Peripheral Visions: Twist in the Tail

Peripheral Visions: They coalesce in the soft blur of darkest shadows and take shape in the corner of your eye. But you won't see them coming... until it's too late.

Twist in the Tale

Professor Donaldson got to the lab as soon as he could. The drive seemed to take forever even though it was only 5 a.m. and the streets were practically empty. He'd left the lab only a few hours before, thinking he might get some rest; he might have gotten a few snatches of sleep, but they were full of dreams about equations and branching causalities and universes unfolding like roses, their petals infinite pathways of fractal histories...

Donaldson tapped the door's lock pad with his hand. The subcutaneous RFID chip turned the red light green and the door's bolts snapped back with a metallic bang. With a yank, he opened the door; with two swift strides he was in the lab, the Oculus perched on its pedestal across the room, surrounded by screens that were busy with the stuff of those dreams he'd been having: Glyphs, ledgers, traceries that grew in profusion until the graphic seemed to retreat to make space for more growth, until the screen seemed full of nothing more than crazily tangled cobweb.

"What is it?" Donaldson asked, catching sight of one of the grad students – Todd, he thought. Or was it Ted? "I got a text from you – you're Todd, right?"

The young man nodded, his eyes anxious.

"I got a text from you that Professor Morley discovered something. But I also got a text from Christie..."

"That's me," a young woman's voice said. Donaldson looked around and saw another grad student – lab coat sloppily pulled over a red blouse, gold earrings glinting under a foamy aura of blonde curls – approaching.

"Christie tells me that he's having a nervous breakdown or something," Donaldson finished, turning toward the young woman as she joined him and Todd. "So – " Donaldson alternated his gaze between the two young people. "Did you two get your wires crossed?"

"No," Christie said.

"Maybe," Todd said.

Donaldson shook his head. "Details, people?"

"He started pacing around and chattering... to himself, really," Christie said.

"But it was just after we got a solution," Todd said.

"Wait – you got a solution? Why the hell didn't someone get in touch right away?"

"We don't have a solution," Christie said.

"The computer says we do," Todd snapped at her.

"That's not a solution, that's a –"

"Can the both of you shut the hell up?" Donaldson said, more loudly than he'd intended. He took a moment to compose himself as they stared at him in shock. Shouldn't have said that, he chided himself. That's sure to show up with all sorts of embellishments at DivisiveProfessors.com...

"Look, I'm sorry," he said, "but first things first. Where is Professor Morley, and is he okay?"

The two grad students looked at each other.

"In the computer lab," Christie said.

"And, really... I don't know," Todd added.

"He didn't want us to call you in yet," Christie said.

"Yeah, well, don't you worry about that," Donaldson reassured them. "You did the right thing. I'll take care of him."

They nodded and then left, each walking to their own corner of the room.

Donaldson stopped in front of the Oculus briefly, trying to trace what the new software, coupled with the upgraded scanning drive, had come up with. His nerves were too jangled, and he was too preoccupied with worry for Morley, to work anything out.

Morley had volunteered to stay until Donaldson got back in the morning. No one seriously expected any sort of solution overnight; it as possible, of course, but it was far more likely that the scanner readings were going to slow to a trickle as the equipment probed deeper into the overcosmos and the Vorenburg resistance grew. The new software would help, to a degree, but even the freshly-coded segital program, running on six entangled quantum cores, could only handle so much data. There would have to be tens of billions, maybe trillions, of smaller solutions before they could expect to find the big one.

The big one.

The solution that would answer their biggest questions... maybe the biggest questions of all...

Or else, Donaldson reflected, open the door to an infinite hall of mirrors. If God wants to be found, now's His chance. And if He doesn't...

Well, if God wanted to stay hidden, this was His chance, too.

Tearing himself away from the Oculus, Donaldson made his way toward the computer lab, where the sum total of the data streams would have been collated. If, that is, there really had been a breakthrough. Privately, Donaldson worried that Christie was right, and no big solution had yet been found. Morley had been as excited as a kid on Christmas Eve; was it possible that he'd snapped? Donaldson had noticed no signs of impending mental collapse. Then again, Morley was the most brilliant of the bunch, and the most accomplished member of a team that comprised a roster drawn from the world's top physicists. No one got to be that smart without paying a price of some sort. Half of the team were alcoholics, and one or two were rumored to be on anti-psychotic meds...

Between rumors like that and the abrasive personalities they were working with, Donaldson was ever grateful that their other collaborators were overseas and their work together was conducted remotely. He and Morley made a good pair even when they shared a lab space in real time, but he couldn't imagine having to interact in person with any of the others.

Donaldson paused at the door to the computer room, listening. The kids had said something about Morley muttering to himself, but he heard nothing. Peering in, he saw Morley seated at a workstation, but he didn't seem keyed up the way he'd been the night before. Now he was slumped over to one side, eyes open, staring into empty space. He seemed lifeless. This must be the catatonia that Christie had talked about.

Morley was so still that Donaldson had a fleeting fear he might be dead. He looked up, however, as Donaldson entered the computer room.

"Find something?" Donaldson asked gently.

Morley simply stared at him for a long moment. Then he started to laugh.

Then he started screaming.

***

It took Donaldson a good twelve minutes to calm Morley down. He finally managed it, to his surprise, by plying his colleague with coffee.

"Better?" he asked, as Morley gulped his third cup of lukewarm, stale joe.

"More!" The cup in Morley's hand traced a brisk arc as the brilliant physicist gestured. Luckily, he'd drained the cup, or coffee would have sloshed everywhere.

Donaldson reached for the cup, but Morley snatched it back.

"Get the pot!" he commanded, his voice rising again toward the hysterical edge it had had moments earlier.

Donaldson raised his hands in surrender and fetched the pot. It was nearly empty; Morley didn't seem to care. He thrust the cup at the pot.

Donaldson poured the remaining coffee into Morley's cup, then walked out of the computer room and toward the corner of the larger lab space where there sat an old-fashioned coffee maker next to a sink. Donaldson found himself regretting that single-serving coffee pods had been banned by the grad students, who took a unanimous stand against them and declared the lab to be an ecologically friendly space. Now he was going to have to go through the entire process of loading grounds into a new filter, measuring out fresh water, and waiting for the water to trickle with insane slowness through the grounds and into the pot.

Donaldson sighed as he worked on the problem.

Then, as the water started to trickle into the filter and drip into the pot, he walked back into the computer room and asked about the solution.

"Found something? Arrived at some sort of conclusion?"

Morley just shook his head.

"That bad? Or that good?"

Morley shrugged apathetically.

"Come on, now," Donaldson told him. "You can explain it in thirty seconds, or else I can spend half an hour or more sifting through this mess..." He nodded at the computer screens, where uncollated data had accumulated.

"I'm sorry it's such a mess," Morley said – the first real sentence he'd managed to make.

"Hey," Donaldson said, taking a chair and rolling it close to Morley's own. "No. It's okay. Just tell me what's going on. Did you find something?"

"Did I find something? Jesus. No. Yes." Morley shook his head. "The fucking computer found it. But it doesn't make any sense."

"So, okay," Donaldson said, keeping his voice neutral. "If the data is corrupted or the scans aren't working right, then we'll –"

Morley laughed again. This time, thankfully, it was a short, almost normal laugh. "The scans are fine," he said. "The calculations are flawless. The equipment, the software – it's working... I was going to say it's working perfectly, but in fact it's working better than perfectly. It's... it's stunning."

"Okay," Donaldson said, nodding slowly. "So tell me."

"I wish I never saw the results," Morley said, his voice breaking, his eyes welling up.

Donaldson felt like he was about to start screaming in his turn – screaming from pure frustration – but he kept his voice calm and steady. "Okay," he said.

Morley was unable to speak. He buried his face in his hands. "I'm sorry," he croaked.

"Why don't you just take a minute, and I'll have a look at the results," Donaldson said.

"No, don't," Morley said, looking up in alarm.

"We're going to have to both confirm whatever the readings showed," Donaldson said.

"But first... let's just go over this once," Morley said, his voice – his entire demeanor, Donaldson saw – abruptly back to normal.

"Go over what?"

"Our goal. Our process. I just want to be sure I haven't lost sight of anything... any of the basics," Morley said.

Donaldson frowned, perplexed.

"Do you mind?" Morley asked, his voice plaintive and almost childlike. "I'm having an existential crisis." He offered a wan smile.

Donald chuckled. "I can see that," he said.

"Yeah," Morley said, chuckling also.

"Okay," Donaldson said.

"Okay," Morley said, and shut his eyes. Then he drew a breath and seemed to settle into himself. "We created our own VR universe in QF number one," he said, sounding as if he were recounting from a list.

"That's right," Donaldson said. "Before we built the other five quantum frames and then networked all six for parallel processing."

"And that was a pretty crude VR simulation," Morley said, "but it covered all the basics. We ran the evolution of a virtual reality universe from its start to its finish."

"Well, not quite," Donaldson said. "Not when we realized that its stars would all go dark and its expansion would continue for a quadrillion years, which even in VR time would have taken way too long to finish processing."

"And when the prototype was so successful," Morley went on, "we built the other QFs and now we have a super-hi-res VR universe that we've watched evolve through all the same stages as the first one we created. All the same stages as our own universe. And all in infinitesimally intimate detail."

"Right," Donaldson said.

"And then we isolated that VR program and left it running on minimal processing time in the background, while we tied the quantum network into the new scanners," Morley said. "And we started filtering everything through the new hi-state transphasic processors."

"The only way to identify and monitor parallel universes."

"Which no one ever proved existed until we did," Morley said. "Which, I tell you, is gonna get us the Nobel."

"That's what everyone is saying," Donaldson replied.

"Except they're gonna take the Nobel away from us and lock us in a rubber room when they find out what the new data tells us," Morley said.

"Hold on," Donaldson said, seeing the value in working through the project's history the way Morley was doing. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves. We tied the scanners into the processors..."

"And we integrated the processors into the QF network so that we could parse and visualize the data and generate user-friendly results," Morley recounted dutifully.

"And last night was our first full-scale attempt to create an extensive spall diagram," Donaldson said.

"Starting with our own universe, of course," Morley said, "and interpreting all the string variances. And you wouldn't believe how many processors it took. First one, which, okay... we expected that. Then two processorts, which, fine, we also expected that. And then three, four... five... all six! All of them, humming away!"

"Good thing we went the extra few miles," Donaldson said.

"And I was watching on the screens the whole time." Morley looked Donaldson in the eye, the delight from the previous evening coming back into his face. "Watching as one universe after the next resolved and the QF network took the processor data and rendered it into visual schema. And I made sure that the software was tracking correctly: Following the string variances one subtle shift at a time, untangling billions of overlapping frequencies, being sure we had coherence and commensurability, making sure we didn't get sidetracked and end up with a dead end, a dissolving strand, or just lose ourselves in the weeds. Oh!" Morley exclaimed, his eyes shining. "It was beautiful!"

Donaldson nodded, his own eyes starting to shine. "Yeah?"

"Yes! Yes... and we were ticking through all the universes we'd charted already. U-321b. U342. U-b-420. Finding out exactly which universe spalled from which other universe, and when. Looking at the stats density so we didn't end up following a route that took us over the cliff into an abyss."

"You mean, if we followed a spall into a new universe that collapsed."

"And finding out how good I am at it! Charlie, you have no idea what artistry it is. I felt like Brahms, like Picasso... guiding the system, watching one universe after another, thousands, millions, unfold and wax and spawn. It was like a Mandelbrot set on speed. I didn't even need to take Adderall; I was in the zone, I was in the groove."

"It sounds..."

"It was transcendent!" Morey said excitedly. "And then the flag sounded."

"The flag?"

"The alarm. The one we thought we might hear but didn't expect to..."

"Which could mean only a couple things," Donaldson nodded. "You found your way to an Omniverse, where all the potentiality functions resolve into a single entity." God, he thought to himself. Was that what Morley had found?

Morley nodded, his eyes bright, his eyes spilling over. "No," he said.

"No?" Donaldson smiled with apprehension. "So... you mean..."

"So, I mean the system followed the trail of spawning universes, one branching into the next and into the next and into the next, until we came to..."

"To the specific signature of the VR universe we created ourselves," Donaldson said, suddenly guessing where this was going.

"Yes."

"Which means..." Donaldson's face contorted with a dozen emotions all at once. "Which means the mathematical simulation we created is more than just a simulation! It doesn't just exist in the network background process. It exists in.. in..."

"We never gave it a name," Morley said.

"Superspace!" Donaldson crowed. "It exists there, nested in with all the other universes! We actually created a real and genuine universe!"

"Yes," Morley said, nodding sadly, his face a study in tragedy.

"But..." Donaldson stopped himself from uttering his next words: We'll win the Nobel for sure! We'll win it twice over! "But that's... that's wonderful! Isn't it...?"

"It was," Morley said. "Until I wanted to see what was next. The universe we created from scratch showed in the scans as originating not directly from our own universe, but way downstream... it spalls from a couple dozen universes slitting off from our own, one after the next. I followed the trail, I sorted through all the hundreds of millions of new branches, and it was like following a trail of breadcrumbs. You couldn't miss it, the signal was so strong and defined."

"Wait. You're saying the VR universe we created is also an actual universe with independent reality, but we didn't directly create it?"

"That's right..."

"Then it must be a different universe. One that's very similar, but..."

"But nothing. The signal is definite. The data are unimpeachable. Every universe has its own unique and specific string resonance. We weren't looking at an identical reality, we were looking at the very same VR universe we created in our own quantum frame. It has concrete, independent existence, but the Oculus data shows that it emerged from one of our known daughter universes."

"One we already know about?" Donaldson asked, puzzled. "Which one?"

"U-R2599."

"All right," Donaldson said. "That makes things complicated, but not impossible. It could mean that the work we did in creating the VR universe here, in our quantum frame, was in resonance with the natural processes that brought that universe into being from U-R2599, even though we were thought we were constructing the VR universe from scratch from within this universe. That's hard to parse, because we have three-dimensional brains that work linearly, but there should be no problem proving it in the higher-dimensional equations... you checked the math carefully right?"

"Several times," Morley nodded. "And it's good. The results are real. Counter-intuitive, but real."

"So the theory of nonlocal, or even multiple-locus, causality turns out to have some merit," Donaldson said.

"It has to, if the universe we created shows up on the spall diagram as emerging independently from another universe distantly descended from ours," Morley said.

"So why is that so terrible? I mean..." Donaldson grinned. "Does it upset you to see that we're actually capable of playing God in a fundamental sense? That we have become Life, the Creator of Worlds?"

"No," Morley said. "That would be wonderful. But..."

"But what?" Donaldson frowned, recalling his thought from earlier that morning. "Did the Omega Solution show up?"

"The solution that indicates the presence of a divine, or at least conscious, creator?" Morley asked, his tone bitter and sarcastic. "That Omega Solution?"

"Did we make contact?" Donaldson asked impatiently. "Did we prove the theory that our own universe is an artificial construct, and make contact with whoever created it?" That had been one of the project's theoretically potential outcomes, but no one had taken it seriously. It was too frightening for anyone to regard the Omega Solution as one of the likely results of their work.

Morley laughed. "I really don't know. Maybe. That might be in the data... but that's not the problem!"

Donaldson shook his head, mystified. "If that's not what had you so shaken up, then what the hell is?"

"Two things," Morley told him. "One is less disturbing than the other... you know that universes usually spall in pairs, right?"

"Yes. The twin universes axiom."

"And you know why they think that is..."

"Essentially, if viewed from a higher dimensional plane, it's the same phenomenon as when particles emerge from vacuum energy – in pairs, spinning in opposite directions until they loop around..."

"Loop around, collide, and cancel each other out," Morley said. "Because they carry opposite charges. And if they don't annihilate, if a gravitational source pulls them apart and sends them flying in different directions, they remain entangled."

"The data shows that?"

"The data proves that our universe, like all others we've observed, emerged along with an antimatter twin. Yes. And the two are probably spinning toward each other through superspace. And in a fraction of an instant... from the point of view of an observer in hypertime... they'll mutually annihilate."

"But from our point of view, that won't happen for trillions of years." Donaldson shrugged. "By then star formation will have long since ceased. In fact, all the stars in the universe will be gone, and everything will be swallowed by black holes... even the black holes! And then the black holes that remain will evaporate. What's more, the universe will have expanded so much that it'll be essentially an infinite, empty void." He shuddered. "I hate that. It gives me the willies. So, if you're upset that our universe and its antimatter twin are gonna collide and both disappear, I have to say I prefer it to the alternative... eternal, infinite emptiness."

"No," Morley said. "That used to be my existential nightmare, too. But... no."

"Thenwhat?! Donaldson shouted, finally out of patience. "What the fuck could be so terrible? What did the data show?"

"It did show where our universe came from," Morley said.

"So you said. And?"

"And our universe spalled from U-237*."

"And?"

"And U-237* spalled from U-3275dd."

"And?"

"And U–325dd was begat by U-4892, which was begat by U-33029-3t, which was begat by 67820... and back and back and back, four thousand eighty iterations, to U-*0001a," Morley said, sounding metronomic.

Donaldson nodded impatiently.

Then what Morley had said sank in.

"You mean...?"

"The same. The U-*001a, the VR universe that we created in the QF network. The one that spalls off of U-R2599... our own great-great-great to the Nth granddaughter universe."

"But you said..."

"I know I said that U-*001a also independently arose from U-R2599. And I know I said that we started with our own universe. But once you follow the spall diagram far enough from U-R2599, you get... us. The unmistakable signature of our own universe: The metric we set to match our own universe's own overall string frequency. Us. We came from a universe that we created, that came from us in turn, after we came from... or before we came from... Oh, my god." Morley squeezed his eyes shut. "I can't."

"We are our own grandpa," Donaldson said, his face ashen, stricken.

"What?"

"It's... it's a stupid song from a long time ago. It doesn't matter."

"But, yes," Morley said. "Yes, that's a good way to say it. We are our own grandpa. We create a universe that creates a universe that eventually leads right back to... to us. Some weird higher-dimensional circumnavigation of causality. A snake growing its own tail from its own mouth, or whatever that old symbol is..."

"Swallowing its tail. An ouroboros. But in reverse." Donaldson paused. "Oh my god," he whispered. "But this can't be correct."

"I've been running multiple verification processes for hours," Morley said, "And so far..." He shrugged. "No errors. It's true, it's correct, it's real. We didn't find God. We found... us."

Donaldson started laughing, then, much as Morley had been laughing earlier: Insanely, dangerously close to some edge he might tip over and never return.

Hall of mirrors, he thought distantly, as the laugher ratcheted up within him on a swelling tide of mania. Hall of mirrors. I thought about it, but I didn't really think about it...

"No," Donaldson gasped, "no... we did find God. Or at least, we found God's joke, and we're the punchline!"

The two physicists laughed for a long, long time, their laughter echoing into the larger space of the lab outside the computer room.

Todd and Christie looked across the room at each other.

Todd, shyly, haltingly, offered Christie a smile.

Next week we return with a burning vision that pierces through layers of time as travelers from the future venture back to the 21st century in order to ask a few questions. But the queries they pose, and the silences they offer, point to troubling conclusions... at least, they do for one man, a conspiracy theorist who believes he's figured out their sinister agenda. Can he save us from disaster? Can he force a perfect future and defy his own descendants? Or is the pattern set for all eternity? Look sharp if you want to understand the "Heritage" our hero tries to protect...