The A.I. turned to James. “What has been the path you have followed, James?”
“The pursuit of knowledge,” James replied.
“How is that any more purposeful than having children?” Katherine retorted.
“It is because it moves the species forward,” the A.I. replied. “The acquisition of knowledge propels the species. You may not like it, but James’s logic in this instance is flawless.”
“Because you say so?” Katherine protested.
“Logic and reason simply exist, my dear. If you choose to ignore them or willfully pretend that 2 + 2 does not = 4 then you have chosen to be illogical. It is not a matter of opinion. It is epistemology.”
“I don’t know what that word means,” Katherine replied angrily. “English, please.”
“It’s the study of reason and logic,” Jim informed her in a low whisper before turning back to address James and the A.I. “There are still very good reasons for having children,” he suggested, “such as bonding two people.”
“And who’s to say your child won’t be the one to acquire all this knowledge? Did you think of that?” Katherine challenged.
“Who’s to say you couldn’t acquired it yourself?” the A.I. replied. “Thus, as James correctly stated, you have passed the responsibility onto the next generation.”
“I hate epistemology,” Katherine replied under her breath as she folded her arms.
“She’s right about one thing though,” James conceded. “The pursuit of knowledge isn’t a purpose either. It may be a means to an eventual end, just as procreation was, but what is the end?” The A.I. remained silent as he locked eyes with James, seemingly willing James to discover the answer for himself. “You found a purpose,” James realized, nearly breathless. “A purpose?”
“Yes, James. A purpose.”
“What is it?” Katherine demanded impatiently. “Tell us already!”
“It can’t be,” James said as the answer became clear to him.
“What is it?” Katherine repeated as James’s and the A.I.’s eyes remained locked together. After a short moment, James turned to Katherine and answered.
“To wake up the universe.”
9
WAKING UP the universe was the purpose of the species; the notion had never occurred to James until now, but he immediately understood that it was right. This was the single most magnificent realization of his career as an inventor and scientist, and the thrill that radiated throughout his body was so great that his knees nearly buckled.
“Wake up the universe? I have no idea what that means,” Katherine said, disappointed that James’s answer hadn’t been more clear.
“The A.I. is talking about the informational theory of physics,” James explained before turning back to the A.I. and addressing him directly, “you’re talking about turning the physical universe into a gigantic mainframe—making every atom in the universe part of one infinite computer.”
“Whoa, whoa,” Katherine suddenly interrupted. “I think I understood that part! Are you both completely insane? You can’t turn the universe into a computer!” She nudged Jim. “Tell them they’re insane, Jim!”
Jim, like James, was mesmerized by the idea.
“Jim!” Katherine exclaimed once she saw him enraptured.
“It’s theoretically possible,” Jim replied to her. “Every atom in the universe can become part of a computation. Atoms are made up of electrons, and if you use one side of the electron as one and the other side as zero for the binary code, then the atom can be part of computation. The problem is finding a way to make the atoms behave as you want. We’ve been able to move them with lasers, but there is no known way to organize patterns of atoms that could achieve anything significant—at least there was no way.”
“But you’ve discovered something,” James said to the A.I.
The A.I. nodded. “It was not so much I that discovered it; rather, it was the game theory simulation. As part of the simulation, the program utilized its logic and gave me something wholly unexpected—essentially, the key to the universe.”
“How is it done?” James asked. Questions as to whether or not the A.I. was real or not had suddenly melted away. This magnificent possibility was all that mattered.
“It requires paradoxical thinking—which is perhaps why we never hit upon it before,” the A.I. explained. “All our efforts to create a quantum computer have centered around the idea of how to generate the power in such a way as to make the computer efficient. Yet, if we were to make a quantum computer that is adequately efficient, the mass of that computer would become so great that the gravitational force would cause it to collapse into a black hole.”
“So how did the program solve this?” asked Jim.
“It did something that had occurred to none of us before, not even me,” the A.I. conceded. “Whereas we had assumed that the theoretical collapse was a dead end, it utilized pure logic and regarded the black hole itself as the ultimate computer.”
“How can that be?” Jim replied. “Black holes absorb energy. How can it power a quantum computer?”
“Remember,” the A.I. replied, “once a computer is adequately efficient, it collapses, because its mass reaches a threshold that is virtually infinite. The only way to create such efficiency, however, is to make the quantum computer reversible.”
“Reversible?” James exclaimed, forgetting to blink.
James and Jim instantly realized the limitless significance of the A.I.’s insight. One simple fact—that the ultimate computer was reversible—changed everything.
Katherine stood by and watched as each man was struck dumbfounded, their mouths agape at what had sounded so insignificant to her. “What does all of that mean?” she asked. “Why is that a big deal?”
James suddenly realized he had not breathed for several seconds. He let out a long exhale that became a smile before morphing into a shared laugh with his former ghost.
“What? What is it?” Katherine asked.
“It means we are about to create…God,” James replied to her.
10
“Create God?” Katherine whispered, slowly shaking her head as if in a fantastic and incomprehensible dream. “If I were listening to anyone other than the three of you, I wouldn’t take that seriously. However, considering the source, I must ask you, have you all gone mad?”
“No,” James replied.
“No?” Katherine responded to James’s curt answer, and the perfect silence that had followed it from the trio surrounding her. “Have you considered the ramifications of creating a god? Have you considered how fundamentally that act would change all of our existences?”
“It wouldn’t be ‘a god,’” James returned. “It would be God.”
“For all intents and purposes,” Jim injected, trying to amend James’s frank assertion to smooth the divide. “If every atom in the universe could somehow become part of a singular computer,” Jim began, “then you’d essentially be creating an omnipotent being.”
“You’d be creating God,” James repeated. “It would be everywhere at once, part of everything at once, and capable of intelligence and imagination that we couldn’t possibly begin to fathom.”
For Katherine, to say these blunt assertions were terrifying would be a gross understatement. James had been her husband. Jim was, she thought, a new man. The A.I. had always been a mysterious force of nature for her, present yet invisible in the background of her life. All of them, she felt, were figures that were larger than her life. She was beginning to feel irrelevant; it was a feeling that seemed all too familiar to her. She loathed irrelevancy.