“That’s a little nerve-racking, Jin,” Zac said. “Let’s run a test on the monitor after this data set.”
Walter said, “Maybe it just doesn’t appreciate art.” He smiled to himself.
Zac called Walter’s attention to the other side of the split screen. “But here is what we think happens to the gravitational waves that fall into the black hole.” He took a step back and folded his arms. The others realigned with him.
The perspective of the sim behaved as if the viewer were flowing atop a current, surfing a purple wave through the glittering photon sphere and onward over the dark waterfall of the event horizon. The momentum of the wave elongated into a cascade and then prismed into bright strings of color. The brilliancy lasted only for an instant before darkness swallowed the strings and the screen became nearly black, with only the rush of quivering dark helixes corkscrewing inward toward the center. Tiny obsidian beads glinted and ricocheted within each helix. As the rush toward the core accelerated, another dimension formed. While one edge of each helix continued traveling inward, the other edge began to travel backward, and in the middle, the flecks of obsidian split into spinning pairs and whirled away from each other.
The men watched, checking each other’s faces like fascinated children. At the core of the black hole, a pinpoint of white appeared. The black helixes smoothed out and stretched toward it, the drag of the rotation pulling them inward in a pattern like the sectioned interior of a black nautilus shell.
Walter said. “Will someone explain how this Hollywood stuff is even relevant?”
“It won’t be beautiful,” Mark said, “if it has to be explained.” He waited for a second, as if Walter might concede, but when he didn’t, Mark continued. “Nevertheless, the algorithm makes the visual metaphor. Entropy increases until the temperature shifts at the value of the golden ratio.”
Walter tucked up one corner of his mouth. “A nautilus shell doesn’t actually follow the golden ratio.”
Jin stood taller in defense of his work. “But this black hole will, Walter. If you had the imagination to see it. This is what precedes quantum tunneling. The whole thing we’re looking for.”
“All right.” Walter turned to Jin, with his brows pulled together. “Let’s not get bristly. I’m just saying—” He let his complaint fade off as he redirected his focus to the screen.
Zac tried to segue back into the math where Walter felt at ease. “The golden ratio will show when the black hole geometry decays, when quantum tunneling allows the transition to the white hole. Then, within the white hole, time itself will reverse.”
The white point became a spinning sphere, and the dozens of surfaces within the shell shape took on the appearance of mirrors, reflecting the point over and over into infinity. The chambers of the shell mirrored each other, brightened, turned inside out, and unspooled in the opposite direction. In a dizzying reverse blast, the mirrors refracted with the color spectrum. The screen illuminated to peak radiance. Then it flooded with white. All movement settled and slowed. The long stretch of the smooth, creamy surface rippled gently into the distant perspective. “The white hole,” Mark said, “in all its glory.” Tiny fiery particles of light glittered atop the ripples.
“Still with the consciousness there, I guess, huh?” Walter sounded as if he were trying to be accommodating.
Zac nodded. “Everything plays its part.” A rich sense of fulfillment came over him. The sim was giving them a preview of what should start to happen in only a few minutes’ time, and his system flooded with a pleasurable anticipation. “And eventually, as the time-reversed white hole decays and entropy increases, all of the energy will be expelled into some version of the future.”
The luster of the wavelets rising and falling cast a peaceful glow over the room. Walter was silent, head down, blinking with his thoughts. Finally, he said, “This rendering is very artistic. It’s a beautiful little story, I grant you that, guys. But how do I use it to get everyone on board?” No one said anything. “Seriously, how do I present this in terms of nuts and bolts? How do I go into a meeting and own this?”
Zac glanced at Mark and shared a moment of understanding with him. Here they stood. With Zac’s time crystal and his model, with Mark’s technical mastery and Jin’s artistry, they had unraveled a great secret of the physical world. Time did not work like a machine any more than consciousness worked like a computer. Time and the mind were like waves and the sea, aspects of each other and inseparable.
“Walter,” Mark said, “it doesn’t have anything to do with nuts and bolts. You don’t have to own it. You simply gaze in wonder with the rest of us.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
2:31 PM
Sunday, June 20, 2021 | Boulder Mountain Park
Erin saw nothing remarkable in either direction, just the wind moving through the fading grass of midsummer, typical mountain brush and rock. She’d stopped at twenty paces down the slope of the trail. To her right stood the half-circle of ponderosa pines. Young trees in pale new plumage, as yet unaffected by beetle kill. She checked her phone. 2:31. She braced herself for the cold, snowy afternoon ahead as she waited through the hot, dry, buzzing seconds until the time shift came.
The world slipped into a winter’s twilight. All of a sudden, the day was nearly gone. Erin’s mind took a second to catch up. Silvery-gray flakes surrounded her, and the ground was soft beneath the soles of her boots, where she stood in the cushion of a two-foot snowfall. It was dusk. Her heart geared higher.
She’d skipped hours.
The young trees stood in the unbroken stretch of white before her. Somewhere here was the spot where he had left her, would leave her before morning. She looked at the white hollow beneath the ponderosas. A confused rage rose inside her. How could he do that to her? Do what he did and then leave her out here? And how can this place look so ordinary? It should have looked like a shrine, but it was as plain as any other patch of snow in these hills.
She pushed her questions aside because now it was up to her to make sure none of that was going to happen. She focused on what she had to do next and scanned the terrain around her. The wind had let up, and the snowfall was diminishing. There were no signs that anyone else had been here, nothing unusual. Except that she’d been thrown back into the past again, but further forward in that past day, somehow.
She looked deep into the woods in the fading light. When she woke her phone, a red warning flashed that the battery was low. Between flashes, the time blinked white on the background image of Korrie’s face. 5:32. Moments ago, it had been mid-afternoon. Now suddenly, it was past sundown. How had she jumped so much in time?
The coroner’s voice dropped into her mind. At one point in the anarchy of those days after Korrie’s death, Rebecca Kincaid had said, “We think he had her ingest them three to four hours prior.” Now suddenly it was the window of time when Clype would give Korrie the pills.
Erin refused to let panic take over. She stomped through the drifts of snow to the roadway and stood at the edge. The wide tracks of a truck ran down the middle. Him? Her mind grappled with the thought. Were they from him? Was she in the right place? Maybe, but now she faced a deeper problem with time. The pills.
She turned toward the east because Tom Drake had hypothesized that Korrie’s body was placed near the trail as Clype left the abandoned road and headed back toward the major arteries into town. She ran along the wake of the tracks, her boots squeaking against the snow as she shivered in the failing light, and she scanned the hillside on either side of the road. As it grew darker, the hollows between the hills became deeper, and her line of sight became shorter.
Wheezing, she eased up. Her breath floated white in the air and disappeared. Her phone read “No Service” and flashed the red low-battery alert. How far should she follow these tracks, not knowing if they were his? She held her breath, hoping to hear something, anything. It was frightening, the sense of being out here alone, exposed to whatever might wait in all that stillness.
>
She ran, perhaps a quarter of a mile, until something ahead of her drew her attention. Halfway up one of the hills, a yellow gleam of incandescence stood out sharply through the trees. She ran closer until the light vanished behind the slope of the hills. When she thought she was as near as she could get without passing where she’d seen that yellow glow, she started up the white hillside.
She picked her way through the bare aspens and up the snowy incline. It was hard work climbing the cold upslope through the waves of snow. She was winded when she reached a rise and looked up. Squares of light shone from an old, derelict building shoved up against the rock of the mountain. Could this be something? It was evening. On a closed road. So there were no homes up here. Who would have lights on up here now? She tried harder to keep her steps quiet in the creaking snow as apprehension spidered over her skin. She pressed on until she reached the level ground the building sat on.
There was a pickup truck in front of the structure. With hunter’s flashers and a plow. She’d followed this black truck to the school. The jolt made her stagger.
She crept closer and angled toward the back of it. That bumper sticker was plastered on the tailgate. She couldn’t read it from where she stood, but she knew what it said because she’d already seen it. That morning, she’d been only a car’s length away, only a moment behind. She pressed her hands against her forehead and looked past the truck at the light coming from the windows of the building. Korrie, Korrie, she thought, are you in there? She took a step forward.
A blast of heat and flame unfolded around her. Thick molten light and black smoke walled her in, howling fire on the wind. All shock and reflex, she turned and ran through the hot gaps between the blazing trees. Choking vapor curled around her face. She gasped for air. Tall flames crackled, and trees exploded in her path, but she kept running. Her eyes burned.
She charged through the flaring grove, down the roiling hillside. The earth loosened beneath her feet, and she slipped down the embankment into the ravine at the side of the old road. She sprang back up and ran.
Massive walls of fire leapt upward on both sides of the road. She raced down the center. Pines erupted into forty-foot torches. Heat baked the air. A burst of embers pelted the road in front of her. She charged forward, the battered asphalt before her blurred by smoke. Flaming branches crashed onto the road. She dodged them, in terror of her clothes catching fire.
A sudden roar of wind shoved her sideways toward the wall of flame, and she staggered back to the center of the road. A tree trunk smashed down beside her like a Roman candle, sparks geysering outward. She swerved around it and raced onward. The wind whipped up a cyclone of flame that whirled around her.
Ahead, a patch of clear light appeared through the smoke. Bonfires of fallen beetle-kill flamed in the middle of the road, and she ran on, clinging to the edge of the shoulder. Gasping, she reached the border where the smoke thinned and the light shone.
When she cleared the darkest of the cindered air, she slowed and wiped her stinging eyes with the sleeve of her hoodie. She breathed the air. Reaching a safe place beyond the fire, under the blue cliff of an afternoon sky, she stopped and looked back at the massive shifting undersea of gray smoke. She couldn’t understand how this had happened. Now she had no idea where she was, or rather when she was, or what to do, but she knew she had to get back, back to where she’d been, to find out if Korrie was in that building.
PART III
The White Hole
Chapter Twenty-Seven
3:00 PM
Sunday, June 20, 2021 | National Institute of Standards and Technology
Zac sat at his dock in the motionless, pristine limbo of the Clean Room. While Walter grumbled in front of a monitor, typing, deleting, with noises of discontent apparently designed to draw attention to his effort, Mark and Jin worked on silently, heads squared to their monitors, foreheads tensed with exertion.
Zac replayed again and again the snippets of the sim’s stutter. Now that he was looking for them, he’d found more. There were six. Every time they’d reconfigured the simulation, a new one had appeared.
“Hey, Mark,” he said, “could you come here?”
Mark scooted around the corner of his dock in his chair, spinning it in a pirouette as he rolled toward Zac. “You rang?”
“I’ve been looking at these stutter points.” He nodded toward the black glass. “And I have a terrible thought.”
“Wow, sounds painful.” Mark smiled.
“When I built the model,” Zac continued, “I structured it so that after each waveform passed, the baseline would return to zero.”
“Right.” Mark nodded and raised his eyebrows in assent.
“Because all of our instruments return to zero after each wave.”
“Correctamente.”
“The detectors return to their initial state.”
“And so …” Mark said, rolling his hands around each other, urging Zac to get to his point.
“But spacetime doesn’t.”
Mark’s eyes shifted downward, and he blinked hard with recalculation.
“It never returns to its original state,” Zac continued, “and I think that’s where the stutter is coming from. At first, I thought it was screen tearing on the monitor or an error in the sim, but now I think it’s the sim just showing us what it sees. I think those stutter points are gaps between where I zeroed out the model and the fact that spacetime never recovers after it’s torn by a gravitational wave.”
“You’re talking about the offset—”
“Exactly,” Zac said. “And so I have to strip out the part of the formula that brings the sim back to zero.” He began calculating the string of code he would need.
Mark said, “Damn.” He pushed back from Zac’s dock. “I see what you’re saying.”
“Jin,” Zac said, typing faster now. “Can you join?”
From his dock, Jin looked up and said, “What are you kids doing? Did you break it?”
Mark, straight-faced, said, “We need you in here now.”
“Shit.” Jin grinned. “You did. You broke the universe. I’m telling Mom.” When he still couldn’t get a laugh, he said, “What, guys?”
“Could you please join on Zac’s?” Mark said, and Jin scooted in to his keyboard and punched in his string of keystrokes.
Walter rose and hovered behind them.
“Okay, Jin,” Zac said. “Could you input this and see what things would look like then?”
“I suppose.” Jin’s fingers raced over his keyboard as he initiated the command to pull the code back into his application. “Hey, guys,” he said as he focused on it, “are you sure you want me to do this?”
“Please,” Mark said.
Walter began to pace. “So are we having problems, or are we just looking?”
“Just looking,” Mark answered, but he sounded tentative.
Zac could feel the tightness between his ribs as anxiety started to rise in him. He feared that the cause of the stutter was irreconcilable with the facts of existence as they knew them—that the sim was pointing out a flaw in their knowledge. We have no idea, he thought, what becomes of the time that is torn.
“One more sec.” Jin let out the soft warble of a bird whistle. “Almost rendered.” He hit a single stroke on his keyboard. “Minkowski,” he said. “I’m sending it now.”
The four men returned to the large monitor, and a moment later the pale froth of the unperturbed sim stretched out before them. A wave rose in the background, bled into purple, formed a beaded peak, and advanced toward them.
“So far, so good,” Walter said.
The wave reared to its greatest height, crested, and washed over the screen, and there, behind it, formed a black gap in the perturbed region of spacetime, and the interior walls of the gap were mirrored. Within their reflections, tiny beads of light plinked against the walls as if they were fighting to escape. After a second, the mottled gray force of the surface rushed over the gap, and it was gone
.
“What the hell?” Walter said. “What did you do to the sim?”
Zac realized he wasn’t breathing and drew air into his stagnant lungs. “We made it true,” he said. “True to life.”
“Explain whatever that was.” Walter’s face turned hard and white as a turnip.
Zac felt cornered. He said, “We stripped out the assumption that the disrupted time returns to its previous state. Because it doesn’t.”
Mark intervened, enunciating the revelation as it was dawning on him. “I think this is the way the sim registers loss. I think it’s trying to show us that the time that is ripped apart by the gravitational wave is permanently lost. What once existed is—obliterated.”
It occurred to Zac that there was something about this that made sense, something recognizable. He thought about when he was a kid at the beach, how he’d tried to understand the way the newer waves crashed over the fading wash of the older waves and erased them, how he used to build towns at the edge of the water on Black Sands Beach and watch the waves wash them away. When he was at Berkeley, he’d once written Erin’s name there. He remembered the time he’d nearly drowned when he was pulled beneath the surface and away from shore by the rip current.
The stiffness of Walter’s expression remained. “That’s not possible though.”
“I know,” Zac said. “That was my first thought.”
“Time can’t be destroyed,” Walter stated. “All of its quantum detail is perpetual. It can’t just be deleted from the cosmos.” He faced Mark. “But … you’re saying it will be.”
“Yes.” Mark answered.
“Go back, Jin,” Walter said. “Run that part again.”
Jin set the sim on a loop to show the rise of the wave, the crest, the appearance of the black gap and the beads of consciousness trying to break out, and then the flood of gray as it vanished.
“This is a disaster,” Walter said. There was a long minute of resigned silence from all four of them. Then Walter looked at them and said, “You’re sure about what we’re seeing?”
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