Supersymmetry (3 page)

It wasn't just elevators, of course. Ryan didn't trust airplanes, or bridges, or security systems, either. Take that baseball stadium in Philadelphia. All those people had trusted the security guards and cameras and electronic sniffers to keep them safe, but those systems had failed them. It took imagination to think of all the ways things could go wrong and protect against them. Ryan didn't trust anyone to have that much imagination but himself.

By the time he reached the eighth floor, he was breathing hard and sweating through his shirt. He made this climb every day, but it was the only exercise he got, and it didn't make up for the quantity of popcorn and Mountain Dew he consumed in the lab. He recognized the irony—his diet was more likely to kill him than an elevator ever was—but death by heart attack always seemed like a distant problem, while death by sudden deceleration could happen in an instant. Besides, he was a physicist, not a biologist.

The corridors on the eighth floor were a maze of unexpected turnings around oddly-shaped rooms, with confusing markings and uniformly painted beige walls. There weren't even any windows to provide a sense of direction. Ryan suspected the security architects had designed it this way on purpose, so that even if someone gained access to the building, they wouldn't be able to find what they were looking for. Or, Ryan thought, to find their way out again. He imagined a would-be spy wandering these halls endlessly, never finding the exit.

He hurried through the maze with the ease of long habit, pushing himself despite his exhaustion. Only four hours had passed since he had left the lab the night before. If he had known it would happen while he was gone, he never would have left. Ryan was accustomed to spending most of his time at work anyway, but lately he could hardly spare enough time to sleep. Nicole Wu, his chief lab assistant, had insisted she could handle it tonight. She said she would call him the moment there was any anomaly, and he had let her talk him into going home.

He typed a ten-digit number into a keypad, cursing as his fingers stumbled over the keys. He felt the familiar knotting in his stomach as the door opened and he was met by an armed guard. But it wasn't the guard that caused his anxiety. The guards were there to protect what was inside the lab from the public. What concerned him was whether they could protect the public from what was inside the lab.

The guard patted him down like he did every day, and Ryan submitted to fingerprint and retinal scans impatiently. His mind was already running ahead to the confrontation that was waiting for him. Nobody else understood the danger; nobody understood what they had created. Not even Nicole realized the significance. He emptied his pockets—keys, wallet, phone—and left them in a bin on the wall with his name on it. The guard typed in a code of his own, one that only he knew, and the next door buzzed open.

Finally, Ryan passed through a scanning tunnel, one sensitive enough to pick up any electronics, even smart paper. By the time he reached the other side, he felt the terror building. He was afraid to go in there, afraid of what the day might bring. But if he didn't do it, who would? At the final door, there was a combination lock, a finicky dial with a digital readout, controlling a powerful electromagnetic lock that held the door in place. It would be easier to batter through the steel-reinforced walls than to open this door without unlocking it. The walls vibrated slightly in a random pattern, defeating any technology that could reproduce voices from inside by picking up the sound waves through the walls. The whole lab was a giant Faraday cage as well, the walls threaded with copper, allowing no possibility of electronic signal leak.

He completed the combination, and the thick door swung open like the door to a safe, revealing a tiny room like an airlock. He stepped inside and swung the door shut. Only when it locked into place did the second door unlock, granting him access to the lab.

Nicole was waiting for him. “Your beta protocol kicked in, and everything held,” she said, handing him a tablet.

He scrolled through the data. What he saw made a chill slide like a drop of sweat down his back. “That was close,” he said. “It's never gotten that far before.”

“Everything seems nominal now,” she said. “Well within tolerances.”

“That doesn't mean anything,” Ryan said. “It's getting smarter. I'm not sure how long I can keep up with it.”

He lowered his complaining body into a seat and looked at his universe. It spun gracefully in the middle of the lab, a haze of multicolored dots sparked through with a laser-light spectacle of electric arcs and flashes. It wasn't the actual thing, of course. The real universe was expanding rapidly in its own space-time, connected to theirs only through a subatomic wormhole. The display was something Ryan had invented using photoionization microscopy, a way of visualizing the quantum
n
-dimensional data in an intuitively comprehensible form. It was his way of looking at his baby and watching it grow.

It was beautiful, but it was going to kill him. It was quite possibly going to kill them all.

The baby universe was an incredible scientific achievement, perhaps unequaled in its scope and implications. It had long been understood that what we called our universe was just one bubble in the quantum froth that had erupted at the beginning of time. There had been billions of other such bubbles, each one different in its physical laws, the particles it contained, the elements it could form.

Ryan had reproduced this effect, generating a bubble universe of his own. Within its own time reference, the universe was only minutes old. It had no planets or stars. It didn't even have atoms. It was just a rapidly expanding quark-gluon plasma, as our universe had been minutes after the big bang. And since its time context was so much slower, he had been able to monitor its development, picosecond by picosecond. The resulting revelations about the quantum world had led to a flurry of remarkable inventions, not least of which was the military technology demo that was supposed to take place on campus next week.

The demo. Ryan finally noticed what Nicole was wearing. She usually came to work in jeans and a T-shirt, but today she wore a black skirt, pink blouse, black jacket, and high heels. Her long hair was twisted into a knot and skewered with a silver pin. Ryan scanned the room and saw the other lab techs in suits and ties.

“You're kidding me,” Ryan said. “The demo is today?”

Nicole gave him an incredulous look. “Of course it's today.”

“Not anymore.” Ryan waved the tablet. “Not after this. It'll have to be canceled.”

He stood again, ignoring the pain in his knees, and marched back toward the lab door.

“Stan's not going to cancel,” Nicole called after him. “There's too much money riding on this.”

Ryan didn't answer. He knew she was right, but he had to try.

Stanley Babington's office was larger than most conference rooms. He had been the head of the New Jersey Super Collider at Lakehurst for a decade now, and his main talent was in convincing government agencies to part with their money. A job which, Ryan had to admit, he performed remarkably well. The NJSC and associated projects had grown quickly while most government spending was decreasing. The man understood politics. Unfortunately, he didn't understand physics.

“We have to cancel the demo,” Ryan said without preamble.

“Oronzi, you're as predictable as a solar eclipse,” Babington said. “Every time there's an important event, you start imagining the worst. Can we just get through this one without the drama?”

“This isn't like that.”

“You have half an hour to get changed, and then I need you at your polite best.” Babington pointed to a coat rack, where an expensive-looking black suit hung in a thin plastic sleeve. A purple tie was draped over the hanger. It looked like Ryan's size.

“You bought me a suit?”

Babington gave a wry smile. “I know you too well. You're my celebrity, Oronzi. You're my Einstein. Everybody knows you're a little eccentric; it's part of your charm. But I can't have you seen in
that
.” He waved at Ryan's clothes.

Ryan had no intention of putting on the suit. He had read once, years ago, about an undertaker who stripped corpses of their clothes just before burying them and then sold the clothes on consignment. He hadn't worn a suit since. “You're not listening to me,” he said. “We have to cancel. We had another incident last night. It's the closest it's ever come to breaking out.”

“What are we talking about here? Worst case scenario?” Babington studied himself in a mirror and adjusted the knot of his tie.

“I don't know,” Ryan said. “That's just it. It's unstable. What will happen if it ruptures? There's no precedent.”

Babington sighed. “Look. This demo is everything. All our funding is riding on this. The Joint Chiefs are here already. The Secretary of Defense is on his way. I should already be downstairs shaking hands. You come in here every other day with a new Chicken Little story. Your little phobias play well in the media, and that's all fine. But your fears usually come to nothing. So tell me, should I really cancel the most important demonstration of new technology in a decade? Is it that important? Are you that sure?”

“Of course I'm not sure. This isn't something anyone has ever studied before. But hear me out.”

Babington picked up a leather binder from the desk. “There's only so much Danish and coffee the Joint Chiefs can consume before they start to feel slighted. You have thirty seconds to convince me.”

“There's something alive in there.”

That stopped Babington short, and he made eye contact for the first time. “Alive? Is somebody hurt? One of your people? Tell me the media doesn't know.”

“No, no, not like that. There's something alive inside the wormhole. Something not human.”

He saw the concern drift out of Babington's eyes, replaced by annoyance. “This gets old, Oronzi. I need you to just do your job.”

Babington strode out into the hallway, but Ryan walked after him. “I am doing my job. Listen, the baby universe stays connected to ours through the wormhole, but its energies are always fluctuating. There's always the danger it will detach, and we'll lose it, or else that the particle stream will increase drastically, causing widespread destruction.”

Babington stopped at the elevator and glared at him. “You told me you had that under control.”

“Well, sort of.”

He crossed his arms. “Explain quickly. Use small words.”

“I manage the baby universe by projecting energy fields through the wormhole. The shape of the fields is governed by certain equations I control. But the energy pattern mutates, so I have to change the equations all the time to keep up. At first, I thought it was just the normal change pattern as the universe grows; it's not like we've done this before. But—I know this sounds crazy—the energy pattern has been changing specifically to defeat my equations, forcing me to make them more complex. There is something
solving
those equations and shaping the wormhole accordingly. It's like I'm setting puzzles for it, rather than actually controlling it. And it's getting faster at solving them. It's so quick now that I have to have several new equations in reserve, programmed to apply as soon as one fails.”

Babington's voice was disbelieving. “You're telling me the wormhole is sentient.”

“No. I'm telling you there's something sentient on the other side of it. Something very intelligent. And it's trying to break through.”

Babington punched the elevator's down button. “I should have seen it coming,” he said to the ceiling. “I ignored all the signs, and now, at the worst possible time . . .” The elevator arrived with a ding and the doors opened. Babington stepped in and turned back to face him. “You're not going to do anything stupid like try to destroy it, are you?”

“I already tried.”

“You did what?” A flash of pure anger passed quickly across Babington's face.

“I couldn't do it.”

“Well, thank heaven for small favors,” Babington said. “Look, I need you to hold yourself together, just for today. Don't talk to any media. Tell them you're busy or something. Tomorrow, once we get this demo out of the way, we'll talk. Maybe you should take some time off.”

“I'm fine. I don't need time off,” Ryan said, walking toward him. “I—” He stopped short at the elevator doorway. The floor of the elevator was a centimeter lower than the floor of the hallway, and he could see a little light through the gap. He tried to take another step, but his legs wouldn't move. The elevators doors started to close.

Babington rolled his eyes. “Right. See you at the bottom of the stairs. Remember, no media.”

The doors slid shut, leaving Ryan staring at his own reflection in their mirrored surface.

CHAPTER 3

“I
s that him?” Alex Kelley asked. She had only been at the NJSC for a week now, and it was her first glimpse of the famed Ryan Oronzi.