Quantum Void

by Douglas Phillips

  A NASA debrief specialist guided the conversation, and scientific people and administrators peppered the katanauts—and Zin, who chose to stand at the rear of the room—with questions. There was plenty of video from their mission, of course, but they all seemed to want to hear the story firsthand.

  Stephanie provided commentary as they replayed the video from her headcam, both underwater and on land. Tim provided color as he recounted their visit to the Dancers’ laboratory and described Beextu’s warning about Core, even though he hadn’t even been there to hear it. Marie added detail but otherwise let Tim’s smug conceit slide since he was the de facto team leader.

  Wesley, being the team sociologist, wrapped up one of the more heated discussions—the symbiotic relationship between the Dancers and Workers. The ESA director had asked the most questions, and he had one more. “The Dancers clearly characterize themselves as superior but benevolent. But all the evidence suggests a more sinister relationship. Perhaps master to slave?”

  Wesley pondered the question before answering, as he had all the others. “Let me address your question obliquely first, then more directly. The Dancers are very open and quite forthcoming with what we might consider sensitive information. We were, for example, welcomed into one of their most advanced scientific laboratories. In fact, the lab was the whole reason why we were brought to this specific town. As we toured, we asked many questions, and none went unanswered. I explain this because each of us got the feeling that not only did they have nothing to hide but also that hiding information may not even be within their character.”

  “Oblique, but I understand your point,” the ESA director said. “And it matches their unprompted revelation about Core. But more directly, what about the Workers?”

  “Clearly the Dancers dominate the relationship,” Wesley said. “The Workers would be nomadic scavengers without their guidance. But I found no hints of forced bondage, no subservience to the Dancers in either custom or law. They live with separate rules of law, separate policing and justice systems, separate religion. In fact, the Dancers have no religion, only the Workers. I can point only to one case of potential injustice, and that is the Dancers’ willingness to withhold kleek shell—a kind of tobacco that the Workers consume. The substance is likely addictive, and the Dancers may use it as both incentive and punishment. But that’s hardly master to slave; perhaps more like a dealer to an addict.”

  “How about the ring the Workers wear?” asked one of the engineering heads from NASA. “Could it also be a tool of enforcement or punishment?”

  Katie, the debriefing specialist, stepped in. “That’s the next topic we’ll cover. The alien device, provided as a gift to Ms. Kendrick. Should we switch to that topic now?”

  Several heads nodded, and Wesley acknowledged them. “I don’t have anything else to add, and of course Marie is our expert on the communications device.”

  Katie resumed. “Fine. Just to set the stage, the device’s purpose as interface between the Dancers and Workers was reasonably well understood prior to the mission, but none of us knew that it could be adapted for human use. Marie, could you tell us more about how you received this item and give us a sense of its capabilities?”

  Marie cleared her throat. “Sure. It’s right here.” She held up the headband for everyone to see. “It’s still a bit of an enigma, but at its simplest level I would say it provides a visualization of the physical world. Forces and motion, light from any portion of the EM spectrum. Things like that. Plus, it manages the complexity of the incoming data, providing mathematics and analysis on the fly. The engineers will have to tell you how it gathers and processes so much information, but what it presents to me is a very elegant view of a very complex world.”

  “The Dancers gave it to you?” Ibarra asked. “Why you?”

  “It wasn’t really the Dancers; it was their representative, Tonia. She visited our sleeping quarters at the end of day one and explained that each Worker wore one around its neck, or snout, or whatever you call that part of its anatomy. She said it provides the Workers with insight that they couldn’t achieve on their own. Apparently, the Dancers think of it as their gift to the Workers because it boosts Worker intellect to something closer to the Dancers’ level. Without it, the Workers would have never developed technologically.”

  Marie looked down at the alien headband lying on the table. “So, why me? Well… Tonia asked if we’d like to experience its capabilities for ourselves, and I volunteered.”

  “To be clear,” Katie added, “we believe the device was initialized specifically for Marie. No one else can use it.”

  “That’s right,” Marie said. “Tuned to my brainwave pattern, or something like that.”

  “And they offered it to no one else?” Ibarra asked.

  “Tonia said she could only make one.”

  Wesley raised a hand and added, “Zin suggested Marie would be the best candidate. As I recall, the rest of us agreed.”

  Zin stood silently at the back of the room. Now that she had experienced the full effect of the alien device, Marie wondered if Zin had known what it might do to her. Intentionally scrambling her brain didn’t seem like it fit with Zin’s character.

  “Does the device still work?” asked a European man whom Marie didn’t recognize. “Even now that you’re back on Earth?”

  “It should,” Marie answered. “It was intended as a gift to take home. A benefit to humans in general, not just me.”

  “So, you can visualize, as you say, things that no one else can?” the man asked.

  “Yes.” Marie knew what the next question would be.

  “Can you demonstrate this to us?”

  Marie looked at Ibarra, her eyes asking him if she should do as requested.

  “Is it safe?” Ibarra asked Marie.

  “Oh, yes. Safe. It certainly doesn’t affect anyone else, just me.”

  “It doesn’t hurt, does it?” Ibarra asked.

  “Oh, no. Doesn’t hurt,” she answered. “It’s just… foreign.” Her heart beat a bit faster. Foreign was the understatement of the day. With twenty people staring she wasn’t ready to explain her personal problem. She’d talk to Ibarra alone. Later.

  “So, what could you do with it in this room?” Ibarra asked.

  “Probably a lot,” Marie answered. She could only imagine the capability of the device within an ordinary office building on Earth. She’d already seen what it could do on Ixtlub.

  Marie took a deep breath. Putting the headband on in front of all these people was like trying on a new bikini. You never knew what embarrassing part of your body it might expose.

  I’m the messenger. Step up to the task. Be brave.

  She lifted the ring from the table and placed it over her head. The headband fit snugly over her hair and rested just above her ears. Everyone in the room watched as she tapped twice on a component at her right temple and closed her eyes.

  Her head swiveled as her eyes remained closed. Her mind envisioned pink. “Wow. Right away I see electricity. All around us.”

  She stood up and pointed straight overhead at a pink line glowing brightly in her mind. “There’s an electrical wire above the ceiling. The wire runs to the wall and then down behind the wallboard to an electrical outlet.” She pointed directly to the pink glow on the wall.

  “You can see the electricity?” a woman asked.

  “A pink glow. It tells me it’s an electromagnetic field,” Marie answered. “The wire stands out like a sore thumb, but there’s a weaker field, slightly less pink than the wire, all around us. It’s a north-south orientation, so it must be Earth’s magnetic field.”

  “Hang on,” Ibarra pulled out his phone and accessed a compass app. “Based on what you see, Marie, point north.”

  She stood and pointed, her eyes still closed.

  Ibarra examined the phone and nodded. “Spot-on.”

  “But electromagnetic fields are just one layer,” Marie said.

  “Layers?” somebody said
.

  “Yeah, I can control them. Many layers of information, most of them color-coded. I’ll flip to another one.”

  “Did they teach you how to do this?”

  “No. I…” She wasn’t sure they’d believe her. But this wasn’t the place to obfuscate, so the unvarnished truth came out. “They didn’t teach me any of this. My ability to control this, well… it feels like I’ve always known how to do it.”

  She could visualize their reaction; she didn’t need to see their faces. Skepticism. The device told her everything she needed, mapped out in a pattern that was easily recognizable. Every observable event—visual, audible, vibrational or otherwise—was measured, matched, and displayed for her to absorb. Big Data, a computer scientist would call it.

  Show. Don’t tell. They’ll come around.

  “Mr. Vice President,” she said. “Your heartbeat.” She tapped rhythmically on the table with her fingernail. “Put a finger to your carotid artery and see if I’m right.”

  She didn’t need to see that the vice president had done just that and confirmed to everyone that her taps exactly matched the rhythm he felt.

  “You’re just one, Mr. Vice President, I see every heartbeat. Every breath, too, and more.” She flipped again, not even realizing how she did it. The space in the room warped, bending toward some point far below their feet. “I see gravity. I’m not just experiencing its pull, like we all do. I can see it.”

  “What does gravity look like?” asked an older man sitting next to Stephanie.

  “Bent space. Bent everything. Nothing in this room is quite straight.”

  She flipped again to a scene of staggering complexity. Infinitesimals, everywhere, all around. Each tiny bit interacting with every other tiny bit. Trillions, quadrillions, vastly more. The sheer number was overwhelming, yet somehow her mind grasped them all simultaneously. Moreover, she could zoom in or out at will from a single speck to a collection of trillions.

  “The molecules of air, nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide and water.” She waved her hands over her head and tilted her head up, her eyes still closed. “They do a strange dance with each other down at the microscopic level, with varying levels of interaction above that, all the way to the larger eddies at the macroscopic level.” She pointed to the back of the room. “There’s a lot of turbulent motion from a flow coming out of that air conditioning vent.”

  Complexity was by far the most difficult visualization. There were just too many bits of information. How could any single mind keep track of them all? She couldn’t, yet somehow, she did. The complexity hurt, not with any pain, but with an intense anxiety, as if she was responsible for the trajectory of individual molecules in the air. It weighed upon her; it scared her.

  It was time for the closing act, and she knew exactly which layer to choose. She flipped again, opened her eyes and looked around the room. She caught the eye of one of the ESA administrators near the back of the room. “No, sir, I’m not.”

  He looked puzzled. “Not what?”

  “Making this up.”

  “You’re suggesting you can read my mind?” he asked.

  “Isn’t that the statement you were about to make?”

  He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Yes, I suppose, but not quite that bluntly.”

  “Wait a second.” Ibarra held up a hand. “You can read minds?”

  “No, sir,” Marie said. “It’s like… I can see you, or maybe it’s an image of you that hasn’t quite happened yet. But in my mind, you’re already talking. I can’t hear the words, but I can still make out what you’re saying. It seems to be accessing tiny bits of time that exist at the subatomic level. I have no idea how I know that—it’s kind of freaky.”

  Ibarra said nothing and kept his hand in the air for several seconds like he wanted her to read his mind.

  Marie shrugged. “Sorry, nothing.”

  “True, I guess,” Ibarra said. “I wasn’t going to say anything, I just wanted to wait and see what you came up with… as a test.”

  Marie swiveled quickly to the ESA admin. “I agree.”

  “You agree with what?” he asked, his eyebrows furrowed.

  “That Mr. Ibarra’s test was unscientific. You were going to say that, am I right?”

  He nodded without comment.

  Marie closed her eyes again and tapped the side of the ring. She took it off and laid it on the table. She lowered her head and sat down. “I’m sorry, it’s tiring.”

  The device was more than tiring. It produced an instant spike of anxiety and a mood swing far worse than any PMS. She would need to elaborate, including the hallucination she’d experienced on Ixtlub, an event that would certainly be on Tim’s written report. But the mental collapse had felt so personal—like something wrong in her own brain, not the headband.

  Maybe she’d ask Zin to join her in Ibarra’s office. He might be able to shed some light on how the device was supposed to work. After all, he had seemed very supportive on Ixtlub just before their return to Earth.

  No one else on the team could have done any better, Zin had told her.

  14

  Singularity

  Within the Fermilab control room up on the surface, walls shook, lights flickered, and dust rained down from ceiling tiles. A deep rumble from far below screamed catastrophic structural failure. Cody’s training in emergency procedures kicked in. Alarms sounded, emergency services were notified, and within five minutes Cody had the accelerator shut down. His next moves were purely personal.

  The steps on the metal staircase were a blur as he raced downward. The smell of smoke was unmistakable, but there were no obvious signs of what had gone wrong. He held his portable radio transceiver in one hand. Multiple calls to Nala had gone unanswered.

  At basement level three, a fire crew had just arrived and were fixing a hose into a water outlet. One of the crew yelled at him as he rushed by, but he didn’t pause. The hallway was cloudy with smoke and dust, but still no sign of a fire. Nobody was going to hold him back from finding out what had happened.

  He turned the corner and skidded to a stop. His mouth hung open.

  The Diastasi lab was gone; most of the hallway too. He stared into a cavernous crater of shredded concrete. Dangling wires showered sparks, and severed pipes emptied their contents into a vast hollowed-out sphere, an empty space where the interior of the building had once stood. On the far side, at least forty meters away, the hallway continued as normal, though the overhead lights flashed on and off irregularly. The empty hole was as deep and high as it was wide—as if someone had taken a giant ice cream scoop and removed a ball-like chunk from the building.

  “Jesus Christ,” Cody whispered. He ran one hand through his hair. “What the hell happened?”

  In the center of the hollow space floated a single point of light, intensely bright but concentrated. Smoke and dust slowly circled in a disc shape, spiraling inward toward the light.

  Cody’s heart pounded and his eyes watered. “Nala! Thomas!” he yelled into the emptiness.

  There was no response. How could there be? There was nothing left of the lab or its occupants. His colleagues—his friends—were gone.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  Jan Spiegel wore a dust mask over his nose and mouth with safety glasses covering his eyes. Jae-ho Park, Fermilab’s director, was outfitted in the same way. Both men stood behind plastic ribbon with Do Not Cross written repeated along its length. On the other side, the hallway flooring was badly broken before disappearing into the monstrous hole.

  On the far side, a ladder leaned against what was left of the corridor floor, and the voices of several firemen could be heard from the depths of the hole.

  “It’s gone, the whole lab is gone,” Jan said, shaking his head from side to side. “It’s impossible to believe.”

  “What happened?” Park asked. “Any idea yet?”

  “Instability of some kind,” Jan answered. “Nala had found some anomalies, but we didn’t have enough data
to know what was going on.”

  “And the light? You think it’s a singularity?”

  Jan nodded. “Probably. Nala described something similar yesterday, but much smaller. She thought she had created a singularity from the 4-D collapse. She must have adjusted some parameters and made it worse.”

  “It wasn’t Nala’s fault,” Park said solemnly. “We all did this.”

  Jan hung his head. “You’re right. She explained the spatial instabilities to me. I threw it all back on her shoulders. I should have helped. Hell, I should have told them to stop.”

  Nala’s explanation was the most likely answer. Four-dimensional space had violently collapsed, taking three-dimensional space with it. The light hanging in the center of the hole was all that was left—a singularity, a zero-dimensional point of energy, lacking any mass or volume. The phenomenon would require more study to determine if the theory was accurate. Unfortunately, the only lab in the western hemisphere that could do the job was now crushed into oblivion, along with the scientists who operated it.

  Jan swallowed hard. They had made progress, but there was still so much they didn’t fully understand. Like any discovery, they had unlocked a treasure of knowledge with enormous potential to benefit humanity. But dangers lurked, made clear in the cruelest of ways. Jan had underestimated those dangers, and Nala and Thomas had paid with their lives.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  Emergency responders had scoured the pit and the side corridors for any signs of survivors and checked the rest of the building for damage. Police were called in too, but they did little more than gather information from witnesses and file a missing persons reports. The first responders eventually gave way to the more technical people, those who better understood the function of one of the most advanced scientific facilities in the world.