Charlie slammed back the wine like it was bourbon and barely tasted a thing. He flung the glass away from his hand as if it were a serpent ready to bite and didn’t even hear the sound of it shattering. “I screwed everything up!” He shouted, “I didn’t mean to! The great Doctor fucked the whole damn world! Charlie Manning… prodigy. Charlie Manning… the next Einstein. Charlie Manning… father of Quantum Conversion and Data Transport Theory. Charlie Manning… perpetrator of the greatest mass extinction since the Great Dying! Charlie Manning… I am becoming death, the destroyer of worlds. Guilty, we shall grow guilty by their deaths….” He whispered the blended verses of an ancient text and let the silence that would one day soon fill the world, fill the space between the two men until he could speak again.
“It’s funny…” Charlie said through a thick and bitter tongue, “Scientists have warned us for years that we’re in the midst of the seventh great mass extinction thanks to our inducement of climate change. They were probably right… and all their opponents insisted that humans couldn’t destroy the world… and now look?”
He spat a red glob of saliva down to the floor, it was still touched with some of the wine he’d just consumed and it struck the face on a bucket of fried chicken, running down slowly like a bloody tear.
“One man alone is the cause of the eighth great mass extinction, and I’m outdoing the Permian-Triassic extinction event… well, probably. It’s hard to say whether or not bacteria will survive, or any animal life, or if it’s just going to be ‘everything’ down to the last single cell.” Charlie gave his head a slow and disgusted shake, he couldn’t meet Josef’s eyes.
“What kind of friend am I now? I’ve killed you. I’ve killed your wife. I’ve killed your family legacy and everybody alive… that’s why I’ve been like this. That’s why I’ve asked those strange questions… that’s why… that’s why I say you’re better than I deserve!” Charlie cried out and wiped his eyes.
“My parents are gone, you can’t kill the dead, but I’ve killed myself, my future… that’s why I couldn’t really toast to tomorrow, that’s why I’m only barely sure of today. I don’t know how long we’ve got…” Charlie’s lips pursed tight.
Josef still hadn’t said a thing. He only sat with his gentle brown eyes, almost cow-like in their passivity and clear as Sherlock Holmes in his focused attention.
“But I know there’s no hope. When I… look, when I took that job, it was just supposed to be a year or three of study, measuring the unmeasurable, plumbing the depths of the unplumbed, discovering the unknown and… you know, what was that thing your teacher liked to tell you?”
“Measure what is measurable, what is not measurable… make so.” Josef finally said something at all, but it was like he wasn’t really there, just reciting from memory.
Charlie nodded along, “Yeah I… I just, I didn’t know what I was going to do! I was working alone, working alone because…”
“Nobody else in the world was competent enough to work with you.” Josef said without hesitation. “Maybe I would have been… if I hadn’t dropped out when I did.”
“No maybe about it… but yeah… the Great Charlie Manning had no equals, had no peers, there was no ‘team’ to do what I could, the rest of the damn world barely understood enough of my work to realize I’d changed everything.” He sniffled a bit, “So stupid. So- damn- stupid. You know how often I think that about people, or… ‘thought’ that about people?”
Josef didn’t meet his eyes.
“There was a cartoonist once, kind of nutty about some things, but he once had an analogy, he proposed a test in which the smartest person in the world was the only one who could do really well. The ‘average’ person couldn’t have even understood the material, so they’d more or less ‘guess’ their way through. Then imagine that you gave a dog the same test and it would have to guess what it should touch. The dog and the average person would get roughly the same score within a reasonable approximation of one another. So to the smartest person in the world, the average person is barely more intelligent than a dog.” Charlie swallowed, a faint taste of wine ran down his throat again.
“That’s how I spent most of my life thinking of the people around me, barely better than ordinary animals, I’d look at their stupid actions, I’d look at their stupid decisions… There was a cab driver I once read about who was going to die of liver failure, and he couldn’t afford healthcare, said to his interviewer in the book that he voted against universal healthcare because he didn’t want his taxes used for illegals and foreigners or something. He not only preferred that other people die, he preferred to die just to ensure they did. He did, or so I read. Imagine being so stupid you’d die to spite a dollar, imagine being so spiteful over a dollar of your taxes to save a life… How could I not be arrogant around that kind of stupid? But all he did was kill himself.”
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Charlie’s fingers shook, as did the rest of his hand, and the rest of his body began to tremble as the pent up emotions, fears, frustrations, and self hatred finally began to shed themselves like sweat out of his pores.
“I’ve killed everyone, what a genius. What a God. Damn. Genius. Supervillains in stories always plot for ‘global destruction’ for some stupid reason, but people always overlook the real villain, the worst villain, the most dangerous villain. Ignorance. Ignorance and stupidity are worse enemies than any evil. Look at me, look at what I’ve done! I thought it was just a harmless experiment, a little breaking of the quanta for one key experiment that would validate everything in my entire life.”
“Good news though… I was right. I was right about everything. Breaking the electron orbit was even more powerful than changing its rotation, the more I could break the more I could build. Remember what I said in my presentation in our second year?” Charlie asked.
Josef recited it from memory, “All creation is destruction, you break a mountain to get the ore to make tools, you tear earth from earth and make it into bricks to build homes. You can’t create or discover without destroying, so destruction with purpose is a moral good because it leads to all the things we have that make life better.”
“Philosophy, right… not my favorite subject, and I was really just trying to tweak the professor at the time. Pompous windbag.” Charlie recited the old insult at the now deceased professor.
“I was right though… to a point… and this is that point… and now we’re all screwed.” Charlie said with finality, his body was still shaking.
“If you want to go… if you… listen… there’s no ‘crime’ that can account for the extent of what I’ve done, most people wouldn’t even be qualified to sit on the damn jury to understand it. But you are. You’ve got every right to judge me… you’ve got every right… to… to walk away from me now. Every right to take my life if you want… I killed your wife, yourself, your friends, our town… city, state, country, and world. I don’t have a right to stop you.”
“So… go on. Do whatever you’re going to do, say whatever you’re going to say, it’s okay to cry, or rage, or hit me, nothing you do in this apartment, will count as wrong. Not in my eyes… and frankly if there is a god… it won’t be unjust to it either.” Charlie swallowed, and waited.
“Is that… is that everything?” Josef asked as quietly as he could. “Can’t you at least tell me… you know, ‘how’ this is going to end, and how you’re sure there’s nothing that can be done?”
“Because I’m Charlie Manning. Because there’s only one place in the world that even has the equipment necessary to plumb the depths of the cosmos and the quanta that make it up down to the impossible fields that separate even the closest and most intimate touch of lovers. Nobody can see what I see… I know what I’ve done… afterward, I tried my hardest to change it, I tried to reverse it, I even changed the equipment, effectively disabling it but… it was too late. The end is coming, how far away it is in time is hard to tell. This isn’t exactly time-state dependent, it’s not even necessarily universe-state dependent. How this interacts with the multiverse is the only thing I’m not one hundred percent sure of, but we’re screwed and that’s that. Just take my word for it, Josef, this is it.” Charlie confessed.
“Does anyone else know…?” Josef asked gravely, “Institute heads, politicians… anyone?”
“I thought I told someone else but… I guess that was a dream… or maybe a nightmare.” Charlie said as he contemplated the previous night.
“I see… I want another glass… do- do you mind?” Josef pressed.
Charlie didn’t move, but he did speak, “Yeah, whatever.”
Josef got up and went to the kitchen, “Hey, I hate to throw in the unimportant but… this is a nice little tool, do you think I could have it?”
Charlie chuckled, “You and your fondness for toys and tools… it’s just a Swiss Army knife, five dollars and change at any store but… why not? Go ahead and keep it.”
“Thanks. So… Charlie… just live your life. If you’re dead anyway, if there’s nothing you can do… then just do things as if you’ve got tomorrow. I mean you thought this was going to happen a long time ago, right? So it hasn’t happened yet. I’m not saying what you did is alright… I don’t want to die… but we’re all going to go out together… and maybe we won’t even know it when it happens… which is kind of how every death is anyway. You never actually ‘get’ the final moment, it’s just a lightswitch going off and that’s that. So…” Josef drank from his glass and set it down on the table, then looked down at the Swiss Army knife and folded the corkscrew closed with a little metallic snap. “Just accept it, you can’t change it, so just live the best you can, make peace with it, not misery with it.”
“Josef…” Charlie whispered and finally looked up in time to feel the bear-like hand on his shoulder, “It’ll make me happier, not seeing my best man all shattered to pieces, so… if you don’t mind… would you?”
Josef slipped the little knife into his pocket and Charlie gave a very slow nod of acceptance.
“Yeah… yeah I’ll- I’ll try. Accept the things we can’t change eh… what else can I do?” Charlie asked.
“Damn right, Charlie. That’s Goddamn right.” Josef replied.
Charlie began to raise his head to the behemoth, fading light came in through the window, orange and descending into the distance, before he could lift his face up to smile, the light hit Charlie square in the retina, briefly sending pain through his head and blinding him completely for an instant.
Then he shot upright in his bed, a cold sweat on his brow, and fell back again. He glanced to his right, the clock was gone from its place, and he was alone in his room again.