When they had the plume in full view, Bill commented, “Damned if it doesn’t actually look like the jet that comes out when the stargate starts up.” He grinned at Matt, who rolled his eyes in reply.
They looked at the video from the third camera, but other than being from a different angle, it didn’t provide any additional information. The only difference worth noting was six frames of Richard in mid-jump, looking very alarmed. Bill took the remote from Kevin and played the frames through several times.
“Okay, funny boy, enough,” Richard said, after the third replay. He grabbed the remote from Bill and pointedly placed it on the table.
Richard paused, considering. “I think we’re going to have to try that again, but maybe with a little more preparation. Bill, can you come up with anything that could maintain a sealed atmosphere around the gate?”
“There are a couple of things in the Engineering Department that could be adapted, I think,” Bill replied. “Depends on how much pressure we need to hold.”
“Probably not a huge amount. The jet didn’t come out like a power washer spray. Couldn’t have been more than a couple of atmospheres.”
“Hmm, OK, let me think about it.” Bill sat down and stared into space. “I think we have something that might work, if I can borrow it and get it back with nobody noticing.”
Matt examined the equipment and the room, looking for any other damage. Kevin sat down and went into math mode. After about ten minutes, they all came together in the lab to compare notes.
“I had a quick look at the logs,” Richard said. “The lock-in worked, it just didn’t lock in to what we were trying for. The phase space became chaotic, and the equipment found some kind of strange attractor that was way, way beyond the limits we’d set.”
“How does the equipment ignore the set limits?” Matt said.
“This particular attractor seems to be such a strong locus that it was like rolling downhill.” Richard paused and scratched his head, apparently searching for words. “The equipment didn’t require extra power to latch onto it. In fact, it would have required extra power to avoid doing so.”
“What I think that means,” Kevin added, “is that there is an alternate reality that is more ‘real’ than our rolled die. Our small retunings of reality are non-stable points in the phase space, so as soon as the equipment gets close to something stable, it’s like—well, like Richard says, it’s like rolling downhill.”
“Uh …” Matt said, and looked at Richard. “I added that neural-net feedback process you asked for. This sounds like just the kind of effect it might have.”
Richard said nothing but nodded slowly.
“So your probability phase space has islands of stability?” Bill asked. “Cool. It does leave one small question unanswered, though. What the FUCK did we just connect to?”
“Venus, maybe?” Matt said.
“I don’t think Venus fits the bill,” Kevin replied. “First, the pressure at the surface of Venus is like 90 atmospheres, and second, it’s hot enough to melt lead. Pretty sure we’d be dead, and the building would be demolished.”
“Thanks, I feel much better now,” Bill muttered.
“But,” Kevin continued, “I went back and looked at the first camera in single-frame, right when the event started. Have a look.” They all moved to get a close view. Frozen on the monitor, distorted by the beginnings of the gas plume, were a small number of dark, distorted objects.
“That’s not the flipper,” Matt said. “Any idea what those are?”
“No,” Bill replied. “But I bet they’re not from around here.”
Richard cleared his throat to get attention. “Yeah. Okay, look, we’re going to revamp this setup inside Bill’s pressure vessel. Couple more days, and we’re trying again. You might want to bring some body armor next time.”
Bill grinned. “And spare underwear.”
10. Eau de SO2
June 16
Erin threw her hoodie to the floor and flopped down on Matt’s couch. “That was … interesting. I suppose I should be more upset that the trip was cut short, but to be honest, I’m happy to get out of there with all my body parts!”
“Well, I’m glad you’re back, parts and all,” Matt replied. “We’ll do inventory later.”
Matt seemed relieved to have her back. Her email from Yellowstone had been very detailed, and might have given him the impression that she had been in more danger than she admitted. While she wouldn’t say it to him, Erin thought he might even be right. The more she reviewed the events of the trip, the less sanguine she felt.
Matt sat and put his arms around her, and Erin snuggled in.
A moment later, she sat up straight, wrinkling her nose. “Y’know, I guess the odor got into my skin or something. It’s like I can still smell the sulfur dioxide.” Erin sniffed her arm, frowned, and looked around. “No, that’s not me. And it’s not my imagination either.” She got up, wandered around for a few seconds, then picked up one of Matt’s T-shirts that had been draped over a chair. “Matt, why does your shirt smell like a fumarole?”
“Who’s got the what now?”
“Your T-shirt reeks of sulfur dioxide. Have you been seeing another vulcanologist behind my back?” She poked him playfully with her index finger.
“Oh, uh, that’s from an experiment that we did yesterday.”
“You mean your bro-ject? A physics experiment about randomness is making you smell like a volcano?”
“Uh …” Matt’s face acquired a deer-in-the-headlights expression.
Okay, that’s interesting, Erin thought. Obviously there was more to this than standard science nerdery.
“Uh,” he repeated, “Richard’s kind of a nut about confidentiality, and he doesn’t have much of a sense of humor about it. Or about anything else, really.”
“Yeah, no, there’ll be no deflecting. C’mon, cough it up.”
With a sigh, Matt told her about the events at the lab.
“So your project ejected a plume of gas? And that’s what I smell?”
“This is all supposed to be confidential. Spilling the beans to my girlfriend is going to get my bro license revoked. Not to mention that Bill will point out some movie where this happens and someone ends up getting killed.”
“Uh huh. I’m coming to your next meeting. I need to talk to them about this,” Erin stated with finality. “I’m not sure you guys have thought this through. In fact, I’m sure of it.”
A few hours later, Erin entered Dempsey’s Pub as Matt held the door for her. She waited while he did a quick once-over to find his group. The pub was less than half full, and the buzz of background conversation was muted. It was around dinnertime, so the aroma of caramelized onions, cooked beef, and vinegar dominated the room. Matt’s stomach rumbled, and Erin smiled. Wouldn’t mind a burger myself.
He touched her elbow lightly, and she followed him in the indicated direction. Three men were sitting at the table. She recognized Bill, and had no trouble guessing which of the other two was Richard and which was Kevin.
As they approached the table, Erin carefully watched the expressions on the men’s faces. Kevin’s affect was more or less blank—he barely seemed to notice her. Math genius, Matt had said. So he probably only rarely touched down in the same reality as the rest of the world.
Richard, a large, muscular man more reminiscent of a fullback than a physicist, had started off looking perplexed but was now switching to angry. Erin would have to get Matt to explain the whole project advisor thing in more detail, but it looked like his prediction had been right—Richard was very protective of this project and wasn’t taking her presence well.
And Bill was grinning, of course, probably anticipating some entertaining fireworks. Typical Bill, always looking to stir things up.
Matt held a chair for Erin as she sat down, and Richard transferred his glare to her. She glared back at him, daring him to give her any lip. Best establish the nature of their relationship early.
Matt did quick introductions. Richard waited for the courtesies to be completed, then said, “I assume there’s a good reason for bringing your girlfriend.”
Erin held up a finger before Matt could reply. “I’m not here as Matt’s girlfriend. I represent myself. And I’m here to provide some context on your experiment that you seem to have completely missed.”
Matt cut in before Richard could react. “Look, Richard, Erin smelled the fumes from the event yesterday on my clothing, and I think she may have a better viewpoint on this than we do.” He spread his hands. “She’s a geology major. She identified the chemical in the gas plume just from the odor, and it scares me a little bit that she thought I’d been hanging around a volcano. I know you wanted this project kept quiet, but I’m pretty sure we’re out of our depth. We’ve got an actual gate on our hands, the kind where things can come through. What if the next time we open the gate, the results are even worse? What if we open it into the interior of a volcano? Or a star?”
All eyes were on Richard as he glared at Matt. “How much have you told her?”
“I filled in the basics. Enough to understand the problem, and enough to understand why it should be kept quiet.”
Richard turned to Erin, still glowering. “You understand that part? You can cause a lot of damage—”
“I get it, Richard. Can we move on?”
Richard tried to stare Erin down for a few more seconds, then sighed and nodded. “Okay, maybe we could use a fresh perspective on this.” He took out his phone, poked at it, then handed it to Erin. “Here’s the video from the event.”
She pressed “play” and watched the scene unfold. Richard, Bill, and Kevin provided running commentary.
When the video had finished, Erin sat in thought for a few seconds, then handed the phone back to Richard. “I’m guessing that wasn’t what you expected. Matt told me that you’ve been working with dice.”
Richard looked down at his hands, and Erin could see that he was trying not to break into a grin. Interesting. Not as humorless as Matt thinks. A self-control thing?
He looked up, deadpan. “Yeah, we figure it was your boyfriend’s software mods that did it. He added an A.I.-based feedback process with learning capability. Apparently, it found something more interesting than our die flipper to zero in on.”
Erin glanced at Matt, who smiled and gave her a Who, me? shrug.
She swept her gaze around the group. “Look, the heat and that particular gas point to a small number of possibilities. Either you’ve connected with a volcano or something like it, or you’ve connected with Venus or something like it.”
Erin gestured at Kevin. “Kevin was correct when he said that it probably isn’t Venus—at least not at ground level—or you’d all be a whole lot of dead. Thousand-degree temps would have done more than just blister the wall. But you’ve connected to something that obviously isn’t from around here—at least from our version of here. And once you accept that, the sky is the limit!”
Richard leaned forward on his elbows. “So what would you suggest?”
“Matt told me that you’re going to try again soon, this time with the gate enclosed in something airtight. That seems like a good plan. Will you have some kind of dead-man switch rigged to the container to cut power if it doesn’t hold?”
“Uh, I will now,” Richard replied, looking surprised.
Erin saw Bill grin just outside Richard’s field of view, and had to struggle to avoid doing the same. She made a pretense of rubbing her lips to hide it while nodding slowly. “Okay. I’d like to be there for it. Can you have cameras focused on the portal or whatever it is?”
“Yes.” Richard gave a dismissive snort. “If we can figure out how to have them survive the experience.”
Erin tapped her fingers on the table in thought. “Can you fill me in on what this is about? I know that it has something to do with Schroeder’s cat and random events, but that’s about it.”
Kevin held up his hands in negation. “First, it’s Schrödinger’s cat, not Schroeder. Schrödinger was a scientist; Schroeder plays piano.”
Erin noted in passing that he talked to the air, even when directly responding to someone. Like a default lecture mode. She raised one eyebrow and waited for him to continue.
“Er, right. Anyway. According to my models, the old idea that you get a new universe for each chance event is incorrect. When you flip a coin or something, the models say that only those things affected by the coin flip get duplicated, and the duplicate realities share the single universe at large.”
“Like in Sliders?” Bill asked.
“Yeah, great. First, that’s where we get our science these days—from TV. Second, that show assumed you get a new world for every little decision. In reality, it takes a significant event to create a different world-line that will persist. Dice flips average out and merge, but if you hit a tipping point, you should get a complete split.”
Kevin looked like he was ready to ramp into full-on lecture mode, so Erin held up a hand to forestall him. She looked around the table, a little amused at this group of men who had possibly just made history and were treating it like a technical problem.
11. Adventure Under Glass
June 19
Bill looked up as Matt and Erin walked in. He grinned, watching Erin skid to a stop as she got her first look at a true mad science lab.
In one corner, the portal equipment, in the form of a couple of server boxes and a bunch of cables, sat on the folding table beside the large monitor. In the center of the room, the gate sat inside something that looked like a giant goldfish bowl with metal reinforcements. The cables ran through a gasket on the top of the container. One of the cameras had been positioned to point through the glass directly into the gate. The whole assembly, including the camera, sat on a large powered turntable.
Matt pointed at the setup. “Now, that is some mighty fine Rube Goldberg.”
Richard waved a hand at the equipment. “That’s the pressure vessel that Bill supplied. I have no idea what it was supposed to be for originally, and Bill just grins when I ask. Maybe you can get it out of him. Anyway, the idea is that we’ll rotate the whole assembly on the turntable and try to get a 360-degree view of things.”
“You think that’ll work?”
“It should. You can’t think of this like a TV. It’s more like a periscope. Gas came through last time, so it’s a physical connection, not merely an image. I think we can rotate our viewpoint by rotating the gate.”
“And we’ll be sitting in the observation room again,” Bill added, pointing to an area behind thick glass. “Just in case.”
Richard nodded absentmindedly as he went through his startup sequence on the tablet. “I got the parameters from the logs the other day, so I know where the attractor is. I can just set the equipment to the general area in phase space, then let it lock on by itself.”
“Shouldn’t someone make a speech or something?” Bill said. “Boldly go, yadda yadda.”
“Chrissake,” Richard muttered, as he flipped a final switch. “Okay, it’ll start up in thirty seconds. This would be a good time to get under cover.” Matching action to words, he hastened to the observation area, quickly followed by the rest of the group.
The monitor was ready to show the images from the cameras. Kevin played with the remote and pulled up the feed that showed the quiescent gate.
“Just in case this goes badly,” Bill said, “it’s been nice knowing you all.”
“Jesus Christ, Rustad! Just once can you put a cork in it?”
“Well, we’ve been talking theory up until now. What if we’ve gotten it completely, utterly wrong?” Bill made an exploding gesture with his hands.
Before Richard could respond, the timer expired and the portal equipment activated. There was a brief flash that made everyone, including Bill, jump. Then the area within the gate settled into a murky view of what appeared to be a landscape with tall objects in the distance. The vessel made a slight groaning so
und as the pressure equalized. A glance over at the setup made it clear that air in the vessel was mixing with atmospheric gases from the other side. Readouts on the container indicated a little over two atmospheres and 90 degrees Celsius.
Once the mixture stabilized, the view through the gate cleared up a bit. Kevin pointed the remote at the video camera and operated the zoom. The view on the monitor expanded, and they found themselves looking at—the UNL campus. Or a very ruined version of it. In the stagnant mist, they could see corroded and partly collapsed buildings.
“That’s the Engineering Center,” Kevin said in a soft voice.
“And Othmer Hall, or what’s left of it,” Erin added.
They were silent for several seconds before Kevin said, “Those buildings are in that direction, too. On this side.”
They stared at the scene of devastation. There was no movement other than an occasional slight shift in the mist.
“I’m really, really weirded out right now,” Bill said into the silence. No one replied. He looked around, and noted that everyone’s facial expressions mirrored how he felt.
“Okay, I’m going to rotate.” Richard operated a control, and the turntable started to turn. As it did, the view on the monitor slid sideways. When the assembly had rotated about ninety degrees, they got an out-of-focus image of something too close to the camera. Kevin backed off the zoom, and they realized they were looking at part of a wall. Another ninety degrees, and they found themselves looking at the room they were all standing in, or a heavily damaged version of it.
“Well, not Venus,” Bill said with an awed tone.
“Nope,” Erin replied. “Earth. Runaway greenhouse effect, from the looks of it. Not as bad as Venus, but bad enough. This is an alternate Earth, and they lost the coin toss.”
The group walked to Dempsey’s after shutting down the experiment. By tacit agreement they didn’t talk about it until they sat down, looked at menus, and ordered food and drinks. Once the waitress left, Erin turned to Kevin and asked, “So is there one alternate Earth or an infinite number?”
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