Quantum Void

by Douglas Phillips

  “Cause?” Ayala asked. His furrowed brow and military stance were intimidating, but the young woman handled herself well.

  “Sorry, no direct data on a cause, but I can tell you I’m picking up higher-than-normal concentrations of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide.”

  “Power plant emissions,” Daniel said.

  “Finch!” called Ayala. Jeffrey Finch, sitting in a patio chair raised his hand. “I thought the plant was shut down.”

  Finch stood up. “It is. There’s nothing coming out of those stacks.”

  “Backwash,” said Daniel. All eyes turned to him. “The plant may be shut down, but for weeks they’ve been pouring effluents into hidden space. It may be leaking out.”

  “Another one!” Audrey yelled. “Bigger. Forty seconds until impact.”

  Daniel looked toward the power plant. Even with unaided eyes, he could tell this wave was a major step up. Trees around the plant were uprooted, branches ripped away. A portion of the roof of one of the buildings shredded, with material flying into the sky as if a tornado had just blasted through. The line of destruction advanced across the ranchland of Texas, tearing apart a house and fences.

  But worst of all, the swirling cloud itself had transformed, with a dark slash opening up on one side. From deep within its interior, a cloud of brown smoke poured out of the slash and down upon the land.

  The group needed no command—they ran for the shelter of the building. Daniel helped Audrey remove the instrument and lent a hand to Parker, who carried the telescope inside. Seconds later the blast hit, this time exploding the large picture window and spraying the room with glass. Everyone ducked down and held up arms to protect themselves. A tree branch skidded across the patio outside, taking out several camera tripods.

  As before, once the pressure wave had passed, things in the immediate area calmed. “Injuries?” Ayala called out. Several people shouted that they were okay. Though broken glass was everywhere, there had been sufficient warning to keep their distance.

  “Jesse, find something to put over that window,” Ayala yelled, “Okay, folks, I still need monitoring. Give me your best call on what we can expect next.”

  They dashed back outside. Daniel messaged Jan. All hell is breaking loose here. You sure about that expansion?

  He got an immediate response. Yes. It would be worse if we’d done nothing. Stick with it. Interior density should be dropping.

  Audrey slapped her equipment together and had everything plugged in faster than a marine reassembles his rifle. A minute later, she called out, “A receding phase. It’s sucking air back in.”

  Daniel looked over Parker’s shoulder. He had repositioned the telescope on the gash in the cloud, which was indeed sucking material in like a giant vacuum cleaner. The telescopic view showed broken wood, tree branches, even farming equipment in a gravity-defying blast into the sky. As it rose, the dust and debris began to swirl like an upside-down drain.

  “Check it out,” Parker said, pointing to what looked like a chicken coop, complete with chickens, flying through the air.

  Over time, the pull of debris ended, and the gash even closed somewhat. It left a sky filled with drifting dust, leaves, hay and whatever other materials were light enough to drift on air currents.

  The pressure waves continued to pulsate, pushing outward and then back in. Now that the pattern had been identified, it could be seen with the naked eye without the need of Lidar or a telescope. Trees bent one way and then another; dust blew in, swirled and then switched directions.

  A tone from Daniel’s phone told him another message had arrived, from Jan again. This one was puzzling.

  Passing this along, from Marie. She says—meet us at the stacks.

  44

  Passageway

  Smoke, particulates, carbon dioxide and a potpourri of poisonous combustion gases filled the darkened space. Even with the medical mask, Marie could visualize each molecule that entered her lungs and automatically compare the ratio of toxins with the nitrogen, oxygen and argon normally sucked in with each breath. Unfortunately, the headband couldn’t tell her when the toxicity might become lethal.

  Their run had reduced to a fast walk, with pauses for bouts of coughing. They rubbed irritated, watery eyes and struggled to breathe through the simple masks. Nala seemed to be taking it the hardest. Thomas sailed right through as if nothing at all were wrong, but he kept looking behind as the singularity, their primary source of light, disappeared below a horizon. Nala said it proved they were following a curved path, parallel to the three-dimensional surface of the earth. But it also meant that the dim glow from the surface was their only source of light. It would last only while there was still daylight back in the 3-D world.

  Marie didn’t relish the idea of finding their way in pitch blackness with only the headband’s visualization to guide them. If the singularity flashed again, at least they wouldn’t see it. There was some comfort in not knowing. The dice were still tumbling, and she could still lose the headband at any time.

  The psychosis was ever-present. She could suppress it, force the pixilating view of the world back into some deep, dark corner of her mind, but she couldn’t make it go away. Worse, it felt permanent, as if it had always been there but was now awake. Removing the headband wouldn’t help any more than removing her clothes. Those things were external. The psychosis felt internal, like a dental cavity, or a tumor.

  “Still on track?” Nala asked in between coughs. Only her eyes were visible. In addition to the mask, she had pulled her long black hair around her face and wrapped her sweater on top.

  Marie flipped to a layer that provided the layout, not just of the bubble of four-dimensional space that surrounded them but of the neighboring three-dimensional space as well. Not far ahead, the dimensions intersected—their destination.

  “We’re getting close,” Marie answered. She pulled her blouse up and stretched it over the mask to add another layer of filtering. It exposed her bare belly, but the air was getting warmer.

  “So, this is Texas?” Thomas asked, pointing to the patchwork of browns and greens beneath their feet.

  “Must be,” Marie answered. The headband wasn’t exactly a GPS unit. Nala explained that a larger 4-D bubble would mean a larger compression of three-dimensional length, making anything on the surface unidentifiable. It made sense. If this was Texas, they had covered more than a thousand miles in less than twenty minutes.

  “Look,” said Thomas, pointing. “An exit point?”

  From behind clouds of smoke, a slash of bright light appeared like a sunbeam around the edges of fog. It had an irregular shape, as if someone had taken a knife to cloth. To the eye it looked like a promising way out, but the headband told another story.

  “Not our exit,” Marie said. “It’s an opening, but there’s no connection to the ground.”

  “You sure?” Thomas asked. “It’s huge. We’d could easily get through.”

  “I think you’d find yourself falling. The visualization is telling me there’s no 3-D ground out there. Plus, I’m seeing incredible turbulence on the other side. Even if we had parachutes, I’m not sure we’d survive.”

  “Where, then?” Thomas asked.

  “Ahead,” Marie answered. “Follow me.”

  They alternated between walking and jogging, with the slash appearing larger and rising higher in their view. The smell of combustion diminished, and the air became fresher, but it was also filled with dust and bits of floating debris. There were even leaves and small pieces of hay and grass floating by.

  Thomas stopped and held out a hand for them to stop too. “Wait a second, did you hear that?”

  They listened. There was something out there, maybe a faint rustling sound. “Wind?” Marie asked.

  “No, not that. I thought I heard a rooster crowing.”

  Nala held her sweater and hair over her nose with one hand, her eyes rolling. “Good imagination, funny man.”

  “No joke. That’s
what it sounded like.”

  They continued walking until a distant but distinct crowing interrupted the silence.

  “There you go,” he said.

  “Holy shit,” Nala said. “There’s a farm in here? I am so ready to get out of this hellhole.”

  Marie could sympathize. She’d been inside for only a few hours. Nala and Thomas had been trapped for days, and they were entirely dependent on Marie’s guidance to get them out.

  They were very close. The farm smells and sounds confirmed the reality of the gash and of the three-dimensional world just beyond. The visualization showed not one but four separate intersections between the dimensions ahead. Marie focused on the nearest one.

  It was a circular cross section with a solid connection to 3-D on the other side. If Daniel’s description was accurate, it was the tip of a smokestack that had been capped by a device that made a right-angled turn into the 4-D bubble. A passageway out, or at least she hoped.

  A welcome breeze blew in their faces, coming out of the darkness ahead. It cleared out the remainder of the smoke, though the smell of soot and tar remained. A soft glow of light from its center illuminated the outline of a large circular shape just ahead.

  It was a low wall that rose hip-high, dirty white in color and somewhat shiny, like it was made of plastic. It formed a circle about fifteen feet in diameter. They stopped at its edge and peered inside. A breeze rose from its interior depths.

  “Jesus,” Nala said.

  “That’s a long way down,” Thomas said.

  The view was still the same flattened version of the 3-D world, but the shape of a deep cylindrical shaft was unmistakable, the illusion reinforced both by the air blowing into their faces and by the rim that extended into their space. It was like looking into an enormous well with no clear view of the bottom.

  “It’s the top of a smokestack,” Marie said. “It must be.”

  “It’s open, too,” Nala said. “This isn’t just a boundary between dimensions, it’s a hole. That’s 3-D air coming out.” She pulled the mask from her face and took a deep breath. “Clean, too.”

  They followed Nala’s lead and removed masks. They had arrived, though the next step didn’t look like it would be easy.

  Within the dark depths of the stack, one thin shaft of light entered from the side. With eyes alone, the distance into the flattened 3-D world was almost impossible to tell, but the headband estimated twenty feet to the source of light and more than five hundred feet to a solid surface at the base of the smokestack.

  Most likely concrete at the bottom. You wouldn’t want to fall.

  Yet this was the way out, their portal back home. It was true there were three more just like it, but each certainly had its own concrete pad of death waiting at the bottom.

  “Sorry, this is all I have,” Marie lamented. “I thought there’d be some way to climb through, but assuming gravity applies, I’m afraid that jumping in is going to get us killed.”

  “Yeah,” Nala said. “Gravity still applies.” She studied the vertical shaft. “There must be some way to get down. Can I borrow that headband of yours?”

  Marie just smiled. “You know you can’t.”

  Nala smiled back. “I know. But you’re making me really curious. Tell us all you see down there, every detail.”

  Marie had gotten so used to seeing an enhanced reality that she had almost forgotten to provide the description to everyone else. Three heads were better than one, and even if they couldn’t see, they might think of something she hadn’t.

  She flipped through several layers of data, describing the distances, the diameter, the constituents of the rising air, even the spectrum of the light coming in from one side, which Nala said matched sunlight.

  “So how is sunlight getting into a smokestack?” Marie asked.

  “It’s a door,” Thomas said.

  “How do you know?” Marie asked. As soon as he said it, she thought he might be right. The headband could examine the composition of materials, and where the light entered, the curved wall of the smokestack changed from concrete to metal. There was some additional metal too, protruding out into the smokestack from where the light shone in.

  “When I was a kid, my dad and I used to build whole cities out of Legos,” Thomas said. “Houses, offices, bridges, the works. I remember making a cheese factory once.”

  Nala smirked. “A factory where they make cheese?”

  “Hey, go with it. I was twelve. It’s not relevant to the story anyway. What’s important is that we made the factory look just like a real one that I saw in a magazine. And the real factory had a smokestack, so we made an exact replica in Legos.”

  “Fascinating, but where is this going?” Nala asked.

  “The smokestack in the magazine had a door, so we put one in. I don’t know, maybe all smokestacks have doors at the top. I think they use them for inspection or sampling or something like that.”

  Marie examined the spot where the light came in. Two thin lines of light, both vertical and parallel to each other. “It does look like a door. And I think there’s some kind of structure in front of it.” She stood up straight. “We should test this. Throw in the water bottle and let’s see what it hits.”

  “Wait a second,” said Thomas, “I’ve got something better.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a coin. “Just like a big wishing well. Maybe we’ll hear it hit.”

  “Will sound travel from 3-D to 4-D?” Marie said.

  “Normally, no,” Nala said. “But if this is a hole, all bets are off.”

  “Shh,” Thomas said. “Listen for a minute.” He tossed the coin into the hole, aiming directly at the source of light. It dropped right through what would have been the 3-D surface and continued down into the real world. There was a slight ring as it hit something metal. Marie held up a hand and they waited, listening for the final ring as the coin hit concrete far below. Whether her hearing was normal or enhanced by the headband was hard to tell, but Nala and Thomas seemed to hear the ring as well.

  “Solid evidence,” Nala said. “This is a hole, and that’s the three-dimensional world.”

  “And that’s a long way down,” Thomas said.

  “But best of all, there’s a metal platform in front of that door,” Marie said. “I can barely make it out. It’s not very big, but it’s horizontal, possibly with a railing.”

  Thomas had a wide grin on his face. “Swan dive, I’m going in!”

  “Wait a second,” Nala said, putting an arm in front of him just in case he really was about to jump. “You’re going to hit a small metal balcony that Marie can just barely see even with her alien vision?”

  “Any better ideas?”

  “How far down, Marie?” Nala asked.

  “About twenty feet. Maybe less.”

  Nala stood in deep thought. “We could tie all our clothes together, make a rope and climb down.”

  Thomas laughed. “Your dainty sweater is going to hold me?” He waved his hands over his substantial bulk like a model showing off a new outfit. “Besides, you’d see me naked. Nope. I’ll jump.”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Nala said, still holding an arm out. She was half his size and her thin arm could hardly hold the big man back if he was ready to go. “What else you got in that headband?”

  Marie shook her head. “This is it. This is our only way out of here. I think Thomas is right. We’re going to have to jump.”

  “Wait,” Nala said again, more forcefully and holding her hand up like a traffic cop. “Here’s the deal. I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, and I don’t even know how this could work. We’re standing in an extension of four-dimensional space, but we’re each a set of three-dimensional atoms. Gravity still pulls us toward 3-D because that’s where the mass of the earth is located, but how does our body suddenly flatten out right at Kata Zero?”

  “True,” said Thomas. He probably saw the blank expression on Marie’s face and stepped in to explain. “Kata Zero is where all thr
ee-dimensional space exists. It’s like a page, a flat piece of paper, and we’re like paper-thin cutouts from that page. Right now, only the bottoms of our feet are touching it.”

  Nala looked grim. “To rejoin the 3-D world, every bit of our body, every atom has to return to the plane of Kata Zero.”

  “The coin made it,” Marie said.

  “The coin isn’t alive,” Nala said. “We struggled at Fermilab to get the alignment right. Electronics were no problem, but the tolerance wasn’t good enough for anything alive. Cell walls break open. Blood vessels rupture. People coming back from 4-D die.”

  Marie was certainly not going to question Nala’s mastery of quantum physics, but there was something she was missing. Marie couldn’t put her finger on it, but the headband seemed to be treating this as a fortuitous intersection between dimensions, not the pit of doom.

  “It’s not the same as your lab,” Marie said. “I remember, I was with Daniel at Fermilab for Dr. Park’s demonstration. You displaced the contents of a test box and then returned it to its original position. But this is different; it’s a hole, a tunnel between dimensions. The coin just proved that. It didn’t need a neutrino beam or an advanced physics lab. It just fell into 3-D. Gravity did it.”

  Nala shrugged. “Okay, I grant you that this is different. We never created an open passageway at Fermilab. But if we jump, I really don’t know how every one of our atoms is going to manage to hit the 3-D page at the same time. We’re really in uncharted territory.”

  Marie flipped to a data layer of forces. Gravity loomed large, bending space downward. There was no question if they jumped, they would plunge through the hole. The headband even calculated the velocity of any falling object and retrieved the exact momentum of the coin when it had hit the metal grating.