Very odd. Surreal, like a dream.
Her shoulder didn’t hurt, though it was hard to remember why she’d thought it would. She lifted the alien band from her head and examined it for damage. It looked intact, though there was something not right about it—a vague feeling that she shouldn’t be holding it at all. She finally remembered.
The headband was lost.
She had lost it and panicked. Yet now it was back in her hands.
The body.
She hopped over some debris to where she’d seen the red-haired man lying on the floor and scanned the area. No man, no sign of blood, just the dark floor covered with debris. Had he really been there? The image of the injured man was now as fuzzy as a childhood memory, that mental image of the essence of the event but with none of the detail.
The confusion was disturbing, and in another time and place she might have allowed it to overwhelm her, forcing her to seek the safety of reality. Those days were over.
I have a mission. People need me.
She tapped twice on the side of the headband, and it lit up the darkened space as if someone had powered up a searchlight.
“Oh, wow,” she whispered.
She twisted her head in all directions, absorbing the nearly magical scene it displayed. A purple glow came from everywhere, creating an elegant spherical dome that intersected the flat floor just as a soap bubble rests on a surface. The glow from its edge pulsed, first from the left and then from the right, as if the bubble had a life of its own. Its surface was translucent, and additional blue bubbles hovered beyond. It was the same collection of spheres she’d seen before, but she was now on the inside.
The floor provided its own magic, very different from the bubbles. Its position was not below her, but somehow next to her, above her, and even within her simultaneously. The limits of human eyes could detect only a surface, but the headband expanded the view to the full complexity of the 3-D world. It was almost like one of those pop-up paper cutouts that when unfolded turned flat paper into the Eiffel Tower or a three-dimensional garden of flowers. The view below was both complex and beautiful.
But she sensed yet another layer, beyond the colorful bubbles and pop-up paper cutouts. It showed yet greater complexity. The layer represented time, and she flipped to it.
The visualization was still of her surroundings, but with the movement of objects and people in a jumbled blur. The motion overwhelmed the detail, making it impossible to see a specific person or object, but each became a set of related images. It was like a photograph of a busy street scene where the photographer had left the shutter open for several minutes, causing the motion of every car and pedestrian to become a blur in the final image.
The layer was a portrayal of time, that much was clear. But unlike a timeline of what had happened in the past or would happen in the future, the blurs showed a set of probabilities of what might happen. Each portion of the blur was a conceivable position without giving away the actual result.
Like rolling dice, she thought. A shiver ran down her neck. They were words that Nala had written on the wall. Words that had suddenly become visual. Marie could see the options playing out right before her eyes, each outcome, each position of the rolling die equally valid.
As she watched, one of the blurs began to throb in a pulsating rhythm. Fear and nausea surfaced quickly, and she realized the pixels and insects would be next.
“Oh, no,” Marie yelled. “No, no, no! Not going there.”
Marie pulled the headband off, but the awful feeling didn’t subside. She squeezed the metal band hard enough to put deep creases in the palms of her hands. The band was surely off her head because both hands were in pain. Still, the pulsating scene began to separate into pixels.
“Stop it!” she yelled and fell to her knees, her heart racing. “Go away, go away, go away.” Tears filled her eyes, and she squeezed the headband ever tighter.
Concentrate on reality.
She thought of home, of ordinary things. Her kitchen, the coffeepot by the stove, the magnets on her refrigerator, the view outside to the garden. She closed her eyes. “I’m home. Not lost. Home. My home.”
Her breaths came in uncontrolled bursts of air, and her chant continued until the feeling finally disappeared. Her heart calmed, and her breathing shallowed, finally finishing with a deep inhale and a long exhale.
Marie opened her eyes. She kneeled on a darkened floor with debris all around. No pixels, no insects. Of course, they’d never been there, it was all in her mind. Concentrating had helped. Even the chanting had helped, banishing the frightening feeling of being out of control and allowing the more reliable conscious mind to take over.
Marie put a hand on her forehead. You can do this.
Her determination had renewed, just as it had when she’d made the leap into the pit. She rose to her feet and walked with purpose, pushing debris out of the way as she went.
“Nala!” she called. She repeated it several more times as she walked, eventually leaving the debris field altogether.
Far in the distance, two figures emerged from the darkness.
37 Probabilities
The two women almost bowled each other over in an enthusiastic collision in the most improbable of settings.
Nala embraced Marie, grasping both of her arms. “I thought I recognized you. You’re Daniel’s partner!” A broad smile and an expression of pure joy spread across her face. They’d only met once via videoconferencing. Nala was darker and more beautiful in person, though she looked like she could use a shower and a cup of tea.
“Marie Kendrick, at your service. We finally meet. Odd circumstances, but it’s the best I can offer.” Nala turned Marie’s hand over and touched the atomic drawing still visible on her palm.
“It turned out better than I thought,” Nala said.
“I knew it was you drawing on my hand,” Marie said, “but to tell you the truth, it was still pretty weird.” Marie reached out to Thomas and hugged the big man. “You gave me a scare when I first arrived.”
“Uh-oh,” Thomas said. “What did I do this time? Hopefully no zombies involved.”
Marie laughed. “It was just a dream, I see that now.”
“I wasn’t, like… dead, was I?”
His guess was uncannily accurate. “Um…”
“Dang,” he said. “That’s twice now. My odds seem to be getting worse.”
“Don’t say that,” Nala admonished. “It’s one possible state out of many. Thomas, we’re going to get out of here. Marie has arrived to show us the way home.” Nala locked eyes with Marie. “You are going to get us out, right? Jan and Jae-ho, they have a plan? They got you in here somehow, so there must be an exit, right?”
A tough question to answer. Well, you see, this crown on my head gives me superpowers, and I thought I’d just pop in to your interdimensional bubble and have a look around.
It didn’t sound very credible. Childish, even. Jan’s more scientific plan was sounding a lot better, even if it might take weeks to carry out.
Thomas must have noticed her hesitation. “Of course she has a plan. She’s a princess.” He pointed to the headband. “Just watch any Disney movie. They always have a plan.”
“Um… yeah,” Marie said. “The band is more advanced than it looks, but it’s not perfect. It collects information from the physical world and projects a visualization into my brain. It gives me a lot of leverage, but it can’t just bring us back home.”
“Well,” Nala said. “I wasn’t expecting ruby slippers, but I was hoping for something more along the lines of science, not magic.”
“Oh, it’s definitely not magic,” Marie said. “It’s technology. Alien.”
“Alien?” Thomas asked.
They both looked skeptical. Anyone would be. “I’ll show you. Let’s try this. Rub your hands together. Get some friction going.” They both did, but their skeptical looks didn’t change. “Okay, now turn around. Both of you.” She tapped the headband as they turned. �
�Make sure I can’t see your hands but pick a number between one and ten and hold up that many fingers.”
She flipped to an electromagnetic layer and dialed into the infrared portion of the spectrum. The view was better than any night-vision goggles, with easily recognizable heat signatures for both their bodies and their hidden but warm hands.
“Nala, seven. Thomas, four. Am I right?”
They looked at each other. “Do it again,” Thomas said. He shuffled closer to Nala to ensure their hands were hidden from view.
“Nala, six. Thomas, two. I could do this all day.”
They slowly turned. “You’re seeing heat?” Nala asked.
“Any electromagnetic radiation, any force, plus dimensional space and a whole lot more. I can even predict what you’re going to say next.”
Marie flipped to the most unusual of data layers, a kind of temporal view of outcomes based on available input. The layer came up, but it didn’t provide the same visualization that she had demonstrated to the higher-ups at Kennedy Space Center. The outcomes, spoken words or otherwise, had popped up immediately when she’d performed this trick before, but that layer had been replaced with something very different.
“What am I going to say next?” asked Thomas, in a taunting tone, but lighthearted.
A hundred versions of Thomas stood before her, each image of the man standing behind the one in front. The column receded into the distance, getting more blurred and eventually disappearing into the darkness. Each face carried a slightly different expression, some exuberant, some tired. A few seemed utterly defeated. There were a few alarming gaps in the lineup where Thomas didn’t appear at all.
“Wait a second, this is not right,” Marie said.
“Nope. I was going to say, ‘rubber baby buggy bumpers’ three times fast.” It was the Thomas at the front who spoke, but the mouths moved on several of his duplicates.
“No, I mean something’s wrong. I’m not getting the same image I was in Florida. There’s a whole bunch of you, different versions. Maybe they’re images of you at different times, but I’m not sure. It kind of feels like the rolling-dice layer I saw earlier.”
“Rolling dice?” Nala asked. “You mean you’re seeing the probability of outcomes?”
“Maybe,” Marie said. “But the rolling dice layer was fuzzy moving images. Blurry, like I couldn’t make out anything specific. This one is blurry too, but I can see duplicate versions of Thomas all in a line.” She turned to Nala. A hundred images of the woman receded into the distance. “You too.”
Nala and Thomas exchanged a glance, nodding their heads in unison. “Superposition,” they said together.
“Huh?”
“You just stepped into the quantum world,” Nala said. “Just like a quark or an electron, every possible outcome occurs and doesn’t occur. In physics, we call each possibility an eigenstate, and unfortunately we won’t know which state becomes reality until there’s an external observer.”
Thomas pointed to Marie. “Maybe she’s the external observer?”
Nala shook her head. “Nope. She’s in this quagmire too. She saw you dead, just like I did. She may have changed, too.” Nala turned to Marie. “After you found your way in here, did you see the light flash?”
“Yeah, I did. I must have fainted because I woke up and the body wasn’t there.”
“You probably didn’t faint. It was some other physical change. Anything could have happened.”
Marie thought about the dreamy recollection. “I had lost the headband. I was in a panic. But after the light flashed, I was wearing it.”
“Bingo,” Thomas said.
“You’re just as affected as we are,” Nala explained. “The crown is on your head and it’s lost—all at the same time. Its state hasn’t yet been determined.”
The memory of the lost headband was vague, but it hadn’t faded away completely. She had a sinking feeling that Nala might be right. Its permanence was questionable.
“So, I might lose it again?”
Nala nodded.
“Hoo boy.” Marie felt the knot in her stomach. “If that happens, we may never get out of here.”
38 Ratios
“He says I shouldn’t have jumped,” Marie said, translating what she visualized from the pad of paper lying on Jan’s desk. The man himself sat patiently in his office chair back in the 3-D world, no different from if Marie was in the room with him. Of course, he couldn’t see her.
“He’s right, you know,” Nala said. She put a hand on Marie’s shoulder. “Thanks for wanting to help us, but you’ve put yourself in the same danger.”
Marie removed the headband, automatically deactivating it. Best to use it in spurts to avoid, or at least delay, the psychosis that always seemed to be lurking around the corner. “A decision I can live with,” she said. “I’m still confident I can help from the inside. Just look at what we’re able to do now.”
Communication was vastly easier with the headband. Without it, the confusing view below their feet was impossible to interpret as writing. There were just too many other objects—the ceiling, the desk, the floor, the fourteen floors below Jan’s office, the various layers of rock beneath the building… it went on and on. The result was nothing more than a mishmash of shapes.
But with the headband, it all became clear. She could isolate a specific plane and viewing angle of the three-dimensional space. Jan’s desk was a good choice, allowing her to focus on a single sheet of paper. The headband also made seeing the objects in the break room easier. The blanket was a blanket, not an obscure whitish-gray mass. No wonder Nala had struggled to pick it up.
But there was one activity that was far more entertaining without the headband. Marie watched in fascination as Thomas carefully pinched a round red oval and then lifted a whole apple from the scene below. “That is so cool,” she said as he handed it to her.
“Jan’s back,” Nala said. “He’s carrying something but I can’t tell what it is.”
Marie reactivated the 3-D layer and got a fix on the man she’d argued with in person no more than an hour before. In his hand was a USB cable, much longer than the first cord, which lay unused next to Nala.
“You still have the phone, right?” Marie asked.
Nala rummaged through her bag of essentials and pulled it out. “Right here.”
Marie bent down and focused on the white wire that Jan held in the air. “And look at that, this time he’s actually holding it up.”
“Wait a second, Jan wasn’t pulling that chickenshit ‘A-square being ripped out of the page’ crap, was he?”
Marie nodded.
Nala shook her head. “So that’s why you were holding everything. Jan, Jan, Jan… we’ve got some serious talking to do when I get back. Prick.”
Marie reached out, pinching the floor where the wire dangled. “Is this how you do it?”
“Being a dimensional goddess is a learned skill,” Nala said. “But you’re doing well.”
Marie felt the wire touch her fingers and with a hard pinch managed to stop it from wiggling. She pulled and magically drew the phone-connector end of the cable through the floor.
“You got it!” Nala patted her shoulder. “Promotion to goddess first class. Don’t pull too hard, though, that was my mistake.”
“Jan’s holding the other end this time,” Marie said. “That was our mistake.” The longer cord helped too, easily providing enough length to reach between the phone and the computer on Jan’s desk. A few minutes later, Nala had located a chat app on the phone and pressed a button to connect. She waited.
Initializing USB port…
… connected to Spiegel244.
Spiegel244: We did it!
A big smile spread across Nala’s face as she typed back.
MyPhone: Works like a charm.
Spiegel244: Outstanding! Is it really you?
MyPhone: No, it’s the office cleaning lady.
Spiegel244: It’s you.
MyPhone: And you
were a prick to Marie. But let’s talk bosons.
With instant two-way communication, Jan and Nala were soon in sync on theory and evidence, along with a few snide remarks passing between them. Mostly baryons, bosons and density ratios. Marie didn’t pretend to understand it all and eventually switched her attention to Thomas, who munched on a pear he’d lifted from the page world.
“You should have been here earlier,” he said. “We stopped by the bank over at Aurora Commons. I could reach right into the vault.”
“Get out of here.”
“Really. Stacks of brand-new hundred-dollar bills. It would have been simple to lift a few bundles. So tempting. But… all I did was draw a mustache on Ben Franklin. They’ll wonder how that happened.”
Marie smiled. “I’m glad you didn’t take anything. You’re going to make it home, Thomas. You don’t want to be a criminal when you get there.”
She thought about what he’d said, and an idea formed. “How far is Aurora from here?”
“Well, in the real world, a couple of miles, but inside this bubble, distance is compressed. Getting to Aurora takes only a minute or two.”
“How far does it go? The bubble, I mean.”
Thomas swallowed a bite of pear and wiped his mouth. “Nala and I have been pretty far, probably half a mile.”
“And what’s beyond?”
“The void. At least that’s what Nala says. You can’t go there. Nothing can.”
“I doubt I’d want to. But I was wondering how far this bubble stretches.” Marie stood up. “I’ll see if I can get some better numbers for us.” She reached to the headband but hesitated. “Um… Thomas. If you ever see me kind of zoning out, do me a favor and take the headband off, would you?”
“Sure,” he said. “Does it need a reboot sometimes?”
“It… takes over my brain. It’s not a good thing, either.”
He didn’t ask for any more information, and she didn’t feel like explaining. There was something personally invasive about the creepy-crawlies, like a personal hygiene problem that’s best left vague.
The Quantum Series Box Set Page 54