Chapter N

Right now I’m on top of the world.

Let me welcome you to ‘New City’, where you can ask “what happened to the old one?” laugh and then return to your glass of room temperature water. Experience a life where no one lives below the 100th floor, and opening your windows means inviting in a cloud. The food is the best in the system, the culture is vibrant and, most importantly, the women are beautiful.

But none of them as beautiful as my (as of this morning) fiancé, Maya. We are dining at the finest restaurant in our building to celebrate.

“How’s the, uh, cricket a la mode?” I ask her with an inquisitive eyebrow.

But she ignores me.

I can’t blame her, ever since this morning she’s been transfixed by the (very expensive) diamond ring I proposed with. Right now she’s taking pictures of it to share with her followers on ‘Y’, the everything app.

“Babe?”

“Leo, do you think you could move for a second? You’re in frame right now.”

“Oh yeah, sure.”

I stand up, let her take her photo and sit back down.

“Sorry babe, what did you want?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m happy you like the ring.”

Her star-like eyes light up more than I thought possible.

“Yeah, it’s so BIG. The diamond, I mean.”

“You didn’t have to clarify,” I laugh.

We’ve always had this kind of back-and-forth relationship. It’s nice to be comfortable joking about each other’s insecurities.

“So Leo,” Maya says as she seductively slides a hand across the table to grab mine, “are you ready for tonight?”

Am. I. Ever.

“Are you?”

“Depends on what you have planned.”

“You remember that thing we did with the wasps.”

“It’s pretty hard to forget.”

“Ok well, I bought a bunch of wasps…”

Suddenly my phone goes off. I don’t have to think for a second about who it is.

“One second,” I plead with her.

“...work?”

“Work.”

In the few seconds I was talking to Maya I have received another message.

“Leo! Get in here now!”

“I need you.”

It seems Professor Koeman has overextended himself again. I’m no stranger to texts and calls in the middle of the night begging, demanding, that I come and help him.

The professor commands my immense respect but I told him today not to contact me no matter what.

I place my phone back on the table and return my gaze to my mildly annoyed fiance.

“Sorry about that. Anyway, the Mongolian space wasps.”

Buzz.

Buzz.

Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

That sound is unfortunately not the alluring buzz of the polistes astralis mongolicus, but once more of unwelcome labour law violations.

I snatch my vibrating phone off the table to turn it off. I ask for one day off every 3 years, I’m going to be married to Maya, not my work.

Or so I want to tell myself.

“WE DID IT,” reads the last message.

Being here with Maya means nothing, an era is being defined right beneath our feet, I won’t miss that.

“I have to go.”

Maybe that came across as callous as it was meant to be because Maya’s face crumbles from a smile back to its usual state of thinly veiled disappointment.

“For some reason, you don’t look like you’re kidding.”

“That’s because I’m not.”

She doesn’t ask me something stupid like ‘is work more important than me?’ She’s a smart girl, she knows that it is.

***

“Thought today was your day off junior,” the guard on duty chuckles as he hands me the standard cup of pills. Even though I’m technically a professor too, I get called Junior because they can’t bestow the professor with a higher title. Even I can somewhat understand, though the term ‘junior’ makes the gap between us seem wider than it is.

“So did I fella.”

“What happened?”

“History waits for no man.”

He gives me a wry smile, none of the military staffers here believe in what we’re doing. They think of ‘project everything’ as the ambitious delusion of a man who has earned the right to do whatever the fuck he wants. Men, I should say, it’s our shared ambition.

“Looks like you’re clean,” the guard informs me after short the observation period ends. I grab my clothes back off the machine and get dressed as quickly as possible.

“No need to rush junior, ‘history’ ain’t changing as fast as you are.”

He probably thought that was funny, but I don’t have time to tell him why it isn’t. So I get on the elevator and punch in the access codes for our floor.

The long ride down gives me time to think about the journey here.

10 years ago, I was putting the finishing touches on my PhD thesis, readying myself for a cushy life working for some bank’s cyber security team. Koeman was my professor at the time.

He specialized in simulating consciousness, ‘Koeman’s theorem’, the mathematics that makes robotic sentience possible, is named for him after all. He was already years past that era defining discovery before I was even born. He was extremely overqualified to be a college professor but he seemed to get a kick out of dunking on students who thought they new more than him. I was one of those students.

One day, he pulls me aside and tells me about an idea he has.

“We can simulate it all, Leo, the whole damn thing!”

The ‘thing’ in question? Well, everything, the universe. He was telling me about his conception of how to do something thought impossible. I didn’t really understand the ins and outs of the mathematics but in layman's terms, his idea was to simulate the universe based on the exact initial state of the Big Bang. Code in the laws of physics, assume a few truths here and there, carry the 2 and, with some luck, you should get an accurate reflection of reality.

Naturally I jumped at the chance to work on such a thing, this is how you become one of those ‘great men’ philosophers love talking about.

The ding of the elevator telling me it’s reached floor -N takes me out of my reminiscing.

Passing through another security check I rush to the gigantic room where the supercomputer we’ve come to call ‘the universe’ is.

As the doors slide open in front of me, I see something I expected but still cannot believe.

Our decade of repeated experiments had brought us simulations of many universe-like things, but nothing resembling what we know today. Much closer to an artist's depiction of hell than some sort of reality. But right now, on the giant monitor in front of me, I’m watching a planet that looks a lot like Earth, rotating at speeds of thousands of years a second. Slowly the supercontinent Pangea forms in front of me. It looks a little off but it doesn’t matter. This is the first thing we’ve gotten even close to Earth-like, even if it isn’t perfect, this proves that it’s possible.

I’ve been slowly stumbling towards the screen, entranced by what I’m seeing. When I’m close enough to touch it, I freeze.

Less believable but more expected, I find the Professor's body slumped over in his chair, with the mind that conceived this glorious machine now splattered all across it.