Dark Matter (17 page)

“I think so.” I insert the filtered needle into the syringe, pull off the cap, and then snap the neck of the glass vial. “All of it?” I ask.

She's tying a rubber band around her arm now and cleaning her injection site.

“Yep.”

I carefully draw the contents of the ampoule up into the syringe and swap needles.

Amanda says, “Make sure you always tap the syringe and push out a tiny bit of liquid through the needle. You don't want to be injecting air bubbles into your vascular system.”

She shows me her watch again: 7:39…

7:38.

7:37.

I thump the syringe and squeeze a drop of Ryan's chemical compound through the needle.

I say, “So I just…”

“Stick it in the vein at a forty-five-degree angle, with the hole in the end of the needle facing up. I know this is a lot to think about. You're doing great.”

There's so much adrenaline raging through my system I barely even feel the penetration.

“Now what?”

“Make sure you're in the vein.”

“How do I—?”

“Pull back a little on the plunger.”

I pull it back.

“See blood?”

“Yeah.”

“Good job. You hit it. Now untie the tourniquet and slowly inject.”

As I depress the plunger, I ask, “So how long until it takes effect?”

“Pretty close to instantaneous, if I had to…”

I don't even register the end of her sentence.

The drug crashes into me.

I slump back against the wall and lose time until Amanda is in my face again, saying words that I'm trying and failing to comprehend.

Looking down, I watch her pull the needle out of my arm and press an alcohol pad against the tiny puncture wound.

I finally realize what she's saying: “Keep pressure on it.”

Now I watch Amanda extend her arm under the glow of the lantern, and as she sticks a needle into her vein and loosens the tourniquet, my focus lands on her watch face and the numbers counting down toward zero.

Soon Amanda is lying stretched out on the floor like a junkie who just shot up, and the time is still running out, but that doesn't matter anymore.

I can't believe what I'm seeing.

I sit up.

Clearheaded and alert.

Amanda isn't lying on the floor anymore. She's standing several feet away with her back to me.

I call out to her, ask if she's okay, but she doesn't answer.

I struggle onto my feet.

Amanda is holding the lantern, and as I move toward her, I see that the light isn't striking the wall of the box, which should be straight ahead of us.

I walk past her.

She follows with the lantern.

The light reveals another door, identical to the one we just came through from the hangar.

I continue walking.

Another twelve feet brings us to another door.

And then another.

And another.

The lantern only exudes the brilliance of a single, sixty-watt bulb, and beyond seventy or eighty feet, the light dwindles off into haunting shreds of illumination, glinting off the cold surface of the metal walls on one side, the perfectly spaced doors on the other.

Beyond our sphere of light—absolute darkness.

I stop, awestruck and speechless.

I think of the thousands of articles and books I've read in my lifetime. Tests taken. Classes taught. Theories memorized. Equations scribbled on blackboards. I think of the months I spent in that cleanroom trying to build something that was a pale imitation of this place.

For students of physics and cosmology, the closest one can ever get to the tangible implications of research are ancient galaxies seen through telescopes. Data readouts following particle collisions we know occurred but can never see.

There's always a boundary, a barrier between the equations and the reality they represent.

But no more. Not for me at least.

I can't stop thinking, I am here. I am actually in this place. It exists.

At least for a moment, fear has left me.

I'm filled with wonder.

I say, “ ‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.' ”

Amanda looks at me.

“Einstein's words, not mine.”

“Is this place even real?” she asks.

“What do you mean by ‘real'?”

“Are we standing in a physical location?”

“I think it's a manifestation of the mind as it attempts to visually explain something our brains haven't evolved to comprehend.”

“Which is?”

“Superposition.”

“So we're experiencing a quantum state right now?”

I glance back down the corridor. Then into the darkness ahead. Even in the low light, there's a recursive quality to the space, like two mirrors facing each other.

“Yeah. It looks like a corridor, but I think it's actually the box repeating itself across all possible realities that share the same point in space and time.”

“Like a cross-section?”

“Exactly. In some presentations of quantum mechanics, the thing that contains all the information for the system—before it collapses due to an observation—is called a wave function. I'm thinking this corridor is our minds' way of visualizing the content of the wave function, of all possible outcomes, for our superposed quantum state.”

“So where does this corridor lead?” she asks. “If we just kept walking, where would we end up?”

As I say the words, the wonder recedes and the horror creeps in: “There is no end.”

We keep walking to see what happens, if anything will change, if
we
will change.

But it's just door after door after door after door.

When we've been going a while, I say, “I've been counting them since we started down the corridor, and this is the four hundred and fortieth door. Each box repetition is twelve feet, which means we've already gone a full mile.”

Amanda stops and lets the backpack slide off her shoulders.

She sits against the wall, and I take a seat beside her, with the lantern between us.

I say, “What if Leighton decides to take the drug and come charging in here after us?”

“He'd never do that.”

“Why?”

“Because he's terrified of the box. We all are. Except for you, no one who went inside ever came out again. That's why Leighton was willing to do anything to make you tell him how to fly it.”

“What happened to your test pilots?”

“The first one to enter the box was this guy named Matthew Snell. We had no idea what we were dealing with, so Snell was given clear and simple instructions. Enter the box. Close the door. Sit. Inject himself with the drug. No matter what happened, no matter what he saw, he was to sit in the same place, wait for the drug to wear off, and walk right back out into the hangar. Even if he had seen all this, he wouldn't have left his box. He wouldn't have moved.”

“So what happened?”

“An hour passed. He was overdue. We wanted to open the door, but we were afraid of interfering with whatever he was experiencing on the inside. Twenty-four hours later, we finally opened it.”

“And the box was empty.”

“Yep.” Amanda looks exhausted in the blue light. “Stepping into the box and taking the drug is like walking through a one-way door. There's no coming back, and no one's going to risk following us. We're on our own here. So what do you want to do?”

“Like any good scientist, experiment. Try a door, see what happens.”

“And just to be clear, you have no idea what's behind any of these doors?”

“None.”

I give Amanda a hand up. As I hoist the backpack onto my shoulders, I note the first mild twinge of thirst and wonder if she brought along any water.

We head down the corridor, and the truth is I'm hesitant to make a choice. If there is an endless possibility of doors, then from a statistical perspective, the choice itself means everything
and
nothing. Every choice is right. Every choice is wrong.

I finally stop and say, “This one?”

She shrugs. “Sure.”

Grasping the cold, metal handle, I ask, “We have the ampoules, right? Because that would be—”

“I checked the pack when we stopped a minute ago.”

I crank the lever down, hear the latch bolt slide, and pull back.

The door swings inward, clearing the frame.

She whispers, “What do you see out there?”

“Nothing yet. It's too dark. Here, let me have that.” As I take the lantern from her, I notice that we're standing in a single box again. “Look,” I say. “The corridor collapsed.”

“That surprises you?”

“Actually, it makes perfect sense. The environment outside the door is interacting with the interior of the box. It destabilized the quantum state.”

I turn back to the open door and hold the lantern out in front of me. All I can see is the ground directly ahead.

Cracked pavement.

Oil stains.

When I step down, glass crunches under my feet.

I help Amanda out, and as we venture the first few steps, the light diffuses, hits a concrete column.

A van.

A convertible.

A sedan.

It's a parking garage.

We move up a slight incline with cars on either side of us, following the remnants of a white paint stripe that divides the left and right lanes.

The box is a ways behind us now and out of sight, tucked away in the pitch-black.

We pass a sign with an arrow pointing left beside the words—

EXIT TO STREET

Turning a corner, we begin to climb the next ramp.

All along the right side, chunks have fallen out of the ceiling and crushed the windshields, hoods, and roofs of the vehicles. The farther we go, the worse it gets, until we're scrambling over concrete boulders and weaving around knifelike projections of rusted rebar.

Halfway up the next level, we're stopped in our tracks by an impassable wall of debris.

“Maybe we should just go back,” I say.

“Look…” She grabs the lantern and I follow her over to a stairwell entry.

The door is cracked open, and Amanda forces it back the rest of the way.

Total darkness.

We ascend to the door at the top of the stairs.

It takes both of us to drag it open.

Wind blows through the lobby straight ahead.

There's some semblance of ambient light coming through the empty steel frames of what used to be immense, two-story windows.

At first, I think it's snow on the floor, but it isn't cold.

I kneel, grasp a handful. It's dry and a foot deep over the marble flooring. It slides through my fingers.

We trudge past a long reception desk with the name of a hotel still attached in artful block letters across the façade.

At the entrance, we pass between a pair of giant planters holding trees withered down to gnarled branches and brittle leaf shards twittering in the breeze.

Amanda turns off the lantern.

We step through the glassless revolving doors.

Even though it isn't nearly cold enough, it looks like a raging snowstorm outside.

I walk out into the street and stare up between the dark buildings at a sky tinged with the faintest suggestion of red. It glows the way a city does when the clouds are low and all the lights from the buildings are reflecting off the moisture in the sky.

But there are no lights.

Not a single one as far as I can see.

Though they fall like snow, in torrent-like curtains, the particles that strike my face carry no sting.

“It's ash,” Amanda says.

A blizzard of ash.

Out here in the street, it's knee-deep, and the air smells like a cold fireplace the morning after, before the ashes have been carried off.

A dead, burnt stench.

The ash is falling hard enough to obscure the upper stories of the skyscrapers, and there's no sound but the wind blowing between the buildings and through the buildings and the whoosh of the ash as it piles into gray drifts against long-abandoned cars and buses.

I can't believe what I'm seeing.

That I'm actually standing in a world that isn't mine.

We walk up the middle of the street, our backs to the wind.

I can't shake the feeling that the blackness of the skyscrapers is all wrong. They're skeletons, nothing but ominous profiles in the pouring ash. Closer to a range of improbable mountains than anything man-made. Some are leaning, and some have toppled, and in the hardest gusts, high above us, I can hear the groan of steel framework torquing past its tensile strength.

I note a sudden tightening in the space behind my eyes.

It comes and goes in less than a second, like something turning off.

Amanda asks, “Did you just feel that too?”

“That pressure behind your eyes?”

“Exactly.”

“I did. I bet it's the drug wearing off.”

After several blocks, the buildings end. We arrive at a guardrail that runs along the top of a seawall. The lake yawns out for miles under the radioactive sky, and it doesn't even resemble Lake Michigan anymore, but instead a vast gray desert, the ash accumulating on the surface of the water and undulating like a waterbed as black foam waves crash against the seawall.

The walk back is into the wind.

Ash streaming into our eyes and mouths.

Our tracks already covered.

When we're a block from the hotel, a sound like sustained thunder begins in the near distance.

The ground trembles beneath our feet.

Another building falls to its knees.

The box is waiting where we left it, in a remote corner on the parking garage's lowest level.

We're both covered in ash, and we take a moment at the door to brush it off our clothes, out of our hair.

Back inside, the lock shoots home after us.

We're in a simple, finite box again.

Four walls.

A door.

A lantern.

A backpack.

And two bewildered human beings.

Amanda sits hugging her knees into her chest.

“What do you think happened up there?” she asks.