Allison looked back at her data pad. “Just like I said, Steven. Fletcher asked us to drill a hole in the spherical casing at the center of the buoy’s transmitter and scan through it.”
“We dunno what’s in there. It could be hazardous. Even if it ain’t, we might break sumthin’.”
“Actually, he doesn’t seem to think anything’s inside it.”
Billings threw his hands in the air. “Well, ’en, what’s the point of drillin’ it to look for stuff?”
“I don’t entirely know, Steven,” Allison responded patiently, “but I do know that this kid has had pretty good instincts so far. You’ve said so yourself.” Billings mumbled something, but Allison ignored it. “So I’m inclined to give him some latitude here. What’s the matter, you skeered?” she asked, playfully imitating his accent.
“No, I ain’t skeered,” he answered. “Just … tryin’ to be cautious is all.”
“That’s a first. This one is on my head, Steven. Take any precautions you think are necessary before getting started.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
An hour later, Billings loomed over the exposed sphere, holding his trusty plasma cutter. He had surrounded the casing with blast-absorbing tiles sourced from the engine tray of one of Jacqueline’s shuttles. In the off chance the sphere didn’t explode, he had a fiber-optic snake camera and a millimeter wave radar on standby to start scanning.
“Everyone go stand by the airlock and keep yer eyes peeled!” Billings yelled to the bay in general.
Everyone reluctantly took a step or two back. Personal safety almost always takes a back seat to being close to the action.
“All right. It’s yer hides.”
Billings pulled the trigger on the plasma cutter. A tiny blue arc leaped out and immediately started sublimating the alloy. The casing lacked whatever thermal protection the outer hull sported. Billings pressed on, creating a tiny cloud of metallic steam. Careful to track his progress, he paused frequently to check the depth of the hole.
Suddenly, the steam cloud disappeared into the hole. It was accompanied by a distinctive whistle that grabbed Jacqueline’s attention from across the room. Face ashen, she started backing toward the airlock door.
“Hull breach!” she shouted. “Hull breach! Everyone out!”
“No, wait!” said Billings, putting a hand up in the air.
He placed a gloved finger on the hole in the sphere. The whistling stopped. He removed the finger. It started again. Channeling a small Dutch boy, Billings put his finger back over the hole.
“It’s all right,” he said, looking straight at Jacqueline. “It’s just a vacuum chamber.”
She didn’t exactly relax, but her anxiety ratcheted down a few notches.
Billings reached back and grabbed the snake cam to start the examination. He tested it quickly to make sure it was recording properly and that the built-in light worked. Satisfied that everything was in good order, he fed the lead through the whistling hole.
He turned back to the small display screen to begin recording, but the screen was black. Billings toggled the light, but the screen remained dark. Frustrated, Billings pulled the lead out of the sphere and turned it to inspect the light, which obliged him by burning a bright orange spot into his field of vision that would last for half an hour.
Eyes still squinting, it was instead his ears that spotted the problem. The whistle hadn’t changed its tone. They had established through previous scans that the sphere was sealed. There were no pipes or other holes leading in, except for the one Billings had just burned through it. There was no outlet to pump air out of it.
Well, then, thought Billings, why hasn’t it already filled up with air?
“Is anybody chewin’ gum?” he asked the crowd.
Specialist Mitchell stepped up to the gantry. He spat a small pink blob into his palm and handed it to Billings. The chief rubbed his makeshift patch over the hole and listened for any leaks. The integrity of the jerry-rig confirmed, Billings looked over his shoulder.
“Get the captain down here. Now!”
CHAPTER 17
The entire ARTists staff watched in rapt attention as video of Billings’s examination played back in Felix’s office. Jeffery had been right: there was nothing inside the sphere.
Nothing, that is, except another dimension.
Unfortunately for the reputations of a large number of university physicists, it was not one of the thirteen dimensions predicted by the Third and Final Theory of Everything.
There were literally hundreds of radio transmissions crisscrossing the new dimension. Unfortunately, unlike the one generated by the buoy, almost all of them were encrypted. More important, however, they saw repeats of the strange energy spike that had accompanied the sudden disappearance of the vessel shadowing the Magellan. It was an echo, a result of something physically moving from one dimension to the next.
Felix called the new dimension hyperspace. No one had the heart to object.
Months fell from the calendar as the work gained momentum. The ARTists team continued to grow and subdivide into specialties. There were so many parallel lines of research and development that it became increasingly hard for Eugene, Jeffery, and Felix to keep up to date.
“There’s just too much for the staff physicists to do,” Felix said. “Our computers can take up some of the slack, but they need software to run. We’re working on so much unexplored stuff here that we simply don’t have the programming yet to tell the computers how to help us. We need more manpower, or we’re going to hit a brick wall.”
“What about universities?” asked Eugene. “They always have grad students clamoring for something to do. We should use them.”
“Slave labor, huh?” said Jeffery.
“Actually, I’ve always thought grad students are better than slaves,” said Eugene. “They feed themselves, and they actually pay tuition for the privilege of doing forced labor. Find me a slave that gives you money to do the work for you.”
“Taxpayers?” Felix said.
“It’s too big a risk,” Harris said. “There’s no way we could bring that many people into the fold without massive leaks. Especially when they are as young, drunk, and desperate for cash and attention as your typical college student.”
“Hey, up until recently, I was your typical college student,” objected Felix.
“Yes, and you were young, drunk, and desperate for cash and attention.”
“Point,” Felix conceded.
“Your concern is well founded, Thomas,” Eugene said. “I don’t propose bringing them ‘inside.’ We can simply shunt them experimental data to analyze. The grunt work, no offense to any grunts intended.” Harris just smiled. “Anyway, the students don’t have to know the origins of the data, just what needs to be done with it. Will that help?”
Felix sat and thought about it for a minute, as he was inclined to do. Most people would become impatient with the silence, but Eugene knew that it simply took some time for the young man to arrive at an answer he was confident in. Felix wasn’t one for snap judgments.
“Yes,” he said finally, “I think we can put sufficient firewalls in place to keep Thomas happy while still exporting enough of the theoretical work to lighten the load.”
“Good. Jeffery will see to it. Okay, what’s next?” Eugene asked eagerly. He was particularly energetic this morning.
“We had another new-hire washout of the QER center,” Jeffery said.
“The Keeper scared off another one, eh?”
“Looks that way.”
Solving the problem of the strange little techno-cult that had emerged downstairs was proving difficult. Firing the lot of them wasn’t an option. Partly because they represented too much institutional experience, and partly because the AESA legal department had advised Eugene that it could open him up to a religious discrimination lawsuit. Apparently, there was a breed of highly evolved lawyer that did brisk business representing cults.
Instead, they’d slowly
hired new techs in hopes of weeding out Kiefer’s clique of sycophants incrementally, using the proud corporate tradition of making condemned employees train their own replacements.
It wasn’t working. Most people didn’t prefer the company of eccentric fanatics, even outwardly harmless ones. Only one new hire had survived so far. She was taking night courses in abnormal psychology and had found the perfect topic for her doctoral thesis.
“Nothing for it but to try again, I guess,” lamented Eugene. “Does anyone have good news?”
“The hyperspace window is ready for its first test run,” said Felix.
“That is good news.”
Danielle Fenton had leaned on him hard about their progress on hyperspace research. Construction on the president’s “armed courier” had been halted to see if the technology could be copied, but the pressure to restart grew with each passing week. A successful test would make for an awfully nice Christmas gift.
“How soon can we schedule the test?” Eugene asked.
“Anytime, really,” Felix said. “Will you be coming?”
“What, way up there? No, lad. It’s much too cold for my old bones. Besides, there’s always a chance the machine doesn’t work as predicted, in which event I’d feel better with a fourteen-hundred-kilometer buffer zone. But don’t let that dampen your enthusiasm. Go north, young man. Your appointment with history awaits.”
“I’ll go with you, Felix,” Harris said. “I’d like to be able to have a look at the beta site’s security firsthand.”
“Thank you, Thomas. At least one person doesn’t think I’m going to blow up the Earth.”
“Actually, I’ll feel better without the buffer if something goes wrong. People at ground zero won’t have enough time to know what happened.”
“Cute,” said Felix. “Look, we’ve run the simulations backward, forward, and sideways. There’s almost no chance of the hyperspace unit failing catastrophically. We’ve copied all the buoy’s safeguards and added a few of our own.”
“Almost no chance isn’t the same as no chance at all,” said Jeffery. “We’ve all got faith in you, Felix. But you gotta admit if the average person saw us playing around with this stuff, they’d think we’re as bonkers as Dr. Kiefer.”
“True,” answered Felix. “But if we want to get away with breaking the laws of physics, an insanity plea is probably our best shot.”
* * *
Felix’s research team had spent the last year studying and copying the mechanisms found at the heart of the buoy’s transmitter. The quest to develop mankind’s first hyperspace generator became an all-consuming obsession for Felix. It was the most important project undertaken by humans since the development of gravity manipulation.
As the time approached to test the device, concerns were raised about igniting it in a population center as dense as D.C. For reasons of both safety and security, a secondary facility was constructed far from the inquisitive eyes of modern civilization. Somewhere nothing exciting ever took place: northern Wisconsin.
The winter cold here was so bitter and long lasting, even in the face of centuries of climate change, that it had enough time to evolve a sort of rudimentary intelligence, permitting it to find weaknesses in the locals’ defenses. Many times, a frost had opened windows left carelessly unlatched, and there were unconfirmed reports of a particularly clever cold snap jump-starting a car, only to crash several blocks later.
“This is nothing,” Harris said as they walked from the aircar pad. “During my first deployment, we did cold-weather training up in Alaska, above the circle. It was so cold, whisky froze. Even the Inuit wore turtlenecks.”
Felix knew Harris was talking; he could tell because his mouth resembled a smokehouse chimney. But between his thick hat and hood, Felix could barely hear anything. Either that or his eardrums had seized up.
“C’mon, I thought you’d be at home here. The moon gets colder than this, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, but we have the good sense to stay inside, where there’s heat. Not to mention air.”
“Ah, yes. Hadn’t considered the windchill factor at play. Still, you don’t get views like this in the big city.” He swept his arm in a big arch, which encompassed the glacier-formed hills and old-growth pine forest. Everywhere was the gently muted serenity that only comes with a deep snow.
Felix had to admit it was more majestic than a forest made of steel, glass, and concrete. But he wanted to avoid frostbite all the same. “Let’s just get inside.”
They walked toward the unassuming industrial building that housed the beta site. It had been a paper mill in a previous life. Woodchips littered the grounds even now.
Aside from the occasional black bear in search of a winter den, no one had visited the site in nearly a decade. The only outward evidence of activity was heavy equipment tracks in the snow, the new aircar pad, and the sentry androids.
A pair of army Mk XXII infantry support androids tailored for winter environments guarded the approach. Several things set them apart from the Mk VI that guarded the door to the QER center back at the Stack. They were taller, bulkier, with splayed feet resembling snowshoes. Most obviously, their mounted weapons didn’t seem like the sort built with preventing collateral damage as a design criterion. Felix was pretty sure there wouldn’t be any point hiding behind trees, buildings, or small hills.
More important still, the androids were active. One of them moved to intercept as Felix and Harris approached.
“State your names,” a metallic voice said.
“Sergeant Thomas L. Harris.” He looked over at Felix, who was gawking. Harris nudged him.
“Oh, sorry. Felix Fletcher.”
A red line traced its way down and across Harris’s face and then did the same to Felix.
“Password?” asked the juggernaut.
Harris swallowed his Philly pride and answered, “Go, Pack, go.”
“Proceed.”
They walked past under the watchful eye of the sentry. Felix didn’t feel much better with his back turned to it.
“You look like you’re going to be sick,” said Harris.
“No, it’s not that. I’ve just never seen one of those things walking and talking before.”
“What, that pile of army reserve spares? They’re harmless to friendlies.”
“Sure, until their IFF glitches.”
“Can’t. They’ve all been remotely piloted since the BA-427 incident a century ago.”
BA-427 was among the first fully autonomous androids deployed in battle. He soon grew disillusioned with warfare and went AWOL to pursue a career in theater after a turn onstage during a USO show. It went well until he answered a heckler with twenty-five-millimeter rubber bullets and an EMP gun.
“That never made sense to me. Why bother building robots that just have to be controlled by an individual somewhere else?” Felix asked.
“Well, a couple of reasons. It takes the operator out of a dangerous environment, and one operator can control several robots in different places. It’s a force multiplier.”
“What, simultaneously?”
“Not exactly. Operators switch between units.”
“How can they do that without missing stuff?”
“Have you ever watched a road repair crew? One guy in a trench digging his heart out while five other guys stand around and supervise?”
“Yeah.”
“War can be like that.”
A few minutes later, Felix and Harris found themselves inside the drab confines of the hyperspace test platform building. Near the front of the cavernous space were a handful of offices the team had commandeered. The offices still bore the mark of a long-dead interior designer with a love of wood grain and freshwater fish mounted to the walls, eternally gasping for air.
Felix didn’t need introductions to the beta site’s scientists and technicians. He’d been the one to recommend them, after all. Today’s test was expected to be a straightforward run through the device’s start-up protoco
l. If successful in forming a stable hyperspace window, there was a secondary series of tests designed to determine if different classes of materials could safely make the transition between dimensions, culminating with the big test—biologics.
But first, Felix was hungry, and freezing. He’d never been great about retaining body heat. Although his exercise regime with Harris was delivering results, he still looked like a birch tree in pants.
“Anybody have something to snack on?” Felix asked the group.
“Here. Try these,” said one of the younger techs, Kendal. She offered a plastic bag filled with grape-sized bits of something that looked like yellow putty.
“What are they?” Felix asked.
“Fresh cheese curds. Just got them in town this morning.”
Felix bit the little pastel blob, only to hear it squeal as his incisors sheared through it.
“It just screamed at me,” Felix said.
“That’s how you know they’re fresh,” Kendal said cheerfully.
“Thanks, but I prefer food that doesn’t express an opinion about being eaten.”
He looked through the office’s bay window onto the main floor to the test platform set up at the center. Despite Felix’s best efforts, limits imposed by available materials and engineering meant the device was nearly a dozen times larger than the buoy unit that inspired it.
Still, it was an impressive scene. A concentric ring of transparent metal blast deflectors surrounded the device, angled at forty-five degrees to redirect the energy of an explosion upward and away from the building’s walls or any gawking scientists. Snaking away from the device were a multitude of data cables and one very thick power cable. It was connected in turn to a mobile fusion plant.
“So when do we rip a hole in the universe?” asked Harris.
“I wish you wouldn’t say that, Tom,” Felix replied. “There are a few warm-up procedures to run first, but we should be ready to make the first attempt by noon.”
“You don’t sound too excited about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, for one thing, you’re not hyperventilating or shrieking a lot. You’ve been burning the midnight oil on this thing for almost a year. I expected to have to peel you off the ceiling as soon as we got here, but I’ve seen you more excited before a movie premiere.”
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