Infinite Library Part 4: Serial Numbers of Atoms

Author’s Note: This is the fourth part of an on going series called Infinite Library. If you’re not caught up these are links to Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. I’ve gotten positive feedback so far about running an ongoing series so there will be more of these in Step Into The Road’s future. However, I still enjoy the stand alone flash fiction pieces so those will be coming your way after I conclude this series. I believe that next week will be the conclusion of this story, but since I am a slave to the story who knows what will actually happen.

Finals for the college had just begun. Instead of preparing tests Rodney sat at the workbench in his lab and grabbed the small screwdriver that was sitting next to him. He tightened a screw that would be holding on a new protective covering he had designed. He had repaired his machine between lectures, staff meetings, research meetings, and of course the Wednesday lectures from the dean. They were lectures and not meetings as the dean had initially presented them. Rodney was talked down to the entire time and rarely had an opportunity to show his findings for the week let alone defend himself from the dean’s berating.

He began to tighten the screw, and it wouldn’t twist. Rodney continued to work at the problem on autopilot. The screwdriver twisted against the head until he could turn it easily. Then he looked down at his work, rubbed his tired eyes and saw the stripped screw. Rodney cursed.

This was the third time this week he found himself in the lab at three in the morning. Rodney Brown was overworked, underpaid, and stressed out. Nonetheless, he grabbed a pair of pliers to take the screw out. Looked at the mess Rodney had gotten himself into and then observed the general disarray of his workstation. If he were honest with himself, he would have gone to bed instead of continuing to beat his head against the problem. Instead, he left the lab an hour later without making any notable progress.

A week later Rodney had input the remaining grades for his students without much care or interest. He knew a few would complain about the outcome of the class, but he was in no mood to negotiate, he had just finished fixing his machine the night before. Rodney was obsessed with his finally repaired device. He had rebuilt the sensors that were overloaded last time and implemented fuses and shielding to get a more accurate reading.

It was three in the afternoon, and despite his lack of sleep, he felt awake and alive. He was ready to recalibrate his machine and rerun his test. By midnight his device was calibrated to the initial conditions of the foreign universe. He started to run the test, and as he watched the readout on his computer tick by, he noticed nothing was blowing up. That was a good sign.

On the downside, nothing else was happening. Rodney’s machine was not creating new matter as it had before, and he was not getting the huge spikes in energy as he had expected. The readings that he saw before weren’t there. The measurements that had convinced him another universe existed, that Dr. Carrus wasn’t pulling his leg about the inhuman book, weren’t there. The past three months of his sleep-deprived life, and all his money he spent on his improved sensors because the dean refused to fund it was for nothing. Rodney felt like all his efforts went down the drain when he ran the test.

For the next three hours, Rodney ran the tests over and over again. Expecting to find the results he had gotten the first time. Rodney looked over his calibration, math and the previous read out. He was doing everything right, but nothing was working.

The next morning, a Wednesday morning, Rodney sat at his desk drinking his third cup of coffee. It was nearly noon, and he had only been at the school for an hour. His life was no longer filled with lecturing classes since summer had begun but it wasn’t any less busy. This morning he was boycotting the lab because he was disappointed by the failed science experiment he spent all night working on.

Worst of all it was a Wednesday which meant that the dean would be coming into his office. The old man would ask Rodney what he had accomplished this week and then proceed to ignore what Rodney said. Instead, he would talk about how the school was underfunded, and Rodney’s project was the thing that was going to get the school on top of its finances and the academic industry as a whole.

Rodney did not doubt that his project if it worked, would bring the school money, success, and maybe even fame. Even if it didn’t work, it would bring the school fame, but mostly for researching and publishing such a delusional idea. Rodney, hopeless and disheveled, determined he needed some math to back up the claim. Ideally math that applied to this universe. At least then he wouldn’t sound insane for claiming that he could create matter or more technically correct pull matter in from other worlds.

He stared at the design for his contraption on his computer. He determined he needed to work from another point of view. Rodney began to think about the machine and how it created matter instead of thinking about how the atoms were pulled in by the machine.

Rodney jotted down notes as his half-full cup of coffee got cold. He worked on intricate equations and perused Carrus’s textbooks for obscure information. At the bottom of his third sheet of paper he put a box around his answer. The number he calculated represented how much power his machine could produce if it worked.

The number was astounding. It was greater than he had ever imagined. He looked at the equations, and double checked his work. Despite the original assumption about the ability to pull matter into existence, it all checked out. But the answer was ungodly. The number was equivalent to the amount of power a large city would use. But his machine was the size of a desk chair instead of a building.

A knock came to his open door, and the dean sat down and started talking. Rodney looked up without paying attention to the man’s words. When he paused, Rodney handed him the sheets of paper he had been working on without an explanation.

The dean held the papers and scanned it, saw the number at the bottom and then looked up at Rodney. “You can do this?” He asked.

“Maybe,” Rodney replied. “Check the math, does it work? If so then theoretically it’s possible.” He offered the man a calculator.

The dean refused the calculator and handed the papers back to Rodney. “If you think you can do this we will continue to pursue the project. I’m not in the business of checking your work, but I’m sure other professors and grad students around here would be interested. I don’t want theory though. There are a half dozen tenured professors here who do that. I need someone who can produce experimental results. Results that will pay the bills. Can you do that?”

Rodney gave the man the answer he wanted to hear but doubted himself as he said it.

“Good,” the dean replied, “I’ll let you get back to it, but I want you to be careful with the budget we don’t have much to spare.”

Rodney responded with, “Of course, sir,” but by the time he got the words out the dean was out of the room.

Rodney’s boycott of the lab ended, and he carried his calculator and calculations down the lab.

In the lab, he found Maria and her few grad students working away on their projects. He interrupted Maria and the work she was doing. “Can you look over something for me?”

She looked at him, but her mind was somewhere else. She answered, “Sure, but can we talk about my grade from Dr. Carrus’s, I mean your class?”

“Yeah no problem, if you don’t like it and can solve this I’ll make it whatever you want it to be.” He ripped the top of the sheet of paper off giving her the equation he started with. He didn’t want his previous calculations to bias her.

Two hours later Maria walked up to Rodney’s desk in the lab. “I finished it, but I don’t think it’s right.” She replied.

“What do you mean?” Rodney looked at the answer. It was the same as his.

“Well, it’s just too big. That much energy would,” Maria paused and Rodney looked from the paper to her. “Well, I don’t know.”

“No, what were you going to say?” He was glad that someone was willing and able to call him out. Finally someone will tear down this illusion and I will be able to walk away from the book and contraption Carrus cursed me with, he thought.

“I was going to say that much energy would tear a hole in the universe. But then I realized it sounded crazy.” She punctuated it with a laugh so that Rodney wouldn’t take her seriously.

“Yeah, that’s what I was afraid of,” Rodney answered solemnly.

“Besides, your first equation is way off. I did the solution based on that, but I think your initial conditions are incorrect. At least these few here.” She gestured at the initial conditions Rodney had calculated from the book. “Why would this variable be like this? I assumed they were initial conditions, but they don’t look quite right.”

Rodney shrugged and said, “it’s all theoretical,” as a defense to the accusation that he expected Maria to make. He wasn’t prepared to defend his crazy assumptions against her and wanted to save face.

“I know that, but it reminded me of something else,” Maria said. She added, “I actually wanted to talk to you about your class.”

“Oh yeah!” Rodney remembered. “I can change your grade to an A now. The solution was correct, or at least the same as mine.”

“No, I already had an A. I wanted to talk to you about the problem you had me put on the board around midterms.”

“What about it?” Rodney said.

“It was awful, genuinely the worst assignment I’ve ever had. I’m glad you pulled it from the test otherwise everyone would have failed.” She smiled, “That being said, I kept looking into it because it fascinated me. At the time I was also reviewing your machine to get the budget down. The two ideas mixed in my mind and I thought maybe you could calibrate your machine to get to a point where it was based on these variables.” She produced another sheet of paper with some initial conditions that he had already calculated.

“And what would that imply?” Rodney asked already knowing the answer to his question. It was the same thought he had the night he blew up his machine.

“Well originally I thought it would imply that nothing would happen, then it looked like you could create matter. That’s, of course, absurd but I think you could use these settings to grab hold of an atom. I don’t know what you would do with it, but it would be groundbreaking if you did. We’ve been throwing atoms around for decades now. It’s boring, but if we could control them, we could study them much more. And maybe even get them to give us more energy. Although not to the level that equation you just gave me implies.”

“Fascinating,” Rodney replied, “Do you have any notes on it?”

“I do,” she said producing a small pile of papers from her bag. The bag had crumpled the edges of the documents, and some of the pencil markings had faded, but the math was there.

He reviewed them for a while and after she explained some of the research she had done he understood what she was claiming. Using the initial conditions he found from the inhuman book, she was able to determine a serial number of sorts for every particle in the world.

“Is every atom unique?” Rodney asked.

“From what I found, yes, everyone has a code, just like every human has specific DNA. But we would only see it if we look past the subatomic level. Which is exactly the level your machine is trying to measure.”

Rodney smiled, Dr. Carrus had sent him down this path of research. “But that serial number would have to be,” Rodney shook his head, “It would be nearly infinite. There are more atoms than humans and look how long DNA already is.”

She nodded, “There is an unfathomable number of atoms, to say the least. That’s why the serial number is equation based. If it was sequential like DNA and barcodes are it would be impossibly long. They do this kind of stuff with computers and encryption. I studied it as an undergrad.”

“So we could never know exactly how to sequence an atom,” Rodney replied.

“Nope,” She responded starting to pack up the papers, “It’s completely theoretical, and even then I don’t know if my math is right. I based most of the research on new stuff that hasn’t been reviewed or affirmed. It was just a kind of spare time project I was working on.”

“What if there was another atom with the same sequence?” Rodney asked. Her research had given him a hunch.

“That would, by what I’ve described in my notes, be impossible. Two atoms wouldn’t exist in the same universe with the same sequence.”

That was the answer Rodney needed to hear to get his machine to work.

Rodney stayed at the lab to work late for another night. After talking to Maria, he had determined that the results from his first attempt rose from blind luck. Rodney hadn’t been able to get control of another atom from a universe because he only had a sequence for one atom. And once he brought it to this universe it had gone array. Rodney still didn’t understand those details, but it had destroyed his machine and put off a promising amount of energy. After Rodney repaired the device, he used the same initial conditions of the atom that had gone array. Realistically this was equivalent to trying to dial a phone that been blown up.

Combining his work with Maria’s, he determined that all atoms were paired to atoms in other parallel universes. Rodney needed two pieces of information to pull the matter into his world. First, the initial conditions of another reality, he got these from Carrus’s inhuman book. Secondly, the serial number of an atom, Maria’s research provided a way to deduct this from existing atoms.

However, this would require substantial modifications to his machine that he had just spent months trying to repair.

He worked through the night on his computer doing calculations and designs he wasn’t committed to destroying his machine on a hunch.

By 2 am he was sleepy. Then while he was typing away on his computer, his fingers quit moving. He tried to move them, but they refused to type. It took all the energy he had to look away from the screen and to his side. When he did, he saw a monster.

Squatting on the lab bench staring at Rodney with its red eyes was an Overwatcher. Rodney saw a vague humanoid outline shaded in black. He couldn’t make out any features like a mouth or nose, only the two beady red eyes that stared intently at him.

“W-w-what do you want?” Rodney asked. He pushed out the words with strained effort.

The monster stared at him and watched him. Rodney felt his eyes dry out. He couldn’t blink the silhouette had slowed all the muscles in his body. Rodney felt like if the thing didn’t leave soon, his heart would stop too. He stared at the atrocity. Then his eyes became too dry to bear. Rodney forced himself to blink. It took all his will. When his eyes finally opened the Overwater was gone.

He rushed over to the lab bench it was sitting on, and nothing was out of place. He could move again, without an issue.

Was I asleep? He wondered. But he didn’t feel like he had napped. He felt manic and out of control. He then knew how Carrus had felt the day he handed the book over. Rodney realized he didn’t have much longer. The Overwatchers were showing up in his day to day life. Since they were leaving his dreams, it meant he would have to pass the book along soon.

Rodney sat back in his chair terrified of the monster that had just made an appearance. He looked at his work, and the notes Maria had made. Was she the one he would be forced to pass the book to? he wondered.

Then he realized there might be another way. A way that he could end the curse of the book. He might even be able to defeat the Overwatchers and prolong his life on this earth. Rodney began to disassemble his machine. There was a new process he was ready to implement. And with the Overwatcher’s appearance, it seemed to be now or never.

Photo Credit: Dr. Bleep, Dave McLear, Andrew Pilling, VisualHunt, scui3asteveo, Asian Development Bank, , APS/Alan Stonebraker