Brane Child, Page 3

  Part of the reason for her selection might be that corporate management considered her expendable. She was not critical to the project's success. If the test flight failed, she could be easily dismissed or reassigned. If it failed catastrophically, they could blame it on her inexperience. In either case, the project could still go on with little interruption due to her absence.

  She could have turned down the offer. She almost had, but she suspected that would have been a bad career move, and good jobs with benefits were not easy to come by. Regardless of her discomfort with the technology behind it, an offer like this came once in a lifetime, if that. The Brane Skip was potentially the most important contract that General Spaceworks Corporation currently held. It might be the most important human invention since computers. It could revolutionize space travel and open the galaxy to exploration.

  That, ultimately, is what prompted her to accept the job. If it succeeded, it could effectively allow mankind to ignore the universal speed limit by skipping a ship and its crew between theoretical membranes that formed different layers of reality. That was the theory behind it, anyway. The physics were beyond her, but it held the promise of allowing humanity to travel to the stars. What kind of aerospace engineer wouldn't want to work on that?

  Funding for the program came from both NASA and DARPA, and she had heard that the White House was closely watching the project's progress. The status reports her supervisors prepared had visibility in corporate and government halls of power.

  If the upcoming test went well, she could be famous, not that this mattered to her other than that it might allow her to name her own job afterwards with any of the major space development companies.

  "Hi, Commander. Mind if I join you?" The tall, broad shouldered man standing by the table gave her a warm, innocent smile. He wore a T-shirt bearing the logo of a popular video game. Lisa recognized the name but had never played it. Games were not her thing.

  "Hi, Brax. I didn't see you come in. Have a seat."

  Braxton White would be the Brane Child's pilot tomorrow. At least his selection made some amount of sense. He had piloted Bruno class cargo ships before and had been involved in outfitting the test ship after General Spaceworks retired the vessel from its cargo fleet in order to be repurposed and renamed for this project.

  "I don't think you would have noticed a herd of elephants line-dancing. You looked like you were orbiting some distant star. Concerned about tomorrow?"

  "Yeah. I take it that you're not."

  "Well, I'm pretty excited to see what will happen when we switch that thing on, but as far as my part goes, there's nothing to it. I fly the bird out. I fly the bird back. Brunos are tough ships. This one may be old, but they were built to last, and everything we're likely to need for this little milk run is up to spec."

  "The gray haze doesn't bother you?"

  He smiled. "No, that's the fun part. The adventure. The mystery. Woooooo…" He held up both hands and wiggled his fingers to accompany the spooky 'woo-woo' noise and laughed.

  She returned a weak smile even though she didn't think it was funny. Brax was seven years older than she was and considerably taller. Most people were. Her size, build, and youthful face often caused people to underestimate her until they heard her speak or caught a glimpse of the depth and intensity in her brown, almond shaped eyes. Despite the difference in their ages and heights, she often viewed him as a big kid. Sometimes his inability to take anything seriously annoyed her. He tended to approach reality with the same inconsequential attitude he displayed for the games he played in his free time. The only thing that ever seemed to bother him was his ex-wife, which is probably why he seldom mentioned her.

  One of the dining hall's robo-servers trundled quietly to their table. "What can I get you, Mr. White?" it asked.

  "Just a cup of coffee, right now," he told it.

  The automated waiter produced a clean cup from a rack integrated into its cylindrical body and filled it.

  "Anything else for you, Miss Chang?"

  She held out her cup with a heavy sigh of resignation. "Just a refill."

  "Listen, Lisa," Brax said. "There's no need to worry. This can only go one of two ways. If the BS device flops, tomorrow will be kind of dull. If it works, it will be cool!"

  His simple attitude was as contagious as an unwelcome social disease, and an involuntary smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. She would love to be able to approach the matter as lightly as he did, but she couldn't. Whether or not she wanted the job, she was the mission commander, and she was responsible for ensuring its success, which she might not be able to do because she did not know enough about the thing being tested.

  "Oh look, here comes the rest of our gallant crew," Brax said, snapping his attention toward the open arch to the main corridor.

  Lisa, inconveniently shorter than the pilot was, craned her neck to look past the cafeteria's other occupied tables. Dr. Leonard Dixon and Sandra Suarez were just entering the dining hall. Doc, currently attired in a loose beige shirt and plain brown chinos, would be monitoring the crew to see if the skip had any physiological effects on them. Sandra, the far better dressed of the two in a silky, low cut blouse and tight black slacks, would be handling sensors and communications. Her effortless magnetism drew the eyes of several men in the dining hall as she and her companion made a visual survey of the room.

  Together their group represented a good representation of the American genetic mix. Sandra had a Spanish name and a Mediterranean complexion. The doctor was dark-skinned with sub-Saharan African features. Brax almost looked Scandinavian with pale skin, short blonde hair, and ice blue eyes. Lisa was everything else. She considered herself one hundred percent contemporary American, with ancestral roots in at least four different continents. Their personalities were a mixed bag as well. Lisa knew she sometimes took things a bit too seriously. Brax was just the opposite. His ground state was to treat everything as a game, often with only mildly restrained exuberance. Sandra was self-confident and a bit flirtatious, but she possessed a quick wit, which occasionally manifested itself in sarcasm. And Doc, well, he was a bit of a puzzle. The best words she could think of to describe him might be 'serene' or 'professorial' as if some philosophy professor from a bygone era had somehow been reincarnated as an African-American physician from Buffalo. Unlike her, all three of them had volunteered for the project—Brax because it sounded like an adventure, Sandra because it seemed like a good career move, and Doc because he said it could open a door to a wider universe. She was not entirely sure what he meant by that but suspected it was more than just getting around the light-speed barrier.

  Brax stood and waved until the two crew members acknowledged him and changed their trajectory to head toward their table.

  "Have a seat," Brax said. "All set for tomorrow?"

  Sandra slid gracefully into a chair. The doctor, almost exactly the same height but over a decade older, took the seat next to her.

  "I need some—" Sandra began.

  "Can I get you something, Miss Suarez?" one of the robo-servers asked.

  "These things are really creepy," she said, casting it a suspicious glance.

  "It's their programming," Lisa said. "They monitor the room and look for people who might want service."

  "They're still creepy. But yeah, little robot, I'd like a glass of red wine."

  "Very good, miss. And you, Doctor Dixon?"

  "A glass of ice water, please," he said.

  That was Doc. No one else would say 'please' to a robot.

  "And a pizza," Brax added before the server could leave. "Bring us an extra-large New York style pizza with cheese and…?" He surveyed the others around the table by raising his eyebrows and letting the question dangle.

  Lisa knew Sandra did not eat meat and that Brax liked sausage and anchovies, so a pizza compromise would be needed.

  She exercised her command authority to bypass a debate.

  "I think just cheese is fine," she said.

&n
bsp; "Extra cheese, then," Brax amended.

  "Very good," the server said. "I'll be back soon with your order."

  "Anyway, Brax," Sandra said, "Since you asked. I checked out ship sensors and communications, and they're fine, but I can't say I'm thrilled about going out in that obsolete cargo boat. Why couldn't we get something newer?"

  Lisa knew the answer to this one. She had wondered the same thing and had checked the files to find an answer. Since it did not pertain to the BS device itself, the information wasn't classified.

  "Too expensive," she said. "The corporate bean-counters wanted the cheapest way possible to test the device before building a new ship around it. They just needed something big and powerful enough to accommodate the Brane Skip device and support a crew. Bruno class cargo ships have big holds and massive power generators. They were going to retire this one anyway. In fact, it was in orbit around Earth's moon waiting to go to the recyclers when it was requisitioned for the project."

  "Isn't it part of a mission commander's job to instill confidence?" Sandra teased. "Saying that the ship we're going to trust our lives to was rescued from a scrap yard doesn't do that."

  The fledgling commander smiled. "Sorry, I'm new at the job. But Brax knows these ships, and he says it'll be fine."

  "She'll get us there and back," Brax said confidently. "She's got two one hundred kilowatt high-beta fusion reactors with opposed magnetic fields powering the thrusters. I checked them myself and there's nothing wrong with them. Seals are good, and electrostatic confinement checks out. We probably won't need it all, but I made sure the deuterium and tritium tanks were full, too. For a little run like this, that ship is fine."

  Lisa knew the ship's power systems were more than adequate. The fusion reactors were designed to lift the ship and all the cargo anyone could cram into it from the bottom of Earth's gravity well. They could power a small city. She assumed the power output would be more than enough for the Brane Skip, but she did not know its requirements. That information was classified above her clearance level.

  "It's still older than my grandmother," Sandra said.

  The robot returned with a large, hot pizza and four plates. Lisa didn't realize how hungry she was until she smelled it.

  "I'm sure it's safe," Brax said, helping himself to a slice of pizza. "The ship and the mice that went along for the ride last time returned safely."

  The last test flight had included a cage of lab mice, and Brax was right. They had come back healthy and no more confused than they had been when they had left.

  "So why does Lisa still look like she's waiting for her own execution?" Sandra persisted.

  "It's not the ship I'm concerned about."

  "She's worried about the BS device," Brax said.

  "You know, they really need to come up with a better name for that thing," Sandra said.

  "I'm not sure it isn't appropriate," Lisa said. "According to what little I've been able to find out about it, the whole idea is based on M-Theory, with the 'M' either standing for membrane, mother, magic, mystery, or possibly mumbo-jumbo. It's an offshoot of superstring theory and proposes that the universe, or at least the one we know about, is kind of like a sheet in a stack of sheets. We're on one sheet, but reality is bigger than that. It's the whole big pile."

  She had spent days researching the subject and had learned a few new terms, but she felt she had gained no real understanding. It was simply far too strange for her logically analytical mind to accept without repeatedly throwing down the bullshit card.

  "Well, I can kind of visualize that," Sandra said.

  "Yeah, but like most scientific analogies, it's probably useful and wrong in all its particulars. And even if it's not, everything that affects a brane, except gravity, theoretically remains on the brane. Stuff from one doesn't skip to another."

  "The thing works, though," Brax said.

  Lisa sighed. "Maybe. Something happens, anyway."

  She pulled up a simplified line drawing of the BS device and some explanatory information on her personal data tablet and passed it around the table.

  "The device supposedly transmits the patterns in an area of space-time in our brane to an adjacent brane in a fourth spatial dimension using Kaluza-Klein particles. According to that," she said, pointing to the data tablet currently held by Doc, "every particle we know of has a KK partner, but unlike things like bosons and leptons, the KK particles have momentum in extra dimensions. So when the device activates, it translates an area of space-time from our brane to an adjacent brane, hence 'Brane Skip'. Now, I'm an engineer, not a physicist, but it sounds like magic to me, and I don't believe in magic."

  "Careful, Lisa. You're attitude's showing," Sandra said. "You might want to tuck that in before you embarrass yourself."

  "I think we can all agree that we do not understand how it does what it does," Doc said, always the diplomat. "But we do know it does something. The test vehicles do disappear and reappear."

  "If it's any help, I don't know how they get such good three-dimensional effects on a two-dimensional screen in a video game," Brax said. "But it works."

  "May I take your empty plate, Miss Suarez?"

  "And I don't know how these robo-servers always know what I want before I do," Sandra said, "but they certainly seem to."

  "Lisa," Doc said, "Perhaps you are uncomfortable because you feel unprepared for this mission due to your lack of understanding about the device. You strike me as someone who likes to know what something is before she steps in it."

  "Doesn't everyone?"

  "Nope," Brax said, grabbing the last slice of pizza.

  Lisa glared at him.

  "What? All I mean is that surprises can be fun."

  "It's okay, Lisa," Sandra said. "Don't hit him. He's not an engineer. He doesn't understand these things."

  Doc smiled. "Lisa, I think you're trying to assume more responsibility than you need to. You're the mission commander, but your mission is to get the ship to the skip point, activate the device, observe what happens, and then come back. That's it. You are not responsible for making the device work, and you are not responsible if it doesn't. Treat it as a black box."

  "I don't like not knowing what's in the box," she said, which was true, but what Doc said was true too. Her overactive sense of responsibility was kicking in again. It was probably because she had developed it so early in life.

  Her thoughts drifted to her childhood and her idealistic parents. Her father was a musician and her mother was a writer, or at least that was how they saw themselves. Her dad did have a steady gig at one of the big Orlando theme parks, for a while, until the corporate big-wigs decided to replace his band after a six-year run with a lumberjack act, which they claimed was 'fresher'. The real reason, she suspected, was that it was cheaper.

  Her mom had a blog, a couple unpublished books of poetry, and a few self-published novels.

  They both had talent. What they did not have were steady incomes. They also shared a seemingly inherent inability to manage what they did make very well.

  They were good parents, in their own distracted ways. They sang her lullabies and read her stories at bedtime, but both seemed to regard money as something so unartistic it couldn't possibly have any real significance. It was useful when they needed a new set of guitar strings or toner for their printer, but things like rent and utilities were unartistic intangibles and therefore not of any immediate concern.

  She ended up taking over the household finances before she became a teenager, soon after their landlord threatened to evict them from their small downtown apartment. Her natural talent for numbers and intuitive grasp for keeping things in balance ensured that they no longer spent more than they made and that their bills were paid more or less on time. Eventually, her parents landed steady jobs in catering, which at least ensured them a more reliable income, but those years had left her with a sense that she always needed to take care of things, as well as making her something of a worrier, afraid she might overlook s
omething important.

  "Pretend it's Schrodinger's cat," Doc said, jarring her back to the here and now.

  "Alive or dead?"

  "Neither or both. It doesn't matter. It's not your cat."

  She smiled. He had a point. She wasn't responsible for the entire Brane Skip project. She was only in command of a two- or three-day mission, depending on what they observed. It should be simple—activate the device, get as much data as they could about the gray haze to help the project's scientists and technicians learn how to navigate through it, and then return to Feynman Station. Her responsibility was limited. She had made sure the ship was as ready as she could make it. The crew knew what she expected of them. That part of the mission was under control, but she remained uneasy about the part she could not influence and what it might do to the part that was.

  "What about the gray haze?" Sandra asked.

  "That's the fun part," Brax said, which warranted an exaggerated eye roll from the communications officer sitting next to him.

  The gray haze was the big mystery. All the missions involving smaller probes, as well as those done robotically by Brane Child, had returned safely, but the data they had collected made no sense. The fact was that there wasn't any data. The probes had gone somewhere—some people speculated some-when—disappearing from normal space and returning seconds or hours later with readings of subjective time passing. They found nothing else. No gasses, no stars, no radiation of any type. All external readings indicated nothing but an ineffable gray haze. It suggested a place that was not a place, not empty vacuum, but void, where perhaps even the fabric of space-time itself did not exist. Some theorists maintained that this was impossible, but something strange was going on. There were several competing hypotheses to explain it, but no one knew.

  "Fun?" Lisa said.

  "Sure. Think of it as an adventure."

  ~Chapter 2~