‘Yes. I would like to meet this “alien” you’ve found.’ Viljo’s smile faded as his gaze switched between his two friends and his wife. ‘There’s got to be a logical explanation. We just haven’t found it yet.’
Being also a Reiki Master, Taimi was the only one to think she might have an understanding of what had happened. Alien or not, the boy had so strong an aura that she had sensed it as she sat on his bedside. And physical contact had made deciphering his strong feelings surprisingly easy. But only because she was aware of the process. The overwhelming impression she had received on gently touching his head was that underneath his surface feelings there was an old soul. A powerful old soul. She wanted to talk with him, when the time was right.
*
Anita lay awake for a long time wondering what it would be like if she were in Qwelby’s situation. And where Tullia might be. With “Their Alien” sleeping in the spare bedroom, she was tucked up in a snug, loft room. She decided she liked that more than the guest room she had used before. It felt cosy and reminded her of fun times in the summer, camping. For a time she imagined that the sloping sides of the roof made the walls of a tent, and tried to imagine what it would be like to be in a country where they lived in tents.
That night she dreamed of a desert where small, dark-skinned people lived. It wasn’t a desert like she had seen in films with deep sand, piled by the wind into great big dunes, and an oasis with wild tribesmen charging around on beautiful horses. This was very different. Fairly flat, with the sand looking more like hard earth and lots of small bushes and spindly trees.
She could not make out clearly what clothes the people were wearing. Brown bodies wearing almost nothing seemed to elide into the same people wearing ordinary clothes. There were bows and spears. She could not make out which people were carrying them. What she was sure about was that none of them were wearing flowing robes and turbans, and there was no oasis. In her dream she said to herself that it wasn’t a real desert. But the brown figures dancing around a big fire said it was.
Meanwhile, Qwelby slept on, whatever else was disturbing him, and being without Tullia was his biggest problem, he knew from the energy responses of the three Rahkamos and Anita, that he was being looked after.
CHAPTER 30
BREAKDOWN
RAIATEA
Twelve hours behind events in Finland, Professor Romain arose early as usual. December twenty-seventh was for him and his team the start of their New Year. They had started their midwinter break by joining with the islanders in celebrating the Earth’s turn on the twenty-first. The calendrical New Year had no meaning for them.
Whilst he showered, shaved and dressed he ran through the thoughts he had been having during their break. The unresolved question in his mind was whether he had let his determination to prove the actual, physical existence of other dimensions cloud his judgement of the broader perspective. In his mind he had been discussing that with David Niven. “Sir David” as he thought of the man.
Romain looked on him as the epitome of the quintessential Englishman. A colonel in the Second World War, a consummate actor and a perfect gentleman. Romain had felt that it was only his early death that had prevented him from receiving the knighthood he so justly deserved. When Romain had changed his birth names, he had specifically chosen David for his first name as he so admired Niven and aspired to reach the standard he had set.
Romain’s development of the only equipment in the world capable of detecting the Earth’s Quantum Field, thus proving that it existed, had been many years ago. That had been all his own work. Once that was made public, he was certain that would earn him the Nobel Prize he coveted.
Miki shared with him the fear that their work could have military applications, to which they were vehemently opposed. Sadly, they had to accept that once the science was out there, how it was used was out of their control.
Early on, Romain had realised just how brilliant a mind Miki had under her self-affacing manner, and how Tyler’s more practical bent made all three into a perfect partnership. An unexpected side discovery of a form of biological glue had led to a radical new approoach to surgery. Initially they had developed products that could repair and restore damaged spinal disks, then created full-fuctioning replacements.
The final step had been the creation of what they called the MiniMax. Inserted into the patient, fibre optics provided a large and perfect three dimensional model of any area requiring intervention. The surgeon worked on that whilst the miniaturised robotic equipment carried out the same procedures on the patient. Roman expected to make a lot of money, even hoped for a Nobel Prize.
His fear, at times leading him to the edges of paranoia, had always been that someone would copy his work and beat him to his ultimate goal – quantum entanglement across dimensions.
Turning to check his appearance in the mirror, he shook his head. On his bedroom wall hung a photograph of David Niven playing Sir Charles Litton as the Phantom in the Pink Panther films. Unconsciously, he had dressed the same: black shoes, trousers and a black, silk, polo neck sweater. As a young man Romain would have laughed at anyone who claimed that emulating David Niven was in any way scientific. Having devoted all his adult life to the study of quantum science, he knew that the energy that pervaded all the universe was not exclusively limited to material items and included consciousness.
‘Well, Sir David?’ he asked the photograph.
‘You are a scientist. An explorer. Is it right to conceal so much knowledge of advancements from your community? Is it honourable?’
The voice was clear in Romain’s head. The language pricked his conscience. I am years ahead. Truly, I cannot envisage anyone catching me up, yet alone overtaking me. And by the time that might happen, I may have three Nobel Prizes. But. Is that what I want? No! What I dream of is having tangible evidence of another dimension. Something that I can almost hold in my hand, like my data returning, intelligently reorganised. He took a deep breath and looked Niven in the eyes.
‘I will publish concerning the ELF when the Nobel announcements have been made. Then for the new neutrinos: two or three years after. My assistants deserve the recognition and, hopefully, honour.’
He felt his muscles relax as previously unrecognised tension flowed out of him. He had made a good decision. Feeling lighter than he had done all holiday, he deliberately flicked the end of his hair so that what was usually an annoying piece fell over his forehead, like a forelock ready to be tugged to one’s Lord and Master. With a soft smile he tugged it to Niven’s photo before descending to join his two doctoral assistants to start the new working year with their usual late breakfast.
Over the years they had developed a set pattern which suited them all. It combined their scientific interest in the changes that took place in the Earth’s quantum field as a result of the solstice along with a celebration of the year’s turn. They followed that with their own Christmas celebration. In spite of the different personal views of the three scientists it seemed appropriate given the weight of history in the island.
Raiatea had been and still was the religious centre of Polynesia. The Moai of Rapa Nui were designed to maintain the Polynesian religious order of Raiatea. There, the Mara’e Taputapu-atea faced the Moai in the sky. But now the majority of islanders were Christian.
Romain did not believe in God in any religious sense. Rather he believed in the universe, the multiverse as it really was comprising the whole of everything, as alive. Tyler had been brought up in a community that believed that God saw and ordained everything. After a series of tragedies had struck the community including his family, he had totally disavowed any concept of an overarching deity. Yet both men had a long tradition of celebrating Christmas, and Miki, who described herself as loosely following the ways of Shinbutsu Shag an ancient Japanese tradition, was happy to enjoy the festivities. For all of them it was not just a mid-winter break but the celebration of a year’s work.
The small staff, principally a housekeep and o
ne of her daughters, had returned to the family home after serving dinner on the twenty-third. Originally, Romain had provided a cold collation for Christmas Eve based on a variety of European traditions from his many years working on the continent. He was never sure quite how it was that Miki, now in her mid-thirties and still looking like a beautiful doll, had swapped from preparing the meal on Christmas Day to providing a Japanese meal on Christmas Eve. This year it had been two fish dishes: Sushumi followed by an exquisite Kaiseki Ryori. Wine with the meal had been Wakatake Daiginjo with Fu-Kii Plum for the dessert of multi-coloured steam cakes known as Uiro.
Romain had risen to the challenge and served a traditional English Christmas meal. Turkey with stuffing, chipolatas, roast potatoes, a mixture of vegetables, and his own home-made Christmas Pudding with brandy sauce. Older than her by a clear decade, Miki’s husband had provided a traditional West Indian meal the following day. Salt Fish and Ace with breadfruit, dumplings, plantain and salad; followed by his variation of a traditional Jamaican Christmas Pudding which included prunes, cherries and dates and, of course, served with rum sauce.
Romain provided the other drinks. The Solstice toast made in the local hooch had been the usual: ‘A good year past, a better year to come.’ Champagne Bruno Paillard Rosé was used for a very different toast on the twenty-fourth: ‘Stellar Thinking’, a five-year-old Chablis from Daniel Etienne DeFazio for the turkey and a four-year old Puilly-Fumé from Louis Chevalier for the Salt Fish, with sake, port, brandy and liqueurs to follow.
As Romain said as they relaxed on the twenty-sixth: there was no point in his having spent a large part of his career in France, the country that invented good food and wine, and not passing on the benefit of his education.
‘If all else fails we can always open a restaurant here,’ Tyler had quipped.
‘A “peak” tourist attraction,’ Miki had added, teasing Romain with his dislike of tourists.
The two men had groaned at Miki’s pun and all three had clinked glasses to a toast of: ‘To us.’
*
The patio on the fourth floor being the most convenient for communal eating, it was there that they were partaking of a leisurely breakfast of fruits, cheeses and freshly baked fougasse with black olives; ‘ladder bread’ as Tyler called it. Angelique, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the housekeeper who had been driven up early that morning by her older brother, was proving to be as good a cook as her mother.
In their lines of research ‘Blue Sky Thinking’ was normal. Over the winter break business discussions were supposed to be forbidden. As that had turned out to be impossible they allowed themselves to indulge in what they called ‘Stellar Thinking’. Sharing crazy and impossible thoughts that sometimes drilled down to ideas with practical and commercial application.
The meal finished, Romain leant forward. ‘Planning meeting this afternoon. Anything in our Stellar Thinking worth pursuing, and remind ourselves where we are with our various experiments. Now that our new year’s underway, let’s go and make our usual checks and ensure all the equipment is ready for action. Hopefully CERN will be restarting any day now. Tyler, please clear the dishes and thank Angelique for the fougasse, it was perfect. Miki, let’s go and start a diagnostic.’
Having seen teams disrupted by favouritism, often unconscious, he was always careful to treat his two assistant equally as he spread around tiresome, menial or challenging tasks. To him, the staff were part of the team. He could not abide the thought that they might feel, or worse, be treated as servants. Yet he was blithely unaware of how embarrassed Angelique was going to be when Doctor Jefferson arrived in the kitchen bearing a tray load of dirty dishes.
*
Once Tyler and Miki had settled in, Tyler had rapidly rationalised the situation with the neutrinos. As various types of brain waves were well known and easily measurable, he hypothesised that a highly concentrated sub-set of beta waves acted on the psien’s energy signature as in a binary system: yes/no, on/off.
With his full commitment, it was not long before the three of them discovered the neutrino’s full potential: it could be ‘encouraged’ to work like a sandwich. A toasted sandwich where the edges were sealed, totally enclosing the filling. Keeping to standard scientific nomenclature they allowed their sense of humour full play by choosing the symbol Ψ , the Greek letter ‘psi’, to represent two slices of bread and a filling.
Tyler drew the line at Romain’s suggestion they should round off the word by adding ‘in’ for ‘intelligent.’ Instead, they compromised on ‘en’ to stand for ‘envelop’, and agreed that it would remain the same in the plural.
Tyler had been in his element when it came to building the new equipment required. First, what was in effect half of the donut structure of a miniature collider was constructed and situated on the other side of the mountain, opposite the laboratory. The aim being to trap the psien and send them back the way they had come. At first individual psien were sent to align the system. After that, increasing lengths of chains of linked psien.
Next they constructed a data accelerator, whereby the data to be the filling of each individual sandwich was fired into the stream of psien emerging from the accelerator. After a lot of trial and error, a sandwich chain was successfully created, sent through the mountain and returned via the half donut. That evening they had celebrated with a bottle of vintage Mumm Champagne.
Following the successful transmission of substantial amounts of information data as far as the Moon and back using photons, the next goal was to transmit something solid. It did not matter how minuscule that might be. Teleportation, as the media would call it, would be the realisation of an age-old dream. That required a vast amount of power. Way beyond anything that Romain’s laboratory could ever produce.
They had one hope for success: to use the power of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The initial experiment being to piggy-back a chain of data-carrying psien onto a stream of protons, ‘encouraging’ them to return as in the trials on Raiatea.
There had been a long period of trial and error before the first, individual psien returned. Once again Tyler was in his element, working with Romain on designing and constructing detection equipment, calibrating, recalibrating and monitoring. As he said in all innocence, it was not feasible for Romain to contact his colleagues at CERN as often as their experiments required.
After that first individual psien had returned, they had steadily sent chains of increasing length and eventually increased the successful return rate to more than fifty percent. Romain was able to advise that CERN had not detected anything amiss. The psien remained invisible.
Finally, on December the twentieth, they were ready for their first trial with a data-carrying chain. To their intense disappointment CERN had shut down, saying that two magnets had failed. Romain was able to report that his contacts had confirmed what CERN had announced. An as yet unexplained surge in the LHC which had caused the failure of two magnets, with the opportunity being taken to close for a short period of routine maintenance.
In a way the timing was fortuitous. They had hoped to start their customary mid-winter break that evening on a note of success. Had they failed and had CERN remained open, they would not have taken the rest they needed.
*
Having reached the third floor, Romain and Miki stepped into the pre-chamber and changed into pale green coveralls and bootees. With Romain in the lead they stepped through the inner door, walked through the main laboratory and along the short “L” shaped corridor that thus maintained the mountain’s maximum shielding of the Fifth Room.
Surprised, they both stopped just inside the door of the latter. Something was wrong. What, was not immediately obvious. The large screen that was a map of the world was jumping about. That could be an ordinary glitch. A red light on the panel covering the data storage system was flickering. That should never happen.
The equipment was so delicate that from time to time it picked up variations that were not in the quantum field itsel
f. Those were stored for checking. The red light came on with a steady glow to show that had happened. It did not flicker.
Damping down his mixture of concern and excitement, Romain issued his command. ‘Miki, see what you can do with data retrieval. I’ll run a systems diagnostic.’
Miki swept her long hair behind her head, tying it into a knot as she sat at the other large screen and called up the latest data.
Romain went around behind the two large screens. He unlocked a drawer and pulled out a curved keyboard with numeric touchpads at either end. Another of his inventions. The left-hand set of numbers and symbols all carried special programming.
‘David, the data is all jumbled up. This is weird.’
‘Let me see what I can find.’ He nibbled at his moustache in agitation.
The soft humming of equipment and air conditioning. An occasional grunt a ‘?’ or a ‘!’
‘You’ve found something?’ Tyler asked as, similarly clad in green, he brought into the room a container of cold drinks, its round shape adorned by a picture of an array of colourful plants.
Miki looked over her shoulder. ‘Problems. Too big a data feed. It’s all over the place.’
‘Tyler,’ Romain called out, ensuring he kept his agitation out of his voice. ‘Will you check the connections. I can’t make sense of what I’m finding.’
The Jamaican-American went in to a small room that was buried even deeper into the mountain. He returned a few moments later, the streaks of grey in his curly, dark hair seemed to add to his puzzled expression. ‘It looks like a fuse has blown.’
Romain’s heart leapt. ‘A purple spiral?’
‘Yes.’
‘Please bring it here. It disconnects easily. Don’t try to reconnect the ends of the cables, just leave a gap,’ Romain said as he turned to Miki.
‘The garden,’ she said, smiling in acknowledgment.
*
It was said that NASA had a quantum computer with a power of five hundred and twelve qubits which was used to explore for exoplanets. How that had been created was still a secret. Developing work done by Nobel prize-winner Richard Feynman, Romain’s design comprised eight perfectly balanced groups of eight qubits operating sequentially, and was dedicated to exploration of the quantum field. Its capability was derived from a magnificent array of healthily photosynthesising plants that covered a large part of the top of the building. Miki loved her time tending the Quantum Garden. Although at times a hard-nosed scientist, she found the spooky and weird world of quantum mechanics often reminded her of ancient teachings on human life.
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