Generations by Frederik Pohl

Author:Frederik Pohl
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2013-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

* * * *

Brigadier General Ronald R. Khoshaba

Even now I have trouble believing that what Steve Avedon told me was true, but there it was. Every lab was confirming it—not only what was left of the American labs but ultimately CERN and Bologna and Beijing as well. And not just the fine structure constant, either. That radar measurement that put the Moon closer than it should have been wasn’t because the Moon had moved, it was because c, that utterly unchangeable speed of light called c, had gone and changed on us and was now just that little bit faster. Half a dozen other numbers that had been holy writ for generations were suddenly in doubt, too. And so the question that we faced—and that the whole scientific community faced, and before long that the whole world faced—was: who was doing this? And was it possible that all those long-ago speculations had any conceivable basis in fact?

Common sense said “No!” Well, that wasn’t really it. What common sense actually said was, “Holy crap, man, are you out of your mind?” I mean, ideas like that weren’t science. They were the stuff of the electronic games the little kids were playing when their parents weren’t paying attention, because they were busy on their own computers. Comic-book stuff. Nothing that any sensible person would believe in for a single second.

Except that even the sensible people had just about run out of alternative explanations for the way scientific dogma was turning out to be just dumb-headed wrong. So we sensible people were stuck.

We couldn’t believe it, and couldn’t dismiss it, either. The evidence was right there, in every physics lab and astronomical observatory in the world. Like it or not, there was a real, non-zero possibility that somebody—some Somebody, somewhere or other—was running a simulation of a universe as some kind of an experiment, and that simulated universe was the one we all lived in.

Well, in a certain way that wasn’t all bad, you know. Since Somebody Else was making up the rules that this universe ran by we didn’t have to drive ourselves crazy trying to make sense of the contradictions. For instance, now we didn’t have to invent negative gravity to explain the acceleration of distant galaxies. Nor did we have to postulate such weird concepts as scalar fields—that is, particles like a photon or proton, but incomparably bigger, in fact light-years in diameter—just so we could account for some anomalous clumping in some other galaxies. We didn’t need to account for anything at all, really. Anything that was puzzling was, hey, just one more glitch in the superbeing’s simulation. Made science a lot easier.

But all of that was a long time ago. When Silvie was still my wife, when the United States was still run by the President and the Congress, when nobody had yet heard of the Doctrine of the Beloved Experimenter.

Still, I should have guessed that some human beings would have seen a way to do themselves some good out of it.

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