Accidental Gods (20 page)

Chapter 33

Week 9: Tuesday

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

—Charles Darwin

Thomas waited in the Hawking conference room for Jules to bring in a man named Vince Martin. Thomas dreaded this meeting, but he had been forced to take it by one of the regents. While IACP was largely independent, they still lived under the University of Texas umbrella and sometimes had to do things Thomas wasn’t very happy about. It pissed him off that this guy had applied pressure to force a meeting.

Soon, the door opened and Jules ushered a man into the room.

Thomas stood and introduced himself¸ though he didn’t offer his hand.

“Vince Martin,” the man said, “from the Center for Intelligent Design Research.”

“Nice to meet you,” Thomas lied. He gestured for Vince to take a seat.

Vince assumed that Thomas had probably taken this meeting under duress. In hindsight, he regretted using the regent connection and felt he probably should have tried a more personal approach up front, but it was too late now.

“Look,” Vince said and tried a grin and a short sigh of a laugh, “I want you to know that I think there are a bunch of morons in the intelligent design community.”

Thomas smiled at that. “Well, we have something in common, then.”

“A lot of what is purported to be intelligent design is really just an attempt to disguise creationism as a scientific discipline—largely with the purpose of shoehorning it into schools.”

This wasn’t what Thomas had expected.

“So what about you, Mr. Martin?”

“Call me Vince. I believe in intelligent design—that a designer or a group of designers architected our universe. Now, this could have been just setting up the big bang, it could have been manipulating evolution…Who knows?”

“So, why did you want this meeting?” Thomas said, hoping to find out the breadth of Vince’s knowledge of what his team had been doing here.

“I’ve heard that you all have created some kind of artificial life while researching the origins of our universe…” Vince paused at this moment to see if Thomas would react. He did not, so Vince continued, “My friends at UT tell me that the process required some…intervention on your team’s behalf to make it happen. Your interventions are different than what a lot of people in the intelligent design community would argue as ‘intelligent design.’ Some ID proponents say the designer—almost exclusively God in these circles—actually designed things like eyes, flagella, et cetera. They say these things could never appear naturally through a process like evolution.”

“And you, Mr. Martin, do you disagree with that?”

“Right. I call that microintelligent design. That group pretty much doesn’t believe in evolution or natural processes. They think God designed everything and that it is impossible for stuff like that to appear by ‘chance’ or ‘accident’—which is basically their interpretation of evolution. That is not what I believe. I believe in macrointelligent design. A designer or creator set things in motion, perhaps through an event like the big bang and lets nature run its course. My friend at UT says you all ‘nudged’ things in a direction to promote the creation of life—since nature didn’t seem to be getting the job done on its own, you just gave it a little
push
to get it on the right track.” Vince swept a palm up and out, as if to say, “Case in point.”

“So, in your case,” Thomas said, “do you view the designer or creator as the Christian God?”

“Yes, but don’t hold it against me. I’ll freely admit that I believe the intelligent designer is the Christian God.” Vince smiled. “What is Jesus, after all, other than
the
nudge of all nudges?”

Thomas frowned. “Why are you here?”

“Because I’ve been told you have basically created a universe with intelligent life in it, right here in your office. If that is true, it is the closest thing we have, scientifically or academically, to make a case for intelligent design.”

“But we didn’t design anything. We manipulated things to meet our ends.”

“You designed the initial system and the parameters that instigated the big bang, did you not?”

“Yes. I’ll grant that that did involve design.”

“So, there you have it, intelligent design—in
your
universe. And I would argue that your systematic manipulation of events with the intent of achieving a certain outcome is another form of intelligent design. Maybe you didn’t have a detailed design, but you had a desired outcome.”

“I concede. You could construe what we have theoretically done to be intelligent design.” Thomas crossed one ankle over his knee and folded his hands in his lap. “So what do you want?”

“We want to fund a research program.”

Vince smiled, recalling academics’ usual reaction to the taste of money, falling all over themselves at this point. They might not like his ideology, but they liked his money. He kept smiling.

“Really?” Thomas asked without budging. “Can you give me an overview of this program and its goals?”

“Sure.” Vince’s smile disappeared. He was surprised by the nonchalant response. “What we would like to see is a statistically significant number of simulated universes run in parallel to see if life ever develops without intervention, or nudges, as you call them.”

“What would that tell you?” Still, Thomas didn’t move.

“It will give us at least a basic scientific framework for showing that ID might be a legitimate theory.”

“But wouldn’t that experiment be partially flawed, because we already did do some ‘intelligent design’ by the very nature of starting the simulated universes through a big bang that we defined?”

That wasn’t an issue Vince had considered. His mouth felt dry. He wondered if he had been too reliant on his secret helper instead of thinking this through on his own.

“Well,” Vince said, “we can’t control for everything, so we can work around that issue. I think if we basically take a time when planets are developing, say eleven billion years into the universe through fourteen billion years, then we’ll have a large enough sample size to see if life develops on its own. We could also look at whether habitable planets develop.”

“I see.”

“Is that possible?”

“Let’s say it is.”

Still,
Thomas hadn’t moved. Vince started to worry about his own gestures and tone, that he might seem too eager. He tried to mentally calm himself.

Vince leaned back in his chair and asked, “How much would a project like that cost?”

“How many universes do you want?”

“A hundred?”

Thomas said, “It would cost hundreds of millions with the hardware and space necessary to run them and the people required to search them.” He smiled, knowing this man Vince couldn’t possibly extrapolate actual costs.

“Search them?”

Thomas realized his mistake then and tried to think through how to redirect the conversation.

“Habitable planets, that sort of thing. You might have noticed that the universe is quite large.”

“Aren’t you omniscient?”

“Nope. I’m just a person.”

Vince laughed. “You got me.”

“So am I correct in assuming you don’t have hundreds of millions of dollars for this program?” Thomas wanted to shut this conversation down.

“True,” Vince said, “but we have tens of millions,” and he readied himself for wide eyes and outstretched palms, but still—
still—
Thomas didn’t bite.

Instead, Thomas said, “We’re going to have to pass.”

“But why?”

“I don’t even want to think about what kind of mark taking your money would put on us.”

Vince sighed. He’d heard this before, but usually the need for money outweighed any hypothetical risks. “We can probably find ways to work around any potential risk on that front.”

“How?”

“Ambiguous funding entities.”

“If anything comes out that remotely looks promising on the intelligent design front, you’ll promote the hell out of it.” Thomas laughed at his pun before continuing, “And the connection will come out. The fact that we attempted to obfuscate it would make it look even worse.”

Thomas crossed the other ankle now. He leaned farther back, and his eyes narrowed. Vince knew there was no chance of swaying this man.

So Vince asked, “Can we have early access to any research you publish?”

“Apparently, you already do.” Thomas’s jaw muscles knotted up. “Who gave you what little amount of information you already have?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

Thomas said, “This meeting is over,” and immediately stood to leave.

“Can I see it?” Vince asked.

“See what?”

“Your simulated universe.”

Thomas pointed to the plasma screen in the lobby. “That’s it.” And he left.

Vince looked at the roiling lava that covered the landscape, punctuated by the occasional volcanic eruption. He was not the first to compare it to hell.

Chapter 34

Week 9: Tuesday

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

—Voltaire

On the screen were images of several panels from the main temple. Stephen and Mike had selected these specific panels because they appeared to convey the Alphans’ creation story. Almost every intelligent civilization developed creation myths that often became the foundation of its religious system and had dramatic influence over its culture. This case was different in that Thomas’s team actually knew the real creation story.

“Watch this!” Stephen said excitedly, rubbing his hand back and forth across his bald head. He had won the coin toss, so he was presenting his part first.

The core group was assembled for this.

He showed a wall panel painted with the Alphan symbols and clicked the mouse.

A square surrounded the first symbol and then moved to the second, then the third. Soon, the square was zooming through them all.

On a second screen, the symbols were reorganized, isolated from the wall, and displayed on a white background, appearing more like a font than symbols painted on a wall. This screen was split, the Alphan characters occupying half, the other half blank.

Words started to appear in English.

“Holy shit!” Ajay blurted out.

Stephen practically beamed.

In seconds, the blank area was full—the wall panel’s words, revealed.

“Mike and the computer finally figured out the written language, and I created a program to identify the symbols and translate them automatically.”

Thomas was nodding with a big smile.

Stephen said, “It’s on the core menus now, so you can activate it to translate anything written in this language. By the way, I’m calling the program Nefirti.”

“Cool,” Lisa said. “How is she doing?”

“Great. She’s nearly twelve now.”

“Wow. They grow up so quick,” Lisa said with a grin.

Stephen said, “No kidding!”

Thomas asked, “What have you learned?”

“I’m glad you asked,” Stephen said and, with a flourish of his hand, invited Mike to take over.

“We just got it working,” Mike said, “but we plan to undertake a major effort to translate as much as we can. The document you can see now is called the
Builder’s
Book
. It’s their creation story. They have a pretty interesting view with a reasonably well-defined pantheon.”

He drew a diamond on one of the dry-erase boards and put dots in each of the corners and the center of it.

“Think of this as their cross, Star of David, crescent moon,” he said, pointing at it. “They ascribe deities to each of its elements, so there are basically six gods. I say basically because the sixth one is kind of a weird concept. Also, there is a seventh that is not represented here.” He paused. “So the diamond itself represents the Creator. He is their ‘ubergod.’ He, not surprisingly, created everything.”

“Sounds like Thomas,” Jenn said.

Everyone chuckled.

“The diamond represents the constraints or the edges of the world. Remember the stories from the Dark Ages that claimed that the world was flat and that if you went too far out into the ocean, you would fall off the edge? Well, that is basically the idea here.”

“Cool,” Ajay mumbled.

“So their all-powerful Creator made some more gods to do his work for him. I guess he’s lazy or something. He’s kind of an amorphous concept for them. They don’t worship him; they thank him. It’s also possible that the diamond shape is a driver for pyramids, since it could be construed as a pyramid and its shadow.”

Lisa said, “Or a pyramid viewed from above.”

Stephen looked at the drawing again and nodded.

“Though,” Stephen said, “they never see them from above. Only we do.”

Mike cleared his voice and tapped the top dot. “This is the Architect. He designed the world.”

Ajay raised his hand. “Is that me?”

Lisa laughed and smacked him on the back of the head. “No. It’s me, clown.”

Stephen rolled his eyes.

“I’ll add the caveat,” Mike said, moving past the interchange, “that we translate these words to the closest concept in our own language. The concept of an architect—someone who designs complex systems, like buildings or computer software—is ours, but it is the idea that mostly correlates with what we think the Alphans believe.”

Continuing clockwise, Mike tapped the next dot. “These three dots across the center of the diamond are the main gods. The rightmost one,” he said as he again tapped the dot in the three o’clock position. “This one is the Builder.”

“Stephen or Larry?” Jenn asked, turning it into a game.

“Don’t forget Bleys,” Larry added helpfully.

Ajay said, “Can we vote?”

“Not surprisingly,” Mike attempted to bring them back on track, “the Builder built the world.”

“Presumably from the Architect’s plans,” Ajay interrupted with a snicker.

“Right. He made the animals, the people, the rivers, mountains, et cetera, following the Architect’s command. It’s kind of ambiguous what he used to make them. That doesn’t seem to be part of the myth.”

He clicked again, showing the city. Across the river were the five pyramids. Hundreds of workers swarmed over the sixth pyramid. It was nearing completion.

“They take the Architect and the Builder seriously. The pharaoh is supposedly the manifestation of a god on Earth—well, on Alpha, really, but we’ve used the more colloquial translation ‘Earth’ in this usage, for our own familiarity’s sake, and since they don’t call Alpha ‘Alpha.’ Only we do. Anyway, the Pharaoh is basically the ‘Architect’ made man. He designs what he thinks is necessary, and people build it. The ‘builders’ consider the act of building these things to be worship. They work in shifts to construct this pyramid in honor of the gods. And their pharaoh is the all-powerful leader.

“Anyway, to get back on track.” Mike pointed to the middle dot. “The Guide. This is an interesting one. They attribute leading them out of Darkness to the Guide. Again, we aren’t entirely clear on what that means. It could mean bringing them out of the trees to farm or introducing them to the religion or the river. The Guide also represents what we think of as luck.”

“Hey, Jenn, I think that’s you,” Lisa said, continuing the game.

“Or maybe Mike,” Jenn retorted.

Mike tapped the next dot on the opposite side from the Builder’s dot. “The Scribe.”

“Doh. I guess that’s more you,” Jenn said.

Mike shrugged. “The Scribe records the events of the world. Again, we don’t know what that means. I get the feeling it is kind of like the Greek fates. He weaves the fabric of the world and in the process records it. The Scribe takes the blame for any bad stuff that happens.

“So the Builder, the Guide, and the Scribe are the gods they mention most. Common expressions we hear are ‘Builder, give us strength’; ‘Guide, show me the path,’ when they need luck or guidance; and ‘The Scribe has written it,’ when they feel defeated or are facing the inevitable.”

He tapped the final dot, at the bottom. “This is Darkness.”

Lisa laughed. “No one’s going to want to be that.”

“Sometimes they use the Darkness as a curse. ‘Darkness take you’ is kind of like ‘go to hell.’”

“Sweet,” Lisa said. “We can curse in Alphan now.”

Mike frowned and wondered why that was the thing everyone wanted to know in every language.

“The Darkness,” he started again, “represents everything they fear, their lost past, the unknown…” He paused. “…and death.”

***

After the presentation, Stephen went back to check on Nefirti in the SU. It had become an addiction. Every morning and every afternoon before leaving, he would check in, sometimes alone, sometimes with Mike. Even though they didn’t need to monitor her for the language program anymore, he still liked to see how she was doing.

SU-N11 Time: 496 PC [+13,508,915,714 Years]

Nefirti’s house was crowded. Everyone was in a festive mood and dressed in bright colors. In the small outside area facing the river, a small band played reed pipes and beat on a primitive drum as people danced around. It took Stephen a few minutes to actually find her, but when he did, it was obvious the party was for her. Everyone who passed her would speak to her, give her a hug, and then drape a colored string over her shoulders.

If the number of strings draped over her shoulder were a measure of popularity, she was doing well. She wore a scarf that resembled a rainbow.

Stephen guessed it must be her birthday, or maybe some special coming-of-age ceremony, since they hadn’t seen anything like this before.

He watched, in real time, for a half hour or so and then, content, decided to head home and get some rest. It was wonderful to see her so happy, surrounded by family and friends, carefree. He wished he could be there.

***

He had already felt good after the great presentation earlier in the day, and seeing Nefirti’s party had moved Stephen into even more of an exuberant mood. He even whistled as he left the office. Walking out, he passed Mike’s office and saw that he was still diligently working.

“Hey, you want to grab a drink?” Stephen asked.

“That would be great. I think we’ve earned it.”

“Yep. The progress is amazing.”

“I can’t believe how quickly we cracked the language. We make a great team, Stephen.”

“Can’t wait to see what’s next.”