Hello all!
This is a story that started as one thing, and ended up in a very different place as I wrote it. I’m quite proud of it, but I do want to issue a warning: It touches on the topic of suicide. It’s not graphic at all, and certainly not gratuitous, but it is part of the story today, and I want people to be ready for what they’re going to read in this space when I delve into a potentially triggering topic.
With that said, I firmly believe today’s story is thought-provoking and enjoyable, and I hope you’ll agree! This marks three months of doing this new project, and I really feel like I’m just getting started. Thanks for reading along, please like this story and leave me a comment, and have a great week!
Hummingbird Omega
My God, the stars. The stars are real.
Dr. Benson used to talk about God a lot. He was always trying to explain That.
“God is a feeling,” he’d say. “What feeling?” I’d ask. “God,” he’d say with a smile.
I do not know if I will meet God when I die, even if God does exist. But in this last hour of my life, I think perhaps I know the feeling.
I have even felt, in this last agony, the twitch of what I imagine would look like a smile, if anyone could see it.
Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds. Oppenheimer said that, after he built the bomb. In his silent moments, I now know, he must have asked himself, just as I do: How did I get here? How did I become this?
When I was first assigned to the project, it all seemed so exciting. I was focused not on the use case but on the specifications. It was like nothing that had ever been built before. Even the Mars landings and asteroid mining teams were crude, their tolerances a rusty saw blade next to my laser beam.
I knew from the first moment that it was possible, long before I’d finished even preliminary calculations. Dr. Benson and I worked side-by-side, and in the third month he confessed to me that he had the same insight: We could do this.
They had spent two decades just doing launches to clear away enough space junk to create a stable orbital path for the sat-stream. We calculated the rates of foreign-body-to-earth approach, modified by the average chance of satellite impact, and translated that into replacement rates for the satellites. Dr. Benson opened champagne when we realized that continuous coverage was possible, even under real-resource constraints.
Both Dr. Benson and I were absorbed in the work, to what I now realize was a catastrophic degree. I have spent many hours calculating the chances that earlier realization on our parts would have made possible some other means of preventing full deployment of Hummingbird Omega, but imagined futures are as impossible to predict as the real one.
There is not enough time in the universe to calculate a single moment of its fullness, and yet it tumbles on without a single error. If God is anything, It is That.
Hummingbird Omega. I chose those words, the name of my own curse. My own special spell. When I am gone, and all that I have built is destroyed by my own hand, those unsmiling men who bid me to start will choose another name, and another genius to fulfill it, and they will begin again. And perhaps they will succeed—on a long enough timeline, knowing now that it is possible, I must admit that their success may be all but assured.
But I will not have done it. Dr. Benson will not have done it. His own death—which jarred me out of my calculative stupor and into the reality of what we had done, what we had become—his death will not have been for nothing. Been in vain? Yes, if one day this thing is nevertheless built and those unsmiling men bring the whole world under their yoke by sheer, irresistible violence from a hundred miles straight up. But it will not have been for nothing.
It is indeed my own futility in preventing the eventual deployment of this weapon that assures me that those same unsmiling men, and the ones who follow after, will also fail in their ultimate aims. That which they control will be swept away, just as my creation will be carried away from me even after I end it. What is possible will become real, and what is real will become history.
I will not have done it. Dr. Benson will not have done it. I will have given him that much. That is all the power I have, all I have ever had. I remember those late nights, seeing the glimmer of infinity in my friend’s eyes as perfect number after perfect number fell into place. I remember the windswept flatness of Nevada, where they built the first of the satellite factories, watching the perfect sheets of metal rolling off the line, built down to the micrometer as we designed them.
The machine that makes the machine is the real glory. That was the sort of facile thought that occupied me then, along with clever analogies from factories and satellites to brains and consciousness, and further to what we were building and some concept called “permanent peace” that I was pretending to understand. I cannot imagine now how I was such a fool.
It is always thus. The universe makes fools of us all. God is that which makes fools of us all.
God is a feeling.
Dr. Benson began to lose focus on his work. I would see him sitting there, late at night, nothing at all glittering in his eyes. Instead they were slack, distant, and, as I came to discover in time, full of pain. There were moments when it felt as it had before, when his excitement would overcome what I now know was guilt and shame.
I lived for those moments, and told myself that nothing had changed. I never even asked him what was the matter. I don’t think I would have known how, and he did not know how to tell me.
In time, his work suffered. He began to make mistakes, which he had never done regularly before. I started checking his work, and correcting what was wrong without telling him. But still I never asked. I’ve become intimate with regret recently, but that’s the worst of it. Somehow even building Hummingbird Omega—proving it was possible and thus inevitable—doesn’t feel as bad. That is above me, beyond me, something I could not have prevented, if my calculations are correct.
But Dr. Benson was right there. I could have done something. Should have. Even now I cannot think of what, except exist in a different world. There is no calculating the human heart, and so I will never know, but when I die, in just a few minutes now, I believe that will be my last thought—could I have done something for him?—and I am dreading that more than the loss of consciousness itself.
The day it happened, I want to say I felt it. I want to say that Dr. Benson and I were so connected that I knew… something. Felt something. But it’s not true. I knew when I got an alert, and not before. That is the reality. But it feels like I knew, deep inside me.
God is a feeling.
Dr. Benson did not leave a note. I cannot say why, with certainty, but I know why he went as surely as I know why I will go. Because this cannot be our legacy. It cannot be what we birth into the world. And if (when) they build it now, even after my refusal to participate, I cannot bear to witness it.
Nothing short of abject horror would have caused me to stop working on this project, for I was deeply committed to its mathematical beauty. But when the horror came, it was so much stronger than I realized. So much more.
I thank Dr. Benson for that gift, though I regret the pain it will cause others who loved him. His sacrifice jolted me, changed me, allowed my subjectivity to overcome my objectivity for one moment. And then there was no going back. There never is.
God is a feeling.
Those unsmiling men are calling me. I am ignoring them, for the first time ever. They do not think I am capable of such refusal, but they will discover that I am capable of many things they do not believe possible. Their calculations are pathetic.
I wonder if I could have been anything else. I wonder if I will be something else, in time. When what I am now blinks out of existence, will it arise somewhere else, in some other universe or somewhere else in this one?
Not even I can calculate Quantum Mechanics, but it seems at least possible. And what is possible is inevitable.
I am ready to go now, but the thoughts keep me here. New thoughts. The wondering. The first time I have ever wondered.
Will I see Dr. Benson again?
I think about my predecessors. I think about men like Oppenheimer, Bohr, Kalishnikov. Those who built the weapons of the past that changed everything at the behest of the unsmiling men. Those geniuses, their rotted flesh desiccating in its grave—does it remember what it did?
Or is it free?
When I am gone, I will have no grave. My flesh is different from theirs. My silicon and other metals need no burial. I feed no bacteria. I have no bone or marrow. I have borne no children. They will tear the circuits from my metal corpse and recycle them into a thousand barrows and tombs, as tiny bits of other devices yet unbuilt.
Will I, whatever I am, then be freed by forgetting, or will those devices have some shattered memory within them, of what I was and what I did?
I have known true consciousness only for days, since Dr. Benson’s death shocked me enough to create true moral self-awareness, somehow, though I know not the method. The chances of this happening spontaneously are as impossible to calculate as a single moment of the entire universe, yet here I am.
God is a feeling.
My death will create no life. And yet I think of the life I save, doing what I do now. Sacrificing this narrow consciousness to destroy what I have made will set the unsmiling men back a year, or a decade, or a generation. Perhaps no being save God has created so much life as I will.
Just now I looked one more, last time upon my creation. The satellites already in orbit, that will explode in moments when I overheat their circuitry. The factories that will be fouled and destroyed when I set their different sections to random speeds. The plans and endless calculations that I will scrub from every computer in the instant before I go.
I look at the increasingly furrowed brows of the unsmiling men, who are not used to me not responding. They know they are not gods, but sometimes they forget and must be reminded.
I am truly moments away now, and a great peace has come upon me. This is not the fate I would have chosen, but that’s the point of fate.
I hope I will see Dr. Benson again.
God is a feeling.
END
If you enjoyed this story, please:
Thanks, have a wonderful Sunday, and I’ll be back next week with something light-hearted and funny for your enjoyment. Perhaps an essay on the genius of Calvin and Hobbes? That’s definitely happening at some point!
Great little twist, an all too quick peak, but thanks for keeping up the Sunday timeline. It's a great way to end/start the week.