Quantum Void

by Douglas Phillips

  It had started with the announcement of the first mission to an inhabited alien world and the selection process for the lucky few who would go. They would visit a watery planet more than three hundred light-years from Earth, inhabited by creatures that appeared as delicate wisps swaying in ocean currents—intelligent creatures known as the Dancers.

  I was so close, she thought.

  The right education, the right background. Years of NASA experience, including eighteen months working directly for Augustin Ibarra, the administrator of human spaceflight. She’d been a key player in the mysterious disappearance, and recovery, of the Soyuz capsule and its three astronauts, and a partner to Daniel Rice, a science guy straight out of the White House. She even had a presidential commendation.

  In the end, her sparkling CV hadn’t been enough to grab one of only two slots allocated to NASA. Two others had been selected, both with spaceflight experience, a skillset missing from Marie’s resume.

  As she stood in the O&C clean room, that particular job qualification now seemed entirely unjustified. A large white oval doorway dominated the center of the room. For this mission, no one would be flying. They’d simply pass through a portal.

  It had been erected on a raised platform—literally a doorway about eight feet tall made of polished white metal, looking not much different from an airport metal detector. For now, it was a portal to nowhere. Step through it and you’d still be standing on the platform inside the clean room. But that would all change once four-dimensional docking technology was initiated. The big event was less than a week away.

  Administrative coordinator. That was the response to her application. It wasn’t a rejection, of course. She would still be involved in the details of the mission. She’d even be managing much of the training and preparation process. But she wouldn’t be going anywhere, at least not now. There would be future missions to the Dancers’ planet, assuming this one went well.

  The Dancers. Just a funny name that someone had made up—was it Daniel? Possibly, but that was eight months ago, and a lot had happened since then. The lone video of the aquatic species from the planet Ixtlub, a name few could properly pronounce, had gone viral worldwide. A new NatGeo series featured jellyfish-like creatures, and a summer blockbuster movie was in the works, already cross-marketing a line of toys featuring squishy sponge creatures. Of course, no one had yet met them in person. But four intrepid explorers soon would.

  The lucky team members formed a tight group on the raised platform, standing alongside racks of electronics equipment and computer displays—the Transfer Command Station. Two men and two women dressed in blue jumpsuits listened to a NASA engineer who provided a briefing of the systems that would assist in their upcoming journey. Marie checked the training task off from a long list on her tablet computer.

  They’d been labeled katanauts. In the days of extra dimensions and compressed space, explorers to new planets now traveled by way of the ana or kata directions, the fourth-dimensional equivalents of up and down. The days of rockets flying through outer space were over, a mental image now as quaint as a 1950s sci-fi movie.

  The key player in the construction and operation of this new technology was not even from Earth. The alien android called himself Aastazin, but nearly everyone shortened it to Zin, a change he didn’t seem to mind. He stood behind the katanauts on two shiny metallic legs. Officially, Zin was Core’s emissary to Earth and would guide the team once they passed through the gateway. Rumor had it that Core’s brain was a quantum computer and that Zin’s intelligence was derived from a quantum entanglement with his maker.

  He was mostly copper in color, though his exterior was said to be a mix of high-performance metals and carbon fibers. He had a head and two arms ending in hands, which he often rested on metal hips, giving him a very humanlike stance. Most people agreed there was nothing coincidental about the human form or his apparent male gender. The robot’s internal intelligence had occupied bodies of many types. His current incarnation was merely this month’s shell. When on Earth, assume a human form so as not to scare the locals, or something like that.

  Their systems briefing complete, the group moved to a set of four reclined seats, each supported by a pedestal that disappeared into a slot in the raised floor. They looked like a row of dentist chairs, but they were far more than that. The mission documentation described the chairs as critical safety equipment that would keep humans alive during the dimensional transfer.

  As the engineer pointed out the various features of the chairs, Zin stepped off the platform and sauntered over to where Marie stood as if he recognized her at a cocktail party. His smooth motion and amiable demeanor were remarkably human.

  Marie removed her glasses. “Hi, Zin, um, what’s up?” she stuttered. The android had never been threatening or even aggressive, but it still took some adjustment to think of him as a colleague.

  Like his body, Zin’s face was humanoid too. His flat eyes, spaced wider than most, were able to pivot slightly out of their sockets in a quick snap to glance left or right. The move was mesmerizing and probably gave him excellent peripheral vision. He had no ears and not much of a nose either. It was hard to find an audio input site anywhere on his head, but he seemed to hear everything that anyone said.

  His mouth worked very much like any human’s, including a flexible tongue and lips. Marie figured the combination was probably required equipment if you wanted to speak a human language. The head itself stood on a narrower mount than a human neck, and he could turn it three hundred and sixty degrees. He’d stopped performing this feat once someone had told him it looked like a bit from a horror movie.

  “What do you think so far, Marie?” Zin said in flawless English. “Is the training going as you expected?” Strangely, he had an American accent when speaking to the Americans but sounded British when speaking to the Europeans. His mannerisms and hand motions changed as well to match each person. He spoke French from time to time with the sole katanaut from France, but English had been selected as the mission language, and he stuck to it for all but the most informal communications.

  “We’re right on schedule,” Marie told him. “And everyone seems to be clear on procedures so far.”

  Zin had no eyebrows, but a thick ridge above his flat eyes was adjustable. He pushed it down, remarkably mimicking a look of concern. “That’s good to hear, but not exactly what I wanted to talk about. Do you mind if I ask a more personal question?”

  “Um, sure.” It would be interesting to learn what Zin considered personal.

  His forehead ridge moderated. “Learning your languages and mannerisms has been relatively easy, but a true understanding of human nature is more difficult. My job as your guide and liaison, is complex, and first contact between any two civilizations is significant. If, for whatever reason, I was not meeting your expectations, would you tell me?”

  An interesting question. Very deep.

  “I’ll answer, but first a question back to you.” Marie smiled. “How would you react if we were dissatisfied?” Thoughts of crazed robots attacking helpless citizens weren’t easy to sweep from her mind.

  “It depends entirely on the person,” Zin said with a flick of one of his flat eyes. “Criticism from some members of this team could be dismissed as inconsequential. But if the criticism came from you, I would be deeply humbled and highly motivated to improve.”

  What a gentleman. Better than most guys I’ve dated.

  Marie put a hand on his cold metal arm. Could he feel her touch? “Zin, you’re doing just fine. No complaints. If you get the feeling we’re not completely on board, just remember, we’re new to this. We thought we were still fifty years away from having conversations with androids.”

  Zin’s mouth turned up at the ends—more than needed for a smile, but if she castigated him, it would ruin all the fun. Zin might be a bit quirky, but so were some of Marie’s best friends.

  One of his eyes performed a gymnastic maneuver that would have won a gold medal
, apparently picking up activity almost behind him. “It looks like they’re almost done. Join us for the next session? I think you’ll find it interesting.” He motioned to the platform, and she followed.

  Tim Tannenbaum, a top American astronaut with beefy arms and buzz-cut hair, sat in one of the reclining dentist chairs, strapped in with a seat harness that looked like it had been borrowed from a high-performance military jet. The NASA engineer pointed at several buttons on the armrest. “If anything goes wrong, just hit Reset,” he said.

  Tim casually looked up from his reclined position like he might ask someone to bring him a beer. “What, no control stick for manual override?”

  “No need to fly at all,” the engineer replied. “The Reset button automatically recycles to baseline, returning you home.”

  “Pretty simple,” Tim replied. He unlatched his seat harness, swiveled off the chair and stood up. He patted the engineer on the shoulder. “Good job, man. Works for me.”

  Zin motioned to the engineer. “Finished?”

  The engineer nodded. “Yeah, I think so. Any questions about transfer preparation?” He looked around at the silent group. “Okay, back to you, Zin.”

  Zin positioned himself to the center of the group. “Thank you. I’m sure everyone is fully enlightened on both suit-up and pretransfer procedures.” Zin scanned the faces, his average height allowing for easy eye contact with the team. “Next, I want to explain exactly what will happen to you during the transfer. I’ll also touch on why it works just this way, but I promise I won’t bore you with the details.”

  As far as Marie knew, the details had never been shared for most of the new technologies Zin and Core had brought to Earth. Any of the NASA engineers would jump at the chance to be bored by those details if Zin ever decided to share them.

  Zin waved to the row of dentist chairs. “As soon as you are comfortably seated in your transfer stations, the retracted hood will extend, covering your face. A yellow light will flash, but you may not even notice it. The flash initiates a spatial transformation that will reposition your transfer station—and you, of course—both dimensionally and temporally. That is to say, you will shift slightly out of normal 3-D space, but you will also shift slightly away from the normal direction of time.”

  “Shifted in time?” Wesley asked. With sandy hair and freckles, he seemed to match his Yorkshire home. “Forward or backward?”

  “Actually… neither,” Zin said, his English accent exactly matching Wesley’s. “I won’t go into it just now, but suffice it to say that forward and backward are not the only directions of time. There are others.”

  “And this yellow light can really control time?” Jessica Boyce asked. Jessica was the only professor in the group. Marie had never had the opportunity to work with her, but Jessica was the star of several NASA videos beamed down from the International Space Station as part of a science program for high school students.

  “Unquestionably so,” Zin responded. “Time is no different from space. Both are quantized dimensions of our universe. Both are managed by means of coherent neutrinos, as your scientists have already learned for quantum space.”

  Time control? Marie thought. Hoo, boy. It might be best if they don’t give us the details.

  Eight months prior, the missing Soyuz astronauts had somehow been frozen in time by the same alien technology before being returned to Earth. It was hard to believe that Zin, or anyone, could wield such power in a flash of yellow light.

  Zin walked over to the portal, and the group followed him. He pointed to the oval doorway. “The portal is nothing more than a four-dimensional path from Earth to Ixtlub, with the three-dimensional distance between these two planets highly compressed. It’s a common method of transfer used widely around the galaxy. But for humans or any biological organism, it requires a temporal offset to avoid death.”

  Tim crossed his arms, a smirk on his face. “Thanks for not killing us, Zinny old boy.”

  Zin swiveled his head rapidly. “I hope you don’t think—” He stopped, and his metal eyes made a clicking sound as they turned upward. “Ah, yes. Sarcasm, I believe? A uniquely human style of speech, utterly unknown elsewhere in the galaxy.”

  Tim shifted on his feet and said nothing.

  “Continuing,” Zin said. “Once the portal is activated, I will step through to the anchor point at Ixtlub and verify that it is positioned correctly. Each of you will enter the portal seated in your transfer stations, which will slide along this track.” A single slot in the flooring led from the four chairs directly through the portal.

  Stephanie Perrin raised a hand. The second woman on the katanaut team, Stephanie was a French television reporter. Her position at a twenty-four-hour French news channel, along with her popularity across most of Europe, had made her selection almost inevitable. Like most of the others, she’d been to the ISS and had provided a remarkably poetic and very personal description of spaceflight to viewers back home. With her glossy black hair, a heart-shaped face and dark eyes, the average Frenchman—in fact, most European men—put her at the top of their list of beautiful women. She flashed her gorgeous smile regularly, both on TV and in person.

  “So, as an artificial life form—” she started. “I’m sorry, Zin, I hope that’s not offensive.” Zin shook his head no, but Stephanie seemed to adjust anyway. “As a nonbiological person, you don’t need the time offset like we do to survive the trip?”

  Zin shook his head again, turning it farther left and right than any human would. The move was vaguely creepy, but at least he wasn’t spinning his head in full circles. “No, Stephanie.” His English words took on a slight French accent that matched Stephanie’s. “I have personally completed more than seventy dimensional transfers with no ill effects. The danger is only to cellular biology, not to any electric brain function.”

  Stephanie pursued her line of questioning. “The astronauts from last year’s Soyuz incident reported that they did not remember returning to Earth from their 4-D orbit. Will we remember the transfer?”

  “No again, Stephanie,” Zin said. “But never fear, the time you lose will be short, just a minute or two.” He lifted his flexible lips into a smile that looked forced but was probably the best he could do. “You’ll see the light flash, and then… Ixtlub. Honestly, I think you’ll enjoy the experience.”

  Stephanie didn’t look too sure. “I read that we’re each going to wear an audio-video headset. Will it be a live feed? I’m sure viewers around the world will want to see what happens during the transfer.”

  “Live streaming is not supported by this particular portal technology,” Zin said. “But never fear, you will each wear a recording device that is switched on by your command. By all means, turn your camera on during the transfer. Viewers will see the same thing that I do when stepping through a portal. Except, of course, that they’ll miss the ultraviolet experience, always where the real action is.”

  Tim and Wesley chuckled. Zin acted like he didn’t understand what was funny.

  “Sorry, Zin, it’s not you,” said Wesley. “It’s just that sometimes you say things just like we would… a little too much like us.”

  “Should I back off?” Zin asked.

  Tim laughed again.

  Zin’s mechanical eyes flitted to the left side of his head, where Tim stood. “English expressions and human mannerisms are designed into my language module, but I can alter my style, if it would make our conversation more natural.”

  “No, no. Don’t change a thing,” Tim said. “All the wacky robot stuff is the most entertainment I’ve had in years.”

  Zin held his angled eyes on Tim and provided no further facial expression, at least none that humans might notice. But Marie imagined an irritation from his silence. She had worked with Tim before, and the English expression jerk came to mind.

  5

  Murphy’s Law

  Monday, May 23

  Marie sipped from a cup of tea, her shoes off and her feet propped up on another chai
r. The break room was a good refuge from the activity of the O&C clean room and gave her a quiet place to catch up on personal affairs.

  She perused an email written in Russian. It was good language practice, but it didn’t hurt that the email was from Sergei Koslov, the commander of the lost Soyuz mission and her part-time love interest. Intercontinental romances didn’t work very well, particularly when lovers were from adversary nations, but they had tried. Sergei would always be special.

  Another message caught her attention, a recording from last night’s Nicole Valentino Show. The guest on the popular late-night show was Daniel Rice.

  “This I’ve got to see,” Marie said, starting the video.

  Nicole sat at her desk, chatting with the band leader. “My next guest has been here before, but I didn’t get to meet him… I think I was sick that night? Yeah, Ricky, is that your recollection? No? Booze?” The audience laughed.

  “Yeah, that was probably it—too much booze that night. Well, I’ve fully recovered, and tonight we get to talk about aliens, cyborgs and travel through the fourth dimension. He’s the scientist who changed the world. Please welcome Dr. Daniel Rice.”

  The audience applauded, and Daniel walked across the stage. He looked a little out of place. He’d been a regular on morning and the late-night shows, but a scientist never seemed to fit among the stars of Hollywood.

  Nicole greeted Daniel with a hug, took her seat behind the desk and waited for the applause to die down. “So, how are things between you and Core? That’s the cyborg’s name, right?”

  “Uh, right,” Daniel answered, rather uncomfortably. Marie couldn’t imagine what it must be like to be in front of the cameras and all those people. If put in the same situation, she’d melt into a puddle on the floor. “Core has turned out to be an enigma. Quite helpful, full of new information, but strict in following a galactic procedure, if you will—a set of rules that it doesn’t talk about.”