He walked past the bank of elevators and took the stairs at a jog. He never used elevators, and he wasn’t about to start now. His colleagues thought it was claustrophobia, but they were wrong. An elevator was just a potentially lethal piece of technology that Ryan himself had not personally designed, and that made it suspect. Yes, he knew about safety brakes, as well as the more modern electromagnetic locking mechanisms, but what would happen if those systems failed? A quick plunge to a spectacular death, that’s what.
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.