Squaring the Circle

by B K Brain

  His body could take no more.

  “I need to get some rest. We’ll talk more in the morning.”

  David, his face showing the bewilderment of all he’d seen, said, “Thanks, Sam.” He and the woman were holding hands and looking pretty chummy. That was new.

  “I’ve set up some cots in the room at the end of the hall. I’m sorry the accommodations aren’t more comfortable.”

  “That’ll be fine, Doctor,” Cathleen said, still holding on to her boss’s arm.

  “Please. It’s Sam.”

  5

  Eddie and her sister sat in the middle of the bedroom floor, each sobbing and holding onto the other, terrified of letting go. The black nightmare had given up for now.

  “I thought I’d lost you,” Rachel said, which implied that she hadn’t really. But that’s what she didn’t understand, the thing she would never fully comprehend. She had lost Eddie. Eddie had lost Eddie, and it would happen again and again, until she became so utterly lost there’d be no finding her way back.

  It edged its way closer to permanent with each terrible trip, each fall into the well. Eddie felt it the way a person feels unwelcome eyes in a crowded room, the way you just know when bad things are coming. The ink would eventually saturate, staining her to nothing.

  “I’m scared,” she told her big sis, the one who’d always kept her safe.

  “Me too,” Rachel said. “We’ll figure this out. I swear.” That wasn’t a lie, not precisely, but it may as well have been.

  6

  David hadn’t slept in a cot before and after waking up to what felt like seized bearings in his back he hoped never to again. He’d sleep at a motel tonight, even if he had to drive all the way back to Morgantown to find one.

  Adventure my ass, he thought, rubbing his neck.

  Another image of one of those magic fingers vibration beds, complete with a slot for quarters and mysterious stains on the pillowcase, made him cringe. Okay, maybe he’d forget the motel and spring for a nice hotel.

  Mo for a Ho. Sounds like a rap song.

  Most people didn’t realize, but the majority of germs in hotel rooms weren’t found on toilet seats. Toilets actually got cleaned between guests. What didn’t get sanitized? The TV remote. And more often than not, the telephone.

  Cathleen was still sleeping, on her side and peaceful, with a blanket over a shoulder and tucked under her chin. She looked comfortable. Happy. Pretty.

  He’d always found her attractive, but never considered her as anything more than a friend until last night, when she took his hand and professed her love. It was a joke, sure it was. But the way she said it, and the way her hand slid into his, made it seem pretty damned serious too, like some kind of Freudian slip. She may have played it off as humor but maybe it was something she’d been meaning to say. Maybe she really did have feelings for him. It sure felt that way last night.

  He was divorced, had been for five seasons now. (It seemed everything was measured in STC seasons.) She was divorced too, although he didn’t know for how long. His kids were grown now, with kids of their own. Maybe it was time to get back in the game.

  He looked down at his left hand, at a gold ring that meant nothing to him, and wondered why it was still on his finger. He twisted it off, walked to a trashcan, dropped it in.

  There. He was done with it, finally.

  He rubbed at the pale circular dent it left behind, wondering if she would notice. He smiled, hoping she would.

  David walked to the control room and sat at the simulation computer. The screen was dark, powered down to sleep mode, but numerous fans inside hummed as if something was happening under the hood. He considered moving the mouse to liven up the monitor, but decided against it. He figured Sam wouldn’t want him messing around with the equipment. He stood and walked to the observation window.

  The wide-open space between the glass and the far wall hung silent this morning. It was hard to believe a real black hole bent the fabric of spacetime right there only a few hours ago. And that he was the one chosen to see it.

  His luck wasn’t just holding at this point, it was soaring. If God was the universe, like Sam said, then the universe must really, really like him. His career, all but dead two days ago, was now headed for the stratosphere. How many fifty-three-year-old guys could say that?

  But what about the implications of Sam’s technology? The human race would never be the same; that was sure. The magic Gravitons made anything possible.

  Astounding. And David had to admit, A little scary.

  Perhaps a lot scary.

  He looked to the security monitors and saw something that hadn’t been there yesterday. On camera four, the view of the main parking lot. A silver car. And a man ducking out of the driver’s seat. Was it Leon, Sam’s research partner? Or someone else?

  David felt a hand on his shoulder and turned. Cathleen looked up at the screen.

  “Who is that?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. It could be the other scientist, Leon Stakovsky.”

  “Or maybe not,” she said. It wasn’t fear he heard in her voice, but it was close.

  The ‘bad people’ the doctor had spoken of had come front and center in their minds. Was this one of them? Were they really as dangerous as Sam made them out to be?

  They kept watching.

  The man scanned the entire lot, one end to the other, cautiously, as a returning researcher might do if checking for government agents. Or, David thought, as an agent might do when finding what he’d been looking for. The man eyed the building.

  He was young, in his early thirties at most, as best could be seen on the small monitor. Dark pants, dark jacket. Glasses. He started walking toward the camera at the front entrance. Blacktop, then concrete. Three more steps. A pause.

  He reached into his jacket and pulled out a pistol.

  “Shit,” Cathleen exclaimed. “He’s got a gun.”

  David stood and took a step back, keeping his focus on the screen. “Find Sam,” he said. “Right now.”

  A voice from behind. “I’m already here.”

  David glanced to Sam, then looked back to the video feed. He pointed. “There’s a man with a gun. He’s-”

  “I see him.” There was anger in the doctor’s words, frustration, like a man interrupted, but not fear. David thought maybe it was Leon after all. Maybe…

  He was walking again, with pistol drawn.

  Cathleen said, “He’s coming inside.”

  “No. He’s not.” Sam reached out without looking beside him, to the quantum interface keyboard. He narrowed vision at the monitor, the fingers of his left hand hovering above the enter key.

  “What are you doing, Sam?” David asked.

  The doctor’s face flexed to stone. “They think they can take it from me, but I won’t let them.” Pure hatred blazed in that bloodshot expression. Sleep had done nothing for him, not in the eyes. And not in the pallid, sickly skin. If anything, he looked worse today.

  A surge of panic wrenched at David’s stomach. Breath caught tight in his chest. There’s something very wrong with Sam, he thought. We shouldn’t have come here.

  Sam glared at the screen. David turned back to the monitor and the mysterious man, a man he now feared for. Three more steps up the sidewalk. Four.

  A small click sounded from somewhere behind. David knew what it was without looking. It was Sam hitting a key at the computer, initiating an algorithm.

  The man stumbled, dropped the gun. Fell to hands and knees. His head went low, threatening to snap his neck. His entire body shook, straining.

  “Let me explain,” Sam said. “I have multiplied the gravity below the sidewalk by two. His body weighs twice what it did a moment ago.”

  The palms of the man’s hands pressed against the concrete, pushing at the unexpected pressure. His arms, locked at the elbows, trembled. Every hair on his head stretched down to point at the shadowed surface below.

  “Stop it,” Cathleen said. “Yo
u’ll kill him.”

  “Me? Oh no. That man killed himself.” Sam stood at the simulation computer now, making an adjustment. “He got caught playing on the tracks, that’s all.”

  David swung around to face Sam, fists clenched. “Turn it off. Now.”

  “No one blames the train, David. It is simply a force that cannot be stopped.”

  At that moment David realized he should’ve kept his vision tight on Sam or closed his eyes, anything but look back to that awful screen.

  The man’s head went lower, into the shadow between shoulder blades. The arch of his spine flattened as bones in his arms wobbled. The sidewalk below cracked into a crumbly dent.

  And then somehow, the man raised his head. The skin on his face stretched downward, creating a horrific mask of death. The lids of his eyes were pulled beyond their limits and bleeding. His jaw hung impossibly wide and crooked, the left side having come unhinged. With a crack the right side gave up as well.

  At once the bones in his arms crumpled in a popping of twigs. He went face-first to the concrete.

  David lurched away from the monitor. Covered his mouth.

  All that remained was a fractured, sloppy mess.

  “Oh no,” Cathleen kept saying. “No, no, no…” David suddenly realized she’d been saying it for some time. Tears streamed.

  “They’re not getting my machine,” Sam said as a matter of fact, holding a pistol he no longer had a reason to hide. He looked it over, checked the safety, aimed it at his guests. “My work is too important. You see that, don’t you Dave?”

  Sam commanded a technology beyond comprehension, allowing him unlimited power. And it was now clear he’d do anything to protect it, even if it meant murder.

  But they don’t call it murder, do they?

  No. Not when God does it.

  DIVISION TWO: HIDDEN VARIABLES

  If you shoot a series of objects, marbles for example, at a metal plate with a single slit-shaped opening running down the center, you would expect the ones that make it through to strike a wall behind in a single stripe pattern similar to the shape of the opening. And that is precisely what you would get. No surprises there.

  If you had two slits, side-by-side, you’d get two stripes on the back wall, obviously.

  If you send something that operates in waves, such as water, through the two slits, you’d get something else entirely. The waves would radiate outward and interact with one another, the tops and bottoms of the arcs canceling each other out when they touch, just like ripples over a pond. This would create an interference pattern, a row of many stripes where the fluid hit with the greatest intensity. Very different from marbles, but still quite logical. Everything makes perfect sense.

  If you replace the marbles with photons you would get a single stripe if fired through a single slit. As expected. Photons are particles, after all.

  But here’s where things go wonky:

  If photons are shot through two slits an interference pattern emerges, just like the water. How is this possible? How can a particle act like a wave?

  Maybe the photons are bouncing off each other and creating that pattern. Firing one at a time should clear things up.

  Even when you take single shots the pattern shows up after a bit of shooting. Each photon apparently spreads out like a wave, interferes with itself, and then strikes the back wall like the particle we knew it was to begin with. Weird, yes. But not the weirdest part.

  When you aim a detector at a slit to see which one the photon is actually passing through it goes back to acting like a particle. In other words, when observed only two stripes emerge.

  Turn off the detector and you get lots of stripes.

  The simple act of looking makes matter perform differently, almost as if the photon knows it’s being watched.

  CHAPTER SIX: FACULTIES AND FÖRTUNE

  1

  Eddie ate a piece of peanut buttered toast, took her meds, and watched two men from McGuire and Sons install the new window - all while peeking out from behind the open refrigerator door. Cold air was expendable. She wasn’t.

  Maurice, tied to a tree in the front yard, barked without a single pause for more than forty-five minutes, until the workers’ truck disappeared down the street.

  Eddie closed the fridge and walked to the window. She saw Rachel admiring the fresh glass from outside as she petted the beast, trying to calm it down. There’d be no getting rid of it now, not with its owner dead in Chicago, an unfortunate turn of events to say the least.

  Rachel had missed work for the second day, but wouldn’t be able to again. She could only get away with faking the flu for so long. That meant tomorrow Eddie would go back to enduring her mother, a woman she hadn’t seen since the fork incident.

  Gosh, I’m looking forward to that, she thought with a sneer.

  She went to the living half of the room, grabbed the remote, and clicked on the TV. Maybe she’d get lucky with a Squaring rerun.

  The front door opened. Rachel smiled, leading the dog inside by the leash.

  “Whoa,” Eddie said, ducking behind the couch. “You can’t bring that thing in here like it’s all normal or something.”

  “I can’t leave him tied to a tree all day. And I can’t keep him locked in my room.”

  “It’ll have to be the pound, then.”

  “I’m not doing that. You’re just gonna have to deal with it until I can find someone who wants him.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. Don’t worry. I’ll baby gate him in the kitchen. It’ll be fine.”

  “Fine isn’t the word, Rachel. Horrendous might be the word. Awful could be the word. Or tragic. Yeah, tragic would be appropriate. But not fine. Fine can suck my ass.”

  “Alright, settle down.”

  “NO!”

  Eddie raised hands to cover her eyes, palms out. Then, without thinking she began striking her forehead with the backs of them, harder with each blow. It hurt, yes, but it was real. There were no lies in pain. Pain always told the truth.

  “Stop it, Ed. I’ll take him outside. Okay? Please stop.” Rachel led Maurice out the door, back to the tree. Or maybe into traffic. Whatever.

  Fine was not a word. It wasn’t. Terrible was a fucking word. Why didn’t Sis say that one? Why couldn’t she see?

  Nobody sees, Eddie. Nobody but you.

  The pounding continued. She couldn’t stop. Stopping would be a lie. Liars were fuckers. Again. Again. Aga-

  Sister had her by the hands now. Holding her. Stopping her.

  “No. You can’t make me. Let me go.”

  Tighter. Squeezing. Stopping. Pulling, hard.

  “Please,” Rachel said. “Stop.”

  Eddie stopped. Lowered her fingers. Looked her in the eyes. “Why do you hate me?” she whispered.

  “I don’t. I love you.”

  Big Sis was still the queen, and hurting still wasn’t allowed.

  2

  Sam aimed the pistol at his guests.

  This morning’s events had complicated things and he wasn’t sure how to proceed. He’d have to make it work somehow. Everything depended on it.

  He hated their fearful, judging eyes. They couldn’t understand what this project meant to him. No one could. This was bigger than two stupid men. And anyway, with the power he now wielded he could probably bring them back, if he really wanted to.

  Nobody understands. But that’s okay. Nobody needs to. Not until the time is right.

  He’d still be going public, naturally. The camera crew was on its way. They’d be here by early afternoon. He just needed a convincing story to tell them about their boss.

  I’ll have to give that some thought.

  In the meantime?

  The room next door would be perfect. It was a space roughly the size of the one where they now stood, empty, save a few boxes of useless paper goods and some cleaning supplies. There was only one entrance as the room had been designed for equipmen
t storage. The metal door had a pretty serious deadbolt on it and he just happened to have the key.

  “Place your cell phones on the counter.”

  “Jesus. You killed him,” Cathleen said. “You-”

  “He was here to kill us. Phones please.”

  David took a step forward, eying the pistol. “You won’t get away with this.”

  Sam raised the weapon to point at David’s face. “You will follow my instructions precisely or-”

  “Or what? You’ll kill us too?”

  “No.” Sam glared at Cathleen. “Just her.”

  David slid his phone out of a shirt pocket, set it on the counter. Cathleen, still trembling, did the same. Tears glazed her flushed face.

  “You will go through that door, take a left, and enter the next room. You will walk to the back of that room, and wait. One at a time, David first. Go now.”

  David locked eyes with Cathleen, took her hand. “It’s going to be alright,” he told her.

  “Now, please.”

  He walked to the doorway, sucked in a breath, and then took a left as instructed.

  Alone with Cathleen, Sam said, “I invited David, not you. I don’t need you. Make sure he remembers that.”

  3

  The storage room.

  A mop stood leaning in the corner like a punished grade-schooler, next to a dirty five-gallon bucket filled with cleaning supplies. Comet, Windex, a squirt bottle of disinfectant, an unopened package of sponges, some stained rags.

  Cases of printer paper had been stacked in the middle of the floor, and for reasons less obvious, a spoon.

  Fluorescent tube lighting above, hardwood flooring. Two outlets. No windows. And a single closed door. David checked the knob after he heard the clack of Sam’s shoes disappear down the hall. Yes, it was locked tight.

  So that was it, the entire contents of their cell, besides a couple sticks of Juicy Fruit and a wallet with ten ones, two twenties, a fifty, and a few credit cards – everything they’d brought with them.