EDGE (47 page)

Saeko switched the TV back to the first channel. The viewpoint was bearing downwards, closer to the ground. The roaring of helicopter blades filled the room as the camera’s line of sight came level with the edge of the chasm. It continued to descend until it eventually stopped, hovering just above the top. The image below the edge was pure black.

A reporter was shouting commentary over the roar of the blades:

 … reporting from the desert between Route 101 and the Interstate Highway Route 5 here in California. Here, you can see the spot where the state highway linking the two routes has been ripped apart. If anyone is listening to this in their cars, please exercise caution driving. Those driving down state highway routes 58, 46, 41, 198 … The roads are now considered dangerous … Repeat, it is extremely dangerous to be on those routes …

The camera panned across the landscape, following the descriptions of the female reporter. The screen traced the line of asphalt, up to where the road met the chasm’s edge. The edge looked unnaturally straight, as though it had been cut out of the land with a sharp knife. The reporter continued:

No one knows at this point what has caused the appearance of this gigantic rift in the ground. It has been reported that it appeared yesterday, sometime between early evening and the middle of the night. The exact time of its appearance is as yet unknown. No seismic disturbances were reported around this timeframe. It is highly unlikely that this is the result of seismic activity …

Using sonar-based measurements scientists have already ascertained the rift as being up to 2 kilometers deep. It is almost impossible to convey the scale via camera. What power is capable of creating such a vast rift through the earth? Is it something beyond the boundaries of human comprehension? All that’s left is this edge. The earth that was here has just vanished without a trace. Could this be the wrath of an angry god? There’s something eerie about the silence here
.

Saeko immediately recognized it as the same phenomenon she had seen earlier back in Atami; there, a crater had just appeared out of nowhere. Now the same thing was happening in California, and the only differences were the scale and the shape—a crater-like hole in Atami compared to this canyon-like chasm in America. It was as though a second Grand Canyon had just appeared overnight. Saeko suspected that the chasm was actually larger than the Grand Canyon.

She gathered her thoughts. The mechanism and its significance were the same as for the crater in Atami. The reporter could only suggest that it was something beyond human understanding, and she sounded terrified. Saeko stood, surprised at the sense of calm she now felt as she watched the chaos unfold on the screen.

2
Despite having had a few drinks, Hashiba had yet to feel the effects of the alcohol. Someone had suggested having a drink and at that point everyone in the room seemed to suddenly realize just how thirsty they had become. Hosokawa had pulled a couple of bottles of beer from the fridge and poured them into glasses to hand around. Everyone downed their glass in a single draught, prompting Hosokawa to pull out another
couple of bottles. The alcohol had been necessary to calm the tension in the room.

Eventually, Hashiba asked the question that hung on the minds of the rest of the film crew. “I guess you’d better let us know just what this ‘phase transition’ is.”

There was no way to decide what to do next without understanding the basics of the situation. Someone had muted the volume, but the images of the gigantic chasm continued to loom on the screen.

Isogai first translated the English phrase into Japanese for the rest of the crew. Only Hashiba and Kagayama seemed to recognize the term even in Japanese, but they too had scant idea what it meant.

“The best way to explain a phase transition is to take the example of water.” Isogai held up his glass to drink his beer but saw that it was almost empty. Instead of moving to refill it, he raised up the glass. “Let’s say this glass is full of water. Water, as we all know, is defined as being in a liquid state. If you heat it to 100 degrees centigrade, however, it boils and becomes gaseous. Conversely, if you cool it below 0 degrees, then it freezes and becomes solid. In other words, water is said to have three ‘phases’: a gaseous phase above 100 degrees, a solid phase below 0 degrees, and a liquid phase in between. That’s the basic meaning of the word. Phase transition is simply the transition from one of these phases to another.”

That was easy enough to follow. The properties of water, H
₂
O, changed between the three phases of solid, liquid, and gas depending on the temperature of its molecules. These states were known as phases. Isogai’s appeal to everyday experience allowed Hashiba to quickly grasp the fundamental concept.

“In the same way,” Isogai continued, “the universe itself also has a phase. Our perception of space is three dimensional, and time flows in a single direction. Our universe is founded on the balance of the four fundamental forces of nature: gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear forces. A particular set of physical constants is required to support the balance and constitutes a phase.

“However—and this is key—if the phase changes, so do the laws of physics in play. Going back to the example of water, we know that the speed that sound waves travel through it differs depending on whether it’s in its gaseous, liquid, or solid phase. The same is true for light; the angle of refraction depends on the current phase of the matter it travels through. A phase transition means a change in physical constants and a shift in the mathematical structure underpinning our world.”

Hashiba felt his body grow increasingly tense as he listened to Isogai’s explanation, immediately taking in the implications of what he was saying. If true, then the shift in mathematics—the appearance of a pattern in the value of Pi, the collapse of the Riemann hypothesis—would no doubt express itself in ways that they’d seen.

Until this point Hashiba had been willing to dismiss the idea that a shift in numbers could have tangible, real-world implications. If the irregularities they had witnessed were some sort of prologue to a phase transition … He shuddered at the idea. Hashiba had conceived of the world he inhabited in terms of gas. Fish inhabited the world of water. Worms, the solid world of earth. If such an order were to be suddenly flipped on its head … It would be as though people were suddenly cast in concrete, or shackled and dropped out at sea, left to drown. Hashiba finally came to understand why Isogai and Chris had been so agitated. He understood the fear in their eyes.

“You don’t mean to say that a phase transition is actually about to happen?”

Isogai coughed awkwardly and brought his head up to meet Hashiba’s stare. He nodded briefly. “Unfortunately, that’s exactly what all this is pointing towards.”

“What’s gonna happen to us?” Kagayama and Hosokawa blurted out similar questions simultaneously, leaning forward.

“Right now there’s still a starry night out there. But even now, as we sit here talking, the stars are disappearing. So, what happens when the wave of this phase transition reaches our solar system? In a flash, we would become nothing. We will simply cease to be.”

Kagayama’s mouth hung open but no words came out. He crashed back into his chair and buried his face with his hands. Hosokawa’s expression was pained and twisted; he walked over to the window and stood looking up at the sky. Hashiba could tell from his expression that he wanted nothing more than to dismiss Isogai’s words as nonsense. It was plain that he couldn’t; the sky was already darker than before.

“Is there nothing we can do to escape the transition?” Hashiba asked, still unable to accept the truth that they faced.

“If it reaches us, then there is nothing we can do,” Isogai replied.

“Snow melts in the spring, doesn’t it? Won’t things just change back to normal?”

“Imagine being trapped in ice …”

“Can anything be worse than this?” Kato joined in, sounding disgusted.

“Listen, you’re probably all thinking of animals in water, right? Or little fish trapped in ice until the thaw comes, after which they become free again. Unfortunately, this is where the example of water no longer applies. The phase transition we’re looking at now is a completely different beast. We’re looking at the collapse of every single physical construct in the universe. Everything in the universe. Including us. In scientific terms, what will happen is the instantaneous scattering of all matter at a quantum level. All structure as we know it will be lost. The four fundamental forces of nature and all physical constants will be transformed at the quantum level. To an observer, it would be as if everything just vanished into thin air. Think of it in terms of erasing all the data on a computer …” Isogai stopped there. He scratched his chin with his hand, looking strangely pleased with himself.

“Meaning?” Everyone in the room continued to stare at Isogai, waiting for him to continue, unwilling to accept what he was saying.

“It fits with the change in the value of Pi right? Think about it, computers record information in binary terms—huge rows of zeros and ones. The deletion of all the information on the computer’s drive would mean that these rows would be reduced to only the number zero.”

“And that’s what happened to the value of Pi?”

“That’s right. The zeros in Pi are simply a precursor to full phase transition.”

The delete button was not designed to just erase everything without warning. The signs had been there for over a year, the disappearances of people around the tectonic plates, the links to high levels of sunspot activity. These were the first opus, and now the momentum of change was stepping up a gear. The numbers of those going missing had begun to increase rapidly, and irregularities had appeared in mathematics. And now, huge swaths of land had begun to disappear. Even the stars were going out. The increase in scale and frequency of such abnormal phenomena suggested that the time for the complete deletion of the universe was getting dangerously close. Sooner or later the final curtains would come down and cast the stage into darkness.

Hashiba felt faint. His legs felt weak, unable to support his body weight; even the floor beneath him had begun to feel uncertain, fragile. He was finally coming to understand the scale of the catastrophe that loomed before them. The reality of the situation was hitting him hard.

Everyone in the room wore similar expressions. Hosokawa slid down the wall he had been leaning against until he sat on the floor. Kato sat
listlessly on the bed. Only Kagayama, who had sat hunched forward on one of the chairs, began to shout in Isogai’s direction.

“Come on, don’t mess around, hmm? There must be something we can do! The American President’s got a team to deal with this, right?” His tone was pleading.

“Of course. But I can guarantee you that right now they’re as aware of their inability to change the situation as we are. The old way is about to die out and give way to the creation of something new. What can we humans do to stop the regeneration of the universe? Absolutely nothing. Zero.”

“Well, why the hell have they been called to Washington? They’re all geniuses, right?” The fight was draining from Kagayama. His voice faltered, growing almost inaudible.

“All they can do now is strive to learn more about the situation. They’re probably attempting to work out exactly how much time is left. I bet that’s why NASA commandeered the James Webb Space Telescope. If they observe the disappearance of a number of stars they can easily estimate the speed at which the front line of the phase transition is heading towards us. All they need is the stars’ distance from earth and the time lag between disappearances. The phase transition is a form of information, and following the basic precepts of the General Theory of Relativity, the wave shouldn’t be able to travel faster than the speed of light. That’s why we’re still here even though stars out there are being extinguished. That being said, information travels at a speed close to that of light—maybe just a fraction slower in relative terms.”

“So when is it going to hit us?” Kagayama asked the question. They all wanted to know exactly how long they had left.

Isogai’s mouth curled up to one side, and he threw up both hands in submission. “All I know is that it’s not long now.” He turned to Chris, voice a whisper. “If you can hack into the amateur astronomy networks we may be able to find out the speed of this thing. They’re pretty good, so I’m pretty sure they’ve picked up on the stars disappearing. If some of them have guessed that it’s a phase transition, that some unknown form of information is making its way towards us, maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ve already calculated its speed.”

Chris seemed to have lost all of his former energy. He sat slumped in his chair in front of the computer, managing only a mumbled response, but pulled himself up and started to type away at the keyboard, trying to access the networks as Isogai suggested.

Hashiba watched passively as Chris performed this new task, then
turned to Isogai and asked the next question on his mind. “It’s just hard to take it all in. I think I need a bit of time to get my head around it. I mean, why would something like this happen? What’s the cause?”

“We don’t yet understand what kind of mechanism can cause a phase transition like this. It happened once before, of course, during the creation of the universe. The universe as we know it was formed from nothing. Directly after its formation a phase transition occurred, the event we now know as the Big Bang. It’s conceivable that yet another phase transition followed later, ripping through the original symmetry, creating our universe and the molecular structures that allowed us to flourish. The odds of a further occurrence of phase transition at some point in the future were considered pretty high. Even so, the idea isn’t widely known.

“Well, it appears that Jeffrey Adams, at least, was trying to warn us. The summary in
Physical Review Letters
clearly states as much. He was certain of a reoccurrence of phase transition in the near future. With regards to the causes, there are a number of theories. The fusion of two separate black holes. A high-speed collision of cosmic radiation. Some have argued that the experiments at CERN would be enough. Jeffrey argues that a number of phase transitions have taken place already, not including the original transitions that caused the formation of our universe. We just haven’t noticed the signs.