“But you said they might be afraid of this butterfly effect, right?” asked Roy. “So what is this butterfly effect? Exactly.”
“I personally think the butterfly effect is a myth,” said Janet pointedly. “But some think it’s an inevitable consequence of time travel. Basically, it’s a belief that if you go back in history and kill a single butterfly then that will change the entire line of history from that moment forward. It means the world that you knew won’t exist from that second onward because you killed a single butterfly that was not previously killed at that split second. But classically educated people don’t largely believe in the butterfly effect. It’s mostly used as an element of fiction. The truth is, most physicists tend to think time is more like the Mississippi River, and throwing a pebble into the Mississippi River isn’t going to change the course of the river. Consequently, changing minor events in the past aren’t going to have much of a punch on the future. All the physicists that I know believe the future is comprised of far too many variables for any single event to alter world history unless you change some truly climatic event like the shattering of Pangaea or the formation of the Pacific Ocean or something with equal consequence.”
Both Jackman and the major were staring down on her as Roy asked, “All right. Forget time travel. Tell me, have you ever actually seen one of these proton weapons in action? In real life?”
“Yeah,” Janet nodded. “Once at Redstone Arsenal in 1987. It wasn’t exactly a portable weapon like a rifle. Not like these maniacs are going to produce by the millions. It was a very complex device as big as a house. But they finally got the voltage up to fire off a nanosecond proton particle beam into a ten-foot-thick slab of tempered steel.”
“What happened?”
“It was over so fast that all you saw was a blue flash that didn’t last a thousandth of a second. Then, after enough checks were done to make sure there wasn’t an undue level of radiation, we entered the room to see the results.” She grunted, “To put it in terms familiar to you gunfighters, it hit like a bullet. It made an impact hole the size of a fist and it blasted a path clean through that ten-foot wall of steel like it wasn’t even there. It even left the remnants of steel in the form of a splash of water—the kind of splash you see when you throw a rock in a pond, ya know? Except this steel was frozen mid-splash with half of it still standing up from the slab. It was fascinating and frightening at the same time.”
“How’d they do that at Redstone Arsenal without a particle supercollider like this one?” asked Jackman.
Janet raked back her hair. “They just somehow managed to speed up a single proton, and I do mean one proton, to ninety-nine percent of the speed of light. At that speed, anything it hits, it vaporizes. There’s nothing on this planet that can resist. No armor. No wall. Nothing. It’s the most powerful weapon in the universe and that down there, gentlemen, is the biggest, most dangerous gun store in the galaxy. So if we let them continue, we might as well kill ourselves. Because if they succeed in making these weapons, nothing on earth will be able to stand in their way. All they’ll have to do is push a button and they’ll vaporize anything you’ve got—an entire battalion or a landscape of tanks, trains, ships, missiles—whatever you throw at them. Or, as I’ve mentioned, they might go back in time if they’re suicidal and manipulate history itself.”
“Is that all we need to worry about?” asked Jackman.
“No,” she shook her head. “They could use ‘the Mandela Effect.’”
“Good God. What’s that?”
“It’s a process by which they use that machine to change the memories of everyone in the world. But if they had perfected the Mandela Effect, we’d all be thinking that there’s nothing dangerous about this machine. Our memories would have been reformatted so that we would simply believe whatever they want us to believe.”
“Like the butterfly effect?” asked Jackman.
“No. The butterfly effect is the action of physically changing history for a desired outcome. The Mandela Effect is simply changing our memories. And if they’d used the Mandela Effect on us, we’d all be at home with no concerns about this place. There would be no reasons, in our manipulated minds, to be here.” As they stood in silence staring down at the compound, she added, “Only one thing can stop it.”
“What’s that?” asked Roy.
“Itself.” Janet said simply. “It’s like you say, Roy. That thing is fueled by hundreds of tons of liquid nitrogen and liquid helium. And both of them are under dangerously high pressure—we’re talking about hundreds of tons per square inch—so if we can somehow sabotage it so that the helium and the nitrogen tanks explode at the same time, we’ll put it out of commission. Maybe forever. The cost of repairing it will be billions and I’m not sure any coven of perverted psychopaths, no matter how cozy and crazy these people are, will pay that much after this place suffers another catastrophic failure.”
“When did they blow it up the first time?” asked Roy. “How bad was it?”
“They blew it up about ten years ago and it took them a good two years and about a billion bucks to get it up and running again. I’m not sure if enough people will get on board to rebuild it if they blow it up again. And I don’t think any supercollider in the world can come close to what this one can do, so destroying this thing might permanently solve our problem. Understand?”
“No,” said Jackman. “I don’t. What do you mean?”
Janet rolled her eyes. “General, what I mean is that if some country spends ten billion dollars to send a ship to Mars and the entire crew gets eaten alive by a ten-foot-tall Ted Bundy do you think another country is going to mindlessly follow in their tracks with another ten-billion-dollar ship just to see it get eaten up, too?”
“No,” Jackman stated curtly. “I don’t.”
“Well, there you go. Neither do I.”
Jackman’s head seemed bowed in something more than a displeased stare. He somberly turned away from the compound.
“Let’s go,” he said. “I’ve seen enough of this damn death camp for one day.”
***
After an uneventful flight, Isaiah departed the Lufthansa jet with Amanda close and they quickly found their luggage and a taxi. They declined the driver’s advice—in English, no less—to the best hotels and decided on an overcrowded hostel at the edge of Geneva. The only amenities were a bed, a table with two chairs and a small bath.
Amanda dropped her purse on the bed, pushed down. “Well, it seems comfortable enough. But why this place? It’s not exactly five stars.”
“Because they have a lot of people coming and going at all hours,” Isaiah said as he unchained the duffle bag. “And it’s not the kind of place where you’d want to ambush somebody. You’d leave too many witnesses or you’d leave too many bodies. Either way, it’d draw attention from Interpol. And that’s the kind of attention nobody wants. Not even the maniacs who run this supercollider.”
“That your only reason?”
“I need another one?”
Amanda cocked her head and knelt to open her suitcase. “I guess not.” She began hanging her things.
“I wouldn’t waste time,” said Isaiah. “Just take out what you need to stay warm and leave the rest. There’s a good chance we won’t be coming back here, anyway, after we do a little reconnaissance.”
“Fine with me. I’m getting used to how careful you are, which reminds me. There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. That is, if you don’t mind.”
“Go ahead.”
“Why do you seem to know so much about this supercollider?” Amanda paused, staring, one hand holding a wool coat. “I mean, it’s like you could build the thing. You probably know as much as the engineers who designed it. I was just wondering why.”
“I read about it a long time ago,” Isaiah replied, detached. “It caught my interest and so I read a little more.”
“The fact that they were attempting to manipulate the unknown forces that power this universe,” Isaiah replied as if recalling it word for word. “And it interested me that there was no formal chain of command for controlling the place, so I guess I found it disturbing that the biggest, most expensive, most dangerous machine in the world was being managed by a nameless conglomerate of faceless goons from unspecified nations and they were turning the end of the world on and off like a toy. And if that wasn’t enough to get my attention, they put up a statue of death and destruction at the entrance of the place and said it was a sign of their ambition. But the cherry on top of the cake was a statement made by one of their chief operators.”
“What’d he say?”
“He said, ‘With this machine we are going to open a portal.’”
“What kind of portal?”
“Hell if I know,” Isaiah shrugged. “I don’t think he knew himself. But it doesn’t matter to me whether it’s a portal to another world or another universe or another dimension. The bottom line is that it isn’t this dimension and I think there’s a lot of real dangerous dimensions out there.”
“What do you think this means for Cynthia?”
Isaiah stopped unpacking and turned, staring somberly. “I have no solid idea what it means for your sister,” he said with obvious compassion. “It might mean nothing or it might mean … something bad.”
Amanda was motionless. “But you said she might not be dead.”
Gently, Isaiah crossed the room and grasped her arms, directing her to a chair. He sat her down and settled next to her. His voice was calm. “Amanda, I need you to prepare yourself.”
“For what?”
“For the fact that these fools might have succeeded,” Isaiah stated simply. “Let’s just imagine for a moment that they did manage to open a door to another dimension. Well, the thing about doors is that they swing both ways. If they opened a doorway for us to enter another dimension, that same door might have allowed for something to exit that world and enter our world. And if your sister was in that control room, there’s a slim chance, and I repeat, a very slim chance that she was either badly injured or killed or something even worse happened when that portal was opened.” He shook his head. “This is all just conjecture. I don’t know. But you told me your sister worked in the Observation Room, right?”
“Yeah,” she nodded. “Right.”
“Well, that would be closest room to what they call ATLAS, and that chamber—among other places—is where protons collide. So if there was a disaster it could very easily have affected whoever was in that room. Now, I’m not saying your sister’s dead but these fools are playing Russian roulette with powers that created this universe billions of years ago. They don’t know what’s on the other side of that portal. It could be Heaven. It could be Hell. It could be millions of years into the past. It could be billions of years in the future.”
“So why are they doing this?” Amanda asked. “They don’t even know what kind of power they’re dealing with, right? Or what’s on the other side of that portal that they might open? Or have opened?”
“Because the people who began this particle collider a century ago were part of an insanely dedicated occult movement of very rich people, and we’re talking stupid-rich, who believed that the powers of creatures from the other side were powers they could manipulate. In other words they believed they could use those alien powers for their personal benefit whether it was political or religious or economic. But what they didn’t consider is that if they did manage to open a gateway, and whatever emerged was unfriendly, they would be its first meal ticket. And I guarantee you that whatever comes from an alternate dimension is not going to have any love for this one. And it won’t be controllable. And it won’t be grateful for the opportunity to be here. Instead, it’s probably going to destroy anything it chooses to destroy from one end of this planet to the next. And when it’s done, this will be a brave new world. Only, the people who invited that thing to the party will be served up for Thanksgiving. So if you’re asking me why I read up on the thing it’s because anything that threatens my personal survival gets my undivided attention. And, in that case, I photograph every word.”
Amanda seemed to scan the room before, “But … if that’s all true … then wouldn’t it mean that hundreds of thousands—no, millions of construction workers and laborers and financiers would have to know about the collider’s true purpose? I mean, how could something as terrible as this stay a secret?”
“It’s not hard,” Isaiah commented. “They kill whoever talks too much.”
Isaiah sharply unsnapped the aluminum case and flipped it open. Without ceremony he removed the Honjo Masamune and held it horizontally before his face. Then, with a single hand on the hilt, the other holding the scabbard, he ripped out the blade. And although Isaiah spoke of the sword without any sense of reverence, there was definitely something reverential about how he held it.
Pursing her lips for a moment, Amanda said, “Think we’re gonna need that?”
A moment.
“Yeah,” Isaiah frowned. “I do.”
***
Arms crossed, Director-General Anton Francois appeared distinctly displeased as he stated, “I am required to inform you that very critical people are beginning to ask inconvenient questions, William. What are you doing about obtaining some answers?”
William Blanchard tossed the file he’d been holding onto the table. “Look, Director Francois, I’m just part of the management that runs this place. I don’t even understand the math for that machine. But our best mathematicians and physicists have run every equation they can imagine and they don’t have any answers, either. All they can tell me is that there seems to be an unknown kind of superpower—as they called it—inside or beyond dark energy and it somehow intervened in the interaction between matter and antimatter on that particular day or we’d all be dead. And maybe the rest of the planet, too.”
“Very well,” Francois allowed. “I’ll give you a little more time. But get me some answers promptly. Now, you were aware that one of our missing physicists, this Deker woman, was an American?”
“Everyone was aware of Cynthia’s nationality,” replied Blanchard. “But I didn’t hire her, director, and had no authority to fire her. Human resources hired her. Nor did I have anything to do with her replacement. That was also a decision of Human Resources. All I did was supervise her work, and her work was flawless. And, then, we had this disaster. And Cynthia Deker vanished with six others.”
“Concerns for the others were, for the most part, resolved this morning,” said Francois. “But this woman’s sister, Amanda Deker, has not been contacted. And now she is in Geneva with a man who is something of an alarming mystery even to our security personnel. And, needless to say, our security people are not easily alarmed.”
“I was under the impression that nothing was a mystery to you, Mr. Director,” said Blanchard, with a touch of bitterness. “After all, you have the President of the United States in your pocket.”
Francois cursed vehemently. “You’re talking about the former president. The current president is a sworn enemy of all that is holy because he will never endorse this facility or what we’re trying to achieve. But neither is he powerful enough to stop us. Not at this point. Besides, we have enough deep spies inside his government to forestall anything he initiates. So what concerns me is the dismissal of this woman, Amanda Deker, without her raising any flags with the FBI or Interpol.” A pause. “She is waiting for you in your office at this moment, William. I want you to talk to her. I want you to explain to her that her sister was very tragically killed in an accident involving the collider. Explain to her that her sister’s body was, unfortunately, vaporized along with the bodies of several others when the plutonium rods of our reactor were accidentally exposed.”
�
�We don’t use plutonium rods.”
“They don’t know that! You’re dealing with little people, William! Use their ignorance! Not one person in a million has a clue as to how the particle accelerator works! All they have are hysterical theories and groundless accusations. And the world is full of faceless villains and dark conspiracies and make-believe heroes rescuing damsels in distress. They are all meaningless.”
“Is that all you want me to tell her?”
“No. I want you to offer her enormous compensation for her sister’s tragic death. Call it a life insurance policy. In any case, there is no proof that anything untoward has occurred, so this woman should realize that further investigation is futile. And, if necessary, we will make that painfully obvious.”
Blanchard grimaced, “I am quite skilled at lying, director. But if this woman and her soldier of fortune are not satisfied with my explanation, there is very little that I can do to stop them. Further, I do not involve myself in matters of violence.”
“As always, William, you will leave such matters to me. That authority is beyond your purview for many, many good reasons.” As if talking to himself, Francois added, “Violence is a precious commodity. Like gold, the more you use it, the less precious it becomes until it no longer serves your purpose.”
“So you will not kill them?”
“Personally? No. Of course not.”
“But they will die.”
Francois laughed.
“Everybody dies, William.”
***
Hulking, the round-shouldered creature stood before the electric panel.
The substation was black and silent.
At its feet, two guards lay with heads torn from their shoulders, their rifles snapped like twigs. It had, itself, been shot but it was not wounded. It had encountered nothing yet in this world that wounded it. The bullets had bounced off its protective armor to disintegrate into the cement walls. And then the killing was done silently and quickly before it effortlessly ripped open steel mesh to stand before the substation control board. Slowly it reached up to wrap a blood-soaked hand around the main breaker switch.
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