Reaction

by Seth M. Baker

  “I guess we’ll find out.”

  12

  They tried to follow Lilly’s hardtop Jeep, but Gravity turned back after half a kilometer, muttering something about destroying his suspension and the rental car company being a racket of cutthroats. They all piled in the Jeep. Amadeus sat in the back with Grassal’s legs across his lap. The storm threatened another deluge with lightning and thunder, but nothing came of it. Up the bumpy, pine-covered mountain, over the rough, muddy road they drove. The engine whined like a wounded animal. Amadeus lost sight of the abandoned mine after the first rise. After two more, he realized if he were dropped off at that very moment, he would probably wander around lost. Death would come from dehydration or a hungry grizzly. He wasn’t sure which he would prefer. Then he wondered what would happen if the jeep crashed, but as he watched Lilly, he realized she was a competent if reckless driver. He guessed she was familiar with the Jeep; it smelled like her, after all.

  The road leveled off and they arrived on a plateau above the tree line. Here they passed an abandoned strip mine, complete with chutes and towers rusting and forgotten. They drove over bare dirt and gravel. A few scrub pines dotted the landscape. Near the middle of the plateau, a single mound rose up another few hundred feet. Snow covered the top. A house-sized chunk was gone from the east side, apparently blown out by dynamite, leaving a sheer rock face. Lilly drove directly towards the rock. She kept focused on the wall. Amadeus watched her and tried to remain silent, but when the Jeep was less than a hundred meters away and she hadn’t slowed down, he couldn’t stop himself from speaking.

  “Lilly, what are you doing? You do see that we’re headed right for a huge rock, right?” Lilly nodded, said she saw it, but that was all. Gravity looked back at Amadeus and raised one eyebrow. The Jeep lurched as she downshifted then slapped a white button on the ceiling Amadeus hadn’t noticed before.

  The rocky side of the mountain drew open like a garage door, revealing a tunnel cut into the earth. When they entered the tunnel, the engine noise washed over Amadeus, muting his thoughts. Fluorescent tubes connected by thick grey wires lit the way. After about two hundred meters, they turned a corner and the tunnel opened up into a cavernous steel hangar.

  The hangar reminded Amadeus of the train stations he had recently passed through; only here there were no tracks, no trains, only a few contraptions in various states of dismantlement: a wingless Cessna, a news helicopter, and a large engine Amadeus couldn’t identify. Beside all these sat a bright orange hearse, circa 1988. A fake arm hung from beneath the back door. Just behind the hearse, Amadeus noticed a visual distortion as large as a car; something covered by some kind of cloaking material. Along the back wall, a large window opened to another control room, a door with a round metal handle, and a hallway leading presumably to more rooms.

  “There’s a stretcher here somewhere, if we need it,” Lilly said.

  “Grassal, buddy, we’re going to move now,” Amadeus said. Grassal moaned but refused to move. Amadeus slipped his arm under him and, with Gravity’s help, pulled him from the Jeep and carried him across the hangar. Lilly threw open the door to the hallway and led them to a small room, inside which was a cabinet overflowing with medical supplies, a bookshelf stocked with canned food, and a brown leather couch. She pushed a pile of clothes from the couch and they laid him down on it. Gravity unwrapped the wound and doused it with alcohol. Grassal whined and writhed but never opened his eyes. With the wound clear, Gravity leaned in closer to examine it.

  “Amadeus, Lilly, watch and learn,” Gravity said, pointing to Grassal’s leg. “The bullet went into his calf here, went through to other side. Here, hold this light.” He pulled a flashlight from his pocket, handed it to Amadeus, and spread the wound open. Amadeus’ stomach turned.

  “That’s awful,” Lilly said.

  “He’s lucky, just tissue damage. There’s no bone trauma. Could’ve shattered his tibia or fibula.” He poured more alcohol over the wound and applied clean bandages. “He lost a lot of blood. He’ll need sleep. Lilly, an IV would be nice…”

  “This isn’t a hospital. What you’re looking at is what we’ve got. Most of the heavy medical artillery is for Dad. We don’t exactly get many bullet wounds here.”

  “Where is he, anyway?” Gravity asked.

  “He fell asleep, this medication he’s on, got him sleeping half the day. You’ll see him tomorrow or maybe late tonight, rolling aimlessly through the hangar. That reminds me, you have the package he asked for?”

  Amadeus nodded then spoke. “Damn it, no. I’m sorry, I forgot it in the rental car. Why, what was it?”

  “Medicine.For my father. Besides being a baker, Ramona is, was, a biochemical engineer. Makes compounds the FDA can’t even dream of. Dad uses them to treat his tumor; the side effects aren’t as bad as the legal stuff. But it’s no problem, we’ll get it tomorrow.” She looked around.

  “He’s going to be okay?” Lilly asked, pointing at Grassal.

  “We’ll keep him dosed up on painkillers for a couple days, save him the pain. Keep him out and immobilized. Maybe put him in a wheelchair after he wakes up. Seems to be enough of them here.” Gravity looked around. “So, it’s just you and your dad living out here?”

  “Gravity, that’s a borderline creeper question. But yeah, it’s just us, unless you count the contractors. They’re here during the day most days.”

  “Contractors?” Amadeus said.

  “That’s right, they’re helping with the Pachyderm.”

  “You have a pet elephant?” Amadeus said.

  “It’s an experimental aircraft,” Lilly said. Gravity whistled.

  “Experimental craft. Amadeus, that’s why I love scientists. Never a dull moment. Now, Lilly, how about a bed fit for an old man?”

  “You’ll have to sleep in the hangar. The other rooms are either under construction or full of supplies. But I’ve already got two cots set up. Didn’t know a third was coming, good thing we had a couch. We weren’t expecting company.”

  “Is there a secure computer here?” Amadeus asked. Gravity glanced at Amadeus and leaned on a stack of boxes.

  “We’ve got running water and electricity, what more do you want?” Lilly put her hands on her hips.

  “Oh,” Amadeus said.

  “I’m joking. And we’ve got something better than a computer; we’ve got a data center. Come on, I’ll show it to you. Gravity, want to join us?”

  “No, I’d rather sleep. I feel like a crate of potatoes that fell off the spud truck. And I don’t really like computers anyway.” Amadeus and Lilly looked at each other and shrugged.

  “Should anyone watch Grassal?” Amadeus asked.

  “He’ll be fine. He just needs to rest,” Gravity said. “But I’ll check on him.” They left him with Grassal and went to another room down the hall.

  “There’s the data center, everything you should need,” Lilly said, sweeping her hand in front of her, her voice dripping with sarcasm. A van-sized flexscreen covered one wall, illuminated with menus, applications, and news feeds, one of which was dedicated to reports regarding the various crimes of Amadeus Brunmeier. A leather dentist’s chair faced the flexscreen. Beside the chair, a bar supported a transparent touch interface as well as an old-style qwerty keyboard. A legless table hung from adjustable poles bolted to the ceiling. A short server rack stood guard in the back, bolted to the floor. On a table beside the server rack sat a selection of legacy equipment: old laptops labeled with their respective operating systems, card readers, IDE inputs, floppy drives, CD-ROM drives, and scanners. “You know how to use all this?”

  “I think I can manage,” Amadeus said. Lilly stood with her arms crossed, feet apart, and her eyebrows furrowed. He knew Lilly didn’t want him here. “Lilly, I…” Lilly interrupted him.

  “Amadeus, I want you to understand something. I’m sorry for what happened to your father, but you couldn’t have come at a worse time. I’m going to help you so that, hopefully, we can send you on your
way as soon as possible.”

  “Um. I’m sorry. That you don’t want me here. I don’t know what I did to you. If this is about when we were kids…”

  “For Tommy Brunmeier’s son, you’re kind of a moron. No, it’s not because of when we were kids, though that doesn’t help.”

  “What is it?”

  “What is it?” Lilly shook her head. “God, you’re thick as a brick. My dad said you were supposed to be valedictorian at your school.”

  Amadeus’s face flushed. He decided to change the subject. “I need to review these files, to try and learn what my dad was doing.”

  “I’m going to watch.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “I wasn’t asking,” Lilly said as she rolled a chair across the concrete floor and sat down beside Amadeus.

  13

  Amadeus pulled the statue from his pocket. Lilly grabbed it from his hand, smirked as she turned it over in her hand.

  “It’s not funny,” Amadeus said. “My uncle has poor taste.”

  “Are you really that,” she smiled and pinched the statue’s cock, “endowed?”

  Amadeus blushed. Lilly didn’t seem to notice. Instead, she plugged the statue into the server and, using an old keyboard, entered a couple commands. A window containing a list of files appeared on the flexscreen. She handed the keyboard to Amadeus. He opened the top-level folder, revealing a long list of files and folders. Many of the files had names like exp0283.rff, though there were also plain text and video files. Opening up a subdirectory, he found a folder titled simply “journal.” He opened it. It was an .html file. On the index page, a table of contents with links to the journal, research, schematics, image backups, reference materials, software, and videos.

  “I’ve seen pages like this. It looks like something from the nineties. From the old web? Like real early web apps,” Lilly said. “Why wouldn’t he use a modern content manager? I mean, this shit is ancient.”

  “Dad used whatever was easiest for him. A quantum physicist, not a programmer, putting his project together using the HTML he learned in school.” Amadeus clicked the folder named “research” but a popup window told him this file was restricted. “Schematics,” “reference materials,” and “software,” gave the same result. The only files he could open were the journals and videos.

  Amadeus opened a video, choosing randomly from a list of about thirty files. He pressed play. The video showed the basement lab at his house. A contraption consisting of a pair of metal pillars two meters high spaced two meters apart appeared on the screen. Blue-tinted glass spheres sat on top of each pillar. Loops of copper wire formed concentric circles on the floor. Unbundled rainbows of coated colored wires tumbled down each pillar. Amadeus thought the contraption looked like the feral twin offspring of a Tesla coil and a jet engine.

  His father’s voice came on. “Trial seventeen of the Lorentzian Generator. Minor adjustments to amplitude, journal ref ten seventeen forty-four. Let’s see if this works.” The camera then panned, tracing the path of the wires to what Amadeus guessed was a control unit on the workbench. Connected to the control unit was a laptop, whose screen displayed a frequency analyzer and two windows full of numerical outputs. Leaning against the workbench was the same rifle his father had used on the night of the attack.

  Seeing his father at home in his lab, Amadeus quaked in his chair and fought to hold back tears. He paused the video and looked around the room, as if examining the walls. Lilly saw this and put her hand on his shoulder, told him it was okay. He shook his head, started to reply, but instead pressed play.

  “I’ve made some minor adjustments; they’re noted in the journal. Here goes nothing,” Tommy Brunmeier said. Amadeus watched as his dead father’s hand turned a black plastic dial on the control unit. The glass spheres glowed vacuum tube blue. Kipium.

  His father said a little countdown: five four three two one. White, blue, and purple electric arcs licked from one pillar to the other then began to coalesce about a meter off the ground into what looked like a satellite image of a dwarf star.

  “So far no change,” his father said. A sound started on the video that reminded Amadeus of a rabbit breathing. His father made some adjustments. “Reducing middle spectrum frequency by ten percent, down to four hertz.” The dwarf star remained the same, but the crackling grew louder. “Speaking into the microphone now.” He raised his voice. “Hello? Can anyone hear me? Is anyone there?” The light flickered and the rabbit-breathing sound stopped. Silence filled the room, followed by a scream like a thousand animals large and small, trapped in a cage surrounded by fire, tortured, agonized, terrified. The speakers on their computer distorted and the dwarf star began to pulsate then split into two orbs stacked vertically, reminding Amadeus of a model of the probability density of the hydrogen atom, only much, much larger. The hairs on the nape of Amadeus’ neck stood up. He looked over at Lilly. She crossed her arms in front of her like she was hugging herself.

  “God, that still gives me the heebie-jeebies. No difference. Damn. Shutting down.” A keyboard clicked, the two orbs became one, as if returning to their original state, then the orb faded out like an old picture tube television shutting down. “Same results as previous five trials. Amplitude and frequency adjustments made no significant changes.” His voice sounded flat, clinical. Anyone besides Amadeus probably wouldn’t have heard the thin sliver of fear trembling within it.

  “Besides being the creepiest sound I’ve ever heard, what was that?” Lilly said. She was shaking, as was Amadeus.

  “I have no idea.”

  They viewed three earlier videos. All were similar. Amadeus felt strange, sad, watching his father work on these secret experiments, only two floors below the place he slept. Maybe these experiments been done during one summer years ago, while Amadeus was away at a science camp, making diagrams of the wavelength of noble gasses.

  Amadeus wasn’t sure if he could watch any more of this, he felt like his father should have some secrets, but then his father had entrusted him with this file and told him to figure it all out. If he didn’t want to share this with Amadeus, he would’ve destroyed it. Instead he entrusted it to only Amadeus, and he had a responsibility to figure it all out, to learn about his secret life. Even if it meant learning things he didn’t want to learn.

  “Maybe you can find some explanations in his journals,” Lilly said. “I mean, I understand if you don’t want me helping you go through all this. I know it’s kind of private.”

  “No, no, that’s fine. I would like your help. What privacy do the dead have, anyway? But I almost forgot something. You have an external drive?” Lilly handed him a small flash drive. “I need to make backups.” With that, Amadeus copied the files and gave the backup to Lilly. “Don’t tell anyone.”

  “Amadeus, you know that was the first thing I was going to do.”

  “Not funny.”

  Lilly made coffee, and even though Amadeus rarely drank coffee, she made it sticky, sweet, and rich. He liked the extra energy it gave him. Long into the night they read. At first, the entries seemed normal enough, scientific data, records of standard experiments with kipium, how it interacted with other elements old and new. Lilly said she found an entry entitled “practical application.” She summarized for him.

  “Your father made a discovery a couple years ago. He was, and I quote, ‘playing with kipium.’ That’s when he figured out he could use the negative mass of the kipium to create a stable Einstein-Rosen bridge.”

  “I thought negative mass created a huge energy deficit.”

  “It does…or at least it’s supposed to. But according to your father, charged kipium creates its own equilibrium.”

  “That shouldn’t work.”

  “Hey, I’m not the quantum physicist here, I’m just reading what he wrote.”

  They returned to their reading, sharing whatever they found interesting. The earlier entries mostly tracked variations on the experiment that they had watched. Every time Amadeus look
ed up, the hands on the clock had crept forward. He liked working with Lilly. Since he was reading, learning, he didn’t actually have to do anything, and he liked it that way. But when his head hit the desk, he knew it was time for sleep.

  “I’m done, spent,” Amadeus said, rubbing his eyes. He looked at the clock then looked away before his mind could register the time. He didn’t want to know the time. Lilly still seemed wide awake, and he left her to read into the tiny hours of the night.

  14

  Lilly woke Amadeus early the next morning by shaking his shoulder. When he opened his eyes, he thought he was looking at her through a tunnel, but it was her hair hanging down. “Amadeus, you have got to see this. Hurry.” Groggy, he yawned, then rolled off the cot. Gravity was still snoring on the cot beside his.

  “I want to check on Grassal first.” He stepped into Grassal’s room and turned on the light. Grassal groaned and covered his face with his arm but didn’t wake. His face had more color. When Amadeus felt his forehead, he felt warm but not feverish. Satisfied, Amadeus followed Lilly to the data center. He stretched out on the dentist’s chair.