A thrill ran down Zac’s spine as the wave swelled, its momentum steady as it reached toward them. The hue of the wave started to brighten into a glossy electric purple, and its crest shimmered with beads of light beginning to crystallize at the peak.
“This is new,” Walter said. “What’s with the white reflections there? Are we doing ornaments?”
“Not ornaments,” Mark said. “That’s how the sim interprets a metaphor for consciousness.”
“Seriously?” Walter turned to face him. “What are we doing?” He made a tick of annoyance at the back of his throat. “Are we making this an entertainment?”
“An entertainment?” Jin said in self-defense.
Mark jumped in quickly. “Jin and I agreed that for the sim to be absolutely true, we had to account for the way human consciousness interacts with wave-function collapse when we observe.”
“Zac’s math does that by itself, without all this extraneous ornamentation,” Walter said.
Mark drew in a lungful of air. “The math doesn’t illustrate this”—he pointed at the flutter of mercury beads forming in the image—“the way quantum entanglement draws our consciousness, our emotion, into the interaction.”
“I know what it’s supposed to show,” Walter said. “I just disagree.”
Zac rotated his chair. “Disagree with what?”
Walter stuffed his hands into the pockets of his coveralls. “With the prettification of science. I don’t think adding this kind of thing helps our case.”
Jin shook his head. “The sim has to translate raw data and render it visually so we can see what’s happening. It can’t help it if it’s pretty.”
“Those so-called ornaments are … us,” Mark said. “It’s the best the sim can do to translate the metaphor.”
“All right,” Walter said, “that’s one philosophy.”
Zac focused on the screen. A second wave grew in the background. The newcomer reared up and charged toward a collision point. As both swells rose and morphed into galvanic purple, different hues of color stacked into the space, creating a shifting iridescent spectrum like an oil slick pattern on the face of the waves. At their crowns, the mirrored beads fired in rolling electrical bursts of successively greater intensity. The enormous spectral waves nearly overtook the dimensions of the screen, and in the final moment, they slammed face against face, and the image burst into a blaze of colors swirling, splintering fragments forming lines that ended in crackling, light-spitting points like sparklers that then zoomed inward and locked into a radiating wheel around a central pinpoint.
“There’s the black hole!” Mark said.
The wheel shrank inward in an instant, all the lines seeming to turn inside out. They contracted into a tiny black dot hovering in the middle of the screen.
“Wow!” Walter said. “We have it! It’s there!”
The wavering gray pattern of the spacetime sea faded in around the black dot and slowly began to stretch and circle with the instigation of the black hole’s rotation.
“Incredible,” Walter said. He turned to Mark. “Tell me how good the relationship is.”
Mark entered a series of keystrokes. The four men fidgeted, waiting for the answer to resolve. “Our sim … established the angle of collision at ninety-one degrees, which matches the other data sets …” One more keystroke, and Mark said, “At ninety-nine point six eight percent. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a bouncing baby black hole.”
The guys cheered. Walter smacked his hands together. “You were spot on, Zac! You said it would happen, and it did!”
“Whew!” Jin laughed. “It stinks like a fucking paragon in here, doesn’t it?” He gave Zac a brotherly slug on the arm and turned to Walter. “And you wanted to send him back to India again.”
The men fell into uncomfortable silence. India was where Zac had been in the weeks leading up to Korrie’s abduction. The trip was part of the idea that he would be the fresh-faced genius who would draw attention to the U.S. contribution to the project, that he would team with his counterparts in India as their facility came online. Walter had pushed him hard to step up, even if it meant being gone for weeks. Zac had harbored qualms about the politics of it and about being away from home for Korrie’s birthday, but eventually, he’d accepted the promotion. Walter had said something about how the needs of science could not be sacrificed for the quotidian comforts of animal existence. And thus, Zac had thought, the man remains self-contained and unencumbered.
Zac had confided in the guys about his struggle with the idea that if he’d come home sooner from Hingoli, or if he’d never gone in the first place, things might have been different. As it turned out, his flight home arrived just after Korrie was taken.
Jin softened the awkwardness. “I think this calls for something spectacular. I might have a protein bar over there somewhere.” The guys chuckled lightly. “Seriously,” he added, “this is truly mind-blowing. Maybe we should all say to hell with it and spring for a bag of pretzels.” Zac appreciated the way Jin was trying to restore the balance as he retreated to his dock.
Zac focused his mind on the stunning nature of the thing in front of him—the spinning black dot in the center of a field of spacetime—the fact that because of what was happening today, the universe made more sense now than at any time since Einstein.
Walter took a seat and started ticking off steps on his fingers. “So next,” he said, “a time line. I can do all of the media.”
Briefly, Zac felt his own time line zoom into focus. He recalled that evening when he was a kid with his dad at Berkeley. They’d locked the prep-room door behind them and then stopped in the upper atrium so Zac could lean over the railing and look down to the ground floor where the massive T-Rex mount stood a story high, and he could almost reach the wing tip of the soaring pteranodon suspended above it.
“People are always impressed with the big ones,” his father said, and it would take until now for Zac to understand why his father had sounded so sad when he said it. He spent decades preserving the least flashy specimens in the collection and going without recognition, because he was a quiet man who wouldn’t crow about himself.
Zac’s father was a man of few words, whereas Walter was a man of several thousand. He could launch into a monologue from which there was no escape. He talked everyone into submission. “But first, Schacht,” he was saying, “I suppose there’s no way to show her a stripped-down version of the sim …”
As Walter began to hammer his mark onto the guys’ accomplishment, Zac was swept with nostalgia for his youth with his father. He wished he could go there now. When Zac was seven, he and his father went to see Jurassic Park on its opening day, and Zac was spellbound. There was nothing he wanted after that but to live on that island and experience firsthand the terror and beauty of those creatures he loved more than anything.
A few weeks later, he plunged into a deep despair that it could never be real. Over time, he developed a belief that soothed him: the view that as the decay of the universe accelerated, it would bring closer its eventual collapse inward on itself until the whole thing would start fresh and the dinosaurs would be reborn.
“Yes,” his father said, “wouldn’t that be amazing? But time is tricky. You can’t know what mischief it might get into.”
Eventually, Zac changed direction. He knew how difficult it was for his father to watch as he drifted away from paleontology and toward physics and the science of time, but when he talked to his father about his future, the advice his father gave him was to pursue whatever kept him up at night. Then, he said, it would be like celestial navigation; no matter what happened on the open ocean, he’d know he was headed in the right direction.
Now Walter barged into Zac’s reverie. “… for another analyst on my grant,” he was saying, “We can have a quick call with Burke at Defense and then with CalTech. If you want, you can be on that call.”
“Wait,” Zac interrupted, “what are you talking about?”
“Making th
e announcement, getting more people,” Walter said, “and more money.” He sat with his hands in a triangle in front of his chest. “First, I’ll run some numbers.”
“But we’re getting ahead of ourselves,” Zac said. He felt unnerved by the way Walter was pouncing, taking this stunning moment and tainting it with his ambition. “We haven’t even reconfigured yet. The black hole isn’t even an hour old.”
“We’ve got enough to start.”
Zac’s voice formed an angry edge. “To start what?” In his peripheral vision, he saw Mark and Jin look over from their monitors. “This was the moment of formation. What about its evolution? What about what comes next?”
Jin angled himself in his chair, looking uncomfortable. All that was visible now of Mark was the dome of his cap.
Walter squared himself as he faced Zac head-on. “What exactly are you worried will happen?” Before Zac could answer, he continued, “You’re just a worrier. Okay. But the math is solid.” He pointed to the image of the sim at rest, the black hole spinning, spacetime softly rippling on the screen. “There’s all you need to see to know that.”
Zac’s father stepped out of the background and into the forefront of his mind. “Time is tricky. You can’t know what kind of mischief it might get into.”
Zac had never felt such strong conflict with Walter before. He had always let him take the lead, but now he had to oppose him. “I need us to wait,” he said. “We have to see what happens.”
Walter looked toward Jin and then over at Mark. Neither raised their eyes to meet his gaze. “I suppose,” Walter said, somewhat deflated. “We can wait. Schacht can wait. We’ll see what happens.”
“Thanks,” Zac said. “Good.” And then after another moment, he said, “Thank you” again. There was something familiar about Walter’s disappointment, something that made Zac feel juvenile. He pushed back against it. Walter was not the man his father was. Not even close.
“Hey,” Jin said. He sent something to the big screen. A GIF appeared, a looping clip of a cartoon cat, pacing. “This is you, Fully.” He and Mark laughed, and Walter cracked a smile. The Clean Room became placid again, the surface glassy and untroubled.
Chapter Twenty-One
12:45 PM
Sunday, June 20, 2021 | Baseline Road
Erin skidded along the snow-packed roads, unable to think through the fog of the quandary, infuriated and on the verge of screaming or crying, not knowing where she was going. She stopped when the road dead-ended into a deserted lot on the shore of Valmont Lake. She watched a pair of geese settle on the thin ice that ringed the water, wind ruffling their feathers.
She had to go find him. Clype. Her hands tightened on the wheel and turned white. The hatred she’d worked so hard to resolve began to take shape again. It had burned through her and turned her inside out, and now it was back. She had to go find the man she hated more than she’d ever thought she could hate anyone. She had to find him and, so, find Korrie.
“What do I know for sure?” she said aloud.
She knew that this winter interval was the fourth one she’d been through. Zac had said he would be involved with the phenomenon for the entire day, so it seemed probable that there would be more shifting back and forth.
She had the few facts Tom Drake had given her as he updated her about the investigation, and now it helped her feel stronger to put her thoughts in order. She knew where Clype had taken Korrie from. She’d eventually learned that he’d kept her with him and driven around the city until mid-afternoon, and then he’d disappeared. No one knew what happened in the time between that point and the next day when Korrie’s body was discovered in Boulder Mountain Park near a hiking trail. The autopsy showed that Clype had poisoned her with oxycodone, the residue of the red pills still in her stomach. After the investigation ended, Korrie’s file was closed, and the missing pieces were never found. Very little was known about her final hours except that he’d given her the pills three to four hours before her breathing and her heartbeat stopped. She’d died sometime around nine o’clock at night. Her body had been moved to the place where it was found the next day, but the investigators never found out where she had been moved from, because Clype had died a short time later and taken all those facts with him.
So Erin did not know where Clype was taking Korrie now. All she knew was the area where he’d left her. That was all she had to go on.
She stiffened her resolve, turned the car around, and drove out of the lot. With a shift in the light like the change to a different key in music, summer returned. In one sense, she felt grateful to be back in the time where she belonged, but she also felt the perplexity that she was months and months farther from where she had to go.
Everything Tom had told her was still stored in her mind, though Dr. Tanner had tried to direct her away from all of it because it set her back to imagine the thousand ways things could have been different. Korrie’s body had been discovered by two cross-country skiers. They’d been heading south from Realization Point. The snow had let up, the air was clear. They crossed an old mining road and started down a slope when they saw her.
There had been a phase in Erin’s grief when she’d let herself get lost in private fabrications of what she wished for. In one of these, she had almost wanted to meet the skiers. She’d imagined herself sitting with Tom Drake, interviewing the two of them, Camille and Brandon. She wanted to ask the young woman how she’d known it was Korrie. Was there some presence she’d sensed there? Had she felt something? But when Erin ran through it in her mind, it was obvious it was merely resistance. In the imagined interview, she might have asked about the other vehicles Camille and Brandon could have seen before they left the parking area. She would have gently inquired about the schedule the two of them had followed that day and whether they could have gotten there earlier. Because if they’d only gotten there sooner—then what? No matter when they found her, it was already too late. That’s how the daydreams always ended. Too late.
Now, with only a small handful of facts, Erin turned her mind to where she had to go. She needed to head back toward Flagstaff. That would get her to Realization Point, and she could search from there for the old mining road the skiers had passed. Tom Drake told her it had been closed to traffic long ago when the mine was shut down. So that was what she had to find. Once she was there, it would be winter, and she could search for the man who had her daughter.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Day After The Day Of: Saturday, February 8, 2020 | Boulder Mountain Park
A couple of cross-country skiers had discovered the body of a child at approximately 1:00 PM. Tom Drake had been sent to Boulder Mountain Park to respond, and he was going to be the first officer on scene.
He checked himself in his rearview as he set out, and he looked okay, but he was in no way ready for this. After eight weeks of medical leave, he’d thought he’d have his police powers restored and then be a house mouse for another eight weeks, but they’d sent him out on this call on his second day back. They probably didn’t have the slightest idea how he would react to it.
Nobody knew about him; but everybody knew. That was the thing of it. Cops either had to grow a cynical gallows sense of humor or the job would ravage them, and Tom had been deteriorating for a long time, continually battered by what the priests in catechism had called “sins that cried to heaven for vengeance,” malice and depravity, when what he hoped for was mercy and salvation.
Nobody knew what it had meant to him that a creeper had slipped away from him. It had happened at the end of summer when he’d been called to the children’s story time at the library because an adult male was loitering, setting off the library staff. Tom arrived to a room filled to capacity with children sitting cross-legged and silent. At the back of the stacks stood a disheveled male in his thirties, eying the children. What Tom saw was the man’s appetite. He looked ravenous. Tom started toward the individual and made eye contact with him, but then his body overreacted and he charged toward
the man. The entire roomful of children got spooked and flittered up like leaves in the wind. Tom couldn’t make his way through their pandemonium, and the man decamped out a rear exit. Tom made his way around the children and burst out the door, but the man was gone. He looked for him but never found him.
Tom wrote up the report as a simple “be on the lookout,” but in his heart, he believed he’d brushed up against someone truly malevolent and then let him run loose in a world of innocents. A few days later, a child went missing from the Pearl Street Mall and was never found. Tom’s symptoms deepened then, and he worked hard to hide them from Internal Affairs. Even so, everybody treated him like an invalid because they could tell there was something wrong with him, even if they didn’t know what it was.
At the end of his leave of absence, he’d paid five hundred dollars for his One-Day Test Out in Commerce City. The testing was on a rare day when his shakes were under control. If it had been on a different day, he might have failed the whole thing.
Now he was back on the job, and the irony was not lost on him that he’d been the one to get this call. The snow had stopped falling. The white hills were unblemished, and the sky was cloudless. He approached the scene at the juncture of an abandoned mining roadway and the Bluebell Trail. The couple who had made the discovery waited in the crisp sunshine.
Tom identified himself. The skiers acknowledged him and directed him down the hillside. Perhaps twenty paces off the side of the trail, in a semicircle of ponderosa pine, lay an army-style duffel bag half buried in snow. He told them to stay where they were, and he followed the tracks of their skis toward what he believed would be the body of Korrie Fullarton, age six, reported missing the day before.
The minor quaking he’d fought to control on the way there was now a full-out tremor. It made it difficult to snap on his pair of rubber gloves. He scanned the fresh snowfield for evidence, but he saw nothing as he approached the duffel bag. Treading carefully, trying not to disturb the immediate surroundings, he proceeded until he stood next to her. There was no movement.
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