“And you believed this person? You've been drinking.”
“Yes, I have. Very much. But she knew where to come. She knew about the neutrino collector.”
“All right, that’s odd,” I say. “But it doesn’t prove anything.”
“I’m supposed to stop you from working on something,” he says. “A great machine.”
“I don’t even know what that is.”
“You were supposed to have a piece of paper for me. To show you.”
“Well, I don’t.”
“No?” he says, and covers his face with his hands. "She… I was certain you would."
I don’t like how upset he is. The Jaz I remembered wasn’t this…gullible.
“What’s going on?” he asks. “These people. These…yous. They’ve been haunting me. Are you just another one of them?”
“No, I’m me.”
I reach for his hand to comfort him and somehow we are embracing. The side of my face touches his. The stubble on his face is soft. He smells like strong alcohol and something un-nameable I'd forgotten until now. If I turn my head our lips will meet.
“No, I can’t do this,” I say.
“Do what?”
“This.”
“What? I thought I’d never see you again until you showed up. I'm not asking for anything. I just don't want to be haunted anymore.”
“Haunted? What the hell is a ghost anyway?” I yell.
I brace myself for him to yell back. For him to launch into one of his long convoluted tirades. There's only fear and resignation on his face.
“I don’t know. Just help me, please. Okay? If anyone can figure this out, you can.”
3. Axis. The Machine
"There are fewer of you here today than I had hoped for," Ilsa Hartlin says.
Only Wendy, Rudolph and I, and three others, have returned to the conference room. Ilsa Hartlin takes us through the door at the head of the table.
"I'm glad you’re here," Ilsa says to me.
I find it strange that I’m singled out.
No guards or attendants accompany us. Ilsa leads us into an elevator that descends fast. We’re going deep.
"You knew it was a collider," Wendy whispers to Rudolph.
Rudolph smiles.
The elevator opens into a cavernous space, the largest I have been in since the neutrino collector.
A giant machine towers over us, a monolithic rectangle as tall as my hotel, but wider. It is faintly luminous, giving off a soft glow that doubles our shadows.
Next to it is the track of a particle accelerator, a tunnel cut into the cavern’s rock wall filled with rails, magnets and metallic plating.
"Ha! I knew it," Rudolph says.
"On," Ilsa says.
Blue and white lights on the particle accelerator come to life. The tunnel extends as far as we can see in both directions—a high tech subway line of electromagnetic fields generating energy to move particles together on collision courses, so their explosions can be monitored.
The great machine thrums. I imagine the sound is the music of the micro cosmos, like the music of the spheres, only the perfect intervals are between vibrating particles, not planets. A six-by-six square of light appears in front of the machine. The square grows and an image appears on it. Water. Dark water. In another cavern.
"What is it?" Wendy asks. "A particle accelerator and a hologram?"
"Yes, that is an accelerator,” Ilsa says. “Our track goes through Italy, Turkey, and Russia, among other places.”
One of the other scientists gasps. "If that is true, it’s larger than CERN. I can’t imagine the cooperation needed to make that happen."
"We've been busy," Ilsa says.
"Working on a hologram?” Wendy says. “The resolution is astounding but—"
"It is not a picture,” Ilsa says. “But the machine is a camera, of sorts. I think of it more as a window maker."
"Windows? To where?" I ask.
But I know where. It’s the neutrino collector. The man-made lake under Illinois.
"Not where, when," she says. "We are looking into the past. Where? I'm not certain. I was hoping you could help."
"Time travel?" Wendy asks.
Rudolph scoffs.
"With enough energy, perhaps,” Ilsa says. “This doesn't move matter. It opens windows and sends images. Like a camera."
"These images. Can they interact?" I ask.
"With enough energy I think they could,” she says. “The amounts needed for that would be astounding."
I look at the accelerator track. She smiles.
"Ghosts,” I say. “Interactive images from the past and future.”
"You brought us here because you think this is a time travel machine?" Rudolph says.
"Aeon built this?" I ask, ignoring Rudolph.
"We had help,” Ilsa says.
"Listen to me. This isn’t funny," he says and storms toward the machine and walks right into the image square.
The collider’s lights surge and an awful whir fills the cavern. All goes dark. The machine’s thrumming hits a fever pitch then stops, the lights return. Rudolph has walked through the square. He walks a few more steps then turns around. His smile is gone. He looks at us like a lost child searching for a parent, then recognition blooms on his face.
"I don't want to be here," he says.
Ilsa helps him sit on the rough cavern floor.
"Rudolph, what happened?” she asks. “What did you see?”
For a second I think he will speak, but he only hangs his head and sobs.
"You knew that would happen," I say to her. "No guards here. No protection. It’s happened before, hasn't it?"
"Please. Calm, please,” she says. “I've brought you here for help."
"Help for what? Corporate profits?"
"Aeon-Hartlin is wildly profitable without this project,” she says. “History shows us the genie cannot be put back in the bottle. The Manhattan Project. Look at what that brought us. All of us. Humankind. I seek your help, to help all of us. This transcends corporate interest. Nationality. I'm a CEO. A mother. A daughter. And so much more. But what happens with this is not for me to decide.”
Ilsa looks around the cavern.
“Because I know this is something grand. We are on the verge of a breakthrough. What do you think? What do you see, Anina? Does it look familiar?"
"Of course it does,” I say. “The neutrino detector. That’s my life."
"I thought it might be," she says.
"Why?"
"I have my ideas, but I was hoping you'd tell me."
I bend down next to Rudolph.
"What did you see?" I ask.
His lips quiver, his eyes are red from tears.
“Let’s all calm down and take him back to the elevator,” Wendy says.
"No, that's my life over there," I say.
I run through the image square.
"Wait," Ilsa yells.
I hear her, but the sound is far away. I’m in the boat, with Jaz, checking the photo sensors in the neutrino collector. He is telling me how I'm like a neutrino. I can see them, countless thousands of dots of light, falling through the Earth. Passing through the spaces between molecules. Passing through everything unnoticed until one is lucky enough to collide with a particle while our sensors are trained on it and we detect it. It is so beautiful. A shower of the most beautiful fireworks I have ever seen.
Everything begins to fade. The cavern. The boat. The water. Jaz. Only the shower of neutrinos remains. Then there is only blackness.
The dark isn’t empty. I feel something. Presences. There are sounds. Like the sound of the machine and the accelerator but different, darker. Is this the sound of the darkness? Of dark matter? Is this the voice of the void? Voices of the things that inhabit it? Voices of things that do not coexist with light and the world we know? I don’t feel malice, or evil. My instincts say these things here just are, same as we just are. And they are just doing what they do. The
re is a terrible sound. I think something sees me.
Ilsa is screaming. “Off! Off! Off!”
I'm back in the cavern with the great machine.
The accelerator powers down with a descending whir. The machine’s pitch crescendos, then stops. I storm for the elevator.
"Don't go," Ilsa says. "We need you.”
I hit UP.
“We need heroes," she calls as the door closes.
"You have all this,” I scream. “Go find one.”
4. Crumple. Diverge.
She said heroes, really? Pria texts.
Yeah, I text back.
Good one. I know you said you couldn't tell me what is really going on, but hey, great story.
Not a story, I text, and attach a selfie with my newly-dyed pink hair.
Whoa. Didn’t expect that. You okay?
Never better, I reply.
I drink my coffee and watch passersby on the cobblestone streets as I look over the crumpled paper the flight attendant gave me. Dad calls.
“Pria showed me the photo,” Dad says. “Is that an absinthe bottle I see?”
“I’m fine, Dad. I love you.”
“Well you’ve got your Mother worried. She wants to talk to you.”
There is quiet, then Mom is on the phone.
“I’m not worried,” she says. “Your father loves the drama.”
“Mom, I—”
“Dear, I understand. You explained everything.”
“I did?”
“You came here,” she says. “One of you did. I understand. And I agree. You never asked to be born. Neither did I. ‘This universe is made up of elements blown apart from one cosmic whole at the Big Bang, the moment of creation,’ you said.”
“The fractured universe.”
“Yes, that’s how you put it. ‘The universe is broken and trying to find its way together again,’ you said. I told you not only do I agree, when you put it that way, but it is no one person’s responsibility to fix it.”
“So there’s no such thing as heroes?”
“No such thing.”
I think of the things in the darkness between worlds. Can they somehow be watching? I remember their sounds.
“Your responsibility is to yourself,” she says. “To live. To fix things about yourself if you see fit. No one person can carry the weight of the world. What did you want to ask me, dear?”
“Nothing. Nothing, Mom.”
“Oh, and I don’t care what your father says, I love your hair.”
“Thanks Mom. I love you too.”
“How is that project of yours going?”
“Perfect, Mom. Just perfect.”
I stare at the paper a while longer. The formulas and numbers are making sense to me. I add to the drawings. They are my drawings. I drew them. Or a ghost of me did. An American ghost in Zurich. Haunting Jaz. Haunting everyone. I understand now.
Pink? Pria chimes in via text. Don’t you think pink is so yesterday?
Yeah, but it was something about yesterday I liked, I text back.
The board?
I don’t care.
OK. I’ll play, she texts. This is the point in your story that is not a story, where you're supposed to go back in time and destroy the machine. Or decrypt a message from the past. No, the future. Maybe you right the wrongs in your life? Or make the world a better place? Resolve loose ends? Learn something? Teach someone?
I let her text away. I text Jaz to come meet me. I sketch ideas and instructions on napkins while I wait.
“I see them too,” I say, before he can say anything.
“You do?” he says. “What are you going to do?”
“I have some ideas.
“Like what?”
“Not sure.”
“Not sure? Has it crossed your mind to destroy the machine, so it isn’t used by that damn corporation?”
“I don’t know. I think maybe I’m supposed to use it to send messages to myself.”
“Anina.”
“Or to you. Or for important things, like arranging to have hot chocolate served at Aeon’s corporate meetings.”
“Hmmn,” he says. “Chocolate I can get behind. But aren’t you afraid of tampering?”
“Nothing can be upset by tampering, because there is no tampering. There only is what is. No order. No divine law. No sin. Only chaos.”
“Why do you think that?”
I think of the presences in the void. There is no way to explain them to him. It crosses my mind that the unwritten songs by Seven Bells had to have crossed them to reach me during the disturbance on the plane. One of my ghosts was trying to reach me and brought a bit of a different future with her.
“Because you told me that, or something like it, once upon a time," I say. "When you told me why you quit your studies. Why you dropped out of everything.”
“Oh. That’s probably why it sounds good to me,” he says. “I think it would make more sense with some absinthe.”
“You were so bright, Jaz, you really were. I always loved that about you.”
He looks like he is figuring an equation in his head.
“Anina, there were a lot of things I said to you that I regret.”
We are both quiet.
“What happens now?” he asks.
“I think this is where you show me Zurich.”
He takes me next door and buys a bottle of absinthe. The streets and shops of Zurich are better with him. His rooftop garden is better with his stories, stories of his life since we parted. I don’t have many. Only the path that led me here. Foul tasting absinthe tastes better with him. I do not drink much. Soon I will be another story in his garden that will have one more bottle. When he has drunk himself to sleep I kiss his forehead and return to my hotel. I call Ilsa Hartlin to have someone pick me up.
* * *
Ilsa and I are alone in the cavern with the machine.
“I’m glad that you are back,” she says. “You built a beautiful machine. We built a beautiful machine together.”
“You were right,” I say. “This is bigger than us.”
She runs her hand along the smooth surface of the monolith.
“Oh what a sweet, sweet paradox it is,” she says.
I pull the papers and napkins with my notes from my pockets.
“So what have you come up with?” she asks.
“I have my ideas.”
“Your first one?”
“Fire it up. Let’s find out just how much energy it takes to make a ghost that can interact.”
She smiles.
5. Scatter
“What are you doing?” Jaz asks.
I didn’t think he was awake yet. I close the door to his flat.
“Who was at the door?” he asks.
“Just giving myself instructions.”
“What?”
“You know, like you said. On how to destroy the machine.”
“Anina,” he says with a yawn. “Really?”
“What do you think?”
He lights a cigarette and prepares breakfast. Years of living like this has softened his sharp edges, but I’m not ready to trust him again. I’m not ready to leave him either.
He checks his stock portfolio on his tablet and brings two bowls of muesli and fruit to the table.
“What do you want to do today?” he asks.
I push two train tickets, courtesy of Aeon, across the table.
“Zurich is wonderful. How is the rest of Switzerland?”
“Beautiful.”
* * *
At the train station I send Jaz for coffee. It is the time Ilsa and I arranged to rendezvous with one of my ghosts. I see her by the ticket machine.
She is young and looks at me like I am looking at her; searching her face for clues to something. Is she asking herself, is this what becomes of me when I get old? I was with Jaz at her age. I want to tell her so much, but it takes so much energy to have her here. There is little time.
“Which one a
re you?” I ask.
“What do you mean?” the other me says.
“The machine. I’m supposed to—”
“Help me build it, of course,” she says.
“Of course,” I say.
I show her one of the napkins with my sketches and diagrams. She looks at it, pockets it and disappears into the crowd merging to go down the escalator leading to the trains.
“Who was that?” Jaz asks. He doesn’t have coffee. He was watching. “Was that…you? It looked like you. What are you really doing?”
“Giving myself instructions on how to build the machine.”
“But this morning, didn’t you—”
“Give myself instructions on how to destroy it. Yes. And before that I gave myself instructions on how to sabotage it. And I’ll give myself instructions on how to fix it later. I’ll do all of it again a hundred times before I’m through.”
He paces in a little circle.
“I see,” he says. “Wow, you really aren’t tampering at all. You’re passing the buck.”
“Your terminology is so unscientific. I love it.”
“Is that what a scientist does? Is that what a—”
“Don’t say hero. Say anything but hero, Jaz. Even scientist is better. Yes, I’m villainous. Say it. Vil-lain-ous.”
He paces that little circle again. He has something to say. Is this the part in the story where he shows his awful side again?
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing,” he says. “Except that I’m glad you’re my villain.”
I laugh.
“Why are you laughing?”
“Because I’m not yours,” I say.
“No?”
“No. And also because you sounded like my Dad just there.”
“Ugh, no.”
“Uh, yes.”
“Do you think anyone else saw?” he asks.
“Probably. But no one but you knew what you were seeing.”
No one but you can see me, I think. The music in the train station is distracting. It feels dissonant, though I know it is a simple melody. Since hearing the sound of the darkness, everything sounds different, but I know nothing has changed. The universe is still as fractured as it was at the moment of creation. Everything that ever was and ever will be is still shooting out in all directions from a single point. Will it keep expanding infinitely? Or, someday, will the pieces rubber band back and reunite in a great destructive collapse. I try to recall those Seven Bells songs I heard on the plane, but all I can remember are the sounds of the darkness. I wish it didn’t sound like laughter.
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