The Prophet of Queens

by Glenn Kleier

  “Hello Nobel,” Max cried.

  Indeed. Their discovery meant vast new fields of R&D. The teleportation prospects alone, if refined and made cost-effective, offered untold commercial applications. A giant leap into the 22nd Century. Worldwide acclaim, booster rockets to their careers.

  Ariel wondered what Mom and Phil would think of her now.

  Then suddenly she realized, “Max, thirty seconds.”

  Whatever they’d done so far to hurt their chances with Scott Butterfield, leaving a spy drone in his apartment could prove fatal. Max was in the middle of a victory dance with Stan, blimp idling above the desk, when Ariel gasped to see the image go haywire, lurching, spiraling.

  Max saw too. “What the hell?” He dashed back to the controls, quickly righting things, searching for the cause.

  Ariel leaned into the screen—only to come eyeball-to-glowing-eyeball with an image of something alive. She jumped back, it hissed, let go a swat, and the image reeled again. This time the blow did damage, airship dropping, listing.

  “Get out of there,” Stan cried. “Hurry.”

  Max veered the nose around cockeyed and poured on the speed, gondola bumping along the desk, plowing over indiscernible hazards. Ahead, the shadowy hump of the couch loomed like a mountain. Ariel cringed, but somehow Max cleared it and swooped for home in a drunken loop.

  “Go-go-go,” Tia hollered.

  The ship’s bladder was leaking, buckling. Max aimed for the vortex, ship off-kilter and approaching too low. Ariel clenched to see him gun the rotors and tilt for the ceiling. But at the last second, he brought the nose down and told Tia, “Now.”

  Tia plucked the antenna from the hole and dove for cover as the blimp careened through lopsided, hole snapping shut behind, catching the ship’s rudder.

  Chapter 53

  Sunday, October 14, 10:51 am, Talawanda

  A half hour later, the team sat around the table in the tent, still vibrating. They’d reviewed the blimpcam video to confirm it was indeed a housecat that attacked the Charles Fort III. Now Ariel and Tia were on their laptops searching online for information on Scott Butterfield, while Max and Stan hunkered over a large map of New York State, mulling theories about what caused the phenomenon they were dealing with.

  At length, Ariel heard Stan declare, “Makes sense, yes.” And he turned to the women to say, “Hey, check this out.”

  Ariel looked to see Stan had scribed a circle on an area of the map with a magic marker. He pointed to it with a yardstick, explaining, “Here’s where the collider lies along the valley.”

  A one-hundred-mile, circular tunnel of electromagnets buried two-hundred feet down.

  Moving the yardstick slightly northwest of the circle, he said, “This is our farm.” Then sweeping the stick to the far end of the map, he said, “And here, two-hundred-fifty miles to the southeast, is Butterfield’s apartment in Queens, New York. Now, if we draw a line from farm to Butterfield…” he placed the yardstick on the map accordingly, “we have a straight line passing directly through the center of the collider’s tower.”

  “I see the correlation,” Ariel said, “but what’s it mean?”

  Max replied, “It could take us years to nail down the math, but we can hazard a guess.” He nodded to Tia. “Remember your comment about a moiré effect?” Moiré effect: waves of energy crossing paths to create a mutant reaction. “Like you said, the collider generates the most powerful magnetic field in the world, second only to the Earth’s itself. What if the fields interact somehow to spin off two Trapping Horizons, connected by a wormhole?”

  Stan clarified, “I wouldn’t call it a moiré effect, per se. But that’s a good metaphor.”

  “All well and good,” Tia said, “but let’s get back to Scott Butterfield. Ariel and I aren’t finding any info on him, he seems to fly under the radar. Closest we’ve come is a Joseph Butterfield, except he lives in the Bronx and has for over twenty years. And he won’t take our calls.”

  “Keep looking,” Max said, “nobody exists in a vacuum.”

  The women went back to their laptops, and Stan and Max put away the map to stretch out the crumpled blimp for a postmortem.

  “Here,” Stan said, pointing to punctures in the airbag. “And here—a crack in the gondola.”

  Ariel speculated that the housecat responsible for damaging the blimp might also explain the damage to Butterfield’s apartment. Newton wasn’t destructive by nature, but after years of confinement, starved for activity, he went nuts over other critters. Perhaps his acute senses had somehow alerted him to the presence of the cat, and drawn him into the wormhole.

  The men completed their examination of the blimp, and Stan clapped Max on the back to chirp, “Stellar display of aeronautics, my man, the way you piloted this cripple home. I say we mount Charlie in the living room above the mantle to replace the shepherd’s crook.”

  Max sniffed, “Hell no. Charlie’s going in the Smithsonian next to Apollo 11.”

  “Not so fast,” Tia told him, “we may need Charlie again. Ariel and I are still nowhere on Butterfield. No phone number, email, social media. Like he’s off the grid.”

  Max angled his laptop to display a frozen image from the blimpcam—the return address on the envelope sent to Scott Butterfield. He asked Tia, “Have you tried this Autoimmune place?”

  “Yes, they won’t release donor data. We need Charlie to drop Butterfield an airmail letter.”

  “And risk spooking him? Let’s just overnight him a letter through regular mail.”

  “That’s a problem, too,” Ariel said. “We can’t locate his apartment building. When we Street View his address, here’s what we get.” On her screen appeared a three-hundred-sixty-degree sweep of a rundown neighborhood. “Butterfield’s address is 252 South 34th Avenue, Queens. But see, there’s no building there.” She stopped on a rubbish-strewn patch of land between two old brownstones at 250 and 254 South 34th. “Nothing but an empty lot.”

  Max sat back, reflecting. “No Butterfield, no building. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  The others paid him blank looks.

  “…The reason we can’t find him is, he doesn’t exist.”

  No one seemed any better enlightened, and he explained, “We’re looking in the wrong place. Butterfield doesn’t exist in our world. The wormhole is taking us to a different world, a different dimension. A parallel universe.”

  The blank looks turned skeptical, and he added, “How’s a parallel universe any less plausible than a wormhole?”

  Stan’s eyes went wide. “If you’re right, and we can prove it, it’s evidence of multiverses. It will prove Superstring Theory. And you know what that means!”

  Max nodded. “We solve The Grand Equation. The Theory of Everything.”

  Awed silence filled the room. The Grand Equation. A yet-to-be-discovered mathematical formula to unite all fundamental forces and particles of nature into one, elegant reconciliation. As Max put it, “Answer to the most profound question of all: Why do we exist?”

  Ariel felt her skin grow taut. For more than a century, physicists had been working on The Grand Equation, considered the Holy Grail of science. To date, no theory to support it held up. The quest had frustrated even Einstein and Hawking.

  One theory that had shown great promise, known as Superstring, stated that all objects in the universe were composed of vibrating atomic strings of energy. The theory had strong support in the science community for a time. But Superstring hinged on the existence of multiple universes. Multiverses. Perhaps an infinite number of multiverses. No one could come up with a way to verify such a thing, and the theory fell out of favor.

  If, however, the team could prove the wormhole led to a parallel universe, they could tie Superstring back together to help reveal the true nature of the cosmos, including life itself. A discovery even more profound than wormholes.

  Max’s Nobel Prize quip rang in Ariel’s head.

  But Tia had a sobering thought. “If we ar
e looking at a parallel universe, we’ll not only have to prove Butterfield exists over there, we’ll have to prove he doesn’t exist here. How in the hell do we prove a negative?”

  Like trying to prove Bigfoot didn’t exist. Or ghosts. Or God.

  “Tough, but not impossible,” Stan said. “First, we have to document Butterfield’s existence in the parallel universe. Get his birth certificate, driver’s license, school records, photos and such from over there. Then we contrast that with the absence of those items over here.”

  The excitement in the tent was palpable. Ariel’s hands trembled.

  Max said, “The only way to get anything from the other side is with Butterfield’s help. Time to contact him through the wormhole.” Getting enthusiastic support, he added, “Let’s send him that airmail. I’ll repair Charlie, you guys keep searching for Butterfield on our side. Before we go announcing a parallel universe, let’s make damn sure he’s got no doppelgänger.”

  And gathering up the blimp carcass, he left for the house, the others rushing after him.

  An hour later, Max strolled back into the living room whistling. Ariel looked to see the blimp under his arm, inflated and like new but for patches on its airbag and tail. His timing was spot on, they’d just finished scouring the web for signs of Butterfield. With unsettling results.

  “We’ve got good news and bad,” Tia greeted him.

  Taking a chair, Max tethered his blimp to the armrest. “Give me the bad first.”

  “We found Butterfield in our world after all. And his apartment in Queens.”

  Max soured and stared at the floor. “So much for The Grand Equation,” he said. “But we’ve still got the wormhole. Let’s contact Butterfield, and on to the press conference.”

  “Can’t.”

  He squinted at her. “Why not?”

  “Because Butterfield doesn’t live in our world.”

  As if he’d misheard, Max shook his head. “You say you found him in our world, but he lives in another?”

  “Exactly.”

  He clenched, Tia enjoying it, and Stan said, “Enough, Tia, just show him.”

  She turned her laptop so Max could see. “It seems the Scott Butterfield we visit through the wormhole does, in fact, live in a parallel world. Because according to this article, the Scott Butterfield in our world is dead.”

  Stunned, Max leaned into the screen. It showed a New York Times article and photo of smoldering ruins. His lips moved silently as Tia said, “The Butterfield in our world used to live at 252 South 34th Avenue, Queens. The building burned four years ago, and all tenants perished, including Butterfield and a sister who was visiting. The rubble was cleared, the lot left empty.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Max said. “Our job just got a lot easier.”

  Stan pointed out, “Convincing people our Butterfield is dead will take more than a news article and an empty lot. We’ll need a death certificate, coroner report, autopsy. Photos of his tombstone would be nice.”

  The gears behind Max’s eyes raced. “Exactly. Perfect way to differentiate the two worlds. Show the man dead in one, alive in another. Imagine the press conference: Butterfield’s surviving relatives on camera watching him resurrected live through the wormhole.”

  Ariel was appalled. “We’re talking about a life,” she cried. Exploiting the poor man’s death and family to further the team’s cause would taint their discovery. Tia agreed, surely thinking of her mom.

  As the others talked, Ariel’s attention wandered to the TV. Frozen on its screen was a closeup of the Autoimmune Association envelope, and Ariel noticed something odd. Something they’d overlooked in their excitement over Butterfield’s address.

  She grabbed the remote and went for a closer look. Still confused, she rewound the video to examine the other envelopes splayed across Butterfield’s desk. Each bore the same peculiarity.

  “This makes no sense,” she said, and the others stopped talking. Rolling back to the Association envelope again, she zoomed in on its postage cancellation mark—a circle showing time, day and month at the top, city and state in the middle, year at the bottom.

  “…Check the date.”

  Tia read, “1:07 PM, Fri, Oct 3. Yes, the day’s wrong. The 3rd was a Wednesday, not a Friday. Same inconsistency we saw on Butterfield’s computer.”

  “Not just that,” Ariel said, pointing to the mark’s bottom line. “The year. This letter’s four years old.” She fast-forwarded to the other scattered envelopes, everyone tilting to and fro to read them. All were four-years old to the month, all unopened.

  Stan said what Ariel was thinking. “Why would Butterfield leave mail on his desk unopened for four years? Especially bills?”

  An answer popped into Ariel’s head, and bracing for ridicule, she let it spill. “What if this isn’t a different world after all, but our world at a different time? Our world, two-hundred-fifty miles away, four years in the past?”

  Quiet. Then the others shook their heads in unison, and Max said, “Quantum mechanics only allows for forward progress in time. Virtually all physicists agree, regression is impossible. It creates absurd, self-negating paradoxes.”

  Ariel recalled the classic brainteaser of a man traveling back in time before his birth to kill his father, thereby canceling his own birth, consequently saving his father, thereby enabling his own birth, on and on in an irreconcilable loop.

  Regardless, Stan and Tia seemed to give her idea consideration. Tia told Ariel, “Rewind to that shot of Butterfield’s computer screen. Let’s see its time/date display again.”

  Ariel did so: Tues Oct 14 10:06 AM. No year given.

  Stan said, “The date and time match ours, but the day is off.”

  Today was Sunday, October 14.

  Pulling his laptop in front of him, Stan checked a perpetual calendar to confirm, “Wow. Four years ago, October 14 fell on a Tuesday.”

  They all exchanged looks, and Tia reminded, “That magazine on Butterfield’s bookshelf is four years old, too.”

  Stan added, “And his computer and operating system are at least ten years old. Who uses technology that obsolete?”

  Max shook his head. “Did you see his TV? Tube-style, with an HD converter box. And a VHS player. How old is that? All it proves is he’s behind the times. What you suggest is nuts.”

  “Most physicists would say traversable wormholes are nuts,” Tia pointed out.

  Max exhaled. “Before we go all H. G. Wells, show me hard evidence.”

  “We’ll need Butterfield’s help for that,” Tia said. “Except now, considering the risks, we can’t ask him.”

  The others puzzled, and she explained, “Butterfly Effect.”

  Dead quiet again.

  Also known as Chaos Theory, the Butterfly Effect explained how a seemingly insignificant change to a system can wreak havoc over time. Its name derived from a famous analogy: the beat of a butterfly’s wing over Africa ruffling into a breeze, growing as it travels across the Atlantic, becoming a hurricane by the time it reaches the Caribbean. Applied to the fourth dimension of Time, the Effect warns that even the tiniest intrusion on the past can change history in surprising ways, cascading forward in time to impact the present with disastrous consequences.

  At length, Max said, “No. If we were dealing with a time warp—and we’re not—butterflies would have already flown. All the crap we’ve chucked into that hole, a dog, for chrissakes. Nothing’s come of it. The world’s no different.”

  “That we know of,” Tia said. “If butterflies changed our memories, too, how would we even be aware? The danger’s too great, we’re on hold till we settle this.”

  Max went red, but Stan intervened to say, “I may have the answer, and it doesn’t involve Butterfield or butterflies.”

  Chapter 54

  Sunday, October 14, 2:00 pm, Talawanda

  The afternoon run arrived, and Max stood near the center of the tent, awaiting the vortex. He held in his hands the antenna he’d used to control the blimp
, wired into Stan’s laptop on the table where Stan sat flanked by Tia and Ariel.

  Stan had indeed come up with an apparently safe, discreet means to determine the time period on the other side, if he could pull it off. He was inspired by something he’d spotted on Butterfield’s computer toolbar. Among dozens of icons was one reading “wifi-enabled.”

  For a former IT specialist at the National Security Agency, wifi was an open door to a computer. Stan’s idea was to send a wifi signal through the wormhole to Butterfield’s router, hack past his firewall and security systems into his computer, and upload a hosting program. If successful, he could control Butterfield’s computer remotely from a laptop in the tent and call up a browser on Butterfield’s side. Then on to a news site or other source of current date, determine the year, and exit, undoing the hosting program on the way out. All without releasing any butterflies, Butterfield none the wiser—presuming he wasn’t present to catch Stan in the act.

  While Max and Tia were fully capable of attempting this hack, Stan was literally a pro at it. Even so, it would be a tricky maneuver to pull off during the ten-minute wormhole window, depending on the sophistication of Butterfield’s software security.

  The thought of hijacking the man’s computer made Ariel uneasy, yet she saw no alternative. If the team hoped to save TPC and their moon shot, they had to settle the issue of when Butterfield existed, and in what universe. Ariel had no clue which. Occam’s Razor was no help, both scenarios equally incredible.

  But if somehow it turned out the team was, in fact, trespassing on their own past, their endeavor would be over, the risk of fracturing spacetime, too great. Ariel took heart in Max’s conviction that traveling back in time was impossible. His instincts seemed prescient so far.

  The final minutes peeled off the clock, and Ariel felt her anxieties crowd once more. Tia added to her fears with an ominous warning:

  “For the record. If we confirm we’re dealing with a time warp, we’ll be forced to shut TPC down. And we won’t be able to reveal why. If word ever got out that TPC is a time machine, every country in the world would be racing for the technology. And God forbid it fell into the hands of terrorists, you think nukes are a nightmare!”