Eighty-Sixed : Chapter 4 - Warp Drive Theories
Dr. Sam Hollander graduated from Princeton University. His colleague, Dr. Drake Bitterman, was a Stanford man.
Both were in their twenties.
Both were hired by Dr. Becca Watts.
Both would soon disappear from time and space.
Despite their advanced degrees and equally heightened IQs, once again Doctors Hollander and Bitterman were tasked with the remedial assignment of making a fast food run.
“A food run? Really?” Drake asked disgustedly. It wasn’t the food, but the egregious being taken advantage of that, after more than a year on the job, was like a fraternity hazing week that wouldn’t end.
Making it worse, Drake was considerably less enamored with his mentor than Sam was, which is to say Drake wasn’t enamored with Becca in the least.
Her scientific knowledge and ability? Unequaled and he fully respected.
Her personality? Improvement was most definitely needed.
Sam, however, regularly had thoughts about Dr. Watts that made no sense considering she was nearly fifty years older than him.
“You’re like a Freudian case study,” Drake told Sam on more than one occasion.
“You’re like a…a…a….just shut up,” Sam would respond, floundering as he often did when he’d trip over his words and feet the moment Dr. Watts gave him a directive of any kind, as she would that evening.
“We need to work late,” Becca said plainly.
“No problem,” Sam said, too quickly, as if he anticipated — maybe even hoped for — this change in schedule.
Becca’s brow was furrowed. Normally when giving an order to any of those under her employ, she relished her consistent ability to maintain an icy cold stare until the other person looked away. No one could withstand a staredown from Dr. Becca Watts.
But today, she wasn’t even trying to make eye contact. Her gaze instead fell squarely upon the phone on her desk. She slowly rubbed a finger across the number keys in a long bending stroke without pressing down on any one of them.
“Anywhere in particular?” Drake asked with a heavy sigh.
“What?” Becca asked.
“Food,” Drake said, a bit too sharply. “I’m sure you wouldn’t want us to choose the restaurant.”
This melodrama finally drew Becca’s gaze. She finally looked up from her desk and locked her eyes on Drake’s, who immediately looked down at his feet.
“I don’t care,” Becca said.
“McDonald’s?” Sam asked.
“Fine.”
“Anything in particular?” Sam pressed, so eager to please, like a well-trained dog.
“Just get two of whatever you’re ordering,” Becca said.
She held her gaze upon Drake.
“So go on,” she instructed, and the two doctoral candidates shuffled out of the laboratory.
Before coming to ENH, at their respective universities Sam and Drake edged out the top echelon of their classes and earned decorated majors in astrophysics and quantum mechanics, each graduating valedictorian. The inertia of education propelled them each to post-graduate work at MIT where they first met and instantly disliked each other.
That mutual disdain never quite dissipated.
From there followed internships at NASA where they not only begrudgingly worked together each day but equally — begrudgingly — lived together. Their first apartment was a cramped first-floor economy unit where all the rooms were several square feet too small and the lone view out of the apartment’s two windows was that of the building’s perpetually overflowing dumpster.
Despite their rivalry and distaste for each other, Sam and Drake continued as reluctant roommates upon upgrading to a proper two-bedroom apartment - this time with an enhanced view of just another apartment building. Now, however, they had a living room large enough for a projection screen, surround sound, and a fully stocked bar cart. They didn’t agree on much, but Sam and Drake at least shared similar tastes in blasting loud action flicks.
This improved living situation coincided with being hired by Dr. Becca Watts at the ENH Initiative and requisite relocations to the western outskirts of Chicago.
“That’s a major mistake,” was the predominant opinion of their collegiate colleagues upon learning that Sam and Drake had accepted internships with ENH.
While not as commonly known as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, or NASA, the ENH Initiative had developed a reputation not only for scientific acumen, but also for questionable business practices, lack of transparency, and unnecessary risk-taking.
Many in the scientific community regarded ENH as the toilet bowl of eccentric venture capitalists where money was flushed into pipe dream astrophysics fantasies. These fantasies, it was believed, possessed as much likelihood of success as the average drunkard’s chance of taking home the entire Powerball jackpot on a random Tuesday night.
In other words, the scientific majority opined that the ENH Initiative was little more than the product of wealthy dreamers and scientific charlatans to whom little attention should be paid.
Even still, as the elusive and privately-held scientific research firm developed over 600 patents in less than a decade for intergalactic travel alone — none of which had yet been successfully implemented — curiosity and derision festered equally among the scientific community.
While ENH was a joke to most, like the drunkard collecting change to buy the potential behind that Powerball ticket, the mere presence of ENH and the speculation and rumormongering they constantly generated made just enough people curious enough to constantly wonder what if?
Sam and Drake were willing to take that risk, enough so that they both gladly signed non-disclosure agreements without pause or legal purview, essentially agreeing to bankruptcy and ruin for life should anything they soon became privy to - and thereby complicit - ever be given light to the world at large, whether it be by deliberately sharing secrets or just Tweeting a picture of the company water fountain.
To sign such agreements, they believed, was to be initiated into a circle of scientific greatness and discovery never before known to mankind. Their agreed silence was a small concession knowing they’d both be working for Dr. Becca Watts, who like Elon Musk at Tesla, was the lone face of ENH Industries to the world at large.
Diminutive in stature, with her tiny five-foot-two-inch frame and rounded bob of patchy hair discolored from too many hastily, self-applied, over-the-counter dye jobs in her constant quest to mask her rapidly escalating number of birthdays, Dr. Becca Watts’s work with ENH was literally lightyears ahead her competitors.
Whereas most private industrialists still struggled to make suborbital flight nothing more than a faster way to fly from New York to Paris, ENH had nearly developed a faster-than-light configurable energy-density field that was lower than negative mass which would make roundtrip transport from Earth to Mars and beyond a flat-out reality within the next ten years.
“This makes the Alcubierre warp drive theory look like nothing more than a stationary exercise bike,” Sam was fond of saying, impressing himself with his joke each time he said it.
“She just doesn’t realize just how smart she is,” Drake would agree as they’d split a cheap six-pack of beer late at night, their faces pale and drained from perpetual life under the bad fluorescent lighting from both their apartment and work.
So when Becca asked Sam and Drake to work late, they were glad to do so. And when Becca asked Sam and Drake to make a food run, again, they did so without question.
Doctors Hollander and Bitterman had not an inkling of how this seemingly benign assignment would play such an integral role in changing the world forever.
Sam’s doctoral dissertation had been on the ramifications of Einstein’s relativity equation in light of nonexistent exotic matter in interstellar universal transport.
Drake’s dissertation had been a more conservative defense of approaches safeguarding against gravitational radiation when amplified into infinite energy.
And on this evening, while Dr. Becca Watts stared at the telephone where she had last spoken to her husband of forty years, Doctors Hollander and Bitterman’s greatest responsibility was returning to work while the fries were still hot.
Yet they gladly went through the monotony of it all: taking the freight elevator up six floors to the lobby level, sputtering along Chicago sidestreets in Sam’s beleaguered and hobbled Honda Civic, puttering up to a McDonald’s and ordering several “value” meals - any nutritional or monetarily beneficial “value” was entirely questionable — and finally making their way back to ENH where they’d all sequester themselves at desks while silently snarfing down their meals.
Not even Dr. Becca Watts, who was always so close to her ever-elusive breakthrough, could have predicted that all the answers to her problems in life would be found that very evening in a grease-stained McDonald’s bag.
Drake drove back from the restaurant, while Sam balanced the food on his lap, using both hands to tap away at his phone.
Ahead, the traffic light changed and the car in front of them unexpectedly slammed on the brakes, forcing Drake to do the same. The sudden slowdown catapulted the McDonald’s bag from Sam’s lap and slammed it against the glove compartment door before it tumbled onto the floor.
“Idiot!” Sam yelled.
“I’m driving!” Drake yelled back. “You can’t hold a stupid bag? You’re the idiot. And you better not have spilled my fries.”
But inside the bag, the fries did indeed spill. They sat there until they returned to the lab.
Later, as Becca sobbed into her fry-laced napkins after her seemingly final argument with Frankie, it was the gray blobs of grease stains on the bag’s exterior that would draw her attention, staring at her like miniature fast food-induced versions of Munch’s The Scream.
In the single second it took her to notice the stain, she would suddenly understand the one elusive missing piece to the scientific equation that would make it possible to get Frankie back again.
At that moment she would move instantly from being so close to all the answers she sought to all those answers being right here and right now.
Sam Hollander would never know that his inability to hold onto fast food that evening was to be thanked for this breakthrough that would alter the existence of the entire universe for all of eternity.
Unfortunately, both Dr. Sam Hollander and Dr. Drake Bitterman would disappear before either had a chance to witness that reality.
Two different spellings: Hollander, Hallender.
What did she see in the bag????? ........