Anomaly

by Peter Cawdron

  “In Iran and Pakistan, effigies of President Laver, draped in an American flag, have been burned in the streets.

  “Japan, normally the epitome of conservative diplomacy, has ordered American warships to depart from its territorial waters, while the Congress of South America has formally requested the United States withdraw its economic missions from all Latin American countries in protest at what they have termed the American hegemony.

  “In the United Kingdom, the Linnaean Society, along with the International Council for Science, has called for the establishment of a non-governmental organization to act as the arbiter for scientific research into the anomaly, calling on the US government to relinquish control over the Manhattan site, but the Laver Administration has remained resolute.”

  Cathy turned to Teller, saying, “I don't like where this is heading. This is getting out of control.”

  Teller barely heard her. He acknowledged her but he was busy tapping away on the laptop keyboard. The phones might be down, but the Internet connection was up.

  “Any ideas on how we can get out of here?” she asked.

  “I've signed into a video chat room and posted contact details on the CERN forums. I only hope someone from the contact team is monitoring them. Certainly, they won't be expecting to hear from us via Switzerland.”

  “Hey that's us,” said Cathy, pointing at the television screen. The old man, his wife and his grandchildren all gathered around. There, on the screen, was a shot of Teller and Cathy in the back of the Hummer as it pulled out of the parking lot behind the town hall.

  “This just in. Officials have confirmed that two members of the investigation team have gone missing en-route from a meeting in lower New York.”

  “David Teller and Cathy Jones were last seen heading north on 6th Avenue. The military has dispatched helicopters and ground units to search for the missing scientists lost somewhere in the Broadway/Union Station area. Anyone sighting the team should notify the New York Police Department on...”

  “Oh, no,” cried Cathy. “They'll never find us. They're looking too far south and east. They're going to miss us by about ten city blocks, at least.”

  Granddad was trying the phone again, typing in the number on the screen, but the phone was still dead.

  Grandma wandered out into the kitchen and returned a few minutes later with some ham and cucumber sandwiches on rye bread.

  “No, Grandma,” said Sarah, resorting to her medical training and the nil-by-mouth policy for anyone that might require a general anesthetic.

  “You worry too much,” said Grandma. “They need their strength.”

  “There could be some late-onset injuries,” Sarah protested. “Like a damaged kidney or slow, internal bleeding.”

  “Look at them,” said Granddad. “They are fine.”

  Teller was famished. The sandwiches were moist and seasoned with a little cracked pepper. The bread was fresh, which surprised him. He looked up, as if to ask, only to have the lovely, aging old lady preempt his question by telling him she'd baked it this morning.

  The old man sat down across from them. Cathy turned the television down. Like most emergency coverage, it had started to repeat itself.

  “You can leave that up,” said the man.

  “Oh, it's OK,” replied Cathy. “News is only ever so new. Working in the industry, I know the real art of news is in regurgitating the sensational rather than providing new information. They'll repeat this over and over again for the next few hours without really adding anything.”

  Sarah checked on the corporal, taking his pulse and wiping his forehead.

  “How is he?” asked Teller.

  “He's stable. His pulse is a little higher, 65 beats per minute, which is good.”

  She checked his dilated eyes. There was a weak, gradual response to light, just enough to give her a glimmer that he was improving. She finished up with the soldier and sat down at the kitchen table, pouring herself a glass of water.

  “Is the alien friendly?” asked the little boy, taking everyone off guard.

  “George,” said Sarah. “Don't be nosy.”

  “It's OK,” replied Teller. He leaned forward toward the young boy and, despite his aches and pains, smiled as he said, “Yes, it is.”

  “What does it want?”

  “Well,” thought Teller. “It's curious. It wants the same thing we want, to learn about life elsewhere in the universe, only elsewhere for the anomaly is home for us.”

  “Is that why it came here?” asked the boy.

  “Yes.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  “Hmm, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away,” he began, but no one else seemed to pick up on his weak attempt at a reference to Star Wars. Timing's everything, he thought, and now was not the time. Teller cleared his throat. “Where it came from is not quite as interesting as when it came from. We think it may be from somewhere out beyond our galaxy. If that's the case, then it has been traveling for millions if not billions of years, so it has been traveling for a very, very long time.”

  Young George looked a little befuddled and Teller's school-teacher habits kicked in as he tried to put the time involved in context.

  “It's been traveling for longer than you or I have been alive. It may have been traveling for longer than there have been people on Earth. It was probably sent out long before dinosaurs walked the Earth. And so, whoever sent this knew they'd be dead long before it arrived, and yet still they sent it.”

  “Why?” asked Sarah, packing up her first aid kit. “Why would they send something they'd never hear back from?”

  “That's a good question,” replied Teller. “Why would you send out a probe you'd never hear from again? Personally, I think this is the most intriguing aspect of the anomaly. And the answer is simple, when you think about it.”

  Teller looked around the room.

  “What's the most valuable thing in this room?”

  The little boy spoke up first.

  “The TV.”

  Teller laughed.

  “Nope, that's not it.”

  Sarah looked around her parents’ apartment. The furniture was old. The pictures on the walls were faded. Dust sat on the bookcase. There was a black-and-white photo of Grandma and Granddad getting married, a photo of her own parent's wedding day, her mother six months pregnant with her and, next to that, a photo of her graduation from medical school. Little George was right. The most expensive thing in the room was the television.

  “I don't know,” said Sarah.

  “It's you,” replied Teller, gesturing with his hand toward each of them.

  “The most important thing in life is life itself. People always look for meaning in life, as though it were somehow missing, but it's not, it's all around us. Your granddad, your grandmother, your mom and dad, your brothers and sisters. There's nothing more valuable than them, there's no dollar figure you can place on them.”

  They were silent, hanging onto his every word.

  “And so why did some alien species millions of light years away from us send out probes? To find the most valuable commodity in the universe. Life.

  “And it didn't matter to them if they never found anyone. It didn't matter to them that they'd never live to see their probes make contact. It didn't matter if their entire civilization had collapsed and disappeared, they still chose to reach out. Life reaches out to find life.

  “They must have sent out thousands, millions of these probes, all on a whim, all on a hope. They sent them out not knowing if they'd ever find anything, but knowing that if they existed, then others were out there too, and so they sent out probes to find them, to talk to them, to communicate with them, to help them.”

  Teller leaned down toward George saying, “They sent out probes for the same reason your Granddad opened the door to a bunch of scary strangers lying on the pavement all covered in blood, because that's what intelligent life does.”

  The old man smiled with pride.

>   “And most of their probes wouldn't have found any life at all. While those that did may have sat idle for millions of years waiting for intelligence to evolve. We don't know a lot about the anomaly, but what we do know is that it was built by someone that wanted to reach out and share their knowledge, share their lives with others, to show others that they're not alone in the universe.”

  Sarah's laptop chimed. The message on the screen read, Dr William Anderson, NASA, wants to start a video conference with you.

  “Yes,” said Cathy, filled with excitement.

  Teller started the web-cam and up came an image of Anderson in his blue NASA polo shirt.

  “Teller? Is that really you?”

  “Yes,” cried Teller. “It's us.”

  Cathy leaned into the video from the side. The rest of the family huddled around, looking over the back of the armchair at the small computer screen.

  “What the hell happened to you guys?” asked Anderson. “Where are you?”

  “That's a good question. Where are we?” asked Teller, turning to the old man.

  “Westfield apartments, West 47th Street, just off 10th Avenue. We're in unit 104.”

  Mason was looking over Anderson's shoulder, writing down the address on a notepad.

  “We'll have someone out to get you ASAP,” said Mason, leaning into the video for a second before disappearing off screen.

  “Damn, Teller. You look like shit,” said Bates, standing behind Anderson.

  “Yeah, it's good to see you too,” replied Teller, laughing. “Hey, tell Mason we're going to need paramedics here as well. We need to get Corporal Davies to a hospital. He got busted up pretty bad.”

  “Will do,” replied Bates, disappearing after Mason.

  Cathy caught a glimpse of Finch in the background, filming the video chat.

  “Hey Finch,” she called out, but he kept filming, ignoring her. She turned to Teller, saying, “Bloody typical. Not so much as a word from him to ask how we are.”

  She turned back to the camera on the laptop, seeing Finch standing behind Anderson, and called out, “I'm getting a new cameraman, Finch. You're fired.”

  Anderson laughed. Finch seemed unfazed by Cathy's comments.

  “Your little friend has been pretty busy today,” said Anderson. “We fed him a couple of kilos of carbon in all different varieties and he turned on the fireworks.”

  “Really?” replied Teller, losing himself and his aching body in the prospect of learning more about the anomaly.

  “Yeah. There was a pinprick of blinding light from the center of the anomaly. The boys in Geneva reckon it was sub-millimeter in size, probably down to the micron level. Damn thing glowed like the sun. It was casting shadows in the midst of a bright noon day sky. You couldn't look at it. It fired up like an arc-welder. It was fusion, Teller, a controlled fusion reaction smaller than the head of a pin.”

  Teller was quiet, listening intently.

  “Then we started noticing a fine powder falling to the ground. It was carbon. The bloody thing was simulating the triple-alpha process required to produce carbon in the heart of a star! Bloody show off. I'm still waiting for the final analysis, but that would mean temperatures of over a hundred million Kelvin in a controlled spot, so the anomaly now holds the record for the highest temperature ever achieved on Earth. Bloody thing could have set the atmosphere on fire if it wasn't careful.”

  Teller smiled. There were lots of bloody's in Anderson's description. He was clearly over-excited. Teller didn't know quite what the triple-alpha process was, but he understood the basic principles behind fusion and the formation of heavier elements from lighter ones.

  Anderson must have read the look on his face.

  “They are temperatures and pressures normally found at the heart of a super-giant star. Our sun can't get anywhere near those extremes. In one afternoon, we've leapfrogged fifty years of fusion research. It's given us temperatures, pressures, electromagnetic energies, densities, composition, magnetic field strengths for containment, the whole nine yards. The damn thing has given us a blueprint for a fusion reactor. It could take us centuries to replicate something like this, but we now know it's possible. They'll be studying this footage and our monitoring log files in physics labs for the next couple of decades at least.”

  “Nice,” said Teller, appreciating the broader ramifications, especially for energy production.

  “The whole show lasted about half an hour and then the anomaly got bored and moved on to nitrogen, so we responded with oxygen, and we've been chatting back and forth since then.”

  “Bates has a theory,” continued Anderson. “He thinks the anomaly is working through the periodic table as a primer before constructing something out of these elements, some kind of device. What do you think?”

  “Makes sense,” replied Teller. “There's got to be a next phase in the cycle of communication, and it seems reasonable that the initial discovery phase would lead to something that's related. Does he have any ideas about what?”

  “Nope. But it scares the crap out of Mason. He's been pleading with the President to cut the live feeds, but, with all the diplomatic pressure, the President is more determined than ever to make sure there's complete transparency.”

  “It won't be bad,” replied Teller. “Whatever it is, it will be in keeping with what we've seen so far. It will be an extension, an improvement, something that takes our conversation to another level.”

  “Yeah, well Mason wants you back here. At the current rate of element exchange, we'll be up to radium by midnight, if not sooner. He wants your thoughts on all this.”

  “Mine?” replied Teller, still getting used to the attention. “I don't know anything about fusion or triple-whatevers. I think I may have outlived my usefulness.”

  “Nonsense,” said Anderson. “We're in uncharted territory, so it's a level playing field for all of us, elementary school teachers and astrophysicists alike.”

  Anderson gave him a wink. Teller appreciated his kindness, but he really did feel out of his depth. It was one thing to come up with the idea of introducing helium, but when it comes to atomic isotopes and high-energy physics, he was a dead weight and he knew it.

  “Bates said we're going to run into trouble once we hit Fermium. It's bloody nasty stuff. Bates is struggling to get his hands on more than a few hundred milligrams of the stuff. After that, we get Nobelium, and that's worse. It has a half-life of only ten days. There are no known stockpiles of the crap so we're scouring several university research reactors trying to scrape some together, but even if we can get that worked out, the next element we need to come up with is Rutherfordium, which has a half-life of ninety minutes. Somehow, I don't think Mason's going to let us whip some up on-site.”

  “I suspect,” said Teller, “our friend is probably counting on exposing our technical limitations with these exotic elements as it will give him a yardstick to determine how advanced we are.”

  Anderson was running his hand over his goatee beard as he spoke.

  “Yeah, he's going to see we're struggling with the heavyweights beyond a hundred. In principle, we can get as far as ununoctium at 118, but no further. And then, that's only ever been a handful of atoms in a particle accelerator. The darn stuff decays in a fraction of a second. There's just no way we can feed this stuff to our hungry friend.”

  “Exactly, and he knows it. It's going to be an interesting evening,” said Teller.

  “Hey,” said Anderson. “Mason said you should be getting…”

  There was a thumping knock on the door.

  “Well, how's that for timing. Looks like your ride has turned up.”

  Chapter 14: Darwin

  Mason wasn't taking any chances. The whole suburb had been locked down by the National Guard, with armed soldiers stationed at each intersection. The Marines that picked up Cathy, Teller and Jones, drove three blocks to an inner-city school where several adjoining basketball courts had been converted into a helipad. Sawn-off basketball p
oles, their nets still attached, lay carelessly on the ground. From there, Jones was flown to a military hospital in Jersey while Teller and Cathy were flown to the park beside the UN. Teller was glued to the window as they came in from the north, making the most of the opportunity to see the anomaly from the air.

  It was a little after eight in the evening and spotlights lit up the anomaly from numerous angles. The concrete intersection sat high in the air, facing down to the north. The underside of the concrete was exposed to the night sky. Teller could see the core team at work on the inverted slab, moving about as though it were natural to defy gravity in such an extraordinary way. The flags inside the anomaly had passed their zenith. They looked surreal, floating freely, suspended against the skyline, flapping gently in the cool evening breeze.

  After landing, Teller and Cathy were treated at the medical center, where they showered and were given a fresh set of clothes. Mason had even commandeered an electric golf cart from somewhere so they didn't have to walk back to the research center.

  Teller joked with Cathy that he was so pumped full of painkillers he could spin upside-down like the anomaly. And yet, she noted, he walked with a limp.

  Mason made sure they got something to eat and briefed them on the progress so far that day. Teller asked about the riots in the city, but Mason assured him that the National Guard had squashed the unrest. He felt it was an isolated incident, Cathy wasn't so sure. One of the monitors displayed CNN. There were images of Paris in flames. She wandered over, wanting to hear the commentary.

  “...coming to you from the Arc de Triomphe. The Champs Élysées is in flames. The rioting, which began in the northern suburbs of Paris, has spread to the iconic western quarter, destroying some of the most expensive real estate in the world.”

  Footage of Prada, Versace and Louis Vuitton stores, ransacked and in ruins, flashed up on the screen. Broken glass and smoldering cars lined the streets.

  “The French government has deployed troops to protect the Louvre, blaming the unrest on the United States. Ambassador Carter was summoned to appear before the French President, Jacques Lebarre, just a few hours ago, and was formally asked to leave the country in protest at the exclusion of the International Community from the anomaly research.