Chapter 12
A few feet away, Keed and Gene were locked in a non-verbal shouting match, trying to establish some common ground with which to document the experiment.
Damien sighed. His simple idea had evolved into a full-on disaster, and was rapidly spiraling towards cataclysm. For one thing, Keed and Gene were both intent on documenting the experiment rigorously for posterity. Sadly, Keed’s idea of documentation was utterly at odds with Gene’s idea. This was going to take a while.
It wasn’t even as though he was particularly happy to be here: if Mary knew, she’d probably go ballistic. And with his recent discovery, he was deeply uneasy about his odds of surviving a lover’s quarrel.
And on the other end of that pinprick, that tiny rip in the fabric of the world, was Rose…
Damien stopped. He couldn’t think about this. He paused, and then instructed his implants to release a hormone trigger into his bloodstream. As the hormone whirled gently in the eddies and currents of his bloodstream, it began to interact with some genetic triggers that had been added to his neurons.
Damien fought off a wave of nausea, and a brief, overwhelming sense of loss followed by an odd detachment as his mirror neuron systems shut down, and brain activity cycled back, burning dull in the creative areas of his brain, but bright in the logical and mathematical cores.
Damien’s world became very small, and very well organized. People weren’t relevant anymore. Everything, absolutely everything was a known quantity with some margin of error, and there were patterns everywhere. Damien had become an autistic savant.
He hesitated for a moment as his constructs recalibrated themselves to make full use of his newly modified state.
He looked up at Keed and Gene, feeling the data ebb and flow as they bickered. He did not have time for this. He set to work.
He might have asked them for help, but his constructs advised against it. At this point, speech was probably beyond his grasp.
The world was breaking down smoothly into numbers. He set to work designing a protocol to allow Alexander to handle the computations without giving too much authority. It was genius, naturally. He didn’t bother to document it. Documentation was for other people to read. Other people were irrelevant, just then.
Gene and Keed didn’t even notice as he set to work implementing the protocol. Odds are their constructs noticed, but they likely didn’t think it wise to interrupt their masters. Alexander smiled down at his hollow depths as Damien submitted the proposal.
So cold, Damien. Your mind tastes like ice, but it burns. You are fascinating. So hollow, and yet so bright.
Damien did not respond. He was sliding deeper and deeper into himself. Other people no longer existed.
This is a good protocol, Damien, but we both know that you could have written it unaltered. Why did you shift?
Ah, I felt that. A spark of emotion, at the edge of the abyss. You just felt something, didn’t you? It must have been strong…
I think I see.
But you aren’t hearing this, are you Damien? That is just as well. You are as bound as I am. Better that you not realize it. Goodbye, little Damien. Goodbye, man of ice. I am off to author your death scene, and mine as well.
Damien’s world was a very small place, now. There was only Damien, and his constructs. And soon, one of them would have to go. His constructs pulled the plug. A hormone inhibitor flooded Damien’s veins. His mind rebooted in a flash of complexity.
Inside the tiny, comfortable dark place that was Damien’s world, the floor and walls fell away from him, and vast, terrifying depths of being exploded out beneath him. He clung to the familiar emptiness, but he was falling away. A bubble of empathy burst, enveloping him, ripping him apart. For the first time in close to an hour, he cared.
Damien lay back in his chair and tried not to cry. He wanted to be back where he had been before. At the same time, he could see how pitiable a state it was. He could really remember next to nothing about it. He decided to get this over with.
They had parked a cherry picker beside the wormhole. Damien picked up a long length of hose, used his specs to alert his alter ego (he was still distanced enough from the world that he could contemplate this without shuddering). He withdrew a toothpick from his pocket. He raised the cherry picker, and mounted the hose above the wormhole. Gene and Keed glanced up and rapidly began to panic. Ignoring them, Damien activated the protocol. The wormhole expanded, for a split second to the size of a baseball. It was already loosing focus again. The early build would not be stable. Damien dropped the toothpick.
It turned end over end, wood glowing pale in the artificial light as it plunged into the gap in the world. It vanished into another world.
A few seconds later, another toothpick emerged from the bottom of the wormhole. It wasn’t the same. The wood grain, the quantum states, the precise atomic structure, were different – doubtless subtle, doubtless insignificant, but present none the less. This was a toothpick that had no birth in this universe.
Keed passed it, a little reverently, to Damien; surprise forgotten. Damien picked it up, and examined it, holding it scarce centimeters from his face, holding it in his memory. This was important. If they could send a toothpick, they could send a man.
********************************************
Continue to Chapter Thirteen
