by Lizzy Bequin
Something could always go wrong.
The doors slid shut behind, and a moment later the elevator moved, carrying them a thousand feet down into the depths of Blue Mesa.
CHAPTER 3
The air in the control room was cold and scented with the aroma of more bad coffee and a half-eaten microwaveable pizza. Besides those mundane details, the room looked to Katrine as if it could be the command center of a futuristic space ship. It was a broad, white, shadowless room, lit from every angle by the harsh glow of LEDs.
Various workstations were arranged around the walls, their control panels blinking and monitors flickering with cascades of data. Even more flat panel screens angled downward from the ceiling. At the front of the room, inset into the wall, was a large, wide, Plexiglas window. On the far side of that window, running horizontally, was what looked like a rather nondescript section of thick pipe big enough for a person to stand up inside of. To the untrained eye it might have appeared to be nothing more exciting than a very large oil or gas pipeline.
In reality, however, it was one section of the Blue Mesa supercollider—a circular particle accelerator twenty miles in diameter.
In a matter of minutes, if everything went according to plan, particles of matter and antimatter would collide at a velocity approaching the speed of light. The collision would recreate energy levels that had not existed since the Big Bang.
Anyway, that was the theory.
The thought prickled the fine hairs on the back of Katrine’s neck. As the Blue Mesa project’s resident mathematician, she was used to dealing with abstractions. The undeniable reality of the supercollider, the physicality of it, was a bit unnerving.
She jumped a little as a contralto voice broke the tense silence of the control room.
“All right, folks, the time has come. Let’s begin.”
The speaker was Dr. Petra Larkin. At nearly six feet, with her long, bronze hair draped over one shoulder of her white lab coat, the athletic Russian-American professor and team leader of the Blue Mesa project cut a striking figure. She stood over her control station in the center of the room, surveying the team with the cool confidence of a captain.
“This truly is a momentous occasion,” Petra said, looking at each of the four team members in turn. “Tonight we are going to embark on the greatest journey humankind has ever taken, not to some distant continent, nor through the vast reaches of space, but to the very genesis of reality itself. In a few moments, right there on the other side of that window, we will replicate conditions that have not been seen since the birth of the universe.”
Petra took a deep breath and set her fists on her hips, striking a power pose.
“And I can’t tell you how proud I am that our team is entirely female. Remember what Neil Armstrong said? One giant leap for mankind? Well tonight, we are taking a far bigger leap for womankind.”
She cast her eyes around the room one last time, seemingly swelling with pride. Even Katrine, despite her dark mood, felt a flutter of excitement and pride after the team leader’s short but rousing speech.
Petra nodded toward a woman at a control station at the side of the room.
“All right, Mei, go ahead and turn it on.”
Mei Wang, the computer engineer, was the youngest member of the team, and she looked the part. With her ripped jeans, scuffed sneakers, and streak of hot pink in her ebony bangs, she looked more like a teenage skater than one of the top software engineers in the world. At the exact moment Petra issued her command, Mei had been in the middle of blowing a rather impressive pink bubble with her gum, which she promptly popped and folded back into her mouth.
“You got it, boss!”
Mei swiveled in her seat and went to work. Her fingers played over the control deck with all the precision of a concert pianist, tapping buttons and making minute adjustments to sliders and dials. In a matter of seconds the superconducting electromagnets of the particle accelerator came to life, sending a deep hum vibrating through the control room.
“All right, she’s up and running,” Mei called.
“Nora,” Petra called out. “How does everything look on your end?”
As chief particle physicist, Nora was seated at a separate console by the wall. Because she was blind, she wore an ear bud in one ear that transmitted a constant stream of data for the energy levels inside the accelerator. Her workstation also had a special three-dimensional pad that displayed the data in Braille for her to read. She ran her fingers over the pad, her expression calm behind her dark glasses.
“All clear,” Nora answered.
“Good.” Petra nodded. “Mei, initiate collimation of the beams.”
“Affirmative, boss. Collimating beams.”
The team watched in hushed suspense as lines of data poured down the flat panel monitors arranged around the walls and from the ceiling. Inside the particle accelerator, two particle beams were now set on a collision course with electrons going one way and positrons going the other. It was now just a matter of incrementally turning up the power until the beams were going at one hundred percent.
“Power at sixty-five percent,” Mei called out.
“Good,” Petra answered. “Proceed in five percent increments.”
Katrine leaned back in her seat and looked around the control room at the other team members.
In addition to Petra, the team leader, Nora, the physicist, and Mei, the computer engineer, the only other people in the control room were Blair Swanson and herself. Katrine had no idea why the team psychiatrist was present for tonight’s experiment, but Petra must have invited her, so here she was.
Blair was a small, somewhat prim woman with a head full of unruly brown curls that she had tried unsuccessfully to tame into a ponytail. One curling lock had escaped and now dangled in front of her glasses. She sat still and straight in her chair, silently observing the proceedings with an inscrutable expression.
To be honest, Katrine wasn’t entirely sure why she was here herself. Yes, as the team’s resident mathematician, she had played a big role in the design of the supercollider and the procedures for the experiment. But now, she had little to do besides twiddle her thumbs.
“Seventy percent.”
“Nora? How are we looking?”
“So far so good, Petra.”
“Good. Mei, keep going.”
As the team gradually brought the collider up to full power, Katrine found her mind drifting back to her earlier thoughts about her infertility. She caught herself doing it, chastised herself for letting her mind wander now of all times. Here she was, part of the biggest moment in the history of science, and all she could think about were her own silly personal problems.
Still, the problem nagged at her, as it always did, drawing her thoughts the way a magnet draws iron filings. She just couldn’t seem to stop herself.
And as always, when she thought of her infertility, her mind eventually found its way to her failed marriage. Though it had legally ended little more than a month ago, the relationship itself had died almost before it got off the ground. They had married quickly, probably too quickly. And then there was the problem.
Her problem. Her defect.
Blair had noticed the sullenness in Katrine and had tried to get her to open up, but Katrine had avoided that, preferring instead to confide in Nora. Her friend had tried to convince her that the dissolution of the marriage was not Kat’s fault, that she needed to stop beating herself up over it, but that was easier said than done.
Deep in her heart, though, Katrine knew that it was her fault.
She was defective.
Broken.
And connected to these feelings in some way, there was the issue of her recurring nightmare. The one where she was sacrificed to a dragon.
God, she would never tell Blair about that. She could only imagine how the shrink would psychoanalyze that dream symbol—a manifestation of her lack of self worth, perhaps.
But now, in the control room, as Katrine thought
about that bizarre dream, something strange started to happen.
She found herself experiencing the dream in the present time. It was not a mere memory, but a waking dream filling her senses. She smelled charred wood and brimstone. She felt hard iron bindings holding her wrists. She heard the slow, steady flapping of great wings.
Before her eyes, the control room had disappeared, replaced by the vision of a great red dragon soaring toward her, its long talons ready to snatch her up, its fanged jaws ready to devour.
The sound of Nora’s voice calling her name suddenly snapped Katrine out of her waking dream.
“Kat, are you going to back me up on this?”
Katrine shook herself out of her daze. She’d had that dragon dream more times than she could count over the past months, but never before had it invaded her waking life like that. Now she felt as though everyone in the control room was staring at her, like she had just been caught snoozing in class.
“I’m sorry, what…”
“We need to shut the accelerator down,” Nora said. “Something is wrong.”
“We’re not shutting anything down.” Petra’s cool voice was tinged with a note of annoyance. “Mei, please increase the beam lumosity by five percent.”
“Roger that boss. Lumosity at ninety percent and holding.”
The deep, fine hum of the superconducting electromagnets had risen ever so gradually in pitch. The vibration reminded Katrine of a switched-on amplifier at a rock concert before the first chord is played.
“It’s not holding,” Nora insisted. “These readings are all over the place. The energy resonances aren’t like anything I’ve ever seen before.”
“Of course not,” Petra said with cold determination. “That’s the whole point, Nora. We are entering uncharted territory here. Now is not the time to lose our cool. Mei, another five percent please.”
Nora’s usually fair complexion brightened to a frustrated red.
“I take exception to that, Petra,” she almost shouted. “It absolutely is appropriate to lose our cool. Just look at these numbers. We’re literally ripping a hole in space-time.”
Katrine turned her attention to the monitors above her work station, her eyes sifting through the seemingly impenetrable rivers of data.
“Kat, back me up on this,” Nora said. “We’re about to create a black hole here!”
“I don’t know,” Katrine answered uncertainly. “I don’t see any signs of Hawking radiation, but...”
But something wasn’t right. The energy levels were shifting and churning in unexpected ways. Everything was happening too quickly to process. From her seat at the back of the room, Blair now chimed in.
“Perhaps Nora is right,” she said. “Best to proceed with caution, Petra. Let’s not make any hasty decisions.”
“Nonsense,” Petra brushed the comment off. “Mei, please raise the beam lumosity to full power.”
“Mei, don’t do it,” Nora snapped.
The young computer engineer turned in her seat, casting her eyes back and forth between the blind physicist and the team leader. Briefly, Mei’s gaze locked with Katrine’s as if looking for her to play the tie-breaker.
Katrine hesitated, unsure what to do.
“Mei, I’m the team leader,” Petra said quietly but forcefully. “Now, please raise the beam lumosity to one hundred percent.”
Nora half-shouted, “Mei…”
But the computer engineer had already turned back to her controls. There was a jump in pitch as the electromagnets powered-up fully. The colliding beams were now fully charged.
A long moment stretched out as a tense silence gripped the room.
“One hundred percent,” Mei said with a slight tremor in her voice.
Everyone waited, breath held in anticipation and anxiety. After a few more seconds, when nothing happened, they all let out an audible exhalation of relief in unison. There had been no reason to panic after all.
“Nora,” Petra asked calmly, “What are the readings on—“
She was cut short by a deafening crack of thunder. It was as if a bolt of lightning had somehow penetrated all the way into the depths of the mesa’s core and exploded in the control room. And now, indeed, jagged stripes of electrical energy were zapping around the chamber on the far side of the viewing window. The air filled with a sharp scent of ozone, and the fine hairs on Katrine’s arms stood up as if rubbed with a balloon.
Blair was the first to cry out. “What’s happening?”
Mei leapt up, toppling her chair in the process.
“What’s going on?” Nora shouted. “What do you see?”
Katrine’s heart seemed to have stopped beating and had jumped so high into her throat that she felt as though she might throw it up. Her muscles were tense and charged as a rush of adrenaline coursed through her system.
“We need to go,” she stammered, “Now…”
“Wait a minute,” Petra said, her normally stolid voice cracking slightly. “Now just wait a minute, there’s no need to—“
There was another boom, even louder this time. So loud, in fact, that it left Katrine’s ears ringing. All she could hear were the muted cries of the other team members, like the voices of people shouting underwater, and the pounding of her own heart which had apparently started working again and was making up for the missed beats by going triple time.
Every molecule of Katrine’s body seemed to be screaming at her to run, yet she remained locked in place, unable to take her eyes away from what was happening at the front of the room.
It was as if the very fabric of reality had turned liquid, its surface wobbling and wavering like ripples on a pond. On the other side of that surface, another world was coming into view—a dark world of craggy mountains and shadowy forests of gnarled, frightening trees the likes of which Katrine had never seen. And the vista of that alien world was not stationary either. It seemed to shift and jump from one location to another like a slide show.
The Plexiglas window at the front of the room cracked and ruptured. The shards seemed to implode, sucked into the expanding rift in reality. A hurricane force wind swirled around them, fluttering clothing and hair, swallowing loose items like empty cups and the remains of the pizza, and seemingly sucking all of the oxygen out of the control room.
Mei, the smallest, was pulled off her feet. Her fingers clutched at the edge of her work station as her body was dragged sideways by the devouring force of the rift.
Katrine saw Petra mouth Mei’s name, but the sound was lost, ripped away as soon as it left her lips.
Mei’s fingers slipped. Her body tumbled into the shifting, alien panorama.
Panic now gripped Katrine’s mind. The wind was tugging at her with an astonishing force. She didn’t know whether to stay in place and hold on for dear life or try to escape through the exit at the back of the room.
She opted for the latter, clutching tightly to the edges of the bolted down work station desks as she pulled herself away from the rift.
Petra was the next to go. Her body was sucked over the top of her station and she tumbled through the air, disappearing into the amorphous portal. Blair followed close behind, her face a mask of utter fear as she was snatched away.
Tears flooded Katrine’s eyes. The whipping wind pulled them horizontally across her cheeks.
She was just a few feet from the door.
Then she heard a scream over the din of swirling chaos. It was Nora.
Her best friend had been seated closer to the front window than anybody. Now she was crouching, using the bulk of her work station to shield her body from the suction of the rift. But Katrine could see the structure shaking as the bolts rattled loose. And besides that, the rift was still expanding, spreading outward like a blob. If Nora didn’t move and soon, she would be swallowed up just like the others.
Katrine had a decision to make:
She was almost at the back of the control room. She could escape through the doors, save her own skin, and live out t
he rest of her days being eaten away by guilt.
Or she could turn back and save her friend.
It really wasn’t much of a choice.
Moving slowly, holding tightly to the work stations as she went, Katrine made her way toward the front of the room where Nora was trapped.
Her friend was shivering, face tight with fear. Even with the sense of sight, Katrine could barely comprehend what was happening. She could only imagine the fear and confusion her blind friend was going through now.
“Nora!” Katrine screamed with all her might. “Nora, hold on! I’m coming!”
Miraculously, Nora seemed to hear her over the rush of the wind. Her face turned in Katrine’s direction.
“Kat?”
Katrine’s curled hair was dragged across her eyes, obscuring her vision. Her lab coat fluttered like a flag in the wind. The muscles of her arms burned with lactic acid as she struggled to hold on, wishing now that she had put in a few more hours in the facility’s weight room.
But she was almost there.
Just a few more steps and she made it. Her body slammed hard into Nora’s work station. The wind howled around them. Katrine clutched her friend’s arm and squeezed.
“Kat, is that you?”
“I’m here, Nora!” She could barely hear her own voice over the roar of the wind.
“You idiot,” Nora shouted. “You should have run for it!”
“Fuck that. You’re my friend.”
But it was immediately clear to Kat that her little rescue plan was destined for failure. The writhing, undulating rift in the fabric of space and time had continued to expand. The force of its suction had doubled. There was no chance of making the hike all the way across the control room.
They were stuck.
And in a matter of moments they would be engulfed by the expanding rift.
Katrine threw her arms around Nora and hugged her tightly. Her friend returned the gesture.
“Kat, I’m scared,” Nora yelled, though her voice seemed barely louder than a whisper.
“Me too…”
With a great crack, the bolts holding the work station in place were torn loose, and the blocky structure was pulled into the rift.
