“Is that a lot?” she asked, still angry at her interest level. However, she’d spent years in the mine back home, so she had a natural curiosity for rocks. She wanted to study geology in college to help further her understanding of the earth, and what was inside it. Her parents were also experts in earth studies, but looking into the abyss, the deep bore hole was unlike any mining activity Mom or Dad ever talked about during their tours.
“By far. The Soviets, whom I just mentioned, managed to get a thin shaft down about seven miles in their country before they ran out of money. NORAD must have taken their lessons and tried to drill down here in Colorado, but they didn’t get as far. It took a contract with one of my companies to get it done. Ours is ten feet wide, too. Plus, we took it a step farther; there are two elevator shafts next to most of it.” He pointed to the far side of the room. The elevator doors looked like they belonged in any office park, not deep inside a government bunker.
“So you have three shafts going down ten miles? This is your superweapon?”
He laughed. “The elevators don’t go straight through. We had to install waypoints—stops, if you will—since the technology doesn’t exist to get elevator cars straight through to a depth of sixteen thousand meters. Plus, you don’t want to be stuck waiting if it has to go ten miles before it reaches you, right?”
Tabby shrugged, clamming up again.
“Besides, the weapon part is along the walls down there. Don’t you see it?” He pointed down into the shaft. The walls weren’t smooth or rocky. Long vertical pipes hugged the curvature of the hole around most of the perimeter, running to points far below. Small LED lights blinked in various locations, as if there was energy flowing through them. As impressive as it was, it still didn’t seem like a weapon. It certainly wasn’t a weapon she could sabotage.
When she didn’t reply, he kept talking. “We drained a water aquifer by accident. People in nearby towns were furious, but we blamed it on a fracking company.” He snickered mischievously. “We tapped into it during drilling, and it drained to a larger void down the tube. Good thing for us. It saved us having to pump it out. It would have delayed us a long time.”
“That would have been a shame,” she taunted.
“Yes, I’m sure you mean it. But consider what we’ve built here, well, with NORAD’s help, of course. The shaft goes down ten miles. We have superconductors and cooling installed in the walls, giving us ten miles of heavily-shielded pathways for accelerated particles. The foundational elements of the universe.” Without warning, he spun around and leaned back against the railing. His golden outfit sparkled from the lights on the ceiling above. “Of course, outside the tube, it’s four hundred degrees Fahrenheit down at the bottom, so it gets difficult to keep it all cool, but my companies did their jobs in that regard. Now, a person could comfortably live down there.”
She brushed bangs out of her eyes after looking straight down. “If this is your weapon, tell me what happened to my dogs. How did…this—” She pointed to the pit. “—kill them?”
David pursed his lips, as if she’d disappointed him. “Is that all you worry about? Everyone else? Your friends. Your dogs. The country.”
“Just tell me,” she insisted.
“Fine. If your dogs were caught by one of our mobile units… Those machines have a lot less power, obviously, than our main gun here. They still tap into the base structure of the universe, but they don’t have the same granular control as—”
“Are they dead or not!”
He looked at her anew. “Probably not. They’ve most likely been punched into a parallel universe.”
“A parallel universe?” she said dismissively. “You expect me to believe that?”
David shrugged. “It’s all ones and zeros as far as I’m concerned. You arrange them in the right order, with enough power behind them, and you can send signals across the universe, you can open doorways between quantum-entangled particles, and you can send puppies into neighboring blocks of the multiverse. You can’t believe it because your people weren’t the ones to figure it out.”
She leaned hard against the railing, thinking. The dark tunnel of blinking lights below took on a new sinister appearance. It wasn’t simply a strange weapon. David and his army had invented technology far beyond the ability of the United States. So far ahead, they were able to defeat her country without anyone knowing about it. And there she was, in the maw of the super gun. “Your weapon can be destroyed,” she blurted out.
He waited a few seconds, as if she might say more, but then he chuckled softly. “Everything can be destroyed. The universe persists under the pain of entropy, as I’m sure they taught you in science class.”
She decided to antagonize him. “It’s just that you seemed invincible up until this point. I almost thought your weapon was designed by aliens or something. Now that I see it, though I have no idea what it is, I know one hand grenade down in the shaft can destroy all you’ve created here.”
“Do you have a hand grenade?” he asked with interest.
It drove her mad he didn’t seem to rise to her prodding. David seemed to see her as a child who needed everything spelled out for her, and in return, he displayed endless patience at how she didn’t catch on.
“No, I don’t have a grenade. You can see what I’ve got in this stupid unitard.” She pointed to the unforgivingly-tight blue covering.
“But you would blow it up if you could,” he said in a studious voice.
She nodded enthusiastically. “That’s my job. I’m an American. You killed my people. What did
