Cacophony Read online

  Cacophony

  Aaron Frale

  Copyright © 2020 Aaron Frale

  All rights reserved

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  To my readers, your support is much appreciated.

  Other Books by Aaron Frale

  Comedy

  Time Burrito

  ORION

  Othello and Zombies

  Xmas Elf: Secret Agent

  Science Fiction

  Atmospheric Pressure Series

  The Robin Hood of Couches

  The Teristaque Chronicles

  Time Agency

  Horror

  Playlist of the Ancient Dead

  Desert During Day of the Dead

  Short Story Collections

  Cowboys and Drones

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  1

  Doctor Benjamin Weatherford-Rice knew the day was coming yet was powerless to stop it. He stood on the balcony of the science building with other students and faculty watching a vortex grow in the distance, crackling with purple lightning, darkening the sky, and sucking in the cloud cover that surrounded it. The only part that surprised him was that today was the day. The people were chatting with each other and recording it with their TF3s. It was like they were watching a curious cloud in the sky and not the beginning of the end of the world.

  He had warned the policymakers and public of the impending crisis, but because the effects were barely noticeable in the short term, and the solutions were costly, his warnings were ignored. That wasn’t to say that people didn’t support him. There was a ninety-seven percent consensus among his colleagues that his research was accurate. The three percent were most likely corporate lackeys who sold themselves to the highest bidder long ago. There were also private businesses who had listened and changed their habits because of his lifelong work of informing about the crisis to come.

  In the end, there was no one bad guy whose greed screwed up the planet for the rest of the population, but rather that society was hard to change, and the needle was moving too slowly to make a difference. By the time the events of today were transpiring, most of the world was on board with his vision of a sustainable future, and there was even a Weatherford-Rice Initiative signed by most of the world’s government, but it was too late. The point of no return had been reached years ago. All Dr. Ben, as his students called him, had to do was decide how to spend the rest of his time.

  The part that boggled his mind was that catastrophic failure was at least twenty years earlier than even the direst of the predictions. A quick calculation in his head put the point of no return at roughly around the time when at least half of the voting public were deniers of his research, and politicians got a lot of mileage about being deniers too. Humanity didn’t even have a chance.

  The only thing left was to protect the multiverse from his failures, and even though he was ringing the alarm bell before people knew there was an alarm bell to ring, he couldn’t help but feel accountable. If he had only done that third special on public television or decided not to take a break during the holidays from his lecture tour. If he had spent more time in the seats of power and less time with his students. There were so many what-ifs that were pointless to ponder but still made him feel the burden of today more than anyone.

  He turned from the growing storm and went back into the building. While he was walking down the hall toward his office, a young student who was bright and native with ancestors who predated the European settlers to the land stopped him in the hallway. She was worried and probably more than most because she had been in his class and would have perhaps rivaled his career had she been given more time.

  “Dr. Ben?” she asked.

  “Yes, Peggy,” he said.

  “Is everything going to be okay?”

  “You have a couple days before it will grow large enough to reach the city. Maybe one or two more before it reaches the reservation. I suggest going home to be with your family.”

  She fought back tears and ran down the hallway toward the exit. A few corridors later, another student stopped him to get feedback on an assignment. Without even looking at it, Dr. Ben wrote the highest grade possible and gave it back to the bewildered kid and continued down the hall.

  When the doctor finally got to his office, he tore off the note welcoming any students whenever they saw the light on and locked the door behind him. He didn’t even bother to pick up the crumpled piece of paper when it hit the wastebasket edge. Even though most professors had the smart screens on their door linked to their email calendar, he was just old school enough to appreciate forms like printed paper and probably had one of the few printers left on campus.

  There was a hint of preparing for the future by keeping physical books and printed pages in his office. After his civilization was no more, there was no guarantee the devices they left behind would be comprehensible to the budding human cultures out in the multiverse. At least if he printed his books with nondegradable papers, there would be something left behind. There would be documentation that he existed, and maybe another would benefit from his mistakes and not make one of their own.

  He sat back on his desk made from solid wood that wasn’t used much anymore in the furniture business that almost was all done by additive manufacturing. He waved his hand, and his computer display appeared around him. His email window hovered to his right, and an interesting article on quantum entangled computing was to the left. Several projects were up in front.

  Dr. Ben closed all the windows, including the one notifying him that he was missing class, and pulled up an interface. He typed in a security password and let it scan his DNA. A command prompt appeared, and he typed in a few commands. In a few moments, a machine in the basement of the building would kick in, and the people of this world would be unable to leave or enter this universe.

  Even though he was condemning every last one of them to death, it was necessary for the safety of other universes. People were already jumping into other worlds, taking their technology with them. There would be remnants of his civilization scattered throughout the multiverse, but at least he could stop the flood. In a couple days, people would be flooding out in droves and taking their tech with them.

  Even though protocols were put in place to prevent the transport of weapons, there were strict observe only rules for travelers, and all the other regulations, it didn’t change the fact that almost everyone on the planet could go to another world with a push of a button. When it was clear their world was lost, they would destroy countless others in their exodus from this one.

  His civilization had its chance. Perhaps another iteration of humanity would make better decisions. He initiated the sequence to power up the device that would seal his universe forever and pulled out a TF3 from his desk drawer. In a moment or two, a fusion reactor with millions of years of fuel would power a device that would leave the people trapped. The only exception were his personal devices. They were coded to pass through the barrier. He had important work to do.

  He pushed a box off of a private tuning platform, stepped onto it, and pressed a button on his TF3. He held his breath and appeared on a platform in the observation station he had created. He couldn’t believe that his government had funded a project to create a science station that was outside the existence of any known universe. It was one year from full operation, and he was glad that no one was there. He planned to shut down the air and kill everyone aboard, but thankfully it seemed to be empty.

  If this place was full of scientists and technicians when the end came, he didn’t know if he could have gone through with it. As it stood now, there was only a construction cr
ew who were thankfully on strike when the World Construction Authority decided to protest the use of drones replacing humans at the worksite. He assured himself that he was making the right decision.

  While he went through the corridors of Research Station One, he used his TF3 to stream the news from his world. He was lucky the barrier didn’t stop the quantumly entangled communication network from working across the multiverse.

  It was the same depressing trash he had dealt with his entire life. Some scientists who should know better said the vortex would go away in a couple days and reassured the world that the Weatherford-Rice Initiative would be successful. Religious zealots railed about the end of days. There were reports of panicking and some looting. However, overall, he was surprised that the world hadn’t fallen apart yet. People’s inability to travel between universes was a minor footnote in the news. Right now, it was thought to be a network outage.

  He was glad that he got to it in time before the mass fleeing had begun while some preppers, people on vacation, scientists, and others who just happen to be off-world would have slipped through. Overall, he guessed that maybe one to three percent of the population of his universe had escaped. It was not enough to organize into a whole new civilization of multiverse travelers mainly because they were probably scattered, and only teenagers lucky enough to be able to do it manually would be able to bounce between the worlds.

  He briefly considered turning on the barrier to this station too, but it would take too much time to fire the software up. He wasn’t worried about the remnants left behind. Maybe some intelligent teen would stumble on this place after figuring out how to use a TF3. It would be a place to go urban spelunking and nothing more. It would take another universe to grow to his world’s technological level to crack the multiverse barrier. Teens could never organize enough to make use of this station. It was way too complicated for them. They would probably only graffiti the walls and take their friends to drink here.

  Tuning was such a rare ability that Dr. Ben was confident that travel between multiverses would be lost even with all the toys left behind. It didn’t mean that one day a civilization wouldn’t advance to their level on their own like his world. He was sure the technology would be discovered again. He hoped at that point, humanity would be ready.

  The problem was that every time someone traveled from their universe, they weakened both the barrier of their own worlds as well as the destination one. The damage to the targets was nowhere near as bad as to their own. They were using the natural architecture of the multiverse and only traveled where it was safest to pass. The problem was the sheer volume of people going through. The passages between worlds were swelling beyond capacity. A river could sustain a few boats, but when hundreds of thousands of ships passed through every day, the stream broke down.

  The core issue was that people’s way of life was dependent on multiverse travel. The raw materials necessary to run civilization came from all over the multiverse. Other universes wouldn’t know a mine or two that was always mining yet never seemed to be shipping anywhere local, considering everyone knew the iron from U-52b made the best steel. Water was discovered in U-16c that legitimately had positive health outcomes for the people of his world. An entrepreneur created a bottling plant all with local labor. The only people from Dr. Ben’s world were the handful of truck drivers who’d drive it to a warehouse that would tune it here.

  The economy was too linked to the multiverse to stop all travel, so the best was to mitigate it, and then eventually transition to sustainable technologies that wouldn’t tear a hole in the fabric of the universe when people traveled. His society had the tools to prevent it, but short-term gain beat out long-term planning in the end. In exchange for the comfort of now, people were willing to give up tomorrow.

  He arrived at a vault made to hold the station’s research. But the real destination was a room inside where he had a secret project. One that only he had permission to enter. He passed the empty shelves waiting for U-1’s best and brightest to store their work and came to an innocuous door with a lock. He entered the code and went into a lab where a large blue sphere crackling with energy was floating in the center of three rings that were rotating around it. The rings generated a field that contained a mass that was as dense as a neutron star and prevented the intense gravity from collapsing the station into it. He flipped on a control panel and scanned for viable candidates. U-78f appeared to have the right requirements.

  He was about to initiate the main sequence when he paused. Even though better judgment should have prevailed, he pulled up statistics of his target Earth. It was an average-sized world with about ten billion people. It was still low tech with the worldwide computer network maybe twenty years old.

  Dr. Ben knew that he was only making it more difficult for himself. Instead of thinking about the other universes that were blissfully unaware that they were about to be saved, he would think about the ten billion inhabitants of 78f who were about to have their home become the firing range for the instability that was afflicting his world.

  Instead of U-1 causing a chain reaction that would cascade through all the universes, tearing them apart, he would channel the energy to 78f. Either way, his world was gone. The only question remaining was whether to take down another universe or the entire multiverse. He scanned again for other candidates, but 78f was the only one. He wished it could have been one still in the middle ages or a void universe, but he wasn’t that lucky.

  He didn’t have time to tweak the calculations to see if there was another with viable parameters. The vortex had appeared too quickly. While he was at peace with sending the people of his own worlds to an early grave, now, during the final hour, he hesitated with the inhabitants of 78f. His own people had had years to correct their societal behavior, but the people of U-78f wouldn’t know what hit them.

  Their world would be fine one moment, then tears in the fabric of reality would rain down chunks of U-1 in a cataclysm the world has never seen. He estimated that only .1% of the ten billion would survive the initial influx. Anyone who was left would be dealing with residual instability, taking pieces from other universes for years to come.

  He was about to press the button that would give 78f about as much time as his world had left when a buzz came through on his personal communication channel. He pulled out his TF3 and looked at the caller. It was Dr. Raymond Stevenson. They had been best of friends since grad school, and his colleague always claimed that Dr. Ben was stealing the idea behind the name Dr. Ray. He clicked the answer button, less because he had anything to say and more because he wanted to delay condemning ten billion people to death.

  “Benjie, how are you, man?” Dr. Ray’s face appeared on the screen of his TF3. Unlike Dr. Ben, who let his hair grey and face wrinkle, Dr. Ray still looked like he was in his twenties with all the treatments, even though they were both pushing seventy.

  “You know I hate that name. You sound remarkably chipper for someone who is about to die in a week,” Dr. Ben said. Dr. Ray of all people should know that the vortex was more than just a curiosity.

  “I skipped town the moment it appeared. Now that you flipped the switch on your little device, I’m stranded. There aren’t even humans on this world, at least ones who aren’t throwing stone axes. At least then I could have taught one of the local teens to tune by ear. I don’t suppose you can open the gates for a friend.”

  “You know I can’t do that. If I open the barrier for even a few seconds, billions of people from our world will—”

  “Blah. Blah. Blah. Purity of the multiverse. I know. You know I helped write the algorithm that fries unapproved technology from passing through the membrane of universes. Other than needing gravity mods for unusually high gravity, the fact that the only edible plant is a tree root that tastes awful, and did I mention the bleakness of the landscape? This place isn’t that bad. But seriously, I needed to come here.”

  “You could have chosen a nicer world like U-61g. The entire pla
net is literally an ocean. The few pockets of land are tropical paradises. Of course, you have to be rich to live on one, but I’m sure a man of your nature would figure it out,” Dr. Ben said.

  “If I did that, I wouldn’t be able to work on a special project that isn’t exactly sanctioned by our government, so I had to go to an uncharted world.”

  “I don’t like where this is going.”

  “Don’t lecture me about morality. I know about your station outside the known universes, the diverter you created to stop the chain reaction. Two can have secret plans to save our world, you know.”

  Dr. Ben sat up. There was no way Dr. Ray could have thought of something he didn’t. His friend was more a playboy than a scientist. While Dr. Ben went into academics, Dr. Ray lived off a few lucrative patents early in his career, and then eventually built an empire of science-based products, anywhere from pharmaceuticals to sleep, beauty, and workout gadgets. It was hard to walk into a drugstore without being assaulted by Dr. Ray's products. What irked Dr. Ben the most was that even though his friend’s early success was solid science, the following products became about the money and not about the facts.

  However, even if there was a remote possibility his college buddy had thought of something he hadn’t, it was worth hearing him out no matter how skeptical he was of any actionable plan.

  “What have you got?” Dr. Ben asked.

  Dr. Ray smiled and said, “Your machine diverts the reaction to one world and then diffuses it over time. What if I said I could stop the reaction from happening entirely with no residual effects?”

  “I’d say impossible,” Dr. Ben said. “Unless you took 1/3 of the charted multiverse with you.”

  “That’s just it. I created a machine that can help you decide where to direct the energy. It will punch a select number of people through the membrane between worlds. It would result in the destruction of the destination universe but leave ours untouched except for the souls unlucky enough to go on the journey. Rather than an uncontrolled reaction that could take out the whole thing, why not pick the 1/3 to go?”