by Rix, Dan
Now that she’d confessed her one secret, she was telling us everything.
“Freaked us the hell out at first,” she said, “but it never hurt us. It was there for years, just hanging out, just watching us. Never hurt a fly. We nicknamed it Glipper . . . made it less scary, I guess. We were all a little cocky. See, the Large Hadron Collider wasn’t operational yet, so we basically had the run of particle physics. We were going after the Higgs, we were going after quark-gluon plasma, hell, we were going after dark matter, we thought we could take on every exotic form of matter . . . I remember the feeling, all of us thinking we were unstoppable.” She nodded to herself, her expression sobering. “Yeah, we thought we were unstoppable.”
“Did you ever figure out what it was?” I asked, trying to get back on the topic of the Glipper.
“We did, actually.” She chuckled darkly. “To a scientist, a mystery like that was like crack cocaine. We started observing and gathering data—when the creature appeared, what part of the complex, how long it stayed, et cetera, et cetera. And we noticed a pattern. The highest-energy experiments were always scheduled for Mondays and Thursdays—those were the nights we really ramped up the beam energy, squeezed out the full twenty teraelectronvolts—and the Glipper always showed up right after those runs.”
“Why?” said Malcolm. “Why then?”
“We were ripping apart the fabric of the universe,” she said. “We were punching holes in it left and right, and that thing, that shadow—it was there to repair the damage.”
“Rep-repair the damage?” I said, confused.
“Like white blood cells to a cut,” she said. “We were running the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator; no one knew what collisions at those energies would do, whether we would create black holes or cause the universe to collapse into a vacuum or what.”
“Hey, we read about that,” said Jace.
“Well, now we know,” said Mabel. “We activated the universe’s immune system response. You damage the universe, it repairs itself. Simple as that.”
I stared at her, still not quite following.
An immune system response?
Really? That was all the Glipper was?
“So why is it coming back now?” I said. “And why is it after us? We didn’t do anything.”
“Maybe the universe has an autoimmune disease,” Jace said, “and it’s attacking itself.”
Malcolm shook his head. “Dude, just, don’t even talk.”
Mabel shrugged. “Had no reason to attack my boy, and it did.”
Somehow, the explanation felt incomplete. And disappointing.
I’d been waiting for some grand aha moment, instead I felt my emotions fizzling out in my chest.
No, there had to be more to the story.
“So what happened? How did he die?” Seeing her discomfort, I added, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for making you relive this.”
“It’s okay.” Mabel pressed her lips together, taking a moment to breathe. Then she continued. “I brought him into work every once in a while. It was just one of our things. He loved the computers and the magnets.”
“That’s Vincent,” Malcolm said, nodding with a sad smile.
“He said he was following Glippie—Glippie, that’s what he called it—I lost sight of him for only a moment, I didn’t think he was in danger, the shadow had never attacked anyone, it was a friend—and that’s when I heard him scream.”
I shuddered.
“He died in the hospital forty-one days later.” She hung her head in her hands and moaned, “I never should’ve brought my boy in there. I never should’ve brought him.”
Malcolm rubbed his jaw. “So he was following the Glipper,” he said, thinking out loud. “He was following the Glipper, and the Glipper attacked him . . . or defended itself . . . but why would it have to defend itself? We’re assuming it was heading off to fix a rip in the fabric of space-time you guys made . . .” slowly, his eyes pinched together, “. . . unless, for some reason, it didn’t want him to go near a rip . . .”
“When it attacked Vincent, was that during one of the really high-energy runs?” I asked, trying to get a better picture of what happened.
She nodded. “It was during the Monday run, right after we reached peak beam energy—right on schedule, if I recall.”
“Which was when?” said Malcolm, staring at the ground and rubbing the back of his neck. “What time?”
“The experiments were always scheduled for ten p.m.,” she said, “but there’s a whole warm-up procedure. The magnets had to be cooled to their operating temperature, the beams had to be ramped up, protons were fired around the tunnel in stages, three miles at a time, the cryogenics had to be shaken out to avoid quenches, and then there were the computer’s preflight checks, it was a whole procedure.”
Malcolm suddenly looked up. “How long did that take? That whole warm-up procedure?”
“Oh, it was the better part of an hour.”
“No, how long exactly?” he said.
She gave him a funny look. “When everything went smoothly, the length of time until the first collisions was forty-seven minutes.”
He stared at her, and repeated slowly, “Forty-seven minutes.”
She put her hands on his hips and gave him a challenging look. “Son, are you listening to me or not?”
I realized then what Malcolm was getting at, and felt the blood drain from my face.
Oh my God.
“So what you’re telling me,” he said, looking her straight in the eye, “is your highest-energy collisions happened every Monday and Thursday at 10:47 p.m.?”
Chapter 22
“Vincent was attacked on a Thursday at 10:47 p.m.,” Malcolm said once we piled into his car, me still reeling from the insight, completely dumbstruck as to what I should make of it. “Ten years later, he vanishes on a Thursday at 10:47 p.m., then Zoe’s taken on a Monday, again at 10:47 p.m.—which would have coincided with times they fired up the collider . . . if it was still operational.”
“It can’t be a coincidence,” I said, shaking my head. “All that stuff that happened—the bright flash, that cold feeling, the static electricity—it must have had something to do with the particle collisions.”
“But how?” Malcolm said. “The collider’s closed. It’s been closed for ten years. None of the effects we saw could have been caused by it.”
“I know, but they were poking holes in the fabric of space-time, right?” I could barely keep up with my racing brain. “The fabric of space-time . . . right? . . . so, maybe the collisions somehow created ripples that we’re feeling now.”
“Again with the time travel,” Jace muttered.
But now that it had taken root, I couldn’t shake the idea from my head.
Time travel.
On the night of the crash, had something reached back ten years in time to alter the past? To change it so Vincent died instead of living? Mabel herself had said he’d survived for forty-one days in a hospital, so he’d almost made it. Evidently, the final outcome had been decided by a coin toss of fate.
And last Thursday, something had happened to reverse that coin toss.
We remembered one version, but everybody else remembered another version, which was probably why everything about the world felt slightly off.
But again it came back to the same problem. All evidence pointed to the collider as the culprit, yet how could it have had anything to do with the flash last Thursday if it had been shut down in 2006?
Even I couldn’t quite buy my “ripples in time” theory.
So why, in my gut, was I so sure the collider had caused our car crash? What was I missing?
I scrunched my eyes together, feeling like something obvious was just out of reach.
Why was this so hard to think about?
“It’s not impossible,” Malcolm said, rubbing his jaw. “The whole point of smashing protons together is to create exotic particles, and antimatter particles have been known to
travel back in time . . . and if those flashes we saw were matter-antimatter annihilation events . . .”
“Guys, guys, you’re way overthinking this,” said Jace. “I have a much simpler explanation.”
“What?” Malcolm and I said, looking at him.
“The Glipper’s like a serial killer, and 10:47 p.m. is just when he likes to strike, it’s like his calling card.”
“You heard Vincent’s mom,” said Malcolm. “It’s only purpose is to repair damage to the universe.”
“Then why is it after us, Malcolm? Why did it erase Vincent? Why did it take Zoe?”
Malcolm chewed the corner of his lip. “I don’t know, maybe it’s like Remi said. Maybe we’re dead, and we’re not supposed to be here.”
The lights.
Suddenly, it hit me like a punch to the stomach.
The night we crashed, the collider’s lights were on.
“Guys, I got it, I got it!” My heart slammed against my sternum at the realization, pushing a wave of adrenaline through me. “The only thing that’s different is Vincent died, right? Well, if that’s really the only thing that’s different, and they shut down the collider because Vincent died, then in a timeline where he didn’t die, in the timeline we remember, they never would have shut it down—it would still be running today! And there’s no reason to think they wouldn’t still be doing collisions on Mondays and Thursdays, according to their same schedule.”
I took a deep breath, my skin prickly with excitement, and continued. “The night we crashed, we saw lights on the complex. I bet they were just starting one of their high-energy runs. Guys, it was the collider. Whatever weird particle collisions they were doing that night switched us onto a different timeline—you know, like one of those railroad switch thingies—and now we’re on a track that branched off ten years ago, one where Vincent died and the collider got shut down.”
They were both silent a moment, while my heart continued to thump in my temples. Was I right?
Would they both laugh at me?
“If that’s true,” Malcolm said quietly, “then we’re shit out of luck.”
“Wh-why?” I stammered. “If we know how it works, we can just reverse it.”
“If the collider switched the timelines, and now it’s closed, then there’s no way to switch back. We’re stuck on this timeline.”
His statement took a moment to sink in, and when it did, a terrible feeling of helplessness set in.
Because we would need the same supercollider to switch us back.
But here, it was a decade-old derelict gathering dust and tumbleweeds.
We’d been transported into an alternate reality we couldn’t escape from.
“Maybe . . . maybe we can fire it up again?” I offered hopefully.
“Do you know how to run a supercollider? Does it still work? Did you see that place?”
“Mabel can help us.”
“We would need Congress’s approval,” he said darkly. “Logistically, it would be a nightmare. With all that aging equipment, it would take years. No, there’s no way.”
My last bit of hope fizzled out.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Jace said finally. “Why would it only switch us to an alternate timeline? Why not everyone else, too?”
He had a good point.
The collider was huge—fifty-four miles in circumference—so it didn’t make sense that only we had been affected.
“Actually,” said Malcolm, “it sounds like we were the only ones who weren’t switched, since we remember the other version.”
“I’m telling you,” said Jace, “we were in the UFOs bubble of protection. Goes right back to the same thing.”
“Maybe there’s something special about those spots,” I suggested. “Where we crashed, and where Zoe vanished. I mean, should we go back and check them out?”
“They got it all barricaded off, remember?” Malcolm said.
I sat forward. “But that was the first site. We haven’t gone back to the second site.”
“The second site?” Jace said.
“Where Zoe vanished . . . maybe that one’s still open.”
“She’s right,” said Malcolm, reaching for his keys. “Second site should be open. Let’s do it.”
He started the car and pulled out of the parking lot for Joanne’s Diner, and I sat back, feeling both proud of myself and nervous about returning to that terrifying section of woods, but my emotions were short-lived.
“Are you serious?” Malcolm muttered, slowing down a few minutes later for a second military roadblock, this one cordoning off the road where Zoe had vanished into the woods.
Well, darn.
Following a soldier’s instructions, Malcolm made a U-turn and we headed back the way we’d come. But just around the bend, he pulled onto the shoulder out of sight of the roadblock.
“Why are you stopping?” I asked nervously, glancing behind us.
He vaulted out and retrieved his binoculars. “Because I want to see what the hell they’re doing down there.”
We were parked on a ridge overlooking a small valley. Zoe had vanished somewhere near the bottom, in a clearing by a riverbed.
Sure enough, peering toward the distant hum of diesel generators, I caught flashes of trucks and personnel moving in the gaps in the foliage.
Malcolm raised the binoculars to his eyes, shook his head, and hung them from his neck while he scanned the woods, looking for a better vantage point.
“Over there.”
He pointed to an oak tree growing out at an angle over the ravine, its knobby trunk perfect for climbing.
“Jace, guard the car,” Malcolm said. “Anyone comes, whistle.”
Malcolm bushwhacked his way over to the oak, hopped up onto the trunk, and shimmied onto an upper limb, and I followed suit, straddling a parallel branch next to him.
“Can you see them?” I asked, while he panned his binoculars over the valley.
He adjusted the focus, his brows tight behind the eyepieces. “I see the clearing. They’ve got it coned off.”
“What are they doing?”
“They’ve got a rover,” he said.
“A what?”
“A remote-controlled vehicle. Look.” He handed me the binoculars.
I put them to my eyes, at first seeing only the blurry shapes of the closer treetops. Malcolm nudged my hands, and the valley floor slid into view, in perfect focus. Steadying my hands, I found the clearing, bustling with activity.
Soldiers and scientists in neon vests crowded around the perimeter, working off the tailgates of pickup trucks and out of equipment boxes.
In the center, they’d marked off the exact location where Zoe had disappeared with cones and streamers.
As I watched, a suitcase-sized vehicle inched across the clearing toward the area marked off with cones. Squinting my eyes, I made out a raised periscope and all-terrain wheels, reminding me of one of NASA’s Mars rovers.
“Why do they have a rover? You think the site’s radioactive?”
“Keep watching. Those have a zoom knob.” Malcolm showed me a dial in the center of the binoculars that increased the magnification.
Then, bracing my elbow against the tree limb to reduce the jitters, I got a perfect view.
The rover crawled across the clearing, stopped, swiveled sideways, then continued to advance.
“What do you see?” said Malcolm.
“Hang on . . . they’re driving it between two red flags.”
All the scientists had looked up from their instruments to watch, too.
The rover reached the flags and began to shrink.
“What the hell . . . ?” My hands twitched, jiggling the view. I scrambled to find it again, frantic not to miss anything.
The rover continued to get shorter, the raised periscope vanished from view.
My eyebrows pinched together. An optical illusion?
What the hell was I seeing?
At last, I understood, and my heart
gave a startled jolt.
The rover wasn’t shrinking, it was traveling through a hole in space in the middle of the clearing.
“Malcolm,” I hissed, “there’s an invisible doorway in the center of the clearing . . . they’re driving it through an invisible doorway!”
Back on the ground, Malcolm turned to me with a wild excitement in his eyes.
“I know what happened,” he said, “the night we crashed, I know exactly what happened. This explains everything.”
“What? Why? How?” I said, just as lost as before.
I mean, I got the gist of it. There was an invisible doorway in the clearing, which Zoe must have run through when she vanished—that’s why I’d lost sight of her—but a doorway to where?
Another planet? Another dimension?
The land of the dead?
“Black holes . . . the collider makes black holes, right?” He slapped his forehead. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before . . . this is incredible!”
“What? What’s incredible?”
“I’ll explain. A black hole is really a hole in the fabric of the universe. Like this—” He swiped out his wallet and pulled out a one dollar bill. With a twig, he punched a hole through Washington’s face.
“Are you . . . sure you want to . . . ?”
“Shh.” He held up the bill so I could see the puncture. “Here’s a black hole. You’re moving through space and, bam, you fall through.” He demonstrated by pushing the twig along the surface of the bill. It dropped through the hole, into his palm. “Where do you end up? Nowhere. You’re in some kind of emptiness outside the boundaries of space-time.”
“Oh-kay . . .” I said uncertainly, still not sure where he was going with this.
“But what if there’s another universe . . . with another black hole . . . ?” He pulled out a five and punctured Lincoln’s cheekbone. “And what if the two holes somehow connect?” He laid the five against the one so the holes overlapped. “Then what happens when you fall through?”
Seeing my confusion, he began moving the twig along the one dollar bill, pushed it through both holes, and then continued to slide it along the underside of the five dollar bill, giving me a pointed look.
I looked between him and the bills. “What is that? What is that supposed to represent?”