Analog SFF, May 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Hold on.” I stared at him until I sorted things out a bit. “Are you saying every particle in our universe is . . . attached somehow to this other dimension?"

  He mimed applauding. “And attached, however tenuously, with every other particle via the second universe! Now you have all the elements of our working theory.” His big eyes were aimed at my face but seemed focused elsewhere. “We constructed a fresh model of a pristine carbon atom based entirely on mathematics rather than observation and compared that model to an actual carbon atom. Assuming the subtle variations were created by vast numbers of Tav cycles, we subtracted the perturbations and came up with a number, the Tav Frequency, which we hoped related to an essential quality of the hyper-universe."

  "I'm still with you so far.” Sort of.

  He started talking faster. “Next, we sent a beam of coherent light through a lens containing a supercooled Bose-Einstein condensate, slowing the light to a slug's pace and providing time for the photonic waves to interact with a magnetic field we set to oscillate at the Tav Frequency. Once through the lens, the light struck our target: a disk of charged cesium. By repeating the experiment with a separate disk while omitting the oscillation, we hoped to observe a distinction between the excitation state of our two targets, presumably because some photonic energy bled off into the hyperdimensions."

  I got about a third of that. “So what happened?"

  "The unexpected, to put it mildly. We set up various ultrasensitive detectors for measuring energy fluctuations, including a photo-multiplier-array infrared sensor and our recently developed GHD—have you heard me mention that device before? I'm rather proud of it."

  Only about a thousand times. “Sure, your gravity sniffer and moggy-in-the-well locator."

  He didn't even begin to smile. “Just so. But when we ran the initial test with our Tav generator, the target simply vanished."

  "Really? You mean it . . . disintegrated?"

  "Not as I understand that word. If it had been reduced to molecules or even atoms, we would have detected them. Instead, it left no traces behind whatsoever. Apparently, we'd dug a wormhole into the other universe."

  "Huh. But I thought you said our matter couldn't hang out there."

  For the first time since he'd started explaining, he looked haunted again and shifted his weight uncomfortably. “Indeed."

  "So the disk just popped back into your lab at some point?"

  "Hardly. We couldn't even guess where it ‘popped’ out, but assumed that the uneven vectors of its countless entanglements determined the location. It might've reappeared virtually anywhere in space and, for all we knew, anywhere in time."

  By now, so much anxiety radiated from him that I decided not to bug the man for any clarification. “That's absolutely fascinating, Abe. So you never tracked down your disk?"

  "Which is why we used the same procedure with a different target: a shielded GPS transceiver. A waterproof one in the event our target landed on Earth, which we deemed unlikely, but in some body of water."

  "Clever. Any luck?"

  "To our astonishment, the GPS unit did indeed reappear on Earth, some fifty kilometers east of Montevideo and most certainly in the brine. We deduced from this that particles with the greatest degree of entanglement tend to, ah, bind to the same general region of space-time."

  "Way cool! I can smell the Nobel Prize from here. Didn't you just invent the world's first teleporter?"

  "Unwittingly,” he muttered. “Still, you've expressed my exact sentiments as of last week.” Tiny droplets of sweat made his forehead glisten. What, I asked myself, could any of this physics stuff have to do with the price of chum?

  "You mean your teleporter stopped porting?"

  "Not at all. In fact, we gradually calibrated the effect by adding and varying secondary pulses through our Tav generator, dispatching new GPS units, and tracking where each reappeared. After two hundred fifty-six trials, we can now transmit a target from our lab to a place of our choosing with an error of less than a centimeter."

  "Wow."

  "During the trials we found, again through serendipity, that we could reverse the process in a sense. I can see you are puzzled and frankly, so are we, although we strongly suspect this result is another artifact of entanglement. In any case, it developed that if the . . . teleported object arrived in a location already occupied by matter of more than gaseous density, a quantity of that matter matching the mass of the target would arrive back in the lab. Something of an even exchange."

  "How about that? So you can even teleport distant objects with a little fussing! As my mum would say, losh! Why aren't you dancing in the street?"

  He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead. “My raptures ended Saturday afternoon. I'd been at home, ensconced on my rear deck, celebrating the sunset and happily planning this week's trials. That's when Sheri Sabine called to inform me that Ben Holtzkocker, a key member of my project, had gone missing. Sheri is Ben's assistant."

  "Missing?"

  "Quite. He didn't show for his scheduled weekend shift and wasn't responding to phone calls, mobile or otherwise, although we've all promised to remain constantly accessible since we are charting new territory. And when Sheri, who has a copy of Ben's house-key, drove to his residence to check up on him, his Honda was present, but he wasn't.

  "I was concerned but not alarmed until Sheri called again an hour later. Checking on the other members of our team, she discovered two more unexplained absences: Ali Kingsley's puppy and far more significantly, at least to me, Meiling Chu, our chief engineer."

  "Do you—"

  He held up a finger. “I noted a disturbing pattern. Only two people had been in close proximity to the generator during most of the experiments, Ben and Meiling. And Ali had been the next most frequent participant."

  "Huh. Any news since Saturday?"

  He sure looked grim. “My associates haven't come to the lab this week and are officially ‘missing persons’ now, according to the police. Even the dog remains lost. Furthermore, I've received troubling reports from several colleagues about unexpected objects appearing near them or in places they frequently haunt. And this morning Ali called to tell me she'd actually seen her favorite vase disappear. Does that give you an inkling of the danger?"

  "Not really.” Actually, I was totally creeped out. “If you have your experiments to thank for all these magic tricks, what do you think is going on?"

  "I see two possibilities.” He paused and we both stepped aside to let some pedestrians pass. He didn't speak again until they were well past snooping range. “The more likely is that we've engendered a sort of, ah, serial displacement effect through the hyperdimensions by exposing not only our targets but our own bodies to the Tav Frequency. Something akin to the audible quantum oscillation that can occur when you force part of a superfluid through a sufficiently small aperture."

  "You've lost me there. But that ‘displacement effect’ business makes me think of trying to get an air bubble out of poorly hung wallpaper. I mean you push the bubble in at one spot and it pops out—"

  "I grasp your analogy and it will serve. The crucial point is that people and perhaps objects subjected to intense Tav Frequency exposure may become loci for connections between ordinarily separated points in our space-time. And at times we can't yet predict, matter seems to, ah, jump the gap."

  I finally got it, but didn't like it much. “So, suddenly that patch of sidewalk right next to you might turn into a doorway to Tasmania?"

  "Or Singapore, or the moon, or a thousand kilometers below Seattle. And the ‘patch’ might appear directly under your feet."

  I instinctively took a step back and glanced downward. “That's not so good. Okay, you said this was the more likely explanation for the magic show. What's the other one?"

  His expression turned really strange. “That the hyper-universe is inhabited and something in it, disturbed by our experiments, is . . . fishing."

  When I didn't say anything he went on i
n a thoughtful voice. “Quite tricky, I imagine, attempting to interact with an alien set of dimensions. Imagine, say, sewing a button on while peering at your work in a mirror, through a kaleidoscope, while hanging upside down. Doubtless the challenge is immensely greater.” He smiled sourly. “Are you ready to toddle off now?"

  "Yeah. Guess I'm due back at the store.” I didn't pressure him to join me.

  [[ I know what you're thinking. If I were serious about doing this story right, I'd have to make Abe's explanation way shorter. Just between us, I didn't mean to make it so talky. But when I was composing this part, the strongest feeling came over me that I was leaving out something important. So I let it ramble on, hoping that the missing bit would surface. It didn't and still hasn't. Anyhow, now's the time for you to guess what parts of all that, if any, weren't purest gospel.

  Ha, knew I'd fool you again! The teleportation thingy is a hundred percent true, and I repeated the explanation he gave me for how it works verbatim, or darn near. I even told the truth about Abe ditching his fresh java and running out of the store.

  But I lied about his reason. That was after my big whopper: the second fish delivery scared no one because it never happened. Abe took off so fast because he'd been zapped with a new idea for a Tav Frequency experiment and wanted to hurry home, snag his car, and burn rubber all the way to his lab. Page let me go after him because we were both curious about why he'd abandoned a pricey brew. The conversation that followed was nearly how I reported it except he wasn't nervous, just impatient. Oh, and he did bring up the Case of the Disappearing Scientists, who really had gone AWOL, but only as an excuse for why he couldn't call Ben Holtzkocker and have him try the new experiment. Abe figured that Meiling and Ben had a good reason for being elsewhere, and it turned out that they'd eloped, which is certainly a reason, good or not. No missing puppy and I also invented the stuff about doorways to anywhere popping open and, duh, the bit about trans-cosmic fisher-beings.

  Better luck next time. Try to listen harder. ]]

  * * * *

  Okay, I was shaken, not stirred. That part about his missing fellow nerds sure frightened me, but I wasn't swallowing his theory about their absence whole. I'm no physicist, but it seemed to me Abe was jumping to conclusions and jumping with stilts on. Still, I kept fighting the temptation to turn around and look behind me. Wasn't that hard to fight because if he was gone or something strange was suddenly keeping him company, I didn't care to know.

  At the store, Page and Paul were knee-deep in customers, and I had to do some quick bailing before I could talk to Page. When the afternoon lull finally lowered the tide, I gave my boss something closer to a skimmy than the skinny. Partly I was honoring Abe's request for secrecy, but also I didn't want to think too much about what he'd told me. So naturally that's all I thought about.

  The ranks of the Regulars were thinned, but those who remained showed rare staying power. Tara lounged in her usual spot like a big sleek cat, listening to Serge and Dusty bouncing notions concerning the mystery fish off each other's foreheads. Serge had torn himself away from his eyestrain-inducing toy and gotten interested in current events. Dusty was letting her brains show by quoting entire pages from old books written by some dude named Charles Fort. She proposed that a “rain of frogs” sort of thing accounted for our gilled visitors, so I guess she didn't embrace J's bug-leprechaun explanation.

  For an ex-librarian, Serge had some wild ideas. I doubt he took any of them seriously, but he “proved” each one with a series of virtual bullet points, ticking off each point with a little flick of his forefinger. You can prove or disprove anything that way, from Paul McCartney being dead, to the moon landings being faked, or even to leprechauns being bugs, and too often you'd need some actual education or information to see the bogusness.

  Serge's most fanciful offering: Page was secretly a demigoddess, daughter of Poseidon, with appropriate tribute due from her subjects. The fish in question had swum from distant waters and then crawled or flopped on their stubby little fins to her front door, driven beyond fishy limitations by sheer religious fervor.

  Dusty summoned up one of her rare smiles for this yarn. I commented that the sole, with both eyes on one side of its body and both pointed upwards while lying flat, would probably get lost on an overland route, but that didn't tarnish the twinkle in his eyes one bit. And Serge's bullet points were ingenious:

  * Why does Page's appearance change so often?

  I wasn't sure anyone but me had noticed that.

  * Why does she wear blue or green exclusively?

  * Why was the Page Turner the only successful minor league bookstore within ten miles?

  * Why had Page been so disturbed when the fish appeared? Because they were blowing her cover?

  That one surprised me. I hadn't thought he'd been paying attention to anything not made by Apple.

  * Why was our Mythology section larger than the one at B&N or New Borders?

  * Why was Page so focused on selling high-quality—dramatic pause—liquids?

  By which, I supposed, he meant our coffee.

  There were more where those came from, and they did produce the illusion of a heavy weight of evidence. But except for one question, the whole thing was just a silly, fun mental exercise. What was bothering Page about those fish?

  So I asked her when I finally got a chance, which took more courage than you might think. She's a nice person and a great boss, but very private. In the four years I'd worked for her she hadn't said word one about her personal life and had sidestepped even the most innocent questions.

  So I was gobsmacked when she glanced around, saw that the fires of customer needs were well banked, and told Paul that we were taking a minute and he should grab the reins until we returned. Then she took my hand, another first, and practically dragged me into the storage room we call the “pantry."

  "Amy, I don't want you sharing this with another soul, but I think you'd better know in case things get ugly. Should've told you already, but I didn't want you worrying."

  She plunked herself down on a stool and I leaned more than sat on an empty shelf. “What are you talking about?"

  "Listen, dear. Long ago, starting in 1989, I worked in an abortion clinic as a counselor. I'm not ashamed of it; I think I saved a lot of lives including the lives of many fetuses whose mothers thought their only choice was a MVA."

  "You know I'm a pro-choice sort of girl. Or maybe you don't."

  "I wouldn't judge you either way; it's not a simple issue although polarized minds can filter out the complexities. But a group—hell, a coven—of heavy-duty Right-to-Lifers didn't feel that way and went after me full time."

  "Real fanatics, huh?"

  "I'd say these were nut jobs rejected by the fanatics as too extreme. They snapped pictures of me at home and leaving work and published them on the Internet, doctored to make me look hideous, and threw in a lot of personal info about me. They practically came out and ordered people to do me harm."

  "That must've been awful. I'm so sorry."

  "You haven't heard everything. After a few months of this, they took to smearing my car with feces and leaving bakery buns covered with fake blood on my front porch daily. Phoned me dozens of times a night. And when I stopped answering, they left obscene harangues on the machine. I got stubborn, as you know I can, and kept my job. Then they started following me everywhere—grocery store, gas station, you name it. And yes, I reported all this to the police and they couldn't do a thing. This group had a whole network going, and I couldn't give the cops a single name for serving a restraining order."

  "What'd you do?"

  "I'd jump through hoops to lose them, Amy, and whenever I succeeded, I tried to stay incognito as long as possible. Got in the crazy habit of constantly changing my appearance whenever I was in public. I'd reverse the reversible clothing I started wearing, altered my makeup if nobody happened to be watching me. Sunglasses and hats. And I'd make faces, but not in an obvious way. Jut my jaw out, suck my
cheeks in, raise my eyebrows slightly, anything I could think of. I still do most of that out of habit."

  I felt my own jaw drop. Never occurred to me she could be changing her appearance deliberately.

  "Ever noticed,” she said, “that everything in life has a . . . grain? Sometimes it's worth bucking it, but usually it makes more sense to work with it. And here's a case where defying the assholes just made them more convinced they were right. Finally, I just couldn't hack it. God, how I hated to let them win, but in ‘94 when some nut job named Salvi started shooting abortion workers back East, that was that. Took the money I'd inherited from the grandparents and all my savings, moved here, and opened the store."

  I jumped up, steaming. “Hold on! You saying that after more than two decades, they're starting to hassle you here?"

  "Got a call last month. Said hi and someone started swearing at me over the phone, saying they hadn't forgotten my sins and I'd burn in Hell forever."

  "Losh! But Page, that doesn't mean these fruitcakes are the ones donating sea life. Both the Professor and Abe claim the jokes were on them. Admittedly for some pretty out-there reasons."

  "No, I'm the target. I hoped that when I quit they'd leave me be, but I suppose people this bent can carry a grudge forever."

  "But why fish?"

  "Remember the buns? Loaves and fishes. Jesus doesn't love me, they're saying."

  "And I say screw ‘em.” For me, that was an extreme statement. I prefer going extra light on the vulgarities. Better vibes. I looked down at my hands and realized they'd become fists.

  * * * *

  That night I couldn't sleep. Page's revelation had knocked me over and made my half-Highland blood boil. Finally, in the wee hours, I had to admit there'd be no rest for Amy and decided to vent steam by walking the mile or so to the store. Opening time was still a goodly way off, but I thought if I showed up real early, hid myself on the other side of the street, and did an amateur stakeout, I might catch the culprits wet handed. I had no idea what I'd do after that, but that didn't stop me from making a thermos of hot cocoa, dressing warmly in dark clothes, and stepping out into foggy darkness.