Flip

by Christopher J Fox

  “We’ve got worse problems than that!” Francisco said. “There’s a shitload of water-gel explosive and electrical blasting caps in some lockers down there. One shot into the tunnel, and we all go up!”

  “What’s beyond that?” John asked.

  “It looks like the tunnel ceiling caved in. It’s blocked. No way back, no way forward,” answered Greg, who sounded more than a little panicked.

  Outside, the helicopter made a slow pass, low enough to shake dirt loose from the ceiling.

  “All right, everyone, settle down,” John said. “I think I have an idea. Those electric blasting caps, how many yards of wire?”

  “Two full spools. Maybe a hundred and fifty yards each,” Francisco said.

  “Okay, good,” said John. “We’re gonna use that water-gel to take out the chopper.”

  “How the hell are we gonna do that? Throw it at ’em?” Francisco scoffed.

  “No, listen. We lay out the electric blasting caps and cable around an LZ and wire up the water-gel in the center. The cap wire is like an antenna; it picks up any random electrical discharge. That’s why we stopped using it in the service—too many premature detonations. In this dry air, those rotors are generating more than enough static electricity for the cap wire to pick up. You were in the service, over in the sandbox, right?”

  Francisco nodded.

  “Remember the halos the helicopters generated at night when they got down low? The sand and dust would pick up a static charge and light up.”

  “He’s right,” Greg chimed in. “In this dry air, the difference in potentials between the ground and the helicopter…” Seeing he’d lost them, he changed his wording. “The static charge that gets built up will be considerable. When the helicopter gets low enough, it would ground out, causing an electrical arc.”

  “What if it doesn’t arc?” Francisco shot back.

  “We can trigger it from here. The batteries will be enough, but…” John paused.

  “I’ll go,” said Greg. “You were going to say we need to lure them down. There has to be bait. I’ll run when they get close…to get clear of the blast.” This last part was to Natalia.

  “No, it should be me,” John said. “There was a note in the ambulance written to me. It said you all would need me and thi—”

  Natalia cut him off. “Don’t be stupid. You can’t run, and you’re the only medical care my mom has. Dad, I love you, but you’re too slow—you’d never get clear—and it has to be someone they want alive. They’d want to use me to get to Mom.” She looked at Mollie and Francisco. “It has to be me.” No one spoke. The only sound in the dry, dead air of the mine was the helicopter, fading in the distance.

  ***

  Natalia felt cold and lightheaded as she gulped the arid dawn air in short, quick puffs. Like an electrical shock, numbness from her clenched muscles ran down her arms, cutting off the blood to her hands and fingers, chilling them even more. She felt the raw horsepower of the helicopter vibrating the ground as she crouched under the branches of a juniper. Although she heard its rumble nearby, she couldn’t see it. Suddenly the harsh mechanical beating of its rotors blasted her out of her hiding place as the chopper popped up from behind the cliff face it had been using for cover. Natalia darted between the trees and brush, trying her best not to be seen while knowing she would be. Bile rose in her throat, making her gag. She swallowed hard to get the taste out, but her mouth was dryer than the high desert she was running through.

  For plan A, her father, Francisco, and Mollie had laid out the cap wire in a crisscross pattern and connected the tubes of water-gel explosive to it in a clear area about forty yards beyond the mine entrance and the safety of the ravine. It was a crude net, but they only had moments between passes of the helicopter to sprint across the clearing with the spool of cap wire, unrolling it behind them.

  John’s plan B had them run another pair of wires back to the entrance. One of which already was fixed to the positive terminal of a lantern flashlight battery. All it would take was a stroke from the other wire to trigger the detonation if plan A didn’t work.

  ***

  “There, it’s the girl. That spooked her out!” Baka said. He opened his comms. “I’ve got eyes on the daughter. She’s running back toward the ravine. Units one and three, what are your positions?”

  “Unit one here. We’re about half a click due north of you.”

  “Unit three. We’re about the same to your southeast and down a steep incline.”

  Son of a bitch. I have to get her myself.

  “Go in low, follow her, force her to the ground. I’ll hop out and grab her,” he told the pilot. “Units one and three, get your asses up to my current location. We’re going in to grab the girl.”

  ***

  “Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God!” Natalia gasped as she sprinted toward the edge of the clearing. The deafening rotor wash tore savagely at her, knocking her down and blinding her. Something snapped in her right ankle. She squinted against the stinging sand and saw the clearing not ten feet away. The chopper passed just feet overhead and swung around. She leapt to her feet to dash across the maze of cap wire hidden in the New Mexico dust. Adrenaline kept her from feeling most of the pain that shot up from her ankle, but at best she was moving at half speed as she crossed the center of the clearing.

  ***

  “Stupid girl. She’s in the open and injured. Set down,” said Baka. This was too easy.

  ***

  The copter swung in, the landing struts skimming the tops of the juniper as Natalia made it to the treeline on the other side of the clearing and ran to her father. He scooped one arm around her, and the two of them hobbled toward the ravine. “We saw you fall. C’mon,” he said. “Move. Don’t look back.”

  The helicopter flared out over the clearing, the blast from the rotors digging into the sand, spraying it up into the air where its own downdraft caught it again and thrust it down in blinding cloud. Feet from landing, Baka saw a pile of whitish tubes, like sausage casings, with wires running from them.

  IED!

  “Pull up! Pull up!” he screamed.

  The copter lurched to one side as the pilot tried to comply, bringing the aluminum landing strut within inches of the ground. Relative to the ground, the copter had built up a large positive charge, and nature hates an imbalance. Electrons surged down the charge gradient from relatively positive to neutral ground, met an inches-wide gap between the two, then jumped the gap in a visible arc.

  Without breaking stride, daughter and father went right off the lip of the ravine. The concussion from the explosion caught them in midair, slamming the wind from their lungs and blacking them out. They fell senseless to the ravine floor between the rock walls.

  ***

  “Unit one, unit three, what the fuck was that!” unit two called out over the comms. The noise from the massive explosion rolled across the Chama Valley and assaulted the peace of the multihued cliffs and buttes of Georgia O’Keeffe country. Three hours had passed since the recovery team had chased the subjects into the hills, leaving the two members of unit two to watch over the monks. Matthew and the others sat stone-like in the temple, waiting.

  “Ah, aerial cover is down. Repeat…aerial cover is down,” unit one said in disbelief. “Unit two, we have one wounded, and Baka is gone. What are your orders?”

  Unit two called, “Full abort. How long to get back here?”

  The head of unit two and second-in-command walked out of the temple and away from the monks. Neither man was paying attention to the monks now, and thus they never saw the blows to the pressure points below their left ears that felled them.

  “Unit two, we’re at least sixty to ninety minutes out,” replied unit one. “Unit two…unit two? Unit two, come back!”

  ***

  Right after the explosion, Aida took a turn for the worse. Francisco had taken off at a run toward the Chama Valley Zen Center for help and transportation. Greg and Nat came around a few minutes later, but it
would be days before the ringing in their ears stopped, so John had to yell for them to hear him.

  “Aida’s pulse is rapid, and her breaths are coming short and shallow,” John told them. He didn’t need to say any more. They all knew what this meant. Nat knelt on one side, Greg on the other. John sat by her head, readying himself to resuscitate her. All of them were pushed beyond the limits of their physical and emotional endurance. Grief ripped at their souls as it squeezed out tears from their desiccated eyes. Exhausted, agonized, crushed, they could only hold her, wait, and watch. Aida’s chest rose and fell in rapid succession, then stopped.

  Then she took one long, gulping breath.

  ***

  The brightness of the sun grew, its light blotting out all else in Aida’s view.

  So this is death.

  The light intensified, but something changed. She felt herself drift peacefully, weightless. Darkness crept in around the edges of the diminishing light. She felt hands in hers and smelled the musty richness of cool earth. Voices, talking too loudly over one another, called her.

  “Mom?”

  “Aida?”

  Her eyes hurt; she looked to the side of a flashlight that someone was holding directly over her head and saw her daughter and her husband. The weight of the ordeal was written clearly on their tear-streaked faces but now was supplanted by the release of joy. They sobbed and held her.

  “You two look terrible,” Aida said, “but you’re alive. We’re all alive.” They continued to hold one another in the silence of the mine entrance, not speaking, just being. Finally, Aida said, “I have to sleep.”

  “That’s a good idea,” John said, then turned to Greg and Nat. “I need to get her vitals.”

  Aida craned her neck up to see John’s face. She gently stroked his cheek. “John…” She then closed her eyes and fell into a dreamless sleep.

  30 The Supercell

  T he cool, dry Canadian air of the high-pressure dome that had been visiting University City over the past few days and bringing blessed relief to all was being evicted by a giant, angry, low-pressure system pushing its way up from the Gulf of Mexico. Its torrid heat and high humidity smothered the Great Plains, making the air gelatinous and unpleasant to breathe. As was typical for the time of year, thunderstorms formed along the frontal boundary between the two battling leviathans, though the outcome of this match was never in doubt. Lightning ripped across the clouds, and some cells dropped torrents of rain and hail before they spun up tornados. Twenty miles due south of University City, an updraft of ground-level heated air paired with a downdraft of cooler air from higher up and a strong wind shear to set a cyclonic twisting into motion.

  The severe weather warnings were lost on Beverly Michelson as she entered building 87. A singular thought had occupied her all afternoon.

  I can get over and come back.

  Seeing the console and the settings that had sent Aida over cemented it in her mind. She understood what had gone right when the lab tech had tried to sabotage the QUESAM device, and more important, she understood what had gone wrong. Enough energy had surged through the QUESAM at just the right places to force Aida’s cortical systems of attention out of the normal alpha wave rhythms into something else, and there it remained, stuck, like dislocated joint. What was needed was another surge, at the normal alpha wave frequency, and strength to reestablish the proper patterns. That was the part that Aida didn’t receive.

  But Michelson knew better. She understood the underlying neuroanatomical mechanisms and physiology of attention better than anyone else.

  I’ve discovered something new. No one else in all humanity knows what I know.

  The fact that she was the one to see and understand this concept and its application didn’t really surprise her. She knew her brilliance was the driving force at The Project. Gilden had money and influence, true, and Qian had built the imaging system for the quantum world. But money was a commodity that could be obtained from any number of sources, and skills like Qian’s could be purchased. These two people weren’t unique, and she had no further use for them. As she imagined the possible uses of her knowledge and the power it would bring, a grin of unwholesome delight twisted her lips.

  ***

  “I’m Dr. Beverly Michelson,” she told the night security guard at building 87, then flashed a University Hospital ID. “I’m working with the NIH grant auditors in the Doxiphus lab. We were in there earlier today. The auditors flew out this afternoon, but they have some additional items they’ve asked me to follow up on. Would you open the lab for me, please?”

  “Of course,” the guard replied.

  They didn’t talk as he led her to the lab and unlocked the door. Michelson strode in like a lioness into the den of a rival she had just slain and flicked on the lights.

  “Remember to pull the door closed behind you when you’re done. It’ll lock itself,” the guard said as he turned to leave.

  “Thanks again. I’ll only be a few minutes, twenty tops.” She smiled at him. “I’ll check in with you on my way out.”

  He flushed at her attention and dropped his keys. He then grunted as he bent over his large belly to get them and was red-faced when he straightened up. “Uh, thank you…uh…Dr. Michelson. That would be great,” he said, and hurried down the hall.

  ***

  Ten miles south of University City, the updraft, deep inside the forming cell, was now rotating at a faster rate around a central axis and grew into a mesocyclone. Moving at fifty miles an hour, the storm would be on the outskirts of the city in minutes. The top of the cloud vaulted up above twenty thousand feet and skewed to the south as the base of the storm raced north, forming the classic anvil shape of a supercell. The bottom of the storm itself was round and hung down from the main cloud body like a sucker off an octopus arm. Viewed from the side, it looked like a wall, and hence was called a wall cloud. The main body of the storm, between the wall cloud at the base and the anvil on the top, was tightly compacted by the circulating winds and rotated ominously. Tentacles of lightning flashed from ground to cloud and cloud to ground. Taken as a whole, a supercell storm frequently left storm chasers with the impression of a titanic, malevolent man o’ war jellyfish floating across the landscape in search of prey.

  ***

  The chair reclined as soon as Michelson settled in, and in the absolute silence of the inner room, she was uncomfortably aware of her rapid breathing and moist palms. In a few moments, she would glimpse the unveiled essence of reality.

  There won’t be any sensation from the initial stimulation impulse, she reminded herself. The strength of the currents she was working with would barely be felt as a tingle on her scalp. It was the frequency, duration, and location of the target pulse that were significant. She reviewed the run parameters in her head.

  Initial twenty-millisecond pulse, then a countdown timer of three minutes, then the correcting pulse for three hundred fifty milliseconds, and I’m back.

  ***

  In the green air outside of building 87, tornado sirens had been sounding for three minutes, warning everyone in the path of the approaching supercell to take cover. The supercell dropped baseball-size hail and also had produced a classic hook echo on radar, indicating funnel clouds.

  ***

  There was a hissing from above and behind Michelson as the open end of the tube extended itself into place. The air pillows inflated, stabilizing her head, while her feet twitched in uncontrolled excitement. When she heard the whine of the charging capacitors, she reflexively clenched her eyes shut. Intense brightness, like thousands of flashes going off simultaneously, blinded her. In a few moments, her vision cleared.

  She gasped. There was no way she could have prepared herself for what she saw: a glowing fabric, woven from threads of light by small shiny points set in the dark space time of the universe. Qian’s representation, for all its technical wonder, was no better than a blind monkey fingering in the sand trying to reproduce the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
>
  “Hello, hello. Can you hear me?” she said as she looked for the observers from The Project.

  ***

  A quarter mile from building 87, lightning struck the secondary power substation that serviced the core of the campus, including building 87. The surge blew out lights and transformers throughout the heart of the campus. The QUESAM device also was on the receiving end of the surge. It funneled through the tube, into Beverly Michelson, and then to the chair as it made its way to the grounded platform. Her body convulsed once in a horrible contraction, then fell limp.

  An hour later, when security was sweeping the blacked-out building, they found her sitting in the stim room chair, mouth open, drool running down onto her chin and her excrement dripping onto the floor. She was alive but unresponsive.

  ***

  Matthew watched the event line approach Michelson and didn’t interfere. He knew her name, who she was, and what she had done. She was akusala. Her awakening to the Wave World was unlike Aida’s, however. When she flipped, she became immediately aware. Her pearl lacked the luminescence of Aida’s, and she vibrated out of time with the background rhythms of creation. The light of her consciousness roamed wildly, and she called out, seeking someone. Her consciousness was trying to orient itself when the event wave washed through her.

  He watched and sensed an immediate change in her. The dancing light of her focus dimmed and fell inanimate, gazing awkwardly out at an angle to her previous path. Her pearl moved forward, no longer turning, bereft of decision threads. She called out no more.

  ***

  In the abyss of her psyche, Michelson was aware of what she saw on some level. The miracle of the Wave World passed unappreciated before the remaining tenuous spark of her consciousness as she lay inert in both worlds.

  31 Coming Back

  T heresa Waters and Dan Kozlowski sat in her office at the OTD, watching a replay of the Los Angeles report on the fire on the Catalina Catamaran and the extraordinary events that had taken place that day.