Professor Collins swapped in a new document, this one a list of dates and events. “You have your itineraries. See you in a couple of days at the airport, for five fun-filled days of slogging around swamps, bogs, and forest and being eaten alive by mosquitoes the size of pterodactyls.”
Erin accepted the glass of wine and skootched over as Matt sat and put an arm around her. She habitually slouched a little to fit into the embrace—one of the downsides of towering over most of her peers.
She took an appreciative sip—Matt definitely knew his wines. It probably came naturally with the trust fund and all. Matt didn’t talk much about it, and Erin didn’t try to pry. They hadn’t yet reached the stage in their relationship where they shared everything, and there was a reserve about Matt that made her wonder what it was that he didn’t want to discuss.
Still, she couldn’t really complain if her boyfriend was low-maintenance. Erin sighed with contentment as Matt played with the remote, trying to bring up Netflix. He paused to give her a quizzical look, and she smiled back and said, “You’re lucky to have your own place. Dorm life is, well, not always good for relaxing.”
“Yeah, my parents are happy to pay all the bills for school, but they’re quick to point out that they’re well off, not we’re well off. Once I graduate, I’m on my own. My dad’s very old-school that way.” He looked for a moment like he was going to add something, then closed his mouth with an almost determined motion.
“At least computer science has high-paying jobs,” Erin said. “I’ll probably end up as a teacher or a park ranger.”
She knew from previous conversations that Matt’s future prospects were a source of worry for him. His father was, apparently, a bit of a jerk. And she could well understand money problems. Trying to stay ahead of the tuition and textbook costs was a never-ending battle. Even getting enough saved in the first place had been touch-and-go.
“So you’ll be gone for five days?” Matt said, evidently trying to steer the conversation into safer waters.
“Yes, and this is an unbelievable opportunity. We get an entire course credit for a five-day field trip, three classes, and what amounts to a book report. Plus the way Yellowstone has been acting up lately, it should be especially interesting.”
“But not too interesting, I hope.”
“Matt, the media has blown it out of proportion, just as they do with anything that can generate clicks. Yellowstone isn’t doing anything that it hasn’t been doing since before there were humans to see it.”
“But not all at once.”
She frowned at him. “Thank you, Mr. Statistics. Okay, yes, Yellowstone has been active lately. There have been times in the past when it would have been completely dormant and boring. That’s just as likely, or unlikely, as this spike. Anyway, we are going. There’ll be about twenty of us, and Professor Collins, of course. And his assistant, what’s-his-face the creepy guy, but as long as he stays away from me, I don’t care.”
“I could kick his butt …”
“I could kick his butt, thank you very much.”
“You’ll text or something while you’re gone, right?”
“Oh, absolutely!” Erin waved her now-empty glass under his nose. “Say, didn’t you promise to ply me with alcohol? I’m not feeling plied.”
Matt hurried to the kitchen and grabbed the bottle. By the time he returned, Netflix was up and running. Erin waved the remote at him. “Computer guy. Pffft.”
6. First Run
June 13
Bill looked at the closed lab door, then down at the box he was holding. Screw it. He gave the door two good kicks and stood back.
A few seconds later, the heavy door opened and Matt peered out at him. “Subtle. Real class.”
“Bite me. This thing’s getting heavier by the second.”
Matt stood aside, holding the door as Bill entered. He paused to look around the room, a typical lab setup. There was a central open area plus a smaller antechamber protected by safety glass. In the center of the room, two tables held a bewildering array of boxes, breadboard rigs, and cables. A third table held only some loose cable ends. Richard sat at a console that consisted mostly of breadboarded panels with switches, dials, and indicator lights sticking up at odd angles. It was less a mad scientist kind of look and more of a ham radio hobbyist vibe.
At Richard’s gesture, Bill put his box down on the third table. He flipped it open and carefully unwrapped the enclosed item, then took the loose cables and attached them to appropriate connectors on his device.
Richard came over to get a closer look. Bill’s apparatus consisted of a cubical wire-frame cage, about twelve inches on a side, with an opening at one end. A metal hoop about eight inches in diameter encircled the opening, with nine odd-looking hieroglyphic symbols spaced equidistantly around the rim.
Richard bent closer to examine the hoop, did a double take, and gave Bill an accusing glare.
“Yeah,” Matt said with a laugh. “Stargate decorations. You didn’t see that coming?”
Richard squeezed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger and seemed to struggle for a moment. “Fine. As long as it works.”
Matt examined the apparatus quizzically. “What exactly does it do?”
Kevin held up a small assembly in his hand. “The cage will contain a volume of shifted probability space. The gate, uh, that’s the hoop, allows us to access that space visually while the experiment is running. This will give us visual confirmation of a shift.”
“Well, that’s clear as mud,” Matt muttered.
Kevin placed the device in the cage through the hoop. “This is just a gadget to generate interference patterns. It will shine a laser through a set of gratings and project a random interference pattern onto the screen.” He pointed to a small white screen at the front of the device. “We’re hoping to modulate the interference pattern using our experimental setup. This is just a calibration run. We want to be sure we still get the same results with the new hardware and control software.”
Bill frowned at Matt. “You already set up your software?”
“Of course. Unlike some people, I got here on time.”
“Y’know, smug is not a good look.”
Matt grinned at his friend, then pointed at the hoop and cage. “So that does what?”
Richard spoke before Bill could reply. “Bill’s Stargate knockoff uses carefully timed lasers and splitters to generate what Kevin calls quantum self-entanglement. It allows us to dial up different locations in probability space for the same physical space. The Faraday cage limits the effect to the enclosed volume. Otherwise it diffuses immediately.”
Matt shook his head. “I’m still lost.”
“Honestly, me too,” Richard replied. “I don’t think anyone on the planet except Kevin understands it. But I’m rolling with it, y’know?”
Bill grinned at the rare display of vulnerability but decided not to comment.
Richard, after an embarrassed pause, turned to his control rig. “All right, kiddies, it’s showtime. We’ll turn on the interference generator, then our equipment, then start varying things.”
Kevin checked two cameras that had been placed in the corners of the room. He placed a third camera directly in front of the hoop, started all the cameras recording, reached into the gate, and flipped a small switch.
The large monitor in the back of the lab showed a close-up of the small device as seen by the third camera. It displayed an interference pattern projected on the device’s screen, reminiscent of the ripples produced by throwing two stones into a calm pond. “Now I’m going to vary the phase lock,” Richard announced.
As they watched the monitor, the interference pattern started to wobble. Over several seconds, it became much more complex, then simpler, narrowing at one point to a single circle, then back.
“Again, it’s important to understand,” Kevin said, lecturing into the air, “that we are not doing anything directly to the device that I placed in the cage. It’s noth
ing more than a laser going through some apertures and producing an interference fringe. It should sit there showing the same thing until the battery dies. The changes you’re seeing are caused by our experiment ‘tuning in’ to different versions of reality. We are, in a sense, moving through the multiverse.”
They stared at the pattern for a few more seconds. Richard stopped playing with the controls, and the interference settled into a stable pattern.
“And that’s a wrap,” he said and powered down the equipment.
Bill stared at the monitor, then at Richard and Kevin, who both seemed unsurprised by the results. “So is that what you were expecting?”
“Yes,” Kevin said. “And if you look at the pattern on the screen right now, it’s not the same one we started with.”
Bill examined the screen for several seconds, then shrugged. “I’ll have to take your word for that. I didn’t memorize the original. But what does that mean for your experiment?”
“It means we’ve modified reality.” Kevin gestured at the setup impatiently. “We took a stable wave pattern, caused it to move through its probability space, then selected a different result.”
“‘Selected a different result’…‘modified reality.’ You changed a final result. That’s …”—Bill turned to look at Matt, whose eyes were bugging out as much as Bill imagined his were—“kind of mind-boggling, honestly.”
Richard said nothing, but a grin slowly formed despite obvious attempts to maintain a straight face.
Then Bill frowned. “But normally when history changes, so do the memories of the characters. At least in all the movies I’ve seen. How is it that we remember the screen showing something different?”
“We didn’t change history, Bill. Just selected a different current reality. And one that exists only inside the cage. Essentially, we’re tuning in to a different world-line. We’re shifting reality sideways inside the cage, so that we’re seeing a different result of a random event than what we started with.”
“But the pattern is different now, so the change is permanent.”
“Yeah,” Richard replied. “We didn’t expect any of this when we first ran this experiment. We’ve run it dozens of times since, and it’s never failed. The trouble is that we don’t really understand why it’s happening. With help from you and Matt—you on the hardware, Matt on the software—we’re hoping to get a better grip on what’s going on.”
“How big can this get?” Matt asked. “I mean, how much reality could you affect?”
“Don’t know,” Kevin replied. “The models don’t predict anything about mass or dimensions. I think it’s all about how well you can tune in to the probability space.”
Bill grunted absentmindedly, still staring at the cage and its contents. “So what now? What’s the next step?”
Richard gestured to Kevin. “Time to bring out the flipper.”
“Hey, there’s a technical term for you,” Bill said.
“I don’t know what else to call it,” Richard replied. “We literally cut the dice bubble out of an old Trouble game and added a delay to the pop. Real high-tech.”
Kevin came back with a plastic hemisphere with a single die inside and placed it in the cage. As before, he set a video camera on a tripod in front of the gate to record the event and checked the other two cameras in the corners of the room.
“Okay,” Richard said. “Ready to go. Turn on the flipper.”
Kevin reached into the cage, pushed down on the bubble, and gave a thumbs-up. “Thirty seconds to event.”
Richard made a few adjustments on his breadboarded control panel and placed his finger on a rocker switch. “Ready here.”
The seconds seemed to stretch forever while everyone watched. “Maybe we’ll modify it for a shorter interval next time,” Kevin muttered.
The flipper gave a pop. The die bounced off the plastic dome and landed on four. Then Richard flipped the rocker switch, tweaked a dial, and said, “Okay, how about now?”
“Uuuummmm.” Matt pointed at the monitor. There were now two dice in the globe, the original one showing four and another one showing two. “I had my eye on it the whole time. The second die kind of faded in …”
Bill abandoned the monitor and walked over to the device. Looking through the bars of the cage, he saw the single original die, but when he looked through the circular aperture of the gate, there was a second die as well.
Mind blown! he thought, stepping back to the monitor. There will definitely be some coattailing—
Without warning, there was a loud bang accompanied by a flash so brief it barely registered as light. Everyone jumped. After a few seconds, when nothing else happened, they moved to the table. The die showed a six now, even looking through the gate, and the assembly had jumped across the table a few inches.
“Is that a third die, or did the bang knock over the original?” Bill asked.
Richard gestured toward the monitor. “Good question. Let’s look at the video.”
Kevin pointed the remote at the camera and started the replay on the monitor. They watched for the same interminable thirty seconds or so, punctuated by Kevin’s recorded background comment. The die seemed to fade out of focus and then back in, but as two dice.
Then the monitor showed the bang, flash, and movement of the whole assembly.
“I can’t tell,” Kevin said. “It could be one of the two dice, or it could be a third one replacing them.”
“I’d call it inconclusive, except the bang itself is a significant event,” Matt added. “So what the heck was that?”
“Don’t know for sure,” Richard replied. “If I had to guess, I’d say probability space inside the cage snapped back to our reality with enough force to knock things around. Unfortunately that means we don’t know what exactly happened. I guess we need to tweak our design a bit. And guys, let’s keep this quiet, okay? This is starting to sound like cold fusion or perpetual motion or something crazy. If it gets out, Keeting will pull the plug for sure. For now, Matt and I will refine the control system so we can lock onto something and stay locked. Matt, I’ll send you an email with specs. Bill, I wonder if I could borrow your engineering skills again to build a bigger and more robust cage and, uh, gate. Maybe without the decorations?”
“Well, how can I resist a request like that? The Engineering Department isn’t quite as deserted as Physics—it turns out we’re bigger nerds than you guys—but I’m pretty sure I can get away with some more light, off-hours metalwork.”
“Couple of days?” Richard looked at Matt and Bill. Seeing no argument, he continued, “Well, okay then. We’ll plan on another run on Friday.”
Matt and Bill left together, leaving Richard and Kevin to the tedious process of post-experiment analysis.
As they walked down the hall, Bill turned to Matt. “Let’s keep this quiet, he says. Gee, ya think?”
“Rogue physicists. Good grief.”
7. Interesting Times
June 14
Bill made a beeline for the Dining Center, his gaze locked on his destination. His body language screamed Do not hassle me. Apparently, the demonstrators du jour got the hint, and no one approached him to proselytize. As Bill reached the entrance, he heard Matt calling him. Turning, he spotted his friend coming from another direction. Bill leaned on the door and paused to catch his breath.
Matt smiled at him. “Exercise really is your friend.”
“Maybe yours. With me, it’s more of a frenemy.”
“Done for the day?”
“Yeah, homework time. Plus, I downloaded something on probability theory. Like it or not, this experiment of Richard and Kevin’s has me hooked. I want to do a little reading so I maybe have some idea of what I’m getting into.”
“And I got homework from Richard. He gave me specs for some software changes. I’ll make sure he’s finished thinking up mods, then I’ll burn the new EPROMs. He wants a user interface as well, running on a tablet.”
They looked around for a good
table. Bill sniffed the air. Unidentified frying objects. Pass.
Once they were seated, Bill pulled his tablet out of his backpack. “Heard from Erin?”
“She’s having a blast. Uh, metaphorically, I mean.” Matt smiled. “She does love her geology.”
Erin wasn’t Matt’s normal girlfriend material, although Bill thoroughly approved. Tall, athletic, attractive without necessarily being what Bill would call pretty, near the top of the grade curve, and very driven—a surprising choice for someone as laid-back as Matt. But he seemed quite taken with her, maybe more than he realized.
Bill bookmarked his work, then set his tablet aside and looked up at his friend. “You get Richard’s email about the next test run?”
“Yup. Another exciting evening flipping dice.”
“Dude, I’m confused. You were as excited as me about the implications of this.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” Matt admitted. “In principle, it’s a huge deal. But the way those guys were talking the first day, I was almost expecting The Time Tunnel or something. Dice flipping seems, I dunno, small. I hope they’re going to up their game.”
“Be careful what you wish for. That’s usually the point where an alien spawn bursts out of someone’s chest.”
“Okay, Captain Reference. I’ll be there for the bursting.”
“Listen, Matt. I may kid a lot, but this really does sound like something significant. I told you that Richard wouldn’t sit in the same room with me, let alone invite me into the project, without a good reason. I think these guys actually are onto something, and probably way out of their depth. I say we need to take steps to hitch our wagon to this train.”
“Western-movie metaphors now? You’re slipping.”
“Just keeping you on your toes. But I mean it, Matt. Stay on top of this.”
8. Field Trip
June 15
Erin and Ayanda huddled together, trying to avoid elbows and feet. The room was far too crowded, with geology students and park staff milling about with no discernable organization. In one corner, Professor Collins was trying to have a discussion with some of the senior park rangers, his voice climbing in volume to compete with the general noise level.
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