Chapter 98 - Locksmiths

  Cole wasn’t sure what to expect from the lab. Big tanks of freaky mutants or velociraptors, maybe. Banks of switches and dials and arcane sigils in the floor. Maybe even a tiny star held in captivity, like the ones he saw when he walked the path in his mind to evolve his class.

  The reality turned out to be somehow both more mundane and more fantastic. No specimen tanks or archaic control panels. Instead, the concrete room was a series of manned computer workstations arranged around a depression in the floor outlined in yellow paint—much like the portal pit at the compound. Except that this one had a dizzying array of sensors pointed at it from every angle, miles of cable snaking across the floor, and only a pair of bored soldiers with 7.62 machine guns shooting the shit on the catwalk with more non-military men and women in slacks and button-down shirts or dresses. Scientists or engineers or whatever, doing whatever scientists and engineers did.

  “Wow,” said Howie. “This place kicks ass!”

  Cole was more interested in the security, or lack thereof. Two soldiers at ease with automatic weapons. “You open portals here?” he asked. Suddenly his hip felt very bare without a sidearm holstered there. It wasn’t as if he could bring his concealed carry into a national laboratory.

  “Once, but no longer. This was the original location where we learned how to open them. And the site of the first missions to other worlds,” said Dr. Sukesh. “Now Oak Ridge is research and development of techniques to find exploitable vectors into other worlds. Sgt. Craine and Corporal Lorne are here because protocol dictates any generation of a Lewis Field powerful enough to sustain contact with another world must have armed response personnel present. Department of Energy, which this laboratory falls under, also has guidelines for protection where fissile material is present. But really, their job is to be bored all day.”

  “Yeah, I don’t envy them,” said Cole, more at ease.

  “Did you say fissile material?” asked Howie.

  “Very finite amounts of Tritium, Cobalt, and Uranium.” Dr. Sukesh handed the dagger off to a woman with glasses. “Standard trace procession test please, Doctor Daniels.”

  “Sure thing, Doctor Sukesh.”

  Howie nudged Cole. “Doctor, doctor,”

  Cole stifled a laugh, then elbowed Howie back. “Doctor,”

  “Doctor.”

  “Doctors,” said Sukesh eye twinkling, “If you please.” He gestured to one of the dozen work stations, that particular one being operated by a middle-aged man with a salt-and-pepper beard long enough to brush the top of his potbelly and a bright orange lanyard holding his badge. He grinned a wide white smile through the shag carpet on his face as they approached.

  “Hey guys! Tony,” he said, holding out his hand.

  Cole clasped it. “Cole,” he said, and nodded to Howie. “That’s Howie.”

  “Nice to meetcha,” he said. “I’ll try and remember, but two names is already pushing it.”

  “Mr. Craine here is one of our LF engineers. He has a knack for getting us places where we don’t belong,” said Sukesh.

  Cole glanced up at the soldier on the catwalk.

  “No relation,” said Tony. “What’s the plan, Doc?”

  “The dagger is still keyed to its late owner, so let’s begin with a soul-key elasticity test and see if it wants to go home, and then a sympathetic resonance comparison, I think.”

  “You got it.”

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  Tony tapped a few commands into his workstation. Cole looked up at the five separate screens while he worked. “That’s a lot of monitors.”

  “Well we’ve got a lot going on,” said Tony. “You should see the sub-level where the actual generators are. Plus I can watch Tennessee eat Auburn’s lunch. You like College ball?”

  “Go Bulldogs,” said Cole.

  “PSHH!” said Tony, picking up the phone on his desk and dialing an extension. “Banned for life!” He leaned forward. “Heya George. Yep. Confirmed, bring up one and two.”

  A red warning light began rotating on the far wall. The soldiers on the catwalk looked up at it. Their relaxed posture vanished, and they split off to a pair of fortified positions at the corners of the room. Down below, Dr. Sukesh’s other colleague stepped out of a marked area on the ground. “Clear!” she shouted up. A vibration began to mount in the metal grating beneath Cole’s feet.

  Tony pushed the phone into his shoulder to muffle it as he raised his voice. “Confirmed clear!” he called back, then lowered it again. “It takes a lot of juice to make a Lewis field without LF Residue.”

  “Woah,” said Howie, looking at the array of screens, most of which were covered in fluctuating bars, waterfall data displays, and one with what looked like a pulsing heartbeat. If Howie understood any of that, Cole would buy him lunch for a week. “I never thought about it before. But you can’t get LF Residue to establish an LF field without first establishing a field to go get LF Residue. How did you open the first portal without it?

  “Folklore, tritium, and an abduction event that luckily coincided with a cellular spectrum survey in Astoria, Oregon. Oh, and about five million volts.” He raised the phone again. “Uh-huh, thanks George. Buh-bye,” he said before hanging up the receiver.

  Howie whistled.

  Tony pointed to one of his screens that had a diagram of what looked like the area down in the pit. “Watch this screen. You’ll be able to see the field establish.”

  Dr Sukesh leaned forward and pressed a button attached to a microphone, causing his voice to echo out of several speakers mounted throughout the room and presumably throughout the building. “Lewis Field coming online in ten seconds. All personnel remain at minimum safe standoff distances. QRF stand by.”

  Cole watched on the screen as a blue mass expanded from the center of the pit area, about a meter off the deck. As it expanded, the core of it shifted from blue to green to yellow. The mass stopped abruptly as a pair of dotted lines on the screen, forming a layered box. Or, as Cole glanced down to the pit, more likely a cylinder.

  “We make sure to keep the field contained and carefully control its strength,” said Tony. “If you were to walk down there right now, you’d start to get your enhancements back. Where’d you find that armament, anyway?”

  “Babel,” said Cole.

  “Hrmm,” said Tony. “That could be tricky. Could be that both worlds connect to Babel, but they can’t touch each other.”

  “Well, we’ll try our best,” said Dr. Sukesh. He turned to Cole and Howie. “For all the few worlds we know about, the vast, vast majority are completely unknown. And the vaster portion of those simply cannot ever connect to Earth. As for whether there are other worlds like Earth without Lewis Fields, well, we simply have no way to know whether they exist or not. But we certainly seem like a very popular target.”

  “It’s an infinite multiverse though, right?” asked Howie.

  “Doesn’t seem that way, thankfully,” said Dr. Sukesh. “If it were truly infinite, then an infinite number of worlds would be targeting us for abduction and an infinite number of them would succeed. Earth does not have infinite children to take.”

  “Ah, yeah, there’s that,” said Howie.

  Tony tapped on his keyboard and clicked several toggle boxes on one of his screens. “Okay… we’re at acceptable strength to begin the elasticity test. Starting the program… now.”

  A new window popped up on the screen with several super-imposed colored line charts fluctuating over each other. Tony continued talking as he worked. “We’re saturating the armament with minute changes in the Lewis field structure, seeing if we can find a configuration that lets ET phone home, so to speak. It stands a better chance of working since its soul key stayed with the late owner, so the only connection it has is to its original Lewis Field and… there we go.”

  One of the colors on the chart spiked while the others stayed zeroed out. Tony pointed up at it. “We’ve got elasticity, Doc. I’ll try and clean it up.”

  “What does the elasticity mean?” asked Cole.

  Sukesh answered him, stroking his chin as he looked at the numbers. “It means that there’s a potential for our world and the world of origin for this armament to have a direct corridor.” He glanced at Cole. “Think back to our hallway metaphor. It means that the door which fits this dagger is likely at least in our hallway. Not in another apartment off in Singapore, say.”

  “Translated, it means we might be in luck,” said Tony, adjusting some of the parameters in his program. Two more of the colored bars spiked. “Bingo. It’ll take some crunching by the supercomputer, but with this strong a response, it’s a high probability that we can locate a potential XDIM coordinate.”

  “XDIM?” asked Cole.

  “Extra-dimensional. Sympathetic latitude and longitude, but think of our universe as one axis and theirs as another, but also separated on the Z-axis and—”

  “Doc, you’re losing me,” said Cole.

  Dr. Sukesh smiled. “Forgive me. Two points across dimensions that could potentially be bridged.”

  “And that’s a good thing?”

  “Better than good. It’s a best-case scenario.”