“Don’t thank me, boy. Not until it’s over, and we’re still alive.”
END TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Hu was alarmingly young and bouncy, a Vietnamese-American postdoc with a ponytail, cargo pants, sandals, and a flippant attitude that would have annoyed the hell out of Eric if Hu had been working for him. Luckily Hu was someone else’s problem, and despite everything, he’d been cleared by security to work on JAUNT BLUE. Which probably means the Republic is doomed, Eric thought mordantly. Ah well, we work with what we’re given.
“Hey man, the professor told me to give you the special tour. Where you wanna start? You been briefed or they dropping you in it cold?”
Eric stared at him. “I’ll take it cold.”
“Suits me! Let’s start with…hell. What do you know about parallel universes?”
Eric shrugged. “Not a lot. Seen some episodes of Sliders. Been catching up on some sci-fi books in my copious free time.” The writers they’d sounded out hadn’t been good for much more than random guesses, and without priming them with classified information that was all they could be expected to deliver. It had been a waste of time, in his opinion, but—“and then there’s the day job.”
“Heh. You bet, boss!” Hu laughed, a curious chittering noise. “Okay, we got parallel universes. There’s some theoretical basis for it in string theory, I can give you some references if you like, but I can only tell you one thing for sure right now: we’re not dealing with a Tegmark Level I multiverse—that’s an infinite ergodic universe, one where the initial inflationary period gave rise to disjoint Hubble volumes realizing all possible initial conditions.”
Eric crossed his arms and frowned. “So you’ve ruled that out.” Asshole? Or show-off?
“Yup!” Hu seemed unaccountably pleased with himself. “We can get there from here, which rules out Level I, because in a Level I multiverse the parallel universes exist in the same space time, just a mind-bogglingly huge distance apart. Which means we’re dealing with either a Level II, Level III, or Level IV multiverse. I’m in the cosmology pool—we’ve got an informal bet running—that it’ll turn out to be a Level IV theory. Level II depends on a Linde chaotic inflationary cosmology, in which you get multiple branching universes connected by wormholes, but travel between universes in that kind of scheme involves singularities, and the phenomenon we’re studying doesn’t come with black holes attached.”
Bumptious enthusiast, no social skills. Eric decided. He forced himself to nod, draw the guy out. “So you’re saying this isn’t a large scale cosmological phenomenon—then what is it?” Some of this stuff sounded half-familiar from his physics minor, but the rest was just weird.
“We’re trying to work out what it is by a process of elimination.” Hu thrust his hands in his pockets, looking distant. “The thing is, we have no theoretical framework. We’ve got a lot of beautiful theories but they don’t account for what we’re seeing: we’re looking at an amazingly complex artifact and we don’t understand how it works. It’s like handing a nuclear reactor to a steam engineer in the nineteenth century. If you don’t understand the physics behind it you might as well say it works by magic pixie dust as slow neutron-induced fission. Absent a theoretical understanding all we can do is poke it and see if it twitches. And coming up with the theory is, uh, proving difficult.” He slowed down as he spoke, finishing on a thoughtful note.
Now’s as good a time as any… “What’s the black box you think you’re trying to reverse-engineer?” Eric asked, hoping to draw Hu back on track.
“Ah!” Hu jerked as if a dozing puppeteer had just realized he’d slackened off on the strings: “That would be the cytology samples Dr. James provided two months ago. That’s how we got started,” he added. “Want to see them? Come down to the lab and see what’s on the slab?”
Eric nodded, and followed Hu out through the door. If this is the Rocky Horror Picture Show, all we’re missing is the mad scientist. Hu made a beeline towards the maze of brown cubicle-farm partitions at the edge of the floor, and dived into a niche. When Eric caught up, he found him sitting at a desk with a gigantic tube monitor on it, messing with something that looked like the bastard offspring of a computer mouse and a joystick. “Here!” he called excitedly.
Eric glanced round. The neighboring cubicles were empty: “Where is everybody?”
“Team meeting,” Hu said dismissively. “Look. Let me show you the slides first, then we’ll go see the real thing.”
“Okay.” Eric stood behind him. “Take it from the top.”
Hu pulled up a picture and Eric blinked, taken aback for a moment. It was in shades of gray, somehow messy and biological looking. After a moment he nodded. “It’s a cellular structure, isn’t it?”
“Yeah! This slide was taken at 2,500 magnification on our scanning electron microscope. It’s a slice from the lateral geniculate nucleus of our first test sample. See the layering here? Top two layers, the magnocellular levels? They do fast positional sensing in the visual system. Now let’s zoom in a bit.”
The image vanished, to be replaced by a much larger, slightly grainier picture in which individual cells were visible, blobs with tangled fibers converging on them like the branches of a dead umbrella, stripped of fabric.
“Here’s an M-type gangliocyte. It’s kind of big, isn’t it? There are lots of dendrites going in, too. It takes signals from a whole bunch of rod and cone cells in the retina and processes them, subtracting noise. You with me so far?”
“Just about,” Eric said dryly. Image convolution had been another component of his second degree, the classified one he’d sweated for back when he’d been attached to NRO. “So far this is normal, is it?”
“Normal for any dead dried human brain on a microscope slide.” Hu giggled. It was beginning to grate on Eric’s nerves.
“Next.”
“Okay. This is where it gets interesting, when we look inside the gangliocyte.”
“What—” it took Eric longer, this time, to orient himself: the picture was very grainy, a mess of weird loops and whorls, and something else—“the heck is that? Some kind of contamination—”
“Nope.” Hu giggled again. This time he sounded slightly scared. “Ain’t nothing like this in the textbooks.”
“It’s your black box, isn’t it?”
“Hey, quick on the uptake! Yes, that’s it. We went through three samples and twelve microscopy preparations before we figured out it wasn’t an artifact. What do you think?”
Eric stared at the screen.
“What is it?”
A different voice said, “it’s a Nobel Prize—or a nuclear war. Maybe both.”
Eric glanced round in a hurry, to see Dr. James standing behind him. For a bureaucrat, he moved eerily quietly. “You think?”
“Cytology.” James sounded bored. “These structures are in every central nervous system tissue sample retrieved so far from targeted individuals. Also in their peripheral tissues, albeit in smaller quantities. At first the pathology screener thought he was looking at some kind of weird mitochondrial malfunction—the inner membrane isn’t reticulated properly—but then further screening isolated some extremely disturbing DNA sequences, and very large fullerene macromolecules doped with traces of heavy elements, iron and vanadium.”
“I’m not a biologist,” said Eric. “You’ll have to dumb it down.”
“Continue the presentation, Dr. Hu,” said James, turning away. Show-off, thought Eric.