Visualizer. “You’re looking at an energy density not seen in the universe since the Big Bang.” He turned to Dolby. “Ken, please increase power in increments of tenths to ninety-nine.”
The ethereal sound increased slightly as Dolby worked on the keyboard. “Ninety-six,” he said.
“Luminosity seventeen point four TeV,” said Chen.
“Ninety-seven . . . Ninety-eight.”
The team fell into tense silence, the only sound now the humming that filled the underground control room, as if the mountain around them were singing.
“Beams still focused,” said Chen. “Luminosity twenty-two point five TeV.”
“Ninety-nine.”
The sound from Isabella had become still higher, purer.
“Just a moment,” said Volkonsky, hunching over the supercomputer workstation. “Isabella is . . . slow.”
Dolby turned sharply. “Nothing wrong with the hardware. It must be another software glitch.”
“Software
“Maybe we should hold it here,” said Mercer. “Any evidence of miniature black hole creation?”
“No,” said Chen. “Not a trace of Hawking radiation.”
“Ninety-nine point five,” said Dolby.
“I’m getting a charged jet at twenty-two point seven TeV,” said Chen.
“What kind?” asked Hazelius.
“An unknown resonance. Take a look.”
Two flickering red lobes had developed on either side of the flower on the central screen, like a clown’s ears gone wild.
“Hard-scattering,” said Hazelius. “Gluons maybe. Might be evidence of a Kaluza-Klein graviton.”
“No way,” said Chen. “Not at this luminosity.”
“Ninety-nine point six.”
“Gregory, I think we should hold the power steady here,” said Mercer. “A lot of stuff is happening all at once.”
“Naturally we’re seeing unknown resonances,” Hazelius said, his voice no louder than the rest, but somehow distinct from them all. “We’re in unknown territory.”
“Ninety-nine point seven,” Dolby intoned. He had complete confidence in his machine. He could take her to one hundred percent and beyond, if necessary. It gave him a thrill to know they were now sucking up almost a quarter of the juice from Hoover Dam. That was why they had to do their runs in the middle of the night—when power usage was lowest.
“Ninety-nine point eight.”
“We’ve got some kind of really big unknown interaction here,” said Mercer.
“What is problem, bitch?” Volkonsky shouted at the computer.
“I’m telling you, we’re poking our finger into a Kaluza-Klein space,” said Chen. “It’s incredible.”
Snow began to appear on the big flat panel with the flower.
“Isabella is behave strange,” said Volkonsky.
“How so?” Hazelius said, from his position at the center of the Bridge.
“Glacky.”
Dolby rolled his eyes. Volkonsky was such a pain. “All systems go on my board.”
Volkonsky typed furiously on the keyboard; then he swore in Russian and whacked the monitor with the flat of his hand.
“Gregory, don’t you think we should power down?” asked Mercer.
“Give it a minute more,” said Hazelius.
“Ninety-nine point nine,” said Dolby. In the past five minutes, the room had gone from sleepy to bug-eyed awake, tense as hell. Only Dolby felt relaxed.
“I agree with Kate,” said Volkonsky. “I not like the way Isabella behave. We start power-down sequence.”
“I’ll take full responsibility,” said Hazelius. “Everything is still well within specs. The data stream of ten terabits per second is starting to stick in its craw, that’s all.”
“Craw? What means ‘craw’?”
“Power at one hundred percent,” said Dolby, a note of satisfaction in his laid-back voice.
“Beam luminosity at twenty-seven point one eight two eight TeV,” said Chen.
Snow spackled the computer screens. The singing noise filled the room like a voice from the beyond. The flower on the Visualizer writhed and expanded. A black dot, like a hole, appeared at the center.
“Whoa!” said Chen. “Losing all data at Coordinate Zero.”
The flower flickered. Dark streaks shot through it.
“This is nuts,” said Chen. “I’m not kidding, the data’s vanishing.”
“Not possible,” said Volkonsky. “Data is not vanish. Particles is vanish.”
“Give me a break. Particles don’t vanish.”
“No joke, particles is vanish.”
“Software problem?” Hazelius asked.
“Not software problem,” said Volkonsky loudly. “Hardware problem.”
“Screw you,” Dolby muttered.
“Gregory, Isabella might be tearing the ‘brane,” said Mercer. “I really think we should power down now.”
The black dot grew, expanded, began swallowing the image on the screen. At its margins, it jittered manically with intense color.
“These numbers are wild,” said Chen. “I’m getting extreme space-time curvature right at CZero. It looks like some kind of singularity. We might be creating a black hole.”
“Impossible,” said Alan Edelstein, the team’s mathematician, looking up from the workstation he had been quietly hunched over in the corner. “There’s no evidence of Hawking radiation.”
“I swear to God,” said Chen loudly, “we’re ripping a hole in space-time!”
On the screen that ran the program code in real time, the symbols and numbers were flying by like an express train. On the big screen above their heads, the writhing flower had disappeared, leaving a black void. Then there was movement in the void—ghostly, batlike. Dolby stared at it, surprised.
“Damn it, Gregory, power down!” Mercer called.
“Isabella not accept input!” Volkonsky yelled. “I lose core routines!”
“Hold steady for a moment until we can figure out what’s going on,” said Hazelius.
“Gone! Isabella gone!” said the Russian, throwing up his hands and sitting back with a look of disgust on his bony face.
“I’m still green across the board,” said Dolby. “Obviously what you’ve got here is a massive software crash.” He turned his attention back to the Visualizer. An image was appearing in the void, an image so strange, so beautiful, that at first he couldn’t wrap his mind around it. He glanced around, but nobody else was looking: they were all focused on their various consoles.
“Hey, excuse me—anybody know what’s going on up there on the screen?” Dolby asked.
Nobody answered him. Nobody looked up. Everyone was furiously busy. The machine sang strangely.
“I’m just the engineer,” said Dolby, “but any of you theoretical geniuses got an idea of what that is? Alan, is that . . . normal?”
Alan Edelstein glanced up from his workstation distractedly. “It’s just random data,” he said.
“What do you mean, random? It’s got a shape!”
“The computer’s crashed. It can’t be anything but random data.”
“That sure doesn’t look random to me.” Dolby stared at it. “It’s moving. There’s something there, I swear—it almost looks alive, like it’s trying to get out. Gregory, are you seeing this?”
Hazelius glanced up at the Visualizer and paused, surprise blossoming on his face. He turned. “Rae? What’s going on with the Visualizer?”
“No idea. I’m getting a steady blast of coherent data from the detectors. Doesn’t look like Isabella’s crashed from here.”
