Marie tapped on the side of the headband and popped back into its strangely beautiful but overwhelming visualization. She ignored the complexity of the 3-D floor and the fuzzy multiple images of Thomas and focused on the multicolored bubbles all around. The ones nearby looked just as they had before, but the lone bubble in the distance had changed substantially. It was larger now and bulging dramatically on one side. She thought of Daniel in Texas.
Is it possible? Can I see that far?
“What’s the compression ratio for these four-dimensional spaces? You know, weird-world distances compared to real world.”
Nala had finished her communication with Jan and spoke as if she was on autopilot. “Compression varies. Anywhere from negligible to 99 percent, depending on the expansion size.”
She appeared to be reciting from memory, but a faraway look made it clear she was pondering something far more important.
“What?” Marie asked. “You and Jan figured something out, didn’t you?”
Nala brushed her hair back with one hand, staring at nothing. “Yeah, I think so. Jan was right, density is the key.” She shook her head. “I understand it, but I need to let this settle in before I really believe it.”
Marie had watched part of their conversation, but that didn’t mean the language of physics made sense. Clearly, the exchange meant something more to Nala. “You found a way out?”
“No, at least not directly. But I think I know how we got here.” Thomas stopped eating and eyed Nala with interest.
She explained. “Before the big implosion, Thomas and I were testing various volumes of four-dimensional spatial expansion, and we began seeing an instability that affected 3-D space. Waves were literally passing through our lab, and I had no idea why. But now I do.”
She turned to Thomas. “It’s the density—technically the baryon-to-boson ratio, but it’s the same thing. Greater mass in a smaller volume leads to unstable four-dimensional space, which then causes an interaction with neighboring three-dimensional space. We created a very unstable chunk of real estate and it collapsed, taking us with it. Sorry, Thomas, my fault.”
Thomas didn’t seem too concerned, or else he was a very forgiving type of person.
“Jan and I had talked about this before,” Nala continued, “but it was not much more than a guess. He’s got the data now. In fact, he found the inflection point—the exact density where instability starts to occur.”
“Well, good for him,” Thomas said.
Nala looked perplexed. “At first, I didn’t want to believe him, but he’s calculated it to six-digit accuracy. This is weird shit—creepy-god kind of weird. According to Jan, our tests started going haywire precisely when mass density reached nine point four seven times ten to the minus twenty-seven kilograms per cubic meter.”
Thomas perked up. “Wait a second, that’s the value for critical density, isn’t it?”
Nala nodded. “It’s a hell of a coincidence. Either that or we’ve just confirmed one of the most mind-boggling parameters in our very strange universe.”
39 Evacuation
Daniel pressed to one side of the hallway as several FEMA team members passed by carrying electronic equipment and a disassembled antenna. Sometime in the next thirty minutes, the entire crew, Jeffrey Finch and Daniel included, would be falling back about ten miles to a safer location.
The number of FEMA and Texas state emergency personnel had grown even since Daniel had arrived, and their efforts to evacuate the area were aided by announcements from the governor, the mayor of Austin and the sheriff of Bastrop County. Still, there were holdouts even near the power plant. Reports of people pointing rifles out their windows kept emergency personnel at bay. The local authorities took those cases, attempting to identify relatives who might talk the obstinate cranks to safety.
Daniel ducked into an empty room just off the hallway and checked for any new messages from Jan, Park, or anyone from Romania. He couldn’t help but wonder about Marie’s fate. Her last words had made it clear that she was impatient. But an impulsive attempt to vault into the extradimensional prison that had trapped Nala and Thomas was lunacy.
There might be more going on than just frustration. Was her grasp on reality becoming tenuous? Perhaps it was spurred by the alien-induced psychosis, as she herself had suggested. Or was she just being irrational?
Daniel switched to a self-critique, his usual approach when an initial assessment didn’t feel right. He wasn’t at Fermilab, didn’t have all the information and was in no position to judge. Marie’s action might have been impulsive, but if a man had done the same, he’d probably be deemed heroic. Certainly not irrational.
He took a deep breath and tried to recharacterize the Marie he knew in a new light. She was gone, that much was clear. A call to Jan had confirmed it. A security guard had seen her jump but never heard the thump of a body hitting concrete. They’d sent a rescue team member to the bottom of the pit but found nothing. Under normal circumstances, someone disappearing into thin air would be cause for alarm, but in this case, it was probably a good thing.
If she made it to the other side of the singularity, would Marie be able to help? She’d seemed to think so, but simply assuming she could see more on the inside wasn’t the best of plans. Not that Daniel had anything better. He should. It was what the famous Daniel Rice was known for—seeing the detail that no one else did and finding the solutions. He’d need to focus, but being pulled in two directions wasn’t helping.
His phone rang. A call from the one person who might resolve this crisis. “Jan, any news?”
“Yes, I just heard from them,” Jan said. His voice was more upbeat than the previous call. “It’s hard to believe, but Marie is inside. There’s a path of some kind, and it goes all the way through. Marie found it with that headband.”
“An opening between 3-D and 4-D space?” Daniel asked. It was exactly what they’d needed—what Daniel had asked about when Marie had first visualized the glowing spheres.
“Not an opening in any conventional sense,” Jan said. “Don’t expect to be able to throw in a rope and pull them out. It’s an area where 3-D space has collapsed to a point, but it’s also a gravity well, so objects are apparently able to pass through to the other side.”
“A one-way trip, then,” Daniel said. It wasn’t a question, but Jan’s confirmation would help him picture the problem.
“One-way,” Jan said. “I’m afraid so. It does give us another path to provide supplies, but whatever we throw in will never come out again.”
Daniel’s anxiety level was going nowhere but up. Nala and Thomas trapped, and now Marie too.
Jan explained how communications had improved. Daniel listened, but Jan’s voice began to fade into the background as his attention focused on the small office where he stood. It was shaking. The walls were moving.
Are we having an earthquake?
“Hold on, Jan,” he said. “Something’s up.”
The floor rolled as if someone had picked up one end of the carpet and shaken it. The wave passed through the room, through Daniel and through the wall behind him. A smaller wave followed it, and another, slowly dampening until the strange effect was no longer noticeable. He’d been in an earthquake before. This was something very different.
He heard a voice from the hallway. “Fall back. Everyone out. Now!”
40 Density
Marie plopped on the floor, sitting between Nala and Thomas. Nala was onto something, but it was impossible to decipher the advanced physics gobbledygook. “Sorry, I really don’t follow any of this. Critical density? You talk about it like it’s some mystical number.”
“Mystical. Not a bad description,” Thomas said.
Nala seemed as confused as anyone. “Most people have never heard of it. I’ll explain, but you might want to take that crown off first.” She gestured with both hands like her head was going to explode. “Crazy stuff.”
The exploding head metaphor was a terribly overused joke. Mar
ie took the headband off anyway.
“The universe is expanding, right?” Nala said. Marie nodded. Edwin Hubble had discovered this in the 1920s. “And gravity tries to halt that expansion by pulling things together. More mass, more gravity. Critical density is a number with deep meaning. It tells you the precise amount of mass that is needed to exactly cancel expansion. It’s what makes our universe flat.”
Marie had read about the flat universe, but it was one of those social media memes that seemed unimportant. “Makes the universe sound a bit boring. You know, flat instead of exotic.”
“It’s anything but boring,” Nala said. “It’s fundamental. What existed before the Big Bang?”
Changing the subject seemed to be common for physicists, but Marie understood why they did it. When the topic was complex, an analogy often helped. She pondered the question. “Jan brought this up too. Nobody knows what came before the Big Bang. That’s the edge of scientific knowledge.”
“Not true,” Nala answered. “Astrophysicists are pretty sure, but they haven’t explained it very well to everyone else. The data comes from two satellites, one in 2000 and another in 2013. Being from NASA, you’ve probably heard of them—WMAP and Planck?”
“Rings a bell, but I’m in human spaceflight. Those missions were probably research,” Marie answered.
“Okay. But you probably know what those missions produced—almost everyone does. They mapped the cosmic microwave background radiation, the leftovers from the Big Bang.”
“Ah, yes, now I remember. A spotty orange-and-blue map of the whole night sky.”
“Right. The map itself is fairly well known, but most people never heard what happened after that map circulated on the internet. The scientists used the data to make precise calculations of two numbers: critical density—the tipping point for expansion versus gravity—and the actual density of the universe.”
Nala paused, either in thought or maybe just for dramatic effect. “They’re the same number. Critical density and actual density are exactly the same, to the degree that we can measure them. There’s absolutely no reason that they should be the same, they just are.”
“Is that bad?” Marie asked, still not sure of the deep meaning that Nala apparently saw.
“It’s not good or bad. It’s flat. It’s like sitting down at a restaurant, picking from the menu blindfolded and then finding out at the end of the meal that the bill is exactly the amount of money you happen to have in your wallet, to the penny. A flat universe happens to have exactly the right amount of mass to perfectly balance out its expansion. What’s more, Jan says we just confirmed it from an entirely different angle. Expanded four-dimensional space becomes unstable at exactly the same density.”
“Which means?”
“Think about it. All the expansion energy in the universe is completely canceled by all the mass energy. The pluses and the minuses perfectly balance to zero. Taken as a whole, the universe is literally nothing. And that tells you where it came from.”
“Nothing?” Marie asked, finally beginning to see Nala’s point.
Nala nodded. “Our universe and everything in it sprang from nothing. Prior to the Big Bang, there was nothing. No mass, no energy, no space. Nothing. The void, as they call it. It’s hard to wrap your head around that idea, but it’s reality and we just helped to prove it. There’s no reason that 4-D space should obey this same rule, but it does.”
Something from nothing. It had come up in Core’s answer to one of Jan’s questions. Marie hadn’t realized it at the time, but Core might have been pointing the way. There was something else in the back of her mind. She couldn’t put a finger on it, but Nala’s explanation was almost like an extension of the visualizations.
“I don’t think any of this is a coincidence,” Nala said. “It’s—”
The light from the singularity flashed off and then back on again, freezing her in midsentence. Nala looked at Thomas, who hadn’t disappeared. Thomas looked at Marie, with the headband still in her hand. And Marie hoped for an explanation from either one of them. “Is this flashing, like, a regular occurrence?”
“It’s becoming more frequent,” Nala said. “Anyone have any fuzzy thoughts that feel like a dream?”
No one said anything. Nala patted herself down like she was checking for wounds. “It could be something small, maybe something we wouldn’t even notice.”
“I’m alive this time,” Thomas said. “Two out of four. Not bad.”
Nala leaned across and gave him a hug. “We’re in this together, big guy.”
“This is ridiculous,” Marie said. “We’ve got to get out of here while we’re all still whole.” Marie thought more about Nala’s explanation. “There was something you said… the visualizations are so similar. I should know what it is, but I can’t quite place it.”
“Something I said?” Nala questioned. “About a flat universe? Or critical density?”
Marie tried to piece it together. Critical density. A single number that measured the stability of space. She’d seen this concept before. Colors. Ratios. All floating in a grand visualization of space.
“What was the number for critical density again?” Marie asked.
Nala picked up one of the cracker boxes and wrote on it: 9.47 × 10–27 kg / m3. “Nine point four seven times ten to the minus twenty-seven kilograms per cubic meter,” she recited.
Marie nodded. “And the actual density is the same number, right?”
“Right,” Nala said. “The ratio is exactly 1.0, which tells you the universe is flat, or that 4-D space is stable.”
The headband had been talking to her; she just hadn’t realized what it was saying until now. “That’s it!” she yelled.
Nala and Thomas were startled by her shout. They both stared silently as she stood up, placed the headband over her hair and tapped twice. Multiple spheres popped into view, hovering all around. Their colors told a story, one that she now recognized and finally understood.
The spheres glowed in various shades of color. Most were shades of blue, with numbers like 0.912, 0.974 and 0.877. In every case, the value—a density ratio—was less than one. Stable space. They were four-dimensional bubbles, probably created by Nala and Thomas during their experiments, and they weren’t going anywhere.
Yet two spheres were very different, colored in shades of deep purple. The first purple sphere surrounded them. She’d seen it both from the outside and now from the inside. Its number, provided by the visualization, was 1.324, larger than one. Unstable space, the result of a cataclysmic explosion that had destroyed much of Fermilab.
The other sphere was far beyond their position, also deep purple, but larger, bulging and distorted. Its number was 1.629, the highest ratio of any.
“You okay?” asked Nala.
“No… yes… well, I’m okay, but I’m worried that Daniel and a whole bunch of people in Texas are in big trouble.”
“You want to explain?” Nala might still be skeptical of the headband, but Marie hadn’t done a good job of explaining how she knew these things. She wasn’t entirely sure herself.
“I can see space in a very different way,” Marie said. Nala and Thomas both listened intently. “There are dozens of spheres—bubbles—all around us, and I’m pretty sure you created them. They’re colored. Most are blue, but two are purple. They all have numbers associated with them, and I never knew what the numbers meant until now. They’re ratios. I don’t know why I didn’t understand it before, but once you explained it… well, it’s obvious now.” She shrugged. “Just by looking, I can tell when four-dimensional space is unstable.”
“Holy shit,” Thomas said.
“Holy fucking shit,” Nala said.
“I like her version better,” said Thomas, pointing at Nala. “Sounds more important.”
“So, what’s this about Daniel?” Nala asked.
“He’s in Texas, called away on an assignment.” Marie explained the details of the situation, as best she knew them.
Nala picked up on one point. “So, these guys down in Texas are filling quantum space they created with smoke?”
“Yeah—well, gases, soot, whatever comes out of a power plant.”
“That’s it, then,” Nala said with authority. “It’s the density. They’re pouring a shitload of stuff into an unnaturally confined space, and the mass-to-volume ratio has skyrocketed. Their little gimmick to get rid of pollution is probably unstable as hell.”
“Then, the explosion that destroyed Fermilab…”
“Yeah,” Nala agreed. “They’re walking into the same disaster we did, and just as blind. But this one could be bigger. Maybe a lot bigger.”
“We need to warn him,” Marie said. “Jan could get a message to him.”
“Shouldn’t we have heard a big boom by now?” Thomas asked. “If the ratio is even higher than ours, doesn’t that mean this Texas bubble is even more unstable?”
Marie thought about the question and compared it with what she’d visualized. The answer wasn’t clear, but perhaps there were clues. “It’s bulging, not spherical like all the others. Maybe the distortion is relieving some of the pressure?”
Nala shrugged. “I suppose it’s possible. Density is all about mass in a given volume, but I have no idea why one bubble would be more elastic than another. Hell, this is all new. There’s a ton of stuff we just don’t know.” She turned to Thomas. “If we ever get out of here, I’ve got a long list of tests you and I are going to make.”
Thomas held up a finger. “With better safety protocols.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” Nala said with a tight smile. “I’ve learned my lesson. Promise.”
Thomas held out a bent pinky finger. “Pinky swear.”
Nala hooked her finger into his. “Really, I absolutely, positively promise.”
Nala picked up the phone and started to type another message to Jan, but Marie grabbed her hand. “Wait.” She paused in thought.
The Quantum Series Box Set Page 55