by M. Modak
Moments ago a hush fell on the lab leaving only a deep humming sound that came from the large magnets that allow her to spin. Nervous spectators filled every seat and billions around the world watched at home on their personal flexscreens. He wondered if the stillness extended across the globe.
On the lab’s ceiling the image of a clear late evening sky steadily passed into dusk. A single spotlight slowly intensified around the secured area Aughra occupied and the sun’s last rays went dark. The audience began to stir as the image on the ceiling showed the polluted light from the city filtered into a crisp, high-resolution image of Atlanta’s naked sky.
Alone in the coming night, one star began shining; another followed minutes later. Soon the ceiling filled with twinkling lights, all seen as if from far away on an island somewhere in the middle of the ocean.
It will soon be show time.
This was his favorite time of day, and he felt a mix of emotions. He was fully awake when the sun finally submitted to the night and the stars began to shine. Those tiny points of light were a call to action he could feel deep in his bones. This was when he did his best work.
He had prepared for this moment for the last 20 years, and now the stress from it all was about to be released. The nervousness he had endured earlier had passed, for a short time, but now it gnawed at his insides.
All the years of college were for this moment. Three doctorates hung on his office wall as witness to his dedication. Limitless hours of checking and rechecking equations, only he and a few others scattered throughout the world knew of much less could solve, have led to this moment.
He lost his wife and family and the world thought he was a mad scientist. Activists were demonstrating with signs held high just outside the barricades surrounding the building. Protesters around the globe burned him in effigy, but nothing would stop him now, not even the anxiety that had just started to knot in his stomach.
I don’t know why I feel this way. Perhaps I missed something, he thought. My math is right. I’ve meticulously inspected the antimatter engine, and the timing is right. They cooled the S-matter to -273.15 °C, just above absolute zero, and it was in a Bose-Einstein condensate ready to reinforce the gravitational effects from Nebula311.
The alignment with the nebula was correct. Yesterday, the country’s top spy agencies had rechecked all the software for worms. They assured me that no one outside my team could hack in and change anything. Even the air above the lab had been designated a No Fly Zone…So; I don’t understand why I feel so troubled. It’s as if something inside me is asking, no demanding, I reconsider the implications of this action.
A flash from last night’s dream came and went, reigniting the feelings of dread he had experienced when he had first opened his eyes, yet the brief image was still indefinable. He remembered reading about the time when the atom bomb was to be tested. Many people thought the Earth’s atmosphere would catch fire and explode in a nuclear chain reaction, but nothing like that could happen.
Everything had gone well this morning. He had given a speech the president had secretly sent him, though he had to add a few technical details. The speech was stirring in its rhetoric while compelling everyone to stay calm. Although he hated speaking in front of people, not to mention the entire world of internet viewers around 15 billion strong, he felt he had delivered it well.
They had played that speech on every news channel a thousand times today, picking apart every nuance and adding meaning where there was none.
In that speech he had repeated, in detail, all that was about to happen over the next 24 hours. He made it clear that the Phase Two Switch, which he was about to turn on, will only release the magnetic fields that hold the S-matter.
However, unlike what will happen tomorrow when the antimatter releases, nothing outside the pods will change.
He had said many times, “The computers should light up like a Christmas tree as the S-matter in the main pods finishes the process of entanglement,” he had stressed, “Just lights folks, that’s all that will happen tonight, just lights.”
Through the one way window in his office it looked like everyone was staring at him, waiting for him to step into the main lab. They looked ready to start chanting “Flip, the, switch, flip, the, switch,” as if they were at some football game. The real show would start tomorrow night, but for most people, antimatter explosions were old hat.
The S-matter was the draw. He made it clear, over and over again, that nothing was going to happen until Phase Three; then they would see the S-matter’s real effects. First, the lab’s exterior ventilation will open, ready to release the air pressure from Aughra’s intense rotating, then they will free the antimatter and Aughra will explode into a rapid spin. That is when they would make history. He expected the Earth to shake for miles!
Kayla had acted strangely all day, even ignoring him through most of the pretest. She was usually the one joking while keeping everyone on his or her toes; but today she was quiet and withdrawn. He had been so busy with all the preparations for the test, and his own battle with his feelings, that he just realized how different she seemed. She had been missing for the past hour, and he wondered if something he had said had angered her this morning. He was a little glad she was not here right now because he could not hide how nervous he felt.
She was a source of strength and motivation for him, but she hated weakness and deep inside he feared her disapproval. No other woman had treated him as coarsely as she did sometimes. However, she understood his nature, as a scientist, and respected his time. She did not bother asking him about his feelings or linger on deep meanings after their romantic encounters. She was the partner he wanted in every sense of the word.
His ex-wife, Elizabeth, never understood him. Each day he found her allotted times for study on schedules stuck to the refrigerator or posted on his flexscreen. He had followed them to a tee but got no joy out of it.
Aughra was his life’s work. She was both his wife and child now. She demanded everything from him, and she had taken everything. When he was done with this project, he would have to build a new life.
He glanced over to the observation lounge noticing the Governor, Senators, House Representatives, and the heads of state from both Brazil and China. Three U.S. generals dressed in full military uniforms sat in erect attention behind them. He thought he recognized some movie stars sitting on the back row but he wasn’t sure since he hadn’t seen a new movie in a long time.
That was the last time he had gotten out, his last date. He remembered the movie Elizabeth had picked and the silent dinner afterword. She insisted on a sloppy romantic comedy. He wanted to see the latest edition to the Star Trek franchise but it had sold out leaving her the choice between a bad or worse movie; she chose the worst. If he could have lived that day over again he would have found a reason to love that movie.
It would’ve been different, he thought, but all that is in the past now.
He was trying to put his mind anywhere but on what he was feeling. He feared that, in the silence, all the people in the lab were looking toward his office, not because they were waiting for him to flip the switch, but because his heart was pounding so loud! Now he wanted to vomit and it was difficult to breathe. That feeling of dread had become a deep but subtle sense of regret. Could it be regret for something yet to come, he wondered? He wished he could control his emotions.
All these emotions were so loud this time, so immediate that he almost stopped the whole project right then. He wanted to take a bottle of vodka from the bar, pop a few pills, open the concealed panel to his bed and disappear into a dream forever…
For a moment, he thought about how his life could have been different if he would have scaled down his ambitions. He could be a well-paid professor at MIT or Harvard. He could be with his family living anywhere he chose, happy.
He was rich now. His total wealth, estimated to be in the hundreds of billions universal credits, but his life felt poor. How different it could ha
ve been, he thought, if I just let life reveal her secrets, in her own time, rather than unleashing this monstrosity to pirate the truth from her.
He took a deep controlling breath and thought, and of course, the universe isn’t a she. It isn’t anything but probabilities interacting at an ever-cooling rate. It had no opinion; there was no deeper meaning to any of it, only data. He hardened himself to that fact.
He knew the man from his dreams of late would disagree with that assessment, but what did he know? Besides, he was just one man. When had one man ever done anything to change the world, for good or ill?
There were many risks in what he was about to do, risks that were both well known and some still secret. He had chosen to ignore them all for knowledge and glory. The potential effects of this experiment could lead to a new science, new kinds of computers, and possibly to the greatest weapon of mass destruction ever built.
Some people hoped that discovering and understanding the entanglement force would make matter everywhere a new kind of weapon. Others thought it might be able to transform or teleport molecules at will. The real wishful thinkers believed they could simply change matter from solid to liquid or gas, without warning. He was sure that was why the Approved Allied Governments of the World had supported him.
His faith was in science not politics and he hoped that Aughra would fall short of the military’s stated interest. The worst of his fears were scientifically impossible anyway…
He took another calming breath and searched the crowd for Kayla. If he could just see her now it might calm him and give him the cold nerve to take this next step.
Through the mass of people he saw that many of his team leaders were quietly talking to reporters, others were checking flexscreen readouts and still some others were triple checking every Nanometer of the Antimatter Engine’s glass.
Kayla was still nowhere to be seen. He thought, I will have to do this myself.
He looked at Aughra again, letting the pain of all he had lost to build her remind him that he was not going to quit now.
Finally the lab was completely dark but for the stars of the Milky Way, and a bluish spotlight shining down on her. Then all the stars began to fly by as a single bright light, in the distance, slowly zoomed into view. It was as if they were all in a spaceship approaching that distant light at a tremendous speed. The light grew in intensity until it became a reddish blur. It continued expanding revealing the sharp image of a greatly warped, cluster of amber lights, in a gas cloud representing Nebula311.
That was his cue.
He put his lab coat on, opened the door and walked out into the main lab. Someone in the background started clapping and then another joined until the group as a whole stood in applause. He waited there for a moment, just outside his office, allowing the excitement to wash over him. He let the applause drown out his fears until his mind was a blank screen. He walked into the light, next to Aughra and pointed up at the ceiling showing the distant amber nebula. He said, “It’s taken 100,000 years for this day to arrive again. Since the day she was commissioned Aughra has taken 15 years to build. In all this time light, energy and gravity has traveled out from the sun and Earth in waves at the speed of light.
“We have a connection to the stars and universe that is real. That connection is not something you have to go into a church or temple to know. It’s not only a story your parents told you to make you feel big when you were little.
“It’s real; we are all connected to everything through fields of energy that weave in and out of the many dimensions. Moreover, until now, all of it has been invisible to the naked eye.
“Today we will open the one eye of Aughra and start to see that connection for the first time. Tomorrow night, Aughra will open her other eye and reveal the instant connection to us that stretches across light years, galaxies and even the whole universe. She will pull on those unbreakable bonds like a banjo player and we will hear the sounds of infinity.”
He dropped his arm and all the lights came on. His footsteps echoed off the walls as he walked over to, and then up, a narrow wooden podium standing next to Aughra’s base. The podium felt too high and he thought he would have to move back down to the floor right after he was done. Soon Aughra’s leading arm would complete its slow rotation putting him in the way of the S-matter’s containment pod.
Just then, Kayla stepped out from the Network Office in the back of the room. The look of worry vanished from her face as their eyes met and was replaced with something… determined. He took a determined breath and silently thanked her for that look. She turned away quietly and tried to find a place against the back wall.
He lifted the remote dramatically into the air and flipped the Phase Two Switch on.
Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he was vaguely aware of an explosion coming from beyond the main lab. In one powerful motion, Aughra’s arms turned violently!
The bottom half of the containment pod inside the black arm just missed him, though he felt the wind from its passing. With a static pop, the white arm continued its turn and its pod opened.
Super cooled black sludge hissed as it spilled from the container in a thick ribbon and splashed across his chest and face.
John cried out, and everyone gasped!
Electricity angrily snapped and cracked from Aughra’s base, driving everyone, but the generals, screaming and running for the doors! The generals calmly got up and walked out. John dropped off the podium as Aughra’s second white arm completed its revolution. He hit the ground hard, rolled to the side and was back on his feet in seconds. All the hairs on is body, that were not wet from the black sludge, stood on ends. His mind felt like an egg that had just cracked and his skin burned!
Deep inside he could hear parts of himself, parts he never knew existed, suddenly become aware of him and most were scared because of what he had just done. He felt his head grow light as the spotlight above him went dim and then black. Then he fell to the floor and knew no more.
Kayla’s eyes shot up in disbelief. Quickly she ran over to him, checked his breathing and pulse but carefully avoided the evaporating S-matter. Then she picked through his lab coat pockets and withdrew his Media Security Card. She checked him again and saw something that troubled her. The S-matter was not evaporating; it was absorbing into his body!
Slowly he opened his eyes and stared right up at her. His eyebrows bunched in confusion and he said, “Anna, what happ-ened…” Then he passed out again.
Kayla stood up before anything more could happen. She said nothing as she grabbed an arm and pulled him over to the media center. She dropped him and used the security card to shut down the power to the live webcams. Then she took both his arms and started toward the exit. Before she had made it ten feet, the antimatter detonated in Aughra’s glass engine with a huge bang!
The exterior Air Pressure Release Doors were not open. The sudden force of moving air slammed into both of them throwing her across the room toward the exit as John’s body flew straight back into the wall.
As Kayla flew, she saw Aughra in motion, spinning perfectly. It was just as the computer simulations had predicted.
She thought Aughra looked beautiful. In the middle of the massive sphere was the sparkling glow of blue that faded into purple. It was the antimatter flowing down the spiraling glass tube, causing Aughra’s rapid spin.
The electromagnetic fields were holding the giant ball bearings in orbit securely beneath her in a purple haze of light. In that moment, she was very proud of John. Then she hit the exit door with a thud and everything went black
5 Joshua
On Earth, in the distant Universe XJ824
Same day, starting in the morning
September/7/2035
8:00am
Joshua awoke with a start as he kicked the covers off the bed! His dreams of late were about the same thing, a great scientist preparing to test his monstrous machine.
That was his first dream. This last, horrible dream still echoed in his
mind, and as his heart raced, he tried to remember it. He took a few deep-breaths as he let the easiest parts to recall come to mind: The knowledge that this was to happen in the near future came first. There was a man; he thought it might be himself or perhaps it was the same scientist from earlier, sitting in a room on a moon in deep space. He was viewing a live feed from many different satellite telescopes positioned throughout the galaxy. On the screens before him, in slow motion, he witnessed the end of the universe.
The vision of it made him inhale sharply. Worlds were flying apart, suns became unstable and went nova as random black holes appeared out of nowhere, destroying everything! This other-self from his first dream, John, was to blame for it all…
Confusion threatened to wipe away the rest of his memory as he tried to sort it out, so he let the need to know go. Perhaps he would understand it all later when he had more of these dreams on paper.
He calmed a little and his memories returned. He could hear the cries from trillions of souls calling to him, begging him to help! But why me? What could I do now and is it too late?