Marie moved closer as words from another dimension formed before her eyes.
Who are you?
“Oh, my God, she sees me,” Marie whispered. The creepy feeling of being watched sent a shiver up the back of her neck. She scanned the ceiling and walls, but of course, her eyes were blind to wherever the apparition might be standing. She knew right away it was a terrible comparison. This was not a ghost or any kind of paranormal spirit. It was Nala. Flesh and blood, and she needed help.
Marie picked up a marker from Jan’s whiteboard and started writing on the wall. I’m Marie Kendrick. We’ve met. Hope you’re okay. It probably wouldn’t work; it hadn’t before. As Park had explained, the view from 4-D was too complex. But he might be wrong.
Something brushed against her shoulder, a physical touch, very light. Marie jerked her head to the left—the touch hadn’t come from Jan, who stood several feet away. That left only one other possibility.
Jan seemed to notice her sudden motion and the I-am-so-weirded-out expression on her face. “You felt her, didn’t you?” he asked.
Marie nodded. It’s not a ghost, it’s a person, she reminded herself, but her nerves didn’t seem to agree.
She reached upward, opening her hand and spreading fingers. She held her hand in the air for several seconds. The touch returned. A light tap on her index finger, a brush against her palm.
“She’s here,” Marie said, her voice hushed. “Right now.”
“Careful,” Jan said. “She might not mean you harm, but…”
A lock of Marie’s hair slid across her forehead on its own and a sensation of touch ran up her arm and across the back of her hand. She turned her hand over, palm up. Something touched her hand. It was just a tickle, like the brush of a feather. She watched as a black oval appeared in the center of her palm. She held her arm steady as another oval appeared, and a third. Marie smiled as the figure took shape. This was no ghost. There was a scientist behind that pen.
33 Particles
The touch had come from Nala. It must have been her, at least the skin of her hand. Flesh and blood, this was no ghost.
The Dancers might join tentacles as an expression of sexuality, but the human gesture is different. When one hand touches another in a handshake, it provides a connection between two people. It acknowledges, we are the same, we are familiar. The touch was certainly from Nala.
It was more than just a touch. Deeper. It felt like an interlacing of two paths. A link between their fates? Marie had been selected by Zin. A probability, a calculation of some sort. Of course, Zin couldn’t have foreseen what Marie would do with the headband or that Nala and Thomas would need her help. Could he?
Fate is an imagined property of the universe. The scientist inside her pushed the thought away.
Jan was preoccupied, copying the notes scribbled across the walls onto paper. The words ran around edges, starting on the desk and dropping to the floor. In some cases, relevant sections were missing altogether. The words were mostly Nala’s thoughts about physics. One note mentioned Thomas. It brought relief for everyone.
Jan ran his finger along the wall, following a sentence that wrapped around the edge of a bookcase. He lifted his head in thought. “She’s right. Why not? She was able to pick up the radio.” It wasn’t clear what he was talking about, but he ran out of the office and returned a minute later with a phone and a white cord.
He plugged the USB connector into a port on his laptop computer and handed the phone to Marie. “Mind offering this to her? You’re better at the handoff stuff than me.”
Better didn’t figure into it, given that Jan hadn’t once tried to hold anything for Nala to pick up. But the phone on a wire made perfect sense. Once a wire was strung between the spaces, there would be some way to communicate that didn’t involve radio technology. It was old-school, but certainly better than a pen and paper.
Marie held the phone out, leaving as much slack in the wire as she could. She waited. Was Nala still out there? With so many notes covering the walls, it was impossible to tell how long it had been since she’d written about the phone. Could she even see it?
The phone wiggled, twisting just slightly between Marie’s fingers. If Nala could pull the phone into her world, it would represent some much-needed progress. Maybe there was even an app that could make phone calls across the wire? It would be nice to hear her voice.
In quick succession, the phone disappeared, the cable snapped taut and the USB connector slipped out of the laptop port. Marie reached for the dangling wire as it flopped through midair but missed by inches. The wire and the USB connector at its end disappeared like a string of spaghetti being sucked into the mouth of the invisible man.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jan’s office was now filled with people: two other Fermilab employees and a guy from the Department of Energy. Even a cop, though it wasn’t clear why the police were needed. Dr. Park seemed to be managing the chaos as the various experts took photographs of the walls and debated the precise angle of the writing instrument used to produce the scrawl.
Jan himself was searching for a longer USB wire, thinking that the previous failure was only a matter of the distance offset between worlds.
It was all a waste of time as far as Marie was concerned. Did the precise distance really matter? The angle of her pen? Even if they could get a wired connection, it was still just an improvement in communications, not a solution.
None of the experts seemed to have any idea how to reach into whatever strange place had captured Nala and Thomas, much less how to get them out. Marie left the office and walked to the break room around the corner. Jan sat at the food and supplies table, still covered with items that Nala and Thomas might want. Someone had put the blanket on the floor to make room for more food.
Jan raised his head but didn’t say anything. He looked tired. The pad of paper he’d used to copy Nala’s notes lay on the table in front of him. It now contained additional diagrams, graphs and a few equations that were far beyond anything Marie might grasp.
“Couldn’t find a longer cord?” Marie asked.
Jan replied without looking up. “One of the security guys went to an electronics store to buy one. When he gets back, we’ll try again.”
He tapped his pencil on the pad, and his thoughts became words. “We need to know the spatial relationship relative to the singularity.”
Marie had already seen that much. “They’re in one of those bubbles I described to you. They must be.”
Jan kept tapping on his paper.
“You better start believing me,” Marie said. “I’m trying to give you accurate information.”
“No, no, it’s not that,” he said. “I believe you. You’re probably seeing the leftovers from experiments of baryon ratios we were running. Four-dimensional space that we didn’t clean up properly.”
Marie nodded. The leftovers comment made sense. She’d seen quite a few spheres of different sizes and positions, and most of them were nearby.
“So, that’s where they are, right? Out in one of these extra dimensions?”
“Probably. But it’s different, not like any four-dimensional space we’ve created before. Nala is trying to tell me, and some of what she says makes sense. They’re in a bubble, but it’s an aberration caused by the collapse. According to her notes, she seems to think it’s a pocket within the void.”
“Explain.”
“It’s a multiverse concept,” Jan said. “Used to delineate the difference between nothing and something. You’re an astronomy type, right? It’s the same concept as pre–Big Bang. Nothing before the Big Bang, something after.”
Marie processed Jan’s comments as well as a human mind could, even a mind enhanced with the alien technology. The concept of nothing had always been difficult. For centuries, human mathematics had ignored the number zero precisely because no one could quite conceptualize the purpose of a number that had no value.
The creation dilemma was also well known. M
arie even remembered a lecture from college on it. What is nothing, when even empty space is something? Explanations of the Big Bang were sometimes stymied as soon as anyone asked what had existed prior. If cosmologists answered, “we don’t know” it felt unsatisfactory, but if they answered with “nothing,” then they were stuck trying to define exactly what nothing represented and how something could spring from it spontaneously.
Marie set her headband case on the counter and reached into the refrigerator for a soda can. She leaned against the counter and refreshed her dry mouth. It had already been a long day. She reached for a pear on the table.
“Hey,” Jan said. “That’s reserved.”
There were several other fruits and snacks still on the table, untouched. “I’m hungry too,” Marie said. “We’ll get more for them tonight.” She was getting a little tired of a brainy physicist who did little more than write equations on a pad of paper. The experts down the hall were still analyzing ink, or handwriting style, or whatever they were doing. And Daniel was gone to Texas.
In the meantime, two people were trapped in hell. The situation demanded action, but she didn’t see any evidence it would come from Jan or anyone else.
“You’ve got this now,” Jessica Boyce had told her when Marie had been added to the katanaut team. One step led to another. An alien gift provided the ability to see beyond human limitations, to interpret vast amounts of data, to visualize what others could not.
Whether real or imaginary, fate doesn’t shape the events of our lives. It’s our resolve, our determination to use whatever abilities we possess that makes a difference.
Time to take control.
Marie grabbed the headband case from the counter and headed down the hallway.
The badge Fermilab had provided cleared her into the underground portion of the facility. She got lost once but backtracked and found the corridor that Daniel had guided her to the night before. The security guard at his post recognized her.
“Back again?” he asked.
“Yeah, just need to check out one more thing.” He motioned for her to sign the log. A signature and her status as a colleague of the famous Daniel Rice seemed to be enough. A minute later, she was standing at the edge of the disaster, alone this time.
Nothing had changed. The vast darkened hole in the building’s interior felt cold and empty. A slight breeze came down the corridor behind her and blew into the cavernous abyss. Bits of dust still circled the single bright light in the center. It looked like the zone of destruction might remain this way for years.
She watched the dust circling the light. It wasn’t all dust. There were larger bits too: a few pieces of broken plastic, glints of glass shards, a few splinters of wood. They circled without any evidence of being pulled downward, as if the center of this hollowed-out cavity was a planetary system unto itself.
Why didn’t it all just fall into the pit? Where was gravity? It was a question she knew she could easily answer.
Marie withdrew the headband and set the case on the ground. She’d never worn it alone before. If there were problems… well, she was on her own. She remembered what Daniel had said. Put it away, send it back to the Dancers for a full reevaluation. Daniel suggested safety.
It’ll just be a quick look, she assured herself.
She lowered the band over her hair and tapped twice. The enormous purple sphere popped into view, its filmy surface glistening from the glow of the light in its center.
She kept her eyes open, overlaying the optical world with the mental visualization. It was easy to do and starting to feel almost natural, like getting used to a new pair of glasses.
She flipped to the gravity layer and the building distorted, everything around her stretching downward, validating the body’s feeling of being pulled by the earth. But toward the middle of the vast hole, the stretching diminished, flattened. The light, and its disk of rotating debris, didn’t stretch downward at all. In the center of the blast zone, it appeared that gravity didn’t exist. If anything, there was a slight tug toward the light.
I knew it.
She flipped back to the dimensional layer and the purple sphere. Looking up to the light, she saw a detail she hadn’t noticed before. The disk of dust and debris was spiraling into the light. Nothing new there. But the spiral arms of dust seemed to be dipping just below the light, as if something else were causing a detour. It wasn’t the light that was sucking the debris in; there was something else. She couldn’t quite make out whatever was drawing the dust in, but a different angle of view might help.
With unaided eyes, she looked across the massive hole. On the far side, another corridor ended in much the same way, broken concrete and twisted rebar. The hallway on the other side was lit, the only other light filtering into the scene. Could she get there? It would give a more direct view to wherever the dust was going.
Too bad there was no floor map of the building in the headband’s list of capabilities. She would need to figure how to get there the old-fashioned way—ask for directions.
“I wonder,” she said innocently to the guard. “Could I take a look from the other side?”
“Sure,” he said. “Two flights up, then straight down the hallway to the far end. There’s another stairwell that will get you back down to this level.”
“Thanks, I won’t be long,” Marie said and started back to the stairs.
“But be careful, ma’am,” he yelled after her. “Don’t go near the edge.” The guard made a note in his logbook.
It didn’t take long. Up two flights, down a parallel hallway and then back down. As she approached, the chasm didn’t look much different from the other side.
She put the headband on once more and looked up into the darkness of the hole. It all became clear.
From this new perspective, the gravity visualization clearly displayed a funnel shape just below the singularity. Streams of dust entered its opening like water going down a drain. The perimeter of the funnel was tilted slightly, like a basketball hoop pulled down by a player hanging on its edge. It explained why the shape was almost invisible from the other side.
She watched the dust and debris draining slowly into the funnel in a whirlpool-like flow. There was no question—this was a passageway. A hole to something not below but ana or kata.
Exactly where the flow of dust ended up was impossible to tell.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Don’t be ridiculous, she thought as she scrambled back up the stairwell. You wouldn’t just pull off a manhole cover and jump into a sewer, would you?
Of course, this was anything but an access point to a sewer. This was an interdimensional passageway, hovering in a no-gravity zone in the middle of a half-destroyed building—probably leading to certain death. At least there were ladders to climb into a sewer.
Exaggerations, she told herself. You’re trying to talk yourself out of it.
The headband didn’t lie. The drain was a passageway. It had an entrance and an exit. She couldn’t describe how she knew, but there was no doubt in her mind that it provided clear passage, large enough for a person to fit through. There weren’t any rotating blades of death within its depths, no vacuum of space on the other side. The air flowed into it smoothly with normal atmospheric pressure. The headband told her so.
But there was one slight problem. The passage was a one-way trip. Down only. The air, the particles—nothing was coming back up. It wasn’t physically possible, a fact the headband had confirmed.
Marie reached her decision by the time she’d climbed the stairs to the ground level of Wilson Hall. She pulled out her phone and dialed Daniel.
34 Bluebonnets
Jeffrey Finch parked next to one of the four primary combustion buildings at the Bastrop power plant. Daniel stepped out of the car and craned his neck. A five-hundred-foot smokestack adjacent to the building reached to the sky, the swirling mass of the clouds not much farther above the blue-and-orange cap at its top. Gusty wind swirled through the parking l
ot.
“Intimidating, isn’t it?” Finch said, his voice loud over the wind.
Daniel shielded his eyes with one hand. “The center of the cloud is offset from the power plant. Could be an atmospheric effect, similar to a low-pressure system. The maximum point of vorticity in the upper atmosphere always lags behind the surface low.”
Finch laughed under his breath. “That’s quite a different reaction than I’ve seen from everyone else who stands under this monster.” He motioned toward the door in the side of the building.
Daniel shrugged. “It’s fluid dynamics. The atmosphere is complicated, that’s all I’m saying. And, yeah, it’s intimidating, too.”
They entered a hallway and descended a flight of stairs to a large basement room filled with people and the cacophony of simultaneous conversations. Some wore uniform shirts with FEMA written on the back. Almost everyone had a phone to their ear. In one corner, two state troopers in tan uniforms sat at a table, holding their cowboy-style hats in their hands. Davis Garrity, the businessman who had started the whole affair, sat across from the troopers. He looked pale.
A gray-haired man wearing a blue FEMA vest over his white shirt yelled across the chatter. “Listen up, everyone! We’re pulling the plug here and falling back to the Highway 71 command center. You’ve got sixty minutes to finish up whatever you’re doing and get your field personnel back in time to evac.”
Finch introduced Daniel to the on-site federal coordinator, Gonzalo Ayala. Ayala carried the no-nonsense look of a military field commander. “Dr. Rice,” he said in a deep baritone. “Your reputation is well known. I imagine you could shed some light on this problem?”
“I’ll try. Or connect you to people who can.”
Ayala held a firm expression in his substantial lower jaw, speckled with gray whiskers. “Good. First question—are we dealing with the Chicago scenario? The Fermilab-style disaster?”
The Quantum Series Box Set Page 52