So, to do its job, every once in a while the error-checker would make little changes in the model universe’s programming—that is, in its basic physical laws.
What that meant was that until the error-checker did its job, sometimes things wouldn’t exactly add up in the model. Computation and observation might give numbers that were a tad different from each other—I don’t mean big time, I mean like maybe a difference in the tenth or twelfth decimal. Like, Barrow said, the afore-mentioned apparent variation of a few parts per million in the fine structure constant.
That was one of the things that had been on Dad’s little list, I remembered. It wasn’t all. There was also the way the Moon had suddenly seemed to jump into a closer orbit. Or the heavy neutrino thing. Or the way this ortho-positronium stuff decayed a little bit too fast. So I turned off my book, and closed Dad’s paper-and-print one, and went out to the kitchen to see how Rebecca was coming along with dinner. And I thought, no matter what Dad thought of my career choices, it might be a good idea if I tried to sign up for some physics or astronomy courses this semester.
Because Labor Day was late that year, Tuesday was the first day of school. It rained. Cold breezes came in off the ocean. Summer looked like it was finally, definitely over.
That is always a pretty sad time of the year for me, though not for the reasons my husband thinks. It’s really just because of the weather. September means that pretty soon the ice and snow will be coming, and all those lovely green landscapes will turn to brown and black, and all the butterflies will be heading for Cape May and the long flutter across the bay to Delmarva and their winter home in Mexico.
What Ron thinks it is, of course, is because of what 9/11 means to me. He doesn’t want me sitting around the house on the day when I might accidentally catch a glimpse of the pictures the government makes the newspeople show on every anniversary of the day, so we citizens won’t forget to hate the Islamic terrorists. It’s always the same scene they show, too. The two towers are standing there with one of them on fire already. Then the second jet slides silent and deadly across the sky. Until it passes behind the tower that’s burning, and, a few moments later, a great big tulip of flame pops out of the middle of the other tower. That was the scene that had sent shivers of horror over a thousand audiences, over the decades since it happened. Especially—yes, Ron wasn’t totally wrong—especially for me. Because I knew very well that what that flame jet contained, among a whole lot of other things, was the few puffs of thousand-degree plasma that were all that there was left of my mom.
So I can’t deny that the subject crossed my mind now and then on that day. I didn’t cry, though. Not even once. Not even when I was in the ladies’ room, in the break between World Lit 211 and Poli Sci 218, and no one was there to hear. And I wasn’t surprised when I came out of my last class for the day and Ron was standing there with a white-rose wrist corsage in one hand and my dancing shoes in the other. “Feel like a couple of lesginkas tonight, hon? Maybe dinner first at that oyster place down by the water?”
As I say, he was a sweet man.
So we did have the dinner—bluefish for him, pepper shrimp for me—and Ron was just paying the check when his phone chirped. The voice was my father’s, upset, shouting so loud that I could hear the phone across the table. “It’s crazy, Ron,” he yelled. “Jesus! Can you believe it?”
For some reason my husband reached over and put his arm around me then. His voice was tight when he asked, “Believe what, Steve?”
“You didn’t hear? Christ, turn your damn omni on! All the labs are reporting it—Argo-Fermi, Caltech, four or five others. The spectra went nuts for all of them at the same time. It’s the fine structure constant, Ron! It isn’t constant any more!”
Brigadier General Ronald R. Khoshaba
Even now I have trouble believing that what Steve Avedon told me was true, but there it was. Every lab was confirming it—not only what was left of the American labs but ultimately CERN and Bologna and Beijing as well. And not just the fine structure constant, either. That radar measurement that put the Moon closer than it should have been wasn’t because the Moon had moved, it was because c, that utterly unchangeable speed of light called c, had gone and changed on us and was now just that little bit faster. Half a dozen other numbers that had been holy writ for generations were suddenly in doubt, too. And so the question that we faced—and that the whole scientific community faced, and before long that the whole world faced—was: who was doing this? And was it possible that all those long-ago speculations had any conceivable basis in fact?
Common sense said “No!” Well, that wasn’t really it. What common sense actually said was, “Holy crap, man, are you out of your mind?” I mean, ideas like that weren’t science. They were the stuff of the electronic games the little kids were playing when their parents weren’t paying attention, because they were busy on their own computers. Comic-book stuff. Nothing that any sensible person would believe in for a single second.
Except that even the sensible people had just about run out of alternative explanations for the way scientific dogma was turning out to be just dumb-headed wrong. So we sensible people were stuck.
We couldn’t believe it, and couldn’t dismiss it, either. The evidence was right there, in every physics lab and astronomical observatory in the world. Like it or not, there was a real, non-zero possibility that somebody—some Somebody, somewhere or other—was running a simulation of a universe as some kind of an experiment, and that simulated universe was the one we all lived in.
Well, in a certain way that wasn’t all bad, you know. Since Somebody Else was making up the rules that this universe ran by we didn’t have to drive ourselves crazy trying to make sense of the contradictions. For instance, now we didn’t have to invent negative gravity to explain the acceleration of distant galaxies. Nor did we have to postulate such weird concepts as scalar fields—that is, particles like a photon or proton, but incomparably bigger, in fact light-years in diameter—just so we could account for some anomalous clumping in some other galaxies. We didn’t need to account for anything at all, really. Anything that was puzzling was, hey, just one more glitch in the superbeing’s simulation. Made science a lot easier.
But all of that was a long time ago. When Silvie was still my wife, when the United States was still run by the President and the Congress, when nobody had yet heard of the Doctrine of the Beloved Experimenter.
Still, I should have guessed that some human beings would have seen a way to do themselves some good out of it. Somebody always had, out of every other unexpected disaster in human history, hadn’t they? Why should this be any different?
The big thing on my mind that day wasn’t scientific anomalies. I was more concerned about how badly the War was going. The War had never gone very well, but I was just beginning to see just how bad badly could be.
All my life I had hoped that some day I would get a chance to go back and visit Baghdad, which was where my parents had lived up until the time that Saddam made the whole country of Iraq unlivable for them. They talked a lot about the old place while I was growing up in Minnesota. Homesick, I guess, and probably that made them glamorize it. What they made it sound like was a real Ali Baba-Scheherezade kind of movie-set place, only with flush toilets.
Well, Baghdad wasn’t like that any more. (Though neither was anything else.)