Building God (2 page)

My frustration was enhanced as I heard my office door slide open. Who the hell would dare-I glanced over and saw the man from the morning – the nervous one who had been inputting more data into the GM. He looked even more terrified now, his paunchy jaw quivering loosely. I turned my attention back to the interview. The anchors hadn’t seemed to notice my inattention and were congratulating me and wishing me success with the GM. I nodded, thanking them and wishing them well, and finally breathed a sigh of relief as the screen flashed red. We were done.

“Uh, Ms. Riese?” the man was carefully edging closer.

“What?” I snapped, shutting off the cam. “Didn’t you notice the closed door?” I heard the rustle of loose papers and noticed he held something in his hands. “What is it?” I asked tiredly.

“It’s just…here.” He thrust the papers out toward me and I grabbed them, briefly leafing through the bundle. A thin black line snaked through the papers, zig-zagging up and down. I let the papers unfold to their full length and watched as the line zigged high and higher up the page, then crashed straight down to crawl along the bottom margin.

“What is-“ My words went unfinished as I found the title of the graph.
Population – Global
. I quickly leafed back to the great drop-off point and found someone had scrawled something illegible by it.

“What is this?” I asked again, spreading the papers on my desk and jabbing my finger to the drop.

“It’s just a preliminary graph of the population, using most of our data. Just to see if everything’s working right for the full test tonight.”

“Yes, yes, I understand that.” It was me, after all, who decided our first run of the GM should predict the world’s population for the next century. Easy to understand, easy to track, useful information, and most importantly of all, nonthreatening to the public. Population had been being predicted for years, slowly becoming more accurate. This would be nothing new or shocking. I pointed at the graph again. “But when is this?”

He paled. “Tonight. A little after midnight. I kept printing off pages, but they were all the same.” He picked up the tail end of the graph, where the line edged along the bottom margin of the page and threw it back down in disgust. It just keeps saying the population drops to zero tonight.”

I shoved the papers to the floor. “You, what’s your name?”

“Timothy Mayer.”

“Well Tim, you are to let no one find out the machine is acting up. How much data did you use? Could it be too little?”

He shook his head, his limp brown hair swishing across his forehead. “It was at 99% accuracy when I ran it. It could be off by a couple million people, but not the entire population. There’s something not right about all this.”

I gave him a sharp look. “All that’s not right is that the machine’s temporarily dysfunctional. I don’t want to hear any end-of-the-world crap from you, understood?”

“Understood.”

“Now this is what I want you to do. Start running more tests. Do population by each country individually. Run simulations for natural disasters. Anything you can think of. Start a live print-out of world population immediately and look for any discrepancies. See if the GM is correctly predicting all this positive population growth up until midnight.”

He nodded quickly and rushed out of the room. “And remember, don’t tell anyone,” I stressed again as he left. The office door slammed behind him and I sank into my chair, carefully picking the print-out off the ground. Folding it up neatly, I placed it on my desk and opened up my Internet browser. If this wasn’t some fluke of the machine, if it really was accurate, what kind of event could cause such devastation? Trying to keep in mind that this was simply a worst-case scenario, I started pounding in keywords. Meteors, black holes, sun expansion, anything. I even briefly opened up an article on the Top 10 Ways Scientists Think the Earth Will End, but quickly closed it as the possibilities became overwhelming. Surely scientists would see something like this coming, right? Or perhaps more importantly, scientists would tell us if something like this was coming…right?

Feeling restless and claustrophobic, I paced over to the window to try and think. The mass of people below was still growing, extending in every direction down the streets. I could hear the muffled sound of the roar below, even through the window pane, so high up. I wondered where the police were, if they were going to clear out all the protestors blocking the streets. It couldn’t be legal. Then again, maybe the police were already down there, amongst the protestors, encouraging it to go on. I sighed and turned away. It was going to be a long time until I was able to get home if the police didn’t start clearing them up soon. What was it about these people that made the idea of free will so essential to their lives? What was wrong with knowing there was only one future and being able to predict it with such certainty?

What if they would rather die than live in a world without real choice? The thought startled me with its simplicity. Already, there had been stories in the news of people committing suicide to avoid the world where the God Machine ruled. The protestors I could live with. They almost amused me with their disdain for the project. But if there was some country, some group that had access to weapons beyond even my imagination, could they destroy us all? If so, the midnight timing of the population drop seemed fitting.

I turned off my computer and rushed back down to the GM interface. We had to run tests – rises in violence, discontent, ability to commit mass murder, something. When I got down to the interface, I could see something was obviously wrong. There was a mass of people outside the room, pounding and kicking on the door. My first thought was that they were protestors, but at second glance, I noticed the name badges, recognized a few of their faces. These were my workers. “What’s going on?” I demanded.

“It’s Timothy!” one man shouted in an unusual show of brashness. Ah, so this is what I need to do to break them of their fear of me: get them to turn against each other. “He’s gone and locked us all out.”

I groaned and brushed through the crowd through the door. “Tim?” I called, knocking brusquely. “Timothy, it’s me. Open the door.” I heard the lock being turned and the door opened a slit. I saw Tim’s round puffy face peer out at me. He looked frantic and close to tears.

“They just kept asking questions!” he pleaded, pulling me inside by my arm and slamming the door shut behind us. The shades had been pulled down around the inner windows and I heard the shouting start back up outside the door. “I’ve done the work you asked, though.” He started piling papers in front of me in a haphazard pile.

“Tim, we’ve got a problem here.” I brushed the papers aside and waited until he looked up at me. “You’ve locked everyone out!”

“They wanted to know what I was doing, why I was running so many simulations and pulling up so much data! I didn’t know what to tell them.” He was sniveling and looking frantically at the door, ushering the papers toward me. “I-I couldn’t find anything. Not any natural disasters, anyway. A small earthquake in Taiwan, a minor flood in Portugal, nothing that would explain, you know, the data.”

I nodded, not really expecting it. “I have something else I want you to run though, Tim. What about human-induced disasters?”

He was silent for a moment. “Like bombs? War?”

“Yeah. Can you do a simulation on rising violence or plans to annihilate the world?” I said the last part with a small laugh, but he didn’t return my smile.

“Well, I can try. I mean, we honestly haven’t tried to run anything very complicated yet, but I’ll play around with it. Just…get rid of them.” He gave a worried glance to the door. “I can’t think with all that noise.”

“Sure, Tim. I’m counting on you.” He gave a nervous bark of a laugh and I headed back out into the crowd. “Hey.” I waited for their attention, but they were all shouting at me and gesturing angrily. “Hey!” I shouted again and they finally went silent. “Look, Tim’s working on a project for me and he needs the GM.” I pointed up at the 99.99999% flickering overhead. “We’re as close as we’re going to get. Everything is ready for tonight, so please just head to your offices until midnight. We’ll meet back here for a quick meeting, then start the first simulation.”

They still didn’t look convinced, so I gave them a conspiratorial smile and cupped my hand around my mouth. “We’ve all been working long hours,” I said in a mock whisper. “Some of us are taking it better than others. So let’s just give Tim a few hours of peace by himself so that we’re all ready for the long night ahead. I’ll be supervising him personally, alright?”

Most of my employees laughed then, and I could breathe again. I slipped back into the room as they dispersed. “Okay, Tim. It’s up to you now.” He was already immersed in his work and only nodded slightly, mumbling to himself as he hunched over the system. I decided to check in downstairs, to see how the protest was going. I wished I had brought an extra set of clothes, my toothbrush, or anything really, in case I couldn’t go home for awhile.

The lobby was in a state as disarray as the half dozen security guards and two receptionists desperately tried to handle the people pounding at the door and phones ringing off the hook. When the protesters and reporters saw me through the glass, they went crazy and the noise was deafening. Over it all, I could hear my name being shouted repeatedly.

“Where are the police?” I shouted.

One of the receptionists looked at me, teary-eyed. “I don’t know!” she said in desperation. “Please, can’t you do something?”

A security guard grabbed my arm and hauled me back out of the lobby. “Stay upstairs,” he demanded. “You’re only making them crazier.” I pulled my arm out of his grip and hurried away, back toward my office. “And close the blinds!” he shouted after me.

I was horrified. Close the blinds? What were they going to do, send snipers after me? Back in my office, I ripped the blinds down over the windows and pulled out my laptop. Locking the door, I huddled under my desk, feeling slightly safer. Leaning back against one of the sides, I switched on the news and looked down on my office building from the view of a helicopter.

“-have traveled from all over the world to be here.” The reporter’s voice droned over the snip-snip-snip of the helicopter blades. “Estimates at the size of the crowd have ranged from one thousand to one hundred thousand people. Travis, can you guess at the size from up there?”

A man’s voice broke out over the broadcast. “Well Stacey, it’s hard to guess at an exact number, but I’m not sure if one hundred thousand even covers it. You can see that people are still showing up.” The camera shot zoomed over to one of the side streets, several blocks away, where more people were piling out of the subway entrance carrying signs and banners.

“Can you see any form of police response to the protest?”

The camera swung away again, off to another side street where a few red-and-blue twinkling lights were visible. “There are several waves of police responding to the area to keep the crowd under control, but the sheer size of the demonstration is against them. I would guess that they will have to call in forces from some of the neighboring cities to gain any sense of control.”

The shot cut back to the newsroom where a woman was nodding. “Quite the scene over there, Travis. And now let’s check back with Korbin, live on the streets. Korbin?”

A man surrounded by chaos appeared on the screen with his finger jammed into his ear, trying to hear the newsroom. He quickly smiled and stood up straighter. “Thank you, Stacey. As you can see, it’s a pretty wild scene out here.” A wave of people moved backward, bumping into him and he stumbled backward, looking nervous. “We talked to several people here today who are taking drastic measures to protest the Global Modeling project.” He motioned the camera to follow him as he took a step to the side and a man covered in blood shambled over. “This man, along with others, has removed his monitor just moments ago. Sir, can you tell us why you felt it was necessary to take out your monitor?”

The man, blood still running down his neck, had a triumphant grin on his face as he held the little metal square up high. “I did it to take back my freedom!” he screamed as others cheered him on. “I demand my free will back and I never agreed to be part of this so-called God Machine!”

“Idiots,” I muttered, taking a screen capture of his face. Let the authorities deal with him.

There was a thump at my door and I started, the laptop clattering to my side. I quickly closed the computer and set it on the desk, hurrying over to the door. “Who is it?” I demanded.

“Timothy!” an indignant voice returned.

“Alright.” I unbolted the door and slid it open, ushering him inside. “Any results?”

He hesitated and I knew I wasn’t going to like his report. “Well, I ran the population simulation for some of the countries individually. They all show the same…anomaly.” I nodded, expecting that result at least. “But I also ran the violence statistics for some of these countries.” He handed me another bundle of papers with the graphs for several other countries. The lines were all increasing sharply with the latest results a nearly vertical increase upwards. I pursed my mouth as I shifted through the papers, not altogether shocked by the trends.

“Okay,” I said, gesturing toward the window. “I could’ve told you that by just looking outside.”

He nodded. “I compared that with some historical information though.” He handed me another small stack. “This is some of the data from the last few wars, of the offensive nations.”

I leafed through them, my displeasure growing. They were nearly identical to the current trends. “So you’re saying we’ve started a world war?”

“Well no, not yet,” he quickly assured me. “It could be a false alarm, or the models could be inaccurate, but…”

“But?”

“Well, I’ve been watching the live feed of global population that you had me start. It’s nearly identical to the predicted population that we printed out this morning.”

The room had grown darker as we talked and I knew evening was approaching. I flicked on the overhead light to study the graphs closer. “So is that all, then?” I asked. He hesitated again and I looked up sharply. “Tim?”