Coin #2 - Quantum Coin (38 page)

They were silent for a moment that stretched on too long. The only sound was a steady, distant beep from one of the consoles.

“How do you figure that any good came of this at all?” Ephraim asked. “The three of you have been miserable and alone for more than a decade.”

“I'd been wondering for a while if the transhumans were as benevolent as they seemed. I wanted Jena to come with me so I could show her this place. She could have helped me work out what was going on. Instead, I ended up here on my own, learned how to use all this abandoned technology myself. I've been taking care of the machine. And I discovered my hunch was right. They gave us the portable coheron drives to sacrifice the multiverse for their own gain.”

“Isn't that what Dr. Kim is doing?” Ephraim said.

“They have something worse in mind.” Scott waved his hand over the console. A screen behind him displayed a white circle.

“This is the universe,” Scott said.

Nathan yawned. “It looks like a donut,” he said.

Ephraim struggled out of his chair and stood next to Scott.

“Go on,” Ephraim said. “I'm listening.”

Scott input a sequence into the console. More circles started appearing in different colors, beside the original circle.

“Each of those circles represents another adjacent reality,” Scott said. “The multiverse.”

More circles began appearing around it, many of them close enough to touch the circle in the center and each other. Some of the first circles began disappearing the farther the circles spread out.

“Most parallel universes are meant to be fleeting. They come into existence when individual actions diverge at a quantum decision point, but they often disappear or merge back into each other, according to the decisions with the greater probability. Have you ever misremembered something that happened to you?” Scott asked.

Ephraim nodded.

“Sometimes our memories are faulty, but other times it's the universes merging, without us consciously noticing. Déjà vu is another one of those side effects, when you merge with a universe a split-second ahead of yours,” Scott said.

“Consider it, Ephraim,” he went on. “Every single person in the world, billions and billions of people, each causing a new universe to appear with each decision…choosing pancakes over French toast, turning left instead of right. Every electron in the universe causes a new universe to appear to account for its erratic motion. The multiverse can't sustain that for long. Think of it as a kind of buffer, a backup system. As the queue fills, it purges itself of old data, at more or less the same rate. It remains in balance.”

“How long does a universe stay in the buffer?” Ephraim asked.

“Until a certain probability establishes itself as more likely than the others,” Scott said.

Those were those phantom universes Nathaniel had told Ephraim about, the ones that exist in their own quantum state, half-real, half-imagined.

“When the controller stores a coordinate for one of these universes, the act of observing and recording its existence strengthens its reality. It becomes a permanent fixture in the multiverse. Instead of disappearing when it's supposed to, it becomes a new anchor point that in turn spawns other universes. Now look at what happens.”

The screen showed circles appearing much more quickly, and now they were overlapping with each other like Venn diagrams. They were also appearing stacked over each other, barely separated in space but clearly overlapping precisely when Ephraim tilted his head one way to see them in three dimensions in the holographic display.

“Getting pretty crowded, isn't it?” Scott asked. “Multiverses are being created at an exponential state, and they're sticking around.”

The universes were represented as multicolored cylinders now, piling over each other. Ephraim closed his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose.

“Stop,” he said. “I get it.”

“You can't stop it, Ephraim. That's the point,” Scott said.

Nathan joined them at the console, camera aimed at the screen.

“But it turns out, it
has
to stop. The transhumans discovered that the multiverse is finite. It's the ultimate data storage mechanism, but it's running out of space. The system's overloading and now it's writing over parts of itself just to keep going. It's merging universes at an accelerated rate, randomly and arbitrarily, forcing disparate realities together in ways they don't belong—probability be damned. When everything happens in the multiverse all at once, there's no way to decide which event is more likely than any other.”

Scott took the coin from Ephraim and laid it on the console.
“We
did this,” he said.

“Did the transhumans know what they were doing?” Ephraim asked.

“Oh, they knew,” Scott said. “They set us up. And we went for it.”

“I thought they wanted to save humanity.”

“Yes, but what does that mean? To them, humanity's manifest destiny is to become pure consciousness. Some scientists call this the Omega Point, and there are two ways to reach it. One way is to advance your technology so far that you transcend into a new kind of noncorporeal life. Sometimes that's referred to as the Singularity.”

Scott spread his hands to take in the room.

“The transhumans came close, but they didn't quite make it in time. Heat death of the universe, and all that. They've preserved themselves as quantum minds in the computer. Noncorporeal life, but not all that satisfying,” Scott said. “They want to be
energy
, right?”

“So what's the second way?” Ephraim asked.

“The universe fills up with too much information. At that point,
everything
becomes information—same result, but it's the brute force method.”

“They wanted to give us a head start, they said,” Ephraim said. “But they were really giving themselves a second chance.”

“If a
multiverse
reaches its Omega Point, every universe in it reaches it, too. Not so great for most of them. Our universes still had millenia of living to go. But it's a great deal for the transhumans whose clock was running down,” Scott said. He looked up. “Tick, tock. Tick, tock.”

“Bastards,” Nathan said.

“They were willing to wipe out most of the multiverse to save themselves?” Ephraim asked.

“They used us,” Scott said. “It wasn't enough for them to commit suicide, they had to take everyone else with them.”

“I assume there's a way to change the plan, if you brought us here,” Ephraim said.

“A massive dump,” Scott said.

Nathan giggled. Scott and Ephraim glared at him.

“Of
data
,” Scott said. “If we're approaching the kill screen of the multiverse—game over—then the only thing we can do is hit reset early. Before it runs out of space.”

Scott waved his hand over the console again, and the circles started disappearing from the screen until there was only one left, right in the center. He put his coin on the console, and the circle became a silver disc, which slowly rotated.

“We have to start over,” Scott said.

Ephraim gazed at the screen.

“This is what Dr. Kim's trying to do,” Ephraim said. “You agree with her?”

“She's a very smart woman,” Scott said. “She's picking up the multiverse's slack, adding order to a chaotic system. She's bought us some time, but she's being too selective. It's like bailing water in a paper cup—you'll never work fast enough and the cup won't hold together for long. More realities are spawning every nanosecond, taking the place of the ones that are gone.

“Entropy has to take its course. Nature abhors a vacuum, but it abhors artificiality even more,” Scott said. “And too much order is just as unnatural.”

“You want to get rid of everything all at once,” Ephraim said.

“This is the last thing I
want
to do, Ephraim. But this isn't about what I want. It can't be personal. That's where Jena is getting this wrong.”

“But all those people in the multiverse…”

“We can't save everyone.”

Zoe had told him the same thing. He knew it made sense, but…

“How do we choose one universe out of all those possibilities?” he asked.

“Pick one randomly,” Scott said. “That seems fair. It doesn't really matter, so long as some life goes on somewhere and has the chance to split into new realities when the multiverse settles down again.”

“Why haven't you done this already?” Ephraim asked. “What do you need us for?”

“To make this work right, we have to delete all the data we have on those other universes and disable all the coheron drives—simultaneously. And funny as it seems at the moment, I can't be in two places at once,” Scott said.

“So call them and tell them what to do,” Ephraim said.

“If I contact Jena and ask her really nicely to please destroy her drive, she probably won't listen. I need someone I trust implicitly to pull this off.” Scott looked at Ephraim and Nathan. “You two will have to do.”

“Thanks,” Nathan said dryly.

“You have to delete all the recorded coordinates for every universe you've visited, except for the one universe you're going to preserve as the template. Every file, every backup. If it's even written on a piece of paper, that might be enough to keep it real. Information is that powerful.”

“What if someone's memorized the coordinates to a universe?” Ephraim asked.

“Kill them.” Scott stared at him impassively then burst out laughing. “Just kidding. I think we only have to worry about physical records, but then again, I've never done this before.” He smiled. “Or maybe I have. Maybe we're all part of the multiverse's grand design.”

“Does a video recording count?” Nathan asked, looking at his camera.

“You asked which universe to save,” Scott said. “I think the one we have the most information about makes a good choice. That'll stabilize it and give it preferred basis. You have a lot of footage of your universe.”

“But every universe has tons of footage. All those security cameras. All the videos uploaded to the Internet. That's probably even more true in the future, right?” Ephraim asked.

Scott nodded. “But this is the only footage of a universe that exists outside of the universe it was recorded in.” He snapped his fingers at Nathan. “Keep recording.”

Nathan gave him a thumbs-up.

“This feels awfully selfish,” Ephraim said. “I don't feel much better about this than Dr. Kim's plan. Why is my universe any better than hers?”

“I'm not saying it is.”

“Are you sure there's no way to prevent more than one universe from disappearing?”

“It's risky to try to save too many. Some universes will probably stick around anyway, once there's enough room in the buffer. When we erase the information we've been saving and remove the coheron drives from the multiverse, it'll all be up to chance—as it should be. The universes may simply disappear, or they could merge in unpredictable ways. But that's better than wiping the slate completely clean and pushing all of us to the Omega Point, yeah?”

E pluribus unum. One from many.

“Okay.” Ephraim took a deep breath. “Tell us how to pull this off.”

Ephraim and Nathan appeared in the atrium of the Everett Institute. Ephraim grunted as his ears popped from the change in pressure and elevation while Nathan knelt and retched.

Ephraim stretched his jaw to clear his ears and helped his friend to his feet. Nathan had tears in his eyes.

The gyroscope of the Large Coheron Drive was still. Ephraim reached into his pocket and touched the token Scott had given him. The smooth metal disc vibrated gently against his fingers, as if reacting to its proximity to its sister machine.

“Is that it?” Nathan cocked his head back to study the LCD. “It's smaller than Scott's.”

“Uh-huh,” Ephraim said. He checked the cameras positioned all around the atrium, wondering if Dr. Kim was watching them. He'd expected alarms to go off when they arrived, but it just showed that she no longer counted Ephraim as a threat, and she didn't know about Nathan at all.

“Put your hand on that panel.” Ephraim pointed at the flat black plate mounted beside the door to the control room.

Nathan glanced at him skeptically, then pressed his palm against the biometric scanner. A moment later it pulsed green, but it didn't open. A numeric pad appeared on the screen.

“Crap. Your analog is more paranoid than I thought,” Ephraim said. “What would you use?”

Nathan thought for a moment, then typed in 1-2-3-4-5.

“That's a stupid password,” Ephraim said.

“That's why no one would try it,” Nathan said.

“Well, it didn't work.” Ephraim squinted at the skylight. He'd lost all track of time in Seattle Below, but it looked like early morning here. Doug's blue balloon bobbed lazily against the glass. “We'll have to find Nathaniel or Zoe for access, then.” Preferably Zoe. “Let's head up.”

Nathan's handprint opened the doors to the main portion of the building without any difficulties.

They walked quickly down the corridor to the elevator.

“Should we take the stairs?” Nathan asked. “To preserve the element of surprise?”

“If anyone's paying attention, they already know we're here,” Ephraim said. He pushed the call button, and the elevator started down from the top floor.