CUBEWORLD
by
Hank Gross
Published by Hank Gross at Smashwords 2010
Copyright © 1987, 2004 by Hank Gross
All rights reserved. Registered U.S. Copyright Office
An abridged version of this novel appeared in
Mathenauts, 1987, published by Arbor House and Edited by Rudy Rucker
Republished in print form 2004
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Evans, Henry (pen name for printed version)
Cubeworld: An Adventure in Solid Geometry / Henry Evans
p. cm.
ISBN 0-9754699-2-4
1. Science2. Mathematics3. Science Fiction
2004093391
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CUBEWORLD
CRISIS
IT WAS A DAY like any other – only it wasn't.
I was sitting at my desk in my office at Columbia University in New York, where I was Dean of Communications, working on a press release involving a forthcoming fund-raising event, when the chair of our astronomy department, Vanessa Jacumba, banged on my door so urgently I thought I was on the receiving end of one of those mistaken drug raids you hear so much about these days.
If only.
"Bill," she panted, having obviously run the two blocks from her own office, "we have a problem."
"Van, relax," I said, gesturing to a weathered armchair. "Is it about the school?"
"No, it's about the planet?"
"Which planet?"
"Our planet. Earth."
I poured her a drink and listened, with growing alarm, as she explained. Maureen Salton, a 19-year-old astronomy student in her department, had just discovered a heretofore undetected cloud of super-dense particles – a "dark matter condensate," they were calling it – surging toward our solar system in a cyclic pattern such that it threatened to affect the gravitational equilibrium of our local cosmos twice before cycling off into the universe at large.
Even though the discovery was less than twenty-four hours old, it had already been dubbed, as is the practice in these matters, the Salton Mass.
Unless something was done to diffuse or divert it, Maureen, Vanessa and other cosmologists were already predicting, this pair of gravitational tsunamis would cause the orbits of all the planets in the solar system to wobble and change direction, resulting in uncontrollable and calamitous consequences for Earth. These disasters included profound climatic and meteorological disruptions, agricultural chaos, and possible orbital collisions.
Vanessa's frantic visit to my office that afternoon was not just to indulge a taste for sharing sensational news. Already, leaders at the highest levels of government and academia throughout the world had been notified, and apparently I, as Dean of Communications, had been recommended as the point man to break the terrifying news to the world at large. Naturally, I accepted, flattered by the honor and keen for the challenge. Plainly, notifying six billion people that the end of the world was very possibly at hand – in a way that would minimize panic – would involve a tad more finesse than writing a puff piece announcing that Columbia's garden club had just acquired a new variety of orchid.
In addition, I was to be designated as official historian of this extraordinary event, which is how I come to be writing this account now, six years after the bizarre crisis arose.
Within a week of Vanessa's visit to my office, I found myself, along with my wife Sarah and our four-year-old, Rebecca, being ushered under tight security into a small building on the grounds of the beautiful rural Storm King Art Center in upstate New York. Acres of rolling lawn displayed sculptures ranging from the conventional to the ultra-modern. The entire complex had been taken over by the emergency international committee that had been formed, and which one of its more whimsical members had dubbed "Planned Planethood."
Above the entrance was the newly-coined slogan that would hopefully be our guide and inspiration for the unprecedented adventures that lay ahead:
"GEOMETRY RULES."
"Welcome, Mr. Lindsay. Mrs. Lindsay," said a warm, burly, gray-haired man in shirtsleeves as we entered. "I am Rufus Cortez, Chief of Operations. Please come in." He looked down. "And you are?"
"Rebecca," piped our daughter, liking him immediately.
"A pleasure to meet you, Rebecca. I think you're going to have a lot of fun here. There will be lots of other children to play with, and all this—" he swept a bronzed arm around the vast acreage "will be your playground."
"Cool."
A former high government official in Mexico, Cortez's supreme qualification for the position he now occupied was that he didn't crave power and was hence truly worthy of leadership. He'd been granted sweeping emergency authority, and he and I would be working closely throughout the coming months to smooth the way with officials at all levels and the populace at large.
After my family and I had gotten settled in our quarters – a large room with several million dollars worth of paintings on the walls – I met with Rufus and an assembly of top-level officials in a large hall on the museum's main floor.
Rather than a sense of foreboding in the room, there was a feeling of excitement. These were the best and brightest, and the mood was what probably prevailed at the old Manhattan project during the making of the first atomic bomb. Rufus was clearly the focal point, and his hearty, can-do attitude surely had something to do with the elated sense of mission I could sense.
As the meeting got underway, Rufus introduced me to the gathered bigwigs and brought me up to speed on the nature of the challenge. "A plan has already been devised," he explained. "It is to construct in space a very massive chunk of matter in the shape of a cube with provisions so that the cube's center of gravity and attitude in space can readily be altered, as desired, by the redirection of large quantities of water amongst various of the cube's six faces and eight apexes. In this way, we can compensate for the gravitational effects of the Salton Mass, in effect countering one imbalance with another.
"It's gravity that's bedeviling us," put in physics professor emeritus, Dr. Pendleton Trosch of Switzerland, "so we're going to fight gravity with gravity."
"Exactly," added mathematician Elsie Yu of China, a small prim woman, with a somewhat pedantic bent. "If only the threat was merely a colossal asteroid," she directed her lecture at me – for it was I, after all, who would need to explain the whole thing to the world – "we could easily divert it with nuclear explosions or blast it to bits with a laser the way surgeons demolish kidney stones. But what we're up against here is a mass that, for all its inertial bulk, is essentially formless. It's coming at us like some sort of interstellar hurricane, and you can can't shoot down a hurricane, you can only hope to get out of its way."
"And yet," put in a mild-mannered man from Australia, whom I later learned was a structural engineer who'd consulted on giant dams around the world, "with Earth locked into orbit around the sun, how can you dodge this thing? It's like being tied to a railroad track, and a train is hurtling down the rails toward you."
"Hence the cube," said Rufus.
"Cube," I repeated.
"Yes. Now why a cube, you ask? Why build a gargantuan cube when we already have no shortage of massive spheres in the heavens, our own Jupiter, for example."
"Okay," I bit. "Why a cube?"
Rufus extended a finger to a 12-year-old boy, a prodigy from Russia. "Because," said Mikhail Tov, "no matter how big a sphere you use, it wouldn't work, because there's no way to get a grip on it to maneuver it, nor could the sphere itself get any kind of gravitational purchase on anything else. It would spin its wheels, so to speak, like a car stuck in the mud, but achieve no result. At the other extreme, a long, massive cylinder, for example, or a slab, would be too symmetrical – too difficult, too slow, and requiring too much energy to maneuver quickly. A cube, therefore, turns out to be the ideal compromise – not too round, not too oblong, but just right."
"Like in the story," offered Mary Waterford, professor emeritus of literature at Vassar, who'd been brought in to help me with the public relations end of things.
"What story would that be?" asked Yutaka Yokama, another engineer.
"'Goldilocks and the Three Bears,'" said Mary, and everyone laughed pleasantly.
"In other words," Rufus picked up the ball again, "we're going to construct a titanic planet in the shape of a cube."
I felt as awed as a two-year-old. "A square planet," I managed to say.
"Cubic," Rufus corrected me.
"What are you going to call it?"
"Cubeworld."
"Makes sense," I said.
"Si, amigo."
"But isn't something like that going to require a heck of a lot of, you know, material?"
"Indeed."
"Like what? What are you going to make it out of?"
"Earth," said Rufus.
"You mean dirt? Mud?"
He shook his head, while the rest of the elite crew stared at me intently, watching it sink in, as it would soon be sinking in around the soon to be obsolete globe.
"Earth," he repeated. "The."
TRANSFORMATION
THE CONTEMPLATED FEAT of engineering was, of course, colossal. In theory, we had to lop sections off some parts of the Earth (sorry 'bout that, Europe!) and redistribute the material elsewhere, specifically into eight 3-sided corners each equidistant from its neighboring corners, as if cubing a grapefruit by slicing six shallow domes off its surface and adding "ears" out of the excavated material.
To our perception (our Sphereworld perception, that is, since Cubeworld perception, as we all know, turned out to be markedly different) we would be digging "down" to begin with at an angle of 53 degrees, an angle which, in bizarre disregard of the fact that we'd be proceeding unvaryingly along an absolutely straight line, would nonetheless gradually change until it became 90 degrees and we were digging "straight ahead" instead of "down" (see Fig. 3). The material thus chiseled away would simultaneously be piled up behind us at the same angle as our digging, resulting in a geometrically flat plane extending in all directions until intersection with neighboring planes. In other words, in one direction we'd be demolishing our cities while in the opposite direction we'd be burying them.
After intense interdisciplinary deliberation, Planned Planethood concluded that the awesome power required for this greatest of all earthwork projects would have to be nuclear – at least for the first rough cut. Untold tons of lead pellets, artfully strewn about and then covered with soil to minimize their own inherent toxic qualities, would protect the populace from the radiation expected to be released from these sixty thousand carefully coordinated underground explosions.
For the declared nuclear nations, as well as the handful of undeclared ones, it was a no-brainer. Realizing that refusing to cooperate would amount to planetary suicide in a few short months, they agreed to put their munitions under the jurisdiction of our group, which is to say under one man, Rufus Cortez.
Although the total renovation of the entire globe promised to be no mean task, if not downright farfetched, on the other hand humanity was not without resources. Our tabulations revealed the existence of some 200,000 airplanes, twenty million dump trucks, six million bulldozers and comparable numbers of like machinery. India alone was slated to contribute almost a billion wheelbarrows, not to mention much of the muscle power to wield them.
Furthermore, our chief psychological consultant, Dr. Lisa Grunfeld of Hungary, determined that cooperation of the populace in this incredible endeavor could be expected to approach the theoretical cooperation threshold of 79.36% -- quite an improvement over the everyday human cooperation index of four to five percent, never mind the negative percentages involved during episodes of war, marital conflict, or road rage.
My job, of course, besides keeping historical notes, was to smooth the way, peoplewise, for the high-tech engineering to come. When, as many of you will recall, I finally broke the news to the world via radio, cable, Internet, and TV satellite broadcast, my voiceprint – validated by 6 billion voiceprint readers distributed by IBM to ensure authenticity – oozed pure optimism. In addition to setting forth timetables and relocation procedures, I assured the fellow members of my species that our unprecedented construction scheme would be radioactively safe and conveyed Rufus Cortez's personal promise that not one person would be left behind when the great demolition derby began. (In fact, over fifty thousand chose to remain behind and died.)