Accidental Gods (23 page)

Chapter 39

The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyrannies of evil men. Blessed is he who in the name of charity and good will shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I shall strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger, those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee!

—Ezekiel 25:17, enhanced by Samuel L. Jackson in
Pulp Fiction

SU-N11 Time: 498 PC [13,508,915,716 Years]

Stephen stood in the pharaoh’s bedroom. The high priest lay dead at his feet. He turned and looked around the room. He touched the captain of the guard, who promptly fell dead.

The pharaoh was panicking. He ran to a corner and collapsed, curled in a ball, watching the room, and screaming hysterically.

Stephen walked around the bed. When the first harlot died, the second jumped out of the bed screaming. Stephen touched her shoulder, too. Her body hit the floor.

He killed everyone else in the room except the pharaoh.

Then he walked to the corner where the pharaoh was curled in a fetal position, soaking in his own urine. He still screamed hysterically.

“Nefirti,” he said, “I only wish they could see me.”

He tried to look the pharaoh in the eyes as if to make him see, but the pharaoh squirmed too much and his eyes were locked shut.

“The Builder is now the Darkness.”

Stephen stopped the pharaoh’s heart.

“It is done.”

***

He grabbed the LCD from the table and smashed it into the wall. Then he quietly returned to his office and began to type.

Chapter 40

Week 9: Thursday, 4:11 a.m.

Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.

—Chapman Cohen

Thomas heard his phone ringing in his dream. On about the fourth ring, he realized it wasn’t a dream. He had had four glasses of wine the night before.

“Answer your phone,” a groggy voice said.

“Mmm.” He looked over, startled. He had forgotten about her. Too much wine.

He picked it up. “What?”

“It’s me,” he heard Jules say over the phone.

He looked at his clock. It was 4:11 a.m., and she sounded like she’d been awake for hours.

“I repeat. What?”

“You need to come to the office,” she said.

“Now?”

“Yes, right now.”

He knew it had to be important if she was calling him at home, this early, and this demandingly. That didn’t completely wake him, but it certainly snapped him back into reality.

He jumped in the shower—intentionally adjusted to “ice cold”—threw on some clothes, grabbed a Diet Coke, and hit the road.

He was halfway to IACP before he remembered that he’d left the girl in his bed.

Chapter 41

Week 9: Thursday, 5:18 a.m.

God is dead.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

He knew it was bad as he approached IACP and saw emergency-vehicle lights. The guard waved him through the gate, a somber look on his face.

Jules intercepted Thomas as he stepped out of his car.

“Have you read your e-mail?”

“No,” he said. “I came straight here.”

He reached to check his phone, but she had grabbed his arm and was already dragging him inside.

“Let’s go to your office,” she said.

“What happened?”

“It’s better that we talk in your office.”

“Just tell me,” he demanded.

“Fine.” She hesitated, though she still led him toward the elevators.

“Well?” he asked.

“Stephen is dead.”

He stumbled and then stood still, glancing around the lobby, dazed.

“Stephen is dead?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“We don’t know yet, I found him dead at his desk.”

“
What
?” Thomas shouted. “Here?”

He looked apoplectic.

“Calm down,” Jules said and took his arm again, more gently this time, and led him inside one of the elevators.

Chapter 42

Week 9: Thursday, 5:30 a.m.

I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

—Epitaph of Robert Frost

Thomas hesitantly opened the e-mail, Stephen’s last words.

To the world,

Tonight I have become a vengeful god. A vengeful, wrathful god. It is not how I imagined it would be, and the results pain me almost as much as the cause. For the events of the last week to awaken such ferociousness within me makes me further wary of the power that we possess over that which we create. It is not me.

When we are gods, things change more deeply. It wasn’t our choice, and in reality, I may be the only one who truly exercised that power. To be a god, answering a dying prayer. Again, nothing I could ever imagine.

We have opened Pandora’s box.

A box we should never have opened. Now, it is a box that can never be closed. It is our nature. Our curiosity is unbridled. As a scientist, it has always been a dream to have a set of laws named after me. So I propose them now:

1.              Human nature means it is impossible to not open Pandora’s box.

2.              We won’t know it was Pandora’s box until after we open it.

Stephen’s Rules, if you will. You might find them contradictory, but I do not.

If you are one of the recipients of this e-mail that does not know what we’ve been working on at the Institute for Advanced Computational Physics for the last eight years, you probably think I’m babbling or have gone off the deep end. So let me explain.

Thomas looked at the “To:” field.

“
Oh shit
,” he blurted.

Everyone in IACP was copied as well as some people at UT and other individuals. In addition, Fox News, CNN, the
Wall Street Journal
,
USA Today
, the Associated Press, and Reuters—along with a few others.

He continued reading.

Soon, the IACP will release a paper announcing the development of living organisms on a planet in a simulated universe. Many were aware of the simulated universe from our work at the University of Texas—a result of our attempts to model the big bang in a massively parallel, specialized quantum computer. It worked, far better than any of us expected.

I’m not sure if trying this was opening Pandora’s box or not. I suspect that happened when we took the next step: letting the computer keep working. We wanted to see where our newly minted universe would go. It went, and it went, and it went. But we didn’t know if it would go where we wanted it to go—so we nudged it along, toward our objectives, manipulating things at all levels, planetary orbits, molecules, natural disasters, and much more, to get what we wanted—the development of an intelligent civilization.

Yes. There is an intelligent civilization in a computer in the IACP facility.

At first, I didn’t really believe it was an intelligent civilization. After all, this is all in a computer. But I watched it develop. I worked with other IACP scientists to decipher their language.

As part of that process, I “met” a little girl, Nefirti. I watched her grow from a two-year-old toddler to a fourteen-year-old young woman. We have nearly her whole life on tape, yet she has never seen us. She didn’t even know we existed.

She was a beautiful, vivacious, smart little girl, and everyone at IACP loved her. Two nights ago, in an event none of us anticipated, she was sacrificed to consummate the pyramid of the current ruler.

I’m sure you are thinking,
If you’re gods, aren’t you also omniscient and omnipotent?
Well, yes, we are. Technically. In reality, we cannot watch everything. Changing things is difficult. There are ramifications. When we nudge things, we effectively create parallel universes, an expensive process that is also limited by supply of key components in our system.

So, by the time we realized this sacrifice had occurred, it could not be undone without substantial cost, a cost which IACP was unwilling to incur.

I watched the sacrifice after the fact. As she died, she called on her gods to curse the people who had done this.

Rather than being an observer, as we had been since the dawn of the universe—excluding, of course, specific nudges made to meet our evolutionary objectives—I chose to answer her prayer.

I destroyed the pyramid in which she was sacrificed. I killed the priests. I killed the Pharaoh in whose name she was sacrificed.

For interfering in their world, I am not sorry. I am only sorry I was too late to save Nefirti.

But I cannot make these choices. They are not mine to make. I can’t deal with this kind of power and this responsibility.

My hope is that by making this public, pressure will be put on IACP, that others won’t be able to abuse these powers like I have. That the people we have created will be protected and allowed to live and find their own destiny.

So, I sacrifice myself for them.

Stephen Eggleton

PhD, California Institute of Technology

Fellow, Institute for Advanced Computational Physics

Thomas looked up. Jules was staring at him.

“Did this e-mail really go out to all these recipients?” he asked, still stunned.

Jules shook her head. “Not
all
of them. Larry said the mail system caught the ones directed at media and kept most from being sent out—in line with our PR policy.”

“But everyone at IACP received it?”

“Yes.”

“What about UT and the others?”

“Yes.”

“What next?” he asked.

Chapter 43

God is, or He is not. But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up…Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.

—Blaise Pascal (Known as Pascal’s Wager)

Thomas was in hell. He was sure of that but not much else. He couldn’t believe the firestorm Stephen’s suicide had created. The vultures were already circling. It would have been nice if they had given him a little time to grieve. Stephen had been his friend for a long time, not to mention that the core IACP group had grown attached to each other through the ups and downs of the last eight years. They were family, something Thomas had not frequently acknowledged.

Thomas was also fighting an internal battle with guilt. He knew it wasn’t his fault, but he couldn’t get it out of his mind. He knew Stephen had been upset the previous night. Thomas wished he had taken Stephen to dinner and talked with him or listened or whatever Stephen had needed. Instead, he had left Stephen asleep at his desk and gone on a date.

Jules stuck her head in the door. “I hate to bother you, but UT keeps calling. They demand answers.”

“What do they want?”

“They want to talk about Stephen. So they say, but they seem a lot more intent on seeing the SU.”

“Figures.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I already sent an e-mail to everyone. No talking to anyone today. We’re on full lockdown. Talk to Ross and Jenn. If they’re up for it, have them prepare some images we can send out. Preferably from before all this shit happened. I don’t want to see an image of Nefirti on the altar. Probably best to get everyone working on something to keep their minds off this.”

“I’ll talk to them. What about UT?”

“Tell them to wait.”