by Lynn Donovan
“Yes. I encourage you to fill this tonight after work, say… seven o’clock?”
He took the paper and looked at what she wrote. A half smile raised one side of his mouth.
“Well… maybe.” He lifted his eyes to Abbie. “You’ll be there?”
“Me? Yeah. Of course. If you’re there, I’ll be there.” Her hands balled into fists at her side. “I mean—”
Karole butted in, “Excuse my sister. She’s not this awkward once you get to know her.” She took Abbie’s shoulder and pushed her as they clumsily walked away. Calling back to him over her shoulder, Karole said, “See you there tonight.”
Abbie tripped over her own feet with her sister’s insistent shoving, trying to see if he answered her final invitation. He smiled, watching them stagger away, and nodded.
“Yes!” Abbie pumped her hand at her side. “He said yes!”
They sat back down to their abandoned table with their abandoned food.
Abbie leaned toward her sister. “You think he meant it, or was he just being nice.”
Karole sighed. “Man, you’ve got it bad.”
“What?” Abbie stuffed a fork full of salad in her mouth and mumbled around the food. “I do not!”
“Are you kidding me? You were falling all over yourself!” She laughed. “Look, I don’t know if he’ll show up at The Oasis or not, but I can tell you this—“
Abbie leaned into her sister. “What?”
“If he does, then you’ll know.”
“Know what?”
“He’s into you, too.”
She flopped back against the chair. “Why would that tell me he’s into me?”
“Because, little sister, if he comes to The Oasis, he’s definitely in to you.” She wrinkled her mouth, the way she always did when frustrated. “You acted like an idiot over there.”
“Oh God. Was I that bad?” Abbie peeked over at Dr. Assad. He had finished his meal and stood with his tray.
Abbie sighed. “I blew it, didn’t I?”
He walked to the dish return window and placed his tray on the stainless steel counter. A young girl, sporting a hair net and gold Dietary Department coat, pulled the tray toward her and separated trash and food from dish, and stacked the plate in a washer rack. He said something to her. She looked up and smiled.
Abbie smiled too. She liked the idea that he was nice to the people who served in dietary. He turned. Abbie darted her eyes to the floor as he walked directly toward her and Karole’s table. His smile widened and he tapped their table with the tip of his fingers as he walked past. He had a nice clean manicure. “Drs. Crossan. See you later.”
Abbie stared with her mouth hanging open as he left the cafeteria. She patted her sister’s arm with a fluttering hand. “He said, ‘see us later!’”
Karole put her chin in her hand, elbow on the table. “That he did. At the very least, maybe he’ll call you.”
Abbie stiffened. Her brow furrowed. “Why do you say that?”
“That prescription I wrote him…”
Terror filled Abbie’s heart. What had her sister done? She managed to utter, “Yeah?”
“I gave him your phone number.”
Chapter Two
Abbie tapped the enter key with her little finger. The program ran the probabilities equations again. Every department head meeting she’d attended had left her frustrated and more worried. While the other scientists didn’t ignore her reports, they certainly hadn’t acted on them either. Her calculations to date haunted her logic. The mountain’s strata analysis had definitely changed since the quantum experiments began. That couldn’t be ignored.
While she waited for the compilations, she put her favorite K-cup pod in the Keurig and placed a coffee mug on the drip tray. Hazelnut-cinnamon soon filled the air. She sighed with pleasure at the aroma. At least something was coming out right today.
The program chimed, indicating ‘End Program.’ She quickly sipped a gulp of her coffee and rushed to see the output. Falling into her chair, she furrowed her brow. “This is not good.”
She stepped up to her electronic white board and scratched out more equations based on this new data. The purple dry-erase marker squeaked under her hurried hand. She stood back and looked it over. “I’ve gotta go talk to Physics.”
Pressing the share icon on the frame of the smart board, she transferred the equation to her secured tablet, tucked it under her arm, and left the QuESO building.
Every time she walked past the brass placard identifying her building she mused about her sister chastising her for the acronym. “Queso? Seriously? You named your department after cheese dip?”
“Look, it’s the way of a top secret facility, such as VEIL, to use acronyms, why not have some fun with it? We’ve got to humanize this project! I can’t think of a better way than to name my department Quantum Environmental Studies and Operations. It fits and it’s funny at the same time. Besides those eggheads at HQ won’t make the connection.”
Abbie chuckled at the memory. She stepped into the indigenous garden. Ling, the environmental engineer, worked in an area of sculptured beds, under the aspen trees. Abbie walked along the pink crushed granite path toward the QuCAD. The Quantum Chemistry Application Department appeared to be a small building, but in truth it was built against this section of the Rocky Mountains, called Mount Herman.
It had been her first assignment when she came onboard with the quantum facility planning team. Back then, she had officed in Loville’s downtown area, between an ice cream shop and a new-age tea shop. Just a half dozen scientists and a few admin people.
Their purpose intentionally obscured by not updating the old tole-paint sign that read, “Janice’s Jewelry & Junk.” The quaint little town flourished with several antique shops and mom-and-pop restaurants along Main Street. Janice had moved to a bigger town for better retail opportunities. Little did ol’ Janice know that big changes were soon to come to her small commerce.
It had been deemed a big secret that the private corporation, funded by private investors, was moving in and building a high-tech facility. Only the City Planning Commission had any knowledge of the plans and they were all sworn to secrecy. Therefore, everyone in town knew all about it.
The initial office, set quietly between Frozen Expectations Ice Cream Parlor, and Mystique Emporium, maintained its ploy of disguise by decorating its display windows with junk-store relics and black-out curtains as the backdrop to prevent any passing foot traffic from seeing that nothing but cubicles lay beyond. Abbie and the few other employees parked along the alley and came and went discretely through the back door, which added more intrigue and fuel for local gossip. They all knew the townies weren’t fooled, the townsfolk were pretty clever, but VEIL’S employees were under orders to remain invisible, so they kept up the façade.
What the townsfolk didn’t know was how much Loville, Colorado would grow with the added business and influx of residential needs to accommodate the facility’s employment opportunities. Once construction began and the facility became operational, Loville had grown from a population of 1,500 to 4,000 almost overnight.
While a huge corporate construction company built the facility itself, construction workers were suddenly in demand for houses and apartment construction. Downtown boomed with new stores, bakeries, and ethnic restaurants. The movie theater was renovated with three separate screens and fancy reclining chairs. A small RadioShack was soon built just south of town. AT&T and Verizon marked the beginning and end of the downtown strip of businesses. And Apple was negotiating for retail space in the old grocery store that had gone out of business ten years ago. I-HOP, Wendy’s, and McDonald’s were clamoring for vacant lots along the main road into Loville. Storage facilities popped up all across town. The City Council had to move the city limits to accommodate the new growth.
Abbie had run core-sample analysis those first few months and confirmed the strata was ideal for excavation and construction. A small impact-crater-turned-lake at the foot of the buil
d site was a nice touch. Given the nature of this project and the brilliant people who would be brought to this facility to work, she suggested the Environmental Operations section of her department take advantage of the peaceful beauty of the lake and put tables and seating for ambient mental processing, otherwise known as thinking… and picnics of course. She went so far as to name it QuIET Lake. Quantum Intelligent Entangled Thinking. Seemed appropriate to her.
Abbie blinked, bringing her mind back to the present. The garden groundskeeper had moved to the north quadrant. She seemed to be dividing and transplanting bulbs. Abbie walked quickly through the aboriginal landscape, pausing only after entering the building to scan her badge.
“Morning, Dr. Crossan.” The guard, Frank Gonzales, greeted her as he opened a small cubical locker and handed Abbie the key. She put her cellphone in the box and locked the door. Smiling at Frank kindly, she nodded her thanks and rushed through.
The Physics Department was just past the entrance. Hopefully the physicist she most wanted to speak to was in her lab. Dr. Holly Teak had become well known, in the short time she’d been on-site, among those involved in the Quantum Entanglement project because of her extreme ideas. While Abbie knew Dr. Joseph Assad was also on the Physics team, Dr. Teak was less intimidating, albeit irritating. At least Abbie’s heart didn’t try to win the Kentucky Derby every time she talked to Holly.
Dr. Teak leaned over a laptop along a wall of desk computers, screens, and other machines. Three half empty Lipton tea bottles cluttered the counter. She didn’t even move when Abbie walked in.
Abbie scanned the collection of equations on the ceiling-to-floor white board walls that surrounded the lab on three sides. She lifted a contrasting blue dry-erase marker as she walked through the room, studying the equations. Slowly she stepped up to an empty spot, twisted the marker lid off, and wrote out the updated equation. She lifted her tablet, swiped the Tinker Bell graphic to open the digitized duplicate from her smart board, and verified she had the formula written down correctly.
“Holly?” Abbie turned from the ‘thinking wall’ and cleared her throat. “Uh… Dr. Teak, could I show you something?”
Holly looked up with a heavy sigh, acknowledging Abbie’s presence for the first time, then smiled. She looked all of nineteen, but with three PhDs, she had to be at least thirty. “Certainly! What?”
“I was wondering…” Abbie turned back to the board, ran her finger along a troubling quantum formula, and tapped a fingernail on a particular summation. “I have updated the equations with current strata findings, and… can you show me where the current effects from the strata have been populated in your calculations?”
“Sure!” Holly looked at the equations that Abbie questioned. She tilted her head right, then left, then drew a big red circle around one term with a dry-erase marker. “This term right here” —she tapped the board with the marker, leaving red dots— “could be positive or negative. We shall make the assumption it is positive and thus would have a negligible effect on the process of photon entanglement.”
Abbie stared at the scientist in disbelief. First, this chemical physicist had figured out Abbie’s equations in less than ten seconds, and second, she immediately dismissed the major influence and Abbie’s concerns. “So you’re not taking into consideration the strength of the resonant fields in the material surrounding our facility? May I ask why not?”
Dr. Teak smiled as if she were speaking to a child who had asked why the sky was blue. Abbie held her temper and let Holly respond.
“Well… though it goes against my nature, we chose to be conservative. We felt that any effect from resonance would only help us. It would create more entangled particles. That’s what we want! So if it helps, yippee!” She shook with excitement, her fists clenched in front of her like a cheerleader with pompoms.
Yippee? Abbie swallowed, regretting the balsamic dressing on that Cobb salad at lunch. She had to keep her emotions in check. “But, Holly, I have conducted extensive core sample analysis in this mountain, not to mention seismic— never mind— the bottom line is you may get too much entanglement.”
Again Holly tilted her head. She reminded Abbie of her dad’s hunting dog, Rex, when Dad blew the seemingly silent dog whistle.
“The more the merrier! We want giga-entanglement. The first time we fire up my crystal, we’ll know if we’re on the right track. Eventually, we want to go for peda-bits of quantumly entangled particles. Qubits! I love that they are called qubits!”
“Right track? But the strata—”
“—might help us!”
“—might create mathematical instability!” Abbie finished, exasperated.
“And that’s good.” Holly’s perfectly straight teeth glistened.
“No, I mean — look, I may have only minored in Probability and Quantum Mechanics, Holly, but I’m talking about the possibility of a dimensional instability!”
“Ah! String theory. Well, maybe. That could cause us to lose a lot of the entangled particles we create, but the containment team will have the burden of figuring out how to capture the little gremlins once we prove we can create ‘em.”
Abbie threw up her hands and paced in front of her equations.
Holly smiled. “I know you put a lot of work into finding this place in the mountain. And it’s perfect. Really. I love it here. Thank you. And the QuIET Lake is a really nice touch. Great place to have a picnic, or walk, or… to think—”
“Please listen to me, Holly.” Abbie wanted to shake her by the shoulders. If this was Patrick or Karole, she would have. “What you’re doing is reckless” —blame the equation, not the scientist, Abbie chanted in her head the one line she had retained from the Effective Communication with Scientists class that she had been forced to take for her Qual-card— “I’m sorry, but I’d like for you to consider the possibility of cascade effects of VEIL’s QUEST on the surrounding quartz strata—”
“Ok. I’ll consider it.” Holly pursed her lips and furrowed her brow in an over-animated display of either concentration or annoyance, Abbie wasn’t sure which. “Nope, I reach the same conclusion. Prolific particle entanglement. So… yay!”
Abbie stepped back, crossing her arms. What else could she say to get through to her? “All I’m saying, Dr. Teak, is if the calculations for the alternate solution to this equation are not taken into account, the possibility for effects on our immediate environment— well, the consequences could be” — Abbie swallowed hard— “a catastrophic accident waiting for a place to happen.”
Holly stared at Abbie. “The only problem I see is how the containment team is going to herd our little bouncing particles if they make that many that fast.”
Abbie frowned. What if the problem is a horrific event that changes everything as we know it? But she didn’t articulate that thought. Holly was so focused on the positive possibilities, she couldn’t see any negative probabilities.
Quantum entanglement was not a toy to be played with. Maybe Holly was right and they would just have a mountain-full of entangled photons. No big deal.
But the other possible results should be considered. A great deal of respect and caution had to be incorporated into every theory, hypothesis, formula, and experiment. This was all new territory. She had to make someone understand. Somebody had to listen. But it wouldn’t be Dr. Holly Teak. Should she go straight to Director Adam Stettler, the Project Director? Well, she would if she had to. For now, she’d keep trying to get through to the scientists on the Quantum Interim Entanglement Team. Even if she had to wreck any possibility of dating Dr. Assad, she’d risk it, for the sake of the people in Loville.
But hopefully, she didn’t have to take that extreme measure. Hopefully everything would go fine and she’d have a chance to get to know the handsome physicist before Holly and her enthusiastic race to entangle photons by the qubits wreaked havoc on the entire state of Colorado.
Maybe Patrick would listen.
As lead programmer with IT in the ops cente
r, overseeing the experiments in the QUEST lab, her brother would have some influence with the team of scientists. Abbie drew her lip into her mouth. She had never been to his area. He had always come to her. The QUEST Operations Center was one of the labs seated back against the mountain. Not above her clearance level, just beyond her scope of practice.
Abbie walked toward the front entry security guard, showed her badge, unlocked the little locker, and retrieved her phone. In the garden she lifted her phone while glancing around for Ling. She was raking leaves in another area of the garden. The garden was lovely with its huge ponderosa pines, aspen clusters, and evergreen shrubs. The aspen leaves were just beginning to turn, like the one she put in her hair this morning. Her brother answered. She turned her back to the gardener for simulated privacy.
“Patrick! I need to talk to you!”
“What is it?” His end sounded muffled as if he’d covered the mouthpiece of his phone. “Keep applying those formulas and we’ll run that in a minute, Minerva.”
“Is that Minnie? Tell her hi for me.”
“Yeah, whatever. What do you want, Abbie?”
She chewed her lower lip. “I need to show you something.”
“I’m a little busy... what?”
“I’ve been concerned about this for a while. I can’t seem to get anybody to listen—”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m going to send you a graphic. Will you look at it, please?” She shouldered her cell phone and lifted her tablet, thumbed past Tinker Bell wielding a wand and opened the copy of her equations from the smart board, then sent it to the secured server where Patrick could open it.
He tsked his tongue in that irritated way. “Just a minute— Okay. So?”
Abbie sighed. “Really look at it, Patrick! I’ve written it on Dr. Teak’s white board too, do you want to come look at it there?”
“What’s the problem, Abbie?”
She took a deep, calming breath. “Everybody’s so focused on making this gigabyte quantum entanglement work, they’re not preparing for the possibility of negative results, catastrophic negative results.”
