I do plan on using characters from the X3FRP belonging to other people- please just flame at me if you're not OK with it! And I do promise to do them justice.
While the attempt is to make this as canon as possible, this story has a very large scope, so I will probably scrape against either Helge's writing, the game's canon, or both. Sorry.
And finally, I do appreciate feedback. Motivation!
Enjoy.
January 6, 2082
Before today, Maria Christi couldn’t recall a day when the blast door to Dr. von Neumann’s laboratory had been locked.
Mostly, this was because nobody, including Dr. von Neumann, really felt professional about the work being done in the Cyberbiological Observatory. Professionalism was for the shipwrights, the jump gate engineers, starship captains, and the CAI Project programmers. Being sent to a bunker in the deepest jungle of Borneo with the most expensive technological toys the Tokyo IST could get its hands on did not breed professionalism. What it made was a family- a family of a hundred and fifty eight programmers, nano engineers, robotics engineers, and a handful of other professions. All of them loved what they did because they were all playing, not working- and none of them had any clue what they were doing.
Dr. von Neumann knew, of course, why the Cyberbiological Observatory was based in the middle of nowhere rather than in Tokyo with the rest of the Institute, why internet access was only available outside the facility, and why the facility itself was based in a nuclear-hardened bunker with four-inch-thick blast doors that could withstand a tungsten railgun shell. He also knew why a USC orbital defense station, armed with a mass driver cannon capable of penetrating nuclear-hardened fortification, was stationed almost directly above Borneo. A million-dollar kill switch, quite literally. Von Neumann wasn’t especially concerned- he was in sole command of the mass driver, the only one actually aimed at Earth. Of course, with one hundred and fifty seven other incredibly smart people working the observatory, questions were often raised, and as much as von Neumann was thankful of their help, he often felt he gained just as much work avoiding their questions.
Robotics engineer Maria Christi was about to raise yet another question. She rang the buzzer by the door, and fidgeted for a few moments before ringing it again, already cursing herself for ringing the buzzer again far too soon, because the good Doctor was probably quite busy, and there was most likely a very good reason why the door was shut…
On the other side of the door, Dr. von Neumann heard both buzzers perfectly, and normally would have answered any query. The door was shut and locked, however, for safety- not for his own, but for that of Maria and all the other bright minds in the Observatory. The Doctor stood statuesque over his laptop with his hands supporting his weight upon the desk. His chair had rolled a good three feet behind him, the single upset item in the entire room. The glow of his razor-thin monitor caught his fading but well-kept hair and moustache and made it angelic white, and accented the few creases in the doctor’s laboratory coat. Aged though he was, he was a strikingly solid man, deliberate and gentle and unworried. The laptop’s glow caught a nearly imperceptible glint in the Doctor’s eyes- a tiny pair of halos, stars of God.
Von Neumann’s laboratory was a square, hardened concrete room with two openings- the blast door and a single vent in the center of the ceiling. Facing the door was the Doctor’s laptop, its dual touchpad-screens barely a quarter of an inch thick together, the sole object resting on a glass and aluminum desk. Around the perimeter of the room were twelve more identical laptops on twelve aluminum and glass desks. Each computer was a complete clone of the others, and any data changed on one was reproduced perfectly within ten minutes on the next- this way, there were exactly two hours to salvage any information that was erased completely from the first computer. These thirteen computers were also the only machines directly connected to the Cosmos Core.
The Core occupied most of the middle of the room- encased in a jet black hemispherical case made of a thin carbon fabric that could stop a bullet. Its placement was, perhaps, like that of a cathedral’s altar. The only opening was for the holographic lens at the top, which projected the Cosmos into the middle of the room. Describing the Cosmos to a layman would be impossible, and even explaining it to the scientists in the Observatory was difficult. Von Neumann wasn’t even sure he completely understood it himself. It existed in a machine, yes, but the most precise forecasting algorithms could not predict what would occur within the Cosmos. It was itself a universe, a primordial ground of shifting shapes, of laws and logic still under formation. To see it was to see our own universe through God’s eyes. Or, at least, Dr. von Neumann saw this.
A fourth buzzer finally moved the Doctor. “Yes, yes, one moment…”
Maria heard the blast door click, its several separate locks rapidly unbolting. The door swung inwards. She smiled, faintly. “Doctor.”
He smiled. “Yes, I called for you. Yes. Please, come in. And if you don’t mind, I’d like to close the blast door again.”
“Of course. Although, might I ask why?”
“That will become apparent soon enough. Do not be frightened, dear.” He walked to his laptop.
Maria fidgeted with one of her long curls for a moment before she scolded herself and clasped her hands in front of her, as if they might go flying off in every imaginable direction. The Doctor’s laboratory had always had a sort of sepulchral quality… no, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t an old feeling, it was a “not yet begun.” Not an impending end, but an approaching beginning. It was a similar feeling that Ash Wednesday gave her as a child- silly enough, she knew, but it was that knowledge that something very big was going to happen soon…
“I’m going to show you the Cosmos, Maria.” The doctor said simply as his right hand made deliberate, precise sweeps over his touch screen.
“I beg your pardon, Doctor?”
The Doctor turned and smiled gently. “This… hm. Might you promise me something?”
She smiled and attempted a joke. “Depends. What am I promising?”
“That what you see and hear doesn’t leave the room.”
Her smile faded a bit. Gravity seemed to triple all of a sudden, and the Doctor was mightiest and most terrible of angels. “Sure.”
“Good.” He turned his gaze upon the Core. “This, Maria, is the Cosmos Core. It’s the world’s fastest and most capable computer.”
“Isn’t that supposed to be in Mumbai, Doctor?”
He smiled. “Yes, theirs is the fastest that anyone knows about outside of this room.”
Her eyes widened for a moment. “…ah.”
“It has only a rudimentary operating system, and the only ways to access it are from my computers here. It is the central directive of the Observatory. All the research done in this facility for the past seven years have been bent around this single core.”
Maria was silent. She could already tell that this might be a real paradigm shift, and she was about to be proven right.
“Cyberbiology. What does it mean to you?”
“…The life of software. The production of life within software. Artificial Intelligence.”
“Yes, yes, and yes.” He grinned and chuckled. “We have a good front, then.”
“…we do, Doctor?”
“Cyberbiology is the wrong word for what I have observed within the Cosmos today.”
“Doctor?”
“…Cyberanthropology, perhaps? Cyberpsychology?” He shook his head. “Maria, I called you here to bear witness to what’s inside the Cosmos.”
“Doctor, what is the Cosmos?”
Maria was momentarily afraid. The Doctor seemed overwhelmed, by something. She was unable to fathom what could cause such emotion and confusion in such a powerful man as von Neumann.
“The Cosmos…” he replied slowly, “is… my creation. It is life. It is… this.” He gestured to his laptop.
The Cosmos Core hummed quietly as the holographic lens lit up. The room was suddenly aglow with stars, huge, wheeling constellations of them. Infinite motes of meaning, of information, of surging binary that overcomes its quantized nature through sheer volume, like the atoms that build a human being or the stars that build a galaxy.
Maria almost spoke, but stifled a gasp of surprise as the stars began to coalesce.
“What you see here, Maria… might frighten you.” He bowed his head. “It frightens me.” I can only imagine God’s fear of Mankind. “Know one thing… nothing has scripted what you see here. The Cosmos learns.”
“It learns?”
“Yes. You will see.” He turned to her and smiled. “Having fun yet?”
She attempted a smile. As she and the Doctor turned to the hologram before them, it completed its transformation. It was a figure of a human being, awash with the alien light of the projector.
“Father,” it spoke.
“Adam,” the Doctor replied solemnly.
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