The entire ARTists staff watched in rapt attention as video of Billings’s examination played back in Felix’s office. Jeffery had been right: there was nothing inside the sphere.
Nothing, that is, except another dimension.
Unfortunately for the reputations of a large number of university physicists, it was not one of the thirteen dimensions predicted by the Third and Final Theory of Everything.
There were literally hundreds of radio transmissions crisscrossing the new dimension. Unfortunately, unlike the one generated by the buoy, almost all of them were encrypted. More important, however, they saw repeats of the strange energy spike that had accompanied the sudden disappearance of the vessel shadowing the Magellan. It was an echo, a result of something physically moving from one dimension to the next.
Felix called the new dimension hyperspace. No one had the heart to object.
Months fell from the calendar as the work gained momentum. The ARTists team continued to grow and subdivide into specialties. There were so many parallel lines of research and development that it became increasingly hard for Eugene, Jeffery, and Felix to keep up to date.
“There’s just too much for the staff physicists to do,” Felix said. “Our computers can take up some of the slack, but they need software to run. We’re working on so much unexplored stuff here that we simply don’t have the programming yet to tell the computers how to help us. We need more manpower, or we’re going to hit a brick wall.”
“What about universities?” asked Eugene. “They always have grad students clamoring for something to do. We should use them.”
“Slave labor, huh?” said Jeffery.
“Actually, I’ve always thought grad students are better than slaves,” said Eugene. “They feed themselves, and they actually pay tuition for the privilege of doing forced labor. Find me a slave that gives you money to do the work for you.”
“Taxpayers?” Felix said.
“It’s too big a risk,” Harris said. “There’s no way we could bring that many people into the fold without massive leaks. Especially when they are as young, drunk, and desperate for cash and attention as your typical college student.”
“Hey, up until recently, I was your typical college student,” objected Felix.
“Yes, and you were young, drunk, and desperate for cash and attention.”
“Point,” Felix conceded.
“Your concern is well founded, Thomas,” Eugene said. “I don’t propose bringing them ‘inside.’ We can simply shunt them experimental data to analyze. The grunt work, no offense to any grunts intended.” Harris just smiled. “Anyway, the students don’t have to know the origins of the data, just what needs to be done with it. Will that help?”
Felix sat and thought about it for a minute, as he was inclined to do. Most people would become impatient with the silence, but Eugene knew that it simply took some time for the young man to arrive at an answer he was confident in. Felix wasn’t one for snap judgments.
“Yes,” he said finally, “I think we can put sufficient firewalls in place to keep Thomas happy while still exporting enough of the theoretical work to lighten the load.”
“Good. Jeffery will see to it. Okay, what’s next?” Eugene asked eagerly. He was particularly energetic this morning.
“We had another new-hire washout of the QER center,” Jeffery said.
“The Keeper scared off another one, eh?”
“Looks that way.”
Solving the problem of the strange little techno-cult that had emerged downstairs was proving difficult. Firing the lot of them wasn’t an option. Partly because they represented too much institutional experience, and partly because the AESA legal department had advised Eugene that it could open him up to a religious discrimination lawsuit. Apparently, there was a breed of highly evolved lawyer that did brisk business representing cults.
Instead, they’d slowly hired new techs in hopes of weeding out Kiefer’s clique of sycophants incrementally, using the proud corporate tradition of making condemned employees train their own replacements.
It wasn’t working. Most people didn’t prefer the company of eccentric fanatics, even outwardly harmless ones. Only one new hire had survived so far. She was taking night courses in abnormal psychology and had found the perfect topic for her doctoral thesis.
“Nothing for it but to try again, I guess,” lamented Eugene. “Does anyone have good news?”
“The hyperspace window is ready for its first test run,” said Felix.
“That is good news.”
Danielle Fenton had leaned on him hard about their progress on hyperspace research. Construction on the president’s “armed courier” had been halted to see if the technology could be copied, but the pressure to restart grew with each passing week. A successful test would make for an awfully nice Christmas gift.
“How soon can we schedule the test?” Eugene asked.
“Anytime, really,” Felix said. “Will you be coming?”
“What, way up there? No, lad. It’s much too cold for my old bones. Besides, there’s always a chance the machine doesn’t work as predicted, in which event I’d feel better with a fourteen-hundred-kilometer buffer zone. But don’t let that dampen your enthusiasm. Go north, young man. Your appointment with history awaits.”
“I’ll go with you, Felix,” Harris said. “I’d like to be able to have a look at the beta site’s security firsthand.”
“Thank you, Thomas. At least one person doesn’t think I’m going to blow up the Earth.”
“Actually, I’ll feel better without the buffer if something goes wrong. People at ground zero won’t have enough time to know what happened.”
“Cute,” said Felix. “Look, we’ve run the simulations backward, forward, and sideways. There’s almost no chance of the hyperspace unit failing catastrophically. We’ve copied all the buoy’s safeguards and added a few of our own.”
“Almost no chance isn’t the same as no chance at all,” said Jeffery. “We’ve all got faith in you, Felix. But you gotta admit if the average person saw us playing around with this stuff, they’d think we’re as bonkers as Dr. Kiefer.”
“True,” answered Felix. “But if we want to get away with breaking the laws of physics, an insanity plea is probably our best shot.”
* * *
Felix’s research team had spent the last year studying and copying the mechanisms found at the heart of the buoy’s transmitter. The quest to develop mankind’s first hyperspace generator became an all-consuming obsession for Felix. It was the most important project undertaken by humans since the development of gravity manipulation.
As the time approached to test the device, concerns were raised about igniting it in a population center as dense as D.C. For reasons of both safety and security, a secondary facility was constructed far from the inquisitive eyes of modern civilization. Somewhere nothing exciting ever took place: northern Wisconsin.
The winter cold here was so bitter and long lasting, even in the face of centuries of climate change, that it had enough time to evolve a sort of rudimentary intelligence, permitting it to find weaknesses in the locals’ defenses. Many times, a frost had opened windows left carelessly unlatched, and there were unconfirmed reports of a particularly clever cold snap jump-starting a car, only to crash several blocks later.
“This is nothing,” Harris said as they walked from the aircar pad. “During my first deployment, we did cold-weather training up in Alaska, above the circle. It was so cold, whisky froze. Even the Inuit wore turtlenecks.”
Felix knew Harris was talking; he could tell because his mouth resembled a smokehouse chimney. But between his thick hat and hood, Felix could barely hear anything. Either that or his eardrums had seized up.
“C’mon, I thought you’d be at home here. The moon gets colder than this, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, but we have the good sense to stay inside, where there’s heat. Not to mention air.”
“Ah, yes. Hadn’t considered the windchill factor at play. Still, you don’t get views like this in the big city.” He swept his arm in a big arch, which encompassed the glacier-formed hills and old-growth pine forest. Everywhere was the gently muted serenity that only comes with a deep snow.
Felix had to admit it was more majestic than a forest made of steel, glass, and concrete. But he wanted to avoid frostbite all the same. “Let’s just get inside.”
They walked toward the unassuming industrial building that housed the beta site. It had been a paper mill in a previous life. Woodchips littered the grounds even now.
Aside from the occasional black bear in search of a winter den, no one had visited the site in nearly a decade. The only outward evidence of activity was heavy equipment tracks in the snow, the new aircar pad, and the sentry androids.
A pair of army Mk XXII infantry support androids tailored for winter environments guarded the approach. Several things set them apart from the Mk VI that guarded the door to the QER center back at the Stack. They were taller, bulkier, with splayed feet resembling snowshoes. Most obviously, their mounted weapons didn’t seem like the sort built with preventing collateral damage as a design criterion. Felix was pretty sure there wouldn’t be any point hiding behind trees, buildings, or small hills.
More important still, the androids were active. One of them moved to intercept as Felix and Harris approached.
“State your names,” a metallic voice said.
“Sergeant Thomas L. Harris.” He looked over at Felix, who was gawking. Harris nudged him.
“Oh, sorry. Felix Fletcher.”
A red line traced its way down and across Harris’s face and then did the same to Felix.
“Password?” asked the juggernaut.
Harris swallowed his Philly pride and answered, “Go, Pack, go.”
“Proceed.”
They walked past under the watchful eye of the sentry. Felix didn’t feel much better with his back turned to it.
“You look like you’re going to be sick,” said Harris.
“No, it’s not that. I’ve just never seen one of those things walking and talking before.”
“What, that pile of army reserve spares? They’re harmless to friendlies.”
“Sure, until their IFF glitches.”
“Can’t. They’ve all been remotely piloted since the BA-427 incident a century ago.”
BA-427 was among the first fully autonomous androids deployed in battle. He soon grew disillusioned with warfare and went AWOL to pursue a career in theater after a turn onstage during a USO show. It went well until he answered a heckler with twenty-five-millimeter rubber bullets and an EMP gun.
“That never made sense to me. Why bother building robots that just have to be controlled by an individual somewhere else?” Felix asked.
“Well, a couple of reasons. It takes the operator out of a dangerous environment, and one operator can control several robots in different places. It’s a force multiplier.”
“What, simultaneously?”
“Not exactly. Operators switch between units.”
“How can they do that without missing stuff?”
“Have you ever watched a road repair crew? One guy in a trench digging his heart out while five other guys stand around and supervise?”
“Yeah.”
“War can be like that.”
A few minutes later, Felix and Harris found themselves inside the drab confines of the hyperspace test platform building. Near the front of the cavernous space were a handful of offices the team had commandeered. The offices still bore the mark of a long-dead interior designer with a love of wood grain and freshwater fish mounted to the walls, eternally gasping for air.
Felix didn’t need introductions to the beta site’s scientists and technicians. He’d been the one to recommend them, after all. Today’s test was expected to be a straightforward run through the device’s start-up protocol. If successful in forming a stable hyperspace window, there was a secondary series of tests designed to determine if different classes of materials could safely make the transition between dimensions, culminating with the big test—biologics.
But first, Felix was hungry, and freezing. He’d never been great about retaining body heat. Although his exercise regime with Harris was delivering results, he still looked like a birch tree in pants.
“Anybody have something to snack on?” Felix asked the group.
“Here. Try these,” said one of the younger techs, Kendal. She offered a plastic bag filled with grape-sized bits of something that looked like yellow putty.
“What are they?” Felix asked.
“Fresh cheese curds. Just got them in town this morning.”
Felix bit the little pastel blob, only to hear it squeal as his incisors sheared through it.
“It just screamed at me,” Felix said.
“That’s how you know they’re fresh,” Kendal said cheerfully.
“Thanks, but I prefer food that doesn’t express an opinion about being eaten.”
He looked through the office’s bay window onto the main floor to the test platform set up at the center. Despite Felix’s best efforts, limits imposed by available materials and engineering meant the device was nearly a dozen times larger than the buoy unit that inspired it.
Still, it was an impressive scene. A concentric ring of transparent metal blast deflectors surrounded the device, angled at forty-five degrees to redirect the energy of an explosion upward and away from the building’s walls or any gawking scientists. Snaking away from the device were a multitude of data cables and one very thick power cable. It was connected in turn to a mobile fusion plant.
“So when do we rip a hole in the universe?” asked Harris.
“I wish you wouldn’t say that, Tom,” Felix replied. “There are a few warm-up procedures to run first, but we should be ready to make the first attempt by noon.”
“You don’t sound too excited about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, for one thing, you’re not hyperventilating or shrieking a lot. You’ve been burning the midnight oil on this thing for almost a year. I expected to have to peel you off the ceiling as soon as we got here, but I’ve seen you more excited before a movie premiere.”
Felix set down his tablet and leaned back in his chair. He was silent and looked troubled.
“What’s wrong, Felix?”
After a long moment, Felix crossed his arms over his chest. “I’ve been feeling conflicted about everything we’ve learned from the buoy. We haven’t earned any of that knowledge for ourselves; we just stole it.”
“You would prefer humanity just kept stumbling around in the dark?”
“We aren’t exactly stumbling, but … maybe. I don’t know. I guess my concern is if we aren’t mature enough to come up with this technology by ourselves, what’s to say we’re mature enough to use it responsibly?”
“I get you,” said Harris. “But while history may not be your strong suit, I’m studying it intently in my Officer Candidate School course work, and I can tell you one thing with absolute certainty. The ability to build something has nothing to do with the ability to use it responsibly. Sometimes the two seem to have almost a negative correlation. The more horrible the weapon, the bigger the temptation to try it out.”
“That really doesn’t speak well for our chances over the long haul,” Felix said sourly.
“I don’t know about that. We’re still here, after all. People just seem wired to like things that go fast or blow up real good. It’s built into our operating system somewhere.”
“Well, if it’s speed you want, that thing is built to deliver.” Felix pointed to the device.
The two men looked at it together, anticipation building.
Felix stood up and walked for the office door. “Shall we?”
* * *
Eugene sat in his office at the Stack, checking his watch nervously like a father with a child in surgery. He’d been pacing, but quit once his knee complained too much. Jeffery watched the seconds tick by in the corner of his data pad display.
“Why haven’t they called?” Eugene blurted out.
“Maybe it’s a ploy to worry you into an early grave,” Jeffery suggested.
“It’s almost six. They were supposed to have made the first run nearly seven hours ago.”
“They were probably just delayed, Professor. Experimental machines never have much respect for schedules. Besides, if a black hole swallowed the Midwest, I’m sure we would have heard about it by now.”
“To hell with it. I’m calling them,” Eugene said. He pulled up the phone feature on his desktop computer, selected Felix’s profile, and dialed.
It went straight to voice mail.
“Damn!”
“Professor, they’re too remote to get coverage,” Jeffery replied.
“Right!” Eugene went back to his phone book and pulled up the secure line to the site itself. He entered an authorization code and dialed the number.
It rang and rang, but no one answered.
“Something’s wrong,” Eugene said. “I can feel it.”
“Not very scientific of you, Professor,” said Jeffery.
Eugene glared at him.
Jeffery relented. “All right. Sorry. Listen, let’s give them one more hour before we start to panic. Who knows? Maybe they’re all blacked out on celebratory champagne.”
* * *
The champagne remained unopened while everyone at the beta site scurried about in a whirl of activity.
“We need more power!”
“We’re already at 105 percent.”
“So go to 110 percent.”
“That’s easy for you to say. You’re not the one trying to keep a grapefruit-sized star from getting loose!”
Harris watched the scientists and technicians go back and forth without actually going anywhere for several minutes. Meanwhile, Felix sat in a corner, typing away on his tablet. Harris knew the smug look on his face. He’d seen it may times before.
“Hey, nerds!” Harris shouted above the din, then pointed at Felix. “Why don’t you ask the boss what we should do?”
“Why, I’m glad you asked, Thomas,” Felix said, without letting too much sarcasm slip into his voice. “I think we should go outside, get a great big pile of snow, and dump it onto the fusion reactor. That will let us run the reactor as hard as we need until the snow boils off.”
“Won’t the water short it out?” Kendal asked.
“That reactor is a surplus naval design rated for use in subs. If it’s not watertight, I’ll eat my phone,” Felix said with conviction.
“But it’ll only work for a few minutes,” said one of the techs. “Then we’d have to throttle back until we can pile up more snow.”
“We only need a few minutes,” Felix answered. “Look, it’s either this or we sit on our hands until we can get another reactor up here.” A murmur of general agreement made its way through the crowd.
“All right, everyone. Put your coats on and grab a shovel,” Harris boomed.
Harris was impressed. Felix had projected confidence, and the group followed his lead. Harris was fairly sure he’d been the only one in position to notice Felix holding a hand behind his back with two fingers crossed so tightly they bleached white.
* * *
Eugene leaned forward in his chair. “All right. It’s been your bloody hour. I’m calling again.”
* * *
The noise in the giant room would have been unbearable without ear protection. The fusion reactor ran at 140 percent. The snow on top of it boiled into steam at an alarming rate, then promptly rose to the ceiling high above, where it condensed on the rafters and fell back down as rain.
The techs managing the reactor were white as paper. The scientists managing the device fared no better. The hyperspace machine howled like a banshee who’d zipped up his scrotum.
Everyone stood, or more accurately hid, as far from the reactor as the walls would permit. Not that it would matter if something really went wrong.
“Rebalance the feeds! They’re drifting out of the green!” Felix shouted to Kendal.
“What about the leads?”
“No, the feeds!”
The roar of the two machines forced everyone to communicate with hand signals and lipreading.
“Let me!” Felix nudged Kendal away from the control inputs for the device.
He had done his best to lay the controls out intuitively, but in the end, there was nothing intuitive about ripping a hole in the universe.
“How much time?” Felix shouted into his headset.
“The snow’s almost gone!” replied the head reactor tech. “Another minute, at best!”
The truth was that they couldn’t keep doing this forever. Even with the limitless supply of snow provided by the countryside, the reactor could only take so many cycles at this power level before the ablative lining in the plasma containment chamber eroded. Constant exposure to high-energy particles made even the toughest materials brittle eventually. They were just accelerating the process. If they didn’t get it right soon, a loop of one-hundred-million-degree plasma was sure to find its way out.
Felix struggled to balance the geometry between the different emitters, but they wanted to slide out of synch, almost like they were fighting back. He did the math on the fly in his head, trying to keep ahead of the distortions. He felt it all coming apart as the seconds slipped away.
But then, in a moment of clarity known to mystics and drunkards, Felix stopped thinking. He stopped trying to beat the problem down, and just let the current carry him. The distortions diminished and then faded away entirely. A power spike shot through the building, so intense that everyone in the room would later report seeing little flashes like static in their eyes.
Felix looked to the camera feed from inside the vacuum chamber. Inside was a perfect hole that reflected no light. The corners of his smile reached around behind his head and shook hands.
* * *
A moment later, buried deep inside an asteroid orbiting past Mars, an automated sensor platform took notice of the day’s momentous event. It couldn’t remember what to do next, so it consulted its manual.
“Right. Step 1: call home upon detecting a portal signature.” It warmed up its own transmitter and fired off the relevant data. Feeling it had handled that task admirably, the platform continued.
“Now, then. Step 2: initiate self-destr … Hey! Now wait just a karking rakim…”
If anyone had been looking, they would have seen a bright flash as a very surprised asteroid exploded for no discernible reason.
* * *
The phone rang in Eugene’s office.
“Hello!?”
“Hello, Professor,” Felix said, sounding immensely pleased with himself.
Hours of concern and frustration came pouring out of Eugene. “It’s about bloody time! You’re eight hours late! I called and called, but no one answered.”
“I’m sorry, Mom, but the concert was really loud,” Felix said, grinning like an idiot.
“Oh, really? You two hooligans can just stay up there in the frozen tundra if that’s the way you’re going to be.”
“Forgive the professor,” Jeffery cut in. “He’s been on pins and needles since noon.”
“Well, we have the proverbial good news and bad news,” Felix said.
“What’s the good news?” Eugene asked.
“We managed to create and maintain a stable hyperspace window half a meter across for almost thirty seconds.”
There was a chorus of cheers in the background, followed by the sharp pop of corks exiting bottles.
“And the bad news?”
“Wisconsin remains undamaged.”
“I see. And how long have you been waiting to use that little chestnut?”
“Since he got out of the car, I’d bet,” Harris chimed in.
“What’s our next move?” Jeffery asked.
“We’ve got a load of data to sift through before we start the material tests, but that’s okay because we cooked our fusion reactor anyway. We’ll need a replacement with double the power output,” Felix answered.
“So you’re heading for home, then?” Eugene asked.
“As soon as we polish off the champagne. We can’t have it going flat,” said Harris.
“Waste not, want not, I suppose.”