The Quantum Series Box Set

by Douglas Phillips

“Let’s get out of here,” Nala said. She reached out and grabbed the first rung of the ladder, carefully placing one foot below it and then a second. “Kind of scary getting to the first one,” she yelled back to Marie over the wind. “But it’s sturdy once you’re on.”

  The workers who used this ladder probably wore a climbing harness and hooked carabiners into each bar on their way up and down. No such luck for the three of them. Marie reached out, taking care not to look down. A gust of wind blew the door, and it clanged against the frame just as she retracted back inside.

  And, of course, the whole world is blowing up around us.

  Nala was already ten feet below and descending. Marie held on tight to the door frame and reached a shaky hand outside, feeling for the recessed space. Another gust knocked her off-balance, and she desperately grabbed for the rung, barely holding on.

  “You can do it,” Thomas called up from below.

  She’d have to; climbing down the outside of a shaking industrial smokestack seemed to be the only option. She closed her eyes and swung a leg out, scraping across the surface to find the recess. Her foot found the solid bar, and she shifted her weight from the relative safety of the interior platform to the insanity of hanging on to the outside of a five-hundred-foot tower.

  With both hands and feet now on the ladder, she looked up. Just above was the lower edge of a blue-and-orange cap with bold lettering across its surface: Garrity Enterprises.

  Thank you, Mr. Garrity, Marie thought. The man who’d created this industrial device had certainly never expected it to act as an escape route, but here it was, functioning as a tunnel from four-dimensional space.

  A huge swirl of clouds filled the sky above the smokestack. A slash split the swirl near its center, with smoke and debris spilling out. It was almost certainly the same jagged hole they’d seen from the inside, but without the headband, she had no way to validate her suspicion. Whatever it was, it didn’t look good.

  Her motivation to get to the ground was strong, but the shaking tower and gusts of wind were stronger, and she was completely exposed. She lowered her foot to the unseen rung below, trusting there was one.

  The wind suddenly changed directions, blowing across the wall of the stack and upward to the cloud. Its intensity increased to a gale and it carried leaves and twigs. Below her, an entire tree branch slammed into the side of the tower, sending a vibration up its length.

  One step at a time. She lowered herself down one more rung. And again. I just jumped into the throat of this monster. I can climb down its outside too.

  Somewhere at the bottom, a car horn honked. She squeezed the rung tighter and dared to look down. In the parking lot was a lone white van. Two people stood outside, waving their arms. It was the most welcoming sight she’d ever seen, even if they were still hundreds of feet below. Nearby, a portion of the roof of one of the buildings ripped off and blew past the stack. She had to will her foot down to the next rung.

  The rest was like a slow-motion nightmare that never seemed to end, with the waves and shaking growing stronger as she descended. With shouts of support from below, the final rung came, and Marie stepped onto solid ground. Thomas and Nala were there, and behind them stood Daniel.

  Daniel wrapped his arms around Marie. “Message received, I’m meeting you at the stacks,” he said. The tower groaned, and Daniel took her by the arm. “Let’s get out of here.”

  They ran to the van and piled in through an open side door. The other man, whom Daniel identified as Parker, hit the gas and the van squealed out of the parking lot. Crammed into the back of a van full of electronics equipment, with the asphalt bucking up and down, Marie thought real-world space had never looked so good.

  A whole tree was uprooted on one side, and Parker zipped around as it crashed onto the road. “Welcome to Texas!” he yelled to his backseat passengers. “Sorry about the weather.”

  Daniel handed several tissues to Marie, and she dabbed at the blood that had now run down her neck. “I think they have a medical person at the command center,” Daniel said. “From there we can get an ambulance.”

  “I’ll be alright,” Marie said, even though her nose still shrieked in pain. “It could have been a lot worse.”

  “Any one of us could have vanished,” Nala said without a hint of exaggeration. “The dice fell into place as soon as we jumped.”

  “Our external observer,” Marie said, pointing at Daniel.

  “I’m still here,” Thomas said, checking his body with his hands.

  “Thankful for that,” Nala said, grabbing him around his neck and hugging him.

  “Uh-oh,” said Parker, looking in his rearview mirror.

  They turned around, peering out the back windows of the van. In the distance, the smokestack they’d just climbed down leaned first one way and then the other and sheared off at its base, collapsing onto the neighboring building in a massive cloud of dust. The deep rumble caught up to them like thunder after a lightning strike.

  As they watched, a second smokestack collapsed, taking out several electrical towers as it went down.

  “We’ll be alright if we can get out of this zone of turbulence,” Daniel said.

  “Working on it,” Parker said, and he pressed the accelerator pedal down further. The wind still whipped trees around, but the waves dampened as they drove. A minute later, they skidded into a dirt parking area. Dozens of people watched the unfolding spectacle from a nearby patio.

  “Medical assistance!” Daniel yelled as they stepped out of the van. A woman came running carrying a first-aid kit. Marie sat on a picnic table as the woman donned rubber gloves, checked Marie’s face and wiped away blood.

  Daniel sat next to her. “We have a telescope set up here. After your message, we kept an eye on the stacks. Still, it was crazy to see the three of you climbing down.”

  With her face mostly cleaned of blood, Marie turned to Daniel. “Thanks for paying attention, partner. That was close.”

  While the medical tech hovered over Marie, Daniel held out a hand and she took it. “I felt bad leaving you alone at Fermilab. And worse when you decided to go rogue. Looks like you got pretty banged up in there.”

  Marie laughed. “Stories to tell.”

  “I’d love to hear them. Buy you a beer?” he asked.

  “She’s got a broken nose,” the medical tech said. “She’s going to the hospital, not a bar.”

  “Another time,” Marie said, smiling through cotton swabs taped over each nostril. “You’ve got my number. Don’t be a stranger.”

  From the other side of the patio, a young woman yelled out, “Something’s happening out there! This one’s off the charts!”

  The slash in the swirling cloud opened to a yawning chasm that stretched across the sky and swept everything around it into its dark depths. Trees were uprooted, an entire side of one building exploded outward, and debris rose only to disappear into the chasm as if it were an enormous sewer drain in the sky.

  The power plant and the entire area surrounding it vibrated. Clouds of dust rose, and with a roar that was easily heard from their remote position, the buildings and the land exploded upward in a cataclysmic eruption. The cloud of dirt, rocks, buildings, and four smokestacks roiled into the air and drained away into the giant hole in the sky.

  A blast of wind hit them, blowing people and equipment around. Marie shielded her eyes.

  When she looked up, it was over. A few streams of brown dust and debris flowed upward, leaving behind a massive crater where the power plant had once stood.

  46 External Observer

  Marie relaxed in the comfortable patio chair and took another sip of coffee. “Haiti sounds lovely. I never knew.”

  Nala, her newest friend, sat across the table and finished the last bite of her onion-and-pepper omelet. Warm morning sunshine peeked above a line of small trees that kept the city sounds of Austin at bay.

  They enjoyed a quiet table on the outdoor patio of the hotel restaurant—their rooms paid cour
tesy of ElecTrek Inc. A comfortable night’s sleep with excellent medication had helped Marie to forget about the broken nose, though it still felt like she had a cold, and the semihard bandage the hospital had applied itched a little.

  The drawbacks of stepping into the role of interdimensional rescuer.

  A hot shower had transformed Nala into the beautiful woman that Marie knew had been hiding under the scruffy appearance the day before. She would become a fast friend—Marie was certain.

  “Of course, there’s poverty in many parts of the island,” Nala explained, “particularly Port-au-Prince. It’s what most people think of whenever I mention Haiti. But, if you get a chance, go to Île à Vache or any place along the south Caribbean coast. It’s really beautiful.”

  They’d invited Thomas and Daniel to join them, but Thomas was already on a flight back to Chicago. Apparently, he had a girlfriend who was out of her mind, first with grief and then with joy that Thomas was alive. Nala said she hadn’t even known he had a girlfriend. For such a gregarious guy, he kept his personal life remarkably private.

  Daniel indicated that he would join them—once he’d finished making a few phone calls. Typical of Daniel. Nala just rolled her eyes, and their conversation pushed on to travel, foreign cultures and languages, along with their shared interest in science. Nala turned out to be fascinated by just about everything.

  “Did you see the morning news shows?” Nala asked. Marie shook her head. “There’s a new ‘star’ hanging over the crater out there. Of course, it’s not a star—it’s a quantum singularity just like we had in the lab. I wouldn’t be surprised if this one hung around for a while. It’s the sealed end to a big chunk of inside-out 4-D space. At least, that’s my working theory.”

  “And it will just hang there?” Marie asked.

  Nala nodded. “Probably become a tourist attraction. But they should put up a sign that reminds everyone how it got there. ‘Don’t get cocky,’ or something like that.”

  “Yeah, people should keep their distance. The Fermilab version produced its own gravitational field.”

  “The headband showed you, right? That’s why you jumped in?”

  “Right. The former headband,” Marie said. An amazing device, but she wouldn’t miss it. “It went up with the power plant, probably pulverized to dust and blasted into that inside-out space.”

  Nala set down her coffee cup. “Good riddance?” She asked it as a question, and Marie had to think before she answered.

  “We should learn from our mistakes. I was trying to prove something to myself. Dumb, really. I shouldn’t have assumed the device would work as advertised. But now that it’s gone, I kind of wish it hadn’t been destroyed. I’m sure some smart engineers could have figured out how it works and then created something better, more attuned to the human brain and without the side effects.”

  “They still can,” Nala answered. “I’m sure the Dancers can make another one, and maybe even send it with some instructions this time.”

  Marie smiled. “Put a label on the side: ‘Warning: continuous use may result in intense hallucinations and a desire to leap into singularities.’”

  Nala laughed. “Sounds like half the pharmaceuticals on the market these days.”

  Marie stared at the table, not focusing on anything in particular. “You know, somebody has to take the risks or science doesn’t advance. My parents were both scientists, my mom works with stem cells and my dad is in genetics. They named me after Marie Curie. I’m sure you know, she didn’t recognize the damage she was doing to herself by handling radium until it was too late. Even after learning that she was dying, she told people, ‘There is nothing to fear in life, only more to understand.’”

  “Brave words,” Nala said.

  “A brave person,” Marie said. “I could never live up to the name.”

  Nala reached out and took her hand. “Nonsense. Thomas and I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t done what you did. It doesn’t get any braver than that.”

  Marie looked up and locked onto Nala’s eyes. “Thanks. It was mostly because of that… that…”

  “Fucking headband?” Nala answered for her.

  “Yeah. That fucking headband,” Marie said.

  Nala patted her hand. “Fantastic job expanding your vocabulary. I’m proud of you.”

  It was a good wrap-up for the alien device, a subject that Marie was ready to move away from. “So, what’s next for you?”

  Nala rubbed her arm, a bruise showing just below her wrist where Thomas had grabbed her. “Well, Fermilab has some rebuilding to do before we can get back to any lab work. But I’m going to submit a proposal that we study the baryon-to-boson ratio—carefully, of course. What we’ve found so far is that when we exceed critical density, things get unstable. We’ll need to learn why. It seems to suggest that quantum space, just like the whole universe, is flat. You really can produce something from nothing. I can’t wait to dig deeper into it.”

  Nala looked up, noticing something behind Marie. Marie twisted around to see Daniel walking toward their table. He was dressed more casually than she’d seen him before, with a V-neck pullover and jeans.

  He made brief eye contact with Marie but walked straight to Nala. He pulled out a chair and sat for a moment without saying a word.

  “Before anything else,” he said, leaning close to Nala, “I owe you an apology.” Nala sat perfectly still in her chair, her body language not giving away anything more than polite interest in what Daniel had to say.

  “I’ve neglected you, terribly,” he continued. “It’s the job, of course, but that’s not an excuse. It never was. I want to tell you that I’m sorry.”

  Nala didn’t respond immediately, but she wasn’t crossing her arms and looking the other way either. She seemed to be studying his face, looking for sincerity.

  The silence was awkward, and being a third wheel is never fun. Marie stood up. “I think I’ll just take a break.”

  Nala looked up, her expression much softer than the glare she was giving Daniel. “Don’t be long, dear friend.”

  Marie left the two alone on the patio and found a quiet place to sit in the hotel lobby. She had her own catching up to do. Marie pulled out her phone and dialed Stephanie Perrin.

  “Where are you?” Stephanie screamed into the phone as she answered. Stephanie had returned to Paris to tell her story of their mission to Ixtlub to a waiting French audience. The phone connection to France was good.

  “Austin, Texas. I’m okay. Well, I have a broken nose, but otherwise okay.”

  “Everybody is talking about you. They said the headband made you crazy and you tried to kill yourself. But then I saw the news—one reporter called you a heroine for saving those scientists at Fermilab. Putain de bordel! Marie, what’s going on?”

  A heroine. That was overstating. But as Marie recounted the events of the past twenty-four hours, she could see how it might make a good news story. There would be parts left out, of course. All the fear, the self-doubts and the hallucinations. Stephanie knew all about those parts.

  “Marie,” Stephanie said. “Tell me the truth. Are you really okay? Don’t lie to me. If you need help, I will bust into Ibarra’s office with the cameras rolling and scream bloody murder until he recognizes his duty to take care of his own employee. ESA would be all over this. NASA should be too.”

  “It’s gone,” Marie said. “The headband was destroyed.”

  “I don’t care about the headband,” Stephanie said. “What about you?”

  “Yeah, I won’t lie. It’s done some damage. I can still feel it.”

  “The hallucination you told me about?”

  “I can keep it in check.”

  “But it’s still there?”

  Marie hesitated. “Yeah, Steph, it’s still there. I think it always was. Maybe it’s been with me since I was born and was just exposed by all this mental stimulus. You know, like a genetic disease that only comes out later in life. I read that forms of psychosis are common i
n women our age, more than men. Maybe it was just my time.”

  “Get help, Marie. Professional help.”

  “Yeah, I will,” Marie responded, and meant it.

  “And if Ibarra gives you any shit, tell me. This is a big deal, and I’ve been worried sick about you ever since you told me about the side effects.”

  “Thanks, Steph… it’s really good to know I have friends.”

  “Forever,” Stephanie said. “Friends forever.”

  Two new friends, three if you counted an alien jellyfish living more than three hundred light-years away. It was both surprising and comforting to find out that people cared. When the world goes crazy, a friend can be the difference between a crushing defeat and I might just make it.

  They arranged to talk again the following week, and Marie returned to breakfast on the patio. Daniel and Nala were absorbed in a conversation. Nala was even laughing—a good sign. As Marie approached, they noticed and stopped talking, another good sign.

  Daniel deftly switched away from their private topic. “How’s the nose?”

  Marie returned to her chair opposite Nala. “It’s not bad. A little hard to breathe, but they told me swelling would be normal. It doesn’t hurt anymore. You know… drugs.”

  Marie allowed her eyes to silently flash the Daniel question to Nala. Nala responded with a small shrug and a twist of the eyebrows.

  Answer received—no headband required. Daniel still had potential, but repentance was in order. Marie smiled. He deserved whatever Nala dished out and would probably be the first to admit it. They did make a nice couple. Marie made a mental note to wish them the best, assuming the two of them left the restaurant together.

  “I woke up this morning stumped,” Daniel said. He clearly hadn’t noticed the eye-to-eye messaging going on right in front of him.

  “Why?” Marie asked.

  He looked confused. “Well, you didn’t mention the headband yesterday, and in all the rush of getting you to the hospital, I admit I didn’t think to ask. But I woke up this morning baffled. I thought the whole idea of the rescue was to take the headband in with you.”