Coldbrook

by Tim Lebbon

  “Don’t you realise what we’ve done, Jonah?”

  “Of course. What we’ve been trying to do for two decades—form a route from this Earth to another. We’ve tapped the multiverse.” He laughed softly. “Vic, what’s happened here might echo across reality. Somewhere so many miles away there’s not enough room in our universe to write down the distance, there’s another you, toasting our success with another me, and the other you is pleased and happy and confident that—”

  “Don’t give me that bullshit!” Vic snapped. And Jonah could see that he was genuinely scared. He has family up there, he thought, and for a second he tried to put himself in the other man’s place. Yes, with the enormity of what they’d done he could understand the worry, the tension.

  But there were safeguards.

  “Remember Stephen Hawking’s visit?” Jonah asked.

  “How could I not?”

  “He and Bill admired each other greatly, and he gave us his blessing. Said we were the sharpest part of the cutting edge.”

  “You say that as if you were proud.”

  Jonah laughed softly. Vic above everyone knew that Jonah’s pride was a complex thing, untouched by fame or its shadow and more concerned with personal achievement.

  “He said we were the true explorers, and gave that plaque as Stephen Hawking’s stamp of approval. We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something special.”

  “Just because we pretend to understand doesn’t mean we’re special. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be scared.”

  “You should be pleased,” Jonah said, sounding more petulant than he’d intended. But damn it, down here in the facility they weren’t walking in the footsteps of giants. They were making the footsteps.

  “Don’t tell me,” Vic said, sounding tired rather than bitter. “It’s something I’ll be able to tell my grandkids.”

  “If you’re lucky enough to have them,” Jonah said, “then yes, of course. You can tell them you were part of the most startling, audacious experiment in history. At Fermilab and CERN they’re knocking protons together to look for the Higgs boson particle and mini black holes. Theorists discuss Planck energies, and waste time arguing about Copernican and anthropic principles with those possessing narrow vision or blind faith. But here… here, we’ve made much of theoretical physics redundant. Here, we have proof.”

  Vic remained silent, turning his glass this way and that, catching the light and perhaps trying to see what Jonah saw in it.

  “What were you doing here, Vic?” Jonah asked. “If what we’ve done makes you like this, why were you even here?”

  “I wanted it as much as everyone else did,” Vic said. “But the reality is… more massive than I ever imagined. The impact of what we’ve done here…” He trailed off, still staring into his glass.

  “Will be felt for ever,” Jonah said.

  “We’ve changed the whole fucking world,” Vic said softly. Then he put the glass down without drinking, stood, and leaned in close to Jonah as if to look inside him.

  “Vic?” Jonah asked, for the first time a little unsettled.

  And before leaving Vic Pearson spoke the stark truth. “Things can never be the same again.”

  2

  Holly Wright should have gone to bed hours ago. It had been like this since breach three days before, with her desire for sleep driven out by the unbridled excitement at what had happened. They would sit here together when others were sleeping, her and Jonah, analysing and theorising, speculating and sometimes just staring at the thing. But most of the time Control was buzzing, there was still much to be done, and staring had to be kept to a minimum.

  She missed that time. For her, being a scientist was all about dreaming. Which was how she survived on two hours of sleep per night, and why she was here now. Staring and dreaming.

  With her in Control were three guards and their captain, Alex. She had trouble remembering the guards’ names—she blamed the hats and short haircuts. They paced and talked, chatting into communicators, and she found their presence comforting. Jonah had once commented that their minds were too small to appreciate what was being done here, but she’d long known that attitude as a fault of his. He never suffered fools gladly, and as he was a genius most other people were fools to him.

  Taking up most of the lowest of Coldbrook’s three main levels, Control was laid out like a small theatre. On the stage sat the breach, its containment field extending several metres in an outward curve. And where the seats should have been were the control desks and computer terminals, set in gentle curves up towards the rear of the room. The floor sloped up from the breach, set in four terraces, and the doors at the rear of Control were ten feet above the breach floor. The walls, floor and ceiling were constructed of the same materials as the core walls, and sometimes Holly felt the weight of everything around her.

  Behind Control, the corridor curved around the one-hundred-feet-diameter core until it reached the staircase leading up to the middle level. In this largest level the corridor encircled the core completely, and leading off from it were the living quarters, plant rooms, store rooms, gym, canteen and common room, and beyond the common room the large garage area. The highest level—still over a hundred feet below ground—contained the medical suite and Secondary, the emergency control centre in case something happened in Control.

  And in an experiment such as this, “something” could mean anything.

  The cosmologist Satpal was working at his station across the room, and though they chatted occasionally he was much like Holly—too excited to sleep, and when he was here, too wrapped up in what they had done to engage in small talk. One thing he’d said stuck with her. I can’t wait to see their stars. In an alternate universe where different possibilities existed, it was feasible that those possibilities had extended to the heavens.

  Down on the breach floor—and closer than Vic would have allowed, had he been there—sat Melinda Price, their biologist. She had chosen the graveyard shift on purpose as her time to be down there. Since the formation of the breach she had been filming, photographing, and running tests with an array of sensors that had been pushed as close as Jonah would permit, and Holly knew that Melinda itched to go through. So far she’d recorded seventeen species of bird—both familiar and unknown—over a hundred types of insect, trees and flowers, some small mammals, and one creature that she had not been able to categorise. Her breathless enthusiasm was catching. If there was anyone who was going to quit their post and just run, it was Melinda.

  Her favoured instrument was the huge pair of tripod-mounted binoculars. She spent so long looking through them that she had permanent red marks around her eyes from the eyepieces. That never failed to amuse Holly. Melinda used simple binoculars to view across distances that philosophers and scientists had been contemplating for millennia.

  The graveyard shift. Holly still smiled when the biologist called it that. After so long working at Coldbrook—and Melinda was the newest scientist here, having arrived eight years before—none of them had ever felt so alive.

  Holly glanced at the younger woman now, watched her watching. Melinda was a natural beauty who paid little attention to what God had given her and, even though she rarely made much of an effort, she always exuded sexiness. It was partly her looks, but mainly the intelligence that resided behind her eyes. Some men would have found it threatening. But to most men working at Coldbrook, it was a draw. Oh yeah, Melinda’s my freebie, Vic Pearson used to say to Holly. Which made Holly wonder whether he’d once said the same about her, Holly, to his wife Lucy.

  A blue light flowed from the breach, accompanied by a brief, low sizzling sound. A spread of lights on Holly’s control panel lit up, and she leaned forward and accessed a program on her laptop. A few keystrokes and the viewing screen to her left flickered into life. It was a focused view of the breach, fed from a camera set up inside the containment field, and she swept it s
lowly from left to right until she found what she was looking for.

  Melinda was already standing and looked at Holly expectantly.

  “Small winged insect,” Holly said. “I’ll file it as sample two-four-seven—you should be able to access it now.”

  Melinda nodded and, without saying anything, turned to her own laptop, propped on a chair beside where she’d been sitting. Can’t we bring something through alive? she’d been asking Jonah ever since the stability of the breach had been established. But his response had always been the same. Until they’d run a full cycle of remote tests on the atmosphere beyond the breach, the eradicator would remain switched on.

  Holly zoomed in on the dead insect and scanned for any signs of damage. There were none. It gave her a deep sense of satisfaction that her contribution to the experiment was working so well, though she could sense Melinda’s coolness growing day by day. For three years it had been Holly’s task to create a safety barrier that would prevent the ingress of anything living from another world into their own, whatever its size, phylum, composition, or chemical make-up. Her previous work in force-field engineering had seemed like child’s play compared with the task facing her, but she had relished the challenge. Upon detecting something penetrating the field, the programs she had devised took three millionths of a second to establish the nature of the incursion and deliver a delicately measured electromagnetic shock to halt its life. The device would kill anything from a microbe to an elephant, and way beyond, with minimal or no damage to the bodily tissues.

  Within the breach, several robotic sample pods took turns collecting these samples, isolating them, then retreating to the extremes of the containment field. They were rapidly filling up.

  “Zapped another alien?” Vic Pearson asked. He’d crept up on her again, as was his wont. Ninja Vic, she’d once called him, when she’d only become aware of his presence when his hands had reached around to cup her breasts. But that had been years ago.

  “Small fly of some kind,” she said, pointing at the screen. “Four wings. See the colouring? It’s gorgeous.”

  “It’s a fly.”

  “From an alternate universe.”

  “Whoopie-fuckin’-do.” He sat heavily in the chair beside her and sighed.

  “You been drinking?” she asked. She kept her voice down; with some staff sleeping, Control was a quiet place, and without Satpal’s soft music the silence might have been unbearable. Even the air conditioning was all but silent.

  “Jonah asked me to his room,” he said. “Raised a toast to old Bill Coldbrook.” He drummed his fingers on the desk, staring at the breach. “Night over there, too.” His voice had dropped.

  “Jonah got you drunk?”

  “I’m not drunk!” he protested too loudly. “And no, he didn’t. We chatted, I left.” He waved a hand. “Had a few on my own in the canteen.”

  “You didn’t argue with him?”

  “No, no. We didn’t argue. Not this time. But he’s completely…” he smiled, grasping for the word “…unaware, you know?”

  “As you keep saying. I think you’re unfair on him.”

  Vic snorted, and Holly knew what was coming next. She didn’t like it when he drank and she never had. Alcohol didn’t suit him.

  “You say that, and you still balance your religion with what we’ve done here.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “But my beliefs aren’t tested at all by this. If anything—”

  “Maybe,” he said, shaking his head. “Maybe.” And that was what she hated most about Drunk Vic. With alcohol in him, he’d only listen to himself. He stood and skirted her station, descending two wide steps and standing halfway between her and Melinda. And he just stared at the breach for a while.

  One day soon, someone would have to go through.

  “You know,” he said, returning to lean on her desk and look her in the eye, “if your God’s on the other side as well—”

  “Of course He is. The other side is just another here.”

  “Right. Well, if He is, don’t you think He’ll do his best to stop us going through?”

  “Why?”

  Vic held out his hands as if it was obvious. “We’re fucking with His stuff.”

  “What did you come down here for, Vic?”

  He shrugged, touched her hand briefly—a surprisingly intimate gesture from someone she’d once loved—and left Control for his bed.

  After Vic had gone and the guards had locked the doors behind him, Holly ran a diagnostic on the eradicator as she did every time it had been activated, checking systems and charges, running three virtual trials and then accessing its automatic log. All the while she tried to ignore what Vic had said. But it wasn’t so easy, because she’d been thinking much the same herself.

  Diagnostics run, she went down the three wide steps onto the breach floor and stared. Contained within a large hexagonal frame was a window onto somewhere else, the thickness of the window itself mere steps away. Night over there, too, Vic had said, but the darkness of that other Earth seemed subtly, beautifully different. There was a glow to the sky that Satpal thought might be due to layers of dust or moisture in the atmosphere. It cast a faint red light across the night-time landscape, painting the triangle of visible sky with an arterial-blood smear. Below that, the hillside was the colour of good port, shadows hiding behind boulders and short, squat trees. They’d broken through (Eased through, Jonah would have said, probed through, nothing’s broken) into a small valley, and the hindered view they had of this place gave little away.

  There were no signs of habitation. That had disturbed Holly to begin with, but the idea of the multiverse allowed for all possibilities. Just as there were other Earths that would be inhabited by people very much like them, so there would be worlds where life had never begun, or had evolved differently, or where the subtle leap to intelligence and consciousness had not been made. There are countless possibilities, Jonah had told them all weeks before. And we have no way to steer. What they had accomplished was the crowning achievement in humankind’s technical exploration of existence, but Jonah likened it to walking blindly onto a beach at night and plucking up a grain of sand at random. There was no way they could target a particular particle, especially as they had no idea which grains existed.

  This grain, Gaia, might be paradise, she thought. Soon after making their first observations, Melinda had named the world Gaia and it had stuck. And for Holly, the idea that beyond the breach was just one possible Mother Earth out of a limitless number did not detract from its wonder. If anything, it was more wondrous, and it got her to thinking about why they had forged through to this particular possibility.

  During the day the distant hillside was a flower-speckled wonderland, with swathes of purple and pink blooms huddled low among the larger bramble and wild rose bushes and the graceful curls of tall ferns. Birds fluttered from tree to tree, and higher up they’d seen larger, more obscure shapes gliding on thermals, barely flapping their wings. Small rodents rooted around in the vegetation. A stream flowed through the shallow valley, turning left a hundred feet from the breach and continuing out of sight. It was beautiful, and though no one had seen anything shockingly alien or unknown all of them could sense a difference about the place. This was somewhere further away than anyone could imagine or even conceive, brought close enough to touch. When Vic had shown a smuggled-out photograph of the place to his six-year-old daughter Olivia, he said she’d called it “all wrong”, broken out in goose bumps, and started crying.

  Out of the mouths of babes.

  It’s somewhere else entirely, Holly thought. A chill went through her. And the familiar conflicting desires arose to tell her father and brother all about this, or protect them from it.

  Melinda glanced back at her and offered a half-smile. The biologist now seemed to occupy a state of permanent distraction.

  “You should go get some sleep,” Holly said.

  “So should you.”

  Holly nodded and sat in a swive
l chair without taking her eyes off the breach. Staring into a world so far away, yet alongside their own, gave her mind a surprising freedom and focus. As she watched darker colours in alien skies, she thought about Vic and that touch on the back of her hand. However much she tried to delude herself, she could not deny that she thought of him every day. And memories of their affair were elusive things. When they were working together in Control or sharing a meal in the canteen, he was a colleague and a friend, somewhat volatile but marked by genius. His background in military research and development had given him access to the forefront of technological progress, and he was the most brilliant engineer working at Coldbrook. The science might elude him sometimes—even after all this time, Holly believed that only Jonah came close to really understanding—but he could strip and reassemble any piece of equipment they used, and make it perform better in the process.

  It was when they weren’t working together that she dreamed about those two years when they had been lovers. It had ended seven years before when Vic’s wife Lucy had fallen pregnant, a mutual agreement that had hurt them both. But Holly had been pleased that they’d remained close friends. That was important.

  Coldbrook was filled with memories for them both. They’d once made love in Control behind her work station, a quick, giggling liaison back when the place had been empty at night. And her own quarters still sang with the cries of past pleasure, sometimes breathed again in the dark as she remembered.

  We’re grown-ups, Vic had said when they’d ended it. And we’ll always be friends. He had been right. But there were times…

  Like when he touched my hand, she thought.

  “Holly.”

  Her eyes snapped open, she jerked, and the swivel chair slipped a foot to the right. “Wha—?”

  “Wake up, Holly. There’s something…”

  Holly blinked the brief sleep away, looked into the breach—and squinted as she saw movement.

  She gasped and felt the hairs rise all across her body. The conviction she’d been feeling for three days pressed on her again: that they were balanced on the precipice of change. She focused, glancing to the left and right to give her eyes time to work in the dark.