The Deplosion Saga

by Paul Anlee

  “Are you alright, Dr. Mahajani?” Dr. Wong's gentle voice broke Greg's reverie. Despite the hour, Campus Security had asked the Chairman of the Physics Department to meet them at the lab.

  “Yeah, just surprised. It’s not every day one of your experiments kills someone.”

  Dr. Wong looked into the lab. “Now, let’s not jump to conclusions. We don’t know this has anything to do with the work you and Dr. Leigh were doing.”

  Greg tapped the air in the direction of the gray sphere. “Well, you tell me where else that came from and maybe I’ll agree with you.”

  Dr. Wong pushed past Greg to take a closer look.

  “I’d be careful, if I were you,” Greg warned. “Judging by poor Dave over there, and by the way everyone's avoiding it, I'd say the thing is dangerous.”

  Dr. Wong walked up to the doorframe. “Excuse me, who’s in charge here?”

  A thirty-something man with a rumpled suit and knitted brows released the corner of the sheet he’d been peering under and stood up without a word. He made his way past the hovering sphere and ushered Dr. Wong back into the hallway. “I’m Detective Lowry. Who are you?”

  The physicist made no secret of sizing up the detective. “I'm Dr. William Wong, head of the Physics department. Can you tell me what's going on here?”

  “Normally, I’d say the man was shot. He has what looks like a large bullet hole through the chest. But I’m pretty sure that thing over there,” he gestured toward the floating orb, “caused it. The hole in the man’s chest is exactly the same size, and too clean for a bullet.”

  “It’s not exactly the same size,” interjected Greg. The detective glared at Greg…but closed his mouth before uttering what came to mind. He didn’t need another reprimand for alienating witnesses.

  “I have a theory. If you’ll allow me to take a closer look at the body, I think I can explain what happened. I promise I won’t touch a thing." He extended his hand, "Sorry. Greg Mahajani. I’m on the research team in this lab.”

  Detective Lowry eyed him suspiciously, dismissing Greg’s extended hand.

  “Listen,” Greg rushed on, “I can’t say exactly what happened, but I have as much expertise as anyone on what that might be.” He pointed to the gray sphere. “If you just let me have a quick look at the wound, I’ll be able to confirm my idea.”

  Lowry stared stone-faced at Greg, evaluating the offer of help against his professional judgment. He shrugged, and called into the lab, “Doc? You done in there? Okay with you if the Professor takes a look? He thinks he might know what that thing is.”

  The medical examiner looked up from his tablet. “So long as he doesn’t touch anything, sure. We’ve got everything we need.”

  The detective handed Greg a pair of latex gloves. “I’m only going to tell you once: touch the body or anything near it and I promote you to the top of my suspects list. You don’t want to be there.”

  Greg gulped and pulled on the gloves, intentionally snapping the wrists against his tender skin. This is not how I imagined returning to the lab. Not what Dave was expecting, either, I guess. Okay, Greg. Get a grip. Take a quick look and see if you’re right. He hoped he was wrong. Please let it be a bullet hole—it was a terrible thing to wish, but he stood by it. The alternative explanation was much, much worse.

  Lowry gave him a nod and pointed his chin toward the body.

  Greg moved into position to take a closer look, and the ME peeled back the sheet.

  The exit wound on the man’s back was perfectly circular, with precise, clean edges. Greg swallowed back his rising nausea, and focused intently on the hole, not the blood-soaked tile floor, and not the corpse of the man who used to greet him on his way in and out of the building on those all-nighters. “Can you turn him over?”

  The ME glanced back at the detective, who sighed but nodded. He motioned for an assistant to help turn the body. Greg examined the chest wound as quickly as he could. “The entry hole is three millimeters smaller than the exit hole.”

  The detective placed both hands on his hips and regarded the scientist more intently. “You got that from a look?”

  The assistant measured the holes in the chest and back. The edges were clean and smooth. “He’s right.”

  “Dr. Mahajani has exceptional eyesight,” Dr. Wong offered, helpfully proposing a plausible rationale.

  Greg stood up, a little woozy, and resumed breathing. “Just one more thing, to be sure,” he said. He retrieved a plastic ruler from the drawer, and walked up to the hovering sphere. He extended the ruler gingerly forward. While everyone watched, the first few inches of the ruler disappeared into the gray ball. The ball didn't budge, and there was no sign of the ruler on the other side of it.

  Greg retrieved the ruler. It was cleanly missing the part that he’d pushed into the sphere.

  “What the…?” The detective squinted and leaned in. “Did that thing burn a hole right through him?”

  “Not exactly,” replied Greg. “It’s not hot.”

  “How can you tell that?”

  “Its color doesn’t match the spectrum of something hot enough to burn flesh. Plus, the wound’s not cauterized and the ruler’s not melted.”

  “Then how was this man murdered,” Lowry asked.

  “Murdered? No, this isn’t a murder,” Dr. Wong corrected the detective. “This was clearly an accident.”

  The detective turned back to Wong, unable to hide his skepticism. “And exactly how do you figure that?”

  Greg saved Dr. Wong from having to explain. “The lab’s been closed for the last ten days. Kathy, uh…Dr. Liang and I have been pretty stressed. As I’m sure you’ve heard, two of our colleagues vanished last month. Once word got out, it was impossible to get any work done around here. We decided to work from home.

  “I’m sure that thing wasn’t here when Kathy and I locked up the lab. If it was, it was too small to see and, thankfully, we didn't come into contact with it.

  “There were only four of us working on the project: me, Kathy, Darian, and Larry. Darian and Larry are missing, and now there’s this. Even though I'm not entirely sure what this is, it’s almost certainly the result of one of our experiments. I suspect it showed up around the time Darian disappeared, and that it’s been growing ever since.”

  “And how does that make it an accident?”

  “My guess is, the night guard was conducting a routine lab check and walked into the sphere. Our work involved altering the basic laws of physical matter. From what I know of the theory, I’d say Darian somehow created a microscopic universe, a microverse, too small for the human eye to see. I know that sounds crazy but, if I’m right, that thing could be consuming anything it comes into contact with, absorbing matter from our universe and converting it into its own. Sort of like a mini black hole.

  “Dave probably didn’t even see it when he entered the lab. It would have passed right through him or, more accurately, he would have passed over it. If he felt anything at all, he might have thought he was having a heart attack. It’s too bad he didn’t just bump into it with his elbow or something, he’d still be alive. But it wasn’t anything intentional, detective, just a bizarre but completely unintended incident, detective. Like Dr. Wong said, an accident.”

  “You seem to know an awful lot about it all,” accused the detective.

  Dr. Wong was gaping at Greg, “Do you mean to say it worked? Dr. Leigh's theories were right?”

  Greg ignored him; the Chair could draw his own conclusions. He addressed the detective. “This microverse, if that’s what it is, has to be a product of Darian Leigh’s work. It has to be. My conclusions are based on observation and logic for now. I have no real evidence. But, trust me, nobody else, nobody, has ever created a microverse. This is huge.

  “We can confirm it for you. We just need to run some tests. With Darian still missing, nobody in the world knows more about this subject than Dr. Liang and I do.” Compared to Darian, we know practically nothing—he said to himself—but
I’m not going to let them take this away without a fight.

  The detective looked doubtful. Before he could object, Greg jumped in, “We’re lucky. This is the only lab in the world that has the ability to analyze the sphere. Besides, until we know more about it, I don’t think you want to try moving it.”

  The detective motioned to the corpse. “Doesn’t look like it was so lucky for him.”

  Greg looked down, embarrassed. “No, it wasn’t.” He contemplated the sphere without comment. The gentle hum of the wall clock was the only sound.

  The detective’s phone rang, and Greg took advantage of the distraction to speak privately with the department head.

  “Sir, if I’m right about this, we may have a much bigger problem on our hands than one dead guard.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Let’s assume this is a microverse, and it’s absorbing and growing from anything that comes into contact with it. I’m wondering, if we can't find some way to contain it, what’s to stop it from getting bigger. A lot bigger.”

  Dr. Wong studied Greg, reading into the unspoken conclusion. He tried to maintain his composure but his voice cracked as he asked, “How big?”

  “Big enough to threaten everything and everyone; I’m talking…the whole world.”

  The color drained from Dr. Wong’s face. “Are you saying that it could eat the whole planet?”

  Greg nodded grimly. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure. Even more.”

  5

  Greg and Kathy were stumped. Once the police let them back into their lab, they spent four weeks testing, probing, and prodding the mysterious gray sphere. They were no closer to understanding it than when they’d started. The orb was not giving up its secrets.

  They threw all sorts of matter and energy at it: light, sound, electrons, and, one evening after a little too much wine and exasperation, an overripe banana.

  The sphere absorbed everything equally, resisting nothing. As far as they could detect, it emitted nothing beside a trace of Hawking-type radiation, which manifested as a dull light lending the sphere’s its muted color. It grew in proportion with the mass of everything they fed it, and with everything being absorbed incidentally.

  One fitful night, just before dawn, Kathy woke with a startling realization. “Oh, my God. Greg, we have to stop the experiments on the microverse. Immediately.”

  “What? Why? Just because we’re not getting anywhere….”

  “No, I just realized we’ve been ‘feeding’ it. The bigger it gets, the more surface area it has, the harder it becomes to contain, and the more danger it poses.”

  They halted their experiments abruptly, erected a plexiglass box around the sphere and had a construction crew move the entrance of the lab to prevent any accidental encounters. Any more accidental encounters.

  The following Tuesday, the light was just right and Kathy noticed a few twinkling dust particles gently drifting toward the sphere inside its box. Strange. There shouldn’t be any moving air in there. Curious, she set up some investigations with canned smoke and traced the air flow around and toward the sphere.

  “Uhh…Greg? You’d better look at this.”

  He poked his head out of the office. “Can it wait? I’m….” His eyes instinctively tracked the wisps of smoke wafting toward the sphere. “Oh, crap!” Greg muttered, slapping the heel of his hand against his forehead.

  “Of course! What was I thinking? Even if we don’t feed it, the microverse is consuming the air it contacts. Man, how could I miss that?” He let fly a stream of colorful cusses describing his poor observational skills, lack of theoretical rigor, general stupidity, overall incompetence, and a host of other transgressions.

  Kathy had to stop him before he plummeted into self pity. “Wow, don’t be so hard on yourself. We both missed it. You’ve gotta cut yourself, both of us, some slack. It was an easy oversight. We’re exhausted. Our minds are still dealing with the tangled-up mess of Darian’s data dump. It amazes me we can still string two thoughts together.”

  Greg waved her away. “It was a critical mistake. We can’t afford to make any more. It doesn’t matter that we’re stressed and exhausted. We have to be a whole lot more careful.”

  Despite his years of advanced education and lab experience, despite the intellectual and technical advantages of his growing dendy lattice, he’d never felt so lost or hopeless. What on Earth did you create here, Darian? What are we missing? Surely, you didn’t make something this deadly with no way to collapse it.

  If his nephew were here right now, he’d be saying something like, “Oh-oh! We’re in some reeeeeally deep doodoo now, Uncle Greg.” Yeah, kiddo, we’ve got some monumental doodoo here, alright. Monumental.

  “I think it’s time to suck it up and call in the big guns,” he said.

  They secured the lab, and shared their concerns with Dr. Wong, who talked to President Sakira, who activated a special emergency budget.

  “If we can choke off the supply of new material to the sphere, including the air around it, we can buy some time to figure out a solution,” Dr. Wong had proposed.

  “Done,” said President Sakira. She didn’t need any convincing.

  They cordoned off an extra-wide buffer zone around the sphere’s plexiglass cage, and had the construction crew build a vacuum chamber the size of a walk-in closet around it. One end of the new chamber was going to jut into the hallway.

  “Not a problem,” Dr. Wong said. He instructed the crew to remove the original wall, and divert the hallway into the storage space beside the lab. That became their new entrance. It had the added benefit of partitioning the lab off from the rest of the wing and from casually prying eyes.

  President Sakira resisted the scientists’ urgings to alert the Prime Minister’s Office in Seattle or call in the National Guard. “There’s no point in panicking the government just yet. You said we can safely contain it in the chamber for quite a while, right? Before I make that call, I need you to focus on containment, risk assessment, and figuring out what the hell that thing is and how we can shut it down. If you scientists do your job, maybe we’ll be able to avoid the call altogether.

  “Dr. Wong, I trust you will support them in whatever they need to carry out their work, and keep me informed. I’ll figure out how to spin the emergency budget expenditure so nobody asks too many questions.

  “And not a word of this to anybody outside this room until we know what we’re dealing with. I mean it.”

  Potential disaster averted for the time being, everybody got back to work.

  * * *

  Detective Lowry was not happy. What he’d hoped was a simple, straightforward shooting, turned out to be neither straightforward nor a shooting.

  Was the guard’s death a homicide or a science experiment gone horribly wrong? Maybe criminally-negligent wrong. He wasn’t sure. Nobody, not even the two remaining scientists who worked here, understood the floating gray orb that killed the man. All he knew was that it was too soon to be back here on another case.

  Only a few weeks earlier, he’d been poking around this same lab for fresh leads on two scientists who disappeared without a trace. Now, this.

  The missing persons case was still open. There were no bodies, no sightings, no calls or notes. No activity on their phones, bank accounts, or credit cards. Nobody had received any kidnap demands, and no one was claiming responsibility. Anyone of interest had been interviewed multiple times and cleared. There were no fresh clues. That case was as bizarrely mystifying as this one.

  The detective had had the dubious honor of meeting the famous Darian Leigh after some deranged lunatic tried to assassinate him during a public lecture downtown. That file was pretty much open and shut. They’d arrested the shooter on site, and the guy swore he’d been operating alone. The Chief had been pleased. Lowry wasn’t convinced; he’d had a hunch there was more to it. Now, he was sure.

  Come to think of it, I must have met Leigh’s missing employee back then, too. Odd—aside from the photos we
got in the missing persons file, I’m drawing a total blank on him.

  These two don’t seem especially worried for their safety, considering the events unfolding around them—Lowry noted. He’d grilled Greg and Kathy separately, at length, trying to poke holes in their stories.

  They stuck to their stories, and insisted they knew nothing that could help the investigation. They had “no idea” where the deadly sphere came from or what it was. Right...of course not. But he couldn’t trip them up on the details or tie any wrongdoing to them. Much as he didn’t like it, he had to let them go.

  “Don’t leave town, either of you. If Dr. Leigh or Dr. Rusalov show up, we’ll be going over your stories again.”

  Kathy and Greg had exchanged guilty glances.

  I saw that—Lowry said to himself. If I keep up the pressure, one of you is going to break. And I’ll be waiting.

  * * *

  Kathy and Greg were as mystified by the sphere as the detective. But, as scientists, they were also fascinated. They hadn’t figured out how it fit with Darian’s theories, but they were sure the orb had something to do with the RAF generator. That it materialized sometime between Darian’s jubilant call and his disappearance less than an hour later was too much of a coincidence.

  “Do you think it’s some kind of black ops thing?” Greg speculated. “Maybe they’ve been watching our work and waiting to pounce once we got the thing to work? I know that sounds crazy, but think about it. Darian’s earlier research was classified top secret and sealed. He was never allowed to publish it.”

  “A little crazy, but any crazier than the truth?” Kathy replied. “Honestly, I don’t know, but I doubt it’s that.”

  “Whatever the truth is. If we do tell them what we know and how we know it, that wouldn’t make things any clearer for them, and it would likely land us in the hands of some secret government agency for an indefinite period of…‘interrogation’, if you know what I mean.”