Complexity was by far the most difficult visualization. There were just too many bits of information. How could any single mind keep track of them all? She couldn’t, yet somehow, she did. The complexity hurt, not with any pain, but with an intense anxiety, as if she was responsible for the trajectory of individual molecules in the air. It weighed upon her; it scared her.
It was time for the closing act, and she knew exactly which layer to choose. She flipped again, opened her eyes and looked around the room. She caught the eye of one of the ESA administrators near the back of the room. “No, sir, I’m not.”
He looked puzzled. “Not what?”
“Making this up.”
“You’re suggesting you can read my mind?” he asked.
“Isn’t that the statement you were about to make?”
He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Yes, I suppose, but not quite that bluntly.”
“Wait a second.” Ibarra held up a hand. “You can read minds?”
“No, sir,” Marie said. “It’s like… I can see you, or maybe it’s an image of you that hasn’t quite happened yet. But in my mind, you’re already talking. I can’t hear the words, but I can still make out what you’re saying. It seems to be accessing tiny bits of time that exist at the subatomic level. I have no idea how I know that—it’s kind of freaky.”
Ibarra said nothing and kept his hand in the air for several seconds like he wanted her to read his mind.
Marie shrugged. “Sorry, nothing.”
“True, I guess,” Ibarra said. “I wasn’t going to say anything, I just wanted to wait and see what you came up with… as a test.”
Marie swiveled quickly to the ESA admin. “I agree.”
“You agree with what?” he asked, his eyebrows furrowed.
“That Mr. Ibarra’s test was unscientific. You were going to say that, am I right?”
He nodded without comment.
Marie closed her eyes again and tapped the side of the ring. She took it off and laid it on the table. She lowered her head and sat down. “I’m sorry, it’s tiring.”
The device was more than tiring. It produced an instant spike of anxiety and a mood swing far worse than any PMS. She would need to elaborate, including the hallucination she’d experienced on Ixtlub, an event that would certainly be in Tim’s written report. But the mental collapse had felt so personal—like something wrong in her own brain, not the headband.
Maybe she’d ask Zin to join her in Ibarra’s office. He might be able to shed some light on how the device was supposed to work. After all, he had seemed very supportive on Ixtlub just before their return to Earth.
No one else on the team could have done any better, Zin had told her.
14 Singularity
Within the Fermilab control room up on the surface, walls shook, lights flickered, and dust rained down from ceiling tiles. A deep rumble from far below screamed catastrophic structural failure. Cody’s training in emergency procedures kicked in. Alarms sounded, emergency services were notified, and within five minutes Cody had the accelerator shut down. His next moves were purely personal.
The steps on the metal staircase were a blur as he raced downward. The smell of smoke was unmistakable, but there were no obvious signs of what had gone wrong. He held his portable radio transceiver in one hand. Multiple calls to Nala had gone unanswered.
At basement level three, a fire crew had just arrived and were connecting a hose into a water outlet. One of the crew yelled at him as he rushed by, but he didn’t pause. The hallway was cloudy with smoke and dust, but still no sign of a fire. Nobody was going to hold him back from finding out what had happened.
He turned the corner and skidded to a stop. His mouth hung open.
The Diastasi lab was gone; most of the hallway too. He stared into a cavernous crater of shredded concrete. Dangling wires showered sparks, and severed pipes emptied their contents into a vast hollowed-out sphere, an empty space where the interior of the building had once stood. On the far side, at least forty meters away, the hallway continued as normal, though the overhead lights flashed on and off irregularly. The empty hole was as deep and high as it was wide—as if someone had taken a giant ice cream scoop and removed a ball-like chunk from the building.
“Jesus Christ,” Cody whispered. He ran one hand through his hair. “What the hell happened?”
In the center of the hollow space floated a single point of light, intensely bright but concentrated. Smoke and dust slowly circled in a disc shape, spiraling inward toward the light.
Cody’s heart pounded and his eyes watered. “Nala! Thomas!” he yelled into the emptiness.
There was no response. How could there be? There was nothing left of the lab or its occupants. His colleagues—his friends—were gone.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jan Spiegel wore a dust mask over his nose and mouth with safety glasses covering his eyes. Jae-ho Park, Fermilab’s director, was outfitted in the same way. Both men stood behind plastic ribbon with the words Do Not Cross repeated along its length. On the other side, the hallway flooring was badly broken before disappearing into the monstrous hole.
On the far side, a ladder leaned against what was left of the corridor floor, and the voices of several firemen could be heard from the depths of the hole.
“It’s gone, the whole lab is gone,” Jan said, shaking his head from side to side. “It’s impossible to believe.”
“What happened?” Park asked. “Any idea yet?”
“Instability of some kind,” Jan answered. “Nala had found some anomalies, but we didn’t have enough data to know what was going on.”
“And the light? You think it’s a singularity?”
Jan nodded. “Probably. Nala described something similar yesterday, but much smaller. She thought she had created a singularity from the 4-D collapse. She must have adjusted some parameters and made it worse.”
“It wasn’t Nala’s fault,” Park said solemnly. “We all did this.”
Jan hung his head. “You’re right. She explained the spatial instabilities to me. I threw it all back on her shoulders. I should have helped. Hell, I should have told them to stop.”
Nala’s explanation was the most likely answer. Four-dimensional space had violently collapsed, taking three-dimensional space with it. The light hanging in the center of the hole was all that was left—a singularity, a zero-dimensional point of energy, lacking any mass or volume. The phenomenon would require more study to determine if the theory was accurate. Unfortunately, the only lab in the western hemisphere that could do the job was now crushed into oblivion, along with the scientists who operated it.
Jan swallowed hard. They had made progress, but there was still so much they didn’t fully understand. Like any discovery, they had unlocked a treasure of knowledge with enormous potential to benefit humanity. But dangers lurked, made clear in the cruelest of ways. Jan had underestimated those dangers, and Nala and Thomas had paid with their lives.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Emergency responders had scoured the pit and the side corridors for any signs of survivors and checked the rest of the building for damage. Police were called in too, but they did little more than gather information from witnesses and file a missing persons report. The first responders eventually gave way to the more technical people, those who better understood the function of one of the most advanced scientific facilities in the world.
The Chicago office of the Department of Energy sent the same safety inspector who had signed off on their adjusted operating plan only a few days before. He seemed upset that he’d been fooled by “that female physicist” until someone told him Nala had been killed in the accident. Then he quieted down.
DOE managers and engineers arrived, some from out of state. They set up monitoring equipment at the edge of the pit, sampled the air, and photographed the magically floating light in its center from every angle.
Later, hazard inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency arrived
. None of the visitors could provide any insight into the accident, and their only recommendation was to suspend operations. Given the damage, restarting operations wasn’t even an option.
Those who were already there, the team of physicists and engineers working at Fermilab, continued to be the best source of ideas as to what had gone wrong and what they might do differently. Most of the assessment fell to Jan Spiegel.
15 Electricity
The hot Texas sun and southern humidity were a powerful combination. Davis Garrity took off his suit coat and laid it across the seat of his rental car, hoping his neatly pressed shirt would hold up for another hour. Today’s meeting was outdoors by design.
He took shelter under a lonely live oak tree, the power generating station’s nod to landscaping. The sparse shade did little to relieve the steam bath of ranch country east of Austin.
The facility was one of the largest in the world. On one side was a railyard. Three times each day, a long train of more than a hundred cars pulled up and unloaded its contents. Forty-five thousand tons of coal a day, every day. In the center of the expansive complex were four enormous steel buildings, each one larger in bulk than any of the gleaming skyscrapers in downtown Austin. Coal entered each building via a covered conveyor belt. Electricity came out the other side, carried by high-voltage towers that disappeared across the rolling hills toward Austin and San Antonio.
Towering five hundred feet into the air above each of the four buildings stood a gray concrete smokestack. Two of the stacks poured a whitish cloud into the sky. A third stack did the same, but since it was venting through a carbon-capture system, the smoke density was somewhat lower.
The fourth stack, the one closest to Davis, was topped with the newest symbol of clean energy—a blue-and-orange Garrity Cap. Its bold colors and placement high above ground allowed it to be seen by anyone within twenty miles of the facility. Not a whiff of smoke came out.
Garrity pulled out an oversized sheet of paper and compared his client site sketch to the real thing. The sketch’s simplicity made it more likely to be reprinted, posted online and presented on television news. Free publicity.
He had a second diagram in the works that explained how the containment dome was set up and managed. Davis didn’t really understand that part of the equation, but his Romanian partners did. He’d been lucky to make the connection. A friend of a friend. A few phone calls, and he had been put in touch with a science lab in Romania of all places. What they did and how they did it was fancy footwork as far as Davis was concerned, but the Romanians claimed they could do the same thing that the US lab had done. Fermilab, the one that was in the news these days.
Best of all, the Romanians seemed anxious to get their foot in the door, and an industrial application in the United States was just the ticket. Davis had a good imagination. He didn’t need to know exactly how this extradimensional space thing worked, only that it did work. Within two weeks, the Romanians had proven their ability to perform the space-science magic and a few days later Davis had a signed support contract.
Davis grinned like a kid who’d just discovered the hidden cookie jar. Manufacturing cost, a mere forty thousand dollars. Installation cost, not much more. Operating costs, relatively cheap thanks to low-cost Romanian scientists. For less than three hundred grand, he had just eliminated more than five million tons of carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and other emissions. Conventional technology couldn’t do half the job at a thousand times the price.
With the Garrity Cap, ElecTrek’s operating costs would plummet, the citizens would get their electricity and nothing else but clean, sweet Texas air. And Davis… well, this gig was like printing money, with a hundred more customers lined up once he was done.
A black car with a state government license plate appeared from behind the nearest of the generating stations. It pulled up to the parking lot where Davis stood. Two men got out.
Davis reached out a hand. “Stan, how are you?”
Stan Wasserman introduced the heavyset man beside him as Ralph Lewis, head of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the state agency that approved environmental permits and provided oversight for utilities.
“Commissioner, it’s a great pleasure to meet you,” Davis said, shaking the hand of the unexpected official. He knew Lewis by reputation; most citizens did too. An industry insider elevated to a government official, Lewis was well known for his colorful approach to regulations. In a TV interview that had gone viral, he had been quoted as saying that since scientists couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth about climate change, they shouldn’t be the ones setting limits on industrial emissions. When asked who should, he had famously replied, “Naturally, the people who know it best. Industry.”
Davis didn’t care what the rules were or who made the decisions, as long as those rules resulted in an expenditure by the power companies. The bigger the expense, the better. It just meant more savings once the Garrity Cap was installed.
Lewis’s grip was strong and his voice gruff. “You put that colored cap on the stack?”
“Yes, sir,” Davis answered. “The Garrity Cap. Zero emissions forevermore.”
“So Stan told me. And it doesn’t matter what they burn—the type of coal?”
“No, sir, they can choose whatever source of coal they want. Carbon emissions will still be zero. Sulfur too.”
The commissioner turned toward the tall smokestack, seeming to judge for himself whether emissions were indeed zero. He waved at Wasserman. “You sure number four is still running?”
Stan Wasserman laughed. “Hard to believe, Ralph, but we’ve got unit four running at maximum turbine speed today. Doing the same for the other three units too… comparing apples to apples.”
The commissioner nodded, his stubby fingers rubbed across his chin. “This could be good, real good. Will ya switch to Texas coal?”
Wasserman shrugged. “I don’t see why not. Whether we’re burning subbituminous from Wyoming or lignite from Texas, once you exclude emissions control, the cost per BTU is pretty similar. Clean coal, dirty coal. It doesn’t matter.”
“Don’t call it dirty,” Commissioner Lewis said. “Rename it. Call it clean lignite, the pride of Texas.”
“Clean lignite,” Wasserman repeated. “Now that’s a word combination you don’t hear every day.”
“If y’all have some free cash floatin’ around, you might think about investing in Texas lignite stock. After we get done rebranding, as they say, I’d be surprised if those stocks didn’t take off for the heavens.” The commissioner turned to Davis, who ignored the obvious insider trading remark. “How fast can you get caps on the other three stacks?”
Davis knew the question was coming, and he was ready. “Commissioner, you’ll be happy to hear that I have three more caps sitting in a warehouse less than an hour away. As soon as Stan gives me the green light, we’ll get them installed faster than you can get the TV news cameras out here.”
“I tell you, son, you readin’ my mind.”
Having the air quality commissioner for the state of Texas standing right in front of him was an unexpected bonus. The timing was perfect. Davis reached into his pocket and pulled out a smaller version of the easily recognizable blue-and-orange cap. He held it up for both men to see.
“What the hell, Davis?” Stan said. “You always carry one of these around to do your magician’s trick?”
“The trick’s even better this time,” Davis said. “With the commissioner here, it’s a good time to unveil phase two of my plan.”
Both men looked at the small PVC pipe, perplexed. It had none of the grand statement made by the huge cap on top of the smokestack. But once its purpose was understood, the little brother packed just as much punch.
“Phase two goes way beyond power generation, beyond every industrial emission. Let me show you.” Davis opened the door to his rental car and pressed the start engine button. He closed the car door and, with the engine still running, walked to the rear bumper
and bent down, coughing for effect. “Typical car exhaust. Plenty of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. Bad stuff, even with today’s auto emissions standards.”
He fitted the cap over the exhaust pipe and remained squatting, his head very near the exhaust pipe. He took a deep breath. “As fresh as a spring morning. Gentlemen, with the Garrity Exhaust Connector, that smog layer hovering over Houston that we’re all so familiar with? We’ll never see it again. I’ve already contracted with a company that can have a half million of these manufactured in a few weeks.”
The commissioner seemed deep in thought. “Well, I’ll be damned. Same thing? Zero emissions?”
“Yes, sir,” Davis answered.
“No carbon at all?”
“None.”
“Jesus,” the commissioner said. He turned to Wasserman. “A two-for-one.” He rubbed his chin again. “Yeah… we could do some mighty fine promotions on this one. This little gadget on the tail end of every car makes good ol’ Texas gasoline a lot more attractive, plus it gets rid of the global warming thing all at the same time.”
Wasserman laughed. “Damn, Ralph. Aren’t you the guy who says global warming is all a hoax?”
“Hell, it’s just politics, Stan. We say what we say. But now… we got a chance to act. The public loves action.”
Wasserman shook his head, a good-natured smile on his face. “You know, Ralph, the wonders of this world will never cease to amaze me.” He slapped the commissioner’s back. “Ralph Lewis, the face of the climate change deniers everywhere, is now going to be the world’s savior. The guy who solves global warming.”
They were neglecting Davis’s role in world salvation, but it didn’t bother him in the least. Let the big dogs take credit—that was his motto. As long as their cash kept rolling in, it was all good.
The Quantum Series Box Set Page 41