Emergence

Emergence

E. R. Henderson

Copyright 2014 Eric Henderson & Henderbooks

Copyright 2014 Eric Henderson & Henderbooks

[email protected]

www.erichenderson.com

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-1-312-85177-1

What really happened

What really happened

Chapter 1

The Program

There were a lot of great jobs in the multiverse.

Creating Life was the best.

Everyone who entered the program knew this. In fact, they all felt that they were predestined to become a ‘Creator’.

Getting into the program was not easy and, once in, completing the program was even harder.  Nonetheless, failure to complete the program was almost unprecedented.

Almost.

Every student knew the story of Clathar.  He was the best of the best.  An incredible programmer, he memorized the entire Base Code.

Memorized it!

This alone positioned him as a myth rather than a real Being.  How could anyone memorize the Base Code?  The origin of the Base Code was even more mythical than Clathar.  It had simply sprung from The Origin.  The beginning of everything.

Almost everything else in the multiverse could be derived from first principles.  Using all the rules of nature one could, with enough knowledge and talent, create solar systems, convert dark matter, travel faster than light and, importantly, transcend the Time Space Continuum, or TSC, as everyone referred it to now. But the Base Code was different. It simply ‘was’.

Clathar was a dark figure in the history of the Beings.  He had mastered the Base Code and created life forms, as did every student as part of their curriculum and requirements for graduation.  But he had gone further, and in the wrong direction.  His experiment dominated those of all of his peers.  The world that was their Petri dish became infested with violence and destruction.  If it had not been for the quick action of his Mentor, whose name remained unknown, that darkness would have spread through space and eventually the entire TSC.  If that had happened, the return to The Origin would have been a few ‘time wedges’, or billions of Earth years, earlier than expected, and infinitely more catastrophic.

The story goes that Clathar’s anonymous mentor was reading through the student’s notebooks when he noticed a tiny inconsistency in Clathar’s code. The Base Code was, as always, correct, but with one curious aberration. The mentor did not have Clathar’s ability to memorize the entire Base Code, but he did have access to it, as did all students upon entry to the program.  He just had a sense, an intuition that somewhere in his experiential database there was a conflict with Clathar’s rendition.

He spent many microwedges, which is how the Beings designated units of time equaling about a thousand Earth years, searching the Base Code and finally found it.  A small, insignificant-looking inversion in a subroutine involving the evolution of thought and belief, two processes that were necessary for species evolution, but in perpetual fundamental conflict.

The story says that upon finding the inversion and having an epiphany about the ramifications the mentor confronted Clathar.  Clathar calmly said, The multiverse is ultimately a boring place. Your teachings are tedious.  Everything is so dismal and the end is so absolute, I just decided to speed it a long a bit.

To state this heresy so bluntly and then to carry out unsanctioned experimental protocols was grounds for serious discipline, even dismissal.

For the first time in the history of the Beings a decision had to be made about the fate of another Being. Clathar was ejected from the program, entrapped in his own empty universe and allowed to live until the point of organic demise. Upon his death, Clathar’s body was recovered, his code was explored and it was discovered that sometime in childhood there had been an extraordinarily improbable, but not impossible, mutation.  Apparently, despite the code scans that are performed regularly to ensure the health and tranquility of the Being society, the Debuggers missed this error because they had considered it to be an impossibility.

Improbable is not the same as impossible.  The Beings learned this lesson and now the Debuggers are held responsible for error-free scanning of every single bit of code rigorously, overlooking nothing.

To the Beings the Clathar myth was a powerful metaphor for the responsibility that rested with the title Creator and whether true or not, a Clatharian event had never occurred again.

Chapter 2

The Experiment

Nebel and Bezaat sat at the bench in the common bubble.  They had been bench mates for nearly nine hundred nanowedges, Nebel having joined the program just fifty nanowedges after Bezaat. In that time they had become both friends and competitors.  Across the bubble sat Rast.  She was no one’s friend and everyone’s competitor.  She was the smartest, fastest and most promising of the lab mates.  The head of the program, one of the Original Six, the revered Sen Dree Norp had, of course, taken a special liking to Rast because of her prodigious skills.  However, among Sen Norp’s many admirable characteristics was his ability to show equivalent degrees of affection and compassion to all of his students.  Currently, Sen Norp was in his bubble elsewhere in the multiverse and oblivious to the laboratory drama that unfolded within this small group of future Creators.

Damn that Rast, she is such a diva.  I swear that she looks at my database when I am in my bubble, said Nebel.

Yeah, right, as if you had anything in your database that is not already old news to her.  Just face it, she was embellished with the superior code and that is simply the way of things.

This was Bezaat’s approach to all undesirable situations.  It was just ‘the way of things’.  Perhaps that is why Sen Norp had the foresight to bestow upon Bezaat the chore of writing the surrender code.

They all worked diligently, as students must to achieve the prestigious title of ‘Sen’.  They were only the third generation to be allowed into the program.  At four wedges (or four billion Earth year equivalents) Post Origin, the Original Six decided that it was time to produce the next generation of Creators. Since that decision, thirty-five Creators had made it through the program and were out in the infinite multiverse practicing their art.

Creating Life.

It typically took a good microwedge (a thousand Earth year equivalents) to accumulate enough work experience be worthy of the title of Sen and the license to traverse the TSC and the multiverse to start the life process again and again, but each time with twists and probability ramifications. Like Bezaat and Nebel, Rast was almost nine hundred nanowedges into the program but her lab mates sensed that she was almost done because of her superior capabilities.

At the last meeting, held diligently every nanowedge, Sen Norp had each student discuss their current progress and the results of past experiments. These experiments were all simulations based on every known principle of the multiverse.  The idea was to force the students to endure the unexpected consequences of sloppy programming so that the real experiment had a good chance of success.  As expected, most reports of simulated experiments were dismal failures.  Fortunately, Sen Norp had an unlimited budget, one of the benefits of being one of the Original Six. This gave him unlimited access to simulated Aggregators. These powerful computational frameworks were critical for their experiments.  Running simulations put a drain on all local computational resources. He could not help but spoil his students due to his resource access.  He had, of course, come up old school, working with tangible matter and creating life the good old fashion way: in a test tube.  Now they had the simulated Aggregator and, at the end of the program, when they performed the real experiment, the Universe was their test tube. 

Bezaat was the first at the meeting to discuss his simulations. The planets formed as expected and I seeded two of them with my current constructs. I collected data points every 500 million rotations.

He showed a graph with the labels of ‘Time’ vs. ‘Emergence’.  The line was parabolic, as it should be, but at a point labeled 100 million rotations, the parabola took a nosedive and intersected the Emergence zero value coordinate.

What do you think happened? said Sen Norp.

Well, I collected samples and did the usual code analysis.  A number of embedded bouncers had been excised and reinserted, but not the way I expected them to. This led to catastrophic algorithmic distress and, basically, the whole experiment went down the poop shoot.

Everyone but Rast laughed.

Sen Norp said, Well, that is a good start, if a stinky ending, so keep at it.  Try inserting delta signals both before and after the bouncer code, make sure they relate to the starter elements in an iterative fashion. You will be happy, trust me.

They always did.  Sen Norp never made mistakes.  He knew everything and was infinitely patient with those that did not, which was everyone, except Rast.

Nebel’s presentation went pretty much the same as Bezaat’s, culminating in a planetary catastrophe of solar system proportions.  A few kind words of guidance and insight from Sen Norp got her back on track.

Then came Rast.  Both Nebel and Bezaat took a picowedge to calm themselves for what was to be another demonstration of superior intellect and performance. 

Rast, not disappointing, gave an exemplary presentation.  Clearly identifying what she had set out to do which was nothing less than the creation of sentient life. She expertly described how far her experiment had progressed, why it had failed, how she was going to fix it.  Then she sat down, neither expecting nor requiring any guidance from her mentor.  Sen Norp simply said, Good work Rast.  You are on the right track.

Sen Norp then stood and smiled saying,  Today I have an announcement to make. Two actually.

First, we are going to use the newest Aggregator in five nanowedges for the final experiment.  I need all of you to complete your work in that time frame.  We want this experiment to be a crowning achievement for you and the program.

Second, in six nanowedges I will be moving to a new domain in Multiverse AD3427.  You are all, of course, invited to join me there but once we leave you will not have much, if any, opportunity to accumulate more data in this multiverse.  You know how the TSC Patrol feels about that kind of thing.

It was silent as the shock wave permeated the common bubble.

Moving!  Holy smokes, said Nebel finally.  Man, we have a lot of work to do before then Sen Norp.

That’s right Nebel, so the three of you better get crackin’.  I would recommend that you live in the lab as much as possible, schedule your TSC travel as far ahead of time as possible, so to speak, and look at this as an opportunity to accelerate your progress so you can blossom into what I am sure will be magnificent careers as Creators.

With that stunning announcement, Sen Norp bid them farewell, formed his bubbled and was gone with a low hum and shimmering of space.

Back in the lab the three of them were sitting around the common bubble, imbibing a photon-matter concoction that Bezaat had brought in.

This is going to throw a serious baculum in the machine, said Rast, using the term for an organic reproductive facilitator that she had invented.

Nebel and Bezaat looked at each other, startled by Rast’s speaking to them and, even more so, for her use of an antiquated term for the architectural element for mating in some species.  Bezaat said, No kidding.  But at least you are almost done anyway so you should be good to go, right?

Rast looked at them for a long time, saying nothing.

Right? said Nebel, trying to motivate more of the miraculous words from a mouth that rarely opened.

Look, let’s just say that there might be one or two problems that I did not bring up in the meeting today, and I’d like to keep them to myself for the time being.  I’ve been tossing around some, um, ‘unconventional’ ideas that could lead to unanticipated consequences if not considered with great care.

Nebel and Bezaat stared at Rast.  That was more words then she had spoken to them directly in the last half of a microwedge.

Right on, said Bezaat finally.  We have plenty to do anyway, but if you need some help or want to bounce ideas around, I am all for it, and I am sure Nebel feels the same way, right Nebel?

Most definitely, this is soooo cooool!

Yeah, cool, said Rast, enigmatically enough to make it impossible to determine if she was being facetious or sincere.

They went back to their alcoves and continued to work, now at an even more feverish pace since the timeline had been so rigorously defined.

The timeline...always an issue...

Chapter 3

SoulGen™

Tracy was looking at her data, not quite sure what to make of it.  She had provided gene screens for over three hundred thousand couples now and the correlation was amazing. Even more amazing was the fact that Dr. Woodrow had had the foresight to realize that in the billion dollar drug development programs there was an enormous opportunity to make a ton of money on what the drug companies would consider the dregs of their industry.  Genetic screening of individuals was about as challenging as making a cup of coffee.  In fact, there were several similarities: follow a recipe, get a result, and enjoy the buzz.

However, the genius of Wilson Woodrow went far beyond merely the idea that there are correlates between matrimonial harmony and gene profiles. He was able to secure funding, build a business and actually do first-rate science all at the same time!

As it turned out the original premise was only the tip of the iceberg.  It went like this.  Somewhere out there exists the perfect mate.  Unfortunately most people on planet Earth will never even be in the same city as their soul mate, let alone meet them.  All metaphysical aspirations aside, the probability of finding the yin to your yang was about zero. 

However....

What if there was a way to screen people, not at the commercially successful but highly bogus behavioral level, but at the genetic level, for gene ensembles that correlated strongly with personal vibing?

The National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation laughed Wilson out of their institutes many times before he won a small private grant to do the simplest of experiments. Under the guise of looking for genes related to susceptibility to HIV infection (which he did discover) Dr. Wilson Woodrow screened one hundred and thirty two couples that had been happily married for over fifty years.  He looked at the genome of each of the two hundred and sixty four individuals and came up with a whopper.  There were no fewer than eighty-seven genes that correlated strongly with a happy marriage.  Even more amazing was that the control experiments, the same study with people who did not get along, got divorced, cheated on their spouses, and so forth, revealed no such correlation.

He had done it:  identified the soul mate genes.

Of course, there was a lot of real science to be done, figuring out what the genes did, how they worked, why they correlated with marital bliss.  But that was standard operating procedure.  Wilson published a hugely controversial paper on the Bliss Gene Ensemble in the premier journal Science and was an immediate Oprah sensation.  After that, raising the twenty million dollars to seed the ocean-side start up SoulGen, LLC was easy.  The two-year-old company had grown to one hundred and seventy employees and was running in the black.  They processed a thousand SoulChips a day at a thousand dollars a pop.  A million dollars of gross revenue a day, 365 million a year, a billion dollar valuation, and one hell of a