by B K Brain
Was she telling the truth? Yeah, probably. Not that it made a difference.
Tag, Sharon. You’re it.
Blood over cocaine looked kind of like a cherry icee. Strange.
6
She closed herself in the bedroom. Locked the knob.
Eddie stood staring at that darkened door, a slab of wood separating her from her mother’s lies, and Mom from Eddie. The real girl. The sick girl. The embarrassment.
Voices resounded from the dining room, low yet audible excuses and apologies and explanations. Mom could say whatever she pleased. It wouldn’t change the fact that there was iced tea in the mashed potatoes and a fork above the light switch. No matter how much Mom wanted it, nothing she said could change the girl behind that door. Eddie. Not fucking Edith Ann. Eddie.
Nothing would ever change anything. Not trying harder. Not therapy. Not handfuls of pills. They didn’t work. None of it had ever worked. No matter what she tried the hallucinations came just the same.
Hello, little girl.
She glared into the corner. “Not now, asshole.”
It’s time, Ed. You ready?
“Ready? For what?”
Oh, nothing.
7
One of the many challenges of creating a black hole in a laboratory setting was finding a way to counteract the pull of Earth’s gravity. Otherwise, the experiment would fall through the floor on its way to the planet’s core, devouring everything it encountered along the way. The solution, Sam discovered, was in the experiment itself.
Bending the fabric of spacetime, that was the task. He figured why not bend it upward, away from gravity’s pull, therefore creating a kind of anti-gravity field over the proceedings. The gravitation above would need to be equal to the already present gravitation below.
So his partner did the math, taking into account the weight of the anomaly itself, the distance from Earth’s center at their current elevation, and many, many other factors that took hours to explain to anyone who dared listen. The math was intricate, horrendous, daunting. But after a few weeks at the chalkboard Leon was reasonably confident of his solution, as long as the simulation held precisely.
Any unforeseen variance could spell disaster.
But hey, no risk, no reward, right?
This was Gonzo experimentalism at its best. Gravity and Loathing in Chicago, as the man Hunter S. Thompson might’ve described it. Live the story, be a part of it, damn the consequences. Sam checked incoming data from the detectors. He grinned.
It was all or nothing now.
8
Everything outside the window went dark.
Eddie turned to see beyond the curtain. No sky. No trees. No yard, only a bible-black wall of darkness. Just like Thatcher’s children, like the taunting bookstore man.
There, but not really.
Should have been. Wasn’t.
Nothing, everywhere.
Even cracks of light around the closed door had been snuffed out, and the muffled voices silenced. Mom’s excuses had gone dark with everything else. The world outside was a void of silent, starless space.
The pictures.
Each one, black. No photograph, no reflection. Every framed piece of glass on the dresser was blank, fallen through the space between atoms, into the nothing.
She turned a full circle in the only place that still existed, trying to keep hold of her breathing, her trembling body, her thundering heartbeat. It was no use. The panic was on.
“Can’t be real,” she said, most definitely out loud. “Impossible.”
No, the nothingman whispered. Irrational.
“Please stop.”
An algorithm is required.
She covered her eyes with thin fingers. “Not real.”
Eddie had been looking for something amazing all day. She’d been expecting it. But not this. No one could’ve expected this.
Power, like heat, began to rise.
9
David sat at the bar feeling the effects of three whiskey and Cokes.
He always liked the initial sensation that began an evening with Jack Daniels. The cool over his tongue, the tingling warmth in his belly. The loosening of conversation. The unbuckling of problems. Life felt different inside the enlightenment of those first few drinks. Best part of the night, hands down.
It was then, at drink number four - teetering at the peak of that warm, delicious hilltop - when he told Cathleen the bad news. The circle, apparently, would no longer need squaring.
She took it better than expected and was surprised actually, that they’d made it as long as they had, considering the declining ratings of the last two seasons. That, and Vice Dickhead’s tendency to be an incomprehensible cocksucker of the highest order, which they both agreed was the true determining factor.
“When are you going to tell the crew?”
David paused, eying the sloshing cubes in his glass. “First thing in the morning.”
“That’s good,” she said.
“What will you do?”
“Me? Hell, there’s lots of snooty British actors that need makeup. I’ll be fine. What about you?”
David held the empty above his head to show the bartender. “I don’t know. I’m not sure I’ve got another show in me.” He shrugged. “Might be time to look into a bed and breakfast and some fishing poles.”
Cathleen laughed. “You’d be stir crazy in a month.”
“Yeah.” She was right of course.
10
Sam felt a cold, wet nose pushing against his elbow. He glanced downward. Maurice looked up from below the control panel with a melancholy gaze only an attention-starved pooch could muster. Sam moved his arm out of reach.
“What are you doing in here, boy?”
He didn’t have time to deal with the dog. The experiment was rolling, for God’s sake. Ten people stood watching in the observation booth, spectators that included General Mitchell and two commissioned officers from the Pentagon, a visiting biologist from a facility in southern California, two board members and some folks he assumed had been invited by the Laboratory director. All of them, waiting to have their worlds turned upside-down. Sam had been waiting his entire career.
This was it. The next few minutes meant everything.
Kevin Atkinson, a theoretical physicist, sat at a console to the right, monitoring incoming data from detectors A and B. He said, “Conjuring a magic black hole is a bit different than stirring up some electrons. But hey, best of luck, Sam.” Sam had gotten used to the sarcasm over the last few months. It didn’t bother him anymore.
“It’ll work.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“No. You’ll see it because the gravitons believe it.”
“Whatever you say, my friend.”
Kevin, always the skeptic. But who could blame him? He wasn’t there when the electrons he was referring to appeared from nothing. He hadn’t witnessed the Gravitons’ power firsthand. But he would today.
Sam would be accepting his apology in about fifteen minutes. That’s all the time he needed to change science forever.
Bonnie Newman, astrophysicist and avid dog-lover, squinted into a glowing screen to the left. She’d been involved from the beginning. She was a true believer.
So was Sarah Reinhold. She stood somewhere behind the others, frantically bouncing between workstations and looking over shoulders.
Leon ran the quantum operations in an adjoining room. His assistant Ben straddled the threshold, glancing one way and then the other. The poor kid looked like he might faint.
Maurice trotted over to whimper at Sarah, wagging his tail.
“Ready,” Leon said over the hum of cooling fans and the whir of spinning hard drives.
“Ready,” Ben echoed.
Sam announced, “Simulation start in five seconds.” He turned to Kevin. “Watch those detector levels. Here we go.”
“Five,” Sarah said, her voice trembling with anticipation. “Four.”
&nbs
p; All eyes in the booth focused through a fifteen-foot wide by eight-foot tall window that separated them from the massive room beyond. A bank of floods came alive at the far wall, each blazing a harsh yellow light, light that would soon distort under the immense power of curved spacetime. “Three.”
Given up on attention from Sarah, Maurice moved on to Ben.
“Two.”
Sweat drooled down Sam’s face. His breath, shallow.
“One.” The loneliest number you’ll ever do, according to Three Dog Night.
“Initiate simulation.”
Maurice slipped through an open doorway and headed for the stairs.
Sam barely noticed.
11
Eddie couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. Power, unbearable pressure, like standing in the black core of a dead star. She tried with all that was in her to cry out. For help or mercy, it made no difference. This could not go on. She couldn’t take it.
Words wouldn’t come. Not without air.
Voices had been silenced by a vacuum that was now growing. Bigger, thicker. Becoming more. And then more. Then everything. A low hum, a rumble. A quake that rattled bones and pounded nerves. Tightening. Squeezing.
God. Please. I can’t-
Life, it seemed, had taken its final turn.
12
Two hours of 50’s jukebox tunes was Cathleen’s limit, at least that’s what she told David. She gave him a hug before she went home, and said everything happens for a reason. He saw it in her eyes, felt it in her smile. She truly believed it. He, on the other hand, did not. Alone at the bar, he finished off his sixth drink.
He slid the empty glass to the bartender. “One more,” he said. “Then I’m out.”
The crest of the hilltop was behind him now. The warmth, all gone.
13
Sam verified the simulation running on his monitor and then checked the incoming data from the detectors. They were telling lies, just as he’d programmed them to do. Very specific untruths to be sure, tall tales of gravitation and the bending of space.
The powerful yet gullible Gravitons would believe the story they told, every concocted syllable, every descriptive nuance. Fiction told in mathematics, the language of science. Of knowledge.
Sam smiled because the make-believe was only temporary. The real was coming.
An algorithm is a step-by-step operational procedure designed for data processing and calculation. It is a precise set of linear instructions, a problem-solving program.
The algorithm used for the initial test was one of Sam’s own design. It utilized pairs of entangled qubits in superposition states to compare Newton gravity strengths from two separate sources – detectors A and B.
The code was written with no halt instruction, which meant it would run indefinitely as long as there were values to compare. Once the experiment went live the only way to terminate the process would be to force a hard stop, either by cutting the incoming signal from the detectors, or by manually shutting down the algorithm at the quantum computer interface.
In other words, once he had a black hole in the laboratory he could keep it there as long as he pleased. That’s right. A black hole. In the laboratory.
The man who changed the world, Sam thought. Me.
The Higgs Boson, the God particle, was about to suffer a humiliating demotion. But that was okay, so was Albert Einstein. Sam had to admit it felt pretty damn good.
“Program start,” he said.
At that moment the experiment was a simulation no more.
It was even more beautiful than he’d imagined.
14
Eddie looked down and realized her feet weren’t on the floor. She hovered a few inches above, straining, kicking, fighting to break free. The pressure would not relent.
Her bedroom fell away, color by color, shadow by shadow, into the nothing. Down the void’s murky throat, to the bottom of all that ever was. An irrational distance, a span beyond comprehension, like the never-ending numbers of Pi, like the stretch of an infinite horizon. An illusion, unreachable simply because you can’t know when you’ve arrived. Because there are no points of reference when drowning in ink.
15
It was like peering through a fisheye lens. And it wasn’t.
Snakes of color - thick, bright patches of yellow light emanating from the halogens on the far wall – stretched and thinned. Circled in colliding orbits around a tennis ball-sized sphere that hung in the air. Each collision punished light into new and twisting strings of ever-thinning particles, tiny clumps of photons spiraling closer to the center, closer, and then into nothing.
The event horizon, the singularity’s unforgiving outer shell, was difficult to see. Small, colorless, yet the surface sizzled with pinpoints of dim light, like grease snapping over a hot pan.
This peculiar distortion of space, infinitely dense, unfathomably deep, the magic that held galaxies together, was, more than anything, a gathering of truth. An answer to things pondered since the beginning of time, and questions that have yet to be asked. It was an opportunity, a doorway, a map to nowhere and everywhere, this globe of darkness, this strange little dollop of nothing.
As sure as Sam had been about the experiment, he still had difficulty trusting his eyes. The magic Gravitons had done their work; lies from moments ago now true. The results were mesmerizing. Unbelievable, yet there it was.
Audible gasps, curses, and shuffling sounds all around. He barely noticed his colleagues’ reactions. Not until Bonnie announced, “Temperature spike.”
Sarah added, “I can verify that. A hundred eighty degrees and rising, Sam.”
Kevin’s voice came next. Loud, clear. Urgent. “We need to shut it down.”
Kevin Atkinson. Theoretical physicist. Skeptic. Killjoy. And genius, naturally. He was right. They needed to shut it down.
Immediately.
16
The world came back to Eddie in a tingling of nerves, a swimming lightheadedness and the icy rush of liquid over her tongue and down her throat. A taste, both bitter and mildly sweet. Alcohol. And cola.
A large man across from her leaned over a slick wood surface. He was busy wiping down a glass with a stained rag. His expression was that of boredom, the surrender of better and more interesting locations. Behind him, a mirror, rows of multicolored bottles, a cash register. And photographs in tiny frames.
What is this place? How did I get here?
There was air, she could breathe. Which meant, hopefully, she’d be able to speak. She was mistaken, mostly.
A sound did come. Not a word, but the low rumble of the clearing of a throat. The tone was deep, thick. All wrong. A man’s voice.
She looked up to the mirror and leaned over to see. Dark hair, peppered with gray. An unshaven, square chin. Glasses. This was not just a man, but the one from Thatcher’s picture. Eddie peered downward.
Yes, hairy knuckles and all. Thick fingers, a wedding ring. White button-up shirt. Hairy chest. A man.
What the fuck?
She was seeing through him somehow. Unbelievable. How could this happen? Who was he? She reached for a back pocket because that’s where they keep their wallets. She pulled it out, opened it. A driver’s license.
“David Sandoval. 1332 Franklin Place. Apartment 14. New York.” Definitely out loud. And deep. God, that’s weird.
The bartender smirked. “If you need to check your license to know who you are I’m gonna have to cut you off, my friend.”
She went unbalanced and slipped off the barstool. Caught herself from stumbling. Or did he do that? This man named David. This old drunk guy. Eddie was seeing through his eyes. Feeling the sloshing effects of his whisky. Scratching at his itchy, hairy chest.
This is not happening. No fucking way.
And then in a blink, it wasn’t.
17
“Two hundred. Still rising.” Bonnie’s voice.
“Initiate hard stop at the detectors,” Sam called out.
“Two-twenty.�
�� Again, Bonnie.
Kevin entered the command. Squinted at the screen.
“The detectors are now offline.” Probably Sarah. Hard to tell over the rising chatter.
Sam looked up, paused, gritted teeth. The experiment continued in spite of the missing data. The black hole raged on, unaffected.
“Two hundred fifty degrees Fahrenheit.”
Beyond the window, only forty feet from where they stood, Sam’s monster kept churning, distorting space, its thermal entropy rising. Raw, immense power. Oxygen, hydrogen, photons, dust particles, anything caught in its deadly spiral, now converting to energy at a phenomenal rate. The result? Heat. Lots of heat.
“Why is the experiment still live?” That was Kevin.
“Three hundred degrees.” Bonnie, her voice desperate.
“Shut it down!” Sarah, trying to hold back tears, contain her panic.
“How can the detectors still be sending data?” Ben.
Sam typed at his keyboard, stared into the monitor. “They’re not. They’re out of the input loop.”
Kevin, angry. “Then why is there still a black fucking hole in the lab, Sam?”
“Three hundred and fifty degrees.” Hot enough to bake a cake. And still climbing. Jesus. In a few seconds it would be hot enough to burn down the laboratory.
“Cut the program!” Sam yelled. “Hard stop at quantum control!”
“Four hundred degrees!” Bonnie. High pitched, screeching.
Kevin. “This building is going to explode.”
“SHUT IT DOWN. NOW.”
18
Unbearable density. Darkness.
Everything was gone. The man, the mirror, the bar, the little picture frames. Gone.
Eddie once again found herself floating in black, her nerves crying against horrific pressure. Blind to the outside world, if the world was even still there. But it was. Had to be. She knew because she could hear it.