Cosm

The creation of a strange object in the rubble of an accidental explosion in a particle physics lab at Brookhaven in the East Coast, and its being spirited secretly away for study at UCI in the West Coast by the researcher and her students, is the meat of this story. It is quickly revealed that the object the size of a basketball is a window into a new universe just formed, and for want of a better name, our enterprising researcher Alicia calls it the Cosm. A battle for ownership wages for a while between the two universities East and West, and when Alicia refuses to give up the Cosm, the East Coast school repeats her exact experiment and turns up its own Cosm II. Alicia and her team could now study Cosm I in peace. Or not so much in peace, as she has become an overnight celebrity, the creator of a universe, a goddess! While some religious freaks denounce her for playing God, the President gets curious enough to pay a visit, encouraging her to learn more.

Molded in with the scientific exploits is a quiet love affair that builds between Alicia and Max, another scientist, the one that gives her the moral and professional support in deciphering the Cosm. In the end, even the Federal government wants to take over the Cosm, for reasons of “safety,” but without knowing exactly what they would be dealing with. We are now made to consider the reality that our own universe could have come about in exactly the same way as the Cosm—as an accident—but as one of many, one that has the right ingredients to support life.

Again Alicia secretly removes the Cosm on the run, just before the Feds confiscate it, only this time it is for the best. At the termination of the life of the universe it represented, the Cosm explodes in the desert creating a huge crater, and thanks to Alicia’s action of removing it from the university grounds, there is no loss of lives apart from a federal agent or two pursuing them. Although the ending is bad for the Cosm, in losing the universe she “created,” Alicia is able to gain a man, as she and Max set to marry.

June 7, 2015. Novel first published in 1998 by Avon Books; ISBN 0-380-79052-1.