Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 13 - Bar Talk

Photo by Pradnyal Gandhi on Unsplash

“What has Becca said?” Tabitha asked pointedly.

“Well,” Frankie started.  “We haven’t said much of anything to each other lately, not that it’s much of your business. But I haven’t much of a clue of where things currently stand in your laboratory in recent days, which is why I’m here now.  But I’ll let you in on a secret.”

Sam took a drink from his beer and then wiped his lip.

Frankie thought for a moment, pondering whether he should share what was threatening to slide off of his Scotch-tainted tongue.  Then, as if coming to some sort of agreement with himself, he nodded, emptied the rest of his drink, and continued speaking.

“You haven’t been working on what you think you’ve been working on,” Frankie said.  “I think that’s fair to say.”

“I knew it,” Tabitha hissed, and clinched her right hand into an angry fist.

“What does that mean?” Sam squeaked. Sam always got drunk too easily, proclaimed his love to women he just met too readily, and argued too incessantly.  

Sam was an annoying drunk, and after two hours of drinking, Sam was now well past tipsy.

Frankie stopped for a moment and sized up Sam once again, re-evaluating the situation.  Sam’s shirt was wrinkled and partially untucked.  The kid was in desperate need of a haircut and a proper shave.  Just a youngster.  Of course he’d be confused.  Becca was no fool. A kid like this would do as he was told. 

What these three scientists at the table with Frankie didn’t know was that even though it was completely forbidden, Dr. Becca Watts regularly took photos of their laboratory work projects on her phone. And what Becca didn’t know, nor did Frankie ever tell her, was that these same photos were automatically uploaded to Internet cloud storage which was then automatically synchronized with the desktop computer in the living room she shared with Frankie. 

Given their broken communication in recent years, Becca’s work photos were oftentimes the only way Frankie was clued into what was going on in her life. 

Frankie recognized all three of them, as well as a few others currently imbibing in the Einstein’s Tavern, from a group photo that had caught Frankie’s eye some months prior. In it, Becca proudly stood in the middle of a gaggle of scientists in matching white lab coats.  In that particular photo, as everyone faced the camera with smiles on their lips, this kid — this Dr. Sam Hollander — was staring at Becca with a smitten look that Frankie recognized all too well.

“Your boss has a habit of saying one thing and then doing another,” Frankie told them.  “She never quite shows all her cards, if you know what I mean. And if she did, I’m certain there are enough of you Black Hole Gang members over there at ENH who would probably want to stop her if you knew exactly what she has in mind to do.”

“I still don’t understand,” Sam said. “You’re saying she was working on something else? How could she be working on something else while still doing all we’re actually doing to advance transdimensional and lightspeed travel?”

“Because I reckon what she actually has in mind has been in the works since before you were probably first learning how to quit crapping your diapers,” Frankie said. 

Sam crossed his arms and said nothing.

“Now, I’m just an architect and no brainiac like the lot of you,” Frankie said, “but I’ve got a better understanding of what all you do than most laymen.”

“Wormholes, though?” Drake asked.  “That’s what you said, Tabitha.  Seriously? Transchronological transportation?  Time travel? That’s all just theoretical.”

“We’ve been working on lightspeed travel,” Sam said. “Not time travel.”

“Obviously, that’s not the case,” Tabitha said.  “You know the theories.  Wormholes are all around us.  That much is certain.  They’re in your drinking glass.  On the bar.  In the air around us.” She animatedly waved her hands around. “All these surfaces look smooth to the human eye, but our senses deceive us. This is basic physics. You both know that.  All around us, this table, the wall, the smoothest of surfaces, have tiny crevices. The air, time itself, have these same pores, tiny wormholes a billionth of the size of perceptibility.”

She reached across and gently flicked Sam’s pint glass with her index finger, making a tiny hollow clink. 

“Your glass looks and feels completely smooth and sealed,” Tabitha said.  “But put it under a microscope and you see bumps and holes and pores that look as big as the Grand Canyon.”

“I’m not going to be traveling through time in my glass of beer, though,” Sam said.

“The theory,” Frankie interjected, “at least according to Becca, that is, is that if you could somehow grab hold of one of the bumps and holes and pores as our lovely Dr. Small here…”

Tabitha cleared her throat uncomfortably. 

“Tabitha,” she said.  

“Tabitha, right,” Frankie said.  “The Large Hadron Collider woman. As she says, then it’s plausible that if you could somehow grab one of these holes, no matter the size, particularly a hole on a particle floating in the environment itself, and if you could somehow have enough pull to expand and extract and amplify that particle’s bits, you would expand the mass of something that originally had limited mass, thereby making it unlimited.”

“You know an awful lot about this stuff for an architect,” Sam said.

“Four decades with someone will do that to you,” Frankie said. 

“We all know this theory,” Drake interjected.  “If we manipulated these holes, enlarged them, we could theoretically bend time.  That’s her plan, then?”

“But it takes two black holes,” Frankie said.  “You haven’t even made one yet.  But I imagine that’s what she’s always saying you’re close on.”

“Actually…” Sam said, and then stopped himself when the thought of his fifty-page non-disclosure agreement came to mind.  “Never mind.”

“Have you, then?” Frankie asked, his eyebrows raising up.  All three scientists at the table looked down at the table.

“Well, there you go, then,” Frankie said.  “Becca said once she had one, the other would be simple.  So she was close, after all. Sonofagun, she’s done it, then.”

“That’s why the rush, then?” Tabitha asked.

“Rush?” Frankie responded.

“We’ve all been sent home for the day and tomorrow we’re starting around-the-clock twelve-hour shifts.  That’s why we’re all here in the middle of the afternoon.”

“I’m sorry,” Sam interrupted.  “Again, this is all just theory.”

“It’s not, though,” Tabitha said.  “With our Large Hadron Collider, a second black hole could pull on the opposite side of the first and expose the unseen time rivulets.  And given the common black hole theories, where light and light speed — and thereby time — are manipulated, Becca could theoretically create a time ripple in a place where time once stood still.  She wouldn’t even need us there.  This could all be replicated in the same way she made the original black hole last night.”

“In other words, you would have the original particle on one end, and an extended exit of the particle on the other,” Drake said.  “A time differential floating in the middle of the room.”

“Boom,” Frankie said.  “There’s your time-traveling wormhole. And I imagine Becca’s still at her lab as we speak, putting on the finishing touches.”

Sam picked up his beer and downed the rest of the glass. 

“Wait a minute,” he said.  “You’re seriously saying she’s going to time travel?  Why?  And to when?”

“There’s only one way to find out,” Frankie said. He reached into his pocket, took out his phone, and began tapping away.

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash