Chapter Eight

Chapter 8:

    The next day, winter came. Damien, limping downtown, walking toward the tram station, found himself wishing that he had taken his heavy coat. A few hesitant snowflakes fell on dry concrete, dissolving gently to run as water between the cracks. The glass walls of the Gardens, normally steamy from humidity, were now totally opaque.

Through the fog, Damien thought he could see a figure inside the top dome, waving down at him. He waved back, just in case. Damien found the tram station without difficulty – the new glasses he’d bought and synched to his home terminal had built-in GPS, and gave him directions all the way.

Even without this constant prodding, he suspected he would still remember. When he’d been a young child, the Gar- his father and his mother had taken him to see the mountains. They had only just finished the towers then, after the wells ran dry. The city had been nearly empty, having been fled by most sane people after the taps stopped working. It had been months since then, and they were some of the only people still around – water had been trucked in at the city’s expense for the construction workers, and other vital employees.

He remembered it vividly, the only clear memory he retained from before he’d gotten his specs. The water crisis, seen coming for decades and never remedied, had eclipsed the grand opening of the Gardens, his father’s pride and joy. The opening was attended by no one at all.

The Gardens has originally been city funded, but the wind was already blowing in another direction. The news from the white house was getting steadily grimmer.  China had called in their debts (this was just before the information war wiped them out), and the government was bankrupt.  Unable to pay, discipline, or even supply their police, army, or civil workers, there was mass desertion across the board.  The government was falling apart. His father could read the writing on the walls, and had made plans for what was coming.

But that was before. On this day, his parents had been taking him to see the water-collection towers, popularly hailed as the ‘saviors of the city’. They had gone to this tram station. It had been before he’d gotten glasses, or else they’d be replaying the video now.

The tram station was much as he remembered; a little older, a little dirtier, but it had not changed much. A few people huddled out of the wind, waiting for the next train. He joined them, watching the snow gather courage, stacking confidently now on metal railings and loose outcroppings and stone.

The train rolled into the station with a little squeal of demented iron. He climbed into it, and sat back, staring at the ceiling.

His dad had been sick that day. He’d been working long hours on the Gardener, obsessively refining code and uploading more and more data from his glasses and constructs into it. When he worked, he smoked. He’d been coughing into his handkerchief.

But that day, his Father had made it up the long trail to the top of the mountains, and held him up to see the vast metal struts extending up, up, into the atmosphere.

To Damien, they had seemed like the hands of a buried monster, some great beast of stainless steel buried under the mountain, fingertips probing into the open sky

The train screeched into his stop, and he got off. From there, it was a short walk to the Medusa corporation.  The walk was made more difficult by a million snowflakes charging down on top of his head. The sky blazed with ice, and the air around him was carved in swirling, twisting torrent of white crashing down around him. The light that came through was brilliant, reflected off a million crystal mirrors. He smiled in the glow and forgot.

The General was waiting for him.

He lit a cigar.

“You have quite a lot of experience, Damien. You’ve been busy,”

Damien nodded.

“Good! You know the protocol then. I look forward to your report.”

He vanished down the hallway quickly, off to some vital business or another. 

Damien frowned after him.

Something about the exchange felt… off. Something itched the edge of his mind. Something hadn’t been right. He gave up.

Damien walked along the edges of the amphitheater. After the first day, the central display had been surrounded by a heavy curtain. Whatever he had seen before had not reappeared, and, in truth, the near-death-experience had quite wiped it from his memory.

Mary took Damien on the rounds of the office. There were a surprisingly small number of employees. Aside from perhaps a dozen paramedics and low-level technicians, there was only himself, the General, Mary, and two other personnel. The one in Damien’s field was named Keed, and the other physicist was named Gene.

Gene was a spry, wiry man. He had a crew cut, and his thin frame was strung with stringy bunches of taught muscles under dark skin. He looked very much as though his entire being was held together by the meanest of sinews.

“Ah, you must be Damien. Mary had told me so much about you.” His smile, so full of teeth, was not a pleasant thing to Damien.

“The General has asked me to brief you on the mechanics of the wormhole. Please come with me.”

Damien with a smile at Mary, excused himself and followed Gene. The office compound was located in a low and unassuming cinderblock structure behind the General’s office. They entered the building, and navigated a winding hallway to Gene’s office.

The office, to an intruder so unfortunate to be stripped of his specs, was nearly barren. A single chair sat in the middle of the room, and the walls were empty, save a single security camera. As Damien entered, however, he found the air stuffed with simulations and running application windows, and the walls plastered with data graphs.

Gene sat down in the only chair, and Damien leaned against the wall. Gene cleared the work space, and began to brief Damien.

“Okay, so Mary already explained the basics to you, yes?”

Damien nodded.

“Yes, but she was a little vague on the method.”

“Okay, in that case, you are aware that light bends space, yes?”

Damien’s physics construct took seniority here and began to occupy most of his mindspace, funneling the appropriate information into his head, predicting his requirements.  Gene became a little difficult to see behind the graphs and articles flashing up in front of his head.

“Naturally.”

“Well, what we’ve done is to use beams of extremely intense light to form a hollow cage around a single quantum wormhole. By doing this properly, we can create a practical approximation of negative energy upon the wormhole, and cause it to expand. Quantum randomness seeps in, though, and needs to be compensated for, so it takes a lot of computational power to keep the wormhole stable though, which is why we have to keep it small.”

Damien tried to keep calm.

“How large is in now?”

“About a millimeter wide in our universe.  Trying to compute it's total surface area in n-space is a really bad idea, trust me. We’ve tried to make it larger, but we can’t do it and continue to keep it stable.”

“If you made it larger, could you send physical matter through?”

Damien tasted copper, and he realized that he had bit his tongue. He could not keep a tinge of anxiety from his voice.

“Well, it would be difficult – you’d have to make it considerably larger than the object you were sending, to avoid your object being shredded by tidal forces. Why so interested?”

Damien hastily scaled back his interest, feeling guilty.

“If you could send an object through, I could compare the nature of it's matter to try and pinpoint the alterations in the laws of matter between universes.”

Gene appeared accepted this answer, for the moment.

“We’ve never tried to send an object through. Even something like a toothpick –“

“-Or a grain of rice,” cut in Damien.

“Or a grain of rice, would require at least doubling the width of the wormhole. We don’t have that kind of computational capacity.

Something occurred to Damien.

“Could you have the Nestor model compute them?”

“I… I don’t know. Interesting. It might work. You’d want to be careful about it manipulating the data though.”

“It is a risk. Couldn’t you modify the Friendliness protocols to restrict it?”

“I dunno. You’d have to talk to Keed about it. It’s an interesting idea – let’s give it a shot the day after tomorrow.”

“Really?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Okay, I’ll be back then.”

Damien walked out of the office, feeling confused. He felt guilty. He had promised Mary that he would not obsess, but he could feel the stirs of hope burning bright within his soul. If he made this work, he could see her again. He knew, on some level that even if it worked, she was still married (to him no less), and that all of the complications that arose from this were overwhelming. But these were wiped away by one bright truth. He could see again – it might cost a mortgage on his life and soul, but it was possible.

He went to his new office. It was empty, of course. A single chair sat in the middle of the room. A security cam was mounted on the wall. He sat down in the chair and opened the company interface.

He sighed, and opened the interface, sending a message to the effect that he wanted to speak to Rose. He tried not to wonder whether the person reading the message was him.

It would take a while. He logged into the World.

He was called back to reality by a small ping.

He inhaled sharply, bracing himself. This was it.

Hello Rose.

Hello Dame.

He sat back in his chair. His hands were shaking. He was sweating. Tears were running down his face, and he was sobbing. She was alive.

 

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Continue to Chapter Nine