After days of trying to do the right thing, I always dream I’m doing the wrong thing, that Dad’s vanished, probably drinking, that our house is gone, and that I am smug and stupid. I quit school, play lousy songs in a coffee-bar dive, and think it’s the center of the universe. I don’t want to commit to anything—not to my music, not to friends, not even to Denby. Something’s always falling apart, but I’m too stupid to worry. I just think it’s funny, like life’s a game. A game? Only in my dreams.
The next morning, by the time I stumble downstairs after about an hour’s sleep, Dad’s at the breakfast table, reading Entertainment Weekly and biting a piece of soy bacon with a look of infinite grief. He hates the soy, wants the real pig, or at least turkey (it’s like something has to die for it to be tasty), despite what I keep telling him about his cholesterol. I figure if he can manage to stay sober almost seventeen years, he can eat healthy, too.
Behind him, through the picture window, I see the little bay and Mom’s bridge. The hard part about still living here is all the reminders that she’s gone. Dad says that’ll be a comfort eventually, like it is for him, but it’s been almost three years and I’m still waiting.
I let loose a sound a moose might make, which Dad recognizes as a yawn.
“Same dream?” he says, slapping on a smile. “Means you’re working too hard.”
I’m better at taking that you-work-too-hard stuff from him than from Denby. But today, I bristle just the same.
“I know,” he says, sucking soy from between his teeth. “Today’s the big day when you get them to fix Prometheus and save mankind. I am proud of you. Really.”
I know he is. I also know he’s a little worried that if I’m right, they may shut down again. His job there wasn’t much, but he lost it when they closed the first time. These days he’s still connected to it, like everyone else. Literally. He manages a Jiffy Lube on the main road leading to the collider, changing oil for his former fellow employees. If they go, so does his business. Hates the job, but it’s all he’s got right now.
Yet not once in all the time I’ve been working on this, not once has he spelled that out for me, warned me of the economic consequences for us or the town. So yeah, he can tell me I work too hard.
“Right or wrong, Wade, when it’s done, do me a favor? Cut school and spend a day with Denby, okay? A day where you just kick back and don’t mention marriage, which, by the way, even though you are eighteen, I am still against.”
He may manage a Jiffy Lube, but all those AA meetings make him more like a therapist with all his healthy-mind talk. He quotes the Twelve Steps to me so often, I keep telling him he should hang a shingle.
“Like I’m really going to cut class in my senior year. Right.”
I pour a cup of coffee, slouch down into a chair, and change subjects. “Just once, I wish I could dream about things being the way I want.”
Dad gets up and pats me on the shoulder. “You probably do. You did play guitar once upon a time. Maybe you miss it.”
“Please. Everyone thinks if the subconscious says it, it must be some deep truth. What if it’s just a kluge?”
“Kluge?”
“A clumsy solution. Maybe that’s how our brains evolved. Maybe there was this totally efficient lizard brain and our human consciousness just got stuck on top of it at the last minute. Dreams? The result of a bad design.”
“So when you’re done saving the Earth, you’re going to work on evolution?”
I sip my coffee. “Maybe. It’s not very efficient.”
He knows I’m kidding, so he laughs as he walks to the garage door. In general, I try not to argue with him too much. It’s gotta be tough on his ego knowing he comes up with only half the mortgage, and the rest comes from his teen son’s automated Web-based tutorial business. Aside from saving the world, I’m also, like Anthony, really looking forward to the Prometheus scholarship. Then Dad won’t have to deal with my college bills at all and he can take some time off from work and go spend it with a girl.
But all of that comes down to the next few hours. Wouldn’t it be weird if that negative strangelet were being generated right now? I look around and try to imagine the edges of the world disintegrating. There’d probably be just one strangelet at first, but it would bump some other subatomic particle, then there’d be two, four, eight, sixteen, and eventually one would touch the outside ring and it would all be over. If someone noticed early enough, there might be time to shut the collider down, and the strangelets might die out, but you’d have to catch it fast. Brr.
Denby’s right, I’m on overload. Is the code correct? Did I go over Anthony’s corrections carefully enough? Even the fact that I didn’t find anything wrong makes me nervous, like I didn’t look hard enough. Sometimes it’s only finding mistakes and fixing them that calms me down. Should I check again, if only to help myself chill?
No, no time.
One of Mom’s projects hangs in the kitchen, an old window frame with a mirror stuck behind it. She never painted it, so the old finish on the frame is peeling. We kind of like the way it looks. I look in the mirror and try to do a little trick the Samurai used before going into battle: I stick out my tongue and make the most ridiculous face I can. It’s supposed to remind you how silly life is, how silly you are, but I don’t feel silly, just scared. And my hands still shake.
I head to school in my hybrid—another gift from the Web tutorial business. It also earned me a great mattress, a skylight, and mobile Internet connections for our computers. Car’s the best. If I keep it under thirty it runs on battery and doesn’t use a drop of gas.
What if I did miss something? For the want of a nail, the war was lost.
Wait. I can have the computer voice read the code out loud to me. That way I can check it while I’m driving. I flip open my rig on the seat next to me and press Start. It’s a slow boot. The code takes up nearly my whole drive, but it finally kicks in. Hearing it read by a robo-voice makes it tough to follow, but if I focus I can manage. Details, details. So far, so good.
For ten minutes, as I drive, I don’t hear a single mistake, but then I make one. I almost run a stop sign.
I slam on the brakes. Tires squeal, everything lurches forward. From the corner of my eye, I see the laptop fly toward the edge of the seat. I lunge to catch it. I manage to clamp my thumb and forefinger on the corner, but I’m a fraction of a second, just a fraction of a second, too slow. It slips from my fingers and slams to the hard floor with a gross crack of metal and plastic.
Damn! Damn!
I sit there, paralyzed, my heart pounding like the jack-hammer beat of the lousy seventies music Denby likes to dance to. I hate that stuff. I feel so light-headed. I hate that even more. Did I just ruin everything?
I don’t want to look, but I force myself. I pick up the rig. The display gives me the blue screen of death—a really bad sign. I try to reboot. As I do, I feel the keys wobble. It’s cracked down the freaking middle. The best I can manage is a shutdown.
Don’t panic. Don’t panic. It’s not—ha—the end of the world.
That’s right. It isn’t. Anthony has a copy on his laptop, with all the changes from last night, and there’s an earlier version on the school mainframe. Two backups. So, no problem, no problem, other than my laptop being destroyed.
That should make me feel better, but it doesn’t. I still feel like I’m going to pass out.
As I sit there freaking, a squirrel runs in front of the car. It looks at me, runs back to the sidewalk, then back in front of the car. Now he sits there like he’s waiting for me to run him over, the little white furs on his chest rising and falling with his quick breaths. We’re both frozen in the face of danger. Where’s the evolutionary advantage in that? Gotta be a kluge, in the squirrel, in me.
I know it’s weird as we stare at each other, but kind of peaceful. My pulse slows. I shake my head and get back to myself. I fold the broken laptop and put it in a safer position on the floor. The squirrel’s still there, so I honk, lightly. He doesn’t budge. I honk louder. Still nothing. I open the door, planning to scoot him away personally. The second my foot hits the ground, he scampers off, darting among the trees.
Much like the squirrel, I speed to school, letting the gas engine kick in. I park, nearly fall out of the car, and run, pushing my way through the morning crowd of students, earning a few curses, and finally stumbling into the lab.
Anthony and Mr. Schapiro are already there, looking up as I enter. Without a hello, I say to Anthony, “Got your rig?”
He holds it up. “Yours?”
“Don’t ask. We’ll use your copy. Boot and hook it up.”
“Oh crap!” he says. Now he’s tense, too, antlers bobbing. Having someone else worried makes me feel better, but not much.
“It’ll be fine, just fine!” Mr. Schapiro says. He smiles, but I can tell he’s worried, too. A balding short guy with rimless glasses, he blinks whenever he’s excited. Right now his eyelids flutter so fast it looks like his head may take off. So the three of us stand there worried until the code shows up on Anthony’s laptop.
“You make any more changes?” he asks.
I shake my head. “Didn’t find any mistakes. What you’ve got is what I had.”
“Excellent!” As Anthony connects a cable from the laptop to the school’s mainframe he and Schapiro visibly relax. Me, I go straight to the next part—will any of it work?
“Where’s Denby?” I ask.
Anthony’s face twists in an odd way when I mention her name. “She waited until the late bell, then said she’d check in as soon as her math test is over. Asked me to kiss you for her, but that’s not going to happen.”
As Zero Hour approaches, Mr. Schapiro steps up and grabs my hand in both of his. He briskly rubs the back of my hand to calm me down. “Steady, Wade, steady. It’ll be fine and, even if it isn’t, at least it will be over, right?”
He’s trying to help, but “it will be over” can be interpreted in more ways than one.
He backs off, slapping his hands together in a concluding clap. “Look, boys, I can’t stay. I’m just here to wish you the best. I hope you’re right, Wade. I hope you shut down the whole freaking Prometheus system!”
Anthony and I give him a look. “Mr. Schapiro, that’s not what we’re going for. I just want them to fix it.”
He swallows, straightens. “Of course. Of course.”
I’m starting to understand why he isn’t allowed in the room when we connect to Prometheus. He and his ex-wife were involved in the Wilson Group, the people responsible for the stupid shielding in the first place. I assume he left because he realized how ridiculous they were. He swears his activist days are over, but little comments like that make you wonder. It’s also a sign of how much power Prometheus has in Rivendale. They can kick teachers out of their own classrooms.
But Schapiro shakes it off and gets excited all over again. He pats me hard on the shoulder, like I’m justifying his entire teaching career in one fell swoop. Done with me, he slaps Anthony so hard his antlers hit his eyes. Then, finally, he leaves.
“Worse than Mom,” Anthony says. “And she makes better cookies.”
As the clock clicks down, I breathe quickly again. Surprisingly, when Anthony’s laptop announces, right on time, that the connection with Prometheus has been made, I actually calm down. It means things are working so far.
A window opens and we’re greeted by the visage of Dr. John Finley. He headed up the group of prestigious scientists who originally calculated the one-in-a-billion figure, then he stayed on to work as chief media liaison at Prometheus. He’s essentially the collider’s public face.
“Wade and Anthony! Good morning. Good to meet you!”
His voice is clipped, hurried, but there’s an affable calm to his demeanor, like he’s not just rich and important, he’s also balanced and self-actualized. Dad’s wrong. Dr. Finley’s who I want to be, not the guitar-playing parasite of my dreams.
“It’s an honor, sir,” Anthony says. Sounds lame, so I’m glad he said it, not me.
Finley doesn’t answer. He looks like he’s glancing at the time on the screen, thinking about wherever he has to be next. This is probably just a PR thing for him, proving yet again how safe Prometheus is.
“Shall we get on with the science project, guys?”
“Sure,” I say.
All we have to do is click Start on the program on Anthony’s laptop. Everything’s automated after that. He moves toward his rig, then hesitates.
“You take the wheel, Ahab.”
“Sure thing, Starbuck.”
I lean over to move the mouse but, all of a sudden, I freeze. My blood pressure shoots up and my heart pounds. My hand vibrates so much it looks like I’ll miss the key if I try. Seeing this, Anthony surreptitiously reaches up and clicks the button for me. Thank you, Starbuck.
The programming code winds its way through sundry firewalls and into the simulator on-site at Prometheus. I’m a little disappointed that there’s no huge power hum or other exciting sound effects. It’s totally silent as our data uploads, a small indicator bar rising.
Finley looks bored, even as our simulation starts to run. Not us. Now Anthony’s freaking, too. His antlers shake as much as my hands.
Whenever there’s a theoretical collision, colored pixels smash each other and make more colored pixels. We’re set to do ten thousand runs. If just one produces a negative strangelet that lasts long enough to reach the shielding, I’m right. The whole process will take about an hour. Time passes like molasses.
The first six thousand times, nothing happens. It’s possible I could be right and still nothing will happen. How about that, huh? I could be completely correct and this could still amount to absolutely nothing. The ten thousand and first run could produce the strangelet, and we’d never know, until it happened for real, in which case, it would be too late.
I tap my tongue against my teeth. I try to think about anything except the fate of the world, but it’s hard, you know?
At run 7,267 something does happen. We get ourselves a bright green pixel. It’s lighter, a different green than we’ve see before. I’m not sure what it is, but when Finley doesn’t look bored anymore, I suspect. He looks curious, then perplexed, then fascinated. Everything the light green pixel touches also turns light green, until the whole screen goes light green and freezes. Now, I’m certain.
Anthony looks at me, eyes widening, like, Does that mean what I think it does?
I don’t say anything. I don’t think I can. I wait for Finley to finish scanning his screen, wait as a weird, befuddled smile plays across his face.
He looks up into the webcam and says, “Gentlemen,” as though he doesn’t believe it himself, “it looks like your calculations are correct.”
“Yes!” Anthony shouts. “Yes!”
I was right. I don’t know whether to be thrilled or terrified.
“We have an important discussion ahead of us,” Finley says. “I’m at the Marriott Conference Center, two minutes from you. Can you meet me? And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t discuss what you’ve seen here with anyone from the press until we do.”
Discuss what we’ve seen? I can’t even talk.
“We are so there!” Anthony says.
I clear my throat and manage, “I’m sure under the circumstances we can get a pass from school for the day.”
“I’m sure you can,” Finley says. “I hope you like strawberries.”
His com screen vanishes.
Anthony leaps out of his seat and dances around the lab. “Strawberries! He’s giving us strawberries! Never liked them before but I love them now!”
He hoots so loudly that Schapiro, who was probably waiting right outside the door anyway, rushes in to hug him. I lean back and exhale for what must be twenty minutes. They’ll have to strip out the shielding to make the collider safe, but that won’t take too long, will it? They’ll probably want to shut down immediately.
I grab my cell. First I’ll call Dad, then Denby. I’m thinking Denby 1.0 is the better title. The Denby Factor is still okay, though. Wonder which she’ll pick.
As the cell connects, it dawns on me that Finley was two minutes away all along, so maybe this wasn’t just a publicity stunt to him. Maybe he knew I was on to something. And that, that makes me feel so damn good, I actually manage to stop worrying for a while.