The magnetic fields containing them shifted slightly, peeling off a few protons on each pass into a slightly different path, a path shared with a stream of protons traveling in the opposite direction.
And then it happened.
The smeared wave function of one proton lined up perfectly with a proton heading in the opposite direction. Their collision unleashed a density of energy not seen since a billionth of a billionth of a second after the birth of this universe at the edge of its creation. The burst of energy tunneled the combined proton’s wave function through the fabric of space, pushing it into a lower vacuum-energy state.
The collapse began.
On the mountaintop in Montana, Vince leaned down to kiss Sheila Connors. Vince’s mother was looking at the comet just rising above the horizon. “It’s beautiful,” she said in the instant that the wave front of the expanding lower-energy vacuum-state bubble destroyed them.
The bubble expanded at the speed of light.
In half a hundredth of a second, a fraction of the blink of an eye, the planet Earth was gone. For nearly nine minutes, the crew of the Comet Catcher mission, their space habitat a hundred million miles away, were the only humans remaining in the universe.
Five hundred and forty seconds after the initiation of the collapse, they too were gone.
At the initiation of the bubble, Bob had inserted information about himself into the collapse sequence. Contained in the POND data had been instructions describing how to encode information onto the surface of the space-time nucleation bubble that the meta-stability event would initiate. This universe would collapse, but a new one would reform, carrying with it an echo of the past. That echo would be Bob’s memories, thrown out in patterns of high-energy neutrinos across the fabric of the multiverse.
The bubble was destroying this universe, converting it into another.
All the pain and suffering of the Earth had come to an end.
And within the bubble, all was calm.
Epilogue
Bob stared at the Great Seawall of New Amsterdam at the edge of Battery Park. It was the first time he had seen it with his own naked, natural eyes. If this place wasn’t still the financial capital of the world, they would have given up and moved to Manhattan by now. All the way up to Canal Street was at sea level now, guarded by an immense system of dikes and seawalls. Money was holding back the sea, but time was a thief and soon would steal it all.
“We need to wait a little bit longer.” Sid slapped Bob on the back. “The glasscutters need to verify us in person.”
The night was gray as the lights of the city lit up the sky, the concrete and metal and glass of the city the same color as the sky and the sea, all of it indistinct from the other in a precipitation that was neither rain nor mist, but something shifting in between.
He let a splinter sweep above the bay, sailing over the top of the Monument de Libertad, ringed by her own skirt of concrete that kept out the rising seas. Spinning further out to sea, he turned his point-of-view to look back at the twinkling city, extending his viewpoint far as he could see. Greater Sophia-Lisbon stretched down most of the east coast of the Republic of States, a hundred million people crowded into one unending metropolis.
They said the meek would inherit the Earth, but nobody had said anything about the kind of state it would be in when it was time for handover. The wind pushed a break in the clouds, revealing the faint twinkle of brave stars that tried to shine down on Gotham.
“Do you ever wonder why?”
Bob snapped his attention back into his body and looked at a man in a gray raincoat, with a hydrophobic shell, sitting on a park bench. The falling mist of rain danced away from him in a veil as the man looked toward the bay. That’s odd. No identity popped up in Bob’s identity algorithms. “Why what?” asked Bob.
The man looked into Bob’s eyes, smiling. “A hundred billion stars in this Milky Way galaxy, and a hundred billion more galaxies just like it. Life fills every available crack in this solar system, and most stars have planets—maybe a quarter of them with planets similar to Earth.”
“And yet?” Bob was still trying to get an identity.
“And yet not a peep from anyone out there. Do you ever wonder why?”
Except for the POND data, thought Bob, remembering the mysterious signal from a supposedly extraterrestrial source that Patricia had detected with her Pacific Ocean Neutrino Detector. Perhaps they should release information about it. It might even change the world from the downward spiral it was in, if the world realized that someone else was out there. But first they needed to decode it. That’s what Patricia had told them. What was inside the message might be as important as the message itself.
Bob shook his head, feeling weight bearing down. He was the wrong person for this.
The man was still smiling at Bob. “No? You never wonder? You look like you do.”
Bob sensed that something had gone terribly wrong. In his mind the Sea Wall before them opened up and the irresistible force of the black ocean beyond came swarming through, swallowing them and everything in its path, sweeping the world away. The vision pulled the breath out of him and he had to lean on the bench the man was sitting on.
The man reached for Bob to steady him. “Sometimes, to look out there, we need to look inside.”
The man looked familiar, but Bob’s internal systems were sure he’d never seen his face before. Bob sent splinters shooting out into the multiverse, looking for a recognition point, for any identity associated with his strange visitor. Still nothing. Bob regained his balance and tried to string out the conversation to buy time. “I don’t think about it much.”
The man retreated and smiled. “You should.”
Then, like a thunderbolt, it came: the priest. Who on Earth was the priest? Bob was inundated by a flood of information, images, and memories that began flowing into his meta-cognition systems. The POND data was unlocked by a time-cloaking encryption that he and Sid used to play with as kids. In this flood of decrypted information came the answer to his question: The priest is the Destroyer.
“We can go.” Sid grabbed Bob’s arm. “We’ve been vetted. The glasscutters have seen us.”
Bob shrugged Sid off. “One second.” In the background he was processing the memories of a world that had just ended. One that he’d destroyed.
Sid craned his neck to look around Bob. “Who’s that you’re talking to?”
Bob’s eyes grew wide as he understood.
Why hadn’t humans detected any signs of other intelligent beings out there? Fermi’s paradox. Trillions upon trillions of worlds, and all evidence pointing to life being endemic, but no other signs of intelligence, no other signs of other technological beings out there? Why?
Now Bob knew why.
Because there was nobody else out there.
Intelligent civilizations didn’t just fizzle out or tend to destroy themselves. They were purposely stamped out, erased by the Great Destroyer, the wrecker of worlds. Synthetic-reality technology was a convergent evolutionary point that all intelligent creatures tended to create. Creation of perfect sensory reality opened a tunnel to the underlying nature of reality, the fabric that underpinned the web of universes. Nervenet technology opened a tunnel that could be traveled, letting the Destroyer cross the threshold.
He tried to make sense of the POND stream. If the multiverse was an infinite series of universes, then why struggle? If everything happened an infinite number of times, then everything would happen, and nothing had any meaning. The answer was obvious: Because it wasn’t infinite. The choices that were made reverberated, forcing some realities to coalesce and become stronger, while others faded away.