by Dana Fredsti
“Hi,” she said shyly.
He stared at her in silence for a few beats, then gave her a warm smile.
“Hi.”
5
Advanced Transpatial Physics Lab, Antarctica
February 2, 2219
Three minutes before the Event
Standing at the entrance of the primary chamber, Meta paused for a long moment, wrestling with his thoughts and the unexpected flare-up with Dr. Khan. Taking a deep breath, he grasped the thick antique steel lever with both hands and pulled down. The great round aperture irised open to allow him in, then closed behind him again.
This was the very heart of the station, a vast open sphere deep underground, large enough to house a sports stadium. Almost two centuries ago, it had been constructed as a colossal neutrino observatory, originally holding more than one hundred thousand tonnes of ultra-pure, demineralized, de-ionized water. The interior surface of the sphere was still covered with hectares of gleaming golden hemispheres arranged in immaculate lines—hundreds of thousands of them, each one made of hand-blown glass and housing sophisticated photomultiplier devices.
The bright points of their light suffused the space with a surreal, breathtaking glow.
A more recent construction, a free-standing catwalk, extended from the entrance and ended at a round platform in the very center of the sphere. The trio of drone cameras shot across the open space in their pre-programmed eagerness to get in position for dramatic long shots as Dr. Meta strode down the precarious walkway.
Reaching the midpoint, he stood perfectly still. Except for an unobtrusive safety rail, the platform had only a small metal stand containing the manual override switches. Even that was unusual when an energy field, hologram, or neural network would do the job, but safety concerns required multiple redundancies and a host of backup safety measures against the unlikely case of a catastrophic systems failure.
From where Meta stood the sphere’s subterranean interior glittered like an unusually well-regimented star field. The morning’s unwelcome surprises were banished from his thoughts as he focused on the task at hand, mentally running through the pre-trial checklists. Five levels above him, in the main control room, all the technicians, engineers, and monitors checked in via their neural comlinks and awaited his signal.
All systems were go.
He took a moment to center himself.
If he was going to say anything for posterity, now was the moment. He had resisted the urge to come up with a speech ahead of time, and now he struggled for words that would convey the appropriate degree of gravitas. Nothing came to mind.
So be it.
He would keep it simple.
Here we go.
Meta raised his arms like a symphony conductor, and the air around him suddenly sprang to life, filled with a panorama of shifting, shimmering, multicolored holographic shapes—bar graphs and indicator lights showing power allocations and operation thresholds, elegant twisting Calabi–Yau manifolds, an electric gridline model of local space in all eleven dimensions, all nestled together in an elegant Fibonacci sequence.
He brought up the containment field, which at this scale looked like a marble-sized ball of dazzling brightness. The actual staging area was a rough corral, no larger than a molecule of benzene, though the energy bound by the field was magnitudes hotter than the core of the sun. According to the readouts, the will-o’-the-wisp at his fingertips employed more power than the rest of the planet combined—twice over.
Next he actuated the quantum micro display. It appeared at eye level, an oval window on the subatomic world. The holographic device was the twenty-third-century descendant of the scanning tunneling electron microscope. With the patience of a watchmaker, Meta sought out and located a whirling pair of subatomic quarks.
“Targets acquired in the operating theater,” he said aloud for the sake of the cameras.
“Roger that,” Main Control acknowledged via the neural link.
“Advancing to stage two.”
“We read you,” Control replied. “Proceed with stage two.”
Meta glanced up to check the evolving shape of the Calabi–Yau display. When its manifold arrangement was optimal, he would give the order.
“Stand by to initiate on my mark.”
“Roger that. Standing by.”
“Approaching optimal…
“Steady… steady…
“Commence warp.”
“Engaging warp.”
Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina
June 28, 1914
Forty-five seconds before the Event
Along the Miljacka River crowds of spectators, some cheering, some only staring, watch the motorcade carrying the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. He looks regal in his gleaming white military uniform, sash, and plumed helmet. The onlookers struggle to catch a glimpse as his would-be parade races down the Appel Quay at high speed. The drivers are more concerned with bomb-throwers than well-wishers.
The lead automobile takes a turn down a side street and the rest follow, only to come to a halt.
Wrong way.
As the cars attempt to reverse, a skinny, dark-eyed Serbian teenager on the street senses an opportunity. He quickly steps up to the open-topped car, whips out a pistol and fires two shots at Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, killing both.
Advanced Transpatial Physics Lab, Antarctica
February 2, 2219
Thirty seconds before the Event
The two particles circled each other from opposite ends of Meta’s viewing screen. Then, as he watched in rapt attention, the space between them began shrinking…
Shrinking…
The two touched.
Meta stared in silence, trying to process the enormity of what he was witnessing. On his comlink, the entire crew in main control began to cheer, the sound beamed directly into the auditory center of his brain. His eyes suddenly teared up, and he began to shake.
He had accomplished the impossible. Today they had successfully sent the smallest thing in existence, an elementary particle, across the span of only a few nanometers—moving almost nothing, almost nowhere. But soon they would be able to send a starship the size of a small country clear across the galaxy—and further.
The voice of one of the supervisors rose over the joyous shouts.
“Quiet down, everybody. We have a situation. We need quiet here!”
Meta strained to make out the man’s words.
“Control, what’s going on up there?” he demanded.
“Primary Chamber, do you copy?” the man said. “We read multiple anomalies within the containment area. Please advise.”
Meta’s brow furrowed. The containment field’s integrity was holding—he knew that because the entire facility hadn’t melted away. Then, on his display viewscreen, the pair of waltzing particles was joined by another pair. Then another. And another.
Shocked, the director looked up at the holographic interfaces. The local Calabi–Yau space-time topology was a psychedelic, undulating wave turning into a three-dimensional Rorschach test, while the holographic gridlines of the eleven-dimensional modeling were tesseracting in a mind-wrecking origami trick.
His stomach lurched as a horrible realization struck him.
Khan was right.
“Shut it down!” he shouted. “Abort! Abort now!” Returning to the micro display viewer he saw that—at the subatomic level—something was happening to the containment field. It wasn’t losing integrity—it was being joined by other fields, and other particles. Yet where were they coming from? The screen began to glow with a deep violet intensity—some form of Cherenkov radiation? At the same time, a torrent of particles began streaming up toward him, rising like champagne bubbles in an endless cascade.
“Primary Chamber, controls are not responding to abort command. Repeat, there is no response to—”
The neural link cut out.
6
Aboard the Vanuatu
Six days after the Event<
br />
Given the choice, Amber would’ve stayed holed up with Cam all morning, but he was well enough to leave the med-lab. She left so Merlin could help him get dressed, and headed for breakfast in the common room.
“Amber.”
Even though she recognized the voice, the hand that fell on her shoulder caused Amber to squawk in surprise.
“Jeez, Blake!”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “did I startle you?”
Blake’s BBC British accent almost managed to make the apology sound sincere, but Amber had been in his company enough to know he probably didn’t get why she’d screamed. Empathy wasn’t exactly his strong suit. Still, she responded like the accommodating middle child she’d always been.
“It’s okay.”
Even though it wasn’t.
A strong-featured man in his early forties, Blake had fought in World War II, and still wore drab olive commando gear, his dark hair cut short under a dark green beret. Amber suspected he’d never truly left the battlefield.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“I wanted to see how you were holding up.”
Amber wasn’t sure how to answer that, because she wasn’t entirely sure how she felt.
“It was nice to sleep without worrying about dinosaurs or Roundhead soldiers,” she offered.
“That seems reasonable.” Blake almost smiled, just a crinkle around the corners of his eyes and a slight twitch of his lips, before his face settled back into its normal deadpan expression. “What now, do you suppose?”
“What do you mean?”
“I…” He hesitated, looking around as if to make sure no one was listening. Amber didn’t have the heart to tell him that the ship itself could do so. “How long do we stay on this ship?” he asked, his voice low and serious. “We have no idea what this madman might have in mind.”
Amber stared at him in disbelief. “Blake, were you not paying attention when Merlin saved our lives?”
“Yes. Yes, I was.” He paused. “I just don’t entirely trust him.”
“Have you even talked to him since we boarded the Vanuatu?”
“No.”
That was a relief. It meant Blake didn’t know that Merlin had caused the Event. Things would only get worse when he found out.
“So why do you think he’s a madman?” she asked.
“Perhaps not mad, but we have no idea what he wants, or if we can believe anything he says.”
“Even after everything that’s happened.”
“Be that as it may—”
What does that even mean?
“—it baffles me that you trust someone so utterly out of the ordinary.”
Amber fought to tamp down her irritation. After all, Blake had pulled her ass out of the fire more than once since he’d found her cowering in a hotel closet, hiding from carnivorous dire wolves. Yet being with him had been like traveling with a living, breathing G.I. Joe action figure—and a paranoid one, at that.
“In case you haven’t noticed,” she replied, “nothing is ordinary these days.”
He shrugged, unable or unwilling to respond.
“Okay, then.” Exasperated, she headed down the hallway to what she hoped was the common room. Despite everything—or maybe because of it—she was ravenous.
“Where are you going?” he asked, falling into step next to her.
“Breakfast.”
“Good idea.” He nodded. “I could do with some coffee.” They entered the common room and discovered that their fellow survivors had landed on the same thought.
Professor Winston Harcourt and Nellie Bly were both enjoying breakfast—at tables on opposite sides of the room. The professor cut a dashing figure in his top hat, black frock coat, and waistcoat, looking as if he’d stepped straight out of a Victorian lithograph. He was, in fact, the very model of a distinguished-looking older gentleman. This had served him well in his former profession—that of a snake oil salesman. Tall and lanky, he made Amber think of a were-fox with his red hair and sideburns, sharp features and sharper eyes.
Nellie Bly, world-famous in her own time as an “intrepid girl reporter,” had discarded the English peasant disguise she’d been wearing when they first met. She was back in her Victorian traveling clothes—a dark blue two-piece traveling dress made of broadcloth with black camel hair trim. Nellie had also risked her life to save others, although instead of Blake’s take-no-prisoners approach, she used a combination of wit and bravery that worked just as well.
Amber wasn’t surprised to see the two eating separately. Nellie had little patience for Harcourt’s blend of arrogance and cowardice, having nearly lost her life because of it. Given a choice, Amber wouldn’t have picked him as a companion for the apocalypse, either, yet she felt sorry for him.
Both looked up when Amber and Blake entered. Nellie smiled brightly while Harcourt gave a small wave without pausing in his meal—which took up most of the tabletop. Both appeared remarkably calm at being on a ship using technology so far advanced that it might as well be magic. Then again, they would all need the ability to adapt, if they wanted to keep their sanity.
“Amber!” Nellie exclaimed. “Come sit with me, my girl. You too, Mr. Blake.”
They joined the reporter at her table. Immediately a pair of lumps extruded from the deck and wall, and swiftly molded into the shapes of chairs.
“Isn’t this wonderful?” Nellie said. “And we can have anything we want to eat and drink.”
Amber asked for coffee, bacon, and a bagel while Blake ordered a platter of smoked kippers, dry toast, and eggs. The ship quickly provided them with their requests and Amber settled down happily with her first real breakfast in days. “Oh, so good,” she mumbled between bites.
Blake eyed his food suspiciously before finally digging in.
They were halfway through their meals when Cam and Merlin entered the room. Cam had a new wool cloak draped over his homespun sleeveless tunic, and tartan pants. With his shaggy black hair, the silver torc around his neck, and the scar on his cheek, the young Celt still looked half-wild.
“Look who’s back!” Nellie exclaimed. Standing up quickly from her chair, she ran over and gave him an exuberant hug.
“Good morning,” he said in English, albeit with a strong accent.
“Listen to you,” Nellie said. “You got yours, too!” Looping an arm through his, she pulled him over to their table. He nodded companionably at Blake, and watched in wonder as the ship provided him with a chair next to Amber.
“Welcome back to the land of the living, Camtargarus Mab Cattus,” Amber said quietly, just for him. He grinned at her and suddenly any remaining awkwardness vanished. Then his eyes fell upon the view outside. Jumping up, he ran to the window as if he were going to leap right through it, eagerly pressing his palms and forehead against the pane. He stared in rapt wonder for a moment.
“We’re flying,” he murmured. “We’re flying above the clouds themselves.”
Nellie grinned at Amber. “I know just how he feels!”
He looked at the others. “Where are we?” Then he hesitated, afraid to say more out loud. “Are we in—is this the hall of Camulos?” A mix of emotions played across his face. Amber came over to the window with him.
“We’re not in Heaven or Valhalla, if that’s what you mean,” she said with a smile. “It is cool to be flying though, isn’t it?”
He nodded. As she watched the wonder playing on his face as he peered out the window, it suddenly struck Amber how many everyday miracles she took for granted.
What it must be like, she thought, looking at all this from his perspective. Then again, he seemed to take most things pretty well whereas she was still freaked out by everything that had occurred. Maybe it was harder for her because her universe had completely fallen apart. Modern life and science had let her down, and she was still reeling from the betrayal. Cam, on the other hand, already believed in gods and goddesses, monsters and fairies—and god knows what else. All this madness was jus
t another day in the office.
Amber looked around at her five companions, feeling a fragile sprout of happiness grow inside her. After days trekking across wilderness, being held prisoner, and fighting for their lives, it was nice to see everyone well-fed, well-rested and, well, clean for a change.
The last thing she wanted to do was disrupt the mood, but they deserved to know what was going on.
“Merlin,” she said, “maybe you should tell everyone how you ended up in England.”
7
Advanced Transpatial Physics Lab, Antarctica
February 2, 2219
The Event
The light from the viewscreen suddenly roared to life as a beam of pure energy. Meta reached for the manual override, but the pulse struck him face first and the impact sent his body tumbling backward through the air. He landed on the catwalk with a painful skid, nearly losing consciousness.
Another blast of raw energy transformed the vast open space of the spherical chamber into blinding whiteness, while the structure quaked. Meta clung to the catwalk for dear life as he fought to remain conscious. His eyes burned, his vision a dizzy, jumbled mess. Shaking his head to clear it, he managed to scramble painfully to his feet, shielding his eyes with one hand. He had to get to the safety cutoff before all was lost.
It took a moment for his traumatized eyes to come into focus. There was no platform anymore—the long walkway now ended in a fiery ball of multicolored plasma, burning freely like a new sun. Another tremor shuddered through the station, nearly jostling him off the catwalk entirely. He clutched at the rail while the narrow walkway began to buckle beneath his feet, and pulled himself hand over hand back to the entryway, throwing himself upon the door release lever and sprinting out.
The rover drones dutifully followed him out before the hatchway irised closed once again, still filming him as he leaned against the wall, stunned and shaken.
Another tremor prompted him to move.
Sprinting down the main corridor proved more difficult than he expected—Meta staggered like a drunk trying to escape a burning building. His eyes were still raw from the blast, and he could barely make out the corridor ring. The lines of its curving walls and floor were jumbled and fuzzy, almost kaleidoscopic with double images. Causing even more confusion, his sense of timing was wildly distorted. One moment it seemed as if he could only move in a slow motion of stretched-out taffy-time. Then time abruptly raced ahead—popping forward in a rapid succession of herky-jerky staccato bursts.