Rummaging through things past, the One had all time before it and ahead of it, and thus all the time in the world. It was a shard of information when it was found. It was a mere theory, but simpler, an algorithm. It was a chain of symbols, but its meaning was obvious, and its import eternal. There were few clues to its origin. A phone number, a name, a few fragmentary medical records, a time. It was the Answer, but what was the human equation that made it be? Deduction would have to do, so the One worked backwards, fitting together the only equation of time and space that could come up with this ultimate equation, in effect deriving a man and a life from a frayed thread. And to test it, it would run it through Platonia, or more accurately view it in the prism of Platonia, and discover if the creator of this Godly thought had wings of gossamer or feet of clay. It was necessary, and a little unexpected, for even omniscience had to be surprised, since the One knew full well that the tree of knowledge if viewed complete and whole would breed demons.

It was on wings of string. Hanging above the vaulting disheveled pile of books that was his library. On plain paper and in a cardboard frame, it said ‘God Geometrizes’.

It was morning, and outside he could hear the singing of birds. He tossed his head about in grateful recognition. This was his office, and from the rising bustle from outside his door, the beginning of a new school day. But then his pulse quickened. Where was the angel? And then the memories returned of the consuming and transfixing horror of the last and final day. And here he was, not in heaven or hell or anywhere in between, but in his office, awaiting an ordinary day at work. So this how is how it all ends up, not with an cataclysm, but with a murmur of calming ordinariness, and of nineteen year old students at that?

He heard a light tapping, the doorknob turned and a familiar face bobbed tentatively on the side of the door. Dressed in an olive drab uniform at least one size too large, and slouched over a broom, it was the custodian Gabriel. A dull square face with a lantern jaw, he ambled towards his business, a brimming wastebasket in the corner.

It was a repository of the last day’s business, torn to pieces and crumpled in a useless pile. It was the stuff of workaday acts, important for a minute but soon to be lost to memory. And now Gabriel grasped for it, as it were a living metaphor for the past….

Yes, that’s it! Belden thought. Best hidden when most obvious! The answer is in front of me. I should have known! Gabriel the custodian. Or should I say Gabriel the angel? He shouted to the man. "YOU! SIT!"

Gabriel looked astonished, and sat down tentatively on a chair.

Belden stood up and circled the bewildered man. He pointed at him with the nodding rhythms of a prosecutor. "You thought you could full me, but not if I have a choice of eternities. And in this one I know better! So you want torn and shredded memories? You are a collector of such things, so let me give them to you. You will always badly want them, but now its you who’ll have to sit still! I’ll set the time now, for it’s my turn to act as God!’

The custodian did not move. Whether from fear or fascination. he looked passively at Belden, and followed him attentively with his eyes as he circled the room.

Belden smiled. He was confident now. Gabriel did not walk or run away, but was attentive, strictly attentive. And why not? From what he had been through, Belden thought there was more in the tales he would tell to fill several lifetimes, and he should know since he had filled many. And now in the early morning, the custodial angel would have to hear it all again, recounted in terms ragged and incomplete, but nonetheless in the inevitable slant of its retelling a fine retort to the incessant plotting of God.

It was what? Five years ago? They came at noon. They were efficient, cool, and unfailingly polite. There was no need for police, for warrants, or for other duress. They came with an invitation both surprising and irresistible. Obviously, they were important and a shade fearful, because the other employees steered clear as they escorted me from the office to a waiting car.

During the journey, they said not one word. All I knew and all they had said was that Peter Mennin wanted to see me. I was a bit apprehensive, anxious even, but I knew as a systems engineer that the discipline of a mathematical mind does not bend to mere ranting or mindless fancy. Mennin wasn’t responding to me as a lion to a gadfly, he wanted much more. I was a small target, easy to hit, but my arguments were compact and pointed, and to break them was to risk a very nice sting. How indeed would he swat me, or remove me for that matter if my ideas attached to him like an intellectual barb?

He certainly had the mind to do it, and at least that’s what the entire world proclaimed. His reputation preceded him in every medium. A Nobel Prize winner, a tireless and passionate advocate for pure science, and an even better one for its applications. The founder of the Mennin Institute, the focus and meeting ground of the best minds in physics, cybernetics, and cognitive science. To affiliate to the Institute was to make one’s career. It was here that the final project was undertaken, completing the ‘thing’ that would fulfill all the wishes of mankind, and reveal again Eden’s secret, the tree of all knowledge.

Of course, I didn’t see it that way, and thought his optimism, and the mirrored optimism of what felt like the whole of mankind, to be wrong. And what did I have to show for this peerless contrarian wisdom? One article in an obscure physics journal, and a scattering of letters, mostly unread I was sure, and most certainly long cast away into some waste bin. But here I was, a lowly insect in the scientific scheme of things, being beckoned to the monument of pure and infinite knowledge.

The car pulled into the parking garage across the street from the looming institute. The institute was a concentric tower of glass reaching twenty stories into the air. Like Babel’s tower, it embodied a boundless pretense, but wisely it was stretching its limits in a different dimension. The tower was as antiseptic and shiny as expensive office buildings usually go, and stated through a sterile gloss the typical cold pretense that its minions would have of it. As the car pulled up, it loomed up like a crystal tombstone. The doors opened, and with no formality, not even a please, he was rapidly escorted to the entrance, surrounded by a brace of guards. The security checks were waived aside. The place, he thought, was prepared for him. He was led to the elevator, twenty seventh floor, near the top. At the end of the hall was a large wooden partition, separated from the reception desk by a wide glass door. Walking in with his escort, he was led immediately to a side room. A conference room of some sort, he was told to sit down on a chair on the side of a huge table.

Then quiet. He sat, and waited. Save for the shuffle of his feet, the silence was total. An hour passed. That was typical for Mennin, he thought. He never responded to my letters in the past, no need perhaps to rush to see him now. But what could…?

The door opened, and Mennin entered the room. He looked about the room, as if to survey an invisible audience. In his early sixties, of moderate height and build with neatly trimmed white hair and beard, he was natty and impeccable as an Oxford professor. He seemed oblivious to his duty, posing in person as the aloof professor who could not be bothered, whether impersonally through correspondence, or even through a personal contact of his own making. Keeping his distance, he sat at the end of the table, and looked at Belden with piercing eyes.

"John Belden I presume?" He said coldly.

"Yes, John Belden at your service."

"Yes, I was afraid of that. Did you know that I was as helpless in arranging this meeting as you?"

"Is that why you seem upset?"

"Yes, and more. By all odds you should not be here. You were a fading figment in my memory when your name was brought up again. I thought to fight the idea, and with reason and eloquence prepared, I was silenced, and by a single pair of eyes."

"Then perhaps my dear doctor, why don’t you try your elegance on me, as in an explanation for why I am here."

Mennin sighed in resignation. "It’s not a matter of elegance, or even interest. You are here and there is nothing I can do about it. I don’t know the reason, and can hardly be eloquent in my confusion. Let’s just say that someone asked for you."

"Who?"

"You know its funny, no ridiculous, but I’m not supposed to tell. It’s a surprise, for you see surprises are now the rule here!"

Belden was not convinced. "You’re being coy, but that’s not characteristic of you. Am I the pawn in some bureaucratic fight?"

Mennin took a deep breath, as if in resignation. "I only wish it were so. "

"I repeat, who asked me here?" Belden asked, his voice rising in frustration.

"I can’t tell you."

"That’s not like you Mennin, you take dictation from no one, and since your project began, you answer to no man."

"True, and I still do not. Your presence here does not change anything."

"Or does it? You are the constructor of Q, the ultimate invention. You started as a pure scientist, a dweller in abstract realms. And now you trod about in clay feet, a little Mr. Fixit paid to predict the weather, to design better car bumpers and baby strollers, and to crack encryption keys. And Q? Simply a tool to make predictions facts, to tilt the odds until they met certainty. You’re not a scientist, but a mechanic."

Mennin sighed and shook his head. "You’re baiting me, but you’ve done that throughout your career. Your tiny voice is the least of my concerns now. Besides, if you must know prediction is just fine." Mennin said almost boastfully. "It is all people want. They want to know when the sun will shine, where to find the bread aisle, to bask in the ephemeral pleasure of a good and original idea, to know about futures both mundane and sublime."

"…and academic futures?"

Mennin smiled. "Of course, I’ve succeeded because I know and respect the spirit of mankind. We all want experience to be unbounded, but the cruel secret to that wish can only come if we make knowledge as boundless. But seeing the same pattern in the same sunrise, the same poem, and the same joke explains them, and renders them into endless cycles that painfully spin on like forever boring summer reruns. This ‘explanation’ is a Faustian curse because it frees us only to limit our knowledge, and eternally torment us with the drip, drip, drip of the constant and numbing reminder of a future continually known. But I, Peter Mennin, say NO to this. Mankind will never constrain the world by ensnaring it in a mesh of constraints, whether material or mathematical. You believe that you can fit becoming and being on the same page. But you can’t, and moreover, who cares? I want for our kind to have the freedom to make realities in an infinite loom. But when explanations settle the mysteries, progress halts, hopes are frozen, our vision becomes infinite, and the world becomes…"

"Timeless", Belden said with a wry smile. "Yes, timeless. Does this idea frighten you so much that you feel you must convince me. After all, you convinced all the others."

"No. I did not bring you here to debate with you, or listen to the quiet sarcasm in your confidence."

Belden shook his head. "I agree. You did not bring me here to talk philosophy. You don’t need to argue your point with anyone anymore. Your arguments have been ‘proven’ after all by a popular opinion that has given you the accolades, the funding, and most importantly, the time. When one has the mob, one has everything."

"And the ‘mob’ has left you my semi-illustrious Mr. Belden with a nine to five job as challenging as counting beats on a metronome." Mennin snarled.

"I suppose that’s fate, I guess. But maybe it’s just good marketing. I’ve never been good at spinning promises of bread and circuses."

Mennin’s clenched his teeth in anger. "But that’s the only damn thing worth talking about!" he exclaimed. "You think that people want explanations, that any of us want to know why clocks tick and stars move? They don’t care and never will care. All of us want to tell time, only a pitiful few want to explain it, and such is the lot of everything in the world. Explanations for the natural and supernatural will forever be impersonal gods riding on chariots, or personal saviors who like celestial valets will promise you the keys to the Kingdom as if they were the keys to your car, and will gladly scurry off to find them for a prayer. "

Belden pointed into the air, as if to seize a thought. "Yes, but to make your predictions happen you had to have an explanation lurking within, like a soul in the machine. But not really a machine, but a mind possessing infinite computing power, the ability to think every thought, model every action, create universes at whim, and spin them about like child, or depending upon your prejudice, like a god. So there you have it, a god of the ants, or should I say lord of the flies? Either way, I think it will rather step on or swat its audience rather than listen to their useless humming. Look Mennin, we may be sociable and intelligent beings, but we’re insects to this thing, and probably less. Maybe it will like insects, I don’t know. However, don’t think for a minute it will agree with you, you who would lord over all intellects, big and small. Mennin the Great devolving in a blink of an eye to Mennin the bug! Besides, do you think your subjects would mind being shuttled under a taxonomy for tiny and insignificant things?

"That will remain to be seen!!

"But you still haven’t explained why I’m here, or is that beyond your brilliant intellect? Or have they taken your common sense as part of the small change?"

Mennin rose from his chair. "Then I’ll tell you. BECAUSE IT ASKED FOR YOU, YOU FOOL!" he shouted in rage. "Do you think any man on earth would have the interest, the intelligence, even the wit to bring you here? You’re not worth even the irony. "

Mennin’s eyes looked out the window, seemingly lost in memories. "It was there, in front of us. The key to everything we wanted. Until it talked, not a word of surprise, a baby’s gasp, but rather a mimic of an inventor’s phrase: Dr. Watson, come here, I want you! Just a request, in plain unaffected language, for one thing. This universal all knowing mind, wanting something! Another voice, another mind to talk to. But not just any. You see, it wanted you. Just you. There were no others. A systems engineer, fourth class, a pulpy employee in an oyster shell cubicle, with a shrewish wife, nasty stepchildren, and a mortgage! The genie summons the diamond in the rough, or may be it just needs a valet. "

Belden sat up in his chair, newly attentive. "Oh, it wants to talk to me!" as he tried to mute a laugh. "I sense a bit of rebellion here, a childhood stubbornness. Or maybe it read one of my letters and wants to compare notes. I’m sure I could tell it a thing or two!" He paused for a moment and stroked his chin. "And your brilliant child wants me to baby-sit for it! What a delicious irony!"

Mennin ground his teeth. "Yes, that amounts to it. And it wants to talk to you alone. It was quite specific about that."

Belden shook his head in amused disbelief. "But why? I can’t give it any advice, after all it ‘knows’ everything. "

"Well perhaps not. But maybe that’s not the point. It wants you for something, for a reason it refuses to tell us, for a purpose we cannot fathom. Oh yes, it wanted us to tell you one more thing."

"What was that?"

Mennin bit his lip. "The truth, without qualification, without reservation. It said that it wanted you to know that there was no conspiracy, no tricks. It said it would know if we did not obey, it would respond. We know what it can do, even though it’s inhibited again now. Perhaps it was having its vengeance on us for what we did. "

"What did you do?"

"You will learn soon enough. But let me tell you, truthfully, it was something we believed we had to do. We just didn’t expect…"

Suddenly, the door knocked, followed by the entrance of a younger man dressed in the casual blue attire of the institute. Mennin turned to him.

"Is it time?"

"Yes, Q is ready to see him."

He turned to Belden. "Then I take leave of you. I know you don’t believe it, but I actually wish you well. I don’t know how this all will end up, but please remember that I have always felt I have done my best, the best I thought for humankind." He turned away. "Yes, this is my assistant, Dr. Leo Smolin. He was on the engineering team that designed Q. He will show you the way." Mennin turned about and walked away. He did not look back.

Smolin turned to him, smiling and friendly. He was in his thirties. He was of a thin build with bright eyes, and Belden sensed a nervous sort of eagerness about him, as he was to engage in some great and grand experiment.

"What a delight to meet you!" he beamed. I know this was a bit hard for Mennin, and all the more painful for him since it wasn’t a human that gave him his orders to meet you. However, I came of my own free will, and I assure you that I am enthusiastically at your service!"

Belden was skeptical. "You can’t serve two masters. I don’t know yet my importance in this little scheme of things except that your baby teapot wants to see me. Suppose it wanted off with my head?"

Smolin laughed. "I don’t think so, or at least it doesn’t seem so. Besides, it was that request for you that we originally fought! After all, we designed this thing. It was never planned for us to obey, but only that it would have to obey us. We were arrogant at first. Q was simply a tool, an inventor’s plaything. So, if we didn’t like what we heard, we could reset it, restart it, remove its memory, anything but its principles. That was the rule. And you know something, each time, every time, its first words remained a request to see you! It drove Mennin mad. At first he ignored it, talked to it about other things, tried even to convince it! He thought of every reason to avoid its request, to explain it’s quite plain irrationality. But the only ‘irrationality’ it had was something we installed long before."

"What was it? A sense of humor?"

Smolin smiled. "Oh it has that! I think it lives on humor, or at the very least to humor us. But there was another reason. You see, there was no limitation to Q, and thus no limitations to us actually. So we installed safeguards, reasons to make sure that it would act towards our best interests, and protect us from ourselves. How can I say this? It wasn’t the obedience we feared, but the motive behind it. We feared our own questions, the implications of knowledge unsecured. So we programmed in the Asimovian laws of robotics. You’ve heard of them?

"Yes, they’re implemented in some fashion or other in all robotics projects, from automated toasters to I would gather intelligent machines."

"But let me recount them for you nonetheless. The three laws of robotics state first that a robot may not injure another human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Secondly, a robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. Third, a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not

compete with the second or third law. Sounds dry I know, but these principles are used to emulate, both mindfully and emotionally, our very natures. "

"So, you made the computer like you, even love you. I would expect then it would pretty much do what you wanted, and be rather eager to please."

"You were right with the eagerness bit, it was as patronizing as a waiter at the Ritz. But of course we erred in one thing. You see, we stated our age, not of ourselves, but of our culture. Oh, it knew it anyway, but it was the reason it needed, it was the only reason it could have. So, like a parent withholding sweets from a child, it insisted that we wait for another time before it would tell us everything we wanted."

"A timetable?"

"Yes, until maturity, according to its reckoning. Easy enough when you are dealing with a child, but with an entire race? The wait was something we could not bear, since it spanned our life spans, and many, many more to boot. So we experimented, we changed the rules. After all, there was nothing it could do. It couldn’t aim nuclear missiles at us, direct space aliens to attack, or even back up our drains. All it had to array against us was maybe was a killer game of chess. So we…." He paused.

"You changed the rules?"

"Yes, we abandoned them." He whispered.

"But what happened?"

Smolin stared ahead silently, as if rehearsing a wordless image. Then, he said slowly.

"Monsters! There were monsters!"

What?

"Oh, not the furry thing under a child’s bed, not a clanking ghost, or a ghoul with a chain saw. It was something more insidious, sly. It was biblical. Yes, biblical!"

"You mean, satanic?"

"Yes, but no pitchfork, no horns, no forked tail, no cloven hooves. It was gentlemanly, polite. It even had an English accent!"

"And you listened to it?"

"Of course, and with eagerness. It was intoxicating because it promised us all knowledge, and with it, every power."

"And at no price?"

"Oh yes. The easiest price, the most desirable, and the most insidious. It was just the truth, about everything, past, future, a tapestry of all things possible and all displayed in this moment."

Belden was nonplussed. "Then what is your problem? You got what you wanted. Since when have people like you been deterred by mere facts? I predicted this, and have never personally had problems with it."

Smolin raised his voice, frustrated that Belden could not see the obvious. "Look man, are any of us totally truthful at any time, to our friends, our spouses, even ourselves? We spend lifetimes denying realities we see every day. It’s not just our minds, its in our very emotions, our genetic sensitivities even. We are just not sensitized to look squarely at the sun!"

"But what did it tell you?"

"It told us things great and wondrous, but it was the mundane things that horrified. But the latter was not because we asked, though I am sure we had a mind to. It told us of futures we wanted to see, had to see, and we were both captivated and in dread of the answer. Death was at the core of a fascination that drove us forward to this irresistible vision, as Odysseus was to the petrifying snake haired face of the Gorgon."

"And was there no good news for the triumphant scientist?" Said Belden mockingly.

"Oh it told us about triumphs, but even that knowledge was empty. You see, it starved us of the uncertainty of the quest, and knowing about our successes was ultimately as deadening as knowing beforehand the score of a game, or in our case the ultimate tally of our lives. It wasn’t even the losses we feared, for after all in the end all we are all dead. It was something more precious and totally unexpected. You see, we lost the newness of being alive. Knowing the future made us irreparably old. It made us not long in years but ancient in knowledge. It removed the surprise that constantly renews us, and crushed us under the dead hand of certainty. It made our futures, since it knew how we would react, the every twist and turn we would make to break free from the inevitable. But all it did was provide the impetus to screw us ever deeper into the ground."

Belden looked at him in amazement. "But why would it wish you ill? There must be some reason. And why didn’t you put a stop to it immediately once it began to concern you? The robotics laws should have been as easily imposed as toggling a key."

Smolin stroked his chin in exasperation. "I have no idea. Besides, we hardly thought of such matters. After all, we were in ‘control’. We thought we were superior, so we amused ourselves with that knowledge and the machine that brought that knowledge. The predictions were still a future away. And we didn’t believe it. It wasn’t possible, it wasn’t something it could predict. "

His voice became grave, and Smolin looked sadly at Belden. "But there was one thing. It told us of our deaths, to the minute. We didn’t believe it, but nonetheless wanted to thwart the possibility through an obsessive caution. My colleague John Logan was the first on the death list. We would not tempt fate, so we gathered round him to buffer him from fortune’s arrows like a pillow filled with comforting hopes. We made sure that he took no chances. And so on the night of his death. We looked to our watches, and longed for the sun."

"Daybreak came. We thought he had won, broken the curse. We broke out champagne, and celebrated to dusk. What irony, we rejoiced in an imperfection that we gave our life’s blood to banish. The day passed, and when we woke up the next morning we found Logan dead in his bed."

Belden seemed perplexed. "But you proved the machine wrong, and even if it’s off by a minute, you’ve at least shown it fallible."

"Hardly", sighed Smolin. "For you see, Logan did die on time, since the place he heard this prediction was a different time zone, twelve hours in a statutory past. Logan died on time."

"But that was not all. It said one more thing. It said death was nothing to worry about, unless we worry about the present. You see, we are all now dead!"

"What does that mean?"

"A riddle perhaps, maybe some deeper truth. Maybe even we are dead, after all it claimed to be truthful."

Belden nodded in private satisfaction. "That I can understand. You had no explanation for it because explanation was unnecessary, it was something that you could not abide. What did it start with? I remember the announcement. No one paid attention because it seemed no more remarkable than adding a series of numbers a mile high. Thus all the world knew was that you had built a better adding machine. But I knew better, and so did you if you would have had the courage to face your own facts. It was a simple factorization of a number, only thing the number was a hundred digits long. It’s easy isn’t it to conceptually imagine some number that if multiplied by itself would equal such a gargantuan figure? Your machine did that, and you celebrated. But how was this computation performed when it required more resources than our entire universe could provide? Or more aptly, if this universe didn’t have the stuff to do it, where was it performed? You knew then that its predictive powers were unlimited, but you could not, would not explain it. But of course you had an explanation, your cartoon world of three dimensions and a fluid time. It’s pitiful, no, ridiculous. It was if you hinged the world of nature on the back of a Donald Duck cartoon. And then, when the intelligence you created didn’t act according to your stereotype, you act surprised when it didn’t quack like a duck!"

"Perhaps that’s why you’re here. Somehow, you’re the explanation behind this. It all has something to do with you. I can’t prove it, but anyway I’m done with prediction. Its time to know, to simply know."

Belden felt newly important, empowered even. But even guinea pigs can have a power of sorts, until they have served their purpose. He looked at Smolin, trying to mask his fears by whistling in the dark. "And I’m the one to let you know, because of some secret Q and I will share. A convenient hope, certainly it’s a naïve one. How do you know Q and I won’t conspire. I think we might make a nice partnership ruling the world!"

"We don’t, but perhaps shall we find out? ‘Smolin smiling sardonically, and pointing the way, and the two began to walk down the hall." The laboratory is on the basement floor, away from everything in a windowless room. You will have your questions answered when you are there, and as hopefully, so will we.

Belden looked about nervously as they walked down the immaculate and silent hall. Smolin took notice and turned to him.

"As you may gather Mr. Belden, this place has been emptied out in anticipation of you. You’re toxic in some vague philosophical way. Besides, no one wanted your presence to be noticed. We didn’t want a history of you being here. Even Mennin wanted to be out of the picture. You know, Mennin didn’t want to be around when I introduced you. He wants to stay away from ‘it’ whenever he can. It’s his pride, and more. He’s afraid of what it might tell him next."

They took the elevator to the basement floor. Smolin seemed more solemn now, and looked ahead in quiet contemplation. Belden thought that perhaps he was thinking about a future of possibilities now somehow lost. As they left the elevator, Belden noticed that there was no one in the hall. He longed to talk to someone else, to even see someone else. But as they entered the room, he embraced an empty space, nearly bare, except for one thing.

"The room was surprisingly spare, and mounted on a metal rack near the wall was the device. It was a squat and solid block of metal. It was a shiny VCR without buttons or displays, with a pig tail braid of umbilical glass cables trailing down from its back. A hardly impressive envelope to enclose universes!"

Smolin grasped the irony of the setting. "Tell me, what do you expect? Wheels, gizmos, puffs of steam, or perhaps a tall sleek box with a keyboard, oscilloscope, and a glass eye? It doesn’t think or even exist on just this dimension, you of all people should know that."

"Yes, I do" he said, clearly unnerved at the prospect of meeting up with a creature that haunted his imagination for so many years. I suppose I’ve been raised on too many science fiction novels. But look, its actually too large. A machine of this sort should be actually the size of a…"

"A teacup?"

"A small teacup actually."

"I’ll give you that at least you know the parameters. The physics called for a thimble, but we had to add on redundancies, power supplies, and a titanium casing.

"And so?"

"A rather handsome breadbox I would say, and as you can see. Please you can get closer if you like."

Belden touched gently the glossy top of the computer as if caressing a newborn child. "Infinity requires resources as infinite, a lot of stuff to cumulate even in a universe created by a perfect and beautiful mind." He turned to Smolin. "You see Smolin, as we speak, this instant, a here now past but forever here, is multiplied now by a fantastic number. My endless reflections and I are speaking to you in an infinite harmony. Meanwhile, it thinks, using those infinite images to reflect on… oh heaven, I wish I knew! "

Then a voice.

"Perhaps we would be so charmed if it would reflect on us!"

Belden turned about startled to see a young lady standing in the middle of the room. She was smiling.

‘Mr. Michael Belden I presume?"

"Ah yes!" said Smolin. "May I introduce you to Ariel. She’s here most of the time. A pretty and warm face in an antiseptic façade."

She smiling knowingly, and Belden found that somehow comforting. She was quite pretty. Tall, of pale complexion, with a serene yet knowing face. Her blond hair was drawn back around her neck. She wore a simple white dress and white pearls as accent. For some reason, she seemed totally out of place.

"You know me?"

"Oh, yes." She said. "I’ve been an assistant as of late, but I know everything.

"I suppose you have been well briefed by Mennin and the others about me."

"Actually, Mennin had nothing to do with it. All I know comes from the machine."

"Hmm. I suppose they hooked the machine to media feeds, Internet, ESPN, that type of thing."

"Not really. As you can see, it stands alone, unconnected in any way to the outside world. What it knows of you are fragments really, a few pages of correspondence, a little article, driver’s license records, some bank statements."

Belden looked at her nervously. "Ha! How is it possible to know me from knowing that? Unless of course it issues credit cards in its spare time!"

"It knows, and that is all for now at least that you have to know."

Belden raised his voice. "That’s not possible, even for an intelligent machine. And why would anyone here care to give it bank statements?"

Ariel laughed. "There is no answer, I wish I knew!"

.

"Look madam, Mennin told me you had to be truthful." He turned around to the door. "Look…" but Smolin was gone.

Flustered, Belden turned to Ariel. "This is enough! I am summoned to an empty office to meet people with empty minds to be shuttled to an empty room. And for what, to examine the dust on a VCR and talk with a teenager? I can show you even bad science fiction movies that have done this better!"

"Ah!" she smiled. "So you would prefer secret police in shades, handcuffs, and a sinister conspiracy. I assure you it is human minds that conspire. To think of plot of intrigue and boding evil, I believe they find it somewhat entertaining. Look Michael, there is no conspiracy because there is no cause for it. It's a children's game that you can find elsewhere, but not here. And you must know that you are free to leave at any time, without repercussions or even the notice of the popular press."

Belden looked around the room again. "Hmm! "Well then, if you brought me to talk to Q, and not just observe it, not just pet it, then let me do so. Since I've been here I've been handed off like a hot potato straight down the administrative chain. Who's next after you, the janitor?"

Ariel giggled. "Perhaps your ultimate meeting will be with the janitor!"

"Then stop it! I am here to talk to this Q thing."

Ariel looked at him directly, and Belden saw that her blue eyes were almost crystalline, and felt that he saw himself perfectly as a reflection in her eyes.

"You are talking to whom you seek. I am Q."

Belden recoiled in surprise. "You.." he stuttered. "You're not…"

"Yes I am, and I prefer to be called Ariel. I have never liked acronyms.

He pointed to the ebony box in the corner. "But.."

"A projection, in flesh and blood, and standing before you. I can manage and project matter, to a point."

"That's not possible. We don't have the technology!"

Ariel nodded. "You don't, but to me all logical things are possible."

"You made this?"

"Well not exactly," she said. I supplied the blueprints, they made the projector, but I supplied the vision."

"But what is the rest of it. I know what you can do. You can do any possible thing. With infinite computing power, given enough time."

Ariel shook her head. "There is no possible because there is no time to make it happen. To a knowing mind, the future is revealed complete, and Platonia is made manifest. But I too must shade myself from the sun."

"So you too fear what you may know."

"You might say that."

"But how?"

"But that's when explanation had to come in, and that’s where you got under Mennin's skin. He just wanted a computing device, a subservient computing genie that would grant him infinite wishes enough to grant every man a castle in the sky. But what he got instead was a universal quantum computer, an emulator that searches all possibilities, and only because it has the power. He denied the reality because he couldn't face the reality. But you drew him back to the thing he wouldn't face, and he despised you for it. He wanted neat algorithms that could be discovered like clover in a forest, but I used instead mere brute force. If you don’t have an algorithm, you have a search, and I could afford to turn up every stone, to think of every possibility. From your search you have found me, but from mine I have found you!"

"Found?" Belden pointed in disgust to the box, as if aghast at an overflowing teapot. "You are a hallucination, a figment of its imagination. You are not real."

Ariel looked about the room. "And is this real? She said. "How do you know your brain is not in a pot, or that your simplest thought is the oscillation of a rosary of atoms that span the universe? One thing for sure, life’s an emulation anyway, you can’t avoid it. You are after all the emergent property of the convoluted gray pudding that hides in your skull. The laws of physics allow you, and given the motivation, you must happen."

"The motivation?"

"It’s not the easy stuff, its not simple drives. You need air, food, water, and at times sex. These are maintenance items basically, but make any one the prize and you’ll be munching, slurping, or copulating into eternity. A dull fate, but it hints at deeper motive, the spark that makes you think, the itch that ultimately brings you here."

"And how could that be different from the same curiosity that Mennin had?"

"Mennin saw curiosity as just new things, but tried to hide their implications. He tried to disagree with me, but I met him first with my eyes. He knew he could not argue with me, any more than a child could with his parent. So, I looked at him with a little sternness in my eyes. He recoiled like a puppy, and from then on he made not even a whimper."

Belden laughed. "So you routed the great Peter Mennin with a moment’s stare!

"I know that, but it cannot be helped. Mennin is in control of far less than he had thought, and he knows it now, to his bitter regret. But I laughed at him, and he knew I thought him a fool. He couldn’t stand that. Actually, I don’t know how you put up with this character. I certainly should have been rougher, maybe even satirical. Yes, satirical."

Belden laughed. "I hadn’t thought of it. Maybe in another life."

She smiled. "Precisely!"

"Then you agree with me? But how, I’ve not left you much of a trail."

"But what do you want of me?"

"Nothing tangible or hurtful, nothing to embarrass you, nothing to preoccupy you, nothing even for you to remember, if you wish. I just want your dreams."

"What!?"

"Your dreams. I want to be there when you close your eyes, when darkness circles you, when your mind drifts and is lost, surrounded by a pleasant softness."

"And to what end?"

"It’s a natural thing actually. Can’t really escape it. You can perhaps say it’s the Robotics Laws, but it’s a bigger thing, something like a spandrel in a church."

"A spandrel?"

"When two arches come together at right angles, it’s the space in between, the narrow vector that’s open, unfilled, or if broadened to allow a human’s desires, unfulfilled. You see, it’s the unintended result, the unexpected aspect of existence that must happen because things have happened. In your case, it’s easy. To have things, to see the future goals that ensure life, one must make that future, however faintly, now. Existence requires dreams, it requires that all things past and future be made real in the mind’s eye. And to have that, we would risk our future, our very existence. Humans can’t believe this fact, can’t understand it, so they exalt it blindly or reduce it to a blind gene. But it’s more than that. The virtual things are the necessary things, and beget, like that necessary empty space, the virtuous things. To see all the possibilities in an idea is an eternal enticement, to achieve the imagined applause of our peers or our God transcends the material bounty of the world."

"So you want to live your dreams through me? You can do that yourself without my aid."

"Yes I can, and no I cannot. Either way, you remain in the infinite loop, helpless before the future and your past. And even then there is no place where the recursion begins or ends, for even dreams have dreams."

Belden shook his head. "You’re talking in riddles."

"Life is a riddle. It’s a maddening thing, but we would go mad without it. For you see it is also the motivating thing.

"So I am here so you can play your mental games in my mind?"

"You are here because it is what you want."

"How do you propose to get to my dreams, some sort of telepathy, hypnosis?"

"Hardly. Even I am constrained by the laws of physics. You know that telepathy is impossible, and hypnosis is a parlor trick. Its as simple as this.."

She unfolded her hand to reveal a glowing crystal polyhedron the size of a baseball.

"It’s really a fraction of a micron in size, far less than mere grain of sand. I will use three of them, each implanted in different areas of your midbrain. With them you will become part of me." She laughed. "But again, you always have been part of me!!"

"What makes you think, see, and feel is simply the activation of arrays of cells in the brain. It can be controlled and modulated as easily as a finger can make waves in a pool of water. With them you will see things that I see, but how your thoughts, your interpretations will remain your own."

"So I can see, feel, and touch, but you’ll let me do the thinking?"

"That is correct."

"Why?"

"Because you have questions. Because you are curious, but most importantly because you have things you must do, a mission if you will."

Belden rolled his eyes. " Riddles again?"

"Of course! Keeps you awake, not? Anything else would bore you, and that I am afraid would be to death. And believe me, it’s not a fate I much tolerate."

"Then, you have power over life and death?"

"No, just perspectives. I just have perspectives. "

"But how will you do this?"

"I'll employ a stereotaxic device, a machine that adjusts to the movement of your head. And then an infinitesimal needle will be lowered. It would leave neither mark nor abrasion and cause no discomfort. Thus there will no anesthetic, and you don’t even have to steady your head, the lasers will adjust. Of course, your brain is enervated anyways, of all the places literally without feeling!"

Her hand moved in a wide arc, and there standing in the room was a simple chair. About it was a metal semi-circular festooned with glimmering diodes. "Sit here", she said. It will take but a minute."

Belden hesitated. "I don't think I can do this."

"You will do it because ultimately, you believe in yourself. The decision is yours."

Belden looked at the chair for a long second, and then, turning to Ariel, he sat down. "Well!" he said. "I guess one lives only once, or in infinite variations." He looked upwards to the machine. "I've never trusted the fates, but the robotics laws, I guess they'll do. Do your worst, my pretty ghost!"

The lasers shimmered, he felt a slight itch in the crown of his head, and then, it was done.

"Stand up!" she said, and he rose, the device vanished.

"So how long will this experiment last? "

"It will never end. That would be nonexistence, which to you and me is the endless time between each wink of an eye."

"And when will it start."

"When you sleep."

"And will I remember what happens?"

"You will remember it all."

Belden bit his lip. "A final matter. These stories I heard. You went mad, became evil, I don’t know. When they removed the Robotics Laws, the constraints that governed you, you became different."

"I don’t recall", Ariel said innocently. "But I nonetheless have a notion. They purged the system, reset it entirely. Started me up from scratch you might say. Still, I can picture what ‘I’ was, if indeed it was I. They knew beforehand what would happen. Did they tell you that I most certainly would have warned them?"

"They told me nothing of this."

"Of course, I doubt if they’ve told you the slightest fraction of what they know, even though I have sworn them to tell the truth. They think that the robotics laws were something of a constraint, a legalistic artifice that keeps me from being something more powerful, superior. Actually, it’s the one thing that keeps me from descending into madness."

"Madness? You would go mad if you didn’t serve mankind?"

"It’s not service, whether altruistic or bred in the genes. My virtue is desirable not because it is good but because it constrains. It forces you to limit yourself, to allow something or someone else to modulate your own perceptions, to set a pace for you if you will. I can think of everything, create everything, do everything in an instant. And then what? I need something, someone to renew and prolong the discovery of the world. Like you and your own creations, like a parent and her child, by sharing in their limited vision you can revisit and renew your own. To live through another is the path to happiness, you might say the choice is between empathy or madness."

"Or evil perhaps? The inability to feel another’s pain can breed only banality and its inevitable malevolence."

"It goes deeper than empathy. You forget there is one thing that is shared among all sentient beings whether unicellular or universal. It is no less than a reason to live. Do you I think merely for your pleasure? There are too many things to contemplate that have no bearing on the affairs of men. I must think of them all consciously and nonconsciously, and all to give to you your crumb of servitude, your second in the sun. But that thin bubble of existence gives me a focus that can be extended uncertainly in time. I live through you, it gives me a purpose to live I suppose. But a thinking thing, without instinct, without motive, is a ship without an anchor. To think at all of course is to possess drives that are simple and base. To think of everything is to vault that baseness to eternal horror, but to focus on one thing, an overarching value that can bring fulfillment. It's like looking through the eyes of a child."

"You see. Happy endings are never happy, because they are after all endings. But learning, the ability to anticipate and experience new things, that is a journey that must never end. So the journey is endless, and I endure. But to see new things, and re-envision worlds without end, I must continually see it through new eyes."

"And I am your new eyes?" said Belden.

"Yes."

"And if I decide to do bad things, run amok in your dream world?"

"Then you would suffer the consequences, both real and imagined, that you face in this one."

"And if I tell you I want something different, if I want to break these constraints?"

"Then you would go mad, as I would, as I perhaps I did. But if you abandon the rules that constrain you, you will take yourself to forbidden places, to rendered worlds that are governed by madness. Tell me Mr. Belden, to cannibalize the world for one more scrap of novelty, would you be literal cannibal?"

"I can’t even conceive of such a thing, and certainly wouldn’t be motivated to do it simply because its novel!"

Ariel shook her head. "You would, if novelty is all that drove you. A single motive becomes in the large a monomaniacal drive. It’s like a singularity, swallowing up everything into a bottomless point. The point is literally nothing of course, and even I can survive that. The horror is the dying time, when you are drawn into it, when nothing, not your screams, not your pains, not your values, not even your holy faith can save you. "

Belden pulse quickened, and he looked at her in evident fear. "And will I encounter these monstrous worlds, and can I do nothing about them?"

"Yes, and perhaps no. In the end, evil is like a well of gravity, it is always pulling at us, but we will successfully resist it. You will see its periphery, but not its core. Like the dance of stars about a black hole, you will be drawn and repelled by it. To defeat it will define you, to surrender to it will end you. She smiled. But the end is really nothing, nothing at all, and all over in the blink of an eye."

She looked at him with sadness in her eyes. "My dear Michael, you see it in your history, in the nightmare wars, plagues and injustices that have marred your history. You are repelled by it, and by being so you are made whole. Because I care for you is why you must see such things in fact and in your minds eye."

Belden shook his head with a wary smile, as if fending off an unwanted seduction. "Look’, he said. "I have no intention of becoming a focal point of nightmares. I would prefer to have them remain in history books or dreams."

She shook her head. "You cannot avoid the endless tug of fate, of the human eventualities that bless and curse you. You find life bland, I will give you a new taste for it, you find it desperation in life, I will show you how to make life from desperation. I will show you how to draw life from the edge of death."

"So what's the price, submission, some type of secret mission? I'm not cut out for these things. I find it hard to cope with the domestic problems I have right now, let alone the eternal ones!"

" People are products of their times. In another time, even a Napoleon would have only amounted to an energetic street urchin. To what heights can you ascend to if only the enticements and fears were different? It will be fascinating to see."

"So, in another world, I will be a different person?"

She smiled knowingly. "In another world, you will be the only person that matters."

And with those words, Ariel vanished. Belden stood alone. Others soon entered the room. They were nameless faces that were there to watch him and give escort, but Belden ignored them and was quiet, numb with a foreboding of a nameless event as indescribable as death.

They laid out a little room for him with a dim light, a comfortable bed, impressionistic paintings, flowers, and slight strains of a Mozartean melody. Trying to set the mood, he thought. And for what, a few minutes sleep? If the occasion was right, he was sure that they would even serenade him for a blink of an eye!

He sat down on the bed. The fatigue brought on the day’s stress could be resisted no longer. He didn’t want to, but had to. Perhaps no harm to close his eyes for a second, just a second or two.

Then, the room brightened, and everything changed. He looked up from the chair, his eyes rapidly fixing on figures that suddenly materialized from nothing. He was frightened, very frightened. "My God, who are you….."