“Hey!” he shouted at the camera. “I’m ready, okay?” He paused, put both hands around the camera, and stared into its lens. “I’ll do it!” he shouted, then added, “I know what the machine needs!”
He released the camera from his grip and stood there for several minutes, up on that cot, waiting. He was hoping to immediately hear footsteps, for the big steel door to suddenly open, for fresh air to come rushing in—he could almost taste it—but nothing happened, and he reminded himself that it was probably very late at night, possibly early morning.
“Hey!” he shouted again at the camera, a note of desperation creeping into his voice. “I said I’ll do it!”
He got back down and spread out once again on the cot. He stared up at the ceiling, going over some of the vague science in his head, his tunneling breakthrough, though to call it a breakthrough might have been a stretch.
Suddenly, he heard a noise. A click. He sat straight up and watched as the big steel door slowly opened to reveal Rachel, looking alert and standing with a large security guard, thankfully not the bald man. If he’d been there, Shawn would have probably gotten queasy from the sight of him and lost all resolve.
Rachel eyed Shawn skeptically. “You’re not fucking with us?”
“I need to see the plant. Right now.”
Accompanied by the guard, Shawn and Rachel made their way from the cell to the dank tunnel that led to the lab. At the lab’s entrance, Rachel told the guard to wait outside, she was good from here, and then she once more applied her eye and thumb to the appropriate screens of the security scanner, and the large iron door slid open, and she and Shawn entered.
The lotus flower remained on the table in the center of the lab, and like a fun house mirror, its orb rendered wildly distorted reflections of Shawn and Rachel as they came in.
Rachel turned to Shawn expectantly. “All right. What have you got for me?”
“Well, first of all, I’ll come clean. I exaggerated. I have no idea what this thing needs, but I really needed to get the fuck out of that cell.”
Her eyes widened. “Are you—”
“Hey, that’s nothing compared to what you did to me, right? And, come on, was it even plausible I could have come up with anything real while lying on my back staring at the ceiling? But I did have a thought. A starting point, maybe. An avenue of exploration.”
She gave him a hard look. “Okay. What?”
“Few years back, I read an article in some journal about scientists in California looking for evidence of quantum mechanics in plant life. Well, one of the big things they discovered was that in photosynthesis, there was some evidence to suggest electrons actually move through plants using quantum entanglement.”
“Okay.”
“But there was also strong evidence of energy moving through plants using not quantum entanglement, but quantum tunneling.”
Rachel waited a beat. “Okay.”
“So. Where else do we see quantum tunneling? Where is quantum tunneling absolutely essential?”
Rachel thought for a second, and it hit her. “Nuclear fusion.”
“Bingo. If you want to understand how this thing really works, I would bet a shitload of money there’s a connection between the quantum tunneling in photosynthesis and the quantum tunneling in nuclear fusion. That’s what you should be looking at.”
Rachel stared at him for a moment, then turned to the plant and said nothing for a little while. She seemed to be contemplating what he had said, although with her, you could never really tell. After a few moments, she turned back to him.
“Shawn, I really want to work together with you on this. But we need to be able to trust one another. I need to know that all the bad shit is behind us.”
He looked at her, took a deep breath. “You gave me a lot of time for reflection in that cell. I know what happened, that it wasn’t your call and that you didn’t really want to hurt me and tried to avoid it. That doesn’t mean I’m cool with it or that I’ll ever be cool with it, but I can just barely understand it. It’s the breaks. Like you once said, what’s at stake here is a lot bigger than you or me. You’re going to be experimenting on this thing, on this plant that may or may not be able to do the incredible things you say it can do. There’s no way I don’t want to be a part of it.”
Rachel smiled. “I’m very glad to hear that, Shawn.” She turned back to the plant and shook her head. “Jesus, I can’t wait to see the look on Burke’s face. He delivered a paper on quantum tunneling just a few months ago at Cal Tech. You really are a genius, you know.”
She then noticed that Shawn was breathing a little heavier and looking at her funny, with just the slightest, slyest smile. “You okay?” she asked.
“Fine,” he answered. “It’s just the last time we were in a lab together and you called me a genius, I’m pretty sure you followed it up with a kiss.”
She laughed, a little embarrassed. “Oh, did I now?”
He nodded.
“Hmmm.” She gave him a sideways glance. Then she turned in to him, slowly leaned in, and kissed him full on the mouth.
The kiss lasted a long time.
And then it lasted too long.
She tried to pull away, but he held her head from behind, keeping it in place while refusing to pull his mouth away from hers.
Finally, she broke free, gasping and coughing.
“What the fuck?” she exclaimed, out of breath.
He stared at her. He wasn’t smiling anymore.
“What the fuck, Shawn?” she repeated. “What was that?”
“Cyanide capsule. It was in my mouth. Now, it’s in your stomach.”
Her eyes went wide. She immediately leaned forward and shoved two fingers down her throat. She began to dry heave, but nothing beyond spittle was coming out.
“I never bit down, so the toxin wasn’t released,” Shawn said. “You won’t start to feel anything for at least another fifteen minutes when the capsule starts to dissolve inside you. Then you’ll experience weakness. Shortness of breath. Vertigo.”
She swung around at him, bloodshot and teary eyes full of rage. “I’m gonna fucking kill you!”
“You could, but then you’d be joining me right after. You probably want to know where the antidote is first.”
“Where is it? Tell me—we can make you tell me.”
“Like your friend made me tell him where Andrew Leland was? How much time do you think you have to fuck around with here?”
“Dammit, Shawn, where is it? Tell me now!”
“I’ll tell you, but definitely not now. You’re gonna help me get out of here first. All the way out and without any issues. Oh, and I’ll be taking this with me.”
He wrapped his arms around the soil box at the bottom of the flower and hoisted the whole thing off the table, glass dome and all. The lotus’s intangible weirdness seemed to almost course through his own body as he held it against his chest, but he would have to ignore the sensation for now.
“Sorry,” he said to Rachel, “but this is stolen property.”
When the guard saw Shawn carrying the large, strange-looking flower out of the lab and into the tunnel several minutes later, he did a double take, but Rachel nodded that it was okay and informed him they wouldn’t need his escort from here on out. As Rachel led Shawn across a long bridge overlooking some sort of garage, neither of them spoke. As it was the middle of the night, very few people were out and about, but now two figures were moving toward them from the far end of the bridge. When they got closer, Shawn recognized them as Ravi and Megan, the married couple with whom he’d worked at the campus many months before. Megan was dressed in her traditional outfit of turtleneck and pleated skirt. Both registered surprise at seeing Shawn.
“Shawn!” Ravi exclaimed. “Hey, you’re here!”
“Hey, Ravi,” said Shawn.
“Shawn’s working with us again,” Rachel cut in, her voice low. “We’ll be conducting some light experiments with the flower aboveground.”
<
br /> Ravi and Megan both looked taken aback to hear that, though it was unclear what they were reacting to: that Shawn had rejoined the team or that the lotus flower was being taken aboveground.
“Well,” Ravi said to Shawn, with a weak smile, “welcome back into the fold, man!”
“Thanks, buddy,” Shawn answered, his tone unmistakably icy.
By the time Rachel and Shawn reached the elevator at the end of the bridge, Shawn could already hear a change in her breathing. On the ride up, he stared straight ahead at the elevator doors, but he could feel her eyes glued to him as her breathing grew louder, raspier.
He wouldn’t look at her. As resolved as he was in the righteousness of what he was doing, he knew that seeing her right now in the state she was in could still weaken him.
When the elevator doors slid open, Shawn was surprised to find they revealed not the inside of Rachel’s dorm room but instead the lobby of the sports and rec center, a building he’d previously assumed to be totally defunct. The visages of sports heroes from decades past gazed down at them from posters on the high walls as they crossed the lobby and exited out into the night.
Outside, Shawn still tried to avoid looking at Rachel as they made their way across the path toward the road that led out of the campus, but he could tell that her walking was less steady now and that her breathing had worsened further. Even so, for someone who’d swallowed cyanide, she was still in reasonably decent shape. When they reached the beginning of the road, he stopped and turned to her.
“Okay. Here’s fine,” he said.
He knew he should have enough time now to get back to his car and make a clean break, and he worried that if he pushed her further, she might not make it back down to save herself.
“On top of the security camera in the cell,” he continued, “there’s a small ampoule of liquid. You’ll want to inhale what’s in it for at least thirty seconds. Also, before tomorrow tonight, you should get yourself an injection of sodium thiosulfate to be safe.”
Rachel said nothing. Her chest was heaving, and her eyes no longer showed any trace of anger or even fear. Just a quiet sadness that seemed almost alien to her face. She looked at the flower in Shawn’s arms. “What are you going to do with it?” she asked. Her voice was strained and barely above a whisper.
“Take it far away from here. From any of you ‘scientists’ who don’t know the first thing about the meaning of that word. You know what the funniest part is? When it came to my life, it was all about the bigger picture. The ends justified the means. When it came to your life, you let me walk right out of here with everything. Good-bye, Rachel.”
Shawn turned around and disappeared up the wooded road and into the darkness. Rachel turned toward the recreation center and began to make her way back. Walking was much more difficult now. Her lungs seemed to be fighting harder and harder for air, as though her chest were closing in on itself, and there was a pounding in her head accompanied by severe dizziness. The trees and buildings around her seemed to be wiggling, dancing. The rec center looked to be about thirty yards away. As she pressed on, she passed a large, thick oak tree and paused for a moment, holding onto one of its branches to regain her balance. She decided to take just a few moments to rest and leaned herself against its wide trunk and let herself slide down to the ground.
She sat there beneath the tree, taking in big gulps of air, and closed her eyes tight, trying to fight off the vertigo. She should get back up, she realized. The rec center was probably only twenty yards away now. She had enough time to get back down to the base and take the antidote. If she moved fast enough, she could tell them all what had happened, and they might still be able to catch Shawn before he reached the interstate. They could bring him back, together with the plant.
But she made no move to get up. Instead, she remained seated where she was, at the base of the tree, transfixed by the old television program playing in her mind. An aging game show host with dyed red hair and wearing a plaid suit and bowtie was smiling before a small, dimly lit studio audience, reading a question off a teleprompter.
“For twenty-five points, which of the following was the name of the theory that explained superconductivity and nabbed the scientists Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer the Nobel Prize in 1972? Was it—”
Before he could read off the choices, the bubbly twelve-year-old contestant from Australia had already slammed down her buzzer.
“The BCS theory!” she called out with a wide grin and in her thick Aussie accent.
“Well, I hadn’t finished the question, but that’s still correct!” the host declared.
The crowd cheered.
“Next question! For fifteen points, in the publication Optica Promota, which of the following scientists—”
The girl’s buzzer sounded again.
The host laughed. “I haven’t even finished the first part of the question, Roach! I’ll let it go this time, but please, for the future, let me finish the questions. What’s the answer?”
“James Gregory!”
“That is correct again!”
More cheering from the crowd as the child beamed. Such a precocious little girl, people murmured. A child prodigy. A real genius!
Rachel opened her eyes and took in another deep breath. Her heart felt like it was beating a mile a minute. She could see the rec center, only some sixty feet away. She should really get up now, she thought. She could make it. She could save her life.
But she didn’t move. She could still hear the murmurs of that studio audience as she closed her eyes for the last time. Such a precocious little girl, they were saying, a child prodigy, a real genius! She could become anything she wanted in this world.
She would go on to do great things.
CHAPTER 30
Dawn hadn’t yet broken when Shawn pulled the car over to the side of a dark wooded road somewhere, he estimated, between Owatonna and the Minnesota-Iowa state line. He removed the flower from the passenger seat and carried it some distance through the trees and then placed it down amid a pile of broken branches and twigs surrounded by sycamore trees. A yellow moon shone through the spaces between their trunks, and, by its light, Shawn could make the lotus out pretty well, its pale green outer leaves, its large and brilliant violet petals, its shiny bulbous orb. A flower, a plant, a machine, whatever it was, it was at once strange-looking and glorious.
From his pocket, he removed the small metal cigarette lighter he’d taken from the glove compartment of the SUV. There was an etching on its side of a pirate ship.
Could he really go through with this? He knew that by most estimates, the sun would begin its long, slow death in about four or five billion years. It would swell to 150 times its current size and brighten to 5,000 times its current luminosity, and then it would reverse course and shrink and cool into a small white dwarf that would eventually fade away. Humanity may or may not still exist by that point. More likely, some highly evolved descendant would be lording over the world. Either way, this flower, this thing, could be the key to the Earth’s continued survival in a sunless future.
For a moment, Shawn allowed his imagination to run away with itself. He could see the flower being hidden away somewhere, maybe in Fiji or the Marquesas Islands or somewhere else at the far side of the world, someplace where it would be exposed to light and rain and somehow preserved for billions of years, a secret handed down from modern man to generation after generation until perhaps, eventually, the secret would somehow get lost. A lapse in tradition, a break in the chain. Then, one day, four billion years from now, with the sun already entering into its long-predicted demise, some future advanced humanoid would accidentally stumble upon the beautiful lotus, stored away, possibly with an ancient inscription nearby, explaining what it was, where it originally came from, and how it would now save the world from the oncoming darkness.
Shawn smiled at this futuristic fairy-tale vision and then let it float away. Deep down, he knew that the Earth itself would not exist in four billion year
s if this thing were allowed to exist now. Nuclear power at its current limited stage of development and usage was already fraught with danger. The catastrophic destruction that could be wreaked by a device such as this one once again falling into the wrong hands was beyond what he could even imagine.
He ignited the lighter, bent down, and lit one of the plant’s outer leaves. For a few seconds, the fire seemed to remain burning in just that one spot, localized, but then it began to spread and expand. He stepped back and watched as larger flames began to dance their way across the lotus’s leafy outer layers, gradually engulfing its beautiful violet petals.
Soon, the entire flower was burning.
Shawn stared, transfixed. He was aware that the strange, high-pitched sound he was beginning to hear coming from the flower was likely the result of the plant emitting ethylene in reaction to the intense heat. Still, listening to that eerie whine and watching the lotus’s leaves and petals writhing and wavering and ultimately withering in the flames, he couldn’t help but imagine that it was in fact screaming, that it understood what was happening, knew that it was dying.
One part of the lotus remained untouched by the flames. In the midst of all the smoke, that large and gelatinous green orb in the center of the flower seemed almost to be watching him, like a gigantic eye. And then, as Shawn stared back at it, he realized that it was slowly expanding. He could see his own distorted reflection in it getting bigger as the orb widened, first to the size of a beach ball and then bigger still, so grotesque and yet totally magnificent, a pale green color brought out by the flames in a shade not quite like any Shawn had seen before, and he wondered whether this thing was about to burst.
It was then that it occurred to him that he had no real idea what this flower was actually made of, nor what sort of chemical reactions might be induced from heating it up. When he had decided to destroy the lotus by fire, he had been conceiving of it as a flower, somehow giving no thought to the very obvious fact that it was so much more than that. Now, he was seized by a sudden panic. Would that gelatinous orb explode? If so, of what magnitude would the blast be? Could heating up the flower and whatever was inside of it actually trigger the ignition of nuclear fusion?
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