Accidental Gods Read Free Page A

Ajay’s theory that something is happening on the universe’s horizon—the boundary between the expanding universe and…Larry, why are you here anyway?”
    “Memory issue, I guess.”
    Lisa asked, “You don’t remember why you came here?”
    Stephen ran his hands through his hair again, trying to figure out if these computer puns were intentional or not. He assumed they were, which only made them more irritating.
    Larry smirked. “A hardware memory issue.”
    Thomas explained, “Ajay said we’ll need a universe’s worth of memory…” He nodded his head sideways toward Larry, “his area.”
    Larry smiled as if a universe’s worth of memory was nothing. In his experience, these theoretical guys always exaggerated what they really needed.
    Larry turned to Lisa and prompted her to continue, “The boundary between the expanding universe and what?”
    Lisa nodded vigorously. “Exactly my point.” She turned back to Ajay. “Whatever it’s expanding into, which for now we’re theorizing is nothing—whatever ‘nothing’ is—you can thank me when it makes you famous, Ajay.” She affected a starstruck fan’s voice and posture, clasping her hands in adoration and looking goo-goo-eyed at Ajay. “Oh, look . It’s Ajay Narula. He won the Nobel Prize for the edge dilemma!’”
    Ajay threw his arms up in surrender and then said, “OK, for now , we will focus only on modeling a universe that is a closed system and has the same underlying parameters as our own. Assume all the universal constants are the same as those in our universe…Well, I guess we are not assuming. We are actually making it so.”
    Thomas said, “We’ll create the new universe in our universe’s image.”
    “Well put,” Ajay said. “So we aren’t likely to get weird results.”
    Lisa said, “We can always monkey with universal constants and see what we get once we have the first universe working. Mimicking our universe will also mean we’ll know if we get it right since we know what to expect.”
    “So by playing god,” Ajay said, “we can constrain the problems of what’s beyond the edge and use universal constants we understand to prevent results that might veer drastically from what we see in our own universe.”
    “I’m all for anything that constrains problems,” Stephen said.
    “Then it’s settled,” Ajay said and raised his Diet Coke as if he were making a toast. “To being gods…”

Chapter 2
    Year 1
     
    I tried to imagine the easiest way God could have done it.
    —Albert Einstein
     
     
    Stephen sat leaning over a laptop, running his hands repeatedly through his hair. Next to his computer sat a mug of coffee, which was rapidly getting cold. He’d been sitting at this table for two days with few breaks and little sleep. He left infrequently and then only to go down the hall, one way to the bathroom or the other way to the kitchen to nuke a sandwich or refill his coffee.
    Lisa was slumped over at the same table next to Stephen, her head on her crossed forearms. Stephen assumed she had finally fallen asleep. Larry sat cross-armed in his chair near the corner of the table. Catherine studied a mass of handwritten notes across from Stephen, her back to Ajay and the dry-erase boards.
    Jules sat, in a professional dress suit, chewing the tip of her tongue and typing away on her laptop. She wasn’t one of the scientists. She was Thomas’s assistant, which in this case meant making sure all these brainstorming sessions got recorded.
    Stephen looked at the dry-erase boards again and pondered the equations they had been working on.
    Ajay was mindlessly staring at the boards as well, but Stephen doubted Ajay saw the math anymore.
    Jules stopped typing and waited.
    The group seemed so close to framing the flow of quantum mechanics, which would unite both atomic-level interactions and the standard model of physics—or, at least, what they needed to implement their system.
    Catherine was noticeably different from the