Translucent

by Dan Rix

  “Okay,” Megan said tentatively.

  “Basically, what this thing does,” she tapped the two-by-four, causing the blob on the projector to jiggle, “is measure interference. A half-silvered mirror splits a beam of laser light and sends half of it along a different path, which then gets reflected back to rejoin the first half before the light gets projected on the screen. Right now it’s calibrated so the beams don’t interfere. In other words, they line up. Hence a bright, smooth spot of light.” She pointed to the screen.

  If she said so.

  “But now imagine we did something to one of the paths but not the other, so that light on that path took a tiny bit longer to complete the path. When the beams rejoined, the squiggles would be out of sync.”

  “And they would interfere with each other,” I said, nodding.

  “Exactly. You’d get an interference pattern.”

  “You guys lost me,” said Megan.

  “Just watch,” I said. “She’s going to show us.”

  Sarah felt around the desk and picked up something I couldn’t see, which she handed to Megan. “Tell me what this is.”

  Confused, Megan opened her palm to take it, and her hand flinched a little. She peered closely at what was in her hand. “It’s invisible.”

  “What is it?”

  Lips pressed together, she probed the object in her hand. “It feels like . . . a nail.”

  “Like a fingernail?” I said, lip curled.

  “No, a nail,” said Megan. “Like a hammer and nail.”

  “Oh.”

  Sarah took the invisible nail back from Megan. “I’m going to move the nail in front of one of the split beams. Watch what happens.” Holding the nail like a pencil, she leaned over her apparatus and inched it toward the two-by-four.

  I stared at her hand, and then at the screen.

  And then I saw it.

  The red blob began to pulsate with fuzzy ripples of alternating light and dark. The pattern converged inward, as if being swallowed by something in the center.

  An interference pattern.

  As the ribbons of light shrank inward, they seemed to peel away from something.

  A shape.

  At last it came into stark contrast.

  There, magnified on the screen, its shadow clearly visible in silhouette, was the triangular tip of the nail. Outside the nail, the red glow remained smooth and unblemished. Inside the nail, the light went crazy and gathered in blurry, wriggling strips like it didn’t know what it was supposed to do.

  I looked back at her hand. No nail in sight. Her fingers hovered a few inches above the faint line of the laser beam, seemingly not even touching it. The schizophrenic pattern on the screen was the only evidence that a nail was dipping into the beam and interfering with it.

  I found myself leaning closer, mesmerized. The way the light swirled . . . it almost looked alive.

  My breath slowed.

  “That’s trippy,” said Megan.

  “That’s what you’d expect,” said Sarah, “given that the light passing through the nail gets slightly out of sync before it rejoins the other half of the beam. They don’t line up anymore, so you get interference. That’s not the weird part.”

  She withdrew the nail, and the blob on the screen returned to normal.

  I blinked, coming out of my trance. Without the wavelike patterns, I felt a strange emptiness. “There’s something weirder?”

  “Much weirder.” Sarah grabbed a leather-bound journal off her chair and scribbled a note to herself, momentarily distracted.

  “Should we be doing this?” said Megan.

  “So I did a little experiment,” said Sarah, closing the journal. “I ran an analysis of the interference to figure out exactly how much longer it took light to travel through the superfluid, to see if I was right about it bending light around objects.”

  “Were you?” I said.

  “Well, that’s what was weird,” she said. “You’d expect if light had to travel around an object, it would take longer, right?”

  “Right,” Megan and I said together.

  “It didn’t. It didn’t take longer. It’s not going around it.”

  “So . . . it’s going through it?” I offered.

  “It’s not going through it, either. If light went straight through it, both beams would take the same amount of time, and you wouldn’t get the interference pattern I just showed you. We’re getting that because it takes less time.”

  “Less time?” I repeated, not getting it.

  “The reason we got interference wasn’t because light went slower through the nail, it was because light went faster through the nail. It takes less time. Zero, to be exact. Light takes zero time to pass through an object coated with this stuff, which means it’s not passing through the object at all. It vanishes on one side and instantly reappears on the other, no matter how large the object is. It jumps.”

  I stared at her. “What do you mean, it jumps?” I said.

  “It jumps from one side of the fluid to the other, without passing through the space in between. Like it’s not even there. Which begs the question, where is that space going?”

  “It jumps,” I repeated flatly.

  “Is that . . . bad?” said Megan, glancing between us. As if I understood this any better than she did.

  “Guys, I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Sarah. “Whatever it is, it’s brand new physics. I mean, this could be a Nobel prize.”

  “Do you think we should have showed her?” Megan said when she pulled up to my house later that night to drop me off. She killed the engine. She’d been fidgety the whole ride home.

  I nodded, staying in the car. “We should have called Major Connor.”

  “Or kept it for ourselves.” Megan chewed her lip and stared absently at her fingers, then rubbed them together.

  “Megan, you heard her. This stuff is freaky.”

  “I don’t trust her.”

  I shrugged. “She’s your friend.”

  “She’s my sister’s friend.”

  “I like her,” I said.

  “You like everybody, Leona.”

  I shot her a look. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Never mind.” She sighed and started her car again. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  My cue to get out. “Yeah, because you’re not being weird or anything.” I grabbed my backpack and climbed out, slamming the door behind me.

  Her Ford glided up the street.

  Inside, I knocked quietly on my parents’ bedroom, but they didn’t stir. I’d texted them earlier that I’d be out late with Megan, and they’d already gone to bed.

  I collapsed on my mattress, head still reeling from the past few hours. Anxious thoughts rattled around in my brain.

  The military had been trying to contain it.

  They had filled the crater with concrete, stripped the paint off my walls, ripped up the carpet.

  Even that hadn’t been enough.

  It had stayed in my finger like a parasite.

  And now I had let it out.

  They had been there at ground zero with their helicopters and hazmat suits and all their equipment. They had it contained.

  Defending Earth in the Worst-Case Scenario.

  And I had let it out.

  I was beginning to worry I’d made a huge mistake. Was that what Emory’s dad had written about? How to stop an extra-terrestrial disease before it spread?

  I could always ask Emory tomorrow at school.

  After my confession, he’d been mercifully absent the past few days. But sooner or later—and I had the feeling it would be sooner—Emory Lacroix would come asking about his sister.

  He found me before
school by the bike racks. Hot and sweaty from the ride in, I had just locked up my bike and shaken out my matted, damp hair when he startled me.

  On the days Megan didn’t drive me in and I slept in too late to catch the bus—and because my parents refused to drive me now that I technically owned a car—I rode my bike to school like a loser pre-teen.

  “Let’s talk.” He threaded his fingers through the chain link fence right in front of me, and I jolted backward. He stood on the other side.

  I peered around, suddenly short of breath. Trapped inside the bike cage. “Right now?”

  “It wasn’t a question.”

  I finally worked up the courage to meet his gaze through the fence, realizing they might as well be jail bars. “I already told you everything I know.”

  “Did you see who did it?” he said urgently. “Was it someone from this school?”

  I could lie.

  I could lie and make this easier on myself, play it off. No, it wasn’t someone from this school. I didn’t get a good look at the driver. Keep acting like I had a crush on him, and he wouldn’t suspect a thing. Maybe he’d even think I’d made up the whole story to get closer to him.

  It would be a cinch.

  But my body refused to lie, so I changed the subject. “Your dad works for that defense contractor, right? Rincon Systems?”

  His eyes narrowed.

  This I could lie about. “I was looking you up on the internet last night, you know, because I have a crush on you . . . and he came up.”

  “Where’s her body?” he growled.

  “Does he know anything about dark matter?”

  “Tons.”

  “What’s that paper he wrote?” I said. “The one about defending Earth in the worst-case scenario? What’s it about?”

  “It’s his theory,” he said.

  I blinked. “You’re not evading my questions?”

  “Why would I?” he said pointedly. “I don’t have anything to hide.”

  His implicit accusation hung in the air. He raised a pack of smokes to his mouth and swiped one out with his lips, but didn’t light it, just raised an eyebrow. His penetrating gaze made me want to squirm.

  “What’s . . . what’s his theory?” I asked, fighting the urge to swallow.

  He took the unlit cig out of his mouth and crushed it between his thumb and forefinger. “You want to talk about my dad? Let’s talk about my dad. I can talk about my dad all day. He has this theory that if we ever did encounter a hostile alien life form, we wouldn’t even know it. Their technology would be so far ahead of ours, and they’d be so different from us, that the war would be over before we even knew what hit us. I agree with him. You want to go one and one? Let’s do it. You tell me something about my sister, then I tell you something about my dad.”

  “No, no, no.” I shook my head, horrified at the thought. “I’m not going to bargain with you for that. You deserve to know what happened to her, and . . . and I’m going to tell you. But I can’t today.”

  “Tell me one thing,” he said.

  “I can’t.”

  He stared at me for a long time. “It’s someone you know, isn’t it?”

  At his words, I froze. Getting hotter. “I . . . I can’t . . .” my voice croaked.

  He nodded as if he now understood everything. “You just did.”

  “I have to go to class,” I blurted, rushing the gate.

  He intercepted me, blocking my exit. “Why’d you want to know about my dad?”

  “Nothing. I don’t care. Just let me go.”

  “Leona . . .”

  “I saw a meteorite land in the woods,” I blurted. “And this stuff got on me, some kind of invisible stuff, and I have no freaking clue what it was.”

  His smirk faltered. “Wait . . . what?”

  “They came to my house—the government, the Air Force, whoever it is your dad works for—and they stripped my bedroom. They took everything I own.”

  He edged away from me.

  “Yeah, that’s right, Emory, I’m infected.” I spit out the word, making him flinch.

  Now he looked concerned. “You want my dad’s number or something? I can give you his number?” He pulled out his cell phone.

  So he did know something.

  “Do you know why they’re trying so hard to contain it?” I asked, stepping up to him.

  He stared at me, confused. “Contain it?”

  “You know, why they’re trying to destroy dark matter?”

  He gave me a strange look, like I’d misinterpreted something obvious and it bothered him. “What makes you think they’re trying to destroy it?” he said.

  “Why else would they take everything I own that had dark matter on it . . . ?” I trailed off.

  Oh.

  They were collecting it.

  “Sweetie, we’re leaving,” said my mom, poking her head in my room. “You sure you going to be okay tonight?”

  “Yeah, I’ll be fine,” I said distractedly, only then realizing I’d been rereading the same two lines from The Great Gatsby for the last five minutes.

  They weren’t trying to destroy it. They were collecting it.

  I had to be more careful around Emory.

  “You should call Megan,” my mom suggested. “See if she wants to come over.”

  “I did, mom. She’s busy. I’ll be fine on my own for two hours.”

  “You can still come with us if you want. We can buy a standby ticket—”

  “Mom, I’m fine,” I shouted, exasperated.

  She hovered in the doorway in my periphery, peering around my stark bedroom before her eyes settled on me again, once again messing up my focus as I reread the lines for the bazillionth time.

  “We should probably get you some new furniture this weekend.”

  “Actually, I kind of like it like this,” I said. To better complement my empty soul.

  “We might be out late again, so . . . if we’re not back before you go to bed, then goodnight, Leona.”

  “Goodbye, Mom,” I said through gritted teeth.

  Finally, they left, leaving me and my troubled thoughts in peace. They had another lecture tonight, part of a UCSB Arts & Lectures series. They loved that stuff.

  Still on those same two lines.

  I sighed and threw down the The Great Gatsby. Such a short book too, and I still couldn’t get through it.

  Why were they collecting it?

  My eyes slid to the contact lens case. The dark matter. So far today I’d resisted the temptation to open it, but now that my parents had left, I caved and unscrewed the cap.

  I don’t know why it always gave me a nervous rush.

  It was still invisible.

  What did I expect to see?

  I can show you things that will terrify you, said a little voice in my head.

  Whatever.

  Five minutes later, a mechanical hum in the kitchen snapped me back to the present. The sound set my breathing on edge. Relax. Just the refrigerator kicking on.

  More troubling, I’d been staring down at the dark matter the entire time, as if hypnotized. Feeling sheepish, I shut the cap and wedged the case under my bed, where I wouldn’t be tempted. The refrigerator cut off, leaving a lonely silence about the house, making me wish it kept going. I rose to shut my bedroom door.

  That was when I heard it.

  The faintest click, but not from the kitchen. I paused to listen, and caught another sound, like metal sliding against metal. My pulse drummed in my ears.

  No other sounds.

  I peeked into the hallway, toward the front door. Shut.

  No movement.

  A cool draft brushed my face, and goosebumps slipped down my arms. Instincti
vely, my hand went to the vent . . . and felt only stillness.

  The draft hadn’t come from there. The furnace was off. Huh.

  I crept down the dark hallway into the foyer and peered into the living room, the dining room. Both empty. The front door. I gave the handle a hard tug—it didn’t open—and checked the lock. Dead bolt engaged.

  Nothing here, there’s nothing here.

  Satisfied, I turned back to the hall . . . and saw movement out the corner of my eye.

  My gaze flicked to the hooks by the door, the keys—my bike lock key, the spare house key, the shed key. They swung gently, as if recently disturbed.

  Stop it, Leona.

  I’d tugged the front door, which had shaken the walls. That was it. My hand went up to steady the keys, but my twitchy fingers only upset them further—

  The floorboards gave a slow creak behind me.

  I spun around, skin prickling. No one there. Just the house settling, wood shrinking as the outdoor temperature dropped. Still, my breath came in frantic gasps, echoing a little in the entryway.

  No, not echoing.

  Someone else breathing.

  I held my breath, and the other sound cut off. I let the air out of my lungs slowly, and heard the whisper of exhaled air on my right. My gaze swiveled to the living room. No one there.

  My eyes darted around the empty space, and I shouted. “Is there anyone else in the house?”

  Now my voice did echo. The glass cabinets buzzed on their hinges before going silent. The breathing had stopped.

  Just my imagination.

  It’s not your imagination, Leona.

  Panicking, I slid sideways along the wall, then barged through every room in the house, making as much noise as possible. My palm slammed against light switches, bathing the rooms in harsh yellow light. No burglar.