by Jim Lombardo
Monica, Anderson, Marshall, and other team members were observing Hannah on a TV screen from a remote viewing room. She was dressed casually in black leggings, a plain white t-shirt under a beige pullover, and white sneakers. All her fancy clothes, makeup kit, and earrings had been left behind. She understood this wasn’t a fashion show, and only cared about comfort. The only decorative jewelry she allowed herself was a cherished charm bracelet that she always wore. Although her face was still angelic, areas of darkened puffiness were developing under her eyes, as this ordeal was taking a physical toll.
Hannah sat at a desk appropriate for a kindergarten classroom, wide with very short legs. On the table, amongst the myriad of papers and pencils, sat three computer monitors. Some of her time was spent on the monitor directly in front of her, which she used to navigate the internet, conducting her own research. Special arrangements had been made to provide her access to classified reports and information. To her left, another monitor was transmitting satellite and ground-based pictures of the sphere, and constantly reporting data on a host of physical parameters, including girth, altitude and speed of growth. To her right, a monitor was dedicated to a collaborative network of physicists. This allowed for the immediate sharing of research data.
Running along at the right of that monitor’s screen was a live chat room that Hannah was participating in. Access was restricted to a select group of scientists, including numerous Nobel Prize winners, such as Hannah for her cancer treatment discovery. This was an open discussion to share theories and potential solutions. There was the option of using computer software to provide her with immediate translation of the non-English words being typed by each person, but she preferred not to use it. She was already fluent in every language spoken by the group, and didn’t want to risk having a program miss the nuance of a single written word. At her disposal through this monitor, with the click of a few keys, was the ability to message, speak, or even skype privately with any participant she chose.
Despite the three monitors, the majority of her time was spent feverishly toiling over her mathematical papers, the work obscured from the camera by her golden, curly locks hanging down. As she began to transcribe a new thought, she would write normally from left to right, but upon reaching the right border of the page, she would continue writing the next row underneath in a right to left direction, rather than starting again at the left. Thus her equations and formulas were connected, but in reverse order on every other row. Most of the symbols were recognizable, such as the speed of light (c), mass (m), and velocity (v), but many were original, created by Hannah, and given special names just for identification purposes, since there were no words that existed in any human language for them. For example, “Strawberry” was g&g, a measure of time dilation in the context of two opposing gravitational forces. There was also the double asterisk, **, that Anderson had questioned. This force remained a mystery to her, but its value, a constant, was unquestionably necessary in her mind in order for her calculations to proceed correctly.
“What are you?” she asked inquisitively from time to time, staring at the ** symbol as if the asterisks were two eyes looking back at her. Occasionally, Hannah would stop, raise her head at an angle, and stare out blankly into space. Each time, the team and her mother would straighten up in their chairs and focus on the camera view, only to ease back as the child would put her head back down and continue on as usual.
Marshall pressed a button on a control board on his desk that provided an audio connection to Hannah. “Sure on the pencils. I’ll bring them right down, your Royal Highness,” he said.
Monica wasn’t amused by the quip, and leaned forward with concern to speak into the microphone. “You haven’t eaten or had anything to drink for five hours now. You want another box meal? Maybe a nice peanut butter and jelly?”
“Unless you’re nearing a breakthrough,” Marshall added, eliciting an icy glare from Monica.
“I’ll take a PB and J and a glass of chocolate milk if you have those, but what I need most of all are the pencils.”
Within a few minutes, Marshall was making his way down the narrow cement stairs with the supplies, passing through a labyrinth of checkpoints, until finally reaching the guards outside of Hannah’s bunker.
Marshall recited his personal passcode, and one of the guards punched it in on a keypad, followed by his own password. The large titanium door began exercising a series of internal security mechanisms that took a couple of minutes before finally popping open. Marshall entered the inner sanctum and approached Hannah, who was so preoccupied with a new formula that she didn’t even notice him at first.
Finally she looked up. “Hi, Marsh’, sorry there. I was lost in concentration. Lost being the operative word. This is a tough one.”
“Well, your mom wants you to eat,” he said placing the box of pencils down and then setting out the food and carton of milk for her. “She’s got a point.”
“Yeah, mothers know best, they say. Thanks, I just don’t feel right about dining while the Titanic is sinking, you know?”
“It’s literally food for thought, Hannah. You have to eat.”
Marshall was about to turn to leave, but hesitated. He felt bad seeing her swollen eyes, and the grim nature of her brave smile, and it held him back. Looking around the stark room and the myriad of papers and monitors surrounding this small child, he wished there was something he could do to cheer her up.
“Hey, just to share some good news—all the wars and hostilities on Earth have stopped completely. There’s total peace everywhere right now on the planet.”
Hannah chuckled at the irony. “So, this is what it took to stop people from hurting each other, huh? There’s your silver lining. Let’s take it. What else is going on in the world, Marshall?”
“Ah, well, of all things there’s a total solar eclipse happening today in the southern part of Africa. That’s pretty cool.”
“Neat. I wish I could witness one of those.”
“I actually did when I was a kid,” said Marshall. “It was so strange. I remember as it was about to happen, the sunlight started to dim. My mother called me over and told me to look out our front door. We had this undersized German Shepherd named Copper, the runt of the litter, and she was sitting at the end of our front walk obediently, like a sentinel. This was in the burbs, and there were always a million birds chirping, but they all went completely silent. Then it got pitch dark. My mother kept me inside because she was afraid of me looking at it and hurting my eyes. But I went to the window and snuck a quick peek at it anyways, and there it was, happening. It was really something.” Marshall recalled the scene for a few seconds, then shook his head. “I’m sorry, I should let you get back to it.”
“No need to apologize, Marsh’. Thanks for the pencils and food, and the mental break too.” Hannah held up the carton of milk to toast him. “Cheers.”
After Marshall’s departure, Hannah went online and searched “Eclipse Africa” to learn more. She read about the projected path of darkness that would be sweeping across the African continent later that day, and then watched a video of a past eclipse, showing the two heavenly bodies drifting toward each other in space and converging. The sun was soon obliterated from view by the moon, which appeared as a dark void of nothingness.
The youngster’s eyes then grew extremely wide as if she had just spotted something amazing in the distance, and she sat up perfectly straight. Still holding her carton of milk, she then shot up from her chair, so forcefully that the backs of her legs hit the seat, and sent it reeling over backwards. Hannah stood motionless.
Marshall returned to the observation room and joined the others who were now watching her intently on the screen.
“The eclipse...the eclipse,” she repeated over and over, so transfixed that the milk slipped from her grasp and fell to the floor without her realizing it.
“Of course!” she cried.
>
Hannah glared into the camera, and Marshall opened the audio connection.
“I think I know what to do!” she said, shaking and with tears coming from her eyes.
“What, Hannah? What do we do?” Anderson implored.
Hannah spoke firmly. “Gordy, come down here in 10 minutes. I’ll need you. Marshall, can you pipe in “Nightingale” on a loop for me?”
Her last request was for her favorite song to be fed into the room. This was a piece written by the famous Greek pianist and composer, Yanni. Hannah had always appreciated how artfully crafted soundwaves of music influenced brainwaves like moving air molecules affected a kite. But to the child, there was something extra special about the haunting beauty of this particular song. The way instruments had been used to imitate nature. A bird keeps singing out for some apparent reason, and Hannah had always wondered, Is this bird crying out for help, or because it simply enjoys the splendor of its own voice? Is it searching for companionship or a mate? Or could it desperately be trying to tell the world about the most wondrous secret it just learned, and which it needs to share? The mysteries embedded in this song always galvanized her.
Chapter Fifty-One
The Hum
After gaining entry, Anderson rushed into the room, taking a seat next to Hannah in a chair that was ridiculously small for him. “Okay. What do we do?” he repeated.
“Gordy, I’ll tell you what must be done. But don’t ask me to explain why, because I can’t make you understand it, not even if I had forever. I can only tell you what needs to happen, and you need to trust me. Is there any way to get Titan and the SSC operational again, and I mean very quickly?”
Anderson shook his head slowly in disbelief at her suggestion. “Very quickly? No way. I mean Titan’s camera and a section of the crossover beam pipes were destroyed. It would take months to get the whole thing up and running. What are you trying to do? How much time do we have?”
“Not much, but we need you to create another void, Gordy. Just one. Then all we have to do is sit back and wait for the two voids to meet, which I believe is going to make something happen. The new sphere has to be from the SSC. No other collider in the world will do to save the planet. In order for you to repeat your result, we need a device that can accelerate protons and generate energy beams with nine teraelectron volts. The only other machines even remotely close to that power would be the supercollider here in the United States and the one in Japan. But even if you were able to create a second void at those other locations, by the time the two met, the Earth would already be gouged down to the core by the first void, and the atmosphere would have vaporized. We’d be done in by that, if not already wiped out by super quakes. I realize there’s no guarantee you’ll succeed, but I want you to conduct the exact same research you were doing, and try for a new void. As soon as you see it, the collider must immediately be shut down, because there needs to be an even number of these things for my idea to have a chance to work. For this, my favorite even number is two. So here we are at day 19, and the void is six miles wide. By my calculations you have only about 15 days to create the new void. After that point, at the rate the first one’s growing, its influence is going to corrupt the integrity of the collider, and make experimentation impossible.”
“Fifteen days?” Anderson looked skyward as if asking for spiritual help. “Maybe if we tried to use one of the other detectors in the ring that are undamaged, we could bypass Titan and save some time, though they’re further away from—”
“No, sorry, I want Titan. That’s where the mold is.”
“Well, I can tell you for a fact that EPIC hasn’t done any repairs yet. I mean, when your house is on fire, the last thing you think about is putting another log in the fireplace. We can do it, Hannah, but 15 days? That seems humanly impossible.”
“Humanly impossible? You mean like people, over 5,000 years ago, moving giant stone pillars hundreds of miles to build Stonehenge?”
Anderson dwelled on that for a moment. “Alright, Hannah, I’ll try. We’ll try. I guess we’re lucky that the thing drifted away from the SSC or we wouldn’t have this chance at all.
“Not lucky, Marblehead. It was drifting to the hum.”
“The what?”
“The hum. There’s a number of people in the world who say they constantly hear a hum throughout their entire lives. I watched an interesting documentary on that, and researched it. I don’t think it’s bunk. I think every physical object has a gravitational or spatial wormhole, just like every apple has a stem. I suspect that the area near Stonehenge is where the stem of the planet Earth is. The wormhole emits a very low frequency sound, which is probably being generated by gravitational waves being funneled in, perhaps all the way from the edges of the Universe. The sound is undetectable to most people, but some swear they can hear it, and I believe them. In the Stonehenge era, I bet people with heightened acoustic sensitivity to these low soundwaves interpreted them as a message from a divine source. Perhaps guiding them to a gateway to another dimension or realm, maybe even heaven. They must have believed the regularity of the sun, moon, and stars were something divine as well. I wonder if the plan was to use Stonehenge as a giant key to open that gate, when the sun or other heavenly bodies aligned in a certain way. I believe the void also sensed the hum, and was drawn to it. The new void will head that way too. But to create that second void, I’m handing the ball off to you.”
“I’ll get you what you need, as fast as I can,” Anderson said with conviction. He hit an intercom button forcefully that connected him with the entry guards and requested to be let out. The two patiently waited while the door underwent the lengthy machinations required.
“You know, the world might end because it took too long to get this door open,” said Hannah, smiling.
Anderson appreciated the humor but seemed discontented. “Hannah, I know you said you couldn’t make me understand what’s happening with this thing, but can you try? I’m a scientist first, and not knowing what’s going on...it’s torture for me.”
“It’d be impossible, Gordy, sorry. There aren’t words in any language that I could use to describe what’s happening. No offense, but it would be like trying to explain to a puppy how a radio works. That’s the kind of impossible I mean. Do you understand that?”
Anderson shrugged, but didn’t want to give up a chance to get a Godlike glimpse into the unknown.
“Alright, then, I’m a puppy, and I’m begging. Can you just use the best words to describe what’s happening?”
Hannah obliged. “Fine, Gordy, here goes. The area of darkness you see is the opposite of the Big Bang. If I had to put a name to it, I would dub it the Enormous Ebb. This is the departure of all matter, space and time—The Big Bang in reverse. These bangs and ebbs are the Universe’s tidal cycle, which I can prove by my calculations. In the end, there is zero matter, zero space, and zero time. Matter, space, and time may appear real at a given moment; take a car accident for example, which depends on a convergence of all three. But still, these things don’t exist in totality. Think of it as, you only get matter, space, and time when the pendulum is swinging one way. When it swings the other way, the exact opposite happens. Einstein gave us the elegant E=mc2, and that was a step in the right direction, but I was able to condense all of my formulas into one simple equation that takes that to the finale.
“Can you show it to me?”
Hannah went to her desk and scribbled
onto a piece of scratch paper, and then returned to Anderson and handed it to him.
“This is it. I created the symbol Awe to treat all existing matter, space, and time as one single combined entity. Awe prime is the undoing of Awe. Your research tricked nature, and caused the pendulum to start swinging the other way much earlier, and in a different place than naturally it would have. Gravity is the invisible effect that proves the pendulum is active. It’s like the wind rustling the
trees. You can’t see the wind directly, but your senses reveal its influences to you, so you know that it exists. The net energy created by gravity per cycle, which I call Egg, is like a footprint depressed into the sands of space and time. Double asterisk is somehow...the foot maybe?…a-a constant force that fits perfectly into it?”
With those last words, Hannah’s train of thought wandered off to that day walking on the sands of Good Harbor Beach with her father, and the impressions their feet had left behind in the sand.
“So where’s the rest of the equation? It says equals, but then what?”
Hannah’s stream of thought snapped back to Anderson. “That’s just it, Marblehead. These all add up to nothing, so that’s exactly what I put...a blank. Basically, I’m thinking that everything is nothing, and vice versa.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s basic,” Anderson said facetiously.
“Now, why is this void or ebb growing so much slower than the Big Bang? It isn’t. It’s growing at the exact same speed as the Big Bang, faster than the speed of light, but we are viewing it now from our relative time frame. If you were inside the void, an impossibility because there is no space, it has gone from an infinitesimally small point to where it is now in the time span of only a fraction of a second. The only reason why we’re still talking right now and there is still a solar system after all this time we’ve experienced, is because the gravity we’re experiencing is so feeble compared to the gravity inside the void. Time is incredibly stretched out from our perspective. You know that physicists theorize that time stops at the speed of light, right? Well, since the enormous ebb is traveling much faster than the speed of light, I think it’s possible that time itself is in reverse there. So what we’ve sensed as 19 days is actually one negative fraction of a second to the ebb.”