I actually have very little direct influence over what happens in the Tom Universe. I barely have the horsepower to knock a stray pencil aside without a billion years’ notice. I can move tachyons about, but what’s the point of that? I’m the weakest of the five forces of nature, the other four being gravity, electro-magnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. I have so little influence over anything with real mass that nobody, not even the Einsteins from both universes, would deduce or detect me. And yet, in cosmological time, I get a lot done.
It took a huge force of will to concentrate on moving things just so, but I did so for billions of years as I influenced the movement of atomic particles this way and that, according to my calculations. It’s not easy when you have to constantly recalculate, thanks to the blasted Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the bane of my existence. I remember how difficult problems used to give me brain cramps; imagine a brain cramp the size of the universe. That’s what you get when you spend a few billion years concentrating on one thing. But I got results. Professor Wilson would have been proud.
With my influence over the course of a billion years, matter in one star system coalesced subtley differently than it would have otherwise. Two hunks of rock, a few hundred pounds each, would have missed each other, but with billions of years of focused thought I got them to collide just so. A large chunk of rock broke off one of them, and took off into space, a meteor. (Actually a meteoroid, but I prefer the colloquial term.) The second hunk of rock ricocheted off the first and hit another meteor, knocking off another large chunk of rock. This meteor took off in the same direction as the first one, about a minute behind, just as I’d calculated.
Those two meteors would take care of my second and third goals. But for now, forget about those meteors. They won’t be heard from again for ten billion years.
My first goal was the toughest. Mary, sweet Mary, how I missed her! I set about recreating her and my old universe in all its details, right from the beginning. With the quantum computing power of the Tom Universe, I could extrapolate all that had happened, and set about duplicating it.
You can call me God, since I applied whatever light touches were necessary to recreate my old universe. Trust me, galaxy formation is not an easy thing when a ninety-pound weakling at the beach can kick sand at you and all you can kick back with are a few photons. Just to get the raw materials needed I had to create supernovas, and explode them just right. But a photon here, an electron there, and it adds up if you do it long enough. Soon I had the matter and energy needed, all in the right place at the right time. I created our solar system, Earth, life, evolution, hamsters, and eventually Homo Sapiens, all exactly as it had happened in my old universe.
It wasn’t easy affecting evolution since I could barely nudge a strand of DNA. I could move an atom so it affects a molecule, which affects a nucleotide, which affects the DNA. It took many millions of years, and I almost died for want of a galactic-sized aspirin. I had second thoughts about recreating history exactly as before, since that meant Hitler, bubonic plague, cooked spinach, and acne—five years of it for me—but any changes would alter future history, and I couldn’t risk that. Once I’d set the initial conditions early in Earth’s history, the rest was inevitable, with minor adjustments now and then, thanks to Heisenberg. As to the rest of the universe, I let it evolve on its own, and it ended up pretty close to the original.
Finally the Tom Universe reached TOM, the Time of Mary.
Oh, and me too. I got to watch both of us grow up. With me, it was diaper changing, playing with Joey, bullies stuffing me in lockers, dropping the fly ball to right field that blew the big playoff game—damn, I wanted to change that—then off to college. With Mary, it was diaper changing, ballet classes, middle school queen bee, high school prom queen, boyfriends I didn’t know about, then off to college where she finally buckled down and studied. We met, we dated, and then Joey joined us as we formed our lab group.
Joey, Joey, Joey. The things I know about you now!
But now I had Mary back. I couldn’t hold her in my arms because I didn’t really have arms, unless you count eighteen billion human arms, since they are all part of me. But after 13.7 billion years of planning and execution, her beautiful mind and body existed again. I had achieved my first goal.
I caressed her with the molecules that bounced against her body, as well as from within, since the very matter that made up her body was me. I felt her at every level of existence, the limbular, cellular, molecular, nuclear, and lepton/quarkular. Such sweetness and beauty…
…and such betrayal. There I was, just as before on that fateful day, experimenting on my singularity, unknowingly about to destroy the universe…again. And there, in Dr. Wilson’s office nearby, on his sofa, were Mary and Joey, just as before, with their bodies—made from me!—entwined, their lips locked. Mary’s purity ring lay on a table nearby.
I’d played it out in my mind a trillion times, always with the same result. Small bursts of cosmic rays spontaneously burst into being throughout the universe as I heaved universal shudders of horror. How could they?
In my youth as a universe, I could never go beyond that moment. What point was there? Mary and Joey betrayed me, and must pay the price.
And yet, as I matured as a universe, my youthful hot-bloodedness was replaced by a more experienced thoughtfulness. It took nearly 13.7 billion years—just a few brief million years before Mary, Joey and I would come into existence again—before I could bring myself to look past the betrayal and calculate what would have happened if I hadn’t destroyed the universe. It was just a simulation in my cosmic mind, and yet it seemed almost real to me.
“I can’t believe we did that,” Mary said as she dressed. “Right here, not fifteen feet from the lab.”
Joey was silent as he pulled up his pants and put on his socks and shoes. When he was done, he continued staring at his feet.
“We’re his best friends, and look what we’ve done,” Mary continued. There was a long silence. Mary stared at her purity ring for a long time before putting it back on. Catzilla stood nearby, staring with accusatory eyes.
“We can’t ever tell him,” Joey finally said. “It would be too much for him.”
“How can we face him?” Tears streamed down Mary’s face.
“We won’t,” Joey said, his face granite.
A week later, Joey transferred to another university, which he claimed focused more on his areas of neurological interest. For several years he maintained occasional email contact with Tom before fading into his past. He never contacted Mary again.
Mary missed a week of school, citing illness. When she returned, she surprised Tom with a candlelit dinner and the finest French food. Thoughts of singularity expansion were put on hold. Later they would work out the theoretical framework for consciousness—including singularities and their part—and their research would revolutionize the field. When Tom wanted to expand a singularity, she convinced him the dangers were too great.
A month after the candlelit dinner, Tom proposed. They married, had three kids, and had fifty happy years together.
I replayed over and over in my mind the simulation of what my life would have been like with Mary. The life I’d lost, and the two lives I was about to kill. A cosmic tear rolled down my metaphorical cheek.
For ten billion years, the two meteors had shot through space for their long-planned rendevous, my second and third goals. Now I watched as they approached Earth, just a few million years to go. What have I done? My betrayal was far worse than theirs. Mine was the greatest of all possible betrayals.