In the course of interstellar exploration, a microorganism was encountered that interacted with some otherwise harmless synthetic foods to produce a horrible mutation within the brain; a person’s ability to think would slowly be diminished, until he was reduced to a mindless vegetable unable even to feed himself. The only known antidote was a spongelike lifeform native to the home of the microorganism. It contained an arresting agent that the best computers and best medical minds had not been able to duplicate.
The world was interdicted, of course, guarded by automated sentinels so none could reach it. All cultures of the microorganism were destroyed, and it was thought the problem had been solved. However, some of the organism and the sponge from the early researches fell into the hands of the underworld elite on a number of the Com Worlds and quickly was adopted as a means of furthering the aims of their interplanetary organization. By introducing the disease to a planet’s leadership, by letting some examples of deterioration be made and by possessing the only means of arresting that decay—the sponge they now grew in their own secret labs—the syndicate came to control more and more of the Com Worlds.
On the communal, genetically engineered world of New Harmony had lived the syndicate leader, a man not just born but engineered to rule. His name was Antor Trelig. Trelig was the perfect conqueror—a human being with a great intellect and in perfect physical condition, but one totally without morals, scruples, or other inconvenient inhibitions. As the Councillor for New Harmony, he knew who ran what everywhere. Gradually, he and his criminal syndicate had assumed control of world after world, their aim the eventual control of a majority of the Council. Com expansion was slowed, so that as each frontier world became “ripe,” Trelig’s sponge syndicate could wrest control. Furthermore, the slower the expansion the easier it was to attain a majority on the Council. Then from his luxurious and well-guarded planetoid, New Pompeii, the self-styled Emperor of a new Roman Empire had tried to gain control of literally everything.
Not a word of which, historian Tortoi Kai noted with increasing horror and fascination, could be found in the history books. The wars, the weapons locker, yes—but sponge was discussed only as an amok alien disease whose cure had been discovered about seven hundred and fifty years before, a cheap and easily distributed cure that had sent sponge the way of smallpox, polio, cancer, and other earlier ills.
Kai couldn’t resist something like this. She burrowed further into the records. Trelig, she found, had discovered the researches of an obscure scientist named Gilgram Zinder, who worked for some long-gone science institute. Somehow this Dr. Zinder had made a mammoth discovery, one so powerful that Trelig believed it would give him absolute control of the Com in a matter of months. So he had kidnapped Zinder’s young daughter, Nikki, and blackmailed Zinder into quitting the institute and moving to New Pompeii to continue his researches. Some recalcitrant Councillors had then been invited for a demonstration; a few had gone, the rest sent agents or representatives. Three days later not only they, but Trelig and the entire planetoid of New Pompeii, simply vanished. None ever returned. Ever.
This Tortoi Kai pieced together from thousands of bits of information. Obviously the experiment, the great demonstration, had somehow gone wrong—but how? And why? And what was the demonstration to have been? Trelig was no fool; Zinder had something, all right, somehow, somewhere. What was it?
Zinder was the best clue. His early lab research and theories were all filed, but they were technically beyond her. So she asked the computer for a basic statement of his theories in layman’s terms.
Basically, the computer explained, Zinder didn’t believe in the absolutes of any physical laws. All matter, all energy, he theorized, was an unnatural state whose existence was maintained by a set of mathematical equations. The natural state of the Universe was a thing at rest, a constant and evenly distributed “ether” or single type of energy. The matter and the energy that we know were caused by the transformation of this single, primal energy into the forms obeying the laws we know.
That the Universe had limits was well accepted in physics; it had been born of a massive explosion of a “white hole” that opened from an alternate Universe into ours for no known reason. Zinder believed that the matter and energy gushing through this white hole had somehow transmuted the rest-state primal energy, the ether of our own Universe, creating the seeds for the Universe as we know it. Generally, Zinder’s theory was in agreement with those of most of his colleagues except on the nature of the ether, the primal energy, of which there was no evidence. Powerful telescopes looking beyond the edge of the Universe had registered literally nothing. Besides, the scientists argued, if this Universe was naturally at rest, as Zinder proposed, then now, almost fifteen billion years later, we should observe signs of a return to the rest state. Our Universe had been nothing, a blank, until the white hole had opened.
Oddly, Zinder agreed that there should be signs of a return to the rest state; the fact that there wasn’t any didn’t convince him that he was wrong. He was the one scientist in a thousand who refuses to believe. Once created, Zinder argued, the matter and energy in our Universe were frozen, somehow, by the imposition of physical laws from outside. These laws were imposed and enforced, preventing our Universe from “damping out” the white hole intrusion as it should have. What agency could impose and enforce the posited laws? his critics had asked derisively. Was he suggesting that there was an omnipotent god, who caused the breakthrough and imposed such laws? Metaphysics! they sneered.
In fact, Zinder believed in such a god and believed he might be the one to prove scientifically the existence of such an intelligence. Other white holes must have broken through from time to time; there was physical evidence that some still did. They were damped out. Why wasn’t the big bang of the Creation damped?
Although a brilliant scientist, Zinder was somewhat practical, too. If science would not allow him to proceed, perhaps metaphysicians would. Endowed by a religious foundation he found personally distasteful, he had set up his lab on Makiva, a huge for-hire science complex, and built on entirely new principles he had developed a huge self-aware computer, with the sole aim of locating the primal energy, discovering why it couldn’t be seen or measured, and then, if possible, divining the imposed equations for those things we think of as real—divining them and, ultimately, rewriting them.
Tortoi Kai did not need to be a scientist to understand the implications of all that. Suppose, just suppose, Zinder had been right? If a thing could be analyzed to the nth degree so that the whole of it could be reduced to the mathematics of its existence, and then sufficient force was applied to change that math ever so slightly…
You’d be a god yourself. You’d be able to tailor-make whatever and whoever you needed. With the transmutation of any matter and any energy into anything else, you could have anything you wanted just for the asking. Anything.