After Jon left his office, Harry realized that he needed to visit the men’s room. Five minutes later, while washing his hands, he studied his gaunt face in the mirror. There were dark circles under his eyes and his pupils were dilated, even though the lights in the men’s room were bright. In the back of his mind he realized that he should be tired, only he wasn’t. He felt absolutely great, euphoric even. He leaned over the sink, splashed some cold water on his face, and felt even better
On the way back to his office, he picked up a can of soda and a chocolate bar in the break room. An attractive middle-aged woman with prematurely gray hair was seated at the table, eating a granola bar and reading a newspaper. When Harry entered the room she looked up and stared at him with an odd look on her face, finally bursting into laughter. What the hell is she laughing at? Harry thought and then quickly dismissed her from his thoughts.
When Harry returned to his office, he stretched his arms and moved them in a sort of boxing motion to loosen up his shoulders. Then he touched his toes a couple of times to relax his leg muscles. As he did this, he noticed for the first time that when he had zipped up in the men’s room, he had zipped up over his shirttail. Eight inches of it stuck out of the top part of his fly. “Jeez!” he said aloud as he fixed the problem. He stretched once more before again taking his seat and logging back on to Big Moe.
A half minute later he experienced the odd resonance he always felt when the Josephson’s junction activated. It was a pins-and-needles type sensation at the top of his skull. As the effect heightened, he had the usual eerie feeling that he was in two places at once. He was distantly aware of his body as a dead weight in his chair and was tuned into the rhythm of his heartbeat. But his mind had been liberated. It was as though it had risen above the earth and was floating across a vast horizon. An ocean of information roiled below him, like waves in a sea, an endless ripple of data structures, twisting and breaking pell-mell.
Harry watched as the directories emerged from the ocean of data. They were in a profusion of shapes and figures: dodecahedrons, octahedrons, icosahedrons, and countless other geometric forms Harry couldn’t even guess at. Already he had spent hours trying to access them but they had resisted all his efforts. He had been able to open only the root directory, which he had accessed by using a mental trigger originating in his own mind. The Josephson’s junction then passed it to the quantum computer as a command. The trigger was a simple, fundamental concept in the theory of numbers: every integer greater than one must be either a prime number or the product of prime numbers.
Before Harry issued the command for the root directory, he looked out again over the vast sea of data, with directories rising out of it like markers. What could they contain? He looked out at the most distant directory on the horizon. It was a nonagon, a curiously shaped nine-sided structure. How he yearned to access it! What marvels would it reveal? What new worlds would open up?
From far away, Harry could hear his physical self, slouched in a chair in his office, sighing deeply. For the moment, access to the higher directories was just a pipe dream.
Harry issued the mental command for the root directory and found himself in a very different place. Here the sea of data did not roil and pulsate. It was calmer, a tiny estuary flowing from the sea of data above it. Nine buoys, the folders in the root directory, floated in the small inlet. The nearest one, shaped like a long cylinder with metal bands wrapped around it, was the nanotechnology utility for nonorganic materials. It had been the first one he had explored.
The next folder was the nano-utility for organic constructs. Its programming features would allow a new kidney, or any organ, to be built based on just a snippet of DNA. The programming was as intuitive and as obvious to Harry as was the programming in the first utility.
The next utility was used to create microscopic nano-bots that could be programmed for any purpose ingenuity allowed. Already Harry had passing familiarity with its main features.
The rest of the directories he had yet to explore. His eyes settled on the most distant one, one that he had hardly noticed before. To his surprise, it was a nonagon, a nine-sided polygon just like the one he had stared at moments ago. The only difference was that it was contained by three sets of parallel lines. He stared at it briefly and decided that he could not resist the temptation.
As soon as Harry fixed his full attention on the nonagon, he found himself surging toward it. It was almost like being on a surf board, shooting across the crest of a wave. The exhilaration ended abruptly when he found himself floating directly above the nonagon. It had a distinct color—an incandescent yellow-orange—and produced a definite pitch. What was it he had read about the Riemann Hypothesis? The distances between prime numbers could be represented almost as a harmonic series. Was the ringing pitch the characteristic frequency of this domain? Confident that he would soon find out, Harry took the last step by issuing the root command again.
And then ….
Panic. Complete and utter panic. Harry found himself in the midst of total oblivion. It was formless, lightless—a terrible void swallowing him into nothingness. He no longer had even the most remote sense of his own body; he was without breath or heartbeat, as though he had never existed.
A pins-and-needles tingle started at the top of his head and Harry came into possession of a new piece of information. He would be okay—he just had to hang on.
At the center of the darkness he saw a sudden pinprick of light. In the same instant, Harry felt an enormous tug as an immense field of gravity bloomed into existence. There was an explosion of light, millions of times brighter than the sun. The light expanded outward, sweeping him along as time and space and matter snapped into being in front of him.
Harry was body-surfing on the immense wave of light. Euphoria succeeded the terror of moments before. He recalled the thought experiment that had started Einstein on the path of Relativity Theory. The young Einstein had tried to imagine himself travelling on a beam of light. Einstein’s thought experiment couldn’t have been nearly as vivid as this.
Harry felt the vibration of the Josephson’s junction again and suddenly understood what was happening to him. He was watching the birth of the universe—the Big Bang. He was experiencing a complete cosmological simulation within the quantum computer’s virtual reality.
He watched the quark-gluon plasma cool into clumps of matter, the clumps of matter attract other clumps of matter. The clumps of matter were transformed into proto-stars.
A minute of Harry’s time equaled millions of years of cosmic time as galaxies formed, creating and seeding the great expanse of Space-Time. And Harry flew above it all, a spirit-mind witnessing all of creation. He followed it in wonder, losing all sense of himself.
The ecstasy, the exultation, lasted far longer than he would have thought possible. He watched as stars were born, saw them evolve and gain systems of planets. He watched suns die in the immense blasts of supernovae and saw their ruins degenerate into stellar remnants and turn into Neutron stars during intense gravitational collapse.
But gradually it all became too much … way too much.
Harry was again seated in the chair at his workstation. His shirt was soaked with sweat and he experienced profound lassitude—the same void that had followed his sporadic sexual encounters, none of them recent. He felt empty beyond belief, burnt out and exhausted. He hung his head and breathed deeply, trying to regain his composure. Without intending to, he fell asleep.
When Harry came to, it was nearly four a.m. He was surprised to find himself rested, almost completely recovered. He stood from his chair and stretched. On his desk he saw the candy bar and a soda that had been sitting there all night along. He cracked open the soda and took a sip. It was room temperature.
When he sat down, memories of his incredible tour surged back, marvels of the universe raised to the highest power. It was then that he remembered his promise to Jon about making the 1949 Studebaker using the nanotechnology module.
I can do it in the time it takes to peel an apple, he said to himself.
It actually took him a bit longer.