Accidental Gods (11 page)

Chapter 16

Year 6

God does not play dice with the universe.

—Albert Einstein

Who are you to tell God what to do?

—Niels Bohr

God not only plays dice, but sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.

—Stephen Hawking

It was early Monday morning, and almost everyone was gathered in the main lounge, not for a meeting but to fuel up by drinking coffee or Red Bull and eating breakfast tacos or doughnuts. The IACP wasn’t a paragon of health, and Mondays were traditionally bad. Everyone was out of it and had to jump-start themselves on junk food. Thomas, of course, knew this. But he hadn’t slept the previous night or much at all over the weekend. After the conversation with Stephen and Don on Friday afternoon, his mind had gone into overdrive. He had known, almost since starting the project, where he wanted to go—but now he clearly saw the path he wanted to take and Stephen had shown him how to get there. So he was going to put everyone on that path, effective immediately.

No one looked up when Thomas walked into the lounge with Jules in tow.

He stopped, surveyed the room, and said simply, “OK, pay attention.”

All the heads in the room popped up and turned to him in near unison, puppets to his marionette strings.

He walked up to one of the walls that had recently been covered with one of the smoked-glass, backlit dry-erase boards. It was, like every other dry-erase wall in the building, covered with formulas and sketches. He did not hesitate to press the “erase” button, granting him a fresh canvas.

“OK.” He drew a circle like Ajay’s original. “Here is the simulated universe we have created—the SU.” He wrote “SU” in the middle of the circle. “It’s eight billion years old, requires forty-seven kilocarats of storage, and has another fifty-three allocated to it…” He drew a square around the circle, wrote “47KC” within the circle and “53KC” in the space between the circle and the square, and continued, “…and has a dedicated quantum computer running it. That means it’s using about four million dollars of resources.” He wrote that figure outside the square. “Right?”

Larry said, “Sounds about right, boss.”

“Do we have another, comparable system ready to bring online?” Thomas scanned every face in the room.

Larry said, “We could probably bring one up in a week or two. The next diamond cluster is almost done, and it’s also a hundred kilocarats.”

“Could we clone the SU into it?”

Lisa and Ajay looked up.

Lisa spoke first. “Why would we want to do that? That’s another four million dollars, right?”

Stephen ran his right hand over his head and nodded, a smile forming on his face.

Thomas turned back to the board and drew an arrow out from the box labeled “SU.” Next to it, he drew an almost identical box at the end of the arrow. He drew a circle inside the new square and labeled it “N1.” He turned partially back toward the group.

“We keep the original SU evolving at its current course and speed,” he said, tapping his original box on the board. “We clone it…” He moved his marker to the box labeled “N1” and tapped the glass as he continued, “…here. But while we’re cloning it, we change it. We
nudge
it—hence, ‘N1’—in a certain evolutionary direction.” He scanned the group again. “Specifically, I propose taking the Alpha system within SU and modifying it in N1 to be more like our own solar system—that is, more hospitable to life. The nudge would be to push—”

“You’re trying to create life?” Lisa asked.

The corners of Thomas’s mouth rose into an ever-so-slight grin. “The nudge would be to push the second planet into a more Earth-like orbit.”

Lisa said, “Just so we’re all perfectly clear on this: you want to try to alter the course of natural evolution in our simulated universe by ‘nudging’ it in a certain direction?”

Thomas looked at everyone else in the room.

Lisa asked more sternly, “You want to purposely taint the results of our experiment?”

Thomas seemed to recoil slightly, as if slapped. “No.” His voice wavered, and he quickly explained, “We let the SU run its natural course,
never
altering the original.”

Lisa frowned.

After regaining his composure, Thomas went on, “The nudge is a new SU. The original SU is a baseline that continues along its course, so we always have a control for comparison. We nudge the clone. Our original experiment will run unhindered, unaltered, un-
anything
.”

“Is it even possible?” Ajay asked, intrigued by the idea.

“Yeah,” Stephen said. “I can do it.”

Catherine looked pointedly at Stephen and said, “You know, it’s not always about the science or simply whether you can do it or not.”

Stephen wilted slightly under her disappointed look.

She continued, “Sometimes it’s about whether you
should
.” She paused. “Or in your case, how you should handle it after you do it—because clearly there is no stopping you.” This time, she looked at Thomas. “I think you’re about to open Pandora’s box and you don’t even know it.”

Ignoring her, Thomas told the entire group, “Also, I think we should do more than just nudge one clone.” He turned back to the white board, erased a new swath beyond N1, drew a new arrow from N1, drew a new box and circle at the arrow’s tip, and labeled the third universe “N2.” He turned back to the group, clearly excited. “We check our nudged Alpha system every million years or so and nudge it again. And again.”

Lisa nodded but kept her frown. “So you’re effectively doubling down each time. You let the original universe and each subsequent nudged universe continue to run, but every million years, you push it in the evolutionary direction you want. Do you want to actually create life or just see what happens?”

“Both, sort of. I’m not sure we could explicitly create life even if that is what we wanted. So we shape the environment as much as we can to what we know of Earth’s early history and see what happens.”

Catherine huffed and then sighed and shook her head.

Don said, “We would also need to be able to unwind events. For example, as you say, we might not be able to create life if we tried. Life here might have been triggered by some random catastrophic event that we haven’t found yet. Earth’s evolution was certainly shaped by various catastrophic events, not the least of which was the Chicxulub meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago. We should consider maintaining or creating the ability to roll back a catastrophic event if it ends up leading the wrong direction. We should probably fork the universe if something like that happened. That gives you dual coverage for events you don’t directly influence.”

“Good point. See?” Thomas asked.

Lisa said, “I never said I wasn’t ready to try your idea, Thomas. I just want to make sure we keep the unadulterated science separate from these nudged results.”

Catherine asked Lisa, “That’s
all
you want?”

Lisa said, “It’s an experiment, Catherine.
Science
.”

Stephen said, “Besides, the nudged universes will still be unadulterated science, Lisa. They would simply run under different conditions, with a control for each new set of conditions. Nothing we’ve done so far is completely random. After all, we did design the entire ‘program,’ so to speak, using variables we understood.” He nodded toward Don. “As far as rolling back time goes, that should be easy. We can fork stuff off at any time, even if it’s past.”

“Cool,” Larry said.

Everyone except Catherine nodded.

Larry said, “So we’re gonna need a boatload of one-hundred-kilocarat diamonds.”

Lisa quipped, “Artificial diamonds for our artificial universes,” and then gave Thomas an exaggerated wink.

Larry shook his head, his hair lightly slapping the sides of his neck. “Oh, they’re real diamonds, all right. They’re just a little different from what you’re used to.”

“Well, diamonds are a girl’s best friend,” Lisa said with a smirk.

***

Catherine quit the next day.

Thomas made sure Jules called to remind her of the stringent nondisclosure agreement and the harsh penalties in the event it was violated.

Chapter 17

Year 6

The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is responsible. Universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the form of computer programs.

—Joseph Weizenbaum

Stephen stared at a thirty-two-inch 4K LCD screen, its twin right next to it. The screen Stephen focused on was full of code. On the right was a view of the Alpha system. The screen was starting to get blurry for him.

He rubbed his temples and then ran his hands through what remained of his hair, which no longer reached past his ears, as if trying to comb it with his fingers.

Shifting the Alpha planet’s orbit seemed such a simple thing on the surface. If this were anything like a normal computer program, it might be, but there was so much information and he could make only small changes for fear of causing some cataclysmic upheaval that had massive, unpredictable effects that rippled across the universe. He thought this was a pretty good example of the butterfly effect.

The IACP simulated universe system was elegant in that it used a relatively small set of rules to allow the universe to evolve. This was the essence of the plan. By using simple rules—basically, the laws of nature—the system was free to develop. Now, billions of years into the “future” of this universe, it was as complex as our own. Stephen considered his new task: build a new program to modify the complex program running the universe that would alter things in it—without breaking it.

So the new program had to go find something in the universe and change it. In this case, change really meant move. He wasn’t entirely sure what would happen if you just moved a planet a few million miles through space and left everything else the same. That wasn’t his forte.

Stephen wondered aloud, “Do I have to change the speed of the planet to compensate for a more-distant orbit?” He shrugged. “Whatever, let’s just try it and see what happens.”

              He clicked the instant-messaging icon in the lower right of his screen, and his buddy list popped up. He clicked Thomas.

Stephen:
hey i think i have this new program working, but i won’t know if it works or not unless we try it

Thomas:
so you are ready to try it?

Stephen:
yes, but what happens if it doesn’t work?

Thomas:
we’ll clone the universe and try again

Stephen:
ok, we might have to try a few times, because this is pretty complex

Thomas:
it’s necessary, we’ll do what we have to do

Stephen:
ok let’s try it

He closed the window and headed to Rendering Room 1.

***

It was thirty seconds before Stephen’s new universe-modifying program would attempt to move the planet into its new orbit. Stephen, Ajay, Lisa, and Thomas watched a fixed point of view projected on only one of the rendering room’s walls.

This particular view was similar to what one might see from an orbiting satellite or space station. In this case, it was about ten million miles out from the Alpha planet with a view of both the planet and the star.

In the blink of an eye, the planet was gone. It immediately reappeared, closer to their viewpoint, as it popped into its new orbit. Stephen had altered the universe.

It seemed to move smoothly in the new orbit.

Ajay said, “It will take an hour to complete a full orbit.”

Stephen asked, “So if it makes a full orbit, we’ll know it worked?”

“Probably. We should still try to verify that it is stable by taking some measurements.” He shrugged. “Though even then, we will have to wait and see, I think.”

***

The foursome plus one—Jenn’s disembodied voice had reunited with her body now that they had all left the rendering room—sat in the main break room sipping coffee while waiting for a few orbital rotations to occur so they could see if Stephen’s program worked.

Lisa asked Stephen, “What will you be able to do with this software, once it’s finished? Just celestial mechanics kinds of stuff?”

“I’m hoping we can use it to make any alterations to the SU that we might want, anything from deleting an entire galaxy down to altering a single cell.”

“A single cell? Like a skin cell?”

“Sure.” He shrugged. “Or even a single atom, but we have to be careful.”

“Yeah.” Ajay smirked, temporarily crinkling the lines around the corners of his eyes. “Don’t want to upset the galactic balance by knocking off a nitrogen atom.”

Lisa frowned at Ajay. “I’m serious.”

Stephen, remembering his earlier thoughts, asked them, “You’ve heard of the butterfly effect?”

Ajay leaned back in his chair and scratched his shoulder. “From chaos theory.”

Jenn shook her head. “Butterflies?”

“Yes,” Stephen told her. “Our whole system inside the simulated universes is dependent upon the idea, among others, that there is an underlying order to everything, that it inherently obeys basic laws.” He nodded at Ajay. “Such as those of physics. However,” he said to them all but focusing mostly on Jenn, “even when all these laws are followed, things can still appear random or chaotic, because of what Lorenz called ‘a sensitive dependence on initial conditions.’”

Ajay nodded knowingly.

Stephen went on, “Lorenz found, when he reran a program with three significant digits in the original calculations instead of his original six digits, that the results were dramatically different—even though both sets of digits were accurate. He simply reduced precision. You’d expect a slight difference, of course, but dramatic differences? The butterfly effect states that, in a very complex system, even the smallest difference can be dramatically amplified over time.”

Jenn nodded.

Lisa finished for him, “Hence the butterfly effect. A butterfly flapping its wings in Rome causes a storm in New York.”

Stephen said, “That’s a bit extreme, but yes. That has certainly helped popularize the idea. But what matters is that a small thing can have big impacts in a complex system—”

“Especially a nitrogen atom,” Ajay said.

Lisa glared at him.

Stephen said, “And we certainly have a complex system.”

“What specifically is the issue here?” Thomas asked, trying to bring things back to the problem at hand.

“Well,” Stephen said, “just as an example, moving the orbit could cause a huge change in, say, galactic gravitational fields that causes the universe to collapse in ten thousand years. But we could never predict it.”

“So what can we do about it?” Thomas asked.

“Always the pragmatist.” Stephen smiled. “We’re playing with things we can’t possibly understand. Early in my career, when I was working on more commercial computer applications, we always used to have one guy that was the architect, who I must admit was usually me.” He made a tiny laugh that came out more like a phlegmatic snort. “This architect’s obvious job was to design the system before we started coding it. But once coding was started, they had an even more important job. The easiest way to describe what they had to do was
keep the entire system in their head
. This really means to have a deep conceptual model of what was being built so that they could understand the impact any changes might have on other parts of the system. But we can’t do that here.”

“Why not?”

“The system is too complex. Back when we were simply building the engine that runs the universe, this was possible, but not anymore.”

Ajay half snickered, half huffed. “‘Simply’? There was nothing simple about that.”

Stephen gave Ajay an acquiescent nod and said, “Relatively. Regardless, the data—the living and evolving universe—is in charge now, and no one can hold all that in their head. Too much information. So anything we do to change it will have ramifications we simply cannot predict.”

Thomas pressed, “So what do you think will happen?”

“What I
hope
will happen is that the system just absorbs the changes and self-corrects and that any ripple effect that might occur is limited in nature or better still, no ripple effect occurs at all.” Stephen added with a sigh, “But I suspect that might be wishful thinking.”

“That…” Ajay nodded. “…is exactly why we are running parallel copies every time we do this. We can compare variations to see what ripples, if any, there are. The most likely ripple I see from simply shifting orbits is that some comet or asteroid that would have collided with the planet now doesn’t—or vice versa.” He shrugged.

“You shrug at that?” Stephen asked, appalled.

“We will see.” Ajay smirked. “After all, as Thomas said, it’s only bits and pixels.”

***

They walked back into the observation room just in time to see the planet crash into the Alpha star in a fiery explosion.

“God damn it!” Stephen shouted.

Thomas had never seen Stephen that pissed.

Lisa laughed.

“Well…” Ajay snickered. “…the first try goes down in flames.”

Stephen sulked from the room.

“I think that pissed him off,” Ajay said after Stephen had left.

“It’s got to be hard,” Thomas said. “This is a pretty big challenge for the computer guys. Normally, they can just run the program a hundred times to see where it breaks and then fix each error along the way or some debugger points out every issue. Not so in our case. He gets to watch a planet crash headlong into a star if he messes up. I can see how that would be frustrating.”

“OK, I’ll cut him some slack…a little.” Ajay smirked.

Lisa nodded.

“Thanks.” Thomas grinned.

***

Three months later, they all gathered in Rendering Room 1 again at Stephen’s request. It was 2:56 p.m., and Stephen had just instant-messaged everyone that he thought he had worked it out. He hadn’t eaten lunch yet, thinking at noon that it’d take only a few more minutes to work out that one final bug. But it had taken a bit longer, and now he was too excited to eat. In fact, he hadn’t eaten since the wee hours of the morning.

“OK,” he told them when Ajay, the last to arrive, had finally shown up. Stephen breathed heavily, standing next to a mobile console from the top of which his laptop was wired into the rendering system. “The system now has specific actions that the user can select…” He took a breath. “…and the system will attempt to make additional, not-so-obvious adjustments automatically to achieve the correct goals. One function is orbital adjustment, and I think I’ve worked all those issues out. As we think up new things, I’ll do my best to add them.”

Stephen moved behind the console.

“OK, watch…”

On screen was an interface with several options. Stephen clicked “Planetary Bodies,” inhaled, and continued, “…as I make the change.”

He clicked through the next options and then clicked “Move.”

“Orbital Change” appeared on the screen with a field that currently showed eighty million miles.

Stephen started to explain, “This number—”

“Wait! Wait!” Ajay said. “Go back. Was one of those options under ‘Planetary Bodies’ ‘Destroy’?”

“Yes.”

“You can press a button to blow up a planet? I can’t say I am surprised that you decided to add the Death Star button.” Ajay winked.

“First,” Stephen said, “if you want a planet gone, blowing it up is only one option. You can also just make it disappear.”

“Creepy,” Ajay said, clearly trying to egg him on.

“Second,” Stephen said, trying to ignore him, “it is my software, and if there is any naming to be done, I will do it. Either way, naming something before it works tends to be bad luck.”

Thomas stepped slightly out of Stephen’s field of view, tapped Ajay, and gave him a short shake of his head.

“Sorry,” Ajay said to Stephen. “Please continue.”

“As I was saying,” Stephen grumbled while pointing at the screen, “this number is the closest point in the planet’s orbit.”

“Its perihelion,” Ajay said, the “p” sounding almost like he was spitting out a seed. Thomas nudged him, and Ajay shrugged to them all and said more softly, “But you all knew that.”

Stephen changed the number to ninety-one million miles, the same as Earth’s, and clicked “Enter.”

Everyone waited.

Stephen said, “It takes a little time for the program to figure out all the changes.”

After several minutes of dead silence, the screen changed:

New Orbit Computed

Additional Adjustments Computed

Confirm Change to SU-N1 and Fork to SU-N2

Stephen clicked “Yes” and said, “It will take a few more minutes to make the change and a few hours, again, for us to see what happens.”