Squaring the Circle

by B K Brain

  The shadow spoke.

  It’s us or them. Tinny, as if from inside a can.

  Then it was gone.

  6

  Your meds aren’t working, Ed.

  David leaned heavily on Eddie’s shoulder as they stumbled into a dark room.

  A frantic woman emerged from a black corner sobbing. “David!” She grabbed hold of him, hugged him. Must’ve been Cathleen.

  They’d done it. They’d found her.

  “Are you okay?” David asked.

  “What happened to you?”

  “The wormhole worked. I got out. This is Eddie.”

  The woman looked to Eddie, then back to David. “When the guns started going off, I thought…I thought you were - Did you find Susan?” Her eyes were beautiful.

  “We found her,” he said in a somber whisper. “She…” A hopeless expression finished the sentence for him. “Doug?”

  “Gone.”

  “Sam took him?”

  “Don’t say his name, David. Don’t ever say his name again.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Hands slid to cover her eyes. Hold back the pain. Contain it. It was all any of them could do.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “I’m getting you out of here.”

  “How?”

  David rubbed at his neck. “The way we came in, the roof.” He turned to Eddie. “So that was the shadow man you were talking about?”

  “Yeah. That was him.” Angry, as intended.

  “Who is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And how the hell did you protect me from Sam?”

  “I don’t know, David. I swear.”

  “You have to know something. Think.”

  Yeah, Ed. Think.

  Why are you so stupid?

  “No. I’m not. Shut up. Leave me alone.”

  You’re going to die here.

  Fists, over her eyes. She had to move. Had to do something. “Please, Rachel. I’m in trouble. Where are you?” Nowhere to go. Nowhere to fucking go.

  Words, from somewhere far away. The new woman, Cathleen. “What’s wrong with her?”

  David. “She’s losing it.”

  Cathleen. “Eddie? Can you hear me?”

  Hands stopping her, but the feeling was all wrong. Big Sis wasn’t here. A girl named Edith Ann had left her behind, a girl now lost and refusing to try.

  No stopping. She had to move.

  Eddie, not Edith Ann.

  Crazy of course. Everybody knew that.

  David said, “We’ll find your sister. But first you need to help me. You said you would, remember?”

  She remembered. Eddie lowered fists away from her eyes. They were standing close, both of them scared and needing her.

  “My sister hates your show. She only watches because of me.”

  “Getting out of here is how we find her, Eddie. Let’s figure this out together.”

  “Okay, David.”

  “You said you saw me before we got mixed up in the wormhole. You felt the effects of our connection before it happened.”

  “Time is an illusion.”

  “Right. You saw me because we were going to be connected. It’s sounds crazy, but I think that’s what happened.”

  “Okay,” Eddie said, hoping for more.

  David used a quiet moment to take Cathleen’s hand, look to the ceiling, swipe a hand down his weary face. “When I was a kid I was just like you. I read every science book I could get my hands on, had my favorite show too. It helped me see the wonder, the possibilities. It taught me how to believe. I was hooked.

  “When I got a little older I realized something important. What we believe is all we have. It’s the only thing we truly own. Everything else is temporary. Everything else can be taken away. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah. I think so.”

  “Good, because I still believe we can beat him. It’s why you’re here. And you believe it too.”

  “Maybe I did, but I’m not so sure anymore.”

  He shook his head. “No. You’ve seen some crazy shit, but it hasn’t changed your mind. You believe and so do I. I think it’s time we started acting like it, don’t you?”

  Was he right? Did she believe? Eddie’s vision dropped to the floor.

  He put hands on her shoulders, ducked to lock his eyes on hers. “From here on out, know that everything happens for a reason. This is what we’re meant to do. It’s what you’re meant to do.”

  “Me?”

  “Both of us. Think about it. He was able to attack me only until we got close to each other.”

  Sam could hurt them separately, but not together? Could that be it?

  “You really think so?”

  “Entangled photons always have opposite spins. Always.”

  Yes, and spin equals power. There had to be a way to use their entanglement against Sam, had to be, but how?

  Your purpose, little girl. Tell me.

  Maddening.

  7

  The main event.

  Susan, now Doug.

  The electricity was out, the overhead fluorescents, the outlets. But the computer where he’d found Sam’s thumb drives still had juice, 118 continuous volts flowing from a small battery backup under the desk. The screensaver reflected off the opposite wall in a multicolored twisting of dim light.

  David had a backup battery at home, about the same size as this one. They were only good for about thirty minutes. He grabbed the mouse to shut down the desktop.

  “We might need it later so I’m powering this thing down.”

  Cathleen said, “The quantum machine is off? That means we can get out of here.”

  “No. The control booth still has power. There’s a backup battery somewhere.”

  Eddie walked to the door and checked the view down the hall. “Where?”

  He looked to Cathleen, took her hand. “It has to be hidden somewhere close to the booth. I’ll find it. After we get you out.”

  The connection between him and Eddie might prove useful later, or it might not. David needed to do something now, and it was pretty clear what that thing should be.

  He claimed the nine-millimeter from the desk, stretched at a brick of pain in his lower back. His neck hurt so bad he could barely turn his head. And his hip, all the way down a left leg, nerves burning a trail of acid. A limp was the best he could do, but with no other choices he’d get there. He’d do what he had to.

  He looked back to the scattered pile of thumb drives, wondering. An idea had begun to percolate, a crazy longshot of an idea. Would it work? No way, not a chance in Hell, but…

  He kneeled down to shuffle through the memory sticks. He found the one labeled Quantum AG, and slipped it in his pocket.

  “What’s that?” Cathleen asked.

  “It’s nothing. Let’s go.”

  David peeked around the corner and saw a dim passageway leading to Reception. He gripped the pistol in one hand, Cathleen in the other, stepped forward. He stopped at the threshold, listened. All quiet.

  David chose each step with slow deliberation, each breath with care. Eyes scanned every corner, ears strained into silence. A big rectangle of sunlight lay over tile at the double-doors. Just outside, Sam’s wall of invisible fire.

  Broken glass. A soot-littered sidewalk.

  And the parking lot beyond. Freedom.

  He imagined running across that lot and into the woods, getting away from this whole mess. David knew better, but it was all he could do not to try it anyway. He gritted teeth, abandoned the fantasy, and picked up the pace.

  The exhausted trio navigated the darkness with caution, a television producer in the lead. Then a makeup artist. Then a crazy girl. No group in history had been so ill-prepared, so surely doomed as they.

  At the end of the corridor, hushed silence. Around the corner, an open doorway to the right and a soft blue glow.

  Up ahead, a wall.

  What? No.

  The path to the ve
nt was gone. Not blocked, not sealed shut. Gone, as if it had never been there. The only way out had vanished, because Sam knew it’s where they’d come in.

  It seemed the doctor’s power didn’t end at manipulating gravity and creating wormholes. Now the fucker could wish entire hallways out of existence.

  8

  Sam knelt down in front of the bound man, rubbing a tremble out of his hands. He could feel his father’s eyes, watching, judging his every move. He knew the others were outside the doorway, in the shadows, watching as well. Fine by him. He wasn’t shy.

  He grabbed a handful of hair, lifted the face up to see. The man’s expression had gone slack. Still alive, yes, but changed. The begging and crying were done. Tears were for the grieving and it was clear he’d moved past that now. Doug was learning his own lesson, one of acceptance. Good.

  Sam remembered standing at his father’s bedside on that final day. There was yet defiance in his weakened expression. And anger, naturally. Cancer had eaten away everything else - his lungs, his heart, the very flesh from his bones - but it hadn’t the stomach for his father’s judgement, a rage for the world and everyone in it.

  “Please don’t die,” a twelve-year-old Sam told his dad, tears trickling down his cheeks.

  “I tried to make you see, Samuel…I did. But you’re just a sinner like all the rest.” His final words. The beep-beep of the monitor dropped to a horrible, steady tone.

  “Just kill me,” Doug said.

  Twitching lips curled into a smile. “I will. As soon as you give up your secrets.”

  “I don’t-”

  “Oh yes, Doug. You do. We all do. You see, I need to find your connection to the cosmos. And let me tell you, it isn’t easy.” Sam motioned upward, into the blue glow, into Doug. Tiny white streaks, millions of them, swam in all directions. Chaotic beauty.

  Power, waiting to be claimed.

  Sam took a moment to consider a different memory, taste it in his mind’s eye. A few weeks after his father died, Mom planted a garden.

  “When I was a child my mother had a wonderful garden. She grew everything. Green beans, tomatoes, strawberries, squash. And the most amazing chili peppers. Hotter than the fires of hell, everyone said so. One day I asked her how she made them so hot. Do you know what she said? She said the trick was in stressing the soil. The more you deprive the plant of water and nutrients, the hotter the pepper becomes. Spice is a byproduct of pain, Doug. Isn’t that fascinating?”

  Sam turned, walked toward the center of the floor.

  “I haven’t found what I need because you don’t have enough flavor, my friend. But we can remedy that. Yes, I believe we can.” He glanced to the door, to David.

  Watch closely now. This is where things get interesting.

  Mom had found meaning in her husband’s death. Freedom. Over the course of that spring and summer she became God to a twenty-by-twenty patch of growing things in the back yard. She fed them, watered them, loved them.

  And when the time was right she pulled them from the ground and collected them in a wicker basket. Brought them in the house, made dinner.

  That’s what they were for, after all. That’s what everything was for.

  Sam dug in. Deep.

  DIVISION FOUR: THE OBSERVER’S PARADÖX

  Over the years Schrödinger’s cat has become the most famous illustration of superposition ever conceived. The thought experiment, proposed by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935, goes like this:

  Take a cat and put it in a steel box, along with a device containing a vial of a radioactive substance, hydrocyanic acid. If the acid decays during the test period, a relay will then trip a hammer that will break the vial and kill the cat.

  With the box closed an observer can’t know if the decay has taken place, and in turn, if the cat has been killed by radiation. In this undetermined state quantum theory suggests the animal is in a superposition, both alive and dead, and will remain that way until the box is opened and the contents examined. Only when we look inside is the choice of the cat’s mortality made. This is known as the observer’s paradox, the idea of simply looking as having an effect on the state of an object, the outcome not final until a measurement is taken.

  Superposition has been proven at the subatomic level. Particles have shown to occupy multiple locations simultaneously. But does this translate to observable reality? Is such a cat really alive and dead at the same time?

  So the question is not of the sound a falling tree makes in the forest, as philosopher George Berkeley set forth, but whether said tree falls in the first place.

  Or remains standing.

  Or both.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THEN AGAIN

  1

  They must’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere.

  Eddie looked to David. Then back, to where they’d been. Ahead, to the unreasonable wall.

  This couldn’t be it; this was a dead end.

  Something new, a voice whispered. Yeah. No shit.

  Through an open doorway she saw the lab. Across the room Sam reached up into a brilliant blue glow, the strange hologram from her dream. But this wasn’t her dream, because the other person was a man. A big, once-strong man, now bound at wrists and ankles and reduced to tears. Doug, David’s cameraman. The spiraling lightshow above lit the massive space like headlamps piercing thick fog.

  The bastard doctor stood center floor, smiling, violating another as simply as submerging fingers in a stream. Only this stream could feel pain.

  Doug wasn’t just screaming, he was shrieking like a man on fire. Writhing.

  Something has to be done. Right now.

  David tried to hold her back, Cathleen too, but Eddie couldn’t let them. An immunity to Sam’s power meant they could save that poor man.

  She rushed inside, paused, took in her surroundings. A glare from the control booth, to the right. Doug, to the left. Blue light, everywhere. And Sam, dead ahead.

  Logic told her she had to get between them. Block Sam, distract him. Anything to make the screaming stop. Eddie ran.

  It was obvious Sam had grown accustomed to his newfound abilities, his mind quickening. Just as Eddie entered his peripheral vision, he struck. A hand snapped outward, as if snatching an insect from the air.

  The gesture, and the intention behind it, would’ve been useless if she’d brought David along.

  But David was still in the doorway.

  2

  The way out, gone.

  Doug, dying right before their eyes.

  Eddie, yanking away from David’s grip. He had to stop her. She couldn’t fight Sam, nobody could. Her arm slipped from his fingers. He reached out but it was too late, she was going in. A thing like that could get them all killed.

  No.

  Sam struck like a viper, claiming a handful of empty air. An invisible stranglehold snatched her up. She cried out, struggled, gasped. Fought for her life. Alone she was vulnerable to his power, like any of them.

  Sam looked surprised. He stared, frowned, cocked his head. “Oh, Hello,” he said. “Eddie, was it? Well Eddie, it seems you’re not as strong as I thought.”

  David stepped across the threshold, into the blue haze. What was he going to do?

  “Let her go, Sam.”

  Sam kept eyes on his captive. “More interruptions, David? I would’ve thought you knew better by now.”

  David took a step toward Eddie, glanced to Sam, took another. The glow was fading. “Please,” he said. “Don’t hurt her.”

  “Life is a series of lessons. What will it take to learn yours? A snapped neck? A crushed spine?” Sam shrugged. “Maybe I’ll just hold her right here and watch her suffocate. What do you think, Dave?”

  Three feet above the floor, midair. Legs kicking. Arms struggling against horrific pressure. Her eyes, impossibly wide. She couldn’t breathe.

  David’s muscles tightened, preparing to run. But where? To Eddie, or away?

  He was right about their connection, wasn’t he?

  One
thing was sure. The girl was here for a reason; without her they were all dead.

  David ran. To help Eddie? To die with her?

  One way to find out.

  3

  It was Eddie’s turn. Life needs no other reason.

  Rachel, I’m scared. I’m in trouble and I’m scared.

  No air. Suffocating. Choking. Squeezing like a vise.

  Can’t see. Oh God, I can’t see.

  David, Cathleen, Dr. Thatcher, pictures with no pictures. Black construction paper. The dark, lonely space between atoms.

  All black.

  All gone.

  Rachel.

  And Sam. “You’re weak. Pathetic. And I’m done with you.”

  A moment of silence. Then-

  A hand reaching out, grabbing her leg. Skin to skin. Falling.

  Air. Sweet, beautiful air.

  Eddie hit the floor and realized she’d been released. She jumped to her feet, gasped. Doubled over, coughed. Her entire body burned like fire. David had done it, he’d saved her.

  She turned to Sam. He stared in disbelief for a moment, with mental wheels churning at the mystery. The moment passed.

  “It’s not the girl that’s impervious,” he said. “It’s the two of you together. You’re connected.” He gazed up to the ceiling, shook his head, laughed. “How ever did you manage such a thing?”

  David had been right. Entanglement, opposite spin. Spin equals energy. And energy is life.

  Any action taken on one must have a contrasting reaction on the other. If the negative couldn’t occur, the initial positive could not take place. It would be kept from doing so, just like the baseball.

  She snapped a look to David. Staying close to him was starting to seem like a very good idea. She grabbed for his arm.

  Sam shook a finger at the pair, smirked, walked closer. “I knew you were smart, Dave. But this? I must admit I’m impressed.”

  Eddie studied the doctor’s face. Crazy, yes. Powerful? Sure. But the universe had rules, and Sam had to play by them just like everybody else.

  A fresh confidence pumped through her veins. As long as she and David stayed close, Sam couldn’t hurt them. That’s why she stood her ground as he made his approach. There was no reason to fear him, not if they stood together.