E.N.D.A.Y.S. (6 page)

“Doctor Parry?” she asked, quizzically.

“That's our man.” Hayes said, as Darvish held back, no words in his throat.

“Oh, of course.” she said, with a brief hint of a smile that swiftly vanished almost instantly behind awkwardness. “And you're from...?”

“The university.” Hayes said, smile pervading.

“Of course. Come right this way.” she walked away from the door with small, hurried footsteps that shuffled along the lobby and up the stairs.

Hayes shot a smile and a wink at his partner as he entered, following the girl. Darvish inspected the lobby with suspicion, then followed Hayes inside, closing the door behind him and picking up pace to catch up.

“How did you know there was a professor?” he asked, in a hushed tone.

“There's
always
a professor.” Hayes said, the confident smile still fixed on his lips. “And they
always
play nice with a university. Grants and all.”

The brunette took them up three flights of stairs, the walls covered in grand paintings of esteemed scientists, fellows of the Royal Society, each with legacies of furthering scientific study in the country. As they came to the fourth floor, the young woman stopped at a large set of mahogany double doors. The colour a deep ruddy brown, texture aged and distressed by time, but veneer lovingly restored to keep the sheen. Rectangular panels were carved at every foot, the doors each standing four feet wide and seven tall. As the woman knocked, her short, shallow taps could be heard reverberating around the room contained within.

“Come.” declared a deep, withered voice. It sounded as though it gained the strength to project through the old wood via the acoustics of the room, rather than by the speaker's own vocal chords.

The woman turned the handles on one of the large, ancient doors, and with a heave, pushed it inwards. It swayed in an arc reluctantly, groaning whilst doing so. The two agents stood in the hallway as the girl entered, taking in the sights of the laboratory ahead of them. The original Versailles parquet flooring was covered with white vinyl, upon which stood stainless steel benches and counters, each set up as workstations for separate sections of an experiment. As Darvish scanned his eyes across the room, based on a casual glance, and unfamiliarity with the equipment, he couldn't decipher what the overall purpose of the research might be. What he was able to discern was that every item laid out was within the technological means of this reality. If there were something illicit going on, it wasn't in plain sight.

The brunette talked in hushed tones with the sole occupant of the room, a man in a lab coat at a workstation facing away from the door. Hayes had his nanos prick up his hearing.

“Really?” said the man, a tonal ripple on the word, as if coming from deep in the back of his throat. “Thank you, Marissa.” he said, turning from his workstation to greet them as she shuffled past Hayes and Darvish, giving them a polite, awkward smile as she turned back down the stairs, her feet
pitter-pattering
softly back to ground level.

“Gentlemen. A pleasure to have you visit.” he said, with a big smile, his voice guttural and hoarse. He walked over from the counter, steps laboured, bones almost audibly creaking as he approached them to shake their hands. Thin, grey hair clung to the top of his head for dear life as he turned from Hayes to Darvish, his wild eyebrows full of life above bright blue eyes. “Come on in, take yourself a seat.” he gestured for them to walk ahead as he wrestled the door closed, an intricate network of lines across his cheeks narrowing as he exerted himself. “What can I do for you chaps?” he asked, amidst recovering his breath. “Cup of tea? Coffee?”

“We're fine.” Darvish said, with a polite smile.

“I could do with a coffee...” Hayes said.

“We're fine.” Darvish repeated, adamantly.

“Very well.” said Parry, taking a seat on a stool opposite them. “How may I help you?”

“We have some questions about your research.” Darvish said.

“Oh, of course!” said the old man. “Always happy to oblige, what may I enlighten you upon?”

“All of it.” Hayes said, before Darvish had a chance to form a more refined question. “Broad strokes, if you don't mind.”

“Oh. But don't you already know --” the professor started, Hayes cutting him off.

“Humour us, please.”

“Of course. Anything for the university.” Parry said, as Hayes shot a knowing glance at Darvish, who ignored him completely. “Well, as you know, we're working alongside the London Centre For Nanotechnology to investigate the possibility of leveraging meta-connectivity to establish a baseline from which future technologies might emerge--”

“Did you say 'meta'?” Hayes asked, interrupting.

“Yes?” Parry said, a quizzical expression forming on his brow.

“As in
the
meta?”

“I don't follow.” the professor said, looking over to Darvish for an explanation.

“Could you remind us of your background?” Darvish asked.

“I... but of course,” Parry said. “My original PHD was in theoretical physics, formulating potential applications for supersymmetric quantum mechanics.”

“Those words all make my brain hurt.” Hayes said, the professor's qualifications going straight over his head.

“It's probably just the concussions.” Darvish said, absent-mindedly, his attention fixed on Parry.

It wasn't the first time Hayes had to listen to a spiel about supersymmetry that caused him cerebral anxiety. He was once on a mission to a dimension in which supersymmetry was not only the basis for the leading scientific research, but also established in law. The population had theorised that not only do particles have supersymmetric partners, but human beings also. This lead to all in-world dating to be based entirely on the belief of finding one's sym-mate, at which point they were married and expected to live happily ever after.

Jump Division found no evidence to prove that sym-mates did in fact exist, but the entire reality's divorce rate was so remarkably low, that nobody thought it was worth raining on their parade.

“You're talking about quantum fields?” Darvish asked.

“Quantum field
theory
, yes.” Parry confirmed.

“Theory, right.” Hayes said, rolling his eyes. He didn't know much about how jump technology worked, but knew enough to be able to assert that anything the mundane inhabitants of this reality deemed a 'theory' was, assuming it was correct, likely a fact.

“Have you done any research into dark matter?” Darvish asked.

“Not of late,” said the professor. “This study in particular is focussed on nanotechnology and the meta –“

“There's that word again...” said Hayes, hand shifting up his thigh slowly, resting at his hip.

Kali's voice chimed out over the top of the conversation.
'Guys, we've got trans-dime activity.'

“Here?” Hayes asked. The professor looking at him with yet another confused glance.

'No. One sec...'
she pulled up the in-world map and found the location.
'What the fuck?'

“Don't make me 'what the fuck' your 'what the fuck'.” Hayes said.

“Is your associate quite all right?” Parry asked Darvish.

“He's just... on a call...” Darvish spluttered, ushering Hayes to his feet, heaving the door open and pushing him out into the hallway, slamming it behind him. “So, you were saying?” Darvish said.

'It's at your point of arrival.'
Kali said.

“Sorry,” Darvish blurted, before Parry could continue. “Actually, I've got to be on that call too...” he said, making his way back to the door “We'll pick this up...”

“Ok?” said Parry.

“Thank you for your time.” he said, as he wrenched the door open and ran down the stairs, trying to catch up with Hayes. “Kali, direct me!” he shouted, unable to see Hayes.

'Sending route to your lens.'
she said.

Darvish burst along the street, turning a corner to see Hayes ahead of him by two blocks. “Is it a jump?” he asked, between heavy breaths.

'No. Maybe. I don't know, these readings are off.'
Kali said, scrolling through the data feeds.

“Find the fuck out.” Hayes said.

Running through west London at full pelt, it took Hayes just over fifteen minutes to get a block from the alley that functioned as his point of arrival. He ordered his nanos to oxygenate his blood, and made his lungs work overtime at catching his breath. As he approached, Darvish was waiting outside the alley.

“What the fuck?” Hayes said.

“Took a cab, idiot. Your fifteen minute run was a four minute taxi ride.

“That's just lazy...” Hayes said, wiping the sweat from his brow, resting his right hand on the holster at his hip, making to step into the alley as the shimmer of the pocket dimension formed against his thigh. Darvish stood in his way.

“Not so fast, cowboy.” he said.

“Cowboy?” Hayes scoffed.

Hayes was unfamiliar with the concept of the wild west definition of 'the cowboy', and was instead thinking of the population of a reality he once visited in which cows were the dominant lifeform. Every building had flaps for doors, ramps instead of stairs, and grass was pretty much everywhere. It set off his allergies, and Hayes spent most of the mission sneezing.

“Kali, scan it.” Darvish ordered, holding back at the mouth to the alleyway.

'Already on it. These readings don't make sense.'

“What kind of sense aren't they making?” Hayes asked, taking a moment after speaking to pull the sentence apart in his head to turn it into English.

'It's not a jump...'
Kali said.
'I mean, it is, but it's not right. Get visual confirmation.'

Darvish took a moment to ready himself, then turned into the alley. The walls of the buildings surrounding it were glimmering, surfaces shifting, as if refracted in a moving fluid.

“I've never seen anything like it...” he said. “It's like a jump that's... ongoing...”

'That's pretty much what these readings say...'
Kali said.
'It's like a feedback loop. The energy cycling, but it's not being released into the meta.'

“This is all very interesting...” Hayes said, joining Darvish at the mouth of the alley “By which I mean it's
fucking boring
. Can I shoot someone yet?”

'No signs of life other than you two... But you're welcome to shoot yourself.'
Kali said, trying to work out what was happening.
'I need a visual inspection, there's nothing happening on the grid, it's got to be an in-world phenomena.'

“Right...” Darvish said, nervously. He took small, anxious steps deeper into the alley, trying to peer through the ripples for signs of an explanation. Reaching in to his pocket, he pulled out a penny and flicked it at the surface of the warping space. It slipped through effortlessly and coasted through the air, losing speed as it got deeper into the anomaly. As it gently descended to meet the ground, it casually kissed the cobblestones and began a graceful, slow-motion leap to another, then another, each pounce taking longer and longer to accomplish.

'Time dilation.'
Kali said, hearing the first
clink
of the coin ring out, long after the impact with the ground.
'I'd estimate twenty-five percent a metre. Maybe thirty.'

“Well how the fuck do we shut it off?” Hayes asked, fingers twitching at his hip, very much wanting to have something to shoot.

“I'm going in to get a better look.” Darvish declared.

“The fuck you are.” Hayes said, grabbing for him, but Darvish had already crossed the glimmering threshold of the aberration in spacetime.

“Kali, still reading me?” Darvish asked, looking back at the surface swelling and surging behind his entry point.

'Dilated, weak signal, but it's coming through.'
Her response came through crackled, words faster than normal, pitched half an octave higher than her natural voice.

“I'm taking another step.” he said, doing so, peering deeper into the folds and furrows of the warped path ahead of him. Something was lying at the centre of the alley, the very point of Hayes's arrival. “Are you seeing that?” he said, taking another step. The light distorted round his body, everything around him undulating as if he were wading through an ocean, forcing the current to shift past a solid object. There was a cardboard box sitting on the cobbles, light emanating from the folds at the top, alternating between red and blue.

'Stop.'
Kali instructed, but the words came through to Darvish a shriek of static.

“I'm putting a stop to this.” said Hayes, reaching into the pocket-dimension and pulling out a gun.

'No! We don't know what that will do...'
Kali said.

“What do your readings say? Is this stable? Is it going to contract, expand, explode, do we know
fucking
anything?”