Accidental Gods (5 page)

Chapter 6

Year 2

A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

—Anna Mary Robertson (“Grandma” Moses)

“Sit,” Thomas said and motioned toward the easy chair in the corner of the kitchen.

Larry plopped into the chair and folded one sandaled foot over his opposite knee. His other foot’s heel bounced rhythmically.

Thomas leaned back against the corner of the table. “Larry, we’ve got a big problem. We keep running out of memory.” He folded his arms. “We’ve been using these MC2 storage systems, almost a petabyte each, but they just aren’t enough to let the simulations run. We’re getting just shy of an hour out of each one. They’re expensive, and for our purposes, they’re very slow, which means…they’re not even remotely cost-effective.”

“Well, how much memory do we need?”

“About one hundred exabytes per simulated year—for four hundred million years, at least.”

“Whoa!” Larry’s upper foot slid back to the floor. Both were still. “Are you sure? That’s…” He scrunched his brows, his mouth moving in silent calculation. “Roughly speaking, eighty-five billion million gigabytes.”

“How come no one thought of this beforehand?”

“I don’t know.”

“Reminds me of the design process at our old company,” said Thomas. “Sometimes the dumb pseudo-obvious questions slip by. Like, ‘Hmm, I wonder how much memory it will take to store a year of time and space?’ Or ‘I wonder how much time it will take for us to really know whether it’s working?’ This all seems so obvious now.”

“Yeah,” Larry said and sighed. “The blindingly-obvious-in-hindsight questions that should have been asked.”

“So I need you to figure something out.”

“You want us to
invent
a newer, bigger, faster storage system.”

“Yup.”

“Just like that?” asked Larry.

“Just like that. After all, necessity is the mother of invention.”

“Am I on a budget?”

“Not really, but if you’re going to spend a lot, let me know first.” Thomas crossed his arms again. “Larry, this is critical. It’s our biggest roadblock right now.”

“I know, but it’s not like there’s some obvious answer just sitting there.”

“You should talk to Stephen. He’s a brilliant computer scientist.”

“Yeah, he’s super smart. Sometimes he just doesn’t have a solid grounding in reality. But I’ll definitely bounce some ideas off him.”

“That’s why I hired you, Larry. You get things done—and that’s why you brought Bleys along. Figure this out. I don’t have to tell you how high the stakes are.”

***

The next day, Thomas called Stephen and Ajay into Bohrs.

“You know about the storage issue.”

Stephen said, “Indeed. We didn’t really design this thing to be storage-efficient. A focus on the big bang itself really doesn’t need that much simulated time.”

Thomas paused. Ajay and Stephen could both tell he had something important to say. Thomas finally spoke. “So…I’ve been thinking we should let it run as far forward as we can.”

“Why?” asked Ajay.

“I’m interested in seeing what could happen. We could extract real, working models of stars, look for black holes. All sorts of stuff could be discovered.”

Ajay nodded. Stephen frowned.

Thomas said, “And, most importantly, it would be pretty useful as a reality check for how accurately we’ve built the system.”

“Ah, yes,” Ajay nodded more vigorously, glancing at Stephen. “The longer the program runs and the longer things seem to behave roughly as they would in our own universe, the more it proves that our underlying system mimics our own reality. Any early mistakes should be amplified over millions of years and would likely show up as glaringly obvious anomalies.”

“Exactly,” Thomas said. “So I want to run fifteen billion years.”

Stephen stood up immediately. “I knew it! I
knew
it!” popped out of his mouth before he could stop it. He sat back down and, as calmly as he could, asked, “You want to see if life develops, don’t you?”

Thomas nodded.

Thomas expected Stephen would eventually figure this out—just not as quickly as he did. Stephen was usually oblivious to the implications of things outside the core work. Thomas guessed that Stephen must have plunged into this project like few others. “Just don’t tell anyone yet,” Thomas said. “We’re at least a year or two from having the storage capacity to do it anyway. Which brings us back to my original point. Now that we’re thinking in the long term, is there anything you can do to decrease the storage requirements?”

Stephen ran his hands through his hair, not noticing the ever so slightly receding hairline, before standing up and speaking. “Two options come to mind. First, we could develop some compression mechanism.” He picked up a dry-erase marker. “Or second, since we’re stepping through time in single-Planck-unit increments, we could skip a few increments.” He drew a series of a dozen vertical, short, parallel lines on the board. “Right now, each of these ticks is a slice of time that is recorded—the entire state of the universe. Storing every tick is expensive. We could store every tenth tick.” He swapped the marker for the eraser and wiped away the second through tenth lines. “And if we ever need to, we could reconstruct the intervening ones.” He put the eraser back and brushed his hands. “There is some risk that skipping ticks and reconstructing skipped ones won’t always work because of a certain amount of uncertainty in the system. We’re just not sure how much uncertainty there is.”

Ajay said, “By the way, I think this represents one of the biggest potential holes in our strategy. If we can reconstruct the intervening ticks, it means everything is completely predictable, which means either that life won’t happen in our simulated universe or that everything is preordained.”

“
Preordained
is a powerful word,” Stephen said. “
Predictable
is more like it. Predictability versus uncertainty.”

“Preordination. Predictability. Uncertainty.” Ajay grinned mischievously. “At the quantum level, those words lose any distinction they may have.”

Thomas asked, “Are you guys talking about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle?”

“Yes,” Ajay said. “Heisenberg said, ‘The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa.’”

Stephen said, “I love physicists. They always make things sound new and complex. Why didn’t he just say, ‘If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, did it make a noise?’”

Thomas laughed.

“It’s not the same thing,” Ajay said. “Heisenberg is saying that measurement impacts the results. The tree-falling thing is more about a philosophy of reality—if there is no observer, can anyone say with any certainty that it is really happening? Which is kind of interesting because it fits with our model—processing the universe is vastly different from observing it.”

Stephen smirked. “So if we haven’t rendered something in our universe, did it really happen?”

Ajay shrugged. “Anyway, what Heisenberg is saying is that you can’t get a completely accurate answer because you can’t truly observe anything at the quantum level in complete independence of influencing it. Observation or measurement at the quantum level itself inherently distorts that answer as you find it. The act changes the result. That’s a lot of what quantum physics is trying to do: create a statistical model for things we cannot measure.”

“But that isn’t true in our system,” Stephen said. “Our observations do not inherently affect the system. It’s like we’re looking at things from a higher dimension. Our observations and measurements in no way impact the progression of the system.”

Ajay nodded thoughtfully, conceding. “Our observations can’t change anything. They are, therefore, truly independent. Hmm.”

It amused Thomas that Ajay actually rubbed his chin.

Stephen laughed and surprised both Thomas and Ajay by saying, “Your beloved Hawking went so far as to say, ‘We could still imagine that there is a set of laws that determine events completely for some supernatural being, who could observe the present state of the universe without disturbing it. However, such models of the universe are not of much interest to us ordinary mortals.’” Stephen took a second to gloat before continuing, “To the esteemed Professor Hawking, I say, ‘I beg to differ, such models of the universe are of quite a lot of interest to us.’ Either that or we’ve just declared ourselves something beyond ordinary mortals.”

Ajay appeared flummoxed, obviously pissed that Stephen had rebutted him with, of all things, a Hawking quote. Of course, Thomas knew Stephen had probably been saving this one for just the right moment and had, thus, played it perfectly.

“Where did you get that quote?” Ajay finally asked, probably more to calm down than to get an answer.

“
A Brief History of Time
,” Stephen said. “I had to at least get the basics on my own.” He chuckled.

“Bah!” Ajay sniffed. “I don’t read popular physics.”

Thomas and Stephen snickered.

“So,” Ajay said while straightening the lapels of his jacket. “In our model, as observers of the system, we can watch and get accurate, detailed results too.”

“Yes,” Stephen said. “Which means we can be certain of what we’re observing, which means we can predictably reconstruct skipped ticks.”

“It definitely changes the game,” Ajay conceded, “and reopens the question of preordination…”

“Don’t,” Stephen cut Ajay off while shaking his head disapprovingly.

Thomas grinned. “Catherine will kill herself for missing this conversation.”

***

A month later, Larry and Bleys were running new cables up, down, and between the many racks of the universe-processing supercomputers. Larry stopped, holding a fresh bundle of cables for Bleys to bind with cable ties and clip off the excess.

Bleys stood a head shorter than Larry and frequently sipped a Mountain Dew, the condensation-sweating green-and-yellow can notable due to the fact it was virtually the only part of him that had any measure of color. Bleys’s hair was black; his long-sleeved T-shirt was black; his pants, his belt, his cell phone and holster—all black. His skin, however, was as white as waxed butcher paper, and the toes and heels of his jungle boots showed brown where the leather dye had been worn and scuffed during his countless crawls around, beneath, and behind huge banks of hardware.

“Last night,” Larry said as he bunched up another bundle of cables, “I was reading some random article about using quantum computing for security. It mentioned using diamonds to parse single photons as a mechanism for supersecure transmissions. Seemed like an interesting idea, so it got me thinking. A diamond is a very well structured crystal, right?”

“Yep. A very expensive, beautiful one.” Bleys laughed. He checked where one particularly long cable led around the side of the corner of the rack and nodded approvingly. “I’m not sure people go to jewelry stores looking for a ‘very well structured crystal,’ but then again, I’m not the marketing type.”

“Or the diamond-buying type.” Larry laughed.

Bleys frowned.

“What if you could store photons in the crystal lattice of a diamond? I bet you could store a lot of information in a diamond.”

Bleys sipped from his Mountain Dew again, lowered it back to the floor, and worked his tongue around his teeth behind tightly sealed lips, as if bits of Mountain Dew had lodged there like crumbs.

Then he said, “That’s not a bad idea. If you could figure it out, it would also be blazing fast, since it would be optical by nature…You think you can make it work?”

“Maybe, but the trick is, we would need very large diamonds.”

“Very large diamonds?” Bleys sipped his Mountain Dew again.

“Huge. Like a thousand carats or more.”

Bleys spit Mountain Dew across the bundle of cables as he laughed. “Kilocarats.”

Larry cracked a smile. “Very clever.”

“What the fuck, Larry? Are we planning to rob a museum or something? Aren’t all the big diamonds behind glass and a lot of security?”

“Seriously,” Larry said, “I think it could solve our storage problem. I need you to go on a scavenger hunt.”

“What do you need?”

Bleys switched to his serious, all-business mode. On these so-called “scavenger hunts,” he got to run around the web—and sometimes the world—buying up expensive, obscure things. Some people liked to shop for Prada but not Bleys; he had more specific tastes, and he loved the hunt.

Larry said, “I’ll need at least ten diamonds of varying carats, from about one half up to about three to start. They need to be cut as cubes, though. That will be the hard part. You might have to go to Amsterdam.”