The Abyss Above Us 2 Read online

  So Shaw started at the beginning. Not embellishing, not theorizing. Just telling him what happened from the moment he was hired on at the telescope without sparing a detail, letting Father Mason decide.

  The Father had asked questions, in his patient and probing way. He spoke of “demons” and “possessions” from the Bible and other stories from the tribes of his homeland, trying to find his own way to understanding. Shaw didn’t disagree with him. It wasn’t out of manipulation, even though he was sure those words were just old world superstition. It was just that he didn’t have any other words to replace them with.

  In the end, despite a life of painful lessons never to tell people exactly what you want, that’s exactly what he did.

  “I need to stay here, and I need you to protect me. I need you to give me money to expand on the network I built here and use it for research. I’m going to find a way to stop this thing, if I can.”

  “But Shaw...no,” said Father Mason, his voice high and quavering with age and fear. “Whether it’s some demon, or an infection you carry, I have to protect my flock from it. If you bring it down on the church, it could hurt the people here.”

  “Yes, that is a real possibility. And if I don’t then it could hurt the people somewhere else. Maybe everywhere else.”

  Father Mason had thought for a long moment. Eyes closed, though Shaw couldn’t tell if he was praying or not. When he had finally opened them there was a strength that hadn’t been there a moment ago.

  “Yes, OK, Shaw my son. God’s will be done, here and everywhere.”

  Shaw wasn’t sure about that, but set to work just the same. At first working directly off the computer lab at night to order computer parts to a PO Box Father Mason had set up. Security was a problem, but he was proud to say this church had one of the finest computer networks in the area. He was well able to configure it how he needed to navigate the web anonymously. It was, after all, his network.

  The Father had offered to get a TV for Shaw’s tiny room in the basement. Shaw in fact would have loved one, despite the fact that the cramped room could barely fit a chair and mattress at the same time. Had been craving it like a drug, being used to spending his days watching it at the asylum. Which was exactly why he didn’t want one. He needed to learn a lot of things fast about a subject he knew very little about, a category which covered just about everything outside of the computer world. Quantum physics, astrophysics, dark matter theories. Just about anything that would help him get a bead on this thing. The tiny room was in its way like a monastic cell, and he intended to keep it that way. The only entertainment he allowed himself was borrowed records from Father Mason’s collection. Mostly old spirituals and Gregorian chanting. It wasn’t really his style, but Shaw found that the prayers in the form of music helped him concentrate somehow.

  Shaw had never bought into the idea that some people were born better at some things than others and there was nothing you could do about it. In nearly every instance that he had met someone who was just naturally “bad” at computers, he had found they hadn’t put in the time or effort to learn. If you wanted to get something done, you had to spend the time. And to get yourself to spend the time, you needed to build a routine.

  First rule, sleep during the day. Waking at 6 p.m., he would read books in his room on various educational topics. He was concerned at first about jumping into such a heady field as quantum physics, but was surprised and pleased to find there were quite a lot of books in the field for the average man to start from basics. Quantum Reality by Nick Herbert became his Bible, reading it through at least three times.

  After a few hours of reading he could be reasonably sure the people of the church had gone home. He would head up to the computer lab for some online research and programming. Switching after a couple weeks to the remote lab he had built in the hidden storage room.

  He searched news feeds for word of what had happened to Walter, but found none. He wished him well, and felt terribly guilty about what might happen to the first poor bastard that pushed Walter back over the edge.

  Lunch would be spent usually with Father Mason, who lived on the grounds and would have his dinner at the same time. It was at one of these meals that Shaw asked the Father why he had decided to let him stay, when all the world thought him a murderer.

  “All that time in the asylum and they never let anyone visit you, never let you tell your story,” said Father Mason. “They accused you of murder, though they said everyone but your victim had committed suicide. It almost seemed as if they blamed you for surviving. Even if you were driven mad by what happened, I don’t know how well those asylums can really help anyone. And I know you’re too good to hurt anyone.”

  “How do you know that?” asked Shaw. “Everyone else seems to think I’m a lunatic. And I can’t blame them, you can never tell what someone does in their free time...”

  “What free time?” Father Mason said with a smile. “I’ve never seen you do anything but work. You only ever take time out to help people. Fixing up the old computers here, donating new ones. Building that database for the Meals on Wheels program. And what about when you were young and old Mike Hollerman needed a wheelchair but couldn’t afford one? You found one on the internet for trade.”

  Shaw thought back. All these things were true, though he saw them in a different light. He fixed up the computers out of a sense of pride. The church couldn’t afford the rates he charged these days, and he wasn’t about to let one of his networks fall to rot, so why bother charging anything? The database had been the perfect project for him to learn how to program in that type of system. And the wheelchair had been back when Craigslist was new and he wanted a chance to try it out. They’d all just been problems that he had the solution to, so applied that solution. Hardly an attempt to do good for goodness sake or incur goodwill with God.

  On the other hand, he could have learned the same things committing a series of profitable cyber-crimes, as the Black Hats on the hacker site would have been quick to tell him. He wasn’t really sure where that left him on the scale of morality, he’d just never really thought about it.

  Father Mason sighed, breaking Shaw’s meditation. He suddenly looked very old, and very sad.

  “We must have committed such sins to bring such a terrible evil down on us,” said Father Mason. “It’s like all the prayer wheels in the world have wound down, leaving us open to the end of days.”

  “What are prayer wheels?” Shaw asked, feeling a bit stupid, as if it was something every Christian should know.

  “Oh they aren’t Christian,” said Father Mason, as if reading Shaw’s mind. “They’re Tibetan Buddhist. Wheels with prayers written on them, spinning them is said to convey the same goodness as reciting the prayers aloud. Some are placed in fields for the wind to turn, some in rivers as water wheels to bless everything the water touches. It is said when they all stop, the world will end. I fear the last one is grinding to a halt...”

  After dinner Shaw would typically take a break and walk the halls for a while. He found places were a lot more interesting at night, as if they were willing to give up certain secrets. The way the cabinets were, the decorations in the offices, they told you things about the hidden people who used them during the daylight hours you could only guess at. Sometimes he would actually sprint up and down the halls, enjoying the simple oddity of running in a professional environment. At those moments he was almost happy.

  After weeks of studying he was beginning to recognize the bits of information that weren’t available in the common texts. He began to write to knowledgeable people he found in the field, having the emails delivered to anonymous email boxes and the paper letters delivered to the PO Box he’d had Father Mason acquire. There was one team in particular called the W. Dyer Research Group. Recently they had published some unprecedented results in the search for dark matter, and specified the mystery of why it had all begun one a certain date. Shaw knew the reason of course, given that the date was exactly one d
ay after Brock had disemboweled himself at the foot of Shaw’s bed.

  Some time after that some preliminary results had been published by their analyst, a mathematician named Collin Althaus. Shaw had written him with some specific questions about his work. He had the reply open on his workbench next to a series of diagrams he had drawn up. He didn’t have the knowledge to put together the data he needed yet, but even after only a few weeks of study he had a good idea of the hardware and software he would need.

  The machine he would build wouldn’t have room for anything fancy in the programming, no room for ego in the design. To be fast it had to be simple, intuitive. If he could pull it off it would be the best thing he ever built. Something that in truth would be more useful to hackers than to Microsoft, but a beautiful machine nonetheless.

  It was extremely ambitious, but he felt like he could do it. It was only the data he was worried about. The mathematics of it. They might well still prove to be too much to learn in the short time he felt he had...

  He opened the letter and read over it again:

  Greetings Mr. Wash,

  To answer your first question, no I was not bothered by your letter. Though I am very busy I found your questions thoughtful and provoking. I’m not sure what you think about the scientific community, but publishing in obscure science journals doesn’t exactly create a large groupie following. In fact, generally when you publish the best you can hope for is an immense amount of people explaining why you are wrong. And the worst is for no one to say anything at all.

  To answer your second question, no matter how fundamentally different an alien was, there would still be at least one way to communicate with it. And that way is math. You might be thinking that this creature who was born on a different world or maybe even in the heart of a star would view math as strange as its concept of language, and in a way you would be right. After all, the whole reason we count to ten is because we have ten fingers.

  But in a deeper way, the math is going to be the same. The reason is simply because humans don’t invent math, we discover it. Math is a perfect truth. In other parts of the near infinite universe, quantum strings might very well have arranged themselves into patterns that don’t include such obvious things as atoms or light or gravity. And yet, even in those weird areas, one plus one will always equal two. As mathematician/economist Steven Landsburg puts it, the angles of a perfect Euclidean triangle add up to exactly 180 degrees in all possible universes. Despite the fact that a “perfect” Euclidean triangle can exist in no possible universes (no truly perfect shape can be made from real matter, there will always be flaws).

  Because something doesn’t have to really exist to be true with math. All the math in the universe can be determined from pure thought, without ever leaving home (let alone the planet). As Galileo says, “Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.”

  And if something is determined to be mathematically true, the question isn’t if experiments will prove it, but when. When something doesn’t add up in an experiment, we assume the theory is wrong. When something doesn’t add up in a mathematical equation, we can assume we just didn’t add it up right. Theories explain the universe. Math IS the universe.

  And we’re part of the universe, so we are math too.

  Let me explain by paraphrasing Steven Landsburg again(who was paraphrasing a cosmologist named Max Tegmark).

  All science can be broken down into math and “baggage.”

  Take biology. It describes things like the heart and lungs, but that’s just baggage. In reality they are both just a mass of chemicals interacting.

  So take chemistry. It describes molecules and solids and liquids, but really what it is talking about is the physical properties of the atoms in the chemicals interacting with each other.

  So take physics. Physics talks about “mass” and “speed”. But mass and speed and any other physics equation can always be explained mathematically.

  So if a “human” is a word for a collection of organs

  And “organs” are a word for a collection of chemicals

  And “chemicals” are a word for a collection of physical processes

  And “physical” processes are a collection of mathematical equations

  Then what is a human?

  Which is why we can communicate with aliens by mathematics. When it comes down to it, once you perfectly understand the mathematics of a creature...

  You understand all of it.

  Sincerely,

  Collin Althaus

  Chapter 21

  ********************

  Ever since meeting The God in The Darkness, Collin had a sense of organization and purpose he hadn’t had in a long time. Not exactly the purpose he used to have, because he didn’t exactly have the mind he used to have. Not with the constant thoughts and whisperings, the constant presence of The God in The Darkness in his mind.

  It wasn’t as if the thing had invaded his mind, or was controlling him like a puppet. It’s just that when you are inside of something you can’t help hearing it’s heartbeat. And this thing’s “body”, was inextricable from its thoughts. It’s thoughts which moved in such a way that even Collin, who had come a long way, didn’t come close to being able to comprehend.

  Despite all he still had to learn, what he had learned so far made him probably the world’s foremost expert on dark matter, even if no one else knew it yet. He was even able to publish a few articles on it, pushing some new theories of dark matter. Theories which explained it as just the gravitational effects of four dimensional objects that didn’t fully interact with the three dimensional world. His ideas were met with the usual skepticism from the scientific community, but nonetheless had everyone talking.

  In fact they had made him a bit of a celebrity, with people even writing him to learn more about and debate with his theories. One amongst them in particular, despite being from a computer engineering background, seemed to have an uncanny understanding of the nature of dark matter and its possibilities for life.

  The truth of it was that he knew these articles would one day place him in the ranks of Hubble, Einstein, and Heisenberg. But in quantum mathematics the rule was that everyone had to do their best to shoot down your theories for at least a couple decades before they started claiming they knew you were brilliant from the start.

  Although he suspected in this case that the naysayers wouldn’t have nearly that much time to debate.

  While he worked he was listening to the music of the dark matter points, as always. He’d streamlined the equations to the point where the 4-D music program could convert the plotted points in real time. The moment the sensors down in the mine shaft monitored the impacts, the information was sent over the internet to Collin’s apartment and converted into a continuous sound. It required a lot of data, and there was no shortage of it.

  Which suggested something of the nature of the creature. Because in order for there to be bubble chamber impacts, the Dark God had to be intersecting with the bubble chamber. So either for some reason It never left the mine shaft, or It was so big that despite traveling around, parts of It was still intersecting the bubble chamber.

  Collin thought that the second option was much more likely. Given the thing’s limited perceptions of our world, it probably couldn’t distinguish a bubble chamber from a bathtub (in fact there weren’t that many differences). But even at a very minor estimate of its movement around the globe looking for whoever it was looking for, the thing must still be large on a scale that mankind couldn’t conceive of life. Proportionally speaking, the blue whale, the largest life form ever to exist on Earth, would be the same size to this creature that a flea is to a human. It boggled the mind.

  Which kind of made sense, based on his interactions with It in his dreams. No matter how immense It appeared to him (and by no means did it always appear this way) he always got the impression he wasn’t seeing the majority of it. Every night he could understand It better. He didn’t li
e to himself and claim it was because of some great progress in his conception of It. There was no doubt the creature was the one doing most of the learning on how to better communicate with him.

  And he wanted to communicate with it. To better do what it asked him to. All his life Collin had defied authority. He’d railed at the supposed right of someone to tell him what to do simply because they had more power than him. He was always the more intelligent one, he should be the one giving the orders. It only made sense, it was stupid that society worked otherwise.

  But the Dark God, it was more intelligent. Infinitely more so. He understood now the Christian desire to serve. They wanted it so much they made up a God. But he had a real one. What it wanted was best.

  And it clearly did want something, though what that was he couldn’t exactly tell. Or maybe it was more like a someone. Collin had offered to find this person for It, but Its ability to describe this person wasn’t something Collin could remotely understand. Collin imagined it being a bit like talking to a hammerhead shark. The hammerhead houses in that funny shaped head organs to detect the electromagnetic signature of the heartbeat of hiding fish. A sense unlike anything humans have, if you asked that shark how it tells one fish from another it would be useless to you. And the shark is a creature from the same world as us, the Dark God wasn’t even composed of the same matter.