magic to the vast majority of Greeks. The automobile and aircraft were magic to primitive cultures who had never seen such things. Since the Industrial Revolution, and in spite of world wars, local wars, and even the revolt of our own technology and the terrible price we paid for it, we've continued to increase our knowledge geometrically in virtually all fields, with science leading the way. The only thing magical about that first expedition was its outcome."

They'd used a master computer as the ship's brain, of course, which caused a lot of agonizing right there and took four years of politicking to get permission to build without any human interfaces. It was a shot in the dark, a mission sent in full knowledge that it probably wouldn't work. Even if the master computers were right and it would bend toward a gravity seepage from our universe and then pop out, reconstituting itself as it did so, there seemed little chance that it would happen soon, or that it would survive the reemergence. The greatest gravity seepages, after all, would be from things like black holes and neutron stars. It might well survive the journey, but be crushed to death by the magnet that drew it.

Still, they set it up, and still, they sent it. Three such were budgeted; after that, things would shut down to a monitoring role until and unless they got some result, perhaps centuries away, perhaps never. They sent it only because the potential of Flux usage was simply so great that none who could afford to participate dared not do so.