It was a beautiful day in New Glastonbury, the sort of day that just rises up and grabs you by the hair, pulling you out the door into the cool dry New England fall. It grabbed Mia that way as soon as she woke up, the breeze from the open window smelling of crisp edges and sunlight.
Of course, she'd be spending the day in a basement, which sucked, but at least the ride across campus would be nice.
And today was going to be a hell of a day.
They'd worked for a very long time to make it one, Mia, Nikolai, Dr. Smith, and the rest of the bandits. On a shoestring budget too, no fancy particle accelerators or giant grants here at UNG, and of course they hadn't needed one anyway.
So. Brush teeth, shower, dig up some not too dirty jeans and a mostly clean shirt and Mia Singh was ready to change the world. With any luck, she could spend the afternoon celebrating at Amelie, drinking cheap beer and watching the girls go by.
Mia left her bike locked with the motley assortment outside the The Wellman Advanced Physics Research Building, which, in Mia's opinion was the most innapropriately named building in North America. WAPRB was really a bone yard, filled with hyenas scrapping over shreds of grant money. Actually, that was a pretty apt description of physics in America anyway, since all the big stuff was happening in Europe now.
Might as well go over the setup again, she thought, badging in and heading for the stairs. They had been over it, of course, and simulated the experiment, and gone over it again, but with 90 minutes until the run was scheduled there wasn't much else to do.
45 minutes and half a cup of coffee later, Mia had the system ready to make, or, possibly, end history. The goal of the experiment, in straightforward terms, was to prove chronotic wave theory. The cyclotron in the basement had been modified to, hopefully, generate chronotic particles, which would, also hopefully, move a minute mass of matter backwards in time. If that happened, they would, for a brief period, measure twice as much matter as was expected, proving the existence of chronotic particles and changing a lot of physics at the same time.
In some simulations, this is what happened. In others, nothing happened. In one, the cyclotron room would be converted into energy, destroying not only the room and the Wellman Advanced Physics Research Building, but a pretty fair chunk of New England. This was unlikely, but it was one reason why they hadn't gone public with the experimental design, intention, or anything. That was the one in 100 million chance. There were weirder possible outcomes, including shifting them into another dimension, converting the experimental material into energy very quickly and catastrophically, and of course the obligatory projection that they would destroy the universe, or at least the part of it that could be reached at light speed.
The rest of the group started to file in. The three grad students that Dr. Smith had brought in, Alan Parra, Nadim Haddad, Nevin Thompson. They were a group of pretty good guys, actually, Alan had written a lot of the simulation code and was a first rate mathematician, Nadim and Nevin were excellent experimentalists and good hardware people. They had been damn helpful, and over the last year the team had grown fairly close. Smith was a schmarmy, credit stealing bastard, but he was a schmarmy credit stealing bastard of the old school, which involved a lot of having the students eat at his house, meet his family, have their kids play with his kids. Nadim was a particularly good guy, he and his wife, Salwa, had treated Nikolai and Mia like family, the two of them had eaten at his house at least once a week for months.
There was a lot of tension in the room, though. No one was talking much, except Smith, who was keeping a smooth line of patter going like a used car salesman at the end of a low month. Mia didn't even notice that Nikolai had entered the room until he sat down next to her.
"So," He asked. "Are we all going to die, or do we all get famous?"
"Only one way to find out, I guess."
Dr. Smith spoke up, "Everyone, please. We have an eight hour window to get this done, and the clock starts in fifteen minutes."
Meaning that in fifteen minutes, they could go downstairs and set up their experiment and then have maybe seven hours of beam time left. They wouldn't need it, if all went well the experiment proper would be over in just over two hours, but still, it felt like a tight window. It was time to stop simulating and get to work.
The cyclotron at State University was pretty old, which meant that while most of them could--and were required to--watch the experiment from the upstairs lab, they still needed someone downstairs to hit the fail safe if anything went wrong. It was an archaic system in the modern networked world, but like most of the universities buildings and equipment, it was a relic of the cold war. Nadim was the only member of the team who was actually allowed to work directly with the equipment, so after the rest of the group headed back upstairs he had stayed in the lower control room.
The energy released in a physics experiment is immense. The technology is amazing. The actual fact of it is pretty boring. Mia typed the command to start the experiment and settled in to wait for the data to start to arrive. Alan had written a program to visualize the data, so it would at least be pretty, and even informative. The group was watching the clock, as it were. According to their instruments, chronotic particles were flooding the experiment area, and the predicted wave was appearing.
The everything went haywire. The line representing chronotic particles suddenly spiked, the wave exploded into snow, and then everything went completely flat.
Dr. Smith was looking over her shoulder. "Goddamn it, Dr. Singh. What just happened?"
"I don't know. Nik?"
"No idea? Alan? Could that have been a software breakdown?"
"I don't think so... I can't imagine what would have caused that to happen."
"In the software?"
"At all."
"Well, somebody figure it out, damnit," Dr. Smith walked over to the wall and jabbed at the intercom. "Nadim. What's going on down there?"
"Everything seems fine down here, why?" Even over the scratchy intercom, Mia could tell Nadim was puzzled.
Smith turned back to the group. "Ideas?"
"We can set up again," Nikolai said. "Go through the data and check the experimental chamber. It'll take a couple of hours, but we should have time for another run."
Smith sighed. "Ok. You know we don't have the funding to buy another run on the beam, right? So hurry." He turned back to the intercom. "Nadim, we think the run may be successful but we're not getting good data up here."
"Okay. I'll check everything out down here once the time has elapsed, I should be able to read the experimental clock from here anyway."
"Good man." Smith turned back to the group, "Alright. You all know what to do."
Yeah, we do. And you don't, Mia thought. In fact, they were already doing it, pulling up all the logs and data and starting to analyze them. There was a lot more information in the system than what was shown by the visualization, and it was all going to have to be fed into other software and analyzed, which was going to take time. The next hour promised to be a lot of hurry-up-and-wait.
Mia stretched, took out her phone, and started going through her social media streams in a desulatory manner. Once upon a time, as a powerfully horny undergraduate, this had been the focus of her life, but once she really started working a lot of things had faded into the background. It's hard to focus on what people think about each other when the universe is rearranging itself in your brain.
For the last three or four years, that was exactly how it had felt, a vaguely hallucinatory state where new theories had simply overlayed her view of the world, as if she could see the forces at work around her. It had been weird, and it had only really faded when she and Nikolai had devised the experiment.
She was going to seize the arrow of time and make it her bitch, and if Annie and Rachel were fighting again that was just static.
The floor pulsed. There was no other way to describe it. It pulsed, expanding under their feet, leaving hairline cracks in the walls as it went back to normal. Everyone looked up, around at each other, trying to confirm that something had just happened.
"What the hell was that?" Nik asked.
"Nadim?" Dr. Smith asked through the intercom. "Nadim?"
He waited a minute, looking... human, actually. Mia knew that Smith had been working with Nadim for a while, and while they all sort of joked about the possibility that the experiment would blow up and kill them all it was a little bit of gallows humor. It could happen. It was incredibly, astronomically, unfathomably unlikely to happen, but if they were wrong about an astonishing number of things, it could. And the floor had moved in a way that floor typically don't move.
"Nadim?"
They look"d at each other. Nevin looked scared, his thin face pinched. Alan's habitual grin was a little forced, a small line of worry creasing his brow. Nikolai was wearing what Mia thought of as his Russian face, a curiously blank expression that seemed to communicate that of course, the worst possible thing that could happen, had happened, as expected. For a blank expression it communicated a lot.
"Well," he said, and stood up. He turned and headed out the door, turning towards the stairs at the end of the hall. There was a pause, and then a sort of scramble, and everyone followed, Mia in the lead and Alan last. Nikolai was standing on the landing, staring down. An odd, greenish glow lit his face, his expression somehow even more blank than before. Then the glow faded and he began to walk cautiously down the stairs.
"Nik?" Mia asked. "What was that?"
"Water. I think."
Mia looked at the dry stairs and the dry basement floor.
"Water?"
"I don't think it was entirely here."
Nevin had caught up with them. "What wasn't entirely here?"
"Water. I think."
Nevin gave Mia a questioning look. She shrugged.
"Water?"
"I don't think it was entirely here."
"Ah. Well... that wasn't in the simulations."
"What wasn't?" Smith Asked.
Mia hurried ahead with Nikolai before the conversation went through another loop.
"What did you see, Nik?"
He shook his head. "I'm not sure. It was water. It wasn't water. It was here. It wasn't here." His voice, normally relaxed, almost lazy, sounded tight, even scared. He paused, "It was pretty god-damn strange is what I'm telling you, Mia. Pretty. God. Damn. Strange."
