“Anything?” Mateo asked.
“Nothing,” Leona replied.
“Where could they possibly be?” he went on. “You need at least three people
to make the new slingdrives work, if it even works at all.”
“Maybe he was wrong about it,” Olimpia offered. “Maybe it works with only
two.”
“We should still be able to detect them,” Leona reasoned, “wherever and
whenever they are.”
“Unless they’re shrouded in dark particles,” Mateo pointed out.
“Yeah, that’s my hypothesis,” Leona agreed, “but Ramses’ systems are being
finicky with me. I technically have access, but it’s...argh!” She didn’t
want to have to explain the complexities of it all, and she didn’t have to.
“If it is dark particles, you know who we can call,” Angela said.
“Won’t work,” Marie countered as she was walking back in from the other
room. “Buddy was here. He disappeared with them.”
“How do you know?” Leona questioned. “The surveillance was garbled.”
“I didn’t look at the footage from the lab. I looked at the recordings from
the drone in Dome 216.” She lifted her hands, and projected a hologram of
the video recordings from Dome 216 last year. They could see Buddy standing
there with Romana and Ramses. There was no sound, and it wasn’t detailed
enough to read their lips, but their body language appeared
nonconfrontational. None of the others remembered experiencing angry
emotions from this moment, though there was some agitation leading up to it,
if they were remembering correctly. As the three of them were standing there
in the desert, the dark particle creature appeared out of nowhere, and
seemingly tried to kill Buddy. It kind of looked like Romana was trying to
save him, further reenforcing the idea that they were not at odds at this
moment. Marie closed the hologram with a drop of her hands after the
creature grabbed Romana and disappeared, and the other two left, presumably
to rescue her.
“You gotta fix that machi—” Mateo began.
“I know,” Leona interrupted. Then she sighed. “I’m sorry.”
“I know that you love her too,” Mateo acknowledged. “I’m just sick of
worrying about her.”
“I don’t think that ever goes away,” Olimpia said.
“There’s another possible way to find her,” Angela began. “Maybe we don’t
need Buddy. Ramses has given us all we need.”
“You wanna use the tandem slingdrives, and hope that they take us where
we’re trying to go, even though we don’t know where exactly that is,” Leona
guessed.
“If it doesn’t work, we’ll try again,” Angela reasoned. “If we can’t
navigate back here for another attempt, it probably means that it never
mattered if we knew where they were, because they’re probably out of range,
and the tandem slingdrives don’t work right.”
Leona sighed, and looked back over to the screen. The computer was trying to
find them just as it had when Buddy abducted Romana years ago. “I don’t know
if this thing is good enough. That seems to be an entire person made out of
dark particles. It could be orders of magnitude more powerful than the
stasis field that Buddy put Romana in before.”
“Is that a yes?” Angela asked.
“I would have preferred to test the tandem slingdrives in a more controlled
situation, but you make a good point that that doesn’t really exist. The
whole purpose of these things is to push the boundaries of intergalactic
travel. If we get lost, that was always going to be the result, and we’ll be
no further from locating Rambo and Romana than we are now.”
“The great thing about these suits he made for us, we’re never not ready to
go.” Mateo mused.
Olimpia interlocked her arm with his. “As long as we have each other.”
“They could be in a harsh environment,” Leona warned. “Suit up.”
Mateo released his emergent nanites, and commanded them to turn mostly
green. He now looked strikingly like Green Arrow. When Leona looked at him
funny, he shrugged and said, “she loved this show.”
“She had time to watch it?” Leona questioned.
Marie looked at the time readout on her interface. “Eleven, ten, nine...”
Everyone shut themselves up safe in vacuum mode, though Mateo kept the
superhero costume on over it to keep things light. If he didn’t laugh, he
would cry. No one lost track of their children as many times as he had.
Put a bell on her, he thought to himself. Well, she had a bell. A
psychic bonding bell, which should always let them know where the other one
was. These dark particles were incredibly frustrating, and how funny it
should be that they would come into their lives around the time the quantum
connection was too. Their fates were sealed, whether they were aware of it
or not.
Marie finished counting down, and they all slung away, concentrating on
nothing but Ramses and Romana’s location. It looked like they were still in
the lab, but it was very different. It was a hell of a lot darker, and these
flashlights that looked like forearm weapons weren’t doing them much good.
They couldn’t make out any details in the room around them, it just had the
vague shape of everything back home. The right angles of the tables, desks,
and chairs; the curve of the gestational pods in the corner; the height of
the ceiling. They were here, but not here, kind of like the Upside Down.
Everything was just a shadow of its true self, nothing more than a slight
hint of its presence. Shadows, really. They could call this a shadow realm.
It was very much like that in more ways than one. This was seemingly where
the dark particles lived. They were swarming all around them, not paying the
humans much attention, but clearly aware of their sudden appearance, however
complex their intelligence might be.
Something was coming at them from the darkness. It was moving steadily, and
maybe a little threateningly, but not too quickly. Before it reached them,
it split in two. Shortly after that, they could be recognized as people;
people wearing EmergentSuits. It was Ramses and Romana. Nice, it worked.
Ramses took Mateo by the hand. He was already holding Romana’s. She took
Marie’s, and together with everyone else, they completed the circle. With
nothing more than a sense of homesickness, and no words exchanged, they
reactivated the tandem slingdrives, and left this place as quickly as they
had come. They were back in the lab; the real lab, complete with
light and solid objects.
Ramses collapsed his helmet, and fell to his knees, sliding on the floor a
few centimeters. At first, they thought he was hurt, but he was positively
ecstatic. He was laughing and crying simultaneously, holding his arms up and
to the side like he had just won Olympic gold, panting, both relieved and
proud. No one had a clue what was going on. Romana was just as perplexed as
the rest. “Oh my God. Yes! Yes! That’s it! I finally figured it out! I saw
it! Me! Well, Romana and I, but I understand it. Whew!” he whooped.
“What happened in there?” Mateo asked his daughter.
“I don’t really know,” she replied. “We couldn’t talk, but he was super
excited the whole time. He kept tapping on the interface modules of his
suit. I’m guessing he was taking readings, but who knows?”
Ramses was still laughing. “Yeah. I was taking readings, all right.” He
stood up, all giddy and cheerful. “I know what it is. I know what it
all is.” He squealed. “I have to write it down.” He rushed to find
the nearest device.
“Care to share with the class?” Leona asked.
“Yes, class first. Then the paper.” He clapped, then started gesturing with
his hands as he prepared his remarks. “Neutrinos.”
“Neutrinos?” Leona echoed. “Are you saying that that’s what the dark
particles are?” She didn’t seem to believe him. She was the only one who was
following him even remotely.
“Yes.” Oh, Ramses was still so jazzed about this whole thing, whatever it
was.
“That doesn’t make any sense. They’re subatomic particles. You can’t see
them.”
“I was wrong,” Ramses went on. He kept talking with his hands. “I thought
that they were lifeforms, which were replicating, but that’s not it. They
don’t breed, they congregate. They form masses. They’re
like...snowflakes; water adhering to a mote of dust, and clumping together
until it becomes too heavy to stay up.”
“So, a dark particle isn’t a neutrino. It’s billions of neutrinos.”
“Exactly. But not like water forming on a mote of dust—”
“You literally just said that that’s what it’s like,” Angela reminded him.
“I know, but not really,” Ramses insisted. “It’s more like...a whole bunch
of neutrinos who happen to be on the same trajectory as each other. They
emit some kind of energy. Individually, it’s negligible, but combined, we
can actually see it. We perceive it. It’s dark, because neutrinos don’t
interact with photons very well either, but these bursts of energy, firing
in rapid succession, do occasionally repel light like a solid object would.
Again, it appears dark, because it’s a minuscule amount, but it is
technically visible. For fractions of a second, but as I said, when they get
close enough to each other, these bursts are happening all the time.
Normally, you don’t see it, because we can’t see the neutrino dimension, but
Buddy can...call them forth.” He pointed while adding, “and so can Romana.”
He was talking real fast, but no one bothered to ask him to slow down,
because they didn’t understand him either way. Except for Leona. She knew
what he was saying, she just couldn’t believe it. She crossed her
arms, but didn’t say anything else for now.
“So, they’re not alive?” Romana asked.
“No, as I said, I was wrong. They just seemed to be that way, because
baryonic matter freaks them out. No, that’s personifying them again. They’re
not used to baryonic matter, because they usually pass right through it, but
in these clumps, and with some sort of weird charge that Buddy can
artificially generate, they do find themselves running into us.”
“That doesn’t make any sense either,” Leona pointed out. “The particles move
around people. That requires some level of sentience.”
“Yeah, I was thinking about that. I don’t think they’re diverting with any
semblance of intent. I think as soon as this energy comes into contact with
normal matter, they split off into different directions, ultimately
colliding with other clusters, and forming new temporary trajectory masses.
It only looks to us like they’re swarming, because we can’t effectively
track one clump at a time. They don’t have to hit us directly, because a
sufficiently concentrated layer of air is all around us at all times. To us,
it’s meaningless, but it’s like a wall to them. I thought they were
disappearing and reappearing, and I was sort of right. They don’t hold
together for very long, but they do form clumps constantly during this
charged condition. I would really love to get my hands on Buddy, and see how
he does it. I may have learned all I can from Romana.”
“Where is Buddy, by the way?” Olimpia asked. “We saw you with him on
the drone cam in Dome 216.”
Ramses brushed it off. “Oh, I dunno, we lost him in there. He could still be
trapped for all I know, or he knew exactly how to escape. I’m sure he’ll
show up again at some point.”
“Hold on,” Leona said, still unconvinced. “Where were we? What was that
place? The neutrino dimension? That’s where they live? Why? Seems random.”
“It’s not,” Ramses continued his lesson. “Let’s say you have a vacuum-sealed
room with two doors. There’s a screen door, and then the fully sealed door.
When you open the sealing door, only the screen door remains, which allows
the air to rush through the screen, and into the room. That’s because nature
abhors a vacuum. As you know, neutrinos don’t interact with
electromagnetism, or the strong nuclear force. The dimensional barrier is
apparently made up of one or both of these, which is why the neutrinos pass
into it. It’s just like entropy, where a state of order naturally flows into
a state of disorder. It wasn’t made for neutrinos specifically, but
those are the particles that go into it, because nothing can stop them. And
they don’t usually come back out, because there’s so much space in there.”
Romana tapped on her arm interface. “Yeah, that was my interpretation too.”
She lifted her arm up. “That’s what it says here, neutrino clumps.”
Mateo laughed. “You’re adorable. Like a young me.”
“Why are you dressed like Green Arrow?” she asked.
“Why aren’t you dressed like Speedy?”
