Squaring the Circle

by B K Brain

  Rage, desperation, adrenaline. Sam was strong.

  So was David. “Go straight to Hell, you motherfucker.” With a twist the pistol flew into the air, hit the floor. David grabbed Cathleen’s shoulder, threw her aside, away from Sam. She screamed, fell to the floor. Scrambled for the gun. Sam growled. David took him by the wrist, pulled. Pushed. Slammed it down to the table.

  In that instant Sam was gone. Like dreams and hockey sticks. Gone.

  It was his best trick to date.

  CHAPTER SEVEN: SPÖNTANIOUS DOWN-CONVERSION

  1

  Dr. Samuel Jacobson, scientist, genius, murderer, was no more. Watching him vanish into thin air, realizing she was aiming a pistol at someone that didn’t exist anymore, was far beyond anything Cathleen’s tender nerves could take. Her body quaked as she sobbed. Arms fell to her sides and the gun hit the floor.

  David approached to offer comfort. She threw arms around him, trying to squeeze away pain, the horror this entire day had turned out to be. It was over now. It was done. She would’ve given anything for a pair of ruby slippers, but a 727 would have to be good enough.

  After a moment she pushed her way out of the embrace. Wiped eyes with the back of a hand.

  Time to go.

  Ten minutes later found Cathleen cramming the blouse she’d worn yesterday into an oversized purse. She then scanned the room for anything she may have forgotten. Two yellow socks hung over the edge of a cot like a Dali painting. She snatched them up, turned to see how David was coming along. His head moved side to side like he was looking for his stuff, but his eyes weren’t focused on anything. He was dazed. She had neither the time nor the patience for dazed.

  Cathleen was getting the hell away from this nightmare right now. If he wasn’t ready to go yet he’d find her waiting for him in the parking lot. Maybe.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Found ‘em,” he said, holding up a ring of keys.

  “Hallelujah. Let’s go.”

  “We need to get our phones.”

  Damn. He was right. Of course he was. “Fine.” She took off out the door, heading for the control room. He’d catch up. If not, parking lot. To hell with this shit.

  She walked into the hum of a dozen computer fans to see every monitor in the room glowing with activity. Somewhat less active were the black screens of two smashed cell phones on the floor. Broken plastic and chunks of circuit board littered the area around a claw hammer lying on the tile.

  “Shit.”

  Her phone was less than a month old. Unlimited talk and text, high definition screen, waterproof for up to thirty minutes. Hammer proof for zero minutes. Once again she exploded into tears.

  A warm hand squeezed at her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” David said.

  “I’m not upset about the stupid cell.”

  “I know. Let’s get out of here.”

  The path to the front doors felt much longer than it had last night. She walked beside David, a fistful of his shirt in her free hand. He didn’t seem to mind.

  That poor man on the sidewalk. His face, his broken jaw. The concrete actually cracked beneath him as he fought for his life. And they were headed for the place where it happened. Had to, there was no other way out.

  She stopped at the glass double doors. From there she saw the back of a stone podium that held the name of the research facility, a name she couldn’t remember. Beyond that, the awful sidewalk. And the parking lot.

  She could do this. “Come on.”

  David tightened grip on her arm. “Wait.”

  Something was wrong. She heard it in his voice, saw it in his expression. She peered out to see what he saw, afraid of what it might be.

  Just outside the doors, between them and the podium, light seemed to flicker and stretch randomly through the air. The nearly invisible distortion danced around the entrance like heat emanating off the hood of a hot car. Cathleen cocked her head left and then right. Whatever it was enveloped the entire entrance.

  “Jesus,” she whispered. “What is that?”

  “Stand back,” David said, pushing her behind him. He reached out to the door. It was unlocked. He pulled it wide.

  “Careful.”

  “Yeah, no shit. Back up a little more please.”

  She didn’t argue. She took one. Two. Okay, maybe three. Yes, three steps back.

  He dug deep in his pocket, pulled out a five-dollar bill, wadded it into a ball. In a smooth underhand motion, he tossed it into the strange warping of light. A puff of orange flame and it was gone, as if he’d thrown it into a volcano. Or onto the surface of the sun.

  Cathleen covered her mouth. “Holy fuck.”

  We nearly walked right into that.

  She held out an open palm to test the air. No heat radiation. The temperature, which she figured to be at least a thousand degrees, was limited to a foot thick, almost invisible wall outside the doorway. Sam wanted to keep people from using the entrance, but didn’t want to burn down the building. More proof that he was a genius. And a total sociopath.

  “There’s no way around this,” David said. “We need to shut down the computers in the lab.”

  “This is like a quantum booby trap.”

  “Yeah. The asshole apparently wanted to keep people out.”

  “Or us in. Do you even know how to shut down a simulation?”

  David grinned. “I know how a hammer works.”

  She lowered her hand. “Payback for our phones. Sounds good to me.”

  Very clever, you son of a bitch.

  Cathleen had never felt so gullible in her life.

  But she couldn’t blame David. He only wanted to save the show. He wanted to keep doing the thing he loved. She could respect that.

  And she did like him. Quite a bit, actually.

  And he likes me.

  He didn’t know she’d seen him throw the wedding band away, but she did. ‘Bout time. He’d been divorced for like five years or something. Would they end up together? It didn’t matter, not now. Nothing mattered except getting the hell out of here.

  She took hold of David again as they made their way back to the control room. Not his shirttail, but his hand. He said, “Jacobson was running the baseball program and that thing in front of the door at the same time. Who knows what other insanity he’s got set up. We need to be careful.”

  “You think there could be more?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll take things slow until we find out for sure.”

  “I’ll keep my eyes peeled,” she said.

  2

  David walked into the control room with determination flexing every muscle. The hammer lay over remains of its smashed victims, on the floor below the counter.

  A row of five computer monitors showed programs running in text boxes of varying size on the screens. The boxes overlapped one another, colorful and bright, happy as lottery tickets. Hard to say what horrors the glad little windows represented, like rainbows full of napalm.

  He snatched the hammer off the floor, approached the nearest computer. Astounding or not, Sam’s experiments were going down. Because enough was enough. David wanted to go home.

  He looked over a tool meant for construction, the building of things. Forged steel, fiberglass, leather. It hadn’t been made to sit in a kitchen drawer or hang in a pantry, not this one. This was one of the big ones, long and thick with a nice textured grip, and a good bit of heft. A solid tool made for solid men who still knew the satisfaction of a true day’s work.

  But putting things together wasn’t its only purpose, the claw side could attest to that. It was also for taking things apart, tearing things down. Demolition.

  Houses can be built and they can be torn to the ground, but David knew the pieces always stayed the same. The ingredients for a structure exist whether the house stands or falls. Wood and nails will remain wood and nails no matter the configuration.

  Same thing in physics. Information can take differing forms, such as houses and piles of lumber, yet cannot
be destroyed, not completely. What is, is.

  Could that apply to consciousness as well? Was Sam still here, somewhere unseen? Had his pieces been scattered into unrecognizable debris, or had he simply been removed, intact, set aside for another time and place?

  David’s original question lingered. Where did the hockey stick go, Sam?

  Had the doctor become a heap of nails and wood, or did his house yet stand?

  Cathleen asked, “Can you tell which one is running the simulation at the front doors?”

  “No. We’ll need to break ‘em all, I guess.” A surge of resolve stiffened David’s posture. He squeezed the hammer tight, raised it into the air.

  Paused.

  Was he really going to destroy to the most amazing discovery the world had ever seen? What was mankind about to lose out on? Could the God computer be replicated? Could someone less psycho be trusted with such power?

  All valid questions.

  Then he thought, No one can be trusted with this.

  I’ll remember seeing that black hole for the rest of my life and I’ll never look at baseballs the same way again, but I will gladly beat the ass out of this machine until it’s nothing but a heap of busted diodes and twisted wire. If it means going home, damn right I will.

  “Oh no,” Cathleen said from behind.

  David spun to see her staring into a security monitor. On the screen three people were busy unloading equipment from a van in the main parking lot.

  His location crew had arrived.

  Adrenaline flooded every nerve. He shoved the hammer into her hands, knowing there wasn’t time to smash all the machines – his crew, the people he’d asked to come, would be at the front door in two minutes, probably less.

  They’d be distracted with armloads of audio and video equipment, talking to each other, about what to expect when they got inside, or how crazy this short-notice shoot seemed. One of them might wonder if their boss had lost his mind with the impending cancellation of the show. Sandoval’s gone off the deep end, they’d say. I always knew he was a crazy bastard. They’d have a good laugh at that, all together, at David’s expense.

  And then they’d die, all together, never knowing what hit them.

  David glanced around in a frenzy. No time to break the computers, but how about cutting the power? How about simply unplugging everything in this room? Yes, that could work for the desktops. But not the main computer, the quantum machine. It wasn’t plugged into a socket; it was permanently hardwired with a thick cable. No time.

  David grabbed Cathleen by the shoulders and said, “Unplug everything. Right now.” Then he ran. Out the door and around the corner. Down the hall, toward the front entrance. He wasn’t going to watch anyone else die today. Not gonna happen.

  He’d make it.

  He had to.

  3

  Cathleen pulled a power cord out of the back of a computer tower, watching the screen snap to black. A cooling fan faded to sleep as she moved on to the next. Another plug, another dead screen.

  She risked a glance at the security monitors. She saw David running top speed down a long corridor. The crew, two men and one woman, strolled down the sidewalk to the double doors, talking. The woman was smiling. Cathleen recognized her. Susan Harding, a new audio tech. Fresh out of college, no more than twenty-five years old.

  Jesus, they’re almost there.

  Cathleen yanked another cord. And another.

  Please, David. Hurry.

  Last cord, then she looked to the big cabinet, the reason for this whole damned mess. Its cable couldn’t be pulled out by hand. The power that fed the quantum machine disappeared into the side like a fat python. The opposite end trailed over the floor and through a busted hole in the wall. The hammer she now held likely made that opening, not unlike David’s escape route in the other room.

  Sweat trickled down her face. Need to focus. She looked back to the monitors. Couldn’t help it. They were so close. Just another few steps.

  No.

  She flipped the hammer to the claw side, raised it up. Brought it down as hard as she could. It hit and bounced off the rubber sheath. Not even a scratch.

  She looked back. They were there. One more stride and-

  Not again.

  Cathleen closed her eyes.

  4

  Three human lives. They were his responsibility. In a few seconds they’d be his fault.

  David heaved for air, his muscles crying, heart thumping, eyes straining to see through the sting of tickling sweat. The end of the hall allowed only a limited rectangle of view. He saw a low shadow, a desk perhaps, and a blank wall beyond. Couldn’t see the front entrance or the doomed people headed for it.

  The echoed clack of David’s shoes. Panting lungs that had begun to chirp under wheezing exhaustion. His aching back and a twist of sciatic pain down a right leg. That was the sum of him. A sprint fell to a jog, a jog to a limp.

  The hallway shortened; his perspective grew.

  He wanted so much to yell ‘Wait!’ or ‘Stop!’ Something, anything to allow him more time. But in his current condition it was all he could do to breathe. Also, anything he called out might be taken as a cry for help, which would cause them to rush to his aid. And for three oblivious people on the sidewalk, rushing would be fatal.

  David said nothing and kept on, fighting through the pain with everything he had left. He stumbled over the threshold, around the corner and into the front reception area. The double doors were across the room, only twenty feet further. The deadly wall of heat, just beyond that.

  His crew? Already inside, setting crates of equipment on the floor and having a look around. Alive.

  “What?” David forced out, struggling for air, trying to understand. “How did…How did you get in here?” The nearly invisible oven distorted light over the concrete, just like before.

  A large man named Doug said, “Hey, Dave. The door was unlocked. Were we supposed to ring a bell or something?”

  “No. No, I mean- How did you get through?” David gazed at the deadly doorway.

  The woman had a look behind, wrinkled her nose. “What the fuck is that?”

  Doug said, “That wasn’t there a second ago.” He snapped a glare at David. “What the hell is it?”

  The other man, the one who’d been quiet until now, spoke. “Did we walk through that? But…but…”

  Possibilities raced through David’s mind, one after another. It had to have shut down momentarily, long enough for them to walk past. How? Had Sam programmed it to let people in, but not out? Was that even possible?

  That must be it.

  They were alive. David dropped to hands and knees, but not from exhaustion. It was too much, all of it. He couldn’t think straight.

  A thick grip had him under the arms, lifting, forcing him onto his feet. He looked up into the cameraman’s scruffy face. Doug was big, lumberjack big, and he held David upright with ease. He probably could’ve curled the weight of everyone in the room, going by the hairy tree trunks he used for arms.

  In direct contrast, the woman (or girl, more like) that was asking David if he was all right in a strange, nasally squeal, was no bigger than a twig.

  “Are you okay, Mr. Sandoval?”

  That’s just what you are, he thought, trying to smile. A little blonde twig. David needed to sit down. His knees buckled again, but he didn’t hit the floor. Thank you, Doug.

  The other man, the unit manager, said, “You need to tell us what’s going on here.”

  Doug held a careful eye on David, allowing the grip on his shoulders to loosen. “Give the man a chance to catch his breath, Steve.”

  David squared feet on the floor, ran a hand though his hair. Took a moment to collect his thoughts, prioritize them.

  Just breathe.

  Number one - calm down. His crew had survived. Everything was fine, at least for now.

  There you go, Dave. Shake it off.

  Number two - get the others up to speed. “Steve’s righ
t. If you’ll follow me, I’ll explain everything.”

  Number three - Finish the job in the control room and go home.

  He led his crew down the corridor, to the quantum computer and Cathleen.

  5

  Rachel had never dared tell Eddie, but she really hated that stupid science show. Hard to say how many hours of her life had been wasted learning about gravity and black holes and subatomic thingamabobs - hours she’d never get back, no matter how theoretically possible time travel was. It was so boring.

  She was usually drifting by the first commercial break, and totally dead to the world by the second. Rachel knew her evening naps annoyed Eddie, but she couldn’t help it. It was either sleep or suicide.

  “Makes us even,” she’d say when Little Sis complained about having to watch TV by herself. Actually it didn’t come anywhere near tying up the score. A nap on a Hawaiian beach might come close, but even that would be a stretch.

  And now Mr. David Sandoval, creator of said program, had invaded her sister’s life like some kind of reverse body snatcher, forcing Eddie into his world through photographs and mind games. If Rachel ever met the guy she’d have a few choice words waiting for him.

  Like asshole, asshole.

  No wonder Eddie looked so scared at Thatcher’s office the other day.

  But now, as her sister sat at the kitchen table spilling everything about experiences with a man she’d never met she seemed calm, strangely levelheaded about all of it. Maybe it was relief she saw in Eddie’s face, from finally sharing the insanity with someone who actually believed.

  Rachel felt a similar sense of relief, in knowing at least part of the goings on in Eddie’s head were real. She was still sick, sure, but perhaps not totally crazy. No crazier than Rachel would be if she heard voices.

  Could the hallucinations have been real this whole time?

  With her story all told Eddie sat in silence, gazing down at a smooth Formica surface. Rachel sat back in her chair, mentally tracing the lines of her sister’s face. The gentle curve of the jaw, thin pale lips. The narrow slit of her eyes, intense, intelligent yet holding back, never giving up all they knew. They’d been blue once upon a time, the color of moonlit ice, but not anymore. Color required light.