Null and void

Gordon slowed his pace as he walked through the white production hall filled with Wiley transformers. The floor tiles clicked under his shoes; a faint chemical tang of coolant and ozone hung on the air. The giant cylinders of the transformers themselves gleamed with glass and chrome, their casings warm from hours of use. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", indeed, he thought. Even now, after watching the technology mature for twenty years and being one of the top experts in the field, Gordon still could not avoid a tingling, almost magical feeling when he watched matter in a transformer vanish in a whirl of green light and delicate objects materialize in their place. The human brain had evolved on the African savannah, hunting and gathering, expecting nature to behave according to the simple rules of Newtonian mechanics. Events that operated under more exotic laws of nature, like the quantum-mechanics of the transformer, seemed like magic to the brain.

The Wiley transformer — more technically, the quantum-gravity wave transformer — had been made possible by the discovery of the quantum-gravity unified field equations by a group led by Professor Rudolph Wiley in the 2080s. Gordon still remembered the excitement of being part of that group as a young research student. It had taken several decades for the theory to mature into the current state of transformer technology, but now it was already considered the most disruptive technology in human history — bigger than fire, steam, electricity, even bigger than the microprocessor.

Many scientists, like Gordon, had chosen to move from basic physics research to various industry positions helping to commercialize the technology. Just as unified quantum gravity had seemed like the final "theory of everything" in physics, the transformer seemed to many engineers like the ultimate achievement in technology. It was indeed difficult to envision anything going beyond it: the creation of quantum-gravity wave patterns to mutate any type and form of matter into any other type and form. What the microprocessor had done for the freedom of information processing, the Wiley transformer had done for matter: allowing complete freedom to transform it. The technology had now revolutionized production, the economy, and the job market — even politics — bringing a new era of human life on Earth.

Gordon's neural assistant chimed a reminder. Its voice was soft, genderless, like warm notes playing inside his skull: "Production review meeting with Irwin Stone in 10 minutes, software room Gamma." Irwin was the latest member of the company's transformer programming team, hired just a week earlier.

The possibilities of the Wiley transformers were limited only by imagination — and software. The complex, dynamic quantum-gravity wave patterns in the transformer made creation of everything possible in principle. But creating complex objects in practice required extensive programming at a level of complexity never seen in the history of software development.

Irwin had joined the ranks of other whiz-kid programmers taking advantage of the booming new economy of the transformer era. Exceptional transformer programmers like him were extremely valuable to the new class of production companies and could command matching salaries. The potential for such compensation in turn led almost every talented kid to train and compete for transformer programmer careers from an early age.

Gordon entered Gamma-room. Irwin already sat there in front of multiple screens, eyes bright from lack of sleep; a thin sheen of sweat on his cheeks; Impatient and nervous in equal measure. Gordon greeted him, smiling:

— Hello Irwin, ready to rock?
Irwin looked up through a curtain of hair.
— Should be good, I have the compilers up and running and all test executions pass in the emulator environment. I'm fine going ahead connecting to production.
— Great, I will hook you in to one of the test-machines in proto-lab 4, let's start with a batch of ten unit of each product model. Remember to upload your language extensions to the controller before you execute the model.

The immense economy of transformers, and the influx of new programmers, had spawned a whole new ecosystem of programming languages, frameworks, and libraries. But the best transformer programmers were going even beyond those, getting an edge in the competition by developing proprietary variants and extensions of languages and libraries. Irwin was using Genial programming language, a recently fashionable syntax for advanced transformer programming. But the exceptional performance of his transformer code in the last weeks simulated technical assessment test had been mainly due to his hand-crafter language extensions for recursive looping. It had been easy decision for Gordon to recommend hiring.

Gordon sat in his office browsing through production reports. The numbers were good and growing, as usual: total world production by transformers was already approaching half of the global economy. The economic boom seemed to have no limits.

He heard a distant rumble. What was that? Quiet again. He returned to reading a report.

Another distant rumble. His neural assistant chimed in: "Proto-lab 4 connection lost; reconnecting." The assistant's voice had gone thin with background error tones.

What the hell? This has never happened, Gordon thought, the networks were triple-redundant. Gordon stood up and commanded the assistant:

— Connect through the wireless backup mode; visuals and status report from the proto-lab 4 cameras!
— Connection lost — wireless connection not available, secondary connection not responding, no sensory data available, visuals not available.
— Keep trying, damn it!

Gordon went out from his office and started nervously walking towards proto-lab 4 in the east wing of the building. In the long, white, winding corridors he passed many of his colleagues looking around in confusion. "What is happening in proto-lab 4?!" Gordon kept asking as he went by, but nobody knew any more than him.

A stronger rumble shook the building. Corridor lights blinked off and on. Gordon quickened his pace. Red emergency lights came on and fire alarm started blaring through the corridors. Neural assistant chimed: "Danger, danger. Building integrity abnormal. All personnel, proceed to emergency exits." "Shut up!" responded Gordon. He ran through the remaining corridors: left, right... there! He arrived to a door with "Prototype Laboratory 4" written with large characters. His palm slipped on the cold metal handle and he quickly pulled the door open.

On the other side of the door was nothing. On the other side of the door was just a vast, dark abyss — a seemingly bottomless pit hundreds of meters wide. A foul smell of hot metal and scorched circuits hit him. Smoke and dust whirled in the dark air, and the gust pushed a fine grit into his nose. The sun appeared only as a dim red disk behind the dust and smoke. Particles sparkled in the stray beams from emergency lamps in the corridor behind him. A deep rumbling noise rose from the depths, a physical vibration Gordon felt through his soles, like distant thunder magnified.

Gordon stood there, stunned, his brain unable to make sense of the surreal, apocalyptic scene that had replaced the familiar white hall of proto-lab 4 and its neat rows of shiny transformers and friendly personnel. On the far side of the huge pit, behind the cloud of dust, Gordon could see a tall skyscraper crumbling, glass shattering into white dust. The massive building chunks continued to fall into the pit, disappearing into the dark depths with a cacophony of deep rumbling sounds. The abyss kept expanding.

After a moment that seemed like an eternity, Gordon was able to snap back into control. He slammed the door shut and started to withdraw from it, first carefully walking backward, then turning and running away, faster and faster, panting, his mind still blank about what he had seen. Now all electricity in the building had failed; the corridors were lit only by rows of red emergency lights. The blaring fire alarm mixed with the steps and screams of colleagues frantically searching for any working exits. His neural assistant kept repeating: "Danger, danger, ..." in his head. But he was not going to evacuate, not now, not without understanding what had happened.

Gordon swung open the door of the Gamma-room, out of breath. He saw Irwin staring at the transformer control screens, his sweaty face illuminated only by the red emergency lights and the green glow from the screen. His keyboard's keys clacked like a nervous metronome under his fingers; the screens flickered between green diagnostic reports and static. His jaw was clenched; a tremor ran across his hands.

— What happened?! Gordon shouted in a raspy voice.
— The system has crashed! I configured the object transformations exactly as specified. There must be a bug; I'm trying to reconnect to debug the transformer state.
— It's gone! It's all gone! The transformers are gone, the proto-lab is gone!
— What do you mean?! I'm trying to restore the connection!
— Just show me the code!

Lines of Genial code flashed across the screen. Nothing should go wrong with this language, Gordon thought, that should be impossible. He browsed frantically through the code, trying to spot something out of the ordinary. Loud rumbles were now echoing through the room and he could feel the building shaking with each.

Gordon stopped, stood, and stared. A dark, cold thought crept into his mind as he pointed at a location in the code:

— What is this?!
— There I hook Genial to my custom native looping extension.
— The diagnostic log shows your extension returned a null value here! How the hell could you generate null value in Genial?!
— Oh, the extensions are not Genial, I found this old code from 2060s, with some ancient language, don't remember the name - but blazing fast in recursive looping! And I was able to make some root hacks to the Genial core to connect it as extension... But what is "null value"?

For a heartbeat the room fell into a thin, ragged chorus of breaths. Irwin's eyes shone with a wet, feverish focus while Gordon's jaw worked as if he could chew the answer out of thin air. A spilled coffee mug steamed on the console.

— You really don't know?! Well, ok course, it is something that shouldn't really exist anymore. Null means "nothing" and it was used in some long-gone languages to represent exactly that, lack of object. It used to be a source of endless bugs until the whole concept disappeared as the world moved to a new generation of programming languages over fifty years ago. But now your ancient hack has brought the calamity back here, returning a null straight to the main transformer controller!
— So? I'll fix the bug!
— Didn't you hear? It's all gone! It's too late now! A null value would propagate through the transformer control framework, all the way to the quantum wave pattern! Do you know what that means?!
— That the transformer produces...?
— Nothing! The null created a quantum wave pattern that transforms anything into nothing! It will just consume any material and produce nothing! It will never complete; it will result in an infinite loop where the quantum wave simply sucks in any input material!
— Let's shut down the transformer then!
— You fool! There is no more transformer, there is no more proto-lab — the first thing that such a rogue quantum wave pattern would do is to eat the electronics and casing of the transformer device around it! There is now just a naked quantum-gravity wave pattern rapidly sucking in anything on Earth!

In a thunderous boom the eastern wall of the software development room collapsed away. Concrete sheared with a grinding sound as dust exploded up in a cloud. Gordon and Irwin watched in horror as the dark, rumbling, ever-expanding abyss appeared; caught helpless at the edge of an enormous, indifferent appetite. The floor of the room began to crumble.