Fine Tuned Page 4
How?—I asked to no one.
And the answer came to me. The story had been fed electronically into the organometallic filaments that spread throughout my brain. Chi-ta-pron had infected me with a fast-acting nanotech virus. In the long seconds while I’d been sitting there, unmoving, it had connected my mind with the An-lan.
Their ancient memories. The perception of millions of machine-people traveling through the depths of local space. It was all there.
“What have you done to me?” I cried.
“You should ask what we have done for you,” he corrected.
And he was right. I saw how the An-lan lived among the stars. I saw how they worked, and explored, and played, and built, and dreamed. I saw it all.
And it was marvellous.
“So, you can see?” Chi-ta-pron, the An-kuh-lan of the aged An-lan inside him spoke through the Emperor’s body.
“I can see,” I answered.
My ambition to be the Sixth was to be fulfilled, but not as I’d hoped. This was more glorious than I ever could have imagined. I was to bring the message of the An-kuh-lan to humanity. I would gift to others the neural net Chi-ta-pron had laid over my own brain. Humanity would join the An-lan in the wonderful community that spanned much of the universe. We would see how beautifully the universe truly was fine-tuned. Fine-tuned for, and by, the An-lan.
- The End -
Thank you for reading this short story. If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll read on for a preview of my full-length novel The Reality Thief (available at a special discount on amazon.com).
The Reality Thief
Book One in the Deplosion series
Prologue
In the beginning was the Chaos. The Chaos was infinite and eternal, dark and silent. It didn’t roil with turbulent fire or explosions for there was nothing to burn, no oxygen to fuel the flames, no hydrogen atoms to fuse in the hearts of stars, no uranium atoms to split. The physical laws that made chemical and nuclear reactions possible didn’t exist, at least not in any consistent manner.
But the Chaos was not inert, quite the contrary. Endless experiments played out among the random virtual particles emerging spontaneously from the nothingness of the quantum vacuum. They arose in pairs, balancing positive and negative energy, matter and antimatter. They disappeared with no enduring effect, no more than inconsequential ripples in the fields, soon-forgotten perturbations.
Why were there virtual particles? Why was there anything? Because there always had been. The strains of the infinite quantum vacuum were relieved by producing virtual particles. That was reason enough.
The Chaos had always been, even though nothing in it had ever existed, not strictly speaking, not even for a nanosecond. In the absence of consistent causal relationships between different bits of virtual matter, Time’s Arrow had no direction; its measure was meaningless. It would be pointless to think about what came before, since “before” was an endless recess of immeasurable time, never reachable.
The timelessness of the Chaos allowed unlimited opportunity for every possible kind of virtual particle to come into existence. Random chance led to diversity among the particles. Physical laws rose out of the evolutionary clay of the Chaos and were spread by resonances between neighboring virtual particles. Where resonances overlapped, standing waves formed, causing real particles to be born and releasing excess energy. The real particles gave rise to self-propagating clusters, tiny islands of budding reality in a virtual ocean. Islands of real matter grew outward, transforming the Chaos.
Where particle interactions led to domains of greater stability, those regions expanded. Simple, short-lived universes were born and collapsed, their histories lost forever. Stability provided the selective pressure through which the universe evolved naturally from the Chaos.
The tumultuous experiments continued unbridled until two particularly stable domains came together, their resonances uniquely complementary. The rate of formation of real matter accelerated. From virtual nothingness, new matter exploded into existence, releasing tremendous energy in the process. The resonances expanded outward faster than the speed of light, driving Creation into the void. Space grew hotter and hotter. Out of the nowhere and nothing, out of the eternal and infinite Chaos, the universe unfolded like a fiery, blossoming flower.
1
Sharon Leigh’s hand trembled as the syringe met her bare arm. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
I’m not doing anything wrong. The FDA and university bureaucrats are just trying to wear us down. Peer reviews, teaching reviews, funding reviews, ethics reviews. Why won’t they just let us work in peace? They know it’s safe; they have all the data they need.
She exhaled and tried to relax. When she opened her blue-gray eyes, she was ready. Determined. She’d rolled the left sleeve of her lab coat up past the elbow. The thin vein was barely visible beneath the skin but she knew she could find it with the sharp tip of the needle.
Years of practice finding the tail veins of rats has served me well. She pictured her arm as a big, scaly tail, and laughed. It came out as a nervous snort that threatened to break into something bigger.
Okay, get a grip, and get on with it. She took another slow breath. The lab was brightly lit but quiet, except for the gentle hum of equipment. She could hear herself breathing. The last of her grad students had wandered off a few hours ago, and the cleaners weren’t due until 2:00 a.m., a full hour away.
She perched on the edge of a stool at the lab bench farthest from the door, where it would be difficult for anyone to see her through the windows into the hallway. The lab paraphernalia covering the bench between her and the window into the hallway acted as a convenient privacy screen should anyone pass by.
Beside the rack in front of her, an empty plastic centrifuge tube lay on its side, its hinged lid popped open: DNND 3.2-003. This was their newest version, the one that would lead to real success.
Am I crazy?—she asked herself for the hundredth time—or just too impatient? She knew the risks better than anyone. It was her invention, after all. After four long years of playing around the edges, it was time for a proper test. A human test.
She pressed the needle to her skin at a shallow angle, to better follow the vein underneath. Her skin dimpled under the pressure.
The lab door banged opened, and the clatter of the janitor’s tin pail on wheels followed.
Sharon jumped and let out a small yelp. The needle pricked her arm, drawing a miniscule bead of blood.
“Oh, sorry,” the cleaner called out in the direction of the yelp. He caught a sliver of white lab coat in the back of the room, barely visible behind the benches and the clutter of equipment. “I thought everyone had gone home.”
“That’s alright,” Sharon replied. She put her finger over the tiny nick and pressed against it. “I’m kind of in the middle of something, though. Could you come back in ten minutes?”
The man craned his neck to get a better look at who was doing the asking. It sounded like Dr. Leigh, but he wasn’t sure. Scientists. He stared at his bucket and mop, trying to come up with a good reason why he shouldn’t alter his schedule. “Sure, I guess I could do Dr. Strauss’ lab first.”
“Thanks. I’ll just be a few minutes.”
He gripped the mop handle and steered the bucket back into the hallway, letting it bump against the hard surfaces a little harder than usual. The door closed gently behind him.
Sharon took another deep breath. She dabbed a cotton swab in the ethanol and wiped the drop of blood from her arm. Pressing her lips together, she pushed the needle into her arm. It stung a little, but not as much as she’d expected. Here goes nothing.
She plunged the contents into her vein, withdrew the needle, and pressed a clean cotton ball to the puncture point. It was done.
Books by Paul Anlee
The Deplosion series:
The Reality Thief
Buy on Amazon at:
https://
www.amazon.com/dp/B06XSML7V5
The Reality Incursion
Buy on Amazon at:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074FH1J44
The Reality Rebellions
Buy on Amazon at:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B078Q84W9G
The Reality Assertion
(coming in 2018)
Other Publications
Friends in Foreign Places Omnibus Edition
(contains the Paul Anlee short story: Illegal Alien)
Buy on Amazon at:
https://www.amazon.com/Omnibus-Friends-Places-Complete-Anthology-ebook/dp/B01LBDPVC6
Now available in Spanish, too.
Buy on Amazon at:
https://www.amazon.com/Amigos-Lugares-Extranjeros-Friends-Place-Spanish-ebook/dp/B076Q49BNR
Want to make these books available for yourself and others to read for free? Ask your local Librarian to order them for their shelves! Available through Ingram.
Copyright © 2018 by Paul Anlee
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.
Darian Publishing House (darianpublishinghouse@gmail.com)
Chatham, Ontario, Canada
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
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