Light Shines Through | Chapter 5 - Jackie
The Shattered World Series | Book 1
Jackie | November 2041 – Seattle, Tahoma – Free Republic of Cascadia
Meeting by the monoliths in Red Square on the University of Tahoma campus is an ancient and traditional location that means we can’t figure out where to go for lunch, so let’s meet at the giant, ugly sculptures on the plaza and then decide.
From where she is standing, Jackie can see the majestic mountain that lends its decolonized name to the state and the university itself, Washington having been demoted from both a long time ago.
She isn’t exactly nervous—she’s excited to meet with Laxmi and her colleague, and she’s confident in her abilities. She’s traded information with Laxmi about the role over the week, and her spidey-sense is tingling. The gig can’t pay close to what she was making at Arachnio, but the idea of working with an up-and-coming physicist wunderkind on a secret project feels like Something Big.
That means this isn’t just any other job; this is a great job, and because it’s a great job, and because great jobs tend to be rare and ridiculously competitive to get, she’s feeling little pangs of anxiety. The feeling isn’t a stranger to her, not from a very young age, but over the years, she has learned to cope. Right now, though, her palms are itching with nerves, and she’s beginning to feel just a tad dizzy.
She spent far more time on her look this morning than she has on anything fashion-related for the last two months, and it felt good. She has a killer wardrobe, and most of her looks are nailed down solid, but today’s sartorial objective was a hard read.
After two months of not dressing up for work, she had a hard time pinning down the right vibe for a lunch job interview with brainiac nerds whom she is trying to impress with her software engineering cred. After rejecting turn-of-the-century slacker-dev slob look, which was never truly authentic to her in the first place, she ended up going for what she likes to think of as “Almost Full-On Jackie”.
She’s wearing a black scoop neck top, covered by a butter yellow wool boucle jacket that screams Chanel classic as only something that had cycled through nearly a century of fashion can. There are echoes of a pillbox hat in the yellow, white, and grey camo-patterned military cap she wears. She smiles to herself at the stray thought that this color palette wouldn't camouflage anyone unless they were hiding in a pile of dandelions, corn, pigeons, and marshmallows.
All of this above her favorite dark jeans and vintage Doc Maarten boots, and of course, the gloves. Always the gloves, which have, in a very real way, led her to her sense of style and her sense of self. This pair is a simple white cotton spandex, elbow length, and tight through the fingers and hands, the way she likes them. She has added a trim of the same yellow camouflage material the cap is made of, and the simple update to ensure a match was something that she was inordinately, and probably unreasonably, proud of. She has also added a dab of bright yellow high-tech gel to the fingertips so that she doesn’t have to take the gloves off to use her phone and touchscreens.
Arriving ten minutes early, she had grabbed a spot where she knew she’d be easily visible from any direction, and proceeded to wait as casually as she could. No earbuds, no music, phone put away in her jacket pocket on vibrate. She closes her eyes for a moment to face the noontime sun and feel the warmth and light flow through her. She tries to ground herself in the moment using one of the simple tricks she has learned over the years to get her overactive mind to calm down and steer away from panic and nerves. Her attention wanders, and she imagines the phone burning in her pocket, but knows the instant she cracks and pulls it out that she’ll be lost scrolling through anything that can distract her.
Far sooner than she expects, a voice from behind her right shoulder says, "Jackie, hey!" in a familiar pleasant contralto, with just a tinge of a British accent to it. Jackie turns around, already smiling, and returns the greeting as brightly as she can.
Coming up behind her are a pleasantly mismatched-looking pair: Laxmi, a petite woman of South Asian heritage, and a taller, somewhat doughy man who looks like he's stepped out of central casting for "college lab nerd", complete with a mop of curly, disheveled ginger-blond hair and thick-rimmed glasses.
"Jackie, it’s wonderful to see you again. Thank you for taking my less-than-artful suggestion on Monday morning seriously", Laxmi says.
She leans in to give Jackie a delicate one-armed hug in welcome. Her dark eyes sparkle with a wry intelligence that promises many hearty laughs soon. She nods to her left and says, “This is my partner in crime, Doug.”
The man shakes her hand, a warm and fleshy grip that is more confident than Jackie was expecting from someone who looks like he might be prone to social anxiety, asthma inhalers, and, judging from his T-shirt, classic Rick and Morty marathons.
“Doug Finkel. I do whatever Laxmi tells me to do." He pauses for a moment and casts a glance at his compatriot that Jackie suspects contains a wee bit of longing.
"And also, I build things out of spare parts and tell jokes", he says.
"Bad jokes, usually," says Laxmi, with a fake scowl on her face.
"Very, very bad jokes," says Doug, falling into a routine that Jackie can tell is an old shtick between the two of them.
"Anyway," says Laxmi, before things can progress further down whatever neo-vaudevillian comedy routine they’re about to launch into, "I absolutely love your hat and gloves."
Doug snorts, and Jackie laughs, already feeling a comfortable rapport with these two. Doug’s eyes go wide at Jackie’s guffaw, and Laxmi beams at her again as she had done on the bus the morning they met.
"Thank you! I made them," said Jackie, then catching herself, "Well, I found this ridiculous old dress at a vintage shop, ripped it apart, and used the material for the hat and to trim the gloves." She paused for a moment, feeling suddenly awkward, and decided to steer the conversation a bit more firmly.
"So, where would you both like to go for lunch?" she asks.
Laxmi and Doug look at each other, both half shrugging, and say, practically in unison, "The Pit?"
The Olive Pit is a hole in the wall just a couple of blocks off campus. A local institution known not so much for the quality of the food as much as for the guarantee that you could fill your belly off of the quasi-Middle Eastern buffet for less than five hundred dollars. In the lives of perennially poor college students during creeping inflation, this was a bargain too good to pass up, and it guaranteed the Pit a base of loyal followers that the occasional "needs to improve" rating from the health board posted in the window did little to deter.
Once Jackie, Laxmi, and Doug had filled their plates at the buffet, they settle into a somewhat hidden table towards the back of the restaurant. Conversation flows easily right from the start. The talk shifts from light banter about fashion and music to the personal histories of each of the three.
Laxmi finishes telling a story about how she and Doug had met, which isn’t very flattering to Doug, and he’s hiding his face in his hands, while trying to suppress laughter. It’s clear to Jackie that even if there isn’t a romantic connection between these two, there is a deep bond of friendship and respect that transcends anything as paltry as gender, or background, or class.
"So, what about you?" says Laxmi, turning the focus to Jackie.
Jackie feigns being taken aback. "Moi?" she says dramatically, raising a gloved hand to her chest and arching an eyebrow. Doug and Laxmi grin, but clearly are ready to hear about her history.
Jackie shrugs and sighs, and then frowns slightly, shaking her head just a fraction.
"Well, I wish I could tell you that I had an idyllic childhood, where my natural talents for fashion, music, and code were nurtured unreservedly, but..." she shakes her head again. "It just wasn't like that." She pauses, trying to gather her thoughts.
"I'm Cascadian. I mean, I'm a citizen here, now, but I was born in Deseret."
Doug and Laxmi sit up a bit straighter, and Jackie can see the questions forming behind their eyes. She smiles reassuringly, knowing from long experience the directions the conversation can take from here.
"I was born into a Mormon family, in Deseret. I had two older adopted brothers, and a little sister. We had a farm and orchard near Bear Lake, and I grew up there until the time I was ten. But I had a kind of fucked up family life. Something..." she pauses for a moment, not really for effect, but because she’s trying to find the right words. "Something really bad happened to me in my family when I was ten." She holds up her gloves and waggles her fingers at them.
"My hands got really badly burned, hence the gloves. The incident destroyed whatever remaining good existed in my family, and I got kicked out after my mom died." She stops to take a bite of falafel, and chews slowly, thinking about the pain from that time so long ago.
Laxmi and Doug look at each other and then at her, as if they were deciding who would ask the next question. Laxmi seems to somehow win, and she turns back to Jackie.
"I'm so sorry, Jackie. But, I don't understand...what could you have done at the age of ten that was so bad that you'd get kicked out of your home for it?" Laxmi's dark eyes are focused intently on Jackie, not unkindly, but with full awareness and attention.
"It wasn't what I did, exactly. Not exactly. It was more because of who I was." She thinks for a moment. "Because of who I am. And something that happened to me."
She lowers her head a moment, takes a breath, and then looks up at these two people she had already come to like quite a bit. She is once again reminded of the simple fact that the act of coming out is something that never stops happening. As many times as she’s had conversations like this, each time it still feels slightly new and different. Every time, especially with people she thinks could become friends, there is a frisson of fear that perhaps she's judged incorrectly, and that this time she might experience the kind of rejection she had lived through at the hands of her family so many years before.
She looks up at them and plunges ahead, knowing in her heart that the only way out is through. She has to push forward and trust, regardless of the outcome. She is who she is, and it’s non-negotiable. Plus, she thinks she can trust these two people. And, she thinks, my tesseract is public on CascadiaNet. If they did any research about me, they already know.
"I'm trans.” she says simply. Laxmi smiles a small smile and gives a tiny encouraging nod, bless her. Doug glances quickly at the crotch of her jeans, and then even more quickly away, and a blush creeps into his cheeks.
Jackie pulls the hem of her jacket down, hating both his reaction, and her reaction to it. She should be used to “The Sneaky Glance” by now, but it bothers her that this is a common reaction from non-trans guys. She’s not judging him, yet, but it is a small red flag.
Jackie pauses to gather her thoughts, and then continues, “And, you know, despite what the government of Deseret says in official propaganda about how well it treats queer people, and about how everyone is welcome in the church...” She shakes her head. “Well...it's not true. I can tell you, as much as I wished it were at one time, it's just not true."
She stops, seeing the thoughts racing behind their eyes and relaxing, because what she doesn’t see is hate, or unkindness of any kind.
"I was kicked out of my family at ten. I lived on the streets for a couple of years, and thank the gods and little fishes, somehow I didn't die, or get murdered, or catch some horrible disease. It's a...complicated and kind of ridiculous story, but when I was thirteen I was smuggled into Cascadia, and I've been here ever since. I was granted asylum in '31, got my citizenship in '33, went to school, came out, and graduated from here", nodding her head towards the campus, "in '36, and pretty much immediately got a gig at a startup, and then two years ago joined on with Arachnio, where I worked until just a couple of months ago."
She smiles shyly at them and takes another bite of her falafel, chewing thoughtfully.
She says with a hint of initial sarcasm, "Lucky for me, living on the streets taught me how to be scrappy, and frugal, and just generally not to trust anyone, so I 'diversified'", she made funny air quotes with her right hand, "and between that and some 'ranger gigs, I'm in an okay spot for the moment."
"So you don't need our job, is that what you're saying?" asks Doug, looking at her directly. Jackie chokes on a sip of water.
"What?! No! I want this gig so bad!" Oh, shit, she thinks, did I just screw this up?
Laxmi hits Doug in the arm, with not an inconsiderable amount of force. "Douglas!" she hisses at him, "Stop! She's lovely and you're scaring her!"
Doug seems to realize that his deadpan humor had genuinely shocked Jackie. He reaches out a hand and very gently touches her forearm.
"Oh, shit, Jackie, I'm so sorry. Sometimes I use humor when I’m feeling awkward. I'm totally kidding. You're awesome. We really like you. We're dying to have you on the team."
"Really?" says Jackie, once again taken aback, but now for a very different reason.
"Well, great Doug, now you've gone full opposite, and given away all of our negotiating power and shown her how desperately we want her." says Laxmi with fake disdain, rolling her eyes at them.
Doug put on a funny face that seems to suddenly radiate condescension. In a snooty voice that sounds eerily like Laxmi, he says, "What I meant to say was that, even though you're, you know, a Husky, we think your skills are just barely adequate for our purposes."
Jackie looks quizzically at Laxmi, who rolls her eyes once again.
"Don't mind him, he's a Duck, and given the chance, will expound ad nauseum on all of the ways in which Whilamut is the superior school. Regardless of where we currently live and work, mind you."
"So....I've got the job?" Jackie says with a hint of disbelief. “I’ve barely told you about my skills, and you haven’t told me anything about the project yet.”
Laxmi grins at her, and her smile is echoed on Doug’s face. “Well, we’re not complete slouches at research, so the secret truth is we know quite a bit about you already, for the first part.” She pauses and looks around at the bustle of the grimy restaurant dining room, as if assessing every person in the place with a quick scan. Jackie notices, modulates the grin on her face, and sits up a bit straighter, looking around as well. “And this isn’t the place to talk about our project. Why don’t we all go back to the lab?”
Jackie is a bit dazed at the speed of this, but nods in return.
Laxmi continues, "So let’s say provisionally you've got the job, unless what we tell you makes you want to run away screaming.” She flashes another warm smile at Jackie. “Welcome to team.....well...fuck....we don't have a name for the team yet. Item one for our list, Jackie: help us come up with a name!"
As they step into the lab, Jackie notes a couple of things right up front. First, the lab is smaller and older than she was expecting. She had imagined that university science labs would be sleek and sterile, packed with modern equipment. This is neither sleek nor sterile, but it’s not messy, per se. It’s just very, very full of stuff. All of it seems to be organized, and there are elements of it that look to have a purpose. Every space is filled with neat agglomerations of items that look like they’ve been arranged based on some kind of system that she just can’t quite identify at first glance.
There’s a stack of copper wire -- a hugely expensive stack of copper, given market prices -- that’s arranged by gauge and size of the roll. Then a stack of computer components that she mostly recognizes, which seem to be arranged roughly by type and year. Back against the far wall, under the row of high windows, there are larger machines in various states of dismantling. Refrigerators and microwaves, plus several things that look like air compressors. Stacks of power backup batteries, some of which are opened in ways that she knows mean they’re never safe to use again.
But what catches her eye most is the art on the wall. Some of it is ridiculous science poster gag art. Jokes made with the table of elements, various conjugations of the word “fuck”, and a version of Drake’s Equation that seems to imply that no two scientists who understand a complex concept exist at the same time and can communicate.
Interspersed between all of that, there are images of genuine art and beauty. Klimt and Chagall, next to deep space images from the legendary Hubble and Webb telescopes. An image of Saturn in full beringed glory that she’s seen before, but never blown up to the size on the wall across from her.
And of course, the math. There are at least ten whiteboards of various sizes in the lab -- and one very old chalkboard—and on all of them, scribbles of math that are as far beyond Jackie as she imagines the deepest levels of her code skills might be beyond these two.
In the very middle of the room there’s a solid workbench, with an old faux-marble laminate top that has seen better days. Between the graffiti etched into it, and the scorch marks, it’s hard to determine what the original color once was, but the surface itself is clean, and free from any obstructions other than one battered laptop that Laxmi has just pulled from her bag.
The three of them pull up stools around the table, and Laxmi and Doug look at her.
“Welcome home! It ain’t much, but it’s ours.”
“I love it.” Says Jackie simply, and it’s true. It has a homey feel to it that she hadn’t imagined a lab could have, and she can already tell that it’s going to be a comfortable place to work.
She holds up her hand. “Before we get started, I have something I want to share with you both.”
Doug and Laxmi trade a glance and look at her with raised eyebrows.
Jackie reaches into her coat pocket with a flourish and pulls out a small object, which she sets reverently on the counter in front of them.
“Allow me to present to you my first contribution to our team. Honest to god, real chocolate.”
Laxmi squeals with delight, and Doug looks at her with amazement.
“Real chocolate?!” Doug shouts. Jackie nods solemnly.
“Real chocolate. From the official chocolatier to the King of Hawai’i, if you can believe it!”
Doug and Laxmi are looking at her like she’s a miracle worker.
“What? How?” says Laxmi, as if she has forgotten language and can only remember these basic words.
“Wellllll...I was hoping that I’d get the job, and figured I should have something with me to celebrate in case I did. I’ve been saving this for a special occasion, and this seems about as special as it gets. So. I’d like to share this as a token of my esteem. My first contribution to Team Awesome.”
“Nice try with the name, but we really do need to come up with something better than that.” Says Doug.
“We really do.” Nods Laxmi. “But, chocolate!”
Jackie motions to Laxmi. “Laxmi, why don’t you do the honors?”
Laxmi sits up straighter, as if she’s just been granted a ladyship, and reaches for the chocolate bar as if it might either bite her or disappear in a puff of smoke before she lifts it delicately off the table.
“Well, I don’t mind if I do! Two-thirds for me, one-third for both of you. To share.” She jokes.
“Hey!” says Doug, gesturing as if he’s about to snatch the bar out of her hands.
Laxmi opens the chocolate bar, slowly peeling back the paper and foil with reverence. She lifts it to her nose and takes a deep inhale of the aroma.
“Oh my gods. Real, actual chocolate. It’s been so long. I can’t believe it.”
Setting the unwrapped bar on the counter, she quickly snaps it into shards of roughly equal size.
“Alright, everyone, take a piece.” She instructs. Doug and Jackie reach out and each take a piece of chocolate. Doug holds his out to toast the other two, and says, “Here’s to Team Insert Name Here!”
They gently touch pieces together, as if clinking glasses, and then each gets lost for a moment in the sheer delight of true, rich, dark chocolate.
After a minute or two, they all reach out and take another piece, once again toasting each other and touching the pieces together in a sort of ritual.
“You know,” says Laxmi, “I remember before the Crash and the Smash how fucking easy it was to get chocolate. It was everywhere. There were little corner markets all over town, and each one had a candy section so big it had thirty or forty different kinds of chocolate. It was quite mad, really.”
She pauses and takes another small piece and places it reverently in her mouth.
“One year, when I was six or seven, we dressed up for Halloween and went down to the old mall, and wandered from store to store, and I tell you every place we went handed us chocolate. Then we went home and went trick or treating in our neighborhood, and each house had a giant bag of candy to hand out. My sister, Parvati, ate so much candy that night that she threw up.”
Doug and Jackie are nodding along, as if this is the most fascinating thing they’ve ever heard.
“I remember trick-or-treating.” Says Doug, wistfully.
Jackie shakes her head ruefully. “I don’t. That wasn’t allowed in Deseret. But I have eaten more Jello than any one person should ever be allowed to eat.”
Laxmi opens her eyes from the momentary chocolate reverie she’d been lost in, and then sighs, and runs her palms across the tabletop as if clearing away workspace.
“So, you know some of the details from the job description I sent you the other day. Later today, I’ll send you the total compensation package info. As it is with the University, I’m afraid it’s not what you’re used to, nor is it very negotiable.”
Laxmi looks at Jackie as if this information is going to scare her away. Jackie nods and holds her gloved hand up to cover her chocolate-stained teeth.
“I get it Laxmi. None of that is a surprise to me. Like I said, I’m a saver, so I can make it work.”
Laxmi’s smile returns full force, as if someone has brightened the sun by half. She gives a little clap and then pops another small piece of chocolate in her mouth.
“Excellent! I’ll do the stuff on my end to let personnel know that you’re the winning candidate. You can start tomorrow, if that works for you, as we’re informal, but in a bit of a rush.
“I’m sorry for being a bit cagey about the nature of the projects earlier, but in truth, a big part of the reason we want someone with your skills is because...” she pauses for a moment, not sure how to express the concept without sounding like a bit of a crank.
“We’re trying to do something really big. Not big size-wise, not yet, but big in terms of science. Like so big that it would be revolutionary.” Laxmi says.
Doug jumps in, “Nobel Prize big. All the prizes, really. Like, billions of reais big. Big big big.” Laxmi shoots him a look that says shut up and get a grip, and yes, probably all at the same time.
Doug stops, shrugs a half-apology, and Laxmi continues.
“We need privacy. Like, extreme privacy. Here in the lab, and in all of our comms. We need to build something that has a control system that is nigh unto unhackable, with levels of security control around it that not even the Feds can mess with. Everything I’ve learned about you makes me think that you are someone we can trust.” She levels a gaze on Jackie that reads as her I’m not bullshitting face.
“So, last chance to back out. If you accept now, a million kinds of confidentiality apply, effective immediately. Once you say yes, I’ll read you in.”
She holds her hand out to Jackie, ready to solemnize the occasion with a handshake. Doug, being Doug, pulls out his phone and begins to record. He intones in something that sounds like a game-show host voice.
“Are you, Jackie Lennox, hereby ready to accept the offer to be on Team Awesome, real name to be determined later in a fabulous contest, working with me, Doug Finkel and the incomparable Laxmi Sengupta, forever pledging yourself to the utmost secrecy in the name of Almighty Science, so help you gods of your choice?”
Laxmi is rolling her eyes so hard that Jackie momentarily fears they might actually get stuck that way, and Jackie reaches out her hand.
She pauses for a beat, looks at her gloves, and then begins to pull her hand back. Putting on an ancient Valley Girl vocal fry, Jackie says, “Actually you guys, this all sounds really hard, so I think I’m going to, like, go home and brush my hair and stuff.”
Laxmi cracks up, and Doug is shaking with laughter so hard that whatever he’s capturing on video is going to be indiscernible. Jackie’s face splits into a grin, and she throws her head back and releases a truly magnificent laugh, something like a cross between a bark and a honk, and so loud that if anyone else were in the building, they would undoubtedly come running to look for the wild goose-dogs.
As everyone settles down and wipes the tears from their eyes, Jackie sticks her hand back out to Laxmi. Laxmi takes Jackie’s hand in her own, and they shake.
“I, Jackie Anne Lennox, do hereby swear that I am accepting the terms to join Team Awesome, and abide by all codes of silence, no matter how abstract or obscure, so help me Great Spirit.”
“Yay!” says Doug, and pulls them both in for an awkward hug over the tabletop. “Now we have a fam-bly!” After the short but genuine hug, the three of them sit back.
“OK, so that’s wonderful. Why don’t we take a moment while I’ll pull up some documents for you to sign, and then we can well and truly indoctrinate you into the great mystery of our work, and how we are going to change the world together,” says Laxmi.
Jackie arches an eyebrow at the “change the world” line, but nods, excitement growing within her. Shan was right, she thinks. I really do need to be working on the next big thing to truly be happy.
There is old-school Bollywood music playing in the background, from an apparently inexhaustible playlist that Laxmi has queued up on the music server in the lab. Jackie is lost in momentary wonder at what she’s heard in the last hour.
Has it only been an hour? She wonders. It doesn’t seem possible. New music and the mindblowing information Laxmi and Doug are sharing with her have made time stretch and warp like the summertime taffy her mother used to make in what seemed like a different life.
“So, I...I just need to go over this again, from the top.” Jackie says during a lull in the music. “This”, she says, motioning to the whiteboard and the laptop that has been the focus of their world recently, “this came to you in a dream?” She tries to keep the incredulity and doubt out of her voice, but she suspects that she doesn’t succeed.
Laxmi trades a look with Doug and nods at Jackie.
“Look, I know it sounds absolutely, stark-raving mad, but it’s not completely unheard of...”
Jackie interjects, “As in, ‘oh look, I dreamt of an ouroboros and now I’ve discovered the shape of benzene?’”
Laxmi laughs, a sound of genuine mirth, “Yes! And points to you for knowing that story. Exactly that. But seriously, think about it, I’d been working for years on exotic and quantum materials for Helios 2, and,” she shrugs, an elaborate motion that seems to include her whole body, “I don’t know. My subconscious put some things together and showed it to me in a dream.”
“Where you saw an equation named after you in a book from the future?”
“I mean, sure. But it’s the most literal metaphor you can possibly think of isn’t it? Like, Dream Laxmi was saying ‘Hey, Waking Laxmi, here’s the next thing for you to work on.’”
“And then you came in here and wrote the math down and tried it, and it worked.”
Laxmi nods, and then hesitates, and waggles both of her hands in equivocation. “Well, sort of. I wrote down what I could remember, and over about a month, I worked out a lot of the rest. And not here, we didn’t have this lab yet. And it changed as I was working on it. I think.”
“And it’s an infinite distance quantum-entangled communicator of some kind?” Jackie has followed most of the information, but the math had become progressively more esoteric, and she wasn’t sure she had fully digested the impact of what they were telling her.
Jackie looks back and forth between the two, and has a moment where she’s sure she’s missing some kind of telepathic communication. Something gets decided, and Laxmi suddenly stands up and starts pacing.
“OK, don’t freak out. Let me show you something on the laptop.” As she says this, Doug is pulling up some kind of simulation program on the old machine.
“Yes, originally I thought this was a way to create a q-matter object with certain quantum properties that would maintain entanglement when the material was split into two halves. And then information could be passed between the two, regardless of distance.” Doug has pressed buttons, and a simulated object gets created on the screen, splits in two, and the two halves float to opposite sides of the screen. The halves blip in unison, as if Morse code or binary pulses are sent between them. “It’s pretty standard stuff, at least in terms of quantum properties. Imagine very long-distance phones, because I originally thought you’d be able to cram a fairly dense datastream through them.”
Jackie nods at this, because it’s true: what she knows about quantum entanglement covers this basic element -- the idea of information being passed regardless of distance.
“But then as I was playing with the maths...I realized that if you created a torus of the material, and split it precisely while running a high-energy current through it, what you’d get would be an aperture of any width through which any normal-matter object could pass through the opening while traversing zero internal distance, regardless of the physical distance of the ring halves themselves.”
Doug has pressed more buttons, and on the screen, indeed, a glowing blue torus has been created, then halved, with each half sent to opposite sides of the screen. This time, a green three-dimensional cube approaches the half on the right side of the screen, and passes through, instantly popping out of the left half without crossing the middle of the screen.
Laxmi and Doug are watching her, eagle-eyed, and she’s trying not to gape at the screen. “So...you’ve invented...what? Portals? Stargates?” she leans forward dramatically, “Have you invented Stargates?!”
Laxmi claps, delighted. “Yes! Yes! I mean, no, not Stargates...not really, not exactly. But portals, yes! Or quantum doors...or I don’t know! I don’t know what we’ll call them, and there are some huge limits.”
Laxmi is glowing, caught up in the thrill of revealing her discovery. The music in the background has shifted to a plaintive love song, and it is dissonant to the mood of the room, a sorrowful longing at odds with the astonishment inside of Jackie.
Jackie shakes her head as if waking from a reverie, and purses her lips to blow out the lungful of air she didn’t realize she’d been holding in an accidental off-tune whistle.
“Laxmi, this is amazing. Truly incredible. But, I have to ask...why do you need me? I mean...I can follow the math up to a point, but...I’m a software engineer and modeler, and maybe on the downlow a decent white hat, but this...” She motions towards the screen, and shrugs halfway through, as if she’s making a half-assed attempt to throw a ball. She looks at Doug.
“You were right. It’s big, big, big.”
Doug shoots a finger at Jackie, pointing, “See!? I told you!”
Laxmi grins at her. “So, you’re not going to run away screaming?”
Jackie laughs, and again Doug seems startled at the sound, while it just makes Laxmi smile even wider.
“I’m not running away screaming, but my mind is blown, a little. And again, I’m not sure how I can help.”
Laxmi nods. She holds up a hand and starts ticking items off her list.
“One, I need top-level security in here. The plans only exist on this one ancient laptop that I take everywhere with me, and I erase the maths from the board every night when I leave. I need an ultra-safe place to work. I need somewhere to store this where I’m sure no-one can hack it. Not even the Feds.
“Two, the devices are going to need robust control mechanisms. For one thing, they need a steady supply of constant power.” She pauses as if she’s debating adding more detail. Jackie interjects.
“But I’m not an electrical engineer.”
“But I am,” interrupts Doug. “I can do the fancy wiring. Bad jokes and fancy wiring are my contribution to Team Awesome. But we need strong, proprietary software to control the devices.”
Jackie nods at this; it makes sense. “Like to switch the portal from Paris, Texas, to Paris, France kind of thing?”
Laxmi sighs a little and shakes her head. “No, actually. Sorry, we didn’t cover that part yet. I said there were some limitations, and they’re fairly hard and fast ones, at that.
“Once the portal pair gets created, they are permanently locked to each other, and only each other, and only if there is a constant flow of power to both devices.”
“What happens if one or both lose power?” Jackie asks, bracing herself for the worst.
Laxmi and Doug trade a glance. “Nothing,” says Laxmi.
“Nothing?”
“Well, that’s just it. If one or both lose power completely, they lose the entanglement. It just stops and can’t be turned back on. Look, imagine the pair has three states.
“There’s on, which means they’re both at full power, and the aperture is open between them. Full power varies, by the way, on the size of the portal, and not the distance. Big portals take more, etcetera.
“Then there’s a low-power state, which means that the aperture isn’t open between them, but they’re still connected in a quantum entangled state.
“And then there’s off. Completely unpowered, on one or both, which is a disaster, because it means they’ve lost entanglement, and no matter how much power you dump into them afterwards, you can’t get it back. You just then have very expensive loops of manufactured diamond.”
“Diamond?”
Laxmi nods, and holds her hand back up, with two fingers out, and raises a third. “And that gets me back to my list. Three-dee printing techniques have gotten pretty advanced, but the means to print what we need exists only in one place, and it isn’t here. Number three is that I need help from someone. Someone very specific.
“There’s a guy I met once, and have been in touch with over the years, who I think can help. His name is Caleb Sims, and he’s my peer at Caltech. I need him to review the maths with me, and if it works, he has access to the only set of equipment I know of that can make test runs of this stuff.”
“And you need me...” Jackie starts.
“I need you because I need to talk to Caleb secretly, in a completely unhackable and untraceable way.”
Jackie laughs again, but in a gentler way. She runs her gloves through her hair, vaguely conscious that this is her tell.
“Look. I’m in, alright? I signed your agreements, and this is so fucking huge I can’t walk away now. But you know what you’re asking, right?”
Laxmi nods.
“The NCR is our ally. But if we’re caught communicating scientific secrets from a research lab across national borders, for something so revolutionary...” She trails off for a moment, “If they catch us, we’ll likely be charged with treason.”
Jackie can see the color rising in Doug’s face, and Laxmi’s warm brown eyes have taken on a hard sheen. They look at each other, and then they both look up at her, nodding.
“We know. We’ve talked about it. We know what we’re doing. And we have to do this. I can’t just walk away from this. God, or the Universe, or Shiva, or Ganesha, or my namesake, or whoever gave this thing to me in a dream, and it’s real, and we can make it work. I can’t hand it over. It’s mine. I have to do it.” The steel in Laxmi’s voice matches the hard determination in her eyes.
Doug is nodding. “And I go where she goes,” he says simply.
Jackie looks back and forth between them. Well, fuck, she thinks. I wanted something big, and this could not be any bigger.
The music in the background shifts to something wild and upbeat and celebratory, a howl of joy turned into a song. It seems fitting. She grins at her two new friends and colleagues, and she knows there’s a wildness in her smile that matches the hype of the song.
“OK, then. Let’s do this. Let’s break some rules and change the world.”
«Chapter 4 - Sharon | Chapter 5 - Jackie| Chapter 6 - Jake»
Lawrence, I love this story. I love the characters, the setting, everything!