She took a pen from her purse, pulled the napkin from under her drink, slightly damp, but a workable drawing space, and wrote from memory.
“It may look hard, but it’s really not. It’s a mathematical relationship between compression and expansion. On the left side, the Greek symbol tau represents compression. On the right, the letter d is the expansion factor for a quantum dimension. The rest are coefficients that we’ve determined from lab tests.”
She turned the napkin around so that Daniel could see it. “You’re looking at a very famous equation, you just don’t know it yet. This will be taught in all future college physics courses. It will be as famous as E = mc2. No kidding.”
Explaining the physics brought her intellect into the conversation. Her anxiety disappeared and her self-confidence returned.
“Very simply, this equation is telling you that if you expand a quantum dimension to a macro size, another dimension must compress. Two different dimensions, inversely related. No one really knows why. It’s like space can’t help itself, like the universe is a balloon. You squeeze in one direction and the balloon expands in another.”
She squeezed an imaginary balloon, looking to see if the light had turned on for Daniel. Not there yet.
“What you saw today was the expansion. Thomas sent a webcam a few meters kata. To do that, he expanded a quantum dimension. Right? But you didn’t see the compression, not unless you measured carefully. And that’s what you missed. Dimensional compression. It’s a big deal. The crown jewel.”
“Certainly sounds like a big deal. The Nobel Prize work that Park mentioned?”
“Yeah, Spiegel will get the prize. I just did his validation testing. But I’ll be there cheering for him when he receives it.”
“Okay. Compression. What does it mean, in practical terms?”
“Well, just do the math. If I expand in the kata direction of one or two meters, I’m taking a quantum-sized dimension that is normally only a few picometers and expanding it by a million times. The Spiegel formula tells you that another dimension, say the up-down direction, must compress. And the formula tells you how much. Here, I’ll graph it for you. It’s easier to see.”
She took his napkin and drew a simple curve.
“This is the same equation, graphically. Imagine a ruler that sits under the blue line. It shrinks as you move left to right. At a few meters of expansion, like we’re doing at Fermilab, we’re at the top left edge of this curve. Virtually no compression, the ruler hasn’t shrunk at all. But expand kata to three hundred kilometers? Well, then things get interesting. The ruler shrinks to about half its original length.”
Daniel stopped her. “I’m not sure I understand. What shrinks?”
“The ruler.” She showed him the imaginary ruler in her hands. “A physical object, any object. Space itself shrinks. Just like a squished balloon.”
His face contorted. “Space shrinks? The whole world, everywhere?”
“No, not everywhere. It depends on your perspective—this is a relativistic effect. Remember Park’s demo? The space inside that Plexiglas box was affected. But only that space, nothing outside. From the webcam’s perspective, space really did compress. You didn’t notice it because the effect was way too small, the upper left part of the curve.” Daniel studied the graph on the napkin and still seemed puzzled.
Cut to the chase. He’ll get it.
“Carry the math a step further. If I expand to six hundred kilometers, the ruler compresses to one percent its original size. Go to a thousand kilometers, and now that ruler has shrunk by a hundred thousand, times. Think about that. Point your equipment in a direction and you can compress space by a factor of a hundred thousand. A planet, say Mars, that was fifty million kilometers away is now only five hundred kilometers away. At that distance, I could hop on a jet, do a tour of Valles Marineris and be back by lunch. A star that was ten light years away is suddenly sitting out at the orbit of Jupiter.”
Daniel tensed, his eyebrows pinching together. “Are you telling me this technology is a transportation device?”
“Well, theoretically. It makes distance almost irrelevant. With the right directional control, I could get so close to Mars I could literally step out onto the planet’s surface. Of course, Mars itself would look different because of the compression. So, I’d be stepping out on a flattened disc.”
Daniel froze, his lips tightened.
“What?” she asked, noticing the reaction.
“Your description. A flattened disc. I heard the same thing earlier today, a message from one of the astronauts. And now it makes sense. From his perspective, the Earth has been compressed from a sphere into a disc.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I know.”
Daniel looked up, surprised. “You know? What do you mean you know?”
“You’re right. Those astronauts are not in 3-D space.”
Daniel’s face reddened and his voice intensified. “You knew this but you said nothing? You do understand they may die?” His emotion hit her like a punch in the gut. He was right to be angry, and she felt sick.
“Sorry. Really, I’m sorry. I… I didn’t know for sure. When I heard the news about the missing spacecraft, I thought it might be possible. When you came to the Stetler office and started asking questions, well… I thought you had already figured it out. I mean, why else would you be asking these pointed questions about Diastasi affecting orbiting spacecraft?”
She lowered her head. “I should have said something earlier. I’ve been feeling guilty for hours.”
Daniel held a fist up to his lips and didn’t say anything for nearly a minute. His face was austere and her anxiety returned, not knowing where this might go.
“Nala,” he started slowly, “I’m bringing in the FBI tomorrow. It’s possible you could be charged for withholding relevant information.”
She held her head in her hands and pushed her hair back. “Daniel, it’s not me. I’m trying to help. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you this earlier, but Jesus Christ, we were sitting in the Stetler office with Yost one step away. Yost warned us to stick to the basic facts and not to speculate about potential capabilities. For all I know they had that conference room wired for sound. What was I supposed to do?”
“You could have told me more than you did.”
“Yes, I could have, and I’m trying to tell you now.” Her words hung in the air and Daniel remained silent. “You’re accusing me, but there’s so much you don’t know.”
“What else do I need to know?”
Nala looked up in the air and took a deep breath. This is where it really gets tricky. “I’m sorry,” she said carefully. “You won’t be able to save them.”
“The astronauts? Why not?” Daniel demanded.
“The technology… it’s not really a transportation device, at least not for people. We can move things. Cameras, electronics, plastic. No problem. But when we try to move anything alive… the results aren’t good.”
“So, you’ve attempted this?”
Nala winced. “Once. A test. We sent a rat. When we brought it back, it was… a mess. The bones and hair were still there, but most of its flesh had dissolved into a bloody goo. We had a full necropsy done and the lab guys said they’d never seen anything like it. The rat’s cells were physically deformed, the cell walls were broken. Every one.”
“And you think it was the transfer from another dimension?”
She nodded. “We thought it might be an asymmetric effect—the expansion didn’t kill it, but the collapse back to 3-D did. Anything that goes into 4-D space has to be precisely realigned on return, to cancel out any kata rotation. If we’re off by a few nanometers… well, that’s okay for a camera, but it’s disaster for living things. When you told me that the astronauts had communicated from kata space, that confirmed it. The expansion didn’t kill them.”
She looked up at Daniel and tears formed in her eyes. “But no one can ever bring them back.”
For Nala, a new reality had b
egun. Her job was certainly in jeopardy. She might even be charged as a criminal. But a weight had been lifted.
The secrecy ends now.
21 Surveillance
The black SUV was parked in an empty alley behind a row of commercial buildings. The nearest streetlight was a half block away, but it provided enough illumination to expose the word Security written on the side of the car. Inside, a large man held his mobile phone to his ear.
“I know it’s late, but you wanted me to call you if anything happened.”
On the other end of the line a tired voice. “Yeah. Yeah. What’s going on?”
“He’s in a bar talking to that woman, Pasquier.”
“At this time of night? Shit. What are they talking about?”
“I don’t know. I’m not that close. He might be hitting on her. But she looks upset, like maybe she’s pouring out her life story.”
“Shit… Put an end to it.”
“You want me to take her in?”
“Tell that bitch to report to me ASAP. Tell her she’s in breach of her employment agreement. Hell, drag her into your car, whatever you need to do, but put an end to it.”
“Will do.”
“And give him the file on her. I’m heading to the office now.”
The large man hung up and the car was quiet. He thought about his next steps. Not being on property, he was currently outside of the boundaries of his authority, and with plenty of witnesses, he knew this would need to be handled carefully.
22 Connections
Daniel’s mind raced. Park’s demonstration, the communications from space, and now corroboration from a physicist who was in a position to know. There was an unmistakable link between Soyuz’s disappearance and the Diastasi technology. Yet no motive and no one to hold responsible.
He glanced at Nala. She had provided a breakthrough, but his relief was accompanied by the sinking feeling that she might be right. The astronauts might never return, at least not alive.
In the jumble of thoughts, one stood out. Correct this out-of-control program, or shut it down.
His experience would lead him to the right decisions regarding the science, even as bizarre as things had become. But he was less sure about the fate of the players. The FBI would be required. He had to make the call tonight.
For now, his focus remained steadfast on his objective. Find a way to return three astronauts to safety. His best option sat across the table from him.
“Nala, let’s keep it very simple. I have just two questions. First, how do we bring Soyuz back?”
She looked up, her expression weary. “I’m trying to tell you. I don’t know how to get Soyuz back because I don’t know where it is.”
Daniel pressed. “Of course you do. You said it yourself. They’ve been moved into a quantum dimension. They’re offset in the kata direction, as people here like to say.”
“Yes, Daniel, yes… of course, that’s where they are.” Her voice was tinged with frustration. “But it’s too general. To bring anything back from a kata position, I’d need much more. Precise coordinates for the 3-D space that was expanded, and just as precisely, how far in the kata direction it was taken. But more than just location, I’d need controlling software that could reach to that space, flooding it with a coherent neutrino stream, and collapsing their offset back to Kata Zero. I don’t have any of that data, or that software, or the lab equipment to do it.” She held her head high, but her eyes were heavy.
“Who does, then? Because if we don’t figure this out soon, there are going to be three dead men in that spacecraft, and the stakes go up pretty dramatically.”
“Jesus, you know how to hit the guilt button. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. How many times should I repeat this?”
He genuinely felt empathy for her, but her answers still felt vague and perhaps self-serving. “Look, I know you’re sorry for not speaking up earlier, and I see that you’re helping now. Let’s get past that, okay? Let’s focus on returning these astronauts safely. How do we do that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think you can. Their bodies won’t survive it.”
Daniel shook his head and kept his voice low. “I’m not willing to give up just because you had one disastrous test on a lab rat. You said yourself you don’t understand what’s going on. Maybe there’s a solution.”
She looked down and nodded slightly. “Yes, maybe.”
“And will you help us try to find that solution?”
“Of course.”
Daniel held a hand to his face and rubbed at nothing in particular. She looked sincere. The touches of guilt and insolence were good, too—common traits of informants. She clearly knew how the technology worked and had identified the dangers. But she probably knew more than she was saying. “My second question. Who did this?”
She hesitated. “I can tell you my suspicions, but I don’t know for sure.”
“Okay, let’s start there. Was it this Kairos team in Geneva?”
“Kairos? Who told you that?” She looked genuinely perplexed.
“I received an email.”
“Kairos is a CERN team. But what do they have to do with this?”
“You don’t know?”
“I know of them. We had some contact with them last year. They were asking a bunch of questions about the technology. But we haven’t had any interaction since then.”
“But could they be responsible for Soyuz?”
She looked down at the table and shook her head. “No, no. Forget about Kairos and CERN. I don’t know what they’re doing, but they’re not the problem. Focus on Stetler.” Her hesitation disappeared and the words poured out. “It started last year. An argument about the pace of the program. Fermilab, Park specifically, wanted to go slow. He put together a multiyear plan. Start with small distances, small kata offsets, and work up to larger offsets. But Stetler wanted to go faster, go bigger.”
“Why?”
“Profit. It’s always money, and this technology could be big. Last year, we created a presentation that highlighted potential applications. A Mars base that could be transported to the surface of the planet simply by compressing space and making a small step. Just build the whole thing on Earth, zap it with coherent neutrinos, and it’s suddenly on Mars.”
“A Star Trek transporter,” Daniel said.
“Yeah, at least for equipment. Remember, no people. But that was just one idea. There was another plan to clean up space junk by targeting old rocket boosters and offsetting them in a kata direction. A cheap way to eliminate hazards to space flight. Good stuff with lots of potential.”
Daniel made the connection immediately. The report from Kwajalein. Space hardware that had simply disappeared. A puzzle piece fell into place. He now had a plausible explanation for the cause, and evidence that Nala was telling the truth. She had no way of knowing about that report, but she had just confirmed it. The tipping point. Put away the threats.
“That’s very helpful, Nala. So, what happened with the conflict?”
She shrugged. “Fermilab won. Of course they did, it’s their program. Since then, Park’s go-slow plan has been our guide. My work for the past year has focused on the control software for the NIC. That’s the Neutrino Induction Coil. It’s what aligns the neutrino oscillation. The software controls the neutrino oscillation amplitude, which controls the size of the space expansion. Bigger amplitude, larger expansion.”
“Who took it?” he guessed. Nala looked puzzled, so he repeated, “I know where you’re going with this. Who took the technology?”
She answered slowly. “Nobody actually took it. It was handed to them. Well, most of it. There’s another player. A company in China, called Wah Xiang. They manage The Higgs Factory.”
“The accelerator the Chinese are building?”
“Yeah, we thought that too. It’s finished. Ahead of schedule and apparently already online. Wah Xiang is handling their operations. Fermilab wasn’t willing to go big, so Terry Stetler made a deal with Wah Xiang.”<
br />
Her composure had returned and her voice was steady. “I have no idea what they’re doing over there, but I do know one thing. I’m sure I’ve been hacked.”
“You? By the Chinese?”
“Yeah. The control software that I wrote is protected. It’s locked and version-controlled through our secured server. There are only two people with the authority to unlock the source code—Director Jae-ho Park and me. Not even Yost or Stetler can get to it. It’s mission-critical software that ensures both the accuracy of our tests and our safety. You don’t want to be messing with that software unless you know what you’re doing.”
“And you think the Chinese company stole this software?”
“Yeah, I do. A couple of months ago, I noticed a background process slowing down my computer. At the time, I thought it was more spyware. Stetler puts this crap on our machines to keep tabs on us. But just yesterday, I was thinking about it and I put two and two together. They hacked me. The Chinese, Wah Xiang. I think they took the source code and are messing with the oscillation amplitudes. Really dangerous stuff.”
Daniel was, at first, elated. A second tip, and this time not anonymous. It could explain both the Soyuz disappearance and why Park had been so forceful in his defense of Fermilab. If she was right, the Diastasi program had nothing to do with Soyuz, and Park had been truthful.
His satisfaction didn’t last long. If another player, located in an uncooperative, even hostile country, held the key to bringing the astronauts home, then hope for their safe return was a fantasy. He thought of the diplomatic complexities, the difficulty of getting cooperation when agreeing to cooperate also meant admitting guilt. Even when relations were good, China’s belligerence was well known. If they were accused of espionage, theft, destruction of property and jeopardizing the lives of astronauts, their response would almost certainly be denial. To get Chinese cooperation would take time. Time they didn’t have.
Quantum Space: Book One in the Quantum Series Page 12