Лю Цысинь - Hold Up the Sky

“No, this is very interesting,” said the Senior Official delightedly. “Do it again.”

Bai Bing returned to the starting interface, selected a new set of parameters, and initiated another big bang. The formation process of the new universe looked to be about the same as the earlier one, an expanding and dimming sphere. Fifteen billion years after creation, the sphere became fully black: the evolution of the universe had stabilized. Bai Bing moved the viewpoint into the universe. Even Chen Xufeng, least interested out of all of them, exclaimed. Beneath the vast darkness of space, a silvery surface extended endlessly in all directions. Small, colorful spheres decorated the membrane like multicolored dewdrops tumbling on the broad surface of a mirror.

Bai Bing brought up the analysis window again. He looked at it for a while and said, “We were lucky. This is a universe rich in variety, about forty billion light-years in radius. Half of its volume is liquid, while the other half is empty space. In other words, this universe is a massive ocean, forty billion light-years in depth and radius, with the solid celestial bodies floating on its surface!” Bai Bing pushed the field of view closer to the ocean’s surface, allowing them to see that the silvery ocean surface was gently rippling. A celestial body appeared in their close-up view. “This floating object is… let me see, about the size of Jupiter. Whoa, it’s rotating by itself! The mountain ranges look amazing when they’re coming in and out of—let’s just call this liquid water! See the water being flung up by the mountain ranges, along its orbit. It forms a rainbow arc above the surface!”

“It’s beautiful, indeed, but this universe goes against the basic laws of physics,” the Senior Official said, looking at the screen. “Never mind an ocean forty billion light-years deep, a body of liquid four light-years deep would have collapsed into a black hole due to gravity long ago.”

Bai Bing shook his head. “You’ve forgotten a fundamental point: This isn’t our universe. This universe has its own set of laws of physics, completely different from ours. In this universe, the gravitational constant, Planck’s constant, the speed of light, and other basic physical constants are all different. In this universe, one plus one might not even equal two.”

Encouraged by the Senior Official, Bai Bing continued the demonstration, creating a third universe. When they entered for a closer look, a chaotic jumble of colors and shapes appeared on the screen. Bai Bing immediately exited. “This is a six-dimensional universe, so we have no way of observing it. In fact, this is the most common case, and we were lucky to get two three-dimensional universes on our first two tries. Once the universe cools down from its high-energy state, the odds of having three available dimensions on the macroscopic scale is only three out of eleven.”

A fourth universe manifested. To the bafflement of everyone: the universe appeared as an endless black plane, with countless bright, silvery lines intersecting it perpendicularly. After reading the analysis profile, Bai Bing said, “This universe is the opposite of the previous one—it has fewer dimensions than our own. This is a two-and-a-half-dimensional universe.”

“Two and a half dimensions?” The Senior Official was astonished.

“See, the black two-dimensional plane with no thickness is this universe’s outer space. Its diameter is around five hundred billion light-years. The bright lines perpendicular to the plane are the stars in space. They’re hundreds of millions of light-years long, but infinitely thin, because they’re one-dimensional. Universes with fractional dimensions are rare. I’m going to make note of the parameters that produced this one.”

“A question,” said the Senior Official. “If you use these parameters to initialize a second big bang, would it produce a universe exactly the same as this one?”

“Yes, and the evolution process would be identical too. Everything was predetermined at the time of the big bang. See, after physics got past the obfuscation of quantum effects, the universe once again displayed an inherently causal and deterministic nature.” Bai Bing looked at the others one by one. He said seriously, “Please keep this point in mind. This will be key to understanding the terrifying things we’ll be seeing later.”

“This really is fascinating.” The Senior Official sighed. “Playing God, aloof and ethereal. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt this way.”

“I felt the same,” Bai Bing said as he stood up from the computer to pace back and forth, “so I played the creation game again and again. By now, I’ve initiated more than a thousand big bangs. The awe-inspiring wonder of those thousand-plus universes is impossible to describe with words. I felt like an addict… I could have kept going like that, never coming into contact with you, never getting involved. Our lives would have continued along our orbits. But… ah, hell… It was a snowy night at the beginning of the year, nearly two in the morning, really quiet. I ran the last big bang of the day. The superstring computer gave birth to the one thousand two hundred and seventh universe—this one….”

Bai Bing returned to the computer, scrolled to the bottom of the drop-down list, and selected the last set of parameters. He initiated the big bang. The new universe rapidly expanded in a glow of blue light before extinguishing to black. Bai Bing moved the mouse and entered his Universe No. 1207 at nineteen billion years after creation.

This time, the screen displayed a radiant sea of stars.

“1207 has a radius of twenty billion light-years and three dimensions. In this universe, the gravitational constant is 6.67 times 10–11, and the speed of light in a vacuum is three hundred thousand kilometers per second. In this universe, an electron has a charge of 1.602 times 10–19 coulombs. In this universe, Planck’s constant is 6.62…” Bai Bing leaned in toward the Senior Official, watching him with a chilling gaze. “In this universe, one plus one equals two.”

“This is our own universe.” The Senior Official nodded, still steady, but his forehead was now damp.

SEARCHING HISTORY

“Once I found Universe No. 1207, I spent more than a month building a search engine based on shape and pattern recognition. Then I looked through astronomy resources to find diagrams of the geometrical placement of the Milky Way with respect to the nearby Andromeda Galaxy, Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, and so on. Searching for the arrangement within the entire universe gave me more than eighty thousand matches. Next I searched those results for matches for the internal arrangement of the galaxies themselves. It didn’t take long to locate the Milky Way in the universe.” Onscreen, a silver spiral appeared against a backdrop of pitch-black space.

“Locating the sun was even easier. We already know its approximate location in the Milky Way—” Bai Bing used his mouse to click and drag a small rectangle over the tip of one arm of the spiral.

“Using the same pattern-recognition method, it didn’t take long to locate the sun in this area.” A brilliant sphere of light appeared onscreen, surrounded by a large disk of haze.

“Oh, the planets in the solar system haven’t formed yet right now. This disk of interstellar debris is the raw material they’re made up of.” Bai Bing pulled up a slider bar at the bottom of the window. “See, this lets you move through time.” He slowly dragged the slider forward. Two hundred million years passed before them; the disk of dust around the sun disappeared. “Now the nine planets have formed. The video window shows real distances and proportions, unlike your planetarium displays, so finding Earth is going to take more work. I’ll use the coordinates I saved earlier instead.” With that, the nascent planet Earth appeared on the screen as a hazy gray sphere.