Branch Off

by Dario Solera

  Branch Off

  Dario Solera

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Branch Off

  v9

  Copyright © 2015 Dario Solera

  All rights reserved.

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  Other books by Dario Solera

  White Dwarf One: bitly.com/white-dwarf-one

  Lisa and Me: A Short Story: bitly.com/lisa-and-me

  One

  That moment, early in the morning, when the day ahead could be memorable or dreadful, with everything still possible and impossible at the same time. A Schrödinger’s paradox of daily life.

  Such ideas were on her mind as beige curls of cream swam on the surface of her black coffee. Her cold hands tingled when she clamped them around the hot mug.

  All the other tables were vacant, as was the counter. She was sitting at a small table near the wide floor-to-ceiling window, trying to focus on each falling snowflake through the dull light of the streetlamps. Sarah followed one flake after another until her eyes ached and her head threatened to spin.

  This was the first snow she had seen in Geneva since moving here. It was somewhat cold for early November, and the streets still didn’t show all the colorful paraphernalia, leaving a sense of something missing, out of place. Nonetheless, Christmas seemed just a week away.

  Images of home in Boston engulfed her for a moment with their warmth. She fought them off with a sip of coffee, whose strong taste brought her back to reality.

  Focus, that’s what she needed. The picture of the particle accelerator formed in her head: a ring of steel, electromagnets, and superconductors, all held together by liquid helium at 269 degrees Celsius below zero. Her heart raced, and she gripped the mug in front of her.

  After gulping down the rest of the bitter fluid, she stood and donned her black woven coat, wrapped the blue scarf around her neck, and then headed outside.

  It wasn’t clear to her what unnerved her the most, experiments over the weekend or waking up so early in the morning. The accelerator used so much electricity that the grid could squeeze the required amount only when everybody else was asleep in their homes, oblivious to the immense powers released by minuscule particles crashing against each other.

  Thin snow crunched beneath her feet as she walked with a brisk pace toward the Institute. She had never visited the previous headquarters, which had been abandoned when the old particle accelerator was retired in favor of this new, improved, and larger installation, which stretched well across the border with France. In fact, she often wondered why something that resided for great part in the adjacent country could be considered Swiss, but that was Europe. All in all, she didn’t care much, as one of the advantages of the most recent labs was that she could walk from home instead of driving or taking a tram.

  No soul roamed the campus, and the fallen snow had already started to muffle sounds. Her footsteps sounded local, close to her, and although she walked in the middle of the paved alley, the cottony silence provided her a sense of privacy, of intimacy even.

  She fought a yawn away, craving another coffee with the taste of the previous still lingering on her tongue. Her whole face was numb with the cold, and she was glad for the double pair of woven socks she wore inside her boots. Hands in pockets, she walked, admiring the light of the campus’s lamps turning everything orange—the pavement, the lawns, and the trees.

  Yellowish light illuminated the entrance of the building, creating a cozy effect, blurred through the increasing snowfall.

  As she approached it, the outer door hissed open. Fumbling in her purse, she found the badge and swiped it through the reader, which unlocked the inner gate with a beep. Familiar grey linoleum welcomed her with the usual squeaking of her wet boots. As she unwrapped the scarf and undid the buttons on her greatcoat, she noticed footprints running toward the corridor to the left.

  Professor Richards walked across the hallway, leaving one room and walking into another. Just as he disappeared through the second doorframe, the man came back out and waved at her with a wide grin. “Oh, Sarah, you’re here already. That’s fantastic,” he said with his English accent. “It’s early but everything is ready. We’re waiting for a ‘go’ from the power company.”

  The scientist had a white lab coat on, with a pen in the breast pocket and his ID badge pinned on it and bent to one side. The coat didn’t form the least fold or crease against his body. His grey beard was sharply shaven on the sides and neck, and regular and thick on the rest of his face. Curly, almost-white hair completed the picture. Sarah always pictured him like a slimmer and taller version of Santa, although he was younger than he showed. When Richards had interviewed her for the position she now held, with his calm voice and polite smile, he hadn’t made her feel under stress, despite there being a dozen other candidates waiting out of the door of his office. She had noticed his hands motioning in the air with slow, deliberate movements and his continued use of her name. Today, the way he talked still conveyed calmness, but he looked more excited than usual.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” the man added, brushing his hands together before him and never letting the grin off his face. “It’s going to be a good day, I know it,” he said as they walked down the corridor.

  The enormous control center was busy with the activity of a couple dozen people. Most of them were the engineers that had built the accelerator and were now operating it. They were grouped inside two ample, semicircular desks lined with computer screens. On the main wall of the room, larger monitors cycled through images from cameras placed in the underground tunnels that housed the machine.

  Sarah walked over to her workstation at the rightmost desk while Professor Richards proceeded toward the other.

  “Good morning,” Frank said from his chair. He was one of the computer scientists of the Institute and had designed the data collection and storage systems. Sarah took note of his overall weather-oblivious appearance: thick glasses, short-sleeved white shirt, khaki trousers, and combed hair. She had never seen him clothed any another way, even when some of them went out together for a beer after work.

  She sat at her desk near him, a tiny red cat figure welcoming her from the top of her monitor.

  “Hi,” she said.

  Facing her, on one of the wall screens, a section of the synchrotron lay humming, painted red and with massive electromagnets encircling it every couple of meters.

  Sitting there and watching the screen of her computer, which showed live readings from the particle detectors, Sarah felt her heart rate increase. Soon, inside the metal tube before her, a handful of subatomic particles would start traveling at an ever-increasing velocity, shoved forward by the magnets, until they reached the speed of light. Goose bumps appeared on her forearms at the thought.

  Chatter filled the room, but the carpet and the walls were capable of silencing most of it. Voices sounded distant and muffled.

  Inside the other desk, a phone rang and Professor Richards picked it up. He nodded once, then twice. “Yes. Thank you,” he said. With the receiver still in his right hand, he yelled at the group, “We can begin! We have half an hour.”

  “Just in time,” Sarah muttered.

  In an instant, dozens of fingers began tapping on keyboards and more people talked on the phone. Voices piled on top of each other as the engineers prepped the machines.

  She was only a spectator, as she didn’t have any active role in the actual unfolding of the experiment she had designed. She spra
ng up from the chair for the thrill she felt and immediately forced herself to sit down again. Her legs were restless.

  Near her, Frank tapped on his keyboard. She saw Richards walking between the desks feverishly, talking to people and inspecting screens from above their shoulders.

  “Thirty seconds,” someone yelled.

  The largest screen at the far side of the room switched view and showed a representation of the circular machine with its tangential appendices. One by one, all the dots scattered along its path became green.

  “All magnets are powered and synchronized.”

  “Detectors enabled, data recording started,” Frank announced. “We’re storing four terabytes per second,” he added in a lower voice. “I love this job.”

  Sarah could not help herself and stood again, looking around her and putting both hands on her mouth, just below her nose. Her face was a big, wide grin.

  This was her life. Watching particles clash against one another, peeking into the tiniest detail of matter, pulling it apart and then putting it back together. Playing God, she sometimes said, but she didn’t believe in God. Playing Nature.

  A tridimensional particle detector’s live view filled the huge monitor, with a horizontal greenish cylinder slowly rotating on its vertical axis, set on a black background.

  She watched it as particles drew curved lines from the center of the detector, and little cubes lit up for just a moment at its periphery, before the real-time computing grid would discard them as noise.

  “Reaching top energy in fifteen seconds,” someone said.

  With heartbeats resounding in her chest, Sarah didn’t notice that most of the scientists were now standing like her and watching the massive screen. Waiting for the monitor to fill with color, and hoping to see the pattern she had calculated over the past year of studies, her surroundings faded out.

  In an instant, the cylinder filled with what seemed like yellow fur, blossoming from its center and spreading in all directions. The surface of the detector spiked with green, transparent bars.

  The control center burst in shouts of joy.

  “Yes!” Sarah yelled, jumping in place with her arms in the air.

  Software inside the computer began going through each detection, separating signal from noise. Some of the green bars became shorter, and many of the curved yellow lines disappeared.

  Slowly, the room fell silent, everyone transfixed with the images on display.

  When the system signaled that it had finished the filtering process, a faint chatter began floating across the desks, like a puzzled murmur of astonishment.

  Sarah walked closer to the screen, attracted by the beautiful image it showed. “Something’s wrong,” she said to herself in a low voice.

  Most of the bars were gone, and those remaining were at the top of the cylinder, in the middle of its curved surface. In the place where the tallest bar lay, right below it, was a tight beam of yellow curves, all of them pointing upward, so precisely aligned that they crossed the outer surface of the detector in the same spot.

  “I’ve never seen anything like that,” Richards said, standing near and watching the screen.

  “Yeah. It looks like a tulip bud.”

  “That’s not what we were looking for, is it?”

  “No,” she whispered. Sarah turned to Richards, who could not unlock his eyes from the monitor. “No,” she repeated. “It’s not.”

  ***

  “It’s confirmed,” Frank announced. “There were a few errors during noise cancellation, but data were overall correct.”

  “What the hell is it, then?” Sarah asked, looking at the wall screen with her hands on her hips.

  “You’re the expert.”

  She watched Richards approach them with a brisk pace, dreading the questions that he was going to ask, for which she didn’t have answers. Damn, now she had less certainties than before the experiment, but that was science. That was what her job was about. Keep asking, keep questioning, keep finding answers, and then use those as starting points to formulate further questions.

  “Any clues?” Richards asked, brushing his eyes with both his hands. His face was dark and tired, the muscles in his neck tense.

  “We checked everything. The parameters are correct. It must be something… new.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Sarah’s lips parted but nothing came out. Another answer she didn’t have. “We’ll have to check our models once more, I suppose, and see if we can correlate them with these data.”

  “Quite obvious,” he said. “What else?”

  “I know it’s a lot of money—”

  “We’ll run the same experiment next month,” he said, his face restored to its usual softness.

  She hesitated for a moment before talking again. “Thank you.”

  “It’s my job, Sarah, to beg for funds so you don’t have to. Oh, Frank, make sure we have enough storage space, and that today’s data is safe.”

  “OK.”

  “Good.” Richards glanced at the large digital clock below the main screen on the wall. “It’s 7:00 p.m., and most of these people have been working for—how long? Fifteen hours? Time to go home and get some rest.” With a gentle touch, he took Sarah’s elbow and walked her a few paces away from the others. “Sarah—”

  “I know. I’m sorry,” she said, her eyes low.

  “Oh, don’t be. We haven’t understood what happened, but we might have discovered something interesting. Keep doing what you’re doing.”

  ***

  Sarah collapsed on her red couch. She kicked off her boots and spread her arms wide on the backrest, closing her eyes and exhaling deeply. The golden light inside the lounge of her apartment filtered through her shut eyelids, turning reddish.

  Jones jumped up near her and shoved his head against her belly.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” she said. “You little lion, come here.”

  The cat purred.

  Thin, sparse snow fell outside, just like tiny specks of yellowish dust.

  Her last winter holidays back in Boston, two long years ago, came again to her mind. She had spent Christmas Eve all by herself, watching an old black-and-white movie, which ended with a joyful, festive dinner. She had remained cuddled on the sofa under a plaid blanket, with Jones purring off to sleep in her lap. Even Will had not stopped by that evening, sucked away by family affairs.

  Each snowflake seemed to whisper into her ears that this year would not be much different, and that it was all her fault. She had tricked herself into hoping that changing life could change her as well, but there she was, with another two years under her belt. Decent professional achievements, but that was it.

  Sarah’s belly grumbled. She glanced over at the kitchen door without the least energy to stand up and prepare something. She reached for the phone on the low table in front of the sofa and dialed the number of the pizzeria two blocks down the street.

  Just as a man picked up on the other side, the doorbell rang. She hung up and walked to the door, placing the still-purring Jones on the couch.

  She felt her heart jump when she put her eye on the peephole. She yanked the door open, and for a time she stood there, incapable of talking or moving, only watching the man in front of her with her mouth open.

  “Hi,” he said. He offered a red rose with one hand, and he was holding a bag with the other.

  “Will,” she whispered. Leaping forward, she placed her arms around his back. “It’s been two years!” she uttered as she hugged him tight.

  “How are you?” he asked with a bright smile.

  “Fine.”

  “I’m glad.”

  She stared at him for another long moment, smiling, before she let him in.

  ***

  “So, what have you done all of this time?”

  “Traveling. Asia, Europe.” He studied her for a while. “I had dreamed of it since when I was a child—but you know that.”

  Sarah nodded.

 
; “It wasn’t meant to be such a long vacation. I kept saying, ‘one more week.’ And the weeks piled up to almost a year. You?”

  She shrugged and looked at the floor. “I moved here. I started working for the Institute.” She didn’t feel at ease and even sensed a tone of excuse in her voice.

  “Yeah, physics.”

  They remained silent for a minute, with Jones peeking at the stranger from behind the armchair.

  Lots of questions floated inside her head, but she couldn’t focus on them. Not yet, at least. They hadn’t talked for two years, not even via e-mail, and now there he was, sitting on her sofa. It was typical of him, appearing just out of the blue, without even phoning—like the many times he had thrown tiny stones at her window in the middle of the night, proposing mad adventures.

  The ice wasn’t broken yet, despite the emotion of the first moments. “How did you find me?”

  Her friend grinned. “I phoned your parents in Boston. They thought I was crazy.”

  “You are,” she giggled.

  “But it worked. They remember me.”

  “How could they forget you? You set our shed on fire!”

  “I told you, it was an experiment!”

  Sarah smiled and nodded. A sense of nostalgia was engulfing her.

  “And,” he continued with a laugh, “you dared me!”

  “That’s true, I admit it.”

  “I was trying to impress you.”

  “Oh, I can guarantee you did impress me.”

  “Yeah.”

  Their gaze ended up once more on the floor, as if some kind of invisible barrier was holding them back from each other. Even if the magic of their friendship was still there, it was muted, buried beneath a layer of dust.

  “Look, I’m hungry,” she said after failing to find ways to carry the conversation on. “Wanna go out?”

  “Sure.”

  ***

  “So, are you seeing someone?” Will asked.

  “There aren’t many interesting girls where I work.”

  He nodded.