Quantum Void

by Douglas Phillips

  As her frustration built, her thoughts turned audible. “Fuck this, I’m getting nowhere.” The sound of her voice automatically engaged the lights inside her float pod, and she opened her eyes. The smooth fiberglass surface a few inches above her face was lit in a violet color that pulsed in intensity. Near the center of the curving top was a single LED, glowing pink.

  The tiny LED over her face reminded her of the pinprick of light in the lab, and it stirred thoughts residing deep in her subconscious.

  Wait a second.

  She lay perfectly still, her naked body floating effortlessly in the warm salt water. Deep thoughts bubbled toward consciousness.

  She had collapsed space. But what if it hadn’t returned to quantum size? What if it had vanished altogether? A singularity, a zero-dimensional point. Could such a thing exist? Black holes were singularities, but a black hole derives from quarks, not bosons.

  Maybe the pinprick was a different kind of singularity, triggered by free HP bosons. They warped space just as much whether free or paired with quarks.

  A Type 2 singularity. That’s what Jan would call it.

  It was an interesting possibility. A wave of relief spread across her body. Insight. It was why she used the float pod. It allowed her mind to focus. Nala pushed upward on the violet surface, and the pod opened like a clamshell. She stepped out of the pool, rivulets of water sliding down her brown skin and onto the tile floor.

  She’d need time to flesh out this new idea. Further experiments would certainly be needed. She’d talk to Jan. Bounce the idea around and see if it made sense.

  Free of the confines of the float pod, Nala found the ordinary world invading once more, and trivial pursuits like getting ready for work took the place of deep thinking.

  Nala pulled a towel from the shelf and wrapped it around her body. Deciding on a hairstyle for the day, she studied her image in the mirror. The tangles of long brown hair over bare shoulders, the not-quite-straight nose, and too-porous skin. People called her beautiful—Daniel had. An African beauty, he’d said, more than once. But those compliments had been in the heat of passion. She didn’t see the beauty today.

  Nala stuck her tongue out at the mirror and scrunched her nose. She recognized the symptoms. A momentary lack of confidence triggered by insecurities in her love life. Daniel was in the past. Done. Over.

  An image of Daniel popped into her head. The last time he had been in her house, standing bare-chested beside the float pod with the very same towel wrapped around his waist. His embrace was strong enough to lift her into the air and drop his towel to the floor. Her heart rate picked up a bit at the memory.

  Over? Well… maybe. Funny how thoughts of sex always followed physics. Did other people do that too?

  She shook it off and forced herself to transition to the mundane tasks of readying for work. A touch of makeup, hair pulled back, and brushed white teeth. She selected a feminine but professional outfit: magenta trousers, white blouse paired with a camel blazer. The sharp, clean lines projected an aura of her professional life—a story of a confident intellectual, a scientist ready to explore the edges of the universe. The image was not only what she wanted others to see, it was also meant to be absorbed by her psyche.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  Less than an hour later, Nala Pasquier stepped into the control room at Fermilab. She walked up behind the long-haired skinny guy, seated at the curved desk.

  “Hey, Cody,” she said. Dozens of large screens covered the wall in front of him, and he was engaged in the details on one of them.

  Cody turned around. “Oh, hi, Nala. Look at this.” He pointed to the screen, where a trend line threaded through a graph of several hundred data points. “The instability we saw last time started just after we hit maximum expansion. But no indications prior to then.”

  Nala leaned over his shoulder and examined the screen. “Came out of nowhere, didn’t it?” she answered. “One minute, normal expansion into a fourth dimension. The next, all this wavering shit.”

  “Definitely a local effect,” he said. “I didn’t see anything here in the control room.” He returned his attention to the graph. “But the data tells the story.”

  “Let’s go with a larger expansion today,” Nala said. “Assuming the wavering returns, I’ll have Thomas measure its radius away from the neutrino target box, and we’ll get multiple data points to plot this thing out.”

  Cody swiveled to face her. “Uh… Nala… I’m thinking the Department of Energy guy might have an issue with that.”

  “He’s here?” Nala asked. The safety inspector had the power to shut down the whole lab if he found infractions. He’d gotten a whiff of the bizarre side effects they’d encountered and had found some cracks in the concrete near the Diastasi lab. But luckily, he was an engineer, not a physicist. That gave her plenty of room to work around any objections he might have.

  “Leave the DOE guy to me,” Nala said. “I’ll explain things to him. Just be ready to go.”

  Cody grinned. “Explain things? Will that include any ass kicking?”

  She waved a hand. “Would I do that? Cody, I’m five-two, a hundred and twelve pounds. I don’t kick anybody’s ass.”

  “Physically? No. Verbally?” Cody shrugged.

  She waved him off. “Don’t worry, he’s an inspector. I’ll give him the final say.”

  “Hah! This guy is doomed.” Cody was generally agreeable, but it helped that Nala outranked him. “You want me to control neutrino amplitude, or Thomas?”

  “You. It’ll free up Thomas for data collection.”

  “Okay,” Cody said. “But these waves are kind of freaking me out. Keep that radio handy.”

  “I always do.” She patted Cody’s shoulder and headed out of the control room and down to the lower levels of the sprawling facility. The safety guy would no doubt be down in the operations support office—there was always hot coffee, and the support team usually brought in pastries.

  The anomalies they’d witnessed were definitely freaky, but manageable. Yeah, the lab had wavered a bit, but that was no reason for the Spanish Inquisition. Not that she couldn’t handle these government inspector types—after all, he had no real understanding of the work she was doing.

  Scientific discovery is not without personal risk, she rehearsed in her mind. Galileo was found guilty of heresy and imprisoned. Jenner, Pasteur, Salk and others who developed vaccines were constantly exposed to pathogens. Curie died of radiation poisoning. But without these pioneers, where would we be today?

  It was an argument that might resonate with another scientist, but it wasn’t a pitch you gave to a DOE safety guy. Instead, when she walked into the support office and found him munching on a chocolate-frosted doughnut, she calmly spoke of hyperbolic paraboloids and baryon-to-boson ratios. She agreed to limit the accelerator to 125 GeV and asked Joanne, their support tech, to attach a new first-aid kit to the lab wall. She also flashed her best radioactive smile—the kind that made men melt.

  In the end, she prevailed, and the inspector signed off on continued research. These people always underestimated her.

  7

  Caps

  Davis Garrity waited impatiently inside a warehouse south of Austin, Texas. On the other side of a glass enclosure, the shipping manager consulted a real-time tracking map and assured Davis the truck would arrive any minute. It would be carrying two full-sized Garrity Caps, ready to install on the stacks at ElecTrek’s Brazos power facility. Another truck with two more wouldn’t be far behind.

  He wasn’t kept waiting long. The huge warehouse door rolled up to the ceiling, revealing a loaded flatbed truck that slowly backed into the unloading area. The caps were bigger than he had envisioned, even though he’d personally provided the specifications to the company in New Jersey that had constructed them. Each cap was partially enclosed in a wooden shipping frame, about fifteen feet on each side and ten feet tall. Just two caps filled the available space on the truck.

  “You tak
ing the delivery?” the truck driver yelled to Davis.

  “Yeah, drop them here,” Davis answered. He’d have the second truck take one directly to the Brazos plant for a full-scale test. It would take a special crane to position it at the top of a five-hundred-foot smokestack, but installation costs were a pittance compared with the billion-dollar carbon-capture system it would replace. The other three caps would be held in reserve upon completion of the test. Davis had no doubt it would be successful.

  A warehouse employee drove up in a forklift and unloaded the framed caps. Davis signed the paperwork, and the truck left.

  Now alone in the warehouse, Davis approached one of the industrial caps, as big as a backyard swimming pool and painted in bold blue and orange on the outside. With the cap lying on its side, Davis stepped between the boards of the shipping frame to the cap’s interior. Inside, clean white PVC surrounded him, a giant version of the sample PVC pipe he’d used in his demonstration. Davis pulled a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and compared the design layout with the real thing.

  Just like the first image at the top left, the real cap also looked closed, but Davis knew it wasn’t. The image beneath was closer to its actual shape, an elbow joint. The upper portion of the elbow was simply invisible to the human eye.

  Not sure I’ll ever understand this 4-D stuff, Davis thought. But I sure do like it.

  The effluents from the smokestack would make a ninety-degree turn at the top of the cap in a direction Davis couldn’t see or point to. He rapped the knuckles of his hand at the top of the cap—solid. The drawing identified the cap’s crown as the exterior sealed edge. It wasn’t really the top, it was simply the beginning of the elbow. The place where the pipe twisted into a fourth dimension of space. The upper portion of the pipe was just as real, just as solid, but unseen.

  Under pressure, momentum would carry the stream of gases around the corner, through a hole in three-dimensional space and out into nowhere. A thousand tons a day of soot and toxic gases would simply disappear. It made Davis smile.

  8

  Gateway

  Arm in arm, Marie and Jessica entered the training room. Conversation stopped and every eye focused on the two women. The others had definitely heard the news.

  Zin approached first and held out his three-fingered hand. “We were waiting for you both to begin our final training session.” He gently touched the arms of both women and ushered them into the center of the team.

  Stephanie shut off her camera and threw her arms around Marie and Jessica in a group hug. She said nothing but gave a purposeful nod to Jessica and a supportive glance to Marie.

  Handshakes and a light hug from Tim and Wesley were a bit awkward, but Jessica’s idea that they should walk in together had been pure genius. Marie would never be able to thank her enough.

  There was less drama than Marie had expected, but she was still relieved when Zin asked, “Shall we start?” The group gathered in a circle, and Zin stood in the center, smoothly pivoting his head to make eye contact with each person.

  “We’ve covered everything at this point—systems, communications, safety and so on,” he began. “So, this afternoon I want to combine all that you’ve learned and do some role-playing, specifically to focus attention on interspecies etiquette and protocol.”

  Zin explained that he would play the roles of both intelligent species found on Ixtlub—the Dancers and the Workers—providing realistic responses to questions. They would focus first on the Dancers, the dominant of the two species. “You won’t have to worry about your words, as I will take care of all translation, but please be aware of body language, as you’ve previously learned. We will be guests in a place that will feel strange to you, and any initial meeting between very different species can be a bit tricky. Thus our practice today.”

  Zin dimmed the lights in the room and took a position in front of the group. “Welcome to Ixtlub,” he said in an altered voice, with gurgles coming from the back of the throat for each hard-consonant sound.

  Marie smiled. This was going to be fun.

  Tim started, asking how much the Dancers knew about humans. Wesley followed with a question about social structure. Zin was completely in character with his responses, though he returned to being the instructor on occasion, cautioning Tim to lower the volume of his voice and Stephanie to avoid looking up at the ceiling when she spoke.

  “They’re not going to be hovering in the clouds, Stephanie. Look at them as you speak, and they will appreciate the physical connection. It’s one of the behavioral traits both humans and Dancers share—eye contact. Even if you find it difficult to locate their relatively transparent eyes, they will notice yours easily.”

  The back-and-forth continued until everyone had asked more than one question except Marie; it was clearly her turn. She took a deep breath, pressed her hands together and remembered to look straight ahead. “Do you have communications satellites orbiting your world?”

  Zin frowned. “Let’s stop for a minute.” He walked over to Marie and pushed her hands down to her sides. “Please, never put your hands together—not in a praying gesture, not in grasping, not in clapping. Did you recall reading this in the etiquette guide?”

  “Um, I might have missed that,” she said.

  “It’s a sex thing, Kendrick,” Tim said, his voice remaining louder than it needed to be. “They do it to each other. You know, tentacle to tentacle.”

  “Thank you, Tim,” Zin said. “Just remember, Marie, your hands, particularly your fingers, will seem very odd to them. They grasp objects by wrapping a stretched tentacle around them, which is why so many of their tools are cylindrical in shape. As Tim points out, only in intimate contact do the proboscis extensions at the tips of their tentacles stretch out, very much like your fingers.”

  “Sorry,” Marie responded sheepishly. “I can see this might be a sensitive topic. I’ll study up on it.”

  “Thank you.” Zin backed away and addressed the group. “Everyone, hands and feet are your most disturbing physical features. Hands, because the fingers are always extended and are so manipulative. Feet, because they look like deformed versions of your hands. To avoid frightening anyone, please, always keep your feet covered.”

  It was an embarrassing start as a new team member. For the remainder of the training, Marie stood ramrod straight, kept her fingers curled and made no hand motions at all. Probably overkill, but until she had time to read what everyone else had already learned, it would avoid further correction from Zin. She began to wonder what he had seen in her. Maybe he was having second thoughts about his choice.

  When the session was finally over, Marie headed straight to the break room, a good place to read. She made herself a cup of tea and pulled out her iPad. Document 4a, Etiquette When Addressing Dancers.

  “Kendrick,” said a voice.

  She looked up to see Tim standing in the doorway. “Hi, Tim. You know, it’s okay to call me Marie.”

  “I guess you were never military, were you, Kendrick?” he answered.

  “NASA Operations. Instructor for ISS systems. No, never military.”

  “Yeah, I remember taking a class from you,” he said. “On ISS heating and cooling systems, I think.”

  “I remember you as a student, Tim. Very well.” There were some students that stood out no matter how much you tried to forget them.

  Tim stepped into the room and waved an arm in the air. “What the hell are you doing here, Kendrick?”

  “What do you mean? Ibarra assigned me. I was moved to active status to replace Jessica.”

  Tim came closer, looming over her. “Yeah, yeah, I know. Ibarra passed over the alternates to pick you because he’s got to have a second woman on the team. Hell, I don’t care how many women we have on the team. But why are you on this team? You’re a teacher, not a rocket man.”

  Marie didn’t move from her chair. There was no point in trying to correct Tim’s assumption. She sipped her tea. “You won’t be a rocket man either,
Tim. We’re going to sit in a chair and glide through a portal.”

  Tim closed within inches. “Is that what you think, Kendrick? That’s it? You’re going to step out of your comfy chair into a room that looks just like home except maybe it’s got a few odd-looking flowers growing at the windowsill?”

  “I don’t really know what to expect, Tim. Do you?”

  “Bet your ass I do. I’ve been there. Flight controls that freeze up, spacewalks that take too long, hatches that won’t close, onboard fires. I’ve dealt with those emergencies and kept my head straight. You know anything about that?”

  Marie didn’t respond.

  Tim stepped back into the doorway, as if intentionally blocking the only exit. “Kendrick, I don’t know what we’ll encounter on the other side of that portal, but I can guarantee you that it will take more than just rote procedures or a pretty smile—it’ll take intestinal fortitude and a whole lot of courage. You got that on your resume?”

  Marie tensed, pushed both hands together under her chin and then, hearing Zin in her head, set her hands down. “There might be more on my resume than you know about, Tim. But thanks for the pep talk. If I need any more encouragement, I’ll be sure to let you know.”

  Tim shook his head and looked briefly at the floor. “Look, I don’t have anything against you, Kendrick. But you’re in way over your head and you haven’t figured that out yet. Once you’re on the other side of that portal… well…” He narrowed his eyes, did an about-face and left.

  Marie sat alone, shaking.

  Nothing like a good cup of tea to help reduce anxiety. She sipped, the warm tea sliding down her throat, but the anxiety remained.