Obscura

by Joe Hart

  She walked down the hospital hallway, everything too bright, corners and edges of walls and counters sharpened to blades. The far end of the corridor held a square of pure light she knew was a window, though it made her vision blur to look directly at it. But more than the ethereal quality of her surroundings, it was the lack of stiffness in her leg that told her this was a dream rather than reality.

  The doorway came into view beside her, and she turned into it.

  Kent rested in the bed, his head and shoulders propped up on a mound of pillows. His eyes were open, and he stared out the window across the room.

  She felt the same elation as she had that day seeing him awake. The doctors had assured her that his consciousness at this stage would be seldom and fleeting. She couldn’t hear the words she spoke as she neared the side of the bed, but she felt the happiness in them even as her eyes found the table on the opposite side, the bandage scissors atop it left by a careless nurse who had put in a new IV for him only minutes ago.

  As she stepped into his line of view, his eyes traveled up to her face and settled there. No life in them. No recognition.

  His lips worked, but no sound came out.

  He blinked, one hand reaching out to her. She grasped his fingers even as terror began to rise within her.

  Because she remembered this. She knew what would happen next.

  She tried to pull away, but already his other arm was moving toward the table, and his hand grasped the scissors.

  They flashed toward her in an arc she could think of only as fatal. He was going to kill her.

  She turned at the last second, and the scissor blades buried themselves in the hollow of her shoulder below her clavicle.

  The pain was molten.

  It boiled down through her arm and up into her skull, giving her a shot of adrenaline so powerful she yanked away from him and fell to her back, dragging him out of bed at the same time.

  There was an electric red spreading down the front of her shirt, and her left arm wasn’t working like it should have been.

  She scrabbled backward, kicking her feet on the tile floor like a dying crab. He was crawling after her, pulling himself along the floor to finish what he’d started, but when she looked at him fully, it wasn’t Kent who approached on all fours like a feral animal.

  It was Carrie.

  There was blood on her daughter’s face, and when she opened her mouth, the final words Kent had ever spoken came out.

  “Who are you?”

  Gillian came up out of the dream to her own shriek. She stifled it with a hand while her other rubbed at the dimpled scar on her shoulder where Kent had stabbed her.

  She sat up and placed her feet on the cool hardwood floor, letting the cold soak in.

  A dream. The dream. Nightmare. Memory. Whatever you wanted to call it. She hadn’t had it in over six months and had been almost sure it was done plaguing her. But this time it was different.

  It had never been Carrie before.

  Her stomach lurched at the image of Carrie’s beautiful face speckled with blood, her words echoing in Gillian’s ears even now in the empty room, fully awake.

  Who are you?

  She stood up and paced out into the hallway. Across from her room, Carrie’s door was wide open. She stood there, watching her small form tucked beneath the blankets, listening to the gentle breaths for nearly five minutes before walking down the hall and into the kitchen.

  The windows were graying with dawn, pale light nudging shadows into the corners. It was still early, early enough for her to go back to bed, but the thought of closing her eyes again was revolting.

  Gillian crossed the room, passing the notepad on the table with the names and numbers she’d carefully drawn a line of defeat through after each phone call the prior afternoon, and stopped at the garbage beside the counter. She hesitated, rubbing the old wound on her shoulder before opening the lid of the garbage can and digging inside.

  Carson’s card had fallen near a banana peel and the coffee grounds from earlier. She brushed it off, looking at the number near the bottom. Then she went to find her phone.

  NASA transcript of Discovery VI disaster press conference.

  Office of Space Flights, Cape Canaveral, FL.

  Spokesperson: Anderson W. Jones, Deputy Administrator.

  Introduction: Erin Fulson, Associate Administrator.

  August 21, 2028.

  E. Fulson: Hello, everyone. Thank you first and foremost for all of the heartfelt support during this tragic time. We appreciate all the condolences, as do the affected families and loved ones of the mission. Now I’ll turn the microphone over to Deputy Administrator Jones, and he will explain the situation to the best of our current knowledge. Please hold all questions until he is finished speaking, and at that point he will answer as many as he can.

  A. W. Jones: Thank you, Erin. Good evening, everyone. I address you all tonight with a heavy heart. As many of you already know, the latest NASA mission, Discovery VI, has suffered catastrophic failure. At two p.m. Eastern time, mission control in Houston received a distress call from astronaut and medical consultant Dr. Gillian Ryan. Shortly thereafter, all communication was lost. The initial launch and docking of the shuttle was textbook with no indication of any mechanical and/or human error. At this time we have assembled a special investigative task force to collect and analyze all data available to determine the cause of this tragedy. NASA and its associates are heartbroken but remain steadfast in honoring those who were lost as well as reaching a conclusion as to why this happened. I’ll take a couple questions now from . . . [Indistinguishable/people speaking over one another.]

  David Fryburg—MSNBC: Sir, can you comment on the exact nature of the Discovery VI mission?

  A. W. Jones: It was a routine flight rendezvousing with the United Nations Space Station. The crew had several priorities, but the essential operation was that of medical research.

  Cynthia Carpenter—FOX News: Mr. Jones, what can you tell us about the information coming out of several Russian news outlets concerning a type of “space sickness” on the UNSS?

  A. W. Jones: Those are unsubstantiated claims, and as of now I am unaware of any reported illness on the Explorer Ten or the space station.

  Lisa Prenetti—CNN: As far as the personnel involved, do you have a firm casualty count yet?

  A. W. Jones: At this point I cannot give you the names or even the number of the other men and women involved in the mission, but there were no survivors. No more questions.

  NINE

  Gillian picked up the sweating glass of chilly water and repositioned it on the table, interconnecting the tenth ring of condensation.

  The glare of a passing car’s windshield on the freeway outside the office building swept the room and was gone, causing her to glance up at the concrete and tarred paths outside in the growing Florida sun. Immediately her gaze was pulled to the massive US flag painted down the side of the towering structure across several streets and parking lots. The NASA vehicle-assembly building loomed over the otherwise flat landscape in all its blockish glory. She’d been told by the overly talkative receptionist who’d led her to the conference room that the vehicle-assembly building was over 520 feet tall, the largest one-story building in the world.

  Interesting, but not really enough to stay entranced for however much longer Carson intended to keep her waiting. And she was sure the room’s views were no accident either—another tactic to impress her in order to get what he wanted.

  It was funny. She hadn’t thought of him in years, yet he had entered her life again just as smoothly and in the same way he’d exited: by putting himself first. They’d met when she’d been a sophomore at the university, a shared mathematics class and fate placing them a desk apart. There had always been an undercurrent to everything in their relationship, skewed toward what he needed or wanted. Mostly it was harmless: his knowledge of culinary arts meant he picked the restaurants they ate at, and the social circles he traveled in dict
ated what nights they went out or stayed in. Even their lovemaking had been slanted by his need to always see her, look her in the eye as he sweated above her. And it had been his ambition that broke them apart—an opportunity at a military college out of state where he could pursue his love of flight. He had expected her to transfer with him, and when she hadn’t, that had been it. A break so clean and quick it was like they had never been together in the first place.

  But now he was back. Wanting something. Needing it.

  She drummed her nails on the tabletop as the air-conditioning whispered that she should’ve taken two hydros instead of one this morning. What was she doing here? She’d been crazy to whisk Carrie off to Florida, even though there’d been no cost since Carson had sent a vehicle and they’d flown on a private jet, which Carrie had adored, but Gillian knew it for what it was: another of his wooing attempts. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Kat had been overjoyed to see them, settling them into the spacious spare room on the second floor of the sprawling home overlooking a white strip of Daytona Beach that she and her husband, Steve, shared.

  But honestly, Gillian knew the reason they’d come here.

  Even now the dream with Carrie superimposed in Kent’s place lurked in Gillian’s mind like a stealthy predator, the memory sending a slither of nausea through her stomach each time it reared its head.

  Who are you?

  That’s why she was sitting in this conference room. Because she would do anything to never hear Carrie say those words.

  The door opened to her left, and a compact man wearing a gray suit entered. Everything about him was trim, from his manicured receding hairline to the way he walked in an efficient line directly to the end of the table. Behind him Carson appeared, dressed much more relaxed in a pair of jeans and a dark-blue polo.

  “Gillian, sorry to keep you waiting,” Carson said, coming over to her. He held out his hand, and she shook it, the formality amusing her. “This is Gregory Tinsel. He’s the head project coordinator and investment manager who’ll also be joining the mission.”

  Tinsel inclined his head but made no move to greet her as Carson had. “Good to meet you.” A faint French accent clipped his words.

  “You too. Tinsel, like the decoration?”

  Carson laughed. “A decoration overly concerned with the bottom line.”

  A look of exasperation crossed Tinsel’s face, and Gillian wondered how long ago Carson had found his needling point. “Spelled the same, yes.” And he offered no more before sitting.

  Carson settled into a seat to her right, placing a tablet between them on the table. “Thanks for coming. You don’t know what it means to all of us here. We couldn’t—”

  “I haven’t agreed to anything yet,” she said, cutting him off.

  “But the necessary nondisclosure agreements have been signed,” Tinsel said.

  “Yes.”

  Tinsel sniffed, relaxing in his chair, and Gillian decided that her initial dislike of him was well founded.

  “I think once you see what I’m about to show you, your mind will be made up,” Carson continued. “Are you familiar with the term ‘absolute zero’?”

  Gillian nodded. “The coldest possible temperature, right?”

  “Zero Kelvin or right around minus four hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit.”

  “Cold.”

  “That’s an understatement.”

  “But if I remember right, it’s kind of a paradox, isn’t it? You can’t ever actually reach absolute zero.”

  “Exactly,” Carson said, tapping the table with one finger. “Bringing a particle down to that temperature reduces its movement to nearly nothing, but there’s still movement, so in turn, there’s heat.”

  “Which prevents reaching absolute zero.”

  “Right. No laboratory or scientist has ever been able to get closer than a billionth of a degree.” He swiped the tablet and pushed it toward her. The screen held graphs of data along with partitioned numerals below in rows her eyes flowed over. “These are files from Dr. Eric Ander, a physicist out of Cambridge who’s been working independently for the last fifteen years.”

  “Rhodium?” she asked.

  “That’s the element he began with for the trials,” Carson said, leaning forward to touch the screen. She could smell his cologne and feel some of the heat of his skin against hers, but Gillian ignored the sensations and focused on the numbers. “Nearly eleven years ago, Ander managed to bring five billion particles of rhodium down closer to absolute zero than anyone had before. On that scale it was a niche science, but it was only a stepping stone for much more remarkable things.”

  “Impressive.”

  Carson smiled, touching the screen again. “That’s nothing.”

  A video began to play.

  It had been shot from what appeared to be a security camera, albeit in high definition, from the corner of a large room. Almost directly below the camera was a long, clear tube large enough for a person to lie in comfortably, with a port open at the closest end. Opposite the opening, the tube was attached to a towering dark box with several thick cables growing from its base and trailing out of the frame. A short distance away, a duplicate setup filled the rest of the room. There was a brief span without movement before a man entered the scene.

  He was tall and thin and completely nude. His shoulder blades were two prominent wings of bone, and his dimpled spine led down to sagging middle-aged buttocks.

  Gillian frowned, glancing at Carson, who tipped his head toward the screen with a just watch motion. She returned her gaze to the tablet as the man crawled inside the first tube and turned onto his back, the angle and reflected light thankfully obscuring his genitalia. From what she could see, he was sallow-faced with a disarray of gray hair sprouting from his head.

  The man lay motionless for several seconds before the hatch at his feet swung closed, moving with an automated speed that confirmed her suspicions that he was working alone. Even though the video was soundless, she could hear the hiss in her mind as two jets of air rushed from the hatch.

  “Is that a vacuum?” she asked, unable to look away.

  “Yes.”

  “But what the hell’s he doing? That’s—”

  “Keep watching.”

  The jetted air tapered off, and for thirty seconds, according to the tracking numbers at the bottom of the screen, nothing happened.

  Then everything changed.

  There was a brightening of the chamber around the man, who continued to lie still, hands at his sides. It became incandescent, flooding the screen white before a flash brighter still bleached everything from view. The video remained blank as Gillian watched, leaning forward.

  Slowly, definition crept back in from the edges.

  The walls, floor, black boxes, and tubes. But there was something wrong . . .

  “Oh my God,” she said, despite herself.

  The first tube was empty.

  Her brain stuttered, tripping over itself to explain what she was seeing, before she noticed the second tube. The man lay within it, exactly as he had prior to the flash.

  Within seconds, the hatch to the second tube swung open, and he began to stir, groggily reaching out to trace the walls of his enclosure before scooting to the opening. He sat there in the port, gazing at the floor, then glanced over at the first tube, which was still sealed. Slowly, his head lowered, and by the way his shoulders began to tremble, Gillian knew he was weeping.

  The video ended, the tablet going blank.

  She swallowed, spit gelatinous in her drying mouth. She wanted to tap the screen and watch the video over again but instead sat back in her seat and looked at Carson, who beamed.

  “I know that wasn’t . . . but it looked like—”

  “Yes,” Tinsel said, drawing her attention to the end of the table where he smiled, sharklike. “You just witnessed the very first instance of human teleportation.”

  TEN

  They gave her several minutes to gain her bearings an
d to also watch the video twice more.

  When it had ended for the second time, she tried to find all the words she wanted to say but instead merely asked, “How?”

  Carson laughed. “The key was absolute zero. See, the problem that’s been facing teleportation, or shifting as Dr. Ander likes to call it, was the Heisenberg uncertainty principal—basically it’s impossible to know both the position and the velocity of a particle at the same time. If you don’t know where each and every particle is that makes up an object, or person in this case, as well as its momentum, you can’t transmit and re-create it somewhere else. By truly reaching absolute zero, the movement of an electron slows to nothing and can be calculated.”

  Gillian blinked, taking in what he had said. “That’s stopping time.”

  Carson grimaced. “Time’s a loop, so that’s an oversimplification, but—”

  “But for the man in the video, that’s exactly what happened. Every atom in his body was stilled for a fraction of a second.”

  “Right.”

  “Again, how?”

  “The tubes on the video are Dr. Ander’s design. They contain a three hundred sixty–degree array of lasers, something he calls a photon net. Contrary to what people think, lasers can cool atoms by slowing their electrons’ movement. This technique used with the vacuum of the tube, a strong magnetic field, and a short blast of radiation is the perfect combination.” Carson smiled. “Unbelievable, right?”

  “Unbelievable,” she repeated, drawing a line through the water rings on the table with her finger. “But there’s trillions of atoms in the human body. How do you calculate and account for every one of them?”

  “The big black boxes attached to the tubes? They’re quantum computers. Traditional computers deal with data in sequential ones and zeros. Quantum computers use ones, zeros, or both simultaneously.”

  “It’s the absolute cutting edge of technology,” Tinsel chimed in. His unsettling smile was gone, stagnant voice back in its groove. “Quantum computing will be the standard soon.”

  Gillian nodded, focusing again on Carson, who took a drink from her water glass, daring her with his eyes to challenge him. He was in his element now, grandeur and spectacle his best friends. Instead of commenting on the water, she pressed on. “How does the reconstruction work?”