Zin waved to the row of dentist chairs. “As soon as you are comfortably seated in your transfer stations, the retracted hood will extend, covering your face. A yellow light will flash, but you may not even notice it. The flash initiates a spatial transformation that will reposition your transfer station—and you, of course—both dimensionally and temporally. That is to say, you will shift slightly out of normal 3-D space, but you will also shift slightly away from the normal direction of time.”
“Shifted in time?” asked Wesley Woods, an English sociology researcher. Wesley was one of two team members selected by the European Space Agency. With sandy hair and freckles, he seemed to match his Yorkshire home. “Forward or backward?”
“Actually… neither,” Zin said, his English accent exactly matching Wesley’s. “I won’t go into it just now, but suffice it to say that forward and backward are not the only directions of time. There are others.”
“And this yellow light can really control time?” Jessica Boyce asked. Jessica was the only professor in the group. Marie had never had the opportunity to work with her, but Jessica was the star of several NASA videos beamed down from the International Space Station as part of a science program for high school students.
“Unquestionably so,” Zin responded. “Time is no different from space. Both are quantized dimensions of our universe. Both are managed by means of coherent neutrinos, as your scientists have already learned for quantum space.”
Time control? Marie thought. Hoo, boy. It might be best if they don’t give us the details.
Eight months prior, the missing Soyuz astronauts had somehow been frozen in time by the same alien technology before being returned to Earth. It was hard to believe that Zin, or anyone, could wield such power in a flash of yellow light.
Zin walked over to the portal, and the group followed him. He pointed to the oval doorway. “The portal is nothing more than a four-dimensional path from Earth to Ixtlub, with the three-dimensional distance between these two planets highly compressed. It’s a common method of transfer used widely around the galaxy. But for humans or any biological organism, it requires a temporal offset to avoid death.”
Tim crossed his arms, a smirk on his face. “Thanks for not killing us, Zinny old boy.”
Zin swiveled his head rapidly. “I hope you don’t think—” He stopped, and his metal eyes made a clicking sound as they turned upward. “Ah, yes. Sarcasm, I believe? A uniquely human style of speech, utterly unknown elsewhere in the galaxy.”
Tim shifted on his feet and said nothing.
“Continuing,” Zin said. “Once the portal is activated, I will step through to the anchor point at Ixtlub and verify that it is positioned correctly. Each of you will enter the portal seated in your transfer stations, which will slide along this track.” A single slot in the flooring led from the four chairs directly through the portal.
Stephanie Perrin raised a hand. The second woman on the katanaut team, Stephanie was a French television reporter. Her position at a twenty-four-hour French news channel, along with her popularity across most of Europe, had made her selection almost inevitable. Like most of the others, she’d been to the ISS and had provided a remarkably poetic and very personal description of spaceflight to viewers back home. With her glossy black hair, a heart-shaped face and dark eyes, the average Frenchman—in fact, most European men—put her at the top of their list of beautiful women. She flashed her gorgeous smile regularly, both on TV and in person.
“So, as an artificial life form—” she started. “I’m sorry, Zin, I hope that’s not offensive.” Zin shook his head no, but Stephanie seemed to adjust anyway. “As a nonbiological person, you don’t need the time offset like we do to survive the trip?”
Zin shook his head again, turning it farther left and right than any human would. The move was vaguely creepy, but at least he wasn’t spinning his head in full circles. “No, Stephanie.” His English words took on a slight French accent that matched Stephanie’s. “I have personally completed more than seventy dimensional transfers with no ill effects. The danger is only to cellular biology, not to any electric brain function.”
Stephanie pursued her line of questioning. “The astronauts from last year’s Soyuz incident reported that they did not remember returning to Earth from their 4-D orbit. Will we remember the transfer?”
“No again, Stephanie,” Zin said. “But never fear, the time you lose will be short, just a minute or two.” He lifted his flexible lips into a smile that looked forced but was probably the best he could do. “You’ll see the light flash, and then… Ixtlub. Honestly, I think you’ll enjoy the experience.”
Stephanie didn’t look too sure. “I read that we’re each going to wear an audio-video headset. Will it be a live feed? I’m sure viewers around the world will want to see what happens during the transfer.”
“Live streaming is not supported by this particular portal technology,” Zin said. “But never fear, you will each wear a recording device that is switched on by your command. By all means, turn your camera on during the transfer. Viewers will see the same thing that I do when stepping through a portal. Except, of course, that they’ll miss the ultraviolet experience, always where the real action is.”
Tim and Wesley chuckled. Zin acted like he didn’t understand what was funny.
“Sorry, Zin, it’s not you,” said Wesley. “It’s just that sometimes you say things just like we would… a little too much like us.”
“Should I back off?” Zin asked.
Tim laughed again.
Zin’s mechanical eyes flitted to the left side of his head, where Tim stood. “English expressions and human mannerisms are designed into my language module, but I can alter my style, if it would make our conversation more natural.”
“No, no. Don’t change a thing,” Tim said. “All the wacky robot stuff is the most entertainment I’ve had in years.”
Zin held his angled eyes on Tim and provided no further facial expression, at least none that humans might notice. But Marie imagined an irritation from his silence. She had worked with Tim before, and the English expression jerk came to mind.
5 Murphy’s Law
Monday, May 23
Marie sipped from a cup of tea, her shoes off and her feet propped up on another chair. The break room was a good refuge from the activity of the O&C clean room and gave her a quiet place to catch up on personal affairs.
She perused an email written in Russian. It was good language practice, but it didn’t hurt that the email was from Sergei Koslov, the commander of the lost Soyuz mission and her part-time love interest. Intercontinental romances didn’t work very well, particularly when lovers were from adversary nations, but they had tried. Sergei would always be special.
Another message caught her attention, a recording from last night’s Nicole Valentino Show. The guest on the popular late-night show was Daniel Rice.
“This I’ve got to see,” Marie said, starting the video.
Nicole sat at her desk, chatting with the band leader. “My next guest has been here before, but I didn’t get to meet him… I think I was sick that night? Yeah, Ricky, is that your recollection? No? Booze?” The audience laughed.
“Yeah, that was probably it—too much booze that night. Well, I’ve fully recovered, and tonight we get to talk about aliens, cyborgs and travel through the fourth dimension. He’s the scientist who changed the world. Please welcome Dr. Daniel Rice.”
The audience applauded, and Daniel walked across the stage. He looked a little out of place. He’d been a regular on morning and the late-night shows, but a scientist never seemed to fit among the stars of Hollywood.
Nicole greeted Daniel with a hug, took her seat behind the desk and waited for the applause to die down. “So, how are things between you and Core? That’s the cyborg’s name, right?”
“Uh, right,” Daniel answered, rather uncomfortably. Marie couldn’t imagine what it must be like to be in front of the cameras and all those people. If put in t
he same situation, she’d melt into a puddle on the floor. “Core has turned out to be an enigma. Quite helpful, full of new information, but strict in following a galactic procedure, if you will—a set of rules that it doesn’t talk about.”
“I see,” Nicole said. “So, at this point, it is not your new best friend?” The audience laughed, perhaps at the genderless pronoun or perhaps just the way she said it. Core made it clear that it had no gender, compelling humans to drop their initial use of he and him. The topic seemed a never-ending source of amusement for some.
Daniel laughed too but then resumed a more serious tone. “Here’s what I would say about Core and whatever policy-making body it represents. They are brilliant, highly advanced, benevolent, as far as we can tell, but… wary.”
“What, they don’t trust us? Can’t imagine why.” More laughter.
“Well, I get a sense that they have undisclosed procedures for how they would react to anything we might do. For example, let’s imagine that we got a bit too aggressive with our newly discovered capability to compress space and we started sending spy satellites to monitor their communications or take close-up pictures of their planets.”
“Sounds reasonable to me. You’re saying they can snoop on us but we can’t snoop on them? I want to know who these people are.”
“Yeah, I do too. But we need to be careful, listen and learn, without being brash. We shouldn’t expect that our Earth-centric concepts of alliances and enemies will hold up in this new arena. There are some entirely new rules of civilization that we’re just beginning to learn.”
Nicole’s eyebrows lowered, her face contorting into a look of scorn. “Don’t you watch the SyFy Channel? We already know how this goes. When do they invade Earth to steal our water and mutilate our cows?”
The audience roared, and Marie laughed along. Nicole knew exactly what she was doing. Regardless of the information governments released, social media posts from around the world made it abundantly clear that fear was widespread, even when expressed in slightly comedic form. The attack would begin with mountainous warships floating in the sky. An interdimensional doorway would open in every city, through which giant insects or lizards with slime dripping from sharp fangs would appear. There were as many variations as there were imaginations in the world. Many thought the aliens were already here, hiding beneath a layer of human skin in a devious disguise.
When the noise from the audience died down, Daniel spoke. “Alien invasion? We’re conditioned to think this way. After all, our history is mostly a story of one group of people invading another group’s country. We’re used to it. So naturally, we think that’s what will happen this time. But try to step outside our limited experience and thoughtfully examine the situation. What do we see? A collection of alien civilizations, scattered across thousands of light-years, that shows every indication of being at peace with each other. Why would they invade Earth? What do we have that they want? Water? Sorry—it’s one of the most common molecules in the galaxy, we find it practically everywhere. How about cows, or even people, as a food source? Every one of these civilizations has a biology fundamentally different from ours. To them, I doubt we’d taste very good.”
“What if they just want our planet? ‘So long, humans,’” Nicole mimicked in a bloodthirsty alien voice, “and they just zap us out of existence.”
Daniel was beginning to get that look of the self-assured scientist that Marie remembered so well from their time together. “We’ve already discovered several thousand planets within a few hundred light-years of Earth. There are probably millions more out there, and many of them may be like Mars, devoid of life but potentially habitable. With a galaxy as big and diverse as the Milky Way, finding good real estate is not a problem. Again, they have no reason to take Earth from us.”
“So, your bottom line is they really don’t care about us?”
“That’s my feeling. They’re inviting us to join their group—granted, in some limited way. But if we decline, we can just go our own way. I’m not sure it even matters to them which choice we make.”
A head poked into the break room, and Marie paused the video. It was Stephanie Perrin. “I thought I might find you in here,” she said. “They’re looking for you. Ibarra wants you ASAP.”
Marie put her phone away and slipped into her shoes. “That doesn’t sound good. Was it Carol?” Ibarra was the administrator for human spaceflight operations at NASA, and Carol was his assistant.
“A woman,” Stephanie said. “I didn’t recognize her, but she looked a little… um, how do you Americans say? Bent out of shape.”
Probably Carol. Marie thanked Stephanie and hurried down the long corridor.
Ibarra’s corner office was at the far end, and Carol’s desk was positioned just outside. “Glad to see they found you,” Carol said as she approached. She nodded to the office. “Go on in, he wants you.”
“What did I do?” Marie asked.
“You’ll have to talk to him.”
“Oh, come on, Carol. At least give me a hint. Am I in the firing line or just an innocent bystander?”
“No can do.” Carol shook her head. “You’re on your own. Get in there.”
Marie took a deep breath, straightened her glasses and brushed her hair back. “Okay, but send in the paramedics if you hear any screams.”
Carol grinned. She knew something.
Marie knocked and opened the door to Ibarra’s office. A slender Hispanic man with a full head of gray hair looked up. “Oh, good. Marie, please come in. Have a seat.”
She scooted a chair from the side of the room to the center and sat. Her heart beat just a little faster now that she was in the crosshairs of the man who had ruthlessly transformed NASA from a government agency to a government-corporation consortium. There had been casualties along the way, with several top-level players leaving altogether.
“Something going on?” In Marie’s experience, direct but polite had always worked with Ibarra. “Anything I can help with?”
Ibarra smiled. “Help? You’re center stage, depending on your eating habits.”
Marie rolled her eyes. “Okay, what’s going on? Carol was just as obscure.”
His lips tightened and the lines in his face seemed to deepen. “It’s been a rough couple of days, tougher still that the launch is tomorrow. That’s why you’re here, Marie. Let’s have a little talk.”
Marie physically gulped.
“But first, a question. Do you eat peanuts?”
“Augustin, really… what’s this about?”
“Do you eat peanuts?” he repeated.
“Yes, occasionally.”
“So, no allergy?”
“No. What are you—”
“That’s it, then,” Ibarra interrupted. “Jessica is out. You’re in.”
His words hit her like a hammer. A flush rose quickly into her face, followed by a tingle in her neck. “I’m… in? You mean, on the team?”
“That’s exactly what I mean. You’re on the Ixtlub team.”
She wasn’t sure she was hearing him correctly or that her brain was even functioning. “But Jessica—”
“She’s been told. There’s nothing she could have done differently. Unfortunately, she’s allergic… to peanuts. She disclosed it on her application, but when we selected her, we didn’t know much about the planetary environment. Now we do.”
“They have peanuts on Ixtlub?” This was starting to sound like an elaborate joke. If it was, she couldn’t bear to hear the punchline that might be coming.
“No, of course not,” Ibarra said seriously. “There’s not a single plant we share in common. But a peanut allergy is not related to the nut itself. People are allergic to a rare protein that, on Earth, appears only in peanuts and a few other roots. On Ixtlub, things are different. The same protein is rather common, in the soil, even in the atmosphere. There’s no way we could have shielded her from it. If I send Jessica there, she’ll die.”
He was still talking nonsen
se. “I’m not even an alternate. I’m the administrative coordinator. I don’t understand.”
Ibarra walked around to the front of his desk and leaned against it. “This is where it gets a little strange,” he said quietly, almost like he was talking with no one but himself. “He specifically asked for you.”
“Who?”
“Aastazin.”
It was flattering and confusing at the same time. “Zin wants me on the team? That’s very kind, but doesn’t he understand we have procedures? There are designated backups.”
“He says you increase the probability of success.” Ibarra looked very serious, and tired too. Maybe he’d already been down this path of explaining to Zin how NASA worked. “He says if you don’t go, he’ll need to cancel the mission, or at least postpone to a later date.”
Marie pondered the sudden change of events. Zin was caring, thoughtful and extremely polite. It seemed he also kept some secrets.
“Augustin, you know I want to be on the team. It’s a dream come true. But I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve Zin as my benefactor.” As much as she wanted to jump for joy at the news, the circumstances were odd. “How do you feel about this?”
His voice was gentle but firm. “I think you’ll make a great team member. I always did, but I could fill only two positions. I figured you’d be on a future mission.”
“But Zin forced your hand.”
Ibarra nodded. “He did. And he won’t explain why, either, which rubs me the wrong way. It’s all about probabilities, he said. Like he’s computing something in his head.”
“Is it Core?” Marie just blurted it out. She wasn’t sure she should be repeating rumors.
“Yeah, I’ve heard the same stories. Core and Zin are connected somehow. We had a long conversation. He doesn’t deny it, but he says it’s irrelevant to his recommendation that you be on the team.”
Marie lowered her head in thought. “Wow. This is so sudden.”
Could she really do this? They were only a day away from launch and she hadn’t read nearly as much of the mission documentation as the other team members. Twenty-four hours. Not much time before four people would take their position on the transfer stations and slide through the portal. Could she be one of them?
The Quantum Series Box Set Page 34