Chromatophobia

by W D County

  “I enjoy seeing your face, Laura, although I regret the distance between us.” The image of his face expanded and shifted off-center as he squinted into his monitor. “Why do you have wires on your head?”

  “Some of us believe the taint affects our brains. I’m wired to an EEG that may provide evidence if that’s so.” The camera-monitor alignment was less than ideal for reading body language. “Barry, would you mind looking at the camera?”

  He settled back onto the bed, a benign smile on his face. “Second Corinthians, chapter ten, verse fifteen: ‘We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.’”

  Laura repressed a shiver. She wanted to respond, but nothing appropriate came to mind.

  “Did you enjoy dreaming of your husband? Realizing he’s not as dead as you believed?”

  A surge of anxiety triggered an irrepressible shudder. “Stop. I’m here to talk about you.” She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “What dreams have you had, Barry?”

  “Oh, I do fine sharing yours. You did notice me, didn’t you? Occam’s razor? Cut to the chase?”

  How does he know this? How? Is my Pavlok set? Of course it is. In five minutes this hallucination will stop.

  His soothing, reasonable voice went on. “What you’re experiencing is neither a waking dream nor a delusion. It’s a glimpse of a higher reality.”

  She shook her head. How had he taken the initiative? She was better than this. She’d conducted hundreds of sessions with patients over the years and never felt this lost.

  “Tell me, Laura—if you could be reunited with John, both of you alive and healthy, what would you be willing to do to make that happen?”

  John is dead. Nothing can change that. And yet, with God, aren’t all things possible? Her thoughts whirled around the contradictions. She couldn’t break free, couldn’t speak.

  “In my Father’s house are many rooms. I will open one of them.”

  A shimmering, seven-foot-diameter hoop appeared between her and the vault. It sparked and crackled as if electrified, a circle of danger through which might leap a daredevil motorcyclist or a man-eating tiger. Neither of those materialized. John stood on the other side of the hoop, staring at her with wide, shocked eyes.

  “Laura!” he cried, and stepped toward her.

  “John!” She sprang from her chair and dashed toward him.

  They rebounded from an invisible barrier. The barrier lacked a definite boundary although its resistance grew stronger the closer they pushed. The force field also tended to push them sideways in opposite directions, as if they were identical poles of two magnets. They managed to grasp hands, and John pulled her through the hoop to his side. She felt a constant pull toward her own side, but it was manageable. They clung to each other, laughing and sobbing.

  “You’re alive,” John said. “I didn’t think Barry could do it.”

  “You’re alive,” she answered. John, her John, was back from the dead.

  “Did you believe he could do this?” asked John.

  She leaned in for a kiss. “Are you real?”

  “I was about to ask you the same question. I’m real, but things are a lot more complicated than that.” He touched her head. “An EEG? Probably a waste of time.”

  “What do you mean by complicated?”

  “Believing is not the same as wanting to believe. We’re together now because Barry believes in himself and his power. As skeptics, I don’t think either of us could have made this happen on our own.”

  She felt uneasy. “I don’t understand.”

  “Barry exists in many worlds. Soon he’ll exist in all of them. ‘My Father’s house’ and all that. He opened a portal between two parallel universes. In my world, you died a year ago. He told me he could bring you back, and he did.”

  She shook her head. “You died six months ago. You died.”

  His eyes widened. “No kidding? Well, I’m on a team. We’re studying him and...”

  She looked past him. “Wait a minute. This place is different. It’s not my observation room.”

  She turned around. The walls of the observation room seen through glittering circle were painted battleship gray, just as they should be. But the walls here were painted white. Another world? Is that where John went?

  “Amazing,” John said with a trace of awe. “Barry gains power and ability as the color drains from his skin. You won’t believe what he can do!”

  “I don’t under—” A high voltage shock jabbed her wrist and coursed through her arm. She gasped and shook it off. “Sorry, John, I...”

  She stood alone in the observation room. Her observation room, the one with cold gray walls. No John. No circle of sparks.

  Barry’s disembodied voice floated up from the command console. “You should sit down, Laura.” There wasn’t time. Her legs buckled as a flash flood of dizziness swept away coherent thought and left her drowning in a sea of darkness.

  Chapter 24

  Sonja glanced up when the door to the lab opened, then resumed her work on the black box experiment. “Zita, there’s really nothing you can help me with.”

  “Oh, so you have a comprehensive explanation for the taint and all its effects, backed by hard evidence and reproducible experiments?” said the women with blue hair wearing a maroon corset trimmed with black lace and fastened with what appeared to be window latches.

  Sonja frowned. “I’m working on it. The taint pushes the boundaries of known science.”

  “At dinner yesterday you proposed the existence of a new type of radiation, K-rays, emitted by the taint and absorbed by any opaque material, which results in the simultaneous growth of the taint and the graying of the material.”

  “You have a good memory.” Sonja repositioned the internal baffles of the black box to ensure no light would leak into the designated dark areas. “But my work requires knowledge and insight.” Not a scatterbrained bimbo in a Halloween costume.

  “The growth and the graying imply quantum entanglement,” Zita said.

  Sonja sneered. “What do you know about quantum physics?”

  “I read a lot.” The puzzle-solving prodigy peered at Sonja’s half-built contraption. “Have you considered how to test the effects of magnetism?”

  “Magnetism is a minor characteristic, a by-product of molecular arrangement following the growth of the taint, and not in any way causing that growth.”

  “If the gray material and the taint are entangled at a quantum level, then the effect of a magnetic field on one would immediately produce an effect on the other. Experimental verification of that connection would bolster your theory.”

  She’s right. I would have soon enough. She’s a lucky guesser, not much different than Nathan. “Why do you wear such ridiculous clothes?”

  Zita laughed. “I don’t like being constrained to socially accepted memes. Why take the chance of conformity creating ruts in the pathways of my mind?”

  “Plodding thoroughness ensures that important facts aren’t overlooked. The way you jump to conclusions creates a risk of totally misunderstanding a complex phenomenon.” Nevertheless, Zita had a point about magnetism. Exposing Doc’s gray clothes to a strong field might produce some interesting, even enlightening, results.

  Sonja pulled the cell phone from the pocket of her lab coat. “Miles? I need you to find Doc’s gray clothing and bring it to Physics Lab One.” She disconnected without bothering to answer his plaintive “What for?”

  “Good decision,” Zita said, “but no points for politeness.”

  “I’m not here to be polite. If you want to stay, keep quiet and let me do my work.”

  “Yes, your highness.”

  Sonja’s frown deepened, but the uniquely irritating interloper said nothing further. For almost five minutes.

  “Dr. Kapoor, it seems to me that the biggest problem with your theory is the inability to explain why reflected views of Barr
y’s untainted skin appear gray, while direct views of his untainted skin appear as normal flesh tones.”

  Sonja grimaced at the reprise of the worst part of her dream. “I suppose you have an explanation for that as well?”

  “Actually, yes. First off, let’s assume there are a huge number of parallel worlds, maybe even an infinite number of them.” Sonja shook her head but Zita kept talking. “Each world, each universe, exists in a different dimension.”

  “The many worlds theory? It’s the laziest, trendiest explanation out there. Sheer fantasy.”

  “Was the tesseract fantasy? It existed in our world and in at least one additional dimension. It’s quite reasonable to assume that multiple dimensions exist, and that parallel universes exist, but we can’t access them while limited to our three spatial dimensions.”

  Sonja grudgingly conceded the possibility. “Some scientists believe the nature of quantum physics requires that every possible combination of particles in the universe exists simultaneously, each in a dimension of its own. But it’s pure conjecture; nothing has been proven.”

  “Assume for the moment it’s true,” Zita said. “There might be a million copies of Barry or a billion copies, each in a separate dimension nearly identical to our own. But the taint itself is a singularity, a single object across all the universes. And like a gravitational singularity—a black hole—the taint seeks to grow.”

  Sonja hadn’t considered the possibility. Could the blue glow and perhaps the sparkling quality of the taint be caused by energy transfer across multiple dimensions? Maybe so, if... no, no, no! Stop taking this crazy person seriously.

  Zita continued, “We don’t know why the taint chose Barry as a host, but we’ll figure that out later after you and I massage your K-ray theory. Assuming your theory is correct, which is likely since the taint seems to accept every theory as viable, K-rays facilitate both the taint’s growth and the graying process, which in turn leads to the key question of why does the taint require color to grow? Since gray isn’t the absence of color but an equal mix of all colors—”

  “Don’t presume to lecture me about color,” Sonja grumbled. She thought of the dream. Colored kites swirling in the sky. Something clicked in her mind. “K-rays absorb energy from the excess color or colors, equalizing their proportions. This energy is instantly transmitted to the taint via quantum entanglement, and it’s used to power the taint’s growth in all dimensions, assuming that K-rays are emitted in all dimensions.”

  Zita nodded. “Once the colors equalize to gray, the taint stops growing because there is no longer an energy differential to fuel the process. Still doesn’t explain why a reflection of Barry’s untainted skin appears gray.”

  She’s no scientist, thought Sonja. But she is clever. “I think it might. Barry’s environment in other worlds may differ significantly from here. In some worlds his skin may appear normal. Barry’s reflection appears gray to us because he is gray in this world. But direct viewing shows normal skin tone because we see the K-rays from worlds where he isn’t yet gray.”

  The door opened and Miles stepped inside carrying a gray shirt and pair of pants.

  “Put them down there,” Sonja said, pointing to the electromagnet. He did so and retreated from her domain. She and Zita arranged the clothing and powered up the equipment.

  As suspected, Doc’s shirt and pants were attracted to the magnetic field. At twenty-five percent power, the totally gray shirt slid across the table and stopped directly under the magnet. The pants, gray only on the outside, slid a shorter distance. Sonja twisted the control dial, upping the power to fifty percent. The shirt reared up as if on display in a clothing store. The pants slid to directly under the magnet. Sonja grinned so fiercely that it felt as though hooks pulled at the corners of her mouth. She increased the field to seventy-five percent. The shirt began to shimmer like a heat-induced mirage. A blue glow surrounded both ends of the electromagnet, although the glow was more noticeable at the south pole, nearest the lab table. She cranked the dial to full intensity.

  The shirt disappeared in a flash of light. Both women gasped and then stared as the pants flew off the table and pressed against the plastic housing of the magnet. The equipment emitted an ominous “pop” from deep inside its guts as black smoke poured from its seams. The pants seemed glued to the housing of the magnet. The acrid scent of ozone and burnt insulation burned their noses.

  Sonja succumbed to a coughing fit and tried to wave the smoke away. An alarm sounded along with an automated message that there was smoke in the room and the fire brigade was being summoned. Zita grabbed a fire extinguisher and sprayed dry powder on the equipment as a shrill alarm began blaring. The door burst open and Miles shooed both women out of the room before rushing back inside with the extinguisher.

  Sonja caught her breath and blinked in surprise at Zita, whose face and clothing (if one could call the assemblage of leather and metal clothes) were splotched with black soot and white powder. The surprise became a chuckle. “The things we do for science.”

  Zita returned the grin and then glanced at the closed door, behind which could be heard Miles cursing and applying short bursts of the extinguisher. She asked, “The shirt, did you see?”

  Sonja nodded. “It disappeared. Just like the Antarctic explorers.”

  “Without a tesseract present. I wonder where it went.”

  Sonja had an idea on that, but verification needed to wait. She stared longingly at the closed door. Its small window revealed nothing but swirling smoke.

  “There’s not much we can do here until the lab is ventilated,” Zita said. “Would you help me on a project? I’m trying to modify a colorimeter.”

  Sonja nodded absently as thoughts of the Philadelphia Experiment danced in her head.

  Chapter 25

  The EEG readings went wild before falling to minimal levels. Tom rushed to the observation room and found Laura slumped on the floor next to the main console. “Laura,” he said. No response. “Laura!” He touched her neck and found a steady pulse. She had no obvious injuries.

  He jumped as the PA system blared, “SMOKE ALARM IN PHYSICS LAB ONE. SMOKE ALARM IN PHYSICS LAB ONE. FIRE BRIGADE RESPOND.” Tom hoped no one there required medical assistance.

  Laura’s eyes fluttered open. He placed a restraining hand on her shoulder when she started to rise. “Easy, easy. What happened?”

  Fear and hope chased each other around her face. She craned her neck to search the room before slumping back. “Nothing,” she said.

  He wondered if she was answering him or commenting on something she expected to see. She shrugged off his hand and got to her feet, wobbling like a newborn calf. She yanked the leads off her head.

  “Nothing,” she repeated. “Nothing happened. I’ll examine the readout later.” She seemed to study the walls. “Gray. The walls are gray.”

  “What?” he asked, not sure if he’d heard her correctly.

  “I have to clear my head,” she said, looking tired and apologetic. “Go work on your own experiments.”

  “The EEG showed wild fluctuations. I’d like to examine you in the infirmary.”

  She headed for the exit without answering. He started to follow until she turned and said, “I’m going to my room to lie down for a while.” She gave a weak smile. “Really, I’m fine.”

  He watched her go and considered calling Miles to find out what the surveillance video showed. He decided against it. The hotheaded Marine would stir things up, depriving Laura of the rest she needed.

  He headed to the biolab and busied himself prepping more tests for Barry’s blood and tissue samples. The previous day’s samples confirmed his suspicions that the gray material was a powerful antibiotic. Bacterial and fungal cultures refused to grow in the presence of Barry’s gray blood. In fact, such pathogens immediately died upon exposure.

  Petri dishes were one thing, live hosts still another. He wondered if the grayed rat would exhibit heightened immunity. To find out, he made a small i
ncision on the rat’s gray tail and swabbed the wound with a virulent strain of Staphylococcus. The incision healed quickly, but results of the infection would need to wait a few hours. He repeated the experiment with a healthy ungrayed rat, then turned off the robotic arms while he contemplated a new idea regarding the taint.

  Zita claimed the changing patterns of the taint represented an attempt to communicate, a claim he dismissed because the patterns were far too complex and granular to be a language. Yet she was correct in as far as those complex patterns did exist. If not language, what could they be? Nature provided the answer with a stunning example of highly complex patterns: DNA, the blueprint of life.

  What if the color and arrangement of the tiny segments on the taint’s surface constituted its biological blueprint? The frequent minor changes in the pattern could be analogous to the formation of proteins and other chemical activities necessary for life. Analyzing videos of the taint should provide evidence supporting or refuting that possibility. Unfortunately, magnifying images of the taint to microscopic levels would create an exponential increase in both the number and the complexity of patterns.

  Eager to pursue this line of investigation but stymied by the lack of sufficient computational power, he called Gordon, requested access to a supercomputer, and provided the rationale. During the conversation, a buzzer rang, signaling that someone wanted access to the biolab. Doc let them wait. Surprisingly, Gordon promised to have a direct connection to an NSA supercomputer set up within a few hours.

  The buzzer rang again. “Hold your horses,” Doc muttered as he opened the door.

  “Dr. Harrison,” Sonja said with an uncharacteristic smile. “Is this a convenient time to conduct our collaboration?”

  “Don’t know. Promise not to burn down my lab?”

  The scientist’s smile turned to chagrin. “The magnet’s ruined. I still need one to conduct my experiments. The infirmary has an MRI, doesn’t it?”