“Don’t say that,” Nala admonished. “It’s one possible state out of many. Thomas, we’re going to get out of here. Marie has arrived to show us the way home.” Nala locked eyes with Marie. “You are going to get us out, right? Jan and Jae-ho, they have a plan? They got you in here somehow, so there must be an exit, right?”
A tough question to answer. Well, you see, this crown on my head gives me superpowers, and I thought I’d just pop in to your interdimensional bubble and have a look around.
It didn’t sound very credible. Childish, even. Jan’s more scientific plan was sounding a lot better, even if it might take weeks to carry out.
Thomas must have noticed her hesitation. “Of course she has a plan. She’s a princess.” He pointed to the headband. “Just watch any Disney movie. They always have a plan.”
“Um… yeah,” Marie said. “The band is more advanced than it looks, but it’s not perfect. It collects information from the physical world and projects a visualization into my brain. It gives me a lot of leverage, but it can’t just bring us back home.”
“Well,” Nala said. “I wasn’t expecting ruby slippers, but I was hoping for something more along the lines of science, not magic.”
“Oh, it’s definitely not magic,” Marie said. “It’s technology. Alien.”
“Alien?” Thomas asked.
They both looked skeptical. Anyone would be. “I’ll show you. Let’s try this. Rub your hands together. Get some friction going.” They both did, but their skeptical looks didn’t change. “Okay, now turn around. Both of you.” She tapped the headband as they turned. “Make sure I can’t see your hands but pick a number between one and ten and hold up that many fingers.”
She flipped to an electromagnetic layer and dialed into the infrared portion of the spectrum. The view was better than any night-vision goggles, with easily recognizable heat signatures for both their bodies and their hidden but warm hands.
“Nala, seven. Thomas, four. Am I right?”
They looked at each other. “Do it again,” Thomas said. He shuffled closer to Nala to ensure their hands were hidden from view.
“Nala, six. Thomas, two. I could do this all day.”
They slowly turned. “You’re seeing heat?” Nala asked.
“Any electromagnetic radiation, any force, plus dimensional space and a whole lot more. I can even predict what you’re going to say next.”
Marie flipped to the most unusual of data layers, a kind of temporal view of outcomes based on available input. The layer came up, but it didn’t provide the same visualization that she had demonstrated to the higher-ups at Kennedy Space Center. The outcomes, spoken words or otherwise, had popped up immediately when she’d performed this trick before, but that layer had been replaced with something very different.
“What am I going to say next?” asked Thomas, in a taunting tone, but lighthearted.
A hundred versions of Thomas stood before her, each image of the man standing behind the one in front. The column receded into the distance, getting more blurred and eventually disappearing into the darkness. Each face carried a slightly different expression, some exuberant, some tired. A few seemed utterly defeated. There were a few alarming gaps in the lineup where Thomas didn’t appear at all.
“Wait a second, this is not right,” Marie said.
“Nope. I was going to say, ‘rubber baby buggy bumpers’ three times fast.” It was the Thomas at the front who spoke, but the mouths moved on several of his duplicates.
“No, I mean something’s wrong. I’m not getting the same image I was in Florida. There’s a whole bunch of you, different versions. Maybe they’re images of you at different times, but I’m not sure. It kind of feels like the rolling-dice layer I saw earlier.”
“Rolling dice?” Nala asked. “You mean you’re seeing the probability of outcomes?”
“Maybe,” Marie said. “But the rolling dice layer was fuzzy moving images. Blurry, like I couldn’t make out anything specific. This one is blurry too, but I can see duplicate versions of Thomas all in a line.” She turned to Nala. A hundred images of the woman receded into the distance. “You too.”
Nala and Thomas exchanged a glance, nodding their heads in unison. “Superposition,” they said together.
“Huh?”
“You just stepped into the quantum world,” Nala said. “Just like a quark or an electron, every possible outcome occurs and doesn’t occur. In physics, we call each possibility an eigenstate, and unfortunately we won’t know which state becomes reality until there’s an external observer.”
Thomas pointed to Marie. “Maybe she’s the external observer?”
Nala shook her head. “Nope. She’s in this quagmire too. She saw you dead, just like I did. She may have changed, too.” Nala turned to Marie. “After you found your way in here, did you see the light flash?”
“Yeah, I did. I must have fainted because I woke up and the body wasn’t there.”
“You probably didn’t faint. It was some other physical change. Anything could have happened.”
Marie thought about the dreamy recollection. “I had lost the headband. I was in a panic. But after the light flashed, I was wearing it.”
“Bingo,” Thomas said.
“You’re just as affected as we are,” Nala explained. “The crown is on your head and it’s lost—all at the same time. Its state hasn’t yet been determined.”
The memory of the lost headband was vague, but it hadn’t faded away completely. She had a sinking feeling that Nala might be right. Its permanence was questionable.
“So, I might lose it again?”
Nala nodded.
“Hoo boy.” Marie felt the knot in her stomach. “If that happens, we may never get out of here.”
38
Ratios
“He says I shouldn’t have jumped,” Marie said, translating what she visualized from the pad of paper lying on Jan’s desk. The man himself sat patiently in his office chair back in the 3-D world, no different from if Marie was in the room with him. Of course, he couldn’t see her.
“He’s right, you know,” Nala said. She put a hand on Marie’s shoulder. “Thanks for wanting to help us, but you’ve put yourself in the same danger.”
Marie removed the headband, automatically deactivating it. Best to use it in spurts to avoid, or at least delay, the psychosis that always seemed to be lurking around the corner. “A decision I can live with,” she said. “I’m still confident I can help from the inside. Just look at what we’re able to do now.”
Communication was vastly easier with the headband. Without it, the confusing view below their feet was impossible to interpret as writing. There were just too many other objects—the ceiling, the desk, the floor, the fourteen floors below Jan’s office, the various layers of rock beneath the building… it went on and on. The result was nothing more than a mishmash of shapes.
But with the headband, it all became clear. She could isolate a specific plane and viewing angle of the three-dimensional space. Jan’s desk was a good choice, allowing her to focus on a single sheet of paper. The headband also made seeing the objects in the break room easier. The blanket was a blanket, not an obscure whitish-gray mass. No wonder Nala had struggled to pick it up.
But there was one activity that was far more entertaining without the headband. Marie watched in fascination as Thomas carefully pinched a round red oval and then lifted a whole apple from the scene below. “That is so cool,” she said as he handed it to her.
“Jan’s back,” Nala said. “He’s carrying something but I can’t tell what it is.”
Marie reactivated the 3-D layer and got a fix on the man she’d argued with in person no more than an hour before. In his hand was a USB cable, much longer than the first cord, which lay unused next to Nala.
“You still have the phone, right?” Marie asked.
Nala rummaged through her bag of essentials and pulled it out. “Right here.”
Marie bent down and focused on
the white wire that Jan held in the air. “And look at that, this time he’s actually holding it up.”
“Wait a second, Jan wasn’t pulling that chickenshit ‘A-square being ripped out of the page’ crap, was he?”
Marie nodded.
Nala shook her head. “So that’s why you were holding everything. Jan, Jan, Jan… we’ve got some serious talking to do when I get back. Prick.”
Marie reached out, pinching the floor where the wire dangled. “Is this how you do it?”
“Being a dimensional goddess is a learned skill,” Nala said. “But you’re doing well.”
Marie felt the wire touch her fingers and with a hard pinch managed to stop it from wiggling. She pulled and magically drew the phone-connector end of the cable through the floor.
“You got it!” Nala patted her shoulder. “Promotion to goddess first class. Don’t pull too hard, though, that was my mistake.”
“Jan’s holding the other end this time,” Marie said. “That was our mistake.” The longer cord helped too, easily providing enough length to reach between the phone and the computer on Jan’s desk. A few minutes later, Nala had located a chat app on the phone and pressed a button to connect. She waited.
Initializing USB port…
… connected to Spiegel244.
Spiegel244: We did it!
A big smile spread across Nala’s face as she typed back.
MyPhone: Works like a charm.
Spiegel244: Outstanding! Is it really you?
MyPhone: No, it’s the office cleaning lady.
Spiegel244: It’s you.
MyPhone: And you were a prick to Marie. But let’s talk bosons.
With instant two-way communication, Jan and Nala were soon in sync on theory and evidence, along with a few snide remarks passing between them. Mostly baryons, bosons and density ratios. Marie didn’t pretend to understand it all and eventually switched her attention to Thomas, who munched on a pear he’d lifted from the page world.
“You should have been here earlier,” he said. “We stopped by the bank over at Aurora Commons. I could reach right into the vault.”
“Get out of here.”
“Really. Stacks of brand-new hundred-dollar bills. It would have been simple to lift a few bundles. So tempting. But… all I did was draw a mustache on Ben Franklin. They’ll wonder how that happened.”
Marie smiled. “I’m glad you didn’t take anything. You’re going to make it home, Thomas. You don’t want to be a criminal when you get there.”
She thought about what he’d said, and an idea formed. “How far is Aurora from here?”
“Well, in the real world, a couple of miles, but inside this bubble, distance is compressed. Getting to Aurora takes only a minute or two.”
“How far does it go? The bubble, I mean.”
Thomas swallowed a bite of pear and wiped his mouth. “Nala and I have been pretty far, probably half a mile.”
“And what’s beyond?”
“The void. At least that’s what Nala says. You can’t go there. Nothing can.”
“I doubt I’d want to. But I was wondering how far this bubble stretches.” Marie stood up. “I’ll see if I can get some better numbers for us.” She reached to the headband but hesitated. “Um… Thomas. If you ever see me kind of zoning out, do me a favor and take the headband off, would you?”
“Sure,” he said. “Does it need a reboot sometimes?”
“It… takes over my brain. It’s not a good thing, either.”
He didn’t ask for any more information, and she didn’t feel like explaining. There was something personally invasive about the creepy-crawlies, like a personal hygiene problem that’s best left vague.
Marie tapped on the side of the headband and popped back into its strangely beautiful but overwhelming visualization. She ignored the complexity of the 3-D floor and the fuzzy multiple images of Thomas and focused on the multicolored bubbles all around. The ones nearby looked just as they had before, but the lone bubble in the distance had changed substantially. It was larger now and bulging dramatically on one side. She thought of Daniel in Texas.
Is it possible? Can I see that far?
“What’s the compression ratio for these four-dimensional spaces? You know, weird-world distances compared to real world.”
Nala had finished her communication with Jan and spoke as if she was on autopilot. “Compression varies. Anywhere from negligible to 99 percent, depending on the expansion size.”
She appeared to be reciting from memory, but a faraway look made it clear she was pondering something far more important.
“What?” Marie asked. “You and Jan figured something out, didn’t you?”
Nala brushed her hair back with one hand, staring at nothing. “Yeah, I think so. Jan was right, density is the key.” She shook her head. “I understand it, but I need to let this settle in before I really believe it.”
Marie had watched part of their conversation, but that didn’t mean the language of physics made sense. Clearly, the exchange meant something more to Nala. “You found a way out?”
“No, at least not directly. But I think I know how we got here.” Thomas stopped eating and eyed Nala with interest.
She explained. “Before the big implosion, Thomas and I were testing various volumes of four-dimensional spatial expansion, and we began seeing an instability that affected 3-D space. Waves were literally passing through our lab, and I had no idea why. But now I do.”
She turned to Thomas. “It’s the density—technically the baryon-to-boson ratio, but it’s the same thing. Greater mass in a smaller volume leads to unstable four-dimensional space, which then causes an interaction with neighboring three-dimensional space. We created a very unstable chunk of real estate and it collapsed, taking us with it. Sorry, Thomas, my fault.”
Thomas didn’t seem too concerned, or else he was a very forgiving type of person.
“Jan and I had talked about this before,” Nala continued, “but it was not much more than a guess. He’s got the data now. In fact, he found the inflection point—the exact density where instability starts to occur.”
“Well, good for him,” Thomas said.
Nala looked perplexed. “At first, I didn’t want to believe him, but he’s calculated it to six-digit accuracy. This is weird shit—creepy-god kind of weird. According to Jan, our tests started going haywire precisely when mass density reached nine point four seven times ten to the minus twenty-seven kilograms per cubic meter.”
Thomas perked up. “Wait a second, that’s the value for critical density, isn’t it?”
Nala nodded. “It’s a hell of a coincidence. Either that or we’ve just confirmed one of the most mind-boggling parameters in our very strange universe.”
39
Evacuation
Daniel pressed to one side of the hallway as several FEMA team members passed by carrying electronic equipment and a disassembled antenna. Sometime in the next thirty minutes, the entire crew, Jeffrey Finch and Daniel included, would be falling back about ten miles to a safer location.
The number of FEMA and Texas state emergency personnel had grown even since Daniel had arrived, and their efforts to evacuate the area were aided by announcements from the governor, the mayor of Austin and the sheriff of Bastrop County. Still, there were holdouts even near the power plant. Reports of people pointing rifles out their windows kept emergency personnel at bay. The local authorities took those cases, attempting to identify relatives who might talk the obstinate cranks to safety.
Daniel ducked into an empty room just off the hallway and checked for any new messages from Jan, Park, or anyone from Romania. He couldn’t help but wonder about Marie’s fate. Her last words had made it clear that she was impatient. But an impulsive attempt to vault into the extradimensional prison that had trapped Nala and Thomas was lunacy.
There might be more going on than just frustration. Was her grasp on reality becoming tenuous? Perhaps it was spurred by the alien-induced
psychosis, as she herself had suggested. Or was she just being irrational?
Daniel switched to a self-critique, his usual approach when an initial assessment didn’t feel right. He wasn’t at Fermilab, didn’t have all the information and was in no position to judge. Marie’s action might have been impulsive, but if a man had done the same, he’d probably be deemed heroic. Certainly not irrational.
He took a deep breath and tried to recharacterize the Marie he knew in a new light. She was gone, that much was clear. A call to Jan had confirmed it. A security guard had seen her jump but never heard the thump of a body hitting concrete. They’d sent a rescue team member to the bottom of the pit but found nothing. Under normal circumstances, someone disappearing into thin air would be cause for alarm, but in this case, it was probably a good thing.
If she made it to the other side of the singularity, would Marie be able to help? She’d seemed to think so, but simply assuming she could see more on the inside wasn’t the best of plans. Not that Daniel had anything better. He should. It was what the famous Daniel Rice was known for—seeing the detail that no one else did and finding the solutions. He’d need to focus, but being pulled in two directions wasn’t helping.
His phone rang. A call from the one person who might resolve this crisis. “Jan, any news?”
“Yes, I just heard from them,” Jan said. His voice was more upbeat than the previous call. “It’s hard to believe, but Marie is inside. There’s a path of some kind, and it goes all the way through. Marie found it with that headband.”
“An opening between 3-D and 4-D space?” Daniel asked. It was exactly what they’d needed—what Daniel had asked about when Marie had first visualized the glowing spheres.
“Not an opening in any conventional sense,” Jan said. “Don’t expect to be able to throw in a rope and pull them out. It’s an area where 3-D space has collapsed to a point, but it’s also a gravity well, so objects are apparently able to pass through to the other side.”
“A one-way trip, then,” Daniel said. It wasn’t a question, but Jan’s confirmation would help him picture the problem.
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