Zero-Point

by T J Trapp

  “Hmmpf. It would be ever so much more efficient and reasonable if we just asked the queen to decide for us,” Erin said. “The queen is the overseer of the land, is she not? And she knows the best use of each parcel. She should be able to dispense a ‘ranch’ for us without all this trouble.”

  “We don’t have a ‘queen,’ remember.”

  Despite Erin’s misgivings, she found the ‘agent’ to be a very pleasant woman, who hopped in their driverless and proceeded to regale them with many details about the properties they would see, the local climate, the local shopping areas, the local schools, and the best place to buy fresh tomatoes. At the end of the second afternoon, they decided on a ranch about two hours away by driverless from the great hangars where the metal birds roosted.

  “I think this place will satisfy all our needs,” Alec said. The ranch they were looking at had a big house and a nice garden, as well as a barn, a large bunkhouse, and a mechanics’ shop. The seller was willing to let most of the furniture go with the house. A tree-lined windbreak extended around the perimeter of the property, and there was a wooded bottomland on one side and a large rolling meadow in the center of the property.

  “That meadow will be just chock full of blue wildflowers come spring,” the agent gushed. “Of course this here entry drive could use a little fixing up – it’s a little rutted out you know, but you could haul in a couple loads of gravel and maybe even pave it if you wanted to.”

  I like it the way it is, Erin thought to Alec. Easier to defend against attack.

  “And you already saw the upgraded bathrooms – such a nice hot tub set up right off the master bedroom – and that designer kitchen is just perfect! All you need to do is bring in the donuts, and set right down and have your coffee,” the agent said, beaming.

  “Donuts? Does it come with donuts?” Erin asked.

  “Well I’m sorry to say that the nearest donut shop is over in the next town, and that’s a bit of a ride – but, I’ll tell you what,” the agent said, trying to not lose a sale over donut availability, “I’ll bring you a big box of fresh ones as a special treat the day you move in!”

  The agent was true to her word, and the day Erin and Alec took possession, a big box of donuts appeared on the wide kitchen counter. With a portal, relocating their few belongings was easy.

  “I’m going to call this place ‘Queen’s Woods,’” Erin said. “I think I will like it here.”

  Erin began the process of relocating and training her newly-formed guard force while Alec continued to work on the transporter.

  ✽✽✽

  From the first, Alec had known that building a transporter would be complex. Even with Daniel’s help, it was taking a long time. The first components had been easy. The large dark energy collector was now situated by the back gate of the ranch in a secluded meadow. The printer had allowed him to make the parts with a minimum of hassle and the portal made moving the individual parts easy. The second component had been the concentrator. Fabricating it had been laborious and time consuming, but straightforward. The third component – the transport ring – had been easy to make. Unlike the copper transport ring that he had made in New Haven, this ring had rare earth components that would not fail after every use.

  The hardest component was the power crystal. Alec had never made a power crystal and had not studied them while in the elf lands. Days of experimenting had led him to conclude that the printer was not precise enough to fabricate a large power crystal. The few small ones that he tried to make with the printer all had microscopic flaws and shattered when any significant amount of dark energy flowed into the crystal.

  He brought Daniel in to help him with the work. Daniel was willing to help, but after observing the situation at the ranch, he was full of questions.

  “Boss, I understand that the boss-lady wants to go home and see your children. I get it. But why all of this? Why not just take an airplane and go home?”

  “Where we are going, we can’t reach by airplane. The transporter is the only way to get to her land.”

  Daniel stared at him for a moment, and Alec knew what was coming next.

  “So, where are you really going, boss?” Daniel asked softly. “I know the boss-lady talks about a place called ‘Nevia’ as being home. But when I cell the name, all I get are references to some kind of sea snail. There is no country named ‘Nevia.’

  “And her ‘guards!’ The guard force she is training is better than any of the teams that compete on the ‘Ninja Game Show’ that everyone watches on their cell. Her guys and women are going to be real fighters – if they survive her training. But I don’t understand her emphasis on swords and spears, or why she thinks you will need that kind of guard force.”

  Alec didn’t answer.

  “And her accent. Her English is pretty good, but there are a lot of words she doesn’t know. Like ‘lavatory.’ She thought it had something to do with hot rocks. I’ve heard her speak to you in another language – and she could speak the same weird sing-song language that the people who took my sister used. I don’t understand who those people were – or how they could be taking my sister right here in our country without anyone stopping them – except the two of you. What is really happening?”

  “How is your sister?” Alec asked, trying to avoid the question.

  “Good. She is finally starting to recover. I don’t think that she will ever take drugs again after her experience.

  “But, boss, back to my question. Why are you trying so hard to build this thing and how could you possibly expect it to work? If I hadn’t seen and built portals, I would think this was all quackery and impossible. Who are you really, and what are you trying to do here?”

  Alec stopped working and stared long and hard at his workbench. After a long while he answered Daniel. “You are right. There is more to us than is apparent.” He thought for a few minutes more, then said, “I guess I should tell you. You’re in this with us, now, and you deserve to know.”

  Daniel looked at him expectantly.

  “I know that transporters work,” Alec said, “because that is how I was transported from here to Nevia, many years ago, and how Erin and I arrived back here a few months ago.” He sighed. “Transporters are the only way for us to get home. I know how portals worked because they existed at home. I even made portals there.”

  “So where is ‘home,’ boss?”

  “The USA is where I was born, but Nevia is home. Erin was born on Nevia. But I have to tell you, I have no idea where Nevia is. It may be a world around a star in this universe, but most likely it is a near-parallel version of Earth in another universe. I knew Nevia was a different world when I saw the five moons.”

  Daniel looked at him quizzically. “Five moons?”

  “Yes, Nevia is the ‘Land of the Five Moons.’” He looked at Daniel, who was now staring at him gape-mouthed. “Five. You know, moons. They circle around the planet.”

  “Okay,” Daniel said, “Five moons. A different planet. Somewhere.” He mulled this over for a few seconds, perhaps trying to determine if Alec was crazy. “So, if you miss your homeland so much, why did you come here at all?”

  “Because we were running from the same kinds of people who captured your sister. This was the only place that I knew how to reach in the short time that we had to escape from them.”

  “And now you need to go back.”

  “Yes.”

  “But if you don’t know where … ‘Nevia’ … is located, how do you use a transporter to find another world in all that vastness out there? It seems impossible.”

  “Transporters work best with an aim point,” Alec explained. “I opened a dark energy link between Nevia and this world when we left. Nevia is what is called a ‘zero-point world’ in modern cosmology. It is on a maximum of one of the filaments of dark energy that permeate universes. The dark energy link to the zero-point gives me an aim point, and that should allow me to find Nevia with the transporter. And go back home.”

 
; “Wow,” Daniel replied. “Just think of the possibilities. Our device could be used to explore the universe – or even beyond. The multiverse.”

  “That’s right. Possibly.”

  Then Daniel became more serious. “Exploring the universe is not for me, boss. I am happy right here at home, on our nice little Earth.” He made a face. “You can explore all you want, but don’t expect me to go to another universe. I love making technology work and I love the things that I am learning from you. You are a great boss – the best I’ve ever had. You and the boss-lady. I will help you get your device working and see that you and the boss-lady get home, but exploring other places is not my thing.”

  “Thanks Daniel. We don’t expect you to go anywhere. Like you, we just want to go home and live a peaceful life. And raise our children.”

  Daniel nodded, reflecting on what he had just learned.

  “So – the transporter – you can use this to put you anywhere you want to go? Sort of like a big portal?”

  Alec nodded. “Theoretically, yes – theoretically we should be able to go anywhere across the multiverse – but practically, no. Transporters are similar to a portal, but different in a couple of major aspects.

  “A portal is a much more clever device than a transporter. The portal changes two volumes in three-dimensional space by establishing an axis in the dark matter dimensions where the two volumes can rotate. You can go between two very-precise points with a portal. The limitation is that the portal must have both end points established in advance.

  “A transporter, on the other hand, only needs one end-point to work, but you have to find the target by precisely focusing large amounts of dark energy. Transporting is like hitting a golf ball. The slightest difference at the start will causes a huge change at the end. If you have something on the other end to provide a beacon, you can tune the receiving point to the beacon. The only beacon that I have is the zero-point. When we transport to Nevia we expect to be somewhere in the region around the zero-point, but I have no way to determine exactly where.”

  “So that is why you stationed your spare medallion at the shop. It is your beacon.”

  “Precisely correct,” Alec replied.

  “It all sounds like science-fiction, boss. It was easier when I thought you were going to somewhere in Africa!” He smiled and shook his head.

  “But I gotta say, boss, I owe you a lot for saving my sister. Now she has a second chance at life. I am on board to help you and the boss-lady get home.”

  The young man reached out his hand and Alec grasped it gratefully.

  “Thank you, Daniel. Your support means a lot to me.”

  “No problem,” Daniel said.

  “But do me a favor. Don’t spread what I told you around to the others. We try to keep our past to ourselves.”

  “Don’t worry, boss!” Daniel said chuckling. “If I told anybody that story, no one would believe it, and they would be trying to send me to the rehab clinic! Detox and the looney bin! Your tale is safe with me.”

  “Then let’s get back to work.” Alec smiled.

  ✽✽✽

  “What’s on the agenda today, boss?”

  “Our immediate problem is trying to figure out how to focus the dark energy without destroying the focusing crystal.”

  “What was the crystal made of that you used to come here?” Daniel asked.

  “I think it was a single diamond crystal – really big. It was larger than a beach ball. It had tiny tricrystals embedded in the structure. The tricrystals were positioned in such a way that they induced no strain in the diamond structure. Any strain would have created flaws that would have caused the crystal to fail. And when the crystal fails, boom! It blows itself to bits. I can make fist-sized crystals like that, but every time I try to create a large crystal, it has too many flaws.”

  “Boss, those soft-ball sized diamonds you have been making are something that no one else can do. But I have a question. Does the focusing have to be done by one crystal? Why not make an array of crystals and then use the array to focus the energy?”

  “Clever idea, but the crystals have to be perfectly phased with each other. I need a way to get them in phase.”

  “Boss, can you make a master oscillator and link them all to it?”

  Alec turned this idea over in his mind. I wonder if Erin could use her ability to sense ‘rightness’ to help me get them all in phase with the master oscillator.

  “Clever idea Daniel. It just might work.”

  ✽✽✽

  Erin stood in the meadow watching Alec make his final preparations. They stood a safe distance from the workshop, on a rise in the meadow, but miles from the nearest structure beyond their ranch – a ‘safety exclusion zone,’ Alec called it, in case something went wrong. The mid-day sun shone brightly, without a cloud in the blue Texas sky. She could sense Alec’s excitement, and felt that he was excited enough that she expected him to succeed.

  A ring was outlined in front of her. In the center of the ring was a wire rodent trap, with a large gopher sitting nervously in one corner. Erin made what she thought was a gopher-noise at it, and the gopher looked at her with its beady brown eyes.

  “Well, here goes nothing,” Alec said.

  “It’s not ‘nothing,’ it’s ‘something,’” Erin said, correcting him. “I hope this little creature survives. If he doesn’t, you’ll have to wait for me to snare you another one before you can run another test.”

  “I hope so too,” Alec said. “This will be our fourth try to actually transport an object back to the rare earth shop. The two rocks I sent made it just fine, but that poor frog didn’t make it in one piece. And I need to make sure that we can send a living animal.” Alec looked dispassionately at the gopher. “This time I am confident that we will succeed. We are going to send this guy from here to the shop, in one piece, unharmed, and Daniel is on the other end waiting for him. This time it will work.”

  “Yes,” said Erin, mirroring his enthusiasm.

  “Go time!” Alec said.

  Erin watched with excitement as Alec started up the device. Success would move them one step closer to returning home, and if the experiment failed – then, it would just be a sacrifice of one of the hundreds of gophers that crisscrossed the meadow. The device began to hum as it slowly ramped up toward full power.

  Erin sensed when it was time for her to join in and do her part, and she laid her hand on his arm. The main crystals all oscillated as dark energy flowed into their hidden dimensions. Careful, she thought to Alec as she felt a small waver. The flaw in the oscillation pattern of the crystal of the controller started to grow unstably.

  Help me, he thought back, and she sensed until she could feel the rightness to correct the oscillation. Alec rebalanced the crystals. The improper oscillations decreased and the dark energy levels stabilized. The crystals increased in temperature until they were almost too hot to touch as the dark energy continued to flow into the crystal.

  As Erin watched, the circle on the meadow wavered, and she could briefly see the bare concrete floor of the rare earth shop, with the caged gopher flickering back and forth. Then the amount of energy approached the maximum that the crystals could transmit. The increased temperature highlighted every slight imperfection in the crystals and the gopher began to run in circles around its little cage, squeaking. Alec continued to let Erin’s sense of rightness guide him as he damped the unstable dark energy oscillations and nursed the array of crystals back into a stable regime. He held the dark energy in the crystals as long as he could, then he released the dark energy.

  A flash of multi-colored light was followed by a loud boom! Erin reflexively closed her eyes, and when she opened them, the gopher and its cage had disappeared.

  Alec’s cell chirped. He pulled it out of his pocket and squinted at it in the bright sunlight, then burst out laughing as he held the tiny screen for Erin to see. A hologram of a confused gopher sitting in a cage on the floor of the rare earth shop appeared, and
as they watched, the rodent stood up and pawed at the wires of its enclosure.

  “We did it! The picture is from Daniel. We sent the gopher to the shop!”

  Alec raised his arms into the air, laughing wildly, then grabbed Erin by the waist and spun her around. “We did it! We did it!”

  Erin smiled at his excitement. “Of course you did it, my Wizard! I would have expected nothing less! But – how is your hand?”

  Alec looked down at his hand. “Oh.” His hand was bloody from several cuts, with a couple of burned spots on his fingers where he had been touching the crystal. He pointed at the trail of blood that led back to a shattered crystal. “I must have cut it on that crystal when it shattered.” He stuck his cut knuckle in his mouth and looked around. “But that’s good! Only one crystal failed this time! Thanks to Daniel, we are getting much better at fabricating them. And with a little more practice I shouldn’t actually have to touch them to control them.”

  “And soon we can go home?”

  “Not quite yet. Now I just need to make enough crystals – and big enough crystals – to transport between universes. I need enough crystals to flow several times more power through the crystals to open the hole back to Nevia and then we need to learn how to keep that many crystals synchronized. We have a lot of work to do, but we are getting closer to success.”

  Erin laid her head on his chest and smiled, sharing in his elation. “My Great Wizard, if anyone can get us off of this land with one moon, it would be you.”

  The moment was interrupted by Alec’s cell.

  “Another call from Daniel? Is our little creature aright?” Erin asked.

  Alec looked at it and frowned. Erin sensed his concern.

  “No, it’s not Daniel.”

  “Another of the strange messages?”

  “Yes – look at the screen. This is the second time I have received a message like this after I did a test.”

  Erin peered at the little screen, trying to decipher the runes.