Quantum Void

by Douglas Phillips

  “You better start believing me,” Marie said. “I’m trying to give you accurate information.”

  “No, no, it’s not that,” he said. “I believe you. You’re probably seeing the leftovers from experiments of baryon ratios we were running. Four-dimensional space that we didn’t clean up properly.”

  Marie nodded. The leftovers comment made sense. She’d seen quite a few spheres of different sizes and positions, and most of them were nearby.

  “So, that’s where they are, right? Out in one of these extra dimensions?”

  “Probably. But it’s different, not like any four-dimensional space we’ve created before. Nala is trying to tell me, and some of what she says makes sense. They’re in a bubble, but it’s an aberration caused by the collapse. According to her notes, she seems to think it’s a pocket within the void.”

  “Explain.”

  “It’s a multiverse concept,” Jan said. “Used to delineate the difference between nothing and something. You’re an astronomy type, right? It’s the same concept as pre–Big Bang. Nothing before the Big Bang, something after.”

  Marie processed Jan’s comments as well as a human mind could, even a mind enhanced with the alien technology. The concept of nothing had always been difficult. For centuries, human mathematics had ignored the number zero precisely because no one could quite conceptualize the purpose of a number that had no value.

  The creation dilemma was also well known. Marie even remembered a lecture from college on it. What is nothing, when even empty space is something? Explanations of the Big Bang were sometimes stymied as soon as anyone asked what had existed prior. If cosmologists answered, “we don’t know” it felt unsatisfactory, but if they answered with “nothing,” then they were stuck trying to define exactly what nothing represented and how something could spring from it spontaneously.

  Marie set her headband case on the counter and reached into the refrigerator for a soda can. She leaned against the counter and refreshed her dry mouth. It had already been a long day. She reached for a pear on the table.

  “Hey,” Jan said. “That’s reserved.”

  There were several other fruits and snacks still on the table, untouched. “I’m hungry too,” Marie said. “We’ll get more for them tonight.” She was getting a little tired of a brainy physicist who did little more than write equations on a pad of paper. The experts down the hall were still analyzing ink, or handwriting style, or whatever they were doing. And Daniel was gone to Texas.

  In the meantime, two people were trapped in hell. The situation demanded action, but she didn’t see any evidence it would come from Jan or anyone else.

  “You’ve got this now,” Jessica Boyce had told her when Marie had been added to the katanaut team. One step led to another. An alien gift provided the ability to see beyond human limitations, to interpret vast amounts of data, to visualize what others could not.

  Whether real or imaginary, fate doesn’t shape the events of our lives. It’s our resolve, our determination to use whatever abilities we possess that makes a difference.

  Time to take control.

  Marie grabbed the headband case from the counter and headed down the hallway.

  The badge Fermilab had provided cleared her into the underground portion of the facility. She got lost once but backtracked and found the corridor that Daniel had guided her to the night before. The security guard at his post recognized her.

  “Back again?” he asked.

  “Yeah, just need to check out one more thing.” He motioned for her to sign the log. A signature and her status as a colleague of the famous Daniel Rice seemed to be enough. A minute later, she was standing at the edge of the disaster, alone this time.

  Nothing had changed. The vast darkened hole in the building’s interior felt cold and empty. A slight breeze came down the corridor behind her and blew into the cavernous abyss. Bits of dust still circled the single bright light in the center. It looked like the zone of destruction might remain this way for years.

  She watched the dust circling the light. It wasn’t all dust. There were larger bits too: a few pieces of broken plastic, glints of glass shards, a few splinters of wood. They circled without any evidence of being pulled downward, as if the center of this hollowed-out cavity was a planetary system unto itself.

  Why didn’t it all just fall into the pit? Where was gravity? It was a question she knew she could easily answer.

  Marie withdrew the headband and set the case on the ground. She’d never worn it alone before. If there were problems… well, she was on her own. She remembered what Daniel had said. Put it away, send it back to the Dancers for a full reevaluation. Daniel suggested safety.

  It’ll just be a quick look, she assured herself.

  She lowered the band over her hair and tapped twice. The enormous purple sphere popped into view, its filmy surface glistening from the glow of the light in its center.

  She kept her eyes open, overlaying the optical world with the mental visualization. It was easy to do and starting to feel almost natural, like getting used to a new pair of glasses.

  She flipped to the gravity layer and the building distorted, everything around her stretching downward, validating the body’s feeling of being pulled by the earth. But toward the middle of the vast hole, the stretching diminished, flattened. The light, and its disk of rotating debris, didn’t stretch downward at all. In the center of the blast zone, it appeared that gravity didn’t exist. If anything, there was a slight tug toward the light.

  I knew it.

  She flipped back to the dimensional layer and the purple sphere. Looking up to the light, she saw a detail she hadn’t noticed before. The disk of dust and debris was spiraling into the light. Nothing new there. But the spiral arms of dust seemed to be dipping just below the light, as if something else were causing a detour. It wasn’t the light that was sucking the debris in; there was something else. She couldn’t quite make out whatever was drawing the dust in, but a different angle of view might help.

  With unaided eyes, she looked across the massive hole. On the far side, another corridor ended in much the same way, broken concrete and twisted rebar. The hallway on the other side was lit, the only other light filtering into the scene. Could she get there? It would give a more direct view to wherever the dust was going.

  Too bad there was no floor map of the building in the headband’s list of capabilities. She would need to figure how to get there the old-fashioned way—ask for directions.

  “I wonder,” she said innocently to the guard. “Could I take a look from the other side?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Two flights up, then straight down the hallway to the far end. There’s another stairwell that will get you back down to this level.”

  “Thanks, I won’t be long,” Marie said and started back to the stairs.

  “But be careful, ma’am,” he yelled after her. “Don’t go near the edge.” The guard made a note in his logbook.

  It didn’t take long. Up two flights, down a parallel hallway and then back down. As she approached, the chasm didn’t look much different from the other side.

  She put the headband on once more and looked up into the darkness of the hole. It all became clear.

  From this new perspective, the gravity visualization clearly displayed a funnel shape just below the singularity. Streams of dust entered its opening like water going down a drain. The perimeter of the funnel was tilted slightly, like a basketball hoop pulled down by a player hanging on its edge. It explained why the shape was almost invisible from the other side.

  She watched the dust and debris draining slowly into the funnel in a whirlpool-like flow. There was no question—this was a passageway. A hole to something not below but ana or kata.

  Exactly where the flow of dust ended up was impossible to tell.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  Don’t be ridiculous, she thought as she scrambled back up the stairwell. You wouldn’t just pull off a manhole cover and jump into a sew
er, would you?

  Of course, this was anything but an access point to a sewer. This was an interdimensional passageway, hovering in a no-gravity zone in the middle of a half-destroyed building—probably leading to certain death. At least there were ladders to climb into a sewer.

  Exaggerations, she told herself. You’re trying to talk yourself out of it.

  The headband didn’t lie. The drain was a passageway. It had an entrance and an exit. She couldn’t describe how she knew, but there was no doubt in her mind that it provided clear passage, large enough for a person to fit through. There weren’t any rotating blades of death within its depths, no vacuum of space on the other side. The air flowed into it smoothly with normal atmospheric pressure. The headband told her so.

  But there was one slight problem. The passage was a one-way trip. Down only. The air, the particles—nothing was coming back up. It wasn’t physically possible, a fact the headband had confirmed.

  Marie reached her decision by the time she’d climbed the stairs to the ground level of Wilson Hall. She pulled out her phone and dialed Daniel.

  34

  Bluebonnets

  Jeffrey Finch parked next to one of the four primary combustion buildings at the Bastrop power plant. Daniel stepped out of the car and craned his neck. A five-hundred-foot smokestack adjacent to the building reached to the sky, the swirling mass of the clouds not much farther above the blue-and-orange cap at its top. Gusty wind swirled through the parking lot.

  “Intimidating, isn’t it?” Finch said, his voice loud over the wind.

  Daniel shielded his eyes with one hand. “The center of the cloud is offset from the power plant. Could be an atmospheric effect, similar to a low-pressure system. The maximum point of vorticity in the upper atmosphere always lags behind the surface low.”

  Finch laughed under his breath. “That’s quite a different reaction than I’ve seen from everyone else who stands under this monster.” He motioned toward the door in the side of the building.

  Daniel shrugged. “It’s fluid dynamics. The atmosphere is complicated, that’s all I’m saying. And, yeah, it’s intimidating, too.”

  They entered a hallway and descended a flight of stairs to a large basement room filled with people and the cacophony of simultaneous conversations. Some wore uniform shirts with FEMA written on the back. Almost everyone had a phone to their ear. In one corner, two state troopers in tan uniforms sat at a table, holding their cowboy-style hats in their hands. Davis Garrity, the businessman who had started the whole affair, sat across from the troopers. He looked pale.

  A gray-haired man wearing a blue FEMA vest over his white shirt yelled across the chatter. “Listen up, everyone! We’re pulling the plug here and falling back to the Highway 71 command center. You’ve got sixty minutes to finish up whatever you’re doing and get your field personnel back in time to evac.”

  Finch introduced Daniel to the on-site federal coordinator, Gonzalo Ayala. Ayala carried the no-nonsense look of a military field commander. “Dr. Rice,” he said in a deep baritone. “Your reputation is well known. I imagine you could shed some light on this problem?”

  “I’ll try. Or connect you to people who can.”

  Ayala held a firm expression in his substantial lower jaw, speckled with gray whiskers. “Good. First question—are we dealing with the Chicago scenario? The Fermilab-style disaster?”

  Daniel took a deep breath. “Not precisely, no, but the fundamentals are probably the same. Four-dimensional space affecting a boundary of 3-D space.”

  “An odd way to think about it,” Ayala said. “But I’ll take it. Second question—how bad could this get?”

  “That’s a question I can’t answer,” Daniel said. “Unfortunately, I don’t think the physicists could either. By the looks of things outside, it’s already affecting a one-to-two-mile radius, and Mr. Finch tells me it’s growing. So, what happens next? A lot depends on what the people who are controlling this do. Is the power plant shut down?”

  “Oh, yeah. First thing we did. Nothing’s been coming out of those stacks for more than twelve hours.” He motioned to the corner where the state troopers were giving Garrity the third degree. “Mr. Garrity is cooperating, but he doesn’t seem to know much. Apparently, there’s a Romanian firm that’s involved.”

  Garrity was in deep conversation with the state troopers. One of the officers examined a short piece of PVC pipe.

  “I’m aware of the Romanians,” Daniel said. “Any contact with them?”

  “None yet. But with the plant shut down, do we even need them? We’ve got a couple of scientists out here that think the cloud might just go away on its own now that it’s not being fed from the smokestacks.”

  Daniel paused in thought for a minute. “No… I wouldn’t count on that. Picture a giant invisible water tank out there. Just because you stop filling it doesn’t make the tank go away. These dimensional expansions can be locked in place or collapsed at will. But it’s the physicists at the accelerator facility who control it, not anything you do at the power plant.”

  Ayala nodded. “So, this Romanian connection is important.”

  “Yeah, I’d say so. Do we know how to reach them?”

  “Yup. Got the contact information from Garrity.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a worn business card. “Institut—”. He handed the paper to Daniel. “Here, you can read it.”

  Daniel studied the card.

  Pavell Iliescu

  Institutul de Fizică Aplicată Belciugatele

  DN3 44 Belciugatele 917010, Romania

  +40 761 904 791

  p.iliescu@ifab.ro

  “I’ll call him,” Daniel said. “They’ll need to be very careful with their next step. Playing around with large volumes of quantum space isn’t a good idea for beginners, so we need to find out how much expertise the Romanians have.”

  Finch interrupted, “I can suspend the permit, if that helps.”

  A monster storm was brewing outside, linked to a vast unseen dumping ground somewhere out in extra dimensions of space, and it was all the result of an EPA permit issued without consulting the scientists who might have advised on the dangers. Daniel tried to keep the scorn out of his voice. “Yeah, suspending the permit would be a great idea.” It wasn’t Finch’s fault; he was just doing his job.

  Ayala pointed to the business card. “Dr. Rice, if you can find out what the Romanians are doing, then I can stay focused on evacuation.”

  “I’ll get on it. How far out are you evacuating?” Daniel asked.

  Another FEMA person ran over and handed Ayala a note. He looked at it and then responded to Daniel. “We just issued a mandatory order for Bastrop County. Eighty thousand people. That’s going to be challenging enough. Rural. A lot of them are already saying it’s fake news.”

  “A rumor is going around that the government created the cloud and is forcing people out to confiscate their property,” Finch added.

  “Gotta love Texas,” Ayala said. “But we’ll get everyone out. Unfortunately, I’m a lot less confident about the next level.”

  Daniel had a good idea what he was going to say next. “Austin?”

  “Yup. If this thing keeps growing, or you tell me it’s a nuclear bomb waiting to go off, then I’ve got to evacuate several million people in Travis County. Nobody’s ever done that before, not with hurricanes or tornadoes or any other disaster. Dr. Rice, I need to know what the hell is going to happen here.”

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  Daniel ambled through an open pasture of bluebonnets, the Texas state flower. The field’s proximity to the parking lot meant that the seeds had surely been scattered as part of a beautification project by the power company. It didn’t matter whether they were natural or planted, the flowers were just as pretty.

  Daniel held his phone to his ear. The reception was better outside, and a call to Romania was easier outside the noisy command center.

  The cloud loomed above, a giant eddy in the sky. It twisted
with the slow-motion speed of any normal cloud, but in the distinctly curved path of a vortex. Daniel multitasked, listening to the conversation on the phone and keeping an eye on the brewing storm.

  The Romanian physicists were surprised to hear they might be the source of panic half a world away. They were following a plan established weeks ago, they said, increasing the volume of the bubble of quantum space in well-defined steps to provide additional space as requested by their American client.

  For the time being, Daniel persuaded them to stop expanding, though he hesitated to recommend they collapse the four-dimensional structure. Where would it go? How would its contents of noxious gases be dispersed? These were questions only a small subset of quantum physicists could answer. Jan Spiegel was Daniel’s second call.

  “We’re in contact with Nala and Thomas,” Jan said when he picked up. “Nala is writing on the whiteboard, walls, floor, everything. She even drew on Marie’s hand. We tried radio communication. That didn’t work, so now we’re attempting a wired connection.”

  Daniel could imagine how writing from an invisible pen wielded by an unseen hand might shake things up at Fermilab. “How about the food she asked for?”

  “Success. She’s able to pull it out of 3-D space,” Jan answered.

  “Remarkable,” Daniel said. He was relieved, but the image of Nala lost in an infinite maze with no exits was still distressing. “Any ideas how to get them out?”

  “We’re working on it, with input from Nala herself, I might add.”

  Jan outlined a few options. There had been no damage to the accelerator, so Fermilab facilities engineers were drawing up an emergency plan to reconstruct what had been lost in the disaster. It would take a few weeks, but they’d regain a limited ability to expand quantum space. One idea was to create a larger overarching bubble that would act as a container to the various 4-D remnants that Marie had identified, including the space where Nala and Thomas were trapped. It would provide the precision they would need to collapse the space when the time came.

  Partners at CERN were also busy experimenting with techniques for bringing living things back from 4-D space. Collapsing the space would hardly be a solution if it shredded every cell in their bodies. The plan would require more research, but the situation wasn’t hopeless. In the meantime, they had already found ways to keep Nala and Thomas alive.