A smile crept across her lips. She envisioned herself standing on the surface of another planet, a dim red sun in the sky and exotic plants around her. Would it be like that? She didn’t know, but there was still time—she’d cram. She’d be ready for the most incredible opportunity of her life.
Ibarra seemed to be reading her mind. His normally hard look softened, almost fatherly. “Marie, we’re behind the curve.”
“Don’t worry, I’ve got this,” she lied. “I’m totally ready to go.”
He seemed unconvinced. She had always been a terrible liar. “Make sure you are. You’ll need to be sharp when you get there. Hell, even before. We’re bypassing the alternates. Adding you to the team is bound to cause some hard feelings.”
“Jessica or Tim?” Tim was the only team member she’d had some experience with, and not in a good way.
“Jessica won’t be an issue, she gets it,” Ibarra answered. “Marie, it’s your job to merge into a team that wasn’t expecting you. It might not be easy, but everyone on this team is a professional, and they damned well better act like it. Tim or anyone else. The stakes for this mission are high, so if there’s a problem, you tell me.”
Marie nodded, even though she knew right away she’d never do as he suggested. She’d prepare and be ready for whatever came.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Marie walked briskly, her head down, reading prelaunch mission notes on her tablet. It had been four hours of much of the same: reading, skimming where possible, rereading for items that probably should have been memorized at this point in the training program. Safety procedures, life support systems, transfer procedures, customs and protocols. It went on and on. The documents were dense in places, too technical in others. She’d never manage to get through it all in time. Launch—or more precisely, the portal connection—was tomorrow afternoon.
A blur in front. She bumped into someone and looked up. “Sorry!”
It was Jessica Boyce, and Marie immediately thought of peanuts. “Oh, Jessica. Sorry, I was…”
“Reading?” Jessica asked. “You’ve probably got a lot to catch up on, I expect.” Jessica’s eyes were tired, her hair out of place, her expression disenchanted. “They told me last night. Congratulations.”
“Oh, Jessica, I’m really sorry.” There were a few things she could have said. If it had been up to me… They should have… But the words wouldn’t have been truthful. Jessica was no dummy, and Marie’s disappointment at being initially excluded had been obvious to anyone.
Jessica waved one hand like she was swatting a fly. “Eh, whatever. It’s done now. They did what they had to do.”
“You’re not mad?” Marie asked.
“At you? No, not your fault.” Jessica pointed down the hallway. “Hey, are you heading to the role-playing exercise?”
“Uh, yeah,” Marie answered.
“Walk with me, I’m going there too.” Jessica held out an elbow. “Let’s make a united entrance, shall we? You and me.” Marie hesitantly put her hand in Jessica’s arm.
Jessica’s attitude was surprisingly magnanimous, given the situation. The two women continued down the hallway together, arm in arm. “Very kind of you,” Marie offered. “I don’t think I understand. Why are you—”
“Still attending training?” Jessica glanced toward Marie and kept walking. “I have a job to do. I’m now CAPCOM. Earth-based team support. Communications to you guys in the field.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
“Maybe not okay. It hurts, but I can live with it.”
They walked silently down the hallway and turned a corner. Marie brought them to an abrupt stop at the entrance to the training room. Inside, the rest of the team stood in a circle of conversation.
Once they walked into the room, all eyes would turn. She couldn’t imagine what Jessica must be feeling. If it were me, I’d be hiding in the darkest closet I could find. She turned to face Jessica.
“What?” Jessica asked.
Marie spoke from the heart, clearly and forcefully. “You’re the bravest person I’ve ever met.”
Jessica provided a weak smile and shrugged one shoulder. “Eh, I have my moments.” She put a hand on Marie’s shoulder. “It’s all yours now. You make us proud, okay?”
Marie nodded and held tightly to Jessica’s arm, and they walked through the doorway together.
6 Bosons
The average person doesn’t ponder the role of bosons in the universe while floating naked in a sensory-deprivation tank, but no one had ever called Nala Pasquier average. She floated in salt water, making no movements in the dark, coffinlike chamber. While her body relaxed, her mind raced.
The waves. The point of light. What were they? Come on, scientist, this stuff is not that hard. A fucking chimp could do it.
Sensory deprivation calmed the senses, allowing the mind to focus and develop deep insight. Apparently, not this time.
Focus on bosons, the framework of the universe.
She was close to an answer, but it would need to be drawn from the deep recesses of her mind. Every physics student knows there are five bosons: gluon, photon, W, Z, and Higgs. Yet now, there was a sixth: a particle that shaped space itself. At least, that’s how Core had explained it.
Our friendly neighborhood cyborg. Provides the clues but neglects to mention the details. Some friend.
Core spoke in vague generalities. The new HP boson was the glue that held space together—or more like an elastic strap, because space could not only warp into gravity wells, as Einstein had postulated more than a century before, it could also stretch and compress.
Learning how to compress space had taken humans to the distant star VY Canis Majoris, where advanced alien technology—and Core—had been waiting. That had been months ago, and they had made significant progress since. Her lab was ground zero. At the flip of a switch, she could expand an infinitesimal dimension that only a quark would notice into something room-sized, or larger. And when she did, normal space responded by compressing. It had no choice; the HP boson enforced it.
The HP, or hyperbolic paraboloid boson, was named because of its tendency to bend space into a saddle shape, or as some call it, a Pringles potato chip. Geometrically speaking, a hyperbolic paraboloid is the opposite of a sphere. It’s a curved surface that is open in every direction and never intersects itself.
Now that physicists had learned of the existence of the HP boson, they had quickly determined one of its intrinsic properties: HP bosons are naturally attracted to quarks, the fundamental particle that makes up protons, neutrons, atoms and molecules. Pair an HP boson with a quark, and they warp space a little. Pair a few trillion bosons with a few trillion quarks, and they warp space a lot. We call it gravity.
But the real discovery was when HP bosons were allowed to roam free without any quark pairings. Then, the boson worked its magic, expanding quantum space into an open structure—a Pringles kind of structure.
Nala knew all of this. She’d proposed half of it, her name now commonly circulated in physics publications. Free HP bosons could be tamed, managed, put to useful purposes. She could already create 4-D space; maybe there were other applications, too. Artificial gravity? That would be pretty cool.
But before they could install artificial gravity plates at the International Space Station, there were problems to overcome. The HP boson was probably responsible for the waves she’d seen in her lab. The pinprick of light, too. There really was nothing else to blame.
Or was there? Could it be the baryon-to-boson ratio?
That was what Jan thought. Nala’s partner in physics was a Dutchman with a name pronounced Yawn, as she routinely teased. Jan was the theorist, Nala the experimentalist, and Jan’s latest theory was that the density of mass played a role in the stability of space. Nala had been measuring density for weeks to find out.
And where was Core on all this brand-new science? Silent. They had submitted questions, but the answers that came back were either vague
or the classic cyborg bullshit line: You’ll learn, in time. Core might represent the combined intelligence of a hundred civilizations. Its moon-sized cyborg innards might be more advanced than any computer on Earth. But as a science colleague, it was coming up short on details.
As her frustration built, her thoughts turned audible. “Fuck this, I’m getting nowhere.” The sound of her voice automatically engaged the lights inside her float pod, and she opened her eyes. The smooth fiberglass surface a few inches above her face was lit in a violet color that pulsed in intensity. Near the center of the curving top was a single LED, glowing pink.
The tiny LED over her face reminded her of the pinprick of light in the lab, and it stirred thoughts residing deep in her subconscious.
Wait a second.
She lay perfectly still, her naked body floating effortlessly in the warm salt water. Deep thoughts bubbled toward consciousness.
She had collapsed space. But what if it hadn’t returned to quantum size? What if it had vanished altogether? A singularity, a zero-dimensional point. Could such a thing exist? Black holes were singularities, but a black hole derives from quarks, not bosons.
Maybe the pinprick was a different kind of singularity, triggered by free HP bosons. They warped space just as much whether free or paired with quarks.
A Type 2 singularity. That’s what Jan would call it.
It was an interesting possibility. A wave of relief spread across her body. Insight. It was why she used the float pod. It allowed her mind to focus. Nala pushed upward on the violet surface, and the pod opened like a clamshell. She stepped out of the pool, rivulets of water sliding down her brown skin and onto the tile floor.
She’d need time to flesh out this new idea. Further experiments would certainly be needed. She’d talk to Jan. Bounce the idea around and see if it made sense.
Free of the confines of the float pod, Nala found the ordinary world invading once more, and trivial pursuits like getting ready for work took the place of deep thinking.
Nala pulled a towel from the shelf and wrapped it around her body. Deciding on a hairstyle for the day, she studied her image in the mirror. The tangles of long brown hair over bare shoulders, the not-quite-straight nose, and too-porous skin. People called her beautiful—Daniel had. An African beauty, he’d said, more than once. But those compliments had been in the heat of passion. She didn’t see the beauty today.
Nala stuck her tongue out at the mirror and scrunched her nose. She recognized the symptoms. A momentary lack of confidence triggered by insecurities in her love life. Daniel was in the past. Done. Over.
An image of Daniel popped into her head. The last time he had been in her house, standing bare-chested beside the float pod with the very same towel wrapped around his waist. His embrace was strong enough to lift her into the air and drop his towel to the floor. Her heart rate picked up a bit at the memory.
Over? Well… maybe. Funny how thoughts of sex always followed physics. Did other people do that too?
She shook it off and forced herself to transition to the mundane tasks of readying for work. A touch of makeup, hair pulled back, and brushed white teeth. She selected a feminine but professional outfit: magenta trousers, white blouse paired with a camel blazer. The sharp, clean lines projected an aura of her professional life—a story of a confident intellectual, a scientist ready to explore the edges of the universe. The image was not only what she wanted others to see, it was also meant to be absorbed by her psyche.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Less than an hour later, Nala Pasquier stepped into the control room at Fermilab. She walked up behind the long-haired skinny guy, seated at the curved desk.
“Hey, Cody,” she said. Dozens of large screens covered the wall in front of him, and he was engaged in the details on one of them.
Cody turned around. “Oh, hi, Nala. Look at this.” He pointed to the screen, where a trend line threaded through a graph of several hundred data points. “The instability we saw last time started just after we hit maximum expansion. But no indications prior to then.”
Nala leaned over his shoulder and examined the screen. “Came out of nowhere, didn’t it?” she answered. “One minute, normal expansion into a fourth dimension. The next, all this wavering shit.”
“Definitely a local effect,” he said. “I didn’t see anything here in the control room.” He returned his attention to the graph. “But the data tells the story.”
“Let’s go with a larger expansion today,” Nala said. “Assuming the wavering returns, I’ll have Thomas measure its radius away from the neutrino target box, and we’ll get multiple data points to plot this thing out.”
Cody swiveled to face her. “Uh… Nala… I’m thinking the Department of Energy guy might have an issue with that.”
“He’s here?” Nala asked. The safety inspector had the power to shut down the whole lab if he found infractions. He’d gotten a whiff of the bizarre side effects they’d encountered and had found some cracks in the concrete near the Diastasi lab. But luckily, he was an engineer, not a physicist. That gave her plenty of room to work around any objections he might have.
“Leave the DOE guy to me,” Nala said. “I’ll explain things to him. Just be ready to go.”
Cody grinned. “Explain things? Will that include any ass kicking?”
She waved a hand. “Would I do that? Cody, I’m five-two, a hundred and twelve pounds. I don’t kick anybody’s ass.”
“Physically? No. Verbally?” Cody shrugged.
She waved him off. “Don’t worry, he’s an inspector. I’ll give him the final say.”
“Hah! This guy is doomed.” Cody was generally agreeable, but it helped that Nala outranked him. “You want me to control neutrino amplitude, or Thomas?”
“You. It’ll free up Thomas for data collection.”
“Okay,” Cody said. “But these waves are kind of freaking me out. Keep that radio handy.”
“I always do.” She patted Cody’s shoulder and headed out of the control room and down to the lower levels of the sprawling facility. The safety guy would no doubt be down in the operations support office—there was always hot coffee, and the support team usually brought in pastries.
The anomalies they’d witnessed were definitely freaky, but manageable. Yeah, the lab had wavered a bit, but that was no reason for the Spanish Inquisition. Not that she couldn’t handle these government inspector types—after all, he had no real understanding of the work she was doing.
Scientific discovery is not without personal risk, she rehearsed in her mind. Galileo was found guilty of heresy and imprisoned. Jenner, Pasteur, Salk and others who developed vaccines were constantly exposed to pathogens. Curie died of radiation poisoning. But without these pioneers, where would we be today?
It was an argument that might resonate with another scientist, but it wasn’t a pitch you gave to a DOE safety guy. Instead, when she walked into the support office and found him munching on a chocolate-frosted doughnut, she calmly spoke of hyperbolic paraboloids and baryon-to-boson ratios. She agreed to limit the accelerator to 125 GeV and asked Joanne, their support tech, to attach a new first-aid kit to the lab wall. She also flashed her best radioactive smile—the kind that made men melt.
In the end, she prevailed, and the inspector signed off on continued research. These people always underestimated her.
7 Caps
Davis Garrity waited impatiently inside a warehouse south of Austin, Texas. On the other side of a glass enclosure, the shipping manager consulted a real-time tracking map and assured Davis the truck would arrive any minute. It would be carrying two full-sized Garrity Caps, ready to install on the stacks at ElecTrek’s Brazos power facility. Another truck with two more wouldn’t be far behind.
He wasn’t kept waiting long. The huge warehouse door rolled up to the ceiling, revealing a loaded flatbed truck that slowly backed into the unloading area. The caps were bigger than he had envisioned, even though he’d personally provided the speci
fications to the company in New Jersey that had constructed them. Each cap was partially enclosed in a wooden shipping frame, about fifteen feet on each side and ten feet tall. Just two caps filled the available space on the truck.
“You taking the delivery?” the truck driver yelled to Davis.
“Yeah, drop them here,” Davis answered. He’d have the second truck take one directly to the Brazos plant for a full-scale test. It would take a special crane to position it at the top of a five-hundred-foot smokestack, but installation costs were a pittance compared with the billion-dollar carbon-capture system it would replace. The other three caps would be held in reserve upon completion of the test. Davis had no doubt it would be successful.
A warehouse employee drove up in a forklift and unloaded the framed caps. Davis signed the paperwork, and the truck left.
Now alone in the warehouse, Davis approached one of the industrial caps, as big as a backyard swimming pool and painted in bold blue and orange on the outside. With the cap lying on its side, Davis stepped between the boards of the shipping frame to the cap’s interior. Inside, clean white PVC surrounded him, a giant version of the sample PVC pipe he’d used in his demonstration. Davis pulled a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and compared the design layout with the real thing.
Just like the first image at the top left, the real cap also looked closed, but Davis knew it wasn’t. The image beneath was closer to its actual shape, an elbow joint. The upper portion of the elbow was simply invisible to the human eye.
Not sure I’ll ever understand this 4-D stuff, Davis thought. But I sure do like it.
The effluents from the smokestack would make a ninety-degree turn at the top of the cap in a direction Davis couldn’t see or point to. He rapped the knuckles of his hand at the top of the cap—solid. The drawing identified the cap’s crown as the exterior sealed edge. It wasn’t really the top, it was simply the beginning of the elbow. The place where the pipe twisted into a fourth dimension of space. The upper portion of the pipe was just as real, just as solid, but unseen.
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