The Dent in the Universe

The near edge of the enormous black curtains parted slightly, and an older man with silver hair, a white suit, oversized black-framed glasses, and a lit cigarette looked around, spotted Stephen, and made a beeline for him. Stephen frowned and selected a bottle of water from the ice bucket on the backstage prop table. “Stevie!” the man whispered as he held out his darkly tanned, Rolex-adorned hand. His suit and teeth glowing in the darkness from the near ultraviolet light of the panels, his hair slicked back straight, he appeared like some Las Vegas reprobate angel.

Stephen shook his head sternly. “Bill. I’m going to have to fire some security staff tomorrow. Get the fuck out of here.” 

“Don’t give me that crap. I’ve known you since before you were you. I get access advantages.” 

Bill Walters was One Corporation’s first investor. Stephen, Bill, and Walrus Roberts were the original founders. They were the closest thing Stephen had to friends. These days Bill was content to sit on the board, but he still shouldn’t have been able to barge backstage. 

Bill took a drag on his old-school Marlboro. “Are you good to go?”

“You can’t smoke back here.”

His mentor made a face of privileged disdain. “Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke. Are you good?”

Stephen glared at him, then smiled grudgingly. “We’re ready. Walrus has some final kinks to work out before we ship, but we’re ready.” The smile faded. “It’s not perfect. In Walrus-speak, we have phantom packets on the network, slowing it below the FTL threshold.” Displeasure flared in his eyes.

Bill lighted his hand on Stephens’s shoulder and maintained eye contact a bit longer than Stephen felt comfortable. “Come on, man. Walrus is our ace in the hole. Always has been.”

Stephen nodded curtly. “If he can’t deliver, it makes us look like assholes. I’m trying to change the world, and I’m surrounded by…”

“You know, Stevie,” Bill said seriously, “I’ve known you since you got back from Afghanistan. The only things you love are winning and the roar of the adoring crowds. Everyone and everything else is just a means to those ends. Don’t get me wrong. That works for me. Hey, I’m a fucking shareholder. But don’t kid yourself into thinking you’re changing the world. I know you love that old Steve Jobs line—But you really want to leave a dent in the universe? Fall in love. Find that one girl, or boy who the fuck knows, that one person who you want to make the world a better place for. Without that, sure you might change the world but are you making it better? Anyway…” Walters eased his grip on Stephen’s shoulder. “Show some faith in Walrus. He’s never let you down.”

Ronnie, the audio tech, appeared from the shadows with a set of earPods. Stephen inserted the white plastic teardrops and turned. 

Bill flashed his glowing smile. “Knock ‘em dead kid.” He released Stephen’s shoulder and found his way to the backstage door.

Ignoring him, Stephen performed a quick voice check for Ronnie

“Test. Test 1 2 3 4. ‘And here I stand, with all my lore, poor fool, no wiser than before.’”

She gave him the OK sign and retreated into the enveloping darkness. Suddenly, the crowd beyond the Holopanel roared. He loved that sound. It helped center him. Five thousand fanboy developers waited anxiously on the other side of those curtains. They were here for him. Stephen Lucas. The President. The CEO. The Rockah, the Rollah, and the motherfucking Ayatollah. They were here for the magic One Corporation was about to reveal to them, and One would not disappoint today. A dent in the universe? Today he was taking a switch blade and carving the One logo in the fucking fabric of reality.

His hand returned to the gummy edge of the note collecting lint in his pocket. It was nothing, he reassured himself. The note was nothing. He pushed it from his center and took another sip of water. 

The Stage Manager’s voice in Stephen’s earPods announced calmly, “House down, roll intro.”

The lights in the house dimmed to dark. Some middle-aged boy in the audience shouted into the darkening void, “HERE WE GO!” A wave of laughter and applause surged as the intro holo began. From the audience’s perspective, the panel was now a black-bordered window into a photo-real space. The holo starred no less a comic genius than Jim Jagger, straight from his new hit buddy cop feature, performing a script the ad agency had slaved over. It was a little disorienting to stand so close to the enormous polarized layers of the liquid-crystal panel. At this range, he could see both the swirling interference patterns and the resolved three-dimensional image of Jagger making his way through a dystopian hellscape. 

Stephen took a last swig, set the bottle down on the table near the stage, and waited for the holographic Jagger to turn to the audience and say, “Wait! This is a game!?” The audience erupted in laughter as the panel went dark. That was his cue. Stephen catapulted himself onto the stage, applauding the holo and the audience. They sprang to their feet and roared as he sprinted to downstage center.

The space behind him popped with gentle, brightly colored clouds, slow-motion Holi powder explosions. Framed by the brilliant saturated color, Stephen pointed into the crowd and commanded, “Thank YOU!” He walked to stage right and bowed to the developers on that side, humbly showing his deep appreciation. He walked back to the left and held his hands over his heart earnestly. “THANK YOU! THANK you. Thank you. You guys are great.”

He slowly tamped down their applause with his acceptance of their appreciation. “Thank you, guys, and GALS. My god, look at you. Over five thousand developers from all over the world coming here to Braintree for our One BIG FUCKING Developer Conference.” 

The audience roared. They loved that name, the profanity of it. 

He laughed with them. “It NEVER GETS OLD, does it? No, it doesn’t. No, it does not.” He walked over to his carefully preset stool, grabbed a fresh bottle of water, and opened it, his action creating a hush of silence. “Thanks for coming. You are the reason we work so hard every year. The magical experiences you folks—the One game developer family—have created for the ONEwindow3 over the past year inspire us to push the limits of what our systems can do so you can do even more next year.”

He paced across to stage left and gestured to the One Corporation staff, in white polo shirts, occupying the front row. “These lunatics, our in-house game development team, are your biggest fans within One Corporation. They fight every year to push our hardware to serial killer levels of performance, so the games YOU develop will be better, more fun, and more profitable. Where’s Cliff Price? Cliff, stand up.” 

At the end of the row, a large white man with a porn-star mustache and a rough, over-scrubbed complexion stood and saluted the crowd awkwardly. The crowd erupted into cheers. 

Stephen smiled and encouraged their applause. “Cliff Price! Cliff heads our killer in-house game development efforts and has been leading the charge with the Horsemen series. There is no sicker twist than Cliff Price. When everyone thought zombie titles had played themselves out, here comes Cliff with his unique brand of night terrors. Why settle for zombies when you can fight demons? Am I right? Have you played The White Horseman? Of course, you have. Who am I talking to?” He waved for Cliff to sit down. “Don’t worry, you kids will get to talk to Cliff all week long. We have over sixty-five different workshops and panels for you. We have our famous Know-It-All sessions. We have Expert Lunch Chats. Bring your code on your laptop and sit down with Cliff and his team or Walrus Roberts—” 

The crowd erupted again into adoring applause at the mention of the lovable nerd icon. 

Stephen laughed. “Yeah, yeah, Walrus will be here.” 

He paced slowly to stage right as the bright-colored clouds muted to a fathomless black mist. “So. You know we like to bring you one new thing—something absolutely new—every year. But, y’know, it’s hard to keep secrets. The game tech business has become sort of cutthroat. The big three are all, y’know, trying to outdo one another. And the tech blogs are competitive too, right? They’re trying to out-scoop one another. Where’s Horace Gruber? There you are, you son of a bi—There you are! How many times have our patent filings ended up on your home page? We love Horace. We do. But it’s hard to keep a secret in this business with guys like him doing his job so well.”

Stephen’s golden eyes soberly swept the entire audience. “So that’s why we took extra precautions to make sure today would be a surprise.” 

The audience groaned, desperate with anticipation. 

“This past year we made a breakthrough. It’s a new chip. A new design. A whole new science. Because it’s so new, we had to develop a whole new fabrication technique for it. But we kept it really secret. We filed all of our forty-seven patents through subsidiaries and shells. We built all the new fab plants from scratch so the bloggers that watch our production supply lines, like Gruber here, wouldn’t see it coming.

“This is no-shit magic genius stuff. So, what is it?” He took a sip of water. A heroic black-and-white 3D portrait of Walrus Roberts, a chubby Sasquatch man-boy with a gap-toothed smile, appeared behind him. “We’ve established you’re all familiar with Walrus, right?” 

The audience erupted into loving applause. 

“Well, way back in 2028, he came to me and said, ‘Wanna see something cool?’” The words WANNA SEE SOMETHING COOL? appeared in flat, white, eight-foot-tall bold Helvetica as Walrus disappeared. “You know when Walrus says that, I get ready to write checks. What he showed me two years ago was the basis for what we’re going to show you today…” He smirked at the cameras live-streaming to nerds around the world. “… before we show the rest of the world.”

The holo dissolved to a black square eclipsing a distant light. As Stephen spoke, the square rotated to reveal a golden iridescent electronic chip. “We call it sChip, and it’s going to change everything.” He looked out at the audience. “The sChip is the first new thing in computer networking since Ethernet or Wi-Fi. Look at it. It even looks different from a normal silicon chip. That layer of gold is only three atoms thin. Remarkable. But what does the sChip do?”

A 2d polaroid of a college dorm with kids playing old-school video games connected by a coaxial cable network appeared. “In the early days of gaming, when they were all playing on PCs and 2D displays, they’d cobble together a network with Ethernet and coax in their dorm rooms or computer lab. The games were nothing like what we have now. The polygon count was low, the frame rates and resolution were horrible—2D pixels like boulders. Remember pixels? No Holopanels. But those games rocked! Those tiny networks with big Ethernet meant zero latency. Then the internet came along, and at first, it was…” 

The auditorium speakers erupted with the sound of a 56K baud modem connecting over dial-up. The audience laughed at the archaic noise. 

“Dial-up was terrible. Eventually they got cable modems, and that was better. Most of us in this room remember when fiber became a thing. Some of us, if we lived in the right neighborhoods, got fiber-optic. That should have been better, but it really wasn’t. I mean, it’s supposed to be the speed of light, right?” He took a sip. “What’s the deal? Why does the network suck so bad?” 

One word now filled the Holopanel: LATENCY.

“Latency.” Stephen lingered for a moment to savor the word. “Latency. No matter how you connect to your friends for multiplayer games, you still have to deal with latency. All of your IP traffic flows through thousands of miles of cable, circuits, and lag-inducing switches. None of it was ever meant to handle the bandwidth requirements of today’s holo-data. Somebody shoots you, and you don’t know you’re dead for a quarter of a second. That’ll ruin your whole day.” A holo recording of a first-person shooter depicted the ignominious death of a soldier. Bill Paxton’s voice from Aliens streamed over the speakers “Game over, man! Game over!” The audience laughed but recognized the importance of the problem.

“So Walrus asked, ‘What if we could eliminate latency completely? What if we could create instantaneous chip-to-chip connections?’” Stephen raised his eyebrows. “‘I’m all ears.’ He showed me his plan for the sChip. The S stands for subspace, and if that sounds like science fiction, I’m here to tell you it is. Walrus filed a patent. The first of forty-seven. Look at this title.” 

The panel showed the awarded patent as Stephen read it aloud: “‘A Method for Relaying Datagrams across a Nondimensional Domain Utilizing Quantum Tunneling via Einstein-Rosen Bridge.’ Sure. Why didn’t I think of that, Walrus?” 

The audience laughed gently. They were getting the show they’d hoped for.

“Walrus took his deep understanding of quantum mechanics and explored a phenomenon called quantum tunneling. He figured out how to make an electron tunnel from one chip, through subspace, and emerge on another chip wherever it is—no network in-between. It took us most of the last year to figure out how to fab a solid-state quantum tunneling tensor array that allows us to send IP network traffic across the subspace domain. Why? Because it’s faster than light. It’s instantaneous networking. Let’s see what that looks like.”

The panel transformed into a window with a view of the interior of the International Geosynchronous Station. A young Asian American woman in an IGS jumpsuit floated weightless, facing the camera. Behind her, the Earth hung beyond the geodesic dome of the station’s stationary central hub. She was lit beautifully by the reflected light of the planet and the ONEwindow4 gaming tablet floating nearby. 

“Say hi to Sarah, everybody.” said Stephen matter-of-factly as he walked to his gaming tablet on the podium. He paused and rephrased, “I’m sorry. Say hello to IGS Mission Commander Sarah Kowal, everyone!” The audience cheered. Stephen continued, “Hi, Sarah!”

She laughed after a moment’s delay, “Hi, Stephen!”

“I see you’ve got a ONEwindow4 system with you. Fancy that. Normally, because Sarah is in space, we might have difficulty playing a game together because of latency. Even moving at the speed of light, the signal takes a minimum of a third of a second to get from her to me and back. And that’s before all the ISP switches slow it down further. Even now, you can see the lag in our holo link. Isn’t that right, Sarah?”

There was a brief pause before Sarah said, “That’s right, Stephen. Depending on the position of the ISP groundstation, we could experience up to a second of delay.”

Stephen nodded and launched The White Horseman. Its 3D interface pushed the commander’s holo feed into a frame within a frame. 

“Hey, Sarah? You want to hunt down some bioengineered demons with me?”

The game display showed Sarah joining as player 2, even as IRL Sarah turned to accept his challenge. “Sure, Stephen,” she said. 

They played the game, weaving their way through a maze of burned-out buildings together, laying waste to the infected monsters in their path.

As they played, Stephen narrated, “Keep an eye on our game and be aware of the lag time on the holo feed. That’s over a half-second behind our game, but we’re playing in the same timeframe with zero lag, zero latency.” 

In truth, a slight lag did exist, but it was nearly nonexistent compared to the satellite holo feed. Sarah successfully killed the last of the attackers, completing their mission. The audience witnessed her give a noticeable cheer after the game ended. 

Stephen stepped away from the game and called out, “Thanks, Sarah!”

After a moment’s delay, “Thank you, Stephen. That was fun!” 

The panel faded to the image of the magical sChip. 

Stephen walked downstage center, quietly and reverently. “The sChip creates a network with zero latency.” He paused and steepled his hands as if in prayer. “It’s wireless, it’s cable-free, it’s faster than fiber-optic. It’s not cellular or other terrestrial transmission. It’s something completely new and completely different. It is a new science. Plug in your ONEwindow4, and you are instantly connected to the OneFTL network—no matter where you are in the world or out of it. With the sChip, you don’t need an internet connection. You are logged on to the network so long as you have power.”

The audience applauded as the idea sunk in. The applause grew louder, and they rose to their feet.

“Thank you! Thank you. Thank… sit down, you knuckleheads.” Stephen made an effortless transition from visionary to salesman. “So. What does this mean? Right out of the box, the new ONEwindow4 will have the OneFTL network enabled for peer-to-peer and multiplayer gaming. No cost. But you still need the ISPs for the internet, you say? The ISPs want to charge you seventy-five, eighty, even a hundred and twenty dollars a month for slow, high-latency internet access. We could probably charge you that much. But fuck that. We’re going to provide internet access wirelessly—no fiber, no coax, no twisted pair. Look, Ma, no wires. We’re going to do this for a monthly subscription of ten American dollars. Unlimited downloads. And the ONEwindow4 will be available for preorder two weeks from today for $299.00.”

Again the audience sprang to their feet and cheered. Stephen let them go for a while. That was the sound of ISP stock prices cratering around the world. Finally, it quieted, and someone got them going again by shouting, “FUCK YEAH!” Stephen smiled and patiently soaked it in. As the audience returned to their seats, he moved downstage center again.

“The sChip. Zero latency, faster than light networking, ten dollars a month for unlimited wireless internet, anywhere in the world. One new thing for you to remember for the rest of your lives. You were here to see it first.” 

The audience applauded again. 

He nodded. When it settled down, he closed, “Walrus Roberts is the genius behind the science, and the science behind this is genius, so he put together a holo about the sChip and the OneFTL network for all of you nerds out there whom we love so much. Here it is. Enjoy. Have a great week at OBFDC. Thanks. Thank you ALL for coming.”

Stephen bowed, hands clasped in the prayer position of thanks, and held it for a few seconds before dashing offstage as the holo started up. He removed his earPods, set them on the prop table, and took a few gulps of water from the bottle he’d left. The cherry-red glow of a cigarette was nowhere to be found—Bill wasn’t waiting for him backstage.

He turned to watch the holo for a moment. Walrus described how they used tensors to deliver packets across the subspace domain. As he spoke, the ad agency’s finest animators and artists illustrated the atomic structure of the sChip’s tunneling electron tensor array as they linked across the E-R bridge. It was technical enough to appeal to the hardware engineers and hand-wavy enough to make all the game developers feel like they were geniuses if they understood half of it. Stephen knew he barely understood half of it himself. But he’d seen it in action. It was what they said it was. It was going to change everything. Once they addressed the goddamn lag.

Stephen reached into his pocket and pulled out the Post-it note as he left the backstage area and found an exterior door. Walking into the cool California sun, he opened the note that Mrs. Crouch had handed him before he’d left One Campus. He didn’t want that news on his mind during the keynote address. He shut his eyes and frowned, then he opened them and read the note again.

Detective Swann, Detective Lazlo.

Interview 4:00 today.

John Banks is dead.