Building God (3 page)

“Well, not quite,” he ventured. “I’m pretty sure this anomaly isn’t the result of a world war. See, I ran some more simulations and –“

He was cut off abruptly by the phone ringing to life. “One sec.” I held up my hand and switched on the screen. It was my dad. “I’d better get this,” I said with a touch of resignation in my voice. I hooked the receiver around my ear and clicked it on. “Hey dad.”

“Hey.” His low voice rumbled through the phone. “How’s it going?”

“Oh, you know. Have you been watching the news?”

He ignored the question. “Have you rethought your decision to pursue this project?”

I slumped my head into my hand. “No, dad.”

“Have you ever heard the saying that ‘All models are wrong, but some are useful?”

“Yes, dad. I’ve heard that line. That is precisely why you began this project. Because how can we tell the useful models from the not useful, if they are all wrong?” The day was beginning to weigh heavily on me and I glanced at the clock. Midnight was approaching far too quickly.

“The news channels keep playing that clip of you, the one where you claim you’re building God. You don’t think their anger is justified?”

I snapped. “No, no it’s not. We’re making real progress here, we’re saving lives. We’re not changing the future, only predicting it more accurately. If people want to live in ignorance, I’m not going to stop them. Why are you even bothering arguing with me about this? You know as well as anyone that there is only one future. What happens, happens. You can’t change anything. Our courses were set the moment the universe came into existence.”

“And my course was to try to convince you that you’re headed down the wrong path. We humans are not meant to be all-knowing. You’re not God and neither is that abomination I conceived.” I could hear the exhaustion in his voice, mirroring my own.

“I’ve got to go, dad. There’s still a lot of work to be done before tonight.”

“Fine,” he said shortly. “But I fear for you, Catharine.”

“You could have done so much more with your life, dad,” I said sadly. “You shouldn’t have let all that talk get to you.”

“I love you, Catharine.”

“Love you too, dad.” I tore the receiver off my ear and jumped when Tim cleared his throat. I had forgotten he was still there. “Sorry, what were you saying?” I addressed him.

“I don’t think we’re headed toward a war,” he repeated. “I ran some more simulations and well, I know our data isn’t so good outside Earth’s biosphere, but I ran some basic activity models for some of the other planets in our solar system.”

He handed me yet more papers and I stared at them for a moment before comprehending the information. “I-I don’t understand,” I stammered. “This doesn’t make sense.”

He shrugged and handed me a couple more. “I didn’t either, so I ran some models of other galaxies. Just simple movement simulations and such.”

I glanced and then shoved the stack of papers back at him. “This can’t be right, Tim. This is impossible.”

“They all show the same thing,” he said slowly, spreading the graphs out on my desk, knocking my pens to the floor. “They all go blank at just after midnight tonight. No data to report. Just…nothing. It’s like existence no longer, well, exists in just a few more hours.”

I shook my head. “No, you have to be doing something wrong. The GM is broken or the data is corrupted. This cannot be right. How come we never caught this until now?”

He shrugged again, his voice resigned. “We never ran a future model with this much accuracy until now. The last model we ran past midnight tonight was over a year ago, back when we were only at 80% accuracy. Things have changed since then.”

I pointed at the numbers over the door. “We still have an error margin,” I insisted. “It could still be wrong.”

He narrowed his eyes. “An error that crops up on every model? Do you realize the chances of that?”

“Yes,” I snapped. “I’m not an idiot. I understand it’s unrealistic.” As I turned away from him, the room was suddenly stripped of light and I stood stock still as my eyes slowly adjusted. “Tim?”

“I think they knocked out the power,” he said in wonder, stumbling over to the window and lifting up the blinds to gaze out at the crowd. “It’s okay though, the GM has a ton of back-up generators to keep it going.”

“You think I’m worried about the GM?” Even to me, my voice sounded shrill.

“Hey, it’s okay.” I could see his silhouette turn away from the window. “We can’t change the future, right? No more than we can choose any of our actions. We might as well just enjoy the time we have left. You wanna go check on things downstairs? Maybe they have some idea on what’s going on with the power.”

“Sure.” I walked ghost-like out of the room, feeling like I was floating down the hallway, my head someplace else entirely.

“Hey!” A woman’s voice called out from somewhere in the gloom, lit only by the emergency lights. “Ms. Riese, is that you? What’s going on? Are we still on for midnight?” I heard other doors opening and closing, the staff all waiting for my word. Tim nudged my side.

“I’m not sure,” I managed. “Stay in your offices for now. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

We continued downstairs, shuffling down all the stairs. As I opened the door to the main floor, I froze, hearing a commotion from further down the hall. Startled out of my trance, I left Tim behind as I raced toward the main entrance. The sound of breaking glass urged me on. The sight that met me in the lobby left me breathless. People were pouring in through the windows and door, grappling with the guards. The sheer blackness of the night had transformed the angry crowd into an anonymous mob, no longer hampered by security cameras or reporters. I was frozen in fear, watching them continue to cascade in and quickly overwhelm the few guards.

A hand pulled me back into the hallway and I let myself be hauled back toward the stairs. “Go, go!” Tim’s voice urged me on and we tore upstairs.

We reached the office level in less time that it took to descend just moments before and I shakily yanked my keys out of my pocket, locking the doors behind me. “Stay in your offices!” I yelled.

“What’s going on?” a man’s voice demanded.

“They’ve broken in.” I bent over, feeling like I was going to pass out from the exertion, but Tim was pulling me along again. “They’ve broken in,” I repeated. “Lock your doors and stay inside.” I heard a sob from somewhere in the dark and the sound of doors closing echoed down the hallway. I felt myself suddenly being yanked to the side, into a room. Instinctively, I locked it behind me and I heard Tim pulling up the heavy desks to further blockade us inside. With an exit sign glowing overhead, I glanced around. We were in the interface room.

“We have to protect the GM,” Tim explained, out of breath. “This is the only entrance to the innards. We have to save it.”

I heard a strange ruffling sound and searched for the source of the noise. The GM was still spitting out paper from one of its many printers. “The current population,” I said softly, reaching down to feel the paper slide through my hand. “What time is it?”

I saw the blue glow of a watch light up, then vanish. “11:30,” Tim replied. “We have half an hour.”

“Why are we even bothering to save it?” I asked, more to myself than anyone, but Tim replied anyway.

“Because it’s our job,” he said simply. “What else are we going to do, huddle in our little offices and pray? I took this job because I truly believe this is the greatest invention of our time. With the GM, we can see the future.”

“But all we can do is watch it happen,” I said, wondering if this is truly what my dad ran from. To be able to see disaster approaching and be unable to do anything to stop it? This wasn’t what I wanted. This was not God.

“Well, those doors should probably hold the mob off for awhile, so what do you wanna do? Run some simulations?”

“Sure,” I said. And what else was there to do? If I was going to die, I at least wanted to know why. The answer had to be in there somewhere.

We sat over the interface, entering in simulation after simulation, not even bothering to print off the results. The display was enough. But the graphs just got shorter and shorter as midnight approached and there was less future to predict. Everything went blank at that point in time.

“Tim, do you believe in God?” I asked suddenly.

He shuffled next to me, his fingers pausing over the interface. “I suppose,” he said. “I mean, there must be something out there, something that made this universe come into being.”

“Do you think we’re being punished? For what we’ve created?”

He started another simulation before answering. “Yeah, maybe. I don’t know what to think anymore.”

“But what if everything we’ve assumed simply isn’t true,” I insisted. “What if we can change the future?”

“I suppose I’d believe anything right now,” he replied. “I mean, what have we got to lose?” I stumbled upward in the dark, reaching across the desks for something, anything. My hands closed around something hard and metallic: a screwdriver. “What are you doing?” he asked in bewilderment.

I felt for the handle of the door that led into the innards: where only the engineers ventured in their cottony white cleansuits. I blew past the gowning room and stormed into the soul of the GM. It was cooler in there and alive with the hum of the massive computer. I could see Tim through the large window that connected the two rooms and as he watched, I plunged the screwdriver into one of the metal units. There was no dramatic show of sparks, no sign that I had done any damage except a strangled clicking sound.

I moved sporadically across the room, raking at the innards again and again. I knew what I was doing was nearly irreversible: it would take years to rebuild all the data I was destroying. There was no simple back-up of the GM. There couldn’t be. In reality, the computer took up most of the building and no computer could even come close to storing but a miniscule fraction of the data in the GM. What we had worked on for 50 years, I was doing my best to destroy in seconds. It wouldn’t be complete destruction, not by a long shot, but with any luck, it would be enough. Please let this be enough.

Finally, I stood still, surveying the damage. A putrid smoke had begun to collect in the room and the steady hum had been interrupted by clicks and beeps. The entire system wheezed in desperation. A sharp knock rang out above it all and I glanced over at the window, where Tim was pounding his fist in desperation, holding something up to the window.

Dreamlike, I dropped the screwdriver and walked over to the window. He held a familiar graph up, the global population. With my finger, I traced the little black line up to its peak and then down, down to annihilation. So? I shrugged at him, not understanding the strange look on his face. He gestured to his side and then I understood. The printer. This was attached to the printer.

“Oh god,” I murmured, sinking to the floor. “Oh god, what have I done?”

The GM was crackling in despair and with great effort, I exited the room, back through the gowning room, and into the interface room. “You broke it!” he screamed as soon as I stumbled into the room. “It was you, it was predicting you!”

I knew he was right, but I shook my head anyway, trying to protest my innocence. “But, I thought – I wanted to make it right, what we had done. I thought we were being punished.”

Tim was crumpling the paper into a ball, trying to hide it. “It knew all along,” he moaned. “The GM was giving us the correct results all along. The programming, it was programmed to provide us with the graphs it would produce in the future. It couldn’t give us any results if it knew its data would be destroyed at midnight. Why couldn’t I figure it out?”

“Because we can’t change the future,” I murmured.

I thought he might kill me then, his face was full of so much rage, but a heavy thump rang out against the door and he moved to the blinds, peering out into the dark. “I don’t believe it,” he muttered.

“Is anyone in there?” a muffled voice shouted through the door. “It’s the police.”

“Yeah, hang on,” Tim shouted back, shoving the desks out of the way and unlocking the door.

The door opened and two officers entered the room. “Ms. Riese?” one of them asked. “We’ve come to escort you and your employees home. The situation has become too dangerous here.”

“What took you so long?” I cried. “Why did you wait until now?”

They gave me a strange look as we walked away from the destruction. “Have you seen the demonstration outside? We only just broke through it.”

We descended the stairs in silence and flashing red and blue lights illuminated the lobby. Uniformed officers swarmed the area. As I stopped to take in the damage, a cool night breeze wafted through the broken windows and I heard Tim sigh. “You know,” he spat, “I had always heard people say you were simply finishing your father’s work. I think you’ve succeeded in that more than any of us ever expected. He should be proud of you.”

Maybe not proud, I thought, but maybe he will understand. Out of anyone in the world, he just might be the one that understands.