Arthur Clarke - Richter 10

Crane snapped to attention. “That’s exactly what it’s telling us,” he said, staring through the ahrensglass and up the three-story height of the globe. “It’s not the same. Something happened to this planet that changed it drastically, altered it forever. So, what could have happened, what—oh my God. I’ve been so stupid.” He turned to Lanie. “Crank it up. We’re going to go from scratch right now.”

“What?”

“Just do it. I’ve got an idea and we’re going to try it out.”

The globe went dark as the computers reset themselves. Within a minute Crane stared at a ball of fire, spinning wildly in its youth. “All right,” he said. “I want you to increase your six-and-a-half-sextillion-ton mass by one eighty-first.”

“One eighty-first,” Lanie said. “One eighty-first?”

“Do it,” Crane said.

Newcombe laughed. “Crane, you’re batty.”

“Only if I’m wrong.”

“The machine refuses to take the extra weight,” Lanie said. “It’s telling me the increase is unstable by its very nature. The globe can’t support the increase in mass and still hold together.”

“Perfect,” Crane said. “Talk to it, Lanie. Explain to it that it’s all right to build to an unstable state.”

“It’s not going to want to hear that,” she said.

“Tell the globe that the instability will resolve itself.”

“It will?”

“I think so,” he said, as Lanie turned to the computer and opened a line of discussion with its higher reasoning functions.

Crane walked up to Newcombe. “What’s the printout?” he asked.

“Ahh.” Dan smiled, handing him a small stack of seismograms. “Almost forgot. We’ve begun to get Ellsworth-Beroza tremors on the Reelfoot grabens consistent with the beginning phases of a major quake. Also, levels of radon, carbon monoxide, and methane are continuing to rise along with electromagnetic activity.”

Crane nodded, not surprised. He’d make his three billion dollars, but it would be at a cost beyond belief. It was happening, a cycle of real horror beginning its relentless harvest of life and property. And no one was going to listen to his warnings.

“Got it,” Lanie said, swinging her chair around. “However, the globe will only do it if you tell it to, Crane. Would you step over here?”

Crane moved to her console as Lanie typed the command that would start the globe. “The machine refuses to take responsibility for what happens,” she said. “It’s looking for authority from higher up.”

He looked at the screen. It read:

He hit the Y. The screen faded, then read:

“Speak your name into the C channel of your pad,” Lanie said.

Crane did so, and the globe lights immediately came on. The sequence was initiated.

The globe spun quickly, but off balance. All the lights went down. Lanie’s programmers stopped work to watch the spectacle. The Earth is not perfectly round, but this one was obviously way off, its equatorial bulge huge and moving, throwing the planet on a wobbly orbit.

“You’re going to break your toy,” Newcombe said.

Warning lights were flashing up and down the consoles, the screens warning of imminent breakup.

A huge lump of fire now appeared on the globe, threatening to destroy it as centrifugal force drew the fireball slowly away from the globe.

“We’re going to have to shut it down, Crane!” Lanie called.

“You do and you’re fired!” Crane yelled over the warning bells sounding up and down the line.

“It wants to go into shutdown sequence.”

“But it hasn’t, has it?” he returned. “It’s smarter than we are. Let it go!”

The globe was wobbling horribly. It creaked as it tore itself apart, but Crane watched it with a satisfied smile.

Then it happened. The globe, now a lopsided dumbbell shape, was no longer able to sustain the hold on itself and the bulge broke free, spinning off, only to get captured in the larger mass’s gravitational pull. What was left began to spin normally again, all the warning bells and flashers shutting off up and down the line.

They were looking at a planet and its moon, a real chunk of the globe, dancing in synchronous orbit, and the globe was just as happy as it could be.

Newcombe sat staring, his mouth hanging open.

“Is that the Moon?” Lanie asked.

“Well,”—Crane shrugged—“now we know where that came from. Bully. Let’s keep watching.”

“It seems to be orbiting so closely,” Lanie said.

“I think we’ll find,” Crane answered, “that as the Earth’s rotation slows, the Moon will move farther away. Right now, imagine not only the effect the Moon will have on sea tides at this distance, but land tides as well.”

“I can’t believe it’s still working,” Lanie said as the planet cooled and holorains began, the Moon now a bit farther away.

“This is weird,” Newcombe said. “This isn’t some kind of trick, is it, Crane?”

“This is history, my fine fellow,” Crane said. “Earth history as no one’s ever seen it before. If this thing keeps working, we may all be obsolete.”

And work it did, half holo, half “real.” Land emerged from the evaporating waters, the closeness of the Moon causing major havoc on land and sea—quakes, tsunamis, and tidal waves rattling the globe in ways none of them could have anticipated. If there had been a Pangaea as such, they never saw it. For an hour that was hundreds of millions of years, the continental masses seemed to form and reform in a continual dance with the Moon, which moved ever so slowly away.

The globe stopped many times during these early periods, adding holo comets, asteroids, and meteorites to the mix in order to conform to known life later on, but it didn’t shut down—it continued. The farther it went, the more excited the programmers became, until they were shouting and cheering every time the machine hit a glitch and reset itself to continue onward.

The Moon finally distanced itself enough to lose its major impact on sea and land. Here, they saw the beginnings of a stable world, more stable, at least, than the frenzy of its earlier years. The seas calmed. The continents emerged in roughly the same form as today.

For Crane, time did not exist during this exercise. First to last passed in an instant for him. He thought of all the men of science from its beginnings who had measured, timed, and speculated about the nature of their Earth. Without their observations, the globe would not have been possible. For thousands of years scientists had meticulously recorded their findings with no notion of where those findings would lead. This was one of the places. There would be others.

Five hours later, he emerged from his thoughts to the sounds of cheering. The globe stood proudly online, up to date, turning slowly. Dead even with them.

Everyone was still there, including Newcombe, and they had been joined by the rest of the staff. It was a spectacle none of them could pull away from. The addition of new information would continue, but this was the core unit from which ever more knowledge would spring.

“Do you realize what we’ve just done?” Crane called to the applauding group. “However much information we’ve put into this system is merely a grain of sand on the seashore in comparison to what the globe has invented on its own to make our data compatible. Every hairline fissure, every graben, every underground stream or unconfirmed nuclear explosion that has occurred on planet Earth is now ours to know. Information is power, ladies and gentlemen. And we have the power.”

Another cheer. He turned to Newcombe. “Still think I’m crazy?”