[becton@localhost /] $
“That’s what I figured. He was probably using this little controller to initiate the belt functions. It’s just an older-model smartphone with the original OS gutted and replaced with Linux. The display is mounted upside-down so that when you’re wearing the belt, you can just lean your head down to control things. Simple, really.”
“But what does it do?” Griffith asked.
“Might be a lot,” the supervisor answered. He held up the motorcycle helmet, its visor in the down position. “That’s no LED. It’s one of the transfer chair strobes. We had some spares in inventory, and one is listed as missing.”
He tilted the helmet, allowing everyone to peer inside. “You see the integrated circuit?” He pointed to a tiny chip glued next to the yellow light. A narrow sliver of metal connected the two. “That’s a Bluetooth chip. The belt is signaling the strobe to fire. This setup is the same as the transfer chairs. Becton just made it portable.”
“So, Becton was jumping through quantum space?” Ibarra asked. “Just like our katanauts do?”
“Possibly,” the supervisor said. “At the very least, he was freezing time like the transfer chairs do.”
The engineer gave a thumbs up. “Cool. There’s probably some Linux commands in this controller that communicate to the helmet.” He typed with enthusiasm on the small keyboard, and the display responded with a second line:
[becton@localhost /] $ Root commands disabled. Enter password:
“Dang.” His joy faded. The colon at the end of the line blinked, awaiting his response. “Yeah, we’ll need Becton’s password to go any further.”
Griffith shook his head. “We got this far at the FBI lab. Unfortunately, our search of Becton’s house and belongings didn’t turn up any obvious passwords.”
“Can you hack into it?” Daniel asked.
The engineer shrugged. “Linux is pretty secure. That’s a root command prompt, which means there’s nothing but the operating system running. No higher-level software, no internet connection, no back doors. It’d be tough to defeat.”
“Try empros,” Griffith suggested. “Spelled e-m-p-r-o-s.”
The engineer typed in the foreign-sounding word, but it was rejected as invalid. “Not a term we use around NASA. What does it mean?”
“I don’t know. It was on a diagram we found at Becton’s house. Just thought I’d try it. Maybe flowing empros? Give that a try.”
The engineer typed again with no success.
Marie Kendrick had been standing quietly in the background as the engineers did their job of examination and analysis. But now, she stepped forward waving a hand in the air. “Wait, wait. That word you just used. I’ve heard it before.”
The room became quiet, and she spoke almost to herself.
“Flowing empros.” Marie emphasized the unfamiliar word. “I’m not sure what it means, but I overheard Zin and Becton speaking about it just a few weeks ago.”
She addressed Daniel directly. “Zin said he’d have more information for Becton when he got back from Geneva. I remember Becton seemed disturbed that day, upset that he wasn’t part of the CERN team and wasn’t getting answers from Zin. Of course, Zin is usually tight-lipped about technology, but now it’s beginning to make sense. Becton seemed to want this empros thing. It may be what Zin and the CERN team are working on.”
She glanced between Griffith and Daniel. “Sorry, but at least some of your answers might be in Geneva after all.”
Daniel had worked with her long enough to know that Marie’s instincts were good. She’d connected the dots, and the trail led to CERN—and Zin. Marie’s tip wouldn’t be hard to confirm. One phone call would do it. Easy, when you had access to one of the leading particle physicists in the world.
He owed Nala a call anyway.
8 Switzerland
Daniel sat alone in a break room, his phone against his ear.
Her voice was silky but plaintive. “I missed you. I rolled over and you weren’t there.”
He’d slipped out before sunrise, Nala still wrapped in the sheets of his bed. “Sorry. Early flight. I didn’t want to wake you. Did you find the coffee?”
“Yeah, thanks. I’m on my third cup. Your bagels are crap, but I’ll live.”
Daniel could picture her sitting at his kitchen table, likely wearing nothing but the oversized dress shirt she’d confiscated from his closet and claimed as her own. Comfortable, from her perspective. Sizzling, from his.
Daniel took a deep breath. “Sorry, but I need to talk to you about something else.”
There was a pause on the other end. “Business?”
“Yeah. I guess our relationship is… complicated?” When your lover was also a prominent scientist, there was no avoiding it. They’d never get past the facts of how they’d met.
“What do you need?” she asked, shifting ever so slightly into a more businesslike tone.
“The usual. Guidance from a particle physicist.” Daniel detected a smile on the other end of the phone. She wasn’t pissed yet.
Daniel relayed the conversation with the NASA engineers and Marie. He left out the parts related to the belt and the coin, figuring these items weren’t public knowledge and might end up as FBI evidence of criminal activity.
She listened silently and then answered. “Well, I’m not familiar with that term, flowing empros. But I can confirm Marie’s hunch. There’s a CERN team working on quantum time.”
“Quantum time?”
“Yeah, you know. Tiny snippets of time. Quantum stuff we can’t see or feel because it’s too small. Time is like that too. Ever heard of a chronon?”
The name sounded vaguely time-like, but that wasn’t enough to give it any definition. “Not really.”
“A chronon is a discrete unit of time. A quantum tick of the clock. You can’t subdivide time any smaller. Theoretically, it’s the time it takes to push an electron to a higher orbital, but it’s not like anyone has ever measured that. It’s kind of a new frontier in physics.”
“But the people at CERN know more?”
“They do. They’re the experts. Make sure you talk to a guy named Mathieu Tournier. He knows his stuff. Or maybe Chloe Demers—she’s great. I’ll text you their phone numbers and let Mathieu know you’ll be calling.”
“Thanks, I will. And I’m sorry about this whole mess. I didn’t want to disappear to Florida.”
“You’re the famous Dr. Daniel Rice,” she said. “I’m getting used to it. I’ll catch a flight back to Chicago this afternoon.”
“Yeah, I might not make it back to Washington for another day or so.”
“You’ll be lucky if you get back in a week, I’d say.”
“I kind of screwed up the weekend plans, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, well.” She paused. “You’re a long way away and probably about to go a lot farther as soon as you talk to Mathieu. I have no idea why you’re even involved in whatever the FBI is investigating, and you clearly don’t want to tell me.” She sighed. “Yeah, sure, I’d much rather be jumping you under the trees somewhere out on the Appalachian Trail right now, but I guess you can’t have everything.”
She had a way of letting him know precisely what he was missing. “Um, yeah. Me too. I’ll call you when I get home, okay?”
There was another few seconds of silence. “Daniel? Don’t forget about me, not even for a chronon.” It was more of a plea than a demand, and Daniel detected a smile at the end.
The Appalachian Mountains popped into his mind, a mental image of a lonely trail now beckoning him to get outdoors for an entirely different reason. His answer was sincere. “How could I?”
The phone disconnected. Their conversations always ended that way. Nala never said goodbye.
********************
The next phone call, to Mathieu Tournier, was brief. Given the involvement of the FBI, he offered to help, but he said he’d need to personally examine the technology in question. It couldn’t be done over the pho
ne.
Marie, Nala, and now Mathieu. They all pointed to Geneva. Zin would be there too, and he might be the most compelling reason of all to go. A long trip, but fortunately for Daniel Rice and Agent Griffith, a Gulfstream G-550 is capable of transatlantic flight.
Griffith made the decision, and Daniel complied.
Eight hours after leaving Florida and with enough sleep to get by, Daniel gazed out the window as the plane descended through a layer of broken clouds. The lush green countryside of the Swiss-French border was punctuated by slate-gray mountains rising in the distance, their sharp peaks and razor edges tinged in white.
The Alps were more than beautiful. For Daniel, they were another list, one of many stored in his head. With more than a hundred peaks above four thousand meters, he couldn’t name them all from memory, but that didn’t stop him from trying. Mont Blanc, 4810. Weisshorn, 4505. Jungfrau, 4158. Mönch, 4107. Matterhorn, 4478. The list went on and the rote memory test helped to calm the conflicts rampaging through his head.
A message from the future embedded in a coin. A dead man’s attempt to manipulate time or space or both. Chronons. Flowing empros, whatever that meant. Confusion dominated his thoughts, a sure sign he didn’t have enough information to reach the conclusions he sought.
The plane turned to final approach, a fact imagined in Daniel’s head and confirmed by the sound of landing gear descending and locking into place. He looked out the window, searching for any signs of the 27-kilometer ring of the Large Hadron Collider. He didn’t find any. This astonishingly complex science facility was mostly underground.
Extending from the outskirts of Geneva well into France, the LHC is a magnetic racetrack for two opposing beams of protons. When they collide at near light speed, the protons shred into exotic quantum particles that wink into existence, only to decay into nothing a microsecond later. Modern physics of the very small, staged on a grand scale.
Their Sunday-morning arrival would normally have left them with a day to kill before they’d have a chance to meet with CERN physicists, but connections helped. Mathieu Tournier was at the airport to greet them.
A young man of slight build, with long curly blond hair and a slightly darker beard, Mathieu displayed a nervousness in his manner. “So glad to meet you, Dr. Rice,” he said, shaking Daniel’s hand and then greeting Agent Griffith. Griffith carried a duffel bag large enough to hold Becton’s toys.
Mathieu motioned to a young woman standing a pace behind him. “My laboratory partner, Chloe Demers.” With jet-black hair, purple bangs, several piercings and a lightning bolt tattoo near the corner of one eye, she fit the description of emo-punk—at least, as much as Daniel knew about the European style.
Mathieu guided them to a parking lot, switching easily between English when speaking to Daniel and Griffith and French when speaking to Chloe. “Sorry you had to come all this way,” Mathieu said as they stopped in front of a three-wheeled minicar.
“Probably necessary,” Daniel said. “Of course, a private jet makes travel a lot easier.” He peeked through the car’s side window. There was a backseat, but filling it with anything more than a small dog and a bag of groceries would be challenging. Their transportation had just shifted from luxurious to cramped.
Chloe pointed a finger to the front passenger seat and pushed Daniel in that direction. “You sit. I sit back. C’est bien.” Her enchanting French accent didn’t match her somewhat severe exterior.
Every seat now claimed, that left Griffith and his large duffel. Somehow, he managed to squeeze in the back, though Chloe ended up more on his lap than the seat. Griffith didn’t seem to mind being tangled up, keeping one arm on the duffel and the other around the young woman’s waist. She paid no attention, as if climbing onto a man she’d never met was an everyday occurrence. In this tin can, maybe it was.
Mathieu sped out of the parking lot, chatting as fast as he drove. “Your television programs, Dr. Rice. I’ve watched them all. So wonderful to see science presented in a way that the average person can understand.”
“I’m glad you like them. CERN has a great public outreach program too.”
“Perhaps.” Mathieu nodded, holding one hand on the steering wheel and the other out an open window. Gusts of wind were in the process of rearranging Griffith’s silver hair on one side. Chloe pushed the duffel to block the wind and helpfully ran a hand across his head to smooth the hair down.
“Merci,” Griffith whispered, his grizzled-FBI-veteran eyes darting uncontrollably to the exotic Swiss miss on his knee.
“Unfortunately,” Mathieu continued, “CERN also has a history of hiding behind bureaucracy.”
Extra dimensions of space had first been discovered at the Large Hadron Collider, but it had been years before anyone on the outside had known about it. Maybe they were repeating the same mistake with empros. Daniel still had no idea what the word represented. Nala’s suggestion that time, like matter, came in quantum packets was the most information he’d uncovered.
“Is your quantum time project classified?”
Mathieu shook his head. “Not strictly. Not like before. But they have made no announcements.”
Daniel tried to ignore the reshuffling of cramped limbs going on in the backseat. “But have you made progress worth announcing?”
Mathieu’s grin grew wide, and he took his eyes off the road for a moment, glancing at Daniel. “Oh, yes. I hope to show you. Dr. Rice, you simply won’t believe what we can do.”
9 Alpha Prime
The Swiss countryside on the outskirts of Geneva was surprisingly green for early October. Like most parts of the world, summer stretched a month longer these days. Vineyards flashed by, ripe grapes hanging from the vines ready to be harvested. Stark rectangular buildings intermixed with the occasional cow pasture or Peugeot dealership, a mashup of suburbs, offices and farms with people and cars everywhere.
As they drove, Daniel explained the purpose of their visit but kept it limited to the function of the makeshift belt. Left unsaid was what a prominent scientist and an FBI agent might do with a belt that could jump to the future. Mathieu didn’t ask any questions, though he glanced over his shoulder to Griffith, looking somewhat uncomfortable about the lawman in the backseat of his car. Exotic Chloe, on the other hand, was so relaxed on Griffith’s lap that her head rested against his. Of course, there wasn’t much room to separate within their doghouse-sized space.
“Where are we heading?” Daniel asked.
Mathieu pointed out the open car window and shouted over the wind. “Over there. At the CERN Meyrin. We’re going to our newest lab, Alpha Prime.”
Daniel had researched during the flight and recalled reading about the Alpha project, one of many at CERN. Physicists use the protons and electrons blasting from the accelerator to create their negative counterparts: antiprotons and positrons, commonly known as antimatter.
Antimatter instantly annihilates when it comes in contact with ordinary matter. In the comic books, there’s always a cataclysmic explosion that takes out half a city, but in reality, antimatter is a relatively benign research material, collected in trace quantities within an intense magnetic field called a Penning trap. When annihilation does occur, it produces sparks too small to see.
“I thought Alpha had been around for a while?” Daniel asked.
“It has, since 2005. But this is Alpha Prime.” Mathieu grinned. “Same facility, same antimatter, but a different purpose. Very different. You’ll see.”
They passed by several tall apartment buildings and through another traffic circle. The green countryside disappeared, replaced by windowless concrete structures and a scattering of 1970s-era blocky office buildings.
“Meyrin.” Mathieu waved a hand out the window. Daniel wasn’t expecting beauty, but this industrial park was as ugly as they came. Mathieu acknowledged Daniel’s lackluster response. “Yes. Not as attractive as Fermilab. We’re working on that.” He shrugged. “Paint.”
One or two of the gray concrete walls ha
d been splashed with colorful designs. A far cry from Wilson Hall or the elegant entryway arch at Fermilab, but it matched the temperament of the very frugal Swiss.
They passed through a security gate and turned down a narrow street marked, Rue A. Einstein. Mathieu parked in front of a stark white building that looked more like a warehouse than a nucleus of science. “Welcome to Alpha Prime.”
Griffith squeezed from the tiny backseat like an innertube bulging from a ruptured bicycle tire. Still, he’d probably volunteer for backseat duty on the return trip, assuming Chloe was coming along. She slipped a hand on his arm as they walked to the building’s back door entrance.
Or perhaps it was just an ugly front door. Regardless, there was no reception, no public display describing the science that went on inside, just a security card reader and a dull beige hallway.
The hallway opened to a catwalk above a workroom floor. Below them, a chaos of pipes and wires passed through and around a set of aluminum vats that could easily have been lifted from a brewery. Racks of electronics filled one wall, with still more wires pouring out. How anyone managed to know which wire connected to each component was a mystery.
Mathieu reached over a railing and pointed to one of the beer brewing vats lying on its side. Huge chrome-colored pipes protruded from both ends. Some of the pipes were covered in white frost, indicating cryogenics, a common need in high-energy physics. “That’s the Penning trap where the antimatter is held. The trap itself is an interior brass pipe only ten centimeters in diameter. The rest is supporting apparatus.”
“How long does it take to produce the antimatter you need?” Daniel asked.
“It’s never-ending,” Mathieu answered. “As long as the accelerator is running, we’re creating antimatter. It annihilates almost as fast as we can make it. Zin is helping us with that issue.”
Two flights of stairs brought them below ground and to a door marked Laboratoire de Basse Énergie.
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