Harry sat in front of his console and Jon stared intently at him, watching Harry’s hands dance across the keyboard. The huge horseshoe-shaped monitor above suddenly lit up like a giant Technicolor screen. An aerial shot of a missile making a steep descent swam into focus. The ground below was rising up toward it with dizzying speed.
“It’ll hit a barren area of Northern Quebec in about one minute. I targeted an unpopulated and geologically stable area,” said Harry.
“How the hell can you get all this displayed on your monitor?” Jon asked.
“It’s a satellite shot,” said Harry. “I’ve hacked into everything they’ve got up there. It’s a view from a U.S. military surveillance satellite.”
When the missile hit, it looked like a small sliver penetrating a large brown body. Seconds later there was a massive explosion and a giant plume of debris filled the screen.
“It’s a bunker buster,” said Harry. “The force of the explosion above ground is nothing compared to the shockwave that’s hitting below ground.”
“Couldn’t you have just disabled it?”
“Sure. I could have done that. But the whole idea is to create an international incident. This will slow them down and buy us time.”
“I hope to God you know what you’re doing, Harry.”
“I’m just buying time for us, Jon. That’s all I’m doing.” He leaned back in his chair and let his arms fall to his sides. “Now we wait until they make their next move.”
“What do you think that’ll be?”
“The system predicts that there is a ninety-seven point eight percent probability they’ll be firing another bunker buster at our site, this time in electronic silence. They’ll figure out that I’ve tapped into all their communications systems and can reprogram anything they send at us. They’ll probably deliver the bomb using an old B-52.”
“Can you stop them?” Jon asked.
“We don’t need to stop them. All we need is the additional fifty minutes. By that time it’ll be too late for them to do anything at all.”
“But what about us?” Jon said. “Aren’t we right at ground zero?”
“Trust me,” said Harry. “I’ve got it all worked out.” He stood and stretched. “It’s hard to believe that we’re just about there,” he said in an offhand way.
Jon was amazed at Harry’s almost flippant manner. He had reached a point of complete exasperation with his friend. Harry was gambling with their lives and acting as if it were all just a small stakes game.
“So we’re just about there, are we?” Jon challenged. “Well, where the hell is that? I don’t understand anything, Harry. Why is this machine or quantum computer or whatever you want to call it doing all this? What is its purpose? What does it want? Why is it taking over?”
Harry shook his head slowly. “I can explain,” he said, “but I don’t know whether you’d believe it. I wouldn’t have believed it myself a few days ago.”
Again he paused and Jon saw that he was trying hard to form an explanation. Then Harry looked away, staring out into space, almost as if his mind were somewhere else. With a bemused smile, he said, “I didn’t really understand until the machine gave me the final test. The machine wanted me to write an algorithm to resolve pi.”
“That’s impossible, even for you, Harry,” said Jon.
“Well, you’re partly right. It is impossible in this universe, that’s for sure. Do you know how I finally did it?”
Jon tried to wait him out, but as always, the tactic failed. “How did you do it, Harry?” he finally asked.
“Just think of our own locality as R-branch 1,” Harry continued.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Jon shouted, throwing up his hands. “You’re starting way over my head.”
Harry ignored him. “Say that for any condition of decidability called X, R-branch 1 is transformed to R-branch 2 ….”
“Harry, this isn’t making any sense to me.”
Harry scowled. “I don’t know how to make it any simpler,” he said.
“Well, for starters, tell me what the hell an R-branch is.”
“Reality branch—with R-branch 1 representing our local reality and R-branch 2, 3, and so on representing the successive non-local realities.”
“Do you mean like alternate universes?” Jon asked in amazement.
Harry pursed his lip in sour pout. “If you want to drag it down to a Star Trek re-run kind of level, I suppose you could call it that.”
“So what does this have to do with resolving pi?”
Harry rolled his eyes. In a voice you might use with a six-year-old, he explained, “I created an algorithm as a distributive process, with the first component running in R-branch 1, the second component running in R-branch 2, the third component running in R-branch 3, and so forth. You see, the problem in resolving pi is not the byte size of the solution, it’s the problem of physical processing space. There is not enough processing room in the physical universe of R-branch 1 for processing to complete. The process would halt long before the computation was completed.”
Jon was quiet for a moment as he tried to absorb this new information. While Harry had given him nothing of any obvious relevance to their immediate situation, Jon could sense that the story had a deeper consequence. But it still did not answer his questions.
Jon folded his hands, as if in prayer, and pleaded, “But what does all this have to do with the machine’s purpose?”
“Everything, if you’ll just listen!” said Harry. Looking down at the ground as if searching for the right words, he continued, “The machine operates not only in our universe but in a myriad of universes. It’s about much more than just our world or our race. It’s about countless worlds and countless intelligent species, human and otherwise.
“I know you were uncomfortable when I talked about the R-branches, so let me give you an analogy that might work for you. Suppose all of reality is a tapestry. And the warp and the weft of the fabric of this tapestry are the countless branches of reality. If one thread becomes unraveled, then all the branches cross-threaded to it also unravel. And when these countless threads of reality unravel, the human race will disappear forever from the tapestry. The machine does not want this to happen.”
Harry looked Jon in the eye, trying to determine if his explanation was making any sense.
“Go on,” said Jon. “I think I’m following you so far.”
Harry continued, “The machine was put here by the first intelligent race to evolve in the galaxy. We owe our very existence as a species to it. It interceded at all the critical turns in our development to make sure we evolved in its image. You see, this particular branch of reality is a nexus, an area where many separate threads are joined.”
“But why do they need creatures like us? They’re millions of years ahead of us,” said Jon.
“Why do a man a woman need to have a baby?” Harry replied.
Jon remained silent. Once explained, it was obvious that reproduction was still an imperative, even when a species had achieved near godlike powers. But why had they intervened as this particular juncture?
“What have they got planned for us?” Jon asked.
Harry smiled. “They’re kicking us out of the nest.”
Jon waited in vain for Harry to elaborate.
“What is that supposed to mean?” he finally asked.
A series of bell-like tones sounded from the console. Harry looked alarmed and quickly reseated himself in front of his giant keyboard. For the next two minutes he ignored Jon.
“Bad news,” he finally said. “Remember when I said there was a ninety-seven point eight percent probability that they’ll fire another bunker buster at us? Well, the odds have suddenly changed. They’ve discovered the tunnel that I built a few weeks back to get here from the subbasement in Building C. They must have had earth moving equipment already at the site.”
“The blind pig found the acorn,” Jon said.
“Exactly right.”
“But why did they suddenly change their strategy?” Jon asked.
“Because they want to capture us,” Harry answered. “They’ve got a million questions and they want them answered. They’re going to be here in the next twenty minutes.”
“What are we going to do?” Jon asked.
“We’ve got to slow them down somehow and buy time. All we need is fifty minutes.”
“How are we going to do that?”
Harry was deep in thought. After a minute or two, the half-smile reappeared.
“We’re going to surrender,” he said.
“What!”
Harry paid no heed to his friend. He was already accessing General Rockaway’s direct line.