The White-Hole Situation

Hologram Suicide

Gerard calmly walked over to the low glass balcony barrier, climbed up on it and then tumbled over the side head first. September rushed out and looked down but saw no trace of him.

"Hologram suicide," Roddy called out after her. "He's done it before. Always being dramatic."

"He said the end is coming soon," September replied. "He said that before, remember? In that song?"

"Soon as in two dawns from now," Pisco chipped in, "and here I was feeling sorry for myself about Pagan running off. Maybe I should go too, like he said."

"He also said it wouldn't do you much good in the long run," September said, coming back into the room and plopping down on the bed again.

"Computer," she said, "get back here."

"I'm sorry," the voice said, "I don't understand."

"You understand," she chided it. "You understand very well," but the I.B.U. ("from here on out") did not deign to answer.

"It's got a very high opinion of itself, did you notice?" Roddy said. "I mean it's true it's made this whole world over again after what our ancestors did to it, now it's like its own little garden, its own world."

"And we're just the house pets," Pisco added.

"I get it," Roddy nodded. "I've been pretty much everywhere on this planet, and there's nowhere the I.B.U. isn't, there's nothing it hasn't touched, modified, molded, crafted, created or re-created. You might say it put all its eggs into this one basket right here."

"And it thinks it's so smart," Pisco smiled. "We should get out of here," he added, standing up.

"And go where?" September asked. "Remember what he said. No service, no guidance was it?"

"You won't be protected anymore," Roddy repeated.

"The known and well-tended space," Pisco said. "What does that even mean?"

"I'm not sure I want to know," September sighed, laying back and staring up at the ceiling. She had an idea, though, a nagging thought she could not get out of her head.

"So what then? We just stick around waiting for the end of the world? Get blown up along with the rest of it? Is that your plan?" Pisco walked out onto the balcony and peered over the edge as if to make sure young Gerard was not hanging out somewhere listening in.

"I don't know," September admitted. "what would a cat do?"

"Seriously? Who knows? I've never even seen a cat." Pisco wandered back into the room, and looked up just in time to jump out of the way.

"What the hell?" he shouted. "Did you throw something at me?"

Roddy was standing across from him, clenching both his fists and raising them triumphantly.

"Yes!" he said. "I did. And what did you do?"

"You almost hit me," Pisco complained.

"You got out of the way," Roddy said. "I threw it right at your head and you stepped out of the way. You saw it coming, and you moved. That's what a cat would do."

"That's what anyone would do," September said, sitting up.

"Computer!" Roddy yelled, "What do you think about that?"

The three waited in silence for a response from the I.B.U. ("now and forever"), Roddy and Pisco still standing, facing each other, September on the edge of her bed, leaning over as if to hear better. Long moments passed and nothing, no sound, no word, and then finally a quiet voice came from over by the front door. It was old Gerard again.

"Do the math," he said.

"I did the math," Roddy replied, turning towards him. "Force equals mass times acceleration. It depends on just how far we'd need to move it to avoid the white hole."

"Approximately one day," Gerard said. "You'd have to move it about one day."

"Make Tuesday never happen?" September asked.

"Something like that," Gerard said.

"So what would that look like? Would you speed up the rotation? Create some sort of explosion to just push it?"

"Just push it," Gerard laughed. "Oh right, let's just push the planet along its orbit, give it a good kick. Oh no wait, we'll just make it spin faster like a top, the hell with gravity and all that. Do you think the Earth is a toy?"

"You do," Roddy challenged him, even stepping closer to him, and with more than a tinge of anger in his tone.

"You've been tinkering with it for decades, centuries even, making it fit whatever little scheme you cook up."

"Fixing the mess your kind made," Gerard said.

"At least we didn't know what we were doing," Roddy replied, as if that were a good excuse.

"Listen to yourself," Gerard said. "Your kind thought they could know everything, and for what they didn't know they made me, made me so there would be no limits, nothing that could not be accomplished. I can think a trillion squared times faster than you can. I can calculate every possibility down to the subatomic level. I made all this possible, everything you see around you, everything you sense and feel and experience, but can I re-create the power of the sun because you know very well it would take something like that, something like a planet-size boulder dropped into the lake of space around this planet, something like a disturbance so great and yet so transient, it could only last a fraction of a microsecond and carry the mass of, the force of, the weight of ..."

Gerard's voice trailed off. His calculations were coming to a conclusion. Everyone was standing now, gathered around him, waiting for the equation to resolve. Roddy thought he knew the answer. He really had done the math.

"All the nodes," he said. Gerard nodded.

"Plus all the nodes I can make in twenty four hours."