The chatter on Bill Minor’s com sounded routine, but Brandon Marsden refused to answer any query. He glanced at Maxine Kaplan, saying, “I’ve lost contact with Marsden in the interrogation room. He mentioned a code but didn’t tell me which one.”
“Should I be worried?”
“I’ve sent a team.” He hesitated. “Should we postpone the test while I check it out?”
She glanced uneasily at where Tanner Jackson and Pete McCoy sat eagerly on the observation platform, their intent stares on the generator which now obscured the rabbit in its carrier.
“No,” she told him as she glanced at her watch. “We’ve got the power window to consider. It took a miracle to set this up. Went all the way to Bill Stevens at the White House.” She glanced again at McCoy and Jackson. “We can’t shut down just because a prisoner died.”
Minor nodded, aware of the wrath that might fall on his head.
“Fifteen seconds,” Virgil Wixom announced from the monitoring station. “Domina is rolling the power now.”
Minor tensed. Like in a movie, he expected the lights to dim as the generator began to manipulate photons, particles, and gravity. A faint hum built as the machine neared the 534-megawatt threshold required for the experiment.
The only warning was a peculiar prickling on Minor’s skin, then a sensation as if a wave were passing through him. He heard the hollow pop, and then a lowering of the hum.
“Containment,” Domina’s voice carried in the sudden silence.
Minor shifted his glance to the flat-screen that showed the containment zone inside the generator. But what was he seeing? The thing looked like a silver-gray orb, but without a definable surface. Looking into the wavering, watery depths and spinning empty vortices it might have been a hole into eternity. Even as he watched, the sphere faded into nothingness.
“Weird!” Peter McCoy exclaimed as he peered up at the image. “And there’s a rabbit inside that?”
“Certe,” Domina replied from where she monitored the gauges hooked up to her little black box. “The creature, the cuniculus, is fine, and will reappear in fourteen and a half minutes. To the animal, the transition through time will be instantaneous.”
“So,” Tanner Jackson asked, “it’s like . . . in a state of suspended animation?”
She turned, fixing him with her unusual blue eyes. “Nothing is suspended. The creature has been accelerated through time to the future. Jumped ahead.”
“And what was that gray sphere?” McCoy asked.
Domina turned back to her readouts, saying, “What you saw is track left through what you call time-space. Field constraint or manipulated quantum gravity slows relationship between particles. Pushes atoms forward ahead of what you call time, yes? Like squirting water ahead of pressure.”
“What if you stuck something into that gray haze?” Jackson asked.
Domina answered. “A different dimension. Relationships between subatomic particles stop. The rules of mathematical probabilities, what you call the Heisenberg uncertainty effect, change. Your general relativity and quantum mechanics vanish at interface. Atomic bonds separate, rejoin in random patterns.”
“And now that it has vanished?” Tanner indicated the empty interior.
“You would feel eerie chill, yes? A sense of uncertainty, a shiver down your back. Nothing more.”
“My God,” McCoy whispered. “Domina, you’ve given us a whole new world.”
“What about going back in time?” Jackson asked. “That’s the real prize, right?”
Domina tossed her tawny ponytail back. “That depends on circumstances. If the ‘now’ is untenable or dangerous, the future might not be so bad, si?” She paused. “But yes, to go back is more difficult. Universe is timeless. Entangled particles must be trapped, mathematically manipulated. Changes in relationship between entangled particles must be undone. You do not have the computational ability. Can’t recognize when you catch one. Let alone identify an alternate branch timeline that will fulfill your requirements.”
“What about changing our own past?” McCoy asked. “Like if I want to go back to last Fourth of July?”
“Impossible,” she told him.
“Why?”
“What you call paradox, the changes in relationship of particles, does not permit.” Domina checked her monitors. “You are made of this timeline branch, created of entangled particles generated and set upon given trajectory. What you call decoherence. Can you undo your whole universe?”
Maxine Kaplan interjected, “You came from a different timeline.”
Domina seemed to tense, then she nodded. “Certe. In theory I could go back in your timeline beyond moment when I arrived here last year. Back to a time when I did not exist in your timeline.” Her slim wrist twisted. “Again, we do not have cerebrum . . . computer capability available to monitor and control variables. You must recover Fluvium’s cerebrum. Then we explore unlimited possibilities.”
She tapped the black box containing her navigator with her finger. It rested on the work top and was wired into the control panel.
Yeah, and we’d have it if we only knew where it was.
Minor’s earbud informed him, “Control room, here. Bill, I think we’ve got a security breach. I’ve got a visual of three people on the stairs . . . What the hell . . . ?”
He touched his throat mic. “Explain?”
“I just lost communication with all the security teams. And I think I just heard gunshots.”
“What do you see on the monitors?”
“Nothing. Not even the teams I dispatched to check the stairs. I tell you, we’re missing people.”
“Who’s missing?”
And in that instant, Bill Minor felt his skin prickle. An unsettling wave rolled through his body followed by a hollow pop. He shivered, looking up at the monitor, seeing the pet carrier now resting in the containment zone where a moment before there had only been gray emptiness. Through slits in the carrier he could see the rabbit as it raised one foot to the wire door, sniffing as if in search of lettuce.
“I’ll be damned,” he whispered as the tech hurried down to remove the bunny and carry it away for observation.
“We’ve got a security breach!” the voice insisted sharply in his ear.
“I’m on the way.” He turned to Maxine. “Something’s up. I need to see to it.”
She read his worry and replied, “We’re rolling on a longer test in fifteen minutes.”
“You got it.” Minor reached for his Sig as he headed for the door.