Alan was in the doowary to the observation room when the group arrived. 

"Where's Nevin?"

No one spoke. Dr. Smith shook his head and looked as if he were about to answer, but then just walked into the room. Mia had never seen him look quite so completely... deflated. Mia just felt numb. Some part of her brain was processing the fact that what they had done here, what had just happened, was a complete revolution in Physics, the sort of thing that happened once or twice in a millenia. This was on par with the Copernican revolution. It was that fundamental. It was what she had been aiming for. She wanted to be excited, or scared, or sad. But now that she was out of the basement, away from the weirdness and the terror, she had nothing.

Alan asked again, "Where is Nevin?"

"He was eaten by shark." Nikolai said. His voice was flat, his accent much heavier than usual, the way it got when he was drunk. He paused, considering. "Killed by shark, certainly. Maybe eaten."

Alan looked at Nadim for confirmation. Nadim nodded. "The shark grabbed him and they both disappeared." He sat down at one of the terminals and started calling up data. "It bit off one of his arms. I think he's probably dead." 

Dr. Smith was sitting on the edge of a metal desk, staring at his feet. Mia realized with some shock that he was quietly crying. She wondered why she wasn't crying herself. Nadim had come to the US when he was 12, a refugee from Syria who had seen his entire world destroyed repeatedly. He was unshakeable. Nikolai wasn't crying but she could read him, and she could see that he was barely holding it together. Alan was clearly baffled and confused. So where were her emotions, or failing that, her reason? Her head felt like it was stuffed with cotton.

Dr. Smith looked up, taking a long breath. He puffed out his cheeks a bit as he exhaled. "Okay. It's clear that we're going to have to tell someone what just happened. But for the life of me I can't imagine who."

"Police?" Nikolai asked.

"I don't think that conversation would be terribly productive. I'm not even sure exactly what happened, and I understand the basic physics involved."

Mia had a sudden vision of the staid professor explaining that a time shifting shark had eaten one of his students. She choked down a laugh. It was all just too absurd.

"Who else is there?" Alan spread his hands, "It's like a, a workplace accident I guess? If he had just fallen down the stairs..."

"We'd call an ambulance." Smith replied. "They'd call the police."

Mia's head started to clear. She tried to think about this from a surfing perspective. If she were surfing, and someone was attacked and possibly killed by a shark, what would she do? She'd probably head for shore, which they had done. She's probably call 911 and report the attack, which they hadn't done. She reached for her phone and dialed, more or less on autopilot.

Everyone stared at her. She shrugged and put the phone to her ear.

"911 operator." 

The woman on the phone sounded youngish, and had a Massachusets accent you could break rocks on.

Mia took a long, deep, breath.

"I need to report a shark attack."

The 911 call went better than she expected. She answered a few questions: "Is the shark still in the area? Who was attacked? Is anyone in need of medical assistance? Where did the attack take place?"

That last question was really where the call went off the rails. Mia had simply answered that it had taken place in the basement of the Center for Advanced Physics at the University, and then there had been a very long pause.

"Are you still at that location?" The operator had asked. When Mia confirmed, the operator notified her that she was sending a unit, then there was a pause as she presumably did so, then she asked if Mia needed her to stay on the line, and that had basically been it. So now she was standing in the doorway of the building, and looking East across the quad, where the campus more or less sloped gently down along a rocky ridge. The town proper was below the ridge. They would be in deeper water out there, she thought, two hundred feet below the surface at least. She guessed the campus was mostly in the shallows. It was an odd thought. She looked at the windows along the ground on the face of the building, the windows that were high on the wall of the cyclotron room. The water had been just below those windows, so, from here, sea level was ground level. The quad would be entirely under water but not too deep. Her apartment was south, just off campus, slightly up the ridge and out of the water.

Of course, that was assuming that it had been high tide. If it was low tide, than the water could go up another ten or twenty feet, and she could be underwater right now. The thought made her stomach clench in terror. She tried to convince herself that she was being ridiculous. After all, a shark doesn't eat all the time.  A shark, even a big shark, that had just grabbed a 200 lb meal wasn't likely to come back for a snack right away, was it? She wasn't sure. She didn't think so. Of course, this shark wasn't living life in the same time that she was. It had come from somewhere else, some when else. How the hell were they supposed to predict the behavior of something like that?

She wished the goddamn cop would just show up already. Not that they were likely to be much help, but still. And why was she the one sitting out here waiting?

The sound of the door opening made her jump. It was just Nikolai. He stood on the steps and pulled out a compact vaping device. It was a shitty habit that she hated, but at least he had stopped smoking actual cigarettes, which had been worse.

They didn't speak for a long moment.

"Well," He said finally. "I suppose this will make an interesting story when we are in Stockholm." He flashed her a sad smile. "We did it, Mia. It is terrible, yes, what happened to Nevin. But we did it. You and I. We have changed the world."

And as terrible as it was, he was right. They had been working for this moment for years, planning, designing, building, writing. Years.

She smiled back. "Munot's going to get the prize, not us. You know they never give the prize to the experimentalists."

"Still. We did it."

"Yes. We did." The knot of fear started to relax. "We goddamn did."

And for a moment, she felt like a damn goddess, a giant, a striding titan throwing lightning across the world. She had a new, incontrovertable, beautiful truth. And no overgrown fish was going to take that away.

What Mia was expecting was one unit. A single cop showing up, getting mad at them briefly, and then possibly going into the basement and either being eaten by a shark or finding what was left of Nevin. She wasn't sure what would happen after that. As she stood waiting in the autumn sunlight, she started to think about possibilities. What would your average police officer in a small New England college town think was going on here? An industrial accident, maybe, that they were trying to cover up with their ridiculous shark attack story? A murder? 

The murder sounded more and more likely as she considered it. After all, there was blood, and part of a body. Her stomach clenched a little as she considered that, the arm flying away in a spray of blood, the way Nevin's chest had simply collapsed under the rush of the monster shark. It was like nothing she could have imagined or ever would have wanted to imagine. She suddenly felt too cold. She glanced at Nikolai, who was staring out across the campus with his jaw clenched. His skin, always pale, looked almost green. She supposed they were going into shock or something.

So... murder. Or an accident. But not the truth, the police would certainly never believe the truth. She couldn't blame them for that. The truth was insane. If the truth were the truth than why would the shark be in the basement, particularly? Couldn't it be out here? Couldn't it attack the police when they stepped out of their car, if they walked up the stairs to the building? Could it attack Mia?

She didn't think so. Her gut said that it had been high tide, or close to it, when the attack came. She was thinking in circles.

"I am wondering over and over," said Nikolai, "Mia, what in hell just happened? What in fucking hell just happened?"

Nik's facade was breaking, as was hers. 

"I don't know," she replied unsteadily. "It was an anomoly in the data."

He laughed a bit hysterically. "Yes. Definitely anomolous." His voice turned serious, "But how? Forget what. How? How did that happen?"

She considered. "I don't know... mabye we caused some kind of... I don't know, a time rift or something? It looked like the whole ocean, was sort of... in two times at once."

"It centered on the shark, Mia. I saw it."

"We think it did, Nikolai. Let's not analyze ahead of our data."

He considered this. He was about to speak when a police cruiser rounded a corner ahead and began to head towards the physics building. Shortly after, another car turned onto the drive, a big, black, American SUV with tinted windows that rapidly overtook the police car and slid smoothly to a stop in front of the steps.

Well, fuck, Mia thought. It's the fucking men in black.

It was not the Men in Black. It was an attractive, fit, black woman of about Mia's age in a well fitting black suit and sunglasses. Her hair was cut close  and she wore sunglasses. As she moved up the stairs towards them, Mia noted her easy, athletic grace, how she moved almost silently even in boots. She always had moved like that.

And in a moment, the Woman in Black was in front of them.

"Dr. Singh? Dr. Chernyshevsky?" She didn't wait for confirmation before continuing. "I'm Agent Angela LeJay with the Department of Defense. Would you both please take me to Dr. Smith? The rest of the team will be here shortly to secure the lab."

Oh, Mia thought. Is this how we're doing this?

"You the ones who called about a shark attack?"

Mia jumped. She hadn't even noticed the cop following Angela up the stairs. He was tall, with reddish brown hair and bright blue eyes. His thick town accent had rendered shark as something closer to "shock". He looked friendly enough, Mia supposed. She looked back at Agent LeJay, who had turned slightly to face the newcomer.

"Officer... McKissick? I'm Agent LeJay with the Department of Defense." This time she took a badge out of her inside pocket and showed it to the Officer. "This lab has just become a matter of National Security. You won't be needed."

The officer looked surprised for a moment, then shrugged. "Sounds like a lot of paperwork. You gotta lot of paperwork?" He looked at Agent LeJay with a bemused expression.

After a long moment, Agent LeJay sighed. "You don't know what you're getting into, Officer. You really don't." She made a short waving motion. "Go ahead."

He smiled and turned back to Mia and Nikolai. "So... you called about a shark attack?" He took out his phone. "Do you mind if I record this interview? It's easier than taking notes."

Nikolai looked at Mia nervously. Mia shrugged. 

"I don't recommend taking any pictures," LeJay interrupted. "If you want to keep your phone, that is. Why don't we all just go inside."

The police officer looked at Mia. "Do you mind if I record?"

"No."

"Can you state your name, please?"

"Dr. Mia Singh."

"Thank you. Doctor Singh, I'm responding to a 911 call reporting a shark attack in the basement of the Wellman Center for Advanced Physics. Did you make that 911 call?"

"I did. I wasn't sure who else to call to report a shark attack."

"When did this attack occur?"

"About fifteen minutes ago."

"In the basement."

"Yes."

Officer McKissick paused for a long moment. His thumb brushed against his phone. "Look... are you guys running some kind of prank here? You know you can't call 911 and make a false report, right?"

Mia saw a flash of anger on Nikolai's face. He was about to say something utterly stupid, she was sure.

But he didn't. He just turned and started walking into the building, which was also stupid. Mia took the hint, though. "Officer... we're not kidding. Please come inside?" She widened her eyes consciously and gave him her best helpless kitten look. She hated playing cute, but this guy had given her a quick once over when he walked up the stairs... maybe he'd follow them in just to watch her ass rather than hassle Nikolai.

Whether the ploy worked or not, McKissick shrugged and gestured for her to lead the way. Agent LeJay rolled her eyes and followed behind.

Mia can picture the night she met Angela with perfect clarity. They were juniors, it was fall. In her memory, Mia is sitting in a chair in a circle of chairs.

Various women are talking about various feminist topics, which she finds somewhat boring. It isn't that Mia isn't a feminist, she is. It isn't that she doesn't face discrimination, she's a physics major and gets a fair amount of shit from professors and her fellow students, who assume she isn't serious, or smart, or good at math. She handles this the way she always has, which is by simply being better at everything. In some classes, that's what it takes to be considered about as good.

It isn't as bad as all that, because while some professors seem to be stuck in the 1700s, a lot of them aren't. Her hard work is paying off with undergraduate research opportunities and discussions about her future plans and possible graduate interests. She's doing well for a sophmore in the department, everything considered.

Still, it sucks, and so she's here, in this meeting of some campus feminist group, just to get some support. What she's getting instead is an overly academic description of something she already knows deep in her bones, which is that men have a lot of power and they tend to use it poorly. She's bored.

And so is the girl looking at her from the second circle of chairs. The girl is tall, and butch, with sharp cheekbones and flawless skin and full lips and the most beautiful brown eyes that Mia has ever seen. And she is looking right at her.

Mia's breath catches and she can practically hear the other girl thinking, "Hey, do you want to get out of here?" 

She definitely does. She looks at her watch, gathers her things together, makes sure to meet those eyes again and walks out. She only has to wait a few seconds outside before the other girl joins her.

"Hi."

"Hi."

"I'm Angela. LeJay. Do you... want to get a coffee or something?" Angela sounds a little uncertain, like maybe she's afraid that she misread the signals or something.

"Um... yeah. I do. Want to get coffee... or something."

Angela smiles with the power of a thousand suns, and Mia is lost.

But now, Angela was pretending they had never met. And considering how that part of their lives had ended, Mia really couldn't blame her.

Mia was confused. Why was Angela pretending they hadn't met before? She decided to play along, hoping that she would get an explanation sooner or later. Once she would have banked on it, but after she parted ways with Angela... well, it wasn't the cleanest breakup. Or the best decision, maybe.

"Do you want to see the rest of the group?" Mia asked. "They were all there when it happened." 

"Nah. I'll talk to 'em after I know there's something to ask." McKissick replied.

"I assume they are in the office?" LeJay asked.

"The were when we left them."

"Okay." She replied, and when they reached the stairs she went up while Nikolai and Mia took the police officer to the basement.

The stairway looked frighteningly normal. Mia was expecting the ocean to come back at any moment. She thought she might find herself in surf, or worse, simply standing in the open water watching a thousand pounds of shark coming at her. It did not happen. The fluorescent lights continued to reflect off institutional vinyl floors.

They made their way to the door of the cyclotron chamber and stopped. Mia simply could not open the door, and Nikolai clearly felt the same.

"Um. Perhaps you could just... go in without us?" Mia asked. Her voice squeaked and cracked and she hated it, but there was no way she was walking in that room. "It's pretty, pretty obvious. I mean, you won't need us to show you around."

Be careful when you walk through door." Nikolai added. "There's blood on the floor there."

Mia wasn't sure how much blood there was. The whole thing had happened very fast and all she remembered was the severed arm. But she supposed that probably there must have been blood. She was starting to feel a little sick, thinking about how Nevin's body had just collapsed in the sharks mouth. She couldn't stop thinking about that, now that they were here. She backed away from the door. "I'll be over by the stairs."

McKissick gave her a curious look but nodded his head and started to walk through the door. He stopped partway through, staring to the right, down the stairs. 

"Yeah." He said. "That's an arm." He didn't sound in the least surprised. He knelt down by the door and looked closely. "And that is a shark's tooth. The boys from CI are gonna love this."