“This just goes from bad to worse,” Reid murmured out of the side of his mouth. “From captives in a Frankenstein mansion to inmates in an insane asylum.” He clutched the satchel to his chest as he and Kilgore followed Chief Raven down one of Grantham Barracks’ well-lit corridors. The place gave him the creeps.
“And you call this archaeology?” Kilgore asked. Her pack hung by one strap over her shoulder.
Patient rooms were to either side, the wide hospital doors pierced by a single window. Over-polished tile floors gleamed under the fluorescent lights. They passed a dumpy-looking guy in pajamas who grinned vacuously at them while he clutched a teddy bear to his chest.
Karla Raven turned to shoot them a gray-eyed appraisal. “Better here, hiding with us, than laid out on a slab somewhere.” A pause. “How’d you get to the furnace room, anyway?”
“The whole house was on the fritz,” Kilgore told her. “We thought the kitchen was the best way out. The cooks just looked at us and smiled when we strolled in. We’d have walked right out the back, but when we glanced outside, there was a guy with a machine gun. So we just tried to look official and ducked into the furnace room.”
Reid added, “Figured we would wait out the alarms and flashing lights, and when the guard was called off, vanish into the woods.”
“They’d have had you before you made the trees.” Raven gave Reid an unsettling wink. “But you get points for trying. Here we are.”
Karla Raven bothered him—some subtle sense that she was a better, tougher, and more competent man than he. He avoided her gaze as she opened the door and held it. He followed Kilgore into a light-blue conference room. Oversized pictures of bright yellow flowers, deer fawns, puppies, and serene mountain landscapes had been painted on the walls. Giant pillows were piled at one end of the room. Two tables had been shoved together at the other, and Edwin Jones sat at one tapping keys on a laptop computer.
“Have a seat,” Major Savage called from where he filled a chair on the left. Colonel Ryan had a haunch perched on the closest table corner, one leg swinging. The man wore Dockers and a plain white shirt. He held a yellow legal pad in his hand, a thoughtful look on his face.
The odd little man they called Falcon sat in an office chair off to one side. He seemed to be listening to someone because he smiled and nodded as if in affirmation. Winny Swink, in gray sweatpants, sat cross-legged in another office chair opposite Cat Talavera.
“Have a good night’s sleep?” Ryan asked with a smile.
“We did,” Kilgore answered wryly, “all things considered. And breakfast was certainly better than expected.”
“Thank Karla. She had complaints about the old cook,” Edwin announced as he scowled down at his screen. Then he tapped a couple of keys, and said, “Got ya!”
Reid began delicately, “As good as breakfast was, we’re not sure we want to make a habit of it. We haven’t, uh, been listed as patients here, have we?”
“Nope,” Savage told him. “While you’re free to go, Dr. Farmer, Skientia is out there looking for you. For the moment, Grantham Barracks is way below their radar. If you leave, and they catch you, everyone here will pay the price.”
In a voice loaded with meaning, Karla Raven said, “I wouldn’t like that.”
“Me, either,” Winny Swink chimed in.
“The best solution is figuring out what this is all about and bringing a stop to it.” Ryan, still perched on the table corner, looked down at his legal pad. “The key question being, who is Prisoner Alpha? Why is she so important to Skientia? And why is she such an enigma?”
“She claims she’s the mummy’s wife,” Kilgore said dryly.
“And who’s the mummy?” Savage was taking his own notes.
Kilgore laid out her case, the presence of orthopedic surgery, results from trace element analysis, the early dental care. “The guy’s a contradiction, meaning he had to be alive in the last fifty years, but extraordinarily well-faked to make him look ancient.” She made a face. “If Skientia is behind the faking, they could have substituted other samples for carbon dating, ensured the strontium and delta 15 carbon analyses were whatever they wanted them to be. Even the genetic testing.”
“To prove what to whom?” Reid asked. “Was it done to convince Domina? Is that what they’re after, make her believe that corpse is her husband? But why try and make it look over three thousand years old?”
Even as he said it, he thought, It doesn’t work. It would have taken years to build that tomb and hide it. He added, “What kind of woman would believe her husband was a three-thousand-year–old mummy?”
“Playing on her mental illness?” Kilgore asked. “She was here, right? What was your diagnosis, Dr. Ryan?”
Ryan’s eyebrows rose. “She’s an enigma. Defies all the categories in the DSM-V. Her peculiar language skills, her odd mathematics—”
“The language is Latin and Ch’olan Mayan. Not church Latin, but a variant of classical,” Reid interjected. “She says she learned the mathematics in the Yucatan.” He went on to describe Domina’s story about Dzibilchaltun.
“But the place is a ruin?” Savage asked.
“Has been for over a thousand years,” Reid assured him. “While I agree her story is impossible, she seemed to believe it.”
“And there’s the doohickey.” Dr. Ryan began to describe some odd machine made from electrical parts.
Reid reached into his pack and pulled out the electrical box. “Did it look like this? We took it out of the sarcophagus. It was resting on the corpse’s chest.” Next, he brought out the papyrus book. “This was laying on his genitals, and this . . .” He removed the glass jar, “was just below the electrical box, and clutched in his hands.”
Edwin rose from his computer and took the electrical box from Ryan. He frowned. “Nothing I’m familiar with. No manufacturer’s code or ID. Don’t see no plug-in for power. Let me Google a description and see if—”
“Edwin, don’t!” Falcon interrupted sharply.
Reid turned to see Falcon, still reclined, head back. The man’s eyes were focused on the ceiling as he continued, “The major and I agree that it might not be in our best interest to have inquiries about the box circulating on the Internet. Now, please, all of you, go on.”
The major? Reid wondered, Who the hell is the major?
“What about the liquid in the jar?” Cat asked, lifting it. “Did you sample it?”
“No,” Kilgore told her. “We didn’t get the time.”
Cat glanced at Ryan. “I could take it down to the lab. It’s crude, but—”
“Leave it sealed,” Falcon interrupted from his chair. “In fact, I wouldn’t open it until you’re in a controlled environment.”
“Why, Falcon?” Ryan turned, his attention on the brown-haired man.
“The tomb’s contents were meant for Gray,” Falcon said softly.
“And how do you know that?” Savage asked.
Falcon laced his fingers together and closed his eyes. “The pieces fit.”
Kilgore lifted her hands in supplication. “Great. A fake tomb, meant to impress a mentally ill woman who speaks Latin, figures in Mayan glyphs, and builds electrical gizmos? To what purpose?” She straightened. “Could it be some sort of test?”
“To test what?” Cat asked. “Her delusions?”
“Or her mental programming,” Kilgore stated harshly. “Is that what Skientia is about? I hate to use the word, but are we dealing with brainwashing? They took Domina, or whatever her name is, and modified her brain engrams, rewired her to believe she studied mathematics at a Mayan ruin and married a mummy while she was there?” She paused. “Is that even possible, Dr. Ryan?”
“Physiologically, no. The brain is a remarkably plastic and adaptable organ, but science fiction aside, it can’t just be wiped clean and then reprogrammed—and certainly not with the sophistication and intelligence demonstrated by Gray. The brain she has grew, evolved, and was trained over a lifetime. It wasn’t inserted like a computer program.”
Cat Talavera said, “I concur with Dr. Ryan. The chemo-electric physiology of the brain can be retrained, but not reprogrammed like simply inserting a new disk. Neurons can’t be wiped clean and then reconfigured from outside. We’re talking complex chemistry, micro RNA, even DNA transcription on an almost infinite level.”
Kilgore pushed back, perplexed. “Why does none of this make sense?”
From behind them, Falcon’s soft voice said, “Because you are not working from the appropriate paradigm.”
“And you are?” Savage’s voice dripped sarcasm.
Falcon shot an irritated glance off to his right, saying, “Theresa, you can’t expect them to understand. They don’t have your training.”
“Who’s Theresa?” Reid asked quietly.
“One of his hallucinated personalities,” Ryan said. “She’s a physicist. Think of her as a part of Falcon’s personality. A way for him to argue with himself.”
“Okaaay,” Kilgore whispered derisively.
Chief Raven, however, dropped to a crouch before Falcon. “What does she say, Falcon?”
The man’s eyes reflected amusement. “She’s not sure those present have the mental capacity, let alone the education, to synthesize the ramifications.”
“What ramifications?”
“Those of impossibility,” Falcon said seriously.
“Oh, boy,” Reid muttered to himself.
To his amazement, Ryan straightened, rising from the table. “Impossibility, Falcon?”
Ryan and Savage might have been slapped when Falcon said, “It has to do with entangled particles. What Einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance.’”
Ryan shared a shocked glance with Savage before turning his attention back to Falcon. “I’m with you at a very basic level. According to General Grazier, Skientia was working on entanglement theory. They’d advanced to entangling organic molecules.”
Falcon cocked his head, listening, but apparently not to Ryan. After a long pause, he said, “Yes, yes. . . . I’ll tell him.”
Falcon turned to Ryan. “Theresa can be such a pain. She wants me to remind you that Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne, and most of the good theorists agree that our illusion of time only goes forward. General relativity ensures this as a means of avoiding paradox. You know, if you kill your grandfather, you can never be born? And then you must contend with the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the ‘chronology protection conjecture.’”
Ryan wasn’t buying this shit, was he?
“What may be applicable here,” Falcon continued, “is the environment of a Bose-Einstein condensate coupled with a well-developed theory of quantum gravity. This is hypothetical, but coupling quantum gravity with entanglement might allow the manipulation of matter across time and space. Keep in mind that entanglement didn’t just appear in the universe the moment humans first generated it in a lab.” Falcon might have been lecturing a child. “Entanglement is as old as our universe. Timeless, in fact.”
Cat interjected, “But, Falcon, the theory of quantum gravity eludes our best physicists. We can’t prove it.”
“To date, we can’t. It is also fact that Egyptians did not inscribe Mayan base-twenty mathematics, written as equations, on their tomb walls. We’re dealing in anomalies.” He paused. “Like Gray.”
Savage threw his hands up. “I’m lost.”
Falcon glanced at him. “Theresa asks, ‘What happens if entangled particles generated three thousand years ago can be identified today? Perhaps captured in a Bose-Einstein condensate?’”
Savage’s look turned quizzical. “And you think this is what Skientia is after? Catching entangled particles from the past? To what purpose?”
Ryan turned. “Sam, remember what Grazier said? They were attempting to ‘entangle’ organic molecules. Some experiment to monitor them halfway across the planet.”
“Ah!” Falcon said, face alight. “Such an experiment would entail detectors with a great deal of sensitivity. Which answers some questions yet poses even more.”
“Answers which questions, my man?” Edwin asked.
“Why someone would want to kill Gray the day she arrived, for one. Perhaps they sought to stop her from sharing secret technology. In this case, the doohickey,” Falcon said. “I suspect we were focusing on the side effects the machine produced rather than its true purpose.”
Karla crossed her arms. “The night she disappeared, Gray spent all night tapping on that thing. Seymore said she kept shifting it around.”
“My suspicion is that she was generating entangled particles,” Falcon told her. “The doohickey is a communicator.”
“With whom?” Savage demanded.
“She was probably talking to the very machine that drew her to Los Alamos in the first place.”
“Drew her?” Karla asked.
“For whatever reason, her ultimate attraction to Skientia was, and remains, that machine,” Falcon asserted. “Either she targeted it herself, or she was sent to find it. Or . . .” His face went blank.
“Or what, Falcon?” Edwin asked.
Falcon’s eyes cleared. “The presences of Gray and the mummy have huge implications for Hugh Everett’s 1957 article ‘Relative State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics.’ And the implications of that are indeed worth killing to protect.”
At the blank looks, he explained, “Anyone going back to the past risks changing the future, and hence creating a situation which violates causality. What’s called ‘the grandfather paradox.’ It states that if you go back in time and kill your grandfather, you can never be born to go back in time and kill your grandfather.”
“Let me get this straight. You think King Smut went back in time?” Reid couldn’t hide his disbelief.
Falcon smiled in reassurance. “Forgive me, Doctor Farmer. I have a habit of talking to myself. The laws of physics—as we currently understand them—preclude time travel into the past. In fact, if you are to integrate general relativity and quantum mechanics, time doesn’t even exist.”
ET pointed at the clock on the wall. “Uh-huh, and how you explain that?”
Falcon smiled wearily. “The notion of time as a universal clock began to unravel with Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The physicist and philosopher Claus Kiefer would tell you that what you perceive as time is only a measure of change occurring between separate particles in an essentially ‘timeless’ universe. We’ve just begun to contemplate a potential theory of canonical quantum gravity in which the universe itself is timeless. And if time really doesn’t exist, Gray’s abilities suddenly become plausible, if not easily explained, given our current understanding of physics.”
Reid couldn’t help remembering the expression on Domina’s face, her sadness. How she really didn’t seem to fit, as if she had an energy about her . . . “Her expression when I told her that Dzibilchaltun was nothing but ruins? What did she say? Nequam populi, inanus orbis?”
“Latin, you say?” Edwin tapped the keys and stared at his screen. “It translates to ‘Worthless people, worthless world.’”
Dr. Ryan turned his attention on Reid. “We need a Latin scholar to translate Gray’s notes. And those odd hieroglyphics are Mayan, you say?”
He nodded. “She told me she spoke Latin and Ch’olan. It’s a Mayan dialect originally written in glyphs and glyph compounds. I can recognize the occasional glyph, but we need a better epigrapher than me.”
“We’re getting away from the point,” Chief Raven reminded where she squatted before Falcon. “What’s Skientia after?”
“Something that’s going to make them a pile of money,” Savage asserted. “Give them some sort of unassailable technological advantage beyond just monitoring communications.”
“And it all goes back to this machine?” Edwin was giving the black electrical box from the sarcophagus a sour look.
Falcon’s soft voice cut like a knife. “Perhaps you had better consider the inverse correlation.”
“And that is?” Cat asked.
“What does Gray want to get out of Skientia?”
“I thought she was on our side.” Raven narrowed an eye. “You know, kidnapped out of her cell here in Ward Six.”
“Kidnapped?” Falcon asked mildly. “Or escaped?”