We looked out the window; the suspended cylinder, beneath the dome, was not visible except in a vid projection. The room filled with a whine and distinct clicks and growls and howls. “Atoms of matter and mirror matter meeting,” Chinjia explained, adjusting the sound. “They’re bouncing around within the cylinder. The cylinder’s heating up, and…” Her finger traced a new graph on the display. “Here’s gamma ray production. We expect about ten percent efficiency, and of course some interaction with the bottle… Neutron flux now.”
“So far, we’ve created about a trillion molecules of mirror hydrogen,” Charles said. “The reaction has produced about fifty-four joules.”
“That should be enough,” Zenger said. “There seems to be heat and neutrons.”
Charles told Leander to stop the experiment. Leander touched the control panel and the red cube and graph disappeared.
“We’ve thought of ways to increase efficiency,” Charles said. “We can convert half of the molecules in the cylinder to mirror matter in a shape that interlocks with the normal hydrogen. The ambiplasma pressure will push fleeing molecules and particles into optimum configuration for further interaction. Ninety percent destruction would occur. But that would vaporize the cylinder and part of the apparatus and dome.”
Zenger nodded. “To the extent that we can make any judgments, it seems you’ve done something interesting.”
Charles said, “We’ll have an arbeiter remove the cylinder and put it in the back of the lab. You can examine it remotely.”
Zenger said, “I assume we can’t take it with us?”
All heads turned to me. “It should stay here,” I said.
“Very exciting indeed,” Zenger said flatly.
An arbeiter moved the cylinder to an isolation box at the rear of the lab. While Zenger and Casares looked it over, muttering quietly to themselves, Charles sat across from me in the dining booth. I forked through an uninspired bowl of nano food.
“Bit of a letdown?” he asked.
“Not at all,” I said, looking up with what I hoped was calm dignity. “I didn’t expect Trinity.”
He smiled briefly. “You’ve been reading history, too. Mind if I eat with you?”
I shook my head. He returned with his own bowl. I was nearly finished, but clearly, he wanted to talk.
“Do you still resent what we’ve done?” he asked.
“I’ve never resented any of this,” I said.
“No,” he said, suspending his tone between statement and question. “It’s only going to get more stressful.”
“You said that years ago.”
“Was I right?” he asked.
“You were right.”
He tasted the paste, made a face and dropped his fork into the bowl. “Not the best,” he said. “It’s a tradition. Scientists on Mars must eat stale nanofood. Something to do with creativity. Remember the terrible wine at Trés Haut Médoc? I’m still sorry about that.”
“The wine,” I clarified.
“Not just the wine.”
I leaned my head to one side, determined to avoid the subject, and pulled out my slate. “Do you have any other demonstrations? This one — ”
“Isn’t going to impress politicians. I know. We can vaporize Olympus Mons if you wish.”
For a moment, I couldn’t tell whether he was joking. “That would be… mature,” I said.
Charles laughed and toyed with his bowl, tipping it with a finger. “We can do a lot more. As Stephen said on the way here, we can build a super-efficient, high-acceleration mirror matter drive, better than the best Earth can make. We can install it in a standard Solar System liner and zip around like hornets. Make a planetary tour in months instead of decades. With a fully equipped engineering plant, we could put it all together in sixty or seventy days.”
“A ship like that would be very bright, visible across the Solar System,” I said. “How about something that won’t upset Earth?”
Charles put his elbows on the table. “Of course,” he said. “Stephen and I have been planning a number of demonstrations, with varying degrees of sophistication. Experts to yahoos. Bring them on.”
He was being a shade too flippant, given the nature of our problem, but I had tired of bringing him up short. “I’m still not well versed on physics,” I said.
“You really should be,” he chided. “I don’t use one, but I could recommend a good enhancement. Martian-made.”
“No thank you. Not right now.” I made sure the others were still out of hearing. “But I’m curious. How did you manage all this?”
Charles leaned forward, face as bright and eager as a child’s, and placed his hands on the table. “I’ve always wrestled with stupid problems — the really big problems. It’s stupid to wrestle with them, because many of them circle back to the language used to state them — and that’s a fool’s chase.
“But one problem seemed truly big and truly interesting — fundamental. Mathematics is powerful. We can create equations to use as tools to describe nature. We can use them to predict what will happen. What gives mathematics such power? It took me years to come to a conclusion, and when I did, I told nobody — because the conclusion was so simple, and I was too young, and there was no way to prove anything.
“So I waited. I studied the Ice Pit, all I could find about William Pierce and his work, his fatal discovery. I knew that my simple solution fit into his theories — explained and supplemented them, in fact. I joined other people who seemed in tune with me, worked with them and prodded them… My ideas became testable.
“Mathematics is made of systems of rules. The universe seems to operate by a set of rules, as well — not so precisely, but then, measurements aren’t ever precise in nature. That in itself should have given everybody a clue.
‘The rules of math give it the quality of a computational machine. We can design computers using mathematical concepts and rules, because math is a computational system. The computer’s operation is not so different from math itself — it’s math operating in light and matter. And math is useful in describing and predicting nature because nature itself uses a set of rules. Nature behaves as if it is a computational system.
“When we do math in our heads, we store results — and the rules themselves — in our heads or on paper, or in other kinds of memory. Our brains become the computer.
“The universe stores the results of its operations as nature. I do not confuse nature with reality. At a fundamental level, reality is the set of rules the results of whose interactions are nature. Part of the problem of reconciling quantum mechanics with larger-scale phenomena comes from mistaking results for rules, — a habit built into our brains, good for survival, but not for physics.
“The results change if the rules change. Our universe evolved ages ago out of a chaos of possible rules… An original foundation or ground that simply bubbled with possibilities. Sets of rules vanished in the chaos, because they were not consistent — they could not survive against more rigorous, meaningful sets. I don’t mean ‘survive’ in time, either — they simply canceled and negated in a time-free eternity. But sets of rules did come into existence which were not immediately contradictory, which could work as free-standing, computational matrixes.
“Those which strongly contradicted — whose rules could not produce long-lived results — were simply not ‘recorded.’ They vanished. Those whose results could interact and not contradict, at least for a while, survived.
“The universe we see uses an evolved, self-consistent set of rules, and the rules of mathematics can be made to more or less agree.
“Mathematics is a computational matrix. Its power to describe and predict is no puzzle if the observed universe is the result of a computational matrix. No mystery — a fundamental clue.”