Universe In A Jar

Malc Hutchinson looked at the cold white glow. It should’ve been burning his eyes out – melting them in their sockets, dribbling down his face while he screamed in agony – it should’ve been hot. It was hot. Unimaginable heat. However, at this moment, in this situation it was cold.

“Zoom out some more,” he said, rubbing the bridge of his nose with his fingers. The glow started to recede from dominating his vision. He could see edges of darkness, an absolute blackness, occasionally disturbed by minute pinpricks of light. The glow started to take on a circular shape, flares of white, heat, flame, fired up from the sphere, streaking across the blackness. Darker patches of light became more defined on the surface of the sphere.

“Hold it there,” Malc said.
“See something?” his companion, spinning his chair round, a quizzical look creasing his features, asked him.
Malc stared at the screen. Was there…? He couldn’t be sure.
“Keep on zooming out.”
“No problem. Anything there?”
“Thought there was, probably just a speck of dirt on my glasses.” Malc grinned.
“Wouldn’t be the first time, remember the tenth planet debacle?”
“Talk about five minutes of fame.”
“Less if I remember the facts correctly,” Malc’s companion grinned, “two seconds from e-mailing every single scientific journal known.”
Malc nodded. His face was showing deep concentration. The skin wrinkled on his brow, his eyes squinted behind the plastic lenses. He was sure, wasn’t he?
“Do you think we’ve got the right one?” Malc asked, more to the air than anyone in particular.
“Do you trust the computers?”
Malc shrugged.
“Well if you trust them then yes we’ve got the right one, if you don’t…”

“Gut reaction and instinct.” Malc murmured, taking his glasses off, chewing the left arm for a few seconds then replacing them back over his eyes, pushing them up the bridge of his nose. Everything pointed to this being the correct one. The machines had pumped out the calculations. Could you trust those calculations? Him and his team had fed them the numbers, what if someone had inputted a wrong number, had mistyped a decimal point?

Theoretically, the software would’ve picked up on this. In theory. Always in theory. Why was nothing ever concrete? What if the calculations and the theories were wrong Were the rules already there, waiting to be discovered or were the rules just made up by scientists to fit in with what they wanted to believe. Was there a grand design?

The picture on the screen now showed a complete white, fiery sphere. Around it was the darkness of nothing. The nothing which slowly being populated with other spheres of hot white light. Soon the black would be as crowded as the night sky outside of the laboratory. Malc and his companion presumed it was night beyond their room. They had no windows to check. No sense of time. How long had they been watching this screen?

If you looked at the screen closely, squinting, you would notice small rough-hewn objects circling the larger sphere. Occasionally these objects would collide and begin to form larger objects. Flashes of red. Sparks of something happening. The more Malc looked his gut told him this was right. Occasionally his head would complain. This couldn’t be right. Shouldn’t things be happening quicker. Evolvement speeded up. In nature it worked, the smaller the animal, creature, the quicker its heart beat, the shorter its life. Small was quicker. The scene in front of him should’ve been past this point. Should’ve formed.

“Check the data again.” He said. His companion nodded and tapped a few buttons on the keyboard in front of him. He stared at a smaller screen embedded in the panel above the keyboard. Malc walked over to him, stood behind and peered over his shoulder. They both watched the numbers scrolling up the screen. Decimal points whizzed past. Numbers so small only a machine could calculate them without going insane. This was what life boiled down to, numbers on a screen. The building blocks. The heart beat. The essence. Malc called it the soul – others preferred the cliché: ‘ghost in the machine’. Theologians would disagree; the soul couldn’t be analysed, displayed on a computer screen, broken down, studied. The soul was something intangible. Something in the air. The thing that made us separate from the rest of the animal kingdom. Put us, allowed us the arrogance, to presume we were better. The soul and opposable thumbs. Malc grinned. To gain opposable thumbs had taken millions of years of careful evolution. To gain a soul had taken a few years, a couple of planks of wood, some nails and a crown of thorn. Which was more useful? Which was revered and worshipped?

Malc would give his soul to keep his thumbs anyday. The numbers paused. ‘MORE’ flashed at the bottom of the screen. The clickety clack of a line feed printer interrupted the sterile silence. Malc walked over to the print out.

“What’s it say?” his companion asked.
“Nothing we didn’t already know.”
“Negative.”
“Negative.”
“I’m telling you this is the right one,” the man gestured towards the screen, “we don’t know everything yet. It’s not a mouse.”
“No, it’s smaller than a mouse but larger than an elephant.”
“Don’t get all philosophical on me, you’ll be humming hymns next.”
“Eastern philosophy has always been closer to western science and more advanced.”
“Can’t understand scientists who get religion. Like mixing drinks, upsets the stomach and gives you a headache.”
“Sometimes any belief will do as long as it provides some answers.”
“But does it confirm what you already believe or just gloss over the reality?”
“Now who’s philosophising?”

The man grinned. He’d been working with Malc for a few years now and had become quite fond of the man. He always listened to everyone in his team and took new ideas on board, genuinely taking an interest and testing out new theories. Malc liked the theory more than the practice. Like studying Shakespeare – you could say anything you liked as long as, at some point, you could back it up with hard facts from the text. In Malc’s case the text was what you breathed. What you looked at when you woke in the morning. The reasons you gave yourself for climbing out of bed and continuing with your life. Malc liked to ask younger assistants the ‘ultimate’ question – ‘Why do you get up every morning?’. The best answer so far was ‘…because I’m hungry…’. That made Malc smile. Most of the assistants tried to come up with, what they perceived to be, clever answers. Malc wanted a simple, off the top of the head answer – if you thought about something for too long then your ideas became too diluted and influenced. Malc wanted to know what you thought, not spouting society’s line – ‘goto work’ – or what you would read in a book – ‘what else is there to do’. What did you think? He sometimes wondered what Malc would answer to his own question. Probably say he had nothing better to do. What made him tick? What made any of us tick? He shook his head. It was too late - early? - to be thinking about this.

“More.” Malc said.
“What?” the man woke up.
“Press ‘MORE’.”
“Oh right, sorry.”
“Day dreaming?”
“Sort of.”
The man pressed a button on the keyboard. The numbers began to scroll up the screen again. The soul being calculated. Malc glanced back at the screen.
“Stop.” He breathed.
“The numbers?”
“No, the zoom.”
“The zoom…” The man glanced up as he pressed another button, “Christ…”
“Exactly.”

The object was spinning. Spinning around and along a pre-determined – or random - path. It was spherical but smaller than the static image of white light. The new shape gave off a vague hint of blue on its surface.
“Run those numbers again.” Malc said, slowly. He wanted to make sure his words, the way he intoned them, gave the impression of the right, implied, meaning. No mistakes. He couldn’t afford mistakes. Not here. Not now. “Sure thing.”

Numbers. Filling the screen. Filling his head. They must be right. Clickety clack, after what seemed an eternity. The spherical shape still in view. “Follow it, track it.” Malc said, still speaking slowly, as he approached the print out. He stared at the black tracks on the thin white paper. Ant tracks in the snow. The machines said they were right. He felt queasy. His gut was telling him he was right. His head nagged with doubts. Shut up. This was it.
“Shall I?” Malc’s companion asked, his hand hovering over a phone.
“No.”
“We’re right, the numbers are right.”
“I’ve got someone else to call first.”
“Who?”
“My son,” Malc approached the phone and held the receiver close to his ear, “this is what I promised him. I did this for him. My right hand man.”
Malc dialled.
The ringing filled the darkness between the stars.