“Okay, start with the coupling in her first arm on the left,” Jake said.
“What?”
“I told you, we’re fixing the plumbing. That includes you.”
“I am quite sure you can do this more efficiently without me,” Solomon said, but he didn’t object when Jake came around behind him, then picked up his hand and made him touch the controls.
One of Eliza’s arms jerked. Solomon had never seen her move like that, whether Jake was speaking to her or using the tablet, so it must be his fault. He made a smaller, gentler motion, and she extended her arm slowly toward the end of the pipe. Fitting the coupling over it required delicacy. It took him several tries, and when he had it in place at last, he whispered, “Yes.”
“Satisfying, right? Now you slide the new pipe into the coupling, and then we’ll put the other coupling on,” Jake said.
This, too, demanded concentration and a light touch. Solomon fiddled with the tablet controls until Eliza finished fitting the new pipe into its couplings, and then he said, “Tell me why we’re doing this.”
“You said you couldn’t fix the breach, so we’re fixing something else,” Jake said, and then, a moment later, “Good, that looks great, now we just have to crimp it.”
“How is this helping?” Solomon asked.
“The crimp? We have to make a seal between the new pipe and the old pipe if we don’t want it to leak. It’s easy, Eliza has the tool on one of her arms already. That’ll finish this part, but there’s a few other leaks that need patching along the line.”
“Stop deliberately misunderstanding me,” Solomon said sharply. “It won’t matter if we have running water if something else comes through the breach. Or if it gets any bigger—the distortions could come back, or—”
“Okay,” Jake said. He stepped away so they could speak face to face. “We need to fix it. Just thought it might help to work on something easily fixable instead of brooding in your lab. Besides, the breach is basically a leak, right? It’s a hole in reality. I know, I know, it works in ways I don’t understand, goes up, down, sideways, forward, backward and in heels, but—”
“You think we could patch it,” Solomon said. Luckily it was Eliza who was handling all the pieces of this project, and she was harder to startle, so nothing clanged to the floor.
“Just brainstorming,” Jake said.
“No, it makes sense,” Solomon said. “I was able to repair the smaller distortions with the organism’s help—to pull them flat—but the breach is simply too big for that method to work. The organism has been trying for days. The breach can’t be stitched back together, or crimped to make a seal—at least, I can’t do that, and I don’t think the organism is powerful enough. But maybe with more matter, the hole could be patched.”
While Solomon was speaking, Jake lifted the tablet out of his hands. His fingers flew across the screen, far defter with the controls.
Solomon continued, “The question is what matter. Where would we get something with enough mass?”
“How big are we talking?” Jake asked. “Would one of the pods be enough? We could shove one in there. We could shove all of them in there, if that would do the trick.”
“No,” Solomon said. “I know the breach looks like it stretches from one side of the machine to the other—”
“But it’s bigger than that,” Jake finished. “Yeah. Okay. Well, what about this place?”
“Facility 17?”
“Yeah, the asteroid,” Jake said. “Is it enough?”
“It might be. But it would be destroyed. This whole project would be over.”
“The whole project is already over,” Jake said. “Heath and Winslow are in prison, Quint’s dead, there’s just a few of us left here who were unwilling to leave the breach unguarded—and I guess we don’t really have anywhere else to go. But that’s a solvable problem.”
“And the eventual goal of exploring the multiverse?”
Jake shrugged. “It’ll be there if people want to explore it. No need for a fixed departure point. This place is just a lump of space metal. And it’s a lump of space metal designed and formerly owned by an evil trillionaire. I won’t miss it, and I don’t think anybody else will.”
“If ‘people’ want to explore the multiverse?” Solomon pressed, momentarily sidetracked. “Not you?”
“I… wouldn’t mind going back down to the surface for a while,” Jake said. He cleared his throat. “I don’t really have people there, or a place to live, but I’ll figure it out. I’m tired of space.”
“I’m tired of space, too,” Solomon said. Saying it aloud was exciting. So was the way Jake had averted his gaze. Maybe they could get out of this mess. “Eliminating this place from reality sounds cathartic.”
Jake laughed. “Okay, so how do we do it?”
“I’m not quite sure. When the alien and I repaired the discrete distortions, we were pulling them flat from different points. If you imagine a crumpled piece of paper, you’d have to flatten it by pulling in opposite directions. Pulling from one spot can’t change the shape. It just moves the paper.”
“You think you and the alien aren’t enough?”
“I don’t know,” Solomon said. “If we tried this, we’d only get one shot. It would be a delicate, time-consuming process. If we destroyed the asteroid without closing the breach, I don’t know what we’d try after that. And there’s a risk of making things worse.”
“If we destroy the asteroid and it doesn’t seal the breach, then we’ll have no asteroid, plus a giant, invisible anomaly in space, waiting to eat the moon or whatever,” Jake said.
Solomon wished he could laugh at that.
“God, this stuff still fucks with me so much. The breach is inside the asteroid, but you’re proposing that we put the asteroid inside the breach?” Jake wrapped one hand around a fist and then reversed their positions to illustrate this question, a hopelessly inadequate hand gesture that Solomon shouldn’t have found charming.
“Think of it as turning the asteroid inside-out, if it helps,” Solomon said.
“Which you’re gonna do with your mind,” Jake added.
“That is how I do most things.”
“What you’re doing with the alien, is it like what the machine was doing? Making some kind of dimensional harmonic resonance?”
“Yes.”
“So if you had another machine—or several more machines—would it help? You could place them wherever you needed to, uh, pull the crumpled piece of paper flat? They’d help you and the alien reverse what happened on the night of the accident.”
“You’re offering to build these machines,” Solomon said.
“If we have the materials, then sure. You tell me what to do and I’ll do it. But what’s inside your machine that allows it to affect dimensions humans can’t perceive? I hope it’s not that stuff Quint was injecting into runners to ground them—the dimensional prions? We don’t have any more of those.”
“It’s not a prion, merely a catalyst,” Solomon said. “And I have plenty, but we’ll have to go out to get it.”
“Wait, you mean out-out?” Jake tilted his head toward the greenhouse windows, toward the vastness of space.
“I was rightly suspicious that Heath and Winslow were stealing my research,” Solomon said. “I took precautions.”
“Shit,” Jake said. “No wonder you didn’t wanna be friends with us. You knew Heath and Winslow were up to something shady and you didn’t know who was collaborating with them.”
“Yes. Though it has also been my policy to keep my colleagues at a distance even in workplaces where nobody was stealing anything or conducting any flagrantly unethical experiments. As gratifying as it is to be understood, we don’t have time to get into that.”
“This catalyst, is it something Eliza could get?”
“Yes, it’s stored in a small antigrav field on the exterior of the asteroid, tucked out of sight of surveillance,” Solomon said. “I can direct her to it, now that you�
�ve shown me how.”
Jake focused on the tablet. A moment later, Eliza had crimped both ends of the pipe, finishing the project. She rolled back down the wall to join them.
“There was no need to fix the pipe, given that we’re going to destroy the entire facility,” Solomon said. “But nicely done.”
“Thanks for helping.”
They admired the shiny new length of copper tubing set into place above them, and Solomon reached for Jake’s hand.
A sound came like someone had slammed their forearm down on a piano, far too many pitches at once, and Solomon whipped his head around, seeking the source, until he realized it wasn’t a sound. It was his other sense, the one that perceived the alien and the breach.
He dragged Jake closer, something prickling at his senses.
The room shuddered. The pipes groaned and, with a shriek, sheared apart. One of the new couplings bent. The copper tube they’d just added quivered and dropped down at an angle.
A trivial problem—or a warning of more to come.
“What the fuck. You think the organism is snacking on our pipes again?” Jake frowned, studying him. “You heard something.”
“I did.” Solomon cast a careful appraisal over the greenhouse. A thin but deadly lacework of fractures seamed the windows. They needed helmets and oxygen tanks, but the air supply wasn’t his only worry. “Does it look smaller in here?”
“Fuck,” Jake said. “The alien is doing what we talked about, isn’t it? It’s turning the asteroid inside out.”
“With us still inside,” Solomon agreed.
Solomon refused to be separated again, so after they sent a message to the others to meet them in the lab, he didn’t drop Jake’s hand the whole way there, except when they stopped to retrieve helmets and oxygen tanks, and even then, he didn’t look away for longer than he had to. When they arrived, he clamped his fingers so tight that Jake yelped.
Or maybe it was the walls that scared him.
Solomon didn’t make a noise when he saw them. That would require breathing.
Yesterday, the organism had been living on what remained of the machine in its more rigid, coral-like form. It had liquefied part of itself in order to move and help him repair the distortions, and as an amorphous blob, it had been perhaps a meter in diameter.
Today all four walls of the lab—even the one beyond the machine—were blotted and splotched with iridescent grey tubes. The organism had not doubled or tripled, but increased in size by ten or twenty.
“It gains energy from repairing space,” Solomon said. What they’d done yesterday had allowed the organism to grow. “Chávez will be excited to learn that.”
“That’s what you’re thinking about?” Jake asked. “I was thinking it seems smaller in here, although maybe it’s just the walls being covered in creepy shit.”
“The organism is not creepy,” Solomon admonished. “It is trying to help. Though it has moved our timeline up rather abruptly.”
“You still need me to build robots? There’s a lot more alien here than there was.”
“There is,” Solomon said, uncertain. He had to raise his voice to be heard. “I worry it’s moving too fast. The tremor we felt was violent, and that could cause more harm. Having instruments would allow me to exert a steadying influence.”
The others arrived then, all wearing helmets and oxygen tanks, the stampede of their boots quiet in comparison to the sound Solomon was awaiting.
“What’s happening? How do we stop it?” Emil asked. He pivoted, taking in the growth on the walls. “Holy shit.”
“The question isn’t how we stop it, but how we control it to ensure that it successfully repairs the breach. Either way, it’s going to destroy the asteroid.”
Solomon waited for an objection, but none came.
“Okay,” Emil said. “We’ll have to make sure we evacuate on time, then. What do you need?”
“You all can help me,” Jake said, and briefly explained their plan to amplify Solomon’s ability by distributing a number of small machines around the breach.
Solomon was grateful he spoke up. The ever-present whine in the lab had grown louder, its dissonance now unpredictable, and he kept waiting for another crash. It was hard to concentrate.
“I could use a few pairs of extra hands,” Jake finished.
“Of course we’ll help,” Miriam said to Jake, and then she turned to Solomon and asked, “But what about the alien?”
“What about it?” Solomon replied.
“Will it be okay?”
Solomon was having trouble following. He stared at her. “Aren’t you the one who wanted to kill it?”
“Yes, when I thought it was trying to kill us,” Miriam said impatiently. “Now I want to know if it’s destroying itself, or, for that matter, if you are.”
“I’m not,” Solomon said, and he hoped it was true.
“And you know I’m as pro-ooze as they come,” Chávez said. “But it is technically an invasive species. It should probably be returned to its own, uh, ecosystem. We gotta make sure it gets home safely.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do for you,” Solomon said. He was shouting again, but the din—like someone had dumped a piano into a blender—was unbearable.
Jake squeezed his gloved hand. “You do your thing. I’ll yell at them for you.”
It was a relief to let the conversation drop from his mind, although Solomon retained enough awareness to note that Jake did not, in fact, do any yelling. Instead he gave a calm, firm explanation that the alien had transported itself here through the Nowhere and could likely transport itself back, meaning its chances of survival were much higher than those of anyone else in the facility. The others seemed to agree, thankfully.
Solomon breathed deeply and tried to pick apart the sounds he was hearing. When he’d worked with the organism yesterday, they’d been in tune. He hadn’t needed the guitar. Thinking of a pitch had sufficed to put himself in harmony with the creature and the space surrounding them. If he could find the right pitch, or the right chord, he could slow—or smooth—the next tremor.
That hellish, all-the-piano-keys-at-once sound again. Solomon winced. The room shifted, rumbling in protest just as the greenhouse had. Jake and Solomon grabbed each other for stability. The floor dragged them closer to the breach.
When it was over, they exchanged silent, wide-eyed looks and filed out of the door as quickly as possible, all headed for Jake’s workshop.
Jake had a high fucking dexterity score, but he’d never had to build a robot during an interdimensional earthquake before. Every forty minutes or so, Sol, who could hear the warning sounds, would calmly say, “Brace.” And then Jake would freeze, his hand hovering above the robot in his lap, and every tool on the wall and jar of hardware on his workbench would rattle.
The whole team had packed into his workshop, which was crowded on a normal day—one where nobody visited and the walls weren’t literally closing in. They were all watching him assemble a prototype under Sol and Dax’s direction. Mostly Dax’s direction, actually, since in the beginning Sol had been busy directing Eliza to retrieve his secret stash of catalyst from the surface of the asteroid.
And after that Dax and Sol had bent their heads to murmur over a multicolored simulation of some squiggly, impossible shape on Dax’s laptop while gesturing at different parts of the screen. Jake guessed they were talking about where to put the machines. The only part of the conversation he’d understood was when Dax had said, after Sol’s last, most emphatic poke at the screen, “No. That’s a mistake. Let’s run it again.”
Sol had said, very gently, “You did it right, Dax. You always do.”
Jake didn’t like the sound of that, and he didn’t like the long silence that followed it, either. But worry didn’t blossom into panic until Sol patted Dax on the shoulder and said, “It would be a shame to lose all the data we’ve collected here. Let’s pack up the labs.”
The two of them picked their way through the c
rowded workshop, spoke in the hallway for a moment, and then Sol came back in and Chávez left to go help Dax.
Jake had a million questions—or maybe just what the fuck—but he also had a job with a looming deadline, so he kept his mouth shut and went back to work.
Even assured that the vials of clear, colorless liquid weren’t dimensional prions and couldn’t hurt him, Jake handled them with dread. It was strange to work on something he didn’t understand. These machines required no treads, no wheels, no magnets for hovering or sticking to the walls. They had hardly any moving parts. No software, either. Sol would manipulate them with his mind.
The prototype in Jake’s lap had little in common with the machine Sol and Dax had designed. There were no sleek curved panels this time. He’d bolted a few metal plates together into a cube with no top, so the inner workings were still exposed. Transparent tubing carrying the liquid catalyst snaked through thin metal strings running taut from one side to the other. It looked like a weird musical instrument.
It was, sort of.
Placed strategically around and inside the breach, the instruments would give Sol better range and control of his ability, in theory. Then he’d be able to keep up with the organism.
Or rather, to slow it down.
With the prototype finished, Jake switched his focus to overseeing the construction of three others, which mostly meant digging through his accumulated junk for parts to reuse and then tossing them to whoever needed them. The room had cleared out a little—after Dax and Chávez had left, Lenny and Miriam had gone to do pre-flight checks on all the pods.
Another quake struck before the last of the machines was finished, and the four of them remaining in the workshop bent toward the floor and covered the backs of their necks. The glass in the window behind him splintered. The power flickered and went out. Tools clanged against the groaning walls, but nothing fell.
Nowhere Else Page 24