by Scott Jarol
Another aftershock explosion hurled shrapnel toward him, and a few pieces of metal clinked against the steel rails and stuck there. He pried a nail loose from the rail and held it in his open palm, a spike as long as his index finger. It pivoted on its own. He rotated his hand, but the nail held its orientation like a compass. When he dropped it, instead of falling straight to the ground, it arced down to snap back into place against the iron rail. The rails were magnetized.
Up ahead, he saw Doc struggle to swing the sack from one shoulder to the other. Its weight must be amplified by the magnetic field. He hung back as Doc stepped off the tracks and hiked away to the right. He had to lag behind to remain undetected yet close enough to not lose Doc.
After at least an hour of walking, they arrived at the edge of an open field surrounding North Star Laboratory. Ezekiel had never been inside. He only knew that this was where it had happened, where his father had gone to work one day and never come back. The facility occupied three identical glass pyramids. Their angular walls camouflaged them in reflections of the starry sky. The buildings formed a triangular courtyard with a gap at one of the three corners serving as its main entrance.
Doc skirted the tree line and made his way around the outer fence. Ezekiel lagged behind, out of sight. Once they were out in the open, Doc would be more likely to hear or see him.
Doc moved in toward the buildings. Two people, featureless silhouettes with purposefully swinging arms, rounded a corner. When they spotted Doc, they jogged toward him. Ezekiel couldn’t tell if they’d come from inside, but he knew they definitely hadn’t come out through the main entrance.
* * *
Howard peered at Doc in relief, still puffing a bit from their dash outside to meet him.
“We detected an explosion at your place on the seismo sensors,” he said. “We thought you had been blown to bits.”
“Nice,” said Gary sarcastically. “Very delicate.”
“I think I still have all my body parts,” said Doc. “Here’s the thing: Don’t look, but I’m being followed.”
Howard started to turn his head in alarm, and Gary shot a sharp elbow into his ribs.
“Ow, sorry. Instinct.” He massaged his ribs, glaring at his colleague.
“Is it Willis?” asked Gary. “We picked up the signal from your place earlier. Willis knows something’s going on.”
“Maybe so, but that’s not who’s out there right now.” Doc plopped his bundle in front of them. “You two can help me out. I need you to take this.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a bag full of junk,” he whispered.
Howard tugged the top of the bundle. The heavy bag barely budged.
“It’s a decoy,” said Doc. “I need you to take it inside. Make it look important.”
“What do we do with it?” asked Howard.
“Hide it somewhere—someplace it can be found,” said Doc. “But you need to take it in one of the service entrances and prop the door open.”
“We can’t do that,” said Howard. “Willis would kill us, hang our cold, dead bodies from the overhead crane, and after he was sure we’d been completely humiliated, then he’d fire us.”
Doc nodded somewhat impatiently. “It’s important. You’ll be followed. It’s just a boy.”
Howard glanced at Gary for feedback. He got none. “Why do you want to let a kid inside Triton?”
“I need you to distract him,” said Doc. “He’ll be looking for this.” Doc nodded toward the bundle. “Just keep him cool until I get back. Give him the runaround.”
Gary was cutting his eyes back and forth without moving his head, trying to see whoever was lurking in the darkness. “Did this kid cause that massive explosion at your place?”
“Not exactly,” said Doc.
“What if someone sees him?” asked Howard, biting his lower lip nervously.
“Doesn’t matter, as long as he doesn’t leave. Take this thing and go—and make sure he follows you.”
“How will we know?”
“He’s out there,” said Doc. “Right now. He’ll be on our tail.”
“Where are you going?”
“I need to find something,” said Doc, “and I think I know where to look for it. We’ll be back soon.”
“We?” Howard felt ill from nerves. “You’re not alone?”
“I’ll explain later. Just make it obvious.”
Howard watched Doc jog away into the trees. He glanced at Gary, who held his glance and shrugged.
Feeling slightly ridiculous, Howard swung the sack over his shoulder and called out in a loud voice, “Better get this thing inside.”
“Let’s take it through the freight dock,” bellowed Gary.
Something told Howard this wasn’t going to be as simple as Doc had made it sound.
* * *
Ezekiel crossed the open field and closed the distance to the buildings. This was going to be easier than he’d thought. He peeked around the corner of the building. One of the men was dragging the sack up a ramp onto a concrete platform while the other punched in an entry code on the keypad at the loading dock door. The door began rolling up, but the man stopped it after just a few feet. Both men ducked under.
Ezekiel sprinted for the door, which was already starting to close. Just before he made it to the platform, the door halted a foot above the floor. Strange, but helpful. He climbed the ramp, staying close to the building and crouched to look inside. It was too dark to see anything. He heard the men talking, already far away, as if muffled by another door inside.
The door lurched into motion again, and he rolled under it. It rumbled down behind him, leaving him in complete darkness. He felt around but found only the cold, bare floor, so he crawled in a straight line until he ran up against the opposite wall.
Back on his feet, he followed the wall until he came to a doorway. It had no handle, and no light leaked around the edges, but he spied a dim dot of red light—a security scanner pad. He felt all around the edges of the door, but he couldn’t find any way to open it.
He felt his way back around the room to the loading door and tried to force it back up, but it was shut tight, with not even a crack of light along the bottom where the rubber seal pressed hard against the floor. If he banged on it with his fists, he thought he could probably get someone’s attention, but maybe that someone wouldn’t be so happy to see him.
The security panel beside the inner door felt like a flat pad attached to the wall. He couldn’t get a fingernail under it. He untied the laces on his backpack and dug a screwdriver out of his pouch of tools. If he could pry off the cover, he could short out the main contacts and bypass the coded lock, although that might be dangerous in the dark because he could accidentally touch the high-voltage wires.
“You’re a resourceful young man,” said a man in a deep, calm voice.
Chapter 11
North Star Laboratory
Ezekiel spun around wielding his screwdriver like a dagger, but he fumbled it and it clattered to the floor.
“Did I startle you? My apologies.”
Had he said “young man”? In the pitch-black darkness, how could anyone see how old he was? Ezekiel wasn’t sure if he should speak. As long as he remained silent, he could hide his identity.
“My name is Dr. Nigel Willis. I’m the chief scientist of this facility.”
His voice reverberated off the walls, making it difficult for Ezekiel to locate him.
“You needn’t worry. I don’t intend to detain you. In fact, you’re free to go at any time.”
The interior door clicked open, admitting an angled wedge of light from a series of amber lamps near the floor along a descending tunnel. The sack the two men had carried into the building sat a few feet away.
Dr. Willis wore all black: a business suit with matching black shirt and tie, a black scarf hung loosely around his neck, and dark, opaque sunglasses. The dim, glowing lights reflected off his polished shoes. His face was beardless, and his h
airline cut neatly over his ears.
“I’ve been expecting you.” He spoke in a low, calm voice, barely disturbing the frigid atmosphere, emitting faint curls of vapor.
“No one knew I was coming here,” said Ezekiel. “Not even me.”
“It was inevitable that some day you would find your way. Cause and effect.”
Ezekiel narrowed his eyes. “Do I know you?”
“Not exactly. But I know you, although it has been a very long time.”
Huh. “I don’t remember you.”
“Understandable. You were very young.”
“Okay. Well, I’ve got to go now. You know, Mom’s waiting.” Ezekiel edged around Dr. Willis toward the tunnel. He had no intention of leaving without the QuARC.
As soon as he lifted the sack, he knew he’d been tricked. He dumped the rusty train parts on to the hard floor. “Where is it?”
“If you’re speaking of the device that drained our power earlier today, I wish I knew,” said Dr. Willis. “I suspect you’ve been chasing a decoy.”
Ezekiel dropped his tools back into his backpack and hung it on one shoulder. “Then I’m in the wrong place. I need to find the real thing.”
“You are the son of Dimitris Kapopoulos.”
Ezekiel froze. He searched Dr. Willis’s face for clues to this sudden turn of topics, but Dr. Willis’s dark lenses prevented his eyes from affirming or betraying his claim.
“I knew your father,” Dr. Willis continued. “You don’t know me. I’m not here to tell you I’m your special, long-lost friend, a missing uncle, or any other such nonsense. I’m here because I think we need each other.”
More deals. Why did everyone want to make some kind of a deal with him?
“I don’t know who you are, but I don’t need help right now,” Ezekiel said. “I’ve got stuff to do.”
It was tough enough to stay warm and find something to eat every day—he didn’t have time for this touchy-feely nonsense. He’d deliver the QuARC to the Chairman, collect his pay, and get back the trailer or find a warm hole to crawl into and get some sleep.
“I was present when your father ceased to exist.”
A shockwave surged through Ezekiel. His blood turned to ice water. “You mean . . . when he died.” He swallowed hard. Why was his throat suddenly so dry? “You can say it—that he died. I don’t remember him much. My mother thinks he’s still alive, but I don’t believe it.”
“You could say that he died. Death was certainly the effective outcome. But death implies some kind of remains, some dissipation of life from its physical host. No, in fact, I quite literally mean he ceased to exist in both body and spirit. It was an unfortunate accident, if you believe in such things.”
“Believe in what?”
“Accidents.” Dr. Willis barely moved as he spoke. He occasionally pressed his fingertips together, but then he would drop his hands to his sides again, standing stiff as a statue. “Like you, I’m a scientist, and as I said, I believe in cause and effect. Accidents are simply the unpredicted outcome of a known cause.”
Ezekiel took a step backward. “Are you saying my father was murdered?”
“Murder is a brutal concept. It implies malevolent intent. The phenomenon we call an accident is more commonly the result of negligence or incompetence. One error leads to another, which leads to a critical failure. Harm is the result.”
“I already know he died in an accident. I’ve known that my whole life.”
And that was all he knew. No one had ever been able to tell him what happened, or how, or who caused it, not even his mother. The memorial service was something a two-year-old could not remember, except that his mother was upset that there had been no body. Without physical proof, she had never accepted his death.
“As I said, I was present,” Dr. Willis repeated.
Ezekiel felt as if daggers ripped through his gut. “It was you?”
“No, not me,” said Dr. Willis. “However, I regret I was unable to intercede.”
Stunned, Ezekiel retreated another step. He felt pinned under the weight of these revelations. He shifted his stance and drew a shaky breath.
“How much do you know about your father’s research?” Dr. Willis asked.
“Only that he was working on some new way to make power.”
Dr. Willis hummed his acknowledgement and smoothed his tie. “For months, we had cloistered ourselves like monks in a small control room, monitoring our instruments. In the adjacent reaction core, twelve laser-like particle beams converged from all directions at a single point in space. We hypothesized that the particles would batter each other into faster and faster vibrations until they shattered into shards of pure energy.” He pressed his fists together and then popped them open. “Like stars exploding in a pocket universe.”
“So what—”
“Permit me to continue, and you’ll soon know everything I can tell you. We were absorbed in our experiment. We had lost all sense of time and couldn’t have told you whether it was Tuesday or Sunday, daytime or night. We stopped only when sleep became irresistible.”
Dr. Willis fell silent, apparently lost in thought. Ezekiel struggled to remain patient, suppressing an eruption of burning questions.
“One morning, your father returned to the lab after one such rest. He’d been working on a modification to our apparatus, hoping to prevent a dangerous side effect from recurring after an earlier test had seriously damaged the equipment. He arrived to find that his research partner, Dr. David Freeman, had started the experiment again without the new component. After a brief argument with Dr. Freeman, your father noticed an aberration on the video monitor his partner had been too busy to notice.
“Every second, the instruments collected enough data to fill a library, mapping the showers of particles and radiating waves of energy. It was like counting and measuring each raindrop in a thunderstorm, and Dr. Freeman had been scrutinizing the deluge of information for signs of success, any evidence that the experiment was beginning to release more energy than it was consuming.”
As Dr. Willis unspooled the story, Ezekiel imagined the scene.
* * *
Dr. Kapopoulos remained glued to the video monitor. A spot at the center of the reaction chamber had grown to engulf the point of light. The beams streamed their energy into darkness.
“Take a look at this,” he said to Dr. Freeman.
Dr. Freeman broke away from what he was doing and rolled his desk chair alongside his friend’s. “Let’s make sure it’s not a sensor problem. Switch to another view.”
But each camera showed the same image from every angle. As they panned from side to side, up and down, the expanding blank sphere remained stationary, suspended midair inside the core.
“Any radiation?” asked Dr. Freeman.
“None,” Dr. Kapopoulos said. “No trajectories plot back to those coordinates. Looks like anything that fires in that direction just vanishes.”
Dr. Freeman traced an imaginary line across the display with his finger.
“We should shut it down,” said Dr. Kapopoulos.
“Let’s capture some more data, then power down gradually,” said Dr. Freeman. “I don’t want to destabilize the field. We can’t afford to fry any more gear.”
Dr. Kapopoulos abruptly pushed back from the monitor. “I need a closer look.” He keyed his access code into the pad by the heavy lead door leading to the core.
“Wait! Your wristwatch,” Dr. Freeman called. “The superconducting magnets will rip that right through you like shrapnel.”
Dr. Kapopoulos removed his watch and tossed it to Dr. Freeman. The lead door swung shut behind him with a muffled thump.
The core was strangely silent despite the trillions of matter-shattering collisions raging like a cosmic thunderstorm within the apparatus. The noisy cooling and generating equipment operated in a separate building to isolate physical vibrations that could misalign the beams. Dr. Kapopoulos had to exercise extreme care to step through the tan
gle of pipes and cables without disturbing anything. In the few seconds it took him to reach the convergence point, the shimmering sphere had grown to the size of a golf ball.
“At least it’s not a black hole,” he said to Dr. Freeman over the intercom.
“Definitely not,” Dr. Freeman said. “No gravitational field whatsoever, and no measurable deflection on the particle trajectories.”
Dr. Kapopoulos flipped a pair of broadband glasses down over his eyes to enable him to detect light outside of the range of the human eye. “It’s absolutely dark. I don’t detect any variations in brightness, but I do see it growing.” He squinted, as if expecting to see inside or through the disembodied shadow. “It’s like looking into absolute nothingness.”
“Watch your step—it’s still expanding.” Dr. Freeman’s voice was distorted to a squawk by the intercom.
“Better shut it down now,” said Dr. Kapopoulos with a first hint of nervousness.
“I did,” said Dr. Freeman. “I already hit the kill switch, but the power is still increasing. It seems to be in a feedback loop. Unbelievable, this thing has become self-sustaining. Get out of there before it breaches.”
As the expanding black bubble began to reach equipment inside the lab, blinding flashes of white light flashed across its surface. Dr. Kapopoulos couldn’t tear his eyes away.
“Still growing?” he asked.
“Yes, and it’s accelerating,” said Dr. Freeman, clicking and typing wildly at his workstation.
“Zero point.” Dr. Kapopoulos held his left arm across his chest and propped his chin on his right hand as he always did when methodically thinking his way through a problem. “It must be consuming dark matter.”
Dr. Freeman didn’t respond, racing through screens full of equations. Then he stopped, turned pale, and shouted, “Get out of there!”