She shrugged. “Next time you make a speech I’ll draft it for you.” A sheaf of Virtuals whirled in the air before her. “In the meantime, Squadron Leader, we have work to do.”

Chapter 45

Among the cultures of matter and antimatter, clinging to their evanescent quark-gluon islands in a sea of radiation, a crisis approached.

As the universe cooled, the rate of production of quarks and antiquarks from the radiation soup inevitably slowed—but the mutual destruction of the particles continued at a constant rate. Scientists on each side of the parity barrier foresaw a time when no more quarks would coalesce—and then, inevitably, all particles of matter would be annihilated, as would the precisely equal number of particles of antimatter, leaving a universe filled with nothing but featureless, reddening light. It would mean extinction for their kinds of life; it was hardly a satisfactory prospect.

Slowly but surely, plans were drawn up to fix this bug in the universe. At last an empire of matter-cluster creatures discovered that it was possible to meddle with the fundamental bookkeeping of the cosmos.

Human scientists would express much of their physics in terms of symmetries: the conservation of energy, for instance, was really a kind of symmetry. And humans would always believe that a certain symmetry of a combination of electrical charge, left- and right-handedness, and the flow of time could never be violated. But now quark-gluon scientists dug deep into an ancient black hole, which had decayed to expose the singularity at its heart. The singularity was like a wall in the universe—and by reaching through this wall the quark scientists found a way to violate the most fundamental symmetry of all.

The imbalance they induced was subtle: for every thirty million antimatter particles, thirty million and one matter particles would be formed—and when they annihilated, that one spare matter particle would survive.

The immediate consequence was inevitable. When the antimatter cultures learned they were to be extinguished while their counterparts of matter would linger on, there was a final, devastating war; fleets of opposing parity annihilated each other in a bonfire of possibilities.

Enough of the matter cultures survived to carry through their program. But it was an anguished victory; even for the victors only a fraction could survive.

Another metaphorical switch was pulled.

Across the cooling cosmos, the mutual annihilation continued to its conclusion. When the storm of co-destruction ceased, when all the antimatter was gone, there was a trace of matter left over. Another mystery was left for the human scientists of the future, who would always wonder at the baffling existence of an excess of matter over antimatter.

Yet again the universe had passed through a transition; yet again a generation of life had vanished, leaving only scattered survivors, and the ruins of vanished and forgotten civilizations. For its few remaining inhabitants the universe now seemed a very old place indeed, old and bloated, cool and dark.

Since the singularity, one millionth of a second had passed.