Stephen Baxter: Time

Now a light started to shine out of the heart of the Moon, out of the eyes and mouth of the Man, as if something were burning there. He could actually see shafts of light cast through lunar dust, as if the Moon were a Halloween lantern hanging in a murky room.

And — with startling suddenness, in utter silence — the Moon imploded, shattered, burst into an expanding cloud of dust and rubble.

The orbiting ships were immediately overwhelmed. So, Malenfant thought, people are already dying.

The cloud began to disperse, spreading out along the Moon’s orbit. Maybe, given time, it would form a new ring around the Earth, Malenfant thought. And there would be spectacular meteor showers on the Earth, skies that would burn like a salute to the death of the Moon.

But now the dispersing debris revealed a point of dazzling white light, difficult to look into even with Malenfant’s mysteriously enhanced vision. The dying Moon had birthed a new star: a terrible, brilliant companion to the sun.

Just seconds now, Michael murmured, staring.

Malenfant glanced at the boy’s face. The quality of light had become strange, sharper. “Michael, what is that going to do to the Earth? The heat it’s putting out will surely play hell with the climate. And—”

You’re asking the wrong questions again, Malenfant. There will be no time for that. The quark nugget is only a tool.

“A tool to do what?”

To create a pulse of high-energy density.

Malenfant longed to understand. “How high?”

Would the numbers mean anything to you? The most energetic particles are cosmic rays: iron nuclei fleeing the explosions of stars, moving close to the speed of light. If an apple falls from a tree to the ground, the energy it gathers is shared over its billions of billions of atoms. The most energetic cosmic rays have comparable energy focused on a single nucleus. If two such nuclei were to impact head-on the energy released would be two orders of magnitude higher again. It is believed that no such event has happened in the history of the universe.

“And the children—”

Are seeking to create an event six orders of magnitude higher even than that. There are no natural processes that could produce such a thing. This is the first time there has been a mechanism — a mind, us — to deliver such gigantic energies. In this universe or any of those preceding it.

Malenfant frowned. “Are you saying this is our purpose? The purpose of man, of life, is to produce a single unnaturally huge energy pulse, this one thing? That’s all ?”

The purpose is not the act. It is the consequence of the act.

The light in the Moon wreckage grew brighter. It flared, electric blue, and then white.

And the point burst, became an expanding bubble of light, pink-gray, ballooning into space. In a heartbeat it overwhelmed the debris cloud. Malenfant glimpsed its glare in the oceans of Earth, like a terrifying new sun born out of Earth’s lost companion.

But it took only a second for the bubble to grow monstrously large, fifty or sixty times the size of Earth, dwarfing the planet.

The wall of light swept across Earth, devouring it. And Earth was gone.

Malenfant grunted, the breath forced out of him. He felt as if he had been punched.

As suddenly, as quickly as that, it was over.

The bubble was growing, larger and brighter every second, a cancer that seemed to be sucking energy out of spacetime itself, and Malenfant saw its light washing over Michael’s face, his round, childish eyes. It was huge, startling, already dwarfing the points of light that populated the universe.

Michael said, The interface is growing at near light speed. It took a little more than a second to cover the Moon s orbit to reach Earth, just a twenty-fifth of a second to cover Earth itself. After five seconds it was as large as the sun. Light speed is fast, Malenfant. Now we have seven or eight minutes before the wave reaches the sun. The inner planets, Venus and Mercury, will be covered before that.

The ballooning bubble wasn’t a perfect sphere, Malenfant saw absently. It was becoming blistered, growing irregularly, as if diseased. Its surface glowed pink-white and it was speckled, as if illuminated by laser light. The stars seemed to be shifting around the swelling edge, their position sliding, turning briefly to arcs of light before the shell obscured them — gravitational lensing, perhaps, as the shell distorted spacetime itself.

…Earth gone, just like that, in a fraction of a second, as if it were no more substantial than a match stalk caught in a firestorm. Earth, all of its billions of years of geology and life, core and mantle and oceans and drifting continents, evolution and climate: all of it gone, as if it never existed, its story over.

And the people. Billions dead, their stories summarily ended. The species already extinct, unless anybody had managed to get away to the outer planets, the stars.

He felt numb, unable to believe it. Shouldn’t he have felt it, the brief cries of those billions of souls, caught in the middle of their lives, arguing or laughing or crying, giving birth or dying, making love or war?

Michael was watching him, as if trying to gauge his reaction. They would have seen nothing. An instant of glowing sky, a moment of pain —

“Michael, what’s inside the bubble? What happened to Earth when it passed the barrier?”

Different physical laws. Anything of our universe that survived the unreality pulse itself would immediately decay into new forms. Physics, chemistry as we know it could not proceed.

But even this new regime, the regime of changed matter, would not persist. The energy density in there is intense, the gravity field it generates very strong. In microseconds after the nucleation — even before the bubble expanded beyond the Moon itself, when the bubble was only a mile across — a gravitational collapse started.

“Like a Big Crunch.”

Yes. But none of the slow collapse and compression you witnessed in the precursor universes, Malenfant. Immediate. This is the true vacuum, Malenfant, the final state of the universe. . .

When the universe was born, erupting out of its Big Bang, it went through a series of phase changes, the vacuum collapsing to new, more stable forms. And with each change, with the decay of each false vacuum, energy was released. Those monstrous energy pulses fueled the initial expansion of the universe.

At last the phase changes ceased, and the universe stabilized.

But the stability it reached was false.

I was told a story of a princess who is imprisoned on top of a perfect crystal sphere. There are no iron bars to hold her there, yet she is trapped at the sphere’s highest point. As long as she stays there, at the point of maximum symmetry, she is safe. But if she steps aside in any direction, she will slip and fall. So it is with the universe. Maximum symmetry is unstable.

“But now the children have disturbed that symmetry.”

Yes. Their high-energy event allowed quantum tunneling to a state of true vacuum … Ah. There was a burst of light on the edge of the expanding bubble. Venus, I think…

The unreality wall approached the sun. The bubble was now sixteen light-minutes across, two hundred million miles wide, dwarfing the sun. But the star seemed unperturbed, even as the great hull raced toward it.

Light speed, Malenfant, Michael whispered. If you were standing on the surface of the sun, you would still see stars and Earth and Moon, the last photons reflected by the planet before its destruction. The wall arrives with the light itself. . .