Hansen’s eyes narrowed in thought. “Maybe you’re beginning to rub off on me, but if they haven’t raided your old room yet, we can plant some things to misdirect them.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I get some black hair dye and some blond hair dye. You can cut your hair and dye it black here, while I leave an empty bottle of the blond hair dye in your old room to throw them off.”
Erin’s eyes brightened. “I like it,” she said. “Maybe we’re in the wrong line of work.” Then, with a broad grin she added, “And I like that I’m rubbing off on you. I guess we’ll just have to make sure we keep rubbing.”
27
HANSEN WAS STUNNED by the number of cars one could purchase for under a thousand dollars. There were dozens of them on the market in this general location. Some as low as three hundred and fifty dollars, which he didn’t get at all. It seemed to him they’d be worth more in scrap metal than that, but what did he know?
He found a twenty-year-old Chevy Malibu with over a hundred and seventy thousand miles on the odometer. It had faded and peeling electric-blue paint, stained, threadbare cloth seats, bald tires, crank-handle windows—one of which no longer cranked—and a nonworking air conditioner. It was hideous. If it had been a mythological figure it would have been named the Blue Medusa, and this is what he decided to call it. But on the bright side, it would allow them to remain completely off the grid. And it was only five hundred dollars, on the nose. The question was, would it actually still drive?
Hansen was relieved when he pulled it off the small slab of desert that served as a front yard to the seller’s run-down house. The car didn’t exactly purr like a kitten, but he was able to get it to sixty without any pieces falling off, so he was satisfied. If it could only continue to work for six or seven hundred miles they were in good shape.
As Hansen made his way to Walmart, his mind returned to his first meeting with Steve Fuller. And with someone who had called himself simply, Fermi.
* * *
HANSEN’S SENSES SLOWLY returned. He had no idea how much time had passed since his visitor, Steve Fallon—no, that wasn’t it—Steve Fuller, had jammed the business end of a needle into his leg. Just as he was about to open his eyes, Fuller waved smelling salts under his nose and he was jolted awake as though he had been hit with a cattle prod.
Hansen found himself in what looked like a glass conference room with a large oak table in the center. The man who had visited him lowered the smelling salts he had been holding and took a seat across from him at the table.
“Sorry about the abduction,” said Fuller. “But I think you’ll appreciate the necessity soon.”
“Where am I?”
“At a very secure, very secret facility. You haven’t been out for long. We used a private aircraft to fly you here from Pittsburgh.”
Hansen noted that his hands weren’t tied, nor was he restrained in any way. Was this really happening?
“What is this all about?” he demanded.
“It’s about your work, Mr. Hansen. You have some very unusual theories regarding quantum physics and quantum computing that are very much out of the mainstream.”
“If you think my theories are ridiculous, just say so. You won’t be the first. Or the hundredth. But you are the first to try kidnapping. You could have just sent a nasty e-mail and saved yourself some trouble.”
Fuller smiled. “I see you’re able to keep your sense of humor about this. Very admirable. But to continue, your unique outlook prompted you to search for a quantum signature in ways others would not have. And you found one. And you keep pressing about it. And pressing. And trying to convince other physicists around the world to take you seriously. You make a pit bull look like a toy poodle.”
“Yes, I’m stubborn. So what? I’m convinced that I’m right.”
Steve Fuller leaned forward and considered his guest for several seconds. “You are right, Mr. Hansen. There is no doubt about it. Or can I call you Kyle?”
Hansen stared at him. “You can call me anything you like if you can tell me why you’re so convinced I’m right.”
“Because you’re picking up an actual, working quantum computer. One that works on principles based on your evolving theory. The only one on Earth. One brought here by four aliens from a planet thirty-seven light years away.”
Hansen shook his head as if to clear it. He opened his mouth to speak.
Fuller held out a forestalling hand. “This is a bold statement. So I would expect a certain degree of skepticism.” He nodded through the glass wall at a man who had been standing outside the room, still as a lizard. Hansen had been so off balance and so focused on what Fuller was saying he hadn’t even noticed him.
The man walked into the room and took a seat beside Steve Fuller. He looked very average: average height, weight, and coloring. No remarkable features good or bad. Thinning hairline. About forty years old. But there was something off in the way he walked, the way he sat, the way he carried himself. Hansen couldn’t put a finger on it, but it made him slightly uneasy.
When no one spoke, Hansen decided to break the silence. “Who are you?” he asked.
“My name is unpronounceable. On Earth, I go by the name Fermi.”
Hansen’s face crinkled up in confusion. On Earth? Part of him wanted to laugh out loud, but part of him knew on some primal level that this really was an alien.
“I thought it would speed things along for you and Fermi to meet,” explained Fuller. “If a picture paints a thousand words, then a few minutes with Fermi cuts through the most stubborn skepticism.”
“I had extensive plastic surgery on my home planet, combined with sophisticated genetic engineering, to pass as a human. And as you can see, or hear at any rate, I can speak your language fairly well, with limited accent.”
As he said this Hansen realized he did have an accent, but it was subtle and impossible to place.
“But evolution has honed your mind to be a remarkable tool to understand posture, body language, and other subtle cues to your fellow human,” continued Fermi. “So the longer one spends with me the more wrong I seem. This can’t be helped. I can pass a cursory examination, and if I don’t move much and keep silent, I can go out in public, be a passenger in a car, or even an airplane. But extensive interaction, other than over an audio-only phone, doesn’t really work.”
The man claiming to be an alien was wearing a light blue button-down shirt. He unbuttoned it to just above his chest, exposing a mass of flesh about the size of a flattened-out baseball. It was repulsive.
“My genetic material isn’t exactly the same as yours, but its principles are analogous. My colleagues and I each were subjects of extensive reconstructive surgery and genetically engineered alterations during a period of over seven of your years. My species has had many thousands of years to perfect the engineering of our genetic material and can do tricks you have yet to even guess at. We were each genetically engineered to produce this growth that you see here.”
“What is it?” said Hansen, his voice betraying just the slightest hint of disgust.
“Think of it as a gill. There are trace elements of your atmosphere that are poisonous to us. And we like less nitrogen in our air. So the air we breathe is shunted through this bio-filter, ensuring we get the mixture we require.”
Hansen raised his eyebrows but said nothing. Just because the man said it didn’t necessarily make it true.
“We have vestigial appendages that are somewhat analogous to your hands,” said Fermi. “Which we’ve engineered back to functionality and converted into replicas of your hands. Even so,” he added, unbuttoning his shirt farther, “our own version of hands are indispensible to us, since they give us far better fine-motor control than the ones engineered to mimic yours.”
As he undid the fourth button down, twelve thin tendrils crept out in perfect coordination from two slits near where a belly button should have been. Hansen’s mouth fell open. While Fermi’s human hand
s had seemed clumsy while unbuttoning his shirt, the movements of the tendrils were fluid and elegant. He picked a pen up off the table with the tendrils, each moving independently, and spun it effortlessly in an intricate pattern that was mesmerizing.
“For us, a precision task like threading a needle could not be simpler. Your hands have greater strength, because your distant ancestors needed to swing from trees.” A small smile played over his face. “There are no trees on our planet.”
Hansen’s eyes narrowed as he considered the smile he had just seen. In addition, he remembered Fermi had nodded appropriately to something he had said. How could this be? While an alien could learn English, no alien could possibly learn involuntary facial expressions. If Hansen were impersonating an alien who laughed by emitting a high-pitched growl, he couldn’t train himself to do this if he genuinely was caught unprepared by something truly funny—he would revert to human laughter instead.
So was this just an elaborate hoax?
Despite the impossibility of mimicking spontaneous human expressions, Hansen was largely convinced it was not. There was still something off about Fermi’s mimicry he couldn’t put his finger on. And no special effect or artifice could possibly have created the tendrils he was seeing.
“You smile and you frown and you nod,” said Hansen. “If you really are an alien, how is that possible?”
“Great observation,” said Fermi, with another nod and another smile. “And great question. Through genetic engineering, our normal body language pathways have been subverted. Before I was modified, when I was amused or happy, my second and seventh tendril would wave to the left. But now, the involuntary impulses in my brain, triggered by amusement, are directed down a different pathway, causing my face to form a human smile instead. It’s all quite complicated, but it is a subroutine that is run automatically.” He sighed. “But as impressive as our capabilities are in this regard, my body language is not perfect, as you can tell. Close, but still a hair off. You can mold the bodies and brains of my species only so far into a human. To go any further, you actually have to be one. A perfect forgery is impossible.”
Hansen nodded thoughtfully and realized the very last of his skepticism had now vanished. “What do you call yourselves?” he asked.
“What we call ourselves is unpronounceable to you. We come from a planet, however, whose closest pronunciation in English would be Suran.”
“We’ve taken to calling them Wraps,” said Fuller. “And this is now what they call themselves as well. I’m not sure who first started this, but it kind of stuck. Or you might say, clung.”
Hansen couldn’t help but smile. He had had no idea what to expect after being abducted, but hearing a joke about Saran Wrap hadn’t been one of his guesses. He turned back to Fermi. “And there are four of you here? Four … Wraps?”
“Right,” replied Fermi.
The alien went on to explain how they had been transported here, basically instantaneously, and the civilization-wide effort this had taken.
“With respect to your theories, Mr. Hansen, your insight into the nature of quantum mechanics is raw and embryonic, but it’s on the right track. Your people don’t know enough about dark matter and dark energy to be able to see the proper solutions, but your theory is correct: you can get useful information from quantum entanglement, after all.”
Despite the situation he was in, Hansen couldn’t hide his elation upon hearing this from a scientifically advanced alien. He felt as though he were floating on a cloud. He had been maligned for his ideas for years. And here Fermi had matter-of-factly confirmed that the theory he so stubbornly defended against a never-ending onslaught of criticism was right—or at least on the right track. It was a vindication of his most deeply held beliefs.
Quantum physics held that particles could be in many places at the same time and could pop into and out of existence spontaneously. But one of the most counterintuitive aspects of the theory, now proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, was quantum entanglement. When a pair of particles were entangled, they would take on opposite aspects when the act of observation forced them into a determinative state.
As a gross oversimplification, all particles in the universe were like spinning coins, in an indeterminate state between heads and tails. But the moment one was observed, it would randomly collapse into either a head or a tail. Quantum entanglement said that these coins were emitted and spun in pairs. And if one ended up landing on heads, the other would always end up landing on tails. Always. And instantly. Even if the entangled coins were now on opposite sides of the universe, if one collapsed to a head, the other would instantaneously collapse to a tail, somehow communicating this instruction between them far faster than the speed of light.
This caused Einstein and others no end of headaches, and entire schools of brilliant physicists refused to accept that this was really what was happening. Einstein didn’t believe this was real, calling it “spooky action at a distance.”
Even so, even after quantum entanglement was conclusively demonstrated, the physics community insisted it still didn’t violate the speed-of-light barrier. Nothing could travel faster than light: not particles, energy, or information. But since information wasn’t being conveyed in this case, the speed-of-light barrier held. Yes, if a coin landed on heads at one end of the universe, its entangled partner would instantly land on tails at the other end. But since the heads or tails nature of the first coin was random, what good did this do anyone? No real information could be transmitted by this process.
And the possible implications of quantum entanglement were even more profound than these bizarre results suggested. Since at the time of the Big Bang, all the matter of the universe was concentrated in a single point, it was conceivable that every last particle in the universe was entangled with every other.
Fermi went on to explain how information could be transmitted faster than light using quantum entanglement, but that it had to be done through knowledge of dark matter and dark energy, which humanity didn’t possess, having only discovered these major constituents of the universe very recently. Although completely invisible, the Milky Way was thought to contain so much dark matter that this mysterious material outweighed all the stars in the galaxy ten to one.
And 73 percent of the universe was now thought to be made up of mysterious energy called dark energy, hidden in the vacuum of space. If human physics was ever in any danger of being impressed with itself, the fact that the science, until recently, had been totally oblivious to the vast majority of matter and energy in the universe, was a humbling reminder of its limitations.
Fermi explained again that he and his colleagues had transported here from Suran using once-in-a-generation resources, so that every atom of extra weight had been inconceivably expensive. The trip had required energy and computational ability beyond even Fermi’s comprehension. While they would have loved to have brought advanced technology with them, the only technology their civilization could afford to send, literally, was a small quantum computer.
“And this is what I’ve detected?” said Hansen.
“That’s right,” replied Fermi. “We have computers many orders of magnitude more powerful, but we could only bring along what you might think of as a laptop. Still, because it operates on quantum principles, it’s thousands of times more powerful than the computers you have here.”
Steve Fuller cleared his throat and faced Hansen. “But bringing this discussion out of the clouds and down to earth for a minute,” he said. “This is one of the reasons I needed to, ah … force a meeting with you. Without putting too fine a point on it, we need you to shut the fuck up about the quantum signature you’ve discovered. Do you think you can do that?”
Hansen was taken aback by the way this had been said. He considered several choice responses before choosing the most benign. “No one takes me seriously anyway.”
“I do,” said Fuller meaningfully. “Consider yourself lucky that no one else has to this point.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that in your zeal to localize this signal of yours, you’ve been trying to get permits and funds to dig underground just outside of Washington, D.C., for months. Where you think this mysterious signal is emanating from. And no matter how many times you’re denied a permit you won’t stop pressing. And you won’t shut up about your theory either. Do you know how fucking annoying that is? Well, congratulations. You finally made it. Right now we’re sitting in a facility three hundred feet underground, at the precise spot you wanted to dig. Dead center. And I can’t tell you how much we don’t want to be discovered down here.”
Hansen swallowed hard. He was proud his theory had so accurately pinpointed the location of the signature, but he was beginning to get nervous.
“So we need you to tell your advisor and everyone else you’ve been pestering that you’ve made an error. And that you’ve now come to your senses. It’s a good thing we’re moving our headquarters out West in a few weeks,” added Fuller. “Or we might have been forced to kill you.”
He said it with a friendly smile, as though he was joking, so Hansen chose to believe him.
28
FULLER OPENED HIS mouth to continue when he was interrupted by a knock at the door. A woman stuck her head into the conference room and asked when she should serve lunch. Fuller glanced at this watch and asked her to return in thirty minutes.
The moment the door closed, Fuller took up where he had left off. “But I don’t want you to decide if you’ll do what I’m asking just yet,” he said to Kyle Hansen. “Because you still don’t know the big picture. After you do, I’m sure you’ll want to cooperate.”
Both Fuller and Fermi described the seventeen known civilizations in this arm of the galaxy and how interstellar comingling of the seventeen species was handled. And why the Seventeen believed it was vital that one of them send a contingent to Earth in order to save a savage but talented new species from self-destruction. The Wraps had been an obvious choice for this duty for a number of reasons.
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