The Burglary In The Basement Of God
By David Grace
Michael McGill's harem was
down to fifteen maidens, but, he admitted, fifteen were more than enough. His favorite body servant had recently died from some nameless
disease which all the chants and leaches from fifty miles in any direction couldn't cure, but new servants were easily acquired. And,
while his palace didn't have central air conditioning, Michael had assigned three slaves to follow him from room to room and fan his
brow and wash his feet whenever the temperature became the slightest bit uncomfortable. Still, McGill was not happy. The problem was
that Michael McGill was bored.
Reluctantly, McGill admitted to himself, unadulterated, obscene wealth wasn't as much fun as he had
thought it would be. Well, soon enough he would be back with the guys in front of the TV, chomping down a pepperoni pizza, guzzling
a Jolt Cola, screaming at Malloy to throw the damn ball before Watkins knocked him on his butt. While this had been an interesting
experiment, Michael knew he would be glad to get back to the present. He would even be glad to go back to work for Edwin Harp. Which
was, of course, where all of this had started.
McGill's discovery was just one of those peculiar things you ran into now and then
when you worked for the billionaire genius who owned NewSoft. McGill's job had seemed ordinary enough, designing the ultimate operating
system data management module, something Harp had named the BigData Project. But after a few weeks it had become so boring!
Out of
sheer frustration McGill started experimenting with Harp's new BlazerBoy mainframe. Well, the truth was that McGill had hacked into
the damn thing to play a few hours of Doomed Galactic Rangers to take his mind off micro-kernals and ring priorities, but he became
irritated that the game was not nearly as exciting as it could be if only its short-sighted designers had added a few additional features.
Still, McGill had a clever mind and it didn't take him long to find a solution to his problem. He "borrowed" a copy of the Galactic
Rangers' source code from a criminally insecure file server at Wheels Of Progress Software, the game's creator, and added the enhancements
himself. First he upgraded the program to operate in true stereo three-d mode. Then he had the idea of adding Hyperspace and TimeWarp
options. After that, well, one thing led to another.
So Michael re-compiled the source code to run on the BlazerBoy, slipped on his
three-d glasses, and pressed ENTER. For a while everything seemed to work just fine. The Galactic Ranger icon representing McGill
chased the Space Demons from solar system to solar system, down one black hole and out the next, all in sixteen million color three-d
stereo glory. It was great, except that every now and then the Evil Demon somehow managed to escape the game and disappear.
"Now,
what could cause that?" McGill wondered. It took him a couple of days but he finally tracked down the missing characters and found
that they were disappearing into the intersection between the hyperspace and time warp regions he had added. The only way that could
have happened was that if when the demon entered the fourth dimension time had ceased to flow, a novel proposition given that the
operation of all computers depended upon an absolute exact clocking of events. Now here was a job worthy of McGill's attention. To
hell with Harp's BigData Project!
If there's no time in the hyper region, McGill reasoned, then there's no movement there either and
thus no data to collect. But if there's no time, how can the icon cross into this zone, and if it crosses over, how can it ever get
back? It would be stuck in a no-time boundary layer forever.
McGill scratched his head, rubbed his neck, paced around his cubicle and
drank three cans of Jolt Cola before he realized the answer: While there might be no Newtonian Time in hyperspace, there could be
Hyper-Time there. Time flows must be different in that dimension and noncontiguous with McGill's real-space existence. Well, he could
handle that.
Two days later McGill's hyperspace software probe had created a 667 megabyte data file. McGill immediately fired up his
viewer program, which he named, Peekaboo, to take a look at what he had recovered. It only took McGill a few minutes to realize that
the virtual world he was investigating was far too big for him to be able to personally explore.
Simultaneously take a picture of
the
But McGill thought of a solution to this problem. Being a clever fellow, not really smart, but crafty,
he built a virtual robotic searcher, which he named, Lewisnclark, to traverse the virtual landscape at increasingly greater levels
of magnification and then build an index of the picture's major features in decreasing order of size, number of objects and complexity.
It was about this time that Edwin Harp's minions began to wonder about the heavy use of the BlazerBoy at odd times and durations.
"Oh that," McGill said casually when his boss, Jerome Krosky, asked him about it. "I'm doing some modeling of one of the new file
structures I'm evaluating. Great machine! I couldn't design BigData without it."
Krosky stared at McGill for a long second, at Michael's
pony tail, at his "I Just Want To ASCII 27" t-shirt, at his open, honest face. Perhaps all this use of BlazerBoy was good news.
Maybe it meant that McGill was closing in on a breakthrough which would spell success for the BigData Project. Krosky finally nodded
his head and wandered away.
"Well, back to work," McGill mumbled happily and returned to his keyboard. Four days later Lewisnclark
posted a message that it had finished cataloging the image and McGill ordered Peekaboo to display the first object on Lewisnclark's
list.
Of course, Peekaboo was unable to realistically translate a four or more dimensional object into a three dimensional one. How
could it? Think about a sphere, then translate that from three dimensions to two -- a circle. The circle looks sort of like a sphere,
unless the surface of the globe had been covered mountains and forests, in which case the circle would look very little like the globe
which it replaced.
Or, better yet, visualize a meadow of flowers surrounded by a hundred trees. The scene stretches off into the distance.
Translate that into an image that has and can have no hint of depth or distance because depth does not exist in a purely two dimensional
world, only length and width. How much does the resulting two dimensional image resemble the three dimensional original? Now try the
same thing again except this time translate an object which occupies four or five or six dimensions down into merely three.
With this
inherent problem in mind, McGill looked at the first item on Peekaboo's list. The thing looked like a forest of eighteen different
kinds of radar antennae encrusting the surface of an elephant with nineteen legs and four trunks which weighed in at close to the
size of
Confused but excited, McGill moved down to the second item on the list, a scene
which would have driven M.C. Escher to confinement in a mental institution. Just trying to look at it through squinted eyes gave McGill
a headache. It was about this time that a personal memo from Edwin Harp was hand delivered. Harp was not happy about the lack of progress
reports, about the lack of documentation, about the excessive use of his multi-million dollar BlazerBoy without adequate justification.
Harp wanted to know exactly what the hell McGill was doing.
McGill called up a text editor and composed a quick memo which he immediately
dispatched to the President of NewSoft:
"Dear Mr. Harp:
I am exploring a completely new data storage
mechanism which utilizes a virtual multidimensional region of pseudo-hyperspace for revolutionary gains in all performance categories.
I expect to have definite results within a short time. If you wish to terminate my employment, tell me immediately as I have received
a job offer at a substantial increase in salary from IBM."
And if Harp called his bluff? If he wanted a personal
explanation of McGill's experiments? What if Harp came roaring down to McGill's cubicle full of questions and demands? To hell with
him. McGill didn't care. He was as enthralled by his virtual world as any doorway-sleeping junkie was by his pipeful of crack. But
the memo worked. Thereafter from Harp's office McGill detected only a profound and absolute silence.
McGill forged ahead. He had worked
his way through the eighth item on Lewisnclark's list before he made his big discovery. More than anything else the ninth item
looked like a huge, rambling, multistoried, unplanned, enormous building. Compared to it, the Pentagon was little more than a PhotoMat
hut. McGill found that he was able to zoom Peekaboo's point of view through walls, down ramps and around corners. Everywhere he went
he found thousands and thousands of objects -- blocks and three dimensional solids. The sizes, proportions and dimensions differed
from block to block and they were jammed in everywhere.
When Michael zoomed through the wall of one of the blocks the screen flickered
with a blur of motion like that of a movie projector running at a million frames per second. McGill pushed deeper into the maze of
the sub-boxes. This time the blur was slower. Deeper yet. A slower wash of images. Eventually, McGill reached a level of boxes within
boxes within boxes where the pictures were comprehensible, a high speed movie of people in long coats and beards with swords clasped
to their belts. McGill pushed down another level.
Now events were running at only about twice normal speed. A left or rightward movement
of the joy-stick accessed adjacent boxes. In the Galactic Rangers game a forward and back joy-stick movement sent your player forward
and back and a control-forward and control-back stroke moved your player up and down.
McGill held down the control key and jiggled
the joy-stick. He found that now his point of view moved left and right, forward and back across the landscape rather than from box
to box. But what did it all mean? What were these snippets of pictures? McGill stared at the screen and tried to figure it out. In
his frame of reference, each of the boxes ran through its video display in the same period of time, but the rate that events took
place was slower and slower as one went deeper and deeper, in other words, the scene shown became shorter.
Each "large" box seemed
to contain an entire video sequence and each box within a box contained a portion, a section of that larger sequence. The only theory
that Michael was able to think of that seemed to explain this was that each of the large boxes contained all of the events over some
unit of time and that each succeeding smaller box contained within it the events for some fraction of the period of time covered by
the larger box which contained it.
Each of the largest boxes contained perhaps a year or ten years, maybe a century, whatever, while
a box at the very bottom level might contain events occupying the smallest fragment of time possible in the cosmos, perhaps a billionth
of a billionth of a second.
McGill pondered this situation for quite a long time before he finally concluded that he had encountered
God's Warehouse. At least that's what McGill decided to call it. Naturally, it didn't resemble a Bekins depot and there certainly
wasn't a sign out front reading: "Jehovah's Storage," but that's what McGill figured that it was, the place where God stored all his
leftover time.
Here, Michael decided, was where all the years went when God was done with them. The Big Guy neatly boxed them up and
stacked them in his warehouse so that if he ever needed to change something, all he had to do was find the right box, work his way
down until he got to the right sub-sub-sub-box, change what he needed to, and then He put the whole thing back where he found it,
until the next time.
"Where, exactly, is this place?" McGill asked himself. "If I turned off BlazerBoy and turned it back on, would
any of this stuff still be here?" But, he realized immediately, that was three dimensional, Newtonian thinking, something that
was completely inappropriate in to multidimensional universe. Three dimensional objects no more had a location anywhere within a purely
two dimensional world than four or five dimensional objects had a "real" location anywhere within a three dimensional one. All of
this was "somewhere else". BlazerBoy merely provided a virtual window into that "somewhere else."
Still, what does God do for fire
insurance? McGill wondered suddenly. What if something happened to the warehouse or somebody stole all the time? How would you replace
all that time? But that was silly, wasn't it? Who would want to steal time? Steal time? Who indeed?
Questions, theories, speculations
began to spawn in McGill's brain at so rapid a pace that his vision became blurred and his head began to spin, but, then again, maybe
it was just the Jolt Cola.
"Time to think," McGill began to mumble. "I need time to think." Michael saved his coordinates, shut
down Peekaboo and staggered home to bed. Eight hours later he was still thinking and, for the first time in his professional career,
he called in sick.
