Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 14 - Enter

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The runtime commands were only ten lines long.  Simple, efficient, and effective, unlike so much else in Becca’s life.  

Each individual command set off a series of more complex executable batch files.  These, in turn, generated multiple processes which Becca refined the previous night following the first successful black hole generation cycle.   

The original commands — before Becca’s modifications — had been around for years in the event of a massive power outage or something more catastrophic such as a terrorist electromagnetic pulse attack. Those original commands launched files containing instructions that primed ENH’s central generators, re-routed power to the core laboratory, and re-directed the half dozen other buildings on the ENH campus to temporarily operate off of the backup energy grid. 

The secondary commands — which Becca added the night before — now began the process of particle acceleration within ENH’s Large Hadron Collider.  Tabitha Small would ordinarily oversee any operations of this sort, as long as those operations were under the stringent specifications of ENH’s original purposes.  

What Becca now planned fell far away from that spectrum.   Therefore, she successfully ushered Dr. Small, as well as the rest of ENH’s employees, off-site long enough to accomplish what needed to be done next.  

There was a fine line, Becca believed, between altruism and selfishness. 

Her entire career, she liked to think her work was for the benefit of all mankind.  She’d prospered financially, of course, but the ultimate goal was the furtherance of humanity.  This, she knew, everyone at ENH agreed upon.

Where she may encounter resistance, however, were in the ideas that had lingered in the back of her head for the last several years, and grew in scope the more her life with Frankie was damaged.  It was in her subconscious, always at work, that the impetus of a more grand idea had cultivated, growing in size while her marriage was collapsing.  

True, time travel was never on the plans for ENH.  Becca wasn’t even entirely sure it was in her own plans.  She had her theories, but never until recently had she considered testing them.  What had been in her plans, however, was for Frankie to be there when she successfully ushered in a new era of transdimensional space travel.  They’d at least pop the cork on a bottle of champagne together.  She deserved at least that much, didn’t she?  Unfortunately, she’d fooled herself for too long into thinking Frankie’s patience was endless.

So now, with the successful creation of a manmade black hole — perhaps the greatest discovery in history by a woman — Becca’s certainty and confidence grew in the belief that a second black hole would not only allow for transdimensional travel but also the potential for time reversal.  

This, combined with the seemingly irreversible way her marriage was ending, was enough reason to put a new plan into play.

With that, she managed to empty out ENH buildings long enough to give her the opportunity to code the runtime sequence that would create the second black hole uninterrupted, unencumbered, and unchallenged by anyone else.  She would not only create the first black hole, as well as the second, but she’d be the first to go backward in time, reversing the errors of her marriage.

Becca sat at the launch terminal and carefully started entering the commands into the mainframe terminal.  The last two runtime commands, once entered, could not be reversed.  These set the entire series of monumental metaphorical dominoes toppling over, triggering a path that once started, could not be stopped. 

The ninth command would generate the actual black holes.  

But the last command, which would execute the longest set of protocols that Becca had poured over for the last three hours, would reposition the two black holes once the second was stabilized and put it into an opposite rotation from the first.

Becca had already entered the first nine commands when a text from Frankie popped up on her phone.  

Frankie hated texting.  Knowing this gave Becca pause.  

“If you want to say something to me, just hit the bloody call button,” he frequently ranted.  

“Texting is faster,” she’d rebutted more than once.

“They’re impersonal and impulsive,” Frankie would counter.  “Texts are like generic Valentine’s cards in elementary school.  You can’t communicate tone and intent in one hundred and forty characters.”

“If you’re at the store, it’s easier to text ‘get milk’ than it is to call,” she’d said.

“Can we just agree not to make this a primary form of communication?  Honestly, I feel like I’m playing a freaking video game when I’m punching out one of these damn messages.”

She’d already typed half of the tenth and final runtime command but that unread text from Frankie paralyzed her from entering the rest. Doing so would be the most challenging task of her career.  

She looked down at her phone.

“Let’s talk,” the message said.

If she completed that line, if she hit enter, there would be no need for talking.  If it worked, everything would change.  All of their fights from the last few months would be forgotten by everyone but her.  Everything would be reset for the good.  

If she engaged in his text, which she knew would end with him giving up and just calling her on the phone, it would lead to nothing more than another fight.

But if she finished this command, she wouldn’t have to prove anything to Frankie ever again.  She could return to a time before their marriage was fractured, and she’d do so now with full knowledge of how to make transdimensional transportation a reality even sooner along a new timeline. 

If it failed, however, none of it mattered.  If it failed it would mean the solution she thought she’d finally discovered after forty years was as intangible as air.  

“This is for you, Frankie,” she said aloud, though she still wasn’t sure that she believed that was her motivation anymore. She typed a few keys on the phone and hit enter before putting it face down on her desk for the last time.   

Becca closed her eyes and took a deep breath, letting it out slowly.  When she opened her eyes, without another moment’s hesitation, she finished typing the final runtime command and pressed the enter button before she could change her mind.

The lights in the room flickered and then dimmed momentarily before then becoming brighter.  A buzz like a swarm of flies emanated and hummed from every metallic surface.  The ceiling lights continued to brighten, not just illuminating the laboratory, but tangibly glowing from the center of the room where two sets of metallic rings rested on two separate pedestals.  

On the first ring, the iris of a black hole appeared out of nothing, as it had the night before.  No bigger than a dime at first, Becca blinked her eyes and it was suddenly the size of a quarter, and then an apple, then a basketball.  It spun in place counterclockwise as the room turned even more blindingly white.  

Through squinting eyes, Becca grappled for a pair of solar-filtered glasses.  They looked like little more than knock-off Ray Ban sunglasses but filtered out harmful light like a pinhole projector during a solar eclipse.   

On the computer, the thousands of lines of executable code initiated by her ten simple runtime commands flew across the open terminal.  The screen was an indecipherable blur of white text racing off the top edge, making it impossible to read the individual pieces of code.

Becca felt her short hair pulling around her face.  Static buildup at the center of the second ring crackled to life.  In the concrete tunnels below her, she knew particles from the LHC were speeding up, reaching beyond light speed. 

As she had the night before, Becca watched in wonder as in the empty space of the second ring, where only air had been there before, a tiny black dot appeared out of nothingness and floated in the center.  Unlike the first, this one spun in a clockwise direction.

Becca looked down at the computer screen, the words still speeding by, then back through the foot-thick glass where the two rings shimmered and vibrated on the other side.  She didn’t so much as blink when, like the first black hole, the second one suddenly doubled in size.  

Within a minute, each of the two black orbs was the size of a car tire.  They floated perfectly in the middle of the laboratory, hovering in the air within twenty feet of each other.  Becca felt a catch in her throat and tears of joy welled up in her eyes.

Then, unexpectedly, both of the black holes stopped spinning.

Becca’s eyes widened and her stomach clenched into a knot. 

On the other side of the glass partition, time began not so much to warp, as to skip.  Like the french fry connecting the oil stains in the fast food bag, Becca expected to see a wormhole form between the two black holes.  

Instead, each of the holes flickered like lightning and instantaneously doubled in size. Then, exponentially, they doubled again.  Becca felt like she was seeing motion under a strobe light.   In the span of a millisecond, each black hole grew to the size of a refrigerator, and then a van.  Another millisecond, and again they doubled in mass and size, each now nearly reaching the ceiling of the laboratory. 

Frantic, Becca tapped repeatedly on the computer’s escape key, though she knew it wouldn’t work.

“No,” she said.  “Stop.  Stop!  Please stop!”

She looked back in the laboratory and watched in horror as the mammoth silver rings around each black hole buckled, then cracked completely.  The remains were then sucked into the pulsing, gaping gravitational mass.

From all directions in the laboratory, desks and workstations were pulled toward the center of the room while the black holes continued to grow. 

This would end everything for Becca, she knew.  

“Frankie was right,” she thought.  “I wasn’t close, after all.”

Becca could do nothing but stand motionless, staring through the window at the disaster she’d wrought. 

But then, in the midst of the horrific scene, Becca gasped when something else appeared: a small, completely conical object that grew with the same speed as the black holes.  On the polar opposite sides of the small cone, it began to pull and stretch, opening on both ends like a drinking straw, spinning as if stuck in a vortex.

“It did it,” Becca gasped.  “I was right.”

The black holes flickered again, and the far walls of the laboratory disappeared into the mass.  Between them, the wormhole continued to stretch, each end reaching out towards one of the black holes.

She did it, after all.  Obviously, something was wrong in the calculations for the generation of the wormhole, but her hypothesis was spot on in the end.  

But what she hadn’t accounted for was that with every passing second, the black holes doubled in size as if they were each stretched out and fed by the gravitational pull of the other.  It doubled again and again, sucking the laboratory into itself.  The glass separating the laboratory and the observation room where Becca stood suddenly splintered into an intricate spiderweb of glass fragments.  A moment later, the glass imploded completely, disappearing into the black hole.

The last thing Dr. Becca Watts remembered was the fillings in her teeth buzzing, the sound of something like radio static, and the vision of Frankie on the last morning she woke up with him.   

She was then lifted off of her feet.  Her entire body lunged forward through the air and tossed toward the center of the room into the mouth of her greatest achievement ever.

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