Yun sat next to her sister and shut her mind off to the absurdity on the hololense. Thoughts about what she would do tomorrow could wait till tomorrow.
It was unusual for Yun to sleep through the whole night. Usually, she’d be awake till at least midnight, often later. Some idea or theory teasing at her mind. While she did her best to separate work from her home life, logic problems, and research quandies would constantly tease at her mind. It was usually fun. But last night, she was exhausted and did something she rarely did.
As tomorrow came, and idea crossed her mind. After the short break, she couldn’t put the problem down. Yun needed some kind of answer, some kind of closure. It was obvious Theo was hiding something from her, and she suspected her data would hold the answer or at least part of.
The train ride down to New Jersey was always a scenic one. Outside the window the dense city passed by for the first half hour followed by more scenic suburban and rural areas. It would take a bit over an hour to reach the new University her old mentor Dr. Shroder was now teaching at.
He was an old man by now, nearly ancient in fact at a 110. Thanks to modern medical technology, he was far from the oldest person alive, but still very much up there. It wasn’t the first time the man had jumped Universities, even whole care paths. His attitude always made him feel like he was still 20, even if he was more than five times that now.
Yun could remember first meeting the man nearly 15 years ago and even thinking then he well passed retirement. It surprised her to learn he had just started in the field of high temperature quantum computing merely a decade before that. A strange and whimsical man, and right now as much as she just wanted to visit and catch up, she needed his guidance and expertise.
The train pulled into the rather rural station somewhere in south New Jersey, though it had elsewhere to be, with more empty stations to visit, this was her stop. She had never been there before, but knew the place had originally been pine barrens, with a landscape covered in pine trees. However, over the decades due to climate change and saltwater intrusion that Vistage had changed significantly. It was now a mixture of farmland, consisting of crops genetically modified to support the high saline content, and mixed urban areas that could be seen on the horizon.
Like most other things in this world, the farms were all managed and run by machines and AIs, with few if any humans about. A robotic taxi would take her the 3 miles to one of the satellite campuses. This place was strange though; it didn’t feel like she was even on a campus. It was so different from the city or other large schools. All around her was farmland, and machines. Some technical buildings here and there held strange looking devices; prototypes created by the various students on the campus.
This campus was so completely the opposite of her old school in New York. Seemingly focused on agriculture, rather than the complex physics and mechanics of that old university. Also different, there were people about. Not a lot, but finding individuals was fairly easy compared to the city. Almost the opposite of what you might have expected.
Asking around, everyone seemed to know the old man, but no one could point to exactly where he was. Chasing after him felt like chasing after a very fast ghost. “You just missed him, try over there.” Was the common phrase she heard.
For someone a 110, he still moved quick. Eventually though, she was able to find him. The old man was tending to some flowers, oddly enough. Taking some clippings and putting them in a see-through box. "They have you doing custodial work now, old man." Yun smiled as she joked behind the wrinkly old man.
His eyes squinted lightly, showing one was a synthetic replacement. Quickly his face turned into a broad smile. "Yun! This is a pleasant surprise! What brings you down here?" He nearly ran to give her a hug that surprisingly strong her given how old he was.
"Eh, I'm on vacation. Thought I'd look up my old mentor and see if he's still alive."
"I'm still here. Just got a new heart actually, three months ago."
"I didn’t know! Are you ok?"
"Oh yeah, old one had some murmurs and the doctors were worried about it. Eh, they cloned it from some old stem cells like my last one. Hoping this one lasts me another 40 years too. I want to see the turn of the next century, ha ha."
He paused after laughing to squint at her, "But this is unusual. I never knew you to take vacations."
"It wasn't by choice."
“Oh? Well, I was just about to grab lunch, come with me and tell me about it…”
A short hour later, the two had finished their meal and were now sitting outside in front of the campus’ cafeteria. It was similar to the one in New York, a series of robotics set about cooking and preparing food. Only, unlike in her building, there were enough students around to keep these active.
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Yun gave a sigh after finishing her story. It felt like she had done all the talking so far, and as much as she may have wanted his help, there was still genuine concern for her old friend and his current location. “So that’s the gist of it all. What about you, why are you out here planting flowers?”
“Eh, something new to do. I’ve been assisting with some of the research going on out here. Figured, I made a big enough impact in computational sciences, maybe I’ll see what I can do in bio-engineering. You know, no one has looked at fusing biological computers with plants before. It’s an interesting idea that my colleague has. I’m helping him with the computational part. Think about it, plants that can learn and change as the climate changes around them. We could pass new protein and gene designs remotely. If it works.”
Yun shook her head in astonishment, “You, just want to write a few more papers?”
The old man shrugged, “My CV is already long enough to be its own book. I just want to explore and see what’s possible. A long, long time ago I started my work in fusion research, way back in the 2020s. I was nearing 40 at the time and realized I never made a mark for myself. It’s never too late to start so I pushed myself, got into research at my first school. Graduated with honors and wrote a few papers, including my thesis. The teams I worked with eventually figured it out. After that, I wanted to do something else, so I was working in astrophysics for a while. Then got into stellar mechanics, jumped around some more and well you know the rest. Eventually, I ran into you when you joined my high energy quantum computation lab. You were another new wave of insight and innovation, and I was along for your ride. You and that other man, Theo.”
The other name bothered her a bit, but she did her best not to let it show.“You didn’t even want to share your name on paper.”
“Eh, it was your idea, I just gave you the space and equipment to work on it, and again, remember my CV is literally a book now. It doesn’t need more pages.” He laughed a bit, before staring at Yun again. “So, I know you well. You didn’t come here to reminisce with me. How can I help you.”
Yun looked away for a moment, perhaps a bit ashamed she had to ask in the first place. But, Dr. Shoder was more than willing to humor her request, even stating that it sounded like an interesting problem. Yet, she was left in disappointment when she saw the small station in Shroder’s office. She didn’t want to say it, but the system at her apartment was probably bigger than this one. The giant systems back in NYU just weren’t available at this small agrarian research school.
“I see…” He looked over the simulations she had already made and the code she used to make them. They all seemed reasonable enough, but clearly, they were making a lot of approximations. “So you need processing power to get rid of the approximations your making.”
“Sorry, don’t worry about it. It’s an absurd idea anyway.”
Schroder rubbed the scruff on his face before smiling and laughing lightly. “Well now you’ve got me curious. What we’re seeing shouldn’t be possible, yet clearly it is. A conundrum if there was one. Either our theories are wrong, or the data is wrong. And I don’t think it’s your data.” His smile grew, “Problems like this are where magic happens. Let me talk to someone from my old University.”
“You mean in New York?”
“Ha! No, the place I worked before that in California.”
In the background of the video call, a banner could be seen that read, Caltech. “Sammy! You’re still working there, I’m so glad.”
“Dr. Schoder, it’s been a while! How can I help you my dear sir?”
“I’ve got an interesting problem, and we need some processing power. Do you guys have any spare time on your array?”
After a few minutes, and an agreement to add a few names to any papers, they suddenly had access to more processing than Yun could have dreamed of.
“They have ten singularity processors?” She was practically salivating. While Next World had far more than 10, Yun had only ever been able to get time on the one.
“I’m sure they have more than that now, but Sam is going to give us these ten and a few hours to work on this problem. Is the code you have ready to be run?”
Yun pointed to the quantum assembly file, and they sent it off, over the quantum data link between the two universities. It took a few minutes before a number showed up on screen, one hour and twelve minutes. They have their answer then, maybe. As the simulation ran, trickles of feedback came through first. Points and insights she was more or less expecting to see.
When the run finally completed, she gave a dejected sighed. The data was just as confusing as what she already had. Even the full simulation showed the same thing, a reduction in usable entropy and data output. Yun thanked Dr. Schoder before turning to leave. As she did though, she heard the old man laughed under his breath before calling her back over.
“Yun, come look at this.” He pointed to the center of the simulation, the model itself. A single pixel on the screen, representing a single point of space time. The simulation showed a value of zero entropy. Something that should have been impossible. There had to be some data there. To be zero would imply pure vacuum, at the center of something that should have been nearly infinitely dense.
Something was wrong at that point. Digging deeper into the output, something quickly became apparent. That point wasn’t zero. It was an error, caused by a division by zero. They spent the next half hour reviewing the data and model, over and over again. Eventually, they even bought in some assistance, a few friends and colleagues from other Universities.
No one had a good answer. Perhaps the initial data was bad, or the model was incomplete. The arguments went in circles until a realization occurred. The singularity was spinning, even on the output they could see it forming a ring, as the so-called Kerr metric dictated. The system couldn’t interpret the value at the center of it because it was undefined. That point no longer existed in their space time, and it overlapped with another. Yun’s eyes shot open wide at the realization. She now knew where the extra data was coming from.
“Holy hell.” She whispered, as her eyes grew wide. The answer was beyond anything they could have expected.